Gabe Cooper: “The Responsive Nonprofit”
That’s Gabe Cooper’s new book. He walks us through the 8 core practices that will disrupt the status quo and make your nonprofit responsive. Like dismantling silos, adopting agile methods, managing change, building a durable team culture, and more. Gabe is CEO of Virtuous.
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Welcome to Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio. Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. I’m your aptly named host and the pod father of your favorite abdominal podcast. Oh, I’m glad you’re with us. I’d be hit with focal segmental glomerulosclerosis. If you scarred me with the idea that you missed this week’s show, here’s our associate producer, Kate to introduce the show. Hey, Tony, I’m on it. The responsive nonprofit. That’s Gabe Cooper’s new book. He walks us through the eight core practices that will disrupt the status quo and make your nonprofit responsive like dismantling silos, adopting agile methods, managing change, building a durable team culture and more. Gabe is ceo of virtuous on Tonys. Take two hail from the gym who talks like this were sponsored by donor box, outdated donation forms blocking your supporters, generosity, donor box fast, flexible and friendly fundraising forms for your nonprofit donor box.org and buy pork bun. Looking to grow your nonprofit. You need a.org domain name from pork bun, instant recognition, trust and visibility. Pork bun.com. Here is the responsive nonprofit. It’s a pleasure to welcome Gabe Cooper to nonprofit radio. He is the founder and CEO of virtuous the responsive nonprofit CRM and marketing platform, helping nonprofits build lasting relationships with their donors. He’s the author of the book, the Responsive Nonprofit Eight Practices that drive nonprofit innovation and impact. It’s his book that brings him to nonprofit radio. You’ll find the company at virtuous.org and Gabe is on linkedin, Gabe Cooper. Welcome to nonprofit radio. Yeah. Thanks so much for having me, Tony. It’s a pleasure to be here. I’m glad you are. Oh, congratulations on your book, which came out just a couple of months ago. Congratulations. Yeah, I appreciate it. It was, uh, it was a fun one to write. For sure. Well, we’re gonna talk about the, uh, responsive nonprofit and, uh, the eight, those eight practices that will, uh, help you be responsive. Can you just give us an overview of what, what it means uh, for you, for virtuous, for a nonprofit to be responsive? Yeah, it’s a great question. So, excuse me, I’d written a book a few years ago called Responsive Fundraising. And the purpose of that book was to help nonprofits connect more personally with donors. So, what we, what we were seeing is many of the nonprofits we were working with would send out the same email newsletter to everybody. The same direct mail appeal to everybody, all of their donors would get exactly the same thing. And it felt, uh, pretty impersonal honestly, donors were giving for very personal reasons, what they felt like they were getting back from their nonprofit was kind of this spray pre marketing like, does this organization really know who I am? And so we were really pushing into, hey, I in the world we live in nonprofit should be able to build more personal relationships with donors at scale. Like that’s possible using some of the modern technology. I think what we found over the last couple of years is most nonprofits really want that. They hear me say that and they’re like, yeah, we want, we, you know, we just don’t have the staff, we don’t have the time to really do that. And, but the other thing we found is is just changing. Innovation is really hard. A lot of the things that prevented nonprofits from really building more personal relationships with donors is like, innovation is hard. We’ve done things the same way for the last 20 years. Moving to this new paradigm, we just don’t know where to start, right. So this new book response of nonprofit is really eight practices of innovation all designed around as a nonprofit. How do I move toward innovating more quickly, changing more effectively? How do I build a culture that can actually pivot quickly with the times so that we can provide better relationships with donors and drive generosity. You talk about disrupting the status quo early on, early on in the book. Uh your introduction, I believe is where so uh but these things are, these things are scary I mean, people, people don’t like change. Organizations are a collection of people that, you know, if the people don’t like change and fear change and innovation, then the organization is going to yet. You wanna, you, you want us to disrupt the status quo? Yeah. And I, I think it’s, it’s necessary. I mean, there’s this uh a concept called Martex Law which says, um technology uh increases exponentially. So if you think the internet came out when at the very end of high school for me, right? But if you think there was like the internet and then quickly after there’s like myspace and social media and then there’s a smartphone and then you have social media on smartphones and you have Uber and airbnb and then you have A I and, and each of these technologies stacks on the one before and it moves faster and faster and faster. The problem is organizations evolve linearly, right? So most nonprofits like way we got to get like 3% better every year. Well, the problem is now you have technology that’s increasing at an exponential rate, nonprofit that’s growing at 3% a year. And you have this widening gap and all of a sudden nonprofits look around, they’re like, man, I don’t, we’re not rel relevant for the world we now live in, right? The changes out pa outpaced us and so disrupting the status quo is more than just, you know, we could potentially do something different here. It’s almost like our lives, depend on us being able to adapt more quickly. I think we saw that a lot during COVID. Right. For the first time, I think, you know, nonprofits, you hear the word pivot more than any other word during COVID. And I think some of that is fortunately continue to echo after COVID where nonprofits realize, man, we’re gonna have to be able to change and adapt more quickly to the world around us and, and part of that’s dismantling what we’ve done in the past, killing the status quo, right? And, and being willing to try new stuff. Yeah, you quote someone in the book, uh a woman who says, I, I’ve never heard the word pivot so often as I did throughout the, throughout the pandemic. Uh you have a quote that, uh I, I really think captures what you’re talking about. Uh uh after every chapter title, there’s a quote and uh after the, um the chapter on managing change, which we will get to one of the, one of the practices uh in times of change, learners inherit the earth while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists from Eric Hoffer. I don’t know who Eric Hoffer is, but I think that’s a brilliant quote. Yeah, brilliant quote. I think like the, the, the winners in our current environment, the ones who flourish are the ones that acknowledge. They don’t know anything or they, they don’t know, you know what’s next and it’s the area that’ll survive. Right. It’s the learners and the ones, there’s a similar quote in the book about, um, you know, for the next stage of growth in the next stage that they’re going to be successful. It’s a, it’s more about unlearning what, what, what you thought was true in the past in order to learn the great stuff that’s ahead and curiosity. That’s a, that I, I admire curiosity, curiosity about people, curiosity about the future. Uh curiosity about the present even, I mean, even just managing ma understanding what uh what’s, what’s right in front of us today. Uh I think requires a AAA curiosity. Um II, I admire that, that trait. Um So let’s talk about the, the eight core practices, please. And uh your, your first one is uh dismantling team silos and increasing transparency. But I really would like to start with your story of your wife to be pushing your Mustang and uh how that relates to dismantling team silos, please. Yeah. Oh, it’s so funny. So you guys have probably experienced this. Our listeners have probably experienced this is where um you’re in a nonprofit. Uh you know, if it’s super small, just a couple of people, this probably doesn’t apply. But once you start getting bigger, you start having kind of silos that develop, you know, your fundraising team doesn’t talk to your program team as much as they used to and my wife’s organization. The problem was the, the fundraising team and executive team set on the other side of the parking lot from the program team and nobody ever, like walked across the parking lot to see what program people were doing. And it’s just these silos begin to form. You have like data silos where uh our finance data doesn’t talk to our fundraising data, doesn’t talk to our, our program data and they just harden and Little Kingdoms begin to form. And so the car example is there because at most organizations, what ends up happening is, is one or two team members will take it upon themselves to become superheroes and put on capes. Right? Well, you gotta, you gotta share the story of Farrah pushing the car. Come on. Don’t, don’t hold out, don’t hold out on uh nonprofit radio listeners. Well, the story of what your wife to be was doing, it’s an embarrassing story, but it’s in the book, you got it in the book. It’s not like I found it in some dark corner. You wrote it in the book. So please tell the story. So I had this four cylinder mustang, this horrible car, it looked like a mustang on the side, but on the inside it was not a mustang. And the thing, the only way to get it started was to push it and, you know, sort of throw it into gear as it’s moving and first gear is a manual, a manual shift. You had to put it into first gear whilst, so my, my sweet now wife, I was dating her at the time. She wouldn’t rain or shine. She’d have to get out of the car, pushing the car. I would pop it into gear, get it going. And she’d run along the side of the car. Dukes of Hazard style, jump in the door and off. We’d go right. So that was, that was the early stage of our dating relationship. But it seemed like just such a great metaphor for what I see. So many nonprofit professionals doing, which is, you know, pushing the car running alongside the car, jumping in just being heroes when they don’t need to be heroes to compensate for the disconnects within the organization, doing everything that needs to be done when it’s not the most efficient. But, you know, the, the lights have to be kept on and, and the people have to be served. So I put on my cape. You use the, you talk about in the book, the, the superhero wearing the cape. That’s right. That’s exactly right. Um And, but also, you know, she was willing to uh break down the silos. I mean, a girlfriend that’s not, that’s not a typical responsibility for uh uh e especially in just a dating relationship. You know, getting your car started after the dinner that hopefully you paid for. At least you bought her. I would hope that you at least bought dinner before the, before these car pushing in the rain episodes, at least pay for the dinner. I should hope. All right. Uh, but, yeah, but she, you know, that’s outside, that was outside the, uh, the girlfriend’s silo. That’s right. Yeah, that’s exactly right. There’s, and that, that’s what we see. Like, you know, the most effective nonprofits that we work with. Realize, like, you can’t have one or two staff members be the heroes that close the gap that do all the unnatural things that shouldn’t be done. That’s outside of the role just to make the thing keep running right. And so, so much of that is, is about and can, can we just have better systems? So our fundraising, our comms team, our program team are working together in lockstep. Do they have shared goals are going after together? Is, do they have shared data across the organization? Can everybody see what’s going on? Are you holding your entire team accountable? So everybody’s pulling their weight. Are, are there any efficiencies in your system that you need to be able to correct for? So you’re not, you know, risking staff burnout because you have one or two heroes that are running beside the car and pushing. Right. So, and it’s critical, especially as your organization starts scale or starts getting older, like these things just inevitably happen, you, you talk about the it silos and, and fundraising silos. Give one of the examples of the uh of fundraising silos and what we can do to break these down. Yeah. One of the bummers that I experienced early in my career and, and I’m sure you’ve seen this too, Tony is that sometimes fundraisers are seen as a necessary evil within the organization. They’re kind of like the sleazy c side of the house that, you know, I guess they, they have to go get money so we can do the real work of the organization and the cause and, and I hated that stereotype, I think, you know, I’m on boards and I do fundraising all the time. But I think generosity is part and parcel to the mission of the organization. It’s not, you know, it’s not we fundraise because we have to, to get the real work of the mission done. It’s like actually building generosity in the world is good in and of itself, it’s good and it’s part of the organization. And so I saw a lot of silos were just like we put the fundraising team in a corner. They don’t really interact with everybody else because they’re kind of doing the dirty work of the mission. And so you begin to have this silo built up, you know what I, I think I mentioned the book, but one of the things that I’ve seen