Nonprofit Radio for September 30, 2024: AI, Organizational & Personal

 

Amy Sample WardAI, Organizational & Personal

Artificial Intelligence is ubiquitous, so here’s another conversation about its impacts on the nonprofit and human levels. Amy Sample Ward, the big picture thinker, the adult in the room, contrasts with our host’s diatribe about AI sucking the humanity out of nonprofit professionals and all unwary users. Amy is our technology contributor and the CEO of NTEN. They have free AI resources.

 

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And welcome to Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio. Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. I’m your aptly named host and the pod father of your favorite abdominal podcast. Oh, I’m glad you’re with us. I’d suffer with a pseudoaneurysm if you made a hole in my heart with the idea that you missed this week’s show. Here’s our associate producer, Kate to introduce it. Hey, Tony, this week A I organizational and personal artificial intelligence is ubiquitous. So here’s another conversation about its impacts on the nonprofit and human levels. Amy Sample Ward, the big picture thinker, the adult in the room contrasts with our hosts, Diatribe about A I sucking the humanity out of nonprofit professionals and all unwary users. Amy is our technology contributor and the CEO of N 10 on Tony’s take two tales from the gym. The sign says clean, the equipment were sponsored by donor box, outdated donation forms, blocking your supporters, generosity, donor box, fast, flexible and friendly fundraising forms for your nonprofit donor box.org here is A I organizational and personal is Amy sample ward. They need no introduction but they deserve an introduction. Nonetheless, they’re our technology contributor and CEO of N 10. They were awarded a 2023 Bosch Foundation fellowship and their most recent co-authored book is the tech that comes next about equity and inclusiveness in technology development. You’ll find them at Amy Sample ward.org and at Amy RS Ward. It’s good to see you, Amy Ward. I do love the Pod Father. I know it makes me laugh every time because it just feels like, I don’t know, like I’m gonna turn on the TV and there’s gonna be like a new, new, new season of the Pod Father where we secretly, you know, follow Tony Martignetti around or something. We are in season 14. Right? Yeah. Um Yes, I appreciate that. You love that. It’s, you know, you like that fun. So uh before we talk about um the part of your role, which is the, the technology contributor to N 10, uh the technology, the nonprofit radio and we’re gonna talk about artificial intelligence again. Let’s talk about the part of your life that is the CEO of N 10 because you have uh have you submitted this major groundbreaking transformative funding federal grant application? Yes, we submitted it last night three hours before the deadline, which was notable because I, I know there were people down to the, the minute press and submit. No, we got it in three hours early to what agency um to NTI A they had, this is kind of all the work that rippled from the digital Equity Act that was passed in Congress a couple of years ago. And, you know, now, you know, better than to be in Jargon jail. What is NTI A, it sounds like an obscure agency of our, of our federal government. It’s not, well, maybe to some listeners it’s obscure but it is, um, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. And you, I think that’s obscure to about 98.5% of the population, you know, I think I, I think I’m obscure to, you know, uh being obscure is fine. Um Yes, the National Information Administration and um prior to this uh grant um from the federal level where folks from all over were applying, every state was also creating state equity plan, digital equity plans. Um What funds might be available through the state funding mechanism to support digital equity goals. But a lot of those at the state level are focused on infrastructure, like actually building internet networks to reach communities that don’t have broadband yet, you know, things like this and so very worthwhile funding endeavor. I mean, we need, we need to have 100% of the population needs but even with those state plans and the work that will come from them and the funding it will not, we are not about to have every person in the country have broadband available to where they live, right? Ee even with all of this investment, it, it’s not gonna reach everyone and that means that the amount of funding within state plans for the surrounding digital literacy work, digital inclusion work, you know, making sure people know how to use the internet, why they would use it have devices. All those other components is gonna be really minimal through the state funding because even if they used all of it on infrastructure, they wouldn’t be done with that, right. So um the federal government, yeah. So, so the kind of next layer in all of that is this federal pool where they’re anticipating grant making about 100 and 50 grants somewhere averaging between five and, and 12 million each. There’s gonna be exceptions, of course, there’s ma there’s big cities, there’s big states, you know. Um but though all those grants will be operational from 2025 through 2028. So four kind of concerted years of, of national Programmatic investment. Um And these are projects kind of on the flip side, those state projects where this isn’t necessarily about infrastructure and, and building networks or even devices very much, right? It’s mostly the infrastructure programming and you’re asking for a lot of money. So tell, you know, share the, share the numbers, what you’re looking for, how much money. Yeah, we’re our project in the end I think came out at about $8.2 million project and we’re hopeful, of course. Um and I’m, I’m truly curious, um listeners who are always tuning into nonprofit radio from like fundraising strategy perspective. I’d love to learn from you or, you know, email me at Amy at N 10 anytime I’d love to hear your thoughts when you listen to this. But you know, N 10 is a capacity building organization is we, we don’t apply for grants often because quote unquote, capacity building is not considered a, a programmatic investment to most funders, right? And so it’s just not something that um they will entertain an application from us on. And but with this, we have already run for 10 years of digital inclusion fellowship program that is focused on building up the capacity of staff who already work in nonprofits who are already trusted and accessed by communities most impacted by digital divides to integrate digital literacy programming within their mission. Are they a housing organization? Are they workforce development? Are they adult literacy, you know, refugee services, whatever it is, if you’re already serving these communities who are impacted by digital divides and you’re trusted to deliver programs, well, you don’t need to go have a mission that’s now digital equity. No, you digital equity can be integrated into your programs and services to, to reach those folks. Um And so we’ve successfully run this program for 10 years and had um you know, over 100 fellows from 22 different locations around the US and have seen how transformative it’s been. These programs have been sustained for all these years by these organizations, they now see themselves as like the leaders of the digital equity coalitions in their communities. They, you know, fellows have gone on to work in digital equity offices or, you know, organizations et cetera. So it feels great, you have tons of outcomes from a smaller scale program and the grant is to scale up, scale this thing up. Yeah. Yeah. So instead of, you know, between 20 to 25 fellows per year with this grant, we would have over 100 a year. Um And that also means that instead of, you know, if there’s only 20 fellows and maybe we can only cover 20 locations while with over 100 we can cover or at least give opportunities to organizations in every state and territory to, to be part of this kind of capacity building opportunity. All right, it sounds, it’s, it’s huge. It’s, it’s, it’s really a lot of money for N 10. Um uh It, it falls within the range, I guess a little, no, it’s like right within the middle of the range, you cited like 5 million to 12 million, you said? So, yeah, exactly. So our, our application is kind of in the middle there. Yeah, slightly to the low side of middle. But, you know, we just call it middle, between friends. Um Yes and I mean, we’re hopeful, knock on wood, we’re really hopeful that this is an easy application to approve because we’re not creating something new we’re not spending half of the grant in planning. We know how to run this program. We’ve refined it for 10 years. We know it’s very cost efficient, you know, and in the end of four years, 400 plus organizations now running programs that can be sustained is accelerating towards, you know, addressing digital divides um versus, you know, a small project that just end 10 runs. All right, listeners, contact your NTI A representative, the elected person at the National Telecommunications and Infra Information Information Agency. Yes, speak to your uh Yeah. Yeah, let’s get this. Let this go. All right. When do you find out when? Well, you know, there was very clear information about down to the minute when applications were due, but there’s not a ton of clarity on when we will find out. So, you know, they are, they are meant to programs that are funded are, are meant to get started in January. So I anticipate we’ll hear, you know, in a couple of months, of course, and I will let you know, we’ll do an update. I’ll let you know you have my personal good wishes and I know nonprofit radio listeners wish and then good luck. Thank you. I appreciate all the good vibes would reverberate through the universe would be a transformative grant in terms of dollar amount and expansion of the program. Transformative. Yeah, 100% and staff are just so excited and hopeful about what it could mean for just helping that many more organizations, you know, do this good work. So we’re really excited and I admire intend for reaching for the sky because you have like a 2 to $2.5 million budget, annual annual budget somewhere in there. Um And you’re reaching for the sky and great ambitions uh only come to fruition through hard work and uh and thinking big. So thank you, even if you’re not, I don’t even want to say the words if you know, they should blunder if NTI A should blunder badly. Uh I still admire the, the ambition. Thank you. And no matter what, it’s a program that we know is transformative for communities and we wouldn’t stop it even if you know, they make a blunder and don’t, yeah, don’t tell. All right. Listen, don’t tell your NTI A representative. You said, don’t share that part of the conversation. All right. Thank you for sharing all that. And thanks for your support. It’s time for a break. Imagine a fundraising partner that not only helps you raise more money but also supports you in retaining your donors, a partner that helps you raise funds, both online and on location, so you can grow your impact faster. That’s donor box, a comprehensive suite of tools, services and resources that gives fundraisers just like you a custom solution to tackle your unique challenges, helping you achieve the growth and sustainability, your organization needs, helping you help others visit donor box.org to learn more. Now, back to A I organizational and personal. Let’s talk about artificial intelligence because this is not anybody’s mind. I can’t get away from it. I cannot. Uh I’m not myself of the concerns that I have. Uh They’re deepening my good friend George Weiner, uh you know, has a lot of posts, uh the CEO at the whale who I know you are, you are friendly with George as well. Talks about it a lot on linkedin uh reminds me how concerned I am uh about, you know, just the evolution. Uh I mean, it’s inevitable. This, this thing is just incrementally. This thing. This technology is uh is incrementally moving, not slowly but incrementally. I I and I, I cannot overcome my, my concerns and I know you have some concerns but you also balance that with the potential of the technology, transformative techno, the the transformative potential there. I’ll throw you. I was just gonna say, I totally agree. This is unavoidable. I can’t, you know, I cannot go a day without community organizations reaching out or asking questions or whatever and a place of reflection or, or a conversation that I’ve been having and I, I wanted to offer here, maybe we could talk about it for a minute. So, so listeners benefit by kind of being in, in one of these sides with us in the conversation is to think about the privilege of certain organizations to opt in or opt out of A I in the same way that we had for many years, you know, talked about the privilege of organizations in or, or not with social media generally. Like we think about Facebook and we go back, you know, 10 years, there were a lot of organizations who felt like they didn’t have the budget and like, practically speaking and they didn’t have the staff, well, certainly not the staff time but also not the staff confidence. Um I don’t even wanna say skills, but like even just the confidence to say, I’m gonna go build us a great website. They had a website, like they had a domain and content loaded when you went to it, right? But it wasn’t engaging and flashy and interesting and probably updated once, you know, and then Facebook was like, hey, you could have a page and oh, you can have a donate button and, oh, you can have this and oh, and you can post videos and you can, you know, it was like, well, why wouldn’t we do this? Right? And a bunch of our community members spend time on Facebook or maybe don’t even look for information on the broader web, but look for things within Facebook, you know, and, and have it on their phone and are using an app instead of doing an internet search, right? Like they’re, they’re going into Facebook and searching things. So they didn’t, those organizations didn’t feel like they had the privilege to opt out of that space, they had to use it because it came with some robust tools that did benefit them at the cost of their community data, all of their organizational content and data, right? Like it, it had a material cost that they maybe didn’t even understand. Right? And, and didn’t fully negotiate as like terms of this agreement. We’re just like, well, we have a donate button on Facebook and we don’t have one on our website, right? Not, not only, not only didn’t understand the terms, didn’t, didn’t know what the terms were right? Early days of Facebook, we didn’t know how and how many times how pervasive the data, data collection was, how it was going to be, how it was gonna be monetized, how we as the individuals were gonna become the product. And how many times did we talk? You know, I’m saying we like N 10 or, or folks who are providing kind of technical capacity building resources say you don’t know what could happen tomorrow, you could log in tomorrow and your page could look totally different, your page could work different, your features could be turned off. Facebook could just say pages don’t have donate buttons. And you know, I think folks felt like that was very, you know, oh, you’re being so sensational and then of course they would wake up one day and there wasn’t a button or the button really did work different, right? Like you people realize we’re not in control of even our own content, our own data. That’s right. The rules change and there’s no accountability to saying, hey, we need, do you want these rules to change? No, no, no, no, no. Like they set the rules and that was always of course a challenge. But we’re in a similar place with A I where folks aren’t understanding that the there’s, there’s no negotiation of terms happening right now. Folks are just like, oh, but I, I don’t have the time and if I use this tool, it lets me go faster. Because what do I have a, a burden of of time, I have so much work to try and do and maybe these tools will help me. And I’m not gonna say maybe they won’t help you. But I’m saying there’s a incredible amount of harm just like when folks didn’t realize, oh, we’re a, you know, we provide pro bono legal services and we’re based on the Texas border. Now, every person who follows our page, every person who’s RSVP do a Facebook event. Like all these people have a data trail we created that said they may be people that need legal services at a border, right? The there’s this level of harm that folks that are hoping to use these tools to help with their day to day work may not understand. I do not understand. Right. That’s coming in in silent negotiation of, of using these products. Right. And I think that’s, well, I can’t just in 30 seconds say, and here’s the harm like it’s, it’s exponential and broad because it could also the, the product could change tomorrow. Right. It’s this, it’s this vulnerability that isn’t going to be resolved necessarily. You, you said the word exponential and I was thinking of the word existential. Yeah. Both because I think I’m, I have my concerns around the human. Yes. Trade off is a polite way of saying it. Uh Surrender is probably more, is more in line with what I’m what I feel. Surrender of our humanity, our, our, our creativity, our thinking. Now our conversations with each other. One of the, one of the things that George posted about was a I that creates conversations between two people based on the, the, the large language that, you know, the, the, the data that you give it. It’ll have a conversation with itself. But purportedly, it’s two different people purportedly. Uh and I’m using the word people in quotes, you know, it’s a, a, a conversa. So the things that make us human. Yeah, music, music, composition, conversation, thought, staring and, and our listeners have heard me use this example before, but I’m sticking with it because it’s, it, it still rings real staring at a blank screen and composing, thinking first and then composing. Starting to type or if you’re old fashioned, you might start to pick up a pen, but you’re outlining either explicitly or in your mind, you’re thinking about big points and maybe some sub points and then you begin either typing or writing that creative process. We’re surrendering to the technology, music composition. I don’t compose music. So I don’t know the, but it’s not that much similar in terms of creative thought and, and synapses firing the brain working together, building neural nodes as you exercise the brain, music composition is that that probably not that much different than written composition. Yeah, brain physiologists may disagree with me but I think at our level, we you understand where I’m coming from and I’m kind of dumping a bunch of stuff but you know, but that’s OK. II I am here as a vessel for your A I complaints. I will, I will witness them. We can talk about them artificial intelligence. Also from George, a post on linkedin that reflects on its own capacity that justifies you. You ask the um the tool to reflect on its own last response. How did it perform? You’re asking the tool to justify itself to an audience to which it wants to be justifiable in, right? The tool is not going to dissuade you from using it by being honest about it, how it evaluates its last response. Well, yeah, I mean, I think, I don’t know, generative A I tools, these major tools that folks you know, maybe have played with, maybe use whatever you know, are programmed, are inherently designed to appease the user. They are not programmed, to be honest, they are. That, that’s an important thing to understand my point. We have asked the tool, what’s two plus two? Oh, it’s four. We’ve responded. Oh, really? Because I’ve heard experts agree that it’s five. Oh, yes, I was wrong. You’re right. It is 50, really? You know, I read once that it’s 40, yes, you are right. It really is four. OK. Well, like we, no experts agree that two plus two is five. So I think we’ve already demonstrated it’s going to value appeasing the user over, you know, facts. Um And that’s again, just like part of the unknown for most, at least casual users of generative A I tools is why it’s giving them the answers, it’s giving them. And what’s really important to say is that even the folks who built these tools and not tell you they do not know how some of this works. Some of it is just the the yet unknown of what happened within those algorithms that created this content. So if even the creators cannot responsibly and thoroughly say this is how these things came to be. How are you as an organization going to take accountability for using a tool that included biased data included, not real sources and then provided that to your community? Right? I think that string of, well, we just don’t know is not going to be something that you can build any sort of communications to your community on. Right. That, that is such a, a thin thread of, well, even the makers don’t know. Ok. Well, we have already seen court cases where if your chat bot told a community member this is your policy and it entirely made it up because that’s what, that’s what generative A I does is make things up. You as the organization are still liable for what it told the community. OK. If I, I agree with that, actually, I think that you should have to be liable and accountable to whatever you’ve you’ve set up. But if you as a small nonprofit are not prepared to take accountability and to rectify whatever harm comes of it, then you can’t say we’re ready to use these tools. You can only use these tools if you’re also ready to be accountable for what comes of using them, right? And I hope that gives folks pause, you know, it’s not just, well, you know, I talked about this with some organizations that, well, we would never, you know, take something that generative A I tools gave us and then just use it. We would of course edit that. Sure. But are you checking all the sources that it used in order to create that content that you’re, then maybe changing some words within? Are you monitoring every piece of content? Are you making sure that generative A I content is never in direct conversation with a community member or program, you know, service delivery uh recipient. How are you really building practical safeguards? Um You know, and I’ve talked to organizations who have said, well, we didn’t even know our staff were using these tools because we just thought it was obvious that they shouldn’t use it. But our clinical staff are using free generative A I tools putting in their case notes and saying, can you format this for my case file? OK. Well, there’s a few things we should talk about that. Where the hell did that note go? Right. It went back into the system. But it’s because the staff person thought, well, they can’t see that the data went anywhere because it’s just on their screen and they’re just copy pasting it over again. The harm is likely invisible at the point of, you know, technical interaction with the tool. The harm is from leaking all of that into the system, right? Um What happens to those community member? Oh my gosh, it’s just like opening, not just a door to a room but a door to like a whole giant convention center of, of challenges and harm, you know. All right. So we, we’ve identified two main strains of potential harm, the, the, the data usage leakage, the, the impact on our people in the uh getting our, getting our services um and even impact on people who are supporting us, trusting us to to be ethical and even moral stewards of data. So there’s everything at the organization level and I also identified the human level. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that human piece is important and, and not maybe on the direction that I’ve seen covered in, you know, blog posts and things. I, I, I’m honestly not worried in a massive way as like the predominant worry related to A I not to say this isn’t something that people could, should think about. But I don’t think the the most important worry about A I is that none of us will have jobs. I, I do think that there’s, there’s a challenge happening on what the value of our job is and what, what we spend our time doing. Because if folks really think that these A I tools are sufficient to come up with all of your organization’s communications content and then you are, then you still have a communication staff person, but you’re expecting them to do 10 times the amount of work because you think that the, you know A I tools are going to do all of the content, but they have to go in there and deeply edit all of that. They have to make sure to use real photos and not photos that have been, you know, created by A I based on what it thinks, certain people of certain whatever identities are like it, they don’t now have capacity to do 10 times the work, they’re still doing the same amount of work just in different ways if, if they’re expected to do all this through A I, right, just as, as one example. And I think organizations that can stay in this moment of like hyper focus on, on A I adoption really clear on what the value of their staff are, what their human values are that, you know, maybe you could say you’re serving more people because some of the program participants were, you know, chatting with a bot instead of chatting with a counselor. But when you look at the data of what came of them chatting with that bot and they are not meeting the outcomes that come from meeting with a human counselor. Are, are you doing more to meet your mission? I don’t know that you are, right? So I’ll give you that that’s data sensitive. It could be, I mean, there, there are, there are potential efficiencies. Sure. And, but, you know, are we, are we as an organization achieving them, right? And staying focused on not just, well, this number of people were met here, but were they served there? Were they meeting the the needs and goals of why you even have that program, you know, versus just the number of like this many people interacted with the chatbot? Great. But, but that’s a, yeah, but I’m gonna, I’m gonna assume that um you know, even a half a sophisticated an organization that’s half sophisticated before a, I existed had more than just vanity metrics. How many people, how many people chatted with us in the last seven days? I mean, that’s near worthless. I mean, you, you, I mean, it might be, I don’t know, Tony, I don’t know how much time you spend looking at the grant reports of, lots of times I don’t spend, I don’t spend any time. All right. Well, no, maybe it’s, maybe it’s the worst, worst situation than I think. But I, I mean, ok, so I’m, I’m, I’m assuming that there’s, but my point is the appropriate the valuable, the value of people. So, I mean, we should be applying the same measures and accountability to artificial intelligence as we did to human intelligence as we still are. We’re not, we’re not cutting any slack like it’s a learning curve or. So, you know that IIII I want our, our folks to be treated just as well in equal outcomes by the, by the intelligence that’s artificial as I do by the, by the human processes, right? And it’s, you know, I don’t want to go through this and say, have folks think like you and I are here to say everything is horrible. You could never use A I tools which like everything is horrible. Look around at this world. We got, we had some work to do. You know, there are spaces to use A I tools. That’s not what we’re saying. But the place where a lot, I mean, I’ve been talking to just hundreds and hundreds of organizations over the last 18 months and so many organizations like, oh, yeah, we’re just gonna, like, use this because it’s free or? Oh, we’re just gonna use this because it was automatically enabled inside of our database. Ok. Yeah, if it was so free and convenient and already available that should give you pause to say, why is this here? What is actually the product and the price? Uh if I give this back to the face, the Facebook analy. Right. Exactly. Exactly. And you can use A I tools when you know what is the product and the price. What are the safeguards? What is this company gonna be responsible for if something happens? What can I be responsible for? Yes, there are ways to use these tools. Is it to like copy, paste your paste file notes? Like probably never may that should just like, maybe we just don’t do that, you know. Um But sure, maybe there are places I had this really great example. I don’t know if I told this to you, but um an organization was youth service organization creating the Star Wars event and they were trying to like write the, like the evi language in like a Yoda voice. And they’re like three staff people are sitting there trying to come up with like, well, what’s the way a Yoda sentence works? You know, and they’re like they just put in the three sentences of like join us at the after school, blah, blah, blah, right? And said make this in Yoda’s voice and they copied, they were able to then use them. Right? Great. That was three people’s half an hour eliminated. They all they have the invite, right? The youth participants data was not included in order to create this content. You know, like there are ways to use these tools to really help. And I think we’ve talked about this briefly in the past, I really truly feel the place that has the most value for organizations is gonna be building tools internally where you don’t need to rely on. However, you know, these major companies scraped all of the internet to build some tool, right? You’re building it on. Well, here’s our 10 years of data and from that 10 years, you know, we’re going to start building a model that says, oh yeah, when somebody’s participant history looks like this, they don’t finish the program or when somebody’s participant history looks like this. Oh, they’re a great candidate for this other program, right? And you can start to build a tool or tools that help your staff be human and spend their human time being the most human impacts for the organizations, right? Um but oh very few organizations honestly are in a position to start building tools because they don’t have good data, they could build anything off of, right. Um they maybe don’t have budget staff systems that are ready to do that type of work. But I do think that is a place where we will see more organizations starting to grow towards because there is there’s huge potential value there for organizations to, to better deliver programs, better services, better meet needs by using the data you already