James Misner explains what he sees as the right and left brain activities of your nonprofit’s fundraising. There are relationships and data; stories and metrics; motivations and outcomes; emotions and systems; and, more brain interactions. Your objective is to balance the art and the science. James is CEO of The Kipos Group.
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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 from neuromyelitis optica if I saw that you missed this week’s show. Here’s our associate producer, Kate with what’s up? Hey, Tony, this week it’s the Art and science of fundraising. James Meisner explains what he sees as the right and left brain activities of your nonprofits. Fundraising. There are relationships and data, stories and metrics, motivations and outcomes, emotions and systems and more brain interactions. Your objective is to balance the art and the science. James is CEO of the Kebos group. On Tony’s Take Two Tales from the train were sponsored by donor box, outdated donation forms blocking your supporters, generosity.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 the art and science of fundraising. It’s a pleasure to welcome to nonprofit radio, James Meisner. He is the founder and CEO of the Kos Group over his career. He has facilitated the raising of hundreds of millions of dollars to support nonprofits. He’s a trusted expert in fundraising strategy, staff, culture and implementation. James focuses on small and mid size nonprofits engaged in direct service. That’s our target audience right here, small and mid size listeners. His company is at the Kos group.com. Kos is K IP OS. So they’re at the keep Posts group.com. And you’ll find James on linkedin, James Meisner. Welcome to nonprofit radio, Tony. Thanks so much for having me. I am excited about this conversation and hopefully we get to share some uh good value and wisdom to the other 95% the small and mid size nonprofit executives out there. Thank you for picking up on that. Absolutely. Yes, that’s uh that’s those are our listeners in the small and mid size orgs. So we are talking about the uh the art and science of fundraising. Uh I know you want these two to work together, not be exclusive of each other. Let’s just give a high level overview. What, what do you see as the art and the s versus the science, which they’re not working. Of course, when I say verses, they’re not working against each other. I know that’s key to, to uh what we want to talk about, but just define them for us, the art and the science. Absolutely. Most nonprofits think of this as a problem to solve. We either have to be completely data oriented, scientific buttoned up and rigid. It’s on one side and the other is we have to be free flowing. We have to be passionate, we have to be uh innovative and in tune. Uh and most people think of this as a problem to solve. And instead it’s really just a tension to manage. And I think the magic happens in nonprofits, especially in marketing and fundraising. When you blend both of these things seamlessly together, bring the left side of the brain, the right side of the brain together. uh allow your teams to bring their whole self to work and uh and dive into both. That’s, that’s what I get excited about seeing. Uh people of both sides of this come together to bring their best to their organizations and to their givers. So you want this to be a symbiotic relationship. It has to be not parasitic, not one feeding off the other symbiotic, they’re living together in harmony. It, it 100% has to be OK. Let’s think of the the science side for a second. OK. Science is linear think of the scientific method, right? We all learned that what in first or second grade, my, my my kids are doing it right now. Science starts with questions and observations. So what questions you know, could a small and mid size nonprofit leader be asking, why are my donors lapsing? Why aren’t we raising more money right now? OK. That’s the first step in a scientific process. And then you observe and then you develop a hypothesis and then you set up an experiment to measure that hypothesis. And at the end of that measurement period, you then say, hey, was my hypothesis right wrong. Was it directionally? Right? Directionally wrong? And, and you hone it as you go, I see a lot of nonprofits skipping that entire thing, especially in the small and mid size space where there’s not a lot of capacity, there’s not a lot of staff and maybe the attention span for risk is two weeks and that’s not enough time to develop an actual experiment and to measure. Um And we can dive more into this on the art side. OK. Um The artistic process is messy if anybody tries to linearly create an artistic process, chances are they’re not an actual artist. Um And when you think of art and you think of let’s just use Renaissance art for a second. Most of it comes out of deep seeded pain and struggle. There’s this story. Uh I think Malcolm Gladwell did on a podcast one time that the Swiss created clots which are precise and they created chocolate which is scientific. Uh No great art came out of Switzerland during the Renaissance because was neutral, they were wealthy, there was no pain or struggle but the surrounding countries were full of artists. Most nonprofits, especially those who are doing direct implementation, they are dealing with something that is painful. They see kids that are not living until the age of five, they see refugees on the move from persecution and war, they see kids in the US be it in rural, you know, Appalachia or in urban centers who are just not thriving uh you know, into their high school years and into their adult years, you can’t with science and linear processes, describe that story to another human being without being deeply in touch with emotion. And that’s the art side of this. All right. So let’s dive in a little uh a little deeper on, on how these two work together. Uh I, I think we should, you know, we should probably talk in more detail about each of them and then, and then put them together in this symbiotic uh relationship. You started with the, the science side. So let, let’s approach that, let’s uh let’s drill into some detail. What, what are, what are the elements of the scientific side of fundraising that we’re later gonna put together in this symbiotic relationship with the, with the art side? And we’re gonna, we, we’re gonna see, we’re gonna see fundraising, we, we’re, we’re pushing fundraising nirvana, right? Is that right? Is that where we’re, is that where we’re, is that our objective when we put these two together, let’s just follow it up into the right growth and uh let’s, let’s dive into it. So the first thing you have to have an observation, most people would observe, especially right now in our climate that they are not growing like they would wanna grow. So then let’s ask some questions and develop a hypothesis. I think a reasonable hypothesis for most small and mid size groups would be we need to do better major donor cultivation. OK. Uh So then let’s set up our experiment. What do we believe would lead to better major donor cultivation? It’s not just measuring the number of meetings, it’s not just blasting out emails. We’ve tried that all before. Uh So let’s say it’s a really great donor development process that we then measure. So let’s figure out that process first. You need leads. OK. Uh So how do we find them? Probably three or four main ways we get referrals from our existing major donors or we look in our small and mid size portfolio and do a well screen and say, hey, we think these people could become major donors. So we measure that. How many do we actually have? Well, then what do you need to do after that? You actually need to meet with them and qualify them. So let’s do that, set up those meetings, qualify them. The goal there is to figure out, hey, could they become a major donor or no? If the answer is no, it’s fine, you know, move on. Don’t waste your time. You don’t have that much time. Uh If you’re small and mid size nonprofit. Uh so ask some questions about what they’re passionate about. Don’t just tell your story uh to them uh ask them questions, see how they respond. And at the end of that conversation where they probably talk 80% of the time and you talk 20% of the time. If they’re still in great, they qualify, then let’s journey with them, send them great content, bring them to the site, engage them with other major donors in community. If they’re still there, eventually you earn the right to ask a question. Does it seem good and right to you that I could bring next time we meet together a proposal for how you could deepen and expand this work that you seem to care so much about. You’ve done all that right? Chances are they’re gonna say yes, you bring the proposal and you get to measure each step of that. Uh And this isn’t short, this isn’t a two week experiment. This is a 69, 12 month experiment to see, hey, does measuring this hypothesis actually work. Uh And the end result is dollars go up into the right. They stay flat or they decline. But by measuring it, you get to see each step along the way. Is it the process that’s broken? Is it how we communicate in each step of the process? And you get to dissect it? Uh But if you follow a process like that 89 times out of 10, it’s gonna work. That’s the scientific side of doing it. And you hear a lot of people that say, hey, you can’t measure meetings anymore. That doesn’t work. I say that’s, that’s crazy. You have to measure something instead of just the end result, but you can’t end there. You need to add the art side uh into this uh for the true magic to happen. Let’s do that actually, you know, let, let’s, let’s deal with a couple of different points. Uh Science, art, science, art, instead of what I had proposed a few minutes ago, let’s talk all about the science and then let’s talk all about the art and then put them together. So I think, I think it’s, it’s more, it’s easier to follow. So we, we’re uh, I mean, I, I’ve been doing plans giving fundraising for 27 years, but I want you to explain what you see as the, the art of the, the relationship side. Where, where, where, how do you, we, we talked about the art, the science, some of the science side. How do you, how does that contrast with the, the relation, the, the art side of the, the relationship? Let’s talk about the art side when you’re in that qualifying, meeting with the giver. If you’re only thinking about your numbers and your metrics and you’re not attuned to what that person is feeling and thinking, it doesn’t matter what your numbers show, you’re not gonna make progress with it, you’re gonna have to attune yourself to what painful thing are they dealing with in their life. Did their kid just leave for college and they became an empty nester and their emotions, you know, are all over the place right now. Did a parent uh just pass away? Uh That’s the art side. No amount of numbers and metrics are gonna tell you how to engage with that when you ask them, hey, what do you long to see change in our world? No numbers or metrics are gonna tell you uh how to respond to that. You’re gonna have to be empathetic. You’re gonna have to experience a little bit of that longing of that pain, of that desire to see something changed in the world uh with them uh to be able to engage appropriately in your space. Tony. You’re talking about plan giving. Some people don’t like to have conversations about the end of their life. Not that plan giving is just that, but that’s a big component of it. If you’re not using art, using emotion attuned to, hey, this person is really uncomfortable talking about end of life uh decisions right now, you’re just gonna offend them. Who cares if your numbers are, are in the right space. Uh Another part of this is uh storytelling is so important. People give to a story, uh broad, big narrative stories and storytelling is an art. I don’t care how many meetings you have and how many um you know, conversations you track in your metrics. If you can’t tell a story human to human, either across the zoom call or across the coffee table. Uh You’re never gonna build the, the real human connections that cause people to make big giving decisions. 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 the art and science of fundraising. I agree. Uh II I think uh my, my flaw is probably uh I’m, I’m more of the, the art and the, the uh the human side of fundraising and not enough of the metric scientific side. Uh So I, I hear you, we, we do have to measure uh we, we have and you know, with different clients, I have KPIS and things like that that I’m responsible for. Uh But I, I still probably it, it’s just, it’s, it’s the reason I entered nonprofit fundraising and plan giving specifically is because I love the relationship work. So I, I tend to default to, to the more of the art. So this is valuable, this is, this is valuable for me. Um, all right, let’s, let’s talk a little more le let’s go back to the science side now again. Uh, another, you know, um, you, you talk about, uh sustainable revenue engines but, but you know, what, what are we, what are we talking about there? What are we measuring there back on the science side? Yeah. Uh, let’s just talk about the, the most horrible number. I think that exists in the nonprofit fundraising space right now. And that’s retention rates, you know, on average right now, every year, between 40 45% of donors stay year to year with their nonprofit, which means that more than half actually stop giving to a nonprofit. Ok. That on the science side, that should blow people’s mind. That’s like a showstopper right there. We’ve had guests talk, talk about even as high as 75%. We’ve had some clients that have come in to only keep 20% of their donors every year. Ok. What in the world? We need to analyze that and figure out what the heck is going wrong. Ok. So we need to measure that and then figure out how do we fix this. Um And, and see if we can’t get that, if it is, you know, 20% 25%. Let’s get that to 30 let’s get that to 50 let’s get that to 70 because if you’re churning through your donors over and over and over again, uh that is not, that is not helpful, that is not sustainable. So, the science side of that is OK. Well, why are they leaving? What’s the hypothesis? And for most organizations, your hypothesis should come down to. We’re actually not letting these people know where their money is going and what good it’s doing in the world. But I’m engaging with a client right now and I actually got them as a client because my family gave to them. Uh We have an adopted kid. This is a foster care organization, uh foster care adoption organization we gave to them and it wasn’t a small gift. It was a, a good mid size, you know, mid-level gift. I got one letter letting me know where the money was going. Just one and they’re literally two miles down the street from my house. So I, I called them up and said, hey, I would like to keep giving to you, but I need to know what you’re doing with the money. Uh They had other donors hundreds that weren’t professional fundraisers and didn’t have 2025 years in this space. Uh I went in and I analyzed their, their data. They were sending four communication pieces a year or you know how many times my kids, school texts me when they have a half day. So I don’t forget to pick them up. It’s something like 11 or 12. If I can’t remember to pick my kid up after two text messages. How the heck am I gonna remember your nonprofit from four communication pieces a year? Talking about a size major gift too. Yeah, a good for them. It was a, it was a high level mid-level gift, you know, for that organization. And sadly, that is more the norm uh that I think any of us in this space would like. Um So we need to go in and fix that. That’s the science of OK, what’s our communication cadence? How are we uh how are we building this out? What content do people actually desire? Um And you do that through interviews, you do that through asking uh them. Uh And on the art side, some of these people are probably pretty ticked off that they took your 10 grand and didn’t do anything with it. Wait, go back a sec asking them asking them what, what, what, what are, what are we surveying? What are we asking them in conversations? Yeah. So if 80% of your donors or 50% of your donors are leaving, you need to go back and actually have a serious conversation with your high net worth givers. It needs to be face to face if they’re willing uh with your small and mid size donors, probably a survey and saying, hey, we think we goofed, we think we messed up here. We need to, you know, understand how to get better. Can you help us get better because we all care about this thing and ask specific questions. Uh Why did you stop giving? Did we communicate with you enough when we did communicate? Was it the right type of communication? You know, we need to ask that kind of stuff to our donors and own. We don’t always do things right. You’re, you’re even suggesting surveying folks who, who are no longer donors who left a absolutely. How, how scientifically would you figure out what caused them to laugh? Leave unless you ask them and for a person to leave? I do think, and this is the art side that probably an apology is needed. Uh I think we did something wrong here. That’s where you get into the art and the empathy and the pain because people don’t give just because they have spare money lying around. People give because they want to see something changed in the world and they’re deeply passionate about the areas that they give to. So if as a nonprofit, you’ve done something wrong, uh you need to, you need to own that. Uh And that’s art not science in terms of how you own that mistake. You also can uh uh on the science side can be surveying your, your existing donors. You know, how do you wanna be contacted? Uh What, what, what do you want to hear from us from uh about, do you, are you interested in our events or you’re not? Uh can we send you solicitations and how should we do that? Do you prefer postal mail, texting, you know, uh, email, um, or do you just want to do it on your own calendar? You know, or do you want reminders? You know, these are the, these are the things that can also be surveyed and then of course, the all important, uh, not, not just follow up but the, the honoring of the, of the preferences when you ask somebody something and they tell you what they prefer and you don’t do it, you don’t follow through on it. Um You know, talk to your partner or your spouse. Hey, what would you like to do this weekend? And they tell you and then you completely ignore it and go do something else. It’s not a great weekend. Say with your givers, if they say, hey, I wanna be contacted this time, I want one meeting a year, remind me via text message. My email inbox is too crazy. You have to follow through and do it, which means you need to have your systems uh built efficiently in the back end, which is more of a scientific, you know, thing than an artistic thing. And, and then honor what people have told you. I always think of, uh, related to that, uh asking what someone’s birthday is, you know, if they’re gonna share their birthday or you might just ask birth month, you know, but if, if they, if you’re asking for any kind of birthday info, then the presumption is that you’re gonna remember their birthday or their birthday month. So you need to do that. You need to have a system in place that sends you a reminder a week before everybody’s birthday that you’re gonna send a card or the day of that, you’re gonna, you’re gonna call them if, if they’re, if they’re well enough known that you, you can place a happy birthday call. Uh, You know, if you’re gonna, if you’re gonna survey those things that you’re saying, you, you need, you know, you need to, uh you need to, you need to follow through on what you’re asking about. Um It just, it feels empty to ask someone’s birthday and then ignore it, they never do anything with it. That’s right. What was the point? Yeah. All right. Um Let’s, let’s, uh this is, uh I’m enjoying this now, this uh compare and contrast the uh the science with the art. What else to tell us some more about the science side, the, the, as I as, as I, the uh relationship, you know, default guy, the art, default guy would say uh the cold, hard, the cold, hard, scientific uh side, share some more of that side. Let’s talk about um teams. OK? And how teams can, can uh bring the art, art, art and the science together. One of the most important functions that I think as a, you know, chief revenue officer that I’ve ever hired for is, you know, the development coordinator. Ok. Um, people call it different things, but this is kind of the grease at the elbow position that makes sure everybody is putting their information into the CRM that’s giving you your weekly and your monthly reports as a leader, these hires are deeply scientific people. Um, the best one that I ever hired people called him. Uh, I won’t share his name but they, they had a nickname for him that was close to robots. Uh Just because the guy was so, you know, is very robotic in terms of how he, he does stuff. It was the most valuable position that I’ve ever hired for. Uh because like you, Tony, I also, I, I gravitate towards the art side, the relational side, the engagement side with people. Um I needed a development coordinator to show me what true North was scientifically. Um I am horrible in CRM. Si need someone to sit down and, you know, tell me to input my information. Most major gift officers are, uh I needed someone to do the calculations of year, over year fundraising. This is before, you know, every CRM had that automated, you know, into it. Um He needed to be that true North for the rest of the team and to have the, the hard conversations sometimes about, hey, we’re not doing so well. Right now, we’re not actually meeting our metrics every month. We need to figure out how to solve this on the other side because I am more art. Uh like you are, if you, if you leave every donor meeting and you are an artist and you feel, oh my goodness, they’re judging me. I didn’t do that right. And because artists are sometimes you know that way uh you need the data people, the science people to say actually your numbers were trending in the right direction. You’re getting your meetings, you’re asking the right questions, the the gifts are coming in. Uh Hey, it’s not all about you and how you feel right now. Uh On the flip side, the, the art people sometimes need to tell the data people. Hey, I’m with the person. I know we want a big gift right now. Uh But someone passed away in their family or their kids going through an addiction crisis. I need you to lay off me right now on the numbers because I’m dealing with a real human right now and I’m helping them and adding value and guiding them through the situation. Hey, number one, it’s the right thing to do. Number two, it’s gonna pay off but not for a year or two. So I need you to calm down, you know, science guy. Uh when you bring those two things together on the team and there’s mutual respect and the leader facilitates that mutual respect. Uh Really wonderful things start to happen and people begin to appreciate uh different giftings and abilities on a team that are usually kind of, you know, uh, butting heads with each other. I wanna pull on a thread that you, you said it sounds like it was transformational for you that, that you, uh, the development coordinator you hired, helped you find true North. What, what were you looking for in a, in a development coordinator? You when you were making this hire? Oh, this is a great question. Finally, finally, we’re half an hour in finally, a great question. All right. This is great because I was unprepared for it. Numbers when they’re not interpreted by people who are numbers, people can tell you any story you want to tell. We’ve all been there, right? When you’re doing the development meeting, you’re with your staff and all the numbers got pulled the wrong way and uh no one’s entering stuff in the right way and, oh, I didn’t know. So your numbers get messy. Uh I needed someone to cut through all that noise. I could manage the relationships, uh with the team. It was a, you know, 4050 person team at the time, but I needed someone to actually do that back end work so that we sat down to have the real meetings, uh the individual one on one performance meetings, the team debrief meetings that we didn’t spend 90% of the time complaining that the numbers and the data wasn’t right. So I needed a person to come in and, and, and operationalize all of that for me and I often encounter uh heads of fundraising that are, are one or the other. They are the systems people, let’s build the machine or they’re the one that’s out there and they’re managing the top 50 donors. It’s very hard to find a senior leader that has both of those things together. So if you’re the science, data, build a system, build a machine person, you need some really strong high eq people around you who are gonna go out there and deal with the uh the other humans that make the magic happen. If you’re like me and you, Tony and you’re, you like to be out there, you like to be engaging with individuals, you need someone behind the scenes to be building the machines and making sure all the cogs are turning. But at the same time, it’s very hard to find people who can live in both spaces. Usually you can bungee to both spaces for a few hours, but you’re, you’re in one space just because of how you are and how you are created and designed in your upbringing. And you really need to get support uh for yourself. I know that’s hard for our audience, small and mid size people, but it works when you get that right. The introspection is important. You, you need to know where you fall, what your skills are. You know, as you said, how you’re wired and either hire an employee or, or employees or, or get help as a, uh, on a consulting basis with, with the other side that, you know, the, the, the, the scientific, the, the numerical, the analysis, if you are more the relationship side, that’s, that’s 100%. Right. One of my, uh, bosses at one point in time, gosh, I was probably in my twenties, pulled me aside and said, here’s your Achilles heel and you’re gonna have this for the rest of your career. You run really fast and it’s good because we were in the humanitarian space and you need to run fast when things are happening. You need to hire a world class process person to help everybody else catch up with where you’re running as a leader. He was absolutely right. And even in our company, I need that today because I’m still running fast. Uh It’s just who I am and I need a process person, you know, to come behind me. It’s time for Tony’s take two. Thank you, Kate. This week it’s tales from the train because I’ve done some Amtrak travel lately and it reminds me that Amtrak is so much more comfortable uh uh more pleasant travel experience. So if you have the option, I would urge you to look at Amtrak as, as a possibility for travel instead of flying. Now, I know in a lot of parts of the country you can’t, I’m, I’m, I’m near the northeast Corridor. And when I was up in New York and I was traveling from there. So, you know, between Boston and Washington DC, I think that’s 80% of the trips and the revenue that Amtrak gets because it’s the most populated part of the country that they serve. So I know it doesn’t make sense in, in a lot of other parts of the country, but just consider it because when you’re on Amtrak, you always get wide seats like first class, the first class with seats, um, they’re comfortable big. There’s leg room, there’s never a middle seat. Amtrak doesn’t have three seats. Uh on one side, it’s always two and two, there is never a middle seat that you get stuck with. Um, every Amtrak seat has a, a plug power. You don’t have to worry about seatbelts. You don’t have to put a bag under the seat in front of you. All the luggage goes overhead, but you, there is room. If you want to have a bag at your feet, there’s a lot more room than airplanes. Um Some of them, even some cars even have foot rests. That seems to be kind of a on and off. Uh I’m not sure how, you know, but occasionally there’s foot rests that, that fold down. Um The, the aisles on trains are wider than the aisles on planes. You have a cafe car that you can walk to anytime you don’t have to worry about uh, seatbelt signs coming on and you know the pilot saying we’re in turbulence. So now you can’t get up, you can get up any time you like use the bathroom, go to the cafe car. Um, you don’t have to check luggage unless you have really like four or five pieces or something that more than you can carry. But pretty much I, I really don’t even know what the luggage policy is on Amtrak. It seems to me if you can carry it on, you can bring it with you and put it in the overhead. Uh and, and a lot of cars have storage space at the, at the end of uh the car also for extra, but I think it’s pretty much whatever you can carry. You’re welcome to bring it on. So you don’t have to worry about like two bags only. And um and then also arrival when you take Amtrak, you arrive downtown. Think of, think of where the Moynihan train hall is in New York City uh where Union Station is in Washington, 30th Street Station in Philadelphia. Uh the Wilmington station, the Joe Biden station in Wilmington, Delaware. These are the ones I know best. Oh, but also Boston, I’ve been up to Boston. Um not the back bay but Boston Maine, these stations are downtown. So you don’t have to a, a long Lyft or Uber or shuttle to get to where you wanna go. If you’re going downtown, it’s not like you’re 30 miles away because that’s where the airport is. You arrive downtown. So consider it. Ok. That’s a, that’s a long thing on Amtrak, but think about it because especially arriving downtown, you might save time even though trains go slower than planes. But the time you’re gonna, you spend in traffic getting to the airport and then you have time, you wait in the airport because you gotta be there early for security, obviously. And then the travel time back from the airport to where you’re, you might need to go. If it’s in the ci city center of a city, you might actually save time or it be equivalent, uh, on Amtrak and you’ll have a much more comfortable ride. Ok? That’s enough on Amtrak. And that is Tony’s take two. Ok. Frequent Amtrak rider used to take Amtrak all the time from New York City to, uh, down to Wilmington to get home right to get home for Thanksgiving Christmas. And then I think right before our, our spring break. So I took it a good maybe borderline 20 times. Yeah, and that was like a span of two years. So I thought it was awesome. I mean, everyone was really quite too because it was kind of night time when I would ride. Um, and everyone was respectful. It might have been a little bit crowded at some points. Um, when I would take coach, it would be kind of hard to find a spot. But that’s also because I went during the holidays. Um, we talked about that once you have to be, you have to just be a little assertive and ask people, may I sit here when they have their luggage or their pet, you know, sitting on, uh, another, uh, uh, on a seat. But, you know, planes can be crowded. Planes can be crowded too. But, yes, I, I like Amtrak and I like that. My feet. It’s on the ground. I’m not up in the air. Yeah. Ok. You made me think of one other thing. The quiet car, every Amtrak train, at least in the northeast corridor has a quiet car. It’s usually the second to last car from the rear and there you’re not allowed to have cell phone conversations. You, if you’re, if you’re talking to your seat mate, you need to whisper and they’re pretty good about enforcing it too quiet car. But it’s just one car. The whole train, it’s like eight cars or 10 cars in a train. One is the quiet car. So sometimes I opt for the quiet car. If I know I don’t have to make any calls or anything like that. I haven’t been in one yet but I like the concept of it. Well, we gotta get you back on the train. But, yeah. All right, we’ve got Buku but loads more time. Here’s the rest of the art and science of fundraising with James Meisner. Is there more, uh, is there more, uh, science and art that we can, we can compare and contrast? I, I think we can, but let’s talk about how these can come together. Um, would that be ok, Tony? Yeah. Yeah. One of the things I’m always struck by is, uh, in Jim Collins book. Good to Great. Uh, I just listened to an episode of your podcast from November and you guys were talking about Jim Collins in, in Good to great. Uh One of the greatest things he talks about is the power of knee hand and that organizations and companies uh are often saying, hey, we have to choose A or we have to choose B and that is often a false dichotomy. And I think we’re, we’re talking about this in the, in the, in the, in the fundraising space. You get CEO S and heads of fundraising who say we have to be this, we have to be scientific, we have to be buttoned up, it has to be metric driven or do you have people on the other side? Just uh hey, wind me up and let me go tell stories. Those are false choices. And Jim Collins says that leaders who bring out the best of a and leaders who bring out the best in b are the ones who actually uh thrive and they’re the ones that actually grow uh their organizations. And I think in the nonprofit space, uh you see this happen all the time. You have a uh a CEO who comes up to the program side and they bring all the science and the monitoring evaluation and just want to slap that on to, you know, fundraising without bringing out the emotional storytelling, art side. Or you have a CEO come up through, you know, fundraising and marketing, who forgets all the monitoring evaluation and auditing and accounting. Um especially in small and mid size nonprofits. We need to say, let’s get the best of A and the best of B and bring these together. Uh So we’re not making a false choice. We’re managing the tension instead of choosing between two things that are uh uh falsely dichotomies against each other. OK? The, the power of the and the power of the end. All right. Um So let’s, let’s uh this is, this is our, this is our up into the right fundraising objective. This is where this is where we want to be, where the, the two, the two are coming together. Um Le let’s say more about, you know, systems um maybe have some examples of teams that, that are excellent at both. Yeah, there, there’s a team that I’ve gotten to work with for the past uh 1015 years or so on or off. They have mastered this, they’ve mastered it. Um They spent years becoming world class storytellers. How did they do that? You don’t become a world class storyteller by accident. You become a world class storyteller uh by deeply figuring out the emotional hooks in a story that are gonna cause people to respond to it. That was the art side. Well, how did a team of 50 people get really good at it? They brought the science site in, they practiced their storytelling and they still do to this day every single week. No one goes to a major giving meeting without practicing their story and having it evaluated by at least three other people inside the organization. Oh, really? Oh They do this like a role, well, not role playing, but you’re rehearsing, you’re rehearsing, they rehearse, they rehearse and they get that feedback. Um The, the leader of the current leader of that team jokes. I don’t care if you figured out the best wine or the best croissants to bring to that meeting. Uh You can show up with the sunny water for all I care, but you will practice your story before you go in. Um And there’s beauty in that because other people can critique it in a safe environment and say, hey, you forgot to ask AAA powerful question. At the end, you’re gonna have a hard time transitioning from this story into a conversation afterwards. Oh my goodness. You forgot this hook. I heard that story the other day in another meeting and you, you forgot this detail. Uh That’s really gonna um make it, make it s what this team noticed is as they implemented a process to get better at storytelling. Donors started responding, more zeros got added to gifts as they went. Um The art and the science uh coming together. Uh Another great example of this is uh I love mid-level fundraising programs. People forget, you know, they’re mid-level donors. Uh But I think mid-level donors are really fun in the future. Uh of most uh nonprofit uh fundraising programs, the science can tell you what your zone of opportunity is. Hey, we have this many people who we think can give between 1000 and $10,000 normal, you know, mid-level range. Um And there’s nothing there. The art side comes in and figures out what kind of community do these people want uh to come together. There’s another team that I’ve worked with for the past two years. They built a wonderful mid-level program. Um And the interesting thing that happened was their