Nonprofit Radio for April 26, 2019: Strategic Knowledge Management & Ethics In Your Prospect Research

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Dar Veverka & Janice Chan: Strategic Knowledge Management
Documents. Data. Projects. Governance. Training. They’re all components of knowledge management and our panel from 19NTC explains how to manage properly. Both returning, they’re Dar Veverka from Urban Teachers and Janice Chan at Shift and Scaffold.





Maria Semple

Maria Semple: Ethics In Your Prospect Research
There’s a lot of personal and private info available on your donors, volunteers and prospects.  Your researcher’s job is to find it. Where are the boundaries? How do you protect it? Maria Semple takes on these and other potential landmines. She’s our prospect research contributor and The Prospect Finder.





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Hello and welcome to Tony martignetti non-profit Radio Big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent on your aptly named host. Oh, I’m glad you’re with me. I’d come down with a case of stati O p Jia if you kicked me in the butt with the idea that you missed today’s show Strategic knowledge management documents, data projects, governance, training They’re all components of knowledge management and our panel from nineteen ntcdinosaur planes. How to manage properly both returning there. Dar Viv arika from Urban teachers and Janice Chan at Shift in Scaffold and Ethics in your Prospect Research There’s a lot of personal and private info available about all of us and your donors. Your researchers job is to find it. Where are the boundaries? How do you protect it? Maria Simple takes on these and other potential landmines. She’s our prospect research contributor and the Prospect Finder. I’m Tony Steak to be the one we’re sponsored by Pursuant Full service fund-raising Data driven and technology enabled Tony dahna slash pursuant by Wagner CPS guiding you beyond the numbers weinger cps dot com and by text to give mobile donations made easy text NPR to four four four nine nine nine Here is strategic knowledge management from the twenty nineteen non-profit Technology Conference. Welcome to Tony martignetti non-profit Radio coverage of nineteen ninety si. You know what that is? It’s the twenty nineteen non-profit Technology Conference. You know that we’re in Oregon, Portland, Oregon at the convention center. You know that all of our nineteen ninety si interviews are brought to you by our partners at Act Blue Free fund-raising Tools to help non-profits make an impact with me now are Darby Burka and Janice Chan. Dar is director of information technology and at urban teachers seated next to me and Janice Chan is consultant at Shift in Scaffold. Welcome back to the show. Both of you think you can be back. Thank you very much. Let’s so we’re talking about strategic knowledge management Your your workshop topic Strategic knowledge Management Don’t stop halfway. Janice. What? What? Halfway. What? What? What’s the problem here? Why do we need this session? Uh, my dar actually chose the name of the sessions and maybe you want to talk about that. Okay, Well, either won or you go for a lot of places. People think of knowledge management as solely just We put some documents and SharePoint. We organize the things on our file server and that’s it. They stop there. But that’s really just a foundational piece for knowledge management, and it’s really just a small part of it. So our session was going over the other things you need to consider instead of just we filed our documents. Okay, Janice, how would you know? Let’s make sure everybody has a common understanding of terms. What we need, what we mean when we say knowledge management. So this is, you know, when you’re in an organization, everybody needs some type of information. People have a lot of experience and expertise, but it’s it’s often trapped in people’s heads or we have the file somewhere, but nobody could find them. So I just end up asking darl the things. And so how do you make it so that the right and the people confined the right information at the right time when they need it on DH in the way that they needed? So they’re not spending an hour digging through unorganized sheer drive when we could have just organized and they’re like, Oh, I know howto Advil unt ears to our serum because it’s in the volunteermatch judgment folder and that, you know, like it’s in a place that makes sense. Teo Awesome to our organization. Okay, okay. I said, uh, the So the halfway point is the documents in a share point. And that’s where a lot of people are stopping but trouble? Yeah, a lot of folks just think that’s all you do, and it’s You need to go beyond that and get buy-in from the rest of your organization and think about the other ways that knowledge flow. A lot of knowledge flows through organizations, and it’s not just sitting in your SharePoint drive and you need to deal with How do you manage all that? A lot of places waste a lot of time. What are what are the other elements of knowledge? Management? Um, knowledge management comes into play with data governance. Were all data driven organizations these days. So you’ve got everything sitting in your databases. Why isn’t why are people dealing with processes around that? For knowledge management, you’ve got project management. You do you know these these built out tech projects that cost you thousands of dollars and nobody does the documentation or things about thinks about building things in. Like, for instance, whether the examples we gave it our session. If you’re redesigning a website you’ve already thought about who’s gonna be maintaining that. Whose job is that? After the fact? What do you need the vendor to do? What type of documentation. But people don’t build that into the project. They think about it, but he never actually get it into the formal project. So that’s all part of knowledge management. Okay, eyes, they’re more generous. And also things like training, right. Like when we have new staff, we think we need to train them. We need to onboard them, we think actively about that stuff. And then we don’t always think of it after That person is no longer the new employees. And so we don’t keep that going. And we lose a lot that way because things change right? We don’t necessary. Maybe updated as a star. Kind of referred, right? Like we know we made the how to guide. Great. We never have to update it. But that process of balls because we realized hey, this doesn’t work out as well as we thought. So now we’ve changed it, right? We’re applying that learning that can get loss of It’s not documented when that person who made that improvement walks out the door. You know they find your job or whatever or, you know, even just things like, you know, when people leave right, we don’t always capture that institutional knowledge. My people, when people leave and we’re just like all right, give us your email account password on like you know it. So making sure that that stays within the organization also that it just feeds back into the world, you know, sort of like when you manage a project and you kind of do be brief sometimes after a project. Hopefully you debrief. Does that go anywhere? Because if you have that meeting, then it’s only in the minds of people who were at that meeting. And that doesn’t That’s a lot of knowledge that maybe it’s useful to other people. Normalization will be used for moving forward, and it can easily