Nonprofit Radio for January 8, 2024: Our Esteemed Contributors’ 2024 Outlooks

 

Amy Sample Ward & Gene Takagi: Our Esteemed Contributors’ 2024 Outlooks

Amy Sample Ward and Gene Takagi kick off the New Year with what they’ll be keeping eyes on this year. They delve into artificial intelligence (AI); the presidential election; donor advised funds; workers’ rights; and more. Amy is our technology contributor and CEO of NTEN. Gene is our legal contributor and managing attorney at NEO, the Nonprofit & Exempt Organizations law group.

Gene Takagi

 

 

 

 

 

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Nonprofit Radio for December 18, 2023: Lessons From The UPenn President’s Resignation

 

Doug White: Lessons From The UPenn President’s Resignation

Doug White

Two weeks ago, the president of the University of Pennsylvania resigned, in large part because major donors to the University harshly criticized her publicly, withdrew their donations, and encouraged others to do the same. Can you prevent an uprising at your nonprofit? How do you manage one if your nonprofit’s core values are at stake? Doug White has been studying ethics for decades and he returns to share what can be learned.

 

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And welcome to Tony Martignetti Nonprofit radio. Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. I’m your aptly named host and the pod father of your favorite abdominal podcast. Oh, I’m glad you’re with us. I’d come down with. So Mathenia, if you weakened me with the idea that you missed this week’s show. Here’s our associate producer, Kate with what’s coming? Hey, Tony, this week, it’s lessons from the U Penn president’s resignation. Two weeks ago, the president of the University of Pennsylvania resigned in large part because major donors to the university harshly criticized her, publicly withdrew their donations and encouraged others to do the same. Can you prevent an uprising at your nonprofit? How do you manage? One of your nonprofits core values are at stake. Doug White has been studying ethics for decades and he returns to share what can be learned on Tony’s take two. I’m thinking about you were sponsored by donor box, outdated donation forms, blocking your supporters, generosity. This giving season donor box, the fast flexible and friendly fundraising platform for nonprofits donor box.org here is lessons from the U Penn President’s resignation. It’s a pleasure to welcome Doug White back to nonprofit radio. He returns as a longtime leader and scholar in our nation’s philanthropic community. He’s an author and advisor to nonprofits and philanthropists. One of his books, abusing donor intent, chronicling the historic lawsuit brought against Princeton University by the Children of Charles and Marie Robertson. We talked about that here and it’s Doug’s recent book that is the one that’s most relevant to today’s conversation to frame things. The president of the University of Pennsylvania was forced to resign by donors, faculty and politicians. Last weekend, she resigned four days after testifying before Congress about what constitutes anti-semitism at Penn. There had been calls for her resignation before her testimony, enormously, wealthy donors who had made 78 and nine figure gifts to Penn, withdrew their gifts and their support of President Elizabeth mcgill. The board chair resigned the same day. We want to examine the role of the donors in the forced resignation of the nonprofit’s president. What should you expect? How can you prepare, how do you manage a similar crisis? What lessons are there for you and your nonprofit where a major gift may be? 45 or six figures, Doug White. Thank you for coming back to nonprofit radio to talk about this and it’s good to be with you again. Tony really is, what’s uh what’s your take? Well, did I leave out anything uh essential to the, to the framing that, that, that uh that you think needs to be filled in or what’s your take on the, what we’ve seen over the past week? Well, I think everybody knows the major headlines of the past week, the three presidents of Penn, the University of Pennsylvania. I should say MIT and Harvard went to a committee in Congress to answer questions about their policies on free speech on campus. And as you, as we all know, many Congress people are upset with not only that testimony but also in general, what they think is going on in the campus world. And so the question became, what kind of policies do you have and what are you doing to, to change them if anything? And in a nutshell, the outcome was fairly negative for the presidents because they basically equivocated, they did not answer the questions directly. And that I think as you’re implying, created a groundswell of criticism and many people asked for the resignations of those three people as we’re speaking right now. And as you mentioned, uh the president of 10, uh her name is Elizabeth. Um mcgill resigned along with the, the president of the, the, the president of the board this past weekend. And just today, Harvard University affirmed their support or the board did uh their support of Claudine Gay. And I don’t believe that the mit president’s position is, is in any danger at this point. And as you’re also saying, a lot of that criticism is coming from politicians. Uh and um some of the constituencies at the universities and one of those constituencies and an important one is the donor base. And so the question I think that you’re asking is what, uh, what role the donors have played in all of this. So I think you’ve, you’ve set it up here, I don’t think there’s anything you missed, but it’s a, it’s a unique time in, I think the world of, of higher education and, and I think nonprofits generally, you know, any uh any uh it goes beyond the, the free speech conversation because a major donor at any nonprofit could be upset about any direction that they see or even maybe, you know, so granular to be a, a particular program or the, the administration of a particular program. So that, you know, it’s, it’s uh I, I it’s a conversation about how we manage our, our donors influence uh expectations uh so that we don’t end up in this kind of a crisis where, you know, maybe it doesn’t rise to calling for the, the CEO or executive director’s resignation, although it certainly could. But, you know, the influence generally that is uh you know, beyond what they’re, what they’re giving relates to. So, you know, the, these donors at uh the University of Pennsylvania, one of the, one of the uh so in one of the instigators uh is a uh is a, is an advisory board member to the uh to the Wharton School, which is the the Penn, you know, the Penn Business School now, you know, his giving and I’m, I’m, I’m gonna assume this, I think it’s safe, but at least for our conversation, I’d like to assume that, you know, his, his uh and he was the uh one of the nine figure donors. So we’re talking about $100 million or more gift, um probably doesn’t relate to free speech. It relates to programs at, at Penn. Um And he’s cons he expressed concern about the direction that he saw in the Business School. So it’s, yeah. So, so again, assuming beyond, it’s assuming that it’s beyond what they’re giving relates to what do we do when donors uh exercise influence? Well, uh you’re bringing up, I think this is the meat of the question. You’re bringing it, bringing it up. And for me, it, it’s almost i it’s really a fundamental question, the person you’re sp speaking about, I believe his name is Mark Rowan. He’s the uh either the head of or he was on the Wharton advisory board. Now, University of Pennsylvania, there’s a university and the business School is Wharton and Wharton has its own advisory board. They’re not a governing board, they’re an advisory board, but they’re very influential as many advisory boards are. Uh but at universities, it’s the governing board that is going to make a decision about whether the president is fired or hired. So he, he was not in a position to say, ok, I want her, I want her uh Elizabeth mcgill to be fired, but at least statutorily, but he did start a campaign that lasted for several, like several weeks actually saying that she’s got to go, she’s gotta go. And you’re right. He was one of the, I think it was 100 was it 100 million? That was 100 million dollar donor. Yeah. And he started to with withdraw that gift and encourage other major donors to do the same. The one of those major donors was John Huntsman who has a foundation out in, in Utah. He had, he’s a former governor and a former diplomat. Uh He was very upset. Uh Dick Wolf, the uh creator of the Show Law and Order. A graduate of U. Penn also said that he was upset. So Mark Roan, he uh the way I understand it, the people I’ve spoken with have said that he wrote to all of the trustees kind of like bombarding them on a daily basis saying she’s gotta go, she’s gotta go and she’s gotta go. Uh And this was well before the um the testimony on the fifth of December, it started the day after Haas attacked Israel. So he was very, very upset and to say that you’re gonna not give $100 million even to a place like Penn, that’s a big, that’s a big threat. And so Penn’s going to listen to it and I think where you were just heading a moment ago if I’m reading this correctly, is that, what kind of, what kind of influence should that kind of a donor have over this kind of a question at a place like Penn or any other university or any other charity? And my answer is complicated. One is we have to understand one of the highest levels of philanthropy is that a donor in the United States? Anyway, a donor has the right to give or not give to any organization he or she wishes. Uh That’s just a personal decision. Uh You can’t be, the person can’t be made to think that the gift has to be made or can’t or can’t be made. So it’s a personal decision. And in that context, uh Mr Rowan had every right to say you do not have access to my checkbook a if you do this. So I think that’s, that, that’s a guiding principle for me, Tony when it comes to philanthropy uh that said uh universities and many other charities. But right now we’re talking about universities here. They are in the, the spotlight when it comes to current affair, uh Current affairs. And it’s been a decades old um controversy where universities have been thought to be much more liberal than many conservatives would like to see them. And so the, the accusations have been that there have been conservatives who have not been able to make their speeches or people who have been invited, who are conservatives have been, uh, kept from speaking and, and that’s been, that’s been a, a mantra of the conservative voice in the United States. And quite frankly, uh, I, I see where that’s coming from. I do see where that’s coming from. So, what you’ve got here is the, the, these three presidents are saying, look, uh, we think what happened, what Hamas did was terrible. They all said that by the way, and then when asked more directly, uh whether you would uh condone that kind of speech on campus that says that, that says that Israel is basically uh en engaged in genocide. Uh should that be Condoned? Should that speech be Condoned? And they, they were, they were saying basically no. And the answer was supposed to be yes. Yeah. Well, they, they, they equivocated uh uh certainly uh Elizabeth mcgill did at Penn, but they were giving sort of legally le le legal scholarly answers uh to uh to a political panel that doesn’t, doesn’t engage in academics and, you know, uh and pedagogy uh nuance for that but, or new, right? Um But, you know, sort of, I was gonna, I was gonna say one other thing though, in terms of that, the legalese question, uh I don’t know if you’re old enough to remember this, but I am when Mike Dukakis ran for president back in 1988 he was asked a question at one of the debates about uh rape. And the question was framed about his wife being raped, which would really, in anybody’s reality, would the person would say? Of course, you know, Mike Dukakis relied on a very legalistic answer and there was no emotion in it. And I think the any lost points. I mean, the there was a moment in his campaign where it was not a highlight where he just didn’t say dolly, we gotta get the guy. This is what was missing last week with these presidents. They didn’t just say we got, we can’t have that. We have to con we have to condemn that kind of language. II, I wanna, I wanna focus on something that you said about the, the donors, you know, they, they have a right to give or not give where they would like to or, or, or not? So, does that bring things down to, you know, for our, for our listeners where major gifts are, like I had said, 456 figures. Um Do, does that bring it all down to the money talks? And you either accede to the wishes of the, the, the donor’s influence uh uh uh or, or you uh or you suffer the consequence? Well, this is what I was going to say earlier when I, what I said is kind of a complicated answer and I think you’re going into that second level of my, my answer there. What would have been my answer? Then, and that is that I would answer your question in a direct way to say no, they shouldn’t be exceeding all the time to a donor’s uh whims. Uh But I’d like to make a distinction between a donor that is given money uh with certain expectations and a person who is not given money and also the donor who is given without expectations, but who might be upset with the organization. So let me begin with the donor who’s, who’s made a gift with expectations. And that is an example of that. It would be the the Princeton gift where the donor was giving $35 million in 1961 to establish the graduate to endow the graduate program of what was then the Woodrow Wilson School of International Relations and the lawsuit that came about in the late early two thousands and went to the late two thousands that said that the school prison wasn’t doing what the donor wished. Um We won’t rehash that whole that whole scenario, but I will say this, that the case was one of saying I made you, I made this gift and you’re not following what we agreed upon. And in that case, I believe the, the university or the, the charity has an obligation to follow what it said it would do. I, I believe wholeheartedly that the, the university or the uh the charity needs to do what it said it was going to do. It’s in many states, it’s becoming uh there’s beginning to be some, some history, legal history on this. Uh and so many states are taking a closer look at it than they were back 25 years ago. But uh from a moral perspective, if nothing else, charities need to do that, it’s time for a break. Are you looking to maximize your fundraising efforts and impact this giving season? Donor Box’s online donation platform is designed to help you reach your fundraising goals from customizable donation forms to far-reaching easy share, crowd funding and peer to peer options. Plus seamless in-person giving with donor box live kiosk. Donor box makes giving simple and fast for your donors and moves the needle on your mission. Visit donor box.org and let donor box help you help others. Now back to lessons from the U Penn president’s resignation. That’s the one that we talked about on, on the show. When, when you uh abusing donor intent was published, the, just to distinguish that from uh what’s happening. Uh I think at the these universities, but we’re we’re broadening the conversation beyond them. Uh Donors are exerting influence beyond the likely beyond the terms of their, their gift, their gift and their gift agreements, and all the documentation. I I don’t, I, I’m, as I said earlier, I’m, I’m assuming that these donors uh Mark Rowan, uh Huntsman Ron Lauder was another one of the SD Lauder of Fortune um that, that they’re giving doesn’t relate to freedom of speech on the campus or, or conversations about anti-semitism. So I know, I know, I know you have three different um examples that you wanna talk through. Just, I just want to distinguish that the, the Robertson case was around the terms of their specific gift. That’s correct. And that’s why that’s in that one category, but you’re bringing into the other, in the current situation, this other category where the donors aren’t really supporting that as an issue, they’re not giving in response to this issue. In fact, I believe, and I don’t have it in front of me, but Ross, excuse me, uh Mark Roans gift was to establish a uh a financial uh kind of institute was Wharton. And so, yes, it had nothing to do with the, the free speech question. But when you get to the question that is at hand at this university uh at Penn and Harvard and mit, you’re talking about a fundamental purpose behind the organization’s existence. Uh And so any donor who is giving for whatever other reason has the likelihood to have an opinion about the university’s uh position on this rather fundamental question. Um The, the free speech question. And so you’re right, they, they, they, they’re giving their, their philanthropy over the years hasn’t had anything to do with, with uh I’m sorry about this, my dog in the background. I have a dog in the back of that. We’re family friendly nonprofit. We’ve had babies, dog, dogs. Your, your dog is relatively quiet compared to some. Yeah. Well, it says when somebody walks in the yard or something. Uh, but no, you’re right. It has nothing to do with the, the issue at hand. So, does this donor, should this donor have any sway in the university’s, uh, examination of this fairly large and fundamental question? I believe that these donors have gone further than what they should. I don’t believe that quite frankly, I, I, I believe in the sanctity of a university and what it does in terms of fulfilling its, its core obligations and one of its core obligations is to provide a what a uh an environment on campus that allows people to feel like they can express themselves and at the same time feeling comfortable doing it, not only expressing themselves but hearing other people express themselves and that tension as we have seen develop over these last decades. But I think it’s really coming to a head right now that tension is not going to be resolved one way or the other. The best that can happen is that it gets managed in my view and the managing of that isn’t up to a donor, it’s up to the administration of the university. So I do feel even though I said earlier, this is why it’s kind of complicated, even though the donor should not feel an obligation to make a gift or not make a gift. It’s up to him or her. It’s a personal decision. But at the same time, I feel that donors need to have a higher regard than what I’m seeing right now for how the university would deal with these questions on its own, rather than having a donor take, take a shot at this. And I feel the same way about politicians, by the way, uh uh free speech being a, as you said, a fundamental value of a university and, and in other nonprofits, uh they all have fundamental values, whether it’s uh valuing might be free speech, valuing people. Um uh a commitment to uh diversity and equity and inclusion, um Commitment, maybe to their environmental impact, reducing that, you know, whatever, whatever their core values are, we all all nonprofits have them. So, so you know how to manage the instance where donors start to exert influence over the, over the, the management of your, your core reasons for being and, and is there a way to prevent a donor from overreaching? I’m, I’m uh I, I, I’m not, I can’t envision one, but I’m interested in your opinion. And so is there a way to, to safeguard ourselves from the kind of crisis that these three nonprofits are finding themselves in? Many organizations have gift acceptance policies. And my thinking is this, that this issue needs to be part of that process. I sometimes ask organizations if they have a separate in addition to the gift acceptance policy, a separate policy for ethics. And I would put this question into that ethics category, whether it’s part of the gift acceptance policy or whether it’s in its own policy that they address this, because there are a lot of other issues where donors can be a problem uh in the, in the development of uh of, of the fundraising process. And uh last week I spoke in Indianapolis about donors who became problems. I would use Harvey Weinstein and, and Bill Cosby as examples of that. Um But here, we’re not talking about that kind of a problem. We’re talking about a problem where a donor is going to exert some influence. So I think it’s up to the uh charity to anticipate that there could be issues that donors have problems with at that charity. We’ll just use pen as an example or the three that spoke last week as an example and say, look, uh we have our core fundamental values. We don’t, we don’t claim to have all of the answers, but it is part of who we are as an organization to address this question as best we can. And there’s going to be tension over time and we expect you to permit us to deal with that tension without interference. And, and, and what, and I’m talking about the donor who’s made the gift so far, the, the guy who says, look, I gave you $10 million and now you’re doing something that I don’t like and I, I’m gonna kind of raise my voice in opposition and that voice has, has, has purchased because of that $10 million. And what the chair is saying before that all happens is saying you don’t have, you don’t have the authority and you’re making that gift knowing that fact that charities so far are, would be very reluctant to do that. They, they’d say, well, why would we want to create an enemy before we get started? I get that. But my, my concern is you don’t have any, you don’t have any real argument once this is all played out and you haven’t established that as a part of the ground rules, then you don’t have any real ability to say, look, we have this, we have this uh quest in uh within our own world here and you’re not part of that argument. Uh At least in terms of what you’ve given us. So my, my suggestion is for charities to look at this, this, this is a tremendously important learning moment for the charities to say, what can we do to prevent? Not so much the different, the, the, the, the problem that comes on campus here or whatever problem that comes with any charity because you can’t, you can’t know. Uh but you can put donors on notice saying we are who we are and your money is going to change our, our fundamental values. All Right. Let, let’s, uh, hypothesize the, the, um, forward looking charity that, that has, uh, an ethics statement that accompanies the, their gift acceptance policy and the donor has signed the, the ethics statement that they, they agree and it says that they will abide by it and something gets under their skin and they just ignore the agreement and do exactly what, um, Mr Rowan did at, at, at Penn and they pull their own, they pull their own donation and they start to encourage other major donors to do the same. Where, where are we just, we’re, we’re, we have an ethics policy that the donors signed on to. That doesn’t, doesn’t feel very uh reassuring in the face of losing a, a, a major donor who’s encouraging others, other major donors to go with him or her. Well, that, that was another part of this, by the way, I’ll get to the substance of the response and I don’t mean to delay it, but, but I do have to interrupt you, I’ll hold your feet to the fire, the academician. I, I do believe that, that, that campaign really to a daily campaign uh to dus the trustees at Penn was low handed. I, I don’t think that was a very, very highhanded uh maneuver on his part and that’s a little bit connected to some frustrations I have with some of high net worth individuals who think that because of that net worth, they have kind of an ability or an, an intelligence or an experience that they really don’t have. Uh, and they’re just shoving it, uh, into somebody else’s, uh, some charity world, I guess that comes with having the ego that it takes to make $100 million. So, you know, that’s not me. But, uh, make, make