several organizations do I think is just amazing is they have people on the program team calling think donors and they have people in the fundraising team participating in program, right? It’s just that actually putting on the shoes of the other person and doing these simple things that can begin breaking down these walls is, is amazing. The best organizations I know fundraising program, communications all start to get blurred in this really beautiful way when you’re doing it. Well, its time for a break. Imagine a fundraising partner that not only helps you raise more money but also supports you in retaining your donors, a partner that helps you raise funds both online and on location. So you can grow your impact faster. That’s donor box, a comprehensive suite of tools, services and resources that gives fundraisers just like you a custom solution to tackle your unique challenges, helping you achieve the growth and sustainability, your organization needs, helping you help others visit donor box.org to learn more. Now, back to the responsive nonprofit. You, you cite one nonprofit where even where everyone has to be in the the customer support uh role for two weeks, even, even the lawyers, the new corporate lawyers for the organization, they spend the first two weeks, they spend two weeks uh on boarding in the customer support role. Zappos is the shoe company Amazon. In the early days, you could, if you were hired as an attorney at Zappos, they would make you do customer support calls your first two weeks. It’s just amazing, right? It creates so much empathy across the organization. In the case of a nonprofit, it really brings your donors to the front. So now your program team is getting to talk with these people that are, are giving their hard earned money and time every month to support your cause. And the pro program team gets to see that firsthand. It just, it’s magical and this could be done, you know, in uh like a, a ride along for a day or, you know, shadow for a day or a couple of days so that you would build the, the empathy that, that you mentioned. That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. The, the, it one is a little bit different that the, it, unfortunately, it, and some nonprofits has just become, they’re, they’re seen as like the bottleneck or the killjoy, right. We wanna kill all, do all this stuff and it has a backlog and we can’t get it done, which is for as a, I’m a computer programmer by trade. So that’s a frustrating stereotype for me. Right. But um there’s several ways, one of the, the things that we’ve seen the best organizations do is actually empower the individual teams to make their own technology decisions rather than having to run everything through it. We were even talking with the folks at Microsoft last week and they’re seeing Microsoft is seeing the most innovation in A I right now from non technical people, right. So with the Microsoft nonprofit team when they go into nonprofits say who’s, who’s doing really cool things with a I it’s never coming out of it. It’s coming from the fundraising team or the program team, right? And that’s like, and the more we can think about sort of empowering the entire team as technology decision makers rather than like keeping that entire burden on the it professionals, the better we’re gonna be, you mentioned, uh goal setting, uh you know, shared, having shared goals and that leads to the, your, your second practice, which is metrics and quarterly goal setting. And you tell us what’s your thinking here? Yeah, I, you know, one of the things is that you’re never going to be successful as an organization and you’re never gonna be able to pivot unless everybody at the organization is very clear on the target that we’re aiming at together, right? And so which requires two things. It requires really good reporting, you know. So if you say as an organization a to be successful, we need to increase donor retention by 20% this year. Like we’re not gonna be able to hit our number and accomplish our mission unless we do that. But if you don’t, if you can’t report on that number in a meaningful way and allow everybody in your organization to see it unless they know that it’s important, you’re just never gonna get there. It’s way too opaque. I’ve been a part of way too many nonprofits that don’t, they just don’t know their number. They don’t, they can’t see the data, they don’t know what they’re chasing after. So decisions end up being made by leadership or whoever has the loudest voice at the table. They’re not data informed their decisions, they’re just whoever has the strongest opinion. Right. And that it, it is a recipe for disaster because you end up wasting a lot of time on the wrong things that don’t actually move the needle. So a lot of what we talk about in the book is, is frameworks for setting clear goals quarterly. A lot of nonprofits have started to adopt E OS the entrepreneurial operating system as a way to set quarterly goals and sort of operationalized goal setting in the organization. Um or there’s a framework as well called OKRS objectives and key results that does the same thing. But basically both of them say like, hey, every quarter, we need to know the 3 to 5 numbers we’re shooting for, you know, whether it’s program outcomes, it could be donor retention, it could be new donor acquisition, it could be starting that plan giving program that we’ve always wanted to do. You set clear goals quarterly, right? And everybody knows what success looks like, they know the number and those goals should actually filter down. It’s not just that an exercise for the executive team in the board. I I feel like I should be able to walk to any employee of a nonprofit, any individual contributor and say, what’s your number? And they should know, hey, the reason I’m getting receipts out within 10 days is because when I do that, I know I increase donor satisfaction, I increase likelihood of second gift in this number. We want to increase second gift retention by 25%. So I’m playing a big part in us hitting that number, right? Like everybody at the org should know how they’re contributing to that, that quarterly goal. And I just find it’s, it’s just too rare in nonprofits, especially small to mid size nonprofits having that sort of discipline around. This is where we’re going and we’re all in lockstep getting there together. Quarterly. Feels just right. It feels like a month is, is not enough time to achieve anything. Semi annual. We could be slipping and not and not know it and it could end up being too late. I don’t know, quarterly just feels, feels perfect. 