mid-level program has actually stayed flat. It hasn’t increased in revenue, it hasn’t decreased in revenue, but you know what’s happened? Their major gift program is off to the races. Uh They through great art through great questions and conversations figured out exactly what their mid-level audience wanted. And then they built the science side. How do we get our high uh higher annual funds, small donors to be into mid-level? And how do we bump up our mid-level people into major the science? What is some of the, what they did for the mid-level community that they created. They were the most transparent organization I’ve ever seen in their mid-level communication. They told their mid-level donors exactly what they were gonna get. Hey, we built this community for people like you. Here’s what people like us are. You know, you get between 1000 and $10,000 a year. There are this number of you. There’s, I forget the number 792 of us together. We’re gonna report to you more. We’re gonna ask you less. They literally said that we’re gonna tell you where your money’s going. And we’re gonna ask you for money fewer times a year. Within six months, they were off to the races. People just ate it up, they love the transparency. Um And uh we, they did a President’s weekend as part of a capital campaign a while ago and half the room was from their mid-level program. Now graduating from giving 10,000 to, you know, high five figures, low six figure gifts because somebody just said, I’m gonna tell you what’s happening here. I’m gonna tell you exactly what we need. I’m gonna stop bugging you with, you know, annual fund type appeals. And I’m gonna ask you when it really matters and people ate it up, Tony, they ate it up. What was the work of that organization? They were in the humanitarian space. So they were doing, uh you know, global poverty alleviation, conflict zones and refugees All right. So sort of build up that program. They sounds like they asked a lot of questions about, you know, what you would want from the community and what, what do you want as a mid-level donor? How can you know, how can we make this experience more valuable for you more meaningful, make your giving uh not make you giving more impactful for you and, and it sounds like folks came back with, you know, we’d like to know more about where our dollars are going. Yeah, they sent out a very simple, you know, almost um envelope size survey. It was a postcard, it was very low tech um and it was check boxes, mail this back to us. Uh They had something like a 40% response rate to that. It was really wonderful. Um And, and people told them exactly what they wanted to hear about, you know, when you’re working in disaster zones and with refugees in the US, you start to wonder what the people you know, really want to hear about. The donors just told them and they tagged it for him. So these people got refugee stories, these people got, you know, disaster response, conflict zone stories and something like 80%. We’re just like we like all of it, just keep telling us all the stories. Um The other great thing that happened and this is so important for small and mid size organizations is by telling that broad story. People stop designating their gifts. They started giving more money and they started giving it unrestricted or semi restricted, which gave that organization degrees of freedom that they had never imagined before all because they asked and 80% said we like it all. Um ok, so when you give these, you know, three or four things happened, their unrestricted revenue went through the roof. Mm What uh what else, what else can, can we uh can we talk about um AAA about around bringing these two together? Um You know, you mentioned uh the systems using, again, putting the science together with the art, using, using systems to uh move, move donors along in relation, you know, in a, throughout their spectrum of giving. Yeah, let’s, let’s talk about how they got annual fund givers to become mid-level givers and then mid-level givers to become major givers chronicles. The philanthropy actually wrote up a case study two or three years ago on this organization because they were so good at the, at the science side of it. So what chronicle what then, what’s the name of the organization? Shout them out. Oh, yeah. So it’s World Relief uh Global Humanitarian Organization based in the Baltimore, Washington uh region. Uh Karen Bryant at the time was their mid level uh director, she’s moved on and now is at a um climate change organization uh but great, great, great leader. Um what they did was they set up a system, a quarterly system where anybody that gave a single gift of $500 or more uh would be flagged in the system for the mid-level team to actually reach out. And thank because they had a hypothesis that if you’re given a $500 1st time single gift, you probably have more money to give, which, you know, nine times out of 10 is usually true. Um And then what they did every quarter is they actually invited those people to explore and join the mid-level program. They did a direct mail and phone call. A very simple campaign. Um Hey, we have something for people like you, uh that we think that would actually really increase uh your experience with us. And they told him exactly what it was, they invited them to it. But it was the simplest thing in the world and you know what people were like, yes, there were a few things here that made it sing quote unquote. Uh First was it happened quick. The systems in the back end flagged it quickly and you weren’t waiting 69, 10 months till somebody forgot about you to invite them into something. They were thanked really quickly and within 90 days they were invited to the next thing. Ok. Uh That’s really important. If somebody gives you a gift in December of 2024 and you don’t do anything to try to engage them until September of 2025 you’ve already lost them, they’ve moved on to the next thing, uh you need to be quick with this. Um And it worked dramatically. The next thing that they did is they would continually research using donor search and other, you know, well, screen engines, uh their mid-level portfolio and the mid-level team identified the top third of people that they thought had significant future potential for the organization. And they would start to treat them like major donors. They wouldn’t just throw them over to the major donor team, but they would do the birthday calls, the handwrit notes, they would invite them to some special events. Uh So they got used to having one on one attention because many mid-level donors if you go from, hey, uh we’re getting emails, we’re getting newsletters, we love this community and the quarterly, you know, online events and hey, do you wanna have coffee that jump is so hard for them because they don’t think of themselves often of being people of, of, of means of wealth. Uh So they started to condition or train their mid-level daughters to expect that and then what they did and this is the brilliance of this art and science coming together is four times a year. They would identify the people that they were, they thought most likely to become major givers. And they asked them if they wanted to become major givers, they would say, hey, we’re actually looking for 10 or 15 people from this mid-level community to come up and do more with us so that we could do XY and Z in our program space and they let them raise their hands and every time they did it, they had more hands raised than they needed at the time. Wow. What, what else were they enticing them with? What, what was there more of an enticement or was it all just program related? You know, if, if 15 people join us at the, at the major donor level, you know, we can do this with humanitarian. Uh That was the main hook because the, the message for mid level was, hey, uh we’re gonna ask fewer times and tell you more. So these people started really to get uh deeply engaged uh with the organization, but there was also uh a communal enticement. You know, we need 15 you to do this. And hey, when our staff come from overseas, we’re actually gonna get you together either in person or on zoom. So you can meet these people. Hey, when we are in your city, we’re gonna show up and we’re gonna, you know, have lunch and coffee and dinner. This is gonna become a big part of your life. Uh What we do together. So there was that communal aspect, I’ve never been a big fan of some of the um the T chay, you know, type incentives for, for givers a, get a book, join this club, you know, those types of things, uh, get, you know, elbow time with the CEO um, givers like community with other givers is what I found. People like to be with people that care about the same things, uh, that they do and the other things just naturally happen, but you don’t have to sell them on it. You saw them on the impact because people give through your organization to make a difference in the world, they don’t give to your organization. Yeah, through to make the difference that you, you, that they want to see. Absolutely. All right, this is excellent. Um Wrap it all up, you know, leave us with uh inspiration for putting together the uh the art and the science so we can have that, that uh the growth that we’re all looking for. Yeah, I want to end by talking about leadership. OK? I think the nonprofit space has a crisis of leadership. We’ve all talked about the, the great resignation after the pandemic. We’ve talked about burnout a ton. There’s new studies out, you know, even, you know, Q four of 2024 about just the next wave of nonprofit leader resignations. But in the fundraising space, this does not happen by accident. OK? It takes a leader to bring these things together and to create the conditions for team members to bring their best, whether it’s on the art side or the science side, this just won’t happen by accident. A, a leader needs to know, um that they have the responsibility to create the conditions for success for every team method, whether it’s a database and analysts were a front line fundraiser to bring their best every single day. And I see people abdicating that responsibility more and more as the world gets more and more stressful. So in ending teams that grow teams that move up into the right, the, the 2% of nonprofits that eventually break a million dollars in revenue, it doesn’t happen by accident, it happens because a leader says I’m actually gonna do something different. Uh Now, um I’m gonna ask the harder questions. I’m gonna uh invest in my team. I’m gonna create the art side of this organization and storytelling and questions and EQ and I’m gonna create the science side of this organization and invest in data and systems. And I’m gonna make sure through my leadership through how I model this, that these people start working together more. Uh Every year we talk about not enough nonprofits are breaking that million dollar barrier or that $10 million barrier. And I don’t think that bigger is better, Tony. OK? I think that bigger just means that you’re better funded, that you figured the funding side of things out. Uh I see so much innovation happening in the small and mid size space uh that I want this community of people uh to develop those leadership skills to bring the best of art and science together so they can move the needle and change some of these problems that have been plaguing our country and our world. Uh, for decades, if not generations, James Meisner, founder and CEO of the Kos group, tell us what Kos is K IP OS. What, what’s the, what’s the, what’s the? Yeah. What’s the Kos group about? Where’s that from? Yeah. Kebos group is the Greek word for garden during the pandemic. My kids and I planted over 1000 plants in our backyard because we were bored. Uh and we got into, into gardening and within six months, people were stopping by to take pictures uh in our yard, you know. Um And so when I started this company, I wanted to create something that helped uh people grow something beautiful. Uh and gardens are beautiful and they provide, you know, food for you if you, you know, grow vegetables and fruit and stuff. So, uh we want to help people grow beautiful things in their nonprofit. So, um that’s where the key plus group came from, James Meisner. You’ll find the company at the Kos group.com. You’ll find James on linkedin James. Thank you very much. Thanks for sharing your thinking. Thanks, Tony. It was great to be here with you today. Next week, Amy and Gene return to share what they’re looking at for 2025 on our last show of 2024. Can you believe this last show? It’s the next two weeks or after that, uh we have next week and then next two weeks after that, we’re off. If you missed any part of this week’s show, I beseech you to 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 dot org. Oh, that alliteration, fast, flexible, friendly fundraising forms. Our creative producer is Claire Meyerhoff. I’m your associate producer, Kate Marinetti. 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. Scotty be with us next week for nonprofit radio. Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95% go out and be great.
Stacy Palmer & Andrew Simon: The Chronicle of Philanthropy Leaders
Stacy Palmer is CEO of the now nonprofit newspaper, and the editor-in-chief is Andrew Simon. We talk about the transition from privately held to 501(c)(3); their plans for growth; the mission, values and priorities guiding them; new content that’s coming; improving mass media’s coverage of our community; the presidential election; potential threats to the sector; and a good deal more.
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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 pika if you made me swallow the idea that you missed this week’s show. Here’s our associate producer, Kate with the highlights. Hey, Tony, here’s what’s up the chronicle of philanthropy leaders. Stacy Palmer is CEO of the now nonprofit newspaper and the editor in chief is Andrew Simon. We talk about the transition from privately held to 501 C three. Their plans for growth, the mission values and priorities, guiding them new content that’s coming, improving mass media’s coverage of our community, potential threats to the sector and a good deal. More on Tony’s take two with a lackluster host. You get a late holiday wish 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 the chronicle of philanthropy leaders. It’s a pleasure to welcome this week’s guests, Stacy Palmer is CEO of the chronicle of philanthropy. Andrew Simon. Is editor in chief of the chronicle of philanthropy. You’ll find them both on linkedin Stacy Andrew. Welcome to Nonprofit Radio. Thanks for inviting us. Thank you for having us, Tony. Absolute absolute pleasure. Um Stacy, I’d like to start with you. It’s been about 2.5 years. It was June of 2022. We last talked. Uh You had, you were making the transition or had made the transition from privately held company to nonprofit status. I, you were awaiting the IRS approval of the nonprofit status. That was June of 2022. Uh I know you’ve gotten that bring us up to date on the Chronicle of philanthropy as a nonprofit. Yeah. So we’ve been operating for 18 months as a nonprofit and every day we learn something new about what it takes to build an organization. And so I feel much closer to all of our readers and all of the challenges that they face, which I knew would happen as we sort of made this transition. But, you know, we’ve gotten through our first audit, we’re doing our 990 we’re doing all of those kinds of things and we’re really trying to figure out how do we re invent ourselves so that the Chronicle of philanthropy will be something that serves our audiences really well for decades to come. Uh What have you uh especially learned as a, as a CEO of a nonprofit. Go, go a little dive a little deeper into what it’s been, how much closer you feel to the audience now. Yeah. You know, I mean, I’m now actively doing fundraising. I’m working with a board, you know, all of the things that people would tell me, this is a challenge I face. This is something that’s wonderful. This is something that’s difficult. Now, I feel it viscerally every single day. Um, the biggest for us has been technology and how to make sure that we have systems that really help us, you know, show the audience, you know, all the things that they want. We have legacy systems. I think every nonprofit is facing those kinds of problems. Um And we need to make sure that we move as quickly as we can into new ways of serving our audiences. And that part, it’s just taken longer than I would have expected it to just because it’s complicated and it’s expensive. And so you need to figure out ways to do. But, you know, I think the really fun part for us is we often are asking ourselves, how do we think about serving the audience? What do they need without having to worry as much about, you know, what our for profit owners were thinking about and they were very generous and very wonderful, but they definitely needed to make sure we were making a profit. Now, we think about how do we plow that into more services to better serve non profits? That’s extremely freeing and that’s the part of the nonprofit world that I love. So it sounds like uh described as your program work you finding takes longer than you expected. Uh It’s costly, there’s fundraising against it. OK. Uh And you’ve described this as AAA period of transformation and growth. And uh how does, how does uh having hired uh Andrew as editor in chief fit with that? It absolutely enables it. Um Because he brings skills and perspectives that our newsroom didn’t have before. Um So why don’t we let him talk a little bit about his background so that you can all know what he brings to the chronicle of philanthropy? Ok. Let’s do it that way. I was going to actually ask you why did you hire Andrew Simon? But I’ll let him do it in the next Andrew Simon. Why do you believe you were hired? What, what, what, what have you brought? Well, you know, um in some of the early conversations with Stacy, we both talked about how the Chronicle can really serve audience by helping leaders see around the corner, right? Understanding the trends, understanding what’s happening now, philanthropy in the nonprofit world, but making sense of it and really helping to guide readers a little bit with our journalism and our reporting about um what to expect next. And in previous roles, I’ve been fascinated with this idea of how can we help readers and leaders see the future? I at a previous job. I was at a business consulting company. We’re uh doing stories on climate solutions. I, previous to that, I worked at gris.org, a nonprofit news site devoted to climate, climate solutions, climate justice and in both of those roles, it was similar, it was sort of making sense of the news now. And how does that help guide leaders in their decision making going forward? So I think Stacy and I were kind of uh excited about the prospect of doing more of that. The chronicle has certainly done that for years. But the idea of doing more of that and coming into this role is what really excited me. Well, what are some of the trends that you’re looking at? Uh We just, I mean, we just had a presidential election. I mean, that’s a, that’s a, that’s a wide open question. Uh But take, take it where you go and take it where you like. And, uh you know, we’ll, we’ll, we’ll drill down some, I see the post election world on a, on a few levels. There’s certainly helping leaders navigate the changes to tax policy and regulation. There are certainly the missions of many nonprofits um that could be under threat. So there’s that level, I, I also think there’s a, a hovering over all this is just uncertainty, really an unpredicted, potentially unpredictable time for leaders, whether you’re on the grant making side, whether you’re a nonprofit leader, whether you’re a fundraiser. And I’m wondering how we can help our leaders and readers navigate this uncertainty, right? So I feel like there’s uncertainty hovering over all of this, right? So you can raise questions about, well, will this mission be affected? What are the ramification of these tax policies regulation changes? Which is very important? But then how do you navigate the uncertainty going forward? The the chronicle has an interesting role I do. Is it fair to say that it, it’s an advocate for the nonprofit sector community or, or is it, is that, is that inappropriate? And it, it needs to remain neutral about it? It’s, it’s primary readership. Yeah, it’s a great question. And, you know, obviously we believe nonprofits are incredibly important to society or else we wouldn’t be in this business of covering and serving them and helping them do better. But we also raise questions when they’re not doing the kinds of things that society depends on them to do. So, you know, I, somebody once described us as the good friend who tells you when your slip is showing and it’s an awkward expression. But it’s sort of the right way to say, you know, I think, you know, it’s important to say that we care deeply about this sector. We think it’s horribly undercovered. We think that that’s one of the reasons it’s not as effective as it should be. We think people are terribly fragmented and it’s our role to connect people. Um You did an interesting blog post or talking about the fact that everyone needs to come together as a sector in this time when there are really big challenges. And, you know, we see already some of the things going on on Capitol Hill where there’s legislation, you know, that a lot of nonprofits are allied against those kinds of things where people need to come together and defend the rights of nonprofits to free speech and advocacy and those kinds of things. It’s really important for them to see themselves in, you know, the pages of our article so that they all know what’s happening. Some will agree, some will disagree, but at least they should be connected to each other to fact based information. So that’s what we’re trying to do. And I think another thing that we’re thinking a lot about um is how do we fix some of the systems that are broken about the nonprofit world. Um I will say that, you know, there’s been frustration forever about lack of operating support, lack of multi year grants. So we saw some of in the pandemic, we saw some changes there, but it seems like there’s a slide back on the very things nonprofits need. So in those kinds of ways, choosing that we’re going to talk about those things, you might consider that advocacy. But we think it’s just important for us to put a spotlight on things that otherwise wouldn’t get the attention. Like, like your slip is showing. Ok. Um, what about the, the mass media coverage? Um, I, I don’t know who’s better to answer this, but you have, you, have, you had at least maybe still do a fellowship program, training other journalists outside the community that, you know, we don’t exist only when there’s, uh, uh, uh, a $500 million fraud foisted on the people by a Veterans Affairs agency. You know, where do we stand on helping mass media better coverage better cover the sector? That’s a really important part of our mission. So every year we take on four newsrooms that we work with intensively over the year, we partner with people in our newsroom who can help them do an excellent job of learning how to cover the field. And we’re really trying to help them focus on, you know, who are the nonprofits and foundations that are serving their communities, what are they doing, what’s happening, what would happen if they disappeared? Um And to really better understand that. So, you know, to be sure some of the fellows we’ve done have found some fraud and abuse in their communities and they’ve reported on that, but we encourage them to look more deeply about what’s going on. Um And to show that, you know, one out of every 11 Americans works for a nonprofit that means that people who are reading their content listening um to them, if it’s, you know, on broadcast networks, you know, those are the kinds of folks that, you know, really want to understand how nonprofits work with the threat, sorry to them, what the opportunities are. Um And we should cover it just like we cover business or any other sector. So we try to argue that we would love to expand this program. So one of the things we hope as a nonprofit that we can do is draw ever more attention in this time when local journalism is suffering a great way to attract audiences is to cover nonprofits. That’s what readers and listeners and viewers all want to know about is who’s solving problems in their communities. And it’s the nonprofits Andrew then are these fellows working with you uh uh on the editorial side? Right. Well, they’re editor of fellows. So they, they certainly work in their respective newsrooms throughout the country. But what we do is our editors and writers will work with them, mentor them, review their stories, help them bring larger concepts to life. And then we also, as a matter of fact, I think we have one of these sessions today. I’m not mistaken as we record to where we’ll, we’ll have um we’ll share our expertise in a kind of learning session where we’ll, you know, share tips on investigative reporting or collecting data sets. Um and hopefully help guide the fellows in those types of ways I see. All right. So they, they remain in their, in their respective newsrooms Yeah. Ok. Ok. Um Yeah, data, I mean, there’s a, there’s a trove of data about the nonprofit sector that I, I think doesn’t get the attention that uh that, that folks, that journalists need to know uh about what’s out there, what the government collects, what, what some of the agencies collect. Yeah. So one of the fellows is actually working on a project to try to figure out where the most charitable cities are, which is a vexing thing to do. We’ve done those kinds of projects too, but the data is not ideal for being able to ask those questions. But we’re really trying to figure out what makes certain stand out. Why is there more philanthropy in them? And then on the flip side, why are there the philanthropy deserts? Um and what can be done about that? So, you know, that’s one of the ways that we’re training them to use data. And of course, we do the very basics like making sure everybody can, you know, glean information from the nine nineties, you know, make sure they really understand how to read them those very basic things. 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 the chronicle of philanthropy leaders, Andrew. I’d like to pull on the thread a little more about uh the uh the presidential election project 2025. I mean, there are, there are some nonprofits that are specifically named in the document like uh the like uh national Public Radio, uh public Broadcasting system PBS, you know, named, called out to be defunded. Um That Planned Parenthood should have its, um, it’s, it’s Medicaid funding withdrawn as long as they’re providing abortion care. Uh What, you know, what’s the, what’s the role of the Chronicle in, in making this clear? I don’t know, uh you know, playing the role of the good friend, but, you know, seeing that the, the, some of the, some of the, some of the good friends are uh, are under like explicit threat. Where, where is the Chronicle fit there? Sure. Well, it, it goes a little bit back to this theme of uncertainty and it’s not to say that some of these threats shouldn’t be taken seriously, aren’t real. But again, hard to know if and when some of these changes would happen, I think our role is to try to identify the ways in which nonprofits can stay financially healthy and stable. Again, through, through tough times, you know, it’s why we have multiple reporters dedicated to fundraising. It’s why we have uh multiple writers talking about leadership and, and navigating, you know, hard decisions um in volatile times like this, you know, not to say that is, um this is not perfectly analogous, but certainly there was uh COVID-19, you know, not that, that many years ago. And this was before I got to the Chronicle, but this was the newsroom coming together with our nonprofit intelligence team, which I know that’s a wonky title. But you know, that’s our uh unit that’s really devoted to um you know, helping uh leaders in, in a professional development capacity. So, you know, the team just got together and tried to again, help figure out, ok, under these um unprecedented, really challenging times, what should fundraisers consider, how do leaders navigate and lead their organization? What does the remote place uh workplace look like? So there will be certainly new challenges in this era. And again, it’s not to say that the next era is exactly like the Coronavirus era and yet these could be challenging volatile times. And I think there are certain themes that we can cover that should be able to apply to most nonprofits. Not all, one of my big reflections of this role so far is the variation in size and scope and mission of nonprofits is so vast that we, we do, we are thoughtful and need to continue to be thoughtful about not offering one size all fit solutions that we do need to gear our coverage um around just, you know, as best we can on that huge variation of nonprofits. But nonetheless, we are looking for trends and things that again, we think should be of interest to at least the majority of the readership. Do we have? Uh I’m saying we, I’m a, I’m a, I’m a member of the Chronicle philanthropy. Uh Is there a Washington DC reporter? Are we able to cover what’s, you know, what’s happening around, you know, discussions around the, the, the sector in, in Washington, you know, we started off being based here. Um And so for many, many years when we were under the Chronicle of higher Education, all the reporters worked from the Washington DC area. Um we had a couple that, you know, were able to be in other places, but for the most part, we were all here. So we start with a really strong base of covering Washington. I will say though that there was a point where I had a lot of the reporters focused on Capitol Hill and the White House, the IRS doing all those kinds of things. Um And so there would be different people assigned to all of those things, but as the federal government sort of pulled back on doing very much that was interesting um for nonprofits writ large, some of, and I would assign the best reporters to those tweets and they would come up to me and say there’s not enough to cover. Can I please have something else to cover in addition to covering what’s going on in terms of policy? So, we’re, you know, in one of those pendulum shifts now where we’re going back to the people who had the expertise in covering it. But, and I think now we’re really, you know, given some of the things that, um, you know, the Trump administration that JD Vance has said about, you know, where nonprofits are going to be, you know, in the sights of possible legislation. We’re in a heavy period and I’m thrilled that we have expertise that people cultivated long ago. Um, but it really does come sort of in and out and I think where we also need to pay a lot of attention to is, you know, state and local politics is going to become even more important and that’s an area where, because we’re small, we haven’t spent as much time. So I think that’s one of the areas where we’re going to need to grow. Iiii I see the need. Um, and, yeah, I hadn’t even thought of right state and local. I mean, the, um, so much, you know, is being pushed down to the States. Uh, and, and, and a lot of issues, um, I’m concerned, you know, I’m, I’m, I just personally and professionally, I’m, I’m concerned about our sector and, and, and pieces of it. That have missions that are, uh, in the sights of, you know, and I think it goes beyond 20 25. Yeah, it goes beyond that, you know, so, regardless of what your politics are and what you care about the missions, the fact that we’re talking about pretty serious federal budget cuts of any kind. I mean, nonprofits get more of their revenue from government than they do from anything else. And so, you know, I think that if any of those things go through the sector could be in a pretty difficult period. So that’s especially the way we’re watching it is, you know, um not even just, you know, obviously there are particular missions that are in the target, but really anybody that gets funding from government entities could be at risk financially. So that’s why when Andrew was talking about helping navigate uncertainty, make sure people know how to lead and fundraise. It’s in incredibly important. Um We were founded soon after the Reagan administration was leaving office and that was a time when there was a burst in professional fundraisers being developed because there were all kinds of budget cuts and organizations needed to double down on their private fundraising. So I, and that will never make up for how much the government provides, but it’s going to be crucial in these next few years, I think. Uh So what am I missing Stacy? I mean, uh when I see the giving usa report each year, it’s like, uh individual giving is 75 or 76% of, of overall giving to nonprofits. But you’re saying government, that’s just private giving. If you look at the budgets of nonprofits, you look at like the Urban Institute kind of study. So colleges, hospitals, social service agencies, that overall budget shows that most of the finances um are through some kind of a government subsidy and people don’t think about it that way. We think of nonprofits and we think of the private giving side and that, that’s usually important and some groups, you know, that’s 90% of their income, but for others it’s a much smaller portion. Ok, thank you. All right. All right. Um All right. Maybe a little lighter, uh, a little lighter topic. Uh What about, uh, what, what, what are we gonna be seeing priority wise in terms of, uh, other content? We webinars podcasts? I don’t know, Andrew. Is that on the editorial side or, or is that not? I don’t know, or? Yeah, I, I can certainly speak to multimedia and, you know, Stacey might be able to talk a little bit more about, um, you know, webinars and, and, and in that unit, um, we’re, we’re excited about meeting readers where they are. You know, I think Stacey already alluded to the fact that, you know, yes, there are some challenges as we transition to being an independent nonprofit organization, but with that comes opportunity. So it’s interesting, we had a discussion yesterday among the leadership team. And it’s sort of like we, we know we want to use different multimedia tools and channels to reach our audience. But we also want to become more sophisticated on understanding of, you know, what are the tools that will reach them most effectively? Right. You know, is there a hunger for podcast? Is there a hunger for short social videos? Right. So there’s a sort of a measure of work of saying, yeah, we, we want to meet readers where they are, but how do we do that? And one of the most effective ways we can reach readers in that way. So it is exciting though. We, we do have hopefully, I can say this publicly. We do have a podcast underway which Stacey might be able to talk a little bit more about uh which we’re extremely thrilled about. We have begun experimenting a bit more video, particularly on social media. We have a terrific um social media manager who is really willing to experiment and guide us in those ways. We, we want to do some small things or things that seem small as uh for example, have our writers just, you know, go on camera and talk for 60 seconds about uh the great reporting that they do. It’s something that other publications do. So I think it’s sort of starting kind of seemingly modestly in these ways and experimenting again, seeing what resonates with our audience and then hopefully leaning in more uh to what we learned is effective. I had the honor of uh hosting fundraising fundamentals for the Chronicle for about five years. Uh when back when uh Peter Pena Pinto was your web editor, Stacy. And uh that, that was always fun. A little short form, uh short form podcasting 10 minutes every two weeks or maybe once a month. It’s time for Tony’s take two. Thank you, Kate. You would have thought that last week, I would have said, uh Happy Thanksgiving. That’s a pretty natural thing to say during the week of Thanksgiving. But uh I didn’t, I didn’t say it because I didn’t think of it because we record the week before when you have a lackluster host. This is what you end up with a late Happy Thanksgiving holiday. Wish you deserve better. I, you do. You do iii I wish the host was better. We’re stuck with lackluster. I hope you enjoyed your Thanksgiving took some time for yourself. Time to relax, rejuvenate. So there’s a whole fourth quarter coming up. Well, we’re in the midst of the fourth quarter, the, the tail end of the fourth quarter coming up. I hope you took some time for yourself, your family, your friends, Happy Thanksgiving late. That is Tony’s take two Kate. We hope you enjoy your