get lost. We’Ll capture it. I presume you spent a lot of time in the session or have you had your session? OK, you’re dahna downside. Okay, Talking about resource is tools tools that we can use for for knowledge management going beyond documents. So let’s spend a good amount of time doing that. Janice, you want to start with, um, with a tool? Sure. So I think one of the things that way talked a little bit about there. Two types of knowledge is the explicit were just like here you do Step one. And here you do Step two, and usually the task knowledge is sort of like, you know, when you’re baking and you’re like what this done look like? Great. And it’s hard to figure that out sometimes. Like, you know, data governance. You’re like, How do I define those? Like, What does this mean? Why does this number look like not what I was expecting? And I think a lot of times we don’t always have the language. We don’t always have that shared language. Tio have that discussion. So when you map out a process right, if you do that diagram of like here’s, here’s what happens. Here’s which systems are connected to each other, and somebody’s like I never realized that right, Like that’s not the model that I have in my head of how these things fit together, and I had these other pieces that are not on the diagram that you just wrote. The act of like making those diagrams is is you know, Wei Tau have that conversation, get that knowledge out of people’s heads and get a documented right than other people can see. That s so There are a lot of tools for that. Like really simple. I’m sorry. Taxonomy. Taxonomy is another. Another helpful thing I think about autonomy is Oh, no Texas. Tow the grant like different things. Teo also think about it. Buy-in named Tulip zoho. I really like like paddle. It is really, like, cheap. Easy. It’s not made for that necessarily. But you can use it. Pagnoni. It’s really it’s men for teacher. A lot of teachers use it, I think. But it’s free. It’s You don’t have to, like, learn how to use it. There’s not like a steep learning curve, which is helpful for diagrams. You’re like, you know, you can just do pencil on paper, but you know, good, more advanced toward, You know you’re losing charts and all of that or more advanced. But they take longer to learn how to use, so that vanish now. So I’ve got a I’ve got a question. It may be embarrassingly basic, but we ask anyway. All right, So now if we have created this, uh, sort of this organizational chart or this this flow of this chart that in paddle it how do we How do we now preserve that so that people confined It is, It is. It is a simple is the shared drive on a network. I think it depends on what it is and what it’s for, right? Like if it’s hears we’re documenting our process for maybe managing volunteers. Or maybe this is how you make updates on your way you might share. You might save it wherever you might be in your share. Dr. It’s wherever you have your documentation, which honestly, should be wherever people go, because if people don’t go to it, then you have to do that whole, like trying to get people to go to. No place is just more on top of more like it’s just not gonna happen when they already are exactly exactly wherever they are. Just just make it work for there. Okay, okay. Time for a break. Pursuant. the art of first Impressions. How to combine strategy analytics and creative to capture new capture, captivate its, actually captivate new donors and keep them coming back. It’s their e book. It’s on donor acquisition and how to make a smashing first impression. You will find it on the listener landing page at tony dot m. A slash pursuing capital p for please, of course. Now let’s go back to strategic knowledge management. Another tool door you can share with you a couple things I can think about. We demonstrated some visual tools, just having simple visual guides to guide people on what systems do what we demonstrated several of those yesterday, and we also know what kind of systems are we talking about? A different knowledge systems. Maybe you’ve got databases. Maybe you’ve got documents, shares, maybe a process. Documents for the finance system live somewhere else. How our users supposed to know what system Teo use if they don’t even know what systems that you have so doing visual guides for where do I find this? Or where do I put that simple stuff that people can literally stick on? The fridge is in their offices, so people see that constantly as a reminder. We demonstrated some landing pages in Portales. A lot of people think of of that is just a way to get into the document management system. But you could do so much more with a portal you can have links to. Resource is links two different systems guides on where you should put stuff. Updates from the internal newsletter. To remind people of recent resource is way did a whole system of links. If folks check the collaborative notes for our session, we put about a page and a half of links for folks to different tools. And then he also made a Google drive of downloadable resource is for folks to express. Okay, well, we need to identify the first. Where’s the where’s the sheet of patient half of links that’s going to be in the collaborative notes for our session. With that, it’s it’s on this session. If you go to the session page on the NDC agenda, there will be a link to our social. Okay, so you start in ten dot org’s, then you go into the conference, extend into the agenda. Great. So on on Wednesday morning, we have is the strategic Knowledge management. If you click on that the session description, all of the links Aaron there Wave also tested it on both of our Twitter accounts. And then we can also post at the forums and handup Florence under the Where do we want? Put that one in the main discussion or debate? Remain discussion with the mid discussion for him with us. The links because we did a lot of resource, is this is a lot for folks to absorb. Let’s take time. What is your what? Your Twitter ID? Oh, sure example. At Darva arika d a r E v e r k Darby murcott Janice What’s yours? It’s a curiosity bilich at curiosity. Bone or bones? Singular singular curiosity. Bone going challenge metoo way. Curiosity is much easier to spell them. Geever. That’s curiosity Bone. OK, OK, good. All right, So now where else is it? Besides the Twitter Twitter accounts, you said it’s in a forum. Thie tenn dot org’s community forums will go ahead, and we’ll post that on the discussion. And then I think the decision makers would be a good one for that as well. And folks confined that okay, community forums within within ten dahna. Or there’s an decision makers as well as a discussed one, and we’LL go ahead and put that link up for folks because we did a lot of research, and a lot of resource is because we know it’s it’s hard to keep track. We’re gonna have to talk about some of these because we’re doing this for about ten minutes and I have a half hour segment to fill. So it’s okay. You don’t hook with Don’t look with go to the community forum, weigh a lot more. Okay. Okay, Janice, go ahead. Your turn, please. S o. I think that Okay, way talked about sort of the diagram diagrams. They’re, like, my favorite way. Talked about training, right? So I think also in terms of thinking, we talked a little bit about, like, the explicit versus task knowledge. And so sometimes it’s sort of like you’re like, where do I start? Right, So, like, I think that, like, just starting with getting things out of people’s