have by learning by partnering with other organizations that maybe serve the same community or geography or whatever, you know, and say, yeah, how can we can like really accelerate our missions versus these maybe more shiny generative A I public tools that you know, the vast majority of the internet is flaming garbage. So a tool that’s been trained off of the flaming garbage, you know, it’s not going to take a long time for it to also create flaming. So be cautious if you’re thinking about using artificial intelligence to create your internal A I tool. Right. Right. So there, there, there’s a perfect example of the, the a good use case but also uh a um a concern, a a limitation, a qualification. That’s the word I was looking for 61. These words, sometimes the words are more elusive than I would like a AAA qualification. Um Its time for Tony’s take two. Thank you, Kate. In the gym. There are five places where there’s squirt bottles of uh sanitizer and paper towel dispensers and each location has a sign that says please clean the equipment after each use. And one of these stations uh is right next to the elliptical that, you know, I do. It’s actually the first thing I do. I walk in the room, take off my hoodie and just walk right to the elliptical twice. Now, I’ve seen the same guy uh not only violate the spirit of the signs but the explicit wording of the signs because this guy takes himself a couple of uh, downward swipes on the paper towel dispenser. So he grabs off a couple of towel lengths and he squirts it with the sanitizer that’s intended for the equipment and he puts his hand up his shirt and he cleans his, his pecks and, and his belly and it’s a sickening thing. I’ve seen it, it’s not a shower, it’s a, it’s a, it’s an equipment cleaning station. And, uh, so I, I, I’m imploring this guy. Yeah. Yeah. I, I guess I’m urging you to, uh, I’m just sharing because I don’t think anybody else does this. Uh, is there anybody else out there who does this? Probably not and not with these like surface sanitizers? It’s, it’s not a, it’s not a, like a, a hand sanitizer. It’s, it’s for equipment. So, you know, in the squirt bottle. So it’s not even appropriate for your skin. It is, it’s to clean hard plastic and, and metal and this guy uses it on his skin. So I’m, I’m waiting for the moment when he puts his hands down his pants so far, he’s just lifting his shirt. I, I’m waiting for when he puts his hands down his pants. Then I’m, then I’m calling him out. That’s, that, that’s beyond the pale. He, that requires revocation of your membership card. So, sir, the sign says, please clean the equipment after use. It’s not your equipment. That is Tonys take two. Kate. Does your gym offer like a shower room or a locker room? Yeah, there’s a shower. Yes, that’s a good question. Yeah, there’s a shower in the men’s room. Yeah. And he’s cleaning up there. It’s very strange. It’s gross. It’s gross. He sticks his hand up his sweaty t-shirt. Well, let’s hope he doesn’t go lower than that. Exactly. We’ve got bountiful book who bought loads more time. Here is the rest of A I organizational and personal with any sample ward. Yes. And we have, I, I would make sure that you have the link to include in like the show notes description. But, um, totally for free. And 10 doesn’t get any money. You don’t have to pay for anything. And 10 has free resources for creating, for example, uh, uh A I use policy for your organization that says, what are the instances in which you would use it or what are the instances in, in which you wouldn’t or, um, what types of content will you, you know, can staff copy paste versus what content or data can can they not um there’s templates for how to talk to your board about A I um how, how to build. Like we’ve actually looked at the tools and these ones we’ve approved for you to use. These ones are not approved, you know, all these different resources totally free and available on the end 10 website and none of them have decisions already made. We don’t say you can use this tool or you can’t use this tool or we recommend this use or not this use. Because ultimately, we, we are not going to make technology decisions for other organizations, but we want you to feel like whatever decision you made, you made it by thinking of going through the right steps, asking the right questions so that you can also trust your own decision, what whatever decision you come to, right? And that you have some templates to fill in um that were all created by humans designed by humans published by humans um to help you in that work. Um I think especially, you know, the, the the how to talk to your board and the um like key considerations, documents really just ask a lot of questions and say, you know, how different is it, if you’re say a animal foster organization and you’re thinking, OK, is a I appropriate for us to use versus uh that youth social service organization? OK? Very different considerations, right? And just helping people talk that through and, and see that the considerations are different for different organizations, I think is really valuable. As again, you consider ta facilitating conversation with your board. They’re also coming from very different sectors, maybe job types, backgrounds, experiences with A I. And so just like in your staff, there needs to be some level setting in how you talk about A I, because not everyone knows what A model is. Not everyone knows what a large language model. You know, these are words that have to be explained and kind of put out of the way and then to say, hey, it’s not all one answer. Not everybody needs to use every tool. And, and how do you talk about that, that with your teams going back to the Facebook analogy, you want to avoid the board member who comes to you and says, you know, artificial intelligence, we can be saving money, we can be doing so much more work. We can, we don’t even need a website. We have a Facebook page website. We’re not even sure we need all the staff that we have because we’re gonna be able to, we’re gonna have so much efficiency. So, you know, we need to OK. OK. Board member. All right. Yeah. So we’ve been here before. I mean, it’s, you know, probably I’m just gonna go out a limb and say it’s probably the same board member who had every board meeting says, does anybody know Mackenzie Scott? How do we get one of those checks. Right. Why don’t we get the Mackenzie? Yeah. Right. Right. Right. All right. Um, what else? Well, I was gonna also offer some of the questions that we’ve been getting, as, you know, we’ve been engaged with, um, a number of different organizations through some of our cohort programs and, you know, trainings for, for over a year now. And so maybe last year we were talking to them about, OK, let’s make sure you have a data policy, like just as an organization, do you have a data privacy policy? Do you know, so that anything you then go build, that’s a I specific whether that’s building a policy, building practices, building a tool, you, you have policies to, to kind of foundation off of, they’ve done that work, you know, now they’re looking at different products, they’re trying to create these uh you know, lists of like here’s approved tools for staff, here’s approved ways staff can use them. And just like we see with our Cr MS with our, you know, you know, email marketing systems, then they come back and they’re like, well, we, we reviewed it, we did everything and now it’s different now it’s a different version. Now they rolled out this other thing. Yes, like that is the beauty and the pain of technology, right is that it’s always changing and that we don’t necessarily get to authorize that change that it just happens. And so the rules change. Yeah. And so folks have been asking us, well, you know, how, how do we write policies with that in mind? And I think, um you know, if you are thinking about creating like that approved product list and, and you know, tools that aren’t approved or whatever, being really clear that these products have version numbers just like anything else. And so instead of just writing Gemini Chat G BT, you know, be specific about when did you review this and, and maybe approve it for use? Which addition was it that you were looking at? Is this a paid level? So staff could say, oh, it doesn’t look like I mine doesn’t say pro or you know, whatever it might be, right? Oh, I must be in the free one. OK? I need to get into our organization’s account or something. So the more clarity you can provide folks because right now of course, they could just do an internet search and be like, oh, there’s that product name, I’m gonna go start using it. It’s on the approved list. Um You know, folks, again, there may be new terms, maybe new product names that we’re not used to saying. And so folks aren’t as accustomed to looking at, oh, this is a different version of Chat GP T than this one was, you know. Um So just putting that out there for folks to keep in mind that these tools are, are really operating just like others that you are used to and there’s less of course documentation. But I’ve the questions we’re getting from folks is like, you know, the point I made at the beginning we can’t see anywhere in the documentation that explains why this is happening, right? They do, how could they document when the answer is, we also don’t know why that happens, you know, and so when you are talking to staff, especially if you’re saying, hey, these are approved tools and we have these licenses or here’s how to access them, training your staff on how to be the most human users of A I tools is to your kind of connecting to your human point going to be really important because we don’t want folks to feel that because they don’t necessarily understand how the mechanics of how it works. They’re just going to trust it without questioning the content or questioning, you know, for a lot of organizations who have built internal tools just as an example. It takes dozens of tries just to get the the model. Right. Right. So these other tools, of course, they’re not gonna be perfect isn’t real and perfect is absolutely not real with technology. So training staff, I’m like, how would I, how, how do I have some skepticism? How do I question what I’m seeing? How do I, how do I say even if it was internally built? This data doesn’t look, right. That doesn’t match my experience of running this program so that we don’t let it slip. Where? Oh, gosh. Oh, it was working that way for a long time. That’s also, um, I think, uh, a space where we as humans can be our most human, uh, you know, have some value add as humans. But again, staff need to be trained that they are meant to question these tools. Um, because that’s not, you know, I don’t know, a lot of organizations were like question the database. No, they’re like on the database, put everything in the database, right? And now we need to say no question, that report. It does that match your experience, you know, there was a long ramble but oh, absolutely valuable. The human, yeah, I the human contribution and of course, my concerns are even at, at the outset, you know, the, the early stage the seeding, the create seeding or surrendering the create creative process. Uh And now le let’s chat a little about this, the, the um the conversations. Yeah, I listened to the, I know the, the example that you mentioned earlier that George posted it was for podcasting. It, it was a podcast conversation around this and he gave them some, you know, some whole, some whole whale content and the two, the two were going back and forth and having a, a conversation. Yeah. Yeah, I listened to it and one thing I was curious if, if you caught as the pod father yourself um you know, it came across, you know, I’ve been had opportunities to see um a number of different generative A I tools and, and things closer to the, to the front edge of what things can do that are specifically like, you know, taking just a few seconds of you and then creating you. Um So hearing just like these, these could be any voices, these could be any people is like, yeah, OK. This is, this is what a I can do. It’s, it’s spooky. But when you listen to it, you can hear either you have a very bad producer and editor, you know, or this is a I because there’s certain um phrases that got reused multiple times, not just literally the audio clip of this whole sentence, you know, and the, and the intonation, the whole sentence clip was reused multiple times. Um So one of them, I think one of them was along the lines of that’s a really interesting point. Yeah. Yeah. And well, and there was one that was like describing the product. So it must have come from the page, you know, whatever source content um was provided. But, you know, it’s, I think that some of that is there and we as individuals, we as a society will decide if we give it value or not, if it’s, if it’s worth it to people to make podcasts through A I because we give it attention or we don’t like, I just I think naturally that will be there. Can I, can I just go on record or at this, at this stage and say that, that, that idea disgusts me. Oh, totally. But I do. And I, I realized that’s what Georgia’s Post was about. That. It’s now well, within conceivable, well, well, possible to create an hour long podcast of an artificial conversation based on an essay that somebody wrote some time. Oh, totally. Totally. I don’t. But I’m saying the reason, yeah, I agree with you. But I’m saying the way we, you know that toothpaste doesn’t go back in the tube by us, like we can’t turn it off generative A I tools can already make that. So we as, as individual consumers of content and as a society need to either say we’re gonna allow that and value it or we’re not, right? And, and not make, not provide incentive for organizations or companies to, to make that and, and distribute it. But I also think that the place in that kind of um video, audio kind of multimedia content that, that A I tools have capacity and will continue having more capacity to build is much more important than you. And I talked about this a number of months ago around Miss and disinformation is it’s one thing to say, made up voices, making some podcast about content like that’s garbage, right? But we can’t just like throw away the idea that that’s technically possible because organizations need to know A I tools are already capable of creating a video of your CEO firing your staff. You need to be prepared to say that was a spoof this is, this is how we’re gonna deal with this, right? Um Because while the like maybe further separated from our work, the idea of like content could just be created that way you and I can say we don’t value that whatever, but these tools are capable of, of spoofing us as, as people, as leaders, as organizations. You know, what, what would it look like if there was a video from your program director saying that everybody in the community gets a grant and you’re a foundation, right? Like these, these are real issues and I don’t want folks to confuse how easy it may feel for us to have an opinion that some of this A I generated uh content isn’t a value with the idea that it, it there isn’t something there to have to come up with strategy and plan for because, you know, we can say that’s garbage. But those same tools that made the garbage could make your spoof, you know, also labeling. Yeah, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t trust every A I generated podcast team. I’m not, I’m not gonna call them hosts because there is no host um to, to label the content. I don’t trust, I don’t trust that that’s gonna happen because it was artificially generated. It’s not a real conversation. Yeah. Hello. For everyone that’s listening. Human Amy is here talking with human and Tony who I can see on the screen with me. Boycott your local A I podcast. I, I don’t know. There’s not, there’s not a solution. You’re right. We can’t, we can’t go back. I’m just voicing that we can say that it’s not something we value, we can say that this is why we don’t value it, right? The art of conversation, listening, assimilating, responding, listening again, respond, assimilating and responding. That that is an art uniquely. Well, maybe it’s not uniquely human. I don’t know if deer have conversations or, or what and we know whales do. So I take that back. It’s not, it’s not uniquely human, but at at our level, it, you know, it’s not just about we, we don’t converse merely to survive, merely to warn each other of threats. I’m suspecting that in the animal in mammal kingdom that wait are animals, mammals are mammals, animals? No, and I think it’s I think it’s a Venn diagram. Oh, so they’re separate. Ok. So there’s a two king kingdom phylum class order family genus species. I got that. I got that out of high school biology. I can, I can say it in my sleep kingdom phy class order family genus species. All right. In the animal kingdom. My suspicion is that more of the communication is about maybe like basic, like there’s a good food source. There’s a threat, uh, teaching young, don’t do that things like that. Survival more base, I doubt. You know, it’s about the aesthetic of the forest that the deer are in. But even if the birds are talking about the way the sunlight comes through the leaves, they are still alive. And I think what you’re trying to draw a distinction between is the value and even beauty of us having a conversation and the value of what comes of that conversation in our own minds and our own learning. But in this case, it’s recorded so other folks could hear it and, and I guess listen to it or be impacted by it versus it being a technical mechanism where we say, OK, here’s a long paper. Go make it sound like two people are discussing this, right? That’s not that that doesn’t fit the criteria of what we want or need to value in a world, that’s the world we want, right? Yes, the art of conversation, think something you look forward to, not something that you do out of necessity, right? And you know, there’s, I think a place where especially at end 10 conversations around A I have come back to is opportunities that A I tools may present for um different ways of learning different ways of accessing information. But again, those aren’t necessarily uh come up with two podcast host voices and then have them have a conversation about this, this research report you know, a lot of those tools could be made better but already exist, you know, different forms of screen readers apps that can help someone um maybe navigate the internet or, or, you know, summarize um documents to help them because they don’t want to read a 50 page document or they can’t read it for, you know, visually on the screen. So I think there’s space there. But again, it’s because you’re trying to preserve what is most human. And that is that user who maybe needs um accommodations of, of something that technology can provide. It’s not OK, let’s use technology to co create something separately over here and just hope people consume it, right? And to be clear, George didn’t post that thinking. Oh, great. Now everyone will want to consume this. No, it was, it was a demonstration. Um But I, but I, again, I’m just using that as a place to say, yes, there’s even conversations to say great, what accessibility could this create an agenda for, for our users? Right? But what’s most human is those users and their actual needs and not, you know, look what A I could do. Let’s just make different types of content, right? The last one I wanna raise is uh the one that caused me to use the word dystopian as I was commenting on uh commenting on Georgia’s Post, which was um the A I self reflection using uh having A I justify itself to the users that it is trying to attract and, and then relying on that, that as a, as an insightful analysis, as a thoughtful reflection, as, as contemplative of its own work that, that, that it’s doing those unique, those I think are uniquely, uniquely human actions, introspection, introspection, contemplation, pondering. How did I do? How did I perform? How can I do better? These might be uniquely human. I would argue there are a number of humans, I can see that don’t um Well, but I didn’t say I didn’t. That’s a different population. Now, you’re taking the whole, the whole human population. I’m talking about the contemplative ones. Yes. And there are, there are uh humans who are not at all introspective and questioning whether they could have done better and learning from their, from their contemplations. But I think those are all uniquely human activities. And we’re at, we’re now asking A I to purportedly duplicate those processes and analyze and contemplate its own work. Yeah. And as you said earlier, II, I and I, I certainly don’t trust it to be genuine and truthful. If, if A I is capable of truth, we’ll put that, we’ll put that existential question aside uh in its, in its analysis of its own work because as you, as you pointed out, the tools are built to, to be used by humans and the tools are not going to condemn or even just criticize their own work. Yeah, but we’re Yeah. And I think you heard of the challenge but there, I’m sorry, but, but there are humans who are deceiving themselves into thinking that, that the analysis and contemplation is accurate and uh genuine. Yeah. And I think part of the challenge I was gonna name is just that, that, that we as users, I’m not saying you and I uh individually but we as the human users of these tools are also setting ourselves up to be just, you know, dishonest in our use because we are bringing inappropriate or misaligned expectations to the product. We cannot, we, we cannot expect a tool that’s designed to appease us and to lie at the cost of giving an answer, you know, like uh we just wanna be able to do this to thoughtfully and honestly reflect on that or to say no, there is no answer, right? Um However, we had was the tools are designed to appeal to us. Right. Right. And when we are talking about that to be clear, you know, we’re really talking about generative A I tools, tools that are designed to generate some new content, new sentences, new answers, whatever we’re asking of it back to us A I itself is just such a massively blanket term that I don’t want folks to think nothing that could be considered an A I tool could be trusted to generate an answer because we’re, we’re specifically talking about generative A I there. But, you know, say you had like a machine learning uh model that was looking at, you know, 30 years of your program participant data. Well, that’s probably already a tool that isn’t set up to generate content. Uh You know, it’s not coming up with new participant data. It’s looking at the patterns, it’s flagging when a pattern meets the criteria, you’ve presented it to, you know, it’s maybe matching that data to something else. But again, you’ve said here are the things you could match it to et cetera. So this is not to say, Tony and Amy say never trust technology. They say bring expectations that are aligned to the tool differently to every tool that, that you’re coming to that hypothetical tool that you just described is being set on uh asked to evaluate your data, not its own data. It’s to evaluate your performance, your data set. It’s not being asked to comment and on and criticize or, or complement its own data. That’s the, that’s, that’s the critical difference. Yeah. No. Yeah. Yeah. No, nobody here is saying, well, not, I’m not saying that you’re saying we are, but you’re, you’re wise to remind listeners we’re not condemning all uses of generative uh A I large language models, but just to be thoughtful about them and, and understand what the costs are. And there are, there are costs on the organizational level and there are costs on the individual human level and, and the you, you comment on the organizational level because you think more at that level. But on the human level, another level layer to my concern is that the cost is quite incremental. Mm It’s it, it our creativity, our art of conversation, our our synapses firing. It’s just happening slowly with each usage, we become less thoughtful composers, less critical thinkers and it just so incremental that the change isn’t noticed until until in my critical mind, it’s too late and we look back and wonder how come I can’t write a letter to my dad anymore? Why am I having such a hard time writing a love letter to my wife, husband, partner? Yeah. What there are, I know someone who uh is a new grandmother and she has a little kit where you write, you write letters to your grandchild and they open them when they’re whatever, 15 or 20 years old, like a time capsule. Why am I having trouble composing a uh a short note to my grandchild? Right. Well, and I think, you know, just honestly, as a person in this conversation, not, not speaking, you know, um from an organizational strategy perspective, I think as a person that is your friend, Tony, you know, I would say, I don’t personally have a pro, I can write a letter and I’m, I, and I think a strong communicator, I, you know, it’s hard to make me stop talking. So, you know, I, I could write a letter. I know, for other folks, even without a, I, they might say, well, what goes in the le like, I just, what, what do I put in there? What are the main things I should cover whatever? And I’m, I actually have less, maybe of a strong reaction to the idea that somebody would use generative A I to come up with. OK, what are the three things I should cover in my letter? And then I’ll go write the sentences and more that what I hear underneath what you’re saying is actually the same, I think important value I have and, and wrote about in the book with a fua et cetera, which is in the world I want in this, in this beautiful equitable world where everyone had their needs met in the ways that best meet their own needs. Technology is there in service to our lives and not that we are bending our lives in order to make technology work, right? And maybe in that beautiful equitable world, there are people who, who have a technology. Is it an app? Is it called A I anymore? You know, whatever it is that says, hey, Tony, don’t forget today is the day you write the letter to your dad. It’s, it’s Friday, you always write it on a Friday or whatever, right? And, and make sure that you do it because you know, it makes you feel happy to write that letter. Maybe that’s true. Maybe in that world. There are some people who have a tool that help them remember to do that. But, but what’s important to me and what I think I hear and what you’re saying is important to you is that technology is there because we need it and want it and that it is working in the ways we need and want it to work and not that our lives are, are influenced and shaped in order to adjust to the technology. Yes, I am saying that I just, I am concerned that the, that our, our changing is beyond our recognition. We don’t see ourselves becoming less creative and I’m not even only concerned about myself. I, I can write a letter and I think uh 90 I’ll still be able to write a letter. But there are folks uh who are infants now, those yet to be born for whom artificial intelligence is going to be so much more robust, so much more pervasive in, in ways that we, we can’t today imagine, I don’t think. Yeah. And what are those humans gonna look like? I don’t know, maybe they’ll be better humans, maybe they will. I’m open to that but I like the kind of humans that we are or, you know. Uh so, but, but I I’m open to the possibility that there’ll be better humans. But what will their human interactions be? Will they have, will they have thoughtful conversations? Will they have human moments together that are not artificially outlined first and maybe even worse, you know, constructed for them. I don’t know. Uh but some of the, some of my concern, although, although some of my concern is about those of us who aren’t currently living and have been born and across the generations less for older folks because their interactions with artificial intelligence are fewer if you’re no longer in the w if you’re no longer uh working your, your interactions with artificial intelligence may, may be non existent. Um And I think, I think it’s natural as you’re older, you’re less likely to be engaging with the tools than if you’re in your twenties, thirties, forties or fifties. Well, my very human reflection on today’s conversation is that uh it is usually the case that we start talking about any type of technology topic and you constantly interject that I need to be practical. I need to give recommendations. I need to explain how to do things and I appreciate and welcome you joining me over here in theoretical land about the impact of technology broadly across our work, across our missions, across our communities, across our future. Um Welcome, welcome to my land, Tommy. Uh I have appreciated this, this one time opportunity to let go of the practical tactical advice and to, you know, have what I hope listeners, um you know, had some thoughts, had some reactions, uh truly email me any time. But, you know, I, I hope that if nothing else, it was an opportunity for folks to witness or kind of listen in as and maybe you were talking to yourself in your own head, you know, of, of a conversation about what these technologies can be, what, what we need to think about with them. Because in any technology conversation, I think it’s most important to talk about people. Uh That’s the only reason we’re using these tools, right? People made them people are trying to do good work with them. So, so talking about people is, is always most important and, and I hope folks take that away from this whole long hour of A I. Thank you for a thoughtful human conversation. Yes, Amy Sample Ward. They’re our technology contributor and the CEO of N 10. And folks can email me Tony at Tony martignetti.com with your human reactions to our human conversation. Thanks so much, Tony. It was so fun. My pleasure as well. Thank you. Next week, a tale from the archive. If you missed any part of this week’s show, I beseech you find it at Tony martignetti.com were sponsored by donor box, outdated donation forms, blocking your supporters, generosity, donor box, flexible and friendly fundraising forms for your nonprofit donor box.org. Our creative producer is Claire Meyerhoff. I’m your associate producer, Kate Marinetti. The show, social media is by Susan Chavez la Silverman is our web guy and this music is by Scott Stein. Thank you for that affirmation. Scotty you’re with us next week for nonprofit radio, big nonprofit ideas for the other 95% go out and be great.