turkey. Well, we’ve got bookoo, but loads more time. Here’s the rest of the chronicle of philanthropy leaders with Stacy Palmer and Andrew Simon. What about, um you know, professional development opportunities through the, through the chronicle? What, what, what do you see there? Yeah, that’s a really important part of what we do and we see our role as in very much helping nonprofits do their jobs better. A lot of our webinars focus on fundraising, but we’re branching out into doing more things on leadership. The podcast that Andrew mentioned is going to be focused on leadership and gonna talk to terrific leaders about the ways that they overcome the challenges that they face. Um And I’m eager to have listeners of this podcast, um share any ideas and thoughts about both topics and guests and those kinds of things as we feature them. Um So I would say the next big area that we’ll get into, you know, has to do more with leadership. We’re really concerned about the fact that, you know, we did a survey that found that a lot nonprofit leaders love their jobs, but they’re really frustrated in them. And, you know, many of them are planning to leave their roles um in the next two or three years and about a third of them are thinking about leaving the sector altogether. That’s a brain drain we can’t afford right now. We need to groom more leaders. Um I’ve talked to people who say that they offer, you know, co leadership opportunities sometimes to younger colleagues and the younger colleagues. Look at them and I would never want that job. Why would you think that anybody would want that job? It’s not a good job. Um You know, that’s really damaging to the sector when great talent doesn’t even think that leadership um of a nonprofit is the kind of role they want to take. So we see ourselves as helping to deal with that problem. So I think you’ll see a lot more from us on that topic, Andrew, you reported on that the leadership transition. I think it was just earlier this month. Can you uh can you pull on that a little more? Talk about the, the next generation and, and the exodus of uh the uh the, the existing. Sure, absolutely. Yeah, we had a, a writer, Alex Daniels um do a recent cover story on the uh transition at many foundations in leadership and it, it’s, it there, we’re, we’re in a moment of change. It’s, it’s pretty indisputable, right? Whether it’s uh J PB, the Ford Foundation, Hewlett um um foundations of that size. And then, you know, other foundations too that may not be um kind of quite as uh reputable as those, but still um really important foundations in the space. And, yeah, what Alex realized in his reporting is that this next generation of leaders, um they’re often um people coming directly from the nonprofit world, right? They’re not necessarily coming from academia or the corporate sector. So they’ve uh lived the daily lives of what it’s like to lead a nonprofit and work in a nonprofit. Uh They’re often women, they’re often people of color, women of color, um which also represents a shift, um just in the demographic, but also in the ideas. Um and the innovation that they could bring to, to some of these entities. So it really feels like a big moment of change and it, it speaks to something I’m really interested in as I’ve gotten into this role is as we alluded to earlier about kind of seeing to the the future, I think even outside of foundation leadership, you know, what is the future of the sector, who, who’s going to be calling the shots, what, what are the biggest challenges they are facing, right? Where, what are their, what are their work back, work backgrounds look like? As Stacey just mentioned, um how does the sector prevent burnout? Right? How does the sector support these leaders? And again, now going into an era of potentially more unpredictability, um How does this next generation kind of thrive? Um And, and not, you know, meet um some seeming insurmountable challenges. I think the burnout is real and some of the other things that Stacy mentioned. So, um I, I would say it’s personally exciting that that shift is really exciting, but there are real challenges that um these young leaders will have to confront. It’s an interesting tension, you know, with the election is based on, you know, make us great again. We’re going backwards to some, some time that’s undefined and, you know, I don’t know how many decades or generations back, but yet we’re talking about a new generation of leadership, uh you know, looking, looking forward. Uh II, I see some, II, I see a tension there. I don’t know, maybe that’s just a, a general, you know, uh rather concern of the community. But I don’t know. I, I see tension between moving backwards and looking forward. I think there are some nonprofit leaders who having been through the first time Trump was elected and all the, you know, having survived the pandemic, um they were already pretty worn out. And so this idea of going through it again, that’s why I’m really worried about the number of departures that we’re seeing. Um So, you know, one of the things that we found in our survey too is that, you know, the problems of polarization is what’s really hitting nonprofits hard. You know, it used to be that when you ask people what their problems were, it was about, you know, making their budgets, raising enough money, worrying about their staffs and those are still big problems, but now they’re really trying to figure out how to deal with a divided country, sometimes divided workplaces. Um So that’s just added another challenge to a nonprofit leader’s job. What else should we talk about that? I, that I, uh I haven’t asked you about what, what, what does, what do you want to share about, uh the, the chronicle going forward the transition, please? I, I can’t, I can’t anticipate everything. No. You know, I want to go back to a question you asked earlier because I, it, I think it was a two part question. I think you were asking sort of, what do you see coming down the road, both related to the election results and, and maybe not so much. So, I feel like I answered the first part, but not the second part. Um There are trends and shifts in the sector that are really interesting um that we uh we, we’ve been covering already, but we’ll continue to cover. So, and some may be related to the administration but not so much, you know, for example, uh technology and A I and what are nonprofits learning about the technologies? Right? There’s a lot of hope. There’s a lot of promise. There’s a lot of excitement, there’s a lot of really interesting applications uh you know, from fundraising to uh organizational efficiency in operations. Um But then there, there’s fear which is just a um there’s risks. Uh So how do nonprofits navigate A I and other technologies too? For example, cybersecurity, right? So, uh that, that is a thread and a and a story we’ll be covering. Um There’s certainly the, the future of race-based grant making and de I efforts at nonprofits. This one does feel like it could be, you know, tied to again this next e whether or not it’s a threat to the administration or not, but certainly in this, in this new world that we’re in. Um what does that, what does that look like? Right. If, if you’re a nonprofit and you’re say, working specifically uh in a sector where you’re helping uh to uh support um marginalized groups, uh people of color, what does that look like? What if you’re an entity who’s interested in supporting your own de I efforts? And yet it feels like maybe the funding um is starting to dry up from grant makers in that area because of the de I backlash, you know, that, that is a real issue and storyline that um again, I think, you know, multiple nonprofits will be confronting. I also think it’s, and I’m learning more about this as I learn more about the sector, but the effect of Melinda French Gates and Mackenzie Scott, right? This their uh their unrestricted giving. Um I think with Mackenzie Scott a little bit more mystery in terms of um the process there with Melinda French Gates uh really leading into uh gender equity, women leadership. It, it’s all really fascinating to have these two high stakes players who have really burst onto the scene. Uh We know our readers are really interested in their moves. We have the, we have the receipts to show it and it’s for good reason, you know, they’re they’re really two power players in the space right now. So there’s, there’s, there’s, there’s something interesting emerging there both with respect to their approach to giving and how they give and then also following the issue areas and in the missions in terms of where their dollars go. Yeah, I think what’s so exciting about watching them is, you know, for years and years and years we’ve had covers that say, you know, philanthropy is not paying enough attention to women donors, where are the women donors? Are they going to start giving it a big way? Um And so many women have been influenced by what they’re seeing from Mackenzie and Melinda and Melinda Gate. It has also made deliberate attempts to make sure that other women are giving. Um and, you know, doing matching grants and other kinds of things. So I think we’re going to see a really big new era in which women play a much more important role in big philanthropy. So that should shift things um in a really fascinating way for us to watch. That’s interesting, Stacey. So women uh non billionaire women are feeling empowered by the Mackenzie Scott and uh and French Gates work. Absolutely. Um you know, and you know, one of the things that Linda French Gates did was offer some matching grants to women who are affluent. Um and you know, encourage them that if they channeled more of their giving to women’s causes, she would match it. Well, that kind of thing unlocks a lot of interest because all of a sudden women would say, wait a minute, there’s somebody else who thinks that these causes really matter. I think we all know the role model effect is incredibly important in philanthropy. Um So, you know, seeing that people are doing things, seeing how they can change the world through their gifts um is incredibly important. So we shouldn’t look at it just as you know, the billions of dollars that Mackenzie and Melinda have even though they’re huge, but it’s their impact on. There are women that, you know, is incredibly important. And we also know from the research that women influence um more than men, you know, what the Children in the family do and usually men listen to what the women in the family are saying about the causes that they want to give to and those kinds of things. So, you know, I think this movement is going to have a lot of ripple effects. Andrew. Uh Well, first, thank you for answering the second half of my question which I I obliterated and forgot about. So um that’s, I’m, I’m a podcaster and not a journalist. Uh What say, say a little more with you about uh artificial intelligence. We, we’ve had several shows on this. We’ve had folks from uh N 10 like Amy Sample Ward and, but also authors like Afua Bruce. Um You know what, say a little more about what, what, what you’re, what you’re looking at, what, what, what you’re thinking about around, uh, around A I and nonprofits. Sure. Uh, the first thing I would say is, uh, for those who are listening, please do follow the work of Sarah Hian Rashida Childress. They, they are two of our reporters who’ve been, um, covering a, I pretty closely, at least in recent months and I’m sure we’ve had reporters, um, before I got here on that beat as well. Um It’s, you know, it’s been interesting again, in certain cases, some of the technology companies have been directly trying to, you know, I think with seemingly with the right intentions, help, you know, support and underwrite um A I experimentation with nonprofits, right? So that does feed again some hope and optimism that A I can help uh certain nonprofits operate more efficiently, uh innovate. So there’s excitement there. But as I alluded to before there, there are the risks that come with A I, there’s that it, it’s not a perfect technology yet. So I think that’s an interesting tension too, right? That uh where we have technology companies and those who are creating the technology, you know, really uh encouraging it, the use of it for nonprofits and the implications there. And then on the fundraising side, there was a recent story about an A I fundraiser, you know, to the point where there is an avatar that uh a potential donor sees and is interacting with and helps them guide, helps guide them through the note to the donation process. And there’s just something that’s interesting and wacky and even a little scary about that. Right. And yet is this where we’re going with fundraising? Is this where nonprofits are gonna go? Will this be the future? I think it’s a question at this point but a fascinating one as a, as a over the top, uh, relationship uh fundraiser II I it’s, it’s hard. It’s a question. I know you’re, you’re not answering, you’re asking, you’re asking a question, but even the question hurts me. Uh uh And I work, I work in Planned Giving so I work with uh folks in their mostly seventies, eighties and nineties, you know, and uh the thought of them being guided by, uh I don’t know, fundraising avatar is, uh I mean, these are folks writing checks, you know, and not, not even, not even credit, they don’t trust online even, you know, just a simple, putting my credit card in an, in a, in an online form. Um All right. Anything else that uh you wanna leave us with either of you? I would say a word about the commons and that body of work that it’s a, it’s a project that started uh back in April and a lot of credit to Stacy Palmer, senior editor Drew Lindsay and others on the team for getting it off the ground and the intention of the commons. It was really for the chronicle to take a close look at polarization. Philanthropy’s role in it both in uh the solutions that are available. But also has philanthropy been detrimental has been causing and ceding polarization in in any way. So really asking some hard questions around again, Philanthropy’s role in in polarization but also talking about ideas and solutions and what’s happening that is helping to bridge divides. And in this current moment, we’re hoping that it really provides value to our, to our readers, right? That it, I mean, say so you feel free to chime in here back when you launched the commons. I I imagine there was thinking about, well, what does an ex administration like, what does A Y administration look like? And then also the calculus are being we might have been facing polarization regardless of, of the election outcome. And certainly here we are and I’m sure our readers are, are reading about this notion of a resistance. And uh there are really, there are real questions around, you know, will funders support um a resistance. I say that in quotation marks, I mean, some are using that word, some are maybe not using that word will some be a little more hesitant to fund a resistance. I think there’s some emotional drain right now from, from some members of the resistance. So there are just some fascinating questions about democracy efforts, polarization efforts. Will they continue to receive support and yet the the vibe for lack of a better word is that it’s still tense right now. I don’t know that polarization is going away anytime soon. So I I just would encourage readers to not just follow the comments but contribute ideas, you know, write us notes, tell us what you think. We received a, a really interesting letter in our, one of our first post election reaction pieces, which wasn’t so specifically about the comments, but I think it captures the spirit of the comments where our election, one of our election reaction pieces had the terminology was progressive. Nonprofits are, you know, really terrified because of the results and conservative ones are celebrating. And there was this powerful short letter from a nonprofit leader saying, I don’t know, I, I don’t call myself progressive and I don’t call myself um conservative either, right? That there, there are, there are organizations working somewhere in between and what, what does the election mean for us? You know, we, we, we’re, we’re sort of feeling a little nervy too and yet I wouldn’t call our mission progressive per se. So it’s just, it’s a long way of saying that I think polarization it, it’s here. Um It’s vexing for I think both grant makers and nonprofits and we’re here to hopefully help uh leaders, you know, guide them through it. What’s the structure of the commons? I, is that something folks can participate in or I’m not familiar with it. So it’s a special section on our website um that you can see on the navigation bar that collects all of the opinion articles, deeply reported pieces. We do something called linkedin Commons in conversation. You know, right after the election, I talked to Joel Goldman, the head of Democracy Fund who’s working on these issues. Um Right after Thanksgiving, I’ll be talking to Judy Rudoff about the series that she’s been doing America at a crossroads. So, you know, we have all kinds of things happening in the commons focused on this issue of, you know, how can nonprofits play a role in healing divides of all kinds, not just politics, geography, race, gender, age, all of the things that are dividing this country. And when we started the comments, we knew that, you know, it was a little bit dangerous to launch it in April only because we were afraid that it would suggest that it was just a project for the election. We knew this country is so divided that this is going to be a very long term effort. Um And nonprofits and foundations need to work on. So we’re committed to doing that. We very much welcome ideas from the audience. Um There’s a linkedin newsletter that people can sign up for in addition to a special edition once a week that comes out in our philanthropy today newsletter. Um All of that is available free to people to be able to sign up for um and circulate. But that’s, I think an expression of how we see ourselves as a nonprofit now that we’re more actively engaged in tackling some of the big problems that are facing the field and saying here are the tools and solutions to deal with them. So, you know, what we’re looking at too is, you know, what is the next comments? What is the other topics that will go into um with a deep dive? Um So we welcome suggestions on that too. And if our listeners want to make suggestions, where do they do that? Um Best thing is to write to Andrew or to me, um I’ll give my email address first. I’m Stacy dot Palmer at philanthropy.com, Andrew dot Simon at philanthropy.com. And then we also have a, a general letter to the editor type inbox. It’s editor mail at philanthropy.com. So any of those places are great. Ok. We have direct lines to the uh to the CEO and the editor in chief. All right, I want to thank you both. Thanks very much. Thank you so much for your interest. We appreciate it and for all the work you do for the sector. Oh, it’s, it’s, it’s a pleasure. Uh uh a labor of love. Next week, the art and science of fundraising with James Meisner. 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. 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 guy and this music is by Scott Stein. Thank you for that Apple mission Scotty be with us next week for nonprofit radio. 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Hello 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 tinnitus if I had to hear that you missed this week’s show. Here’s our associate producer, Kate with what’s going on this week? Hey, Tony, we’ve got passion isn’t enough. That’s David Rhodes. New book. It’s necessary but not sufficient says the author, he brings us his practical advice on building your programs, your board, your brand, your team and your volunteer community. His expertise has value for aspiring new and experienced nonprofit leaders alike. David is CEO of dot dot org.com on Tony’s Take two tales from the plane, talking to your roommates 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 passion isn’t enough. It’s a pleasure to welcome David Rode to nonprofit radio. He is the founder of dot dot org, a nonprofit consulting firm focused on ceo mentoring. He teaches nonprofit branding and nonprofit consulting at the University of Pennsylvania. He’s the author of the book Passion Isn’t enough, a practical guide for nonprofit leaders, which is what brings him to the show today. His company is at dot dot org.com and you’ll find David on linkedin. David. Welcome to nonprofit radio, Tony. I’m delighted to be here. We are both delighted to be at the Serafina Restaurant on the 77th in Columbus because you know, any Schmo podcaster can record his podcast on Zoom as I do week after week. But only the uh exemplary podcast hosts are gonna actually meet the guest. Uh where, where around the corner, uh a block and a half, you came. So, you know, there’s the expression, you meet people where they are, you literally came to meet me where I am. I did it. I’m glad I’m walking the walk. All right. So I’m in New York City. Uh visiting uh doing some work. David lives here on the Upper West side. So we are at Serafina. Cheers, cheers. Congratulations on your book. Thanks so much. We’re excited. We’re both drinking uh sauvignon blanc today. So let’s turn the title of the book into a question. Why isn’t uh passion enough? Passion isn’t enough? Because while passion may be necessary to bring you into the non profit sector or to help you launch an organization, the skills that you need to run this business and nonprofit organizations are businesses. It requires you to have a range of skills covering a range of areas. So passion can be one of the elements that’s necessary to be successful within the non profit sector, but it’s not sufficient. There’s so much more to the role and there’s so much more to being successful long term. OK. So fair to say necessary, necessary because of, because of everything you’re gonna, you’re gonna sacrifice to do this work most likely but, but not sufficient. Ok? Uh Tell the story of, uh, pitching for baseball and softball because a lot of what you share in the book. Uh, you have a lot of advice from others as well, but a lot of your advice, I it sounds like comes from your experience leading pitching for baseball and softball. Yeah, I mean, my, my experience ranges from, from my time there to also all the other client interactions I’ve had. But yes, fundamentally, uh I founded a nonprofit organization in 2005. I had a lot of confidence in myself as a leader, but I was new to the nonprofit sector and pitching for baseball and softball, really sort of blended with my personality. I’m a sports person. I was coaching my two boys in baseball at the time and I realized that, you know, all of the equipment that they would acquire and then grow out of maybe there’s a better use for it than sitting in the corner of our garage or in a closet. So the whole premise of the organization was based on seeing if we could collect and redistribute new and gently used equipment so that kids in under resourced communities, both here and around the world could gain access to the game. And the organization grew and thrived, it thrived for a lot of reasons. We had a really clear idea of who we were a strong brand. We really relied heavily on strategic partnerships with major league baseball teams and equipment manufacturers, all those things for years and years to develop. But at the end of the day, the organization really had a meaningful impact helping over a million kids in over 100 countries around the world. So really proud of the time I spent there. You evolved into disaster relief too because we’re gonna talk a little about uh a little about you. We’re gonna talk a fair amount about programs and maybe expanding programs but, but not getting carried away with that. But you, you did move into disaster relief. Well, the, the organization was actually born right around the time of hurricane Katrina and this is in some of the first work we did not by design, but just the way the world worked. Um Our first board meeting was in late September of 2005 and, and hurricane Katrina struck, I think August 31st of that year. So we found ourselves in a moment where it’s like, well, yes, we envision helping people all around the world. But the people that need the most help right now are in the Gulf coast region of our own country. So we quickly shifted our focus and learned how, what was a very simple idea of providing baseball and softball equipment could be really not just helpful for kids to play but provided this real sense of healing for a community, getting kids back to doing something that they found was normal to do. And that really defied our organization in many ways. Almost 15 years. I was with the organization disaster relief programs, you know, Hurricane Sandy here in the New York area. This is some of the most important work we did and things that we became known for. We were the Red Cross of baseball, one group tabbed us and we wore that Monica really proudly. We were really happy to play our small part in helping communities recover from natural disasters. I’m a little intimidated. Uh, when you say you’re a sports guy because I’m, I’m not well skilled in sports, softball and baseball are those the ones that have field goals? Uh, is that softball and baseball they can, but only, only if things go really poorly. All right. So that’s a, that’s, you’re being, uh, you’re being kind, in other words, no, there’s no field goals. That’s a, that’s a hard, no. All right, we’ll try. All right. Baseball is that the one that has the Super series at the end of the, uh Well, there’s a World Series. It’s not super, what’s the Super Super Bowl is the end of the football season? Oh, it’s not, there’s not who has the Super Series. Nobody? Super Series. Nothing I’m aware of. I mean, I, I can’t speak to every sport, Tony. And again, I’m not from North Carolina. I don’t know what goes on down. I don’t know what. Now, this is a long standing. This is a long standing belief I had, I thought that I thought it to the end of some season. It’s not hockey. It’s the Super series. That’s the Stanley Cup. Oh, the Stanley series. Oh, the Stanley Cup. All right. All right. Well, so, so like I said, I’m intimidated. May. Maybe, maybe we’ll keep the sports metaphors to, uh we should, we’ll just keep doing stick to white wine and, and non blanc and non. All right. No sports. All right. Uh Even though it’s your origin story, uh here I am dismissing it as no sports. No, but you, you told the story. All right. So the book, the book is, uh I found valuable. There are 16 chapters, but we cannot even broach uh half of them, but I wanna give the book its due and I’m not gonna put you on the spot and ask you to recite by memory the 16 chapters because I didn’t, I, you asked me what to bring and I didn’t say bring your book. So I will uh I will give you the uh share with listeners the 16 chapters, they’re all around. It’s building your strategic plan, board, fundraising strategy, partnership, portfolio, financial controls programs, which we’re gonna talk about evidence based brand, which we’re gonna talk about communication strategy A I capabilities team. We’re gonna talk about diverse organization, volunteer, community, building your crisis response, your exit strategy, and then you have advice for new leaders. Does that sound familiar? Does that sound, that sounds like a book that I’ve recently had played a major role? That is the right book for the right? All right. Um Some of these things we have talked about recently, like Strategic Plan. I’ve had guests on two or three guests just in the past month or six weeks talking about strategic plan. So that’s why we’re skipping some of these. And plus we just have so much time together. People want the full value of the book. They’re just, they’re just gonna have to buy the book. Passion isn’t enough. All right, but we are gonna talk about building your programs. You have advice around uh quality over quantity being persistent, flush out your, your thinking around building your programs. Well, I I think there’s a lot of pressure on leaders and organizations to grow and expand. And I think that that’s a, it’s an important dynamic to think about growth but, but measured growth, I think is very important. I think it’s really important to prove what you have to refine what you have before you begin to expand and replicate your model. And sometimes people get, maybe the expression is a little out over their skis. They, they, they try to, they’re so worried about scale and helping more and more people that they, that they don’t focus enough on getting the actual programming, right? And that programming is in part, you know, identifying what you do. And it’s also then the measurement and evaluation that goes along with it, how do you know that your program is working? And so I think it’s really important to kind of know who you are and not spread yourself too thin. And again, we’re talking about organizations maybe in the earlier days, sorting themselves out and, and figuring out what they’re really good at. And so I think quality over quantity just means trying to really understand what is the unique impact you’re gonna have on the community. What is the unique impact you’re gonna have with the target population you’re trying to serve and, and how can you do that? And how can you do it better than everybody else that’s out there, there’s almost 1.8 million nonprofit organizations in the United States. And many of them have similar missions. They’re in the same sector, the same space, same geography. And so it’s important to sort of differentiate yourself and figure out what do you do best, what should people think of when they think of your organization and I think that comes down to your program and we’ll talk about brand in a little while, but, you know, really understanding who you are understanding what you’re good at. So how do you resist the pressure though, to do, to do more? It may come from your board, it may come from the community, uh your staff, you know, wherever, wherever the origin is, how do you resist helping more folks who need help? And it’s just a little bit maybe just an increment from what we, what we, what we originally originally are doing. It’s not that much of a stretch. It’s closely related. How do you avoid that? We’re here in Manhattan. We should be able to go to Brooklyn or we should be able to go to Queens or we should be able to go to wherever these are natural conversations and every board and every organization should have them. And I’m not saying that help more people. I’m saying make sure that you have the infrastructure and the resources and all of your ducks in a row before you start doing that. So it’s a natural progression to help more people. It’s a natural desire to help more people. That’s why most of us got into this business helping people. But, you know, we want to make sure that and organizations typically have very limit resources. So both, both people and money. So you want to make sure that those dollars are being used wisely and this is not meant to say that growth is bad. I’m just saying, make sure that you, you kind of have a smart plan that you know where you’re going, you know why you’re going there and that the programs that you’re and and the dynamics that are present that are making you successful in, in maybe one community or within one program are going to be present as you continue to expand that so that you can deliver the same quality, the same impact that you’ve achieved initially, 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 passion isn’t enough. Let’s talk about assessment, then you, you mentioned it in passing, but let, let’s let’s drill down on identifying what the metrics are for uh for your, for your program. So you know what kind of success you’re meeting or if you’re not, right? So if you’re not being as successful as you are, so measurement and evaluation is an aspect of the nonprofit sector, which is growing in importance. It’s been on a trend in that direction for years and years and it’s not going to go away and it shouldn’t. Um The reason you want to measure your work is really two fold. One is first and foremost to prove that this, the people that you’re trying to impact are being impacted the way that you intend. How can you demonstrate that? How could you know that if you’re trying to attract a donor or if you’re trying to tell your story, you can’t just say, trust me, we’re doing great work. You need to be able to demonstrate the kids that we’re helping are going to college at a higher rate and we can show you the kids are reading at a higher rate. People are being retrained in their jobs and more successful, more sustained, more independent as a result of whatever, whatever the sector that you’re in. So the good news when it comes to measurement evaluation is, it’s very idiosyncratic. There’s no standard that says you have to measure it this way, you can measure it in a way that really is right for your organization. So there’s a, I’m a big fan of sort of right sizing measurement and evaluation. You may help 5000 kids with your program. You don’t have to measure all 5000 kids to prove that your program is working, choose a cohort, a group that represents the others in some meaningful way and then measure them. So what does measurement look like? Measurement fundamentally means you have to measure this group of individuals before they enter your program. And then you have to use the same device, same measurement device and see how they’re doing along whatever dynamics you’re trying to capture after they’ve been through your program. So it’s a before and after component and therefore you can measure the change that your program uh help, help demonstrate, help create. Uh and so those dynamics of a pre and post measurement and using the same instrument in the beginning and at the end are sort of some of the fundamentals of, of sort of research and research design. Um And then it’s really ties back to your theory of change. Maybe also, let me just insert, maybe also having a control group. Well, a really a similar cohort that does not go through your, didn’t go through your program in an ideal world. Yes. But, but realistically, that’s gonna be difficult to come up with in the nonprofit sector. And again, how are we gonna find a control group? What we’re? And I think there’s a little bit of an understanding that if we can talk to funders and people and say we’ve measured this group of people and this is the way we measure them. They’re not holding us to the standard of a control group. This isn’t the same as some other types of research which require that, let’s say medical, you’re trying, you’re trying to get a new drug through the whatever you’re trying to show some cure rate, you have to have a control group. We’re in the nonprofit sector. People understand that the amount of resources we have to measure and evaluate things is not to that level. So while a control group would be ideal and maybe there are schools in your community that are not part of your program and you’re helping kids in school. B and there’s a school a that’s across the street that draws from the same population. And you can somehow measure college success rates within that school versus your school and, and things of that nature. That would be great. All I’m, I’m being a little too sophisticated. You’re not being too sophisticated. It’s the right thought. But I, I think, I think at the fundamental level, we have to try to measure our people in a thoughtful way and we should tie it back to our theory of change. So your listeners are sophisticated nonprofit professionals. But in your theory of change, you’re trying to say, you know, we want people to become more resilient so that they can do X and Y and Z. OK. So then you have to measure resilience um or you’re trying to increase reading levels so that this and then you have to measure reading levels. So like each of the, each of the organizations are, are, have the freedom to measure what is necessary for them. Not just in terms of outputs, we, we’re reading at a better level, but then long term impact would be things like are able to attend college at a higher rate and things of that nature. So it’s, it’s important for people to be rigorous about measurement. Um And think about it from day one, not, not after I’ve been in this nonprofit sector for years and years, I really encourage people to begin to think about measurement. You know, at the earliest moments of the organization, how are we going to prove to others that our organization is having the desired impact? And it’s very challenging. Most organizations really struggle with this but start at the outset so that you can, you can see progress, you know, year one metrics are not gonna presumably not going to be as strong and positive as your year two. That’s right. And if you’ve