heads, and you’ii think you come up together with some strategies like the, you know, shadowing people and sort of like doing the retrospective after an offense or things like that about shadowing something in real life. What’s that about shuttering people? So, you know, sometimes I don’t know if you’ve ever had that experience. It’s like, maybe haven’t somebody knew who’s coming on board and they ask all these questions. You’re like, I never would have thought to explain them if you had an *** that question. So sometimes, you know, in terms of getting that knowledge out of someone’s head, we don’t always realize that we have it because we’re like, Oh, yeah, like I just do it. And I’ve been doing this for a long time, and I don’t realize that that, you know, personal system that I’ve come up with for how to get this done really efficiently, that that’s actually knowledge that is useful and that I can share with someone else, like I could teach somebody else I do. This, it is, may be hard to think about how to do that, and sometimes the best, like the easiest way is to have someone who doesn’t have that experience watch you do, you know, like maybe how do I, you know, host a good podcast? How do I do an interview, right? And so you watch somebody else do it, and then you come up with these. You either like notice. Oh, they’re doing it. This and this order, they’re doing it in this way. Or it’s an opportunity to ask that question of, you know, like, why did you choose to do it that way? Right? And I wouldn’t have thought to explain the decision for me, Like, you know, I’ve done this a million times advantage, just, you know, So I think that’s a good, easy way to pull it out. Anybody could do it. Another simple related to that. Is it sort of just telling someone like, Oh, yeah, you just go enter this over there. You could use simple tools that we all have on our laptops I movie or another, you know, quickie tool, off of Windows, laptop and just scream cast really quick what you’re actually doing and capture that in a thirty second video. You know, you could post that internally. A lot of us use chat programs at work, you know, slack or G chat or whatever. You could post that straight in there on a team channel and say by the way. This is how you do the thing. And then if people have questions about, why are you doing it? That way you can have more of a live back and forth and just a static. You know, just go do that thing. But I think even to write, like not just the not just sharing it in that moment when somebody has that question, but making sure that it’s it’s stored somewhere that people confined it later because they’re like you had that question. Probably five other people will have that question. So let me just save save the time now and just put in a place where you could find all of the screen cast on DH. Yeah, they’re a lot of simple, like snag. It is. Another one is just really. It’s really simple to use on. It’s not that expensive, so a screen Flo would be another one that’s a little bit more pricey. It’s maybe ninety nine, but it’s it’s another good moflow captures maggot. What you’re doing live on your computer to demonstrate that for folks, Maybe you’ve got your Tio. You know, a lot of folks are purely remote offices, so you might not have that ability to sit one on one, but you you could capture what you’re doing for a training video like Janice mentioned. If one person has that question, you know, ten other people have got that questions of capturing that knowledge of them, making sure you get that knowledge out as well, Not just capturing at once, but making sure people know where that resource is good. And sometimes that’s faster, right? Like trying to get somebody to like, can you? Right, the out, all the stops and documentation. They just look at you with that leg. Look like I don’t want to need you to spend time like if you were to ask him to show you that I’m like, Oh, yeah, like you did so did it up right? And and so that’s almost a wayto document more quickly. So especially people who don’t like to write things out or like they’re really stress out about it, but are willing to answer that question in that moment. If you can capture that then and make it easy for them, I think sometimes that it’s pompel for that, Uh, I don’t have anything else to say except what other? Whatever tools we got when I was trying, I was trying to think of some different types of data needs, but I can’t I can’t think of any that that I was going to ask you about specifically. So you may as well just keep going. We can talk about women defremery. Sure, a couple of the other items we talked about that are sort of the basis for when we talk about knowledge management. People look at that and they go, How did I do that? What are some practical ways to do that? So we talked about having a knowledge management framework, and frameworks can be really intimidating for folks. They see that they look online and they say all these diagrams and they go. I don’t know what that is, but it’s really just a lens for thinking about the structure. Framework is just a structure. It’s a scaffold. Eso It’s how you build your knowledge management and a focus of what’s important for your organization. Is it that is Janice mentioned? Capturing tacit knowledge is a huge problem. Your organization nobody writes anything down. They leave and then you don’t know what they did so maybe you want to build your knowledge management process, focusing on capturing tacit knowledge. Maybe it is that you guys love doing documentation, but nobody ever updates the documentation. So maybe you need to build your framework on a continuous capturing of that knowledge and continues updating instead. So we talked about different ways to to think about how knowledge works at your organization and how you should build your structures around that. And then another simple tool that we talked about is a taxonomy, which most people already have at their organizations. But they don’t think about it, and it’s not really written down. And that’s the way you refer to commonalities. So maybe your know it. Urban teachers. We’ve got three remote offices, and we use acronyms in particular terms to refer to them. We’ve got terms for referring to our program and for different stages of our participants. That’s a taxonomy. That’s something we can use across all of our systems as a common language, and it usually starts in the in the document management system, and that’s often where people see it. They build that out across multiple systems that can be used in your CR M. It could be used in your HR system. It could be used in your documentation on when you start having a common taxonomy or lexicon like that, it makes it easier to capture knowledge management cause People start using the same things to refer to processes, and it helps bring teams together and really provides a cohesion around your knowledge in your organization. Just a common understanding. Yeah, and people are often they already have one. They just don’t think about it, his attacks on me, but in general, they’ve already got one. The other thing, too, is that you can capture all of this documentation, right? But if nobody knows what it’s called like if you call it volunteermatch judgment and I call it, I don’t know constitutent management or whatever, right, I that’s no good, because then I’m not finding I’m not looking under there because I don’t think that that’s relevant to what I’m looking