90 days is enough time to get something done. Right. And it’s, and, and you can now look back and make adjustments for the next quarter as needed. Right. A lot of this too is, is, takes executive leadership in bringing your board along because a lot of times boards are calibrated to sort of annual plans and as nonprofits, we all know that we get like halfway into the year and everything goes to hell in a hand basket or things change. Right. So it’s even calibrating board and leadership to understand, you know, this is what we’re going after this quarter and the next quarter and the next quarter and it gives us permission to pivot and sometimes even stretch further than we thought we could halfway through the year. Let’s move to uh agility, the agile, your practice three, the agile nonprofit. What, what is the uh agile methodology comes out of software development, doesn’t it? It does. And it’s been applied. There’s this great TED talk on, on a guy that started using agile for his family, like his parenting and, and, and doing stuff at home. And so it’s, it’s used broadly. It’s used a lot in marketing right now. Actually, um Agile is just the concept that, hey, we’re, we’re gonna work in small teams and on projects and we’re gonna work in two weeks, spreads, right? And so this is especially powerful in marketing and fundraising teams and nonprofits where uh you want to test new ideas or launch a new program. So rather than saying, hey, we’re gonna lock ourselves in the room for the next six months and hopefully, what we come out on the other side will work instead of doing that, we’re gonna work in, in two weeks, sprints where we’re going to see how much we can accomplish in two weeks that we could test at the end of two weeks. And so, you know, maybe as a nonprofit, you have this hypothesis. Hey, I think our donors care way more about video stories than they do all about all the stats we’re shoving down their throat. It’s like, well, we don’t have to wait six months to figure that out. In the next two weeks, we could create a video. How could we test? So what we could run, run on social media side by side, split test to see what works and what doesn’t work. It allows you to break up work into two week chunks plan that work, execute on it. Everybody comes back at the end of two weeks and shares what they’ve done and what they’ve learned, which is incredibly important because you have this like continuous learning loop that allows you to make pivots on the fly rather than just wasting time working on stuff that will never bear fruit. And the uh agility also not surprising. It starts with, with goals with shared goals and the goals toward the, to I guess toward the two week sprints, I guess not, I guess towards the two week sprints. Right? I, I know, I know, I know, I like to, I like your time period, the quarterly goal setting, the two week sprint. I don’t know. I just like the idea of a sprint. You know, even if, even if, even if it crashes and burns and you didn’t meet the goal you still have learned and you’ve only, and it’s only taken 22 weeks to learn a lesson. Well, now it turns out they do like the statistics better than what we thought would be the engaging video. But our, you know, it turns out that our intuition was incorrect. Our audience more prefers uh what we think is bland over what we think is engaging. But now we know, so let’s focus more on numbers and we don’t need, you don’t need to produce so much video, you know, that’s counterintuitive. But, but you, you, it’s valuable to learn that, you know, all your assumptions, whatever they may be, however, you know, how strongly we hold them could very well be wrong. And you can, you so many of those you could test in just in two weeks, a little sprint. That’s right. That’s right. I always encourage organizations to use the word hypothesis. It sounds like a goofy scientific word. But you’re h uh hh zero H one. That’s right. Yeah. So it’s what our reach not. That’s right. So you have a board member, hey, direct mail doesn’t work, right? It’s like, well, we have a hypothesis. Direct mail doesn’t work. Could we test that? Hypo? Let’s not assume even best practices here. All these best practices, nonprofit space, well, sometimes best practices are best practice because they are our best practices. Sometimes somebody just said it a long time ago and nobody bothered to test it at this organization. And so let’s hold those loosely as a hypothesis. Let’s see how quickly we can test, learn from them and then pivot to what actually works. Anything else you want to say about, uh, agility? It’s, there’s, there’s a ton more in the book. I mean, the bumper practices is it just, you can’t deep dive into any of them too much. But if you’ve never tried sort of that like an agile approach of two week sprints, like, find, don’t, you don’t have to roll at all. Just find one team at your nonprofit, two or three people with a project you’re working on, they can test it out. I promise you, you’re gonna be thrilled with the results and, and want to adopt it. But just start with a project with a small group of folks and give it a shot and see how it goes. And there are hundreds of books on uh the agile methodology. Um OK. Human centered design practice for being human centered. You talk about uh as an example here, water.org the, the way they uh did empathy gathering brought, brought constituent opinions in te tell us that little water.org story. Yeah. Water orgs this great org. Um Matt Damon is one of the founders. So they have all this kind of, you know, big star appeal and that kind of thing, what they found was uh just funding water projects like wells. The kind of thing that typical orgs do was good, but really fixing this problem required big systemic change, large capital investments working with governments, all of the kind of big buzzwords that are really hard to pitch to donors, you know, because the donor wants to feed a child or dig a well, they don’t want to invest in systemic, you know, 10 year initiatives. And so uh what water.org does did to solve this problem is to rather than assume they knew all the right answers. They actually spent a ton of time doing what’s called empathy gathering in Human Centered Design, which is effectively just going out and, and interviewing their stakeholders, their donors, their other constituents and saying like, you know, like, why would you give to water.org? Like what makes you tick like? And, and they use this Toyota Practice. There’s a ID O is the big company that does Human Centered Design, but a lot of them use Toyotas ask why five times. And so it’s uh I give an example of my 10 year old daughter in the book where I say, you know, she says, you know, why is this guy blue? Well, because this, well, why? Well, because this, why and she’ll just keep asking why to get to the heart of the thing, right? That’s what empathy gathering is. Don’t assume that you know why your donors give, why your volunteers volunteer even on the program side, don’t assume that you’re making the biggest impact in your community just because you’ve