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Nonprofit Radio for May 20, 2024: Sociocracy & Attract More Donors

 

Justin BirdsongSociocracy

It’s a new form of decision making you might want to try out. Justin Birdsong from Skeleton Key Strategies introduces us to circle structures, domains and aims, and linking roles, as he acquaints us with this more equitable and inclusive, sociocratic decision making method. (Recorded at the 2024 Nonprofit Technology Conference.)

 

Shannon Bowen & Emily DiFrisco: Attract More Donors

When your development and communications teams work collaboratively with strong relationships, you’ll draw more donors and increase your fundraising revenue. Our panel shares their strategies. They’re Shannon Bowen with Monsoon Leadership and Emily DiFrisco at the Center for Environmental Health. (Also recorded at 24NTC.)

 

 

 

 

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Welcome to Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio. Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. I’m your aptly named host and the pod father of your favorite abdominal podcast. This is show number 691. That means we’re only nine weeks away from our 7/100 show and 14th anniversary. Not that we are wishing the summer months and weeks away. Certainly not, but we are close to the big one. Oh, I’m glad you’re with us. I’d be forced to endure the pain of Burrito Genesis if you got under my skin with the idea that you missed this week’s show. Here’s our associate producer Kate to introduce what’s coming. Hey, Tony, this week we have two more conversations from 24 NTC Sociocracy. It’s a new form of decision making. You might want to try Justin Birdsong from skeleton key strategies. Introduces us to circle structures, domains and aims and linking roles as he acquaints us with this more equitable and inclusive decision making method and attract more donors. When your development and communications teams work collaboratively with strong relationships, you’ll draw more donors and increase your fundraising revenue. Our panel shares their strategies. There’s Shannon Bowen with Monsoon leadership and Emily De Frisco at Center for environmental health. Antonis take two through infants. Eyes were sponsored by virtuous, virtuous, gives you the nonprofit CRM fundraising volunteer and the marketing tools you need to create more responsive donor experiences and grow, giving, virtuous.org and by donor box, outdated donation forms blocking your supporters, generosity. Donor box fast, flexible and friendly fundraising forms for your nonprofit donor box.org here is Sociocracy. Welcome back to Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio coverage of 24 NTC. You know what it is, you know that it’s the 2024 nonprofit technology conference. You know that we’re at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, Oregon, beautiful Portland, great food city. And you know that we’re sponsored by Heller consulting technology strategy and implementation for nonprofits. What you don’t know is that I’m now with Justin Birdsong, founder and principal of Skeleton Key Strategies. You’re now informed fully, Justin. Welcome to nonprofit radio. Thank you so much, Tony. I’m so glad to be here. Pleasure, pleasure. Thank you for joining us for our coverage where we are, you and I are going to talk about equitable governance and consent based decision making an introduction to sociocracy. That’s it. All right. I think we better start with a definition of sociocracy. Absolutely. So, sociocracy is a peer governance system that is based on decentralizing power and hierarchical power structures and uh more equitable distribution of decision making in organizations. What do we say? To the CEO S who think they just heard a definition of the word anarchy um to a certain kind of CEO with a certain kind of, um you know, power centric mindset, they wouldn’t be far off. Um I think the difference is that it’s the opposite of anarchy in the sense that sociocracy actually has really strong uh process and governance procedures. So it’s not that there’s no rules of the road. It’s that the rules of the road are about integrating all voices, making balance for dissension and um objections to certain kinds of decisions and making sure that everybody has a voice in the kinds of major decisions that drive either an organization or a team or uh it’s also used extensively outside of organizations and more informal kinds of settings like cohousing communities. Oh, interesting. OK. Or maybe we’ll get to some of those other settings. Sure. Uh But we’ll be focused on our, our listeners are small and mid size nonprofits. Yes. So I think they would be fertile ground for, for your ideas. I think. So I think an important thing I can say right up front is that sociocracy is a really different methodology from most of the kinds of power structures we are used to having, especially in businesses and nonprofits. They tend to be traditionally hierarchical in nature. There’s nothing wrong with hierarchy. It’s just ultimately decision making rolls up to a certain kind of level of decision making and the buck stops with one ultimate decision maker. Some smaller nonprofits are a little bit more flat in nature. We’re a little bit more democratic. We’re sort of, everybody gets to weigh in, but there are pros and cons to that as well because that can make it really difficult to make a decision and to integrate everybody’s different perspectives when they are in competition with one another. And so sociocracy attempts to sort of balance the things that are useful about hierarchical methods and flat and democratic type methods into a consent based approach where that balances all of those voices and seeks not just to have a sort of one decision maker or a consensus or a majority of decision makers who agree with one thing, but that every single member of a decision making group will be able to consent to a particular way forward as you alluded. Uh This is going to require leadership. Yeah, buy in. We’re not going to be able to, we’re not going to be able to do this without the senior leadership being on board 100%. Um you sort of made the case but let’s make it explicit. So, uh what, how would we make the case to maybe to our vice president to bring it to the CEO, maybe our CEO to bring it to the board um help us make the case? Yeah, absolutely. I think that ultimately depends on what the organization is struggling with. So when organizations and I think I’ve seen this in a lot of nonprofits, both large and small is how easy is it to make decisions? And then even if it’s relatively easy to make decisions, how brought in are people to those decisions? How easy is it to manage people through change? Because those conversations may have happened when they weren’t in the room, or somebody may be moving forward with something that they think the right thing, even though they may not feel like their perspectives or objections were heard. And so ultimately, that can sort of slow down or impede the success of a major project or a new initiative. Um And what sociocracy is designed to do is to level that playing field just a bit while still having an active facilitation role to make sure that everybody is being heard, make sure that um when somebody raises an objection that has to do with the effectiveness of the mission or the aim of whatever it is that we’re trying to do that, we’re able to hear and balance that and incorporate any of those objections through maybe altering the proposal a little bit or saying we’re going to extend the timeline of this so that we can give it a try. But then we’re going to commit to checking back in and making adjustments if we need to et cetera. So you just referenced some of the symptoms of less than ideal decision making that we might, that we might encounter slow processes, people not feeling bought in, um, anything else that would sort of trigger, you know, maybe we can, we can be doing a better job of and, and could be more successful at decentralizing our decision making. Yeah, I mean, I think the types of organizations that are drawn to something like sociocracy are also generally doing it from a sort of equity perspective. They’re just generally interested in decentralizing decision making, maybe making things a little bit less top down um organizations that are close to organizing or social justice tend to respond to this type of model because it’s about sort of disrupting traditional power structures in a way that just generally appeals to people while also understanding it’s a big shift and sort of putting it into practice is uh is complicated and um it involves a lot of letting go of uh the traditional sort of seats and, and controls of power that people are used to in organizations. Hence, you know, the senior leadership has got to be uh has got to be willing to have some fun with uh decision making but make decision making more equitable, exactly less flat as you, as you already explained. OK. Um We need to have a foundation, there’s some things we need to learn like circle structures. Yes, some things. OK. So set us up with our foundation. Yes. So this is, and this is by the way, also how there are bits and pieces that you can borrow from sociocracy, even if your whole organization is not ready to sort of move uh part and parcel into a socio cratic model. Um Essentially the way that we sort of take the hierarchical structure and adapt it for sociocracy is by having a relationship between sort of parent and child circles. And you can think of the core of those being a general circle, which in most organizations is kind of like your C suite, you sort of executive leadership and decision makers and then governing that is a mission circle which in nonprofits is typically akin to the board, may or may not not be all internal folks, but which are trying to make sure that the organization stays aligned with its declared mission and purpose in the world. The general circle is about managing the organization and then stemming off of that central circle are sub circles which are equivalent in many ways to teams and departments. And the thing that’s a bit different is the model by which these circles are linked. So as opposed to being sort of purely top down, there’s a system of double linking where there’s a leader and a delegate that is a member of both every parent circle and the child circle. And part of what that enables is for there to be two perspectives that get shared in both the parent circle and the child circle. And that the leader is making sure decision making happening uh or influence or questions happening at the parent level circle are being communicated down to the sub circle. And then the delegate is doing the same thing in the reverse, making sure that what’s happening in the sub circle is reflected back to the parent circle. And the explicit delegation of power is that rather than all of the decision making happening at the C suite level, that executive general circle level, anything within the declared domain and aim, which is an explicit sort of set of standards that get defined when you create these circle structures is, you know, my marketing sub circle has an explicit aim that is about, you know, publicizing and communicating about the role of our organization. And their domain includes potentially things like the website, the email list, anything that falls squarely within the domain of a sub circle, they have the autonomous decision making power to make decisions and recommendations at that level without necessarily always having to run things up a chain to a uh a general circle for buy in. OK. All right. That, well, that’s the big shift. They, they have the autonomy, they, they have the, they, they have the authority and they also have the responsibility, the accountability, responsibility for their, for their decision. OK. Now, at one point, you had said the parent child and the, the, the parent circle and the child circle. Uh I don’t that, that still sounds hierarchical. I, is there a better? I’m, I’m not trying to revolutionize sociocracy. I just learning about it for the past 9.5 minutes. But uh I don’t know that, like I said, it still sounds hierarchical. Well, there, there are different words we can use. Um I think it’s not wrong to say that it is, it is taking the thing that is effective about so about hierarchy, which is the fact that there are different levels of domain and oversight that are needed when an organization is handling both high level strategic and mission level impact type things and then all the way down to the weeds of the operations. So I think it makes sense that there’s still relationships and gradations of responsibility. Um And they are still related to one another in that sort of binary relationship that we can think of as hierarchy. But typically hierarchy stacks power and decision making at the top and the farther down in the hierarchy you go, there’s less decision making and that’s explicitly inverted in sociocracy and some decisions do need to go up to the parent. Exactly. I mean, there’s always the case where a sub circle itself, even though there’s a lot of uh rich process around decision making and how you get consent and how you integrate objections. There’s always the case that a sub circle can’t in itself integrate all the objections and make a fully consent based in which case that’s part of the reason why we still have the parent circles. Ultimately, things can be escalated up. If they can’t be solved at the sub circle, they don’t have the data, whatever information can’t resolve the conflict, they may not have the relationships to make their decision effective. It could be that it could also just simply be that there’s opposing viewpoints that are both valid. So when someone has an objection, it, first of all, it really needs to be based on something that is related to the aim and domain. I think this proposal that’s on the table, say it’s about a certain kind of marketing channel that we want to open up and somebody may have a really genuine objection that can’t be about their sort of personal feelings and preferences. But it is about, I genuinely think that us going into tiktok is going to erode our aim, it is going to make us less effective at our aim and domain. And therefore I am going to withhold my consent from our ability to move forward with that. And the group can try to integrate that objection by again, sort of saying, well, we can try it for a period of time and then check back in, we can amend the proposal and say we’re only going to do tiktok for certain kinds of campaigns, there’s ways to sort of balance that out. But if the group cannot ultimately arrive at consent rather than consensus full consent from everybody involved. Then worst case, that’s why you have parent circles to escalate things up to. It’s time for a break. Virtuous is a software company committed to helping nonprofits go generosity. Virtuous believes a generosity has the power to create profound change in the world and in the heart of the giver, it’s their mission to move the needle on global generosity by helping nonprofits better connect with and inspire their givers. Responsive fundraising puts the donor at the center of fundraising and grows giving through personalized donor journeys that responds to the needs of each individual. Virtuous is the only response of nonprofit CRM designed to help you build deeper relationships with every donor at scale. Virtuous is CRM fundraising, volunteer marketing and automation tools. You need to create responsive experiences that build trust and grow impact virtuous.org. Now back to sociocracy with Justin Birdsong. Le let’s shift away from the theoretical for a minute. Tell, tell me a story, tell me a, a success story of uh sociocracy decision making. Uh Sure. So I think one way that I have been able to implement it in a very small way is with um some colleagues of mine who were putting together uh their own sort of strategic plan for their new consulting company. So it’s a small, tiny, tiny group, group of three and they were looking for some sort of system of power that would enable the three of them, two founders and the sort of first hire underneath them to equitably balance the decision making power between them and then also position them to grow as they imagine they’re bringing on eventually mother staff. How could they do so in a way that continues that same method and doesn’t kind of concentrate all of the power and decision making in the hands of the founders. And so this is actually a really good example of where, you know, we went through the sort of whole model top to bottom. And there were lots of things that they were like, you know, I don’t know that we’re going to fully adopt that, that that sort of feels like in some ways that’s impeding us. We might not need quite this level of process and decision making. But we really, for example, liked the uh the circle structures because it gave clear aims and domains that could be distributed and it allowed them to then divorce in some cases themselves from one of those circles and say, OK, I’m going to step back and let these two other principal consultants take the operations circle and they have full aim and domain about that. If they need my input, they can come to me because all three of them are in the general circle, but I fully trust and delegate all of my trust responsibility to them. And it’s enabled them to um understand where they need all three of their decisions versus where they can move faster by making autonomous decisions themselves in smaller groups. And how long has this start up in uh engaged this way? They are in their third year and they adopted this early in 2023. So about a year and change and they’re still successful, they’re finding that it’s easier to, again, they sort of, they can move faster without anybody feeling disenfranchised because there are explicit agreements up front that these two individuals are double linked into this parents circle. They have autonomous decision making power over this particular domain and aim if it’s operations, if it’s product development, et cetera. And um and there’s no overhead of having to constantly run things back up the chain. I can see how this would make an any organization more, more nimble, you think more reactive in, in a, in a good way. I don’t mean knee jerk reactive. But you know, like the three of us in our circle can huddle and we can make this decision maybe in 10 or 15 minutes where we might have to wait for the next meeting with the vice president or the, or the CEO and that’s not scheduled for another whatever 10 days, you know, we can resolve this right now. That’s the best practical application of it is that it just allows people to move swiftly and it puts into place agreements of I at the time we set up the circle, we imbue it with this trust if you’re in this circle, otherwise I would be in the circle if I didn’t trust you to make the decision, I’m going to delegate explicitly this power and that allows us all move a little bit quicker. Plus, it tends to raise this sort of sense of morale because everybody has a voice at the table and has explicit ability to influence whether or not decisions get made and move forward. Now, what is your role in sociocracy? Are you, are you, is there a certification for teaching this and implementing it for organizations or skeleton key? What are, what are you doing around sociocracy? Well, at skeleton key, it’s mostly a thing that we have imbued in certain scenarios. Like what if we’re setting up a kind of committee? We are always kind of looking at like power dynamics and what’s going to enable an organization to move fast. Sometimes we are calling it sociocracy. Like with the group of consultants, I was mentioning other times, it’s more like principles of equitable decision making that we just try to weave in. Um but there is um there’s a number of organizations that do this, but I spent all of last year working in and training with an organization called Sociocracy for all that is an international NGO. But it’s based in the US. And their whole mission is about sort of spreading education about socio cratic models. And I trained in their sociocracy. Sociocracy academy for all of 2023. And um and that is where I learned a lot of this content and was able to practice it with people all around the world who again are using it in some places in the sort of eco permaculture sort of movement, cohousing movements. There’s lots of places where this is being used that are outside of sort of formal nonprofit organizations. And so now do we have our foundation set? Can we move to the next step of process? There’s, there’s something called rounds and integrating objections. And so do we have our foundations we’ve created? OK. Uh So what does it look like in practice then? And so this is where we’re, we’re sort of, we’re inner circles, right? We’re in our, our meetings and we’re trying to have more effective meetings. And one of the ways that we facilitate, there’s a strong, strong facilitation role at all levels of sociocracy and most meetings are run through what are called rounds. And that’s essentially whoever is in the facilitator role in that particular meeting, which is often rotate. Yeah, is going to make sure that every single person in the room or in the circle gets a moment to talk. That’s explicit. It takes some of the pressure off because everybody knows that at some point they’re going to get called on, they’re going to get to say their piece even if they have nothing to say and they can just pass. So it takes some of that pressure off of people feeling like they need to insert themselves. When, when does my chance come? I, I didn’t get a chance yet. The meeting’s gonna end. I’m not gonna, everybody gets an explicit chance. Exactly. It also helps to balance voices because then you don’t, it’s the facilitator’s role to make sure everybody’s being heard. It’s sort of the reasonable, roughly equally, nobody’s dominating that contrary to our purpose here. Exactly right. And so we are facilitating things through rounds. And so for example, when we are making a decision, there will be a proposal on the table. That’s the sort of traditional way that we talk about whatever the topic is the proposal. What is it that we’re deciding on and somebody might run, the facilitator would run us through first is a clarifying questions round. So we’re going to go around. Everybody gets just a moment to say, is there anything about the proposal you don’t understand or need more information about? We can go through that as needed once all the clarifying questions are asked, there’s a second round that is about reactions and that’s when people can start say like, you know, I am hesitant about this or I actually think this is a really good idea or, you know, I have some real concerns about this particular proposal as it’s articulated. And then that would be followed by an explicit consent round that is literally going around. Do you consent to this, do you not consent for this? And within that the sort of range of tolerance of consent, you know, there’s gonna be people who love it and they like, yes, this is perfect for me. I’m super enthusiastic about this and then there’s other people who are like this is fine, like it works for me, maybe it sort of falls into this sort of neutral territory and both of those count as consent. Um And then the third option is I object, which again, I have something about this proposal. I feel like it’s going to interrupt or be counterproductive to our aim. So I have an objection. I’m going to clearly state what that objection is. That’s that sort of last round. If there are objections, then the group is going to attempt to integrate those objections by potentially extending the timeline. Um Saying, you know, can we modify the proposal in some way that accounts for this or can we agree to move forward with this proposal as written? But know that we are going to check back in at some specific point and revisit it and what ultimately we’re trying to get people to consent within, to move whatever it is into that range of tolerance of at least being able to say like, OK, this works enough. It’s good enough for now. OK. So I have to be heard. Yes, my, my objection has to be heard. If, if, if that’s where I that’s where I start out precisely. OK. Um Say a little more about the role of the, the person who has the dual uh the dual appointment. They’re in the, they’re in, they’re in the, the parent circle, but also the child circle that is the liaison is that the leader and the delegate, the delegate, the delegate has the two, the dual role, dual assignment, let’s say yes. So the circle leader, you know, which may or may not always be the circle facilitator by the way, but they are the sort of designated leader of convening that circle. They may be the one that’s calling people together or sort of managing outcomes, et cetera. Um leader. Less likely to be rotating, it’s selected. Actually, there’s a selection process that’s similar to the rounds where somebody gets nominated. We discuss qualifications, people can amend their nominations and then the group decides on who the leader and the delegate are and the delegate is another participant who is explicitly not in the leadership role, but they sort of represent everybody else. And so their job is is to again, sort of keep in some ways, keep each other honest, right? Like if you and I are both in our marketing sub circle and then we have to go up to our general circle because we are double linked and you’re the leader and I’m the delegate, you may be reporting out on something that our decision making group did in the sub circle. And I’m another perspective. So I can even just sort of qualify sort of what you said is like, actually, there’s something else, I think the general circle needs to know about how that decision was made. We had to integrate this particular kind of objection and this was the nuance about that. And so it makes sure that there’s two perspectives being represented in every conversation, which helps again, sort of make sure that there’s no one person’s perception or, um, you know, allegiance to a certain kind of outcome that is going to prevail in every case. What else? Uh, what else should we know? I mean, you have some, uh, things that you’ve suggested about the, the, the topic, um, understanding how it improves equity and inclusivity. I mean, I think, I feel like we’ve talked about that at the outset even. But what, what else, what else should folks know about this, this process? I, I think ultimately the thing to know is that it is, um, it is a set of tools and I think one thing is people see it and they may have a really, well, they have a really strong reaction one way or the other. Yeah. Right. It’s unlikely to be neutral, talking about the neutral in the decision making. But I like it’s ok, you know, I could live with it. It’s probably gonna be, I think it’s very positive or very negative. I think that’s exactly the case. And so, um and while that is true, and I think even, you know, a thing that sociocracy for all that organization that I was training with, you know, they do implementations of this in organizations and they are frequently unable to move forward because if there’s not the kind of buy in and alignment about the kind of seismic change it represents, if you are an existing organization with a traditional hierarchical structure and you’re planning to upend that, that is not something to be done lightly. Um But the thing that I think I want to reinforce is that I see it as not just a monolith but a whole set of practices and tools and um sort of micro processes that can be used and adapted, especially when you are in an operational or a technological or project project based kind of role because you are constantly making decisions in agile projects, technology implementations, you’re constantly trying to like get stakeholder buy in to be a level in a certain way and make sure that decisions are soundly informed by different, maybe even competing perspectives. And you want to be able to integrate objections from different stakeholders and project members because they may have something really valid to say that you may want to adjust a little bit. And so I see it as a whole tool set from which people can learn and take pieces of it that they can implement. Even if you’re going to do it within a traditionally hierarchical organization? Is it difficult in uh sort of the, the delegation of where the authority ends for each circle? I mean, there, you had, you had said at the outset, there are certain things that are not gonna be conducive to this or the CEO is just not gonna give up uh uh give up sole authority over. Um But say a little more about delineating the, the boundaries of each circle. How do we, how do we define that? Sure. It’s when you, when you’re creating a circle structure of any kind, even if you were going to sort of just do this within, uh let’s say you have a technology department and you have a couple of different teams and you sort of, and you want to be able to adapt this just even within a department, you could sort of the thing that you do when you’re defining it is you first are articulating the mission that unites the whole group together and then you are delineating the aim and domain. The aim is what we’re here to accomplish. And then the domain is the set of things, usually multiple things