been working with a group of kids for a number of years, starting to measure them in year three really is not a deal. So maybe that you’ve figured out your programs. But now instead of being in school one, you’ve added schools two and three to your program. Great. Now those schools are new to your program, measure those kids before they start with your program and track them along because the kids that are in school one, they’ve already been with you for a couple of years. They’ve already been seeing the positive effects of your program and, and you’re not getting a pure read on, on how you’ve been able to alter their trajectory, whatever their origin. That’s right. So it’s really important to kind of identify a group of people and be able to measure them before they come into contact with your programs and then measure them after they’ve had whatever that cycle of programming is. And, and ideally, you measure them longitudinally meaning over time. So it’s not just six months after, but maybe 12 months after or two years after three years after. So you can continue to measure their progress and see the long term effect. Anything else you want to share about the programs before we move on? Let’s keep rolling. OK, we’re good. All right, I’m gonna take a sip. I’m, I’m a little ahead of you with the wine. You wanna, you wanna take a sip? You’re all right. I’m gonna catch out. OK. OK. No pressure. All right. Building your brand. This is um as I said, one of the many chapters building, building your, building your brand. Let’s identify it first. Ho how do you define brand? A brand is sort of the totality of the thoughts, feelings, emotions that you might have when you think about something. So if you think about Starbucks, you might think about the music, you might think about the pricing, you might think about the coffee, you might think about the the, the service or the amount of time it takes for you or the noise or you might think about their position on a social issue, like fair trade for acquiring their coffee beans or you might think about their green sign. So it’s the mistake people make when they think about the brand is they tend to equate it with the logo of the organization and the, the visual identity of an organization is part of your, it’s, it’s a part of it, but it’s, it’s a small part of it. And in the nonprofit sector, it’s an increasing and that’s just the visual identity too. The brand is your, your values are part of your brand. That’s exactly right. So in the nonprofit, we’re not Coca Cola, we don’t have, we don’t have hundreds of millions of dollars that we’re spending on, on marketing for the typical nonprofit organization. In fact, most of the smaller organizations will spend zero on marketing. So, you know, your visual identity, they might see it on, on your website or they may see it on a T shirt, but they’re not, they’re not being blasted with it. So it has it, it’s kind of a smaller piece of the puzzle. So the brand is really, you know how people think about you and, and, and this is really, it’s sort of the essence of your organization and it’s not easy to always put your finger on it. The mistake organizations can sometimes make is, they think they, as maybe the executive director or a board member knows what the brand is and they, they, they have a sense of what the brand is. But the, the people that you’re affecting the constituents within your program, they can tell you what your brand is and the people that volunteer with your organization, they should be telling you what your brand is and your donors should be telling what your brand is. And then you’re looking for patterns and alignment and you’re trying to see if I imagine a word cloud, that sort of is the totality of what people are telling you their impressions and feelings about your organization. It could be everything from responsive to, in our case, baseball equipment to whatever. And then you start really feeling like you understand what your brand is or if there’s this huge diffusion of how people think about your, your, your organization and you realize we don’t really have a very well defined brand and that’s not really a great problem. That’s not a great, um I mean, getting the information is really helpful. It may not be the answer you were looking for. But so brand is really this totality of everything. It’s, it’s, you know, how, how you communicate the tone of the organization, the way you share the impact so that people understand what your organization is all about the, the consistency and quality of their communications, you know, branding is really the long game branding is about how do I want people to think about my organization? Five or 10 years from now. It’s not a campaign that we run on giving Tuesday, that’s not your brand, that’s a communication strategy, that’s tactical. The brand is really sort of more amorphous a little bit elevated. Maybe how you approach your Tuesday and you have more fun with it, maybe you’re more formal, all of those things should be consistent with who you are. You know, brands have personality, brands have personalities. So, you know, if you take a nonprofit organization, I don’t want to do this in the wrong way. But there are certain organizations which are maybe a little bit more abrasive and there’s other organizations that you said are more formal and then there’s other organizations that are more inclusive and welcoming and there’s organizations which are youthful and there’s organizations which deal with older populations. So all of those entities have to really think about how they communicate where they communicate all of those things so that the people that are the consumers of their organization experience, the organization in way that’s sort of right and appropriate for them. And then you could build and shape the perception of your organization into a brand over time, right? And appropriate and, and consistent, consistent, you know, what you expect is go to an event with you, they have a meeting with you, they uh I don’t know, they engage with you even, you know, just commenting on, on social posts or something. They, they know they know what the vibe is, they know what to expect if you’re lighthearted, you know, they, they, they know they can make a, you know, maybe make a uh ha have some fun in a social comment or something. That’s right. It’s a, it’s a consistency, right? So branding is one of those things and, and, and one of the references in the book is to uh Jim Collins and his book Good To Great. And he talks about branding is, is sort of like turning the fly wheel. So if you’ve ever been to a spin class or something like that, and you get on the bike for the first time and the resistance is kind of hard. You put a lot of effort in and, and the wheel hardly moves at all. And then, but if you keep applying the same effort and you keep communicating consistently, then the wheel turns a little bit more easily and the wheel turns a little bit more easily. And brand building is, is a little bit like that. The amount of effort it takes to establish your brand up front is enormous and you’re not going to see very much progress in the early months and even maybe years. But then there’s going to be a moment when the wheel is going to turn a lot more easily. And that’s because you’ve been applying this consistent pressure, this consistent messaging this consistent theme over time. So now finally, people are registering that messaging that you have been saying all along, but it just took a little while for it to sink in. And, and I think that that that sort of picture is really helpful for people to understand. It’s not a quick fix. Branding is not A B I go over the sports again. I I I’m, I’m outside me. Maybe I had a long term when you, when you mentioned, when you mentioned sports thing, you might have to take the, it’ll get, it’ll get much worse. Uh It’s a long term. That’s correct. Ok. Ok. Uh You, you sort of, you’ve alluded to this a little bit, but you, you make the distinction in the book about marketing versus branding. You wanna flush that out a bit. Yeah. And it’s, and sometimes it’s easy and I, I’ll find myself. I mean, I teach nonprofit branding at the University of Pennsylvania. I started my career, Proctor and Gamble. I’m a branding person. Um But the way you work with brands that we would know, I work with the Tide brand. I work with the Dawn brand. I use the Tide Free and clear. There you go. You were you there when in the free and clear days or I may have been there a little bit before lemon scent. I used to be in lemon scent, but now I’m purely uh free and clear for years, I’ve been, I’ve been committed to free and clear. I’m not gonna tell you when I was there, but it was before that. But anyway, that’s, that’s big business. So the, the thing about marketing is marketing is sort of how you carry your branding messages forward. So, um marketing is sort of the how and the what and, and so that, that’s decisions about, you know, which, which platforms you’re gonna be on, which communication channels, the types of messages when you do things, things of that nature. So marketing is much more tactical. Um It’s you really think marketing about who your target audiences are and how you’re going to reach them with specific messages, but all of them should tie back to this bigger notion of who you are as a brand and, and everything should still fall under that umbrella. If, if you got some marketing ideas that are really inconsistent with this big idea of what you think is your brand, then there are the wrong marketing ideas, you know, you got to rethink them, they should, there should be an alignment there that should make sense. Um So the marketing is really the tactics that of how you carry your brand and your planning forward. It’s time for Tony’s take two. Thank you, Kate, talking about talking to roommates. Uh I’ve been in a center seat for a past couple of flights. Now this is a touchy one. it’s a little dodgy. Uh, you know, everybody’s, uh, everybody comes in, they sit down and of course they’re, uh, glued to their phone. So now I’m not saying you have to talk to you or, or even try, but if you want to, if you wanna be a friendly outgoing person and maybe have a conversation, uh, first of all, you’d have to be off your phone. Yeah. And this is as the person enters the row, uh, and I’m envisioning you being the first person in your row we take on if, if you’re joining a row and everybody is already on their phones already. You know, this, this might work but not as well. So I’m thinking, um, you’re the first one in it doesn’t matter a row of two or three, doesn’t matter where you’re seated. Somebody comes in, you, you open the conversation. So what I’m suggesting is start with, hey, how are you or? Hello? You know, how are you a little more, something more than just, hi. Hello? Ask a question and see what you get back if you get back. Hi. You know. Ok. That’s that person. Probably not interested in talking. I wouldn’t push it any further, wouldn’t pursue it. But if you get back, uh, hello. Uh, I’m good. Ok, that’s, that’s pretty good or I’m good. I’m doing well. How are you? Oh, now, now they’ve asked you a question. So that’s my, and then you can go from there, you know, and then into are you, are you going home or you know, traveling, what, what’s, what’s at the destination, you know, wherever you all are headed, is that where you live, et cetera? So that, that’s the easy part going from there. The the more challenging part is opening the conversation and doing the uh call it, doing the assessment work. What kind of person are you dealing with? Or are they just, you know, it’s no comment on them as a person. Just they may not feel like talking, right? So by no means saying, am I saying, you know, push it or something? But it can be fun. Me, I’ve met folks, I’ve exchanged business cards, people. 62 years old sometimes. II I still carry business cards and other people do too sometimes. So it can be fun and you can learn about the city you’re going to, if you haven’t been there before, you can tell them about the city if you’ve been there and they haven’t. So, you know, it can be fun but you just gotta do your assessment work at the uh, at the outset. All right, good luck. Let me know, let me know how it goes out there talking to your roommates on the plane. And that is Tony take two Kate. So Tony, I think you can do that with just about anyone anywhere. Like even when you’re in like the supermarket and I love to do it when I’m getting my Dunkan order and I see, you know, the driver worker and maybe she has a new set of nails or her makeup looks great today. Compliments go a long way and just checking in on people. I think you can do that anywhere. Not even just on the plane. That’s excellent. I’m glad to hear you say that Kate. Really? Um uh I mean, I, I’m like, genuinely impressed that you would, that you’re doing that already for workers, you know, workers that just, people just don’t pay a lot of attention to, like, the drive through line at Duncan. Absolutely. Like, give me my order. Here’s the money I’m going. Oh, don’t you hate that? That’s so like you’re not connecting with the person and you can connect fast. I mean, on a plane you could have an hour, you could have a plane, you could have four or five hours together, you know. So all the more reason to try to strike up a conversation. But, yeah, but, but absolutely no, I’m, I’m glad to hear you say that because there are so many workers, service workers who are just really ignored. People just want their service and they don’t need, they don’t feel the need to be civil or polite even sometimes. Yeah, that, um, that gets me and then, you know, like if I’m behind the person who’s the uncivil one, you know, I’ll give an eye roll or if the uncivil person has left the area. I’ll say, you know, sorry you had to, sorry, you had to go through that. But yes, civility, humanity, politeness, sincerity. I mean, these go a long way, a long, long way. So I admire you doing it at the Duncan line and you’re right. There’s lots of places it could be done. Absolutely. Well, we’ve got f but loads more time. Here’s the rest of passion isn’t enough with David Rode. Can you talk about, uh the seven PS in your, in, in the building? The brand chapter? Now, we’re not gonna go through all seven. There are traditional ones. I don’t want to put you on the spot again. Maybe you can name the seven. Would you have been able to name the 16 chapters? No, probably not. Not in order. Well, not, certainly not. In order you think you could have gotten them all? I could have gotten them all. You could. All right, I’m not gonna hold you through. All right. Well, these are seven P. So we, we’re gonna take a little shortcut with that. So you, you distinguish between uh, the traditional 44 PS and then some additional add ons for, for nonprofit. So the traditional are the, are your price, product, place and promotion. But then the nonprofit add ons, that’s where I want to focus on the people proof and the process, right? So when we look at the nonprofit world, what are the tools that we have in our toolbox that can help us build our brand and carry out our marketing efforts. Um And the ones that I found to be the most important and relevant and really what separates the for profit and the non profit sector are people proof and process. So why do we talk about people, people in a nonprofit organization? You know, we don’t talk about who’s on the board of directors at, at, at mcdonald’s or who’s on the sales force or who’s doing this or who’s doing that. These people are totally unknown to it, unless, unless they do something outrageous to make a headline, then you’ll know them for the wrong reason. But in a nonprofit organization, the people are, are very important to carrying out our message. You know, it’s marketing, um, is very decentralized in the nonprofit sector. If you are a fan of my organization, you might talk about the work we do. So the challenge is as a person, whether you’re a volunteer or a board member or donor or whatever, my job is somebody that’s a senior staff member is to kind of make sure that I give you the right talking points. If you were going to explain my organization, you probably would not have had me on the baseball and softball board. That, that would have been, I would have had a tough time getting you through the nominating committee. But, but I mean, you’re a heck of a guy. What is baseball? But, but let’s start with a common understanding of what is baseball people as an example are important to people. It’s a remote hypothetical people help us fundraise people carry our message forward. People know other people. So we’re not buying, we’re not buying paid media. All of most of our communication is word of mouth. So it’s the people play a huge role in the nonprofit sector in terms of how we build our brand. And then we talk about proof. So proof goes back to this notion of measurement and evaluation. And so it’s really, it doesn’t have to be 53 different statistics about how your organization is making a difference. It could be one or two key numbers. Um It could be really even the proof could even be in stories, it could be storytelling, it could be a story about a family or a child or whatever that was positively impacted by the work that you’re doing. So that proof element is really necessary because you’re trying to say, we know that we’re having the impact that we’ve hoped. And I can tell you about this individual case or I can tell you about this data set and I can, I can demonstrate that our organization is making, it’s, it’s its impact in the way that we hope not every organization can do that uh equally. So the ones that are more successful about demonstrating proof are the ones that are maybe going to get a greater share of funding dollars and attract other resources. So proof is really important and then process might be not on the same level as, as people improve. But process is the way you go about doing the things that you do. You might have um special type of way that you do programming, whether it’s coming into the community in a certain way or the way that you serve meals or how your, how your shelter is organized or how your volunteers go into the home of people that are seniors and help them use technology or help them feel a reduced sense of isolation. So the process of how you go about your work sometimes is very interesting. I cite an example in the book of an organization that I um I know a little about here called Bloom Again, Brooklyn and, and, and, you know, they are taking upcycled flowers and then they’re using those to help reduce social isolation. So if you can imagine, you can’t imagine a more perishable item in some ways than flowers. So they’ve been used at a we or a party and then they get donated to Bloom again, Brooklyn. And then they, with their volunteers have to very quickly turn these back around and use them in a way that can be gifted and shared with people that are maybe not feeling a sense of connection in their communities for whatever reason. Um, but that process that they go through once you kind of see the care they put into that you’re like, huh, these guys really have their act together. So, you know, it’s the process can also be a way that we build our brand in the nonprofit sector, how you make laundry detergent or how you do this, that and the other thing in the for profit sector, the process isn’t really all that important. You know, we, we think in a different level in the nonprofit world, people proof and process can help define who we are and help us build our brands. I’ve had a little word about uh potentially rebranding. If we’re, why, why might we, why might we uh engage in a rebranding exercise? Well, rebranding is common. Um It’s common sometimes for the right reasons and it’s common sometimes for not as many right reasons. So a lot of times you’ll see a change of leadership in an organization, maybe a new executive director comes into the seat and they wanna, they wanna prove to the, to the community that they’re having a big impact on the organization right away. The first thing they’re gonna do is they’re going to rebrand the organization and that’s a very common dynamic. Um And rebranding can, I mean, rebranding can mean a lot of things in the best case scenario, what rebranding does is it maybe better aligns with the current version of your organization is with the current work that you’re doing, an organization could have been started 1020 3070 years ago, called itself a certain thing and, and, and was, was understood in a certain way, but then maybe it evolved over time and now it, it’s sort of a disconnect between the work they’re doing and, and how the organization may be understood by people. So in those situations, a rebrand is completely appropriate or you decide to be the upper West side something, something. And then you realize you’re going to expand your work to other boroughs in Manhattan. So you can no longer be the upper West side something or other. You have to be the New York something or other to make it more, make more sense in those situations. Rebranding is, is, is logical and necessary. Rebranding is not easy, it takes time, it takes money, it takes more time and more money than people think. And as we mentioned earlier, this is not a quick fix just because you changed the name of the organization and maybe tweak your programming. It doesn’t mean that people that have been living out in the real world or have the donors or supporters of the organization are gonna understand that and digest that right away, it might take a few years before the full effect of a rebrand really takes place. So I, I just, I want, I would want to encourage people to understand that while branding is the long game rebranding is also part of the long game. If it’s the right thing to do, that’s fine. But don’t expect it to somehow be some kind of a magic wand for your organization, your branding chapters where you, uh, on, um, Sarah Trump Peter from, uh Big Duck. She and Sarah have both been guests through the years. Uh, smart, smart folks, good smart agency. Uh, I think they’re in Brooklyn. Are they in Brooklyn, New York? They’re here in New York. And you know, Farrow is one of 22 subject matter experts that I interviewed in the creation of the book. And so while you get a lot of David Rode in the book, you also hear from some folks that have been in this sector for quite some time. I think that, that I, I did some back of the envelope math. It was like 450 years of experience or more in the group of people that I that I spoke with. So, you know, you, you not only get my insights that somebody’s been a practitioner and a founder and a consultant and an educator, but you get this compilation of all of their collective wisdom and knowledge baked into the book as well. So I was really delighted to speak with far and so many of the other folks that contributed meaningfully to the book. Next on one I I’d like to talk about is uh building your team and you break this into hiring on boarding, performance management and retention, uh hiring, you say, uh higher, slow fire, fast. Well, I mean, sometimes these are, there’s cliches and sometimes they’re cliches that you’re backing away from your own book. No, I’m just saying these, these, these expressions come about for a reason. Um I think we sometimes we can spot a problem, somebody that’s not working out, but we, we form a personal connection to them or we, we, we, we try to rationalize the ways that they could be helpful or might be helpful or have been helpful in the past. So we keep them around. We keep them around for 369, 1224 36 months longer than we should. So sometimes when you spot a problem, I’m not talking about being, you know, a maniac about this, but, you know, making the decision to get rid of somebody, there are a lot of talented people out there and if somebody is not the right fit for what reasons move on and you have to be willing to have made the mistake, whether you or somebody else made the mistake. It’s, it’s, it’s better to everybody else on your staff already knows that they’re not the right person. This is not gonna surprise anyone. So if you keep them around, you’re some in some way sending the wrong message. Now, how quickly you bring in that right person? You know, I, I just say you know, people are so um important getting the right people are so important that this is the higher, the higher part time. It’s, it’s so much better to have taken, taken a little extra time or significant time to get the right person because we all know how much effort it takes to on board train, you know, in, in incorporate somebody into our culture. Um And then if you get the wrong person, you just have to start all over and redo that again. Um And so I, I just think it’s really, you know, being thoughtful about this, uh trying to, trying to um take advantage of references, take advantage, use a hiring r do whatever you need to do. There’s a birthday and there’s a birthday the next day, there’s a birthday the next day, which is, that’s OK. This is, this is live podcasting. This is, this is, this is the beauty of the thing. Any smo can have a podcast without a, without a happy birthday message, but without a happy birthday singer, a full experience. Any J, is that what you said? J AJ? It could be a smoke or a jam. Sure could, could have a podcast episode without a happy birthday singing. So, but this is the next level. This is next level. So I, I think it’s important to really think about that. And one of the things I emphasize in the hiring chapter is to not just look at what somebody is like as a candidate on paper is really think about your culture, the kind of people that have been successful in your organization in the past and see what characteristics they are. You can train somebody how to do some specific tasks. It’s not that critical that they come in with skills ABC and D, but what kind of person are they are? How do they solve problems? Where, where are they in terms of their resilience and how empathetic are they? How, how good are they going to be as a teammate to work with others, et cetera. You want to begin to try to measure those things as best, you can assess those things so that you can, you can, you can direct somebody as to the specifics of your program once you have the right person. But if you have the wrong person just because they’re good at Excel or they’re good at working your, your database, they’re good on some specific element of social media. If they’re no fun to work with and, and they’re, and they’re not really, you know, committed to the, the core passionate mission of the organization, then, you know, maybe it’s just a job to them. And at the end of the day, you people need to believe in the work you’re doing in order for them to stay around because they’re not gonna get rich mostly in the nonprofit sector. And that’s, that’s a bit of a reality when I see, you know, skilled in razor’s edge or something, you know, you can send them to a course for that. Uh, that, that just because the last person was a whiz at razor’s edge doesn’t mean that the new person can’t learn it. There, there’s, I mean, there are all these other factors that you’re, that you, you just describe that are, that are so much more valuable than your, your querying, You’re querying acumen in razor’s edge, right? I mean, what is the, how is that person? What’s at that person’s core? What is somebody I’d like to have lunch with somebody? Exactly. Our donors, the board, they’re gonna be in front of your constituents, they’re gonna be in front of board members, they’re gonna be in front of donors. How comfortable would you feel? Yeah. And when they’re alone, you know, what, what’s their judgment you mentioned? How did they, how did they solve problems? Tell us about a few instances where you solved the problem uh overcame a, a, a AAA bad relationship. A relationship went sour. How did you overcome that? You know, these are the kinds of things that show reason and judgment and whether you can place. All right, let’s jump to uh retention, compensation, things like that. Right? Le let’s how do we, now we’ve, we’ve taken the time to hire the right people that are, that we do trust and they fit well in our culture. How do we treat them well. So that they’re less likely you can never prevent, of course, but less likely to leave, especially leave soon, like within two years. Well, I, I think it’s, I think many organizations have challenges. I was, I was speaking with an organization today where a lot of smaller leaner organizations, there’s not a lot of clear pathways for advancement. When I started my, you were talking about something about that I was making, I’m not really just today. And so, so Procter and gamble, you start at this level if you get promoted to this level and there’s 15 levels all the way to the top of the company. And you could, you could, you could imagine how your career will progress. But nonprofit organizations, there might be an executive director and then there might be director level people and then there might be people on the front lines with programs, et cetera. But there’s not all these levels that exist where you can become a VP or a senior VP and a this that and the other big nonprofits have that kind of structure because they’re just like any other major corporation. But, you know, I think the statistic was 92% of the nonprofit organizations have budgets of a million dollars or less. And if that’s the case, you’re talking about 456 employees or something of that nature. So it’s not this complex structure where they can really see how they’re going to advance. So I think one of the ways that you retain people is first and this sounds simplistic and I apologize. It’s, it’s a Friday afternoon. I’m gonna try to keep it simple for myself, but like, maybe you wanna ask them, what are they hoping to accomplish with their career? And just what are they looking to do is this, is this skill based? Is this something you know, how can you build a professional development plan with them? So they feel that they’re not only having an immediate impact on the work they’re doing for the organization now, but they’re helping themselves grow at the same time. So people, if people are growing and advancing and, and and becoming a better version of themselves professionally, then they might be more inclined to stay. They feel like the company is making an investment in me. I’m not just giving to them, they’re giving back to me and this is we’re in it together kind of a thing. So I think that the challenge that executive directors have is having line items in their budget for professional development so that when somebody needs to understand and learn more about certain things that you have the ability to send them to seminars, workshops, trainings, get them coaches, whatever is needed, so they can grow class and whatever that new technology is that comes out. So you really do need to ask them what success would look like for themselves where are they trying to be a year or two or three from now and see if you can chart a path together to get them from where they are now to where they want to be. And if you can do that successfully, then they’re going to think this person’s got my back. And even that you’re just taking the time, the fact that you’re there to ask and, and as well. Yeah, now you in the walking, you know, the talk part of part of that equation, then you have to do the thing. You can’t just say, oh, we really care about, you know, you have to, you have to come up with a plan you have or maybe you put it back on the person. Listen, I’m willing to send you to some of these seminars you’re describing, but I’m going to ask you to do the research on finding the ones that you would think would be the best fit for you. That’s OK. That’s a shared responsibility. But when they come back with the answer, you can’t say $400 or whatever that need. You gotta, you gotta be willing to or maybe give them a budget up front. Listen, this is what we have set aside. Can you, can you try to see if there’s something available that we, but, but have an open honest conversation with them and to find out what, what would be their career path, what would be, what do they want to accomplish in the, in the near and maybe if they know this much the long term of their career and see how you can play an active role in helping them get from where they are to where they want to be. And if you do that, I think you’re well on your way to people staying and having this listening culture I think is, is part of that. Uh Well, it helps people see a future too with the organization. That’s right that you’re, you’re, you’re, you’re working this plan that we’ve developed together and they see potential for themselves. Not that they’re in a dead end that they were hired as a development associate or AAA director and there’s nothing, there’s no, there’s no future for them beyond that. That’s right. They’re working in events to retire or die or move up. Sure. They’re working in events now, but they wanna, they wanna get into major gifts. They know that major gifts is the place to be or, or, or whatever as an example. So how can you transition them from where they are over time? They get more exposure to major gifts, maybe they’re not gonna become a major gifts officer or whatever. But like, hey, we’re gonna have you sit in with or we’re gonna have you learn how to do this and, and begin to kind of get them exposed. You have a small portfolio, we’ll start with a little portfolio of 15 or 20. And then you have more redundancy in the organization. Maybe your major gift person decides to walk out the door or they get hit by a bus or who knows what happens. Then you got somebody in your organization that could step in. So, but again, you’re not gonna know these things until you talk to folks and, and, and that’s the, that’s the end of the day. You’ve got to have quality time. You’ve got to have open dialogue. You can’t just tell them come to work and work hard. You got to figure out like, why are you coming to work? What are you hoping to accomplish? What do you want to learn? Where do you want to be? And I think if you can do that and then support people along the way, you’ll, you’ll, you’ll find your retention numbers moving in the right direction. The premise of the book is that it’s for new nonprofit leaders. And I think most of this that we’re talking about, if not, everything applies to uh uh applies to well, you know, well positioned long standing nonprofit CEO S as well. So I think some of this, you know, they, they may have heard it before, but it’s, it’s valuable to hear valuable advice, you know, uh repeated, you’re reminded of it. Um And sometimes, you know, I think your book transcends. Thank you. It’s, it’s purpose. Thank you. I appreciate that. I mean, II, I had a few people in mind when I wrote the book, some of the people that I’ve mentored along the way and it was sort of helpful for me to have a picture of them. When I was writing this book, this book is written in some ways as a conversation with them. But yes, I hope it applies more broadly. I hope it applies to board members. I think you’d be a much better board member having read this book knowing both the broader sense of how the nonprofit organizations function, but also having a better appreciation of what the executive director is going through so you can partner with them and support them. So there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of benefits to, to people that are other than just young nonprofit leaders reading the book. Let’s talk a little about building your volunteer community. Uh You make the point that volunteers, you know, the, the obvious advantage is they’re doing work, they’re not being paid for it and that can help you expand your, your capacity, uh maybe expand your programs if that’s appropriate based on what we, we talked about a few minutes ago. Um But also, you know, what, what do they get you? It’s a, it’s a value share. What’s their value proposition or what’s your, how do you say it? What’s your value proposition to your volunteers? That’s right. I think, I think you have to look at any relationship from both sides. And I think I try to, you know, provide that perspective in the partnership development chapter in this volunteer management chapter. You know, why are they coming to your organization and what do they hope to get out of it? Sometimes they are hoping to get out of it, special opportunities. You know, maybe they get to work with animals in a way that they could never work with animals otherwise. Or maybe they get to travel because you have a trip with your organization to some part of the world where they otherwise wouldn’t have exposure to that. So you have to understand and ask people, why do they, why do they decide to volunteer their time? And then, you know, think about how you