for. So I think that that common language is also what makes it you know, that your consistent about it you can other people confined it. They know, like OK, when someone says like this is you know, our hears their marketing materials, right? I know that that our logo is considered our marketing materials, right? And some other places it might be under something else entirely. Might be, like under and join our brand your brands, right? So it doesn’t matter what that is, as long as there’s that shared understanding the organization. This is what it means so that I can go into the document German system or, you know, if I ask, ask somebody. Hey, I’m looking for acts, right? Like we have a shared. Understand what that means and what they look for it. How do you create the shared understanding and taxonomy if one doesn’t exist? You were saying, You know, it probably exists and you don’t know it, but suppose it doesn’t suppose you know, just lots of examples of people referring to the same thing by different names. That’s where you need treyz glossary. What do you do it? It’s where you need to do a little bit of legwork. Someone on your team. It’s usually on the team, but not necessarily needs to do some knowledge. Management work needs to work with those teams, and, you know, maybe you’ve got eight sites but they and they’re all talking about his Janice mentioned things under different labels, but they’re all really doing operations, functions or volunteermatch judgment. So you work with those individual departments are sites and you find out what their commonalities are because a lot of knowledge management is about finding commonalities between things a lot of groundwork. Yeah, And you do you have to, As Janice said very aptly yesterday, you’ve gotta invest some time to save some time. You know, you can’t get saved time for free. You need to invest some some leg work up front. So if you work with those different departments to figure out what their commonalities r and you work with them to build a lexicon, you’re going to find that people aren’t is really determined to refer to something as a particular thing as they once thought. When you start showing them the commonalities on DH when I’ve done taxonomy, is that organizations? In all three cases, I’ve had to do it. People end up agreeing on the taxonomy because they you know when when you get him talking, they’re really just talking about the same things. And they’re really not that invested in referring to it as a particular thing. They’re okay with going with operations instead of, you know, office, office management or something like that. You know, they released a little bit, and they realize special and you promoted as like, you know, we’re trying to make it easier to work together. They tend to release a little bit and go. Yeah, okay. We’re cool with operations, OK? I’m surprised to hear that, actually, people would stick to their This is operations. Well, that’s what culture. So that way, that way. So So, Yeah, we talked a bit about organization because I think any time you talk about language, any time you talk about the way that we do things here, right, that is organizational culture. And you know you don’t have unorganised age culture that supports knowledge management that supports learning, right? Sharing of information. You know, sometimes people will get very Don’t touch my stuff. Stay in your lane. You know, this is my job. That’s your job. Whereas I think if you are learning organization, if you want to build that college culture of you know, we share our knowledge here and we all learn from each other. You know that obviously you don’t want those silos. That doesn’t work out very well. That’s kind of the essence of what you’re trying to do. But I think like the one of things that we talked about in terms of road blocks, where you’re trying to roll some stuff out and maybe people are like insecure, they viewed their knowledge is job security. And it’s not that Maybe that doesn’t come from a place where they used to work somewhere where you know that was an issue and that that certainly can be at an issue and in some organizations, But a lot of times it’s just that really, that individual like, you know, I want to make sure that I keep my job or I want to be seen as valuable. And you can use that to write because so it can be not were trying to steal your knowledge and take take your job away from here, take things away from you, but also you know, Hey, your knowledge is valuable and sometimes people don’t see that and helping them see that you’re acknowledges really valuable to the organization and look how much stronger the team could be if we all had could use that knowledge, and we could help you even more. And, you know, whatever you’re you’re role is all right. Gentle persuasion, all but all for the good of the mission. Absolutely. Way all could do a better job if we could come together with this agreement around this common language. Yeah. Yeah. And also acknowledging that you might be in an organization where you know there is a toxic or culture, and they’re no amount of knowledge. Management is going to fix that. So they’re just, you know, knowledge management cannot fix broken business process buzzes and broken culture. So there is an acknowledgement of that. You you’ve got larger problems if that’s going on in your organization, and we can fix that for you. We’ve had discussions about on the show previous ntcdinosaur about blaming technology when leadership or processes or culture are the problem, right? And I’m looking for a technology solution to a bad CEO, right? No amount of pretty software is going to fix something like that. No amount of nice, you know? Well streamlined document man, aren’t you? Knowledge management is going to fix that. Wait a couple more minutes together. Uh, what else did you talk about? That maybe some questions about some of the Okay, Well, a lot of the questions were related about related to culture and trying to get people on board with things when people were resistant. Because it’s hard to make it hard to make culture change. Absolutely, absolutely. And I think it’s sort of like it needs become a part of the way you do that here. And so it needs to also be part of, you know, one way. Besides, getting people’s buy-in is also making a part of job expectations, making it part of your performance performance evaluation on DH. You know, just making it like every time we haven’t have a project meeting, right reflection is part of that. Every time we have a staff meeting, there’s there’s some aspect of knowledge mansion or we talk about. You know, every quarter we talk about what do we need to update? Maybe in document management? Maybe. What do we need? So like, nobody uses this folder. Nobody looks like this like it’s maybe we need to just archive it. We don’t need it anymore or things like that and building that in and acknowledging that you can’t do this solo, you need your stakeholders and identifying who those are early on and that you’re going to need some executive stake holders. Get them in. Earlier on, we talked about different techniques with you know, that straight project management type stuff. But in terms of knowledge management, get him onboard early. You know you’re going to need them to help you push this through on DH. Really? Make sure you take care of your stakeholders and you deal with the people that are not liking your process. Figure out why they don’t like your process and