Category Archives: Planned Giving

Meet Me At bbcon 2013

BBCON2013_greenbackground copy

I’ll be interviewing guests for Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio at bbcon 2013, the Blackbaud conference for nonprofits.

I’ll be at the conference all day Monday 9/30, on stage in the exhibit hall, hosting interviews to air on upcoming shows. I start with keynoter Karen Worcester, passionate executive director of Wreaths Across America.

My other smart guests will share strategies and tips on
— Dr. Seuss and digital storytelling (is nothing sacred?)
— #GivingTuesday
— mobile giving
— getting society level gifts
— engaging web traffic
— building a board that brings the bucks
— fraud protection
— plus 5 more

To celebrate and have fun, I’m giving away 2 one-hour prizes of free consulting time!

There are 2 ways you can enter to win an hour of Planned Giving or Charity Registration consulting, your choice:

1. At bbcon, swing by the stage and drop a card in the bowl. You’ll be in the contest and I’ll add your name to my weekly email alerts. One card will win!

2. Not at bbcon? Tweet during conference hours, 6am (early fitness) to 10pm (drinks & networking), eastern time, on 9/30 using the 2 hashtags:
— #NonprofitRadio
— #bbcon
You tweet, you’re entered! One correct tweet will win!

bbcon2013 will bring together Blackbaud users, consultants and interested interlopers, sharing their expertise at the Gaylord Resort and Convention Center in National Harbor, MD.

I’ll see you there!

Nonprofit Radio for September 20, 2013: The Nonprofit Outcomes Toolbox & News Sources/New Source

Big Nonprofit Ideas for the Other 95%

Listen live or archive:

My Guests:

Dr. Robert Penna: The Nonprofit Outcomes Toolbox

Robert Penna 2Dr. Robert Penna, author of “The Nonprofit Outcomes Toolbox” discusses the wave of reliance on outcomes measurement, and gives concrete steps and tools so that small and mid-size shops can stay ahead of the trend toward outcomes assessment. We also talk about Easy Bake ovens and my Eagle Scout project (as an example of what NOT to do). This is part 1 of our interview from a previous show. Part 2 is next week.

 

 

 

 

Maria Semple: News Sources/New Source

Maria 057 Low Res Color_crMaria Semple, our doyenne of dirt cheap and free ideas in prospect research, is also The Prospect Finder. She’s got advice for you on which news sources are best for your research, and a new free offering from The Foundation Center, “Foundation Directory Online.” Plus, her 60-Second Style Stop!

 

 

 

 

 


Top Trends. Sound Advice. Lively Conversation.