even more because you have 100 million that you can give away. Well, exactly. He’s got billions, I’m sure. Uh, but getting back to your question, uh, you’re right. The, the, uh, it’s only a piece of paper and it’s not a legal commitment or anything of that nature but what it does, uh, and it, it doesn’t solve all the problems. I will, uh, I will grant you that, Tony. And I think the listeners have to know that there is, I don’t have the, the magic bullet, but what it would do is tell the donor that you thought about this. In fact, I think it’s actually a cultivation tool because if you tell donors that you thought about this, you’re also telling them that you’re an intelligent caring, uh, thoughtful, charitable, charitable organization. And that, uh, as a result, your money is going to be well stewarded once it gets to us. But that’s just the way I look at it at the end of the day. You’re right. It is just a piece of paper and at the end of the day, the donor doesn’t have to abide by it at all. And he, and he makes the fuss just like, as has happened at Penn and Harvard too, by the way, we’re focusing on Penn, probably because MS mcgill did resign. But, you know, the, the Harvard problem was as severe. There were many, many, many donors who, uh said she should resign. So it’s not just that, but that paper, you’re right, that it’s not going to say it’s not gonna stop anything if the donor is really bent on making sure that uh a a resignation takes place. But it would allow, I believe the charity to say, look, uh we, we have thought this through, we, we think this through with our, in our world of philanthropy and we, we not only care about it but we respect our donors so much. We wanna, we wanna share this thinking with them. So there’s a, there is a high ground there in doing that even if the donor doesn’t really respect it. In the end, you have a book on nonprofit ethics. One of one of your earlier ones before I, before I knew you, you uh you were publishing. Uh and so we haven’t, we didn’t talk about that one on the nonprofit radio, but you, you published a book on nonprofit ethics. Yes, it was called The Nonprofit Challenge back in 20 gosh, 2010, 2011, something like that. And I looked at what was going on at uh the Red Cross after 911 and they had this, they had accepted a lot of gifts after 911 a a on 911 and shortly after, um, and, you know, the Red Cross its job is to take care of people who are victims of, of tragedy like hurricanes and, and fires and things like that. And I don’t wanna sound too brutal here, but there weren’t a lot of living victims after 911. And so the world of the Red Cross is, uh, it, it wasn’t the right fit if you will. They, you know, they got a lot of money but they couldn’t put it to what they would traditionally use it for that kind of a situation. Everybody gave money that I know of anyway, everybody tried to give blood. It was a, as a moment of, of national importance. And so of course, you’d want to go to the Red Cross and give, but they didn’t have enough places to put the money. So they, they put it elsewhere and a huge case came up afterwards, uh, because they had established a trust and, and, and the money didn’t go to the victims and the people who gave the money wanted them to go to the victims. So the question was, uh, not that anybody was stealing the money but, uh, ethically, what should the, what should the Red Cross have done? They have since changed their, their policy there. I, I think what the Red Cross is a great organization. Uh And that they, this handled that at the time is part of growing. I think uh we’ve never had a 911 before. The outpouring was huge. But that was just one example in, in the book on ethics. But the question there was how, how could we look at our ourselves? I think of, I think of charities, I think of the charitable sector, Tony as the ethical sector of our society. We oftentimes talk about ourselves as being the third sector of the business and government being the other two. So we’re the third sector. But I also think we’re the the ethical sector. We don’t have political pressures, don’t stop laughing. I understand there’s lots of politics that uh places like Penn and other charities. And we also don’t have the same uh need to make money for shareholders as as is true in the for profit world. And so we have a cleaner runway to look at ethical questions. And I’ve taken a lot of time these last several decades now examining the role far play in society and their, their ethical uh motive behind what they, what they need to be doing. And so uh yes, I feel like this what you had just asked about a moment ago in terms of a uh or what I mentioned a moment ago about the uh the, the ethics document or the, the agreement that the charity would have with the donor uh And if the donor doesn’t really abide by that, what happens? I think at least the charity would have the, the moral high ground to say we have thought this through. We have talked about it with the donor and we can’t, we can’t make the donor do one thing or the other at this point. But we can say that we’ve talked about it. And by the way, even at that point, if you take that down the road as you just did a moment ago, and the daughter is making a fuss, uh, the, the charity would still say, we, we respect the donor. We, we understand where he’s coming from or she’s coming from. This is not a us against him kind of a thing. But it’s a matter of saying, ok, here’s a, here’s a, a problem that has developed and we’re dealing with it the best way we can. And we can only hope that our donor sees that fact and tries to not use his or her uh financial ability to, to sway us in making decisions about our core, our core purposes. It’s time for Tony’s take two. Thank you, Kate. It’s December giving. I know how critical it is for you. I’m thinking about you. I’m on your side. I know I said a couple of weeks ago, but I wanna tell you again, if you do your best, then you can stand proud on January 1st knowing that there’s nothing more you could have done. I’m thinking about you this, these last few weeks of December. I’m with you. I’m with you. Do the best you can. That’s Tony’s take two Kate. Happy holidays and Happy New Year. Everyone. We’ve got VU but loads more time. So let’s go back to lessons from the U Penn president’s resignation with Doug White. The other dimension is that the, that, that donor is hurting the very beneficiaries that the nonprofit exists to help. In the, in the case of the universities, it’s, it’s students and, and faculty. Uh in the case of an animal shelter, it’s the uh it’s the animals that are housed in a, you know, in a no kill shelter. Uh in the case of a food bank, it’s the, it’s the folks who come in twice a week to fill grocery baskets and, you know, maybe come for lunches. Uh It’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s not only a question of surrendering the core values, but it’s a, it becomes an issue of being uh detrimental to the people we exist or, or the people or entities. What? However, I mean, some charities exist to help the environment, what whatever we’re about to help donor, major donors pulling their gifts hurts the, the, the cause that we’re, we, we exist for what you’re pointing out right now is something I was listening for or looking for among the people at Harvard and Penn and MIT. And that is to say you may disagree with this, but by withholding your support, you’re really, you’re really hurting the entirety of our organization. You’re, you’re hurting what you want to see us do and you’ve already given us support to do what we’re doing. And so clearly, you think that we’re doing that correctly. And so if you’re going to take a position on this other issue and we all agree, it’s important, nobody’s trying to say it’s not important. But if you do hold your money back because of that, then what you are interested in is less likely to be successful. And so you’re really, really taking away a lot of what we can do that you want to have happen. So the argument can be brought back to the donors saying you’re hurting yourself by doing this, you’re hurting your own interests by doing this. And, and I think there’s an argument there and III, I haven’t heard that from any of these. I don’t know if they have been talking about this internally in among the board members or among their staffs or whatever. I haven’t heard that, but you’re right. They are hurting themselves. The donors are hurting their own interests when they, when they take that position, see, it would be one thing if the donor, if, if we’ll just use Mark, since we Mark Rowan, since we, we’ve talked about him, he could write an editorial in the New York Times or the Philadelphia paper or the student paper saying how much he opposes this, which is his right and quite frankly his obligation if he feels that way. Uh, but that would be a separate activity from withholding his money. Now that, that was not, that was not sufficient for him. The, the coverage I read said that he did have an op ed in the, the pen newspaper. Ok. Well, I’m not surprised and I thank you for telling me that I didn’t know, uh, that doesn’t surprise me and, and clearly, you’re right, it wasn’t sufficient for him. Uh, but this, this tug of war, you know, we, we a lot of time we talk about conflict. This is what another thing I wrote about in the, the book that you just referenced the ethics. You know, it’s not a question of avoiding conflict or, or, or making sure gets resolved to everyone’s satisfaction that doesn’t happen in real life. What does happen in real life among people who are, who are care about a resolution is that we, we understand this tension. And I think the free speech question is probably the per the perfect example of this and that is we’re not going to solve this. This is one thing that both sides don’t, I don’t feel, I don’t see it anyway, understand. And that is that there should be this one solution where everybody’s gonna understand the rules and with free speech, if I say, uh Hamas is a terrible group because look at what they did and they are, and I will say that they are terrible. But then uh if someone who supports the Palestinian cause and has, has taken a look at what’s been going on there for the last several decades, lifetimes. Uh uh They, they can say, look, you know, Israel is a bad actor in this whole thing. Both of those things can be true. Both of those sentiments could be within one person. And what I think the the university’s goal is to tell people that that’s what it is an ethical decision. When we talk about an ethical dilemma. The reason we use the word dilemma is because there’s no black and white answer. There’s no clarity to, there’s no clean way to get from where we are at a dilemma to where everybody’s happy. And oftentimes there is no way at all. So you see him manage it. You say, look, this is going to come up and it’s gonna come up and it’s gonna come up and we’re not going to come up with a rule that says, uh this is the way it’s going to be all the time when a conservative person comes, comes to, to, to campus, we’re not gonna say he, he, he can always say what he wants to and the same is true for a liberal person or what whatever the, the argument might be, what we’ve got to do is say, look, we understand there, there are conflicting viewpoints here and where, where the, where I do believe the president’s got it right. They said it’s context, uh, this is just the worst place to say this, but it was context dependent and at least defen the person who was doing the grilling at that point in Congress was saying, are you kidding me? And quite frankly, she had the, she had the hearts of, of America when she said that and I me to it, I, I think, you know, I have differences with this fact but they couldn’t say uh no, this was wrong. They, we would condemn this on, on campus. So, but the policy itself is true that you have to take a look at, at the context of what’s going on in this. And if you’re really saying, look, we’re going to make you feel unsafe you Israelites because you guys have been beaten down the Palestinians for the last 5075 years. Um Then, then that’s wrong because you can’t make anybody else. You can’t threaten anybody else. Uh In my view, you can say, I, I support the Palestinians. You can’t say, I believe you can’t say that. And I believe that’s what the presidents of these universities were saying. And, but they were also saying that the, the, the Israelis have a position too. And what, what, what fuels this conversation right now is the atrocities that Hamas committed against the Israelis that that, that is, you, you, you know, one of the steps that I’ve created when it comes to ethical decision making because everybody thinks it’s, you know, kind of squishy. And, you know, I, I know ethics because my mama told me what’s ethical or, I know it’s in my gut. That’s what a lot of people think. But when you’re trying to deal with someone else who has a different mama or has a different gut, uh, you’ve got to have some common, some common language or, or you don’t go anywhere. And so, you know, you’ve got to say, look, uh, you’re gonna be uncomfortable. We’re not gonna try to take away the discomfort of being on campus. We’re not gonna try to take away the discomfort of hearing something. You really, really, really don’t like. That’s where I think colleges have gotten it wrong. This question of saying we’re gonna make everybody comfortable. So everybody’s happy all the time. That’s a recipe for disaster. And, and my, and my feeling is that, uh, you know, as long as you, uh don’t threaten anyone or imply that there’s a threat to anybody individually and physically that you’re taking a position on policy, then then anybody should be able to speak and people who are, and you, you’ve seen this a lot more where a conservative comes and the liberals kind of shout them down. I think on campus, the shouting down thing, you shout me down, you’re out of here. I mean, you don’t have a right to be in the room if you’re gonna shout something. Well, that goes right. And that, of course, and then that goes to the, the core values again, you know, what, each nonprofit supporting its own core values, what, what it stands for, uh, even in the face of, you know, uh potentially losing major, major support. Uh I wanna look at another dimension of this, that the uh these three university presidents are, are all women and at least at Penn, that’s the one we know the most detail about all the major donors are men. Uh So I don’t, I don’t know that that’s true at, at the other two universities. But, but again, I want, you know, I want to take it out of the university context. Do you think there’s a, there, there’s, there’s a gender bias here that it’s, it’s a bunch of, uh uh I is, it is a bunch of rich men picking on a bunch of uh uh female CEO S I, I can’t believe you’re bringing this up because this is the conversation I had with my wife a few days ago. Uh and she brought that to my attention and I’m thinking first of all that, the Ivy League has seven out of its eight pres uh eight presidents as women, which is, I think an astonishing thing given the history of the uh schools and astonishing and a good thing uh Dartmouth just got its new president, a woman for the first time this past fall. And so I’m thinking this is, this is great. I’m not looking for a woman necessarily. That’s not how I look at. No, but, but let’s deal with. This is a good thing to deal with the, this, the, the what, what seems to me to be AAA gender, a gender overreaching? Yes. And iii I think the answer. OK, so I will answer your question. I think yes, I think that’s a factor. Uh And uh but I don’t think it’s i it’s, it’s meant I don’t think that the donors at Penn have said we want to get this woman out of there. Now, there have been some donors at both Penn and Harvard. I think I was reading the other day about Harvard and Claudine. Gay people were against her even before she was, she was there. And one of the, I think was Bill Ackman, a lot of the financiers who supports Harvard who said that uh when you limit your choices to a woman of color, then you’re taking a lot of people off the table and that was wrong as a process and, and he, he can believe that and people would think he’s right. Uh It’s not a fact, it’s an opinion. So I don’t think you’re taking a lot off the table. You might be taking a lot off the table, but you’re leaving a lot on too. So I don’t think that was a really accurate. I don’t believe that was an accurate criticism but was there a gender bias in here? Um All of these women, all of these presidents are women? All the then all of the critic, criticizers were uh men uh at least the the most vocal but there were some women I know at Harvard who were on staff who, who felt uncomfortable with Claudia Gaines gays leadership. Uh But you can’t, you can’t ignore it, can you? I mean, you bring it up. My wife brought it up. I don’t think it’s something you could ignore. Uh And I think it should be part of the conversation. If I were a reporter, I would go to some of these really, really wealthy people and ask that question. Now, they might deny it, but I would like to hear them, deny it because I do, I, I, I’d like to hear their, their answers to that also final dimension that uh I’d like to bring up because we just have a couple of minutes left. Board support seems to be key here. Uh I at Penn, the board support eroded for uh Doctor Elizabeth mcgill uh at uh Harvard, as you said, just yesterday or today, today, the, the Harvard board has said we are behind president gay board support. Uh So I know knowing your board members that you, you’re not gonna be able to anticipate how they’re gonna react in, in the event of uh of a crisis. But knowing them having their support overall, it seems to be a, a distinguishing factor here. One of the points that was made in the news articles that I read about Elizabeth mcgill, who being fairly new was that she didn’t have time to create uh relationships uh really deep relationships with individual board members uh to your comment a moment ago. Yes, board support is crucial. Uh In fact, I mean, just, I’m sure your listeners know this, but just to get this on the, on the table, the board is the president’s boss. And so the board hires and it fires the president. Uh she, she kept the board from having to fire her by resigning. But, um, it could have been different at Harvard because she wasn’t going to resign and they could have fired her. Uh, but the board is crucial and, but what not the waters a bit here is that many of your major donors are also on the board. So you have, you have that going on that was going on at Penn too. But the board, the board really, the job of the board is to set, not only a strategic direction but also a philosophical direction for the organization and the president is meant to be the executor of the, of that philosophy. And so when, when you see a, uh uh uh a, a president who went out these three did or to Congress, they are saying what they are carrying forth the values of the university. That’s another, I’m so glad you brought this up because that’s another, quite, quite frankly, another big issue for me. The board did not have Elizabeth mcgill’s back. In fact, it was the opposite. Um and it was the opposite for a long time. It had been building up. Hamas was uh the, the, the, the, the testimony was just the last straw. But that said they, they, each of these women, each of these presidents were doing what they both, they all agreed to with their boards. And so the board walking away at that moment, uh I felt was, was unfortunate for those people. They, they need the support of the board. If I, if I were on the board and I really disagreed with what they said before Congress, I would say, let’s take this behind closed doors. I would not have done what they did know your board, know your board members. I think, I think that’s another takeaway. All right. Doug, you wanna, you wanna, you wanna uh give us a uh closing closing statement? I feel so strongly about charitable organizations. Sometimes people don’t realize that places like Harvard are charities and they’re so, so wealthy, but they are legally speaking, they’re in the same place in the IRS code as the local uh food shelter. Uh And, and so, uh I think we, we look at charities and say uh there are organizations that will do the work that neither government nor business does or no for profits do. And so we are so fortunate to have them and we need, and they need our support. They do not live uh solely on their earned income. And what I mean by that is uh in the case of the university uh tuitions, they need uh they need philanthropic support and it just so happens that the United States has many, many uh good philanthropists, I mean, by philanthropists, people who just give any amount of money that, that support to charity is crucial. And what I would hate to see is that this issue as big as it is take away the philanthropic support these organizations get and, and I do want to make a point here, Harvard Penn and mit all those organizations represented in Congress are all what we would call very wealthy organizations that is to say they have, they have big endowments, but that said they still need their annual support. We I can’t go into now as to why that is. But I can, I can say for a fact that each of those people legitimately, each of those organizations legitimately need uh philanthropic support in addition to their, their endowment, they do great work for society. And I would, I would really not want to see this situation as important as it is as fundamental as it is to these organizations that would not like to see this situation overtake our spirit of philanthropy to these three or any other party in the United States or any others. Those are, you know, the, all our listeners know the value of small gifts, annual gifts, major gifts, foundation support. We didn’t even talk about the institutional support. It didn’t, didn’t really doesn’t seem to have applied here, planned gifts, recurring the monthly. They, they’re all important and I hope this has helped folks to put some thought around how you might uh manage a AAA crisis like this, how you might help prevent a crisis like this. Doug Thank you very much for sharing your, your wisdom. Well, Tony, I appreciate your taking the time to have this uh conversation on this particular topic. It’s very emotional for many people. It’s emotional for me. I think of it as being fundamental to what we do. You and I and so many thousands of others across the country all to promote uh what I think is our ethical sector, Doug White author and advisor to nonprofits and philanthropists. You’ll find him at Doug white.net. Thank you again, Doug, my pleasure. Next week. No show. It’s Christmas the week after. No show. It’s New Year’s. We’ll be back the second week in January for our 2024 outlook with our smart contributors, Amy Sample Ward and Gene Takagi. If you missed any part of this week’s show, I beseech you find it at Tony martignetti.com. If you celebrate Christmas, I hope you have a great one. I hope you have a fun time, wonderful time with family and friends. Happy New Year. Of course, wishing you the best in the early weeks of 2024. And we will be back in the uh in the second week. I hope you enjoy your time off time. Well deserved. And Kate Merry Christmas, I’ll be seeing you in person for Christmas Week. So see you soon. See you soon were sponsored by donor box, outdated donation forms blocking your supporters, generosity. This giving season donor box, the fast flexible and friendly fundraising platform for nonprofits donor box.org. Our creative producer is Claire Meyerhoff. I’m your associate producer, Kate Martinetti. The show social media is by Susan Chavez. Mark Silverman is our web guide and this music is by Scott Stein. Thank you for that affirmation. Scotty be with us in a couple of weeks for nonprofit radio. Big nonprofit ideas for those other 95% go out and be great. Happy New Year.