try and work with that. You know it might not make them your favorite stakeholder, but if you understand where they’re coming from, like Janis was just talking about, like understanding why they’re a road block that could be really key to getting past them and really making them invested in your project and turning them around to liking your project. Having good office relationships helps also yeah, long before we’re talking about knowledge management. Just if you’re decent and it isn’t to your peers and colleagues and, uh, you get to know them outside the office, you know? And you’ve got his foundation of a relationship than when you’re calling on them for some. Some compromise. I think you’re more apt to get it. Yeah. They didn’t trust that. This is going to be good for the organization. This is We’re working towards the same goal if you don’t have that trust, and you need to start there like you need to start establishing Janet. You also mentioned the archive folder. I do plan e-giving consulting on. So I’m brought in sometimes to revive a program that’s stalled. And maybe there was a plan e-giving consultant or director. You know, four years ago. And then they eliminated the position, and it just kind of faded away, So I’m so I’m invited. Tio, update the files. Update the files. I can’t tell you that the first full day I makes archive, I’m opening this. I don’t know what everything is from two thousand six. We’LL move archive. You know, it has no relevance reducing that I think producing that clutter are not overwhelming to people. What are things you that actually relevant to to our organisation and our operations now, like maybe we need to keep that. You know, we don’t care. We’re not sure if we need to keep out, and we’re keeping it just in case that sort of get it, clear it out of the way, right? Because, like, it’s not the stuff you’re using all the time. The stuff that you are using frequently That should be, you know, really central and real quick. Good technique. With that, people get really nervous when they say you’re going to delete those archives and they hide a copy of them. So you just do a process where you keep them. But you put them in a place where it’s not clogging up their search terms and assure them they really, really need that. You can still get that back for you, and that really helps them move it out of what? What’s searchable their day today life. But if they know that it’s still there somewhere, they often are much better with being able to archive because they’re not worried about you pushing the w good. Okay, Janice, I’m gonna give you a chance to wrap up. Oh, like she’s pulling together. So I think some of the biggest things we talked about were really like, Get things out of people’s heads, Get the knowledge out of people’s heads, make it organized so that people can find it in a way that it’s It’s not overwhelming to people what makes sense to them, right? And also not, you know, being aware of people’s what people are scared of or what people. But those hang ups or obstacles might be to make sure that we can address them and get them on board. And it sounds like a lot of rigging it is, but the passing that time out front will really help you save time down the road. All right, that was Janice Chan. She’s consultant Shift and scaffold on DH. Also Darby arika, director of information technology at Urban Teachers. You are with non-profit radios coverage of twenty nineteen, the non-profit Technology Conference. All of our nineteen ntcdinosaur views are brought to you by our partners at Act Blue Free fund-raising tools to help non-profits make an impact. Thanks so much for being with us. I need to take a break. Wagner, CPS. They’re free. Webinar came and went earlier this month. Tips and tricks for your nine ninety you missed it. You suck. No, but you can get it back. You watch the archive? Yes. Lamenting wayward listener that’s you gets the archive. You learn how to use your nine ninety as a marketing tool. You goto Wagner cps dot com Click seminars go to the month of April. I know it’s a little convoluted, but they don’t have a landing page there. Wagner cps dot com Click seminars Go to April and you’LL find tips and tricks for your nine ninety. Now time for Tony’s take to be the one that is my video this week. Inspired by in an Air Force reunion that I put together. It’s not really fair for me to say I hosted it because it was on the Air Force base, where we all worked Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri in the mid to late eighties, and about thirty five of us came together and then you add spouses was like fifty people, a total, but we all had this shared experience of doing an unusual job. We were launch officers for Minuteman nuclear missiles at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri in the Reagan years, and so we came together and It was just wonderful seeing everybody reconnecting you. No way have had we’ve had to reunion since then, So some of us have gotten together at other times. But some of us we have some haven’t been seen since, like nineteen eighty eight eighty nine. But there’s a re connection immediate, and that was the inspiration from my video. Be the one and what? What I mean by that? You’re just gonna have to watch. The video is at tony martignetti dot com, and that is Tony. Take do now. It’s Miller time. No, it’s not Miller. It’s Maria time. Real simple. Maybe Maria drinks Miller. I don’t know. Probably not. She has better taste. She has better taste in that. She’s much, much more refined. She’s, Ah, she’s the prospect. Find her. She’s our our trainer all. She’s a Strainer and speaker on Prospect Research. He’s our research contributor. Her latest book is Magnify Your Business Tips, tools and Strategies for Growing Your Business or Your non-profit. She’s our Doi End of Dirt, cheap and free. She’s at the prospect finder dot com and at Maria Simple Maria. Simple. Welcome back after many, many months. Yes, thank you for having me back. It’s great to be here. Absolutely. You’ve been absent since Hurricane Florence, which you and I all know know verywell. Now we track hurricanes because we live in North Carolina very close to each other on that was last September, like September twelfth or so. Yes. You’re supposed to have been on. And you had to. You had to cancel because the hurricane was imminent. Yes, I was evacuating your evacuating, right. We had an evacuation order in my town, too. On. That’s last September. Now, are you Are you done with? You had some damage. You had more damaged than I did. Are you done re rebuilding? No, they haven’t even started. Yeah, that’s the problem that people don’t get. It’s hard is held to get contractors. And this is back from September. We’re talking about September. Well, yeah, well, we’ve got this contractors on site, but there have been a lot of insurance related issues, so that’s a whole other thing. Yeah, well, there’s that too, but but just the idea of getting contractors, people don’t realize that. Of course, I never did When I lived here in the city that it’s it’s It’s not uncommon for it to be years later. I mean, I guess we experienced it somewhat with Katrina. You saw, you know, the one year anniversary, the two year anniversary. But everybody, you know, Katrina struck me as a riel aberration. Although now as the climate changes, it’s it’s less so. But at the time, it seemed like, you know, it couldn’t be that devastating. But But even just Hurricane Florence from