always done it a certain way, like take time to really be empathetic to ask open ended questions. Don’t assume you know the answers and ask why. So that’s exactly what water.org did and found some have found multiple really creative approaches to connecting with donors around some of these initiatives. But it just in human centered design, generally, it’s like starting from the ground up being empathetic to the communities that you’re serving in your donors. Like actually asking them questions. One of the things that I’ll recommend a lot to nonprofits is I know it sounds crazy, but I call 100 donors and don’t, you’re not calling them to ask them for money to get anything out of them, just have a conversation and ask great questions. What made you give, give? Like what, what did you find appealing about our organization? Like, you know, what was the thing? And just that simple little thing can be transformative in how you think about fundraising or your organization in general. Again, the assumptions that we hold so dear. I just know it. I just know it’s true. Well, you, you believe it, you believe it to be true. It’s time for a break or b.com named the number one domain registrar by USA today for 2023 and 2024. Pork bun helps you share your organization’s mission with a.org domain name dot org. And the entire.org family of domains are at the heart of change makers and philanthropies worldwide. Join an international community of individuals and organizations sharing a common goal to make the world a better place. Your.org domain name gives your website credibility is easy to remember and helps bring better awareness to your goals. Every domain at Pork Bun comes with free features like who is privacy ssl certificates, web and email hosting trials and more. You can manage everything about your domain from one place backed by five star support. 365 days a year, Get your.org domain name for a low price at pork bun.com. It’s time for Tony’s take two. Thank you, Kate. I’ve got more tails from the gym. II, I don’t know if this is a Southern thing or, you know, the way folks talk, uh adults, we’re talking about adults older than me. I mean, these, these uh these are guys uh 7070 plus it could be 75. Um And you know, of course I’m overhearing because I just like to do my work at the gym. I’ll say, you know, polite hellos, but I like to get my work done and depart because I have things to do the rest of the day because I go to the gym in the morning. Uh So it’s not like I’m conversing with these guys at all. I’m just overhearing because they have loud voices. And so one of the things, uh he was uh a guy was saying that uh he was talking about dancing, they were out for, you know, I got to hear the whole story, right? He and he and his wife were out dancing and uh they were, they had met somebody or they were, they were with somebody younger. It wasn’t clear whether they had met them or come with them. But, and he was dancing with the, the younger woman and, and he said, I maybe could have kept up with her if I was 20 years younger, I maybe could have. I, I don’t know, I, I could have, I think what the English that he’s trying to express is I could have, I could have kept up with her if I was 20 years younger, but I maybe could have, it’s just not proper English. And then the other one, same guy different day, you know, I’m, I’m, I’m putting a couple of different uh gym days together. He um had a neighbor wanted to cut, trim some trees, but I gather the trees were growing on this guy’s property. My, my uh loud gym person property. But, you know, there were the branches were over on the neighbor’s property. So, uh the neighbor had asked, you know, could I cut them? And he said, uh to the neighbor that uh it don’t make me know. Never mind. I was what? Uh it don’t make me know, never mind who talks like this. II, I don’t hear these, these idioms. I don’t know. Uh again, you know, it’s one person but maybe I’m overreacting. I don’t know, it don’t make me know. Never mind how they talk. That is Tonys take two date. He kind of sounds like he would make a very good brisket at a barbecue. He sounds like a very, that is, that is the southern, that is a southern skill. We’re actually a couple of towns over there’s an annual barbecue competition and festival. Um, uh, what town is that? I can’t remember the town but barbecue is very big down here. Yeah. Uh good, very good observation. Yeah. Uh He, he might very well. I’ll, I’ll be listening out for his barbecue recipe. Well, we’ve got VU but loads more time. Here’s the rest of the responsive nonprofit with Gabe Cooper. Your fifth practice is managing change. This is where you have the, uh the quote in the, on the opening page of the chapter about uh finding yourself beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists. Uh The learned versus the learners who are uh inheriting the earth. Um In, in this, in this practice, you’re talking about AAA shared vision, shared skills incentives, share your, share your thinking about the best, you know, best work around managing change, which is a cha uh which is a constant, uh you know, it’s a, it’s a cliche now to say it. And I won’t, I won’t get into all the sort of the techniques and, and tricks of this practice. But the big people have to buy the book, you gotta, you gotta leave something to buy the book, you gotta buy the book. I mean, we can, we can scratch the surface here in an hour and wet, uh, appetites. But, you know, if you want to, if you want the, the detail, we, you know, we just don’t have that kind of time, you’re gonna have to buy the book and it’s, it’s worth buying. That’s right. That’s right. Yeah. But this is a big one, right? Because nonprofits, you, you get to the point where you see where you need to go. Everybody sees that aspirational reality out ahead. And everybody’s clear on this is where we need to go as an organization where it gets stuck is ch the change required within the organization. Everybody’s gonna have to do their job slightly different than they did a year ago. And that’s hard, right? Because everybody’s cheese is being moved and everybody gets a little bit uncomfortable, um, with what’s going to be required of them in whatever the new normal looks like. And so a lot of this just revolves around, you know, how do you get team alignment early on and cast a clear vision for where we’re going? So everybody knows where we’re going. How are you asking the right questions along the or around the organization to make sure that you’re not inadvertently gonna create a real problem that you don’t anticipate? Like, how do you set a culture where people are adaptable and curious and they want to change and they want to get better. Right. And then how do you assign the right ownership and accountability through change where you’re not all of a sudden just asking