Nonprofit Radio for December 11, 2023: Lessons From The Sam Altman & OpenAI Headlines

 

Gene Takagi: Lessons From The Sam Altman & OpenAI Headlines

Gene Takagi

Our legal contributor, Gene Takagi, returns to first, unravel the story in his clear, plain language way. Then he shares his wisdom on the takeaways for nonprofits including good governance, proper documentation, gift acceptance, commercial co-ventures, and more. Gene is managing attorney of NEO, the Nonprofit & Exempt Organizations law group.

 

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Hello and welcome to Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio. Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. I’m your aptly named host and the pod father of your favorite abdominal podcast. Oh, I’m glad you’re with us. I’d get slapped with a diagnosis of lordosis if I had to shoulder the burden of knowing that you missed this week’s show. Here’s our associate producer, Kate with what’s up this week? Hey, Tony, this week we have lessons from the Sam Altman and open A I headlines our legal contributor, Gene Takagi returns to first unravel the story in his clear plain language way. Then he shares his wisdom on the takeaways for nonprofits including good governance, proper documentation, gift, acceptance, commercial co ventures and more on Tony’s take two. How I can versus why I can’t were sponsored by donor box, outdated donation forms blocking your supporters, generosity. This giving season donor box, the fast flexible and friendly fundraising platform for nonprofits donor box.org here is lessons from the Sam Altman and open A I headlines it’s always a genuine pleasure to welcome Gene Takagi back to nonprofit radio. You know who he is, but he deserves a proper introduction nonetheless, he is our legal contributor and managing attorney of Neo, the nonprofit and Exempt Organizations Law Group in San Francisco. He edits that wildly popular nonprofit law blog.com and he’s a part time lecturer at Columbia University. His firm is at Neola group.com and Gene is at GTC Gene. Welcome back to the show. It’s a pleasure to see you. Pleasure to have you. It’s great to see you as well. Tony, thank you very much for having me. Absolutely. Let’s start our discussion uh about the uh the Sam Altman and the OPEN A I and the, the potential implications for uh for our listeners in small and mid size nonprofits with, if you could just sort of summarize uh what happened between Sam and his nonprofit entity and his for profit or not his, but the nonprofit entity, the for-profit entity. And what inspired you to uh think about this and, and write a, a two part blog post at uh nonprofit law blog.com. Yeah, I mean, it’s a great story, Tony, it gets a little convoluted but, you know, it was dominating our headlines for, for a few days and I think a lot of people sort of lost sight um about like one important fact is that the whole organization started out as a nonprofit public charity. So this is, you know, a charity with charitable assets that decided, hey, we’re gonna develop A I in a way that’s gonna like impact the world. Um but we’re not gonna do it for the benefit of for profit investors, we’re gonna do it for the good of humanity, right? So that’s the way the charity was developed and why they thought, hey, let’s develop it in a charity. Let’s not develop this in a for profit, let’s do it in a charity. So just to, just to be explicit, open A I is a 501 C three uh Open A I Inc. Um And so that’s important, that’s important. It becomes important in the story. Open A I INC is a, is the, the charitable entity, the 501 C three. That’s right. Um Dan Altman is the founder of, right, founder and board member. Just as an aside, Elon Musk was one of the uh initial board members uh as well and might have tried to take it over but didn’t, wasn’t able to do that. But that’s another story. Um So, um they, they were formed in 2015 and they probably took a year or so to get going. And I don’t know that they expected to develop into such a prominent player in the field and the dominant A I player with uh chat GP T, right? So uh GP T chat G BT, I think uh a billion users within just like months or even, you know, several weeks is the fastest growing application I think uh in history. Um So uh an amazing thing now before we got to that stage, the nonprofit sort of realized, yeah, we’re developing this and, you know, we raised, I don’t know, like $100 million or so. Um, to develop this A I technology. But we need a lot more if we’re really gonna, like, produce something substantial. And that’s their, their original goal was a billion dollars. Yeah. And they couldn’t get there. So they said, you know, this faces some other nonprofits as well when they, when they want to do something at scale and they learn, you know, we actually need to sort of partner up or collaborate with for profit investors here and they’re interested in this technology as well. But we have to remember the whole idea was we’re doing this for humanity and not be controlled by a for profit investor that tells us what to do. Um So they decided to drop down a subsidiary, they formed a subsidiary. Um and then they took in investments in the subsidiary, but by forming the subsidiary, presumably they contributed some amount of technology that they had developed to this point. So they raised over $100 million and they developed technology and they contributed down to the for profit. Now other investors are investing in it. And you know, it got to the point where I think Microsoft’s um investment and Microsoft is the second biggest company in the world. So talking about a big player, I think Microsoft’s investment was in the realm of $8 billion I think in total. So, and there’s a lot of investment, you know, of course, not all at once, but um and they created the subsidiary which um was a limited liability company or LLC. So I’ll just refer to it as the LLC. Um And um, so open A I INC, the nonprofit has now contributed charitable assets to an LLC and is in partners, in essence, with all of these other for profit investors who have invested a lot more money than open A I did. Um But because open A I had charitable assets contributed into the LLC, which it created, um it sort of said before we bring in investors, let’s set the rules and the rules are, we’re going to make the LLC, you know, provide in the operating agreement and provide to any investors that invest in us, that this technology is going to, you know, be developed for the benefit of humanity. And um this is what the operating agreement um said and that is a private document so we can’t see the full thing. But um this is on open A I Inc’s website and it says that the operating agreement of the LLC provides, it would be wise to view an investment in the LLC in the spirit of a donation with the understanding that it may be difficult to know what role money will play in a post A I world. And the company’s duty to this mission, the LLC S duty this mission um will take precedence over any obligation to generate a profit. The company may never make a profit and the company is under no obligation to do so. So before Microsoft put in any money or any other investors put in money, this is the operating agreement that they are signing and accepting. So that’s the thing. The other thing they did was, they said the nonprofits board is effectively going to be the fiduciaries, essentially the board of the LLC as well. So they’re going to determine what is in the best interest of the LLC. So they’re wearing two hats. Now, one is as the hat of the board members of the nonprofit. And one is as the board members that sort of govern the LLC. Um And at some point, the board and Sam Altman or majority of the board and Sam Altman, the founder, um uh who is also the CEO of the LLC where in conflict. Um And the board decided that they didn’t want to keep Sam on a CEO. Now, they gave a reason for it and it was essentially that he wasn’t um open and, and that’s the, the board of the LLC, correct, which is the same as the board of the nonprofit. So it’s, it’s right, but it’s not the, it’s not the nonprofit entity board that I understand they’re the same people, but they operate in two different, they operate as two different entities wearing two different hats, just like a, a person could be an individual and a trustee or an executor and an in. So, so the, the, the LLC board and Sam Altman were in conflict. Yeah. And so let me say that they, they made the structure much more complicated than that. So there are other entities that are acting as partners for, for, for like let’s call this a hypothetical. We’re simplifying it. So this may not all be accurate because we don’t get to see all the private documents involved, but essentially the same people are involved in both um as as the governing body or the fiduciary. So the board members of the nonprofit seem to be the same as the board members of the LLC from a practical perspective. So I’ll, I’ll go along with you kind of just using that analogy, but with that sort of caveat or disclaimer. Um So, absolutely, because there was a third party entity, a managing entity in between the two but, and a holding company as well. But for simplicity, uh le let’s keep it to two. And, and it’s not, it’s not a distortion of the story. It’s just, it’s for our purposes, it’s, it’s not a significant detail. So, um again, this is not the news for, for everybody, but this is trying to learn some lessons here from, from what we um So yeah, wearing their hats as the fiduciaries of the LLC, they decided they were going to remove or terminate Sam Altman as CEO. Now, this alarmed a lot of people and particularly because I think it’s widely viewed that this was apr blunder, um, as well that the board members of the LLC, the same board members of the nonprofit and said, basically, we’re firing him because he wasn’t sort of, um, open to, to what he was really, you know, doing or um um they didn’t say that there was any fraud or any unlawful conduct. But I think, you know, the presumption was that he wasn’t really looking after the mission of the nonprofit that was built into the operating agreement and therefore the purposes of the LLC as well. He was really looking to advance the A I from a commercial context, let’s expand it and grow the scope of the business just like in the for profit world would traditionally do. Um But the board members kind of had this background. Um, you know, some of them anyways, academics and kind of people who kind of understood the charitable context of it and were more concerned with the ethical issues related to, to A I. Um and I think, you know, you’ve probably discussed that with some guests in, in the past as well. Um uh of uh artificial intelligence and what that might mean uh beyond just making the world easier for all of us because we can talk to machines there are some dangers with that as well. And I think the board didn’t felt, felt like Sam was like progressing on like, let’s make this this, you know, huge company and let’s dominate the space. Um And not thinking as much about the ethical considerations that the board had. It’s time for a break. Are you looking to maximize your fundraising efforts and impact this giving season? Donor box’s online donation platform is designed to help you reach your fundraising goals from customizable donation forms to far reaching easy share, crowdfunding and peer to peer options. Plus seamless in person giving with donor box, live kiosk. Donor box makes giving simple and fast for your donors and moves the needle on your mission. Visit donor box.org and let Donor box help you help others. Now back to lessons from the Sam Altman and open A I headlines. I I saw this sort of captioned in uh uh something I was reading or maybe it was even a video that I saw uh just, you know, a week or 10 days ago when this was all capturing headlines, it was basically a uh altruism versus acceleration is I won’t go too much down the rabbit holes because there, there is this whole effective altruism movement um that um was embraced, I think by one or more board members um that’s associated with Sam Ban and greed, sort of the whole um other area but avoiding that rabbit hole for the moment yes, that, I think that’s right, that, that there’s kind of like, are we doing this for a charitable reason? Because this is an LLC with outside investors who put in most of the money? But they agreed that, hey, this is the operating agreement, we are going to be operating really for the benefit of humanity and we may not expect a profit. And in fact, we were told, don’t expect a profit, think of this as a donation. But then when you terminate somebody, we thought this makes no sense. And then I think, you know, from the perspective of some investors, even though some of them, you know, were involved in the signing of this operating agreement and the employees of Open A I who are probably a lot of engineers and others who were involved in the tech world that probably weren’t involved in nonprofit technology. So not really thinking about the charitable of it, they had a huge uprising against this move that the board did. And so within days, you’ve got um Microsoft being upset and saying, you know, we may desire just to hire um uh Altman and run the A I division within Microsoft itself because by this time, open A I and Microsoft are now very embedded together Microsoft being the, you know, the primary um uh or the biggest investor in Open A I I believe. Um And uh a lot of their um sort of programs that were or apps that we’re familiar with. Like word and outlook now have open a I sort of structures built into them and I don’t know if you remember Tony. Uh Another aside, do you remember Flippy um from Microsoft’s old, like a I help. This is from the nineties where you could say help and clip uh animated paper clip would pop up on your screen. I didn’t know clipping by name. Uh Sorry, I’m sorry. Clip uh the, the designers of clipping, I didn’t know him. Uh I mean, I don’t know, clip, he could be a woman too. Uh uh who knows the gender of clipping anyway. Uh I didn’t know clipping by name but I certainly remember the little, the little animated uh paper clip. Yeah. Yeah. So that was Microsoft A I so open chat is like a huge evolution from, from that, right? And now it’s embedded in Microsoft’s stuff and it’s like a, a powerhouse chat G BT um program that, you know, Microsoft can make available for users of its programs. Um And that’s a big deal that, you know, if somebody threatens what that might end up being. Um They had kind of A II I think from their perspective, reason to say, hey, why are you firing the CEO who’s been, you know, growing open A I LLC at like an incredible rate and incredible impact. Um And it’s really, you know, uh jeopardizing our business at, at Microsoft beyond our investment which maybe we don’t expect money back, but we’ve been like using the technology and if there’s some threat to the technology because you’re not going to follow the lead of your CEO, um, then maybe we need to sort of see what our legal recourse might be and maybe other strategies like hiring Sam Altman away from you and what’s terminated, just hiring Sam. And I think close to 90% of the employees of open A I said we’re going to if you don’t bring back Sam A CEO um at that point and a lot of media coverage. So everything, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, like everybody writing all about this. Um probably not from the legal perspective that, that I might want to see. But um uh and understandably so, but yeah, I, I think there was pressure on the board to say, yes, we know what our fiduciary duties are. We know that the operating agreement says that, you know, the LLC is gonna be, you know, operating the, the programs for the benefit of humanity, not for the benefit of our investors, but in light of all of this, we are going to bring back Sam. So Sam Altman is now CEO there are other conditions to it, including some board members who um led the termination of, of Altman and to leave the board. But other board members who are thought, you know, at least this is how, how the, the press release from open A I read some board members or, or some of the outgoing board members, I should say um that the new board members were strong enough to stand up to Sam Altman. Like, so we put in fiduciaries that are strong enough. So should he go off, you know, kilter and really, you know, pursue a commercial and not a charitable purpose? Um uh or over the charitable purpose, I should say, and the benefit to humanity that there are board members that will hold him in check. Um So that’s kind of in a nutshell, what’s happened here. So nonprofit board also in charge of the for profit joint venture. So it’s a joint venture because the nonprofit has some ownership of it and the other for profit investors have ownership of it. Um And there are all sorts of rules that we can talk about in those type of collaborations, but nonprofit board is essentially in charge of both. Um And they made a decision with charitable purposes in mind. Uh That didn’t go well with the other stakeholders, they got threatened um with something that could have really harmed or um just eliminated a large part of the value of the LLC. Um And now we’re back to where we kind of started, but with a slightly different board and I think the questions are, what have we learned from this? And, and where are we now with nonprofits and for profits collaborating this way. Yeah, absolutely. And those are our broader lessons uh which we’ll get to imminently. It’s time for Tony’s take two. Thank you, Kate. I’ve been thinking recently about the, the contrast between thinking about how I can do something versus why I can’t. And this has always been my philosophy to, to think about the, the, the positive rather than the negative. I feel like if you’re looking for reasons why you can’t do something, you’ll find plenty. They’re, they’re easier, they’re much easier to identify. They come to the surface so much quicker than the, how you can. So I don’t like to start with the why I can’t because they’re too easy and, and they’ll, they’ll just block you up, they’ll jam you up. I like to start with the how I can. And I’ve been thinking about this in terms of like bringing on a new client, opening a door to a new donor relationship, um, visiting donors when I take my trips up to New York City, this is how it’s been, it’s been showing up for me. So for you, I’m urging you to uh start with the how you can just because the why you can’t is so much more abundant, so much easier to find. It’s, it’s definitely tougher to find the, the way forward rather than identify the roadblocks. I fully understand sometimes there may be reasons why very good reasons why you just can’t do something, but I urge you to not start with that thinking, figure out the how you can instead of the why you can’t first and then hopefully you can, you’ll, you’ll find a way forward for whatever it is that whatever it is that, uh, is maybe giving you some pause in your work or, you know, personal life, the, the how you can instead of the why you can’t. That is Tony’s take two K. That’s a very optimistic. Look at thinking that way. You know, how people make a pro and con list. Why not just make a pro list and manifest good things that you can do what you wanna do. I like that. Ok. Ok. Uh, well, sometimes there are legitimate cons. Uh, so I wouldn’t ignore them. But yeah, I don’t, I don’t like to start there. Definitely. Don’t, don’t wanna start there. All right. You, you sounded a little surprised. Were you surprised that this is an optimistic way of looking like that? I would be optimistic. I feel like when I like, talk about maybe like an event coming up and I’m like, oh, I shouldn’t go because con con con versus, well, I should go because pro pro pro and I can go do all these things, you know. I’ve, I don’t know, I liked your philosophy. I think it works very well. Not just nonprofits but like, in life in general. Ok. Cool. I just, I, I was afraid that you thought you, you sounded like surprised that Tony would have an optimistic outlook on things. What a shock. All right. But you, you’re not shocked. So that’s good. We’ve got VU but loads more time. Yes, we do. Let’s go back to lessons from the Sam Altman and open A I headlines with Gene Takagi. To me, this is a, a positive story for, for nonprofits. I mean, the, the, the humanitarian mission overcame the uh the uh the desire for, you know, acceleration is in, in profit, in, in, in potential profit making, maybe it’s too early to tell. But at this stage, I mean, I’m not saying this, this, this is gonna be the ultimate. But at this stage, I don’t know, I was pretty optimistic, maybe, maybe, maybe you disagree. But I, I felt that with, with the, with the, with the guard rails in place that uh overall, it was a, it was a positive story for non, for the nonprofit entity. Well, I, I think the positive story is in the creation of open A I and when they first developed the LLC um like that, that was certainly a positive, it’s like nonprofits and then for profits collaborating to make something really good at scale. Um And that goes outside of A I and the technology world, you know, one good example of, of this is National Geographic, that’s a joint venture um which is now uh between Disney and the nonprofit National geographic where Disney owns about 73% I think, um, of the stock of that joint venture and the nonprofit owns 23%. But each of them put four people on the board of that LLC. That’s also an LLC. Um, so that the nonprofit has an equal say essentially. And there are sort of guardrails there as well as to what the nonprofit must allow and not allow the LLC to do so. Because charitable assets are involved. Again, the nonprofit needs to have control over those charitable assets and how they’re used. So that would have held true here as well. And that’s why we have part of the reason why we have that operating agreement that the LLC um giving, you know, the, the board of the nonprofit to be the board essentially of the LLC and all these provisions saying that investors may not make money from this. It’s, you know, really about the benefit of humanity and, and in 501 C three terms, the ability of the LLC. So, yeah, the lesson is, yeah, there are some good laws that create these guard rails. Um And there are some people who are involved that really were interested in doing, you know, doing a I right the right way. But I think on the, on the other hand of it and sorry to be the pessimist in the holiday season. But on the other hand, or the other side of the coin is, the money always wins. You know. So, well. But we don’t know, we don’t know if that’s gonna happen, do we? Well, we know Sam got rehired, right. Altman got rehired as the CEO of the organization. And yes, they said there’s gonna be more controls because the board members are the new board or people that hold him to check. But the, the, the new board members are also kind of for profit people, right? They’re not other sort of nonprofit leaders are like they’re, they’re more well known for, for their investment expertise and what they do in the for profit world and technology world, which is important too. Um And, you know, we can sort of go into, you know, some people wanted to write an immediate reaction kind of in the nonprofit law world that I reside in is, hey, these are charitable assets. They did what they thought was the right thing to do. You’ve got to protect those charitable assets and those charitable assets always have to be used for charitable purposes. Uh unless they’re sold for fair