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Hello and welcome to tony martignetti non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent for friday, september twentieth i’m your aptly named host. Oh, you know that i hope you were with me last week. I’d be put through mitral regurgitation if i heard that you had missed cause marketing one oh one trish in naper, principal manager at alcoa foundation and mounir panjwani, business development manager at do something dot or ge shared tips for getting started in cause marketing and internal social networks. Scott koegler, our technology contributor and the editor of non-profit technology news, explained how internal social networks compliment the external networks like twitter and facebook this week. The non-profit outcomes toolbox dr robert penna, author of the non-profit outcomes toolbox, discusses the wave of reliance on outcomes measurement and gives concrete steps and tools so that small and midsize shops can stay ahead of this increasing trend toward outcomes assessment. This is part one of our interview from a previous show, and part two is going to be next week. Also, news sources new source maria simple are dyin of dirt, cheap and free ideas in prospect research and the prospect finder she’s got advice for you on which news sources are best for your research and a new free offering from the foundation center called foundation directory online, plus her sixty second style stop. We’re going tow! Try having one minute tips on style like travel, food and leisure from guests. I’ll be anxious to know what you think about these sixty second style stops between the guests on tony’s take two my block this week is planned e-giving saved our ass and also i want to tell you about bb con coming up, i’m going to be there will say a little about that got contests that’s in tony’s, take two my pleasure now to give you my interview with dr robert penna and the non-profit outcomes toolbox. My guest now is robert penna. He is the author of a complete i’m sorry, the non-profit outcomes toolbox, a complete guide to program effectiveness, performance measurement and results published by wiley and sons he’s, a consultant, and his work includes the application of corporate sector, outcome based tools and insights to the work of non-profits he’s done work for the n e casey foundation, the national geographic foundation and the ford. Foundation he’s, an adviser to charity navigator on outcomes. I’m very glad that his work and his book bring him to the studio. Robert. Welcome. Thank you very much for having pleasure to have you. Thank you for coming all the way down from albany. No problem. Live in the studio. In the studio. We hear an increasing amount of talk about outcomes, outcomes, measurement. Why is that? I would save it for basically two reasons. The ones historical. The fact is that traditionally and this goes back easily to the beginning of the last century. No one ever asked non-profits to be quite fair, no one ever asked non-profits to either show evidence of or to demonstrate that they were having an actual impact. That was sort of a field of dreams and concept. If we make it available, things must get better. And it was taken on faith that train people with good programs with enough money would bring about positive change. Nobody actually quite asked that all started to change in the late seventies and then into the eighties, and quite independently of one another in various spaces. This concept of a focus on results in outcomes. And evidence of the same started a crop up, and it began to coalesce and particularly as we are in an in an era of limited resource is it becomes more important than ever for non-profits to be able to say here’s actual evidence of what we’ve accomplished, as opposed to a story about how big the problem is or how hard we’re trying in his forward. Ken berger, president, ceo of charity navigator who’s been a guest on the show, says that measurement is a battle for the very soul of the nonprofit sector. Ah, it’s taking on that great a prominence? Yes, it is that actually that line comes from a from an article ken and i co co authored it really is because there are those apologised who honestly believe in its ah term used before a fair exchange of differing ideas who honestly believe that non-profits and their clients should not be held. Tio this kind of accountability that the concept of just making services available truly is the mission of the non-profit space and that as long as they’re doing that, they’re doing their job. The problem is that for all of the money we’ve spent thes problems haven’t gone away, and so the question is, shouldn’t we be putting our our resource is into those programs into those organizations that have proven that there having the most beneficial impact, as opposed to giving it to other places that are perhaps not being as effective? The problems are too big, and the resource is of too scarce not to do this anymore, but it truly is a battle within the sector because there are those who just don’t believe in it, and we’ll get to a little of what their arguments are, maybe obliquely only, but that some of the ideas are so nebulous that they can’t be measured that like a child feeling a more positive ah feeling about education or about going to school, sort of nebulous ideas like that, but actually, those, um, sort of feel good outcomes can be measured. Well, first off, i would argue that if an organization is focusing primarily or almost or solely on feel good outcomes, they’re rethinking what they’re doing. Number one but number two there are proxies. There are proxies in terms of attitude, in terms of behaviour, in terms of various other kinds. Of things that can be looked at and can be taken as fairly accurate measures of whether or not if what you want to changes in attitude, whether or not that attitude has changed so it can be done, and we’re gonna talk about some of the ways that non-profits get there and the way that we can measure these things, um, is the butt is the story is the non-profits story the compelling story is that is that dead? Well, it it shouldn’t be dead, but what it should be, what should happen is that should be put in its place. Okay? The idea of telling a story is not a bad one, in fact, that there’s a whole chapter in the book that talks about using narrative as opposed to just factoids, because people remember stories where they have a tendency to forget much more vivid right stories vivid. But the problem is, if the if the story first off focuses on how big the problem is and that’s all it, it focuses on, and there are a number of non-profits i won’t name any, but you could probably think of them. You get things in the mail. And they show you the picture of x, y or z and it’s always how big the problem is, when we’re telling that kind of story and that’s all we’re telling we are in a way, avoiding entirely the question of, well, what do you doing about it and what other results that you have that you have achieved so that’s one one reason why the story has to be put in his proper place? The second is, and i don’t know whether we’ll get into this today, but a lot of non-profits wind up telling the wrong story for the wrong reason and ofttimes to the wrong people so that something has to be carefully handled as well. Okay, we have just another minute before a break, what if not a named example? What do you mean? Telling the wrong story? A lot of non-profits will focus on an emotional story that will highlight, for example, a success story, and it will be about this client of that client, but inadvertently, what they’re doing is they’re focusing the attention on that client. What we don’t know is, is that story cherry picked? How representative actually, is it what they’re not talking about is thie the the work that the organization as a whole does it’s it’s, shall we say, it’s it’s, macro impact. They focus so specifically on the story of this particular client at that particular client, it becomes very easy for their overall message of what they’re doing to be lost, counterproductive in counterfeit. His book is the non-profit outcomes, toolbox, it’s, robert penna. You’ll find his blogged outcomes, toolbox, dot com, and he’ll be with me after this break, so stay with us talking alternative radio twenty four hours a day. Do you need a business plan that can guide your company’s growth? Seven and seven will help bring the changes you need. Wear small business consultants and we pay attention to the details. You may miss our coaching and consultant services a guaranteed to lead toe. Right, groat. For your business, call us at nine. One seven eight three, three, four, eight six zero foreign, no obligation free consultation. Check out our website of ww dot covenant seven dot com oppcoll are you fed up with talking points? Rhetoric everywhere you turn left or right? Spin ideology no reality, in fact, its ideology over intellect no more it’s time. Join me, larry shot a neo-sage tuesday nights nine to eleven easter for the isaac tower radio in the ivory tower will discuss what’s important to you society, politics, business and family. It’s provocative talk for the realist and the skeptic who want to know what’s. Really going on? What does it mean? What can be done about it? So gain special access to the ivory tower. Listen to me, larry sharp your neo-sage tuesday nights nine to eleven new york time go to ivory tower radio dot com for details. That’s, ivory tower radio dot com everytime was a great place to visit for both entertainment and education. Listening. Tuesday nights nine to eleven. It will make you smarter. Hey, all you crazy listeners looking to boost your business? Why not advertise on talking alternative with very reasonable rates? Interested simply email at info at talking alternative dot com dahna welcome back to tony martignetti non-profit radio talking to robert penna about his book the non-profit outcomes toolbox right before the break, robert, we were talking about, um, for too much focus on problems. But the non-profit sectors exists to solve problems. So shouldn’t they be talking about what the problems are? Well, again, it has to be put into its proper place into its proper perspective. And this is not, you know, women, teo, bash the sector. Okay. I mean, we have to be honest and say this is a historical perspective and very early on this was how attention was brought. Tea to issues were literally going back to the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds. Um, people, for example, he’d carry nation she’s well known for wanting tio bring about prohibition. Well, what she talked about was all of the ancillary downsides of alcoholism, all right, and the folk. But the focus was on drink. The focus was on people drinking too much. And the idea was they didn’t think, think it through to say, well, what’s really gonna happen. What other causes here. It was just focused on the drinks. So we had prohibition and guess what? All of those issues did not go away. The issues of broken families, the issues of domestic violence, the issues of unemployment, the issues of of poverty didn’t go away just because, well, we got rid of alcohol for those period that period of time. So part of the problem of the focus on just the problem is it tends to lead to simplistic answers because the concept is that progress is a lack of the problem when, in point of fact, really, the outcomes approach is that what you want to do is bring about some positive change that goes beyond merely an absence of the problem. So that’s one of the problems with focusing on just the problem, the second thing is that it kind of takes you off the hook if you think about it, for having to say, really what you have done to alleviate the problem or what success you’ve had in alleviating the problem. If every time i come back to you, pick an issue, homeless puppies, i come to you and i sent put something in the mail and tony, you know, look at all these starving puppies, and i say it was ten thousand starving puppies and you know it, justin in manhattan or something. That’s, a problem. And you emotionally are expected to resupply with a cheque will. Now, next year i come back and i say, well, now, there’s ten thousand homeless puppies. This still ten thousand homeless puppies will again. What it keeps focusing on is the problem. It does not focus on am i having an impact on alleviating situation. So that’s, a real son of short way of describing why that tends to be a ah sort of a circle, you know, like the snake eating its own tail. It really doesn’t get you where you need to pay. And you alluded to earlier the fact that we do still have deep seated, entrenched problems that we have been working on for generations like homelessness, entrenched poverty, etcetera. Exactly right be a hunger of broken family, you name it, these problems, or of worldwide. And so you might even get thes these appeals from any place on the globe. But it tends to in a lot of ways, i think the lead to a sense of defeat because, i mean, think about it if every single year you get the same appeal from the same organization showing the same picture of the same a person in need. The question starts to hate begs the question, well, what’s happening with my money, what we’ve been at it for so long, and we’re still seeing the same right? The one problem? One gentleman i speak speaking to someone’s ago, he runs a non-profit e program in ohio, and he said to me, well, do candy said, you know, we’ve been fighting this war on poverty for, you know, forty something years, and i’m not so sure we have anything to show for it. And part of the reason is that from the beginning, what we have to show for it was not the accent the accent was on making money available and making programs available. You’ve heard a thousand times there, the concept, the underserved community, right, which you could argue about whether they’re actually underserved enough but that’s a different story. But the question is what it seems to lead to. It leads to the implication that if you make services available, things will be better. Well, that’s not necessarily true. Just making them available, zach. Will will result in the outcome that you want exactly, and for years social investors you know, traditionally called funders, we’re investing in making services available rather than investing in change, and if you’re investing in change, then there ought to be sameer marks of the change. The whole concept of moving your your your your head away from the idea of being a thunder what’s being an investor is one of the first the first steps what’s a funder and interested in a funder, is interested in the dispersement of funds. In terms of the process, the paperwork who’s it going to what’s it being used for what’s, an investor interest is an investor and investor wants a return let’s talk about some more of the language differences that you point out not so much differences, but the important language around outcomes measurement that takes up roughly the first third of the book or so gent generally outputs versus outcomes outputs of what you do outcomes of what happens because of what you did okay example of an output and output is training class, and the outcome would be that somebody got a job by virtue of having been trained and more importantly, kept the job for a reasonable amount of time. When and this was this was rampant in the late sixties and seventies. Excuse me when thanks to largely to government, we got into being counting and compliance organisations were measured onto in terms of how many fannies their head in the seats, how many training training class they help? Well, that was great. But then it turned out in some cases people we trained for jobs that no longer existed or the training was insufficient, or there really was no placement attached to it. So we had organizations claiming success because they’ve had x number of fannies in the seats, or because they held so many training’s or the game, but someone certificates. But the end of the day was anybody hyre did anybody did anybody’s life improved? Well, don’t ask me that question when i focused on that were protest on how many training on the output not come from the outcomes spring from the outputs. Yes, yes, you need the outputs in order to get the outcomes and they have to be the right outputs. But again, if that is only just your focus is there’s a saying that a colleague of mine, a colleague of mine who wrote a book, if well, you fundez activity that’s usually all you get? Yes. Okay. All right. Impact, impact flows from outcome. What? Tell us about it and that’s down the road that’s down the road. In other words, for example, let us say that what you were talking about was bringing possible water. And this is something i was engaged in a t united nations potable water, fresh water supplies to certain kinds of villages. I was pronouncing potable. Is that okay? Potable vote on a laudable somebody made a tomato, somebody from and why you were calling correct one of us. I have to. But i was so it’s possible that anyone, when you’re with the united nations. So that’s a hyre i’m just tony martignetti non-profit radio it’s hyre hyre hyre stand. But you had a situation where okay you’re you’re bringing fresh water and now you could think of a host of reasons early on why you might want to do that. One of the more interesting ones to me was to alleviate the burden on the women and girls in the village usually whose job it is to do nothing while david hole water one of the reasons why their educational opportunities were so so stunted was because, well, gee, somebody’s got to get the water and that’s the woman and children’s job rather a woman and girls job. Well, let us say that you bring it in and let us say that some girl does get to go to school. Well, perhaps if twenty years later, when she’s an adult, she actually has a business and gets out of the out of the village, that might be an impact. But the problem with the focusing on impacts these long term impacts is very often the causal chain is extremely weak. The causal chain is broken and it’s kind of hard. Teo teo to take credit for some things. I mean, we’ve all heard the stories of the head start program that’s taking credit because thirty five years later, one of their graduates became the head of some, you know, ceo of some company. Well, you know, thanks, snusz because back in nineteen forty seven, he was with us in today’s end of a corporation. I don’t know about that, but i honestly would say impacts agreed to have these are the kinds of things you see in mission statements and vision statements, the long term impacts, what