can amplify their work. You know, whether it’s profiling your volunteers and some of your communications, whether it’s again, thinking about the volunteers sometimes are the best brand ambassadors. So make sure they understand what the organization really is. Maybe how they fit into their, how they fit into it. They might have come into the organization in one specific moment. Maybe it’s, you know, let’s, let’s say it’s um an organization working in food and security and they’re helping serve lunch one day that doesn’t give them a complete picture of what the organization is all about. So if you, if you can educate them on what the organization’s broader impact is, then they could tell story versus just, yeah, I made a sandwich for somebody and they, they didn’t go hungry on Friday. So, and I think volunteers have enormous potential. Volunteers can be converted into donors. Volunteers can be converted into board members. Volunteers can attract other people to your community. Um And, and so it’s important that we think about all the ways volunteers can be helpful, but it’s also important for us to understand all the myriad reasons that somebody might come to your organization and for you to, you know, be very intentional about creating uh opportunities for them to experience whatever they’re looking to experience. And so you’re, again, you’re only going to get that by, you know, it’s sort of like the managed by walking around thing, but going to your programs and interfacing with your volunteers talking to them. Why did you come today? Why did you choose? I love these? You know, you have some very basic questions to ask. What, what is it that you love about our work? Why did you come? Why do you spend your time here? People love to talk and, and so give them a couple of open end questions and, and learn to do something. I’m not particularly good at which is be quiet and listen. And um and then, but if you can do that, you’re gonna learn an incredible amount. And so give people the opportunity to talk, donors, volunteers, et cetera and they will tell you why your organization has meaning. And then you as the leader can figure out how to, how to bottle that up and, and use it to the best advantage of the organization so that you can grow the impact and help even more people. You wanna make sure also that you have the bandwidth, the capacity to uh train you train the volunteers, manage them appropriately. Um schedule follow up. You can’t just, you can’t just put out a call for volunteers without knowing that you can manage a volunteer. Ca That’s right. I mean, what is their experience going to be like when they show up? Are you organized or not? You know, did they get there and they spent an hour waiting around while somebody told them what to do or did you have a whole thought out approach for what was going to happen from the moment they got there because again, they’re forming an impression of your organization. The brand is being translated through that volunteer experience. And so you to engage volunteers takes a lot of work. By the way, in some situations, you can do the work more easily on your own because you know how to do it inside that you’ve been doing it for so long. But you realize if I had 20 people helping me, I could probably get more done. So how can I somehow systematize and train people effectively so they can come to my warehouse and you know, an organization like cradles to crayons, which provides, you know, clothing and necessary stuff for, for, for Children and young families, you know, they have volunteers that come and sort clothing by size and by gender and by this and by that, well, you’ve got to teach them your system in a short amount of time so that when they come to help do the work that you’re doing that they do it right. You don’t want to have to do their work nine times over. Otherwise it’s just rework and it’s not helpful. So what can you do? How much resources is it going to take from your organization? Do you need a full time staff person as a volunteer coordinator? Many organizations have that uh and sometimes it’s hard to justify that expense up front. But if you think about the, the impact that volunteers can have, again, this is very organization specific if volunteers are the right match for you. But in many organizations, that is the case that volunteers can be really helpful. The question is, can you make their experience positive for both the organization and for them, follow up with them appropriately, capture their information so that you can thank them so that you can communicate in the future when there’s another volunteer opportunity or, or what or when giving Tuesday comes up, you might want to ask your volunteers to help, support your work so that you can continue to grow and, and, and help even more folks. I like what I’m just gonna amplify something you mentioned. Um It struck me in the book that they, they’re your brand ambassadors from, from their first impression, the, the, their first half hour with you through multiple times that they come the way they’re treated, the way they’re followed up with. They, they can be very effective um evangelists and ambassadors for, for your work in the community. That’s right. And, and so that’s why you have to be very thoughtful about it. I’d like to move to um your, your final chapter is uh advice for new leaders, which as I said earlier, I think applies to all leaders. Um Share some of your own advice. Uh You know, I had some things I wanted to touch on but uh I’m feeling like less of a, a general manager now and more of a uh uh uh a more, more open approach. The general manager, that’s a sports thing. I was gonna have teams have managers, they do, the general manager usually decides, uh and, and figures out who’s gonna be on the team, they recruit the players to sign the contract and then who decides who’s gonna play full back or third day? Oh my God. Here you go. I mean, full back as a football person and third base as a baseball person. But yes, absolutely. So, advice for new leaders. What would you like to talk about? Well, it’s, you know, I, I asked the same question of all, each of the 22 folks that were uh subject matter experts were generous enough with their time to, to help me on this project. Um And so, while I talk to them about some very specific things in terms of their background, I asked them each this question about what advice would you give to somebody that’s either a new leader or new to an organization? Um And, and the most common answer was this notion of a listening tour, figuring out how to go around thoughtfully first to staff, to board, to donors, to partners and ask them some of these open ended questions. We just talked about, what does our organization do? Well, why are you, why do you support us in the way that you do? Do you think there’s anything that we could do better? Um, and really just get them talking and, and that’s how you can establish? First of all, that’s how you learn. Like, what’s the culture of the organization where, where the blind spots? What do you do? How are we perceived? How are you perceived? Maybe, maybe it’s inconsistent what we do, what we do hire, you’ve been hired somebody in the hiring committee, you were interviewed, you, you your way through that and now they gave you the job and now you’re like, well, now, why? And so the thing is you got to go find out what you just got yourself into because invariably you want have learned the true organization through that interview process unless you have been with the organization for 10 years and you just got promoted up from, you know, one level up to the executive director, let’s say you’re new um in that role or new to the organization. So these listening tours are fundamental um they’re vital and, and it enables you to learn about the organization and enables people to begin to develop a relationship with you to get a sense for who you are as a person. You’re coming to them without an agenda other than to learn and listen, you’re not telling them what your plan is. You may have a plan and they may even ask you what your plan is and you can tell them I have some of my own ideas and let me give you a couple of things, I’m thinking about them. But the reason I’m here today is to learn from you, you, you’ve been with the organization much longer than I have. So, you know, my thoughts might be preliminary. I’m here today to learn more about what you think. So turn it right back around as quickly as you can, right? Because you are here to listen. That’s right. All right. Um Self care CEO it’s lonely, it’s lonely at the top. It is. I mean, I’ve heard this theme over and over again that being a leader of a nonprofit organization could be a lonely job and there’s a couple of things that were suggestions that I think make a lot of sense, which is finding the cohort of other nonprofit leaders. Maybe it’s somebody that’s in your same community. Um Maybe it’s somebody need at a conference or something else. People that you can talk to about, maybe the struggles you’re having it. It’s a little bit of a therapy session. Sure. You do it over a glass of sauvignon blanc or you do it over coffee or you do it virtually doesn’t matter, but build time into your schedule to talk to other people that are kind of in the same role that you’re in. And what you might find is that some of the problems that you’re experiencing are also problems that they’re experiencing. And then you don’t feel like that somehow you’ve created this disaster and you’re the only one that’s been in it. I know it’s common and that gives you a sense of community and, and, and feeling a little bit better maybe. And then you’re also going to get potentially some really practical suggestions for how to move through that challenge. So that’s one particular suggestion, patience, patience for leaders. Well, and maybe this ties back in a little bit to, you know, this listening tour and being will may be willing to take a step back and learn before you might come up with an agenda and preset ideas of how you’re gonna put your plans in place and, and make the organization turn in one direction or another from the minute you hit the ground. But I think you need a certain level of patience to build relationships. You need a certain level of relationships to understand what the organization is good at and not good at. And then you need a willingness to understand that when you put changes in place that you may not see the immediate effects. But if they’re the right decisions for the long term, then you need to be willing to just let it take its natural force, setting up your successors, you’re setting up the organization and your successors and everyone for success and, and trying to get the fundamentally the right pieces in place. So where would you like to leave it? David? Uh spent a good amount of time. You uh I, I’m feeling egalitarian again. What would you like to leave us with? I, I’m just, I’m just delighted by the fact that, you know, people have responded well, that have read advanced copies of the book and I’m hopeful that I’m, I’m really excited to hear from people that read the book. I, I’m really hoping that this book has the effect that I’m intending. Um You know, this has been a really writing, a book is kind of a very vulnerable. Um There’s, there’s some big time impostor syndrome moments that come into play when you’re writing a book. Like, why am I, why am I writing this book. But as people have read the book and, and given me really good feedback, like, no, you were the exact right person to write this book, conversational, a bit of a sense of humor, a lot of experience, a lot of perspective. And so, um I, I don’t know, sometimes we have to get out of our comfort zone personally and professionally in order to grow. And I think writing this book was um that and um but I’m delighted that it’s, you know, the book is being released as we speak. And um I’m really excited to see what’s gonna happen because I don’t know, it’s a lot of unknowns, but I’m excited about the. Congratulations on the book. I, I appreciate that. And as far as I can tell, well, the book is excellent. Uh As far as I can tell, you’re, uh you know, a Stanley super series, uh celebrity star uh in all, whatever many sports that covers. Exactly Bravo and, and thank you. Thanks for taking time. My pleasure. The book is passion isn’t enough, a practical guide for nonprofit leaders. David’s company is dot dot org, which you’ll find at dot dot org.com and you’ll find David on linkedin David. I thank you very much again. Thanks for coming out to Serafina, sharing a glass of wine and uh your wisdom. It was a great pleasure. Thanks. Thank you. I’m glad next week, Stacy Palmer and Andrew Simon, the leaders of the chronicle of philanthropy. 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. 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 web guy and this music is by Scott Stein. 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.
That’s Donald Summers’ new book, where he introduces the seven phases of nonprofit growth derived from his research and practice. He walks us through assess, align, plan, test, fund, execute, and lead, so your nonprofit scales to meet the demands of your mission and vision. He’s the CEO of Altruist Partners.
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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. I’m traveling this week and a couple more weeks. So my sound quality won’t be up to what you’re used to. Oh, I’m glad you’re with us though. I’d suffer the effects of osteochondrosis if you inflamed me with the idea that you missed this week’s show. Here’s our associate producer, Kate with usual high quality sound and what’s on the menu this week? Hey, Tony, I hope our listeners are hungry for scaling altruism. That’s Donald Summer’s new book where he introduces the seven phases of nonprofit growth derived from his research and practice. He walks us through, assess align plan, test, fund, execute and lead. So your nonprofit scales to meet the demands of your mission and vision. He’s the CEO of altruist partners on Tony’s take Two Tales from the plane. A savvy survey 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 scaling altruism. It’s a pleasure to Welcome Donald Summers to nonprofit radio. He is the author of the book Scaling Altruism, a proven pathway for accelerating nonprofit growth and impact. He’s the founder and CEO of Altruist partners, an advisory boutique firm with over $1 billion in new revenue and program growth for nonprofits around the world. You’ll find the company at Altruist partners.com and you’ll find Donald on linkedin Donald Summers. Welcome to Nonprofit Radio. So happy to be here, Tony. Uh And the first thing I wanna say is thank you for all the work you do to make the world a better place. It’s always an honor to, to chat with, with leaders like you. Well, thank you. I’m glad that you are with us. Uh You have particular poignance for uh nonprofit radio because we are big, as I said, uh in the introduction, as I always do big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. And you uh make some very clear distinction between the 95% who are listening to nonprofit radio and the other 5% or roughly 35,000 nonprofits that have, that have figured out scaling growth, acceleration, uh efficiencies. So we’re gonna uh I, I don’t want people to leave nonprofit radio, but we’re gonna help people move from being uh their nonprofit being among the 95% to the uh to the wealthier and higher scaled 5%. I think that’s uh that, that I, I think we can achieve that, but I don’t want to lose listeners in the process either. I don’t want listeners to leave nonprofit radio when they go from the 95 to the five, there’s a whole new set of challenges. We can talk about those. But we, we all, we all aspire to better problems. All right. Let’s start with the basics. Why this book Scaling Altruism? What’s the, uh, genesis of it goes back into your practice. There’s research around the, the work we’re gonna talk about. What’s it all about? Well, there’s a tremendous barrier to nonprofit growth and, and as you’ve accurately um pointed out, you know, we’ve got over a million nonprofits stuck below a million dollars a year in the have, it’s a have and have not landscape and they’re struggling to stay afloat. They can’t access the, the, the money and the resources and, you know, Tony, this is a fixable problem and it is so exciting and, and simultaneously frustrating because there’s so much snake oil out there. There’s so many people saying, hey, they’ve got the solutions. Uh but those solutions are often not backed by evidence. So we’ve spent uh 20 years translating the best practices from the high growth, high performing uh nonprofit and the entrepreneurial space, hybridizing everything and putting it in an operating system into which any nonprofit program can fit. And just recently, we’ve, we got the book and we’ve got an accelerator. We’ve got a low cost support program. So I’m just delighted to be here today to talk about uh while it’s still not easy, it’s clear and it’s doable. So any nonprofit founder or executive with courage and grit and tenacity and focus and discipline, which there’s so many out there, if we can just get them away from those subsistence tactics, those survival strategies and get them into the growth strategies with all the tools and the processes and the support we can un unleash a wave of social impact that this country has never seen. And I truly believe that we have the evidence basis. Now, all we have to do is get the word out uh because there isn’t any barrier to, to learning and executing. And, and I’m just again, delighted to share with you today, you lament. Uh And I’m, this is the only time. Uh I think I’ll probably quote the book is that uh the nonprofit sector is decades behind the for profit sector in the rigorous use of organizational growth methodology. And you have this methodology, we’re gonna talk about the seven practices tested, researched uh evidence based, right? So we’re trying to, you’re trying to fill this gap between the for profit and not for profit knowledge basis. And, and it’s problematic to say we want for pro we want nonprofits to run like for profits. And that’s not my message. We want, we want to give nonprofits access to the same tools that everybody else has when you look at MB A programs, you’ve got venture capital markets, you’ve got 350 accelerators you’ve got in incubators, you’ve got mentor programs, the ecosystem for, for profits is incredibly wealthy and it’s incredibly rich and founders can find all these resources. There’s a culture and a practice gap that’s holding back nonprofits. They use different language, different terms, different processes and all it does is create barriers and it makes them hard to understand and, you know, we call it the myth of uniqueness. Yes. Thank you. I was, I was, I’m glad you got there because I was gonna lead you to it if you didn’t. Yes, me. But I’m a, I’m a nonprofit or my, you know, my, our work is hard to quantify. It’s, it’s an after school program, you know, we, we can’t track the Children after they leave or we’re feeding or we’re sheltering. We’re, we, we can’t use business practices because we’re working in, in social, social good. And as, as uh you know, we say whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re probably right as Eleanor Roosevelt says, um you can measure, I’ve never met, you know, having worked with hundreds and, and touched thousands of nonprofits around the world never run into a program that can’t be rigorously quantified and measured either with, with qualitative or quantitative data. Everything is provable. Everything has an evidentiary basis. So, um it just has to be, you have to be creative. Um, you know, and again, it’s a cultural barrier. So if you have, you don’t, you don’t buy this uniqueness. Uh No, it’s a myth of uniqueness. And I’m, I’m working on getting this article um uh published and it’s propagated by very respected people. Jim Collins who wrote Good To Great, which is this massively successful and, and tectonic piece of literature about what are the best practices driving growth in the for profit space completely uh with great respect to him. But he lost his mind and says these practices don’t apply to the social sector. And he wrote this book uh Good For Great for the social sector. That’s flatly, it’s flat wrong. And he, he’s misguided. Uh He’s well meaning individual. Uh But there’s other people that say, oh, you don’t understand business dynamics because they don’t apply, that’s not the case. And you know, and we don’t say we gotta get out of this distinction between four and nonprofit because it’s a, it’s a false dichotomy. You’re talking about when you need to solve a problem, not just nibble around the edges if you want to accomplish something and you need to put teams of people together and you need to capture the resources and you need to execute with efficiency and effectiveness. There’s a single unitary body of practices and tools that work your corporate, your tax status, your, your corporate tool that doesn’t, that’s just a tool and people get stuck on their tax status and what they, there’s these false labels and they miss the forest for the trees, you know, this in your daily practice. Uh, but, you know, we, we’ve got a, there’s a very small movement and I don’t even like to call them nonprofits. These are social impact organizations for impact, you know, these linguistic frameworks themselves are prisons. So when you free yourself and say, hey, I want to accomplish this. What’s the tool? You know, I just did an interview with Fortune talking about, you know, uh open A is challenges with their fort nonprofit status and, and even the smartest people in the world um often don’t understand what it means to be a nonprofit and what the power is. And the fact that you can have a nonprofit, you can have a for profit, you can have an LC three. You can have a public benefit corporation now. And, and, and again, the revenue in the nonprofit sector is crazy complex. You’ve got individuals, foundations, corporations, government agencies in the US. It’s a $2.5 trillion sector. Half of the money is earned nonprofits earn hundreds of billions of dollars every year, just like any other business. And it’s, it’s gifted, it’s earned, it’s invested, they can take on debt. You can, we have nonprofit clients, we’ve started up for profit subsidiaries. So what you need is good guidance that says, all right, if you have a goal, understand your strategies and then understand your revenue, your execution, your KPIS, the team you need and get out of this nonprofit mindset. Because chances are, uh you know, the social proof. Oh, all these nonprofits are doing galas, everybody’s doing a give big, everybody’s doing end of year appeals. They’re all small and look what’s happened to individual support for the sector. So we’ve got to break out, we’ve got to establish new paradigm and it’s got to be clear, it’s gotta be practical and it’s got to be actionable. It can’t be just this hazy, you know, academic, you know, here’s what to do. We need, how to do it and in what order and, and that’s what we try to do, Tony. Well, you do, you uh a lot of people are trying, you’ve succeeded because the book is enormously actionable. Um And it’s not only look what’s happened to individual giving, look what’s also happened, you know, we at to the scale of the problems that we’ve, some of these that we’ve been working on for generations, not just decades, generations. And we’re still tackling uh poverty, homelessness, uh uh uh uh clean air and water and we’ve been at these things for generations. So we’re not scaling to meet the, the needs. All right. So, so let, let’s get to the, can we get to the, the practice? Let’s start 100%. And I’ll say we have examples where we have scaled solution. It’s, it’s amazing. We just got to get it out. We got to break through the information, overload, break through the noise. So, again, that’s why I’m grateful for this opportunity to try to do just that. Yeah, there are organizations that have scaled. You’re right. Uh, and they’re the, they’re the 5% that they’re the ones, they’re the, uh, future, uh, nonprofit radio former listeners because they’re gonna, they’re gonna, they’re gonna leave here and they’re gonna move into the over a million dollar and they’ll scale to the $50 million and the elite, you know, 1/10 of 1%. 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 scaling altruism, you’ve got seven phases, phases. The book is all about the seven phases. Why don’t you just step us through, you know, quickly, each one and then we’re gonna come back. Can we do? You don’t look 100%? You look like you have consternation on your face, you. Ok. Ok. Good. All right, you look. All right. So you’re brief, you know, just brief on each of the seven and then we will come back to each of the seven in more detail after 30 years as a fundraiser nonprofit, executive foundation CEO and, and catalyst for the growth of dozens and dozens of, of nonprofits around the world. We, we built this methodology which says do it in order you first need to understand that what the capabilities and assets and skills drive growth and impact many are known, many are not known. So the first part of the book is assessment here are the questions to ask you and your team do. We are do, where do we, where do we line up on a set of benchmarks? Two, you’ve got to align your board and your team around a clear goal, a clear strategy and KPIS so many organizations have these watered down missions and lack a goal because they haven’t had the hard conversations. They let everybody have their own individual version of the truth and they sort of muddle along so that you’ve got before you can write a good plan. You’ve got to nail a couple the tips of the waves and get it done well. And we do that in a one page, what we call a business framework. Thirdly throw out theory of change, grow out your logic models. That is just woo woo I’m tired of that stuff. It doesn’t work you need a goal, you need Kpis, you need a strategy, you need metrics, you need a market analysis. You have to have a clear um compelling uh crisp statement of your value proposition. There’s 15 elements of what comprises what we call a world class investment grade business plan that will allow the organization to have a clear road map for its staff, an actionable guide for governance for its board and a compelling investment prospectus for sophisticated uh wealthy individuals, agencies, corporations and earned income clients. So number three is plan number or you do your best with it and then you test it in the marketplace. You don’t mistake your confidence for actual knowledge. You test and align it with your stakeholders. There’s a process for that. Then we get to funding so many nonprofits are moving ahead with fundraising efforts before they’ve got all the tools in place. And that describes why they’re struggling with growth and trying, you know, surviving on these galas when they’re unable to capture the growth capital. So defining the mix of earned contributed and invested income from those six sources, individuals, foundations, corporations and so forth that strategy, you got to nail the strategy. You have to understand the staffing, how to monitor pay and improve the team. Yep, then, so finance, then you have execution. So all that’s the easy part, then you get to execution, which is hard. How do you actually track? You have to score your strategies and continuously improve them. So we help organizations set up dashboards leading you love, you love your dashboards. Then after all of that, so you’ve got assessment, alignment, planning, funding, right? Execution, right? And then you’ve got lead in the middle. What does it mean to lead? How do you build equitable? Um uh Well, compensated teams. What’s the role of the board? There’s so much information out there. A lot of it’s confusing. It’s very verbose. So you put all these pieces together. It’s a circular process, it builds a flywheel and it’s proven to drive. And this is the one thing I want your listeners to, to, to really focus in on when you apply this tool kit. It typically takes anywhere from 6 to 12 months with a median adoption uh time of about nine months when you apply it. The median annual growth rate of organizations who execute this methodology with fidelity is 25% a year in their revenue and their social impact. These are organizations that were either declining or flat growth. They do the hard work they invest in, in, in adopting and using this operating system. And you know, anywhere from 6 to 12 months afterwards, they get a growth, hockey stick that we have many, many data points. There’s a lot of variants in there. Some organizations take off and get 50 100% growth, others, 5 to 10% growth. But that median of 25% is real. That’s the value of doing this work and it’s not just a pop and drop capital campaign. It’s not a one time win. This is gained growth over time. This is an iterative process which we’re gonna talk through in detail. All right. So let’s go back now to uh number one assessment. The what what grabbed me here is that you’re uh the, the, well, let’s just assure people there’s a lot of detail that we’re not gonna be able to cover you. Just if you want, if you want to scale, if you want to be a former nonprofit radio listener, you gotta get the book because we can’t go through the 50 or so practices in the remaining, you know, 30 or 40 minutes together. So, uh but we will hit the highlights. So assessment number one assess, what I liked to hear was that you, you don’t just say benchmark, but you say benchmark against robust standards. I mean, so you’re already sitting up, you’re already setting the bar high for, for just the, the threshold benchmarking. I like, I like robust standards. You’re competing against the, you know, people. Well, what’s our market rate compared to other nonprofits? Well, guess what? You’re already starting, you know, why don’t you, you have to compete against everybody for top talent, for top people, for top funding. It’s a competitive world. You need benchmarks that are realistic. We’re not trying to, we’re not playing life on easy here, right? You have to understand what it takes to succeed, not survive. And Tony, I want to say this whole process is only for the most ambitious nonprofits. You make the point in the book that it’s, this is not easy, it’s not, you’re not pollyannaish about, about it taking time. I actually, this is, this is not for social impact tourists or people who want to make themselves feel better because they work at a nonprofit. These are people that want to have the courage of their convictions, get their skin in the game and execute and, and there’s a lot of them out there that haven’t been served. All right. So say a little more about assessment before we move on. But uh you have to have top pay, you have to have a, a robust, you have to have KPIS, you have to have board members who have grown companies before the number of nonprofits with nothing but subject matter expertise on their board. You know, we see these um healthcare associations with nothing but doctors on their board. You know, things like that. There’s so many. Uh and again, there’s 50 known drivers and the book allows uh people to walk through and say, do we have these or not? And it’s very factual and clear. So there’s none of this. We, we try to eliminate the ambiguity. And you know, we also give throughout the book, people um can distribute this form, we have the assessment online so people can take it and they can have these conversations that are actually productive and get organizations focused on the right things. So many assessments are, are long, they produce these narratives, nobody can focus on it. So we, we try to keep it short and sweet on the stuff that counts. Number two, let’s move to alignment. You uh you talk about a growth mindset, powerful language, hit these, you know, hit these highlights for, for, for our listeners. Again, you know, I’ve got a, we’re launching a national initiative with, with clients right now. And the core cap, the core capability of organizations that succeed is optimism and courage. And you know, some people, whether through their own past experience or their own trauma, just don’t believe they can succeed, right? And they have a poverty mindset and you know, those are understandable, but if those folks are on your executive team or your board game over, right? And again, choose powerful language. If you want to create confusion with people outside the sector, used words, use or, or even suspicion, use words like charity and gift and logic model and theory of change. Why don’t we all use words that everybody knows like investment, right? Like business plan. So, you know, these are examples, these are uh two practices of many in the alignment sector in the alignment chapter that help give people these traction points. And whether you agree or not. I don’t expect everybody to agree with these and there’s cultural uh and, and historical barriers against using this language in the sector which I acknowledge. Uh again, it’s not for everybody, but for the folks that want to go big, there’s also a set of organizations like you sit down and ask people, hey, imagine Warren Buffett’s gonna write us a check for as big a dollar amount that, that we want all the money we need. How are we gonna spend it? You’ll get folks saying, well, we need a new copy machine. We’ve got to hire an executive assistant and you get other folks saying, well, we want a 500 million endowment. We want offices in every major metropolitan area. And when you do these exercises among people on your board and your staff, you start to understand the enormous practical variance among the, the visions. So it’s exercises like this, you’ve got to do the hard work, you gotta stop and do the work and get people aligned on the big goals and how you measure it and how you’re gonna get there. And you know, these organizations say, well, we don’t have time to do that. Well, you know what? You get to pick your hard, you get to pick your challenge. You want your challenge to be doing the doggy paddle and, and barely staying above water for the rest of your career. Go ahead and do what you’re doing. And until you carve out the time to get these traction points and build a team, uh you’re not gonna succeeded. So, um we don’t make an apology for the investments and the focus that these alignment practices require. And if folks can’t focus and can’t get aligned, they shouldn’t be on your team. Right? So these are hard choices that every organization has to make. But you’ve got to get the building to getting at people on the team. So many board members are supervisory, we’re all, you know, they’re just there to be critics and we all know the problem with the space. But again, clear concise, concrete, comprehensive, very actionable steps for getting your team aligned and agreed on just a one pager breaking through the information overload. And once you have that one pager, then you can get to creating a business plan, which is uh which is the next piece. Yes, we’ll get to three planning. But I wanna uh flesh out uh what’s a b hag bhag this again. I thank Jim Collins, a tremendous scholar in the world of entrepreneurialism. Uh a professor at Stanford uh Management School of Business who studied the stock market. And he, he looked at all the positive outliers and distilled their uh behaviors that drive growth, right? And he settled and he and his research team settled on a set of practices is defined in good to great and great by choice. I’ve learned a ton from those books and be hag having a big hairy audacious goal. You know, you’ve got to have that North Star and you have to have the courage of your convictions and so many organizations aren’t, it’s called audacious for a reason. Right. They don’t want to. And this is what kills me. I don’t care. I like the hairy part. Big, big, hairy. Yeah. It’s, and scaring. They’re not just o, they’re hairy goals. It’s not supposed to be delusional, right? But you’re supposed to stretch yourself if you’re working on behalf of the vulnerable, if you’re working on behalf of those without a voice, if you’re working on behalf of, of creatures or trees, you know, you owe it to your mission to try some, to do something big and so many organizations fundamentally lack the ambition that their mission deserves. Right? And they think that’s because, well, we’ll look bad. Actually, you look worse if you’re behaving safe and you’ve got these wishy washy goals, big dollars follow big visions. So you start with a big vision now, you have to have a credible plan to execute on that vision. But getting that B hag and getting this is what, why we want entrepreneurs on the board. We don’t want risk, averse, you know, people that are worried about