that then fall into our responsibilities and oversight. Like for example, one group may have the domain of the website, another group has domain over technology infrastructure network desktop. Another group has domain over project management and applications, things like that. Um And so you define those things at the outset and you are clear about what does and does not fall into the domain and you try to make sure everything is captured somewhere. And then of course, you know, organic organizations are constantly changing. New things will come up and when they do come up, it’s the job of that parent circle to figure out. OK. Whose domain does this fall into? Does this stay with ours? Does it move into one of the sub circles or do we even need a sub circle of off of that? Do we need a new sub circle that has a clear domain? And that’s the way by level setting right at the beginning about who has, who gets to decide who decides, who decides everybody decides at the beginning? Ok. OK. Leaving it there. You feel like we gave it adequate coverage? I think so. Thank you very much, very interesting sociocracy. Um Justin Birdsong, founder and principal at Skeleton Key Strategies. I love the company name too. Skeleton Key. Thank you so much. That’s brilliant. I appreciate it. Thank you, Justin. Thank you Tony and thank you for being with Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio coverage of 24 NTC, the 2024 nonprofit technology conference where we are sponsored by Heller consulting technology strategy and implementation for nonprofits. Thanks so much for being with us. It’s time for a break. Donor box, open up new cashless in person donation opportunities with donor box live kiosk. The smart way to accept cashless donations. Anywhere. Anytime picture this a cash free on site giving solution that effortlessly collects donations from credit cards, debit cards and digital wallets. No team member required. Plus your donation data is automatically synced with your donor box account. No manual data entry or errors make giving a breeze and focus on what matters your cause. Try donor box live kiosk and revolutionize the way you collect donations. Visit Donor box.org to learn more its time for Tonys take two. Thank you, Kate. A couple of days ago, I was on the beach. Uh I just sat myself down, still not warm enough to go, you know, sit for six or eight hours under an umbrella, not quite that warm yet we’re getting there. But uh I was just out uh walking and I decided to sit down and there was a little infant, uh I’d say 23 months old or so and she was being held by, I’m not sure it was mother or grandmother. I think it was her mother and the, the so the mother was facing the, the, the sand and the dunes and the houses and she had their baby facing out uh to the ocean and this little infant was just so captivated by, you know, the vast ocean. I guess the waves and she was just like serene and uh they were like 20 ft away or so, you know, it’s not, not really that far. And, you know, the baby wasn’t fussy, just calm and, I don’t know, h, I don’t know, I don’t know if babies think, I don’t know what, I don’t know what infants think about. Do they even have the capacity to think or what they, they, what, I don’t know what they’re doing in their minds, in their brains. But she, she was just so calm on her mom’s shoulder over her mom’s shoulder and I was just thinking, oh man, that the ocean and you know, she could feel the breeze and maybe smell the salt, although she doesn’t know it’s salt air. She just knows it smells a little different than, than her house. Uh unless her mother cooks with a lot of salt, but all the senses from a little infant from like a two or three month old infant. And I was thinking just how unusual it must be for her, the wonder, you know, and just to sort of seeing it through the infant’s eyes too. I was enjoying it myself, especially like more than usual that that afternoon, but just, you know, through an infant’s eyes, the world or in, you know, and just the ocean for the first time. It was, it was uh it was really moving, it was really something uh and it went on for many minutes. Uh the baby was just captivated, we can all be captivated by life. See the world through infants eyes now and then, and that’s Tony’s take two K. I would love to go back in time and look at the world through like five year old Kate’s eyes because I’m sure it was so much more colorful and bright and just exciting and I really like, didn’t take anything for granted, you know, at that age. Right? Because so much was new, like this little infant watching the, watching the ocean and hearing the waves and uh yeah, you know, we get a little jaded so take time to smell the roses. We’ve got Buku, but loads more time here is attract more donors. Welcome back to Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio coverage of the 2024 nonprofit technology conference. We are all together in Portland, Oregon at the Oregon Convention Center. Nonprofit Radio is SCHED, is sponsored by Heller consulting at 24 NTC Heller does technology strategy and implementation for nonprofits with me for this conversation conversation like I’m 14. My voice breaks are Shannon Bowen and Emily Def. Frisco. Shannon is founder and CEO at Monsoon Leadership. And Emily de Frisco is senior Director of Communications at the Center for Environmental Health. Shannon Emily, welcome. Thanks for having us. Glad to have you on nonprofit radio. So we’re talking about your session topic. Have you done your session yet? We did it, you did it all right, as you’re fresh off the stage. So all the questions maybe we asked some about, about some of your questions that came up your session is full court press harness development and communication teams to attract donors. Alright. Sounds like we’re breaking down silos. Uh Emily, let’s start with you. Why do we need? I think it may be uh it may be widely known, but I want to make it explicit why do we need this session? We need this session because it’s never been more clear that there are silos, you can absolutely collaborate and work together to achieve your shared goals. So we had a lot of fun in our session, taking a lot of questions from folks who were learning just how to collaborate across the teams and how to really achieve their goals. Uh Shannon, what what happened? Why, why are we in this situation? Development and communications. They, they seem like ideal partners. Why are we siloed? What happened? Well, I think it’s hard for humans to work together in general. So that’s just across the board. Um But Emily and I worked together at Center for Environmental Health and really, we harnessed all of the different vehicles to connect with our donors. So not just donor emails, but also using social media website pop ups, you know, earned media, everything to really attract new donors and engaged at a deeper level with their existing donors. And so we really wanted to share that story because it is actionable and you can do it today at your organization. All right. So, so how we got here is just human nature. Well, I don’t know what happened, what happened to the, what they seem like symbiotic partners. I think that sometimes people put a lot of pressure on development because you got to bring in the money and you’re paying for people’s salaries. And so sometimes in organizations, it’s like, oh, well, development is more important than communications. But really what Emily and I saw as they are part and parcel, working together to increase the brand reputation and that brings in your major donors. So really, instead of working in opposition coming together and co collaborating on campaigns can increase your impact exponentially, which is what we did at ce H Yeah. And sometimes there can be a little tines as Shannon mentioned, you know, between communications and development. Um but we really valued each other’s expertise, respected each other’s expertise. And that really set the tone for collaboration for our teams as well. Ok. All right, Emily, let’s stay with you. How do we start to break down the silos? How do we start to collaborate, see each other as, as equal partners? What do we do? Yeah, it starts with communication with setting up meetings, brainstorming together, creating campaigns together. Really soup to nuts, sit together and work on something in a collaborative way. Instead of having, oh, my team is working on this, your team is working on this and never the Twain shall meet. Um really collaborate from the get go and that you will have a stronger campaign meeting together and from the beginning and then sharing success at the end. So it’s not just development going and presenting to the board, you’re bringing communications along and saying, hey, we did this great campaign together. I’ve never seen that. I mean, I always see development, presenting development outcomes. OK. All right. What, what else can we do? Yeah, I mean, I think communications serves a vital role in the organization and just having communications needs to have the humility and respect of the development team when they approach the development team to understand that um you know, fundraising for the organization is so it is so challenging. So sometimes communications folks can get kind of a little bit set in their ways and just really from the get go valuing fundraising and really just putting your best foot forward and valuing the expertise will set you up for success. What if development and communications are both under the same, let’s say vice president is that that’s not sufficient. I mean, you still still the two teams should be meeting together. I mean, I, I can see a scenario where they, where they don’t even though they’re under the same vice president. Exactly. I actually am also a Chief Advancement Officer for an organization in Seattle. And so I oversee development and communications and still even within that, you need to bring everybody together to say, OK, how are we using each vehicle to achieve our goals. And so we’re not just, oh, we’re only going to send print appeals, we’re only going to send email appeals. How are you incorporating social media? How are you incorporate video or I currently work with genetic scientists. We’re talking about podcasting because they don’t really like to be on camera. You know, I think that we have to be creative about those different mediums to increase the brand recognition, but also to talk to the donors about the content that they’re interested in and really it’s coming together brainstorming that we get our best ideas. All right. And that, that’s a great transition to another one of your learning outcomes from your description, expanding social media as well as earned and traditional media who speaks to is that this is my favorite topic is press and media. I still believe it’s the best way to reach the most amount of people when you have a piece in the New York Times or the San Francisco Chronicle or the Chicago Tribune. Um You know, you’re reaching millions, tens of millions of people at once. So it’s very important to develop in your communications team, a robust press and media strategy, develop that calendar and then keep some of it flexible for breaking news and then work with your executive director, your program directors, your science director, whomever you have at the organization who’s really moving and shaking and come up with a way that you can develop news for your organization and you can use one of the fancy platforms that there are to pitch journalists like Cision or Meltwater. There’s other ones as well help a reporter out Harrow. Is that still a thing? Yeah, I think it is. Yeah, I think so. But you can also be scrappy about it and build your own press list using an Excel spreadsheet. Um, that’s a possibility to build relationships with journalists that way. And then when you have, have a press release, ready to go, you pitch the journalist and you make a splash with that news and try to connect it to current events and then once you have that piece that you landed, um then you can approach your development team and say, hey, we’re in the San Francisco Chronicle today on the front page and that is so validating for donors um and for board and for everyone who cares about your organization’s mission. You said something that I want to flush out a little bit with, um have a relationship with journalists before you’re pitching before there’s a news item, news hook related to your work. Say a little more about developing that relationship, you know, like uh building the digging the well before you’re thirsty, you know, building the relationship before you want to pitch the journalist. There’s so many ways to do it. You can follow journalists, you like on Twitter who are reporting on issues that your organization works on, you can tweet at them and say, hey, thank you. I read your piece. It was great. I would love to connect with you. Um You can build that press list, as I mentioned and you can proactively share with them the work your organization is doing in our session. We talked a lot about virtual town halls, basically a fancy phrase for a webinar. And you can invite journalists to your webinars, invite them to your virtual town halls. They might write about your work. At the very least they’re going to get educated about the work your organization is doing. So all of those are things you can do to build relationships with journalists and to the extent that there’s still local journalism, which is not, not nearly what it was 10 years ago. Uh that includes local journalists, not only the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle and the Chicago Tribune. Absolutely. We just had, um Fox News come out to our office in Oakland yesterday. They came out at like seven pm and interviewed our CEO about a report that we launched yesterday. So local journalism is still alive and well, although it has, you know, as you said, there’s been some setbacks but you can still reach local journalists and they’ll still report on the work your organization is doing ok. All right. So you’re earned in traditional media, uh social media, Shannon. Do you want to flush out social media a little bit. I’d actually love to hand this over to Emily because she has an amazing hot of depressed story um about tiktok. Yeah. So we released this toxic fashion report yesterday. Um We have tested a lot of consumer products for toxic chemicals and we found over the period of the last 10 years, high levels of lead in purses and other accessories at Ross and Burlington stores. So of course, we’ve sent them legal notices, but it’s kind of like a persistent problem. So we released this report yesterday, detailing kind of our results and the legal actions that we’ve taken. And we did a Tik Tok video on it um which we didn’t expect to get a lot of traction because it’s really um like kind of a slide carousel with music and as of today, it’s reached over 300,000 people. So social media there is, is still a wonderful way to reach people. Ok. Uh Is there a broader lesson that uh our consultant from uh Monsoon wants to extrapolate from the, the, the tiktok breaking news? Well, I think that you have no idea which of those 300,000 views is going to be your next major donor and major donors are looking for causes that resonate with their values and they’re looking out in the world. They’re watching Tik Tok and we had an experience at Center for Environmental Health where we had out of the blue, an email to our info at Ce h.org started con connecting and talking with them and they turned into a $300,000 over a three year donor and you just never know who is, who is reading, who is watching. But you, you have to find a way to engage them and bring them in. And then once they’re there using all of your communication strategies to steward the donor and bring them even closer and increase that gift. And so I really think that all development directors should be savvy in communications and be open and willing to new communication channels like tiktok, you know, Twitter was the hot thing five years ago and now we know it isn’t. So you gotta be open to linkedin Tik Tok all the different ways that people are engaging now because it could shift and you don’t want to be left behind. Now, these were two anecdotes that both called up the number 300,000. You’re not making this up, are you? I guess it’s just our lucky number, I guess. So, skeptic in me, I’m sure you’re being very truthful for non nonprofit radio listeners. I mean, you wouldn’t, you wouldn’t lie to you. A scout. I was a girl scout for a long time and scouts on her counts, otherwise it would have to be a pinky pledge, but scouts on her counts. Um Anything else you want to say about media, whether social traditional earned? I think social media is a great way to showcase your organization’s work. And what we do at ce H is we have a comprehensive editorial calendar. We keep some of it flexible and we do different strategies across different platforms. Um linkedin is growing really quickly right now. So is tiktok Instagram a little bit? Um So definitely diversify your strategy across social media. The news is very hard, it’s very depressing. Our work is sometimes challenging. So I always encourage um social media strategists to celebrate the wins. So when you do have a piece of good news or you are part of some legislation that passes, you know, really celebrate that on social media and you will find that, that those are some of the most highly engaged with posts that you create. And I’ll also add that in our session. We talked a lot about email strategies with donors and segmenting your list and really talking to your donors in different ways in different places. Glossing over here we go. So when I came to ch there had been a two year vacancy in the director at V Monro. So our donors hadn’t heard from us. So the first thing we did is we set up a what we call our three things email and this was a monthly email from our CEO to our major donors. It came from his name. It looked like a normal email to the point that people respond back and be like, oh, it’s so great to hear how you’re doing. Here’s my, my wife, how it’s like, oh, this is the development team, but it looked like it was, it was fresh off his email. Exactly. And we had huge engagement with it and we actually ended up, we were writing a story about, uh, toxic chemicals and exercise. You wouldn’t think that’s how you’re gonna get back, one of your biggest lapse donors. But we did and she wrote back and said, oh, I’m using this brand blah, blah, blah. We had it tested by our toxic team wrote back to her, not only did she come back as a lapse donor, but then she for the first time ever introduced us to her family foundation. And we got a second gift from her family foundation and it was all because of this email and the interaction, the opening the conversation through that email. And so we really believe in the power of segmented emails, talking in different voices, providing different content that all aligns with your brand, but really speaks to the donor. And how does this align with our bigger purpose of bringing together? What do you say? Harnessing the development and, and communications teams? Well, and I think that’s because we would repurpose content from the communications team. And we would hear, oh, this is what’s hitting really big on social media. This is what you know, reporters are really interested in and we would tailor that content to the major donors based on what was hitting and lo and behold, it would engage in conversation. And our donors would say, hey, I want to hear more about that report, you know, how did you guys even think to test lead in purses? You know, and so I think it’s like if you don’t know the data of the other team, you don’t really know what your audience wants and we need to deliver the content that our audience is actually interested in. So you got to entertain too, purses and exercise bands and socks. We did a whole Safe Socks campaign in clothing, high levels of BP A in all of our workout clothing, sports bras, leggings, shirts, shorts. Um Yeah, so this is one of the issues that we’re tackling with our public interest litigation, telling companies get the BP A out of the clothes. Ok. Um, we still have more time together. You, you did a what a 60 minute session, right? So we’re not, we’re not flushing out some things. We’ve only been talking for about 15 minutes. We, we’re not flushing out some things that you did for your live session. Well, I think one thing that we talked about is really about validating your brand, that there are a lot of people that are tackling the same issues that you are and you also have a great mission, but you really have to your brand to attract top donors. And so using her media using virtual town halls where you’re your CEO in line with other stakeholders that builds a trust of your brand and validity that you are actually the right person to be delivering this mission that all increases the dollar amount that you’re gonna get from donors. So you really have to be thinking about all of these things working together to validate your brand because there’s a lot, a lot of great missions, there’s a lot of great organizations, but why are you the right person to do this work? And that’s what’s going to get a new major donor or a larger gift from an existing donor? What were some of the some of the questions that you got? We got so many great questions. Let’s see. We definitely talked a lot about virtual town halls. People were very excited about that topic and exactly what Shannon was just saying about bringing together different stakeholders to kind of validate your brand. Um We talked about a lot about press and media coverage and talked about how you don’t have to have a huge budget and you don’t have to have a super comprehensive plan. You can get started just sitting down with your executive director, your program directors, your science director, whomever you have, who’s really moving and shaking at the organization and create a piece together and what you want to do for that is think about what the work your organization doing, what what’s happening, what has changed because that’s what reporters want to talk about is what has changed in your organization or what has changed in the work and then connecting it to current events, what’s going on in the world that you, that’s connected to your organization’s work. And then you can write an op ed together hooks we talked about and you can pitch it to different reporters or you can publish it on your website, you can publish it on linkedin and that’s a way of really driving thought leadership forward. Absolutely. We also had an interesting question about how many staff we had and who’s actually watching the metrics and who’s reporting back the metrics and why we were inspired to do this session is we both have small teams. So Emily had two staff and I had three staff and it really just takes a dedicated portion of one person’s time to look at the metrics and to discover the gems. I told a story of, I had a staff who would look at who opened and who clicked on the emails and she brought it to our team and she said, hey, there’s this donor that’s been, they only give about $500 but they’re opening and click everything. And when I looked at them, they’re actually a producer in Hollywood, maybe we should re engage them, guess what we did. And it turned into a $10,000 donor. And so by having someone just take a minute and look at those, bring that data back to the team. You can actually optimize your process and get a bigger result. And so, you know, we’re not a huge shop, we’re small shops, but we just kind of work smarter, not harder and really by working together, even though it’s monsoon consulting, you’re not enormous, you know, creating tidal waves and tsunamis. No, just little lightning bolts, you can create a tidal wave with a few amount of people. That’s true. That is true. Well, our 300,000 on Tiktok today. There you go. That’s just today, that much breaking news that we didn’t make it to our slide show because it just happened. Is there any more questions that came that you think could be instructive for us? I think there is definitely some people that just felt really frustrated, you know, that they wanna do things this way or they want to try new ideas and the other team member doesn’t want to. And I think that Emily and I are both early adopters of technology. We’re both really open minded and it’s like you have, everything is moving so fast right now. You have to be open to new technologies and new ways to communicate with your donors. And if you do things, the same thing over and over again, you’re gonna bore your donors and you’re gonna see attrition. And so I think that just one of the main takeaways is be creative take risks. You talked about an idea that failed and you have to be open to failure to be able to be successful. And I think that both of us have that same ethos and we brought that to our teams and that’s why we could create so much success in a short amount of time. You know, while I was there, our development team brought in close to him, million dollars over our goal. We could not have done that without the support of the coms team and all of their creative ideas and immersing our donors in this message that what we’re doing is important and vital and urgent. And that’s where I feel like you’re missing out. If you’re not harnessing your communications team, you’re missing out on the bigger ripple effect you can make for your donors. I’m dying to leave it there because that was a beautiful closing. However, there’s a story that you teased a story of a failure that was, that’s instructive. Why don’t you tell that story? Yeah. So sometimes your op ed that you craft that you spend so much time on does not get picked up. So we have had, you know, an op ed on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle. And then there was another time that we spent a lot of work on an op ed on the very sexy topic of leaded aviation gas. I know people are falling asleep already. So this is actually a big problem because in this small little municipal airports where the small aircraft are flying, a lot of leaded aviation gas is released. And then the folks living in that area have high blood lead levels. So we wrote this op ed about this California airport and how the Children living nearby had blood lead levels on par or worse than those in Flint during the height of the lead poisoning crisis. So we had a lot of facts and figures and a lot of solutions that talked about our litigation kind of making, you know, unleaded aviation gas more prominent and prevalent. Um and nobody bit, we pitched it out a bunch of different places and nobody bit, but it was ok because what we ended up doing is posting it on our blog and um kind of made lemonade out of lemons and that page has been one of the most viewed pages on our website. So it all worked out in the end even though we failed along the way to place the op ed. How about we leave it there then? A good uh a willingness to share a failure that resulted in a highly viewed page. And uh also uh Shannon’s uh two minutes ago, very good wrap up, which I was, I was, I was very tempted to end there, but I wanted to hear the story. You can’t tease the story with failure though, but that’s why it wasn’t a failure. That it was the most red page on the blog and on a linkedin article which, you know, really harnessing all the linkedin tools is a great way to reach your audience. And I don’t think people should be afraid of failure because if you’re trying new things, you will fail and you should embrace it and learn from it and it’s going to work out, especially something that’s outside your control. Like whether newspaper accepts your op ed or not. Exactly. Exactly. But if you don’t try, you’re certainly not going to get published, right? And then you balance out with things. You can control your blog, hosting your own virtual town hall, hosting your own panel event, you can control those things. So yeah, you have some percentage of stuff you’re thrown out into the world and hoping it sticks and the other half you’re actually controlling and make sure it fits within your strategy. That’s Shannon Bowen founder and CEO at Monsoon Leadership with her is Emily De Frisco, senior director of Communications at the Center for Environmental Health. Shannon Emily. Thanks very much. Thank you. I’m glad. Thank you. And thanks to you for being with nonprofit radio’s coverage of the 2024 nonprofit technology conference where we are sponsored by Heller consulting, technology strategy and implementation for nonprofits. Next week, more from 24 NTC with strategic meetings for teams of one and cyber incident cases and takeaways. If you missed any part of this week’s show, I beseech you find it at Tony martignetti.com. We’re sponsored by Virtuous. Virtuous gives you the nonprofit CRM fundraising volunteer and marketing tools you need to create more responsive donor experiences and grow, giving, virtuous.org and by donor box, outdated donation forms blocking your supports, generosity, donor box, fast, flexible and friendly fundraising forms for your nonprofit donor box.org past flexible friendly fundraising forms. Love it. 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 guide 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 April 29, 2024: Acquiring Email Leads On Social & Matching Gifts 101, 201, 301