organizations need to do is figure out how to translate those things into measurable, achievable, significant, meaningful outcomes. Okay? And shortly, we’re gonna talk about the outcome statement and contrast it with the mission statement and talk about what the elements are and how to get to ah, no a ah, a proper and and viable outcome statement. So yeah, and and just around impacts you say in the book impacts or what we hoped for, outcomes are what we work for. We’ve talked about that means your outcomes or what you’re working toward the impact of the the longer term we we we talked about funder donorsearch versus investor, anything else you want to say about the about? Maybe non-profits looking at themselves as invest, ese. Well, that’s, that’s a very good point. I mean, when someone gives you a gift christmas gift. Okay, now we’ve all had the relative who gives us something. And then every once a while checks oh, yeah? Are you using it? You? Have you been? Did you like the sweater? Most people that give you a gift, they hope you like it, but they really don’t have any kind of control. Now. My grandmother used to give me cash. She would slip me cash in by hand like a handshake, and she would always say, spend it like you earned it. My grandmother never did that. You didn’t know i’m sorry. You know, my grandmother borrowed but no that’s, um, we’re not related event starting now, but the idea is when someone gives you a gift really the in most cases, the strings got, you know, the the very there, the influence they have over the use of that gift, et cetera. Well, the problem is, when you think of yourself, if you’re a non-profit as a grantee of donor of a donation or giving, okay, the implication that the onus is on you to deliver something back to that to that donor to that investor is i like to use use the term is much less clear than if you see them as investors and you see yourself as an invested because right from the start from the basic language, what we’re making clear is that you owe them a return investments give returns exactly. And so the mindset shifts that i mentioned before the first one is moving from the concept of thunder to investor. The second is moving from the concept that what we’re investing in is the provision of services opposed to we’re investing in change. And then what are those changes and how do you define them? And the third thing is that we are going to be satisfied with an account of activity as opposed to actual evidence of results, performance and effectiveness thes air three crucial mindset shifts that the space has to eventually and will adopt, and the sooner non-profits get on this, the better off they’ll be. You quote stephen covey saying, it is incredibly easy to be very busy without being very effective. Well, we’ve always have seen those people who can, you know, go to the office in the busy all day, and at the end of the day, what have they actually accomplished? And the answer is, you know, not a heck of a lot and that’s, you know, that’s, the wife, i’m with robert pennant he’s, the author of the non-profit outcomes toolbox. Let’s, talk a little about the outcome statement versus the how does it contrast with the mission statement? The well, mission statements of very often pie in the sky and aspirational mean they ought to be yes, and an inspirational okay, okay, but the idea is that the idea that we’re going to solve a problem in our time, we’re gonna end poverty. We’re gonna end homeless. Is thies air the kinds of things that you very often see working their way into? Ah, emission statement or vision statement. The problem is that how do you then actually turn around and effectuated if you basically go to an investor and they said, what do you know what we’re going to? We’re going to end and homelessness well, you’re probably not. So when you don’t, what do you could do? You come back and say i failed an outcome statement is based upon a couple of key characteristics that good outcomes have among those are all right. It’s, meaningful it’s not a cosmetic change. It’s sustainable that’s. A very, very important one, right? It’s achievable. All right, there’s. An old statement. Everyone talks about the weather. No one does anything about it. Why? Because global warming aside, it’s. Tough to do anything about the weather. All right, but if you ah, couch your your goals in not slam dunks you want, they want them to be doable with a stretch. You clearly want to push yourself. All right. But the idea is that you want it to be something that can be achieved in your lifetime on dh something that can be measurable. The sustainable part is particularly crucial. I think of my involvement. I’m a lifelong scout on fifty. Eight years old and your first join the boy scouts when i was ten kayman eagle scout well, i never made it that i was in the order. The arrow you want? Ditigal oh, no, no, no it’s different. But i have a son who was in the order of the arrow and he’s an eagle scout like vicarious thrills. But we i remember ah, project where are we going to clean up a lot. And tha this lot had been used as a dumping ground. The scouts came in and we weed whackers and rakes and tree pruners. And we’re trying to look like a park who had done right and we congratulate ourselves. Up, up, up we all went home in that night’s peace. Somebody dumped a refrigerator. It wasn’t a sustainable achievement because we didn’t have the facility for either blocking it office, stopping people from dumping again. So the concept has to be again in terms of a good outcome, one of the characteristics and aki one is this concept of sustainability, but again, to go back to your question about the difference between a mission statement of vision statement and an outcome statement a lot. Of organizations all right have a tough time differentiating in the book i refer to ah, vision approach. You may recall the book in the book, i had a picture of some futuristic city, teo illustrate that my belief is that mission statement envision statements are both great things that good ideas, they’re visionary, they belong up on the wall, but they don’t belong in terms of you every day action plan, they’re different from an action plan it’s the difference be between having the long term goal of i wanted to be fit. I want to be trimmed and having an actual diet that you’re that you’re following. All right? Um, you know, there are numerous examples we could weigh could point to okay, i’m realizing now, since we’re talking about since i’m talking about being an eagle scout, i’m really you know, i didn’t measure the the outcomes of my eagle scout project, which was teo. Make sure that address is street addresses were visible to emergency services in my little town of altum panned new jersey, which had maybe three thousand homes or so, so we looked at every home and where there wasn’t a visible address. From the street that a policeman or fireman or the ambulance could find could see it easily. We left a note in the in the mailbox, and the note was signed by the police chief, the fire chief and the head of the angelus score. But that’s just that’s just activity. I don’t know what the outcome’s were. I don’t know if more lives were saved police response times, we’re reduced fire response times are reduced. That would have been right that would come into the out moment. And what? And if you had done the eagle project as an outcome, you know, an outcome based thing that was specifically the kinds of things that you would have wanted to look at. Now that was response time reduced, you know, i don’t know anything is dramatic, is we’re lives saved, but certainly were response times reduced. You could even you could even have done it as looking at things like ups, you know? Did ups have fewer lost deliveries because they were brought to the wrong home? All right, i have thiss factual case up in albany way way. Have to hold on your case. Feeling bad about my eagle project from thirty five years ago. This is tony martignetti tony martignetti non-profit radio we have to take a break after the break. We’ll be tony’s take two for two minutes and then i’ll return with robert penna. Stay with us now. We were going into a break. I’ll have the second half of that interview next week. You could tell you know he didn’t hey didn’t like that. I said i was an eagle scout and then he said he wasn’t an eagle scout. So that’s why, i think that’s ah that’s reflecting now, that’s. Why the bashing of my eagle scout project? That was a good project that i’m i got i got raves from the first aid core and the fire department in town. I remember that was a good project. All right, yes, we go away. I’ll have some live listening love. We got lots of live listeners tony’s take two and then maria simple she’s in the studio news sources. New source. Stay with me for all that they didn’t think the tubing getting ding, ding, ding ding you’re listening to the talking alternative network get in! Dahna duitz are you suffering from aches and pains? Has traditional medicine let you down? Are you tired of taking toxic medications, then come to the double diamond wellness center and learn how our natural methods can help you to hell? Call us now at to one to seven to one eight, one eight three that’s to one to seven to one eight one eight three or find us on the web at www dot double diamond wellness dot com. We look forward to serving you. Hi, i’m ostomel role, and i’m sloan wainwright, where the host of the new thursday morning show the music power hour. Eleven a m. We’re gonna have fun. Shine the light on all aspects of music and its limitless healing possibilities. We’re gonna invite artists to share their songs and play live will be listening and talking about great music from yesterday to today, so you’re invited to share in our musical conversation. Your ears will be delighted with the sound of music and our voices. Join austin and sloan live thursdays at eleven a. M on talking alternative dot com. Yeah, you’re listening to the talking alternative network. Duitz durney i’m dana ostomel, ceo of deposit, a gift. And you’re listening to tony martignetti non-profit radio. Big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. I’ve got live listener love nashville, tennessee i don’t know if you’ve been with us before nashville. Welcome new york, new york and new york, new york couple people from right here in the city and los angeles, california. Welcome live listener love to all of you. We also have someone masked in the us there’s someone else at least one of the person in the u s maybe it’s, the national security agency. I don’t know, i can’t tell, but you’re out there live listener love to all of you moving out to asia. Always lots of loyal listeners in asia, none ing china and guangzhou china ni hao and also happy mid autumn festival hope. Hope you did you save me some moon cake? I would love for you to send me some moon cake, if you will if we’ll make the trip over malaysia, we can’t tell what city maybe it’s kuala lumpur maybe not. But malaysia live listeners love to you. Welcome. And seoul, korea anya haserot will have mohr. Lots of live listener love time for tony’s. Take two. Last week i had a client tell me planned e-giving saved our ass. It’s. Exactly what? They said, and save them from what in four of the past six years planned giving saved them from shortfalls in unrestricted giving unrestricted cash planned giving got them to goal in those four years, including, of course, the recession and that’s, because the vast majority of plan gif ts and you would expect at least seventy five percent sometimes as high as ninety percent of all your planned gift doesn’t matter what kind of mission you have to be bequests and most bequests are unrestricted gif ts so that as you build your program, you gettinto lots of wills, and i’m just talking about will bequests in will’s not any of the other other many types of plant gifts just talking about wills as you get into more and more of those. The fact is that people pass away irrespective of the state of the economy, whether we’re in a recession, whether stock market is high or low, people pass away, and those requests that are in those people’s estates represent a lot of unrestricted cash for you. Not that you khun budget for it that’s unwise. But as your plan giving program grows, there will be revenue from bequests each year. And i say a lot more about that. On my blogged at tony martignetti dot com. Also going to be at bebe con on september thirtieth, this’s the blackbaud conference it’s at the gaylord convention center in maryland. And we’re running some some contests while i’m there. I’m going to be there interviewing for this show, doing about fifteen or so interviews. And i’ll be on stage on the exhibit floor, but they set up stage for for metoo podcast from and the contests are that i’m giving away two hours of consulting teo either people who were at the show or who are on twitter that day so you can tweet live that day, september thirtieth, and you have a chance to win or if you’re at bebe con, you can you can enter to win and there’s more about all of that on my block. Also a tony martignetti dot com there’s, a post devoted to be become twenty thirteen that’s coming up on the thirtieth of september and that is tony’s take two for friday, twentieth of september thirty seventh show of the year maria simple she’s in the studio today she’s the prospect find her you know, her he’s, a trainer and speaker on prospect research fact she spoke today we’re going to talk a little about that. Her website is the prospect finder dot com her book is panning for gold. Find your best donor prospects now she’s our doi end of dirt, cheap and free you could follow maria on twitter at maria simple welcome to the studio. Maria. Hey, tony. Good to see you in person. I know it’s. A pleasure, it’s a it’s. A bigger pleasure than usual to have you here. Have you hear? Face-to-face you did a little speaking gig today. What was that in the city? Ah, yes. So wilmington trust hosted some of their non-profit clients and colleagues and had an opportunity teo, to do a topic on prospecting on a shoestring budget. So it was a lot of fun as our die. And you’re the perfect person for that. What was what were what was a question? That you got any common questions or ah one that you hear a lot that you want to share? Probably one of the common questions was just sort of related to, you know, what are the resource is that i typically would go to and is it worth paying for? The resource is, you know, people always want to know is always good to just use the free resource is or sometimes should we be paying for them? So and i had a chance to to talk about the new foundation center’s project that we have, which we’re talking about today, so that was good that we were able, teo dovetail that in you and i have talked a lot about free resource is, of course, as i said, you know, a couple times you are doing end of dirt cheap and free. Um, do you think you’re do you think you’re really hindering your program if you’re only relying on free resource is well, what i think you’re doing is you’re probably spending a lot more time staff time on trying to hit a number of different research resource is, whereas ah lot of the fee based resource is will compile a bunch of things under one and so on what you’re what you’re not spending on resource is you probably are expending on staff time unless you have a volunteer doing your research. Ok, ok, go let’s, talk about our some of new sources that with news sources that we talked about and then well, later on, we’ll get to the new source. The foundation center thing. Yeah. You have advice about newspapers? Yeah. So of course, one of the things that you want to be able to do is sort of keep on top of what’s going on in your local economy what the local business owners air doing, for example, who the movers and shakers are. And then certainly, as you’re doing reactive research, that means you have a name of somebody you’re looking to research. One of the sources that you definitely want to check out is news sources. So i generally will try and check out newsreel ated to where they live a cz their primary residents. But if they’re snowbirds, so for example, if you have somebody from the northeast and they spend their winters in palm beach, eso you would want to be able to check out well, what are they doing? Philanthropic lee there. Okay, cool. So you know where they’re where they’re located in you? Then you look for local news sources. You just searched the newspapers in the vicinity. Is that well? That that’s. Definitely one way of doing it. I love using, as you know, libraries. And, you know, i’m a huge proponent of our library systems. And so, in fact, if you did have that snowbird down in palm beach, i you can go to the palm beach county library. And they have magazines and newspapers that you, khun research online for free. So they will include the local re newspapers for palm beach area. And even if you’re not a cardholder, they will give you a temporary pass. A research passed to be able to research their sources. So it’s fantastic. You can get that online. Yeah. Get the free research past online and be anywhere in the country. I believe so. Yes. So you just there’s. Ah, button. You click and you just request it. And so it would give you access to those newspapers if that’s indeed where your prospect was living for temporarily do you have ah, earl for since ah, approaching winter and palm beach is a popular snowbird place. Yeah, well, it’s, palm beach county, p, b, c library dot or ge is thie site. You want to go to bbc library dot or ge? Okay, you could put that on facebook page for sure. Okay. Um, okay, interesting. So, what is the advantage to going to the library? Is it because they they’re aggregating versus trying to find the sources on your own? So going through a library resource is going to mean you’re not going to pay for the full article. So very often, if you go directly to a news source, what they’ll allow you to do in a lot of cases is to do the search to come up with a set of list of search results, but then you won’t be able to see the full article without paying for it. Whereas if you go through the portal of a library, you typically will be standing are doi in-kind now it zoya i said, like, five times already today, we’re not even family it’s, very smiths. Incredible. Well, you know, your shoe string budget, right? So you’ve got to be able teo to figure out a way to access news sources and not paying arm and a leg for them. Go through the library so you don’t pay for your feet. Content? Excellent. I’m definitely include that we i post takeaways now on facebook