last September in the Carolinas, it is devastating. And people are still rebuilding and have not like like you. Yeah. Yeah. Still still waiting on a lot of a lot of work to get done. But you know what? I’m grateful and blessed to still have a roof over my head and we can live in our space so that that’s all good. Yeah, yesterday. I mean, when I say rebuilding, you weren’t destroyed. But you had you had damage damage in your in your apartment. What do you It’s a townhouse. Where do you have their townhouse? Condo. Thank you. Answer. Okay. That word eluded me. That’s a That’s an advance word from a condo. Right on your in your condo. Alright. So welcome back. It’s been many many months. I’m glad you’re back. Thank God you’re back. Um, so we’re talking about ethics? Um, what’s I mean? There is a lot of there’s a ton of private information and personal info, and you know, they have to be boundaries around what we collect and how we save what we do collect. That’s that’s issues here. Yes. So, you know, that’s definitely a lot of the issues here. You know, it’s it’s interesting because sometimes people will call me and they will say, You know, Maria, I need you to work up profiles, whatever these five or ten people we need, Thio know everything they’re interested in. You need to know their network on DH a sentence. They actually, as soon as they say that word network. I know that there’s a certain level of educating that I’m going to have to do even if I begin to start to work with this particular client. And and the reason for that is because what we as prospect researchers have access to, So whether you’re working for a small to midsize non-profit or you’re a college or university or ah ha, that all you have on ly to information that’s in the public domain. We do not have access to private information such as credit reports, right? So it’s important to make that distinction. Because when we’re looking at publicly available sources, we can never come up with a net worth. I don’t tell someone. Yeah, we’re going to get into detail on the Net worth conversation. I know you. Yeah, You specifically have wrote something on it. We’Ll get to that. Um but so let’s let’s let’s pursue what you just said about public versus private sources. I mean, I would think that when your clients hire you to do prospect research or when we task our prospect researchers if their in house, uh, we want all sources, whatever you can get it. Where did you get your hands on? No, right, that’s not so right. That’s that’s an uninformed doesn’t mean she can’t get your hands on. It might not be something that your organization would consider ethical. So an example of this might be, um, divorce records, right? So sometimes those be publicly access. However, think about this. If if you have to stop and think to yourself, how would how would this donor for a perspective donor-centric er ds. And if the answer to that is G, they might sever the relationship with our organization altogether. Then it’s simply not worth looking at those divorce records or even hey, even, maybe not. Maybe not be so extreme, but they would be upset that we were evaluating that. But But But But it has value. Okay, so let’s have a conversation. So I’m gonna push back. It has value to the organization. Um, if I’m trying to find out how much a person’s settlement is in a in a divorce, you know that that goes to what I think their capability is for giving to my organization. How much they gained or lost in a divorce is goingto figure into that calculus, all right, but just let’s say they’ve gained a million dollars from that divorce settlement. Are you entitled necessarily to that million dollars? It’s just like anybody making their money in any other way. Just because they have it doesn’t mean that they would want to gift any part of that settlement here working well, you, But you could say that about you could say that about anything. You could say that about their salary. Just because they make one hundred fifty thousand dollars a year doesn’t mean I’m entitled to any of it or one and a half million dollars a year. You could say that about anything, right? But that’s why I think you really want to rely more heavily on good old development, work and cultivation and developing a relationship and under standing what those people have an interest in funding on DH whether it’ll the lines properly rather than knowing the final settlement amount of what their divorces. Okay, But it’s still I mean, I I agree that it’s unseemly, but I’m I’m challenging it anyway because, uh, you’re stuck with me as the host. I mean, that’s the best. You’re the best reason I’ve come up with. So you’re stuck with it. You can either hang up or continue. It’s your choice on I’LL be fine without you. So don’t worry. You know, if you want to end up going so I mean, I’ll entertain myself. If nobody else, I just amuse myself. Um, no. Okay, so now but it’s still it goes to their potential. I mean, you’re you look at other sources of potential, right? Like like you public public public stock holdings, right? If the person happens to be an insider, you and I have talked about this, so this is not jargon jail material. You know, I’ve talked about this. If they’re an Insider Inc. Then their public, their their their stock holdings are public. That goes to their capacity to give. So why write? You have to find another reason why divorce settlement either gain or loss is not is not valuable info because because so far so far it’s analogous to a matter of public of insider stock. So when those when those insider stockholders file with the federal with the SEC right, the Securities and Exchange Commission, they know that this becomes part of a public filing that is completely searchable online, etcetera, etcetera. Operation will have it on their website. No eso again. It’s just what is the perception that they’re goingto have of you looking at the different types of records. So I think that again, and it’s just if your organization ends up having a policy that it’s perfectly fine to do that, then that’s fine. But I think that you do need to make a decision about you know if if are there certain types of records that you will consider off limits for your organization and just put a policy in place, whatever. Whatever way you decide to go, in the matter of, say, divorce records, for example, what’s another word not going against your policy? Do you think of another category of data? That’s Ah, a gray area. Um, you’re a professional, and you’re professional researcher. Yeah, well, you’ve been asked three years for other stuff that you felt uncomfortable with. Well, they’re what they’re I can remember one time in particular when I was researching an individual. Ah, that I decided not to put something in writing because I knew that the perspective donor-centric lorcan ization And this is this is across the board. You need to be aware of this, uh, altum non-profits do that. They could walk into your organization and say, Show me what you’ve amassed on the show Me any. Tell me my donor records. Show me my files. Right. Uh, so you need to be able to turn that over and know that they’ve been written in a very subjective and objective way. I’m sorry and not put anything subjective into it. No subjective statement. So, for example, there was something that I passed along to a development officer verbally, as opposed to putting it in writing, because I felt that it was going to potentially jeopardize our relationship