Donald Summers: Scaling Altruism
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 A savvy survey were sponsored by donor box, outdated donation forms blocking your supporters, generosity, donor box, fast, flexible and friendly fundraising forms for your nonprofit donor box.org here is scaling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.