page on dh. That will definitely be one of the one. The bullets. Excellent one. Is there something else you want to add about this? No. Okay. Okay. Um, now, are there fee based places that you can find local news sources? Yeah. I mean, there are and i would say for for the most part, though, non-profits that are doing research on more localized basis unless you’re really looking to get into international research, right? Sew something like it used to be called dow jones interactive. I can’t remember what they switched teo, but that news source, for example, will be able to scan newspapers worldwide. And in case you do have, i could see you in more of a college or university setting where they may have alum living all over the world, and they have to be able to see what’s going on in those sources. But i think for the for the average, your audience, the other ninety five percent who might be more local you khun definitely do that. Of course, you’re your listeners who are overseas would want to take advantage of some of that, so you can definitely google news resource is fee based news resource is, and you’ll come up with some alternatives to looking on a paid basis. Okay, now we have just about a minute before we go away for a couple minutes. This presumes that you confined addresses on people or at least if not an address a locale. Teo, how do you how do you find those locales? What do you get that well in? In a lot of cases, when i’m doing my research, for example, i will be told that somebody might have a second home somewhere else. So during the course of my research, i know to be looking for that piece of information. S oh, if i know they have a secondary piece of property in another state, i’m always trying to find out what the news sources are and checking out what they might be doing. Philanthropic lee. Sometimes they’re participating in golf tournaments, galas and so forth, so it’s, kind of good to know what they’re supporting when they are doing their their snow birding, right, okay, because you can help find the vicinity. All right, we’re gonna have a lot more on this on dove course. Also, maria’s, sixty second style. Stop at the very end, so hang with us. You’re listening to the talking alternative network. Buy-in are you stuck in your business or career trying to take your business to the next level, and it keeps hitting a wall? This is sam liebowitz, the conscious consultant. I will help you get to the root cause of your abundance issues and help move you forward in your life. Call me now and let’s. Create the future you dream of. Two, one, two, seven, two, one, eight, one, eight, three, that’s to one to seven to one, eight one eight three. The conscious consultant helping countries. People be better business people. Have you ever considered consulting a road map when you feel you need help getting to your destination when the normal path seems blocked? A little help can come in handy when choosing an alternate route. Your natal chart is a map of your potentials. It addresses relationships, finance, business, health and, above all, creativity. Current planetary cycles can either support or challenge your objectives. Time. Montgomery taylor. If you would like to explore the help of a private astrological reading, please contact me at monte at monty taylor dot. Com let’s monte m o nt y at monty taylor dot com. Talking alternative radio twenty four hours a day. Dahna with the prospect finder maria simple, and we’re talking about news sources, and then we’re going to get to a new source shortly. Maria, this part of the value of this is if you find that someone works in a place that’s different than where they’re living, right, so then you’d want to be doing this local local news search in both places. Yeah, i think that would be very valuable, you know, especially when you’re talking about metropolitan areas where you’ve got people commuting on hour or more to get to work. S o they might be doing some philanthropic efforts in the locale where they work as opposed to where they live because they well, the commute is so long, so yeah, absolutely. The’s online research access cards that you can you can sometimes get. Do they have ah, limit to how long is that for a day pass? Or how does that work? Well, ahh, yeah. I mean, they all have different rules around them, so you would definitely check out with the individual library. But for the new sources that i typically will be searching and and that search is actually a lot of newspapers across the country i go through my local county library, i have my county library card. It has a bar code on the back of the card, and that barcode is what allows me the access to being able to search things like a pro quest, which is a new stand that’s available online and another one news bank, which is available online. So again there it’s it’s, searching across multiple newspapers across the country, but that’s that’s mostly in a situation where i i i’m not entirely sure where people might be residing elsewhere, but if i know where they are, then i will definitely go straight to that newspaper of the town where they’re spending other time. And you and i have talked about this before the value of having a local library card like you’re talking about. You use your local library? Absolutely. It gives you access. Yeah. You’re saying so? Yeah. Lots of sites that yeah, and you don’t even need to be, you know, on site at the library to do the research. You anywhere. You have an internet connection, you can be doing the research. So that may be money. Well spent just on a local library card. Knowing that you could get ah, access. Yeah, well, if it’s your local library card, you won’t have to spend any money at all. Yeah, yeah, yeah, so long stuff had one. But if you if you find that your your local or county library does not have a good card, another source to think about is your alma mater. Because sometimes your universities and colleges will allow you access. Teo to resource is online. And another alternative is you can buy a library card. Ah, if you if you live outside that county or region, some libraries will allow that to happen. So in the fees range hundred to two hundred dollars. Okay. And if and if it’s a place that’s. Ah, popular spot for your your prospects. That may be money well spent. Absolutely. Local library. Yeah. Excellent tip about, um, it’s. Amazing about your alma mater. Another way, another backdoor way. Teo, get library access. Yeah, right. Cool. All right, let’s, move to the foundation center. They have something called fbo. They’re calling fto free foundation directory online on dh. You checked it out for us? Yeah, i did. So, of course. Staying with our sort of library theme, right? So foundation center, very specific library on doing donorsearch research on dh, whether you’re doing the search at the foundation centers library in manhattan or and any of their cooperating collections, you may be aware that they have fto foundation directory online, which is a fee based resource that they make available for free through the library’s. However, what they have now done is they have basically taken a portion of that data base and made it available, or certain search functionalities across the board available for free through a link on their website. So you don’t even have to be in one of the co operating collections. Okay, excellent. And what does it? What does it offer this this limited free service, right? So i did. I definitely found, you know, some some pros and cons. So what do you want? First, the pros of the calls start with the positive. Okay? Absolutely. Okay, pro it’s free, right? So i have to promote that for sure. Andi, i think i find that it was good for both reactive and proactive research. And we’ve talked about that before. Reactive. You’ve got the name of a prospect? Proactive, you’re just in there trying to find some new prospects. I loved the fact that you had access to researching the entire nine nineties. The text of irs nine nine text searchable its search text of the nineties is searchable, right? Do you know if guidestar they’re popular nine ninety site, do they do they have that feature? I think they might have that feature as well, but this is the first time that i’m seeing foundation center making that available for free. That’s, right? Well, oh, yeah, i don’t know if guides to write, i may be confusing. I don’t know if guide star has nine nineties of foundations yeah, they d’oh, d’oh, d’oh, andi. Also, what you can do is you’re getting a glimpse of the fto product, right? So you’re getting a glimpse says to because you’ll get a certain amount of data that you can get for free and then as soon as you go to try and do a little bit more, it’ll say, well, you need to be a subscriber, so at least it gets you in the mode of understanding how to use the tool and do the research and then and then, you know, you could decide either subscribe on a monthly basis and at what? They have various levels of subscription, or go to the local cooperating collection and used their source there. And then you can use it for free. Absolutely. Latto one of cooperating court. Cooperating collections. Yeah. So those were the real pros that i found let’s. Give the what’s the girl for this. Ok, so the girl for this is fbo dot foundation, center, dot or ge? Okay, i do love thee, even even if it’s even if it’s available elsewhere. I just i love that keyword search of nine nineties. Yeah, it’s. Really, really cool, eh? So what i did was i did a little test of the keyword search. First of all, just like you would be doing a keyword search on google if you had a phrase you want to make sure that you’re putting quotation marks around anything that’s a phrase, right? So i was testing it for the phrase foster care i was trying to see. Well, who are the funders that might come up funding foster care and you can also narrow it down by st. Right? So i did a search for who was funding foster care in new york and came up with a bunch of foundation hits, so then i thought, well, let me see if this really worked. So i went into a few of the nine nineties, and i searched for the word foster inside of thie nine ninety and lo and behold, there it wass and it appeared as one of the grants that they had made was for funding foster care. Excellent. Excellent. Now, if you don’t use those quotes, you might end up with it’s on foster brooks. So the comedian who used to play a drunk, actually what i what what had happened was i did the search without putting the quotes first, and i got a ton of hits and i couldn’t believe it and i thought, something’s wrong here what had happened was they picked up on embedded in the nine nineties companies that were foundations that were invested in foster wheeler as a company. Ok, so i thought, okay, so i’ve got to refine it further and once i re ran the search with foster care in quotes, then i got better hits. Excellent love this love the keyword search. Okay, yeah, that was great anymore. You want to say positive before we get to the what you saw some problems with? Um, no. Go ahead. Okay, good. What do you have on the downside? So, on the downside, you know, some fields are definitely fi base to research. And i think the biggest downside of all was that you could not export the results so you could not come up with that list of foundation hits and and download them to a spreadsheet to have something that might be very share a bowl with other staff for board members before you decided to do this research and behind the food that’s behind the export. So you have to take notes? Yeah. Yeah. You have to take notes, or yeah, you could construct the spreadsheet yourself. I’m sure, but okay. I just kind of found that that might be a con, but as i said, you know, you can definitely go on a monthly subscription or use it at the cooperating collection. Okay. That the only downsides? Yeah. I found more pros and cons. Actual. Excellent. All right, cool. I was like, i love the foundation. Center for people here in new york. It’s it’s right on the lower fifth of it, i think it’s at sixteenth street and at all the cooperating collections. Not only is it free to use, but they you are very generous with showing you teaching you how to use it. The librarians are there and they will spend as much time as it takes. And it really doesn’t take much because it’s a pretty simple system i ous i recall teo teo use but the librarians are very generous with their help. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Okay, cool. Let’s. See we we’re going. We’re going toe, i guess. Wrap up. I asked er i asked you for a sixty second style stop. What do you s o? We’re opening this too. You know things like travel, leisure, food, what’s your just sixty seconds what’s your what’s, your what’s, your style stuff. So i decided to pick the topic of travel for and there’s a fabulous website and mobile app called hop stop dot com and i had to use it today. As a matter of fact, i need to figure out how to get from my location in midtown to your studio here and it told me exactly which subways i had to take to get here. Is it only for public transportation hub? Stop no, you can. You can select to be told how to walk to a location, how taxi and approximately what the taxi might cost. So you you’ve got a lot of different options that you can play around with and yeah, it’s pretty cool. I see people using hop stop dot com. My objection is that when they’re new york, if you live in new york, if you live in new york, i don’t think you should be using hop. Stop. I think that’s cheating. I think you’re supposed to use the other tools that are more difficult. It’s just it’s a part of living in new york. You’re supposed to do it the hard way, not the hop stop where you’re supposed to get the apse that the empty a the metropolitan transit authority has, you know, they use a map that from the subway token from the token booth, if you have to go paper, i just object to residents using hop stop. But if you’re visiting someplace hop stop is really cool. Perfect. We got some last minute live listener look that maura liberation last minute live listener love japan! I never want to leave you out tokyo, sugisaki, yokohama sutjipto or sugito? I’m not sure konichiwa to our japanese live listeners where’s, north carolina today in the u s didn’t north carolina and check in miree simple, thank you very much for coming to the studio. Thanks for having me always it’s a special pleasure today, as i said, you can find maria on twitter at maria simple and you’ll find her blawg her sight at the prospect finder dot com next week. I have part two of the non-profit outcomes toolbox, no more berating my eagle scout project, but we do mention easy bake ovens, so you wantto you want to listen for that? Remember easy bake ovens. I’m going way back like foster brooks references from thirty years ago, you got to keep up. Also, amy sample ward is back, our social media contributor and the ceo of non-profit technology network has tips for optimizing your profiles to boost your search results and stay consistent with your mission, and she will have a sixty second style stop. I’m interested in what you think about that little nufer teacher, do you have a sixty second style stop? I’ll i’ll share yours if you got one you want to use, you hit me on facebook or or twitter or even on my block does contact page. Let me know what you think. I’ll let you know if you have one you want to share over nine thousand leaders, fundraisers and board members of small and midsize charities, the other ninety five percent listen each week you know how to reach me. If you want to talk about sponsoring the show and we have a sponsor starting in october, be welcoming them. Our creative producers claire meyerhoff sam legal, which is our line producer, shows social media is by deborah askanase of community organizer two point oh, and the remote producer of tony martignetti non-profit radio is john federico of the new rules our music. Listen to that bye, scott stein. I hope you’ll be with me next friday one to two p m eastern. I’ll be here in the studio. I hope you will be listening. Live one, two, two eastern at talking alternative dot com e-giving didn’t think that shooting the good ending. You’re listening to the talking alternative network, waiting to get a drink. Cubine are you a female entrepreneur? Ready to break through? Join us at sixty body sassy sol, where women are empowered to ask one received what they truly want in love, life and business. Tune in thursday said. Known eastern time to learn timpson. Juicy secrets from inspiring women and men who, there to define their success, get inspired, stay motivated and defying your version of giant success with sexy body sake. Sold every thursday ad men in new york times on talking alternative that calms. Are you suffering from aches and pains? Has traditional medicine let you down? Are you tired of taking toxic medications, then come to the double diamond wellness center and learn how our natural methods can help you to hell? Call us now at to one to seven to one eight, one eight three that’s to one to seven to one eight one eight three or find us on the web at www dot double diamond wellness dot com way. Look forward to serving you. You’re listening to talking alternative network at www dot talking alternative dot com, now broadcasting twenty four hours a day. This is tony martignetti athlete named host of tony martignetti non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent technology fund-raising compliance, social media, small and medium non-profits have needs in all these areas. My guests are expert in all these areas and mohr. Tony martignetti non-profit radio fridays one to two eastern on talking alternative broadcasting are you concerned about the future of your business for career? Would you like it all to just be better? Well, the way to do that is to better communication. And the best way to do that is training from the team at improving communications. This is larry sharp, host of the ivory tower radio program and director at improving communications. Does your office needs better leadership? Customer service sales or maybe better writing are speaking skills. Could they be better at dealing with confrontation conflicts, touchy subjects all are covered here at improving communications. If you’re in the new york city area, stop by one of our public classes or get your human resource is in touch with us. The website is improving communications, dot com that’s improving communications, dot com improve your professional environment. Be more effective, be happier. And make more money. Improving communications. That’s. The answer. Talking dot com. Hyre