that they were developing with that individual. However, it was very important that the development office, they’re new, that this person had insider trading and had done some paid a lot of fines for it in their background because they were considering this person as treasurer for the organisation Esso. I felt that it was my duty to toe let this officer know that this was in this person’s background because they just didn’t know that, right? Very Jermaine. Yeah, I think you might have used that as an example some other time for something else we talked about. That sounds familiar. Yeah, okay, but it’s a good one. It’s a poignant story. Okay, okay. All right, so So I. So I guess you’re saying divorce records. That’s the main. That’s the main thing that you find unseemly. And I do kind of like your standard do of what would if someone came in and read everything that we have on them. What would they say? How would they feel on that? That’s going to go to not only what you include, but how you describe it to how you describe your conversations with them. You know, you and I both agree that the best some of the best research, not all some of the best research comes from face to face meetings. How do you describe those meetings in your CR M after you’re back from the lunch or the dinner on DH? So thinking how the person would evaluate that feel about it could shade how you describe it? Okay, I gotto now. I just did a lot of talking. I gotta take a break. Hold on, Maria Simple. Stand by our last Break last break text to give you diversify your revenue by adding mobile e-giving. It is a misconception that this is only for disasters. That’s not true. You can build relationships by text. You do what you do it all the time with your family and friends. You can build relationships with donors as well. It’s very possible to do through texting. You learnt how, with the five part email, many course, um, to get into the many course you text NPR two four, four, four, nine, nine, nine. Now we gotta do the live listener, love. Ah, and it’s Ah, live listeners are in starting abroad. Seoul, Seoul, South Korea Gotta send annual haserot comes a ham Nida, of course, to Seoul Moscow, Russia Welcome Moscow on DH Hanoi Hanoi, Vietnam Sometimes Vietnam is with us, but we can’t see the city. But today we can we know. We know it’s Hanoi. Welcome, live! Listen, love to Vietnam and also Istanbul, Turkey. Very happy to have you with us Live love to you and Burundi. I’m sorry. We cannot see your city Brandy, but we know you are with us. So live love. I think that’s a first for burned e cool. And here in the U. S. Only couple Tampa, Florida Live love to you New York, New York Multiple love to see that. And on the heels of the live listen, love comes the podcast Pleasantry are pleasant trees. It’s multiple. There’s more than one listener podcast. In fact, they’re over thirteen thousand, so I can’t just send one pleasantry. The pleasantries to you so glad that you are with us. However, non-profit radio fits into your schedule. Pleasantries to you. Thank you for being with us on the podcast. Now, we’ve got lots more time for ethics in your prospect research. Um, anything you want to say, Marie Sample. I gave a big diatribe, and then I cut you off with a with a with a break. Anything you want to add or comment on About what I just said. Now, Now, I think I think we covered that in general. But I did want to spend a little bit of time talking about, you know, potential code of ethics that the organization might want to follow on where they could find some guidelines. Yes, you get your dirt free and dirt free. Resource is cheapen defremery everything. Okay, So there’s this awesome organization that you’ve heard me mention it before. That professional researchers prospect researchers either belong to it were at minimum, will adhere to their code of ethics and its apra a p r a. Dahna work. So that stands for the Association of Professional Researchers for Advancement. And the thing about APRA is that they’ve got this page of their website that is actually dedicated to their statement of ethics. So it would be great if your listeners at least went to the after a website. Took a look at the ethics statement Whether or not you remember and really take a look at you know what is involved? What are the areas that you need to be aware of as you’re putting together your your code of ethics for your organization. And they’ve even got a wonderful ethics tool kit. A za pdf document that’s chock full of great resource is so I really would encourage your listeners to go check out our our listeners. Maria. Simple, please. You made that mistake. You made that part in that pronounced twice. I share the listselect hours. No ownership here. Yes. So I I went through. I was disappointed with the statement of ethics. I I found it kind of vague. However, the tool kit had the good examples. Like I was looking for examples. All right, um, of you know, they talk about, for instance, in the statement of ah, statement of ethics, they talk about bilich shall only record data that is appropriate to the fund-raising process. So I was thinking for I was looking for examples of what’s inappropriate, but it gets flushed out when you go to the when you go to the tool kit now, right? So let’s, uh let’s talk a little about Oso in the ethics statement, it suggests a couple things like you should not be. You should not be friending prospects that you’re doing research on with your personal accounts for one is that that’s right. Is that your statement? Yes, yes, that’s correct. And and also, you should be transparent when you are doing any type of research on behalf of your organization, right? So if you’re, uh if you’re if you’re calling somewhere to find out, you know, whatever. Somebody stop holdings are something like that, you know, in public stockholding records and and they ask you, you know who’s calling you. You have to be transparent as to who you are on DH, you know, and what organizations of your work you know as well. So you want to just make sure that your you do have maintained the standard. Okay, so So when you’re calling, you’re not just saying, uh, my name is Maria Simple, but you’re giving the name of the organization that you’re calling on behalf of two. Is that what you mean? Right? And quite frankly, it is rare that you’re going to be asked for, you know? So when they’re publicly source to information, they’re typically not going to be asking, you know who’s calling? I mean, I’ve never called. For example, if I can’t find information on tax assessment records, right or tax property tax records and I call it an assessor’s office, they’ve never really asked Who is this? Why are you asking? Because they know it’s publicly available information. They just give you the information that you’re looking for, you know, on that property record so you can call and ask about any property you know, anywhere in the United States, and you’d be able to get that information without being asked. But if in the in the event that you ever are rushed to be transparent, so the same goes on social media, right, um, you can That’s why you don’t want to make a fake profile. But I know I saw that. Yeah, people do that. You don’t want to make a fake Lincoln profile with the, you know, with the intention of trying to take all these people into becoming your first degree connections just so that you can reap all this wonderful information off their profile, right? Because now they