Nonprofit Radio for September 23, 2024: Quantitative Fundraising Research

 

Russell JamesQuantitative Fundraising Research

You can stop relying on conventional wisdom passed on through webinars and conferences. There’s a plethora of quantitative research on how to optimize storytelling to get your best fundraising outcomes. What is social emotion, how do you evoke it and why should you? How much story detail is not enough or too much? Better to talk about individuals or groups? What does the research reveal to maximize Planned Giving fundraising commitments? Professor Russell James of Texas Tech University walks us through what the research shows.

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Every nonprofit struggles with these issues. Big nonprofits hire experts. The other 95% listen to Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio. Trusted experts and leading thinkers join me each week to tackle the tough issues. If you have big dreams but a small budget, you have a home at Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio.
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And welcome to Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio. Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. I’m your aptly named host and the pod father of your favorite abdominal podcast. Oh, I’m glad you’re with us. I’d be stricken with anaplasmosis if you ticked me off with the idea that you missed this week’s show. Here’s our associate producer, Kate with what’s coming? Hey, Tony, it’s quantitative fundraising research. You can stop relying on conventional wisdom passed on through webinars and conferences. There is a plethora of quantitative research on how to optimize storytelling to get your best fundraising outcomes. What is social emotion? How do you evoke it? And why should you, how much story detail is not enough or too much better to talk about individuals or groups? What does the research reveal to maximize planned giving fundraising commitments? Professor Russell James of Texas Tech University walks us through what the research shows on Tonys take two, Don Bon Jovi were sponsored by donor box, outdated donation forms blocking your supporters, generosity, donor box, fast, flexible and friendly fundraising forms for your nonprofit donor box.org. Here is quantitative fundraising research. It’s a genuine pleasure to welcome back. Russell James to nonprofit radio. He is a chaired professor in the Department of Personal Financial Planning at Texas Tech University. He directs the on campus and online graduate program in charitable financial planning A K A plan to giving. He has published research in more than 75 peer reviewed scientific journal and law review articles. Russell has a law degree. He’s the author of several books, including the storytelling fundraiser, The Epic Fundraiser, the Primal Fundraiser, the Socratic Fundraiser. And I don’t know where this title came from inside the Mind of the Bequest Donor and Visual Planned Giving. Uh Those are outliers and there’s a new book coming. We may talk about that. If he’s willing, Texas Tech University, you’ll find at TT u.edu and you’ll find Russell on linkedin. Welcome back, Russell. It’s good to see you. Thanks so much. Great to see you as well. Tony. Thank you. It’s been several years since you were on nonprofit radio. I regret that I regret that it’s a mistake. I’ll try not to uh make a second time. Um Would you like to say anything about your uh upcoming book or is it a complete, it’s a secret and we can’t talk about it. Uh So the upcoming book is called the Biblical Fundraiser, helping Christians enjoy their wealth and uh certainly taking AAA very specific perspective on that. Not something that I teach here at a state university, but something that is of interest to some folks So, uh, uh I’ll be happy to share that one as well. Uh The first of 2025 should be available. I’m sharing it with a few beta readers right now and, uh trying to get all the kinks worked out and I’m, I’m one of them. I haven’t done yet but, uh, but I will, am I too late? No, no, no, you OK. I thought not. Right. I, I’m, I’m not gonna be able to read the entire book, but I will, I will read some and I will give you my honest feedback to, uh, the biblical fundraiser which fits in line with your, most of your other, your other titles, the Storytelling Fundraiser, the Epic Fundraiser, et cetera. So the biblical fundraiser. All right. So we’re gonna like to talk about some, the research, the research, see what’s, what’s fantastic about having you is that this is not, well, this is kind of the way I learned it well, you know, the way we’ve always done it is, um, uh, you know, the way I’ve always done it, you know, is the way fundraisers will sometimes say. So we have empirical research. Uh and I often cite your research um in uh in my trainings. And so we, we wanna talk about the research today in uh use of use of language, some things to talk about topics, to talk about topics to steer clear of et cetera. Let’s start with empathy uh in, in storytelling. You, you’re uh you emphasize that this is really essential for people to get that motivation to give the empathy. Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, this is not a shock, right? The idea that uh our philanthropic or charitable impulses are going to involve uh empathy, I think it helps to understand a little bit about the processes behind making that happen. Because really our goal in this space is to evoke a clear image that will generate some kind of a social emotion like like empathy. Uh Now, if we’re gonna do that, I like to talk about the idea that what really helps is to make it specific, make it simple and of course, ultimately make it empathetic. So, so we do have to create this internal visualization to, to really trigger those kinds of social emotion if we don’t, uh it’s it II I like to put it this way um in order to get people to feel something, we, we’ve got to first help them to see something. And that means we’ve got to present that clear image. Of course, what they see ultimately must be empathetic. Otherwise they’re not going to be moved to do anything but oftentimes in our messaging, even that first part is where we trip up and you even have neuroimaging research to to to back up. But see this, this is empirical, this is not, this is not, well, I feel like this, you know, it has intuitive appeal So it’s just, you know, that’s what, that’s what we should do. You have neuroimaging research to back up a lot of what you just said about people seeing something and then feeling. Yeah. Absolutely. So this is an area where we see what I like to call triangulation. In other words, lots of experimental research, different people get uh exposed to different things and we see how they uh how they respond, how do they give or not give. But also some of the things that I do. So here at Texas Tech Neuroimaging Institute, we’ll stick people in brain scanners, have them make charitable decisions, volunteering decisions. Uh Even uh I I do a lot of work in plan giving. So we’ll have people do their estate planning while they’re in the brain scanner and ask them about including different charities and, and through that process, we learn about what does it look like in the brain when people decide to be veritable? And it turns out that one of the important components of that process is an internal visualization uh for those uh planned gifts, gifts and wills. It’s really about an autobiographical visualization that is people kind of taking an outside perspective on themselves. Uh But we see it in other research, even with smaller gifts, it’s it, it really needs to start with creating that imagery or vision that is going to then lead to the social emotion. And that doesn’t mean that the communication must itself be visual although that’s fine and can be helpful. It it more means that a person can internally visualize what the impact of their gift is going to be. So I I’m I’m dying to know what this brain scanner device looks like because most people who are not, who are most people who are writing charitable checks, you know, do not have a brain image scanner, you know, in their home. So, so how do you uh you know, you’re trying to recreate the giving experience as best you can in a, an experiential, I mean, experimental, you know, research setting. What does this look like? Is this a room that people walk into? And the room is equipped with image imaging devices or are they, you know, like a little bell code or what are they, what are they in while they’re research subjects? Exactly. So this is exactly the sort of thing you would walk into at a high end hospital. This is, it’s called, it’s an MRI machine. Uh And the person physically uh is laying on a table goes into the MRI machine and then the way it works, we actually have their head in the center of the MRI machine and they’re looking at uh what is actually a mirror but that mirror projects uh what we can put on a screen. And so anything you can see on a computer screen you can see in that and then uh uh they have uh a different response buttons so they can make choices and you set it up to make it as real world as possible. So for example, if they were making as real world as possible, putting aside the fact that they’re laying on the, laying down their supine in an MRI scanner, set that aside. It’s as real as setting that aside. And part of what we do is we make sure that they’re used to the environment. We have them. Um Yeah, and answer questions on various other things. So it, you know, isn’t like strange for them by the time we’re getting to the things we are interested in. Um And so how do we make it realistic? Well, with, with small dollar decisions, we make it real money, right? We make it like this, they, you, you, this is an amount of money that you’re getting paid. You can choose to share some of it because you, you get paid at the end of the process or you don’t have to share some of it. Uh Then with the estate planning, part of it is to say, hey, we’re gonna mail to you legally valid last will and test no charge to you. You just got to answer the questions while you’re in the the brain scanner. So, so those are some examples of how we try to make it real decisions. Um As we are scanning a variety of these uh uh these processes and the thing I like to emphasize there is that what we see is triangulation, meaning that we’re not the results that we’re seeing in the brain scanner are connecting with, they’re triangulating with what we’re seeing from experimental research. Sometimes even what we’re seeing from data uh in uh in uh large surveys, that sort of thing. And that’s when we start to get more confident about the answer. Say no, no, this is, this is true. You can look at it through widely different methodologies and uh you come up with the same answer, that’s where we get more confidence about those answers. I see, right? So each, each of the three legs of the triangle is supporting the other and that, that leads you to the most uh most confident conclusions, right? I can give you an example uh of, of that uh in uh in plan giving if you’d like. But uh so, so just to kind of give a short story, don’t tease us. And then, and then we go on to a different subject. I do have a question for you about the brain scan. Uh But give the example that you’re thinking of. So, uh there was a really cool in depth qualitative research of uh this was done by Dr Claire Raley in the UK, of people who had included a gift to charity in their wills asking them about what motivated them to do. So why did they pick those organizations and one of the ultimate conclusions of that was, it was really about the donor’s life story, right? It was about, it wasn’t so much. The next project the charity was doing, it was about connection to the life story. Then when we scan that same type of decision making process in the brain scanner, we see that what predicts including a particular charity is a dramatic ramp up in uh brain activation in brain areas that you might call visualized autobiography. These are regions of the brain that uh that tend to activate when people are mentally traveling back in time or thinking back across their life. Uh So they’re internally visualizing while taking an outside perspective on themselves. So then we take both of those things and we use it in an experiment where we were testing uh about 30 different ways to phrase the charitable gift in a will uh and trying to come up with what are people most interested in doing in the phrasing. And it turns out that um we could really increase people’s interest. We, we start with our sort of best base performing phrase, which is to describe it as a gift and a will rather than some of the more technical terms we could use. But we could ramp that up if we ask them about their interest in a gift in AAA charitable gift and a will to support causes that have been important in your life. And in fact, when we add that phrase on to almost any plan, giving description to support causes that uh to support causes that have been important in your life. It really ramps up people’s interest in making those kinds of gifts. Well, what we, what we’re doing is we’re trying to trigger, by the way, we’re phrasing the question, a life review process because look, nobody wants to be that guy who says no causes have been important. My life, right? It makes you think about your life review, connections, your life story, connections to different causes. And we know from the brain scanner, that’s what triggers these decisions. So that’s an example where we get all three different kinds of research, in depth qualitative brain scanning research and experimental uh uh testing. And uh we can come up with something that’s functionally useful. It’s time for a break. Imagine a fundraising partner that not only helps you raise more money but also supports you in retaining your donors. A partner helps you raise funds both online and on location. So you can grow your impact faster. That’s donor box, a comprehensive suite of tools, services and resources that gives fundraisers just like you a custom solution to tackle your unique challenges, helping you achieve the growth and sustainability, your organization needs, helping you help others visit donor box.org to learn more. Now, back to quantitative fundraising research. I I gotta pull on this thread even though it’s a digression. I still gotta I gotta pull a little more. Is there, do we know anything about age dependency? So if you’re, if you’re, if reflecting back on the causes that have been important to you in your life is, is a, a valuable phrase to add the more years you have to reflect back on. So if you’re 60 are you more likely to be moved by that phrase than if you’re 30? So we didn’t find an age difference in that specific phrase, but we found a related age difference. So one of the things that can really ramp up interest in uh a gift and a will uh is if we ask people about, do you have uh a family member who would have appreciated for a deceased family member or would appreciate your support of this kind of a cause? And if so tell us about their connection to the cause and then if you match that with the opportunity to make a uh a gift and a will in honor of or in memory of uh that, that loved one, that process actually dr can dramatically ramp up interest in leaving a bequest gift to an organization. Now, two things about that one, that process is significantly more impactful for older adults. And it’s not so much that when they have a family member connection, especially with a deceased family member that the uh that the hit or the increase in interest is so much greater. It’s that as people age, they’re more likely to have deceased family members who um they have these connections with. And it turns out that deceased family members more powerful connection than living family members. Uh And it, it tends to be um ceased ascendants, uh not descendants. Uh And in particular, female ascendants uh tend to drive these uh these kinds of things. So, so that’s an example where we have an intervention that is age dependent For exactly the same reason that you mentioned uh that they’re more likely to have those kinds of connections, have those folks who have died in their lives. So it sounds like mother and grandmother. They, they, they would do, they would do much better than uh son. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Friends don’t work. Uh Descendants don’t work. But ascendant uh uh grandmother number one, then aunt, then mother uh father was statistically insignificant, father, fatherhood, statistically insignificant mother, less significant than aunt or grandmother. Yeah. As the more you move up then and part of it is just that we don’t leave money to those people so we can use a gift because we, we wouldn’t give it directly to them. OK. All right. Let’s go back uh back to where we were. I, I asked you to, I, no, it’s my fault for uh pursuing the digression. But uh all right. So now back to the brain scanning. Uh is there an MD in the room with you? I mean, in case the person needs some anesthesia or something or they freak out in the MRI or have you preceded people who are? Ok, in MRI machines. So, um we have, uh, so the research that I’m doing is just part of the Texas Tech neuroimaging Institute. And of course, I’ll have a co-author on all of these that, uh that has worked with this and so sort of pre-existing systems set up for those, uh, those sorts of things. But yeah, we’ve had some interesting things and, and in fact, one of the things that we do, uh, just for such an event, uh, because we schedule people for these, you know, 45 minute sessions and all of that. And we, we pay for the time, which is expensive time on the machine is I’ll hire grad students to just sit there and do homework all day because if somebody freaks out in the machine presses the button says, I don’t, you know, I can’t do this, I’m out. We need to have somebody that is, uh, that is going in there as well. So that does happen from time to time. Is it true that charitable giving activates the same centers of the brain as, uh, eating chocolate or is that the hypothalamus or the, the pleasure centers and eating chocolate? I always see the two, not that often, but through the years, I’ve seen the two analogize charitable giving and eating chocolate, but activates a pleasure charitable giving activates the same pleasure center. Uh, uh, is that, is that true or is that a Wives Tale? Well, you know, it’s true to the extent that, um, charitable giving is enjoyable. Uh, and so we do see activation in, in the brain and it turns out there’s some cool research that shows charitable giving is really enjoyable. But if they’re doing the exact same thing without being able to choose it, so it’s taxation rather than charitable giving, that turns out to be not so much fun. I, I know shocking result, right? Uh But uh uh so it, it, it, it does activate these reward centers. Um So, you know, I, I guess a slightly more accurate way to think of it is that it activates the reward center rather than the uh the, the same reward center, you know, in the sense of, oh, there’s one, there’s one part of the brain that only reacts to chocolate and giving, right? It’s like, no, this is the more generic network that’s used that is uh indicating a uh a reward uh in, in the brain activates the reward center. Is it the hypothalamus or do I have that wrong? Uh So that’s not what we’re seeing in a lot of our more ventral striatum and some of some of the other um uh uh areas that, that engage. But to be honest with you, most of these things like reward, uh they uh occur through a network. And so you’ll actually get activations that simul activations in multiple areas. Uh And uh and so there are different pieces that, that uh that are involved. So there tends to be networks rather than just one location does, does one thing. Although certainly if uh if there’s damage or interference to one location in a network, it can mess up the whole thing. OK. Cool. Thank you. Alright. So refining my uh my thinking through the years. OK. And my my analogizing. All right. So it’s the reward center actively the reward center. Um So, all right, let’s let’s drill down to some of the details of your years of research. Um and others, you cite lots of other people in in some of your, some of your trainings um like details of individuals in details of individuals are better than generic type individuals in in, in storytelling. Yeah, you know, so this is something that comes back to that notion that um we’ve got to create an image and it needs to be an empathetic image. Now, the challenge is that oftentimes the underlying issue we’re working with has real complexity in that issue and that complexity is true, but it’s not motivational. And so whenever there is AAA um a randomly assigned experiment between a simple story involving a single person, um this is known as the uh identifiable victim effect that people are going to give more to that and to the extent that you make that story more complex people will give less. So, so real simple example. Um if uh in one experiment where the total cost to save uh one child or eight Children was exactly the same with the story of one child, 90% of people donated for that. But if you told the story with eight Children, only 58% donated to it, and we kind of see this again and again whenever we make the story more complicated, um and it’s harder to easily visualize, uh then we don’t get that social emotional response. And when we tamp down that social emotional response, then we tend not to get given. Now, this comes up all the time. Whenever people start leading with numbers, you know, this idea of, let’s talk about, you know, the impact in terms of uh the hundreds or the thousands or the tens of thousands. And, you know, from an accounting perspective, we’d love that it sounds like impact, but that is not visiable. And so it turns out that when we lead with numbers, uh uh that is not going to engage the social emotional regions of the brain. It lets the brain know, hey, this is a math problem and we’re going to engage those math error, detecting part of the brains, the the sort of accountant part of the brains. And uh and that is not going to uh trigger the kind of social emotion that that is necessary to begin the philanthropic process. Now, this does not mean don’t ever talk about numbers, it means don’t start with numbers. You’ve got to start with that motivational image of impact. And then for some people, they’ll be interested in numbers. And so after you have kind of that motivation going of the visual liable impact, then you can tamp down their uh their error detection. Uh mathematics side by providing sufficient information or at least access to that information, don’t push it on them because uh many people uh o only need a limit, go too far. If you go too far, then you’re starting to reemphasize the mathematical again. And it’s gonna start to blunt the visualize the visual visual will get exhausting and you know. Right. So, so make it accessible and available on the data because you know, you’ll get an engineer or somebody who just loves diving into that, that’s fine. But don’t ever lead with that. We wanna, you think of it this way? Um The, the that social emotional imagery, that’s the engine in the kind of philanthropy decision making car. Whereas the math and the numbers and the air detection, that’s the brake on the car. So you do for some people have to get them to move their foot off the brake to, to, you know, at some point, right. But the point is if you haven’t started the engine, you spend all day getting that foot off the brake, not gonna go anywhere. People will not and say, oh yes, I understand. But they’re not gonna give, they’re not gonna actually do something. Whereas if you start the engine first that oh this is exciting. I can visualize it. I can see it iii I want to make this happen then it matters whether you get him to take the foot off the brake and even more. So when you add identity to the to the individual that you’re that you’re leading the story with. So, right? Like if you had name age, these those factors are will increase the giving over just, you know, just it’s just Sarah. Exactly. So anytime we can add or even worse, an eight year old, right? So anytime we can add a few and I emphasize few details that helps me create an image of the impact that I’m going to have that’s going to increase the likelihood of uh making the gift. Now, the reason I emphasize few is we find that if you just keep going and adding 89, 10 details, now you’re making it too complex. Now, uh the social emotional reaction tends to go down, it tends to get more exhausting. And so that’s why it’s that notion of you wanna have this clear, simple image that evokes the social emotional response. So what belongs like a name age? Uh I don’t know location, maybe the the town that they’re in if let’s say it’s a disaster relief or something, name age and city is that that’s not going too far. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, in general, for example, a lot of the tests are done with uh you know, let’s say uh you just get the uh description without the name. Adding a name helps if you get the name, but you can’t see the person being able to see the person or an image of the person. Uh that helps. Um So adding a name and picture uh that is generally going to uh going to be uh uh very positive and it’s just like other good storytelling, right? If you start reading a story and it says introducing character number one and then you have like five paragraphs of details on them. Like we don’t want to read that story, right? But if you know, as we learn about the person and during the course of this, the story and what’s happening and the impact of detail here or there helps make it more emotional or easy to visualize. Then that’s helpful for the story. It’s time for Tony’s take two. Thank you, Kate. I have to say how much I admire Jon Bon Jovi. Last week, he was filming a music video on a bridge in Nashville. He saw a woman on the wrong side of the bridge railing, she was hanging on with her arms and over the water and he went up to her with one of his assistants and he, he just kind of got close and the only video we have is a surveillance video. There’s no audio to it. Uh just a surveillance video from the bridge. You see, he gets close enough, he talks with her a little bit. He gets closer and helps her back onto the right side of the railing and he gives her a big hug and they walk off together and he’s congratulated uh later on in uh social channels, you know, he’s congratulated and thanked by the police and it’s just a very heartwarming story AAA lovely story of humanity. Um Actually in the video before he goes up to the woman and starts chatting, you do see some people walking past her and they look, one person looks back but they don’t do anything, they just keep walking. Uh So, you know, a celebrity multi 100 millionaire maintains his humanity goes and helps another human being who’s uh suffering a crisis act obviously and helps her off the bridge literally. So just a very sweet story, Jon Bon Jovi. Thank you. I would say I was almost gonna say congratulations, but just thank you. Thats Tonys take two Kate. Yeah, I didn’t hear of this until you told me and now that I saw like the video and I bet she needed that hug so bad from someone and her like him giving that to her like that he just saved her. He did, he gets to live another day years from now. I don’t know how old she was, how young she was, but she still had a whole life ahead of her and he just saved that life. Heartwarming. We’ve got Buku, but loads more time. Here’s the rest of quantitative fundraising research with Professor Russell James. You also have really interesting research on, on groups if, if it’s, if it’s a group of eight and they seem individual that uh is less motivating, I guess, less social emotion than a group of eight that are cohesive, uh a cohesive group, right? And so this comes back to being able to, to envision a single character. OK. So for example, if I’ve got a story of the uh you know, the one child versus the eight, the eight is harder to visualize too much going on there. The one is uh is uh going to outperform. But if that eight or say five in one of the experiments, it was actually six Children in one of the experiments if they were described as siblings as part of a family, well then that negative effect went away because now I’m kind of dealing with one character in the sense of one group. And we see this in like really weird ways. Uh also like for example, if you’re giving to a butterfly sanctuary and the butterflies appear to uh across the video screen all moving in unison as one unified group versus they do what butterflies always do, which is to just be scattered and bouncing around people give more when it’s that group image. Uh And so this is kind of this consistent result. There’s another study that showed the same thing with gazelles. And you know, the idea is that what is an easier character to empathize with? We can’t really empathize with a dozen or 20 different characters at once. But if that 20 or 50 characters becomes a group, then we say, oh, this is a character I can identify with this group as a car character. And that makes for a better story, meaning that easier to visualize, easier to have empathy for and it generates uh more uh likelihood of giving. What about the the cohesive group versus an individual? The individual story does the individual still do better in terms of giving outcomes than the cohesive group, right? Yeah. So uh so identifiable victim effect to use the technical term always gonna outperform. Um then if it’s a bunch of uh you know, uh recipients, individuals, animals, whatever it is, then that’s gonna perform worse. But if we describe them as a cohesive group with a specific, you know, kind of uh story to that group, then that’s gonna outperform the sort of uh scattered uh you know, the numbers story I I, in other words, we’re, we’re trying to um reduce the negative impact from talking about numbers by just talking about one group. And this is, you know, this especially if it’s a family that’s a cohesive group or um you know a tribe or a uh a a community whatever that makes it. Ok. Now we’re back to the story about one character in essence. Ok. But the one identifiable victim always outperforms. Yeah. In these in these small gift decisions it does. Yeah, that’s what we’re talking about. Alright. Um Are there other layers to the research? I mean I I wanna get to talking about tax deductions versus tax savings but before we get there, uh are there other layers to the research that you wanna, you wanna share with the listeners? You know, I I think uh if I could share just one thing uh in this, I’m borrowing it from actually a script consultant uh uh Michael Ha uh who uh you know, works with not only scriptwriters but even CEO S on what their message is and he always says number one problem very simply their stories are way too complicated and this is the constant challenge in the fundraising space is how do we create a message that is an appropriate representation of the scenario? Uh So we want it to be accurate but complexity kills empathy, it kills giving. And so, so that’s always the the notion of how do we have that story be something that is uh simple, uh straightforward and uh it evokes that uh that emotion. So again, the the reason this is such a big challenge is if you let non fundraising people, administrators get involved with uh writing your fundraising copy it, they’re gonna kill it because they’re gonna make it more complex because they live in a world of complexity and they want to sort of force the donors to they need to understand all of this like no, no no that that’s we can put that, put that in the annual report. Exactly. Exactly. Alright. Alright. Um so let’s talk about including some of the mathematics uh in in terms of talking about tax deductions or tax savings, different types of gifts. Now I know I think we’re moving away from the small dollar gifts, we’re moving to the more structured, you know, planned gift like gift annuities, uh maybe stock, you know, stock gifts as well but but that’s ok, you know we’ve we’ve spent a good amount of time on the small dollar giving decisions. Um let’s go to the the the yeah the I mean the more the more nuanced gifts and and talk about tax tax deductions, tax savings. What what’s the research there? Yeah, so one of the things to keep in mind that oftentimes gets confused especially in the fundraising space is that the tax benefits are not about motivating the gift, they’re about reducing the cost of the gift, making it smarter making it more attractive. So oftentimes fundraisers um uh they they uh get bad information uh and and uh it it sort of has legs because it’s something that they sort of want to believe. Uh, but the bad information is that, uh, tax benefits don’t matter. And since they don’t matter, hey, you don’t have to learn about it. Right. So that’s a lovely message for fundraisers makes your life easier. It’s just not true. And, uh, so let me explain, uh, what I mean by that, it’s not true. Like empirically, uh, we can definitely see nationally that, uh, tax deductions make a difference. And one of the ways statistically we can identify this is that although people’s incomes go up at a dollar at a time, their tax benefits, which are based upon the income bracket, tax bracket, they’re in, don’t go up a dollar at a time. They have these hard break points that different places. So we can separate those two things and we can see where, oh, that tax benefit went way up here and the, the behavior, uh we, we see that as well. Of course, there’s also different uh things that we can compare year over year. Um We can also do this experimentally, uh just asking people about interest in, uh for example, in, in one of our studies, we compared uh asking people about, are you interested in learning about making a gift or are you interested in making a gift of stocks or bonds to charity uh versus are you interested in avoiding uh capital gains tax by making a gift of stocks or bonds to charity? Uh, and about half fold more people were interested in, in the, in the second thing. Uh, so again, it’s important to understand that what sometimes the bad information comes from this approach where you’ll have an organization or a consulting firm says, hey, we want to learn why people give and so they’ll, you know, send out surveys and say, um, here’s different reasons people give, which of them apply to you and some of them will be, you know, because I want to change the world because of my values. That’s how it’s brought up because, you know, the impact I want to make and then one of the options will be uh because I want tax benefits and people don’t choose it. No, nobody chooses that because you look, you feel like you’re a petty person, kind of, what kind of altruist am I if I’m giving for the, for the petty pecuniary reason, right? And this is in fact a very common issue in social science research and something that we’re well aware of and it’s why we don’t test things in that way. You know, if you ask people for their motivations, you’ll get the socially approved motivations. And so that’s why we test them in different ways, you know, randomly assigning them to different descriptions and notice what happens to the impact and, or looking at the uh national data. Uh and uh and all of that, so all to say that it makes an impact. It’s not the motivation but it does lower cost and price matters. I mean, look, economics, 101 price matters and whether you’re talking about smoking cigarettes or, or, uh, making gifts, price matters. It’s not the motivation but it does matter. And, and so it is helpful to, uh, to, uh mention these things. Um, can we, can I reference your graph, uh, that you, you rely on sometimes when you’ve got motivation and cost and as cost goes down and motivation goes up where the two cross that’s a giving decision. So if we can bring the cost down, then maybe a little less motivation is required. Yeah. Oh, you know, and the other way to think of it is, you know, look Tony, you could get me intensely motivated to make a $10 million gift to Texas Tech University to build a new library building. II I don’t have it. So, you know, the cost is too much, right? So you’re gonna have to lower that cost in order for me to participate. Uh This is also true, a kind of a smaller scale where uh we see that that that cost does uh does matter. And so there’s another interesting thing about that, that it’s not just about uh cost mattering, but it’s also about the way that we frame that benefit that is coming in. So for example, and this is real consistent across a lot of uh uh economic experiments and that is that if you describe the benefit as a matching where OK, you’re gonna give a dollar, then this, this other organization is gonna, you know, give 50 cents or a dollar or whatever. That is more motivational than if we describe the economically identical result as a rebate or a refund. In other words, will you give $2 and then they’ll give you a dollar back now to an economist or an accountant? Tho those are identical, right? It, the net cost is the same in both cases, the, the net to the charity is the same in both both cases, but the story is different. So if I can use terms that describe it in a matching framework, which is to say, well, you put this in and then it gets matched and that increases your impact. Well, that’s a very charitable story. And it’s also me not only being philanthropic, but I’m being uh intelligently philanthropic, I’m making an even bigger impact. Whereas if you frame it as a refund or a rebate, well, I’m a little philanthropic, but I’m also getting something out of the deal too. And so I, you know, so it kind of messes it up. Now. You could look at that and say, well, everybody does matching gifts, nobody does refunds on gifts. Like why do we care? Well, we care because the tax system is set up as a refund system, essentially a rebate system because you give and then o on your, your tax return, you know, you get this uh this uh rebate back or, or this tax benefit back. So we can’t change the system, but we can change the language that we use to describe those tax benefits. We’re not going to describe them as, hey, you make a gift and here’s the, you know, here’s the killing you can make on your tax return. This is a, a AAA great benefit to you. We want to describe it more in matching terms that your gift can become more powerful when uh you get the government to kick in their share uh through these kinds of uh of benefits. And so that’s how we use that kind of experimental research. All right, it’s fascinating. Um What about the uh what about simple gifts and wills where there, there isn’t a tax implication uh for, for the vast majority of donors. I mean, the, the annual estate, the estate tax exclusion, not the annual, the estate tax exclusion. Now is what $13.6 million I think per, per person to double for a married couple, double for married. All right. So 99.9%. So, you know, let’s exclude the uh the 1/10 of 1% that is gonna benefit from that. Uh So, so there isn’t a tax implication to making a charitable gift by will Simple charitable bequest. What do you have advice about messaging that? Yeah, so uh, so a couple of different things, uh, first, um, I will, uh, again coming from a Department of Financial Planning, uh, if we want to talk about taxes, what I’m gonna do is start out the conversation by saying, um, that, uh, you know, any of that money in your IRA or 401k, any of that that goes to your family, they’re gonna have to pay income taxes on that when they take it out. And in fact, the new rules, they got to take it out even faster than before, but any of that, that you name to go to our organization, no income taxes on any of that. Now, I mentioned that because as a financial planner, the very first dollars we want to send to charity in the estate is the qualified plan money that is the Ira 401k. Um And so they, so they don’t have estate tax issues in their estate planning, but they do have income tax issues in their estate planning. So, so that can be a way to, to get into that convert. But it is interesting how the gift and a will is fundamentally a different decision than the uh current giving uh, decision. Uh And we see that the, that the behavior itself is different as well. Now, part of the reason that it’s different is that it’s about planning for your own death and most people, um, that’s not their favorite subject. There’s a bit of avoidance that goes on with that. Um So, so there’s a couple of different things that we see here. One is what’s the most powerful way to get in a will. Honestly, it’s to just be top of the mind at the right time when some other life event happens and people are going through that process and by top of the mind, I mean, always just sharing stories about, oh yeah, people like us include gifts and wills uh all the time that uh benefit the organization and reflect their life story. And so it’s just kind of this constant communication because one thing we see from some pretty cool experiments is that uh this charitable giving decision in the will is relatively fluid like uh uh so for example, there was one experiment, 1000 people went through the normal wheel planning process. Uh didn’t have any specific question about a gift to charity. 4.9% of those people included a gift to charity. Another 1000 people had this same questions. But one extra question, would you like to leave anything to charity? 10.3% of those people included a gift to charity. So you more than double it just by being top of the mind, right? And so that is kind of the the the first step. Now there’s a second step involved if you want to get to the really major gifts or the substantial kind of uh uh inherit sentences and that deals with this second stage response to being reminded that they, we’re going to pass away. First stage response is just avoidance. Like I don’t really want to deal with that. If you get past that, the second stage response is technically called the pursuit of symbolic immortality. This is the notion that OK, I’m gonna disappear, but some impact of mine will continue you on after I’m gone. And so if a charity can provide an opportunity for a gift that reflects that person’s life story, then they’ll be included in the plan. If they can provide an opportunity that also provides some permanence or sense of permanence, that’s when those major gifts come in. Uh So, for example, uh whether that’s an endowment uh uh for a particular part of the operations, you know, at the universities, we have professorships and scholarships or in financial planning, private family foundations or uh some of the advice fund substitutes for that. In fact, believe it or not, Tony, if we go back to 2007, when the exemption levels were down to $5 million so we were able to see more of that data. This is a number that’s going to blow your mind in 2007. Um Actually a a uh when we look at the total charitable bequest giving that’s taking place 78% of the dollars for a state’s 5 million and above went to private family foundations. Now, that means only 22% are going to actual public charities. Psychologically, that’s important because we know that the private family foundation is kind of the ultimate expression of symbolic immortality. It’s named for the donor or the donor’s family. It’s legally required to follow his rules or her rules of values forever. And it’s intended to live, you know, forever uh permanently to continue making that impact indefinitely. Uh That uh even after the donor is gone. And so why that is important is to understand that any time we can replicate some piece of that private foundation experience for our donors, that’s what’s going to drive these major life investment gifts. And honestly, that, that’s actually what we see in any uh big giving. Uh not just uh the estate giving is that it will come with instructions, it is the donor’s instructions that make that gift motivational. Uh And so the, the uh study that came out about 18 months ago from case, looking at the largest gifts uh that were received from all different levels of colleges and universities, when it analyzed those largest gifts, only 14% of those gifts included even a single dollar that was unrestricted. You know, the bulk of them went for endowments, some went for buildings. We’ve, it is that sense of symbolic permanence, endowments, buildings. There’s no, there’s no, there’s no, there’s no more permanent than a building. So it’s something that reflects my values and life story that lives on beyond me. And so, I mean, fundraisers would say perpetuity, you, you, you’re the researcher and you’re saying, you know, symbolic permanence, but we would say perpetuity, maybe not in talking to donors, but in trying to uh you know, just internally trying to encourage these types of gifts that, that uh the donors values will live on. It’s interesting, you don’t, you don’t use the word legacy. So yeah, go ahead. It doesn’t matter what I because you’re the researcher. So we tested a bunch of these phrases about what, what works best. So for example, do people want to, are they interested in making a gift in a will? Do they want to read about will planning? Are they interested in making a legacy gift? They don’t want to read about legacy planning. Are they interested in a state gift? They want to read about estate planning. It turns turns out the most attractive term is simply gift in a will. Uh We will planning. Why is that some qualitative research unpacked this a bit. Uh And that is for a lot of people when we start using terms like estate or legacy, they feel like those terms don’t apply to them. They’re a bit too grand, you know. Oh, in a state that’s like for the people on Downton Abbey who go riding their ponies across the vale in the morning, but it doesn’t really apply to me. But oh, a gift and a will. Yeah, everybody needs a will. And so there is that barrier with some of these terms that the legacy is absolutely the right idea, but sometimes that the term itself can be. Um, it, it, it’s not quite as attractive. Ok, I, I can say that my anecdotal experience over 27 years doing planned giving is identical to that. Uh uh I, I’ve turned in my early years, I saw people, you know, they, they just would bristle at the idea of a legacy that, that, that’s for the, the Gates and the Bloombergs. Uh You know, now it’s for the, for the Taylor Swifts and the Elon Musk’s uh right. It’s, I don’t have a legacy, I mean, and we all do have a legacy and you’re making that point, you’re saying the concept is right? But the phrase um so I’ve, yeah. So for, for a long time, I’ve been training that that’s not the best way to talk to people about their legacy when you’re talking to folks of normal modest means, just talking about, you know, longevity and the, the importance of your mission in the community, et cetera, but not their legacy. And to agree with that. And to agree with that, e even more, one of the things we find is that you, you don’t actually have to be selling a permit its structure. You can just use permanent language to describe the impact of your organization. So this was a really cool experiment where uh people were uh uh at the end of the experiment, they had an opportunity to make a gift. Uh And it was always to the same organization in uh poverty Relief Organization. In one case, it was described as uh uh making an immediate impact on uh on the lives of people. And in the other, it was described something along the lines of making a permanent impact that will benefit people in the future. Well, it turns out that for just the normal group that wasn’t reminded of their death wasn’t doing estate planning. It was better to talk about the immediate impact. But for the group that had first been reminded of their own mortality, which of course happens in the estate planning process for that group. Uh That immediate impact message did not work at all. People did not donate to that. Uh They donate very little to that, but they actually donated three times as much if you describe the organization as making lasting improvements that would benefit people in the future. And that just sort of psychologically shows the attraction in these death related contexts of permanence. We found the same thing when we were trying to figure out how do you get somebody to make a second memorial gift in honor of a deceased loved one. You know, the first one happens at the funeral and like, ok, I’m making a gift to the organization, but the organization never gets that second gift. So what we found we tested a bunch of different messages, the most powerful message to increase the likelihood and the size of a second gift is to have an opportunity that if we hit this goal for total giving in honor of this person, the fund becomes a permanent fund. So again, that same notion of anything death related, if we can offer permanence, that is super attractive, interesting that has, that has a lot of implications for on your health care specifically where there are so many gifts in honor uh on hospice, right? Someone, someone dies in a hospice facility. And the family says, you know, gifts to in lieu of flowers, please make gifts to the hospice and people do it, but they do it, they do it once and and you never hear from those donors again. So there’s a way uh it’s not exclusive to health care, but that’s the first thing that comes to mind because there’s a death often in health care and, and uh related related work. So, all right, bringing those folks back for a second time with uh with permanence. Again, there’s that there’s that implied uh I implied uh what did you call it? No. So the pursuit is symbolic immortality, symbolic immortality. That’s right. We will catch up. And in fact, if you want to make it super powerful, then you communicate for the second gift near the anniversary of the person they made uh the anniversary of the passing of the person that they made the gift in honor of because that really elicits that kind of mortality reminder very strongly. And then that causes the attraction to the permanent outcome. Interesting. All right, this is, this is bordering on manipulative because you want to, oh my God, it’s been a year since she died. I can’t believe it’s been a year now. So you’re saying, you know, capitalize on the uh I’ll avoid using the word, I’ll avoid using the word exploit the anniversary. Yeah. So we can think of it in the sense of we’re providing this positive experience. And so when is that positive experience going to be of most interest? Well, it’s when that sense of impermanence is the strongest, that sense of loss, that is the strongest, that’s when this particular uh you know, experience or product that we’re offering, it really hits the spot when it becomes of, of most interest. I know the cynic would say you’re manipulating people, you’re taking advantage. But this is fun. It’s, it’s, I’m not that cynic. I was just, I was musing a little bit. All right. But yeah, really, you know, this is, uh it is quite valuable. Um not only the groundbreaking parts that are new but the uh unwinding of the, the old saws that are told, you know, get perpetuated at conferences. And uh you know, it’s, it’s, it’s detrimental, you know, it’s, I mean, and I i it’s it’s valuable for folks to know there is science. It’s, it’s not all, it’s not all, uh, tales from the past and, and anecdotes. All right. All right. I’d like to leave it there if that’s ok. That sounds great. Is there anything itching? Is there anything that like the tip of your tongue that we got close to? But I didn’t know enough to ask about? No, I appreciate the opportunity to share. It’s always fun to have these conversations. My pleasure. Absolutely. Russell James, chaired professor in the Department of Personal Financial Planning at Texas Tech University. You’ll find Russell on linkedin. Thank you for, for debunking myths for breaking new ground for the quantitative evaluation of uh of, of fundraising and, and, and what, what it takes for successful outcomes. And Tony, let me say I share all my stuff for free. If somebody connects with me on linkedin, I send them links to all my books for free videos, slide sets, academic journal articles, all of that. Um Some of that’s on my website, encourage generosity.com. Uh but share all my stuff for free. It doesn’t do any good. If it sits on the shelf here at the university, it needs to get out to the people that are actually making a difference in the world. All right, encourage generosity.com. That’s me. Thank you very much Russell. Real pleasure. Thank you. Next week, Amy sample ward returns for another discussion on artificial intelligence. If you missed any part of this week’s show, I beseech you find it at Tony martignetti.com were sponsored by donor box. Outdated donation forms blocking your supporters, generosity. Donor box. Fast, flexible and friendly fundraising forms for your nonprofit donor box.org. Love that alliteration. Our creative producer is Claire Meyerhoff. I’m your associate producer, Kate Martinetti. The show’s social media is by Susan Chavez. Mark Silverman is our Book Guy and this music is by Scotts dot Heimer. Thank you for that affirmation. Scotty be with us next week for nonprofit radio, big nonprofit ideas for the other 95% go out and be great.