“Planned Giving Saved Our Ass”

 

Image courtesy of Myxi, Creative Commons license
Image courtesy of Myxi, Creative Commons license

“Planned Giving Saved Our Ass.”

That’s what a client reminded me last week. I’ve been helping the college capture planned gifts since 2004, and Planned Giving saved them four times in the last six years.

Saved them from what? Shortages in unrestricted cash. Lots of planned gifts are unrestricted—especially bequests.

We’ve been promoting long-term planned gifts together for nine years. After several years the long-term arrives, and it comes in the form of immediate-term cash.

You see, people die irrespective of recession, unemployment and stock market values. When your charity is part of hundreds or thousands of estates, some of those donors will die each year. I guarantee it.

That’s the double-edged sword of Planned Giving. We don’t want our donors to die, but when they do there’s a gift for our important work.

How many will die in a year and how much cash will result, that’s uncertain. After you’ve got unrestricted Planned Giving income for three to four years, you can look to that history for your average and median, which isn’t skewed by very large gifts. Those numbers will give you an estimate of what you can look forward to each year.

Caveat: It’s enormously unwise—reckless even—to budget for planned gift revenue, unless you’ve got many years of history and fancy finance and actuarial pros looking over your data. It’s too speculative.

All you have is a rough estimate, which is some comfort. Not for accounting, but there are other forms of comfort than spreadsheets.

I’m only talking about unrestricted planned gift income. There’s restricted money too.

If you’re not promoting planned gifts, get started. The sooner you start, the sooner your long-term will arrive.

There Is No Shortcut To Getting Planned Gifts

Photo courtesy of Jeremy Lim, Creative Commons license
Photo courtesy of Jeremy Lim, Creative Commons license

 

Planned Giving is soliciting gifts from estate and retirement plans, and there’s no way to close them quickly. I’ve seen suggestions to the contrary lately and I sternly disagree.

There are plenty of quick (and cheap!) ways to promote Planned Giving. Here are a dozen:

  • Put a sidebar in your next newsletter to promote giving by will
  • Drop a buck slip in your next mailing about giving by will—or IRAs for those over 70 1/2
  • As you promote IRA giving, use the December 31 deadline to create urgency
  • Send an email blast to your board about the IRA deadline
  • Drop in a buck slip that tells the short story of someone who gave by will or IRA
  • Planning your annual report? Put in a sidebar to encourage planned gifts
  • Keep these sidebars short! No more than 125 words
  • At your next event, put in two (literally) sentences about giving by IRA by 12/31
  • The second sentence is, “Give us a call if you’d like to know more.” As the calls come in, refer to my IRA article linked above.
  • Planning your year-end mailings? Squeeze this check-off onto the reply card: “I’d like to know more about including you in my will.”
  • Make space for this check-off too: “I’ve included you in my will or other estate plan.” Remember to thank your new donor!
  • For the flap on all your reply envelopes, a new check box: “Send me info about including you in my will.”

My fast promotion ideas will not get you gifts fast.

Nothing will.

Planned gifts are part of your prospects’ large plans for the future. You don’t get into those plans from an email blast. You might get into them from six email blasts, spaced appropriately.

Want more ideas for Planned Giving promotion?

Get Going On Planned Giving from GuideStar
6 article, year-long Planned Giving series from GuideStar (just as relevant now as it was in 2010)
7 Tips For Small Shop Planned Giving from Claire Meyerhoff
8 Tips To Get Your Planned Giving Going from Karen Signoracci Suero

Planned gifts take a lot of time to close because lots of personal factors are in play. What would it take for you to put a charity in your will—alongside your spouse, children and grandchildren?

Don’t confuse—or let others confuse you about—quick promotion and quick gifts. The former is eminently doable in Planned Giving.

Quick gifts? Ignore the hype. They’re impossible in Planned Giving.

Nonprofit Radio for August 30, 2013: Trim Tab Marketing & More Social, Now What?

Big Nonprofit Ideas for the Other 95%

Listen live or archive:

My Guests:

James Heaton: Trim Tab Marketing

James HeatonJames Heaton is president and creative director of Tronvig Group. The metaphor of “trim tab” as one person who can move an entire society has professional and personal meaning for him. He explains how something small and seemingly insignificant can make a big difference in your marketing. And how to figure out what that small thing is. (Originally aired on July 20, 2012.)

 

 

 

Amy Sample Ward: More Social, So What?

Picture of Amy Sample WardAmy Sample Ward, our social media contributor, co-author of “Social Change Anytime Everywhere” and CEO of NTEN, has thoughts about how to manage the internal changes when you make social media a part of your office culture.

 

 

 

 


Top Trends. Sound Advice. Lively Conversation.

You’re on the air and on target as I delve into the big issues facing your nonprofit—and your career.

If you have big dreams but an average budget, tune in to Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio.

I interview the best in the business on every topic from board relations, fundraising, social media and compliance, to technology, accounting, volunteer management, finance, marketing and beyond. Always with you in mind.