might be okay. Here’s an interesting one. Suppose they’re talking about their divorce on, um, Now, don’t make it Facebook, because the likelihood of friending prospect on Facebook is pretty slim, I think. But let’s see. Well, wait. Now let’s see if they’re If they’re a fan of your organization Page, does their personal feed become visible to you? No. No, it doesn’t. No, no, it doesn’t work that way. Okay, but if they made any comments, you know, on DH, I got in. Any person would make a comment about their divorce, and I’m trying to I’m trying to make it more like trying to make it more likely. Okay. Suppose this supposes Twitter, Um, suppose you’re the organization is following them on Twitter. Um, and, uh, and there another bitter. Or maybe they’re ecstatic. Maybe they did great. You know, maybe the guy reaped a big reward. Um, it feels like he you know, he’s got over. So the guy or the woman is now bragging on Twitter and you’re following them. That’s that’s public now. Right now, it’s now it’s public. Now it’s public. So in my opinion, I think my fellow researchers would probably agree with this. It would be perfectly fine Teo to take a screenshot or quote what was said and then give attribution to the day, uh, that you saw this particular quote on Twitter. Ah, and but again write it in a very objective way. So you know you don’t write. You don’t introduce it by saying, you know, looks like metoo windfall in their divorce, as evidenced by the tweets. And, you know, just you know this so and so commented on their divorce by saying, you know, the couple was divorced, It would appear the divorce is final and the prospect had the following tweet regarding their divorce. Not now. Very objectively written. Okay, I agree. I see. Um, so going into the going into the er going to the tool kit? Um, they said something about list sharing that I was surprised by, um, list sharing. Never share lists with volunteers, key stakeholders, um, etcetera, etcetera. But But they were saying they said volunteers and key stakeholders. But we’ve talked about Andi. I’ve had other guests to talk about sharing lists with board members. But but this opportunity, it says you shouldn’t be sharing this with volunteers and key stakeholders. What do you make of that? Yes, so again have a very clear policy in place. So if your organization’s policy would be that the only stakeholders who would have access to discussion of proactively created list would be boardmember and state that on DH, then maybe put together ah, confidentiality confidentiality policy for your volunteers board members on employees. Also, by the way, on DH, we could talk a little bit later about a particular organization that has an excellent example of those types confidentiality agreements. But if you are going to start doing that type of list creation, discussion of lists or even quite frankly, discussion of any prepared profiles that you have on individuals, it’s going to be a good idea. Tto have thes confidentiality policies in place. Okay, okay, shut out the organization now go ahead. The one that has good, good examples. What right? And so there’s one called the National Council of non-profits. Ah, and the the way I actually got to their their confidentiality agreement was actually through through the two tool kit and through operas website. So that would be a really good place for you to start. And then, you know, get your way over to those agreements that they get very good samples that you could literally just, you know, very easily modify, um, plug in the name of your organization, you know, run it by your attorneys to make sure that being the language would be appropriate for your organization and then actually have these folks sign it. So, Fury, let’s say you’re only going to have the Development committee is going to be the only folks that have access to any, uh, any of these profiles or these lists that you create and make sure that everybody on that development committee, whether they be a boardmember or outside the board, you might have you might have some outside boardmember is also involved in development efforts. Have them sign the agreement as well. And then these documents have to be treated properly after they’re after there. You set the board meeting, right? Absolutely. Absolutely. If you decide to print anything out, be extremely careful about what happens with those documents. Try not to let any of them walk out of the room, make sure you’ve got a shredder in house. The last thing you want is for something to go into the trash and, you know, or recycling or whatever and then get, you know, literally the wind blow it around the neighborhood. So did you want to be careful? And even though it’s all publicly sourced information, still, it is something that, uh, that they were accepted the donor or perspective donor. You know, out there in aggregate, it could be a lot more valuable than individual discrete pieces of data that people have to go and find on, especially when it’s a list of fifty potential major donors, etcetera or even foundations. All right, I want to give you a shout out. You are. You are named in the Capital kit because you wrote an article about being more than networth for from non-profit times and we so So you already already explained why you need need no liabilities, not just assets if you if you’re going to do real net worth. But they shot you out in the tool kit. So I wanted to mention that. Okay, wait. Just have thiss flies, but it always does with you. So we just have, like, thirty seconds left. Um, wrap us up. Okay. So to wrap this up, then you’ve got all this wonderful information. Make sure that it is stored in a secure way. Locked file, password protected files if you you share it through e mail. Make sure through password protected, encrypted ways that you’re communicating this thes profiles and so forth on. So make sure that the data is all security in some way. Ah, if your whatever you’re using Teo as your cr m Teo donorsearch software, make sure it’s password protected. And I know exactly who has access to those passwords, then change them often. Thank you very much. Maria. Simple. She is the Prospect Finder trainer and speaker on Prospect Research are doi and of their cheapened free you’ll find her at the prospect finder dot com And at Marie, a simple thank you again. Maria, Thank you for having me. Good to see you again. Thanks. My pleasure. Next week, more from the non-profit technology conference. If you missed any part of today’s show, I beseech you find it on tony. Martignetti dot com were sponsored by pursuing online tools for small and midsize non-profits, data driven and technology enabled Tony dahna slash pursuing by witness Deepa is guiding you beyond the numbers when you’re cps dot com and by text to give mobile donations. Made Easy text. NPR to four four four nine nine nine A Creative producers. Claire Meyerhoff Sam Liebowitz is the line producer show. Social Media is by Susan Chavez. Mark Silverman is our Web guy, and this music is by Scott Stein be with me next week for non-profit radio. Big non-profit Ideas for the other ninety five percent Go out and be great. You’re listening to the talking alternate network e-giving Good. You’re listening to the Talking Alternative Network. Are you stuck in a rut? Negative thoughts, feelings and conversations got you down. Hi, I’m nor in Sumpter potentially ater. Tune in every Tuesday at nine to ten p. M. 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