market value in return, which I don’t think is the case here. So charitable assets involved got to be used for charitable purposes. But I think there’s a bigger question too. Um And the question is if the fiduciaries just held true and said, yep, we’re not changing, we’re not hiring Sam back because we want to do this the ethical way. And Microsoft went and hired Altman and 90% of the staff of Open A I and Open A is other investors lost confidence in the organization. Let’s say the organization tank. Um, there was, you know, the, the, about the $100 million investment that might have been made by the nonprofit that might be worth billions of dollars right now that the nonprofit could have all seen wiped away and all of those assets would be bound by charitable trust that had to be used for charitable purposes associated with it. So, you know, on one hand, it’s like, yes, you know, we have to stay true to our mission. But on the other hand, it’s like we own a really valuable asset. And if we do something that tanks the value of that asset to, to where it doesn’t have very much value anymore, is that consistent with our fiduciary duties? So I think there’s really sort of tougher questions in there. And again, because we don’t know all of the private documents that exist with the, the complex corporate structure. We don’t know exactly if it’s that simple, but I think that’s one of the considerations to have and why we’re not completely sure. I, I guess between your optimism and my pessimism, it is, we’re gonna have to wait and see what happens. OK. All right. Let, let, maybe we’ll come back to it in six months or we’ll see, we’ll see what’s, we’ll see what’s developed it. May not even be, who knows the way things move so fast. But in any case, we, we’ll, I’m sure we’ll revisit this. Let’s, let’s broaden to uh some of the, some of the lessons for uh not, not for, uh you know, a smaller mid-sized shop, having a, a for profit subsidiary, governed by a managing entity and entity that uh but there are, there are um takeaways for our, our, our um our routine sort of contracts with and, and partnerships with for profit companies that, that around fundraising um around some of the other char well, the, the uh the commercial co ving. So let’s talk about some of the lessons that we can take away. Yeah, I think that’s a great way to sort of take, take some lessons out of this open A I structure and make it real for, for, you know, our, our listeners here. Um And, and I think one, maybe the first one is not just for profit companies when, when you’re partnering with individuals as well. And let’s start with your kind of realm of the world. Uh and the nonprofit sect Toian fundraising, let’s say you’re representing a charity has a million dollars in, in gross revenues and is, you know, doing great work. And a donor comes along and says, I will give you $2 million that’s twice your annual gross revenues, but you must do this with my $2 million. Now, would you automatically accept it no matter what their conditions are. Um Or would you say, hey, we actually have to, to see what, what, what those conditions. Yeah, of course. You know, what, what, what are you, what are you asking us to do? And is it consistent with our mission with our organizing documents? Uh So I’m certainly happy to have a conversation and isn’t that kind of the open A I issue as well? Right. You’ve got for profit investors that say, hey, we’re gonna give you a ton of money and yeah, we’re not gonna ask pretty much from you because we said, you know, this was all like, this is what we all want. But when you fired your CEO now we’re upset now, we want to know what we can do to change that and donors can be the same way, right? I mean, so super major donors that are very demanding, upfront when they put their conditions on, it might be something that the nonprofit might be able to accept, but you should actually know what the history of that donor is as well. Like how, you know, once they made their gift legally, that relationship should be, you know, over unless there are other contracts involved. But if it’s a gift, they made their gift, they get a deduction, you know, from, from the gift and the control of that gift lies with the, with the nonprofit. And generally speaking, the donors really can’t sue the nonprofit. If they misuse the gift, it block that, that lawsuit would belong to the attorney general. So the donor would complain to the attorney general and the attorney general would say, hey, you’re not using it for the restrictions that were imposed by the donor that you agreed to. You know, we’re gonna step in and, and make sure that that happens. Um, and we’ll, you know, we’ll go to court if you’re not complying with it. And we might find you as the attorney general of the state or the state charity official. Donors can sometimes have rights in some states by contract if they entered into a contract. Um But largely it’s with the regulator that that’s going to deal with it. But if you’ve got a donor and you see this again, maybe outside of the normal listeners, but like in the university context and stuff where they’re asking for a lot of things and when you do something that they don’t like, they start to leverage it and maybe it’s because they leverage it with future donations that they could withhold that you thought you might get, um or they leverage it with a media attack against you and the leadership. Um So you wanna know a little bit more about that donor as well, not just the conditions, but is that donor litigious? Do they use pr to attack past relationships? Um um You know, so learning a little bit more about that when when you’re gonna get a big gift and when it’s conditioned, um, heavily where, you know, and, and this is not sort of the typical. We wanna just make sure you use it to, to advance children’s education in Los Angeles rather than in, you know, other cities we’re talking about like a gift that is like, suddenly quasi charitable, right? Like you’re not even sure if it’s really charitable or not, or the condition is so strange, um, that, you know, it should come up to the board for the board to decide whether we really want to do it because of this, because of the conditions that are attached. And, you know, you could add another layer. Uh I could add another layer to what you were hypothesizing, which is the person could be a board member and, and a major donor. So, you know, they can cause trouble for the leadership because they are a fiduciary. And, you know, they can claim that the organization is, is breaching its duty to its mission because it’s not adhering to the terms of my agreement, which is more in line with the, the mission. And, you know, you can imagine an argument, uh uh you know, a, a long played out a long played out uh difficult relationship uh on that level too. Um All right. So that, that’s very good. You know, it’s, that’s valuable. That’s, it’s not only, it’s not only corporate or even incorporated entities of any type profit or for or profit or nonprofit. Uh It’s gonna be a relationship with an individual that you need to be very scrupulous about. Yeah, that’s, that’s very teddy and not to say that, you know, we, we need to be super cynical about every goal that we have. No, but, but, but uh go in with eyes open, you know, you need, you need to, you need to protect what you founding documents and what your mission on your website says. Absolutely tiny, what else, what are, what are, what other uh lessons here? So, you know, I think there are other sorts of collaborations that nonprofits may have, including smaller nonprofits with for profit organizations or individuals including like, oh, we want to like fundraise together. Um You know, perhaps it’s um cause related marketing. Um So somebody is going to say, hey, you know, buy uh some of our goods and we donate, you know, 1% of our proceeds to charity. Um And that’s a, you know, a, a collaboration that has some importance to the nonprofit, right? So, you know, again, as a fundraiser, Tony, you probably want that what that company, you know, who that company is and how they’re run before you agree to let them sort of promote the charity as sort of um kind of a partner if you will um in, you know, in layman’s terms um with the for profit, in raising funds. Now, you know, if you get 1% of, of that, that might be, you know, great money that you wouldn’t have seen otherwise. Um, but we also know that there are a lot of scams that have gone on and sometimes those are with, like, it, it used to be robocalls. Right. I don’t think we have that so much now in our, in our world but it’s, um, uh, sort of email and, and other sort of, uh electronic messaging now. But Robo calls from, you know, charities, um, which were actually commercial entities that are saying, hey, you know, we’re fundraising for this charity that’s associated with the police or with the firefighters support us and, you know, you know, your proceeds will go to that charity and it turns out, you know, maybe 1% 2% or some minuscule amount would go to charity. And that commercial operator that Robocall was making all the rest of the money, um for providing that fundraising services. And some charities would say, hey, that’s one, you know, percent, you know, that’s money we wouldn’t have gotten in any way. So go ahead and use our name. But in the end, you know, that could really blemish the charity’s reputation and, you know, its relationships with donors because that seems pretty deceptive. Um, uh And so you have to be careful and that, that’s, those are extreme cases, but there are going to be those gray areas where you say, I don’t know, if going into this relationship with this organization and what they’re selling and how they’re using, our name is good. So you gotta be careful of that as well. If we’re gonna lend our name to something like this. Uh uh I mean, at the most basic level, we need to make sure that this is not just a handshake agreement, there needs to be a written agreement. Uh A as, as you’re thinking, you know, as you’re speaking, I’m thinking there has to be a way for the charity to remove itself if there, if anything happens that, you know, just, I don’t know, broadly would bring discredit to the, to the nonprofit name or reputation or, you know, anything, something broad like that. So that if the, if the president of the car dealership is, um, uh, you know, caught up in some kind of scandal, even just accused of something, let, let’s keep it, let’s keep it financial and not anything, you know, lascivious, but, you know, they’re accused of some kind of financial crime that, that, that brings discredit to the nonprofit and we can, we can walk away from this. Yeah, I mean, that’s just, and that’s just a basic, uh, that’s just a fundamental term I would think. But there has to be a writing between the two, the, the two, parties that are gonna, uh, work together and most states require some sort of writing and some sort of provisions in that writing to protect the charity in those relationships, um, under a lot of state laws, they call this commercial co venture, um, rather than cause related marketing, but kind of the same type of relationship where a for profit is out there using the nonprofit’s name with permission. Um, and saying to the public, if you buy some of our services or some of our goods, the car that you mentioned, then a percentage or some portion of our uh revenues, uh, or the, the funds that we get from the sale, we’re gonna go to charity and you know, having something in writing is great and you know, required provisions in the contract is great, but you’ve got to even do more than that because you know what if they give you, what if you’re the head of a charity and they give you a check for $10,000 at the end of the year and say, hey, this was all we raised. We thought we were going to raise $100,000 for charity, but we didn’t sell that much. How do you know, how do you know they didn’t sell a whole lot more? And what obligation did they have? You know, were they holding the $10,000 for a year, were they holding it for a week? Um And there, there are laws, uh, you know, depending upon what state you’re in about how that works. So, for charities, the obligation is if you’re going to enter into that type of, uh, relationship, make sure, you know, the laws involved as well because there may need to be a specific type of contract that’s involved. You might need to have, um, that other party register and report on this and you might need to build into your contract, certain things that allow you to be able to audit, um, what that organization is doing, at least, you know, on, on their books or on their paperwork. Um There could still be fraud. So you have to always be cognizant of, of uh the reputation and the history that your other partner again loosely um stated is, but you, you, there’s a lot that goes into that and again, just like with open A I and its relationship with its investors, you, you have to know something about that other party and you have to have this mutual understanding that should be documented in agreement just as you said, you mentioned registration. Uh a lot of the laws in states that require registration for charitable solicitation also require registration of commercial conventions. That’s right. Um And uh reporting, I mean, it might be with each form of solicitation or might be on an annual basis. Um So, um something to, to pay attention to, again, as a charity, you have a responsibility to make sure you’re contracting with parties that are permitted to do the work that they say they’re gonna do for you. So it’s not just their fault, it would be your fault is the charity leaders. Um if you enter into a relationship like that and it isn’t compliant with the law. So, be careful of that. What else should we talk about, Jean? Um So we can talk about a little bit about, well, partnerships where um there are actually kind of nonprofits looking for a little bit of money um from, for profit investors who want to do something with what the nonprofit is doing. And it might not be, you know, in the millions or billions of dollars that we’re talking about with open A I, it might be in the thousands of dollars. So you’ve got a nonprofit program. Um And you know, you think that there might be some people interested in supporting it, but they don’t want to give you a loan, they don’t want to give you a donation, but they said, hey, let’s go into some sort of business together and we want a piece of, of sort of the equity in it. And this happens again in a little bit of a bigger context all the time in low income housing. Um So for for profit developers to get low income housing tax credits from the government, they have to be partnered with a nonprofit in order to do that. Um So the only way to access those tax credits is to partner with a nonprofit. So in, you know, in that case, the nonprofit again has a whole bunch of rules involved in terms of, well, you’ve got to protect the charitable assets that you are contributing to this joint venture that’s co-owned with for profit investors. You’ve got to make sure that the nonprofit purposes are being advanced by that joint venture. Um, so again, if you’re thinking about it, even in a small context, not involving, you know, a lot of money, but even in a small term, like, let’s start a small LLC together and, you know, the nonprofit is gonna put in $20,000 and for profit investors are going to put in $20,000. Um, and we’re gonna do something that furthers the charitable purposes, but that is outside of maybe what 501 C three allows or it’s only gonna be capable of doing it at this scale because there are people who want their money back as shareholders or they want to have skin in the game as well, right? Um So if they’re gonna do something like that, again, laws involve that protect the charitable assets, so you have to do it carefully. Um, you know, 20,000 $20,000 is possible, but you, you, you, you’re gonna have some associated costs and of course, if you’re gonna also manage, uh, a joint venture, you have to be very careful about, um, keeping an arm’s length distance with the nonprofit, even though you need to have a certain amount of control of it. So again, just like the open A I thing, but on a much smaller scale it gets to be complicated stuff. Yeah, this sounds like walking a tight rope between, between the, between the two entities. Um All right. I mean, you’re, you’re saying it’s, it’s, it’s done but it needs, uh, obviously it needs to be done delicately. Now, I see this happening a little bit more often nowadays because there are like government incentives um for small businesses like so, um sometimes it’s, it’s minority owned small businesses, sometimes it’s women owned small businesses and there are sort of government funding to spur on these businesses and nonprofits are sometimes excluded from that. But the work that is to be done is often, you know, in the public interest, which is why the government is funding it in the first place, right. So it’s something that a charity could do and it might be a minority led charity or a woman led charity that wants to get in on it, but they can’t get in on it because those programs are designed for small businesses only. Um And that may not have been the intent of the legislative body that created that, that fund to exclude nonprofits that are led by those um uh persons that face sort of economic disadvantage in certain areas. So it’s interesting, some nonprofits are forming for profits for the purpose of being able to compete on those government bids. And what realms are you seeing that is that also mostly housing? No, in, in all sorts of realms from uh disaster relief, for example. Um um uh So, uh yeah, and, and you can find it in uh education as well. So, uh distance learning education um largely was kind of a concept of joint ventures as well. You had four profits that wanted to put up the money and you had a nonprofit that had the skills and the teachers, right? So a lot of distance learning, um um, now they’re in apps and stuff and in websites. Um, but when they first started, they, they were often done through joint ventures between educational institutions that were nonprofits and some uh investors or educational providers that were for profits. Anything else, uh, that you want us to be aware of when we’re partnering with some other entity? Yeah. So there’s a, you know, the, the big concept that everybody is concerned about from a regulatory perspective is 501 C three s are not allowed to give prohibited private benefits to anybody, right? Not just insiders where we call it private endure if like a board member benefits too much from an organization. Um, um, but for anybody to be overcompensated by a charity, um, for any reason, uh can be seen as a prohibited private benefit. Um And if it’s an insider, like a director or officer, there can be penalties on that individual and they would be required to return the money as well. And the board members who approve that transaction could also be personally liable for some penalty taxes as well if that private benefit is extended to an insider, like a founder board member, you know, high level manager or officer. Um, but if it’s to anybody, an outside vendor and you didn’t vet the situation well enough to know that, oh, they’re actually getting more than what they contributed um to us, more than what they paid for. They’re getting more value from the charity. So it looks like it’s a diversion of charitable assets, right? So if you overcompensate, for example, somebody who developed a website for your organization and the commercial rate would have been, let’s say $10,000 for this and that person did the exact same service that their competitors might have done, but charged you $50,000 for it. And the board just simply didn’t know what the commercial rate was and approved it without any intention of doing anything wrong. That’s still a private benefit transaction. And that could threaten uh an organization’s exemption. So, be careful, um, when you sort of enter into transaction with, for profits, even if they’re vendor relationships to make sure that you’re not overcompensating anybody and always be super careful if it’s an insider that’s involved. So a board member officer, you know, that has a company and they’re entering into the contract and, or office space. I see that often board member, board members giving office space to uh to, to the, to the nonprofit. But you’re talking about not giving or you’re talking about, you know, beyond market rate uh when they try to market rate transaction. So, all right. Well, so this goes back to, to uh the, the due diligence that you and I talked about years ago around uh private benefit transactions that were related to insiders c suite board members, uh founders, you know, so it’s the same due diligence supplies just uh it applies to a, a commercial entity as to your due diligence around a commercial entity as well. And, and what, what’s appropriate compensation for them? Yeah, and that wraps back into the open A I issue as well without knowing it. But I would consider that the, the board may have been concerned that they were extending a private benefit um to its outside investors by operating for commercial purpose, even though they’re organizing documents or their operating agreement said, hey, we’re doing this for humanitarian purposes and you might not get any profit coming out of this interesting gene. All right. Well, that’s savvy thinking. All right. I see uh anything else that we should take away from our potential relationships with other entities? Um Open eyes is what you said earlier. And II, I believe that that’s 100% true, Tony. So, yeah, most people are good. Most, you know, most people are trying to do the right thing. Um But keep your eyes open. Um And not just with respect to, to um what you know, who you’re dealing with, but also with respect to kind of what laws might apply. Um So, um stay, stay in touch with kind of the important resources that you need. Keep yourself safe, keep your nonprofit safe, stay safe. All right. Thank you, Gene Takagi. And it’s the nonprofit law blog and the uh firm is at Neo Law group.com. Gene is at G Tech. Thank you very much. Gene always uh always learn more than more than I can, more than I can manage in, in one sitting. I have to listen back again. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Tony. Next week there is a 57% chance it’ll be performance measurement if you missed any part of this week’s show, I do beseech you find it at Tony martignetti.com were sponsored by donor box, outdated donation forms blocking your supporters, generosity. This giving season donor box, the fast flexible and friendly fundraising platform for nonprofits donor box.org. Our creative producer is Claire Meyerhoff. I’m your associate producer, Kate Martinetti. This show, social media is by Susan Chavez, Mark Silverman is our web guy and this music is by Scott Stein. Thank you for that affirmation. Scotty be with us next week for nonprofit radio. Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95% go out and be great.

Nonprofit Radio for December 4, 2023: Misinformation & Disinformation

 

Amy Sample WardMisinformation & Disinformation

Amy Sample Ward returns with their insights into what to do about these maladies plaguing our world. They reveal smart internal tactics to reduce the odds of your nonprofit’s info being misused by bad actors; what to do if it is; how to avoid your org itself being a source of misinformation; and a lot more. They’re the CEO of NTEN and our technology and social media contributor.