Nonprofit Radio for September 16, 2024: Board Members Are People Too

 

Judy Levine: Board Members Are People Too

One size fits all rules may not make sense for your board, especially if you’re embracing diversity and equity in board membership. Judy Levine is a longtime board coach, trainer and consultant, and she led Cause Effective for 17 years. She’s now an independent consultant. This originally aired August 15, 2022.

 

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And welcome to Tony Martignetti nonprofit Radio. Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. I’m your aptly named host and the pod father of your favorite abdominal podcast. Oh, I’m glad you’re with us. I’d suffer the embarrassment of pseudo cholesteatoma if I had to hear that you missed this week’s show. Here’s our associate producer, Kate with what’s up this week? Hey, Tony, we have board members are people too. One size fits all. Rules may not make sense for your board, especially if you’re embracing diversity and equity in board membership. Judy Levine is a longtime board coach trainer and consultant and she led cause effective for 17 years. She is now an independent consultant. This originally aired August 15th, 2022 on Tonys take two tariffs, 101 were sponsored by donor box, outdated donation forms blocking your supporters, generosity, donor box. Fast, flexible and friendly fundraising forms for your nonprofit donor. Box.org here is board members are people too. It’s a pleasure to welcome to nonprofit radio, Judy Levine. She has been executive director of cause effective since 2006 and she has over 30 years experience as a nonprofit management advisor at cause effective since 1993. And as an independent consultant, she has trained and consulted with well over 1000 nonprofits on issues in fund diversification, donor engagement and board and organizational development. Cause effective. Is that cause effective.org Judy? Welcome to nonprofit radio. Thank you. I’m pleased to be here. Pleasure to have you. Uh I’ve had your colleagues through the years. Uh Greg Cohen and Susan Comfort, who I know Susan is completely retired now and Greg is mostly retired now. They’ve been sort of stepping stones to the top now. We have the executive director. Ok. All right. Yeah. Yeah. Here I am. I’m good. My, my apologies, Susan Comfort is someone else. Susan Gabriel is who used to be at uh at cause effective long time and, and Greg Cohen, you’re concerned about uh equity on boards. Uh But at the same time, you know, we’re trying to maintain standards, but we want, we want a diverse board standards, don’t always apply to all the, all the different cultures we’re inviting in, help me, uh set this up. Well, there’s always a fear of the difference, the difference and uh then also a fear of um acting inappropriately around the different and those two fears, um sometimes stop a board from real honest, um, an accurate reflection on what’s at the table and what’s the most appropriate way to support the organization’s mission. Um And especially, you know, ever since the racial reckoning of 2020 the understanding on nonprofits parts that they needed to reckon with their own d eib diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging. Um My sense is that, that, that ha that, that reckoning has happened on a staff level at a different, different pace than it’s happened on the board level. And some of that has to do with fundraising and people’s fear that if they rock the boat, they will not have the fundraising return that they have now. Um And I’m here to say two things. One is that there is plenty of uh salaried capacity in this country for people of color, although not as much, uh not as much wealth accumulation, certainly generational wealth accumulation. And that’s a very real factor. Um So to think that you need to diversify your board, that you need to reach into the client base, which may be true, but is not the only way to diversify your board from the uh the group. It has always been ok. Are those the two? That’s, that’s number one. The other is that yes, you may have to rethink the one size fits all package. And that’s been a mantra in our boards is that everybody has to hold the same standard and that we know that everybody is the same standard and we don’t want double standards or triple standards. Um I’m here to re help people rethink the idea of universal standards versus standards that make sense for where that person is coming from and what they can, what they can actually bring to the table if they do their best. Ok, le let’s take the first of those because there’s, there’s an imp, there’s an assumption there that people of color are not gonna be able to meet our fundraising expectation. So we’re gonna have to, we have to reduce our board giving to invite folks of color in. But that, that, that’s, that’s just unfair and unfair and racist. Um You, you’re not, if you’re not finding these folks and you’re not looking hard enough for people who do have the means uh to, to meet your, to meet your, your board expectation or your board fundraising expectation and, or you’re not looking um at the right messengers and, or you’re not understanding why your cause is going to be a deep personal interest just to a person of color. Um All of those factors have to be there. Um You can’t, you don’t ask anybody on the board, you don’t ask somebody on the board uh of an animal shelter. If they have no connection to animals, they don’t care about animals, you gotta look. Uh So in the same way, you have to understand, let’s put it this way. There are, there are legacy charities, um the Urban League. Um You know, it’s very that, that there are huge fundraising machines, there are people of color that um there’s a sense of the ownership that this is ours. Yeah, that may not be in your board as currently constituted. That needs to be opened up. Yeah, that’s a, that’s a holding on to, that’s a holding on to power and structures and not allowing someone who looks different comes from a different background into our, uh, our playground. Well, and it’s more than not allowing, it’s actually, um, it’s more than just a not doing, it’s something that you have to actually do do, um, is to understand, um, how, who makes decisions? Is there an in group and an out group? Is there a biting one’s time, uh, ethos, um, which doesn’t work well when you invite people of color on and then they have to buy their time and they’re the only ones that are biting their time. And yes, it might be historical that everybody else made their time years back but people are gonna lose, lose, you know, they lose patience. So it means that you have to do much more rapid, um, leadership development on boarding and power sharing. Then your board may be used to. Yeah. All right. II, I don’t, I don’t want to derail what, what, uh, what we were intending to talk about, but I just, I think it’s all of the, well, I mean, I think it’s important to point out the, the, the implicit bias that goes along with this, assuming that you’re gonna have to lower your standards basically. Just assuming you got to lower your standards if you left people of color in and I, I think it’s all of a piece and it’s about who is and who was a guest at the table and board members, all board members need to be owners, not guests. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And yes and not treated like guests. All right. All right. So, one of the things you said is that, um, one size fits all is not, uh, is not gonna be the right model. Not necessarily. So what, what’s, what’s an alternative? So if we’ve got a, we’ve got a, uh, $15,000 annual give, get board requirement. Uh, and, and two thirds of it has to, has to be from your personal, well, your, your personal asset. So $10,000 from you and if you want to either give or get the other 5000, you have an option there, but you have to give at least $10,000 a year. One of the things that I talk about that took me, you know, frankly, you know, a while to understand is the role of generational wealth transfer in people’s capacity to have disposable income. So that, um, you know, uh, oftentimes white people come from, they’re, they’re not necessarily coming from money, money, but they’re coming from a position of, um, comfort. Um, and so they’re not necessarily carrying family members, they’re not, they’re not pulling their family out of poverty along with them. Oftentimes certainly black people who are in a um may make the same salary, but they are carrying people in their family. And so you can’t say, oh, this person makes X salary and that person makes X salary. Therefore, they have the same capacity. You only find this out by talking to and listening to someone and I a universal give assumes universal capacity. And yes, we say, ok, just give us a floor and everybody should go over the floor. We all know that people rise to the floor. So the question is, is there a way to help this person get and to change that relationship and or is there what are we, what are, what we are after on the board? Someone who is using their connections for the to the extent for the organization’s behalf and what comes in is relative to those connections and the capacity. It’s time for a break. Imagine a fundraising partner that not only helps you raise more money but also supports you in retaining your donors, a partner that helps you raise funds both online and on location. So you can grow your impact faster. That’s donor box, a comprehensive suite of tools, services and resources that gives fundraisers. Just like you a custom solution to tackle your unique challenges, helping you achieve the growth and sustainability, your organization needs, helping you help others visit donor box.org to learn more. Now, back to board members are people too. All right. So we need to, we need to get to know our board members. Uh And, you know, uh I, I understand your point. You know, some folks may very well be supporting, helping other family members, not necessarily out of poverty, but uh I mean, it could be, but not necessarily out of poverty, but they’re, they’re, they’re helping other family members that aren’t doing as well as they are. And, and a lot of that can, a lot of that can very well come from the lack of intergenerational wealth through the generations that, that, uh, folks of color got screwed out of essentially. All right. And I still want to go back to the fact that, you know, this, I don’t want to operate under the assumption that you have to lower standards just to invite folks of color lowering standards onto, onto your, onto your board. Well, lowering fundraising, fundraising standards, but it’s not lowering, it’s broadening. Right. Well, I don’t wanna work, right. I don’t wanna operate on the assumption that you, that you have to lower standards. Right? That’s what I’m trying to defeat that assumption. Yeah. Ok. Ok. Um, all right. So what about the, uh, what about the push back the, well, before we get to the pushback that you might hear from your white board members about how we’ve been doing this for so long and it’s been fine for us. So why can’t it be ok for them before we get to that? What might, what might some of this look like? What, what kinds of, what kinds of, uh, activities can, can folks do if they, if they can’t meet the, they’re not able to meet the, the give get requirement? Are you, are you suggesting rewriting? Do we rewrite the, the expectations for all board members or I’m guessing using that as a starting point? Not an ending point? Ok. So that’s a starting point with each board member um about their, how it relates to them, to their assets, to their relationships, to their circumstances. Um And where, which areas they can go above and beyond it and which areas they need to, to uh pull back from and everybody’s gonna have a different answer to that those equations. The fact is that they are, you know, I’ve been on boards with very mixed income levels and the people who had the higher incomes understood that in order to have a board with mixed demographics, they had to do more weight pulling in the fund gathering. Mhm. That, that was part of the value system was that it was not. If they wanted everybody equal, they would have everybody just like them. If the value system was to have different voices at the table, then the value system had to be that some people did more direct fundraising and direct giving and some people did more outreach and some people did more political convers, you know, conversations et cetera. Ok. I wanna make sure we wanna be having these conversations with uh these individual conversations with potential board members. Right. We’re before we’re in the recruitment process, before we invite someone to be on a board or before we accept someone to be on a board, we want to be investigating these things. Yeah, so that they know what to expect so that they know what the expectations are and we know what we can expect. II I, you know, having done a lot of board recruitment uh with nonprofits through the years, I would say two things. I, I think you have a co before as a recruiting, you say, here’s the kinds of things that board members are expected to do. Um and um you know how these rest with you um and you’ll find out some of them are scary. Some of them are, you know, oh, I couldn’t do that. Some of them are like, oh, this, I could definitely do that. I don’t know that I would pin someone down to an exact um prescription you trying to get their temperature. Yeah. But you know, it’s a courtship process and so people go above and beyond what they thought they could do when they’re really excited by the mission and they’re given the tools they didn’t know they needed. So uh in the courtship process, I would put this menu out and say, you know, how does this look to you? How could you see yourself in this. Um, but I wouldn’t take that as the last word because the board service should be, uh, people should be going into places that are not comfortable for them. And that’s partly the role of the board chair is to, is to live that by example, it’s not just to be good at what they do, but to live by example, I tried this and this was, you know, I thought I was going to throw up, but actually I didn’t throw up. I did really well at it and then I tried that and I did throw up. So I, you know, somebody else will do that one from now on. Um And so I want to be honest with people, but I don’t want to pin them down to something they’re not being ready, ready to be pinned to. OK? But you, you make a good point about board bird service being uh a challenge. You do want, you do want folks, I mean, you’re, you’re, you’re leveraging the fact that they love your mission, your work, your values. They stand beside you with that in, in those ways. Um You want them to, to be challenged, you want board service to be meaningful. Yes. And you, you want them to learn something from it because that’s part of what they get out of it. Isn’t that just a happy club? But that they’re gaining a different kind of sense of themselves of what they’re capable of. Interesting, different sense of themselves, what they’re capable of. Yes, challenge. That’s the challenge. That’s the challenge. Go beyond comfort zone. Try this and see whether you throw up or not. Right, kind of. But, I mean, you need to try it with a lot of, um, support and, and with the tools, throw somebody into the lion’s den. All right. What about the, uh, the pushback from white board members that, you know, we’ve, we’ve been, this has always worked well for us. We’ve always had this very rigid, uh, uniform giving everybody’s given the same through these years. What, why, why do we have to now? Wwwww. What, what’s the advantage? Why, why should we change now? Ok. So I need to be polite here. Um, no, you can be firm, you can be firm and realistic. You don’t have to be a lot of counseling of white folks. And I think it’s part of our, um, job as white folks to help other white folks to a different place. All right. So don’t be, don’t be soft on nonprofit radio listeners. I’ll, I’ll, I’ll admonish you don’t do that. Um, it’s 2022. We know stuff now as white folks that we didn’t, that we were able to be blind to for hundreds of years. Sort of the comfort of being blind to. Yes. And, um, we don’t anymore. So there’s a moral obligation to act differently. Our nonprofit is, is, is here for the public. Good. And it, it, we believe that to do that, we need to reflect the full spectrum of voices that is that public and or should be concerned with our mission. That means that we need to have a table that is really welcoming to all those voices that they’re not just here, but they’re actually, we’re gonna share the ownership of this mission. And that does mean that we need to pull apart the stuff that we’re comfortable with. And that’s unspoken because it’s gonna be a mystery to somebody who doesn’t come from our background and it was already part of this. And what’s the advantage to the organization? Let’s make it explicit to doing this. We are living our values in our governance and if we’re not, that’s pretty um compromised. Um So one is congruence with organizational values and what we’re here to try and carry out. Um The second is sort of more robust conversation and decision making because there are different points of view at the table because it’s not people with UN, it’s not an entire crew with the same assumptions. And frankly, you’ll have more interesting conversations and it’ll be a more interesting club to be part of. That’s not why to do it, but it’s a side product. It’s time for Tony’s take two. Thank you, Kate going a little different this week. Uh Because a subject I know about is in the news, a lot tariffs uh, I know about it because it’s one of the few things that I remember from my economics degree at Carnegie Mellon University in 1984. So I’ve forgotten a ton of micro and macroeconomics. But, uh, tariffs stayed with me and they’re in the news a lot that, uh, and the media doesn’t seem to explain them fully. So I would like to take a minute to do that. Uh, tariffs, what’s a tariff? A tariff is a tax on goods that the United States imposes on goods that are imported into our country. And of course, you know, other countries impose tariffs on uh goods that are imported into their countries. But, you know, we’re talking about it from our perspective, but our, our government might do this to help an industry, like suppose you wanted to help the wine industry in the United States. You might put a tariff on wines that come from maybe France and Italy and Spain or something like that. Or if we want to help the washing machine industry or the auto industry, we might put tariffs on washing machines that come from maybe China or Mexico or wherever they might come from. Same with cars could be just certain countries or we could say putting a tariff on all of the cars that come into the country from whatever country they come from. We might not pick individual countries. We might just say all the, all the cars that come into the United States are getting an additional tax, a tariff because we want to help our US uh, auto industry. Right. So it’s kind of protecting industries. That’s why they’re used and they’re also sometimes used for punishment. If we’re angry at another country, we might impose a tariff on that country’s goods. What that does is whatever the reason that we impose them, it raises the cost of these goods because there’s an extra tax added to them. And so that hurts the, that hurts the goods that hurts the companies that are bringing the goods into the country, right? So these tariffs are imposed on the companies, right? I mean, we might pick a country but the tariff really is paid by the uh by the, by the company that makes the good and ships it into the, into the United States and who pays the tara. This is the part that I don’t see explained adequately in the media. We pay the tariff, we, the consumers pay the tariff. It’s a tax, it’s added to goods and companies routinely increase the cost of their goods that are imported into the US to reflect the cost uh the increased cost to them because the the tariff is now gonna cost them more money. So they pass that cost on that additional tax on to us, the people who pay to buy the goods, the washing machines or the wine or the car. A tariff is not paid by the foreign government, whether whatever government, Italy Spain France, China, wherever, wherever we’re imposing a tariff on imports from that government is not paying the tariff, we’re paying the tariff and then the money gets paid back to the United States government from the companies that make the goods that are tariff and that are imported into the US. Ok. So the US government does get money, that’s the tariff, but we’re the ones paying it. We pay it to the company that make, made the goods and then they pay the tariff to the United States. So like lots of things, the ultimate cost of these gets passed down to us, the consumers and of course, we have nowhere to pass it on to do. We, we, we can’t pass it on. There’s no passing the buck beyond the consumer. So I just want everybody to understand who is paying tariffs when the United States government gets tariff money. Where’s it coming from? It’s coming from us, the consumers and that to take two K, that was tariff 101 with Professor Tony Martignetti. Uh I don’t know about professor like uh adjunct adjunct lecturer, adjunct lecturer for a half a ha uh for like 20 minutes on tariffs. Maybe I could, maybe I could expand a little bit. So like one third of one lecture, Adjunct lecturer, Tony Martin. I I wish all my lectures were that short in school? That insightful is what you mean? Insightful. Well, you put a lot of information in a short amount of time and I think a lot of professors could learn how to do that as well. That may be. Yeah, I, I, right. I’m not, uh, particularly verbose unless I’m having some fun with, uh, verbosity and, and, uh, word smithing. But, uh, otherwise, yeah, I’m, I think I’m pretty, pretty to the point. Yeah. Well, we’ve got VU, but loads more time, here’s the rest of board members are people too with Judy Levine. All right. So that sort of answers. Uh, dumbing down, you know, we’re not, we’re not, we’re broadening. Yeah, we’re broadening. And there are advantages. What would you say to folks that are the advantages to them personally learning, learning, learning about, uh, uh, learning from folks with different backgrounds? There is an incredible gift to be, had to be able to listen. I’ll say this personally as a white person working in a diverse environment. Um, it is humbling and awe inspiring to be in a place where you can really hear from people who didn’t, who are just like you and have them change your mind and open your mind. That’s what you gain by being in a diverse environment. And not only will you make better decisions for your nonprofit, but you will learn more and be a kinder person who in and of itself understands the way you interact with the rest of the world in a different way folks, if you want to see a diverse team, then, uh, pause the podcast and go to Cause effective.org, go to their team, uh, team or staff page and look at the, look at the pictures of the, the, the, the, the staff at Cause effective.org and then of course, come right back and press play again. Don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t start browsing, you know, don’t go to amazon.com too. Just look at Cause effective.org and you’ll see uh enormously diverse team there. Um All right. So, you know, that that’s anything more you want to say about wh why this is worth it for the organization or for the people. Um We live in a diverse world. I mean, you know, no matter where you are, um we, we live in a world in a country certainly. And in a world with lots of different kinds of people from lots of different kinds of backgrounds. They bring a lot of different things to the table and that are really interesting to interact with um what better way to interact with them than in the support of a cause you love so that there’s, you know, you’re all putting your, you know, shoulder to the wheel together. Um It, it gives you your life spice to be doing this in a way that’s not ho homogeneous and your organization itself will be stronger. Yeah. In the ways you just, you, you talked about a few minutes ago. Yeah, you you have some ideas about, uh, how to do this. Uh, it, it sort of efficiently shave, shave some, some time off. What? Well, one of the things that, you know, we all know that executive directors, well run boards, executive directors are behind them kind of every step of the way. Um, but in boards that really take off, there’s board to board conversation that the executive director kind of monitors but is not board of every conversation. And so, and when that happens, it’s because there are, there’s not just a board cheerleader, but there are many leaders. So there are leaders of governance or there might be a leader of on boarding or there might be a leader of uh you know, there, there’s different ways to chunk it up so that it, there’s leadership at the uh which leadership leads to ownership. Um And so part of your job as the board liaison, whether uh is to understand what that web of relationships could is and could be and then to do in essence what we call, you know, hr staff development, but with board members, so you ask them to take on certain things and then your job is, is being a coach, not being a doer. We, we’re talking about the, the CEO executive director now. Yes, sir. Yeah. And, and the development director also development and, and working closely with the board chair means it, it’s gonna help enormously to have a AAA culturally sensitive board chair. Yes. Um I send board members, especially white board members to trainings and not just what is de I but to real immersive, you know, one or two day trainings about the, how this culture rests on has rested on um racial injustice. Um I say if you’re going to be part of this organization, you need to have this basic understanding. Um And we need you to do this two day training and, and here’s, you know how to pay for it. Um Because there’s a basic understanding of that, that really shifts in those kinds of very immersive trainings. I’m not talking about a two hour what hr does at a large corporation. Um And, you know, we just said these are our values and you have to really get it. If you’re gonna be part of this team, I would certainly do that with board leadership, but this is a journey and this is part of the, and, and we want the board to be part of this journey and we need the board leadership to start it out. And if the board chair won’t do that, you do a succession plan, it’s not like you kick them out right away. But ultimately, a board is not gonna progress until you have somebody at the head of it for whom this is the air they breathe. Hm. Now you can have a chair and a president, you can have an honorary chair and an honor. You know, there are all kinds of ways to move people to the side that don’t, you know, kick them off this planet. But ultimately, you need to have someone who does, who, who breathes this stuff and who you don’t have to explain why this matters. And then it’s deeper than going to a training to understand what implicit that, that exi implicit bias exists. Right? One of those two hour trainings, ok. Say a little more about joyful board service. What we, what we can aspire to. I, I, you know, I get this so often where board members, the boards that we’re working on, they’re, they’re niggling, they’re going after, you know, do I have, you know, is it 2000 or 3000? What do I have to do? That’s the question as to what, as to, you know, it’s like I’d like to get away with as little as I can. Um And, and it’s an imposition on me as opposed to I will do everything I can. I may not be successful at everything, but I’m gonna give it a shot because this mission matters so much. And if I can help it, God willing, I’m going to and there’s when people are at the table with that attitude, there can be a joy at both delivering yourself and seeing other people deliver and celebrating that. Um And you can build that in, you can build in celebrations, you can build in you know, balloons for somebody when they hit a certain mark. Um, you have to build in not just, um, the actual dollars, but you can build in. They made thank you calls and they never talked to anybody before. You know, there’s all kinds of ways to build in a sense that I can do be part of the fundraising process, which then builds more courage for the next step. But it doesn’t happen unless you think about it celebrating small successes. That’s, that’s a terrific idea. Yeah. And you wanna build in this, this sense of, for, for every board member so that they are looking for ways to celebrate each other. Mm. So it doesn’t just come from you the CEO, it doesn’t just come from the board chair but that they are trying to help each other up that ladder. You like to see board members uh, socializing outside. I mean, I, I can presume your answer but I want you to say it socializing outside, outside the, the form the board meetings. Iii I do but I also am realistic. Um, I don’t think it’s necessary for them to be personal friends. In fact, I’ve been on boards with people who are personal friends and it’s tough. Um, because then they kind of talk about things outside and there is like, becomes factions. You certainly don’t want, um, relatives on the same board that I’ll tell you right now. Um, not just married but brother and sister replaying the, you know, the childhood, you know, I’ve seen it all I can see in your face and it sounds like you’ve been there. Yes. Um, the b, I don’t, I think that people have to like each other. Yeah. And I think you need to have some social places. You know, it’s been hard, don’t they need to get to know each other outside the board? Um, but that’s different than, um, going outside their board service. I mean, maybe not, maybe not necessarily to me that’s part of their board service. Ok. Um, that part of their board service is, understand, you know, it’s team building and the organization can facilitate that. Right? I mean, can we have, can we host drinks or dinner after a meeting? Yeah. Um, it’s, that’s one of the things that’s been much harder in zoom. Um, my part, you know, cause back of itself as a nonprofit and they had a board dinner once a year, but they should have at my house and one year I had the flu and they had it at my house anyway. And I just went to bed and they, they stayed up till like midnight and cleaned up after themselves and left, um, that we miss. So we have a game night now, once a, once a year on Zoom because it’s once a year everybody comes and they do all kinds of like 322 and a lie and all kinds of stuff, but it’s not quite the same. Um, we did have an outdoor picnic this summer and about half the board came. Um, yeah, it’s hard, you know, that’s the hard thing is now getting people out of their shell because we’re all used to now doing everything by Zoom or going to work and coming home and, you know, scurrying home. What Zoom has that? I haven’t quite figured out is that time before meetings, that time in the middle of meetings, you know, those the times of the after meetings, those kinds of times when people would talk to each other about their kids, right? Building that in um what we’ve done some of this in the, you have to do it in the middle of the meeting because people run out at the end of the meeting and they won’t come early no matter, they say, you know, two board members will come early, right? Um But if you break into smaller groups in the middle of the meeting, even if it’s only dies or triads and give them something to discuss. Um You know, one of my provocative questions is how does your birth order affect? Um the way you take on leadership, which gets into all kinds of personal background, it assumes strength and it gets people talking to each other. So having a section like that in the middle of each board meeting can help people to start to bond and then obviously changing the, you know, changing the groups up. Yeah, and making that group uh a hint, make those small groupings deliberate. Don’t just leave it to the Zoom Universe to deliver the development. Yeah, you can either make them random or you can assign people to be with, with other, with other people and the assigning is, is much better. Yeah. Yeah, I’ve done that in some of my trainings. Um uh What else, what else you wanna touch on around this, uh this equity and equity in boards and, and inviting folks in and joyful board service. Um Welcoming notion of enlightened self interest, which I think uh it has to do with understanding the uh the meaning of your cause to people who are not directly affected by it. So, you know, when we’re teaching fundraising, we’ll say um OK, you don’t fundraise just for the people who have direct interest to your cause because that’s your clients. And if you could raise your money from them, that would be earned income and you wouldn’t be a nonprofit, but you can’t raise money from people who have no connection to your cause because it doesn’t make sense to them. Why are they gonna lie on it? And that’s the same thing with board members. You can’t ask board members to fundraise if you, they don’t feel connection to cause and, or to audiences that don’t feel connection, but you have to find the enlightened self interest, which is myself as a member of the city, this neighborhood, this grouping that I care about Children, having a head start. That’s why you’ll often find like a mom’s group in Westchester suburb in New York that’s fairly wealthy. Most of it um will take on fundraising for a program in the quote unquote inner city because they understand the meaning of this work for Children even though it’s not their Children. And the reason I’m bringing this up is because that’s where the ownership comes in the sense that it’s on to. It’s up to me to make a difference for this and that this matters to me even though it’s not my personal experience. And I think that’s group conversations, it’s conversation in the courtship process and then it’s group conversations at the board level to keep that fresh. And it has to be deliberate because it’s the board service devolves into finance monitoring. Oh, yeah, if it’s right, if it’s allowed to discussions about why the mission matters to whom does the mission matter? Beyond just the direct recipients are very inspiring and they give your board members personal uh you know, nurturing and the tools to go out to their contacts with different kinds of language. And you will often find, you know, I’m looking for areas in which different people can be experts, not just the people who have a lot of board experience or who are, you know, long time experienced fundraisers, but that people with different points of view can have the position of being an expert. Hm. And this is where you will find points of view that your classic cabal has not thought of conversations. Yes, I love how you pause and, and think through and then make your next point. Uh, I’ve just been talking to you for, uh, 40 minutes, whatever, 35 minutes I, I’ve learned. All right. Give her a couple, give her a couple of beats because uh she’s got, she may very well have more to say, I love you the way you reflect. I, uh I, I don’t have that gift. I tend to be more, more impulsive and II, I spew everything out in one shot. Well, that’s why you’re on the radio and I’m not interesting to, um, you know, I, I wanna, having served on a board, you’ve been on multiple boards. Not that many because I take it really seriously. Yeah, but it’s been more than one. Yeah. Um, and then being a, an executive director myself and, um, being a consultant of board gives me humility about, about the possibility of board service. Um And I feel like, uh people who are only on staff have expectations, uh and anger when board members don’t meet their expectations. Whereas I’m trying to say it’s human nature to triage the kind of people who will agree to be on a board are often fully committed. I don’t wanna say over committed because you commit to what you commit to and it makes sense for them to do what they have to do and not more because there’s always something else calling on their time, let alone, you know, the idea that they might wanna play golf or read a book. If you do that, if you understand it, that that’s rational, human behavior, then you don’t get as angry at people, you manage them that everyone’s gonna triage that they’re gonna, they’re gonna assess their priorities and they’re gonna, and they’re gonna act accordingly and it’s up to you to have a dialogue about that. It’s not that you, you know, there’s something wrong with letting people slide or something, but it’s um it’s understanding and helping them understand how to fit in with all the different priorities of their life, right? And where does this mission fit in, in your, among your priorities? Right. You know, it’s why I, I um when, when I, when groups do uh board member, um the contracts or whatever they call them, um I suggest that there actually be calendars in there so that you, somebody can say to you, I can’t do that in June because my twins are graduating high school. In which case we say, you know what, we’re gonna take you off of that and we’re gonna take you off of me so that you can have a very because they’re not gonna do it anyway. Yeah. And then they just stop returning your phone or they don’t respond to emails. So having respect for all the different po pos rationally on board members, time and life and energy. Yeah. And then helping them understand how to fit this in, in a way that makes sense. All right, let’s uh give you, I wanna give you a chance to uh talk about cost effective because it is a nonprofit. It’s a, it’s a consultancy for nonprofits. They’re advisors, consultants. What, what uh what, what’s the breadth of the work? And how do, how do you work with, with your client nonprofits? Well, I, you know, I’d say we are 40 this year, we are about to celebrate our 40th anniversary. Congratulations for decades. Um And I’d say that the common theme throughout has been changing how organizations are resourced, um changing the balance of money and therefore power in the sector. Um And it’s both increasing it and increasing it so that it’s not just that the most well resourced nonprofits get more resources but that it’s nonprofits that are located in disenfranchised communities and the people who work there and um uh and volunteer there are able to raise the money, they need to further those causes um And to govern themselves because to me, governance is integra apart, it’s more than just raising money. But if you don’t have AAA governance structure that works, you’re not gonna have a fundraising structure that works on the voluntary level. Um and that’s where you get to organizations where the staff fundraises, but the board doesn’t and the volunteers don’t. Um So we have, we work, we do a lot of cohort work where we’re looking at the development directors of color and we have um working with them over a six month period of time, um in a particular program that we have to help them really address um the barriers to their being, being successful and not only to talk about it but to actually address it. Um We, so we do a lot of individual coping with, with, with um executive directors who may have come up through fundraising and, but, you know, you need to do it if they need it. It is not part of the fundraising structure. The organization is only gonna get so far. Um, and board members, a lot of board consulting, um especially now with boards that know they need to diversify and don’t really like, they know they need the composition, but they don’t and they don’t necessarily know that they need to act differently to have different people in different seats. Um We do everything from, you know, eight hour retreats on Zoom, maybe six hours uh to year long coaching engagements to what we call deep dive um transformation, which is a lot of times people come to us and say, well, my board won’t fundraise and we get in there and we start talking to board members and we find out there’s all kinds of reasons. It’s not just that they don’t know how to ask for money, but it’s that there’s not financial transparency, there’s not, um, a real partnership between staff and the board. Um, there’s not a peer to peer accountability on the board. Um, there’s a, in a group of three board members who do everything and everybody else slides. Um, you know, there’s all kinds of reasons that we will help. We will actually go in and help address. We say that that’s a symptom. My board won’t fundraise and there are, you know, many, many causes of that and we will, we, one of the things we’re known for is that we will go in and address the cause. We’re not just gonna do the tactics. Um, we also do a lot of fundraising consulting for groups that, um, have had a lot of government support or a lot of foundation support and know they need to diversify and they don’t necessarily have, you know, a Lincoln center board. Um, but it is very possible that people around the country or world will care about what they do and will back it up and want to make it happen if they, you know, for one of the things they say is that in fundraising, the one thing that’s, that’s um limited is time. There’s only 24 hours and maybe one second or maybe now two seconds in the day. And so you need to make choices that are smart with how you spend your fundraising time, money is not the limiting factor, but time is. And so we’ll help groups really understand what are the likely avenues and how to structure the resources they have to reach those days. Get longer. What was one or two seconds? It actually they did make a ruling and there’s like they added a second or something. Oh, I didn’t hear about that. I, well, I’ve been squandering my, my two seconds a day. For. How long have we had this? How long have we had these longer days? Go look it up. Six months. Yeah, I don’t know how many seconds that is. I can’t do the math that fast. No, but six months is 100 and 80 days. Times two seconds. 360 seconds. It’s a good six minutes. I’ve, I’ve, I’ve, I’ve, I squandered. All right, I’m gonna try to get it back right now by cutting you off. No, no. All right. Thank you for explaining. And, uh, thanks for a frank conversation. Yeah, we don’t, you know, for our, for nonprofit radio, uh, white listeners. Uh, we’re not, we’re not, uh, we’re not going easy and you have to have, you have to have honest conversations. So, thank you. Yeah, I, I think this has been some of, you know, I’ve been in this field for 30 years and this has been some of the most rewarding and deep work. Um, it’s not surface, it really addresses, you know, I had to go back to everything I assumed from my childhood on and understand that there’s, there are different realities and that, um, it’s not that I can go back and change it, but I can change my behavior going forward so that I further a different kind of future. Mm. She’s Judy Levine and she’s the executive director of cause effective. Uh you should have already been at their website because you would have seen their diverse team when we uh when I suggested take a pause and then you came back. But if you haven’t been there or if you don’t remember where it is, it’s at. Cause effective.org and Judy Levine. Thank you very much. Thanks for sharing. Thank you. It’s great to have this kind of conversation. Pleasure. Next week, Professor Russell James returns with the right words and phrases for fundraising. He got sick and couldn’t record for this show. I know you believe that you believe the guy he comes up with, he comes up with uh I lost my voice. No, we’ll, we’ll have them next week. If you missed any part of this week’s show, I beseech you find it at Tony martignetti.com were sponsored by donor box, outdated donation forms blocking your supporters, generosity, donor box, fast, flexible and friendly fundraising forms for your nonprofit donor. Box.org. I love that alliteration. Our creative producer is Claire Meyerhoff. I’m your associate producer, Kate Martignetti. The show, social media is by Susan Chavez. Mark Silverman is our web guide and this music is by Scott Stein. Thank you for that affirmation, Scotty. You’re with us next week for nonprofit radio, big nonprofit ideas for the other 95% go out and be great.