somebody to work 80 hours a week, you know, to get there? But how do you create realistic deadlines with accountability? And so everybody’s moving in the same direction in a predictable way. It sounds, you know, a little bit, you know, maybe uh boring or mechanical. But this really is the thing for many nonprofits, they know where they want to go. It’s just really hard to pivot. It’s hard to change. Virtuous has uh an audacious vision as a company. Well, why don’t you share what that is? So, um we want to create $10 billion in that new generosity in the world, right? We, we think that if we can help nonprofits level up how they communicate with donors, um how personal they can be. We think that, you know, people, there’s this famous quote that says donors aren’t ungenerous, they’re just distracted. Right? And right now, giving is roughly 2.7% of GDP in the US. We think it could be way bigger and we think nonprofits can, you know, can contribute and more and more uh interesting and um sort of um complex ways than they are today and we want to be a part of that story, right? So we look at all the data for the organizations on our platform. Um And we see how they’re able to tilt up after they adopt responsive fundraising and they adopt our platform and we measure how much they’ve grown generosity. So to this point, we’ve generated about a billion dollars in that new generosity in the world that’s measurable across all of our customers. We don’t think that’s enough, we want to get to 10 billion just because we have such a passion for generosity in general. Now you said earlier that anybody in the organization should know their number. So what as, as ceo at virtuous, what, what is your number? Yes. Well, my number is that $10 billion. It’s, it’s interesting that you said that I talk a little bit about this in the culture chapter of practice in the book. But um when a new employee starts at virtuous, I don’t start with like the pithy values that, you know, sound kind of trite and fun and sound like they should be printed on a copy mug actually start with the Economic Engine of our business. And I explained to every new employee, this is how all the numbers work like this is how I if you’re in customer success, I want this much retention. I want this score and customer satisfaction. I want in our quarterly business reviews with our customers. I want them to give us this grade and if you can hit these numbers, it’s going to create happy customers that stick around. It’s going to create more successful customers that can increase, giving 5% a year. You know, they spread that out across x thousands of customers. It gets us to 10 billion in generosity. So before I have one single conversation about values, you should know how my job is gonna contribute. My number is gonna contribute to our number. And then I talk about our values in the context of that. It’s a, it’s a backwards way of thinking about culture, I think for some orgs. But that context I think is so powerful if you can provide it. Well, that’s, that’s your next practice building a durable team culture. What, what do you mean by durable? Um Well, uh one of the biggest issues in nonprofits that I’ve seen is uh people either burn out or check out, right? Nonprofit work is really hard. And so you either put on a cape, you put in too many hours, you burn out the turnover of fundraisers, especially in this country is far too high, you know, or you check out, you just, you know, you start just taking up a seat and mailing it in and you don’t want to change anymore. And so you have to develop a culture that is um adaptable where people want to be a part where you’re able to attract the best and the brightest talent, not just whatever you can get, but people that care deeply about your cause and they’re in it for the long haul, right? And you have to, you have to create this, you say uh great culture doesn’t just build itself. This has to be intentional. II, I assume you’re beginning with leadership and, and, and then eventually it becomes bottom up. But I would think that initially, it’s, it, it starts at the top a 100% a virtuous. I’ll give you an example. We have a cultural road map just like we have a product road map, right? Because we know that we will lose our soul if we don’t uh have a very intentional plan for culture. And so what that means is as we scale, we want the cadences and rhythms of our company to remind everybody why we’re here. So when you go into a meeting at virtuous, when you do your performance review at virtuous, we want our values so embedded in all those cadences, it almost becomes like, you know, to use a religious term like a liturgy that reminds you of why we’re here, why we show up every day and what we’re all about. And, and when you do that, then what the magic that starts happening is now, culture isn’t like a tops down like the executives telling us how we should behave. It’s, it’s bottoms up where you see people that have been here, six months that are individual contributors that are enforcing our culture and they’ll be in a meeting and they’ll call somebody out. Hey, that’s not our culture here, right? Like, and, and that’s really when you start seeing a durable culture, when it’s so sort of ingrained at the ground up, which means as, as leaders you have to be. And, and this happens at nonprofits where we become so focused on the mission that we sort of, it’s at the expense of our team. Like, you know, we’re riding our team, like the people ride a mule through the Grand Canyon and just like, you know, this is gonna get everything we can out of this until it’s done, right? And as opposed to, I wanna be shoulder to shoulder with my team asking them what they need, seeing how they feel, asking them how their weekend was making sure they understand the job that we’re doing here together and they fully embraced our, our culture because without a great team, without the ability to attract and retain great talent, we’re never gonna accomplish our mission. It’s time for a story with uh it doesn’t really belong in this uh this practice area, but I like the story about Cure International. Oh Yeah, you talk about them with related, related to the metrics. But we, we, I felt like I wanted, I wanted to spread out the stories and you were just told the good uh good Mustang story. So uh tell, tell us about Cure. Cure has AAA great CEO um buddy of mine and he uh when he came in and, and took the job, um realized cure was number one, an amazing organization. They’re doing like children’s hospitals globally. They do amazing work, have this great reputation. But also realize that if they really wanted to have the impact, they wanted, they were going to have to tighten up the ship and get way more focused. And so one of the things he uses the E OS framework that I mentioned before of like sort of operational