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Hello and welcome to tony martignetti non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. I’m your aptly named host. I hope you’re with me last week, i’d suffer pilot nephritis if i learned that you had missed cool crowd funding dahna ostomel, founder and ceo of deposit, a gift, shared her wisdom on how to create a successful crowdsourced campaign from appearance and copy to who you’re reaching and how and in-kind investment anita fi willis, vice president of strategic partnerships at new york, needs you. She and i talked about how to create or grow your in-kind giving program, she stepped through the process from assessment to thank you this week. Trim tab marketing james eaton is president and creative director of the tronvig group. The metaphor of the trim tab as one person who can move an entire society has professional and personal meeting from him. We’ll hear about both of those he explains how something small and seemingly insignificant could make a big difference in your marketing and had to figure out what that small thing is. This is an archive show originally aired on july twentieth last year and more social now what? Amy sample ward, our social media contributor, co author of social change, anytime everywhere and ceo of non-profit technology network, has thoughts about how to manage the internal changes. When you make social media a part of your office culture, amy’s lives and on tony’s, take through this week, take time off. In fact, i’m off this week. Where, ah, were pre recorded. My pleasure. Now, to bring you. James he eaten and trim tab marketing with me now in the studio is james eaton he’s president and creative director of tronvig group. He grew up in florida and left the u s at nineteen for an eight year odyssey in asia, where he had a near death experience in the north of tibet, became a terra bod in buddhist monk in thailand and studied calligraphy in japan. He’s, fluent in japanese and proficient in chinese tronvig group, has worked for clients in a wide variety of business and non-profit categories, including museums, community organizations, funds and think tanks. His philosophy is based on the power and efficiency of truth and importance of doing good in the world. James speaks on marketing and branding, and he blog’s at tronvig group dot com. I’m very pleased that his work and his very interesting background bringing to the studio james welcome. Thank you, pleasure to have you on the show. What is your definition of marketing? Marketing is tactical activity that you engage in on top of your brand messaging so that’s, very dense technical activity, your brand messaging, what does? What does it mean in your heart? So for example, uh, marketing activity will get you to buy a particular toyota s o you’ll see an ad, you’ll say, wow, that’s a great price. I’m going to go buy that toyota, and but that needs to be built on a brand and it’s the brand that allows you to ally yourself within that that product and believe in it so that you will subsequently say, never buy another car other than a toyota for the rest of your life. So the marketing is tactical in the branding is strategic ah, the marketing ask youto to engage in a particular activity make this donation volunteermatch volunteers have to be all about money that’s right here beyond our board and that supported by your mission, you’re your brand or the the the notion in people’s mind of, of why you exist and why you matter so ah, the so marketing is essential as the communication tool to get out a request for specific activity and you want to do this all in your own voice, right. This is why marketing you matters that’s, right? You want to do it such that you are creating a sense of alignment with your with your organizational with your organizational brand. You want them to do what you want them to do. But then, at the end of the day, you also want them to believe it and believe in you and believe that they have done something good. And before they can believe in you. They have to know about you and there’s. Where the right communications eso marketing is communications there’s an interesting statistic that just came out from nancy shorts. Men’s blood getting attention which says that eighty four percent of non-profits characterized their own messages as difficult to remember. Oh, my eighty four percent of non-profit difficult to remember difficulty. Remember how this is a communications, but they know it well. Yeah, then and there’s nowhere. This issue, they know. So, what we gonna do to cut through this so first, uh, one thing that’s important is teo. Not be afraid of marketing. When people think of marketing the i did get a little bit of cold. Feet like this is something that’s going to be costly it’s going to be in order for it to be effective it’s going to have to be big, and for some people it’s just a pejorative term. And for some people it’s a sort of term it’s ugly thing it’s a it’s, a it’s, a it’s, a right it’s a for-profit or it’s a commercial activity that non-profit shouldn’t be engaged in, but actually because it is about communication. If you have an organization whose mission is good who’s doing something good in the world, it’s almost a crime not to communicate that if you don’t communicate that thousands of people who are actually in alignment with what you do, who care deeply about what you do don’t know about it, right, you don’t want to hide and right. So marketing is your is a means teo, get that out in your own voice. Um to those who are already predisposed to want what you do to to want to support what you do. Ah, so it’s not it’s, not about a chain, you know, trying to create a marketing message like a ginsu knife. Kind of like push of course, it’s really about just explaining in ways i think old thirty second infomercials at four in the morning or too expensive, anyway, it can’t be engaging in that. So put those aside no it’s about communicating the true value of of your offerings so that people can understand it with with, with clarity and and and understanding of what there they need need or want to hear. So it’s this overlap this intersection between what you are and what you do and what they’re ready to listen to and to find that place and we’ll talk about. We can talk about that a little more in in a minute, but don’t take over the show we’ll get, we’ll follow my agenda, okay, okay, but we’ll get to that point, but you have some very good ideas. First, about howto identify who these people are, who might be predisposed. We have just about a minute before the break, and then we have lots of time after the break, so we just sort of tease the, uh, the your idea around finding the right people for your message. You have lots of information already, probably about your constituency. Who gives you money? Who comes to your events? Who visits your institution? That data, i cannot just sit idly at the, you know, in the corner somewhere. One of the things that an organization can do that can be tremendously effective in this is something that anyone can do, and it doesn’t require any money at all. And that is to take all that data and build it up into what we call personas teo to make of that information, eh, really, person, something imaginary person that you can talk to that will, that you can use toe bounce off your marketing ideas and your location idea. Okay, we’re going to talk about these personas after the break. Hope you stay with me. Trim tab marketing with james eaton talking alternative radio twenty four hours a day. Do you need a business plan that can guide your company’s growth? Seven and seven will help bring the changes you need. Wear small business consultants and we pay attention to the details. You may miss our culture and consultant services a guaranteed to lead toe. Right, groat. For your business, call us at nine. One seven eight three, three, four, eight, six zero foreign, no obligation. Free consultation. Check out our website of ww dot covenant seven dot com are you fed up with talking points? Rhetoric everywhere you turn left or right? Spin ideology no reality, in fact, its ideology over in tow. No more it’s time. Join me. Larry shot a neo-sage tuesday nights nine to eleven easter for the ivory tower radio in the ivory tower will discuss what’s important to you society politics, business it’s provocative talk for the realist and the skeptic who want to go what’s really going on? What does it mean? What can be done about it? So gain special access to the ivory tower. Listen to me. Very sharp. Your neo-sage tuesday nights nine to eleven new york time go to ivory tower radio dot com for details. That’s ivory. Tower radio. Dot com. Every tower is a great place to visit for both entertainment and education. Listening. Tuesday nights nine to eleven. It will make you smarter. Hey, all you crazy listeners looking to boost your business? Why not advertise on talking alternative with very reasonable rates? Interested simply email at info at talking alternative dot com so let’s, look a little more into these thes personas that may be could be a donor or could be a potential boardmember or maybe some other kind of volunteer. Or how do we identify these people? You want to think about who engages with your organization and essentially list them out first by type? You know we have donorsearch thes general characteristics age, you know, sixty five who’s retired who’s, you know, has time now too volunteer at the organization and so forth. So you you’ll know these people are but what you need to do is too create hey ah, an amalgam of a couple different people, but then make that into a persona that is very specific. So it has a name birthday on address. Particular children, particular pet peeves. Interests? Yeah. Such that you can actually write a journal entry and their in their head a cz if you were them. And of course, you could have multiple personas for each category. You wanna have a view percent might be a teenager. That’s, right? I also be your retiree that’s, right? You want to create a number of them? I think the maximum number is about nine but you want to have these very specific persons and you, khun, you know, grab a picture off the internet, give them a face, make them as real as possible, and you can actually bring them to meeting. What else do we know about them? What? Where they shop exactly where they shop. What? That, what websites they visit? You know what they do in their free time? What their secret fears are? What would be the hope? What would be the worst thing that could possibly imagine happening to them in their entire life for you? So that you create something that’s sort of a sort of psychologically formed imaginary person. And you give it a name and a face, and you use that to look at what you’re doing. Look at oh, we’re going to send this appeal letter out. Well, what would george think of that? And you be george, read the letter and say, well, this is this part of the letter is silly. I don’t i don’t care about that. So it gives you this consumer. Ah, perspective on what it is that you’re trying to say and it can make it substantially better. And it takes some work, but it doesn’t really cost you anything to put this put these personas together and it doesn’t cost you anything to bring them to a meeting and some people, like physically, like, have a little alright, stand on then or do these people talk in the meeting? What are we doing with them? You could so yes, they will criticize and review what you’re planning on doing that the actual program that you’re going to come to put out there, and that gives you this view that internally you don’t have and it’s, like focus group almost, but you but you’ve got this sort of imaginary person in the room and this can be extremely beneficial if particularly you then sort of look at your organization to create a kind of a latto vent diagram. What do we do? What we do this and we do this and we do this and he’s like the three areas of our of our activity. Where do these personas overlay on that you could like? You have little chest piece is almost like where did they sit on this thing? And where is our sweet spot that is? That is going to capture the broadest group of our constituents. And how do we need to talk to them? Who are they? And what language did they understand and will make sense to them? You can then tail your broad brand message. Your your your overall institutional organizational messaging to speak to them it’s one hundred times more reflective already already writing in their voice. I mean, you said you can even write their journalist that’s, right? Right? To write to them right to a specific person and not to this sort of amorphous, fuzzy general audience. And it will make whatever you’re doing one hundred times better. Okay, who do you who should be involved in creating these personas? Well, that’s an interesting thing and and it’s. Okay, say that’s a good question. It is a great. Even though i admonished you before you can say that’s a good question, that’s allowed. Can i tell a little story about this? Sure welcome. Who should? Who should be involved in understanding the consumer’s perspective in relation to an organization? The best answer is everyone that may be impractical, but arnel lehman, the director of the of the brooklyn museum who i think has a kind of a visionary and an adherent to trim, to have marketing, whether he recognises it or not initiated a few months back. A new program on this institution wide program where he requires every single person in the institution, whether the c f o the chief curator or a research associate to sign up on a sheet or not maintenance maintenance on a rolling basis. Ah, spend an hour on the floor of the museum interacting with the general public. Yeah, and just a knauer or an hour a week or just an hour on a rotating basis. So i don’t know how many employees they have. Quite a few, so copy takes a while to get through that cycle. And i think he instituted this, you know, basically with a switch of an aven edict in this case, and i think there was quite a bit of resistance internally to this. But what this does is it gives everyone that kind of on the ground retail insight about the experience of the exhibitions at that museum. Uh, the insights gained there will have, eh, a long term sort of cascading impact on improving everything that they do because they’ll be aware of the ultimate final on the ground, sort of experienced how people are using that museum because they’re interacting with absolutely answering their cause. They get to their watching. Maybe even yes. And i went to an unrelated meeting there recently. And when i came out of the meeting, i went into the great hall, and there was a fantastic exhibition there, and i had to tell somebody about it. So i walked overto this man who looked official. And i started saying, this is an absolutely fantastic exhibition. And, well, what was it? What was it was thie connecting cultures in there in the great hall? Okay. And we started up what turned into a forty five minute conversation about the exhibition and the institution and how it relates to the public. And it turns out that he was serving his his one our mountains from the borders of his three quarters of his one hour, i think, to both of our both of our ar benefits and that it was actually edward bleiberg who’s thie, curator of egyptian cloudgood on ancient eastern art. So but what he learned from you in that forty five minutes, do you think it was very interesting because he had contributed to that exhibition and he was resistant to the notion of that exhibition? And i spent, like fifteen minutes extolling how basically saying why? I thought the exhibition was great. And in fact i brought my kids to the exhibition that the following saturday, and they thought it was great. So he was getting retail in sight. He was getting what? No, i as the actual, like coming to it, knowing nothing about the background or the struggles that led to that exhibition, but the the actual user interface he was getting a firsthand account of how his work and the work of all the other curator’s who worked on that played out on the and this is the this’s, the tactical experiential level which makes all the difference for the success or failure of a particular exhibition, and ultimately of the institution and all that. And in order for that to happen all aren’t a lehman had to do is just have this idea. Yes didn’t cost him a thing. And this would obviously