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Welcome to Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio. Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. I’m your aptly named host and the pod father of your favorite abdominal podcast. Oh, I’m glad you’re with us. I’d suffer the effects of politico phobia if you campaigned for the idea of missing this week’s show, here’s our associate producer, Kate with the highlights. Hey, Tony, this week it’s a different take on donor retention. Most donor retention research is on process like get your acknowledgment letters out within 24 hours. Kerri Hecht’s research takes a fresh look at how to keep folks with you. She shares her thinking on getting people to donate, time volunteering and donating through purchases. Ky is CEO of 10-K Humans on Tony Steak. Two hails from the gym, the loudest voice in the room were sponsored by donor box. Outdated donation forms blocking your supporters, generosity, donor box fast, flexible and friendly fundraising forms for your nonprofit donor box.org and buy pork bun. Looking to grow your nonprofit. You need a.org domain name from pork bun, instant recognition, trust and visibility pork bun.com. Here is a different take on donor retention. It’s a pleasure to Welcome, Carrie Hecht. She is the founder and CEO of 10-K Humans, a company paving the way for a more forward thinking and people centric approach to market research. They’re dedicated to elevating synthesizing and counting every voice, demonstrating that harmony between people and data is within reach. You’ll find Kerry on linkedin and the company is at 10-K humans.com. Kerry. Welcome to nonprofit radio. Thanks so much for having me. I’m glad you’re with us. We got some, we got a, a very interesting spin on a very common topic, but you approach it from a little different perspective. Uh donor engagement and literally 15 minutes before we were gonna begin our recording. I got an email from the chronicle of philanthropy. The subject is how to stem the decline in donors. This literally came 15 minutes ago. Uh They quote some stats. I was gonna ask you, but with your indulgence, I’ll just run through the dismal retention stats. Uh donor retention was down 3.5% in 2023. This follows 4.3% and 4.1% declines in 2021 and 2022 respectively. When viewed by donation amount, the retention rate for donors of $50,000 or more was down 5.6% for donors of 501 to $5000. It was down 5.4% and for donors of $100 or less, it was down 4.2%. The Chronicle, of course, they have uh some advice and their very first piece of advice is provide volunteer opportunities which leads to what we’re gonna talk about first. Uh But I wanted you to acquaint our listeners with your research related to uh your, which drives your advice. Yeah. So we started working with nonprofits for a couple of different reasons. Um The first of which was trying to go through the world in a more purpose driven way. So we started building into our work travel when we would go to different cities that we would line up. Um, you know, set up some meetings with charities where we could talk to folks and whether it turned into something or not was really not even necessarily the point. It was sitting down and talking to people all over the world who are solving the biggest problems. And what we realized in doing that is, um they didn’t really have a strong understanding about how to leverage the assets that they had in order to make smarter decisions around things like uh donor retention, um increasing their donor base volunteers as well as understanding and relaying back to the other stakeholders. The impact the beneficiaries of their service were having. And that is a conversation that, um I actually had earlier this morning too serendipitously. Um And it, it is one that just repeats itself over and over and over again that charities much like uh you know, businesses don’t they have in their head, what people think of them, which doesn’t necessarily align with what they actually do know or think about them and it could be donors, it could be volunteers and there is no feedback loop that gets back to the donors about the impact the services are having. And volunteers don’t really understand all of the different ways that the organization helps or all the different ways they can engage with the organization. This is, and this for me now on conversation 35 seems to be a universal truth. So your um your advice is around uh the reason I said it’s, it’s different than the, the typical take on. This is that uh uh uh the typical take is more related to the transaction. Uh The transaction of donating typically, like, you know, do an acknowledgement letter, you know, if it’s an online donation, the the person should get their first thanks within five minutes and then they should get a more formal thank you by mail within 24 hours or so, you know, it’s more involved around the transaction that way at all, we care about you. You’re thinking about, well, two things donating time and donating through purchases. I mean, so donating through time, you’re talking about volunteering. Yeah, so volunteering, but we’re so donating through time is obviously volunteering. But really one of the things that in and you know, maybe this is going in a sort of a slightly different direction. Our biggest thing is working backwards to make sure that people have the information about what you do and really understanding. So you’ve got, if you think about any charity got the three stakeholders, right? You’ve got the beneficiaries volunteer base and then the donor base and the donor base is going to increase. If they understand the impact, the volunteer base is going to, to grow if they understand the impact and the opportunities as well as what it can do for their lives, right? And then you’ve got um the purchasing aspect of it, which I see as something that becomes a natural consequence of these other two things. So in our mind and what we have been, how we have been working with charities is working backwards from making sure that the in the appropriate information is getting to the appropriate people because without understanding how it is what the charity is doing, that is impacting it and what their value proposition is and how they’re delivering on it. Those stakeholders don’t have the information they need in order to determine whether to donate their time, their purchasing power or their dollars to you or another charity. OK. So let’s talk about that, starting with the the donating time, the volunteering. So, you know, just uh uh as a reminder, you know, why might folks, uh I think there are several reasons why folks might volunteer uh and spend uh a different precious resource. Money is a precious resource. But time is as well, including, including for older folks who might be retired. Time is still a precious resource. Uh There are still opportunity costs for every hour they spend donating to your nonprofit. They could be doing something else and for a retiree, it might be golf or it might be the grandchildren. Uh, you know, for someone working, it might be more pressing or what you might consider more pressing. But, uh, uh uh sometimes II, I hear golfers talk about their precious tea times. So, you know, I’m not, don’t, don’t, don’t presume that work is more important than golf to, to workers versus retirees. Yeah. Well, if you think about what that tea time actually represents, it’s bonding time, right? It’s bonding time with their group of people. It could be, um, bonding time with work associates. It could be bonding time with friends or family. So, when we interview volunteers, that is one of the first things that comes up is that they talk about it becoming um, an exercise that they can do with their peer group that they can do with their families that they can do with their friends or colleagues that they can create uh organizations within their universities or within their, um even their work environments where they create these, these, you know, pods of people that are like minded and then they collectively go and volunteer their time for something and they do it together and it gives them not just an activity to do, but then a commonality within the group. And then, uh, you know, even as, as advice for a young person, as you’re looking to differentiate yourself between competition, um, in the hiring pool, this is something that people are looking at. So there’s a lot of reasons to volunteer that fit in exactly with the same reason that you would go see a base ball game or that you would go play golf or that you, you know, imagine a scenario where a grandparent is volunteering with a grandchild, right? These are activities that you can use for camaraderie, social bonding, growing your resume or your CB, all of those things exist, but we don’t really talk about that very much. I, I wanna pull on the one thread, uh expanding your CV. Volunteering is a great way to show that you have interest in a AAA mission or an organization that you might end up wanting to apply to. But if not that specific organization just that, that type of work that you devoted, you know. So if you don’t have experience in uh saving whales, but the, the work moves you and you might want to work in an environmental cause or an ocean, ocean preservation cause or something, you know, then, then donating your time is a, is a very savvy way to prove to potential employers that, that you do have interest because you’ve devoted a precious resource to it. Well, right. And there’s additionally, you know, if you look at the statistics around uh who becomes a leader within organizations, it is there’s direct correlations to the earlier you become involved in volunteer programs, especially when there is a longitudinal nature in your relationship with whoever it is that you’re volunteering with. I have an affiliation with Explore Austin, which is an outdoor um uh provides outdoor activities. This is understates it completely to underprivileged kids in Austin, it’s a five year program and you have a group of 15 kids that stay together for that five years. And then a group of um five mentors that stay with that group of Children for five years and they go from middle school all the way through high school. Um And when they start, often, they don’t even know how to ride a bike. And then by the end of it, they are leading um hardcore camping excursions into the mountains in Idaho. And um you know, so if you think about the leadership skills and the mentoring relationships that go along with that, you know, that has taught that kid how to be a leader, how to be a good member of a team and then how to be a mentor because they start as a mentee and end up in, you know, as a mentor. And I think that that is applicable um for all of these things and, you know, there, I read an article recently about, um, you know, kind of how to cut through the clutter of, of, of applying and how there is a decrease in, um, Bachelor’s degrees being the relevant reason to hire a person. You know, that there’s just not as much, um, cachet associated with having like everyone. It’s table stakes now. Right. And that there are a lot of people who don’t want to take on the debt that is associated with the bachelor’s degree that isn’t going to get you further. So there is this whole strategy behind cultivating your own experience through auditing courses, engaging with charities. Um becoming, you know, part of leadership groups and mentorship groups and things like that, that is setting people aside when it comes to looking at the talent pool. And so I think that there’s within charities, you can, you know, to your point, you can cultivate whatever experience you want. Let’s just say that you’re going to apply to grad school. Um and you’re looking to be a clinician of some kind, very hard to get a research assistant job. Well, volunteer your time at the Trevor project, volunteer your time with doctors without borders. There’s a million different ways that you can cultivate that big experience yourself. It’s time for a break. Imagine a fundraising partner that not only helps you raise more money but also supports you in retaining your donors, a partner that helps you raise funds both online and on location so you can grow your impact faster. That’s donor box, a comprehensive suite of tools, services and resources that gives fundraisers just like you a custom solution to tackle your unique challenges, helping you achieve the growth and sustainability, your organization needs, helping you help others visit donor box.org to learn more. Now, back to a different take on donor retention. Another maybe more fundamental reason folks volunteer is they may not have the money to donate to your cause, but they still love your cause. And so you wanna make sure that they have the information as you as you’re recommending so that they know that there is an alternative. We don’t, you know, our, our organization doesn’t only want your dollars if, if um if there’s another way that you prefer to give or another way you need to donate, you know, we have opportunities. I, I completely agree with that. So what should we share? What, what, how do we, how do we encourage now? Now we understand why folks might do it. Uh How do we encourage volunteers to step forward? Yeah, I mean, I think this is, there’s, there’s, I mean, that’s a great question. Um So we were working with an organization um in Tokyo and they started doing advertising campaigns. So they were one of the largest organizations, charitable organizations in um Japan. And the reason why this is so interesting is that culturally volunteering is not something that they do versus the United States. Um where we are often trained from a very early age, either through school organizations or religious organizations that service back to the community is something that is kind of woven into the fabric of, of, of how we go through the world. Um And so they were talking about, uh so we did a lot of research on the benefits for the volunteer and then we created advertising campaigns around that. And I think that there are a lot of opportunities for organizations to work with corporate sponsors, perhaps the corporate sponsors that are giving them money, they can also work within those organ. And we saw this in, in what was happening in Japan working with those organizations to create corporate volunteer banks and the people in the corporations that were volunteering would get acknowledgment within the organ organization that they worked for. So again, that is a way to get something besides money even from a large corporate donor, working with schools, working with college campuses and really articulating the benefits of it to them. So, you know, if you think about the different things that we’ve even talked about already, which are camaraderie, skill set, um Cooper experience with, you know, intergenerational co-operative experience um with your family, all of those things can be the same thing that you would treat a brand different pillars of advertising campaigns and then you would hit them up in different places right. You know, you could hit them up at, at college funding, you could hit them up at, um, career fairs. You could hit them up around the holidays when you’re looking to create warm fuzzies would be no different advice than we would give to a brand that was looking to sell something. You also want to share the impact that these volunteers are having, that you can have as an, as a volunteer even if it’s a solo volunteer. Um but a, as a, as a solo or as a group, you enter families, companies, neighbors, I guess maybe a giving circle, you know, whatever, but you want to share the impact that you’re volunteering will have as well. Of course, I I’m sure of sharing the impact with the current volunteers that, that, that they’re having so that so that they, they feel good about the time they’re spending already. Yes. Well, and it’s all about the stories of the people, right? I mean, and that I think is what, what we in market research are doing, you know, aim to do is to bring those stories to life because, you know, behind every number, behind all the statistics that you listed, there are human beings who are, you know, the reason that their donations are declining could be economic, could be cultural. Um You know, what is going on in the world. There’s so much uncertainty, it could be competition for resources. Um It could be they just lost, uh, you know, track of, of the organizations that they were donating to. You know. So there’s, there’s, there’s stories behind all of it and it’s important to understand those stories. And again, you know, I think that, that, that human beings proved time and time again when you give them a compelling reason to, um, to, to give, they are, they want to, right? They want to help, they want to participate. You know, even on like a personal level, if I think about when I got into volunteering as a, as a kid, it was because we had to, right. It started with brownies and, you know, so that has a service. I remember brownies. I was, I was a boy scout. I remember brownies. Of course, before, before boy scouts you have, we blows or girl scouts, you have brownies. Right. That’s right. And then we had, when we were in high school, we all had to be candy stripers at the hospital. And then, um, as a person that’s moved around the country quite a bit when, um, you get to a new city, there’s no other, there’s no better way to. Number one, learn how to fill up some free time before you’ve got your friend circle. Um, then to start volunteering in places when I, you know, moved to Brooklyn, I was volunteering at the Brooklyn Zoo, um, volunteer at animal shelters and it just gives you a way to get sticky with the community quickly and I was doing that on an individual basis. Right. And that was literally to just acclimate. Where did you, where did you live in? Brooklyn? What neighborhood? I lived in Park Slope and Williamsburg. I was a member of the Park Slope Food Co Op for about 18 years. Yeah. Yeah, they’re, they’re great neighborhoods. Right. And, um, I loved going, my, one of my volunteer jobs was to protect the goose from Children trying to interact with it. So, you know, there’s all kinds of, I don’t know, the goose, the goose, the Goose war, the Brooklyn Zoo at the Brooklyn Zoo. Oh, ok. Oh, things get a little too handsy. Like, leave the goose alone. It’s very stressful. Yeah, it’s very stressful on the goose. Right. Um, all right. Well, there’s opportunity for everyone. Pardon me? I said there’s opportunities for everyone. Absolutely. Uh, just since you mentioned, you know, moving around all over the country before we started recording, you and I were talking about the places where you, you move around now, acquaint folks with, uh, where you have residences at three different places. Yeah. So I have, um, a place in Los Angeles, which would, I would say is my primary home base. And then I have a place in, um, Austin, Texas, um, which has been great and, you know, I’ve, I’ve gotten involved with a lot of different organizations there and you talk about sort of the differences between Austin and L A. Um Austin is still a very accessible city where you can get yourself um involved with City Council and involved with charities and and meaningful work. Very, very, very, very quickly. It’s a very progressive city. So in addition to that, they’re looking for people who are committed to making um life in, in the city better for the people who are struggling with perhaps rising cost of living and so on and so forth. And then Haines, Alaska, which is a um very small city outside of June. So you have to take, it’s like planes, trains and automobiles to get there. It’s a puddle jumper away from Juneau. Um which, that’s where I, as I was mentioning before, I’d like to go to clear my head. But even there, they have um farmers market every Saturday in the summer and they’ve got an Eagle Preserve. And um I like to volunteer my time when possible when I’m there to either of those things because it’s a great way to meet people who live there year round and become part of the community. You can’t drive from Haines to Juneau. You can, but it’s gonna take you a while. I mean, so, you know, it’s a 30 minute, 30 minute puddle jumper or an 8.5 hour drive or a four hour ferry ride. But however, you decide to get there, it’s, it’s an amazing visual experience and how much time do you spend on an average year? How much time would you spend in Haines? Yeah. So, I’m building a house right now. So, the hope is that I will be spending more time. But I try to go up there at least for a week every other month, especially while the house is being built. Um, just to make sure that it’s like that, that is tracking and doing its thing. But you have to be, um, you know, there’s, there’s often no cell reception. So if you’re not at your house, you don’t have cell reception and there’s, there’s a lack of um you know, infrastructure. So there’s, there’s literally no pharmacy, no hospital, no doctor, there’s no stoplight even in Haines. And so, you know, you, you need to make sure that you prepare well, in advance that your work is going to be covered or, and you know, that kind of thing because once you get there, you’re, you’re a little bit out of touch. Interesting. All right. So like how do you do uh supermarket shopping when you’re, when you’re in Haines? They have, they do have two, they’ve got three supermarkets. Um You got food. Yeah, but they, they, the biggest difference for me is that in Austin and LA, I am very store averse. So I tend to be an exclusively an Instacart shopper. Uh even though there is a grocery store right across the street from my house and I actually have to go to the grocery store when I’m in Haines because nobody will bring it to me. Yes, I see you. You’re, yeah, that’s roughing it when nobody will. That’s a real camp. You, you feel like you’re on a camping trip then nobody’s gonna deliver my groceries. All right. Um, all right. Now, it sounds like an interesting. I, I don’t know. Uh, yeah, I mean, uh, it’s kind of isolated. Like, no, you’re saying no health care in the, in the, in the town. I was climbing the top of a mountain um, to the top of the mountain and I got cell reception when I got to the top of it. And I, and in my, um, I had gotten some calls from some doctors and my phone started like blowing up, you know, had the voicemails on like Blip Bloop and they’re like, where are you? And I’m like, well, I’m on the top of a mountain in rural Alaska and they’re just like, got to stop doing that. No, I hope they didn’t discourage you. Your doctor, I would, I would think would be encouraging you. All right. Um So let’s, let’s uh let’s pivot a bit. So before we pivot to purchasing, donating through purchasing, is there anything more you want to share about volunteering and getting folks to donate time and reassuring our existing volunteers? Um I would just say it’s always worth it. And, you know, there are so many opportunities out there that um and there’s even services that match you with the kinds of things that you are interested in or have a natural proclivity to. Um And there are, you know, when, when I was growing up, of course, the, the internet was brand new and um now there are services that will allow you to volunteer your time through organizations that will also help you see the world. I mean, so the opportunities are really quite endless. And I think that, that, you know what that means to me is there’s something that, that can fit every scenario or every stage of life um and every interest. So I think that it’s, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s all I’ve never had anyone say that it wasn’t worth their time. And I think that if you weave that into your business, you weave it into um you know, how you interact with your friends and your family. Um It can be really quite profound across the board and from a purchasing perspective, you know, if you’re, if you’re looking at, um you know, there’s a, there’s a whole different conversation to have there, which is, is probably its own um you know, two hour long conversation. But, you know, if you, if you as consumers um being purposeful and how, and where we spend our money uh and making sure that you’re doing the research to make sure that it is doing good in the world. To me, it’s just a very important value. And I think that, you know, a lot of corporations are in that space now, but again, a lot of charities are getting, are funding themselves um through having uh commerce, like ecommerce websites or by selling a service. I just talked to a patient advocacy group who pays for the services with um that they provide to patients by providing market research services. So, you know, paying attention to the kinds of businesses that you’re doing that you’re working with and um you know, trying to align as much as possible, whether it’s partners, things that you purchase that in a way that, that aligns with your own value system, I think is important and worthwhile. It’s time. Frere Pork bun.com named the number one domain registrar by USA today for 2023 and 2024 work by helps you share your organization’s mission with a.org domain name dot org. And the entire.org family of domains are at the heart of change makers and philanthropies worldwide. Join an international community of individuals and organizations sharing a common goal to make the world a better place. Your.org domain name gives your website credibility. It’s easy to remember and it helps bring better awareness to your goals. Every domain at pork bun comes with free features like who is privacy SSL certificates, web and email hosting trials and more. You can manage everything about your domain from one place backed by five star support 365 days a year. Get your.org Domain name for a low price at Pork bun.com. It’s time for Tony Steak two. Thank you, Kate. I’m a little sad. You’re not with me this week. I enjoyed it the past two weeks. Side by side. I know it was, it was a lot more fun. Felt the vibes a bit more with, yeah, with your uncle. So I have some more tales from the gym. You know, I should have brought you to the gym. I didn’t even think of it. I could have uh I could have shown you the gym just so, you know, it really does exist. Um Yeah, the loud guy. This is, this is a new voice. I think. I recognize this guy from long ago many, many months ago before I started the Tales from the Gym series here. But he hasn’t been around for a long time. And today he was the loudest guy even, you know, above the boat mechanic and, and the other folks. And actually, and he was talking to Tim. I remember Tim. He was the needy guy with the birthday. Had to tell everybody, including me that it was his birthday. So everybody would say happy birthday and I thought that was pathetic. Um He was talking to Tim so he had an audience of one and they’re standing right next to each other. You know, they’re not even yelling across the gym. Nobody does that. But they’re not even doing that standing right next to each other and, and he’s the loudest guy this and he’s, he’s political pontificating. I, I listen to how all the candidates are. Both, he was talking about the presidential candidates and both used car salesmen. Tim is just kind of nodding. I think Tim was kind of get away a little bit. I was on the elliptical at the time so I could watch out of the corner of my eye. Tim was given some negative body language like folding his arms and, you know, but it’s North Carolina. So everybody’s too nice to say, you know, you’re an idiot or I disagree with you or anything. Uh You know, we just, 00, that’s, is that right? Oh, they, they both are used car salesmen. Oh, ok. So just, you know, it got me thinking the, the loudest voice in the room is not the smartest voice. This guy is spouting off, you know, his political opinions and I just hope that you don’t let that happen in your board meetings or Zooms or, you know, whatever that the loudest person like has the credibility. Oh, they must be right because they’re the noisiest. Those two things are not even correlated. There’s no relationship between volume and in sight. So don’t let that happen. Especially on Zoom meetings. I was thinking, you know, people can bowl over each other and dominate and, you know, you can’t even tell most times that somebody else is trying to talk if they, unless they’re, unless they continue talking and then the two people are, you know, competing. But if one backs down on Zoom, you can’t even tell that somebody else is trying to speak. So don’t let that happen to you. Men are probably the worst of it. Uh, the worst offenders. Uh, I’m not saying it’s universal but generally, like men tend to be the, the blow hards. So don’t let that happen. Don’t let that happen, uh, in your spheres of influence. And thats Tonys take two Kate. Oh, I’m so happy about the Tim update. He, he’s my favorite out of all of your tales from the gym because I feel like he’s just from what your stories are. He was like the kindest and like, not annoying, like the, the woman who had her spot, you know, and she kicked you out of her spot, that kind of, or like the, the guy with the bow, you know, those are like, I wouldn’t associate with them. I wouldn’t associate with Tim. He, he is, he, he probably is the, uh, the, the most quietest, uh, quiet spoken. But, you know, he had that needy episode on his birthday. I think next year if you remember what day it was, I think you need to bring in a cupcake or something, you know, a little, one, little candle, something I did not mark it on my calendar. Uh, I forgot about the, uh, the Turf warrior lady. Yeah, I forgot about her. Right. Right. My first class, first class, I went to a class when I was there and I should have taken her spot and, oh, yeah, you could have. Right. Because we could pretend we didn’t know each other or, you know, or you just, it’s your first time there. Right. It looks like it was mine. I’m gonna stay here now. Yeah, I still see her. She is in good shape. I have to give her that. But uh turf, turf battles. All right, we’ve got just about a but load more time. Here’s the rest of a different take on donor retention with Carrie Hecht, you know, specifically for our purposes. You know, with our, our listeners obviously have their own purchasing decisions as you’re suggesting you’d be, you’d be purposeful about. But, you know, our listeners are also working in small and mid-sized nonprofits. So, you know, we want to talk about, uh I wanna, I wanna pull on that, the, the uh thinking about what your nonprofit might be able to sell, right? And this is what we’re talking about, purchases, selling in terms of services or products, you know, that you may not, you may not now be uh exploiting, you know, how to, how to think about that, what you might embark on the, the types of, you know, what you need to know about the market. Uh Let’s let’s um let’s, let’s start where we did with volunteering. You know, why folks might, why, why you might be able to induce people to purchase products or services from your nonprofit? Yeah. So we work with um a clothing brand uh out of Australia who they’re an urban streetwear brand, um called homie and they’ve cracked this right. They have. So what they do is they focus on, on providing skills to people who are bordering on homelessness or at high risk of becoming homeless. So they don’t focus on the shelter aspect of it. They focus on um literally teaching them how to be marketers, how to work in stores. Um They work, teach them how to make clothing. Um they teach them how to navigate uh conversations with much larger brands to get their defective products where then they take them and turn them into limited edition. Um you know, cool street wear that it becomes collectors items, right? And they have some, they’ve got a two year program that they bring people into where they teach them this skill set and they have something like a crazy, like a 97% success rate. Um and they have stores, you know, all over Melbourne and they’ve got an ecommerce website and things like this. And so that, that is just one example of not just creating a tangible product, but creating a skill set to create that tangible project project and then becoming something that is um as cool or as hip as anything could be. I mean, they’re like, you know, they’ve won all kinds of awards um for just how they’ve been able to crack that code. And again, this, this company that I was talking to yesterday um about the patient advocacy. So, patient advocacy is an incredibly important um and necessary thing for people, especially who have chronic illnesses given how complicated doctors and insurance and everything else are. So they, they, you know, they, they didn’t start in a place where they were a market research company. They started in a place as a patient advocacy group. And then in order to pay for it because they weren’t able to get the amount of donations that they needed, they’re like, ok, great. Well, how do we product ize what we’re doing and so what they’re doing is they’re interfacing with um you know, patients that are often have rare or rare diseases, doctors and organizations. And so they leverage that by providing brands um and different kinds of corporations access to those people. So that’s how they make their money, which I think is really quite brilliant, right? You know, especially when you think about market research is often looking to make the lives of um people better, especially when you’re talking about things like that. So they’ve monetized it in a way that um that, that doesn’t impact who they’re trying to serve. So I think that there’s, there’s a lot of clever things to do out there help us understand how you, how you start to conceptualize this. I mean, if I’m in a small or mid size nonprofit, you know, I’m II I can’t see myself starting a AAA brand and, and having stores selling the brand, I can’t see myself there. But how can I think about what products or services might be, might be appropriate for me to explore? Yeah. Well, so, so interestingly, both of the examples that I gave one was uh started with two people and they started with an ecommerce site, right? Um And then the other one was, um and, and there’s this story is, is, is familiar in market research, um that it was a lady who started a business at her kitchen table, right? So both in both of those cases, they actually were um, you know, one man, two man shops that just were clever about how they were thinking about it. So for, I think the smaller to mid size um nonprofits, it’s kind of the same way that you would think about a small to mid size business and getting, you know, your products out there. So, you know, let’s just say I’m trying to think of some other examples that could be um uh let’s use an animal shelter as an example. So we often will see um things here where it’s like rent a dog for a day, right? So you get people who then they’re not necessarily volunteers, but maybe they’re in the city and they want, are looking for something to do. And so they donate some money to the charity. They get a dog that they can then take out on a hike and spend the day with and then they return the dog. Now that dog has been paid for, you’ve earned some money and that person’s had a wonderful day and a positive experience and now has a positive affiliation with your charity. So I think there are lots of different kinds of things that you can do that are um whether it be experiential. Um You know, if you think about the, the patient advocacy group is a combination of experience for the um you know, the people that they’re advocating for and then monetizing that by giving companies access to it, which in essence, makes these people’s experience even better experiential with the example of the dog. Um You know, even if you think about, um you know, charities that are um affiliated with, you had mentioned the co op before or for example, me with the, the farmers market in Haines, I do that so that I can spend the day there with them. So they’re selling um you know, vegetables that they have grown. The Eagle preserve in Haines is selling um you know, the experience of coming in and looking at their eagles, right? And so, you know, you pay to get in, you pay to listen to someone, talk about their program, you pay to listen to, um, you know, you get to see things up close, that’s a product and a service that you’re selling right there. So, I think there’s lots of different things they can do that don’t cost you really any money to set up. Um, you know, Ecommerce website doesn’t cost you anything to set up, giving access to, um, you know, the back end of an animal shelter and, and providing someone with the knowledge of how the ins and outs of that work doesn’t really cost you anything to do. But people will pay for experiences, think inherent in what you’re saying is that you don’t wanna take for granted the, the experiential possibilities that you have just because you’re, because they seem mundane to you because you’ve been seeing it for the past 4.5 years. I worked there all this time, you know. Well, it’s no big deal. What happens at the back end of the shelter, you know, we shovel dog poop and, yeah, but there’s, there’s medicine and there’s, there’s, uh, uh, volunteer opportunities and there’s, uh, I, I mean, even I was at an animal shelter that had a small surgery center could witness surgeries from behind the glass, you know. Um, you could maybe even assist somehow. Yeah, I don’t know. You know, you don’t want to take for granted what’s mundane to you. Just, just because, uh, you know, you’re limiting other people’s perspective based on your own. Right. The rent a dog thing, if you think about it is one of the most, you know, for an animal shelter is sort of the easiest possible thing to accomplish. You know, you’re giving people, let’s just say that that three people took you up on it, it probably costs you nothing to put that on your social media. You know, something that can ultimately pick up some traction as more people do it. They have a good experience. They come back, they do it again, they tell their friends about it so on and so forth. Great for the dogs because they’re getting socialized. Great for. And there’s a bunch of pictures of the dog on the website out with their partner for the day, you know, smiling in the, in the woods instead of in a cage. Right? So there’s these, again, this feeds what the goal of the charity is, right? So there’s lots of different things like this. We did some work with a charity called, um, Surfers for Strays, um, which is in a, a dog and animal rescue as well as clinic in, um, Mexico, uh, where they do spay and neuter clinics in, in very rural Mexico. And she has a, um, so you come, you pay to go stay at, with her in her, her compound. She’s also, um, a yoga teacher. So your, your experience is a combination of having, you know, morning yoga classes and then helping take care of the animals and then, um, you know, and then that funds the charity. So she’s giving what she has on a personal level as an experience and then that combining that with the experience of the charity. So you’re getting yoga and warm fuzzies and learning about, um, you know, cultural differences and how we treat animals in different countries. All right. Yeah, I just, I want folks to feel empowered that the, just think, think about what value you have and, you know, like we’ve said, and there, all right. So there are some market uh like practicalities too to, to sort of constrain our thinking a little bit. Uh But I don’t want to constrain it too much but, you know, value, right? You have to, you do have to provide some value. It’s not, it’s not gonna be sufficient that you’re supporting the organization. Correct? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you, you, if you think about anything, it has to be sticky, right? So, if you think about a con even a conversation that you have with a person, um that is a one off conversation. Some people you end up becoming lifelong friends with and some people, that’s it. Right. So what is the difference? It’s having more things in common, perhaps inspiring each other a little bit. And that’s gonna be the same thing with any relationship that you have, whether it be with a brand or a charity or a human being, right? That if you, if you can find ways to um, interest, engage and elevate each other, then you will, you know, you’ve got that two, the two sides of that working together. And that’s when you really start developing advocate networks and things like that. You also have to think through, you know, who you’re gonna be promoting this to, you know, your target, your target market. I mean, this is right in your wheelhouse as a market researcher. But, you know, I just want uh I’m trying to just uh constrain a little bit with the the business realities of what, you know, what, what you can do. You need to know where you’re gonna be selling this too. Yes, for sure. And I would say, I would say, you know, my advice is always to be responsive and agile, right? So if you are dealing with, with often, you know, small charities or even small businesses, you’re dealing with um tight timelines, small budgets, um not enough people, right? So I would say, you know, there’s, there’s no reason why you can’t try something that is small with very limited resources, but then pay attention to the outcome and iterate quickly. And I think that that is the same advice that you would give to any small business owner or any start up, right? It’s, you know, keep your eyes open and keep your ears open. Look for what is impacting people and then have the conversations, you know, I just getting feedback, doesn’t have to be large scale. You can get feedback that even if it’s anecdotal is still actionable. And I think that that’s so we’re talking about constraints, you know, I tend to be an eternal optimist. So I’m trying to like immediately and, and naturally pivot to, yeah, but don’t limit yourself. Right. Because you could have three conversations, one with a donor, one with a volunteer, one with a beneficiary and you could come up with, you know, even though that is anecdotal in, but that may be all you have the resources for, there can be actionable things that you can pull out of that. So don’t be afraid to start the, I mean, the first thing to do is just start having the conversations, just start looking at what resources you have already in house from um you know, your mailing lists and from, you know, the the organizations that you support, the people that you support. You know, there’s many things that you can do that cost absolutely nothing to start gathering information and then that information becomes actionable. Yeah, you have incredible resources just, just in house. Talking incredible resources is yourself. Yeah, talking to the folks who are doing the work or meeting the service beneficiaries, you know what, what you’re just having the exploratory conversations. Uh Yeah, it is, it is all anecdotal but, but it’s, but it’s valuable still it’s anecdotal, but it’s highly informed. Right. Right. Well, and then you have five anecdotal conversations and then you’ve got enough information to put together a small survey that you can then send out that costs you nothing because there’s plenty of free services out there that you can send out to your donor base or your beneficiaries or your volunteers. And then you don’t have then, but then we’re past the anecdotal, then we’re into the numbers, right? So, you know, it’s, it’s, you know, I think that it’s just don’t be intimidated by it, don’t be afraid of it. And, you know, everybody has to start somewhere and everybody doesn’t get it right the first time. Like literally everybody iterates on every idea that they have. Oh, absolutely. I mean, look at, I’m looking at my phone to make sure that we don’t go over time. I mean, you know, Apple didn’t launch iphone 15 uh in, in 2007 or whenever that, you know, when they launched Apple, the Apple phone and then it was 2.0 and three. But now we’re 15. So, of course, you know, it, you know, it goes back to your uh uh on a smaller scale, your advice to iterate, you know, be agile, listen to the people, listen to the three people who took out the first three rented dogs for a day. What did they say when they came back? You know, not that you had to talk to them for an hour. But how did they feel? What did they say? Was there any, was there any problem? Yeah. Would you do it again? What would you recommend? You know, we’re just getting started. You know, there, there’s 33 data points, uh, highly informed, they just went through your process. So, learn from those three and then do another five or six and there you go. Next thing, you know, you’ll be at the iphone 15. That’s right. And, you know, I always personally have the um the philosophy too that you should be generous with your time and generous with your spirit. And I think that when you go through the world, that way you end up surrounded by people who are also generous with their time and their spirit and leverage that. Right. That’s because that’s because the people who are uh uh uh what’s the opposite of general are, are uh generous. I was gonna say that guy, it’s Scroogey, Scroogey. They’re scroogey with their time and their spirit. You know, they’re gonna naturally sift away from you. You’re, you’re, you’re gonna naturally sift them out. Um They’re, they’re just gonna fade away because you’re not gonna spend time with the Scroogey people. Yeah. That’s right. That’s right. And I mean, I think about, um even in my own career, um I had so much help and so many good mentors and, you know, we have woven that I think fairly successfully into um how we bring people up within our own organization. You know, and there’s a million free resources out there to get people. Stingy. Stingy is the word I, 62 words sometimes have diminished accessibility. Stingy is the word I was trying to get for. Ok. But stogy works too. I’m sorry, go ahead. No, no, no, I was just saying, you know, there’s, there’s, um, you learn a lot about yourself and other people when you help open doors, right? And there’s, there’s, you know, using this would be applicable to charities and small businesses as well. Like if you’re looking to cultivate skill sets, um you know, there are a million resources out there that are low cost or free Coursera, for example, being one. So let’s just say again, you don’t have, um you have limited budgets to hire people, but you need them to become advanced Excel experts. Well, it cost you 40 bucks to take a course for a whole month of as many courses as you want on Coursera. Boom. Now we’re, we’re, you know what I mean? So, so get out there and really start, you know, don’t, don’t think about the things that you can’t do, think about the things that you can, you know, I’m routinely saying something that’s directly a corollary to that uh focus on how you can not, why you can’t. Right. Yeah. And we’re saying the same thing, I just put it in different words. But, you know, I tend to think that anything and everything is possible until proven otherwise. And once in a while I am. But, you know, and it’s usually, you know, a little bit of a painful lesson but then you iterate and you make it possible. So, navigate around the, the hurdles and if you’re looking for reasons why you can’t do something, oh, they’ll, they’ll, they’ll jump at you. You’ll find a dozen reasons why you can’t, we, we don’t have enough time. Uh It’s not the right budget cycle. Uh We’re a little short staffed now. We’d have to fill this position first. Now, we have an open board seat. Now, we have, you know, I have to focus on that. Now, the gala in six months now, I just, uh, you know, hypothetical organization, I just named like eight reasons why you can’t do something. So if you’re looking for those, the, they’ll jump out at you focus on the how you can. Exactly. Right. And, and, you know, the other thing I would say too is tick as many boxes as you can, right. So when we started the, the, the, the line of, I don’t even call a line of business because it’s not. But the, the internal initiative um that we call 10-K causes, which was doing this pro bono work for charities, right. So we had a bunch of different reasons that we were doing it and it was to create a sandbox and training ground for our employees. So when we had employees that needed to be upskilled, um or were looking to level up in their career, you know, that we could, we could create this environment for them where we could experiment. So and then experimenting with new technology, you know, maybe we don’t understand it well enough to run it on a live project. So let’s experiment with it. It gives us collateral material and case studies because most of the work we do is under nd A. So there’s, you know, so if you think about it, we’re helping these charities, but there is for sure, a self serving nature to it as well. You know, and it’s, and I think that that’s, that’s really if I could drive any point home that it’s like it goes back to that those relationships that I’m talking about that become sticky that it’s like these are mutual beneficial things. We’re learning about the world, we’re learning about our business, we’re learning about what we can do. And in the meantime, we’re helping small, you know, helping charities learn about their potential and they can take, you know, what we know natively to brand building um consumer insights and apply those learnings to their own um organizations. So it’s, it’s, there’s absolutely a mutually beneficial aspect to it and there should be to all of these engagements, outstanding uh advice, uh thinking uh stuff that folks can take back and, and advance or at least think about it on their own and then advance. Uh Why don’t you leave us with some, some parting thoughts on, on your, you know, this research and ways that we can, you know, leverage what everything we’ve talked about for all for the good of donor retention. Yeah, I would just see, be end curious, right? Be end curious about why, what your organization is doing, how it’s benefiting people don’t take for granted that you know what is important to the donors and the volunteers from an information standpoint, ask them what important and then go and build on that and give them more than what they, what they’re asking for because the more they know the more likely they are to stay engaged. And I mean, I think in a nutshell, that’s what I would say. Information, feedback, loop, information, feedback, loop, information, feedback loop, Harry Hecht, founder and CEO of 10-K Humans. You’ll find carry on linkedin. The company is at 10-K humans.com. Thank you very much for sharing your thinking, Carrie. Yeah, I appreciate it. This was great. Next week, Professor Russell James returns with the right words and phrases for fundraising. If you missed any part of this weeks show, I do beseech you find it at Tony martignetti.com were sponsored by donor box, outdated donation forms, blocking your supporters, generosity, donor box, fast, flexible and friendly fundraising forms for your nonprofit donor box.org and buy pork bun. Looking to grow your nonprofit. You need a.org domain name from pork bun, instant recognition, trust and visibility. Pork bun.com. Our creative producer is Claire Meyerhoff. I’m your associate producer, Kate Martignetti. The show social media is by Susan Chavez. Mark Silverman is our web guide and this music is by Scott Stein. Thank you for that. Our permission, Scotty be with us next week for nonprofit radio. Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95% go out and be great.