taking risks. I mean, yeah, you’ve got to have some of those folks, you’ve got to have a balanced team, but you got to have people that are willing to put it out there for the mission and that’s what a be hag is all about. Not all doctors and lawyers on the board or, or, you know, and you know, and CPA si don’t want to leave out CPA S. They’re, they’re wonderful. You’ve got to have them. You’ve got plenty of entrepreneurial doctor, lawyers and CPA S, it’s more of a personality than a profession. Um And we know what personalities cause that. So when you get into the leadership chapter later, we’ll talk about where that entrepreneurial gene comes from and how to create what we call neuro balanced teams because you can’t have just aggressive entrepreneurs. Otherwise you get out over your skis and things blow up, you need the risk uh managers, you need the administrators and the integrators. So there’s a whole methodology there. But we talk about that later in chapter seven under leadership. All right, you’re the balanced, right? The balanced board of advisors. All right. Uh So the plan number three, the, the, it’s, it’s a business plan, but it’s, but it’s more than just your average business plan. Flush it out, please. Well, you know, you, you Google business plan templates and the variety that comes up is amazing. It all over the road. Small business association. You have nonprofits, the templates that I, that I found early as a practitioner. II, I was a fundraiser um for nonprofit organizations for the early part of my career. And I got uh tons of practice, thousands of meetings with high net worth, sophisticated individuals about passing due diligence, about earning their credibility that we would use their dollars. Well, and having done that all over the world with from everywhere, from modest investors to billionaires and looking at all the templates, we came up with our own that we think is the best because it works. It’s got 15 pieces to it. It’s clear, it’s got lots of examples. So there’s 15 sections to a business plan. It’s all backed up in the literature. It’s a template and we provide nonprofits with not just the template and the explanation of each pieces. There’s a case study in the book, we talk about how we walked uh a wonderful agency for foster Children tree house through the business planning process. We took them from analyzing 22 pages of data per child to under to analyzing only four KPIS. We took them from spray and pray financing to focused targeted strategy. We took them from seven layers of management down to three. You know, the business plan is, you know, really it takes that business framework and builds it out into all the aspects you need to succeed. And here’s the thing. No brochures. I, I had the, the, the great honor of working with Connie Kravis, the Vice President of Advancement for the University of Washington who raised billions of dollars and like many geniuses who I think you say they, they raise $2 million a day on average every day of the calendar year, the UW and major universities raise millions of dollars and, and he asked Connie, hey ho, Connie, how’d you do it? He says, well, I make insiders out of outsiders, right? You establish trust and transparency, no brochures, no videos. None of these tear jerking events. You show them how you’re gonna succeed with a credible concrete, very, very clear plan. These are hard to write, which is why we break it into a bite size chunks, right? Most strategic plans, totally, they’re not strategic and they’re not plans. And this is true, not just in the for profit sector. It’s true anywhere. Very few people understand how to really write an action plan that lines up your staff and will attract investment. We know exactly how to do it. And it’s a very prescriptive process you put your content in but do it the way that this plan says because we know it works. It guides. We iii I published an excerpt in the Stanford Social Innovation Review and I said, look, a good business plan is a Swiss army knife for nonprofit leadership. It’s a guide. It’s a clear roadmap for your staff. It’s a governance guide for your board. It’s a prospectus for investors. It’s, it’s a, it’s a recruiting tool, right? It it captures all your marketing and communication language. It really should be the center, the access of your organization and so many people as you know, produce these plans and sit on shelves, we produce plans that are continuously updated and, and again, the devil’s in the details. Um Not everyone has the focus to really learn all of these uh uh particular steps and really engage in the level of rigor and discipline that’s required to, to achieve a world class business plan. But again, you know, anything hard, how do you eat an elephant one bite at a time? So again, if you’re, you don’t have to be brilliant, you just have to be tenacious. We show people how to bite it off one piece at a time. And guess what? When you’re done with chapter three, you got a completed business plan, it ain’t complete, you got to go to chapter four and test it and refine it so that process can take months, but it will be transformational. It gets you out of the legacy, you know, soft folk, you know, kind of in, you know, not credible, you know, woo woo, you know, strategic plan model, that’s the dominant paradigm and into something far more uh useful and, and able to catalyze organizational performance and growth. And you’re talking about the testing, uh you know, you want us to identify the key constituents who we’re gonna be testing this with and we’re gonna get feedback from, say more, say more there about the, these, you gotta start with your team. So the executive team writes the plan, build it, you know, get the feedback from your staff. These are peers, these are not serfs, they’re not, you know, robots, you’ve got to get alignment among your team. You’ve got to get your board members bought off on the plan. They’ve got to understand what their swim lane is. They stay at the high level. So, testing that plan and revising it just with your team and moving quickly, time is money. You don’t have 69, 12 months, these nonprofit strategic planning processes that take, you know, more if it’s more than, you know, 60 days, it’s broken process. So moving with precision and quickly and creating this alignment, that’s the trick and that’s what we show with these exercises. If you do that alignment piece first, we can produce the business plan quickly. So you do your internal constituents, then you do the next phase. Who are your stakeholders? They could be agency partners, they could be your closest funders. It could be peer NGO S. Um It could be the people obviously needs to be. If you’re serving people, you should review the plan and it’s key elements for the people you’re proposing to serve, right? And make sure you’re getting the the their input, then you can go and test it with prospective partners perspective funders. So there’s a, there’s four or five questions you can ask, you get your board involved. And again, you really practice using the plan and getting feedback. Um, really new. You, you collect new knowledge, you correct, you, you get a lot of practice, you get comfortable uh, with what the plan contains and you get a better document as a result. It’s time for Tony’s take two. Thank you, Kate. We’re back to Tales from the plane. This one isn’t exactly on a plane. Uh, it’s a company that owns a lot of planes, Delta Airlines. I had to change a ticket. I did it over the phone and they gave me a very smart, just s simple one question survey after the call. Ordinarily, I reject the, the customer service surveys. Uh, whether it’s whether I get a link by email or, you know, phone, I just say I, I usually skip them. But I thought, ok, one question they say, you know, will you accept a one question survey at the end of the call? So I said, ok, one question. So, uh, the agent took care of me. She was excellent, made the changes I needed. And the very simple savvy, one question survey at the end of the call, would you hire the last person you just spoke to if you were the CEO of a customer service company? End of quote? And I thought that’s just really brilliant. Like all of a sudden I’ve been elevated. I, I, I’m, I’m, I’m, I’ve got a promotion. I’m not just, uh, you know, uh, I don’t just work at a customer service uh company. I’m the CEO of one and now I’m called on to make a hiring decision and I just thought that was a really, it’s obviously a simple one and I thought it was a smart, uh just survey gets right to the point and just asking about that one person. Really simple. Simple. The last person you spoke to, would you hire them one through five? One? Definitely not. And five. Definitely you would. I pressed a five and that was it. So I wanted to share the simplicity of that survey with you. Maybe it can inspire simplicity for your own surveys. You know, which some of which, right? I don’t mean your surveys are too long, but we all have experienced the customer service surveys that uh you know, they promise it’ll take like 3 to 5 minutes. That OK, that means 15. So um maybe some inspiration for simple savvy surveys by you for you. And that is Tony’s take two. OK. That is so smart. That’s a better way to get feedback. Just something so simple. I think so. Yeah, absolutely. It worked on me one question. Other companies should start doing it. Well, maybe some of our listeners will do it for their nonprofits. Well, we’ve got Buku but loads more time. Here’s the rest of scaling altruism with Donald Summers. What about including these stakeholders, especially the internal ones in the plan development process that happens in phase two that happens in, in phase two, the alignment, it again, but you can’t just write a business plan from scratch. You got to get the, the right alignment. And so you start that in chapter two, gives that one pager that’s got, that’s got executive team and that’s got staff and it’s got board input for and just pieces of it and do it again. You go deeper. So the trick is Tony and it took us many years to figure this out and, and many missteps, how do we create a business plan that people own? That’s not the lowest common denominator. We, you know, you, you’re not gonna, most plans are written so that anybody can believe that they got their piece in there, right? They’re so ambiguous. They don’t mean anything. How do you get something that’s really clear and audacious and courageous and very, very crisp yet everybody’s bought into it. That’s why we spend two chapters on the planning. OK. So it, it all right. Yeah, the, the buy in is included. OK? It’s, I want folks to understand it’s not AAA C Suite developed plan and then you’re bringing it to, then you’re showing it to your staff after, after it’s been brought down from on high, right? It’s not that, no, it’s, it’s got to be inclusive and democratic and at the same time, if there are people like no, I don’t agree. You say goodbye. God bless you and good luck. You’re forming a team here. This is not something where we’re going to have critics and people serving as sea anchors on our sailboat ain’t gonna happen. So also in that planning process, you’ve got to get the right people on the bus and if people don’t believe in your plan and you keep them on your team, what you’re asking for problems and that goes for board members and it goes for staff. So it’s when we talk about alignment and planning, you’ve got to have people that really believe that this can happen and anything short of that will kill your execution. And you know, you have to decide, are we running an organization to keep our, our own people happy and keep everybody in a comfortable space where we’re not going to have any conflict, right? Which is a lot of nonprofits, right? Or are we going to have a team that’s gonna change the world? And we got to get the right people on the bus and we got to make some hard decisions. It’s not a family, it’s a professional sports team. You don’t choose your family, right? You love and you, you, you, you respect whomever is in your family but a sports team. Hey, you don’t have somebody that’s able to pass the ball or doesn’t wanna, you know, adopt your strategy, you cut them. So it’s like what paradigm are you in? You’re not a family high performing organ and this is uh I’m, I’m, I’m quoting from a famous uh uh deck, a Netflix deck that, that set these paradigms many years ago, everything I’ve learned, I’ve, I’ve read somebody else has figured it out. Uh I’m just putting the pieces together. So think of sports teams, not families when it comes to planning. Awesome. Uh I just wanna make sure everybody understands that each chapter has the resources that are talked about in that chapter. So for instance, when you’re, you know, you have, uh when you’re going back to step three, developing the business plan, you have a template business plan at the end of the chapter, it’s all, it’s all on the, it’s all on the website. Oh, it, it, it goes, it goes even deeper than that. Tony, you know, uh nonprofits have spent millions of dollars hiring my firm and we’ve generated many, many multiples of those millions of back. We’ve, we’ve generated over a billion, right? And the whole point of writing this book is to democratize access to these tools. I’ve always been frustrated by books that tell you what to do and not how to do it. So I said, I’m gonna go big on this. I’m gonna say, not just what to do, how to do it. I’m gonna say here are the tools, here are the practices, here’s the exercise, here’s a case study with organizations that went through the same process and we can talk about this later. I, I spent years building an online community that’s now active. It launched in August where nonprofits can join for incredibly low sum of 79 bucks a month and get support from me and my partners and our expert affiliates and from other nonprofits to say, ok, what practice are you on? Here’s what it means. Here’s a tool, here’s a template and you can get feedback from the experts who’ve been to the movie before. So you have all of the depth of resources that you have all at very little cost. Um So there’s no excuse not to do this other than the fact that it requires hard work discipline and focus good old grit. So we go, the book is a portal and every chapter says, hey, go to Altruist accelerator.org and you go to that website and you’ll see a landing page that describes the Accelerator and there’s a sign up and a free trial for the online, for the online accelerator community. It’s based on a platform called Circle. It’s a learning management community and it’s now staffed by about, you’ve got about 15 nonprofits on there now, some really, really cool ones, they’re already showing they can march their way through the practices. Now, many nonprofits, particularly those that are more resourced, are hiring us because, you know, they just don’t have the time and they have the resources and they can bring us in. But for the nonprofits below a million dollars a year, uh this is the fastest and best way uh that, that we’ve been able to see uh to, to adopting this methodology. So it’s a lot more than a book. It’s a, it’s a community and what I really want to do, Tony, if my own bag is to create a movement, right? My friend and, and the chair of the advisory uh of the, of the Accelerators Akhtar Bods Shaw, he’s a brilliant man who is the former head of uh Microsoft Philanthropy. And he’s now a professor of social impact at the University of Washington. And you know, he says something that I’ve taken years to understand. He says, don’t try to scale your organization, try to create a movement, right? Try to create a movement and the movement. I’m trying to catalyze here is empowering social impact leaders with the best tools and practices so they can do their best work. There’s no barriers, they don’t have to struggle and they can, they can share and they can bring these tools and practices to others and we can form communities around this and we, we want to see this, this activate. So hopefully, the, the book is just the, the the entry point. Let’s continue in the book uh with funding which you are careful not to call fundraising you like uh in I MP investment and partnerships. Let’s talk about the funding phase. Oh, gosh, there’s so much to talk about now. All right, let’s start with All right. Yeah, there is. All right. So let’s start with the sources. You, you teased them earlier. Uh you identified six sources, individuals, corporations, et cetera. So let’s, let’s name the, let’s name the six sources that are potential uh for funding before we start that there needs to be a reckoning in the sector. 999 out of 100 small nonprofits identify fundraising as their number one concern and they all know it. But there’s for some reason, it’s like, hey, definition of insanity is, you know, repeating some the same thing and expecting different outcomes. So we’ve got to get out of serial grant writing, begging for money via events, uh uh sending appeal letters, uh you know, tear jerking videos, emotional appeals, uh individual contributions of the sector have plummeted, have plummeted. You know, my uh uh we’ve got a book called The Generosity Crisis. So if you’re a small to mid size nonprofit, you know, we the first thing, whatever you see whenever a small nonprofits that you see zig, you need to zag, you need to do something different. Ok? So the first thing is there’s no pro tips, there’s no quick fix. You need to get your head into a completely different space when it comes to a building a revenue engine and you have to learn the entire funding stack. It’s earned, contributed and invested. It comes from five sources via three means, contributed, earned and invested. There’s a lot to learn here. Five sources uh name the five sourcess, individuals, foundations, government agencies, right? There’s earned income and impact capital investors. There’s debt, corporations and corporations and corporations. So 666 buckets they, and they give, give you money a charitable gift which, which we prefer to call charitable investments or charitable contributions. I don’t like the word gift. It’s got terrible associations, right? Um You have a contribution then you have, right? You earn income, half the money in the sector is earned. These are entrepreneurial businesses who happen to be C threes. They’re getting, they’re, they’re running for profit subsidiaries. They have uh grants and they have contracts, right? They’re, they’re running a typical business, right? And then you have invested income, you can take on debt, you can get peer to peer loans, you can get risk and rate adjusted capital. Um There’s all this money sitting on the sidelines that nonprofits can capture if they have the sophistication and the tools to get it. So, you know, sorting out what a nonprofit should be going for and shouldn’t be going for, requires expertise and experience. We go through the strategies and we go through the high performing and the low performing strategies. If you’re earning money through events, if you’re running a gala or an auction, you might as well commit yourself to a life of poverty and mission, you know, forget, forget scaling your mission. And this is just standard operating procedure. Everybody does it. So everybody thinks they do it. And transitioning organizations away from this is like getting them to quit a heroin addiction. It’s terribly hard. Don’t know any better. You know. You read, I think the reason people don’t know any better is we grew up with the, uh, boy scouts, girl scouts and, and cheerleading squad model of fundraising, which was, which was right. We sell, we sell, I mean, cookies. I mean, I do love, uh, the girl scout cookies. The thin mints especially. And then the Samosas are my number two. But, you know, but in terms of scaling, you know, that’s, that’s, well, that’s right. But that’s, that’s, those are, you know, those are youth activities. That’s a troop level. Yeah. No, that’s fine. If you’re a, if you’re teaching a girl scout how to sell cookies, that’s awesome. But we, but we carry these things, we carry these processes over like the girl, like the cheerleading squad. Uh, you know, Saturday car wash, we carry these into adulthood and then we remember, oh, well, back in the PT A days, we had a bake sale. So why don’t we scale the bake sale and have a gala and, and, and then we end up and, and if you have, if you had spent that the amount of time on the gala, uh uh, instead talking to individual investors about investment level, uh, investment level. Well, I, I do call them gifts but, uh, investment investment level contributions to the, to the contributions to the organization. You, you would have had a lot more, you, you, you end up with a lot more profit and you wouldn’t have the headache over whether the flowers match the bunting and the, the second course came out 12 minutes late. So now, now the, now the chili, the chili course is cold. Yeah. But we, my point is we carry our childhood fundraising activities into adulthood. And then we, we scale that to like galas and auto, you know, car shows instead of instead of building deep relationships. And you do have a lot of strategies and tactics around relationships with individual investors who are gonna partner with you for the long term and give you 567 figure gifts, you know, regularly and the greatest source of money comes from individuals comes from your very, very desperately needed line of expertise, which is planned giving. Yeah, but we got to start in the lifetime giving and those folks become so deeply invested that they want to put you alongside their husband, wife, Children and tell you how many charities I’ve seen nonprofits. They’ve been in business for 40 50 60 years, the millions, the hundreds of millions of dollars they they’re leaving on the table because they’re not cultivating these major investments and these, these these legacy commitments, you know, this, I’m not going to please, you know, refer them to me, refer them because that’s what I keep a 100%. That’s the difference. That’s the difference between a survival tactic, which is immediate gratification money right now for a little transaction. And this is the distinguished, this is, this differentiates the, the the organizations that struggle from the organizations that succeed. Leaders who struggle are oriented towards immediate gratification transactions. Give it to me right now. I gotta have it now. Now, now they’re like Children. They don’t invest in the future. The the adults understand they delay gratification to get a bigger return down the road, right? They in that, that’s what the principle of investment is. They put in focused, intelligent time and effort now for many multiples of return later, right? So you want to be a hunter gatherer running around, grabbing, you know, grabbing hands and your nonprofit will stay small. If you follow you, you’re not able to raise this type of money until you have the business plan and the financial projection and the alignment of your organization that’s critical. The order of operations is essential. You can’t do this high, you know, high value fundraising with tools that don’t pay past due diligence that aren’t comprehensive and and incredibly well written. But once you have those tools, it takes time 69, 12 months, not forever, but you can start capturing six and seven figure investments. If you show how you’re going to allocate that capital to drive your mission. So it’s not again, Tony, I can’t say it enough. This is not for everybody, but I’m telling you, there’s tens of thousands of nonprofit leaders out there that really are ready for this stuff. And, and once they see the light and they get their first six and figure first seven figure investment and I’ve done that so many times in my career, gotten organizations, their first million dollar gift, gotten their organizations, their first multimillion dollar corporate partnership or their first multimillion dollar, you know, plan giving or their first when that happens, then they get it. Let’s move to uh executing you. Love uh executive dashboards. Let’s talk about the, the value we’re on steps. We’re on phase phase six, the, the executing, but talk about the value of solid dashboards. Well, it breaks through the information overload in the clutter. We’re all information overload victims and you know, again, we’re in a paradigm, a space where you wanna do analysis and reporting. Well, we’re gonna, we’re gonna produce a long annual report and we’re gonna look at it once a year that ain’t gonna fly. That dog does not hunt if you want to grow up. If you want to create a high performing high growth organization, you have to have frequent what we call short cycle analysis. On a very small set of key performance indicators. You need to know the outcomes you’re gonna create and the activities that you need to execute on to drive those outcomes. Those are called lagging and leading indicators. And you need to have them at the program level and you need to have them at the organizational level and you need to track them on what’s known as the cadence of accountability. There’s a book written by a brilliant guy and his colleagues called the four disciplines of execution. When I read that it was like the lights coming on, like the heavens opened up and saying, here’s what success looks like for high performing organizations. Once they have their resources and they want to succeed, they might not get it right first, but it’s continuous improvement. And so programs, your finance, your hiring, your governance, your, your, the the scale, the quality, everything that uh an organization needs to measure and communicate both to its staff, its board and its funders and its stakeholders can be wrapped up in a very concise dashboard, takes work to build it. What it does is you think of it is we have a plan instead of sticking that plan on a shelf. Let’s score the plan. Let’s see how we’re performing against the plan. Strategies are meaningless unless they are scored and we collect data and we can’t collect very much data. So many were like treehouse. My famous example of my book was looking at 22 pages of data for each kid. They had all these fancy phd S and all these consultants coming in, bunch of academics going look at all the data, we can analyze everybody was so too much data. You might as well not have not anything at all because you’re drowning in it. You boil it down key performance indicators in the book. They’re very, there’s, there, there are very few of them. They’re not, you can’t subvert them. Everyone knows what they mean. So again, you gotta understand what a KP I is. You gotta understand how to collect the data. You got to nail the workflow, you gotta have good visualizations. Again, a lot of stuff here around creating a dashboard. Um We’ve seen, we’ve tried to help many organizations and they couldn’t get to the dashboarding phase. They didn’t have the focus and the discipline they couldn’t get themselves over the hump of getting out of, you know, uh those organizations, we, we failed to help them. It’s critical, you know, planning is easy, executions, 95% of it. And, you know, until you actually get into starting that we’re going to be really gonna sacrifice what we want to talk about and focus on these core sets of measures when you get there and you do it regularly two weeks for the staff, one month for the board members, quarterly, for your partners and investors have the right cadence of accountability and you have the right KPIS, you’re gonna know real quick if your plan is good or not and you’re gonna know what to adjust and you’re gonna have your strategy, your data is gonna drive your organizational improvement and you do it with fundraising, you do it with programs, you do it with everything and when you get that culture and you get that tool sky is the limit dashboards executing. All right, practice uh practice seven of seven leading leading talk, a little talk some again, more than we can go into here, talk about psychological safety in the workplace. Oh gosh. Hit that. Please explain it very well known again. This is a, this is a, you know, it’s another uh uh the, the, the, the author of the article, I quote, the Harvard business Professor, you got to have an organization where people are, are comfortable telling each other the truth about what they’re thinking, you know, and the nonprofit sector is full of top down uh tyrants just like the for profit sector, right? It’s full of people that are, that are poorly trained, that are insecure, that don’t want to hear bad news again just because you’re a nonprofit doesn’t mean you don’t suffer the same challenges of any other type of organization. It also includes permission to take risks 100%. So psychological safety and this is something that the executive team and the board needs to hold themselves responsible for. And I hear so few organizations talk about it. What risks are we to take? And you know, Jim Collins talks about confronting your brutal reality. What challenges are we really facing and can we talk about them without getting, you know, caught up in this, you know, emotional grip of, oh my God. I don’t want to talk about it. I, I’m anxious. Psychological safety is a fundament of, of if you don’t have that, there’s again, there’s 50 practices in the book. You take out one, forget it, you got to have them all. And psychological safety is a great example of that. Let’s talk about another one, investing in great people money. We we martyrdom should not be part of your compensation strategy. And you know, we talked about the, the great Dan Paata wrote about this in 2006 or seven with uncharitable that we’ve inherited this puritanical impulse to, you know, be unemployed ministers in the space. So we put out job descriptions for our clients with six figure salaries and incentive plans. I just wrote a job description today offering uh um AAA chief ac suite officer of my fast growing nonprofit client equity in their for profit subsidiary. You got to compete with the best brains right there. There’s no, there’s no sacrificing. So um and, and oh my God, what if we pay our people? You know, the highest paid nonprofit staff in, in every state are Tony. This is I do because you have it in the book. But go ahead if the f football coaches, football coach, nobody complains about paying football coaches. 2030 40 some guy down in Texas got like A 70. These are nonprofit guys. Now, the IRS doesn’t want, you know, excess, you know, compensation. There is a ceiling, right? And you’ve, you’ve got, but, but there are procedures around, there are procedures. Again, it’s a mindset thing. People get the right people on the bus. There’s ways to structure it. You know, you can have incentive pay for fundraisers that are still in, in line with the A FP ethical guidelines. Again, there’s a lot, there’s lots of specifics and nonprofit executives need to understand all of them. There is a lot in the leadership chapter uh uh for that practice, the uh you open the, well, you in each chapter with a quote and that the one to that chapter is we manage things we lead people. Oh, you know, I have a, another uh uh uh uh uh great thinker, you know, there’s a, there’s a small set of books that have helped me, you know, deliver catalyze growth to our, our many clients and, you know, another, you know, um I shock a de uh the, the great um and, you know, thinker, it, it uh uh understands, you know, one of the founders of Bank of America pointed me out to him, one of the, one of the old time executives, he’s been long past and he said you need to read this book to if you’re going to be a management consultant and he shows how people are either pro some combination of producers, um, entrepreneurs, administrators or um integrators and it was a light grow going off, you know, so many empathetic people from nonprofits get together and if they’re all integrators, they’re, they, they’re all worrying about how each other is feeling and nothing ever gets done. If they’re all entrepreneurs, there’s nothing but arsonists, then there’s fires getting put out. So, and, and there’s nothing but drivers, they can end up being lone wolves, flush this out in, in, in regard to something you said earlier. Uh the board, you the, the balance, you know, the, the balance on the board and then we’ll, we’ll, we’ll wrap up again. So again, I don’t write about everything that nonprofit leaders need to know about leadership. There’s a lot of resources out there and I’m, I’m pointing out these are the tools that you must pay attention to. If you do. If you’re ignorant of these tools, you risk um organizational, you know, constant struggle. So it’s not trying to be everything that’s ever been written about governance. There’s a lot of books and there’s, there’s more information that you need. No, no, but I want, I want you to hit, I Donald, I want you to hit on uh flesh out uh the balanced board, you know, getting, getting that, that getting that personality as well as skills and right. So everyone knows you’ve got to have diverse skills. I hope everyone knows you need, you need people that know technology that no law that no finance that no operations, that hr advertising. So you want to get diverse skills, right? Obviously, you want diverse backgrounds, ethnicities, gender and so forth. But the other thing that people don’t talk about is diverse thinking styles. You need people who are entrepreneurial, who are risk takers. You need um risk mitigators, right? And you need people that are uh do this the structuring piece and the same holds for boards and executive teams. So again, we give a, a very shorthand uh uh introduction to the concepts. And again, there’s tools and there’s, there’s a whole set on the accelerator website on how to identify folks and help them talk across their differences. So many organizations are in conflict because people don’t recognize is that someone else has a different neurological style that they’re born with and I don’t know how to talk to them. Now, you probably wouldn’t be surprised to understand that I’m a driver and an entrepreneur and I’m terrible with details and I’m not much of an integrator. I’m the guy who’s driving out head making stuff. I’m a founder, my team, my firm will struggle if I don’t have strong administrators and strong integrators and it has, I’ve made this mistake myself. So, and I’m going to naturally uh cause the hairs to go up on the back of the neck of an integrator because I’m outspoken and I’m ambitious and executive and I’m not worried about their feelings and that integrator needs to know that they’re not gonna succeed without me in the organization. And I need to know that I’m not gonna succeed without them. And we better understand each other. And that is, and it took me years to learn this lesson and it’s just one of seven practices in the leadership piece that it’s hopefully it’ll, it’ll turn the lights on for leaders so they can create what we call neuro balanced teams, not just on the board but on their staff c street also. And staff and below. All right, the book is scaling altruism, a proven pathway for accelerating nonprofit growth and impact. Where do folks go if they want to join the Accelerator program online, which the book is integrated into where, where just where do we go? You go to scaling altru, excuse me. Uh Let me start over Altruist accelerator.org has a landing page and a link to the platform where you can altruist accelerator.org read the book before you start the Accelerator, right? You got to read the book and then the Accelerator goes through and reviews each practice. There’s short videos and a full library of tools and you’ll find people like you in different nonprofits that are working their way through the tools and there’s no barrier to entry, there’s no application and you expect to spend an hour or two a week. That’s all it’s needed. Low dose, high frequency. It’s like getting a gym membership, you, you’re gonna get out of it, what you put into it. And I’m there along with my colleagues, my affiliates and our partners to answer questions and guide people. So no cost, all you have to do is have the ambition to join. And if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. Right. It’s month to month and it’s 79 bucks. It’s about the price of a cell phone. Altruist accelerator.org. All right. That’s it, Donald. Thank you very much for sharing all this. Thank you. Thank you for all the work that you’re doing to help me share and for all the help you’re already delivering to nonprofits and helping them capture um plan giving, which is so critical. It’s such a big piece of this next week. Another author David Rode with his new book, passion isn’t enough. 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. 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. Scotty be with us next week for nonprofit radio. Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95% go out and be great.