 

Melanie Schaffel: Acquiring Email Leads On Social

This 2024 Nonprofit Technology Conference conversation helps you ensure your email acquisition efforts are targeting those interested in your work. You can incentivize your social audiences so they’ll willingly share their emails and you can measure the success of your acquisition campaigns. Melanie Schaffel from Parkinson’s Foundation helps you get started.

 

Julie Ziff Sint, Alison Hermance & Mark Doty: Matching Gifts 101, 201, 301

Julie Ziff Sint, Alison Hermance and Mark Doty, also from 24NTC, explain the different types and styles of matching gifts and challenge grants. How do you ethically message and how do you establish your own matching gifts asks? What if you don’t have a matching gift to take advantage of? And more. Julie is with Sanky Communications. Alison is from WildCare. And Mark is at San Francisco SPCA.

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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 get slapped with a diagnosis of primary sclerosing cholangitis. If you inflamed and scarred me with the idea that you missed this week’s show. Here’s our associate producer, Kate with the highlights. Hey, Tony, this week we have acquiring email leads on social. This 2024 nonprofit technology conference conversation helps you ensure your email acquisition efforts are targeting those interested in your work. You can incentivize your social audiences so they’ll willingly share their emails and you can measure the success of your acquisition campaigns. Melanie Saffle from Parkinson’s Foundation helps you get started then matching gifts. 101, 201 and 301. Julie Zant Alison, Hermance and Mark doty. Also from 24 N DC. Explain the different types and styles of matching gifts and challenge grants. How do you ethically message and how do you establish your own matching gifts? Asks what if you don’t have a matching gift to take advantage of and more Julie is with SI Communications. Alison is from Wild Care and Mark is at San Francisco S PC A on Tony’s take two travel convos were sponsored by Virtuous. Virtuous. Gives you the nonprofit CRM fundraising volunteer and marketing tools you need to create more responsive donor experiences and grow, giving. Virtuous.org here is acquiring email leads on social. Welcome back to Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio coverage of the 2024 nonprofit technology conference in Portland, Oregon where we are sponsored by Heller consulting technology strategy and implementation for nonprofits. Before we start the conversation, I wanna let you know that you may hear sounds of a uh a AAA tear down around us. There’s uh 24 NTC. The, the archive is uh being taken down booth by booth around us. But nonprofit radio perseveres, this is irrelevant to us. Uh We have our own power. I have a generator outside uh uh and 50 gallons of diesel fuel. So we’re, we’re prepared to continue regardless of what happens around the nonprofit radio uh booth. And for our, this is our final conversation of 2024 and it is with Melanie Saffle. She is senior manager of digital advertising at the Parkinson’s Foundation. Welcome to nonprofit Radio Melanie. Thank you, Tony. Thanks so much for having me. It’s my pleasure. Thank you for rounding out our, our many conversations. I won’t say save the best for last. That’s a lot of pressure, but it’s a little no No, no, don’t do that to yourself. It is breaking down, but it’s irrelevant. And uh I’ve been looking forward to this because I think, I think these conversions are important. So we’re talking about acquiring email leads on social. We’re trying to uh convert our folks, right? Take a next step. You’re active with us on social. You might like us on social. Have a finger, grab a hand, we’d like a little more come over. We’ve got more things to offer on email for sure. So um a lot of the discussion we had was about all the social email website, all of our digital channels working in tandem. Um So we know that there’s a lot of people on social that have proven interest in us already. So if they don’t know already that we have an email series that they can join, we want to let them know how to easily get into it. Uh Let’s let’s start with identifying who the best prospects are for uh for this upgraded engagement opportunity. Let’s call it the uh the uh the upgraded, yeah, the Eoge og we always know that upgraded opportunity. Um who who should we be focusing on uh in our in our social channels? So an efficient way that we found to focus on the people that are proving interest is to use that first party data that for us meta provides these ads will be right through meta, right on the platform and we can upload our lists, we can create lists from different engagements that people are taking on Facebook, whether they’re watching our video or D ming us sliding into our D MS, right, ending up in our inbox and using that first party data. Just because in this more and more cookie less world that the whole wide internet is joining in on that. The first party data is key here. So we want to focus in on that and a lot of the session also focused on creating look alikes of those. So people that act similarly to the people that have proven interest to help broaden the reach a little bit wider, creating look alikes. That sounds like something phony. What does this scamming and fishing and ransomware? What is this? It is my favorite way to sound really impressive to my colleagues when I tell them that this is an option at all. So meta can create a whole new list based off the way that people act online, they act at least similarly online. And so whether the places they’re visiting, uh the actions they’re taking online based off their emails, based off the list of emails that we provide uh meta can generate a lookalike list. So just people that are acting similarly to the ones we already know like us and hopefully they like us too. OK. So these are folks that you don’t know and meta is finding them bringing them well, they’re not bringing them to you, but they’re identifying them for you. They’re not currently engaged with Parkinson’s, but they act like a lot of people who are, is that the algorithm is working in our favor that way? I see. Well, I’m glad it has some value for somebody somewhere that’s mildly reassuring. Infinitely reassuring. But I’m glad it’s helping you. Um All right. So then what might you do? How do you then reach out to those folks? So we’re targeting. That’s right. So the whole discussion did focus on the lead generation ads that we create right in meta. The idea behind it is that people are scrolling in their news feed when we want them to do an action. A lot of times we don’t, they don’t want to be taken away from their scroll. They don’t want another app to pop up or a browser to pop up. So by keeping them right in the platform, there’s a form that pops up from the ad that they can fill out real quick um in exchange for a resource that uh we hook them in with already and just give us a quick piece of information. A lot of it. Also, if the user has already approved autofill and whatnot on, on Facebook, then it kind of just pops in and generates there already. So it’s a really fast track to the finish line for the user and they just give us their name, email, we get out of there. They get their resource. Everyone, everyone wins. What’s your resource hook? So we’ve tested, this was like uh over six months, we ran about six ads only for about a week each and we tested different resources each time. A lot of times we focus on things that we know our audience wants and likes uh based off of seo social learning. Um You know, whether it’s a highly trafficked page or a resource that’s already, that usually performs well and highly engaged with organically on social things that we know people want. We can um kind of hang that like a little carrot on the stick, right? I don’t know if that’s the same carrot for the user, right? Carrot on a stick, carrot on a stick, but the carrot on a stick works too. Ok? Ok. Um So in our case, um maybe exercise content performs super well. Um I’m at the Parkinson’s Foundation and exercise is really important for people with Parkinson’s disease. So they’re always looking for what kind of exercise should I be doing or how often? And so if we have a PDF fact sheet, something like that, we let them know like if you just give us this little piece of information, we’ve got a PDF on the other side for you. OK. And you’re asking very low threshold, like first name and email, first, last name and email, hand, first, last email. So very low boundaries. I always object and I never fill in the phone. You know. What, what state are you in? I even object to state. I mean, I’ve been asked state. I don’t know if I’ve seen zip code, but I would find that equally annoying. Look, you’ve just given me a little PDF or a link to a video or something or a white paper for God’s sake. You know, I’m not, it’s not a marriage proposal. That’s right. I think we’ve done lead generation ads and where we have asked for state, if it’s like a volunteer opportunity, we just want to be able to sort them through to the right person. But for this, we just want you on the email list and I think there’s an opportunity here for people. Uh we, we can get them in a different welcoming series, right? All the people that joined us through the lead generation ads, maybe we start setting them up in a welcoming series where we get to know them and can ask more intimate questions. Like, do you want to join our local chapter or, you know, when were you diagnosed or different things that might help us get them into the right um journey, right? Uh Depending on how specific we might have those options. But, but yeah, there’s opportunity later to get to know them a lot better and we’re just starting off just by collecting their email and we can work with that from there. Don’t ask for everything at the outset. It, it’s a journey. There’s a chance of getting the band in from there and we just want to maximize the, you know, the, the efficiency here. Something to the finish line. You said, sprint to the finish line and then we’ll take our time. We can get to know you. There’s plenty of time. Um What did you call it? That, that meta will give you the, the, the people who act like the people you identify a look alike just called lookalikes ads. Yeah, when you upload a list or you create a list that’ll ask you, do you want to create a look like? And this is something that even if so one of the ways too that we try to what we’re after are new emails. We want new people into the database. We’ve also found that people that we’ve already had in the database that found these ads, they’re finding like new value from this. So it’s also OK if new people are seeing this ad, but the focus here is trying to grow the email list, grow our email size. So the focus is with that. But in order to kind of exclude the people that we already have, we upload our email list and we exclude that. But when we upload it, Facebook says, do you want to generate a look alike list of this? So while we’re excluding the ones we already had, we can include the look alike. So it’s a nice and you trust Facebook when you upload these email addresses and that it’s not a perfect science. Let’s put it that way because hey, maybe you logged in with your Facebook with an email from 2010 and maybe you don’t use that one anymore. So maybe you’re on a different one and that’s why it’s not a perfect science with this strategy. About 50% are new um in total to our database. So like I said, it’s not what we’re after is, you know, repeating customers, but we are re-establish value in a different way. So it kind of works out well. There’s that, there’s that too, but I was asking about trusting Facebook with the emails, but you’re giving them, you trust them with that. You don’t have a choice, I’m sure. Well, do they say something like, you know, well, this is a subject to our privacy policy which you can go read at 79 pages. And ultimately, you know, ads in general digital ads in this world we live in is like they get a super bad rep a lot of times and rightfully so, right, wrongfully using different pieces of information. But as a nonprofit, we’re just trying to accelerate our missions good. So we’re, you know, targeting certain people, but they need our resources and so we want more people to have them. It’s time for a break. Virtuous is a software company committed to helping nonprofits grow generosity. Virtuous, believes that generosity has the power to create profound change in the world and in the heart of the giver, it’s their mission to move the needle on global generosity by helping nonprofits better connect with and inspire their givers. Responsive fundraising puts the donor at the center of fundraising and grows giving through personalized donor journeys that responds to the needs of each individual. Virtuous is the only responsive nonprofit CRM designed to help you build deeper relationships with every donor at scale. Virtues gives you the nonprofit CRM, fundraising, volunteer marketing and automation tools. You need to create responsive experiences that build trust and grow impact virtuous.org. Now back to acquiring email leads on social with Melanie Schaffel. Is there another way to do this? Get these conversions from social besides targeted ads? This is the easiest way to do the in platform form solution, right? You can do an organic post that sends them to your website where it might be parkinson.org/subscribe or something, right? Where they can put their email in on our website. We have different forms like that here. You can hear the booths coming down around us literally uh as the carts go out, I hope there aren’t bodies in these carts. I can’t tell they, they have opaque of law and order. Those don’t look like that. Oh, you’re an expert, you’re an expert. Those are, those are clean. I was talking to a law enforcement expert. Forensics. She’s also a digital forensics expert. Uh, she can, she can find your, uh, your date of birth. Not through this. A no, but she’s seen a lot of law and order. So expert. Ok. Those cars are clean. Um, there may be forklifts coming around too so soon. So we may hear backup buzzers. You know, this is a, it’s a menagerie here, but nonprofit radio perseveres. Ok. Um, so I was asking about other methods besides digital ads. Yeah, of course, there’s the organic way to get people. It’s really efficient just to get them right in the platform. I think, you know, there’s other social platforms that have similar opportunities to do these foreign lead generation ads, but a majority of our audience is on Facebook. So we’re just grabbing them where they are and what, what um what age cohort is the largest proportion for you. We find a lot of our audience are Children of the people with Parkinson’s. So the Parkinson’s patients, there are, there is a large audience of people with Parkinson’s too, but let’s call it like, you know, 5060 year old, older adult Children of people that are living with the disease later in life. Yeah, we have a lot of caregiver care partner resources as well for sure. Uh Just so folks know, you know, what age group we’re talking about, you’re talking mostly people, 50 plus we have opportunities for, you know, a lot of people are on Instagram too. And we’re also trying to engage grandparents of people, grandchildren of those living with Parkinson’s. There’s a lot of really fun fundraising opportunities that we provide for them as well, but the information going right to the source. A lot of time. Yeah, right in that Facebook opportunity. Um So just drawing from your, your your description, um we’ve talked about how to, how to do this, how about measuring ro I metrics? What do we look for? So, one of my favorite parts of the lead generation ad is that it hits on all these different points on the marketing funnel, right? We’ve got awareness. So at the very least these ads are going to reach people that may have never heard about our brand and the ads that we’re creating the creative part of it. We’ve got our blue, we’ve got our logo. So at the very least we’re going to have a brand awareness moment. Then one step down, we’re informing, we’re informing that we have this resource and we’re also informing that we’re in the business of sharing resources. So we might get some new followers along the way on top of the reach and the brand and the impressions. And um so one and two checked off, then we’re also like converting people to move away from just being interested to uh loyal um advocates for us as well by joining our email list. So they’re, they’re working their way down the funnel, maybe the first time it doesn’t hit them and they convert, but it’s a series and maybe the second resource we’re offering is more appealing to them. So we might get them on the next try. So it’s an interesting ad because we’re also, we’re doing impressions, brand awareness, reach kind of arbitrary, but it still counts for something. We’ve got website traffic. We’re going to get people when they click on the resource to um get this, they’re clicking through to the website itself. And then we’re also opening up our email leads at the same time. So it’s hidden a lot of pieces at once. What was interesting for this presentation? It went back into each constituent profile and kind of looked at what their journey was since they were served the ad and we saw enough donations come through after they were served this ad to justify the whole spend of our series. So positive row as on top of it all, we love it. What a turn on ads not return on a ro I thank you. Otherwise you’d be putting drug in jail return on ads. Yeah, we have, well, it’s related to your, your law enforcement background. I hope not. Nobody listens to the show. It doesn’t matter. No, that’s not true. That’s not true. Um OK. Roa, we turn on ads be, thank you. But we do have Jargon Jail on nonprofit radio, but you skirted it very quickly by defining your jargon. Um What else can we talk about? We still have a few minutes left. What else did you share with your audience that you should share with nonprofit radio listeners? I also shared how, you know, maybe you don’t have the budget right now to invest in an ad strategy. Maybe you and your boss haven’t had that conversation yet. One, the examples in the strategy that we talked about, maybe this is a good opportunity to ask the powers that be the purse that maybe this is a good opportunity for you to uh trial, maybe get a little small investment. You never know what the results can turn into. Maybe they’ll be super impressed and they give you more of a budget and it kind of opens up your ad advertising program from there. But even if you’re not there just yet, there’s a lot of steps you can take for when you are there, like growing your audience now um and doing a lot of social listening and seeing what is working in your other channels, like your email, what are people clicking through? What do people want? You can create more of that content on your website so that when you are ready to launch these ads, you have like the perfect piece of content that will push people over the ads. You can have something ready for them to offer up anything else we can do in preparation to getting the budget for the ads, I think going back real quick to growing the audience and just kind of doing a lot of organic work. It’s just going to help you with that first party data when we’re doing all the targeting and everything. So putting in that work up front is only going to benefit you more down the line. Are you ok? If we leave it there? I’m great with that. We haven’t, we haven’t given short shrift to nonprofit listeners. It felt good. I don’t know. I, I want them to get the full, this is a 30 minute, this is a 30 minute session or it was a short 30 minute session. Just a little me up there. And uh yeah, a lot of positive feedback. It’s been a good week. It will continue as folks hear you here. She’s Melanie Saffle, senior manager of digital advertising at Parkinson’s Foundation, Melanie. Thank you very much. Thank you so much as, as 24 NTC comes down around us. I thank you for being, she’s giving a queen’s wave to the forklift truck that’s uh going by. I thank you for being with our coverage of 20 the 2024 nonprofit technology conference where we have been sponsored by Heller consulting, technology strategy and implementation for nonprofits. Thanks so much. It’s time for Tony’s take two. Thank you Kate while I was away for the two weeks, uh doing lots of donor meetings uh that I talked about last week I had the chance to talk to two guys, uh, one in the airport and one on a plane. Vaughn and Jorge and they’re both very different. Uh, Vaughn is uh mid seventies, maybe even, uh, maybe even 80 but still working. Uh, he’s from Kentucky and he owns 13 Papa John’s franchises and very interesting talking to this guy. Uh, you know, deep in the baby boomer ages, uh about how work has changed. Uh He, he cites that labor is his biggest problem. You’re keeping 13, Papa John’s franchises staffed uh people who with, you know, in the face of people who just don’t show up for work. They, they don’t just, they don’t even, you know, people don’t call and say they don’t want to work there anymore. They just don’t show up often often and I’ve heard that from lots of other folks too. Uh But so just, you know, very interesting talking to Vaughn about how work and, and attitudes toward work have changed uh that he’s experienced, you know, as a 7580 year old. Uh and hiring lots of folks in their twenties or even teens, so teens, twenties. Um and, and, and thirties is, is mo mostly where his workforce comes from, but it’s actually mostly teens and uh and twenties and then Jorge uh talk to him on a plane. So he is about, I’d say he’s about 32 or so. Uh And he has an interesting career he, you know, he works in finance for one of the big tech companies full time. Uh It has a finance MB A but then he also develops real estate projects. Uh And he, he’s on his second one, which is a 32 unit residential building with two or three commercial units on the ground floor. So, you know, talk about the way career has changed. I mean, here’s a guy who wants to be doing something different and he’s gonna make you making that transition on his own happen by reengineering himself as a real estate developer and, and all the financing that goes into that, getting loans, getting investors, you know, permits and hiring the, the contractor. Um So, you know, uh Jorge was kind of exemplifying what bond was telling me about, you know, the way he has seen work and career change. Uh So very interesting conversation. So I would, uh you know, I guess I’m always curious about people. I mean, if they don’t want to talk, you know, I’m not the annoying guy who keeps talking to them, you know, even after they put their air pods in, you know, I’m still talking to them. I, I don’t do that. I asked them to take their airpods out. No, I just, I just leave them alone, leave them alone. But uh you know, but I’m naturally curious about people. So if they’re willing to talk, um I, I uh these two guys were quite interesting. Vaughan and Jorge and how work has changed, career has changed. And that is Tony’s take too date. I think the coolest part of public transportation is meeting a bunch of different strangers. And like, that’s what I miss about taking the Amtrak train just back and forth from home to, to the city. You used to talk to a lot of folks on Amtrak. I remember one girl, this was my first time on the train alone. I couldn’t find a spot and she was getting off the next spot and she told me to come sit down with her and then we started talking about college and all this stuff and she was actually designing um public playgrounds for different schools. Um And like, we just got to know each other in that like 15 minutes that we had together and like I really connected with her, it was so it was a good experience. That’s it. Yeah, connections. You’re right. You’re right. Well, we’ve got Buku but loads more time here is matching gifts. 101201 and 301. Welcome to Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio coverage of 24 NTC. It’s the 2024 nonprofit technology conference. We are all at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, Oregon. Julie Alison Mark. Welcome. Thank you so much for having us. It’s my pleasure. Julie Zin is Vice President account and strategic Services at Sankey Communications. Alison Herman is at, is Director of Communications and Marketing at Wild Care. And Mark doty is Director of Annual Giving at San Francisco S PC A. And we are talking about matching gifts. Your, your session is matching gifts. 101201 and 301. So we’re gonna run the spectrum, not the phd level, I guess that’s, that’ll be next year. We’re still undergrad here. This is undergrad and you took your senior year off. Indeed. We’re not doing the 401. Ok. Um Combined it all into one hour. Ok. Well, we’re gonna, we’re gonna condense it down even a little more, a little more. Um Mark, I’m gonna start down there with you. Ok. Um What? Well, just generally just like sort of tee us up. What, what could we be doing a little smarter better? Uh generally with matching gifts with matching gifts? Uh two things, there’s a lot of different kinds of matching gifts. So there’s a perception out there that if you’re doing a matching gift, you need large amounts of money, you need to double triple, quadruple it. There’s actually a number of different kinds of matching gifts you can do and they have different uses. So you don’t necessarily need a lot of money. You can do what we call a contingent match. For example, where if we’re gonna get into the details. Ok. So in general, I would say, um, consider doing a match, even if you don’t have large amounts of money. Um Make sure you plan it out and make sure you work with your organization, like your major gift officers and maybe communications department to make sure it’s well publicized and that you can actually get the dollars for a match. Ok, thank you. Um Alison, I I’m taking from your session uh description uh and Mark started to allude to these different types and styles of matching gifts. Can you? Uh Now, since he mentioned, contingency, is this, is this an OK place to talk about. Contingency. Am I the person to talk about that? I mean, I’ll be the person to talk about that specifically. But no, it is, it’s, it’s uh the thing about matching gifts that I think people really, we want people to take from our session is that they are incredibly effective and they are incredibly, it something that people get very excited about both your donors and your team members. So introducing the concept of a matching gift to your donors is something that’s going to inspire their giving and also inspire your team to reach new heights and do better things with your fundraising for your organization. OK. OK. So let’s start to get into some detail then Julie, but uh I’ll try you. That Mark mentioned contingency. Are we, why don’t you acquaint us with different types? Yeah, no problem. So most people think about the standard of all gifts up to $100,000 will be doubled, right? And that, that’s kind of your standard double match or you could say tripled and that’s your standard triple match. When you get into some of the other, other types of matches, you can say things like if we get 50 new sustainers, 50 new month donors will get an additional $10,000. That’s a contingency match where we have to reach this threshold and then we’re going to get this lump sum of money. It can be a much easier ask, especially when you’re asking for a certain number of donors. You don’t have to give dollars. You just have to be one person. Um You can also get into different types of matches where if you have the money already in hand, you can say this major donor is ma has made this donation, will you step up and match their gift? Um You can even have a campaign where you ask your donors to create a matching gift fund to then inspire their peers. So there’s a variety of different types of tactics and ways that you can use, talk about and create matching gift campaigns. Are we considering corporate matching gifts here too or is that something? Is that something different? We are. It’s in our 101201301. So corporate matches are a little bit different. We’re not really going to be talking about corporate matches as much. Although corporate matching gifts are certainly very valuable it’s more of a individual um individual technique that, that is often valuable on the back end. So someone makes the gifting and you say, do you work for a, for a corporation for an entity that’s matching your gift? So we’re talking here about individual donors doing different types of matches or collectively. OK. Go ahead. I was gonna say at my organization Wild, what do you do at my organization in Wild Care? There is some confusion between the two ideas of matching and so you have corporate matching, which is I work for a company and I make a donation and then I request for my corporation, my company to match that gift. So that’s what we consider corporate matching. You can also have a corporation that gives your organization a gift to be matched. So we’re talking about that idea of money that’s being donated, that will be an incentive for individual donors to match. And so sort of two different things with sort of the same name. So a source of confusion for us as well. Thank you. I mean, you all have been thinking about this for a long time. I’m a neophyte. Um Mark, how about you at uh at San Francisco S PC A? What, what do you, what are you doing there around uh matching gifts around matching gifts? We plan those into our annual planning process. So we will actually sit down and say, oh, we’re gonna do a big campaign around the holidays. We’re going to be do a big campaign around the end of our fiscal year. We’re going to need a match for those s so we will actually um go out to our major gift officers plan out our timing, say we’re going to need, we’re going to need you to secure some matches for us by this date. And then we actually integrate that into actually producing campaigns which we then promote with the hope that the match is going to inspire more people to give and when they give to give more and indeed it does. Ok, they do work. I mean, otherwise we wouldn’t be here. This is a, this is an upbeat, don’t do matching gifts. There’s no question here and we were actually just talking about how you never test this because you would never want to give half of your audience something that didn’t include the matching gift. They are that successful that you don’t eat. We test that we know how well they work, our consultants on the team on the panel. You agree with that. Absolutely. We have done a lot of testing around things like match length, for example. So there are a lot of giving. Exactly. So for example, giving Tuesday a lot of organizations have a match. If you don’t have a match on giving Tuesday, you’re going to need to think about something really exciting to cut through the match clutter and the match language that other organizations are putting out. But there are now a lot of organizations that have started promoting their giving Tuesday matches before Thanksgiving, we have tested things like that. And when you’re, when you’re looking at, at elements like that, that giving Tuesday preview match before Thanksgiving, it doesn’t actually work. You’re not going to get a substantial lift on it. So there are definitely times and ways that you want to use your match and promote it to have the most efficacy. But overall, all of the data, both data around the industry and data from our clients where we’ve done a matching gift campaign versus not a matching gift campaign or have multiple clients where we can see who has matches and who doesn’t. Um, every, every data point shows that having a matching gift of some sort is always going to be, be beneficial for your campaign. Ok. Ok. Um Alison, what type of different asks do you have? Can you acquaint us with? You started to allude, you know, you made the difference between corporate and individual on the individual side. What are some of the sample asks? Well, we’re very lucky at wild care. We take care of injured and orphaned wild animals. So I have uh absolutely adorable animals like baby opossums or baby raccoons or baby squirrels or an animal that’s going to be really compelling. But one of the matches that we frequently do is our summer match and the summer match is to help raise funds for our wildlife babies to help them to grow up healthy and be released back to the wild. And so that gift is that matching campaign is really, really effective because you can show the benefit of the match for the actual individual animals that are, that are being raised and being uh being treated at our wildlife hospital. So, uh that is a really, that is a really fun one. Another one that we do is uh Julie talked about not making a preview for your giving Tuesday match, but we do have started doing every year a matching gift fund which is asking individual donors to contribute to the match before the giving Tuesday. Actual matching gift goes into effect. So it’s building that matching gift fund and same thing uh you know, doing it for the animals giving the, the care that the animals need and raising that money to be an inspiration for other donors on giving Tuesday. It’s alright. Now Julie, let me go back to you. How is that different than what you said? Doesn’t do well pre pre giving Tuesday, we’re only 10 minutes in. It took a while, but finally a decent question. We’re only seven minutes in. So I give myself a break. These are all excellent questions. Thank you. Oh, no. So how, what’s the distinction here? So that is not, you’re not previewing a match. You’re actually asking people to make a gift to build a match fund. Um which it sounds, it sounds a little bit nuanced. But when you say in early November, we have a donor who’s giving $20,000 to create a giving Tuesday match. But we know we’re going to raise a lot more than that. On giving Tuesday, we need your help to match more money. Will you help us increase the matching gift? And then, and then what care does? And it’s, it’s an incredibly successful campaign is their broader donor base will actually contribute to the matching gift fund. We have several clients that do a similar type of campaign with their mid-level donors where donors who are giving $1000 plus at $1000 plus level will contribute to that matching gift fund. That particular audience type is typically not always less focused on making a gift for a matching gift campaign, but they can be really, um but but they can really help contribute to building a match campaign. So then let’s say at wild care, they would say, ok, now we have a matching gift fund of $42,700. Then on giving Tuesday, they go back out and they say we have a matching gift of $42,700. Will you make your gift for this matching gift campaign? Ok. And then what, what do people have to do to, to qualify for their gift to for you to get the 42,700. I’m missing something. Well, it’s kind of, you don’t necessarily have to have it be a challenge or a contingency. It can simply be that we have this money. We want you to help us match it. It’s not that you help us match what we’ve already help us match what we’ve already earned. And it’s, those are sort of two different types of matches. You can have challenge match, which is essentially if you don’t do this, we have to offer to give the money back. And that’s one type. And you hear that a lot on the N pr fundraising. Exactly. But it is, it seems to be exactly as effective to say we have this. Will you match it? Will you bring us this funding? Yeah. And I think that’s a common misconception about matching gifts. You ok, go ahead, Julie often times what we often times what happens is when you have a matching gift campaign or a matching gift effort, you’re not really relying on the gifts to bring in the match. You actually want to have a matching gift such that you will absolutely hit it and your matching gift donor has already committed to it. So if your matching gift donor says I’m going to make $100,000 gift, you say I’m going to create a matching gift campaign with the specifications and the timing and the length and the channels where I think I’m going to raise 100 and $30,000. So I’m absolutely overreaching that 100,000 and I’m absolutely going to have that money in hand so that you’re raising money on the match doesn’t actually, um, is, is not actually necessary for the gift for the matching gift to come in. And I think that’s one of the biggest misconceptions is for the general public is, it really is a fundraising tactic. It’s, it’s a strategy that, that we all do and that we all know in the industry. But when you look at folks who are outside of the industry, they don’t necessarily realize that this is a tactic that isn’t actually meaningful that when if you give your $100 gift to an organization that says your gift will be tripled. It doesn’t actually mean that they’re going to be getting an additional $200 because of your $100 gift. It means that they have this money in hand um or pledged or committed and that, that you’re, they’re using that to inspire that giving mark. Can you share with us? Uh Some specific asks that you do around matching gifts at San Francisco S PC A. Yeah, actually, most recently, we basically did what’s called Gamification of a match gam game playing radiation, radiating the animals or Gamification, Gamification. And this is where we try to turn, uh we introduce a lot of many goals and ask donors to help us achieve those goals like you might find in a lot of apps or uh or anything else. But um what we did was for giving Tuesday sat down and said, ok, we need to raise this much money that actually corresponds to uh the amount we spend for in a full year on our mobile vaccine clinics where monthly we go out and vaccinate about 4 to 500 animals in the space of a few hours. So uh we actually sat down and messaged to donors, hey, we need to fund 12 months worth of this mobile vaccine clinics. Will you help us do it? We’ve got matching funds and every dollar you you donate will be matched as well and then kept them updated over the course of giving Tuesday to say, hey, we’ve matched, we’ve achieved four months. Can you help us get to five? We’re at six months by the 11 o’clock, we’re saying we’re at 11 months. Can you help us get over to that? 12 months? And just introduced a lot of little goals to ask donors to help us match, um match their gifts and get to that goal. I love the, I love the time. You know, the the time challenge we’re at 11 months, help us get to 12 for God’s sake. Don’t leave us hanging with 11/12. You often do find that that deadline is what’s so critical. You can, you can message as much as you want, but three weeks out from a deadline. You’re never going to have quite the same sense of urgency as saying our deadline for this match is tonight at midnight. And I honestly, I have no idea why people are sitting at home on December 31st at 11 p.m. making their donations. But there are so many people who decide that that is their moment, don’t we all wait for the last minute for things? I mean, pretty routinely. I mean, I know I do, you know, I have a two week, I have two weeks and then I’m doing it the night before. I don’t know. I just, I think that’s our nature. I wanna, I wanna get to something that comes directly from what you just said, Julie is what if gifts come late? What kind of policies do we have? Do we, do we bend the rule or what, what’s best? It’s a terrific question. Um We actually, recently you have a lot of these, you’re with this, Tony, we had this conversation recently with one of our clients. They are based, um, they’re based in New York. Um They have an international presence and an international donor base, both across the US and internationally and they had a matching gift deadline at and we had countdown clocks. We had all sorts of things saying get your gift in before midnight on the matching gift deadline. And one of the staff members said, is it midnight Eastern? Is it midnight pacific? What about our donors who were in Dubai. Um And so fun question. Um So a lot of the tactics that we can implement technologically actually allow us to let that, that, that deadline, that exact 11:59 p.m. uh be catered towards the recipient’s home schedule. And so countdown clocks on emails, search engine, marketing ads on light boxes. We can, we can actually direct all of those to the recipients um time zone At the same time, most organizations are going to have some fluidity around it. And so if a donor calls you up at 3 a.m. God forbid, you’re answering the phones at 3 a.m. But if you get that message at 3 a.m. from the donor that says I just got in my gift, will it be, will it count? You just say yes, just say yes. You don’t want to say no to the donor. Exactly. We are flexible and you also can set those policies based on your own needs within your organization and be fluid about them within your own parameters. So it’s, there’s not some hard and fast like overall arching rule about matching gifts. It’s a, it’s within your own organization that you can determine that. One of the things you can do is actually plan a strategy around people not making it in, in time. One of the reasons we know matches work is if you look at hour to hour donations, the minute that match ends, you see donations drop off like a cliff. So people really are giving up to the last minute. But one thing you can do is um follow up and say, hey, we’re gonna do a small mini match for those people that missed it and that can be a very effective tactic. So in giving Tuesday, we’ve actually sent out a smaller match the next day and said we have a little extra money. If you missed it, please give again very effective for our large end of calendar year uh uh a month long match. Uh We’ll actually plan in January to send out direct mail and email that says in case you missed it by the end of the year, here’s a small smaller follow up match just for those guys that didn’t give. So people don’t feel bombarded again. Very effective tactic works very well. So it’s very humane and gracious too if you missed it, you know, if you still have more opportunities to give us money, right? You do. Yeah, even if you’re worse than procrastinating like you the deadline, you didn’t just wait till the end of the deadline, you blew it. There’s still a chance for you. There are still puppies and kittens and babies, squirrels and baby opossums that need help, that need you one of your uh session uh objectives, how to apply matching gift tactics across each channel. We haven’t talked about specific channels. Mark, let’s let’s keep with you. What do you do across channels. This is an important part of keeping your organization looped in on what you’re doing with the match. And we will actually sit down and have people from marketing communications. We’ll have people from development. Um We’ll have the major gift officers and we’ll all talk about, we’re gonna be having this match. What can everyone do in their channels to support this match and support this effort? And we’ll have a group conversation about what we’ll be talking about what the messaging will be and get everyone on the same page and then everyone is sort of in charge of uh going off and executing in whatever it is they’re due. Whether that’s the website, we will get it on the website. Uh If we’re on social, we will get it in social. Um We will put it in our DM and email appeals as well. If we have newsletters going out, it will go in the newsletters. Our MGO will again be talking to people about what the match is about and will they support it? So we just get everyone on the same page and that way everyone in the organization that’s in charge of some kind of communication um can, can communicate that out and whatever, whatever they’re working on. We uh we have Jargon Jail on uh Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio. Now you didn’t, no, you didn’t really transgress. I mean, you, you mentioned MG OS and D MS but, but I think people understand major gift officers are, those are, those are basic. I’m just alerting everyone that we do have jargon jail here. And I’d hate to see anybody, uh, imprisoned not wrongfully, it would be rightfully imprisoned. But, but you don’t get a jury. It’s just me. But no, you are fine because DM, everybody knows direct mail. Um, I, I do one thing. That’s, that’s interesting about a multichannel. Yeah, that’s interesting about the campaigns is you do have different timing for the different channels. And so you obviously have your direct mail pieces that go, you know, significantly in advance and there’s a much longer tail, a much longer time for those to have been effective. And then you would have the model that goes up on your website, which usually corresponds with the time that your direct mail is hitting mailboxes in case people open the letter and then go to your website and then, oh, sorry. Yes, I’m doing jargon. That’s the pop up thing that shows up on your website when you open up a website and something pops up in front of you. That, that’s what’s called a model and there’s a link on that that would go to a donation page. So we don’t call them pop ups anymore or light, what do we call them? Moss I learn that pop up a pop up. Technically speaking, a pop up is different technology. A light box and a model are interchangeable Um And the, the technical term, this I consider one of my key roles in my company being translating between our developers and everybody who doesn’t speak, developers speak, which I don’t. But a modal is the technical way that a lightbox is coded. And so a motel and a Lightbox are the same thing. You can say. Either one pop up is a little bit of a different story and that gets blocked by pop up blockers and all of that sort of thing. So you’re fine. I’m fine too. None of us are in jail. My language is not ancient anyway, but I love this because I just learned something new as well. So Lightbox modal being the two things that pop up. Exactly. So you would have that correspond with the time that your direct mail piece hits people’s mailboxes. And then you would also have a, an email campaign and a social campaign that usually start and run on a faster schedule. You would want that to be closer to the deadline and be able to send those messages out. So you’re getting, you know, people often participate with your organization’s communications on many levels and having that same messaging the same images, the same compelling ask that goes with the match coming both in your mailbox also on the website, also on your social feeds and also on your email is a very, very compelling and effective way to raise donations and having that match with the timeline, just makes people jump in with both feet and donate and donate more. It’s wonderful. You had asked about what happens when people make their gift after a deadline as well. Direct mail has an extremely long tail. And so it’s very common that people will, I mean, people will hold on to direct mail and then send a check. Two years later, I don’t understand that. I’ve seen that I do plan on giving fundraising. I’ve seen two years. I’ll send me information on including you in my will. It’s wild. But so what we do when we’re promoting a matching gift is direct mail. We actually won’t promote the deadline. So you just don’t lift the deadline. You can put in very fine print at the bottom. Nobody’s going to read it anyway. It’s fine. Um Whereas when you’re looking at the digital channels, you’re gonna have your countdown clocks and you’re really pushing the deadline and increasing your frequency as you approach that deadline and people don’t get tired of this. Shocking. No, no, especially as you’re increasing the frequency as Julie said, when you get closer to the deadline. No, it seems to just inspire them and you will have people that give again when they see the countdown clock when they actually the same challenge. Yeah. Yeah, we see that as well. Ok. All outstanding. We, we’re busting potential uh misconceptions. Um Well, we still have some time left. What else? Uh do you plan to talk about in your session that we haven’t or a little more detail that you want? I think one of the things that I think is really interesting is what happens when you don’t have a match and that is something that it’s valuable to have to have matching gifts. You don’t want to have a matching gift for every single campaign, but most organizations in an ideal world, you have a few matching gift campaigns over the course of a year. But on these key days, like giving Tuesday or 1231 most organizations, most of your competitors who are, who are hitting people’s inboxes have a matching gift campaign and there are always a few organizations that don’t. And so I think that that is an important thing to think about is what happens when you don’t. Um So for some of those campaigns, we often will fundraise around tangibles. We work with an organization habitat for horses. Um, out in Texas that um this past year on giving Tuesday, we were raising money for a new rescue trailer last year. On giving Tuesday, we raised money for a batwing mower. I didn’t even know what a batwing mower was, but it is really valuable. So don’t leave us all hanging a bowing mower. It’s a mower that has those off board things so it can mow a very wide path path. It’s a wide mower. But when you’re a horse rescue, when you’re a horse rescue, you need a lot of mowing capacity. Um And so, so we could run this campaign that really gave people a tangible and a goal even though we didn’t have a matching gift or um we work with Glaad, which works on LGBT Q issues. And this past giving Tuesday, they didn’t have a matching gift campaign and we had a really terrific campaign. Our creative team did a bang up job on it. But the whole I’m not sure if I’m allowed to say it, the whole theme of the campaign was it’s time to give an f and we’ve had people say fuck, OK, great. So the campaign was, it’s time to give a fuck. And we replaced the you and fuck with the heart from the Giving Tuesday logo. And it worked really well. And so if you have an organization where you can, where you don’t have a matching gift campaign, but you don’t have a matching gift available, but you have a tangible or a goal or um leadership allows you to curse across all of your, your direct marketing channel. There are different ways that you can break through, break through the clutter. This is swearing for a good cause I wanted to say actually, on that note, the opposite problem is I know a lot of organizations swearing enough, not swearing enough. 100%. No one of the opposite problem would be something that my organization certainly deals with, in that I wouldn’t want to necessarily fundraise every time for the bat wing mower, which I’ve never needed in my life. But because once you put a specific thing into your fundraising, that means that fundraising becomes restricted unless you’re very careful with the language. But one of the things that I love and my organization loves so much about matching gifts is the match gives you that specificity. It gives you that goal without having to restrict the gifts that are coming in in any way. It, it has that same psychology of oh yeah, I wanna give $20 for the batwing mower. That sounds amazing. But instead of having to say it’s for the X ray machine or it’s for specifically opossum formula or whatever you are saying, it’s for this monetary goal and this time goal and it has that same psychological benefit of. This is something I want to contribute to. This is something I want to be part of. And this is a goal I want this organization to reach. And that’s, I think the one of the main reasons that match is so matching gifts are so powerful. And I think uh so we know that there is hope in case you don’t have a matching gift, there is, there is the tangibles as Julie described. And I think um one take away from this and it’s important to keep in mind is to just stay creative with your matches. I have seen so many conversations where it’s like, well, we’d like to do a match but we don’t have sufficient funds to double or triple or quadruple what people are giving. There’s a whole lot of different ways, uh, to work with matches. Uh, we had a small match come in and it was just $10,000 and it was like, well, what can we do with that? Uh So we did a challenge grant and actually brought in 100 new sustainers uh just by sort of shifting it and saying, let’s just do a number of instead of dollars, we can absolutely use that money and we did and it was very successful. So stay creative, think of creative ways to to to get the message out and what you can do matches around and for a lot of listeners, $10,000 may not be such a small match at all that may be impressive for them. Um Alright, I I kind of wanna let Mark uh kind of bookend it us. We opened with Mark, we closed with Mark. Is there anything else anything else anybody? Ok. We’re gonna wrap it up then. Terrific. Good luck on your session. It’s gonna be a fun session. It will. And this is a little preparation for you. They are Julie Zin at Sanki Communications, Alison Herman at Wild Care and Mark doty at San Francisco S PC A. Thank you for being with Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio. Coverage of 24 NTC where we are sponsored by Heller consulting technology strategy and implementation for nonprofits. They are booth mates and thanks so much for being with us. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you next week. Prompt Engineering and getting the most from your current tech. If you missed any part of this week’s show, I beseech, you find it at Tony martignetti.com were sponsored by Virtuous. Virtuous, gives you the nonprofit CRM fundraising, volunteer and marketing tools you need to create more responsive donor experiences and grow, giving, virtuous.org. Our creative producer is Claire Meyerhoff. I’m your associate producer, Kate Pinetti. The show, social media is by Susan Chavez. Mark Silverman is our web guy and this music is by Scott Stein. Thank you for that affirmation. Scotty be with us next week for nonprofit radio. Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95% go out and be great.