goal setting in the organizations. But the other thing he did is that I loved as, as a, as a new leader, he didn’t assume he had all the answers. So he kind of went on a listening tour around the organization and talked to almost everybody, like, you know, what do you care about? How do you do your job? What are the problems you’re facing? A lot of what we talked about in human centered design. So as a leader, just really empathy. That’s right. And, and then use that empathy to a line up to their overall strategy where they’re going as an organization. One of the even the hard decisions he had to make was he realized the organization was doing a lot of stuff that was off mission. It, you know, stuff that seemed like a good idea at the time. And now they have 20 little like side projects that are just hanging off of the, the core mission. What, what they want to create. And as long as they’re dragging around the baggage of like 20 things that they’re doing that are good but not great. Right. And, and they’re like kind of aligned to the mission but not really, they’re just gonna never get to where they want to be. And so a big part of what he did after he kind of did his empathy gathering was he went through and began to cut projects and programs or fold those in to the mission in a way that lined everybody up. So everybody’s marching in lockstep together which at an organization, the size of c is no joke, right? As this is a year, a multiyear initiative, but was just so impressed by his thoughtfulness, not just being a leader that comes in and says, this is where we’re going, we’re quitting all this dumb stuff, you know, but instead taking the time to truly listen and get to know everyone across the organization and align everybody together. I like that concept of alignment. You know, it just to me, it, it embodies the shared goals, the shared vision, everyone walking together, helping each other. There’s a, there’s a lot of that in your book too. The team support, you know, that’s uh uh that, that, you know, in, in stand up meetings, you know, how can I help you? Uh uh uh a, a big part of the stand up meeting you talk about is you know, what, what, what obstacle have I gotten and who can help me do it, who can help me overcome it and we can take care of it probably in the next 30 minutes versus a bunch of emails back and forth. And nobody really understands the, the issue as well is if we just talk about it right now in our meeting 100 yeah, 100%. You know, and that it’s, it’s not all like, you know, rainbows and roses and all the time. You got as a leader, you have to make really hard decisions. You just, you do. But if you’ve taken the time to actually collaborate with people and, and build trust and they understand why, like why are we going into direction or what goal are we trying to accomplish? Those hard decisions? Get way easier and they make way more sense as opposed to just dictating from the top. This is where we’re going. You’ve, you’ve earned the right to make the hard decision if that makes sense. Mhm Community and storytelling. Yeah. As uh as the drivers of change. But uh what, what struck me here is that the long haul? And you’ve, we’ve started around this. But uh I like to focus on that explicitly that this so much of what we’re talking about is the long game. Even, even if it’s a two week sprint, there’s a lot of two week sprints long game, you know, that, that commitment. That’s right. Yeah. And in community is definitely a long game kind of thing. But, you know, at a, at a ton of the works that we work with the issue becomes, hey, we just don’t have enough resources to pull this off. We don’t have enough staff to pull this off. You know, maybe you have 10 people on your team, 20 people on your team. I’m like, yeah, but you have 10,000 raving fans in the world that love your mission and want to make a difference. Like you have all of the resources at your fingertips. You just have to work to catalyze. And so, you know, I, I tell the story in the book of the Kony 2012 video and uh uh a lot of you that have been around nonprofits for a long time, like I have probably remember Kony 2012. You probably remember that video. Um But it was this moment where it was youtube’s highest ever viewed video and people that saw it thought this came out of nowhere. This is crazy. How did this get popular so fast? What they don’t see is the years and years before that video came out of people on that team, they were driving, you know, vans around the high schools all over the country, like telling the stories of, of the atrocities of Joseph Kony to kids that just didn’t know anything about it and they were building a community. They were like doing the really hard work of creating a massive movement of people that care deeply about their call. And yeah, it’s the long game. It’s hard work. But if you look at some of the best organizations and even the best campaigns that nonprofits have done, it’s because people have done the hard work to really care about building a community. And so now it’s not just you and your 10 staff members, it’s you and this 10,000 person army behind you that’s willing to do anything for the cause. And the power of that is just amazing. But it takes work and intentionality. You, you have to get out into the community and you have to do the hard work of getting to know people and building that movement. Another example you use is uh food link the way, the way they built community around getting food from, from farms to uh to shelters or kitchens. Yeah. Yeah. The farm lake is amazing because they uh they were started by a couple of kids in college that just solved this problem where farmers had a ton of excess food. And then there was all of these, they’re throwing it away and there’s all these food banks that were short of food, right? And so the amazing thing there is recognizing that your community isn’t just powerful because they have money. I if we see our donors, it’s just checkbooks like it’s, it’s an incredibly like short sighted way to see the world. The magic of what they did is they had, you know, college kids driving around in vans picking up onions. Right. They started with picking up 50,000 eggs that a farmer was going to throw away. So they go rent a van and a truck and go pick it up. That was their first, I think that was their first episode and they were just, you know, uh, young enough and, and hadn’t been sort of part of the institution long enough to not know any better, right? It’s like, well, what do we need, we need somebody to drive a van and pick up some eggs. Well, I can find some people to pick up some eggs, right? They, they saw their community um as not checkbooks. They, they said all of these people have different superpowers. How can we bring together all of these amazing superpowers to accomplish more in the