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Hello and welcome to Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio. Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. I am your aptly named host and the pod father of your favorite abdominal podcast. Oh, I’m glad you’re with us. I’d bear the pain of nocal Beura if you dampened my spirits with the idea that you missed this week’s show. Here’s our associate producer, Kate with the highlights. Hey, Tony, this week it’s misinformation and disinformation. Amy Sample Ward returns with their insights into what to do about these maladies plaguing our world. They reveal smart internal tactics to reduce the odds of your nonprofits info being misused by bad actors. What to do if it is how to avoid your org itself being a source of misinformation and a lot more. They are CEO of N 10 and our technology and social media contributor on Tony’s take two December, good wishes were sponsored by donor box, outdated donation forms blocking your supporters, generosity. This giving season donor box, the fast flexible and friendly fundraising platform for nonprofits donor box.org here is misinformation and disinformation. It’s always a pleasure to welcome Amy Sample Ward back to nonprofit radio. You know who they are for Pete’s sake. Nonetheless, they deserve the proper introduction. Of course CEO of N 10 and our technology and social media contributor, they were awarded that 2023 Bosch Foundation fellowship from just this past summer. And their most recent co-authored book is the Tech that comes next with AUA Bruce about equity and inclusiveness in tech development. They’re still at Amy Sample word.org and at Amy RS Word. Welcome back, Amy. What a pleasure. Thanks for having me. I’m excited and I appreciate an intro that doesn’t list the number of years or episodes I’ve enjoyed on nonprofit radio. That always makes me take, take a bit of a pause. Well, we regale you on the anniversary show, right? Each July we’re coming up. This next July will be the 7/100. Wow. But only then will we remind you that which show you began in? Yes, I can accept these terms. Close listeners will remember but uh but the others who may not remember, you’ll have to wait till the 7/100 show to learn what Amy’s first show was. So we’re talking about uh misinformation, disinformation. Why don’t we just start with the basic explanation of what the differences are between Miss Miss and Dis Yeah, I appreciate starting at the beginning because I do see especially in this, you know, world of tweet or Instagram sized language where people kind of write Miss slash disinformation, but they’re not interchangeable. They mean very different things and the implications for your organization or even the potential that your staff do wanna these things is very, very different, right? Um A good way to remember. It is misinformation is a mistake. So, misinformation is you or a staff person or a community member even saying the wrong thing, you know, they said 73% instead of 37% or something where it doesn’t have an intentional agenda, right? It’s not, it’s not created or distributed as a way of trying to um do something whether nefarious or just, you know, against what you’re trying to do. Um And misinformation, unfortunately, like we can still talk about, this is something we, we need to think about as organizations, especially when we think about um trying to have staff out in the community um being present, sharing their thought leadership, all of these places. We humans, we do make mistakes, we do say 73 instead of 37 right? But that means we just maybe just said that to, you know, and we’re here um at a big donor recognition event and we say the wrong percentage and all those people then they want to be informed, they wanna look like they know things. So then they repeat the same wrong stat, right? So it is something we want to think about. Um and there’s some tactics for making sure staff have all those resources um to fact check themselves and to share things. But I think the more concerning one of these two is disinformation. Um And that’s not to say that your staff don’t and intentionally or unintentionally create um or, or participate in disinformation, but especially want to talk about what it looks like for your organization’s images, content, data website, et cetera to be used as part of someone else’s disinformation campaign. Um And that means again, people who are creating or sharing or distributing information with the intention that it is, you know, going to change people’s mind and that they know that what they’re doing is not factually correct. Yeah, the intentionality is the distinction. I like misinformation. Very good, helpful and disinformation, of course. Intentionally interesting. Yeah. Uh Right. Uh Yeah, let’s definitely talk about what happens if you’re essentially a victim included in disinformation, disinformation, post article campaign. Right. I OK. Excellent. All right. Um So some basic things, you know, uh we could be like on an individual basis as well as an organizational basis. Some simple things to help you avoid on either level, misinformation and disinformation. I think, you know, basic news literacy, you know, let’s, let’s flush out, flush this out a little bit for folks and maybe it may be covering things that are obvious. But II, I think there’s value in the, in the basics, you know, just, yeah, and, and some of it really is kind of a, a journalism like go back to the basics um place that we don’t all have that kind of training or background. So it’s not um I’m not saying this to say, oh, everybody you know, knows this and isn’t doing it. No, a lot of people have never had the privilege to get this information or to be trained to do to operate in this way. But I think as organizations, we already see that there’s silos, there’s certain staff who know certain things and other staff who don’t. So that’s going to still be the case when it comes to organizational data, data or information reports that you’re putting out etcetera. Um But creating kind of a information center for all staff. And again, not thinking well, only these three people on the communications team who are the ones who do our presentations need to know it, put it in a place where all staff can see. Here’s the deck that explains our organization and our, you know, latest numbers of impact or how many people we’ve reached this year, right? Um That’s a number that many people on staff maybe have an occasion to say and you want them saying the correct number, right? Um Having uh uh we used to create a cheat sheet, for example, where in 10 puts out lots of different reports and they have so many different data points in them. But what are the ones that we know the community is most interested in, regardless of which report it was in? Let’s make one cheat sheet for staff that says, ok, this is the trend on this topic and here’s the number of organizations, you know, that responded in this way on this other topic in one place. Um That way anybody who’s presenting or answering a question from a community member is all pulling data from one place. If the a new year goes by a new version of that data, it’s updated in that document, people are still going back to the same place. They’re not like, oh, let me find this year’s version of this, right? They’re always going to the same place. Um And what that looks like externally, which is where the kind of misinformation to the dis gets connected is making sure just as a a good journalist would, would cite their sources, organizations need to be comfortable citing their sources too. But I think um part of this has come from feeling like we need to be the authority on everything we say. Uh And, and what that means is that organizations don’t, you don’t have the latest information on every topic under the sun. That’s fine. What you’re, what you’re an expert on is your mission. So cite the source for the data on your page where you’re making the case for what you do. Is it from the census? Is it from a partner organization? Is it from a state department? You know that, that you work with actually putting in where that 37% came from is going to mean that if someone out there has an agenda and they’re saying, oh, yeah, I’ve heard that 37% of people XYZ, they’re not able to reference your website as part of their disinformation campaign because your website really does list, here’s the link to the census where this came from, right. They’re not able to modify what you’re saying. You’ve made clear where you got your information. Otherwise that website, you know that article where you don’t link to any sources, you don’t list how that data was collected is really ripe for interpretation. And that’s really what disinformation campaigns look for. Something that’s coming from a legitimate website. You are a legitimate organization, you have a legitimate website and if it’s not clear they can use that however they want, right? They can reposition it. Yeah. Yeah, cite your sources and, and you might be the source. Of course, it may be maybe your own data, maybe your own research might be your own annual report. But citation, citation. Yeah. Very smart. Right. So you can’t be, you can’t be linked back to as the source because you’re giving the source of the correct information. Excellent. Yes. Is there, is there more? Well, I think that, yeah, there is definitely more. I just wanted to stop but yeah, no, there is more. And I think um you know, just as we are suggesting you cite your sources for that 37% maybe written on your website. A place where organizations often don’t think about adding their logo or their website or anything else is other pieces of content they’re sharing. Um But creating almost like a watermark, you know, your logo in the corner or um maybe if you made a little infographic to share online and it says in the corner, this is from, you know, n tens, 2020 report on X, right? Because creating content that’s meant to be shared off of your website is even even more likely to be uh picked up, right? And used conveniently in disinformation when it doesn’t, when it’s, when it has no anchor, right? When it doesn’t have the watermark, it just looks like a fancy stat that somebody else posted. So making sure you think about anything that, that you’re sharing externally where it isn’t on your website and you’re controlling it. Can you add this watermark? Can you make sure that a source or a reference is written inside the graphic? Not just in, you know, maybe the caption that you put with it right? Inside that graphic? All right. Awesome. What else? What else should we be doing? Well, I think the other piece of this is so that’s proactive, right? Let’s make sure staff have the resources to say the right things and also the content we’re putting out on our website and our email out into social, it is cited has the right information that’s all proactive from our side. But what do we do for everything we can’t control? Right. So the other side of this is monitoring and often an organization only finds out that they, their content, their data, their imagery is part of some disinformation campaign because they got tagged or recognized by a community member who, who saw that content somewhere else, right? And they were like, wait a second, you know, I recognize that photo or, or whatever. Um So we’ve said this probably on the first episode I was on, which was too many years ago, you know, when we were talking about any other type of social or, or online listening, but it’s still the case setting up alerts to track your organization’s names and mentions online folks think, oh, this is great because, you know, we’ll know when we’re in the news, you’ll also know if somebody is, you know, trying to, to misuse your content. Um So, so not overlooking that, especially within certain systems. So, you know, maybe you work with a certain community that uses Instagram a lot, for example, or tiktok and you don’t really use your full written out, you know, maybe of a five word name, you know, making sure you’re setting up notifications or following hashtags on those tools that use the kind of name or abbreviation or acronym or even, you know, maybe tag that would be most likely used if you were getting pulled into something. Um because it’s really gonna be through that type of listening that you find your content being used. And then of course, what do you do if you see that? Uh I think some folks feel like like any other type of potential trust breakdown, you know, OK, we should come out really strong. We’re gonna make some big statement like we do not support or like, don’t worry, your data has not been stolen, that doesn’t necessarily convey that you understood what was happening there, right? Um So I think instead if you see your contents getting picked up and misused, maybe, you know, and this isn’t like at the level of of an international scene, this could be locally, maybe some of your um event photos and and talking points are being misused by a local representative, right? Um This doesn’t need to be huge scale, it should still be meaningful, right? And not to be on the scale of the uh the Israel Hamas War, but it’s just, but it’s important to you, but it’s important to you. It’s still your name, it’s still your reputation and it’s a perversion of your content. Exactly. It’s time for a break. Are you looking to maximize your fundraising efforts and impact this giving season donor boxes. Online donation platform is designed to help you reach your fundraising goals from customizable donation forms to far-reaching, easy share, crowdfunding and peer to peer options. Plus seamless in-person giving with donor box live kiosk. Donor box makes giving simple and fast for your donors and moves the needle on your mission. Visit donor box.org and let donor box help you help others. Now, back to misinformation and disinformation. The one tactic that folks have used when that is the case when OK, your stuff is getting, you know, twisted a little bit. One option. There’s a couple here, one is to flood the system. So instead of trying to add more attention to that person and try to say no, that isn’t what we said or that isn’t what that graphic is for, right? Ignore them and flood the system. So make sure that you have a correct fully sources cited blog post on your website. So that if people Google what that person just said, they’re finding your correct blog post, that you have a recent social post that points to that, that clarifies this information again, you need to tag them, you don’t need to say anything about them, but make sure that if people are reading what’s out there and are like, what is this? And they do a search for you, they are seeing what you want them to see and not that right. So there’s one flood the system, make sure it’s all all correct. And so far as you can do it. And then the second is really not gonna be seen by a lot of people and that’s contacting the, the folks who are posting this often in disinformation, the folks doing the posting are not the ones who created the content for them to post. Um And so they are also in a little bit of a more precarious position than whoever gave them the content, especially on a local level where it’s harder to hide like, you know, each other locally. So contacting them and saying, hey, this is not good, right? Whatever the case may be and engaging with them. Um Especially saying, could we have a public engagement around this, this conversation? Um Folks, organizations have turned that around and been able to great, we had a town hall because our, you know, recent report was of interest but wasn’t understood. And now you’re getting positive attention because you were able to engage that person and turn it around. Um Of course, if they say no, you’re wrong, we’re right. Our content is good. Well, you know, where you stand and you can move to a uh uh maybe option two B which is then to, you know, go into the process of reporting those accounts, reporting that content. Um The challenge there just so folks are already thinking about it is when we’re reporting content on, on the, on the greater internet across social media, et cetera. Folks are gonna see if that content has already been used by other users, if it’s been shared or posted. And so if what they’re posting and you’re now reporting is very similar even to your own con content or to content that others have posted, it likely will not get taken down because, you know, the the content review process will say, oh no, this is like what widely used widely known, right? Versus thinking that it’s this one accounts content. Um and it’s kind of a catch 22 when it comes to managing and reporting disinformation. So the, so the more widely it’s been used, the less likely it is that you’ll, that, that the originator that you’re talking to would, would remove it. Well, they wouldn’t be the ones removing it. You’re, if you’re reporting it, you’re asking, you know, meta to take it down or something. Um And in that point they are, you’re essentially reporting that user. Um And that user and their content is all part of whatever meta would be looking at to say, oh, is this a nefarious thing? Is this bad? You know, and a lot of folks don’t have success getting it taken down because there’s the, the content is similar to content that’s already up. Maybe they weren’t the ones that created it anyway. So that I just want folks to know. It’s not just a one click. Oh, great. It’s removed. That’s why it’s not step one because it is very difficult for a lot of folks to get disinformation accounts stopped. OK. OK. I know you did a little reading and thinking about disinformation too. What are your thoughts? I did. Well, II, I was, I was on a different level. Um, I was thinking about folks trying to validate something that they might, that they need. Let’s talk about that. Um All right. Well, you’re, you’re being very gracious look. So, but, but I don’t want to deviate from our best practices that you’re enumerating. Like you got, you’re, you’re down to level two B already. So. All right. Well, all right. I know you wanna, you, you probably feel like you’ve been talking a while but everything you’re saying is valuable and you got more insight into it than I do. That’s why you’re our technology contributor. So don’t, you don’t, you don’t need to be humble, but all right. So we, we, I wanna know if there’s a step three after two B but we’ll come back to it. Um Yeah. No, just sources like, you know, if, if something seems a little unusual to you or, I mean, you, you can’t, we, we cannot fact check everything we read. There’s just, there’s just too much but so if something seems, uh as David Letterman used to say a little hinky uh because I was just in Indiana with my wife. So hinky, pinky is on my mind because that’s where Letterman was from. Uh You know, there’s a place like uh Politifact, Politifact, they have their Truth 0 m. It’s green, red or yellow and it usually they’re green or red. There’s, there’s not a lot of yellow. So politifact, I mean that, you know, you want to go to a bona fide source. Politifact Snopes has been around for a long time and they are legitimate fact checkers. Um If you’re, if this may come up, if you’re, if you’re creating content, that’s not, uh that, that’s not based solely on your own data, but you’re relying on other people’s data. There’s, there’s something called the crap test. It’s craap. Um and it is, it’s, it’s quite bona fide now. I I was not aware of it but uh it got links from it. It’s linked to by Texas A and M University. Uh even Central Michigan University, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Oregon State University for you, Amy uh Southern Utah University, University of Chicago. So there are respected universities and uh some of them seem to be library systems of those universities though that recommend the crap test for their students. So you can just Google crap craap. It’s an acronym for currency. You know, how, what’s the timeliness of the information relevance authority? What’s the source, the accuracy of the, of that source overall and the purpose for which the the data, uh the data was posted or the purpose for which the source exists, you know, is there some nefarious agenda? So currency relevance authority accuracy purpose uh the crap test to, to take a look at and there are a lot of factors within each one of those but determining whether data that you’re relying on is valid, right? I really like that. A couple um reactions coming up for me, especially thinking about nonprofit staff who are trying to do this or, or muddle through this one is when you’re creating content or, you know, trying to put up a blog post or a page, whatever letter you’re writing. Um And you’re looking for sources, if you aren’t comfortable writing right there in the letter or right there on your website, you know, where that fact came from, then it’s not a fact you can use. Um, I know we’ve definitely talked with organizations where, you know, they’re like, oh, it’s the perfect stat and like the perfect, just what we want. But it’s kind of like a sketchy organization or like, it’s not an organization that’s mission aligned and, you know, so let’s just use the stat and like, we don’t need to, if you’re not, you know, if you can’t cite the source, then it’s not a stat, you can use it in that’s intellectual dishonesty, right? It’s just, it’s like a gut check, right? Um So there’s that the other kind of reaction that’s coming up for me is I know, you know, nothing is simple. It is complex to say, OK, well, this needs to come from quote unquote, authoritative source, but there is no authoritative source in this kind of white dominant. Are they a university or are they a paper or whatever? Maybe on the topic you work on. That’s OK. You know. Um