Nonprofit Radio for April 8, 2024: Email Deliverability & Email Welcome Journeys

 

Jamie McClelland, Natalie Brenner & Alice AguilarEmail Deliverability

In our age of rampant spam and artificial intelligence, you need to know how to give your emails the best chance of getting delivered. What are DMARC, DKIM and SPF, and how do they help with deliverability? This 2024 Nonprofit Technology Conference panel is Jamie McClelland, Natalie Brenner and Alice Aguilar, all from Progressive Technology Project.

 

Patty Breech & Elizabeth Sellers:  Email Welcome Journeys\

What happens after your emails are delivered and folks want to support your cause? How do you bring them into your family so they’re engaged and stay with you. Also from 24NTC, this panel is Patty Breech at The Purpose Collective and Elizabeth Sellers with Humanity & Inclusion.

 

 

 

 

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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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Welcome to Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio. Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. I’m your aptly named host and the pod father of your favorite abdominal podcast. Oh, I’m glad you’re with us. I’d be stricken with Eisenmenger syndrome if you broke my heart because you missed this week’s show. Our associate producer, Kate is sick and lost her voice. Of course, I wish her a speedy recovery to good health. But then a question comes to mind. Do we need an associate producer? Let’s see how it goes this week, email deliverability in our age of rampant spam and artificial intelligence. You need to know how to give your emails the best chance of getting delivered. What are D mark D Kim and SPF? And how do they help with deliverability? This 2024 nonprofit technology conference panel is Jamie mcclelland, Natalie Brenner and Alice Aguilar, all from progressive technology project and email. Welcome journeys. What happens after your emails are delivered and folks want to support your cause? How do you bring them into your family? So they’re engaged and stay with you. Also from 24 NTC. This panel is Patty Breach at the purpose collective and Elizabeth Sellers with Humanity and Inclusion. I’m Tony take too. I love the wise. We’re sponsored by Virtuous. Virtuous. Gives you the nonprofit CRM fundraising, volunteer and marketing tools. You need to create more responsive donor experiences and grow, giving, virtuous.org. This is getting exhausting here is email deliverability. Welcome to Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio coverage of 24 NTC. It’s the 2024 nonprofit technology conference. Of course, we’re in Portland, Oregon. You know that you’ve heard this already. Our continuing coverage is sponsored by Heller consulting here at 24 NTC. Heller does technology strategy and implementation for nonprofits with me now is Jamie mcclelland Technology Systems Director at Progressive Technology Project, also Natalie Brenner, Director of Resource mobilization at Progressive Technology Project, and Alice Aguilar, the leader, the executive director at Progressive Technology Project. Jamie Natalie Alice. Welcome. Thank you. Thanks for having us, Tony. Thank you all. Uh Your session topic is email deliverability in the era of spam and artificial intelligence. Um Alice, let’s start with you. What could you just kick us off? We have plenty of time together but general strokes. What, what could we be doing better? What are we ignoring? Why do we need this session on email ability? This session is really, really important for nonprofits and, and grassroots organizing groups, you know, um in PTPS 25 years, we know that email has been really critical to organizations and, and organizing. Um It’s a critical communication vehicle, um, to get the word out quickly to groups so that they can, and their community so that they can take action. Right. There’s no stamps. Right. It’s pretty instant. As long as somebody on the other side is watching. Right. And, and you know, the thing about email, it’s also the place where we control our own messages. Uh, we control our own lists, you know. So it’s, it’s democracy at work. we control the timing, the timing of it, right? Um So there’s nobody there, you know, like, you know, to like to look at our content. At least that’s how it has been, you know, email is Federated. You know, anybody could be an email service provider and send out your email. But now here’s the thing that we’re seeing, right? There’s this concentration of ownership around technology and you’re seeing this in email. So when organizations are sending out email, about half are going to gmail Yahoo or Outlook Microsoft, right? So, um if you think about that, it’s like now with this most recent changes, if you had seen there’s changes in, in uh Google and Yahoo had changed the rules about what emails are gonna be sent. So there’s a concentration and the rules are changing by the, the companies that control 50% of and so they’re controlling the deliverability, correct, you know, and, and like email is supposed to be different than platforms like Facebook or, you know, X you know where they’re monitoring your contact and the algorithms. Email is your, that’s your words, your story being told. And so, you know, it’s, it’s really critical for our groups to get their messages out. Right. And so now because of these rules and these changes and, and eventually they could just totally, they’re gonna make all sorts of decisions about what email is gonna go. Um We have to, we as organizations have to jump some hoops and take responsibility now to make sure that our emails are delivered and it’s really hard for folks to keep up with this. And that’s why our session is, you know, PTP is gonna help uh groups figure out how do we at least get our messages through these corporate gatekeepers, right? To be able to get that out. So that’s the, that’s the purpose of the session, Natalie. Um Who uh can you expose us to some of these rules or, or one of the rules that’s changed? We have plenty of time together, but Alice mentioned all these rules changing. What, what, what the hell is going on? Thanks, Tony. I knew you were going to ask me the technical question. Are you the person? I’m the accidental techie of the. However. Yeah, absolutely. Does that mean Jamie is the technician is I should say he surely is. Yeah, absolutely. So as Alice was saying, you know, email is kind of kind of the dinosaur of the technology world at the moment, but it’s also so critical still like Alice was saying, even after our 25 years, we’re seeing groups still relying and counting on it. And now they have all these acronyms to work through D Mark D Kim SPF. And what in the hell do those mean? Most of the groups we work with don’t know, I don’t know what the hell they mean. And so our session is going to expose that for folks and tell them how to work through all that Mark Net non profit radio. We have jargon jail. You just transgressed terribly like you are in it to bail you out. Obviously. D Mark D Kim and I am in jargon jail and I totally accept that will get you out. Pf to me is some protection factor because I live on and I probably even said the wrong jargon. We don’t even know, but I live on a beach in North Carolina. So to me, that’s my 50 at least help us just before we get into the technical details. Just what are these rules about, right? The, the main goal of the rules is to stop fraud. Um You’ve probably received an email that was sent from Tony Martignetti and it wasn’t you? Yeah. Yes, I have. It’s another guy out there and there are other folks I think I might have just called you Mark. By the way, it’s Jamie because we have another, it’s not D Jamie. It’s D mark is the acronym and Jamie is the, that’s where it came from. Thank you. That’s very gracious of you to bail me out. It was my fault. It’s mine. I made the right Jamie. So the main idea is fraud because Google and Yahoo, in this case, at least they’re trying to impose new limits for a noble cause which is they want to stop people from being able to send messages that claim to be from your domain name, but they aren’t. And your domain name is the part after the at sign in your email address. And you don’t want, I don’t want to get a message from Alice at progressive tech.org that says, hey, Jamie, your payroll didn’t go through click here in order to make sure it’s proper, that’s what we’re trying to stop. Have there been problems with Mark’s payroll payroll? No, I get it from Natalie asking me to like, hey, I forgot the login for our bank account. I need to get these checks. Can you please just click here and just give me you hover over the email address and it’s like that’s not Alex dot ru when you hover over. So they’re doing it for a noble cause they’re doing it for a noble cause. And you might, you know, 10 years ago you got these also, but they were full of typos and they were so obviously not from Natalie or not from Alice, but now with artificial intelligence. It’s possible for anyone you don’t even like, you can be anywhere with any kind of language skills and you can have a perfectly written email that’s very convincing. And, and they’ve also cut down on the, uh, the estates, you know, a $45 million estate greetings of the day, you know, from one of the African countries, you cannot, they are smarter, they are smarter and they’re closer to the real thing, close to the real thing. And so, you know, if you hover over and it says.ru it’s easy. But what if you hover over? And it says Alice at Progressive tech.org which it can you just to make clear.ru is a domain, a Russia, it’s a country level domain name. It’s owned by Russia and it could be anything. Tony dot Ma Ma is Morocco, it’s country of America. So every year I think I pay 75 or 100 and $75 or something to the, to the to the my domain provider. Of course, but they’re paying the country of Morocco for my dot Ma U so.ru is Russia, which means it’s very likely spam. I’m sorry, Jamie. That’s great. So the deep dark secret is that from the beginning of the internet, you could send an email that was from progressive tech.org and you still can send an email, you can put whatever from address you want in the email protocol. It allows it, you can put whatever you want in the from address and it really will be whatever domain name you want it to be. So these new rules and regulations are intended to stop that. And there’s two main rules that are used to test and the test, one of them is called SPF for Sender policy framework, policy framework. And that one says I can, I love the energy between the three of you, Natalie and Alice are giggling while, while Jamie is talking, I love the energy we’ve been working. Plus there’s this guy Mark who’s presence is hovering over us. We’re channeling Mark even though he’s 3000 miles away. Are you, are you based in New York or a Texas, Texas? Paul Minnesota. I’m in New York is somewhere. We’ve worked together for over a decade and he’s only five 100 miles but his presence is felt we’re channeling. So SPF again, SPF is center policy framework and this allows us as progressive tech.org to publish to the internet to say if you get an email that claims to be from progressive tech.org, it has to be sent from one of these 10 servers. And if it wasn’t sent from one of these 10 servers, you should consider it fraudulent because there’s only 10 servers that legitimately send our email. Those are the email servers of our internet service provider. So that center policy framework, if Google or Yahoo or proton mail or may 1st mail, whatever, that’s an email that claims to be from progressive tech.org. That email provider can look up our SPF record check to see if it was sent from the right server and if it wasn’t sent from the right server, it fails the SPF test. D mark. Let me do D mark last DKIM. Let’s work on Kim. There’s no, no job description. Your name must be Kim. We’ll accept middle name, first name preferred. We’ll keep an open mind. Kim is a signature. It’s a digital signature. When we tell us what the acronym stands for, can I on the domain key identified? Male? Yes, there’s math involved. There’s math involved. There’s some very cool math involved. So he said cool math what I was saying? I thought it was redundant. So dkim, when a message is sent by us, we insert a digital signature into the header part of the email, the header is usually hidden from most people. So you can’t see it, but a digital signature is sent with the email message. So when the receiving server gets the message, the receiving server sees the signature and then it has to look up your DKIM record to see if it’s a valid signature and if it is a valid signature, then you pass the DKIM test. So two tests every does every email have to pass all three of these tests that we’re talking? Right? So that’s where Mark comes in. This is the rule. Oh jeez, don’t ask me what that one stands for the D mark is when you make those two tests and then the receiving service says, well, what do I do if it fails? And a dar policy can be, none says, don’t do anything. It’s OK. You can be fraudulent and two is reject and three is quarantine, which are in practice mostly the same. So in other words, you can set your SPF and your DKIM so that the receiving server can tell whether it’s valid. And then you can say this is what you should do if it fails either one of those two. So if the rule is you only have to pass one, so you can fail SPF. But if you pass DKIM, you pass, you can fail DKIM. But if you pass the SPF and the reason is because there’s actual legitimate reasons why you might fail one or the other, it’s still valid and you could fail one or the other. So you just need one. It’s time for a break. Virtuous is a software company committed to helping nonprofits grow generosity. Virtuous believes that generosity has the power to create profound change in the world and in the heart of the giver, it’s their mission to move the needle on global generosity by helping nonprofits better connect with and inspire their givers responsive. Fundraising puts the donor at the center of fundraising and grows giving through personalized donor journeys that respond to the needs of each individual. Virtuous is the only responsive nonprofit CRM designed to help you build deeper relationships with every donor at scale. Virtuous, gives you the nonprofit CRM, fundraising, volunteer marketing and automation tools. You need to create responsive experiences that build trust and grow impact virtuous.org. Now, back to email deliverability. This really is getting exhausting now. All right. So we’re acquainted with what the rules are rules, these are new rules. So this is, this is, I mean, if you consider relative to the internet, this is ancient history. These rules have been around for over 10 years, but the way rules become adopted is very slow. So what Yahoo and Gmail have done is they’re trying to speed adoption of these rules by saying we’re going to reject your email if you don’t have these three things in place. And it’s kind of interesting because D Mark is supposed to say no, you’re supposed to accept it if the policy is none, but Gmail is breaking that protocol and say no, we’re going to reject it. If you don’t, if you don’t have one of SPF or Din, we’re going to reject it regardless of D Mark. If you send more than 5000 messages a day, we’re really going to make sure you have at least one of these two and you have to have ad mark policy, even if the D MARK policy says none, you still have to have that D Mark policy if you’re a bulk sender and we’re gonna stop you. We’re gonna, we’re gonna break away from the technology part of it. I wanna talk. No, no, we’re not abandoning. I mean, it’s important, but we’re gonna move to leadership Alice. What, what is a nonprofit leader’s role in ensuring email deliverability? Well, you’re the executive director. What, what do you feel you take on in, in, you know, in your role obviously as your role as executive director, what do you think is your responsibility around email deliverability? Our responsibilities are responsible to our help our groups because that’s what we do. We support community organizing groups, that’s our niche. Um really think about like, you know, because we care about their work and we care that they get the communications out. It’s our responsibility as our team to understand these rules to be on top of this stuff, which is really hard. I mean, we’re a team of three plus mark out there. Don’t forget I can’t, you know, and so we have to like sift through and keep up with these rules because our groups don’t have time for that. We work with small to medium sized organizations that don’t have a tech arm. They don’t have a techie, they have accidental techies like Natalie, um which we make Natalie do a lot of things, right? They make me do a lot of, you know, so, so that’s our responsibility to move. We were there to really help groups navigate this world and also help them understand the role of technology in their organizing work and the impacts um that technology has in society and for social change. And this email stuff is critical because there’s so much dependence, we call it dependence on the master’s tools. You know, Audrey Lord, uh the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. You know. So for us, it’s like having we, we throw in a lot of political education around the role of technology. Email is like the one that everybody understands, but they don’t realize that as organizations that their emails are not getting sent. And they’re wondering like, why can’t we move our folks just because they’re not receiving an email. And so our responsibility is to help them get that word out. And so we deconstruct this stuff, figure it out. Jamie memorizes these acronyms and we hold trainings, we actually hold trainings, we help them navigate, help them get things set up. That’s our, that’s our role. My role is to work to move our team to make sure that this is we’re doing the best we can. We work with almost 100 and 50 organizations, nonprofit, uh grassroots organizations. It’s, it’s our job to make sure that we’re on it and in a timely way and we keep up with it and also translate, right? We got to translate this stuff for the groups that don’t have a technologist. They don’t have the benefit of a Jamie, right. And also the, the understanding is not, it’s, it’s again, understanding that role because we sort of like use whatever is easy. But to do this stuff is actually takes a little bit of, you have to dig in a little bit and that’s our job to help dig in and we’re gonna get to what to do very, very, very shortly. But this is why this is perfect for our listeners because most of our listeners small and mid-sized nonprofits, they don’t have the benefit of a full time or even maybe even an outsource technologist, like you’ve got Jamie. Alright, Natalie, how do you, how do you fit into this? So, um I have been with progressive technology project for 11 years and I started in an administrative role um and in a small organization that doesn’t take a whole lot of time. Um And so I started to learn how to do technical support and started working on the programming aspect of things. Um started training alongside my colleagues. Um We provide several trainings a year online and we’re going to do our first in person since COVID this year, probably this fall. Um And so I do a little bit of everything and it’s wonderful. Can you so can you help us start to get into the topic of how to design your own emails so that they, so that they meet, meet the criteria? Don’t suffer the uh the consequences of, of D mark. I got these acronyms down. Now, you got to do one of the two SPF or D Kim and D Mark will evaluate, will instruct the internet. Well, the email provider, what to do if, if one of those two tests is not passed, I’m, you’re like your name. I didn’t say hirable. You don’t want me as an employee. I’d be a terrible employee. You wouldn’t want me as an employee. But yeah, there’s a lot of things you can do to help before you get to the acronyms. There’s a lot of things that you can do on the front end to help your emails get delivered. And that has to do with setting up your template, not including weird characters or you know, animated GS like the word free can sometimes be, don’t use the word invoice or free in your subject line in your subject line. Don’t send an email to 20,000 people and include an attachment, things like that. And so we do train on things like that as well. And then on the technical end of things, you’ve got all the acronyms to work through and there’s lots of ways that you can get help addressing those if you don’t have a technologist at your organization or if you’re not with a social justice partner, like progressive technology project, um where we provide uh really awesome support to help you through that. So I want to go into a little more detail about the structure of emails, the planning of emails. So that uh Jamie, you want, I mean, I don’t know, Natalie, should we stay with you? I, I’m just, I’m still concerned about the subject line. Leave out free, leave out invoice free at if you’re sending to thousands of people that don’t do attachment. What else just about? Yeah. So, you know, there’s a lot going around these days from different consulting firms or organizations talking about how to craft a subject line that will gain attention. And that’s really important. But you also have to just be careful about the buzzwords that you’re using to avoid the pitfalls. And it’s not that hard if you’re talking about a subject line. Do you guys have anything to add? I think everything Natalie said is straight on some of it. It is common sense. You receive lots of spam messages and you don’t want your email to sound like that and look like that. And some of it can be obvious the no free act. Now there’s a lot of exclamation points, things like that sometimes get picked up. But I think that’s important. It’s becoming less important as these new rules and regulations are happening because it’s getting bigger, the data’s getting much bigger. And I feel like the big providers are really getting a little bit better at differentiating between the spam and the non spam. So I think that really important is following these rules and getting your domain names properly set up. Um, the only other things I would add are just, there might be personal preferences. Like a lot of people have the subject line newsletter number three, number 12. And it’s like, no, it’s the same thing I find too. I think most personally and this is very, like, there’s a matter of taste. I’m not a big fan of the newsletter that has 12 different stories in it because I see a subject line and I decide whether I’m going to open that message based on what’s in the subject line. You can’t put 12 things in a subject line. Yeah, but then whatever is not in the subject line is buried and it’s difficult. I’m a bigger fan of sending out more frequent emails with um that are shorter that like you, you see in the subject line, what it is and then you’re going to open it and you’re going to read it as opposed to a long newsletter. Now, do things like frequency. Does that impact your deliverability? Frequency? So too many, too much. No. In fact, it’s the opposite quantity and volume help you because a lot of these are percentile rankings where the providers are going to say, oh, wow, we received 1000 messages that were successfully sent and not complained about and you got two complaints. That’s a, you know, very tiny percentage. If you send 10 messages and you get two complaints, it’s, you know, it’s like a complaint can sink you more. So they’re tracking, there are, aren’t, aren’t the providers also able to track what people do with your message, whether they, whether they, whether they, whether they put it, whether they market junk, do, are they able to track that you’re doing in your inbox? They’re 100% able to track it. And it’s a black box as to what the algorithm is as to what they’re doing. And this is one of the, when you’re talking about, I think what leadership as a nonprofit sector, a lot of that has to do with paying attention to the power we’re giving these corporations. You’re familiar as a media person in the nineties, we were really fighting hard against the concentration of media ownership. It was a huge threat and it’s still a massive, massive threat. The same thing is happening with email, there’s a concentration in owner within the internet in general and with email in particular with Google Yahoo and Outlook. And we think, you know, Google is free and it’s not, it is like it comes with a price cash. Right. Exactly. Exactly. Surrender, privacy, surrender. Yes. What did you say? Free as kittens? Ac RM kind of thing. Free. Yes, exactly. So, but that’s where this black box comes in is that we’re giving the power to a very small number of corporations to decide based on our actions and based on who knows what, whether the message should arrive in the inbox. Now, these new regulations, I think they are in the public interest. I’m very glad that Google and Yahoo have decided that they’re going to cut down on fraudulent email. I applaud that, I think that’s good, but they’re doing it for their own reasons. And that means next time they might have other changes that they want. And I’m not at all comfortable with us as a sector saying sure, we’ll give three corporations the ability to dictate what messages land in the inbox, especially during these really crazy political times, it’s un predictable what could happen. And I prefer for us as a movement for us as a nonprofit sector to diversify. I really encourage people to look at other providers. Don’t just go to Outlook or Google because your a technologist says, oh, this is a simple thing that everyone’s doing. It’s really important to diversify to go to other providers. And I just want to say like, you know, we can make a choice, we make a choice to voluntarily give up our, you know, work, go to gmail because it’s oh, it’s so easy and, and it does all these things, but we can make changes now, right? I mean, I think that’s what PTP, what we stand for is we believe in people controlled technology for social change because then we can control, right, our data, our messages, how we wanna get things delivered. And so and, and also design it the way we need it right? To design it, the way organizations and organizing, really need to do the work and in our language, right? So this is where we can make choices. But it’s, um, it’s usually most folks get directed, right? Because of whether it’s consulting or sometimes it’s foundations. I hate to say it. But, you know, because you’ll get free money if you just like, everybody get on 365 Microsoft. right? It’s like without thinking and it’s like, but meanwhile, here they are doing work, you know, and that’s anti corporate work or something, you know, and so be conscious about your choices, especially how it may, may uh coincide with your own cause you were going to say something. I am in total agreement with all of that. And I just wanted to go back to a little bit about email deliverability on the recipient’s end. A shout out to all email recipients out there. I know the spam button looks very inviting for every single email that you don’t want to see in your inbox. However, if it’s not real spam, if it’s from an organization where you went to their gala maybe and you decide you don’t want their email, try to click unsubscribe because when you click spam, you know that goes in to mark against that organization and maybe that’s not what you intended. The user actions that do get collected aggregated. I was gonna ask you too, Natalie about Alright. So as a recipient, be thoughtful. Not real spam and we get it. You don’t want our stuff. That’s totally cool. You get to make that choice but just like unsubscribe instead of a spam. What about cleaning up your list? I mean, isn’t there in, in having a smaller list that’s not gonna mark your spam that’s more engaged with your emails and having a bigger list and, and lower quality receipt actions. That’s such a good point. And uh with power base, the database for community organizers through our support, we do a ton of work with um the groups we work with on duping, making sure you have valid and correct email addresses, you know, having a sign up sheet at your gala or your event is great. Um However, if those people are clicking unsubscribe, make sure they’re actually getting unsubscribed in your database. Um You can even go so far as to if you want to keep them in your database, remove their email address, just you brought up such a good point. Make sure you’re not sending it’s, you know, quality over quantity. Definitely you don’t need to send to the world, you know, do some searches in your database for who is the most engaged and send them a particular email segmenting your list can be very helpful for that. Yeah. Did you have more to add? No, I was just saying it’s like, it’s sort of interesting because the idea of unsubscribing, people should know that they’re only unsubscribing from that one list. And organizations are great at like, creating multiple lists for multiple different things and just like, I have 1625 30 different communications lists and like, people are wondering why am I getting all these emails? Because, well, you only subscribe from the one list, you know, so what that email list was on and sometimes you may not know what list you’re on so organizations can do that too. I mean, if you think it’s good to have 25 communication lists, maybe you should pair it down to 10, maybe like limit. I have another technical question. Mark Jamie. I want to ask you to myself. Don’t be so harsh if I was a DJ DJ. Got it. Alright. Um You mentioned setting your domain name up properly. What did you mean by that, please? So with Dkim Dar and SPF these all are referred to stop laughing at the, stop laughing at the acronyms are bona fide. He got you out of jargon jail. Some gratitude. I would, I would charge you interest on the bail payment. I just made quite an acronym. Yeah. Jeez. So how do you do? How do you put up with this? This is a virtual organization. I was glad you’re not all based on the laugh at your technology. So your domain name, she’s I know she’s going to apologize for that. I know she feels bad already. I can say she’s blushing. I’m putting, I’m putting her on the spot. Does she feel she feel bad? I do. I sorry, deeply sorry, apology accepted. I know they really care about setting up your domain name. So if you own your own domain name, then you have a company that’s called the Registrar, which is where you pay an annual fee. Usually about $20 a year for the right to have this domain name. Domain 10 one is a big one. Hover name.com, gandhi.net registrar.com. There’s a number of different ones. The company you’re paying for your annual registration exactly. Now, that often is different than the company you’re paying to host your domain name. Now, these are really subtle and nuanced differences but they are important differences. The company that you pay to host your domain name is usually the same company you pay to host your website or your email or something like that that’s usually packaged together. Now, the company that’s hosting your domain name is where you can set what your domain name records point to. So that’s what you say DNR S domain name