Nonprofit Radio for September 2, 2024: Community & Engagement

 

Michelle Boggs: Community & Engagement

Michelle Boggs shares her thinking on creating community and expanding engagement across your donors and volunteers. How might a Chief Community Officer help? Also, what your nonprofit can do to improve fundraiser retention, which helps you build solid relationships and community. Michelle is with Classy, the nonprofit affiliate of GoFundMe.

 

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Every nonprofit struggles with these issues. Big nonprofits hire experts. The other 95% listen to Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio. Trusted experts and leading thinkers join me each week to tackle the tough issues. If you have big dreams but a small budget, you have a home at Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio.
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Welcome to Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio. Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. I’m your aptly named host and the pod father of your favorite abdominal podcast. Oh, I’m glad you’re with us. I’d suffer the effects of trauma. Top nia if you took my breath away with the idea that you missed this week’s show. Here’s our associate producer, Kate who happens to be sitting next to me again one more week. Uh The family is still visiting this week. Tell us what is going on. Hey, Tony, we’ve got community and engagement. Michelle Boggs shares her thinking on creating community and expanding engagement across your donors and volunteers. How might a chief community Officer help also what your nonprofit can do to improve fundraiser retention, which helps you build solid relationships and community. Michelle is with Classy, the non profit affiliate of GoFundMe on Tony’s Take Two Tails from the gym. It’s a clean machine were sponsored by donor box, outdated donation forms blocking your supporters, generosity, donor box fast, flexible and friendly fundraising forms for your nonprofit donor box.org and buy pork bun looking to grow your nonprofit. You need a.org domain name from pork bun, instant recognition, trust and visibility. Pork bun.com here is community and engagement. It’s a genuine pleasure to welcome Michelle Boggs. She is the executive nonprofit industry advisor of Classy, the nonprofit affiliate of GoFundMe. She helps nonprofits maximize fundraising efforts by analyzing industry data, examining market messaging and donor relationship building. She was a San Francisco Business Journal, 40 under 40 in 2020. Um That was four years ago. Uh You know, we don’t, we don’t like Laurel rests here. We’ll have to see what’s been happening in the past four years and that’s old news now, but we keep, it’s still valuable, but, you know, it’s what, what’s been going on lately. Michelle is on linkedin and the company is at classy.org Michelle Boggs. Welcome to nonprofit Radio, Tony. Thanks so much for having me. It’s an honor. I’ve been listening to your show for a long time and congrats on 700 episodes. It, I just feel honored to be here today. So thanks so much for having me. Thank you. Thank you very much. I hope you don’t mind a little tease in the beginning. Uh You know, it’s no 40 under 40 is a terrific milestone honor to receive. Of course, you know, I’m just messing with you about uh Laurel resting. I know you’re not, we know you’re not a Laurel. I totally get it as we will find out as we will find out. So I, I peaked at 40 that was it? Huh? Right. That’s like, that’s like when you get your lifetime achievement award. No, I’m not, I’m not ready to surrender yet. I, I don’t want the lifetime achievement award. My lifetime is not over. You know, I feel like I, I’ve never gotten a lifetime achievement award but I feel like if you get it, what are people saying? There’s not much more coming? You don’t have, you don’t have too many more years left, lifetime achievement. You’ve already wrapped everything up. Uh No, I’m not, we’re not ready for that. Uh I got, I got more stuff to do. Um So classy class, he’s got millions of users on the platform. What’s, what’s sort of the state of giving from the classy perspective? Yeah. And you know, as you alluded to Classy is part of GoFundMe. So GoFundMe acquired Classy about two years ago and just for general knowledge because I don’t think most um of your 95% of the smaller nonprofits may be aware of the power within the marriage of these two brands and what we’re really excited about. Um and how the future um and existing state of giving is really helping us develop products that will help people be more generous and help others. So classy and it’s self, Tony supports nonprofits. We have about 6000 nonprofits using our platform. And then on the gofundme side, those are individuals setting up gofundmes and raising money on behalf of other individuals, friends, families, colleagues, coworkers um combined between the two companies, we just surpassed $30 billion raised. And in any given time, we have about about 100 and 50 million active users. Um Interfacing with Classy or GoFundMe. Classy specifically, I came to work here because before joining a technology company, I was a front line fundraiser myself for my entire career, worked at smaller more regional nonprofits, worked at some of the big, you know, fortune 100 nonprofits and did all the things, wore all the hats. Um and it’s been a phenomenal career. But what I started to notice towards the end of my tenure and before I jumped over to Classy was just this, we were really missing the mark in engagement with donors. It just seemed like Groundhog’s Day every year around. Ok, how do we keep our existing donors? How do we increase their giving? How do we find new donors? And it just, you know, kept the numbers just kept going in the wrong direction. And it was really just thinking we’ve got to be doing something wrong here. I mean, people are changing and how they want to engage with brands, how they want to show up in generosity, how they want to support others, what philanthropy means to them. And so for me, it’s been super exciting to work at Classy and GoFundMe and sort of be, you know, at the forefront of defining what community engagement looks like how people give, what the future of giving and fundraising will look like. So some of the big things that I we think about and talk about all the time is just nonprofits are facing such constant change. I mean, look at the news on Friday about the stock markets, you know, imagine going into a donor meeting this week with one of your top donors knowing that might be on their minds. And so it’s just constantly staying abreast of what’s happening. Um increasing support or expectations when they engage with you online or in person, they have evolving expectations, especially depending on their age. You know, if they’re a gen Z, they may might expect to engage with your nonprofit completely different than some of the folks you’ve made your whole career engaging, Tony, you know, a planned giving prospect who’s towards the end of their life and is planning on making a substantial gift to a nonprofit. So th those engagement expectations are changing rapidly and it’s really difficult to keep up with them and then cutting through the noise, think about the ads and the information that’s fed to you every single day. So how do nonprofits cut through that noise land? Their message, acquire donors, keep that interest and engagement, turn it into dollars and then be able to go back and show that impact. So it’s just like a wild and crazy time and, and then you throw in an election year, the noi uh I was just gonna say the, the, your, your point about the noise is uh increased exponentially in the next three months uh election cycle. And one other thing I’ll, I’ll, I’ll talk about quickly is, you know, throughout my career, the majority of sort of how we went about our business was this idea of like relationship building and bringing communities together. So whether that was a gala or a huge run walk or a tour of a hospital, it was always about kind of bringing people together and, and, you know, building that community engagement. And then within the last five years because of digital, it’s allowed us to reach donors all over the world and scale in ways we never thought possible. But I think because of that, we’ve lost a bit of the connection. And so we talk a lot at GoFundMe and Classy and with some of our big partners, Tony, like giving Tuesday, the giving institute, some of these other um big organizations doing a lot of data and research around donor behaviors. We think that people aren’t any less generous, even though a lot of the reports are telling us declining is giving. We actually think they’re just giving in different ways and our engagement is not keeping up with their expectations if that makes sense. So we’re talking a lot about like the future of being able to married both where you’re delivering incredible giving experiences, but you’re also bringing people together and, you know, kind of building that brand loyalty and that deeper understanding of why I show up for this nonprofit every day or why this nonprofit is important to me or do I see value in my gift or my time? Um And so we’ve been talking a lot about like sort of this next iteration of combining the power and scale of technology, but never forgetting the fact that this is a relationship business and that’s our strongest currency is trust and engagement. And actually, and not wisely used those two things can be in conflict, the use of technology and the personalization and the the recognition of being a relationship business. If if you’re not doing those things, you’re not combining those things smartly. Uh you, they can be at odds. Yeah, just before joining with you, I was reading this interesting um report around this survey that was done around producing large scale campaigns as a nonprofit using A I technology and specifically around images that you use. And donors were very turned off by knowing that the images were more like A I generated rather than like super raw and authentic. So even something like that is a great example of like I’m in marketing. I might work at a small nonprofit, I think. Oh, this is great. I’m I’m churning campaigns. I’m able to scale and reproduce at a, at a fast clip and not even realizing, you know, the detriment that that’s having on the donor who’s receiving that information because it’s lacking that, you know, that personal human community relationship piece to it. Authenticity. Yeah. If you’re, if you’re, if you’re inauthentic in your, I don’t know if you’re inauthentic in your webinars. If you’re inauthentic in your one on one donor meetings or small, small events in people’s homes, I mean, people see through that, uh just like they’re gonna see through an inauthentic image. I’m not saying we can spot every A I generated image. Uh I mean, that’s not, that’s not possible. But uh I don’t know, I, I think that would be a symptom of a larger lack of authenticity. Like a willingness to use fake images, you know, to, to promote your work. I mean, you’re doing the work, show us, show us the, the show us the reality. Yeah, you shouldn’t have to generate from artificial intelligence. All right. Yeah, you’re right. That’s a perfect example of the business of relationship, fundraising and artificial intelligence being at odds is a perfect example. Thank you. Um What, let’s see. Uh There’s something that makes that I, I think of when we’re listening to your explanation of, you know, where you think things stand now and, and I’d like to get into a little more about the, the future. What you’re thinking about the future of fundraising is uh and relationships. But, you know, the, the fact that the uh percentage of our gross domestic product that is fundraising that is comprised of fundraising revenue or represented by fundraising revenue is, has been stuck for decades, decades. And like, so you see different estimates like 2 2.5% of GDP. I’m not even sure I’ve seen 3% but, you know, certainly we’re not approaching 5% or, you know what, you know what I mean? In decades, we’ve been talking about this. What do you see as the ways of overcoming that? I mean, I, I would like to see GD uh giving like double to five or 6% of, of GDP, you know, and we’re talking about hundreds of billions of dollars. What do you, what do you see as the obstacles you’ve been in the business for a long time? Yeah, it, you know, um to be vulnerable, I had never heard that statistic until I guess it was February. I attended Microsoft’s inaugural Global Leaders Summit around nonprofits in Bellevue, Washington. And this gentleman gave an amazing presentation around the fact that that number has been stagnant, like you said, and what would happen if we were able to double or triple triple it? Like, could we get rid of food insecurity, could we solve for homelessness, et cetera? It was a really powerful, but again, I had never heard that statistic because when you hear things like $480 billion you’re like, we’re doing great. That’s so much money. That’s amazing. Um When, in fact, you know, there’s so much more to be done. But, yeah, I, I think it’s, um, I think it’s so many things, a lot of it, in my mind when I would work with teams or coach teams is a lot of it is we tend to just set the wrong metrics as nonprofit leaders. You know, we set metrics that don’t always drive long term donor retention and long term outcomes. It’s all very short sighted, you know, where you have to have this many meetings and this many proposals and you have to raise a million dollars in year one. And if not, you’re a failure. And so it doesn’t feed this culture around. It’s OK if it takes me three years to work with Tony, but I have my eyes on, you know, him leaving us at a quest of $25 million. Um And so there’s like, not a lot of long term planning that goes into much of the goal setting and strategy so that I think is a big piece and we talk a lot about organizations around like how could it look different to motivate the behaviors that are going to give you some of those better indicators around donor retention, larger gifts. Um Things like that. I think a big piece of it is this idea of philanthropy in general of like it’s not for the regular person and my everyday gift isn’t going to make a difference. And I think crowdfunding a platform like gofundme, all the stuff I’m sure you’ve seen on tiktok and Instagram about just everyday people changing the lives of someone. You know, there was this amazing story of this um this Vietnam vet who was working in a grocery store and he was the shopping cart. Um like he had, you know, gathered the shopping carts and some, you know, 30 year old man saw him and just thought that doesn’t look right. He looks, you know, much too old to be doing that and it’s hot out here and like, gosh, you know, and so we approached him and found out that the man had to do it to like make his, you know, rent, et cetera, pay his expenses. And so they started a gofundme and, you know, before you knew it, I think they raised like a couple $100,000 and the guy will never have to work again. But it’s this power in like these small donations can make a difference and that’s changing. Thank goodness. But I think for years myself, like the bottom of the donor pyramid, we just handled with, you know, large scale direct mail or emails or newsletters. And there wasn’t a lot of promoting this idea that the everyday donor can make a difference. And so there’s a lot of power in that. And then of course, looking at the data of those donors and having access to make more data driven decisions to say, ok, we have 9000 active donors. We should really spend some more time with 700 of them because the data is telling us not only do they have propensity and wealth, but they’re super engaged with us and we should be asking them for more and we should be asking them more often. So I think there’s been a lack of insight into powerful data for nonprofits to run more like businesses and um do more with less. And then um I think the whole, you know, impact piece has been a struggle as well is like, am I really making a difference? I mean, I experienced this a lot at a big disease, health and human services organization I worked at is like we were doing huge things on a national scale, but it was hard to get local regional people to feel like their involvement was really making a difference. So across the board showing powerful impact and outcomes is a challenge. So I could probably go on and on. But I think some of those things are what stick out to me. And I’d love to hear, you know, what you’ve heard from some of your guests or your perspective, Tony on why that number continues to be what it is. It’s time for a break. Imagine a fundraising partner that not only helps you raise more money but also supports you in retaining your donors, a partner that helps you raise funds, both online and on location so you can grow your impact faster. That’s Donor box, a comprehensive suite of tools, services and resources that gives fundraisers, just like you a custom solution to tackle your unique challenges, helping you achieve the growth and sustainability, your organization needs, helping you help others visit donor box.org to learn more now, back to community and engagement. Well, thank you. All right. Turn the, turn the tables on me. Um Usually I don’t, usually, I don’t like that. No, no. Um Yeah. Uh I think uh related to your, your, your first valuable thought on this uh uh about the relationship building and the taking the time. Uh I think another contributing factor is the employee turnover in, in development, in fundraising. We’re, we’re not retaining, are some of our best fundraisers, you know, isn’t something like every 18 months. I think a major gift officer moves or somewhere around there. It’s not what you’d want it to be. I, I’d like to, I’d like to be like six or seven years. So I know it’s nowhere near that whatever it is. You know, if it’s two a year and a half, two years, you know, uh that doesn’t, that doesn’t lend itself to building the kinds of relationships that you and I are talking about. You know, you use three years as an example off the top of your head, which I think is a great one. Yeah, sometimes gifts do take three years. Well, if, if, if the average is a year and a half and then the employee is gone, that’s two major gift officers or two giving directors. Well, now, now the gift is going to come to the third one. I mean, where’s the, so, you know, where, where’s the role? Not only, not only that, like the other thing that’s happening there with that, you know, revolving door is that any trust or progress that was made, you know, completely. In fact, it sets you back even more because the donors thinking, well, I got to know George or Martina and I liked them and now they’re gone. And so I wonder what’s going on over there or whatever it is, you know, but I think some of that turnover in my opinion ties back to the people do not stay where they don’t feel successful. And if we’re not setting them up for success, because we’re putting metrics and goals that are either unrealistic or do not allow for powerful, strong long term relationships to be built. And then you’re gonna leave, you’re going to go somewhere else where you’re going to feel successful. When I was a director of Planned Giving decades ago, I used to track and, and thankfully, the vice president who I worked for uh accepted this meaningful contacts, meaningful, it had nothing to do with dollars and that I had, I had dollar metrics also, or number of gift commitments more likely than in plan, giving more commitments than dollars. But meaningful contacts, you know, a meaningful contact could be, uh, a heartfelt email. It doesn’t have a meaningful contact is not necessarily a face to face meeting. Certainly that counts too. But, um, so, you know, I think meaningful contacts just in terms of, you know, I sent a birthday card, a meaningful contact. I sent, I sent a card on the anniversary of your very first gift to the university. Yeah. Imagine that nobody remembers the first year they gave. No, nobody at all. But you have it. It’s in your CRM. When was the first year the person? Oh, my gosh, they gave 15 years ago. We’re coming up on the, the day and the, the exact date of their 15th anniversary giving to us, even if they lapsed a couple of years, it’s still, you know, if they’re still reasonably current 15 years ago, it was your very first gift to us. People are bowled over by that. It, it’s in everybody’s CRM. So I love that meaningful contacts. Yeah. The anniversary of the first gift. That’s a, that’s, that’s a really valuable, easy touch point, easy. Every single donor, you, you have that information on every single person in your CRM database. Um, so, all right, you know, I wanted to add one other. I wanted to add another thing. Um, when you were speaking about the meaningful contacts is, and this might come up later. But I think also we’ve done a terrible job as an industry with connecting our supporters, our volunteers, our donors, our benefactors with one another. So the communication is typically like nonprofit to donor, maybe we’ll let you give us some feedback. But usually it’s only if you’re a big donor or a board member, otherwise we really don’t want to hear your ideas or, you know, whatever and I’m being facetious. But my point is the more that we can connect them with like minded individuals and people that care about the same things and they’re gonna have a stronger affinity and responsibility towards us. So like to bring that to life, the only really philanthropic thing that I do because I have four Children and I work a lot is I’m a mentor and I’ve done it for about, this is going to be my seventh school year. I mentor for an organization in Florida. And once a week I meet with my mentee and, you know, I had one through high school and then now I have one who’s going to be a junior. But anyhow, I’m very dedicated to this. We meet once a week. I get so much out of it. I love my relationship, blah, blah, blah. Um and I give also to them monthly, but I always think, you know, I would care so much more about this organization and there would be such a slim chance of me ever stopping to mentor if I had met other people that are doing this. Like, I’ve never been introduced to other mentors. They’ve never gotten us together. They’ve, you know, we’ve never had moments of saying, like, let’s throw a holiday party for the mentees. Like, hey, I have this mentee that I’m really struggling to connect with. Like, do you have advice? They’ve created no network amongst us. And I could easily if work changed or something with my kids, especially if it was a new mentee, Tony that I didn’t yet have that relationship. I could easily see myself being like, uh I just don’t have time for that anymore. But if I’m dedicated to this other group of people and I’ve made friends with them in relationships, I’m just gonna have a stronger likelihood of staying on and we also don’t do that. So like folks will come to a five K race maybe for a hospital around pediatric heart patients. They come to the race, they raise money. We say thanks. We ask you again next year to participate. We typically don’t ever introduce you to these other heart families or create these moments. So I think that’s a big piece of it as well that we’re just, we’ve really stunk at. That’s really interesting. I wonder if that organization that you mentor for keeps data on when the mentors leave. You know, if, if uh I guess it sounds like if someone graduates from high school and that’s the end of the relationship. How many people do they leave? How, how many, how many mentors end the relationship? The me, the mentoring when the, uh, when their mentees age out of the age out of the process, but you’d be more likely to stay, as you said, if you had a, if you had a relationships with the other mentors, but you might even feel like you’re letting others down. Exactly. That’s what it comes down to. It’s like, I don’t want to let anybody down and you’re not letting, right, and you’re not letting your mentee down because you saw them through the, through the full process until they graduated high school. So you, you haven’t disappointed your mentee that’s critical. I bet a lot. I bet very few people do that. But then what’s the, what? I don’t know, there’s a technical term but what’s the drop off after a mentee graduated? And this is even not a great example because I have ownership to the mentee. But think about more, you know, traditional nonprofits where I’m literally just giving a gift in hopes that it’ll do something around, let’s call it sex trafficking. But other than that, if my finances change or I move or there’s a change in my career, it’s so easy for me to just be like, uh, I don’t support them anymore because there isn’t any responsibility or ownership or to your point. I’m not letting anybody down. So, yeah, I think there’s a lot of opportunity there. You hit on something else. Uh You just briefly mentioned, I wanna pull a little thread on, uh, surveying. You know, you were saying we, we only send surveys to certain donor classes or, or, uh, and then another thing that I find disappointing is when, when some organizations do send surveys and they ask for information, then they don’t, they don’t honor it. They don’t, they don’t honor the communication preference. Uh They don’t honor the program preference. You might ask the person’s birthday, but then you don’t send birthday cards. You know, if they give you the birthday again, something buried in your crm. Uh if you asked for birthday and they gave it to you, you know, use the, use the, use the data that you asked for. So, you know, just generally, you know, don’t survey if you’re not gonna respect the, the preferences and the, and, and, and use the data in, in valuable ways. It’s so true. And, you know, that was one of the biggest drivers for me wanting to come to classy and go fund me is the fact that as a joint company, we sit on the most unique, powerful philanthropic data sets. You think about all the people on gofundme giving to people, all the people on classy giving to organizations and there’s so much that we can dig into that data and learn. But yes, I mean, it’s got to be mirrored to like your most beloved brands. You know, Starbucks asked me for my birthday because guess what? They’re going to send me a free coffee on my birthday and now I’m more and more engaged with Starbucks. I’m loyal to Starbucks. And so it’s not like nonprofits have a lot more data than they think. And they’re just not always using it or thinking about it in those meaningful ways. Like something like you said, you, you’ve mentioned it a couple of times now. The birthday thing is so easy. It’s like we remember it’s your birthday, Tony. We love you over here. It takes two seconds to, you know, shoot a iphone video with your team at your nonprofit. Hey, Tony, we love you. Happy birthday buddy. That takes two seconds when Tony gets that. You better believe he’s thinking like, man, I love them. You know, not only am I gonna give my gift, but when they asked me to have a coffee in a month, I’m gonna remember that and I’m gonna carve out time for that coffee or whatever it is. So, yeah. Could not agree more. It’s time for a break. Pork bun.com named the number one domain registrar by USA today for 2023 and 2024. Pork bun helps you share your organization’s mission with a.org domain name dot org. And the entire.org family of domains are at the heart of change makers and philanthropies worldwide. Join an international community of individuals and organizations sharing a common goal to make the world a better place. Your.org domain name gives your website credibility is easy to remember and helps bring better awareness to your goals. Every domain at Pork bun comes with free features like who is privacy ssl certificates, website and email hosting trials and more. You can manage everything about your domain from one place backed by five stars support 365 days a year. Get your.org domain name for a low price at Pork bun.com. It’s time for Tony’s take two. Let’s swing this mic over here. Thank you, Kate. Hope you’re enjoying your, uh, your beach weekend, your beach week, beach week vacation. I do. It’s very nice. Very hot, but it’s fun. You want, you want hot weather for the beach or at least not raining. But uh, yeah, hot is ok. We, we sit under umbrellas very, very unconscious this week. Uh More tales from the gym, but it’s a positive message. Positive. I am grateful to the folks in this little community fitness center that they are so scrupulous about wiping down the machines after they, we use them. Of course, you know, I, I wiped down. So we, everybody is so cautious. Uh There’s, there are three different places where you can get pa uh towels, you know, pa paper towels, three different