Code. Blockchain. Proofs. Wallets. Exchanges. Coins. If foreign words like these keep you from accepting a gift that tens of millions of Gen Z and Millennials invest in and gift, Pat Duffy will set your mind at ease. He defines the terms in plain language and explains why crypto giving belongs on your donation page. He’s co-founder of The Giving Block.
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And welcome to Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio. Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. I am your aptly named host and the pod father of your favorite abdominal podcast. Oh, I’m glad you’re with us. I’d be forced to endure the pain of kyphosis. If you twisted me around the idea that you missed this week’s show, here’s our associate producer, Kate to introduce it. Hey, Tony, here’s what’s up accepting Cryptocurrency gifts, code, Blockchain, proofs, wallets, exchanges, coins. If foreign words like these keep you from accepting a gift that tens of millions of gen Z and millennials invest in and gift. Pat Duffy will set your mind at ease. He defines the terms in plain language and explains why crypto giving belongs on your donation page. He’s co founder of the giving block on Tony’s Steak too. We have a new president were sponsored by donor box, outdated donation forms blocking your supporters, generosity, donor box, fast, flexible and friendly fundraising forums for your nonprofit donor box.org here is accepting Cryptocurrency gifts. It’s a pleasure to welcome Pat Duffy to nonprofit radio. Pat co-founded the giving block, creating the new fundraising category, crypto philanthropy. The giving block helps thousands of nonprofits, fundraise cryptocurrencies, stocks and donor advised fund grants. He was a Forbes 30 under 30 in social impact in 2022. You’ll find the company at the Giving block.com and you’ll find Pat Duffy on linkedin. Pat. Welcome to nonprofit radio. Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. It’s a pleasure. I’m glad you’re with us. Uh, ok, let’s start with basics le let’s make sure everybody understands the, just the essentials, the basics of what Cryptocurrency is before we start talking about how your nonprofit can benefit from it. Yeah, definitely people overcomplicate it a lot. So in very simple terms, it’s a digital form of asset. It’s kind of like money in the sense that you can move it anywhere in the world really quickly. You can sit in an account. Um, it’s fungible divisible. Um But it kind of plays the role of a stock um or of gold kind of stores, the value in the sense that a lot of these cryptocurrencies have a set, um number of units that can’t be increased. The code is written that way. So there’s a scarcity element where you can buy into something and know that it won’t be um manufactured and won’t be creative of it. Uh And then it’s kind of like stocks and that a lot of these cryptocurrencies have speculative values where people are kind of betting on whether or not they’ll go up or down. Um But all of them for the most part are built off of Blockchain. And that is just uh kind of computer riddles, cryptographic uh proofs that are solving uh problems. And when they all um agree on the solution to that proof, a transaction is authorized and money moves so really secure way to store value, to move value. Um super cost efficient, just kind of a really effective version of digital money. Ok. Now it has been with us for years in, in, in the mainstream uh are fairly mainstream. There’s probably argument about that but it would be generous, you know, say mainstream at least or at least fairly mainstream. OK? But when you uh when you start to say, all right, so it’s, it’s sort of like you mentioned gold but then there’s code and you talk about scarcity and some people for some people, it’s speculative and it’s on the Blockchain and you talk about proofs, this is the stuff, this is the stuff that I think makes people like what the what are we talking about here? So, so, all right, that is an overview but we gotta, we gotta drill down what you know, like code and scarcity and speculative and Blockchain proofs uh reassure our listeners that this is something that is safe. Uh you mentioned safe, but you got to explain why the Blockchain and the proofs make it safe. Like why? OK, why is this something that we should just think about before we even start about how to get into it. We’re not there yet. Why should we consider bringing this to our board? Uh you know, with scarcity and speculative and Blockchain and proofs? Yeah, definitely. So every technology that you’re interfacing with sounds like this if you dig into it. So it’s just at a super high level. If you think about Bluetooth and Wi Fi, I even say like if you’re going to buy a car, like most people aren’t really in tune with the fact that like pistons are firing and like, what is the transmission? Like there’s all these things, it would sound infinitely more complicated than it needs to with every technology. Eventually you get to a place of like, why should I care? Do I need to use it? Has it been made easy for me? Um Those sorts of questions when it comes to crypto are important, we’ll get into those to answer the question first about like the complexity of it, like the Blockchain and the proofs and everything else. Like why do we even need something like this? We had money, we have gold, we have stocks. Like what’s the point? Um When you are sending money from one place to another, there’s no real system for it. Like ultimately what’s kind of happening is people are updating numbers and spreadsheets and there are automated processes for it. But like there’s no formalized system that’s authorizing that like there are lawyers authorizing whether or not an agreement is actually legitimate, right? Or that both parties have agreed to it. There are banks authorizing whether or not funds are in one place or another, right? There are people who are initiating transactions and kind of choosing where to park their money. Um When you think about stores of value, you can’t really store value with something like cash. Um you have to have something like gold and gold isn’t fungible, right? You can’t take a piece of gold and divide it and send it on the internet real quick. What do you think about something like stocks? You’re speculating on these assets that are tied to a company but doesn’t really function like money. You can’t move stocks between individual will or try to like stake your stock somewhere and earn interest very conveniently because it’s not technologically driven. There’s a lot of inefficiency in all these different types of money and stocks and gold. So what these cryptographers were trying to figure out is like, can we create a more um useful financial instrument? And in doing so, could we make it so that it’s infinitely more scalable than something like dollars in terms of where the dollars come from? In terms of how difficult it is to move money to one place versus another. Like ultimately, the money isn’t actually moving. We have something called fractional reserve banking where a bank is kind of pretending there’s more money in the bank than there is when you wire money to a bank, they’re not actually getting a bag of cash from somewhere else to kind of back it. Um So what you have with Cryptocurrency in short is you write this code and the code is formalized and it can’t be changed and it says it’s gonna do a few things. We’ll take Bitcoin as an example. So with Bitcoin, they go, there’s only ever gonna be this many Bitcoin and we write the code in a way where it can’t ever be altered. So people will know for sure in the way that when you have dollars sitting in the bank, the Federal Reserve during COVID, for instance, could print a bunch of money devaluing your uh savings. That can’t happen with Bitcoin if people go. But that’s great. There’s a 0% chance that more supply will be injected, but I can still have this asset. It’s easy to move around. Ok? I like that. And then people go, well, if I wanna send it to somebody else, how do I know it’s gonna get there? Right. Or if I have it, how can I prove that? I actually have it and someone can’t just take it away or say it isn’t sitting in my account. Um The code is again written with the cryptography where you would have to get more than half of the computers involved in Bitcoin to all simultaneously agree on the false premise that it isn’t your Bitcoin or the false premise that you send it somewhere else? You’d have to orchestrate what is an impossible level of scale and it packing all of these devices at once, maybe the most secure way and the most provable way to say, I actually have a thing or it’s actually gone where I said, I’d like it to. So you go, ok. So I have a more guaranteed way of saying I own something and a more guaranteed way of saying I’ve moved it somewhere else and people say I like that too and then there’s an efficiency component. So because it’s all code based, you don’t need banks to code is what authorized the transactions. You don’t need banks to prove that you have the asset or to say I moved it to someone else. It’s so much more cost effective and um you don’t have to spend as much money moving it from one place to the other. So you go, oh I could move a billion dollars instantaneously, you know, within a matter of seconds at the lowest cost possible without all these middle men and infrastructural components. So you’re writing code more or less to replace what are a bunch of inefficiencies in the asset types from like cash to stock gold and then the institutions necessary to move those asset types or prove that they’re in a particular position or pretend that they’re in a particular position with a lot of finance So it’s just a really efficient alternate financial system that solves for a lot of problems that cash had, the stocks had that gold had. So people are betting on it when people hold something like Bitcoin, they’re kind of betting on it as if you had a share of stock. Like cell phones are gonna be used more often because they’re so much more convenient than a landline. People are holding Bitcoin oftentimes as a correlated asset saying, I think this cryptography in finance, this uh cryptographic proof of work system. These blockchains, I think these tools are gonna be used more and that companies are gonna use uh these crypto assets to make their systems more efficient. Uh So that’s explaining the technology. Second half of your question was why should nonprofits take it seriously? Well, ok. All right. Before we get there, we, we will, we will, we gotta, we gotta tick off a few things. Um You, well, first of all, let’s reassure people, you said you’re writing code, but let’s just reassure people they’re not writing code, you’re not, you’re not profit is not writing the, the code is written in, in such a well, the code is already written for cryptocurrencies, right? I just wanna make that like when you’re on Google, when you’re using your iphone, when you’re using your tax software, the code is serving a particular purpose. Definitely, you’re just clicking buttons. There’s just making sure that somebody doesn’t say, well, wait, I have to write code. No. OK. If there was a listener who didn’t quite understand. OK. Um You, you said it’s uh now you said it’s scalable, but then you also said there’s a, there’s a finite amount. Those, those two, those two sound incongruous to me. So what am I not? What am I not getting about your explanation? No, great question. So, scalability in terms of the infrastructure, like how much money you can move over a particular period of time or how effectively it can solve different problems. And like if 100,000 people send the transaction or one person sends a transaction, it doesn’t become more difficult, right? You can fit more of these transactions into one block and have them approved. It actually becomes more energy efficient. The more transactions that happen in the sense that if you’re doing one transaction, you’re cracking all these codes to solve it, it kind of takes a lot of energy. This is one of the complaints of something like Bitcoin, but the more people who end up using the technology is actually uh authorizing more transactions at less cost. So it’s scalable in the sense that it allows for, if you wanted to scale the traditional financial ecosystem, you would need skyscrapers, you would need human employees, you would need a bunch of cars, taking them to buildings, you would need more lawyers, more agreements. Um When you do that off of a code base you can make an infinitely larger financial system to offer infinitely more transactions um at infinitely lower cost and more uh effectiveness. So, not scalable in the sense that you create more of the assets themselves. Um but scalable in the sense that more people can participate in that network at lower cost. Ok. Lower cost, greater efficiency, right. So, I mean, comparing it to uh you know, checks, you know, there’s a lot of, if there’s a heavy mail volume in the week, let’s say it’s the final week of December and is a heavy mail volume. You have to wait longer for your check to get to the nonprofit. You have to wait longer during certain periods for your broker to make a stock transfer for you. Even if it’s, to me, it’s just, it seems like it’s only a couple of keystrokes. But sometimes you say, well, it takes up to 3 to 3 business days to, well, it’s like you, you, you, you’re typing a couple of keys. What, what is the three business days? But anyway, uh but brokers, brokers can be all right, broke. All right. So, and to your point, you know, you made the same point. You’d have to build, build a bigger buildings and have more bank employees to scale, you know, billions of transactions or something. All right, I see. I understand. Thank you. Explain the scale up. Um Another one, you talk about, uh you know, security, you’d have to convince more than half of the servers that are, that are part of the chain that you own, the asset that you’re claiming that you own or you’re owning the, uh, we’re not talking about dozens. Reassure people. How many, what’s the scale of the server, the servers that are involved in? You know, let’s just stick with Bitcoin. That was your example for the, for the currency so far. Oh, yeah, I’d have to look up the number but I mean, there’s millions. It could be tens, hundreds. I, I’d have to look at what it is. Um, but in short, when you, when I say I’m gonna send Tony, you know, $100 in Bitcoin, what it does is it wraps it in a cryptographic riddle more or less that these miners. When you hear about like Bitcoin mining, you have all these computers that are waiting to crack riddles. These are riddles that like humans can’t solve it. A computer needs to figure it out and the faster they solve it and by getting it correct, they get a little reward that’s like released on the network. So they, they get a little bit of money off that. So they’re all university incentivized to solve it correctly. You would have to hack into all of these individual computers and get them to simultaneously, uh, agree that an incorrect proof is actually a correct proof that says instead of your wallet is the endpoint someone else’s wallet is the end point, which was impossible. More or less when there were even like 50 of these computers doing it. You’d have to orchestrate and crack into everyone’s system which all has their own security protocols. Um, it just becomes infinitely more impossible over time. So at a bank you can log into one bank uh computer and you can change the records on the spreadsheet or you could push money out of an account to another person. You’d actually have to convince, um, you know, millions of these super computers more or less that the money isn’t actually an Tony’s accounts in someone else’s. And then the same thing is true for changing a transaction record, which is why law enforcement um prefers crypto transactions to cash. Why they think it’s so much more traceable and safe. Um If you’re a criminal who’s moved Bitcoin, let’s say, from one wallet to another, you could never change the record or cook the books like it has moved from a wallet to another wallet. You would need that same level of computer takeover to just pretend you didn’t move money or you took it somewhere. So at an individual level, it allows for its privacy if I send it to you and we’re not being investigated by the FBI. If you’re a company, I could transfer funds without having to go through all the protocols. But if law enforcement were to try to investigate, did you do something you weren’t supposed to do. There’s no way for me to pretend I didn’t commit a crime or move money to that other person. It’s permanently locked in and traceable. All right. Reassuring. 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 accepting Cryptocurrency gifts. All right. So let’s let’s move to um the value, you know, why, why should, why should nonprofits pay attention to this? I mean, I let’s talk a little about like giving trends a bit to, I’m sure this skews by age younger, I I happen to be a baby boomer, young, young, very young, very very young, baby boomer, very young baby, boomer uh mathematic. No, but mathematical proof by, by, by birth year. Uh I, I’m very young baby boomer. Um in case I hadn’t mentioned that I am young baby, but you know, I’m sure there are not many boomers uh giving crypto donation. So let’s talk a little about the giving trends but, but also just, you know, generally why, look, why bother. We’ve been doing this fine with checks, stocks, wire transfers. Why, why should we bother? Oh, it’s a great question. So, if, if the methods of payment you accept as a charity were driven by the nonprofit trying to solve a payments problem, you wouldn’t really have to adapt at all. Right. The nonprofit gets cash through a check the same way they would from a credit card. But you take credit cards as a nonprofit because eventually there are so many people using them and they’re so much more convenient to the ability to get that donor and convert that donor and have them pay in a way where they’ll actually send you the money. Once credit cards become their thing, you eventually have to just adjust to it. Right. The same reason nonprofits take stocks, you don’t take stocks because it’s easier than a credit card. You take stocks because it’s so much more tax efficient for a US donor. If they’re gonna send this appreciated stock to the charity and it’s a million bucks or they send a million in their bank account, they might be erasing an extra 150 grand in capital gains tax liability because the donor doesn’t pay capital gains tax on the donate stuff and neither doesn’t charity. So the example I use is like, think about credit cards, merged with stocks. Credit cards are used because people move money using credit cards and actually there’s so many people doing that, that if you don’t have that option on your site, a lot of people come there to look for it. You ask for bank details or a check instead and they just drop off. They go, this isn’t the way I like to move money. Um And there is a conversion issue with that and then people take stocks again because if you’re gonna get a big donation, 5 to $15,000 average gift size, plenty of them, a lot higher than that. Donors who get into those types of gift sizes. They’re thinking about the numbers, they’re thinking about the math. And if I can give 100 grand to one charity and save $20,000 more, I’m gonna consider that nonprofit. Um, a lot more often than a charity I can always send the cash to. So there’s a sort of a supply side push. That’s right. You can say the donors, there are donors, the supply side of the charities being on the demand side. There’s a, there’s a, there’s a push among don’t when checks became popular, when stocks became popular, when credit cards became popular. Absolutely. Right. Ok. That’s right. So there’s, there’s tens of millions of people in the US who use Cryptocurrency and there’s about 600 million worldwide. So it’s, it’s at a size and scale in terms of the user count and people participating in these systems that it’s not, you can’t not have it as an option at a certain point. So like there’s more users on Coinbase than there are on fidelity or Charles Schwab at this. Like it’s, it’s at a scale that most people who don’t participate in. It aren’t really aware of. Like Gen Zs are more likely to trade crypto than trade stocks, like more likely. And then millennials, 90% of millennial millionaires are crypto traders. Like it’s if you are a millennial or gen Z, that cares seriously about investing in any capacity, it’s a part of your world. It’s part of your portfolio and it’s part of the way you think about money. So when it comes to giving, it’s the same thing. So there’s that element of just the widespread uptake and then there’s the element of it’s so tax efficient. So when something appreciates again, you don’t pay capital against tax on it. So if I have a million dollars in Bitcoin, that’s gone up a lot. And I have a million dollars sitting in the bank, I can move the million dollars in Bitcoin to the charity if I want to make that kind of a donation. And let’s say the 150,000, 200,000 that I owed in state and federal capital gains tax on the appreciation of that investment that evaporates the charity gets the full million. I give them the full million to get the full million dollar write off. And that $200,000 tax burden disappears. And then I, as the donor can even take the million I had in the bank and buy more Bitcoin or whatever crypto I’m donating and now I have a million dollars of Bitcoins if I gave the cash. But it’s at today’s cost basis. I don’t know any taxes on it yet. So it’s this magical tax liability eraser that people have always dealt with stocks, especially older donors, younger donors never really did it because it’s inconvenient. We need to work with the broker. But with crypto, you can send the transfer as easily as you said it with a credit card with this enormous additional tax benefit. And the more of these younger donors who keep their cash in crypto to interest and then move out of those stable cryptocurrencies into investments like Bitcoin, the more of their money that’s parked there, the more convenient it is for them to send it that way, the more tax efficient it is because crypto has outperformed all the other asset classes for the last 10 years. All of those things compound to the point where if you want younger donors in particular young donors to consider that major gift pathway. So you can kind of future proof that donor base for the great wealth transfer and beyond, they’re becoming this larger and larger swap of what that world looks like. Now, what about the charitable uh federal income tax uh deduction? Is there, is there that for a Bitcoin gift. Is there a charitable deduction? Yep. You get the same deductions if you gave anything else, you the tax liability and it’s really convenient. Ok. So you avoid the capital gains and there is a charitable deduction which would be at your, whatever your marginal tax rate is. Ok. And that’s been locked in by the IRS year after year over and over. It’s not going anywhere. Ok. Just making it, making sure the basics are covered. Ok. OK. What more, what more do you want to say uh about uh value, importance, relevance, anything? II, I didn’t wanna, I didn’t wanna end your, your explanation. I just wanted to make uh I wanted to make sure people understand the basics. No, that was it. I was out of important things to say, I guess. Uh the only other thing I would say is um for nonprofits to understand the uptake. So like the majority of the Forbes top 100 nonprofits in the US already have crypto fundraising programs. So it’s, it’s more common than not the bigger and more established. The nonprofit is, it’s becoming pretty much universal for small and mid size nonprofits. Um It’s less common in the same way that they tend to lag on other technology adoption, but it’s, it’s not like a fringe thing from the charity side either. Right. Billions of dollars have been donated. Um Nonprofits actively present this to donors in particular younger donors and it generates revenue, increased average gift size. Like it’s, it’s pretty well adopted over the last 67 years. All right. How do we reassure folks about the headlines that they see, you know, a Bitcoin dropped from? Yeah, I don’t, I don’t really know what the numbers are. I know, like at the low end it went down to $30,000 but it had been as high as, I don’t remember how much, you know, per per coin. How do we reassure folks who read headlines about crypto, Bitcoin? Well, they’re not synonymous. Bitcoin is a, is a, is a coin, one of many cryptocurrencies, but people read headlines about Bitcoin the floor dropping out. How do we reassure people about that? That’s a great question. So there’s um in short, there are several considerations that matter a lot for folks involved in crypto that don’t matter for nonprofits depending on how you’re using it. So, one of the big misconceptions charities think about with crypto is that they have to hold crypto to accept it. So like one of the first things we built into our tool is it immediately liquidates any balances instantaneously. So it’s just a program that scans you have a crypto exchange account on a heavily regulated crypto exchange platform tied to your institutions. Ein it sits there and as soon as crypto hits any wallet in that account, it says automatically sell for the US dollar going rate value instantaneously. So from a volatility standpoint, as an investor or as a nonprofit who wants to add crypto, let’s say to your endowment. Um and invest in it long term price volatility is a concern for sure if you’re investing and you’re not interested in things that are that volatile. Um Or you worry about the, the risk of losing value on the funds that you’re holding and the idea of holding crypto or investing in it as a, a donor or a nonprofit isn’t for you. But for 99% of nonprofits, they use that auto liquidation feature. Even the nonprofits who hold it for the most part liquidate the crypto that comes in and they’ll invest in more stable cryptocurrencies like a Bitcoin Ethereum. They’ll make sure that if there’s some of these smaller all cryptocurrencies that are extra volatile, they don’t hold those things. So as a nonprofit, you can accept the fact that let’s just say us, for example, that there’s 60 ish million people trading this stuff, they have decided to participate in the system. Despite the volatility, this is how they’d like to invest and potentially give to us when it’s up. We’ll probably get more when it’s down. We’ll probably get a little bit less. But ultimately, that volatility is not something we have to endure because it hits our account and it automatically liquidates. So the price volatility thing is optional for charities, whereas it’s not optional for investors. Ok. Right. You’re making a distinction between accepting it and investing in it. Uh, and there’s also price volatility in the stock market. Absolutely. And that’s why stocks, stocks are quickly liquidated. It’s so, it’s, it’s identical. Nonprofits don’t hold stocks that are, that are donated. They, uh, they liquidate that day usually and, and then they can decide to invest or, or spend, you know, what, whatever and if they’re gonna invest in stock it, it’s, it’s obviously a decision that they make independent of the, the, the stock that was donated. That’s right. And it’s probably for the best because there are a lot of, a lot of our nonprofits, like, around this time, like Bitcoin almost hit a new all time high yesterday. Like, cryptocurrencies has been doing really, really well. It’s up like 100 and 50% over the last year. It’s, it’s like, tripled since the bottom of the last Bear market. Um, a lot of nonprofits. I mean, dozens in the last couple weeks have been, like, turn off the auto conversion and I’m like, let’s have a meeting and let’s talk about it. It’s just bad. It’s just natural. You see a thing go up for 12 months and you’re like, it’s gonna keep going up forever. I feel like an idiot. I’m not a sucker like I know. And it’s like, well, let’s just, let’s say let’s not time the crypto market anymore than we’re gonna try to time the, uh, the New York Stock Exchange or you know, or the S and P, we’re not, we’re not gonna be able to, let’s not time these things. Let’s not get carried away either. All right. So now that not only that, not only accepting it, but let’s keep it, let’s hold it. So, so our general, we cannot give financial advice back. We can’t tell anyone not to do. But like, usually after a conversation it’s very rare that any of our nonprofits ever don’t have auto conversion on. And some people get annoyed about that because we’ve been doing this for seven years. So the nonprofits who haven’t had auto conversion on have actually made uh an extraordinary amount of money. If they actually held it through, they didn’t pan excel at different points. It’s gone up a lot over the last seven years, of course. Um But there’s a lot of volatility. So like we said, ever, it’s just like you could turn it on today or turn it off tomorrow and easily lose money. Like there’s a lot of risk in investing and a lot of no in particular, let’s just say if you don’t have an endowment making, the only asset you’re deciding to hold and invest in Cryptocurrency is I don’t think reasonable. And even if you have an endowment, it should be a very small percentage if you’re even considering it just because of like you’re saying, there’s some volatility there, you mentioned different kinds of coins. Uh Let, let’s do we, we’ve used Bitcoin as an example. You mentioned a couple of others. What do, how, how does all that? And there are many right, there’s, there’s hundreds, hundreds, aren’t there maybe thousands? Thousands? All right, thousands of different coins. How does that play into uh what we accept? Uh do we need to accept certain coins? Only ex explain that the basics there? Yeah. So there are some cryptocurrencies that solved really important problems just from a technological standpoint that made it really easy to write codes called smart contracts that like automate processes and allow people to build these kind of applications that tie into the networks. And then there are some cryptocurrencies that are, it’s like open source code related to some other crypto and you make kind of a copy and paste version of it. Like you hear about these meme coins where it’s just kind of um you’ll see a Cryptocurrency and it’s got like a picture of a dog and there’s like $30 billion invested in it. And that’s sort of like baseball cards or certain types of art where it’s like people are investing in it because they’re trying to catch a wave and there’s like momentum and timing and it’s not really doing anything that’s fundamentally changing anyone’s life. It’s just like people want it because other people want it and those tend to muddy the water in terms of people understanding the value because they’re like, oh all cryptos kind of feel like this. But in short, um there’s probably uh you know, a few 100 that are doing unique technological things and those tend to be the top Cryptocurrency. So even if you get down into the top 2030 5080 these are very high market cap um assets, like more than most other types of investments. Like I think on the stock market with the Bitcoin ETF S for instance, like I think the Bitcoin ETF S have well surpassed silver. Like there’s a lot of interest in some of these technologies. But if you made an ETF O one of these like Doge coins, um you probably wouldn’t necessarily see the same level of interest. Um What a nonprofit needs to understand is similar to what we said about the auto conversion. This doesn’t need to be a consideration of yours because again, you’re not investing in these cryptocurrencies or choosing which ones to invest in. You just wanna make sure that whatever is being sent to you isn’t like a scam or something that like the SEC or some other regulatory agency would consider. Um not OK, or maybe classify as a unregistered security. And then you want to make sure that there’s enough liquidity on the order books to accept this and not get caught, hold in the bag you don’t want because we’ve heard these horror stories of very small cap crypto gets donated to charity. It’s $100 million type donation and then they try to move it to an exchange and sell it and they lose 80% of the value because again, the volatility. So that is solved for by using an exchange on the back end instead of just a wallet. So these exchange accounts that we use through Gemini, it’s just like Coinbase, it’s like fidelity. It’s like e trade. It’s a uh exchange with a ton of order book liquidity. Um