records. Yeah. Well, DNR, I don’t know if I haven’t heard that accurate. That makes me think of testing Department of Natural Resources. We can name them. All right. Look, I have the board here. I can shut your mic down. Not supposed to make fun of the host that consolidation of power. You’re damn right. This is not progressive technology project. Nonprofit Radio. This is Tony Martignetti, Nonprofit Radio. You’re damn right. The middle aged white guy is taking over explicitly. At least I do it explicitly. I acknowledge the power so I’ll shut you down. All right. So no domain name record if we spell it, DNR do. So that’s what you’d say. This domain name points to this IP address. If you want to send an email to this domain name, it should go to this mail server. Those are the historic ways that domain names have been used and they’re being added to and order to support the SPF, DKIM and D Mark records. So SPF is a kind of a domain name record called the text record. And DKIM is also used as the text record. So you say for progressive tech.org, show me the text record and it will say SPF policy is this or you say, OK, and you look it up just the same way you’d say for this domain name. That’s the IP address. How do we make sure we’re set up correctly? You know, I would love technical help with this. I would love to explain to you how to do that. That would take a diagram in 45 minutes. It’s painful. I’m embarrassed as a technologist, how complicated it is to do this. The best I can say is first ask your consultant, staff or volunteer if you’re lucky enough to have one, if you’re not then ask your web host and if your web host can’t do it and you have a database, maybe you have power base or maybe you have um sales force or maybe you have networks nation or any of the other corporate places. Ask them because they’re the place you’re sending your bulk email, they have a responsibility to help you and they should be able to help you solve this problem. That’s valuable. Natalie, I’m going to choose you to bookend us. So the Accidental Techie, which a lot of a lot of people find themselves in that position. Uh You know, just take us out with uh with final thoughts. Yeah. Um Well, we really appreciate this opportunity this time. It’s been a while since we’ve done a radio show and progressive technology project is growing. Um We’re a social justice nonprofit organization that believes in transparent and democratic technology. Um like Jamie said to get help with this stuff, your database provider should be helping you, your technology providers should be helping you with this, so seek their support. Um And then, yeah, we’d love to hear from anyone out there who’s interested in learning more progressive. Tech.org is our website. Ok. Thank you. And just to set the record straight, it’s a podcast. It’s, it’s called Tony Martin TI Nonprofit Radio, but we’re, we’re a podcast, weekly, weekly podcast. Alright. So they are Jamie mcclelland, uh at Progressive Technology Project, Natalie Brenner with progressive technology project. And Alice Aguilar, the leader, the executive director, progressive technology project, Jamie Natalie Ellis. Thank you very much Tony and thank you for being with Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio coverage of 24 NTC, the 2024 nonprofit technology conference where we are graciously sponsored by Heller consulting our booth partners, technology strategy and implementation for nonprofits. It’s time for Tony take two. I’m at the National Association of Y MC A Development Officers Conference, the National Association of all the Y MC A s in uh Mexico, Canada and the US. We’re in Denver, Colorado and I have to admire the w for just all their camaraderie, you know, their support for each other. Um I saw it today at uh two round table conversations that I hosted the desire to help each other. Um These were all small and mid size wise and the sharing of ideas, you know, the, just the, the getting along the collegiality. Uh It’s really delightful to see. Uh There are about 1800 people at this uh North American Y MC, a conference and I’m delivering uh a session on planned giving, not surprising, planned giving 101. I haven’t done that session yet, but from everything I’ve seen the two days I’ve been here, the WS really do support each other throughout North America and it’s uh it’s, it’s inspiring, it’s really, it’s, it’s uplifting to, to see everyone just desiring to help each other so much. Uh sharing ideas, you know, and just laughing and understanding. Yes, understanding, empathizing, even if there isn’t a solution or a suggestion, but, you know, just the empathy. So my, my hats off to the Y MC A s of North America. It’s a real pleasure and a privilege to be at their conference. And that is Tony’s take two ordinarily I would say Kate, but she’s not with us. Uh uh III I think she’ll be back. Uh I think we’ve got Buku but loads more time here is email. Welcome journeys. Welcome back to Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio coverage of the 2024 nonprofit technology conference where we are in Portland, Oregon at the Convention Center and where we are sponsored by Heller consulting technology strategy and implementation for nonprofits with me. Now are Patty Breach and Elizabeth Sellers. Patty is founder and CEO of the purpose collective. Elizabeth is us, Director of Communications and Development at Humanity and Inclusion. Patty Elizabeth. Welcome. Thanks for having us. Good to be here. Pleasure, Patty for you. Welcome back. I think this is your third spot on nonprofit radio at NTC. You’re a perennial. It’s great to be back. I’m glad, glad. Thank you and Elizabeth. Welcome. Welcome. First time we’re talking about the secret to loyal donors. Email, welcome journeys. Um Elizabeth, why don’t you start us off with how important because we’ve heard from Patty on this subject in the past. Uh I believe it was two years ago, but it, that was two years ago. Uh start us off motivation. Why is the email? Welcome journey so important? Sure. So we’re all nonprofits. We all rely on donors to do our work and have impact. So we’re welcoming donors into our organizations every day. Um But so often we’re not nurturing them in a way to share the impact they’re having and share other opportunities for them to get involved. So welcome journeys, really provide an opportunity for us to introduce people to the organization, to our work and to ways that they can take part in our work with us. Um And of course, whenever you’re able to automate a welcome journey, it helps small teams like ours at Humanity and inclusion to welcome those donors out as much capacity or or resource of a manual welcome series. So for us, the initial need for a welcome journey that kind of pushed us over the edge was two years ago when the Ukraine conflict started, we work in situations of conflict and disaster mostly with people with disabilities. And we saw an influx of thousands of new donors who really didn’t know much about our work. And we’ve caught ourselves with the problem of how do we tell them who we are, why we’re managing this emergency situation. And the answer to that was the email welcome journey. And we’ve now added more of those to our repertoire to bring new donors into our space. And and Patty, we can do this with, with uh automation, but also, as Elizabeth said, also nurturing we can, we can automate and nurture together. Yeah, absolutely. Um I think the primary goal of any welcome journey is gratitude. Um We want to thank the supporter for whatever their most recent action was, whether it was a gift or joining an email list or signing a petition. We really want to validate that decision and say um you know, we really appreciate you and we’re so glad you’re here. Um Patty, I gotta ask you a question from previous years. Are, are you the person who told me that you, you, you go on dates and they google your name and they find your nonprofit radio appearances was that you, it wasn’t you? I thought it was, you know, well somebody did tell me I thought it was you. Uh no, you’re not, you’re not seeing that. Ok? No, you would remember all. I’m just sorry I I remembered the wrong person but uh it is happening. I I can’t say that there are any uh marriages have spawned from nonprofit radio appearances. Not yet, but I’ve only been at it 14 years. So I’m still working to get to reach that marriage threshold. Somebody did tell me that their dates were, were mentioning their appearances. Yeah. Yeah. Alright. So it could happen in your future, you know, I don’t know if you’re dating or not but let’s talk about uh is this, I mean, there’s a series, you have a, you have a kind of a, this is a series of like four or five emails properly timed. Ok. Now, let me ask, uh Elizabeth, are you working with the purpose collective in your email? Welcome journeys. We presume we’re here, we’re here together. Ok. Um So Patty, you’re the expert here. Uh How do we, how do we get our plan started? We got to think about the timing, the messaging, right? Like isn’t the first one supposed to be within, within 24 hours, 20 four hours? Ok. Describe what that first message should look like. Yeah, so that one is just a simple. Thank you. Um We usually recommend that it comes from someone recognizable within the organization. So like the executive director or anyone who has name recognition with your supporters. Um and the email can be really simple. It can even be plain text. And the goal is just to say I saw your donation come in and I wanted to tell you how much we appreciate your gift. Ok. So really simple. It doesn’t have to be formatted. Like plain text is great. It’s like like the digital equivalent of a quick handwrit note. I saw this come and it moved me and I want to thank you. Of course, you’ll hear from us, you know, you’ll get something more formal maybe or something. Yeah, that’s a great way to describe it. OK? Ok. And that within 24 hours, I mean, with automation, I mean, should we do this within 15 minutes or 30 seconds? Yeah, it depends on the system you’re using. Sometimes there’s like an overnight sink that it happens between like your, your database, your donation platform and your email program. I’m also thinking timing wise, if you want it to look authentic, if it comes within 15 seconds, it’s unlikely that your CEO could have, would have typed that and now you’re giving away the authenticity of it, the authenticity. Yeah, so that’s, that’s actually why wait until the next day, we usually wait at least a couple of hours if it’s a more automatic sync. But if you have an overnight sync that can, that can work in your favor because it looks like the executive director saw your donation come in first thing the next morning and wanted to send you a note. Ok. Alright, Elizabeth, what kind of responses have you seen? You? You’re getting emails back. Like people believe that the executive director really did take the time. Yeah, we do sometimes get emails back. Um just thanking us for the work that we’re doing asking if there are other ways that they can get involved. Um So yeah, we do see some people who reach out on those um on those emails and, and the best thing about those emails is they’re when someone is super warm to your organization. So our open rates are are much, much higher. So we’re automatically seeing more engagement from those folks. After that first email. Are you adhering to the patty breach purpose collective best practice of doing it within 24 hours that first? So yeah, so our donors, they actually do get an immediate thank you receipt if they’re donating online. Um So they get that immediately and then that first email from our executive director lands within 24 hours. And what’s what’s the next step in the in the journey? The next step is story of impact. Um So for us to her validation, for nonverbal validation, story of impact, gratitude and validation happening with our glances at each other. So yeah, have you done your session yet or no? It’s coming up. Oh, good. Let’s have some fun prep. Ok. Alright. So next uh story of validation. No, no validation is of impact is what you get from your consultant of impact. What does this one look like? What’s the timing, story of impact? Um We’re letting the donor know the difference that they’re making with the gift that they’ve sent. Um So for us, we typically will feature someone who’s directly impacted by our services. So our most, I guess most used donor welcome journey features the story of a little boy who was injured by a landmine and actually lost his leg to that explosion and went through our rehabilitation services and was fitted with a brand new artificial leg. So he’s, there’s a photo of him happily running through the streets and just the story of his recovery and, and the life that he’s living now thanks to our donors and I’ll let Patty answer the exact timing of that timing. Well, what is the format? What does it look like it? Now, this is, this woman has pictures and or maybe video or something. This is not the not akin to the first one, right? This is not plain text. We want people to actually be able to visualize the impact that they’re having. So um your typical kind of designed email with, with photos with text, maybe bolding certain um certain pieces that you want to stand out. Um That’s what it’s gonna look like. And what’s our timing? Timing is 2 to 3 days after the first email, we have data behind these uh these timing the flow. I mean, like if it comes too soon or if it, if it’s a week, it it it diminishes the uh the engagement with it. Yeah, exactly. We found that if you wait too long to send these emails, um people kind of forget about the donation that they just gave you and the email feels like it’s coming out of the blue and they’re like, why are you, what is this? So we definitely have clients who are nervous about. They’re like you want to send two emails within the first week that feels like a lot. Um How do you reassure them? We reassure them with the data behind it so we can show them that the open rates, the click rates are really high, usually double or triple their usual email newsletters. So that shows that people want to get these messages and they’re happy to receive it. And we really are striking while the iron is hot and we’re not annoying people with too many messages. And Elizabeth, you haven’t seen push back that, you know why? Two messages after I made my first gift or something. I mean, it seems it’s, it doesn’t seem likely. I mean, II I just made you a gift. I mean, I actually appreciate the attention and knowing now from the second one, what, what my gift is doing but, and just validate, you’re not, you’re not seeing no push back on that. People are opening them, people are engaging with them. I think the important thing on that second email is that we’re not making any sort of ask. We’re just providing them information on the impact they’re having no follow up. You know, if you want to do more for you, it’s too soon. Let’s talk 2 to 3 days much, too soon. Patty, what’s uh what’s our third? How many, how many are there in the The Journey Series? How many emails? Yeah, for a donor welcome series, we recommend five. Ok. Um and we’re about to do number three. And what are the other types of series you folks might have um you could have one for new subscribers. So whenever anyone joins your list, you could send them a welcome series. Um You could also get more specific about your donor welcome series. Like you could have one series for people who give a one time gift and a different series for people who sign up to give monthly. And then depending on your organization, um like Elizabeth’s organization has petitions that people can sign. And so we have journeys tied to those. So if you add your name to a certain cause we can send you a personalized series of emails about that, that cause. Um but yeah, if you also, if you’re recruiting volunteers, that’s a great time to send a welcome series. If someone signs up to volunteer or maybe after they do their first volunteer experience, they spent their first half a day or whatever. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Alright. So bring us back to number three, the third one in our journey. What’s our? So the first one was 2 to 3 days after the first email, which was within 24 hours. When should this third email be timed? This is one week after email number two and this is an invitation to become more involved. And so the key here is that this is also not a donation ask, but we’re asking them to take some sort of action with the organization. Um That could be anything from, you know, will you, will you become a volunteer with us? Will you follow us on social media? Um In the case of humanity inclusion, it’s, will you take a survey because we want to get to know you better? Um And the goal is basically saying like, we appreciate you so much. We want, we want to invite you into our inner circle. We want to get to know you. We wanna, we wanna have more interaction with you, Elizabeth. What does that survey look like in this third email? Sure. So we really wanna get to know our donors, so who they are, what motivates them um and what it is about our work that matters most to them, which then of course, helps us tailor our communications to them in the future to really make sure that we’re nurturing them and nurturing their interest moving forward. It takes like two minutes. It’s three questions um very, very easy to complete. So at this point, you’re not asking how, how do you like to hear from us or how often or anything like that? You’re saying it’s only three questions we’re not asking much on um on preferences of that nature, but really just what, what areas of our work they want to know more and and why so you can segment your future communications. OK? Anything else on email? Number three? Either of you that it is important for us to know we wanna do this journey correctly. Now, we don’t wanna, we don’t wanna uh we don’t want to uh walk off the path to follow the path correctly. All right. So we’re OK. Don’t message number three. Yeah. The only other thing I would add is that you can test this out for your organization, you can try a survey and if you’re not getting a lot of responses, you can try something else. OK. How about number four, kick us off with that one. Number four is another story of impact. So we as human beings interpret the world through story, we love stories. So I don’t think that there’s such a thing as too much storytelling. Um And this is just another opportunity to say um Here’s how you’re changing the world, here’s the impact that you’re having and again, that gratitude message, we really appreciate that you’re helping with this work. And again, no, no, no. And what’s the timing for number 41 week after the previous email? Ok. So we’re about two weeks after the right? Aren’t we about two weeks and 2.5 weeks or so after the action that began the journey another week? OK, Elizabeth, what are you doing? And number four? Sure. So number four clients. So we actually, we do have a story of impact, but it’s a little bit interesting because this email actually comes from one of our staff members on the ground in Columbia who works as a Dinor. So, clearing weapons contamination from communities and she’s actually clearing contamination from community, the community that she grew up in where she actually herself as a child stepped on a land mine that fortunately did not explode. Um And she opted to become a de miner and later went back and cleared that same area where she had had that interaction as a, as a kid. So, yeah, so it’s a really, it’s a really nice like behind the scenes stories getting to know both the impact of our work. But it’s another opportunity for us to showcase the boots on the ground that we have as an international organization. And that um you know, the staff that we’re working with are local and are working to improve their communities and they’re doing that. Thanks to our donors, anything you wanna add about? Uh your email number four feedback. Are you still? Uh So it’s through the journey, we’re doing five messages. Are you getting feedback? Uh like through you said when you get the first one from the executive director, you do get some messages there. Do you find much response to 23 and four? Yeah. So sometimes we, yeah, sometimes we get responses. Sometimes we don’t, I think the important thing on these journeys is to recognize that it’s really about keeping your audience warm and informed and familiar with who you are. Um So that whenever it it it’s right for them to take the next action, they know what they can do and why it’s important that they do it. Um So we do sometimes hear back from people. Um But for us, I think the most important thing is just knowing that people are reading those emails and they’re seeing about our work and the impact that they’re having. Um, so that we know that they’re gonna continue to engage with us and that goes to Patty’s point that some folks will forget that they even made the gift of you said, if Patty, if the second email comes too late, folks will wonder why you’re writing to me. You know, they don’t even remember. So you’re trying to keep them warm and engaged as you’re saying, Elizabeth. OK. And how about your, your fifth email, Elizabeth? What is that the the fifth email is the ask? So we’re looking for validation in that one. Yes, we’re asking. So um in that fifth email, um we are typically asking and encouraging those one time donors to now take another step forward and become a monthly donor and join our monthly giving community. Um What if they, what if they were monthly donors to begin with, if they are monthly donors to begin with? So we do have a separate, we have a separate journey for monthly donors. And so in that one, we’re asking them to upgrade their monthly gift so they can give extra and that’s actually a really good point. There’s a filter before this email. So in case anyone signed up to give monthly in the meantime, um they’ll be excluded from this message. The last thing we want to do is ask someone to give monthly who is already giving monthly. It makes it seem like we’re not paying attention a little bit, just a little. Ok. Ok. And what’s the timing patty for this fifth male? We want ideally be a month after the gift. So it should be about two weeks after email number, right? Ok. And so, and you feel comfortable Elizabeth that asking for do more within a month after about a month, right? Yeah, I think, I think that can initially be scary to folks. How is this, you know, are we going to offend anyone? And if we’ve offended anyone, they haven’t told us that we’ve offended them. Um So you got that right? No, we haven’t gotten that feedback. And in fact, we’ve seen people who have either made a second one time gift or people who have decided to start um that monthly gift or maybe they don’t take an action immediately after that email, but two months from now when we continue nurturing them and showing the impact that they’re having, maybe they make that gift, you know, two or three or six months down the road. Um But yeah, we haven’t had any, any negative feedback. I think the important thing is that, you know, donors choose their philanthropy and they choose when to give and how to give and where to give. And so for us, you know, I think Patty and I were talking about this earlier, you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. And so, you know, we’re just asking, we don’t expect anyone to do anything that they can or don’t want to do, but we’re giving them that opportunity to make another gift and broaden their impact. If that’s, you know, if that’s on the table for them. And at this point, they’ve learned how important that gift can be and the, the life changing um actions that it can, can fund Elizabeth if it, if it was a petition, that was the first action that began the embarkation on the journey. But I love this journey. So I’m sticking with this journey metaphor. You have the path and it’s a cruise, maybe it’s a cruise ship or um if, if so, if they were uh they signed, they signed a petition, then I assume your ask in email five is for a gift. And how do you decide how much to ask for? Um We actually don’t, we don’t include amounts. Um So, you know, that’s something really up to the donor. We actually um I will give a plug to fundraise up, which is our donation platform and we actually use their machine learning um which A I is, I’m sure gonna be a focus of some of your other interviews. Um but we use their machine learning and they actually will suggest gift amounts. That makes sense to the person who is, you know, coming to our site and opening that donation form. Um But yeah, if they, if they sign a petition that last ask is just to make any gift, whatever the amount um to fund our work. Ok. Ok. Patty gift number, email number five. You haven’t said anything about this one yet? What do you want to add? Um Yeah, I would just add that. I really recommend acknowledging the donor’s previous gift um explicitly in this email. So saying like we remember that you donated to us a month ago, we’re still thinking about how great you are over here. Um We’re still really grateful for that and we wanted to invite you to become a part of this monthly giving program because we think it would be a good fit for you because we know that you’re passionate about this cause it’s because you gave us a donation a month ago that we’re now asking you to do this. So again, we want, we want to make it seem like we’re paying attention. We remember you, we see you um and we’re not just blindly sending out donation requests. I appreciate that. It’s because of your first action that we’re we’re asking this. Alright, we still have some time together. Is there more that you’re gonna share with NTC attendees? That you have not yet shared with nonprofit radio listeners. I mean, I don’t, I don’t appreciate you holding back on uh on our listeners. Is there, is there more that uh we haven’t talked about yet? Um Yeah, I mean, one thing that we’re going to mention in our presentation is that if creating a five part welcome series, feels daunting to you, you can always start smaller, you could start with 123 emails in the series. And as time allows, you could add more emails to them or not like the petition series at Humanity Inclusion. It’s a three part series and that’s it just three emails. Um So we believe having something is better than having nothing even if the something isn’t like the full recommended journey link. But you can set these up as automations in probably any decent email provider, right? I would think contact mailchimp sales force. All the big ones have automated series features. And Elizabeth, is that just a capacity issue for now? I thought you said, I thought you have four and five on the donor Impact Journey. We do have on the on the donor welcome journey. We have five, the subscriber series. We have five, our petitions, we only have the three. So we have two petitions that we ask people to sign. So um so on that one, the j it’s a thank you for adding your name. And then the second one is again that story of impact. And then the third one is that one time ask. Um So I think it depends on to the action that someone is taking. What makes the most sense and what kind of that final ask how it compares to the one before. So if someone’s already given you money, I think nurturing them a little bit more before you ask them for more money is important where if someone is, has taken an action like adding their name to a petition, then for me, it feels a little bit more comfortable to more quickly ask them to, to make a gift. So they get the shorter journey. The three messages makes intuitive sense and you’re seeing good results. Yeah. Another thing I want to mention is that we really recommend segmenting anybody who’s on a journey, segmenting them out of your general newsletter list until they finish the journey. So, ok, your regular list. So like we don’t want someone to get email number two in this journey and then six hours later get your monthly newsletter that might feel like email overload for someone. And um we also feel like it’s the point of this is to nurture someone to the point where now they’re ready after the five emails, now they’re ready to be added to the general list. But for that first month, let’s really make sure we’re just talking to them about their donation and their donation only. Ok. Yeah, it seems disruptive to the, to the, to the whole cause of the whole purpose of the journey to, to have other communications in there. There might, there might be an asking that you might be asking that a newsletter, right? I mean, there probably is and now it seems incongruous like what? But I, I thought you were. Yeah, II I thought I just gave especially if it comes too close to the gift to the initial gift that started the journey, I could see. All right. That makes sense. It’s confusion. It’s disruptive. Ok. Ok. Ok. This is exclusive for the first month. They are exclusive communications. Ok. Is there anything else I I would just say for nonprofits, especially smaller teams, it can feel daunting to set these up at the start, but it’s really worth the time and investment to do that because you, you are now having these personal tailored touches to every donor that’s coming through or every subscriber that’s coming through and there’s a little bit of work on the front end. But really these journeys, once they’re, once they’re set, you can kind of set and forget, you know, maybe do a refresh every 6 to 12 months to make sure that the is still relevant to make sure that, you know, maybe you have a new story of impact that’s more recent that you wanna change out. Um But once you get these going, um they make your job as a fundraiser as a communicator as a marketer, a lot easier um to, to meet these donors where they are. That’s a perfect place to end. Thank you. That’s Elizabeth Sellers, us, Director of Communications and Development at Humanity and Inclusion. And with her is Patty Breach founder and CEO of the purpose collective, Patty Elizabeth. Thank you. Thanks very much. Thank you. Thank you and thank you for being with Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio coverage of the 2024 nonprofit technology conference where we are sponsored by Heller consulting technology strategy and implementation for nonprofits. Next week, the generational divide. That’s not a joke. You’ll see, you’ll see it’s coming. It’s next week. If you missed any part of this week’s show, I beseech you find it at Tony martignetti.com. We’re sponsored by Virtuous. Virtuous, gives you the nonprofit CRM fundraising, volunteer and marketing tools. You need to create more responsive donor experiences and grow, giving, virtuous.org. I think this went pretty well. Uh It’s, it is exhausting. Uh um And I’m a little tired of hearing my voice. Uh But you know, I’m the 1st 600 40 shows were all me and I didn’t get tired of hearing myself for those 13 years. So we’ll see, we’ll see the, the jury is out still about uh whether we need an associate producer on nonprofit radio. Our creative producer is Claire Meyerhoff. The show’s associate producer for now is Kate Martignetti. Our social media is by Susan Chavez Mark Silverman is our web guy and this music is by Scott Stein. Thank you for that information, Scotty. You with us next week for nonprofit radio, big nonprofit ideas for the other 95% go out and be great.