but for example, in Oregon, we found I was um on the board of an organization that did gender equity uh work, especially policy work to support gender equity organizations. And found that in there was not a, a report or a survey or a government census on certain data related to all kinds of factors, gender, domestic violence, et cetera on, on, on certain topics for over 20 years. So, yeah, maybe there was a stat you could find from 1989 we’re not using that stat, you know. Um And so instead of saying, OK, well, there’s like nothing good. So we don’t, don’t have anything to sort uh to, to site or what we have is so old, we’ll just reference it. No, that’s how they framed a lot of their content. These stats are so old, we can’t even use them, right? And that became a talking point that made them an authority, right? So we are going to do research because it isn’t out there. Um And it created an opportunity for their website to become the author authoritative source. Other organization could link to, hey, here is their report. Maybe it’s not the same as a census, but at least it’s something the state didn’t even care to report on this, right? So, um an opportunity to think about not just OK, there’s a real lack of data and your organization is at a disadvantage. Maybe naming that really clearly on a web page will mean that when folks go to fact check, oh, this local representative said that it’s 37%. They find your website where you say don’t trust anyone who tells you. There’s a number, there hasn’t been a survey in 40 years, right? Like, wow, now you’re educating people, you know, that that’s a very savvy turnaround. Yeah. And having, you know, quick facts on our, on your, on your missions topic, you know, on, on Portland Land, Conservancy, whatever it is that you do, having that quick reference page means you will come up when people do an internet search and maybe you’ll get to frame how they think about any stat or talking point they come across from somebody else. It’s time for Tony’s take two. Thank you, Kate December. I know it’s a critical month right at the end of Thanksgiving and giving Tuesday comes that important month where I know you can be looking for 2530. I’ve seen like 40% of your annual fundraising from this single month sometimes. So if that’s your situation, you have my good wishes. I’m thinking about you. I’m rooting for you. I hope you’re giving Tuesday. If you were in giving Tuesday, not that you needed to be necessarily, you could sit it out. But if you were in, I hope you did well, if you didn’t do well or as well as you would have liked brush that off. Don’t let your giving Tuesday impact what you’re thinking about. You know, don’t, don’t second guess yourself for your, your December strategy. Giving Tuesday stands alone. I hope you were very successful. If not, don’t let it impact the coming month. You’ve got my good wishes. I’m like I said, I’m rooting for you. If you do everything you can, then you have nothing to be ashamed of. That is Tony Stick Two Kate. Good wishes to everyone from Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio. Well, we’ve got buu but loads more time. So let’s go back to misinformation and disinformation with Amy Sample Ward. I, I’m, I’m gonna take us back to your best practices. Conversation. What, what else you, you put a lot of thought into this, what else should, should we be doing if we discover that our content is misused? Yeah. One thing that’s specific to, you know, social media profiles or accounts that you’d have that aren’t on your website that I’ve seen some organizations do. And I really like, um is they have put in their bio and of course, that’s limited, you know, some accounts, you have five characters in an emoji or something, but like where you can have this information, um I organizations have referenced really concise, you know, we don’t post stats or we only post infographics from our own research or something that kind of gets out ahead of if their, if their organization’s account is then getting tagged in some tiktok, you know, videos, comment thread where people think they’re referencing their stats. Anybody that then clicks through to that organization’s bio will see. Oh, they, they couldn’t have posted that because they only post X, you know, uh whatever it might be. So that’s another place to think about how you frame what your content might be is, you know, here your profile on whatever tiktok, I, I guess the Portland Land Conservancy maybe would have a tiktok. I don’t know. Um but you know, putting in your bio, like we are sharing tips and strategies if you want research data, contact this email or you know what, however you might frame that but making it so that even in the course of the kind of fast action of social media where people are tagging or commenting or whatever your organization gets thrown in the mix, anybody that sees that and clicks through will know whether to think you were really part of that content or not even just by what they land on your account with, you know. Yeah, your account B OK. Um And is that something it sounds like that belongs on your website as well? Maybe maybe on the footer of every page where you have your whatever your tax ID number and your address, maybe a disclaimer because because this the the trouble is so ubiquitous II, I think it deserves, you know, it sounds like it deserves to be on every page. Well, and it’s interesting that you say the ubiquitous comment because, you know, I think it’s pretty similar to conversations we have with organizations, especially smaller or medium sized organizations who, uh, about security where they’re like, no one cares about us. No random hacker, you know, thinks we’re important, like we’re not on anybody’s radar, nobody’s coming for us. And so they don’t plan and they don’t think about any of that until all of a sudden, do we have cyber insurance? Like, what do we do when there’s been a breach? Like, they, they think that it doesn’t apply to them because they think, like, they’re not an important fancy spinning this organization, but that’s not why a security breach would happen. Right. Um, just from a kind of accidental breach of staff doing something or from, uh, ransomware. It’s because you care about your content. Not because the person hacking you does, you know, they just know that you’d pay to get it back. Similar, similar mindset with disinformation is, yeah. Who no one, no one knows about us. No one would try to do whatever, you know. Oh, that disinformation is just for the war or just for some government, whatever. Yeah, it’s for everything. There’s a reason that people have, you know, malicious intent to shift, you know, pers perception locally or, or nationally on all kinds of issues and whether you work in homelessness or food security or animal rights. Like every topic has its issues and it’s folks who wanna take down, you know, organizations or wanna shift whether money goes to that sector or not. So, I’m not trying to be like a fear monger, but it is, it is worth spending some time making sure that you do have these practices in place and that you do know what you would do if something happened. You know, I think it’s naive, Unfortunately, it’s regrettably, uh, in, in the culture over the past probably 10 years or so. It’s become naive to think that your organization is too small or your work is too benign. Your work could be incendiary to anybody. Right. And look at the, the pizza, the pizza shop in Washington DC. It’s a, it’s a pizzeria. Well, you know, who’s gonna attack a pizzeria. But, yeah, yeah, including the guy who went there or went to, I don’t know if he got to the store but the guy who went to DC armed and he was, I think he was stopped before he got to the, whatever the pizza gate place was called, I forget. But, uh, yeah, so there, there is nothing so benign. I mean, you know, uh, animal welfare, like a no kill shelter. There may, there could just be people who think that not, that only not, they may not be so incendiary as to think that animals ought to be killed. But why is that? Why are they getting money. But my, but my um you know, my I just got laid off but the, but the No Kill Shelter just expanded building just they just had a campaign and raised a half a million dollars and expanded their building. But I just got laid off, right. Any, any cause is fodder for, for any kind of, you know, irrational criticism. But that criticism could run pretty deep and, and be dangerous. And I know that you have had some smart and insightful recent conversations about A I with A Fua and Beth and George and all these different people. And I want to make one bridge over to those conversations as we’re talking about disinformation. But some of it is also created by A I A I is great generative A I specifically is great at coming up with content. That’s why it was created to make it, it also is making up fake sources. It is is making up fake information. And so the more that people start getting used to A I tools being out in the in the wild here and are using them themselves, the more people are going to be hopefully looking for sources and they might see something and click on it and see that it’s fake because you know, this generative IA I tool made it all up and then they come to your website and they click on a source and they see it’s real. So they are going to trust that more, you know. Um And it just really, I think underscores the need to make sure the content on our websites um or out in our emails, et cetera is really what we mean it to be. It is fact checked. It’s correct. It cites its sources because we’re now putting that website up in a, in a sea of content where a lot of it is gonna be created by a robot and not and not correct. You know, you’re talking about the uh show from June 5th 2023. Uh It’s called Artificial Intelligence for nonprofits. Uh We had uh Beth Cantor Afua Bruce, your co-author George Weiner and Alison. Fine. That’s the, that’s the show. Yeah, that was a full explanation. Uh conversation about the risks, the opportunities, uh bad practices, uh potentially good practices. Um My, my bias comes out when I say, yeah, I say bad practices, potentially good. I qualified the good but the bad I left, I left. That’s just bad and maybe good. Uh My, my bias comes out. Uh My bias comes out in that conversation too. So June 5th, uh the show is called Artificial Intelligence for nonprofits. I am very concerned. I’m very concerned. Um Anyway, we don’t need to rehash that conversation. Um We were just uh so, all right. All right. This is uh this is valuable, this is valuable stuff. Nobody is um nobody is immune. No cause as good as you think your cause is imagine somebody who thinks it’s as evil as you think it is good because, because that person could very well exist probably does. It’s just a matter of how incendiary that person is, right? And I think that there’s two pieces related to this, that of course, a lot of what we’ve just talked about are actions, nonprofit staff can be taking to post content in a certain way or, you know, create resources internally, et cetera. But I also think there’s two opportunities here to build better, closer relationships with other organizations. So that um even if you’re not all working on the same issue, maybe you all work in the same community or maybe you all have a similar funder or, you know, whatever the relationship might be. But using this as saying, hey, I know that we all want there to be accurate information out there. We did a survey and we have this, you know, here’s the data I I I’m happy to share it with you so that you can trust it. Can we all agree to say it’s 37% so that we are, you know, getting out the word in a more consistent way to proactively fight any disinformation that comes out later, right? People will see three different organizations are all citing the same source, all agreeing that this is the content, right? Similarly using uh potential, the using the potential for disinformation as an entry point for conversations with a funder to say, we know this is a topic that not everybody supports, you support us. We’re so, we’re so glad that you do and how could you support us making sure that there is accurate reporting or more, more research than the limited amount we’ve been able to do, you know, so that more information is out there for the public and, and again, we’re proactively cutting off the influence of disinformation on this topic. Um So I think that’s an important entry point for those conversations. Even if nothing comes of it, the funder doesn’t give you more funds. I wish they would truly, um, maybe they don’t, but it’s part of, it’s something that you’ve planted with them that, hey, this is a role you need to be playing if we need accurate information out here, if we want these missions to be successful. Right. So, um 22 places where this conversation we’ve just had about disinformation maybe helps you start new or different conversations with partners or funders. Yeah. Yeah. And that comes, that brings to mind the, uh the information gaps that you were talking about earlier, you know, the turn, turn that around into something positive and try to get funding for the research that hasn’t been done since 1989. Right. Exactly. Exactly. What about the tech companies? Let’s shift a little bit. Uh, I’m interested in your opinion of their responsibility. They are, uh, they are absolved from the responsibility that media companies that news organizations have under. Um, uh, the Communications Act that was, uh, I think it’s article 230 or something, something like that. But, uh, of, of the, of a, of a communications, a federal, a federal statute, they’re exempt from, from that because they, they claim that they are, they’re merely like a bulletin board. They’re not, they’re not a content creator, they’re a content disseminator poster distributor. So they’re not responsible that this is where this is where I think their argument breaks down. Therefore, they’re not responsible for what gets posted on their billboard. Well, when I was in seventh grade, there was a billboard monitor we took down if it was from last week’s, it was advertising last week’s seventh grade dance, we took it down because you don’t need that anymore. It’s, it’s, uh, that’s, that’s old versus disinformation. But, uh, obviously, um, I believe they ought to be, well, he’ll do a much higher standard. I, I, I’m not, I’m not opposed to the journalistic standard or something. Very, very close to that. Right. Yeah, I mean, I think this is, uh, but I’m also interested in your opinion. Yeah, this is, this is unfortunately not a, a new point of frustration, of course. Right. Um, folks feeling like whether it’s Facebook or Twitter or whoever else, you know? Sure you, the company didn’t create that content but you are allowing it to be disseminated and it is wrong. Um You know, we get disinformation is is kind of a Venn diagram in this context with hate speech, there’s there’s this kind of out of proportion understanding or reference to freedom of expression that is that is being used often to cloud whether or not there’s accountability to be taken. Um And I think of course, I think that the platforms need to have a level of responsibility to either prevent or then address harm when it happens because they have allowed this content to, to exist and be disseminated. I think similarly, organizations should really think about, are you prepared to be responsible for harm that comes from content that you may post? And that’s not to say that, you know, every time you’ve been posting on Facebook, it was malicious and you were doing something. But um you know, are, are you maybe going to start using certain tools that are generative A I or something else? And are you ready for what content maybe comes out of there or do you wanna say, hey, we are only our humans are writing our content about our advocacy because we know it is very important that it is 100% accurate, you know, and, and uh we need our experts to do that or um you know, we are only going to post parts of our research when it can be posted in full and these parts of our research are able to be posted as an individual infographic. There are definitely reports that easily are misinformation can be disinformation if they’re posted without the full context of that report, right? And so maybe you wanna say we can’t just have this random thing going on Facebook because it will easily turn into something that we we aren’t necessarily ready to be responsible for. So let’s post ourselves. It’s not to say someone else couldn’t take a screenshot and post it. But you as the organization didn’t start that, right? You are saying we are posting this in full context as a full report document. Um So just some places to think about guidelines or at least guard rails for staff and how they post and, and where, where they post that content. Yeah. All right. Guard Rails for making sure that you’re not, you’re not becoming the bad actor. Right. Right. And right. And you may not even, you’re not doing it intentionally but, you know, context is, is, is, is critical. Yeah. So, yeah, so, yeah, you got to scrutinize uh uh policies, right? What, what’s the role of a generative A I in your organization? If it has a role? Uh what are the, what are the allowable purposes uses where not, you know, you don’t and you just don’t want to be embarrassed as well. Uh Putting aside disinformation, you know, you don’t want to be that was that college? Um There were, there was a, there was a college where the, the, um, one of the officers posted something that was supposed to be thoughtful about a shooting at a local, in a local community. It was a university officer and, and it was just, it was posted by Generative A I, and it, it, it was, it was off color and it was, it was worse than just neutral and not, it was worse than not saying, not persuasive. It was poor and, and it, you know, and it created a whole, uh, you know, it, it created a big problem for the, a big pr problem for the university. Um, you know, so you don’t, you don’t want, you don’t want, you know, it’s your reputation, you just, you need to be judicious about. Right. Who, who posts in your name? Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. And again, it’s not because that means you can lock it down and control random other internet users. You can’t. But anyone that goes then to fact check what that random internet user posted about you will see thoughtful, carefully posted content and no, oh, that you didn’t create that. Right. Because that is clearly out of step with everything else they can see from you or is factually not matching what you have on your quick fax page or, or, you know, whatever else. I know this has been like an hour of tips and people are like, oh, my God, stop to giving me more tips. You know, I, I can only do so many things, but even if people do two of the things we just talked about, that’s a, that’s a good direction for getting into a better position. Yeah. Well, I think people are, uh, often overwhelmed when, when you’re a guest because you have, because you have too much value. You bring too much value. Stop, turn it off. No, no, no, it’s a buffet. You take what works for you and, and if, if, if you don’t agree that this could be a potential problem for you, then, uh at least you’re making that decision informed. Right? And I hope that it doesn’t, I hope that it isn’t an issue. Yeah. Yeah, of course. We wish no ill will on anyone, right? Uh Naturally or anything that we haven’t talked about that any approaches, we haven’t explored angles. We haven’t, you know, the only thing that I will say is that I think this is perfect time to be talking about this. Um, you know, it’s November 30th when we’re recording this. Not that it’s live in this moment, but, uh, a year from now, not even a year from now, six months from now, uh, in the US as politics kicks up its its cycle again, every topic is potentially a topic that a person in a debate references, right? Or a candidate on TV, references or that somebody wants to put into a commercial. And that means, you know, over the next six months you really wanna make sure your content is in order that you only have, you know, stats you stand behind on your website in case you know somebody’s in a debate, they reference the food insecurity rate in your area and you’re like, I know that’s wrong. Can you prove it wrong? Is it on your website? The correct number? Right. So um I just wanna make sure that not again, there’s no fear in this, no anxiety, but just the timeliness is a year from now when it’s election time, we wanna be ready before that. So let’s make sure that you have the content on your website that you want folks to be able to reference and source and well, before the campaign start kicking everything up again, context, you’re right. 2024 is an election year. Be conscious. All right there, Amy Sample Ward, the CEO at N 10 and our technology and social media contributor, Amy. Thanks so much. What a pleasure. Thank you. Yeah, this was a good one. They’re all good. Next week, Gene Takagi returns with a discussion of Sam Altman chat G BT and why they’re relevant to nonprofits. If you missed any part of this week’s show, I beseech you find it at Tony martignetti.com were sponsored by donor box, outdated donation forms blocking your supporters, generosity. This giving season donor box, the fast flexible and friendly fundraising platform for nonprofits donor box.org. Our creative producer is Claire Meyerhoff. I’m your associate producer, Kate Martignetti. The show’s social media is by Susan Chavez. Mark Silverman is our web guy and this music is by Scott Stein. Thank you for that affirmation. Scotty be with us next week for nonprofit radio, big nonprofit ideas for the other 95% go out and be great.