contribute to the creation of the personas? Yes. Okay. James eaton is president and creative director of tronvig group, which you’ll find at tronvig t r o n v g group. Dot com. What is tronvig yeah, that’s. My great uncles name. Carl tronvig emigrated to the united states in the nineteenth century and went to north dakota. Okay, south next-gen in memory, and we’re gonna talk a little about another family member of yours shortly. Let’s, talk about the trim tab. What? What is it? What’s. A trim tab. And why is this trim tab marketing a trim tab is, uh, a little a device the edge of a rudder that helps it turn. But the importance of the trim tab is a metaphor is let’s. Say you’re a child and you’re in a bathtub. And you have a little replica. A miniature replica of the queen elizabeth to this huge ocean liner and it’s floating in the bathtub. And you want to turn it well, the natural reaction would have to be in the tub with my brother. Do i? I hated bathing my brother. You want to turn the ship chips, and i’m there alone, we think my little boat. So you touched the bow, right? To turn the ship. You wanted to go left. So you you touch the touch the bow and that turns the ship. But if you had an actual queen elizabeth to ocean liner and you wanted to turn it by touching the bow, the force required to move the ship by touching the bow is astronomical. So how does this ship actually turn the rudder? Right. The rudder is in fact the size of a house, so i can’t turn it with my own strength. So in fact, on the end of the writer there’s, a little tiny rudder i called a trim tab turns in the opposite directions writer creates a vacuum and allows the rider to swing easily the direction that you wanted to go. Okay, so now if i take that model and i lifted out of the water and i tried to figure out what makes this ship turn it’s going to be very difficult for me to understand that it’s, that little tiny trim tab on the tip of the rudder on the rather runner on the redder, they’re actually allows me to easily turn this ship. So this notion of the obvious small changes that can turn the whole organization is what we’re talking about. This is the notion of a trim tab this’s finding those things that that actually can steer the whole system in the direction you want but are not big, they’re not costly, they’re not. We have this idea that big solutions are big problems have to be solved with big answers that end marketing is one. Of these big answers it’s like oh, well, we need to have more money. Well, let’s, let’s mount a big marketing dr and that there’s big marketing drive is going to give us big results. That notion is flawed and that’s good news for small and midsize charity is very good news in the fact of the matter is that if you think about the system and you think deeply enough about changes that can be made at the user experience level, there are some very minor that’s what i say when i say tactical, they’re very minor changes that can be made that can have the same effect as these big marketing programs were. We recently did a thing for the bronx museum, where we were asked to get more people to come into the museum. Ah wei have a certain amount of money, and they wanted to do a traditional marketing program, you know, bust signs, bus shelters, subway posters and so forth, which we did, but we set aside a little bit of that money to do something else that they didn’t really ask us to do. And that was to change the sign ege on the door and the windows of this at the street level of the museum. Okay, that thousand dollars from the however many thousand dollar budget we had was the best money we spent because that’s what actually brought people? How do you know that? How do you know that? The door sign it and the windows made the difference. Because when we were a few, a few a few things one when we were talking to people as they were walking on the right on the grand concourse, they’ve been there for forty years. Ah, and we were asking people on the street will what’s this. And they were saying, i don’t know they’re working buy-in causevox busy. Is that? Is that a courthouse? I don’t know. And if you looked at it, then considering okay, why don’t they know? Well, let’s, look at it. Oh, okay. There’s. The sign the sign is is way up there over the top of the door and there’s a flag way up there. But people tend not to really look up when they’re walking down the street. So and it’s a beautiful building. But there was nothing on the front door that you could see that the windows there wasn’t really anything that was big and obvious telling you what this was and and they were announcing in this case that they were free. So we put big orange signs in all of these places that you would see on the street and lo and behold, people walk. How come? How can charities find their trim tab? The the example that i give you that i give you a minute ago about understanding who you’re talking to and how they see you is a is a is a kind of trim to have activity the personas as a function of your spending the time because i think any trim tab action requires a kind of research it requires thought you’ve got to find that thing it’s not going to be obvious it’s not going to be the the i mean the thing that’s right there in front of you it won’t be the big an obvious thing, so you have to look at your system. How does it operate? What mental models are you operating with? What is what is this? And this is also how personas are interesting because they get you out. Of your mental models, you’re your marketing department might have its own vision of, like what? What the organization is or what have you and you we work psychologically with this kind of shorthand? We don’t necessarily think through every step along the way that gets us to a particular decision. We we use shortcuts and mental models are a shortcut, and we have them for our for organizations and and the way we operate and also who we think we’re talking to. Bye that’s what the specificity of these personas? Why it’s so important? Because you’re getting at something that breaks through these short hand models that we have of, well, we have this, you know, the retired over sixty five crowded and is too superficial, yeah, it’s the need to get into the detail we need to get in. We didn’t think we need to talk to the time you know, the curmudgeon, right, who comes every saturday and, you know and complaints to the guard, you’ve got to get into his head and start talking to him, and then he will break down your you’re in perfectly formed mental models and help you create useful ones, we have just a minute before we have to go this trip tap metaphor has personal residence with you. You explain. Tell listeners why that is. Yes, well, the notion is not applied to marketing. It may be mine, but it’s, not mine at all, in the sense that my great great uncle, buckminster fuller, whose people know as thie, inventor of the geodesic dome, futurist designer argast maximilian of the dime actually and map, and maxine carr and and the geodesic dome, which everyone knows because it’s, the lightest, most cost efficient, strongest structure in the world and your uncle, has this on his on his tombstone. Great uncle martignetti he on his tombstone, has engraved. Call me trim tab. Great nephew of buckminster fuller, james eaton is the president in creative director of tronvig group. You’ll find his blaga tronvig group dot com james, a real pleasure having you on the show. Thank you, thank you so much. My pleasure. I was a very touching end to that interview. I remember it very finally, we’re go to a break, and when we come back, tony’s take two, and then amy sample ward talking about cultural change. When your organization becomes more social, how do you manage that? Just keep listening. E-giving didn’t think dick tooting getting ding, ding, ding ding. You’re listening to the talking alternate network e-giving. E-giving good. Are you suffering from aches and pains? Has traditional medicine let you down? Are you tired of taking toxic medications? Then come to the double diamond wellness center and learn how our natural methods can help you to hell? Call us now at to one to seven to one eight one eight three that’s to one to seven to one eight one eight three or find us on the web at www dot double diamond wellness dot com way look forward to serving you. Hi, i’m lost in a role, and i’m sloan wainwright, where the host of the new thursday morning show the music power hour eleven a m we’re gonna have fun shine the light on all aspects of music and its limitless healing possibilities. We’re going invite artists to share their songs and play live will be listening and talking about great music from yesterday to today, so you’re invited to share in our musical conversation. Your ears will be delighted with the sound of music and our voices. Join austin and sloan live thursdays at eleven a m on talking alternative dot com you’re listening to the talking alternative network. Hyre sametz hi, i’m kate piela, executive director of dance, new amsterdam. And you’re listening to tony martignetti non-profit radio. Big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. Durney welcome back to big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent, i can’t send live listener love this week, but i certainly do love the people who are listening live were pre recorded this week for a couple of weeks, but i know california, texas, oregon occasionally, and we got oregon represented very soon with amy, new york, new york, brooklyn, new york and all our asian listeners. I’m sure you’re out there live listener love to each of you, thanks so much for listening podcast pleasantries for everybody listening through itunes and all the other podcast sites that the show is on. Thank you so much, tony, take two a sigh said, i’m away this week. If you go to my block this week, you’ll see it says gone swimming, and i’m a tte bethany beach in delaware taking a week completely off offgrid off line i’m not looking at email, not checking phone messages, not checking twitter it’s just a week disconnected on the beach, and i heartily recommend that for you you’re each in a urine e-giving profession you’re either giving to the organization or you’re directly giving to the people that you’re non-profit helps. And when you give and give and give, i believe you’ve got to take and that is time off. So think about yourself. I hope this summer you took time off to whatever you whatever you love to do, call it decompressing generally, but whatever it is you love. I hope you got some time to do it away from your phone and all the social networks that we enjoy so much most of the time. But we got to take some time away from all that just for ourselves and that’s. My that’s, my week that’s, my suggestion and that’s tony’s take two for friday, august twenty ninth, the thirty fifth show of the year. Amy sample ward. You know her she’s, a ceo of non-profit technology network. Our most recent car third book is social change. Anytime, everywhere. She’s, our regular social media contributor on dh her blogger is amy sample ward dot or ge? How are you? Amy? Welcome back. How are you? I’m terrific. Welcome. Welcome from oregon. Yeah, thanks. And i’m very jealous about a week. Totally unplugged on beach. That sounds like heaven. Well, you’re a very connected person. Do you? Do you take time off for yourself where you’re where you’re offline, i do not as often as i probably should and, you know, i definitely unplug from feeling like i need teo, you said, check twitter or stay on top of e mail, but it’s rare that i wouldn’t i even have my phone, right? Well, now you are ceo of intent. So that’s hyre responsibility. Yeah, i think you would be hard for you to go away and not be connected to them for however long, right? Exactly. Yeah. Ok, but the social networks you can let those go and and your friends and your followers they’ll all still be there, right? When you come back. Exactly. And it’s, you know, it’s kind of a nice feeling to come back from vacation and see people have kind of left left pieces of conversation for you to jump back into that that’s one of the cool things about social media. Yeah, you can get back right in. Yeah, a tte this point, i would say, i’m looking forward to my vacation and then, while this is playing, i’ll be on it. So let’s talk about what it looks like inside an organization. And some strategies for managing on organization when it becomes more social. What are what are some of the concerns that we wantto talk about? Well, i think we’ve talked before about how, you know, if you want your staff to be engaging in social media, we need to create some sources for them, like a social media handbook or even part of your arm fully handbook that there’s examples of you know what his customer service was like or here’s some commonly asked questions so that you can, uh, answer them with these examples, things like that, but the next step beyond that, when you’re when you’re really trying to move your organization to be a social organization and let those staff across the organization, not just one, engage online with your community, that next step then is to identify what that engagement looks like it’s part of their job description because it may be different department to department for staff buy-in staff person and it may be that some people, you just want to be accessible and to show that people across the organization or online and it may be that there’s a certain department, that actually you know, responsible for campaigns and it’s a bigger part of their job description, but it’s, hard as we know toe hold staff accountable to different pieces of that work is it isn’t explicitly in their job description that you can’t then put it in their review. Okay, so we’re going to make that, and we’ll talk a little more in detail, i think about what? Maybe some of those, uh, descriptions and maybe some of those metrics might look like it does impact the organization broadly when even even beyond individual responsibility. When you start sharing annual reports and financial disclosures on, you know, the way you’re supposed to be in good practice with transparency, people are going to start to ask questions about those things, man. So yeah, so i think what’s interesting is that, you know, organization sometimes start to share piela finance older annual reports or or, you know, impact reporting in some way and think, okay, here we go, one step you could be a lot of questions sometimes there isn’t because people just wanted to know, and that was it. But again, once you put it out there, it’s sometimes more about the culture changed. Within the organization that staff that staff realize that kind of information that really reporting is going to be shared publicly on getting all of the staff across the organization comfortable and batted on. Understanding why it’s important to do more so than it is now. You’re going to get it a lot of questions from twitter because people just read your annual okay, now i can see that probably true, right? It’s hard. It takes more cultural change to get it approved and understood. Then it does once it’s actually out there because that is true. How many people are actually gonna pore over your annual report? Like you said, they just want to know that it’s available right? Well, isn’t it a a great annual report? I mean there’s so many examples now of organizations really rethinking what the annual report did so that even as a report itself, its social and it’s engaging so it’s something that people come and directly interact with, you know, to open up different pieces and see different stories, maybe watch videos and then click on something else. Looked at the data from that program. You know what? Whatever it may be. But taking advantage of the fact they’re posting it on the web and making it and engaging interactive pieces of information on and that too, is going to take some culture change because many organizations have have created annual reports every year that are pretty static, you know, usually, like are are meant to be printed and then given to thunderzord donors are longtime supporters, but then also used in, you know, fund in different ways for forward over the coming year. Well, the idea, just creating an interactive, you know, the web page or something khun definitely could definitely take some convincing, especially when people are thinking of the annual port less so of it needs to look like this, but but more of a i like to have it