world? Right? And it’s, and, and it’s amazing. I think so many nonprofits can learn from that is like, how do I look at my community? See their unique superpowers and figure out how to plug those in in a meaningful way and it’s, it’s helpful to your org but man, for your donors or volunteers, you, you no longer feel like an outsider who’s giving to this cause like this cause is kind of my proxy for doing good in the world. But I’m not really a part of it all of a sudden you feel like you’re part of it. It’s like, it’s, I don’t have to be a staff member. Like I’m shoulder to shoulder participating in this, in a meaningful way. It completely changes the nature of how you accomplish your mission. Yeah. Yeah. You have a lot of touching stories, uh, that they, they illustrate points but I, I found a bunch of them also moving and that, that food link one especially. Um All right, your last one, I’m sorry. I wish they were. I wish you had 12 because then we’d have, we’d have five more to talk about. But uh we only have one, we only have one more uh generosity gen ops, you get generosity operations, structuring your team for shared insights, what you’re advocating for a new position or in a bigger organization, a new team. What is this? Well, let’s let our, our audience is small and mid-sized nonprofit. So it might be uh it might be a, might be a halftime responsibility or something. But what, what, what’s the idea behind generosity operations and, and the person leading that? Yeah. And it, it probably is more applicable to uh more mid-sized teams honestly. But the, the idea here is that um your constituents interact with your organization in all kinds of different ways. Like you have people who have volunteered, who have also given, who have also uh taken part in your program or, or been a part of your services offering, right? They’re interacting with your org in all sorts of different ways. The problem is if you, if your departments or teams are siloed, you don’t have really any visibility into this. And so this is a team and sometimes you’re right, it can be just call it a committee of a few people working together a few hours every month that are stewarding the entire constituent journey. So they understand some people, hey, are you, do you guys realize 20% of our volunteers give money? It’s like, oh, I had, I had no idea like we should, we should see if we can report on that and figure out why that is right? Or did you realize that um our program team, the the most powerful stories or this kind of story? But our program team doesn’t know that and they’re giving us the wrong kind of stories and we could easily fix that problem. It’s somebody who understands how your stakeholders and constituents interact with your cause. They’re looking at that from a bird’s eye view and they’re connecting the data and dots between departments. And so that people have one single coherent experience with your organization, not a bunch of dis disparate experiences. And so that within your team, data and insights are shared. Yeah, there’s this uh Brian Regan, he’s this goofy stand up comic. He tells a story about, he saw two logging trucks passing one another, both carrying logs on the freeway one going one direction and the other going the other one. And like the guy in the one truck says, hey, you had logs over there. And so the point of the story is, you know, as nonprofits, I think we do that all the time where we realize somebody and some other team is doing something massively similar to us, man. If we just would have shared and communicated better, we get to s save so much time and effort. And so generosity ops is that team that helps optimize data and communication across the org and optimizes a single constituent journey outside of the org. It’s a holistic view. That’s right. You’re right. You’re, you’re taking data. But first of all, you have to have the right, you have to have the right data. There’s a, there’s a key part of being able to enhance generosity uh but taking data from, from across the organization and like you said, you know, sort of connecting dots and discovering learnings or even things worth testing. That’s right. Yeah, that’s exactly right. These are kind of your, the, the team that really drives innovation and insights across because they’re the ones that are seeing data that’s disconnected. They’re seeing real huge opportunities for growth. They’re able to bubble up those insights to the rest of the team and find sort of unnatural opportunities for growth that if you’re just heads down in fundraising every day or heads down in finance or heads down in it, you’re never going to see it without somebody connecting the dots. All right, Gabe. So, I, uh, dictatorially, uh, you know, chatted us through the, ran us through the, uh, the eight practices. What, what, what, what didn’t we talk about? What, what, what do you want folks to know beyond what we’ve, we’ve said about being a responsive nonprofit and these practices. Yeah, I think one of the things is there’s a lot covered that we just covered and it can sometimes feel really overwhelming like boiling the ocean. Right? And so I’ve, I’ve been into quoting Frozen Two lately, which is, you know, your daughter. It’s a favorite of your nine year old daughter. Yeah, that’s exactly right. Yeah. So it in there, the, the sort of punch line is just do the next right thing, right? And so don’t get overwhelmed by all everything. It just feels like so much I would say just pick a practice. Like the one we talked about with agile. Could we do? Could we try out working in two week sprints to see how fast we could learn? Right? Like, or could or be picked goal setting, man. I don’t think we have clear goals. Can we for, for one team for one quarter? See if we can set some clear goals and go after them, just pick one, do the next right thing. Don’t get overwhelmed with all of it. If you, if you can continually get better in any one of these practices. I can promise you you’re gonna get better as an organization. All right. Thank you. The book is the responsive nonprofit eight practices that drive nonprofit innovation and impact Gabe Cooper, the author. You’ll find the company at virtuous.org. You find Gabe on linkedin Gabe. Thank you very much for sharing so much. Fun. I’m glad. Thank you and congratulations again on the book. Yeah, thanks. Next week, empowering women with Jenny Mitchell. If you missed any part of this weeks 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 and buy pork bun looking to grow your nonprofit. You need a.org domain name from pork bun, instant recognition, trust and visibility. Pork bun.com. Our creative producer is Claire Meyerhoff. I’m your associate producer, Kate Martignetti. The show social media is by Susan Chavez. Mark Silverman is our web 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.