millions of users people trading into and out of assets and the uh assets that get listed on that exchange. These cryptocurrencies are ones that, that exchange and their legal team in uh relationship to all of these regulators that they interface with have decided are OK to list and have enough interest in market activity um where they can easily liquidate, um buy and sell orders. So when you’re taking crypto through the giving block, it’s only the assets that GM and I the most regulated Cryptocurrency exchange in the US has listed. And then if a donor came to you trying to send you something else, we have something called private donor services where we have a, a lawyer on our team and we can talk to the exchange and other partners to decide like is this a legitimate asset to accept from that donor? But those cases are very rare. So you should almost never. And for pretty much every nonprofit work with the answer is never um be in a situation where you’re deciding, should I accept a particular crypto or not? That should be handled by this exchange with a giant legal team and strong relationships with all the regulators. It’s time for Tony’s Steak Two. Thank you, Kate. We will have a new president. My thinking is around our national nonprofit community. Um And I feel that there’s potential for some of our work to be uh defunded or threatened or, or just minimized. And if we see any of that, we all, all of us have to speak out against it. We can’t only support our, our lane, our mission. We all need to stand together as a nonprofit community. So, like I’m thinking, there’s the potential for nonprofits that do work for uh immigrants rights. LGBT Q plus rights people who fight climate change, those who product uh protect uh reproductive rights and women’s health. Those of us who are advancing public education, fight for uh uh fighting for economic justice and equality and equity, protecting vulnerable populations. Those who work for safer gun laws, advancing social justice and the rule of law. Those of us who champion first amendment rights of speech, assembly and religion, the folks who promote a free press, those who assure ethics in government. Those are the ones I have so far that you may very well think of others. It might be your work or the work of other nonprofits. But the point is that we need to stand up for the work of each of our nation’s nonprofits, not just as I said, not just our own lane. Um, and I’m very willing to say, you know, if these things don’t happen, you know, if, if agencies, uh, aren’t threatened, if, if there, if there isn’t that kind of trouble then, uh, you can call me, uh, an alarmist. I’ll, I’ll accept it six months a year from now. If it’s not happening, Tony, you’re an alarmist. But I do think it’s more likely now than it was before the election. Um, and some of the things I’m thinking of potentially, um, maybe a tax on the, uh charitable deduction, maybe carving out some nonprofits that are no longer considered 501 C three and, and eligible for the federal charitable income tax deduction. That would be enormous that some people, some nonprofits donors can’t get a deduction anymore for giving. Um, it could be rhetoric, you know, it could just be talk whether it’s official or it’s just some random asshole or so it could be some official asshole. Uh, you know, or it could be some random official. You know, if, if we’re talking, if we’re hearing, talking down missions or even specific agencies, we need to all call that out it. We, we, we have to stand together. Um, maybe, maybe the federal government starts unfairly favoring some nonprofits over others in, in some other way, you know, beyond the charitable deduction or rhetoric. We have to all stand up for each other, please. Because if we’re divided, then our community is weakened. We all need to stand for each other. And I do think the potential is there because the country did vote for big change and we’re gonna see it. I also want to salute my fellow veterans, Monday where the show is being published on Monday the 11th Veteran’s Day. I admire your service. You made enormous sacrifices to serve the country in any of our military branches. So I admire that service. I salute you on Veterans Day and those are the issues. Those are the things for Tony’s take two, Kate. A lot of things might change. But what will never change is the love for our veterans. Thank you guys. That is very well said, Kate, you’re right. We can never waiver our support for our veterans and, and our admiration for their service. Well said, well, we’ve got bookoo but loads more time. Here’s the rest of accepting Cryptocurrency gifts with Pat Duffy contrast in exchange which you just explained very well with wallet wallets, which you’ve, you’ve mentioned a couple of times. Uh, what, what, what’s the difference here? Well, well, first, what is a wallet? What is a wallet? And then how does it differ from an exchange? Yeah, this is why nonprofits should be set up with some even if it’s not us. But like a solution that has an exchange account and everything else because donors will often tell nonprofits just pop open a wallet. So for each of these cryptocurrencies, you can participate in them and move value back and forth by having what’s called a wallet. So, like we talked about with Bitcoin, there’s an end point where the Bitcoin we’re sending needs to go and there’s an end point where the Bitcoin was originally sitting. So those are referred to as wallets. So exchanges when you’re holding, um, Bitcoin on exchange, for instance, they have the Bitcoin wallets and they’re holding on to the keys to those wallets. Um You’re kind of giving over the security component to them similar to when you’re buying and selling stocks on a lot of these exchanges. You don’t actually have like a paper stock sitting in a safe somewhere. Um This would be the equivalent of that paper stock example, but digital. So you can actually have Bitcoin sitting in a wallet that you have and it’s your own wallet that you can open up, not a wallet held by the exchange and you can take that Bitcoin keep it in a wallet. Um, that only you have like a private code phrase to get into. So that was the original idea behind the technology. This, when you hear it decentralized and disintermediating, like part of what’s really cool about something like Bitcoin or theorem is you can, if it was just you and I, and we were working on some deal, I was building you a fence and I wanted to send you money. I could send you that full amount of value using something like Bitcoin for my wallet years without ever needing to use an exchange or a lawyer or someone else as a middleman. And the code is written to allow for that. And, and if II, I remember this about wallets too. If, if you lose your, if you lose the key to your wallet, that’s it. You’ve lost, it’s like a 16 digit code or something like that or maybe it’s even longer. I don’t know. Maybe, but if you lose the key, you’ve lost what, everything that’s in your wallet, you can’t prove, you can no longer prove that, that you owned what, what was in, what is in your wallet that you can no longer access. Yeah. And that’s the trade off. There’s a lot of misinformation on this or I wouldn’t even say misinformation. But misunderstandings like, um, the only way that can happen to you is if you lose the information, right. So on, there’s nothing, there’s no security issue with the technology when you hear, like this person lost $100 million of Bitcoin. It’s like, well, it’s like losing your email password but you can’t get another, like, be careful with it is what a lot of people say. Like, if you’re gonna do that, like, then if you have $100 million and you lose the information you wrote down about it, like it’s kind of on you is done. And then the, there’s an inverse to that too, which is sometimes exchanges that you’re trusting with that money. Um, they get hacked and now people think about that as a Cryptocurrency hack. But it’s actually the opposite. What the crypto people will tell you is like, well, if you had your Bitcoin sitting in a wallet and you had the private keys to no one could have ever taken it. So in both scenarios, people think about it as a, uh, Cryptocurrency and security issue, but it’s actually the opposite. There’s a 0% chance you will ever lose your money if you have it in a wallet in your own private keys unless you lose the password. Now, if you’re, and like my parents and other folks, like they will lose that password. I know it just put it on the exchange because the odds of an exchange being hacked for crypto is still less than even traditional banks and find it. Like, it’s, they’re very regulated, they’re very secure. It’s the same as having money in a bank. And a lot of the like cash that you have there is FDIC insured as well, just like you would in a bank. So like there’s a lot of reasons to use an exchange for institutions like a nonprofit. You should definitely be using exchange, not a wallet because if you put in the wrong code and you send it somewhere. It’s not supposed to go, you can’t get it back and if you lose the code that you wrote down to get into that wallet, you can’t get it back. So if you’re very careful and pretty libertarian in nature, it’s an amazing technology for actually having stuff, but being able to move it, um, online, it’s like having gold in the safety, you can actually use to buy goods. Um, but if you’re not that specific person just use an exchange. It’s, it’s like having a bank account. OK. OK. Let’s move forward then to w what we, what we uh like we wanna bring this to our board or our, you know, we’re not, we’re not the CEO we’re gonna bring it to our vice president. Help folks. Um uh We’ve done a lot, we, we’ve, we’ve done a lot of that already. I was gonna say help folks make the argument. But what, what would be steps that we would take? I mean, II I think is there, I think we’ve helped folks understand what it is. Why it’s valuable to accept. Uh Are, are, are you ready to move to? How would we, how would we start to implement a AAA crypto acceptance platform? Yeah, absolutely. So if I were a non bro, let’s say I’m, I’m talking to the board, I’ll just like hit the key points here both in terms of the why and the implementation. I would say there’s trillions of dollars invested in it. There are Bitcoin theory, ETF s. Now on the actual stock market, every hedge fund has it or is moving money into it. Every millennial or gen Z has some invest this way if we want to grow our major gift program, which generally speaking, probably has an average donor age of like mid sixties um and not slowly have that eaten away if we want to win out the Great Wall Transfer. Um We want to get a a younger, more robust uh donor base that actually has major giving potential. Like we wanna grow this nonprofit and kind of not get left behind by a very serious financial trend. Like this is a donation method. We need to accept kind of point blank period like it just needs to be an option for our donors. Um Now, in terms of how we implement it, there’s a couple of really important things we need to do. One. We need to make sure that it’s easily discoverable on our website. Um This mistake has been made with stocks, with donor advice funds, sometimes even with bank transfers where it’s really hard to find alternative giving options. Um which is why platforms like ours, in addition to this donation form that we give to nonprofits, um We aggregate all of our charities on the giving block.com with a search bar where donors go search for charities that take crypto and give and we get tens of millions of dollars donated through that channel because donors look on the nonprofit site, they don’t see it and then they just go to Google, Google take this donation. It’s too, there’s too many tax implications for me to not give it directly. We don’t want to be that charity because like every day so it goes to the giving block looking for some heart related charity, they don’t see it. So they give this giant crypto donation to American Heart Association instead, like our donors need to know we take this. So I would take seriously like our ways to give menu and then like the donate button on our site where it takes you to this giving interface. Like I wanna make sure that I’ve got a very clear other ways to give type options, crypto stop donor avi funds a bank transfer. Like let’s get that infrastructure right? So when donors are on our site looking for a way to give, they’ll find this if they’re looking for it. Um Then two, I would say in terms of how we integrate it on our site, I would remind the board and it’s a copy and paste donation form, just like anything else. There’s nothing crypto technological involved here. All of that is built into the code on the back end, we are just pasting a giving form on our site where donors select which crypto they wanna give, enter their details and then send uh money. What happens for us is that crypto hits an account, it cashes out, it swept to a bank account. We get cash as if they use the credit card or anything else. But the donor gets the crypto giving journey they’re looking for. So to explain that we are accommodating the best in class crypto donor journey. They can send money from any of the major exchanges or wallets, etcetera. It’s fully accommodating. And for us, we’re just getting cash. This price volatility concerns which cryptos we take, how do we hold it? When do we hold it? All of that is off the table. These things have been solved for. Um And then the real conversation from there is like, how do we fundraise it? And that final step is one that a lot of nonprofits missed our 1st 30 clients that we signed for the giving block were charities that already took crypto that we signed over to our product instead. Not even because our product was so much better. It had a lot of features that were good. Um But because we knew how to fundraise it and we helped them do some basic stuff like talk about the fact that they take it on social and add in other ways to give button in their capital campaign emails. We added QR codes to the direct mailers people were sending out and people started ho their phone over a piece of paper and sending $50,000 in Bitcoin because so it’s available for them. Um, those sorts of considerations often get missed and then you could still do all of those other things. Right. And end up being one of these great nonprofits with a donate Bitcoin button that just sits somewhere collecting dust because you never really told your donors about it. Um That’s the final consideration. Do you have any more fundraising tips? Oh, yeah, I mean, sure. All right. Well, uh infinite. Uh That’s a lot. But uh we could, we could do with AAA very small, finite number like two, just another couple more fundraising tips because it’s very analogous to gifts we’ve been taking for, for decades and generations. I mean, you, you mentioned, you know, talking about it on social, uh adding a button making it clear on your ways to give, drop down menu. Yeah. So to reassure folks that this is not so something esoteric and uh, I don’t know, forbidden or, you know, whatever nuanced share, share a couple more simple, you know, fundraising methods. It’s, it’s probably an overstatement anyway. I’ve probably got, I’ve probably got three good ones and then a bunch of share a few more. But yeah, so to your point, I feel like this is, it’s, it is fundraising advice. It’s, it’s like a bit more um high level but like just pretend it stocks is like a really important thing for every fundraiser to think about for at the organization. They just pretend it stocks. What would you do. And unfortunately, for a lot of nonprofits, when you make that list of what you would do for stock, what you realize is everything you’re writing down you’re not doing for stocks. You know, like, well, I’d make it really easy to find on my website when I am having a major gift meeting. I would of course, bring it up as an option with the donors because maybe they don’t think of their stocks as a donation method. They think of it as an investment. And maybe this donor who gives us 10-K a year is like, well, the S and P is up 25%. Like I would, can I fulfill my $100,000.10 year pledge right now because I have a huge tax incentive to do it at this. It’s like I would have it featured there. I would make it really easy. Again, I put a QR code that opens up this giving page slash form so younger people could send this stuff from their phones. I would make sure that if I’m sending a capital campaign email that like this is such an important giving option with a way higher average gift size, like let’s make sure it’s easy to find. So think about it like a stocks is what I would say first and foremost. And then the second piece I would say is blended with stocks and with donor advised funds, right? And with these other tax efficient giving options, if you take real estate, whatever that is, blend it all together. Because what that solves for is one of the biggest sticking points for nonprofits donor segmentation and strategy. They’re like, who is a crypto donor? How do I know when to ask for crypto versus something else? How do I find a crypto donor in my database? Like, how do I know for sure that I should be asked for crypto and not these other things. It’s really hard to figure that out and it takes time and depending on the quality of your data and Wealth engine tools, like not every charity has availability um or access to those things. If you just take crypto and you mix it in with stock and that whatever other things you take. Now, suddenly every email you send makes sense. It could be going to every donor you have at every agent just goes, hey, we take tax efficient options like stock d crypto, et cetera, right? It’s, it’s all directly analogous to forms of giving that you just named. I mean, how do you know if somebody has a donor advice fund? You don’t? So you could just mention in your, in your, in your over your lunch that, you know, you know, donor advice funds are, are, are a great way to give. Stocks are a great way to give. We accept Cryptocurrency, you know, and there’s something resonates with somebody then they’ll say, oh, crypto, crypto, oh, I have a donor advice fund. So, you know, you don’t need to know, you know, just like you don’t need to know someone’s wealth necessarily to ask for a gift. You can look at their giving history and you can just promote, promote it in the same breath that you’re promoting stocks and stocks and donor advised funds. And we accept, we accept crypto as well. 100%. No, you nailed it and it, it’s helpful to know. It’s nice to know. And even then it’s a lot less complicated. People think leave cryptos up a lot in a particular year. And you have these donors who gave crypto the last year, like my version of stewardship is like, we just email donors and we’re like, hey, cryptos up a lot like you feeling generous and if crypto is down a lot, sometimes we’re like, hey, we know crypto is down a lot. Like we’re not gonna ask you for money right now because it’s the way you like to give. But maybe you could introduce us to some friends or run a fundraising for us, maybe some like, like maybe there’s other kind of crypto things we could be doing. Like it’s helpful as an indicator, but it’s to your point, it’s not necessary you can just open up the options. And I guess the last thing I’ll say is that if you’re trying to get them to come out of the woodwork. A match is so powerful for all these giving options. I, until we started this company, like it’s, it was seven years ago and still throughout this period, I’ve never found a nonprofit who independent of us did a crypto specific match, a stock specific match. A da A specific match. And das was always the one that blew my mind the most. I’m like, there’s $260 billion sitting in accounts earmarked for charity. It’s the only money these donors have that they can’t spend anywhere else. It’s already sitting in, it can only ever go to a charity and what they’ll probably do, especially if they’re in their thirties or forties, they’ll let it sit there for decades and they’ll add it to an estate plan eventually. Like there’s no urgency they got the taxes out of when they parked it there. So how do you get the money out? Like if a donor gave me 25 grand tomorrow, I go. Can I use this as a match? They always say yes, you’re like, yeah, but why not help you fund raise? And I would just put an email out and be like if you have a DA account will match the next 25 grand in given. And I wanna know who in my donor base, who has the debt, how much will they send? And once I get 1000 bucks for someone who has one of those like now when I’m steering that donor, like how much money do they have in that account? Can we block it in as a commitment to us? Like, you wouldn’t even have that conversation without prompting it? So, in short matching the specific giving options occasionally, especially with the targeted email to particular high value donors, let’s say really nice way to get people coming out of the woodwork in addition to just sprinkling it in as a passive option. Let’s talk a little about something you you mentioned in passing like to flush it out a bit. Uh mining energy consumption. Uh The popular press uh explains that uh these, these mining operations can be very energy intensive. Let’s uh can you flush that out? I don’t know if you can reassure folks, but at least explain what it is. We’re explain what it is that I’m talking about. I’m explain, explain, explain to the listeners what I’m talking about because I don’t, I don’t fully understand it, but I know there’s a lot of energy behind all these calculations and proofs and they have uh they have an energy, they have an impact on our energy infrastructure. No, 100%. So there’s like there’s warehouses with these computers, like thousands of them sometimes and they’re like running these computers that are trying to solve um these proofs to authorize transactions um for a network like Bitcoin in particular, like it requires the most they use crypt or cryptographic proof of work is what it’s called. And there’s a lot of value in it that other types of um networks don’t have in terms of like the utmost security and traceability and everything. Like it’s, it does a lot of really powerful things, but it uses more energy than it should. However, it’s exponentially less than is reported. Um because a weird thing happened, like the, the media more or less than it came from a Columbia research thing that was like quickly debunked, but no one seemed to care. Um They confuse what’s called a block with a transaction. So we talked about it earlier. You could have one transaction like one Bitcoin transaction that goes out to the network. And if it was the only one, that’s all that would be in one of those blocks on a Blockchain. So once uh once the system gets a block, then the computers all fight to try to figure it out as fast as possible and it cracks the code. But when there’s a lot of transactions happening in each of these blocks, there’s usually between like 1000 and 2500, they took a number like the amount of dollars per Bitcoin transaction. And I think they said it’s like 100 and 5 to 100 and $35 worth of energy per transaction. One, if that were the case, no one would do it. Obviously, just everyone would be losing a ton of money all. Like it just mathematically, people should have seen that number. But like, well, that’s impossible. Obviously, people wouldn’t spend more than what they’re sending hundreds of thousands of times a day. Like, it’s just not a thing. Um But you, when, once you divide it down, it’s like a few sets of transaction for the most energy intensive. So like Bitcoin and a zillion zeros and ultimately a decimal like fractions of a cent for every other Cryptocurrency that uses proof of work with these more efficient systems. So even at that scale, it’s a ton of energy for something like Bitcoin and people are always trying to find ways to make it more efficient. Um but it’s exponentially less than what’s reported. And I think it’s inarguable that Bitcoin is still more efficient than the traditional financial system. Like no one runs numbers saying like, well, if we want to use banks, like we said, we have infinite skyscrapers and commuters and like lawyer, like there’s just an infinite amount of waste and energy and like little sheets of plastic getting dumped into landfills to like make traditional finance work. Like the Bitcoin ecosystem is not nearly as significant as I feel like people reported on. Um However, it’s definitely the least energy efficient of the cryptocurrencies and it’s like, it’s a good thing that people are like, let’s make it a lot more efficient because it’s using more energy than it should over time. I’m just kind of like you said about the postal service. I’m betting on Cryptocurrency even something like Bitcoin over the next five years in particular to become exponentially more efficient. In the same way, I would bet on emails over time being a less energy intensive way to move mail than like the post office. Like, just having code versus infinite, like actual physical infrastructure and commuting. Like, it just, it’s a better bet from an ecological standpoint even though it started off, I think, pretty inefficient. OK. And, and that’s where a lot of the press came from. All right. Plus this, plus this misunderstanding that you said was debunked. But you know, the that rarely sees, sees a lot. It gets anywhere near the number of eyes as the original reporting does. OK? All right. Um What, what proportion of all the crypto transactions is Bitcoin? Is it, is it an enormous proportion? Is it, is it, is it as outsized as it seems uh to, to AAA non crypto investor or, or do you know what? It’s a great question. I don’t know if there are more versus all of the other cryptocurrencies out of all the transactions as the denominator. How many are, are Bitcoin in the numerator? I’d have to look usually not a lot. So what’s interesting is a lot of people because um Bitcoin requires more energy like this is what happens, right? It requires more energy to send a Bitcoin transaction. It costs more to the users. Um They tend to move their funds using different networks. Um So even people have like Ethereum, which is more efficient than um Bitcoin. It gets kind of technologically. It’s, it’s, it’s not extraordinarily complicated. But what happens is like, you can take a Cryptocurrency like Ethereum and you can what’s called rapid. So you can have a asset that’s sitting on a different chain. So like, let’s call it solana totally different Cryptocurrency. Um You can have a asset sitting on the Salana chain that’s just pegged to the value of Ethereum. But you can move it across their network at which point you can then move it back on to like a the, you cash out the salon and you exchange it for a theorem. So people do that kind of stuff all the time, um where they’ll move Ethereum or they’ll move Bitcoin or other assets, but they’re moving it across other chains that use less energy because it saves everybody money. So I’d have to see the actual number. I think it’s a Bitcoin is, I think more than half the total crypto market cap. But I’d be shocked if it was more than like 10% of the overall network activity. Like I think a lot of people tend to move value on some of these newer cryptos that, that got a bit more efficient. But in terms of the total value, it, it’s, you’re saying a little more than half yeah, a lot of people park it, they treat it like a lot of people call it digital gold. Um It’s the least um the least volatile versus some of these other cryptos that just have smaller user bases and more kind of uh speculation on it. Um So a lot of people will kind of invest in other cryptocurrencies and they rotate back into Bitcoin in the same way. Some people rotate back into like cash or gold uh store value type thing. It’s valuable. You make all these analogies to the, the traditional, you know, the longest established um stores of value methods of exchange. No, because I think it’s comforting for folks. You know, it’s, it’s just like, you know, you promote stock gifts. You, you accepted, you decided to accept credit cards 40 years ago, et cetera, right? You know, there’s, there’s value in these analogies that are based on known understood uh exchanges of value. Oh, definitely. I mean, I wouldn’t understand. I have a political science degree. And the other guy that I found the company with was the crypto guy. Like he got me into it and like it took a lot of these types of analogies for me because I was like, it’s sounds like vaporware, it’s backed by nothing. It’s just like code based money. Like I don’t. And then he was like, no, it’s the double spend problem. It’s like, wait, this is the only kind of money you can’t counterfeit. He was like, yeah, I’m like, that’s very valuable. That’s interesting. And you can’t make more of it. Yeah. So it’s like, cool. But you could actually move it like you can move it like, instantly anywhere, like, yeah, and then you can write code that moves it around and it’s all, like I say, yeah, I’m like, this is ok, I get it. This is kind of cool. This does a lot of things that nothing else does. He’s like, yeah, that’s why people are buying it. They’re not just dumb. I was like, OK, it makes more sense. I, I, one quick thing on this, I listened to a podcast before starting the company maybe six months before where I’ve gotten into trading crypto at all. And I went on a trip with friends and which, you know, we drank beers and we were at the beach and I talked about 10 people out of ever buying crypto because I listened to this podcast and I was like, backed by nothing. It’s paper and I told everybody about it. Just traditional financial guys I was listening to and then eventually got into it and invested and like, never circled back with some of those people. And then they saw that we had started the company and the stuff we were doing and I tried to like, what the hell dude, why didn’t you tell me to buy this? It’s like quadrupled. And I was like, I was being gen, I wasn’t trying to trick you. I just didn’t get it yet. Not only why didn’t you tell us to buy it? Why did you tell us not to buy it? I was adamant before six months before you co-founded a company based on the, the exact, the exact store of value that you told people to avoid. All right, I needed to do some research. You’re a hypocrite. You’re a hypocrite. All right. All right. Leave us, leave us with some closing thoughts. Pat or, or maybe there’s something we haven’t talked about that. You want folks to know, I’ll throw that out first before closing thoughts. Anything, anything I didn’t ask you, maybe that you want, you want to talk about? Uh I touched on it lightly but it’s a timing thing. So, uh Bitcoin almost hit a new all time high yesterday, like the market’s done really well this year. So in a year where crypto is down, you have significantly less people who have appreciated assets uh to donate for that tax incentive. Like this year is uniquely good for that. Like we’ve had a huge recovery and are looking at new all time highs. Um And then the other piece is the end of year giving for crypto similar to stocks, um is even more extraordinary than um the end of your search we see for things like cash because they’re trying to get up against that end of your tax deadline. So a lot of these transfers happen in November and December. So the main thing is like, if you’re a nonprofit who isn’t taking crypto now is definitely the time to consider it seriously. Um You don’t wanna be like, we’ll look at this in February of next year just from a timing standpoint. Like it’s a really, if you’re at all thinking about it now is the time to like have a conversation and do a bit of research. Uh Just cause like for us, generally speaking, in that end of year window, it’s like 60% of our donation volume um in just a couple of months versus the rest of the year. So it’s a significant um fundraising opportunity. Ok. That’s a good place to wrap, I think because we’ve talked a lot about why do it, what, what the value is? Thank you. All right. This is the, this is the time, it’s the fourth quarter and values are very high. Pat Duffy co-founder of the Giving block at the giving block.com. You’ll find Pat on linkedin. Pat. Thanks for sharing your, your wisdom, your uh your expertise on this and uh your hopefulness. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. This is great pleasure next week, scaling altruism with Donald Summers. 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. 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 guy and this music is by Scott Stein. 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.