Nonprofit Radio for November 27, 2023: Donor Surveys & People-Powered Movements

Crystal Mahon & Christian RobillardDonor Surveys

You’ll make the most of the donors you have by discovering their potential through surveying. Crystal Mahon and Christian Robillard talk principles, best practices and goal setting. Crystal is with STARS Air Ambulance and Christian is at Beyond The Bake Sale.

 

 

 

 

Celina Stewart & Gloria Pan: People-Powered Movements

This team helps you build more effective and inclusive movements, by encouraging you to think about communications, power and privilege. They’re Celina Stewart from League of Women Voters U.S. and Gloria Pan with Moms Rising.

 

 

 

 

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Every nonprofit struggles with these issues. Big nonprofits hire experts. The other 95% listen to Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio. Trusted experts and leading thinkers join me each week to tackle the tough issues. If you have big dreams but a small budget, you have a home at Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio.
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And welcome to Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio. Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. I’m your aptly named host and the pod father of your favorite abdominal podcast. Oh, I am glad you’re with us. I’d suffer the effects of emphasis if you inflamed me with the idea that you missed this week’s show. Here’s our associate producer, Kate. What’s going on this week? Hey, Tony, we’ve got two convos from 2020 donor surveys. You’ll make the most of the donors you have by discovering their potential through surveying Crystal. Mahan and Christian Robillard talk principles, best practices and goal setting. Crystal is with stars air ambulance and Christian is at beyond the bake sale. Then people powered movements. This team helps you build more effective and inclusive movements by encouraging you to think about communications, power and privilege. There’s Selena Stewart from League of women voters, us and Gloria Pan with moms Rising. These both aired on August 7th 2020 on Tony’s Take two Happy Thanksgiving. Unbelievable were sponsored by donor box, outdated donation forms blocking your supporters, generosity. This giving season donor box, the fast flexible and friendly fundraising platform for nonprofits. Donor box.org here is donor surveys. Welcome to Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio coverage of 20 NTC 2020 nonprofit technology conference in 10 made the excruciating decision to cancel the nonprofit technology conference. But we are continuing virtually, you’ll get just as much value. Uh We don’t have to all be close to pick the brains of uh the expert speakers from uh from N 10. My guests now are Crystal Mahan and Christian Robillard Crystal is manager of annual giving at Stars Air Ambulance and Christian is founder and chief podcaster at Beyond the Bake Sale. Crystal Christian. Welcome. Welcome to nonprofit radio. Thanks, Tony. Thanks, Tony, great to be here. Uh It’s a pleasure to have both of you. Um You are both in uh in Canada uh Crystal. You are in uh Alberta and Christian. Remind me where you are. I’m in uh beautiful sunny Ottawa, Ontario, Ottawa, Ottawa, the capital, the nation’s capital. Not to be, not to be disputed with Toronto who uh likes to think they’re the capital. I know well, and many Americans think it’s either Montreal or Toronto. Yes. But uh Ottawa capital. All right. I’m glad to know that you’re both well and safe. Um And, and glad to have you both with us. Thanks. Um We’re talking about donor surveys. Your, your NTC topic is uh donor surveys, your untapped data, gold mine. Uh Crystal. Why are surveys? A data gold mine? Well, we had the fortune of launching a survey. We’ve never done one prior to 2016. And when we did it, we were amazed at what we found. So we learned a lot about our donors in terms of their communication preferences. We made money like easily made net on that. And on top of that, we actually ended up learning a lot about time giving prospects and turns out that there were a lot of donors that we had no idea, had named us in their will or were interested in naming us in their will. So there was a lot of revenue like hidden revenue that we were finally getting access to. So that’s sort of where that line is moving here. What’s what it’s referring to? Interesting. I’m, I’m looking forward to drilling into that more because I do plan to giving fundraising as a consultant. Uh And I’m sometimes asked by clients about doing surveys. Um So I’m interested in what you’re doing as well. Um And, and you’re getting uh gifts, you said you’ve made money back from them. So people do send you gifts of cash along with their surveys. Yes, like this year we did uh early because last year 2019, our Stars Ally survey made $300,000 and then that all all the new people that we found for plan giving, like we’re looking at billions of dollars coming into the door in the future for stars. So it’s yeah, to not do a survey just seems like a huge opportunity at this point. Yeah, my good. Did you say billions with a B no millions with an millions? OK. The audio is not perfect. So it almost sounded billions. So I wanted to be sure because I’m sure listeners have the same question. OK. Millions, millions are still very, very good. Um Christian, anything you want to add to about why these are uh such a gold mine for nonprofits? I mean, besides the fact that you’re using data, obviously to reinforce certain decisions and to highlight certain wealth elements, I would say in terms of your sponsorship potential, I know that a lot of organizations are looking more so into the corporate sponsorship, corporate engagement side of things. And I think with your, your donor surveys, you can really reveal a lot around where people are working their levels in terms of uh positions within a certain company or organization. And that can lead you down some interesting paths from a corporate sponsorship perspective. OK. OK. Um Your um your description of the, the, the workshop said that uh you make the most of the donors you already have and it sounds like you, you both obviously are, are are going there, is there anything you wanna add about sussing out the, the, the the value that’s in your uh that, that you don’t know you have among your current donors? Well, from our perspective, like it’s given us an opportunity to get to know our donors better in terms of what, what are they actually interested in learning about in our organization or why are they choosing to give? And it allows us to tailor our messages and just be a lot more personal with them and act like we really know them as opposed to them just being a number in our database. So it really give us an opportunity to really cultivate that relationship and just continue bringing them on board and continuing that relationship with them. Yeah. OK. Um Is, is most of your uh content in the, in the workshop around the best practices for, for surveys? Is that what we’re gonna be exploring? Mostly Christian, feel free to jump in. I would say that we were working a lot at best or best practices then also case studies. So people would have some tangible examples of how to actually launch one but to consider and what they would actually need to do once they go back to their nonprofit actually. Ok. All right. Well, let’s, um, let’s start with like, where, where do you get started? W who, who, who are the best people to send surveys to or, or what types of information are, are you finding or most uh re responded to or what types of questions are most responded to? How can you help us sort of frame uh uh an outline of what we, where to get started? Well, Christian and I talked a lot about building the proper scope of your survey. So, figuring out like, why exactly are you doing the survey? What are you trying to find out? And once you kind of, I guess tailor down exactly what you’re trying to learn or what you’re trying to achieve that can sort of help you figure out who you need to actually reach out to and what demographic or audience you need to build that sort for. Ok. So like starting with your goals, what’s the, what’s the, what’s the purpose of the darn thing? Yes. OK. OK. Um Christian, you wanna, you wanna jump in around, you know, starting to get this process started? Yeah, absolutely. And I, I think uh as crystal and I were kind of building this piece out whether you’re talking about uh more of a philanthropic focus for your survey or whether you’re talking about more of a corporate kind of sponsorship, focus of it. You ultimately want to ask yourself a number of different questions before you can get going things around. What you ultimately want to know about your donor base or about this particular audience population that you’re ultimately looking for. More information on. Why are you doing this in the first place? Is, is this more responsive, isn’t it more of a proactive type survey to uh explore new avenues? What do you ultimately need to know? I think that’s an important element to focus on is not asking everything but asking the right. Things who do you need to ask? So who is the actual population that you’re targeting at the end of the day? Uh What would you do with the information? So don’t just collect information for, for information sake, not that, that’s not important, but what’s the actual actionable pieces for that? And how are you going to protect that information? I think with the today’s sensitivities around, around data privacy, it’s really important for, for charities and nonprofits to steward that data as they would, any type of gift that they ultimately get. Yeah, in terms of the data stewardship that, that might constrain what you ask as well because now you have um uh conceivably a higher level of security that you need to maintain. Absolutely Tony and even just in terms of sensitivities of, of phrasing certain questions, I think it’s important for you to think about how you phrase certain things and how intimate you’re ultimately getting. And if you do get that intimate, like you said, how do you protect that data? But also what’s the purpose for collecting that particular piece of data aside from, well, it might be a nice to have someday instead of this actually contributes towards our, our bottom line. Now you’re doing uh surveys around corporate sponsorship. Uh Right. That’s, that’s the example you mentioned. So you’re, you’re getting to know where people work so that you might use that information for potential sponsorships. Yeah, I mean, when you look at sponsorship. Ultimately, it’s, it’s very much a business transaction. If you look at how Forbes just uh defines sponsorship, it’s very much the cash and in kind fee paid to a property, a property being, whether it’s a charitable run or some type of adventure or conference in this case, um in return for access to the exploitable commercial potential associated with that property. So you think of any other type of exploitable commercial potential, which is the most buzzwordy definition you possibly could. If you think of any type of advertising medium, whether it’s TV, radio print, you wanna know ultimately who’s in your audience. And one of the best and most effective ways to do that is to conduct some type of survey to really tease out who are some of your very specific or niche audiences in Canada, we say niche. So it’s a bit of a cringe for uh for us up here in the north. But uh having a survey to really tease out who are, who’s in your audience and some of the more behavioral psychographic uh demographic features of that audience are particularly important to, to have to really make a compelling case to, to corporations looking to use sponsorship with your organization. OK. Um What format are you using? Christian Crystal? I’m gonna ask you the same thing shortly. What, how are these offered to people? Yeah. So we, so in the experience that I’ve had, we usually use a survey monkey survey of some kind that allows for a lot of cross tab analysis to be able to say that people who are in between the ages of 18 and 29 have this particular set of income. They have these particular purchase patterns, they care about your cause to nth degree they um are engaged with your cause or with your property and whether it’s through social media or through certain print advertisements or whatever that might be. And we usually collect around 30 plus data points on all of those uh on all of those elements ranging from, again, the behavioral to the demographic, to psychographic to some very pointed specific questions around the relationship between your cause and the affinity um for a certain corporation based on that uh based on not caring for that cause. Yeah. Uh So you said collecting around 30 data points? Does that, does that mean a survey would have that many questions? Absolutely. Oh OK. Now I’ve heard from guests in the past may have even been NTC guests, not this year, but the, you know, the optimal number of questions for a survey is like five or six or so and people bail out uh beyond that point. Yeah. And, and usually before I had actually sent out a survey of that magnitude, I would agree with you, Tony and I would agree with most, I think the, the important differentiators one is that you frame it as it’s very much for improving the relationships and the ability for the, the cause properties, whether that’s your, run your gala, whatever that might be to raise money. And usually the audience that you’re sending that to is very receptive to that. I think you want to frame it also, as you’re only collecting the most important of information. And uh you’re also looking at uh again, like you’re incentivizing it in some way, shape or form. So usually when you tailor it with some type of incentive, be it a $50 gift card opportunity to win something like that, usually people are a lot more are a lot more receptive. And in the time that we’ve done surveys, whether it’s in my, my past days consulting in the space or now doing a lot of work with charities and nonprofits, we’ve sent it to tens of thousands of respondents and you get a pretty, a pretty strong response rate and a really nominal if negligible amount of an unsubscribed rate. So people are not unsubscribing from getting those questions. And in fact, they’re answering a lot of them and an important element as well as making them optional. So not forcing people to have to fill out certain pieces but giving them the freedom to answer whichever questions they feel compelled to. But when you’re doing it for the cause people are pretty, are pretty compelled to respond to those types of questions. Crystal, how about you? What what format are your, your uh surveys offered in? We do both offline and online. So our donor base tends to be a little bit older. So for us, the physical mailing is absolutely mandatory because, because a lot of our donors respond that way. Um But we do also produce an online version for, I guess other parts of our donor base that are in a di different demographic or just based on that person’s preference, just giving them that opportunity. Um But what we did find is that in terms of our offline responses, we had a lower response rate in terms of responses to the survey. But exponentially more donations coming through offline as opposed to online. And then for online responses of the online survey, we had a lot more responses to the online survey but far fewer donations. So we found that there was an inverse relationship there. And I thought that was very interesting. It’s time for a break. Are you looking to maximize your fundraising efforts and impact this giving season? Donor Box. Online donation platform is designed to help you reach your fundraising goals from customizable donation forms to far-reaching easy share, crowd funding and peer to peer options. Plus seamless in person giving with donor box like kiosk. Donor box makes giving simple and fast for your donors and move the needle on your mission. Visit Donor box.org and let donor box help you help others. Now, back to donor surveys. Do you uh subscribe to the same uh opinion about the, the length that there can be up to 30 questions in a, in a survey. As Christian was saying, we personally haven’t practiced that. We usually keep ours between five and 10 questions and sometimes we even tailor it. If we know that somebody is interested in a particular program, we might take out a certain question put in something else related specifically to them. So there is some variability in the surveys, but generally we keep them quite short. But I do agree with Christian for sure in terms of really framing the purpose of the survey. And each of the questions around this is the whole purpose of this is to build our relationship with them and to better serve them and to get to know them better. And I think that really makes a huge difference and then we also do the incentivizing approach as well. So I think that also inspires people to uh I was just gonna ask about incentivizing, OK. Something similar like a, a drawing for a gift card, something like that. Yeah, we get a Stars Prize pack because we wanted to do something that would be specific. They couldn’t get something that they could elsewhere. So, yeah, we, we have started merchandise. So that’s one of our OK. Um I’m gonna thank Christian for not having a good uh a good video uh appearance because this video I’ve done 10 of these today and they’re all gonna be, all the videos are gonna be preserved except this one because Christian um has a very extreme background. It’s really just like a silhouette, a head with headphones is really about all I can see. But um I’m grateful because my background just fell. I have a little Tony, I have a Tony Martignetti if you watch all of these videos, which are gonna be available. Uh There’s a Tony Martignetti nonprofit Radio, um sort of easel, you know, um CEO core, you know, sign and uh it was behind me. Uh It was, and it just fell while uh Crystal was talking. So thank you. Uh Christian. I was just so surprised that you could ask 30 questions on a survey and get some type of uh degree of response. So it, it, it shook my house that I’m 30 data points. What madness is this? I’m so aghast at it. Yes. And then also the fact that the two of you disagree. Um All right. So, but I’m shouting, calling myself out as uh having a, a flimsy background but it lasted through, it lasted through like seven hours of this. I love it. I also say that we don’t necessarily disagree, but I think different surveys serve their different purposes. So I agree with Crystal that in, in that particular case, you only need to send one that has 5 to 10 questions. Whereas in this case, you’re probably sending it to, in, in a sponsorship case, you’re probably sending it to a larger population of people and you only need a certain amount of people to fill it out. So, um, Crystal, I had asked you and you probably answered, but I got distracted by my collapsing background. Uh What, what kinds of incentives do you offer? Uh, we offer Stars price pack. So it’s Stars merchandise. So we wanted to offer something a little bit different other than like a gift card that they could get through any other. Yeah, so that’s all right. Um a different angle for us. Yeah. Personalized to Stars. Ok. Got you. Ok. Um Now was yours specifically uh uh a planned giving survey or did you just have a couple of planned giving questions? And that’s where you discovered this data, gold mine of future gifts and all the wills that you found out that you’re in. It was not, it was not specific to plan giving. So it was more just a general survey. And then we did have a question about plan giving and then we were stunned by the response that we saw in subsequent years. We kept asking that and right now we’re sort of in the middle of doing a whole plan giving strategy and trying to really build that out now that we know that there is this whole core of people that are interested in this and that our donors are open to it. So it’s really opened up a lot of opportunities for us as an organization of all. Yeah. Interesting. Ok. All right. So, you, you learned from the first time this is, you’re in a lot more states than you had any idea. Yeah. Um, le let’s, let’s talk about some more, uh, good practices for surveys. Uh, Crystal. Is there something you can, one or two things you wanna recommend and then we’ll come to go back to Christian. Yeah. One of my major things is that if you’re gonna ask a question, you have to know what you’re gonna do with that data after the fact, like a pet people sign is where people just ask a question to ask a question for whatever reason, but then they don’t action anything out of it. Like to me, it’s very important that if our donors are going to spend the time to actually read through your survey and take the time to respond or mail it in or submit it online that we actually to do something with that information. So whether that’s tailoring future messaging or changing their communication preferences or whatever it is that they’re asking us to do or telling us, I think that’s so important is that you have to have a follow up plan in terms of once these responses come back in, what are we gonna do with them? Who is gonna take action? How are we gonna resource this? How are we going to use this information, I think of um date of birth as, as a good example of that, like if you’re gonna, if you’re gonna develop a plan to um congratulate someone for their birth on their birthday each year, then that can be a valuable data point. Um But if you just, you know, if you’re just asking because you, you know, you don’t have a purpose, you’re just interested in what their age is for some vague reason, then, then there’s no, there’s no value in asking. And if, if it’s just a follow up, if it’s just to know their, you know, when you want to send a card, maybe you don’t need the year, maybe you just need the day in the month. Um But if there’s value to your database for knowing their age and then you would ask the year. Exactly. So it helps you filter down there. What do we need to know? And why are we asking these question? What is the purpose, Kristen? You have a uh uh best practice you want to share. Yeah, I would say consider the not just the population size that you’re not just the population that you’re serving, but also the, the representative makeup. So if you know that your database is predominantly on more of the, the senior side of things, but you’re getting a disproportionate amount of, of more uh individuals who are on the younger side of things in terms of respondents that’s something important that you have to take into account. So the make up of the actual population is um is more important than I would argue than the amount of responses. You can get a crazy amount of responses. But if it doesn’t represent the population that you’re serving and that who make up your donors, it’s, it’s not gonna be valuable data to you. I remember one time we had uh an instance for an organization wanted to uh want to do a survey for sponsorship purposes and in other cases, it’s been for more donor specific like, oh, we’ll just put a note on Facebook or Twitter or something like that. It’s not necessarily your population, it’s not necessarily the group that you’re looking that you’re actively engaged with. Um in a fundraising perspective, you get information to the otherwise and then obviously reflect on that and use that. But um be really clear about the, the breakdown that you need to have in order to make the, the information actually representative of the rest of your database. Um What, what kinds of response rates like? What’s, what’s a decent response rate to a, to a, to a survey? I uh I think it depends what type of server you’re sending. I will, I’ll let Crystal speak to this more, but I’d say if it’s philanthropic, it can vary on the sponsorship side of things you’re looking for. Um a response rate that coincides with a 95% confidence interval with a 5% margin of error. That’s good market data to calculate that. There’s a bunch of big cal complicated formulas that we probably have all repressed from our time. In uh in statistics in uh in university, there’s a, a company called Surveymonkey that actually has a calculator for it. So if you go to the Surveymonkey website, you can actually um just plug in a what the sample size or what the actual size of the, the database you’re sending it to and you can plug in what confidence integral that you want and then what margin of error that you’d like and it’ll pump out a number of a minimum that you need to have. I would say that’s a good starting point. But again, as I talked about before, make sure you have the representative breakup breakdown of uh of who’s actually within your audience reflected in the survey results. And don’t have it disproportionately skewed towards a particular demographic that might be just more inclined to uh to respond to surveys. OK? OK. Um Crystal, anything you wanna add about uh the, the, the confidence it’s, it’s different. But, but yeah, but yeah, that I I withdraw that, that doesn’t make sense for you because you’re doing individual philanthropic surveys. So each response you get is valuable. You find out that someone is interested in plan giving already, has you in their will. That one response has, has great value yes, the purpose of our survey is a little bit different. So we don’t worry so much about that, but I completely agree that the Christian in terms of actually needing to calculate that and being mindful of who you are actually reaching out to with this survey to make sure that the representative of the, that you’re trying to question your survey. What what, what kind of response rate do you shoot for though Crystal? Cause still, you know, these, these things take time and you’re doing some of them are offline. So there’s postage and printing, et cetera. What kind of response rate do you consider good for, for an effort like that in terms of a financial response rate? So what I would clarify that for us, our response to the survey doesn’t necessarily mean a gift and a gift to the survey doesn’t necessarily mean that they responded to the survey. So in terms of number of gifts, we usually aim for between six and 10%. Um But in terms of actual response to the survey, we’ve seen as low as 2% but then as high as 7% depending on the year of the channel. Um So either way, like we have, we’re quite lucky, we have quite a large database. So any of these hands could be 50,000 people or more. So even 2% it is a pretty decent sample and gives us a lot of work to do and a lot of information to build off of? Ok. Ok. Um, for your online surveys, Crystal, are you using surveymonkey also? Did you say I’ve used a couple? We used Surveymonkey last year. Um, it is very user friendly. What I would caution people on is to always read the fine print about whatever price package they’re signed up for because like we discussed for our surveys a lot, a big focus is the financial return on it. So we needed to pick a price plan that involve being able to redirect right from the survey monkey page to our donation form. So you have to be really mindful of things like