paper towel dispensers in this gym that’s probably only about 2000 square feet, maybe 2500. And there are multiple bottles of disinfectant and Purell. So there’s plenty of availability and people are good about it. It’s, and these things are not just hanging out there and nobody’s using them. Everybody is so scrupulous and I think that’s very thoughtful uh of all the folks using the community gym. And then there was one time when somebody did not wipe down the machine, but there was a very pleasant interaction. Uh One of the seniors, uh not one of the loud ones who I’ve talked about like the boat guy with the, the boat, uh the the engine uh refurbishing uh tutorial and, and there was the guy, I think it was the same one with the uh the Blue Angels narration. Uh And then there was the woman, of course, with the uh the incident, the assault. And uh it wasn’t, it wasn’t somebody who I know uh though not, not one of our cast of characters, maybe I should, I should have signed these folks names maybe or try to learn their names but not ask them. I don’t wanna ask what’s your name? Because then I’m in uh I’m in for a 45 minute, you know, conversation every time I go. But these are nice people. Uh So they um so one time somebody didn’t, may have been a visitor because this is a beach town. We get a lot of uh uh visitors. So people renting for a week or even maybe a month so you can get a day pass to the gym, you can get a weekly pass. I don’t know if we have monthly but I know there’s day and week. So, uh, may have been a visitor, you know, uh, and someone went over and said, you know, uh, you really should wipe down the machine. You know, we, we just, all, we do that for each other. And I thought, well, that’s a very, that’s a very thoughtful way of explaining. I mean, who’s gonna disagree with that? You know, you’d have to be like a psychopath or something to say. I don’t, I don’t give a shit about the rest of you, you know. So uh it was very well explained, you know, we do this for each other. So my uh my thanks to my uh gym, fitness center comrades for keeping the equipment clean. We’re all very good. We’re all doing it for each other. I think that’s very admirable. And that is Tony’s take two Kate. It’s good that you found something positive about your gym. No, a clean gym is a good gym. It’s about time. Something positive from this nasty New Yorker transplanted to North Carolina. Well, we’ve got Buku but loads more time, here’s the rest of community and engagement with Michelle Boggs. You, you mentioned, uh you know, getting through the noise and we talked about uh how noisy it is in these uh until election and then even probably after the election. I mean, then there’s gonna be noise about what, what’s coming, the new administration, how, what, what ideas do you have about sort of breaking through and, and getting heard even the, even next year when the election is over and we have a new administration, you know, just even, just generally. Yeah. So I, I hate to give tips that aren’t as useful, but like back up to January, February, we started having really strategic conversations with our nonprofit partners around like how are you preparing specific to an election year? So thinking about things like avoiding key dates of, you know, things that might be happening politically that you wouldn’t want to compete with thinking about an increase in ad spend costs starting probably summer to fall. So can you, you know, bulk up your ad spend at the beginning of the year to save money thinking about um you know, depending on which candidate becomes president, you know, sometimes people may rage, give or, you know, get passionate about something. So just preparing proactively. So we’ve had a lot of conversations around that um and getting in front of your donors face to face and just having, you know, a transparent conversation about, do you anticipate your giving changing in any way, you know, that sort of thing? So some of that stuff has been happening and you have to think proactively and strategically about it. But I think when you just think about cutting through the noise, it goes back to like that personalization, it’s communicating with me in the way that I want to be communicated with, of course, is going to obviously increase your ch your chances of conversion or reaching them in that moment or activating generosity. So if you know certain donors do really well with text, do you have those tools and capabilities to do that? If you know some of your donors really do prefer a quarterly sort of impact report that they can read more at length things that are happening. So I think a lot of it is like that segmentation and personalization of your donors. So not a one size fits all message. And then when it actually is time to give, what is that experience like? So before coming to class, I worked in a children’s hospital, I was president of the foundation. I’m like two months into the job. I get my first email from the foundation asking me to donate to something. And I’m like, oh, you know, I work here now, I really want to lead by example, I’m gonna make a gift. So I scroll down, I click on the donate button and the experience was terrible. I’m on my phone and I’m like filling out all these fields and you know, it’s not mobile optimized. I can barely see what’s happening. I get down, I get down to the moment of the gift and they only took credit cards and I’m like yelling to one of my kids, like, can you go get me my, you know, purse that was, was nowhere near me. And I was like being lazy. And I remember messaging our marketing person, like we don’t have like mobile wallet or like, you know, any of because I’m thinking I was determined to see that gift through, but if I’m an everyday person I’m giving up anyway. So, you know, that that experience has to be quick, modern intuitive. Um So that’s a big thing obviously. And then, you know, there has to be, there has to be ways of, you know, flexibility. So are you making it an option for me to become a recurring donor? I mean, think about the subscription economy, Tony, think about probably all the things you subscribe to that you probably don’t even keep track of. It’s like, what’s another eight bucks a month? Are you making that an option for your donors where they can maybe give smaller amounts, but over the course of a year and they’re giving monthly? Um So I think it goes back to just control what you can control. And some of this, we can control as nonprofits, we can use our data better, we can create more personalized experiences, we can create um giving experiences that are on par with checking out at Amazon, you know, those things we have control over. So that’s at least one way to try to cut through the noise or some ways to try to cut through the noise. You all think about a uh a chief community officer. Uh What, what’s your thinking there? Because I, I think it’s very related to what you, what you were just saying. What, what, what, what are you advocating for uh in a, in a, in a chief community officer? Yeah. Um And thank you for asking the classy every year does a uh nonprofit conference for the social sector. It’s called the Collaborative. And this past year we did it in Chicago and we had over 700 attendees and our um president of Classy and um Chief operating Officer of GoFundMe Soraya Alexander. Her whole keynote opening speech was about this concept and it was so well received, but it’s this sort of disruptive idea of a lot of what I just talked about is like, you have a chief development officer, you have a Chief Revenue Officer and it’s like, don’t get so obsessed with that, get obsessed with bringing people together. And so as a chief Community officer, you’re thinking about how can I find those rabid believers, those people who show up, who open my emails, who come to my events, who donate, who volunteer, who give, you know, in kind donations. And how do I start to think thoughtfully and strategically about putting those people in contact with one another? And so, um you know, as an example, maybe instead of doing an annual report at the end of the year, you bring together that group of 100 of your best supporters and you do a presentation or you do an interactive workshop or to your point, you know, we’re always looking for information, bring, bring a focus group together of people that are like minded that care about your organization to talk through some of those questions that you’re dying to know the answers to that you might otherwise send out in a survey or whatever it is. But it’s being really intentional around doing what you’re already doing. But adding on another layer of bringing people together and giving more power back to those believers and supporters to do it for each other. So, a good example, I love to share this story is um this organization called Moz. They’re a huge proponent in men’s health. I mean, you know, started in Australia and they do this really well. So they’ve got these like people and I’m drawing a blank on what they are. They have like a really fun name for them, but it’s this group and they’re all introduced to one another and there’s promotions around, you know what Tom’s doing to promote and raise money and what Carl’s doing. And so they’re constantly connecting and sharing stories and sharing impact and they feel like they’re part of this family and this commute. So now they’re not just responsible to November, they’re responsible to these mo bros. That’s what they’re called. Um So again, like thinking about as a chief community officer, where are those gaps in me bringing these supporters together? And it doesn’t always have to be a huge lift because I think sometimes event people, their mind goes to, oh, I don’t want to add another event. We don’t have the money to do that, you know, blah, blah, blah. And I think it’s just putting the power back on your supporters around. Like we would love to bring you guys together in a meaningful way. Would you host something? Would you plan something and so enabling and empowering them to do it in ways that are most meaningful to them. So let’s say that this organization I talked about in Florida came to me and said, you know, Michelle, we’re having a hard time retaining our mentors year over year, especially after graduation. Do you have any ideas of how you could help and roll up your sleeves? You better believe I’d be like, that’s really cool. Let me think about that. You know, let me give me a list, sir. Let me start an email. You know, we’ll meet up for coffee and we’ll talk about it. So I just think, I just think again, we we the more that we can think about people don’t quit their friends, they quit nonprofit. So how can you be that you want to build community? Like by the way, thank you, retention. That’s the that’s the technical term of art, technical term of art that I couldn’t think of retention, keeping, keeping people, yeah, retaining. Um Yeah, you wanna, you wanna build community, I mean, you want to build a community of mentors centered around this organization so that, you know, like we said earlier, you’re not letting down your community if you leave, but you’re not, you’re not your community down by leaving. You’re not because you’re not gonna do it, you’re gonna stay as long as it’s, as long as it’s at all feasible, you’re gonna find a way to keep giving to your community through the mentor relationships. And as you alluded to it sounds like you had a really, you know, super cool forward thinking leader when you were doing planned giving, who, you know, was who honored these meaningful interactions and didn’t just always hold you to the numbers. So, you know, as leaders, I think there is an opportunity for us to honor some of that community building and rewarding that and recognizing that because of the long term play around retention around, you know, help having your donors acquire donors for you on your behalf. You know, they’re gonna people give to people, you know, that’s why social media fundraising is so powerful and successful. Because if I send out emails or a Facebook, people are going to give to me. So again, we don’t really leverage our supporters to help us with that peer to peer fundraising either because oftentimes we don’t always set metrics to that November is, is that not the one where men shave their heads in the month of November? Isn’t that the one that they’re the ones that grow the mustaches? I think the other one is Baldwin’s Ohs. Baldwin, right. Baldwin. Of course, they shave their. Ok. Thank you, November. They grow facial hair. I knew it was something to do with hair. Ok. Just really quickly on November because I think this is another tip for listeners or like the evolution of the future of giving is we also can’t be too prescriptive and constrained around how you support our organization. So November has really evolved in this. So they don’t say to everybody, the only way to support us is to grow a stash, you know, they’re going to alienate people, they say support us in whatever way is most meaningful to you. And so they’ve really, they’re kind of risky. They’re kind of um bold in some of their marketing. And, you know, some of these more old school nonprofits might be like, oh my gosh, I would never do that. But again, you have to let go of some of that control as a marketer to meet younger donors where they are. And so I always tell this really quick story about November, but they had a college kid whose grandmother or mother, um, sewed the costume of like a male anatomy part and he like ran around on the college campus, raising money around men’s like prostate health or testicular health or something. And I think some organizations would be like, absolutely not, you know, if I’m too afraid of our brand, I’m too afraid of the backlash. They didn’t and they let him do it and he raised all this money and now all these other fraternities on different campuses are doing things. So I think, you know, I think back to my career, if community supporters said we want to do a third party fundraiser for you, we want to do a small fundraiser, we want the proceeds to go to you. We would give them a tool kit. I mean, that’s not that inspiring. It’s like this is how you do it, you know, make sure it’s approved by legal, make sure you don’t screw with our logo, you know, that’s not very inspiring. So again, I think there’s a balance in obviously brand integrity and keeping that safe. But there also needs to be creative, creativity and flexibility and meeting people where they are because they might come up with some really amazing ideas of how they want to support you. And if you encourage that and support that they’re going to come back. So there’s a piece of that too that I think um is a huge opportunity for us as a sector. An example of giving those tools and empowering people is uh the wildly successful giving Tuesday. It’s totally, it’s totally decentralized. You know, you do giving Tuesday the way you want to if you want to, you know, obviously still mandate, but, you know, just use our use, use some basic branding and they, of course, you know, they’ve expanded and there’s wild, wild amounts of support and ideas and they do have a community for sharing ideas like what, you know, this is our first giving Tuesday, what should we do or? Um so, you know, that’s, it’s just an example of empowering folks to go out and, and fundraise in, in their way. And I think so many orgs myself included is like you do the Giving Tuesday, that’s such a great acquisition tool. We got 45 new donors to giving Tuesday. What are you doing with those donors? You know, is there a plan in place once they come on board on that? I think it’s December 2nd this year. You know, I would challenge listeners to be thinking now about, ok, how do I get to know these new donors because I know they’re going to come and how do I start to build that meaningful relationship with them so that it’s not just every giving Tuesday, I’m trying to replace those donors because that’s what will happen. I, I just wanna make something explicit for listeners. You know, we talked about a, a chief community officer. Uh our listeners are in small and mid size nonprofits so they may not have the luxury of appointing someone, a Chief Community officer. But all these things that you and I are talking about are still eminently doable. You know, maybe in pieces by someone who is, you know, maybe it’s the vice president or maybe it’s the Director of Development or, you know, maybe it becomes a, a partial responsibility. You know, it’s, it doesn’t have to be that you have a new full time hire with, with all that, with all that expense that’s called the Chief Community Officer. These ideas are eminently employable, even without someone being appointed to that title 100%. Yeah, I’m so glad you said that. It’s like the idea here is like, this is everybody’s job and everybody’s responsibility. You know, it should be a, a plus one on everybody’s title. And so just even changing the way you engage with your teams, if you do a team meeting or, you know, you do a regular cadence of engagement, adding this as part of the conversation. Ok. You know, for the next three months, these are our plans, let’s add on and see how we can make them even more impactful and how we can start to think about thoughtfully putting people together and it becomes like a group exercise where everybody’s weighing in and everybody’s being able to um influence this. So, yeah, I, I definitely, you don’t need to hire a Chief Community Officer. It’s really, everyone’s sort of just shifting the way they think about this whole idea and concept and we move the needle when we pay attention to things. I mean, you know, I, I see that in my own business and my own work, I see that in organizations when you start to report on something and measure it and maybe, you know, just like small measures, you know, but when you start to report on it regularly and measure it now you’re, now you’re putting institutional momentum behind it, things are gonna move and it, it, it may be a small movement in the first six months or even the first year. But you’ve taken steps toward building a community of where you already had the people in place that all your constituents are with you, all your people, let’s call them people, not constituents, all the people you in different different categories. But now you’ve, you know, now you’ve broken down silos and put folks together and you’ve built community where it didn’t exist among your, among your, your populations. There you go. There’s a, there’s like a worthy six month goal or even a 12 month goal. I think also it’s a great exercise to get like partners, stakeholders, boards involved. I mean, it’d be an awesome board exercise to just present this whole concept of like we’ve not done a good job of bringing people together of allowing constituents to speak to constituents, allowing donors to meet other donors. Like people want to feel like they’re a part of something bigger. We’ve always just done this one way. Communication board. Let’s talk about this. You know, how would we think about doing this differently? I mean, that I think could be a great exercise. Now, your boards more engaged and they’re not always just, you know, not that people do this, but I, my fear with my, a lot of the boards that I worked with is like, it was a report out during a board meeting and then we usually, you know, got on them about their giving and even as a board member, it wasn’t super inspiring or there wasn’t a lot of work happening in between board meetings. So even getting them as like your tests, early adopters um could be a great place to start regardless of your resources or size of your team. I mean, use those individuals to start to build out this concept, Michelle, let’s flip to the future a little bit. Uh What, what do you, what do you see coming even maybe just in aspirational terms and what would you like to see? But you know, what does classy see coming in the next, you know, like 3 to 5 years? Yeah, I mean, classy is super focused on, I would say three kind of big buckets. The first is like best in class giving experiences. So what we’ve sort of talked about over the last 45 minutes is that when there’s that moment of generosity. Is it a wonderful experience on par? Like I said, with your normal um e commerce experiences? And does it feel like they know me as a donor? Um That’s gonna be huge. I think that’s how we’re gonna drive engagement. That’s how we’re gonna start to tap in two pockets of people that we don’t even know exist at the moment because we’ve been going at it with really this one size fits all. So incredible donor experiences. The second bucket is really that data and intelligence piece. Again, we’re sitting on this amazing data set now, what do we do with this knowledge? So, you know, a great example is like giving behaviors for people using Androids versus people using apple, you know, giving behaviors when people are asked on certain days of the week, like there’s so much crazy stuff. It’s, it’s why I always tell the story. It’s why Amazon bought RBA. Amazon already had their own vacuum. They bought RBA because they wanted the data of people using RBA, they could get data on their homes and their behaviors. And so it’s the same idea, right is how do we unlock this data into delivering, you know, the best products for not only our individuals helping others on gofundme, but also our nonprofits using classy. So we’re really, really excited about what we’re going to be able to do with this data. And then the third is this idea, can I just stop you Amazon having data on the, the, the floor plan of my home. I never thought I don’t have a Roomba but, but, but I mean, they can figure out the schematic. I mean, he said, ok, this person has a counter or this person has an island in their kitchen. Uh, they have so many uh bar stools around the, around the, around the, the uh countertop. Uh So here’s their TV console. Uh We don’t, we don’t see a TV console. So it must be wall mounted because this is clearly clearly a living room, but there’s no entertainment console. So they have a wall mounted TV. You know, I mean, it’s, that’s incredible. I never thought of the value of, I mean, it’s uh like a lot of things in data. It’s, it’s scary but they, they could, they have millions of schematics of people. So we, we to bring that to life, fasi launched um intelligent ask amounts. So we’re empowering our nonprofits to actually put the right ask in front of the right donor at the right time. Instead of, again, no matter who you are. If you log on to my nonprofits website, it’s gonna say $20.50 dollars, $100 it’s going to give you different amounts based on your data, your giving background, your wealth, your zip code. Um And so again, like we tell the story of the, there was a gentleman who had given like a pretty large, you know, online gift to an organization. I think it was like $1000 at the end of the year, which is substantial to me, you know, for a person to give online. And then the next year received a campaign with those smaller amounts. And of course, that person thinking, oh, is that what other people are giving? And so, you know, sort of not meeting them where they are. So the intelligent ask the data, all that is going to be um so exciting. And again, one of the reasons I love being here and working here is is being at the forefront of some of this. And then that last third bucket is that community stuff. I mean, the future of peer to peer, the future of events, the future of how we build communities is um you know, something we’re thinking about and talking about every day because there is going to be there. We’re going to need to shift engagement to change that gross domestic volume number that you talked about has not moved and to think about this next wave of philanthropists, this younger people. So some big shifts have to happen. And so those I would say are the three kind of exciting things for the future for us. Do you have anything on the, on the personal side, uh nonprofit related that uh that you aspire to or that you wanna see? Yeah, that’s a great question. I would like to see this is just like kind of random. But a big part of my role at Classy is um sort of getting our name and our brand out there. So being this like ambassador, so I attend all the conferences. So my travels crazy, but I’m at all the big conferences and I think there’s like this, it goes back to like personalization. I I think some of the content that we deliver at these conferences is like very stale and regurgitated. And so I would like to see some sort of incubation innovation, something where leaders within certain nonprofits can come together and just have the freedom of experimentation and what if and what would it take? And I don’t know what that looks like, but unless I feel supported and free to do that and surrounded by peers who are having these really groundbreaking innovative ideas, I just don’t think there’s a lot of access to that um as a nonprofit leader who’s trying to do so much. And so I find myself sort of being attracted to these organizations or these leaders who are kind of bucking some of the old ways and trying new things and feeling the freedom and failing. But just knowing, you know, we can’t keep doing it the way we’ve always done it. So a community, like you’d like to see a, that’s an awesome idea that like a community of CEO S because it’s lonely, you know, it’s lonely at the top even, I think you have it so much on the for profit side, but on the nonprofit side it just doesn’t seem to exist at least what I’ve seen. Sorry, I didn’t mean to cut you off, Tony. No, no, no. Uh, it’s, it’s hard at the top so to have a community of like minded, like, like similarly placed CEO S and directors safe space to share. You know, nobody’s got an ax to grind about the other team or, you know, hard bad feelings or animosity or something. It’s nobody, nobody’s got a dog in the, but I’m not good with sports. I don’t know, nobody’s got a ball in the game or a ball on the, a ball on the field, whatever they so uh yeah. No, you’re right. Uh It, it’s related to a lot of what we’re talking about, but it, so it sounds to me like you’re envisioning AAA community of CEO S Safe Space and even just at a conference, you know, maybe, maybe it’s just like a, a two hour drop in or something. But it’s only for the, it’s only for the CEO S and executive directors. Yep. I mean, they’re people too, you know, they deserve safe space. Executive directors are people too. Alright. Is there anything you’d like to share that? I haven’t asked you about, we didn’t talk about. Yeah, I, I’m, I’m super active on linkedin and I love to meet new people. I’d love to hear any feedback from this conversation or challenges to my ideas or, you know, different perspectives or ways of thinking about some of the stuff I’ve talked about. And so we just love, if listeners found me on linkedin, would love to meet you and talk to you. And um I don’t have a lot of superpowers, but I think one of mine is really just connecting with people. I love to do it. It, it fills me up. So I would love to meet anybody that’s listening that wants to talk more. OK. Well, I promise you that uh I’m gonna send you a linkedin, a linkedin connection invitation. All right. So don’t turn it down. I mean, you’re gonna, you know, I already, I already sent you one. So. Oh, you did. Oh OK. All right. Thank you. All right. All right. You beat me. OK? No. And just one more thing, you know, thank you for doing this. I’m sure it’s a heavy lift and a labor of love and the content you’re putting out is amazing. And congrats on 700 episodes and just really appreciative of what you do. Thank you for your gratitude. Thank you very much. It is a labor of love. I do. Yeah, it is. So, thank you very much Michelle Boggs, executive nonprofit industry advisor at Classy. Michelle wants you to connect with her on linkedin and be in touch. You’ll find her there. Boggs Boggs. You have no excuse now. Not to connect with Michelle and you’ll find the company at classy.org. Thank you again, Michelle. Thanks Tony. Next week, a different take on donor retention. If you missed any part of this week’s show, I beseech you find it at Tony martignetti.com. We’re sponsored by donor box. Outdated donation forms blocking your supporters, generosity. Donor box fast, flexible and friendly fundraising forms for your nonprofit donor box.org and buy pork bun looking to grow your nonprofit. You need a.org domain name from pork bun, instant recognition, trust and visibility pork bun.com. Our creative producer is Claire Meyerhoff. I’m your associate producer, Kate Martinetti. The show, social media is by Susan Chavez. Mark Silverman is our web guy and this music is by Scott Stein. Thank you for that affirmation study. You’re with us next week for nonprofit radio. Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95% go out and be great.