in my hand when i meet with someone, how am i gonna have this interactive website in my hand when i meet with someone so recognizing where those people are coming from because of how they use that data so that you’re not creating us an infographic that’s how you know they couldn’t ever using the situation, but maybe something interactive online that still has some of the feature. Stories and the rial financial and, you know, fundez breakdown over the year and things like that so they could still pull the pieces out that they used in those meetings and when they’re trying to convince me funders teo, give you some more funds, but that otherwise it’s still meeting the need online have seen something a little more engaging. This all has implications also for our volunteers, and i’m thinking of the key volunteers, the board members, they need to be a part of this cultural shift also. Oh, exactly, i mean, you know, there are a lot of organizations out there where the board is technically considered, you know, working board, it’s a it’s, a very small organization, and the board is there to really contribute directly to the operations of the organization, which for many organizations now means someone on the board or a couple people on the border actually managing the social media accounts for the organization, and that doesn’t mean that they just talk about how great, you know, the organization is on twitter once a week. If whoever is going to be a man, you know, social channel needs to be prepared to answer questions, jump into conversations, be accessible regularly and if that’s not something that a boardmember who, as you pointed out is a volunteer, is able to commit to it not then that you don’t want the board to have access to the channels, but they’re just not gonna be able to be there as much as the community is on dh, maybe that’s an opportunity to have boardmember have personal accounts where they can certainly, you know, engage with people directly representing themselves, but you still have that organizational profile managed by a staff person just so that it is more more reliably online account. We’ve had lots of guests on talk about the setting, the expectations for board members appropriately at the recruitment stage, and if you do expect them to be out there and engaged socially on behalf of the organization, i think you’d want teo make that clear in your board expectations discussion while you’re recruiting people. Yeah, exactly make sure if you know, that’s something that there isn’t capacity on staff for and you need to recruit for it on the board. Be very open about that end about you know, how big nose communities potentially are how much time commitment and engagement there will need to be, and then, you know, proactively look for someone who is, as you and i have talked about before, recognizes the way that social work’s so it’s not someone trying to come into, you know, quote unquote have that message control, but someone that gets that this is a conversation we’re here to engage with the community directly it’s a great opportunity to do that and that we’re going to shave the conversation together and not someone who’s going to say, well, i’ma boardmember and this is all that we want the community to talk about, so, you know, that’s what? We’re going to tweet because you know that it doesn’t matter if they have all the time in the world to be on there because they’re just not going to be engaging in the right way? Yes, okay, we’re talking about getting buying at all different levels from leadership certainly employees, volunteers, key volunteers like board members were goingto go away for a couple minutes, and when we come back, of course, amy and i will keep talking about more social now what? Keep listening. You’re listening to the talking alternative network. Are you stuck in your business or career trying to take your business to the next level, and it keeps hitting a wall? This is sam liebowitz, the conscious consultant. I will help you get to the root cause of your abundance issues and help move you forward in your life. Call me now and let’s. Create the future you dream of. Two, one, two, seven, two, one, eight, one, eight, three, that’s to one to seven to one, eight one eight three. The conscious consultant helping conscious people. Be better business people. Have you ever considered consulting a road map when you feel you need help getting to your destination when the normal path seems blocked? A little help can come in handy when choosing an alternate route. Your natal chart is a map of your potentials. It addresses relationships, finance, business, health and, above all, creativity. Current planetary cycles can either support or challenge your objectives. I’m montgomery taylor. If you would like to explore the help of a private astrological reading, please contact me at monte at monty taylor dot. Com let’s monte m o nt y at monty taylor dot com. Talking alternative radio twenty four hours a day. Welcome back on dh amy and i are still we’re going to continue talking about the cultural change and howto manage that when your organization becomes more social, more engaged. Amy well, let’s, talk about some of the strategies we you mentioned, including in job descriptions, what are what are different levels of engagement that might be appropriate for different, uh, sorry, different job descriptions where it’s not the person’s primary job when they’re not, they’re not the organization’s social media manager. What is just sametz samples of different levels of engagement, you might you might call on, well, one example that i like to use from n ten it’s. You know, for us, we want to make sure that all staff across the organization have an opportunity to connect with the community because that’s important to us and your mission is to help all staff use technology well. And so if we only had our community, you know, well the manager online engaging in social media, we also wouldn’t be practicing what we preach that all staff could be using social media. So we want to make sure that it’s staff running those channels what they can, but we also recognize that some people just you know, i know that it sounds crazy and unbelievable, but some people don’t have a facebook account for twitter accounts, and we’re not goingto have them create an account just because they work at ten and then have them not. I feel comfortable using it or not engaged very much there, because ultimately, that’s, what happens in this movie will be feel feel more just connected on confused then, if that person didn’t have a twitter account that s o that also is going to be contrary to what, what you stand for, which is real engagement, and if you’re not comfortable doing it, then you don’t force people into it exactly it’s not going it’s not gonna feel like a great conversation and came across their twitter account anyway, but there are opportunities to be accessible to the community and engage with them in a way that is comfortable and authentic. And so we have what we call weekly touchpoint and we have, you know, listening dashboards and all of those kind of resource is talked about in the past, and staff are expected to find one one thing that they want. To comment on or engaged with maybe, you know, someone participates in a twitter chat on, you know, a topic that they’re interested in or that is part of their work. Other people will find a news story about non-profit or technology sectors, you know, whether it’s from the chronicle for him to be or non-profit times and, you know, something like that, other people will just find block post from someone in the community, and you leave a comment and engage in that way, but whatever it is that you feel comfortable doing, the expectation is that you participate once a week, you find one conversation to contribute to in some way because the goal for us is, yeah, that you contributed, but it’s that actually, that means that was one member or maybe many members, if it was something like a tweet chat that feels like they got to have a direct touch from the organization and that it was it was really it wasn’t just, you know, one more email that we’ve sent out, but it was that staffers sense going and reading your block post, which feels good, you know, someone actually left a comment on your vlog and twenty thirteen were killed, like knowing these cummings anymore. So that’s one way where we set the expectations but left it open for open for interpretation, if you will so that staff can pick the channel that makes sense, and then if they’re doing this once a week, that’s fifty engagements per year per staff member that’s that’s, considerable, exactly, yeah, there’s twelve staff and, you know, easily fifty weeks where we’re online, so yeah, it adds up to feel like we’ve we’ve done a lot of external engagement and that’s not counting, you know, the actual social media engagement out of the organization’s profile, the foster parents and so on. And if you have that metric of one a week, some people are going to embrace it and do three or four or five a week it’s more natural for some people, others will be at that many others will be at that minimum, but even at the minimum, that’s still pretty good fifty engagements a year out of somebody who is not really that comfortable, but you know, that does what they do, what they’re being asked to do. That’s pretty good, exactly, and we have staff who, you know are are those staff i was talking about before that don’t have a twitter account that, you know, don’t log in to facebook, teo really use that, and so they choose the blog’s comments because for them they always get excited to actually hear what one of the end members was thinking about our working on so as much as it’s an opportunity to go the comment yes, engage directly, it also lets them feel like, you know, they can turn around in their chair and tell the rest of the office, hey, did you know that twenty martignetti thousand each right now, her, uh, whatever it may be, you know, because they just got to read, you know, take a few minutes out of their day of of otherwise, you know, just doing work and here, directly from a member as well, i love it and thank you for using intent as an example because i think that’s uplifting and motivating people because you are the non-profit technology network and still you’re saying you have people who aren’t all that comfortable don’t have a twitter account of facebook account and there’s still able to engage the love that you love it. Okay, so, uh, the the implication of including this in someone’s job description, as you said earlier, is that this is now going to be part of their performance review. We’re going, we’re going to talk about this once a year, once every six months hopeful i think once two years kind of bare minimum, but once in every six months, maybe in evaluating their their performance and maybe help them, i feel more comfortable or get to the next level if they are feeling like they’d like to get to next level, this can all be sort of growth opportunity. Oh, exactly. We’ve had staff where when they first join the organization, you know, they didn’t have have twitter accounts, for example, and they started out doing the community touchpoint knowing they had to find something to comment on or engage with and over time they got more interested and because it is and then they were on our own webinars as the half percent, you know, leaving the webinar and of course, that means you do the intro. You make sure that everyone’s able to log in eleven art, but then it means you’re listeningto all of these. Seminars throughout the year from, you know, experts in their in their different fields. So at one of the reviews, the staff person said, okay, i i listen to enough webinars about social media, i want to create a twitter account and i want to try engaging with the community there, you know, before our next unconference so that i can, you know, be a part of that online side of the conference, and i thought that was great a great way to for the organisation instead of us saying, we have a lot of people tweeting during the npc shouldn’t really have to do in our account and said by just saying here’s, the community, you need to be accessible, find the channel for you on the expectations you do something, you know, whatever town that is that over time they were able to see oh, i’m missing, you know, i’m missing this piece it’s on twitter, where i see people are doing things that i’m not there and they foreign fired-up join that channel on dh recognized the value themselves instead of us just deciding that they needed to be there. We have just a minute or so. Left, this should be part of staff training, too, not just the evaluation process, but regular staff training. Yeah, i mean, let’s think about how many times we complain that facebook has once again changed, you know, the the way that your friend list work or five settings or anything else if if you and some of plugged in recognized that weinger changing that it needs other people probably don’t recognize that. So having a regular checkpoints, uh, throughout the year where people can get together and say, oh, you know, i’ve actually been trying out google plus, does anyone want to talk about that? You know, or hey here’s, something that has changed in facebook setting, living off anyone needs to walk through it together. It could be a collaborative, learning type of meanings. That way everyone has a chance to share and to hear from each other just what’s working or what has changed in the different channel people are using under their own names. Thank you very much. Thank you for sharing. Amy, amy, sample ward, dot org’s, herb log and on twitter she’s at amy r s board and she’ll be back in a month thank you again next week, the overhead myth letter it’s coming, the three co signers of the letter will be with me, the ceos of the better business bureau wise giving alliance guide star and charity navigator do you want to ask them a question? Put it on her facebook page or send it to me on twitter. I won’t answer this week, but i will next week and we’ll have your question for them. So please love to have your questions. Also, jean takagi returns are legal contributor what overhead should you invest in to protect your non-profit coming from the overhead myth letter what’s wise overhead investment so that you protect your non-profit those you’re helping your employees and your board members. If you love tony martignetti non-profit radio, you might also love fund-raising fundamentals it’s, a monthly podcast devoted to fund-raising topics that i host for the chronicle of philanthropy, you’ll find it on their website, and you’ll also find fund-raising fundamentals on itunes. Our creative producer is claire miree off sam liebowitz is our line producer shows social media is by deborah askanase of community organizer two point oh, and the remote producer of tony martignetti non-profit radio is john federico of the new rules. I hope you’ll be with me next week. Friday one to two p. M eastern at talking alternative dot com, which is talking alternative broadcasting. Dahna hyre e-giving thing duitz good ending. You’re listening to the talking, alternate network waiting to get in. Nothing. Cubine are you a female entrepreneur? Ready to break through? Join us at sixty body sassy sol, where women are empowered to ask one received what they truly want in love, life and business. 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This is tony martignetti athlete named host of tony martignetti non-profit radio non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent technology fund-raising compliance, social media, small and medium non-profits have needs in all these areas. My guests are expert in all these areas and mohr. Tony martignetti non-profit radio friday’s one to two eastern on talking alternative broadcasting are you concerned about the future of your business for career? Would you like it all just better? Well, the way to do that is to better communication, and the best way to do that is training from the team at improving communications. This is larry sharp, host of the ivory tower radio program and director at improving communications. Does your office need better leadership? Customer service sales or maybe better writing are speaking skills? Could they be better at dealing with confrontation conflicts, touchy subjects all are covered here at improving communications. 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