that. So in some of the basic packages, they don’t allow you to redirect to the donation form and that if you can’t do that, that will really negatively impact your financial return of the number of donations you’re going to see in? Ok. Is there another online tool that you like? Also I used a platform called Response, I believe they’re based out of Sweden or somewhere in Europe. And they were very good to be honest. So and there are some limitations as well with them in terms of what the different packages offer. But right now we’re using Surveymonkey and that’s what we’re sending out our like, for example, like even surveys, we’re sending out the survey Monkey or any of our ST based ones. So that’s what we’re using actively. OK. How about you Christian. Is there another one besides Survey Monkey that, uh, you could recommend? I, I think it just depends on what you’re, you’re looking for Tony. So, if you’re looking for a lot of, let’s say more Q answers, I’d say even a Google form would, would be more than, would be more than acceptable. It really just depends on what functionality you want to get out of. I use Surveymonkey pretty religiously just because it’s like Crystal said, it’s very user friendly. It has the functionality that I need and it’s real and it’s relatively um reasonable in terms of, in terms of price point for what you get. Um It’s also going to depend and it’s up to you to do due diligence on what types of functionality you need. Do you need to integrate with your database versus other software? Do you need certain functionality? Do you actually know how to use a lot of those things? Is there going to be support? And again, like what, what are they going to do with your data? Like do they have access to your data, whether it’s metadata or otherwise? Are there other rules or jurisdictions you have to consider with that, that data privacy? So I use Survey Monkey. But lots of considerations to make. Ok. Ok. Thank you. And um so Christian, why don’t you uh why don’t you lead us out with some uh take us out with uh some I guess motivation, closing thoughts what would you like to end with? Absolutely. I would say from a sponsor perspective, whether you’re a large organization or small organization, the, the riches are in the niches. So to do good sponsorship, it requires good data and it requires those 30 plus data points. But whether you’re a big group or a small group, you can compete at the, the same scale, especially um with the amount of money that’s being spent on cost sponsorship over $2 billion worldwide, which is no small amount of money that’s that you can get access to whether you’re $100,000 a year org or a million dollars plus requires good data. So make sure you’re collecting good data. Make sure you’re clear on uh what you want to use your information for and uh yeah, just be, be diligent in uh in making sure that the, that the data is actually protected. Ok. Um I was, I was, I was gonna let Christian end but since the two of you have such divergent purposes, which is fabulous for, uh it’s great for a discussion, uh, divergent purposes around your surveys. Crystal, why don’t you take us out uh on the, on the philanthropic, the individual donor side? Yeah, absolutely. So, like we were discussing, don’t be afraid to fundraise. Like, just because it’s a survey doesn’t mean that you can’t make money off of it. Your people are supporting you enough that they’re willing to fill out a survey and respond to you, they may be willing to donate as well. And then on top of that, like I said, you, you have to know why you’re asking these questions and what you’re gonna do with that information after. It’s really important in terms of respecting your donors time and the fact that they’re giving you this information, you need to be able to use it and sort properly and safely. And then lastly, I just say, please, please, please test your survey before you actually send it out, send it out to other departments or other people that are not in the midst of building the survey so that you can find out that you phrase things appropriately. You’re actually learning what you want to or the functionality is appropriate. I think that’s just so important because you only have one chance of sending it out. So just make sure that it works appropriately. Ok. Thank you very much. That’s Crystal Mahan Manager of Annual Giving at Stars Air Ambulance. And with her is Christian Robillard founder and chief podcaster at Beyond the Bake Sale Crystals in Alberta. And uh I’m sorry, Crystal, did I just say crystal? Yeah, I know crystal. Say crystal. Crystal. Crystal. Crystal. I know is in Alberta. We don’t make it easy on you, Tony and I, I got through 25 minutes so well. And then it’s a lackluster host. I’m sorry. It’s uh this is who you’re stuck with the Christians in the capital city of Ottawa. Thank you so much, Christian Crystal. Thank you very much. Thanks Tony. It’s time for Tony’s take two. Thank you, Kate. Happy Thanksgiving. A week late. Can you believe that your lackluster host forgot that last week’s show should have included Happy Thanksgiving. We were doing the show the week before and it never occurred to me and I would say parenthetically it did not occur to our associate producer either. That’s the end of that parenthetical. I’ve always wanted to have an intern so I could have somebody to blame. You’ve heard me say it. Give me an intern, I need somebody to blame but just leave it right there. I have to wish you happy Thanksgiving a week late. I hope you enjoyed past tense. Hope you enjoyed your Thanksgiving last week. That’s the best I can do on Tony’s take two. There’s a nice little, uh, whimsical little rhyme. That is Tony’s take two, Kate. Well, um, thank you for putting it on me. But, uh we all know that it was your mistake and it’s ok. We forgive you. Um Tony for forgetting Thanksgiving. Yeah. All right. I’m not sure that, uh, you’re quite gonna get away with that. It wasn’t on you. I, I put it in parentheses in parent. Oh, I, I need an intern so I can blame them on everything. Yeah. Well, you’re not an intern. You’re the associate producer. I put you in parenthesis. I put the I put the blame statement in parentheses. I thought that would be good. Alright, let’s go. Well, we’ve got Buku but loads more time here is people powered movements. My guests now are Selina Stewart and Gloria Pan Selena is senior director of advocacy and litigation at League of Women Voters us. And Gloria is Vice president for member engagement at Moms Rising, Selena Gloria. Welcome. Hello, I’m glad we were able to put this together virtually. It’s good to see both of you. Um And I’m glad to know that you’re each well and safe and in uh either DC or just outside DC. Selina, you’re in DC and Gloria. Where are you outside Washington, Gloria? I am actually near Dulles Airport. So, you know, some people commute from here but because um mom’s rising is a virtual organization. I don’t. And so when people ask me for lunch, I’m always like, ok, it takes a little bit more planning. I have to bend my mind about it. I have to get my body into D CDC. OK. Um Your uh your NTC topic is a revolution is coming top tactics to build people powered movements. Um Selena, would you get us started with this? What, what was the need for the session? Well, I think um I think one of the things is right now it’s all about people power. You know, there’s everything is so politicized right now and I think that there is often a conversation about how people are involved in what, what government actually represents or what the government is representing. So I think that that’s really, really important. Um We also saw like in 2018 more voter turnout mo more voters turning out to vote and things like that. So I think that that also is as part of that people conversation, like what is compelling people to participate even more or at a greater extent than their democracy. But all of these things kind of work together to figure out, not only do we have people engaged now, but what is important? What does community as more people become engaged? Um How does, how does our definition of our community and communities in general change as more people are included and participate in all of those things? So I think that we’re at a very um interesting and crucial moment in time and so people powered and, and people involve movement. It’s, it’s, I think it’s always happened but it’s just a, a coin phrase. I think that’s especially prevalent right now. OK. Um Gloria E even though participation is, is uh is very high, we’re also largely polarized. So how do we overcome the opposite ends of the spectrum to try to bri bring people together and, and, and organize? Are you talking about everyone or are you talking about voters? Uh I’m, well, I’m talking about the country. Uh I don’t know, I don’t know whether I don’t know whether people are voting. Um But I’m talking about our political polarization. I don’t know if they’re necessarily voting. Uh I, they actually talk about voting so I probably threw it off a little bit, Gloria, they act like I’m asking for clarification only because like some of the most talented and I think unifying um politicians in recent memory, for example, Barack Obama did not succeed in unifying all of us, right? So there are some segments of our um citizenry that will just not do it, we will not be able to come together with them. But I think that for um people who really do want the best for our country and who are open minded enough to um want to hear from other people who have different um you know, slightly different ways of looking at the world. It is possible to do it. And um that goes back to what Selena was saying about people powered movements. Um I think that one of the reasons why that’s become more and more of a catchphrase is that um you know, we are in an era of information overload, we are in an era of polarization and um not believing everything that we’re seeing on the internet and in the news. And so being able to actually really connect with people on the ground in person over the phone, but directly and not going through the filter of social media or news movements is, it’s increasingly important and that will be um one of the main channels for us to unify as many people as possible. So, we’re, we’re, we’re talking about uh creating these both online and offline, right? Um Or uh people powered pe people centered movements. Um How Gloria, how do we want nonprofits to think about uh or what do we need to think about in terms of doing this, organizing uh creating these, these movements. Um First of all, it’s about um inclusivity. OK. So um at least from where we sit, um mom’s rising and me speaking on behalf of mom’s rising right now, um We want to make sure that whatever we do and if its the most people and harms no one at all, if possible. Um So that’s one part of it, how we speak, how we communicate to make sure that what we’re speaking and how we communicate does not reinforce that stereotypes that creates divisions. OK. That’s one way. Um Another way, not way, but another thing to consider are also the tools that we’re using. Um Are we using, you know, people are on, on different kinds of communication tools, some people um only do Facebook, other people only do um email. Um And there are also like text messaging. There are all of these new com communication schools tools coming on and being on top of the different tools is super important because we need to meet people where they are um those are just a couple of thoughts. Ok. Um So we, so Selena, so we’re talking about diversity equity inclusion. Um Let, let’s drill down into a little of the like, what do we, what do we need to do around our communications? That is more equitable and non harming. So I think that’s an important question and that’s definitely something that has been centered um in the league’s work over the last I would say five years, but more intentionally over the last two, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, whose work the league? I’m sorry, I always refer to the league, women voters, women, voters, us. OK. The leagues were at the league. Sorry, folks. The that the full title is just too long for me to keep saying. So I just referred to it as I got you now. All right. So de I is, is very, very important. Um for us, you know, our organization has historically been older white women. We’ve al always had members of color, but I don’t know that they were always at the forefront. So for us, our work is really centered in two questions and in everything that we’re doing, who’s at the table and who should be at the table, who’s missing. So I think starting all of our conversation and the efforts that we’re doing with those two questions allows us to center our work in diversity, equity inclusion and also use our power as um people who have had access to legislators, stakeholders, etcetera. How do we use our power in a, in a way that allows access and inclusivity for more people. So I think that that is really important and something that D I diversity equity inclusion work is hard. Let me just say it’s not easy, you know, it, it gets very uncomfortable. A lot of times when you’re talking about privileged patriarchy and all of the, we have to talk about as it relates to D I. But it’s so important to get comfortable and being uncomfortable and having these conversations is the only way I think that we can start to build a bridge towards unifying. Um because at the end of the day, we may be politically, but at the end of the day, we all share many of the very same values which is historically united this country. Like right now, we’re in the midst of the Coronavirus. The Coronavirus doesn’t care whether you’re a Republican Democrat, black, white female male. It does, it doesn’t matter. Um At the end of the day, we all have to make sure that we’re doing what we can to be safe as individuals, but also our actions greatly impact the people around us. So it’s more of a, it’s more of a community mindset that’s required in order to tap this down. So I know that that’s like a little offset offshoot from what we’re talking about. But I think it all plays together in some way, shape or form? Ok. Um Gloria, how about, how about uh for mom’s rising? I mean, how do you ensure that your communications are equitable and, and non harmful? Um Well, mom’s rising um has very intentionally built an organization that tries to bring different voices to the table. We are intersectional and we are multi issue. And so from our staff, um we’re very diverse in many, many different ways And from the way that we um choose which issues to work on, we also take into consideration um which communities are being impacted. Um And um how we communicate about those and then the way that we um campaign is that our, our campaigns are always overlap. And so there are different people within the organization as well as the partner, policy partners from different issue areas. They help us um vet our issues and in the way that we communicate with them to make sure that, you know, there are um we’re not communicating in a way that, that, that um excludes communities reinforces that stereotypes. Um and raises red flags makes, make, make people feel bad in ways that we don’t understand because of where we individuals as campaigners know. So everything we do is very thoroughly vetted through many different filters. OK. So vetting. Yeah. So please, yeah, Selena, I totally agree with um what Gloria said and I think that’s really important because the league is also multi issue and and kind of has that you have to compete when you have multiple issues, you sometimes have to think a little differently about how you present yourself on each issue in order to not negatively impact the whole set of what you’re trying to accomplish. And so for us in the communication space, um expressly is thinking about whether it’s appropriate, who’s the appropriate messenger when we’re communicating. So, is it appropriate for the league to be a leader in this space or do we need to take a step back and be a supporter? Um So I think that’s one of the things that’s very important for us, communication wise is we’re figuring out what is, what space are we gonna take up in the communication space and how we’re going to communicate this issue? And then the other piece is who’s talking, who is the person that we’re putting in front to actually speak about a particular issue? And is, is that the right person? And are they speaking from the, the lens that’s most appropriate for that particular issue that’s gonna be impacted most as a result of what you’re saying you’re doing? So I think that’s very important. What Gloria lifted up. How do you manage the, the conflicting issues? If, if you know, I, I guess it, I guess there are issues where you have a large constituency on one side of one issue, but something else may seem contrary to that to that large constituency, a different issue that you’re taking a stand on is that, is, that is my understanding, right? When you say, you know, potential issue conflict. Um Yeah, well, when you have a hun 500,000 members and supporters and you’re in every congressional district, everybody’s not gonna agree on, on how to approach an issue. But I think what grounds the league is our mission, our mission is to empower voters and defend democracy, empower people to defend democracy. So I think as long as you stay rooted in what your mission values um statement is, then you can find some reconciliation across, you know, the most seemingly divergent issues. OK. Climate climate change, I think would probably be a good example. I was, I was gonna add, OK, that um just to step back a little bit, the one thing that I am super, super proud of um is that um at least for progressives, I think that we’re actually pretty consistent and about our agreement on issues, we may have um different levels of intensity in what we agree with. But I think that there are very few conflicts. We may not agree on how to get somewhere, but we all agree on where we want to go. OK. So in that way, I, I rather feel at least from um mom’s rising standpoint, we rarely get, I can’t even think of a single instance where we have conflicts because we are not agreeing with each other or with policy partners on the most important thing where we’re heading. Uh So I think that’s a difference because our, the league is, is not um left or right leaning. We’re kind of, we have members who are both conservative and liberal have some of that conflict more in that. But I think you’re absolutely right. Do we all want the same things and a, a healthier, more vibrant democracy? Absolutely. So you have to find some common ground in that space, but we definitely have members who are, who want to handle things one way versus the other. We have to find common ground. Yeah, that, that’s the challenge I was trying to get at. Yeah. OK. It helps. At least it helps me to think of an example like climate change, you know, some, there are some people who don’t even believe that it’s, it’s human impacted and there are others who think we’re decades behind and in, in our inaction to, to uh reverse the effects of human induced climate change. So, um yeah. Uh it’s uh that’s, that’s quite a challenge really, Selena. Um OK. Well, where else, where else should we go with these people? Powered movement ideas? You, you, you, you two spend a lot more time studying this than I do. Uh So what, what else should we be talking about? That? We haven’t yet. I would actually love to hear from Selena how the league is dealing with um doing your work remotely. I know you guys are already virtual. This is like no, no sweat for you guys, right? Well, you know, I mean, we, we do have, you know, our plans range from virtual all the way down to the grassroots, right? And I think um especially for organizations like your Selena, we share the um the, the, the common goal this year of, of voter engagement. I am very sorry. What’s real life like I do it like if I open the door family, my kids might come in. I’m gonna let her out. I’m very sorry. All right. So, you know, um in terms of remote working, but yeah, but how it relates to this topic of people power. Yeah. So I think that’s really, really important and we’re definitely, so it’s, it’s one thing to convert to um teleworking, right? That’s one thing. But when your work is so much advocacy um and especially the leaders on the ground who are doing voter registration, which requires you to be on the ground talking to people, you know, that has shifted our work. So, one of the examples that we have is we have our People Powered Fair Maps campaign, which is basically um trying to get redistricting reform for across the country in a positive way that we don’t have another situation like we had in North Carolina where you’re from Tony and also in Maryland. So we wanna, we wanna make sure that you know, people are represented appropriately, but a lot of the states that we’re working in, they have signature collection campaigns going on right now. So how do you do signature collection when you can’t actually be within three or 6 ft of people? So now many of our um leagues are converting to digital signatures and going through their legislator to make those adjustments so that they can still collect signatures and meet that need, et cetera. Our lab, we have a lobby corps which is 21 volunteers that goes to the hill every month. Obviously, with the hill being uh also teleworking, it created what we thought might be a barrier. But now our lobbies are doing virtual coffee meetings on Zoom just like this and having those conversations with uh legislators, legislative staff and all of those things. So I think that the Coronavirus has forced us to do our work in a different way, but it’s also been great to innovate and be creative and do the work that people love just in a different way. So we, it’s not perfect. I don’t even wanna make you think that this is perfect because it’s definitely not. But I think that uh there’s a lot of positive energy about doing our work and finding ways to do our work in different ways which OK, thinking creatively, you know, II I for our, for our listeners and I don’t, I don’t want to focus just on moms rising and league of women voters us. Uh I want them to recognize how, what we’re talking about can be applied by them. Are they, are they what they need to go back to their CEO S or whatever vice presidents, whoever and what, what kind of like discussion items they need to be putting forward that the organization is not now thinking about uh in terms of, you know, again, people power say a revolution is coming. Um You know, how, how, how can our listeners help create it? I think just becoming involved, like when you’re talking about people powered anything, it’s really about base building. And for me, the goals of base base building are always to, to grow a base of volunteers who have a shared value of some sort. And you’re coming together in order to, to make some progressive movement on that. It’s also about leadership development, um communities and constituency who turn out who are players in, in this issue or what have you and then putting issues to the forefront. So I think that wherever you, what do you value, what’s important to you? Um It could be as simple as, hey, there’s a pothole in my street that hasn’t been fixed in the last year. Can we come together as a community and really talk with our local election officials about making sure our streets are in a position that’s not gonna wreck our cars or um have someone get endangered in some way. So I think it comes down to as on an individual level, what is important to you, what do you value and finding and connecting with those people who also value something similar? And what do you want to change? What is it that you’re trying to change or that would make your life better and who are the people who can support you in getting that done? OK. And that’s consistent with what you said on an organizational level too. Uh the same, you know, what, what are the core values? That’s what, that’s what drives all the work. Uh And, and brings people together just finding that commonality around whether it’s the pothole in the street on the individual level or whatever, whatever you, whatever your part. Yeah, Gloria, what, what, what’s your advice for how people can contribute to this revolution? Um I think that right now um we’re all sitting in our homes and we’re rethinking the way that we do our work and even as individuals, um we’re rethinking the way that we are doing our activism. I think that a very important message right now for activists personally and for organizations that organize activists and try to recruit and build the base is that now is not the time to step away now. More important than ever. It is important to stay on top of the issues, to sign those petitions, to speak up and to share your stories because I will give you a very, very specific example. Right now, Congress is um negotiating, arguing over all of these different critical needs in the Coronavirus relief bills. Right? Well, mom’s rising has been on the forefront of um trying to influence those negotiations and the most powerful weapon we have are your stories, people’s stories. Um What’s gonna happen to your childcare center that has to close down what’s gonna happen to uh domestic workers who suddenly don’t have a paycheck um paid family leave. This is something this is a uh a signature models rising issue. We’ve been working on that forever ever since our founding. It’s one of our signature issues. But now um because of the stories that we have gathered and we are hearing from our members about the need for paid leave and the fact that if we had had paid leave all this time, that the burden of Coronavirus would have been much lighter. This is something that we are powerfully bringing to the negotiating table and we are actually seeing we’re going on paid leave. So all organizations and all individuals, whatever issues that you’re working on do not step away continue to share your stories because those stories have to be brought to the negotiating table for policy. And that’s the only way we’re going to get the policy that we need. Ok, we’re gonna leave it there. That’s uh that’s quite inspirational. Thank you. That’s uh that’s Gloria Pan Vice President of member engagement engagement at mom’s rising and also Selena Stewart, senior director of advocacy and litigation at the League of Women voters, us. So, Gloria Selina, thank you very much. Thanks for chatting. Thank you, Tony. Next week, the Thanksgiving Show. If you missed any part of this week’s show, I beseech you find it at Tony martignetti.com were sponsored by donor box, outdated donation forms blocking your supporters, generosity. This giving season donor box, the fast flexible and friendly fundraising platform for nonprofits donor box.org. Our creative producer is Claire Meyerhoff. I’m the associate producer, Kate Martinetti. The show, social media is by Susan Chavez. Mark Silverman is our web guy and this music is by Scott Stein. Thank you for that affirmation, Scotty. You’re with us next week for nonprofit radio. Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95% go out and be great.