Nonprofit Radio for April 1, 2024: Avoid Technical Debt & Your Technical Roadmap

 

Jagan Narayanan & Karen Graham: Avoid Technical Debt

 

Our 24NTC coverage continues, to help you avoid crushing tech debt that would bust your budget and cause you a big headache. Our panel encourages you to manage and maintain your IT infrastructure and software so that costs are managed. They’re Jagan Narayanan, from Fourth Dimension Technologies, and the tech speaker, writer and consultant, Karen Graham.

 

 

 

 

Kestryl Lowery:  Your Technical Roadmap

Another way to steer clear of a technology budget crisis is to prioritize and plan your investments. Kestryl Lowrey shares the best practices for creating your tech roadmap. He’s with Cloud for Good.

 

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Hello listeners. It’s Tony. Every week for the past 14 years. I’ve produced a show this week. I’m sorry, I just II I could not pull it together. Uh personal problems, technology problems. Its just, it was just overwhelming. I, I could not, I’m sorry. It’s April Fools. It’s our April Fools show. 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 Hebdomadal podcast. Oh, I’m glad you’re with us. I’d suffer the embarrassment of. 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 going on this week? Hey, Tony, it’s a technology management show. First. Avoid technical debt. Our 24 NTC coverage continues to help you avoid crushing tech debt that would bust your budget and cause you a big headache. Our panel encourages you to manage and maintain your it infrastructure and software so that costs are managed. They are Jin Narayanan from fourth dimension technologies and the tech speaker, writer and consultant Karen Graham. Then your technical road map another way to steer clear of a technology budget crisis is to prioritize and plan your investments. Castro Lowry shares the best practices for creating your tech roadmap. He’s with Cloud for good. Antonius. Take two, I’ve been dreaming were sponsored by virtuous. Virtuous, gives you the nonprofit CRM fundraising, volunteer and marketing tools. You need to create more responsive donor experiences and grow giving, virtuous.org here is avoid technical debt. Welcome back to Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio coverage of the 2024 nonprofit technology conference. We’re in Portland, Oregon and we are sponsored by Heller consulting technology strategy and implementation for nonprofits. With me. Now are Jin Narayanan. And Karen Graham Jin is CEO at fourth dimension technologies and Karen is speaker, writer, consultant and coach. Welcome back to both of you. You’ve both been on the show before. It’s good to have both of you back. Jug and Karen. Welcome back. Thanks. Thank you. Pleasure. So you’ve uh you’ve done your session and your topic is avoid technical debt from killing your nonprofit, not, not just not just damaging or injuring, killing, killing, jugging. Why is this uh an important topic? Why do we need this session? Uh It’s basically it’s a more to do with being able to keep up with uh technology and trying to address issues as and when they come up and not let them pile up. Once you let the issue spile up, then it kind of grows to such an extent that it becomes a very difficult task to manage at that point in time. And that’s why we’re talking about being able to kill them because suddenly you find yourself in a situation where you have a huge technology challenge and you probably don’t have the resources both financial, as well as technical to be able to address that. Ok. And it could have been avoided with better management through the, through the years. Absolutely better management in terms of planning and probably spreading it out over a period of time. Ok, Karen, do you want to add something to, to our introduction to the topic? I think, I mean, you asked why, why this topic here, why this conference? I think it’s especially important for nonprofits to think about this because they have so many pressures that, that send them in the direction of accumulating more technical debt, of putting off purchases of under investing in technology because of the way that they’re funded because of the um just all of the different ways that they operate. I think nonprofits are perhaps more susceptible to technical debt than any other kind of organization. Um So some of the things we want, let’s stick with you, Karen. Just reading from your session description, learn, learn the negative impacts of technical debt, I mean, jug and sort of alluded to them. Do you want to go into more detail or maybe tell a story of, of the, the uh the implications of putting off proper investment and management of technology. I’ll use a release. Simple example. And this is, this is kind of an embarrassing example because it’s a way that I am accumulating technical debt myself by keeping a laptop for longer than I would ever advise a client to do. I would usually tell people to plan to replace their computers every 3 to 5 years. I’ve got a laptop that’s six years old and I’m just crossing my fingers that it’s not going to die in the middle of this conference. And then I would be forced to go out and sort of panic, purchase a new machine without shopping for sales without really thoroughly looking at what my options are. And so in that way, I’m probably not making a very smart decision and could end up the impact of that, could be that I would spend more. I wouldn’t get the right kind of computer for, for the next, the next one that I buy. And that’s just like kind of a microcosm of what happens on a much larger scale with a lot of kinds of enterprise technology systems and organizations. Well, I admire you sharing your own personal, uh, I don’t know, shortcoming or oversight. Uh, hypocrite is the word that comes to mind, but at least you’re honest, you’re an honest hypocrite. You’re not, you’re not a concealed. You know, I love Karen. Karen’s been on the show many times. We’ve talked a lot, we email. So I know she doesn’t object to. I feel the same kinds of pressures that a lot of people working in nonprofits do where, you know, I want to make the best use of my funds. I don’t want to overspend. And so sometimes I can be kind of a cheap skate, double, double hypocrite, not, you’re under investing and you’re not, you’re not turning over the technology as it ought to be as it ought to be upgraded. Alright. Um Jin, uh is there a story maybe that you wanna share or, or uh about, you know, proper, let’s let’s go to the other end of the spectrum from Karen now to the to the proper the proper management and, and investment in, in uh technology. Yeah, actually we, we manage it for a lot of organizations and uh as a part of our job, it’s, it’s a part of the job to let them know how they are accumulating debt and what are the risks they carry and what we see sometimes is uh actually quite surprising. Uh we have clients who still use versions of operating system like Windows 2000 just because it works, they use it, they want to use it. They’re not changing it because the change will cost them no longer supported. It’s no longer supported, it’s risky some of the people attending this event. Absolutely. So that’s the risk that they carry risk is whether if they’re using uh uh let’s say unsupported versions of either operating systems or some of the systems that they have, they risk the possibility of security process. So that’s the biggest risk. And uh again, security is like an insurance and the general perception is if it’s not happened to me, I’m safe. So it’s, it’s, it’s a kind of a situation where it hits until it does happen to you. Absolutely. So I think this is where the challenge is. Uh we need to take, that’s why people need to take proactive measures. So when I talk about my own experiences with organizations, this is what we see in a lot of organizations and even then they would want to probably extend it as much as possible because at the end of the day, upgrades also cost money. I think that’s the challenge. But Karen, we, we should look at this as an investment, right? I don’t know why you’re asking me questions because I’ve now completely undermined my own credibility. Well, let me, let me take a moment to rehabilitate because Karen I’ve known Karen for years. She is a very smart, very savvy tech uh tech reviewer, tech consultant, tech person, professional. Uh she used to produce reports about technology. Um and I had her on the show talking about them. So this is all that was uh that was all in fun. Karen. Karen is a very, very savvy and very smart consultant. Karen Graham consulting. I don’t know, her little bio doesn’t say doesn’t say Karen Graham consulting. It just says, speaker, writer, consultant, coach, I’ve made my best after myself consulting. And as I Tony Martignetti, Tony Martignetti nonprofit Radio Martignetti Planned Giving Advisors II, I think that’s, I think that’s the right way to go. You’re because you’re a well known name in technology. So Karen Graham consulting has gravitas and that’s not just a gratuitous rehabilitation, it’s all deserved. So he’s made such terrible fun of you. II I wanna make sure that I go uh make sure I rehabilitate and set the record straight again. That was not a gratuitous rehabilitation. It’s all true. So as a savvy smart tech consultant at Karen Graham consulting, uh we should be viewing this as an investment, right? Not expenditure, not spending, but we’re investing in tech just like we should invest in our people. Yeah, we should. Um and but in order to make a proper investment, you need to, you need to save for that, you need to budget for it and you need to understand how to evaluate return on investment. And I actually think that’s sometimes how these things start to fall apart is that people don’t understand how to really evaluate the ro I they don’t understand how to swayed someone of that. That’s something we talked about in the session a bit. There were a lot of people in the room that were it and operations, people that do understand this already and yet they’re sort of inhibited from implementing really smart technology investments in their organization because their leaders don’t understand the importance of it. Their boards don’t understand the importance of it, their don’t understand the importance of it. And so I think it’s our responsibility as technology leaders to acquire the skills, to be able to really make a strong case for those investments and to do it in the language, to use the kinds of arguments that are relevant to the people that are making those decisions. Well, let’s stay with you. How do we start to budget for this? Let’s take uh websites, for example, almost everyone, almost every nonprofit organization does some kind of website refresh or maybe even a complete overhaul, redesign every 3 to 5 years. And yet few organizations budget for that in the years that they’re not doing it. And so to smooth out that um that cash flow and to be prepared for a major website redesign, a few organizations have a practice of setting aside a little bit of money in a fund that’s dedicated for that as they’re building up to it. Um But many of them just wait until it’s kind of past due and then they’ll maybe go to a funder and say, oh, we need, you know, many tens of thousands of dollars to be able to do this redesign and they just cross their fingers that somebody’s gonna say, yes. What, what about for the jug? And what about for the kinds of technology that we’re, that’s, that’s palpable. Um Kron was talking about her laptop. Uh you know, I’m thinking of servers. I mean, I’m not a tech person but you are uh you know, how do we, how do we budget for what those expenses are going to be? The the laptop upgrades, the server up grades, things like that. How do we know how much to plan for? See? Actually, uh if you are a technology person, normally the road map for technology is laid out by the vendors. You take the large vendors, be it the network vendors like Cisco and Junipers or you take the server vendors like Dell or HP, I mean, all of them have set a road map and I think that road map is available for us as technology. So we know where technology is headed in terms of what so very clearly uh that road, once that road map is available, there is a possibility that you can therefore start seeing that this is when I need a refresh, this is when I need an upgrade and stuff like that. Well, you may not know the exact amounts which are required for these exacts. But Karen said if we put together a plan and start setting aside some money straight away, so at least it doesn’t hit you when in a big time when it actually happens, you start setting aside funds for it over a period of time and then start rolling it out on an annual basis rather than doing it at one shot every, every year, you set aside a certain amount of money for upgrades for, uh let’s say you now you’re using the technical debt for, let’s say, uh managing technical debt and you set aside some money and then you know what comes in at that point in time and start using it for that purpose. And the large providers have a road map, road maps for us that most of them have, most of them, we have some visibility into what’s in store. It’s not that they just throw something at us. I mean, there is obviously an available in terms of, if you go to Microsoft, I’m sure Microsoft will tell you when is the next release planned for their operating system? And they will also tell you when is the support stopping for the earlier version of the operating system? So you certainly have a time plan for you to plan that out and hardware, hardware as well and HP etcetera, and there might be a lot of people listening that are not with an organization that has an it professional on their staff. And so maybe they don’t have somebody that really has the knowledge to keep track of these kinds of things. In that case, they should find somebody like Jan or you know, someone who can advise them, maybe outsource that um who can help them make those plans. Actually, it’s a good idea to have a periodic audit, let’s say, do you do an annual audit to see where you are? And what is it that you need to address that? That’s probably a good way to address it in that sense. Auditing software, hardware. Absolutely. That’s right. Ok. Vendor relationships, backup plans, all of it together do infrastructure. I audit to see where you are and what are the gaps that you have to fill and then plan for it. At least you can plan for it the next year. It’s time for a break. Virtuous is a software company committed to helping nonprofits grow generosity. Virtuous believes that generosity has the power to create profound change in the world and in the heart of the giver, it’s their mission to move the needle on global generosity by helping nonprofits better connect with and inspire their givers. Responsive fundraising puts the donor at the center of fundraising and grows, giving through personalized donor journeys that respond to the needs of each individual. Virtuous is the only responsive nonprofit CRM designed to help you build deeper relationships with every donor at scale. Virtues gives you the nonprofit CRM, fundraising, volunteer marketing and automation tools. You need to create responsive experiences that build trust and grow impact virtuous.org now back to avoid technical debt. Something I’m curious about, I know both of you, but I, I know I’m not the person who introduced you. How did the two of you come together to do this session together. That’s interesting. That’s interesting. Actually, I’m going to locate in only the last few weeks. Ok. Uh We have another gentleman in our organization who’s been talking to her for a long time. Ga ga. That’s right. So Ronga has been driving this and uh that’s how he got set up and we’ve been in this nonprofit technology thing for the last couple of years. So we’ve been working with multiple people and reaching out to a lot of people and Karen was certainly one of the, on our list. She was on top of our list. Outstanding fourth dimension. Of course, you were a sponsor of nonprofit radio and uh you were on our 650th or 6/100 show, 6/100 show. I interviewed you in uh Moynihan Station in New York City, Moynihan Hall. Pardon me, Moynihan Hall in New York City. And then we had a very nice dinner together. So I know I know the both of you. Well, I just regrettably, I’m not the person brought you together, but Ron found Ronga found Karen top of her list, top of his list. Um Let’s talk a little about Ro I let’s stay with you, Juan. Uh and then we’ll Karen, I’ll turn to you to fill in some too about how do we start to estimate RO I because this is something that if, if, if everything is going along fine, then the C suite may just say, well, everything’s going along fine. I don’t, I don’t see any downside to continuing with uh with uh Windows 2000 for instance. Wh wh why, why should, why should we bother, how do, how do we quantify the, the, the value of upgrading to a, to the current uh operating system, for instance? OK. There are multiple ways of doing this. There are multiple ways, one is uh uh very simply is, is there a productivity impact because of the fact that you’re running older systems? I mean, that’s, that’s one way to look at it. And uh when you look at productivity impact, that’s something we can straight away uh add money value to it and do it. The other is a potential risk that you carry. Like when you say security risk, it’s a risk. But to be putting a money value on it, we need to put a model by which you can say, hey, in case we have a security incident, what is the impact that is having on the organization? OK. So these are the two things that, that comes to my mind straight away security wise, we can look at some of the headlines, a ransomware attacks uh on, I mean, sometimes even on nonprofits, we don’t even have to just look at the commercial, the corporate side of hacks, uh like Yahoo is the one that comes to mind, but there have been others since then. But some nonprofits have been attacked. In fact, I’ll send you a very good example of technical debt, which actually had an impact on general users. Uh Some time back, we had an issue at Southwest where I think the systems came down. I think this is about the air this happened, I think about 34 years back. And I think the one of the reasons was that some of the systems were not upgraded in time. Ok. So having said that, I mean, I’m saying even for large organizations, it happens because we tend to ignore it in a lot of ways, right? So having said that from an ro I look at the impact and uh so if you look at it as an impact, somebody has to put together and say in case this happens, what are the costs and therefore it’s better to invest now and prevent an incident happening sometime down the line. And then also, as you mentioned, productivity, productivity is a very simple, simple model. Yeah, we’re working, right mccarron, we’re, you know, suppose let’s take this windows 2000 example. I mean, we’re, you know, aside from the security risks of using an operating system that still hasn’t been supported for, I don’t know how many years or decades or a decade or so, but just, you know, like the work arounds, like if you wanna integrate calendly, let’s say, or something, you know, to your email or you know, to, to to use something modern with something that’s 24 years old. Um, that’s enormously unproductive. Right. Well, and just to put some numbers to this and I hope I’m not the technical side to it. I hope I’m not doing the math rather spontaneously here. But I was just thinking, like, let’s say you have 10 minutes a day that your old computer, your old operating system, your workarounds are slowing you down by 10 minutes a day. And then if you multiply that out, say by like 40 40 hours a week and 50 days or 50 weeks a year with some vacation, things like that, say, you have somebody that’s being paid $50 an hour. If you take the value of their time, I think that’s $2000 a year, right? One employee. Right. So, I mean, for $2000 would you want to upgrade their operating system? It seems like that would be a pretty clear two $1000 of ongoing costs each year. And then on top of that, the risk of the security risk, we haven’t quantified that right now by, by making the investment of time and money into upgrading the operating system, you’re not really gonna save $2000 you’re still gonna be paying that employee, right? You’re not going to be paying them for 10 fewer minutes every day, but they 10 more minutes that they could be using to do something that is advancing your mission that is raising more money for your organization that is increasing your reach. You know, there’s, there’s all kinds of things they could be doing. So it’s really more of an opportunity cost in reality. But if we wanna put numbers to it and be able to use that to compare ro i of different options, then that’s a, that’s a way that you can do it. Ok? Um uh I’m just reading from your session description um best practices for managing and maintaining it, infrastructure and software systems. Have we, have we covered that? Have we covered that? We talk about it? We did talk about managing and maintaining. That’s right. One of the things that came across during our session itself was uh one was the periodic audit itself which kind of gives you an idea of where you are and where you want to be. Uh The other was I think one of the participants that brought this out was to put together a plan. I mean, while he spoke about a five year plan, I mean, my personal view was in technology, five years is a long time. It’s a very long time. I think about where we were five years ago and how many things didn’t even exist yet. So, but to put together at least a plan saying, hey, this is my technology plan over the next few years and then start implementing it in phases so that you spread out your cost over a period of time. So these are primarily this one is an audit to see where you are because we are so much into the issue that you become part of the problem and not a part of the solution, right? So it’s one way is to step back and get somebody to do an audit and look at it and give you a feedback. The other is to spread out, put together a plan for the, for the next few years. I would, I would rather say three years and spread out your cost over a period of time rather than have them stuck. I mean, thrown at you at one time, these are the two things which came across at that point, I would say with technology planning because things change so much and it’s nearly impossible for that reason to make anything more than even a one year plan, I would say in the environment that we’re in right now, it’s equally important to have a technology strategy. And to me that means priorities, for example, in security, there is often a trade off or friction between higher security and higher convenience for the end users. And so to have sort of a philosophy like when those two things are in conflict, we’re going to lean in one direction or the other or if it’s a matter of investing more money versus um I, I’m trying to think of what the tradeoffs might be here. There’s, there’s all kinds of dichotomies where you can say our philosophy, our approach is going to be that we’re going to lean in this direction and those kinds of things can guide the decisions that you don’t even anticipate. You’re going to have to make a year from now when some new technology arises or when something changes in your environment or your organization and talking about security, there is no limit to the level of paranoia that you can have. It’s clear which side you would, you would. Karen said one way or the other, it’s clear which way you would. It’s a question is where do you want to draw the line and say, hey, I’m willing to live with a certain set of risks and you need to be sure that you’re not taking the one, you can’t be one extreme or the other. If you’re pursuing perfect security, I mean, you’re just going to drive yourself crazy. It’s impossible. You have quadruple factor authentication because they spend half their day logging on. So you have to decide what’s good enough and it’s probably not what you’re doing right now, but there is something that’s probably good enough. Another thing that I was thinking about when you were talking about return on investment is user adoption and training. And, um, and I often see really great technology investment sort of go to waste because people don’t take advantage of them. It’s like the treadmill that I have in the basement right now, which is collecting dust. You know, that’s not gonna help me get more fit. You don’t have to tell your own personal story about the treadmill now too. But, but, but, um, it sounds like there’s, you’ve seen some evidence of that or you’ve seen cases. I most often see that in CRM, um, databases and, you know, other kinds of software applications, but mostly CRM buying something much more robust than needed or even buying the exact thing that’s needed. But then if staff don’t fully utilize it, if they’re not well trained on it, then you’re just leaving a lot on the table. We had a session yesterday. I spoke to some folks actually from Heller consulting about leaning more on your existing tech stack before you go to an outside shiny object that does just one discrete thing. It may be very well buried in your Microsoft 360 subscription or your Google subscription like and they, they were using uh calendar, calendaring as an example, like polling calendar polls that exist in Microsoft 360 also in Google um beyond oh white boards, white boards that’s buried in Microsoft 360. A lot of people don’t know that. So using that also to your point, Karen, knowing what you’re paying for and utilizing it fully. I always tell people don’t be so scared to click on things. You’re not going to break anything, you know, just like go through the whole menu and just click on every single thing and see what it does and you’ll probably find all sorts of things that can improve your productivity and avoid extra expenses because you have already something that will solve the problem. Video video conferencing was another um and, and and transcribing video conferencing. So this stuff is all buried in Google and Microsoft. You may very well be paying for it. Alright, that was another that was a session yesterday uh utilizing your existing tech stack before you go outside. Um Alright, well, so you spoke to folks for an hour yesterday and uh we’ve only been talking a little over 20 minutes, so don’t hold back on nonprofit radio listeners or otherwise I I can’t have either of you back. So if I know you’re giving short shrift to our listeners, so don’t do that. So what else did you talk about yesterday? That uh we haven’t, we haven’t talked about today or, or go deeper in something maybe that we’ve covered but not sufficiently. Actually, we had a lot of uh participation from the audience and a lot of them are willing to share what they had done in their organizations. And uh if you look at some of the um uh what should I say, takeaways that happened? Uh It is more, more from uh participants sharing their views as much as what we were talking about. And this five year plan, in fact, one of them came up and said, hey, we do a five year plan which I think was very impressive uh when everybody heard about it, but maybe, uh maybe not, maybe ill advised. It sounds like like 1 to 2 years is more, having a rigid five year plan is probably ill advised, but having a flexible five year plan. That sounds fantastic. More importantly, having a plan. Ok. What else, what else from the audience? Questions or things folks said privately, what else came from the audience? Anything that you remember that you can? It’s funny being in the moment I was just listening to everybody and now I’m trying to remember exactly what was the most juicy stuff that came out of that. But I will say that it felt a bit cathartic for people to just have a grape session together and compare notes. You know how that is when you experience things and in isolation, maybe you are the only it person in your organization. But I think that was true for a lot of those people. They’re not part of a big department, they’re in a relatively small organization. And so they, they might not even be an it professional, maybe they’re the operations person. And that’s one of five different areas of responsibility that they have and the chance to connect with other people and understand that like other people also experience this and, and they have figured out ways to overcome technical debt or, or at least to move in that direction that seem to feel good for people and a few individuals commented to me about that afterward. Another thing comes to my mind, Karen is uh I think there was some thought in terms of how do we present all of them are mostly it professionals and if they need to present it to their boards or to their uh CXO how do we present technology challenges in a manner which the senior management understands? I think there was a, there was a need, there was a need to see, I mean, we are aware that this is something we need to be presenting it differently from what we probably do because normally we tend to talk technology language. So we probably need to talk the business language for the senior management to understand the impacts of what we do. And therefore, Karen, you alluded to that earlier talking about using the right language. Do you have advice about converting tech language to language? Yeah. Um Think about the audience and what they care about, right? So you’re going to present probably a different message to your CEO or executive director than you would to your CFO or to your board. Um Boards care about risk management. They care about big picture strategy and how is this going to help our organization be successful in the long term? I think CEO S and executive directors care about the same kinds of things, but they’re also more operationally oriented than a board of directors would be. And um but they also above all, probably care about the mission. And so that’s something we talked about is as soon as you can connect a technology investment to serving people better um providing better quality of service or better reach or quicker response times or things like that to, you know, whoever your constituents are, then that starts to get people’s attention more than talking about. You know, this license is going to expire. This product is no longer going to be supported and there’s security patches that won’t be happening anymore. La la la people kind of tune out when you start talking like that. But if they can translate to what this means is that our food shelf might not be able to continue providing services, we might have a disruption, then it becomes very real. All right, perfect. How about we leave it there? That sounds like good motivation and, and advice. All right, she’s Karen Graham, speaker, writer, consultant, coach at I’m gonna add at Karen Graham consulting and uh with her is Jin Narayanan Ceo at fourth dimension technologies. All about avoiding technical debt from killing your nonprofit, Jin Karen. Thank you very much. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you, Johnny. Good to see both of you. Thank you. Thank you and thank you for being with Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio coverage of the 2024 nonprofit technology conference where we are sponsored by Heller consulting, technology strategy and implementation for nonprofits. Thanks for being with us. Its time for Tonys take to thanks Kate. I had a dream recently. Uh it was a fundraising dream. Um I was hosting a Jerry Lewis Labor Day Telethon. Now, if, if you’re not 50 or older, you may not know what that even means. But the actor Jerry Lewis used to hold, used to host Labor Day Telethons over the Labor Day weekend to raise money for the muscular dystrophy association. MD A. So uh but in the dream, I was the host. So Jerry Lewis that hack. He’s out. Second rate comic. He’s out, I’m the host and we are raising money, not for muscular dystrophy, but we’re raising money for a philharmonic in the dream. And I ask the executive director of the Philharmonic, what is the all in cost of a production night? So all the rehearsal, backstage, front of house performers, everything. What, what’s, what’s the total cost? And he says $300,000 and right away, a donor comes to us and I don’t remember whether it was online or actually phones were ringing. That’s the way it used to be done in the, in the Jerry Lewis Labor Day Days, the phones would be ringing, but whatever a donor comes to us and he pledges $3 million which is enough for 10 performances. So we acknowledge that transformative gift and we shut down the shut down the fundraiser. It’s over. We’re done because this is, it’s an amazing gift. But the funny thing is that the donor had the voice of the actor Paul Benedict. Now he’s not a very well known actor but in, in a movie that I love, remember this is my dream. So I, I’m entitled to put anybody in who I want. Um in the movie I love, which is Waiting for Guffman. It’s a Christopher guest film, Paul Benedict plays kind of a savior character in that movie waiting for Guffman. So it makes sense that, that he would be the sort of savior for the, for the fundraising telethon that we were doing. All right. Uh So then, so then after the dream, then I got up and I went to the bathroom. But so what’s the takeaway? Uh you know, after the bathroom you gotta think about, well, why am I having this dream? All right. So the takeaway I think is there’s the bona fide for fundraising, share your real need with your donors, don’t, you know, don’t pretend that you can get away with less than you really need. I asked the executive director, what’s the full cost of a performance? And, and he shared it. So I think you should share your full needs and then when you’re budgeting and planning plan for full needs, not sort of get by type deeds, I think if you share your full need with your donors, they’re gonna be very much more likely to step up and fund you just like Paul Benedict did in my dream. That is Tony’s take two. OK. That was such a vivid dream. I feel like when most people remember their dreams, they’re like, oh, I was just falling in the middle of nowhere. You had like faces and voices. Well, I have those too but I, I made some notes uh right after this dream. So I was able to help that helped me remember it. Well, we’ve got Buku but loads more time. Here is your technical roadmap. Welcome back to Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio coverage of 24 NTC, the 2024 nonprofit technology conference. We are still in Portland, Oregon at the Oregon Convention Center and this conversation kicks off our day three coverage of the conference. Maybe you can hear that in my voice. Uh Just a little bit were sponsored at 24 NTC by Heller consulting technology strategy and implementation for non profits. I am now with Castrol Lowry. He is managing director for technical services at Cloud for good Krol. Welcome to nonprofit radio. Thanks for having me here. Absolutely pleasure. Thanks for being with us early in the morning. Uh your session, you’ve done your session already. I assume it’s this afternoon. 115, you’re one of the last ones. Ok, this afternoon. So a little preparation for you. It’s oh, the places we’ll go building a technical road map. Alright. So I’m gonna start with the, you know, just the basic uh why did, why did you feel we need this session? What are nonprofits? Uh what uh not quite, not quite getting right about uh their technical planning. Um I think that a lot of nonprofits end up in a very reactive place when it comes to their technology that instead of being able to really think ahead, you know, where are we going to be in three years and five years? And what tools do we need to support that? It becomes a, oh, we’ve been prioritizing, you know, our outcomes and our mission driven delivery and technology becomes kind of an afterthought. And I think that there can be a lot of impact by thinking ahead and saying what tools are out there. What could we be doing differently? How could that increase our impact instead of having it come from a reactive place um and maybe even avoiding a crisis. So I’m just drawing from your, your session description, uh how to prioritize tech investments based on the growth and maturity of your organization. Um How do we like, you know, how do we forecast what our needs are gonna be? And you even talk about our growth and maturity, help us to look ahead, how do we do that? So a big part of it first is to both, look at, look at where you are and what you’re using. Um and think realistically about what you have the capacity to absorb there. I think one thing that a lot of nonprofits end up doing is, you know, there, there can be some great free tools out there, both of enterprise level tools that will give free licensing for nonprofits or also things that are deeply discounted. And so someone might adopt a tool that is frankly bigger than what they need. You know, I say with the free license, sometimes it’s free like puppies, like somebody two days ago said free like kittens, same thing just because you have the tool doesn’t mean necessarily that it’s the right fit for your use case or that you have the team to support it. So then you can end up with some pretty tremendous technical debt. You’ve got all your data into this thing or you’ve built all this automation and you’re not able to manage it well. So some of that technical road mapping is thinking through like what’s the right fit size for your organization and not just what do you need to implement it, but what do you need to be successful with it? Long term? But how do you figure that out? What factors, what variables are we looking at to determine that what’s right for us? So things to look at for figuring that out. Of course, first of all, looking to your peers, you know, looking to other organizations with a similar size or that do um comparable work in other industries, even essentially for what you’re doing. Um conferences like NTC can be a great place to kind of start seeing what’s out there and what your options are. Um looking at what the, what the tool is best at, which is hard sometimes when you’re talking to sales people, you know, because every sales person is going to tell you it’s the best thing for anything you would want to do. But trying to actually get some references from them of how are other people using this tool and then really taking a step back and not, not saying, oh well, gee this this thing, you know, this marketing tool looks awesome. It can do all of this stuff. Look at how you’re doing marketing right now. If you’re sending a scheduled email on a weekly basis, that’s a newsletter and you don’t have um journeys or drip automation. If you don’t have responsive campaigns, then those might be things to look at bringing in, but you probably don’t need the broadest feature set just to start with. So think about whether or not you’re going to be able to support that. Um and something like that like an email journey that may even be in your existing stack already, your email provider may already have that for you. Exactly. Like when you’re building your road map, it doesn’t necessarily mean tool change. It can mean staying on the same thing that you’re using and using it better um I think the first with any technical change really, you start from features and capabilities that you need, like you start from, what does your organization actually need to do? And that’s what should be driving any of the conversations that you’re having and decisions that you’re making for the technology. What you need to do might be about your marketing, might be about your fundraising, might be about security and compliance, but you should start with what do we actually need it to do and then find the tools to suit that instead of starting with? This looks like a really cool tool. Let’s find a way to use it. Ok. Yeah, very smart. Um And you know, it seems common sense but very worth saying because a lot of times I think the shiny, right, the shiny object gets our attention. Plus other people, my friends are using it, I just saw and the interface is so simple. It was so easy for me. I was able to just turn it on and now I have this thing and I can send out text messages. Ok. Well, have you thought about how you’re going to use text messages for your organization? Are they actually going to move you forward? Have you thought about compliance for that? Can people opt out? Like anytime you bring in the new shiny object, you’re actually opening a whole can of worms of other things to think about that. Who should we be getting input from uh who should be at the table, making these decisions. Well, not, not tech implementation decisions but thinking through, you know, what do we need, what are our needs? Who, who should we be getting this uh input from? So I think that any of these changes really, it’s, it’s a whole organization conversation. Like you want to get input from staff that are going to be using the tool you want to, you don’t want it to just be coming, you know, from it. You don’t want it to just be your executive. That said, look, I went to a conference and saw this cool thing, we’re implementing it like you need, you need to actually think about what, what is our organization doing? What supports our processes better? What is our vision for how we’re going, where we’re going to be and what we’re going to be delivering in two or three years. Um I can speak from my own experience, one nonprofit that I used to work directly at um where we were a legal advocacy organization. Um And we were expecting a specific Supreme Court decision to come, you know, within the next year and it was going to be a tremendous spike in our case volume. And so what we were looking at was what tooling do we need to be able to scale up to? You know, I think in the days after the decision that we were concerned about we went from typically having about 10 to 30 inquiries a day to over 1000 inquiries in one day. It was tremendous. And so part of my role as the it director there as we were planning for that was to look at what do we need to accelerate response times for our paralegals? What can we set up for knowledge management so that more people can help faster? Um What did our existing database have that could do that? And what did we need to bring in to support that? So to get to that decision, I was then taking and talking both to our paralegals to our lawyers that would be taking the kind of the equivalent to tier two or tier three cases to do it, talking to our different legal compliance people of OK, if we have this high volume and what do we have to then retain later for it to make sure that we’re doing everything to cover our requirements there? Um What sort of scalability considerations am I not thinking about talking to other it partners with that? So I could really get the full picture on it. It turned out in that case that the system we had and we were working on sales force at that point, was able to scale to what we need. But we did end up implementing a few other pieces of the platform in order to support that fast responsiveness. So in some ways, it’s really, you’ve got to both look at what’s coming, talk to the people who are actually going to be using the tools that are implemented. Look at what you have whether or not you can expand what you have, if that works in the time frame you do or if that’s not going to work, then what other tools are out there that you can bring in and support what you need to be doing? That’s incredible scale. Sounds like overnight when the, when the decision was released, you know, and there was a Supreme Court decision, Supreme court decision related to gay marriage. So that was a significant one. Um And we had not just, you know, the like technical planning there, but there was additional planning even of like document access for our uh our C suite because they were often traveling all over. And so what was the planning to make sure that, you know, our director of Legal could read the decision as soon as it came out when we knew she might be on an airplane. So how do we make sure that that document availability was going to be there? Um So which I suppose points to that your, your technical road map and your technical planning should factor in not just the day to day tools, but what do you have for handling specific moments of surprise or crisis communication? Yeah, that’s a good story. Thank you. Incredible scale. Um You’ve got some Uh Well, I guess we’re starting to get into them best practices for creating this tech road map. So I’m gonna let you take over through some in preparation for your session this afternoon. Thank you. Yeah. So best practice. First of all, is that your technical roadmap approach? It like a project like approach, working on that road map, not as something that you’re doing just off the side of your desk, but that you devote resources and time to actually making it happen. Um I’ve seen too many organizations that kind of say, you know, what things are on fire. We need to start changing things now. And if you jump in too quickly, then you might end up not really having any direction of where you’re going, you know, and so you can spend a significant budget and significant time and not have the progress you’d want to show for it because you might end up working against yourself. You might implement one thing and then realize a year later. Oh, wait, this doesn’t really go where we needed to and change course. So first best practice actually take it as a project. It is a good phase zero to start about. Um Next thing I would say is make sure that you have a good diversity of people in the room. It shouldn’t just be, it, it shouldn’t just be executives, it shouldn’t just be line staff, you should have a variety of voices across the organization, you should probably bring in another point of view outside your organization to talk to you. Whether that’s through, you know, other nonprofits that you partner with that might have done similar things before. Whether that’s bringing in a consulting partner to work with you other people to help, push a little on your ideas and think through like, is this where you want to be here are the things that you’re not thinking about. Here’s what I’ve seen at other organizations. That’s some of what I end up doing a lot as a technical architect is help, help people think about the bigger picture. The outside perspective is valuable, help benchmark. You’ve seen other cases. Yeah. Um I’d say the next one is really avoiding a lift and shift mentality. So a lot of times I’ll see nonprofits that mostly will say like, OK, well, we’ve been using this database for 10 years, maybe it’s time for us to move to something more modern and then they roadmap out essentially rebuilding the same system that they had on whatever the new tool is. Um Without anyone stopping to think about like, oh gee is that process, is that way that we do things the way we do it because the tool made us do it that way or because it’s the most efficient way to work. Um One story I like to tell for this actually that uh so when I, when I was a kid, I would always watch and help out when my mom was making a roast and I noticed that she would always cut off the ends of the roast on either end of it and make the roast. Um, and so that was then how I learned to make a roast leg and I assumed it must have been that there’s something wrong with the meat on either end of a roast or something, you know, it’ll better something. Yeah, that’s what I figured. Um, and then, then a couple of years ago I was cooking with a friend and she noticed me doing this and she said that that’s perfectly good meat. Why are you cutting that off? And I said, oh, well, this is, this is how my mom taught me. It’s just, it’s what I always saw growing up. She was like, hm, that’s weird. You should ask about that. Um, and so I asked my mom and her response was, oh, well, when you were a kid, we had a really small oven and the pan that I had, wouldn’t fit something larger. So I had to cut the ends off so things would fit in. And so, you know, it’s the same thing there of just that lift and shift of, I took the process that I saw and moved it forward without understanding the context of it. And we see that sometimes with nonprofits also of that because, because processes get adapted to fit whatever your current situation is because sometimes you have a level of turnover. That means the people who are doing the process now don’t understand why it came to be that way and just know like, oh, well, I have to tick these three boxes in the system and then fill in this field here and enter this data and I don’t really know why we do it that way, but it’s what we do. And so this next system needs to support ticking those three boxes and filling in that piece of information. So I think you can’t do your technical roadmap without also really doing kind of your business capabilities, roadmap and your business processes. And they go hand in hand to make sure that you’re actually helping your organization mature and move forward instead of just maintain current state. That’s a touching little story about your mom and the roasts you be watching as a child. Um Plus I know baking you have baking in your uh bio that you love to bake. So did your mom influence your baking too? Um I mean, probably a lot of the things I know how to cook came from her, you know, but uh at least with that there aren’t anywhere. It was like, oh well, you don’t put in the baking soda or something. It’s a sweet story. Um I mean, other best practices, um other best practices I’d say is to not be, not be trying to make your technical roadmap, an indefinite plan, I’d say always work towards deciding what your time horizon is that you’re trying to plan within, I think 3 to 5 years is normally a pretty good range. Um, because if you’re trying to make something that’s going to last forever, first of all, it’s going to be really intimidating. Second of all, you’re going to close yourself off to what innovation might come in a few years and say, well, we have this plan that has us extended 10 years out. We need to stick to that and then you miss out on innovations, like what we’re seeing with A I, for instance, three years ago, five years ago, we didn’t probably expect to be where we are now. Um Plus your forecast just becomes less reliable beyond five years. Exactly. And also like it can, it can help then be a good frame of reference for what investment makes sense for your organization. Um When you think about the total cost of ownership of things that you’re going to bring in and also how viable are things that are maybe the solution that you’re choosing because it’s, it’s good enough for right now. You know, like, yes, I know it’s not the best to have double entry into the finance system and the donor database and it would be a lot more efficient for people. It would be less annoying for our team members to have an automated integration. But gee this is what the automated integration is going to cost and we only expect this system to be in play for the next two years. Is it worth it then? So that sort of thing can help you really think through where to put your investment based on how long you expect a tool to stick around. There was a panel yesterday that said uh two folks, you know, beyond year three, you need to build a lot of flexibility into your tech plan because we don’t know to your point what the technology is gonna be artificial intelligence as an example. And we’re not even, you know, we’re not even certain what direction the organization, I mean, not that you surrender your mission or your core values. But, but you know, there might be programs in four years that we’re not anticipating today. So, so beyond like from the 3 to 5 year point, you need to have a good degree of flexibility exactly. Like probably one of the last things in like your road map is going to be your next road map project to then start planning where you’re going next. You know, because both like and with that, like once you make a road map, it should not be locked in stone, you should maintain some plan for flexibility and innovation. There, you have to be able to be responsive. Um But also it’s really good to be able to finish a road map and say, OK, we did what we planned to, we got where we were planning to here. Now, let’s go on to the next one. I think that some organizations get to a point of change, fatigue if they essentially are just constantly updating the same plan instead of being able to step back and say, yeah, we got something done. Now, where are we going next? Do you have any other best practices to share? I know your session is just 30 minutes, right? I I’m not trying to embarrass you or anything but, but if you have more best practices, uh we’d love to hear them. I think the other, the other best practice is to um how to phrase this, not be afraid of picking up what’s happening in other industries that are not nonprofits and using those technical benefits frankly towards nonprofit use cases. There’s a lot of powerful tools out there that don’t necessarily frame themselves as being for nonprofit and there can be a lot of advantage in looking at, you know, something you’re experiencing with. I don’t know your say your supermarket loyalty program or something and figuring out like, how are they doing that? What could we do to better engage our donors with it? Um How could we for our museum membership? What about this would actually be more engaging, like being open to looking more broadly because that’s where some of the really transformative change can come in for your technical road map is not narrowing your scope to just what’s been done before. Ok. What else, what else are you going to talk about? Um, so you can share with our listeners. Yeah. So other than that, what I’ll be talking a bit about is making sure that you do in that road map, use it as an opportunity to improve things like your security and compliance posture. So that’s something that we’re seeing more and more of, um with, for instance, data regulations coming up. You know, California has their data rules that in, in the presentation, I have a list of something like 20 different states and localities that are bringing in new data regulations in 2024. Increasingly, you’re going to see a lot more that you have to be doing from a compliance perspective. If you’re managing anything that could be considered, excuse me, personally, personally, identifiable information. And so any technical road map, you’d rather be looking at that head on instead of having to kind of retroactively look at your systems and say, oh, wait, what do we need to do to actually align with being able to let someone manage their preferences, being able to delete someone’s data when they ask for it, being able to send it all over to them. Um I think that also during these road mapping times is a really great time to think about how you’re handling identity and authentication, making sure that your user management is secure. Um because that’s part of then what you can either if you don’t have it in place yet, it’s a great first place for organizations to start and then it’s something that should just be table stakes for any new tool that you’re bringing into the system. Like, can you bring in single sign on? Does it have multi factor authentication? How is it going to be managing your data? Um, so, yeah, compliance and security. Right. Right. So these are things that, you know, um, especially if you’re dealing with the personally, personally, personally identifiable individual information, is that personally identifiable information? Only two, I’s not three. Ok. Personally identify identifiable information, but that one hasn’t caught on keep trying. Don’t give up, don’t give up on your, on your, uh, on your key word. Um, so if you’re, you know, if you’re dealing with those, something like that, that, that’s just something that you’re looking to be a part of whatever, whatever system app you, you’re looking to bring in. Yeah, definitely. Um, and then I guess the other, the other thing I would highlight is when you’re, you’re planning out your road map to not just be thinking about tools but also to be thinking about staffing for it. So it’s great to bring in a new tool, but you also got to think about the care and feeding of it who in your organization already could handle it. Um, but also, you know, every nonprofit people are wearing seven different hats. Um, I think that particularly at a conference like NTC, at every other conversation you have, are people saying, oh, I didn’t start in technology. I ended up here because we got this tool for marketing and I really liked it. We got this new CRM. And so the accidental techie. Exactly. You know, and so either figuring out like, do you have that person in your organization already that wants to take up whatever the next steps of this road map are or specific pieces of it, or is that something that you need to hire in? Do you need to build that into head count for your organization? Is it something where sure you have someone who can administer it but you need to bring a partner in and to implement it, you know, and figuring out actually what the human side is going to be of that technical road map. Ok. Yeah, that’s all valuable. Yeah, I’m not sure if people think about the staffing, you know, they’re thinking, as you’ve said, they’re thinking about the, how, how, how, uh, wonderful this, this new app is gonna be but is there somebody who can support it? Maintain it? The care and feeding, as you said, as you said, anything else that, uh, we want to talk about? I don’t want, I don’t want to hold out on, uh, nonprofit radio listeners. Ok. All right. Good luck in your session. Half hour. Why don’t you leave us with a little motivation for the uh for the technical road map, motivation for the technical road on a high point with your technical roadmap. But it’s really an opportunity to take a good look at where you are and where you want to be and then plot out the steps that it’s going to be to get there. It can be a really exciting journey and can also mean that you are much better prepared to weather any of the bumps along the way. Outstanding. Thank you, Castro Lowy managing director for technical services at Cloud for good. I think Cloud for good is lucky to have you. Thank you for having me on the radio. My pleasure. Thanks for sharing. Thanks for sharing with our listeners and thank you for being with Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio coverage of the 24 2024 nonprofit technology conference where we are sponsored by Heller consulting technology strategy and implementation for nonprofits. Next week, the generational divide. No, that’s another April fool’s joke. Next week will be email, deliverability and email. Welcome journeys. If you missed any part of this weeks show, I do beseech you find it at Tony martignetti.com. We’re sponsored by Virtuous. Virtuous, gives you the nonprofit CRM fundraising volunteer and marketing tools. You need to create more responsive donor experiences and grow, giving, virtuous.org. Our creative producer is Claire Meyerhoff. I’m your associate producer, Kate Marinetti. 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. Ok. I wanna try something. I wanna try a second take on, uh, the generational divide next week.

Nonprofit Radio for March 25, 2024: Living Our Values & Healing Over Everything

 

Amy Sample Ward: Living Our Values

The first of our 24NTC conversations is with our technology contributor and the CEO of NTEN, Amy Sample Ward. They give us the numbers around the conference, and remind us to walk the walk on our nonprofit’s values, including centering equity.

 

 

Beth Leigh: Healing Over Everything

Wellness in your workplace. Is that a value your nonprofit holds? Then take in this conversation packed with suggestions for mental health, creativity and unity in your office. Beth Leigh from Village of Wisdom, shares hers.

 

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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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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 suffer the effects of Schwan mitosis if you unnerved me with the idea that you missed this week’s show. Here’s our associate producer, Kate with what’s on our menu? Hey, Tony, I hope our listeners are hungry for the nonprofit technology conference coverage. We’re kicking off our coverage with these living our values. The first of our 24 NTC conversations is with our technology contributor and the CEO of N 10 Amy Sample ward. They give us the numbers around the conference and remind us to walk the walk on our nonprofits values including centering equity and healing over everything. Wellness in your workplace is that of value your nonprofit holds. Then take this conversation packed with suggestions for mental health, creativity and unity in your office. Beth Lee from Village of Wisdom shares hers on Tony’s take two. The NTC conversations were sponsored by donor box, outdated donation forms, blocking support generosity, donor box fast, flexible and friendly fundraising forms for your nonprofit donor box.org and by virtuous virtues gives you the nonprofit CRM fundraising, volunteer and marketing tools. You need to create more responsive donor experiences and grow. Giving. Virtuous.org here is living our values. Welcome back to Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio coverage of 24 NTC. You know what that is. You know, it’s the 2024 nonprofit technology conference, you know that it’s hosted by N 10. You know that we’re at the Oregon Convention Center. What you don’t know. Oh, you also know that we’re sponsored here by Heller consulting, technology strategy and implementation for nonprofits. Now, the reveal, what you don’t know is that I’m now with the N 10 CEO, the grand high exalted mystic ruler of NTC and our technology contributor at nonprofit Radio, Amy Sample Ward. Thanks for having me. It’s fun to get to do the interviews in person a year. We get to see each other while we do it. You know, in years past, your husband Max has been affiliated like stage managing. Is he with us this year? I didn’t, he hasn’t done it. And well, I guess we had a few years where the NTC wasn’t, wasn’t in person, but he hasn’t been helping with the main stage since maybe, maybe 2019 was the last year. Yeah, but um, he and Oren are gonna be here at the reception, so I’ll make sure you get to see them and say hi. Yeah, in the arcade staff or local, wherever the NTC is. Um we have staff in eight different states and you know, everybody has friends and family everywhere, so we’ll pick a reception and have that be where staff can bring their friends or their families so that it’s so it’s so rare to get to see what we do at N 10 since most of it is online. Right? And so it’s a fun way for friends and family of staff to get to see us in our element. The reception is this afternoon. That’s right. Ok. Awesome, awesome. Alright. Um So just acquaint us with some of the basics of uh 24 NTC. How many folks are here? How many folks are with us virtually? Yeah, we’ve got about 2000 attendees. Um Almost 400 of them are joining virtually. So they’re joining into the general sessions, the hybrid sessions and the virtual only sessions. Um and we have over 100 exhibitors here in the arcade. And I think it’s really interesting folks. We I heard some attendees talking about this yesterday, how diverse this group of exhibitors are? You know, I think sometimes folks think it’s, you know, 100 different Cr MS or, or, or 100 different payment processors or, you know, there’s so many different types of technology projects or service providers, even if they don’t have a technology product, you know, that they’ve made or that they sell so many different folks that are really invested in nonprofits being successful, you know, and um walking around here you go from agencies to communications firms, you know, to technology providers. There are Cr MS, there are payment processors, but there’s also like a safari fundraising team and like platforms that, you know, help you keep your board engaged. Like there’s just so there’s a video production booth, Bubu TV, they’re helping us with our live streaming and they’re recording. Yes. So there are, there is, there is a big diversity. You’re right. You’re right. Well, and the, the N the N 10 community is a diverse population and you, you are always very good about that. Um There’s a, there’s a, there’s a racial affinity room. There’s a quiet space for folks who might be neuro diverse and maybe just need quiet time alone. There’s like, I don’t know if it’s a silent room, but it’s a devoted quiet room. You’re always very intentional about that at N 10. Yeah. Thank you for saying that. Yeah. And I think folks that haven’t been um, had the opportunity to be at the conference in person, don’t necessarily know all of those other pieces. You know, we want the conference. Yes. To have this big arcade, this place where you could connect with service providers, vendors, et cetera, connect with other community members, but also educational sessions where you can learn and then third places where you can just find other people like you a feather along with, along with the quiet room and the racial birds of a feather. There’s dozens of those folks just say I’m coming from Chicago. Anybody else from Chi Town want to get together? That’s it. That’s a birds of a feather. That’s all. I think. This is one of the first years in easily like 15 years of, of the conference that I’ve been at where there hasn’t been a West Wing birds of a feather table. I don’t know if West Wing fans now have something new that they’re holding on to. But for many years, there was a stronghold, there was always a West Wing Table. Um In addition to, you know, Chicago or Canada, whatever or the other, we need some more entertainment related. I’m Binging Blair said she’s gonna do Love is Blind Table. So there you go. That’s all it takes. Yeah, I’m doing this, come join. You want to join. We’re now birds of a Feather. And ultimately, the bigger lesson here is you’re never alone in this community. There are, there are other folks who want to talk about the same things or have experienced similar challenges or issues or favorite TV shows, whatever it might be. You’re not alone when you’re in this community. Uh Portland is an enormously, uh and justifiably proud uh food, food city, very justifiably so many rounds tonight. Oh my gosh, we have to keep expanding the Google. We’re now going out to like a 30 minute drive out across the river and then, maybe, and then you gotta go into that other suburb. And, yeah, they’re, they’re going out. I know there’s, there’s one that’s, I was invited to, it’s like a 30 minute drive. Um Yeah, we’ve taken over the immediate uh convention center, downtown Portland, downtown. Uh, but, you know, at the NT CS you’re always very good about the food. I mean, today’s breakfast, there was, it was a European breakfast, there was salmon, there was Brie, there was blue cheese, there was a quinoa, a quinoa like breakfast, parfait with fruit and nuts, um cheeses. Uh There’s an oatmeal station, steel cut oatmeal station. You’re all, you’re very sure want to have folks feel taken care of because we know that the vast majority of folks who attend our conference are allowed one conference per year or maybe one conference every other year and that only includes their registration sometimes includes part of their travel. We don’t, we know we know we get it. We’re a nonprofit too. You know, we really want folks to feel like while they’re here, we are not expecting you to go try and find some expensive breakfast next to the Convention Center, right? That if you’re here, if you’re at the conference, we are feeding you, you are taken care of, you are supported. Um because that’s what we all deserve. And also humans don’t learn when they’re hungry. We don’t have fun at the birds of a feather if we’re hungry. Right. So we really want folks to feel taken care of here. I believe lunch today is Indian. Ok. Um, coffee, there seems to have been an adequate supply of coffee. Coffee is always like, I don’t know, 8000 gallons or something. There’s a $8000 per gallon. We talked about this, a couple. You’re paying like $80.90 dollars a gallon or something. It was 200 for cold brew. Damn, for a gallon. Jeez. You know, if you’re looking for a money making business, go into convention coffee. Um Not to mention convention furnishings, which you and I have talked about offline. We we’ll leave that there. Can I can I make some sort of bridge or paint some picture from this into something bigger? We actually were talking about this as staff and as an illustration, I think of how, how there are challenges even when we have these, you know, empowering messages from the keynotes of we, we can do it, right? Like we can have our values and we can build what we want. And we say that, you know, I say that, oh my gosh, I say that all the time and yet we’re not saying that because it means everything is now easy, right? We can say we want you to be fed, we want you to be taken care of. We want um accessibility is huge for us. That’s is a dedicated line item in our budget, accessibility is so important to us, but we are not the entire system, right? We’ve said we, we know that there’s a lot of reasons you might not be able to travel, you can join the conference remotely, you also have scholarships, but then we are not the internet providers. And so when the internet providers don’t deliver the internet and so the live stream goes down, it looks like we are not invested in that accessibility, right? So N 10 can say we will spend the money, we will focus on it. We will plan with the community, we will do all these things, but we are still only our part of that process or that system. And I just wanted to name that because I think it’s, it’s helpful to remember that it’s not just, oh, say the right things and like you’re good, we can say we’re invested in these things. We talk to these vendors for months and months and months. We’ve set the expectations, we even have staff in the room. But when the internet is down, it’s down, it’s, you know, we can’t magically make it come back on our own or even necessarily with the vendor sitting there saying I’m also pressing the big green button, you know, I also who want the internet to work. So I, I think it’s important to know. It still takes us saying those things, making those commitments, putting the, the values into our budgets and accepting how much can we influence in the process in that whole system? Where can we say? Well, we couldn’t change that. The internet went down in the moment. But we can say for the next conference that comes along or maybe a smaller conference or a conference that isn’t as invested in accessibility. We can meet with the convention center and the vendors here after the conference and say this can’t happen again to somebody else. And here’s how we think you can mitigate it, right? We can still pass along those knowledge and expectation kind of lessons. Even if our part is over, you know, it’s time for a break. Open up new cashless in person donation opportunities with donor box live kiosk. The smart way to accept cashless donations anywhere, any time, picture this a cash free on site giving solution that effortlessly collects donations from credit cards, debit cards and digital wallets. No team member required. Plus your donation data is automatically synced with your donor box account. No manual data entry or errors, make giving a breeze and focus on what matters your cause. Try donor box live kiosk and revolutionize the way you collect donations in 2024. Visit donor box.org to learn more now back to living our values. That’s an enormous commitment because you want to convey your values even for the next convention. And, and I our conference and I I heard that uh from, you know, the, the uh, the, the, the exhibitors talk. We, I heard some exhibitors scuttle but that somebody had been told by, by someone who works here that, oh, this was an issue a couple of weeks ago, you know, so they know that there’s a dead zone here and, and, you know, it’s been weeks. So, you know, maybe those prior conferences hadn’t passed it on or maybe it’s the Convention Center not living up to values even though you had meetings with them. And they still, you know, they didn’t say, well, you know, in this area, we’re gonna be, I’m sure they didn’t relay to you, there’s gonna be a dead zone and for these uh eight or 10 booths. So, you know, because if they had, you would have told them to remediate it before the 12th of April 12th of March. Um So, yeah, but, but we each still have to be committed to our own values and we are, we’re, of course, we’re all players in a much bigger system. We just have to try to bring the others along. Right. And Sabrina’s message this morning of, you know, we do all have power and it’s not to say, ok, well, we really tried, we said that we’d have hybrid and virtual sessions and the stream went down like, you know, sad Trombone. So sorry, we can say, right. But so what is still in my sphere of influence? What is still in my power to do? It’s still in my power to say, hey, we did pay for this. We did expect this. We did talk about this. It didn’t work. So let’s document it. Let’s make it as public as need to be, you know, what, what else can we do here? Because I think that’s the piece where especially a nonprofit organizations where the list of things to do, the list of community members asking for support. It just feels long that we don’t always do the second part of it. We say, OK, well, we did try there, let’s move on to the next thing and, and spending a little bit of time just to do that final. OK. But what was the, what, what’s the last piece of influence I have here in instead of saying, OK, well, we did, we did do it, it’s resolved, it it isn’t resolved. Some of these things are never resolved. Um And feeling like we can take up the space inside our teams or, you know, with vendors in this case or with community members, whatever it might be with funders, whomever take up that little bit of extra space to say, actually, II, I have a little more influence I wanna put here. You know, this is why you’re a multiple book author, you see these, you, you make these connections and you see this bigger picture and it makes perfect sense. Uh Once you explain it when I have 250 pages to explain it. No, you did it in 13 minutes. Come on. All right. Um, no living your values and, and carrying them forward and even for the benefit of others, like you said, you know, for the next conference it’s admirable. It’s, and I know, I know N 10 lives its values. I see it in the conference. II, I see it in our, I hear it in our conversations. You know, you’re always, um you’re always putting, putting mission forward equity forwards, like centering equity. You know, it’s not a, it’s not an office on the side. You and I, you and I and Tristan and Justin Spell Haug from Microsoft just had a conversation about centering equity uh in uh in tech and artificial intelligence specifically. Um You know, so no, I admire it. I mean, I, I admire you the work you do and the organization you lead and the uh the pervasiveness of the, you know, just walking the, what did you say? Is it walking the talk or is it walking the walk? Like you talk the talk, don’t you walk the talk? I, I’m getting confused about this. I always used to say walk the talk, but I think you’re supposed to walk the walk because if you choose to talk, well, no talk to talk is in is insufficient. You know that. But walking the talk, you don’t want to walk the talk, you wanna walk the walk or is it or is it just, it’s it’s walk the walk, walk the walk, you don’t walk your talk to upgrade from talking your talk. No, you walk the walk. All right. I admire that intent is always walking. Always walking the walk. Alright. Thank you, Jason for your help. Jason is running our video and live stream as well. Hopefully, you know, uh communications guide correspondent colloquialism colloquialism king. Um Well, can I make another bridge to what you just said there? Something else that I think is coming up in conversations here? Um So many, so many sessions, not that they have to put equity in the title, right? But equity is the foundation from which they’re talking about technology in their session, regardless of the topic or, or whatever. And I can’t help but feel frustrated that we’ve been having these conversations, we’ve been successful in putting resources out like the equity guide that have helped folks create or find language around this for themselves and for their organizations and yet it’s 2024 and I look out at the tech sector and I’m like, yeah, OK. Yeah. Have we, what are we doing here? You know? Um And I’m really hopeful that other folks, you know, just as Sabrina said in the keynote, like part of solidarity is just saying, I also see that, you know, you, you’re, no, no, no, you didn’t lose it. I also see this and now we can be together. I see you, you know, we’re in this together, but I hope that we can not just find this language for ourselves or our organizations, but we can better use this language together to say more loudly because our voices are more united. Yeah, we see you tech sector, we really do have clear and different expectations than what you’re delivering. Um I’m hopeful that that 2024 especially with this continued just proliferation of A I tools marketed at us that we can be stronger in our voices around that I was encouraged by our conversation, you meet Tristan and Justin be Haug from Microsoft uh technology TSG technology for good for social impact T si, right. Thank you. Um I mean, he um you know, I like to think he’s not just um being condescending and the team and gratuitous when he was basically, you know, speaking truth to power because he does run he’s the global head and global Vice president or corporate vice president of uh of technology for social impact at Microsoft. So, you know, I think that was a valuable conversation and I think he said the right things, but you’re seeing evidence of it as well. Yes. And I think, you know, there’s there a piece of this, you know, we often talk about, we’ve talked about on the show accountability, but a part of that is helping make real and helping make visible incentives to be accountable to us, helping more technology companies that are not Microsoft, that do not have an entire tech for social impact division, right? Um these smaller tech developing or service related, developing uh entities to realize it isn’t to build whatever you want and then come market it to us as a vertical later, it is to build it with us from the beginning because there is real incentive to doing that with us in this community. There are users, there are clients, there are customers, there’s, there’s money to be made and also like impact to be made by, by doing that work in this sector and not just selling it to us later. Is this the, is this the proposal for your next book? Sounds like it. Yeah, I don’t know. I mean, I haven’t thought about another book but I feel like I hear the frustration, you know, but we have achieved but we, we’re but not to not to where we need to be, not to where we need to be. Because I think for me and I don’t think I’m alone in this. I think you, I think, I think this whole community, it isn’t just like a this hope, this optimism that maybe one day it will get better. I know it can be fucking better now, it can be better. So let’s do it. You know, it’s not about like, oh my gosh, we’ll build to one day like today is now and by the way, don’t blush because you said, fuck, you’re not the first one. Somebody said, fuck you. And somebody said as today, grab your ass with both hands or something. I never heard that before. So well, he said, but, but I encouraged him to say yes so that I can say whatever. But I think my point is like it doesn’t have to be a kind of grindstone where we say, OK, well, you know, it’s just worth it to have, have known in our hearts, we were doing the right thing, we actually can make it better. So what have been the obstacles then? Why aren’t we much closer? I mean, we, we, we both acknowledge the community acknowledges this is a journey. It was never gonna check it off and say, oh, we, we have a completely equitable tech community. I mean, I think some of the big, why aren’t we further in 20 24? I think some of the biggest challenges, at least specifically to this community to, to nonprofit organizations, especially as they think about technology and their work is access and uh kind of segmentation or separation. I think a lot of folks in organizations don’t consistently have access to technology knowledge, technology, leadership, technology decisions. And so those decisions become inequitable, they become not very strategic honestly, they, you know, so within our organizations, we are creating access issues to, to knowledge and power. And then as organizations, we are limited in our access to the service providers and the technology providers where it’s not clear. Oh, maybe three special clients that paid the most in our giant enterprise organizations got to be on their nonprofit advisory. Right. But as a sector, as, as everyday organizations, as you know, most organizations are under a million dollars, like these kind of regular organizations don’t feel that access to inform or influence the tools that they then adopt. So that’s, that’s an access piece at both levels within organizations and then between nonprofits and the service providers or vendors that they’re working with and the smaller or they just don’t, they don’t feel they have the agency and who would they would they would they ask for? Right? Like there, there it is uh systemic issue. The vendors are often set up in a way where there is no manager to ask for, right? And so they’re not creating an access point in um to allow for that influence. And then the segmentation issue I see this perpetuated so strongly by funders and technology providers, you know, this is a tool for arts organizations. We fund arts organizations. What is art in 2024? Like I think my definition is a little more broad than to consider myself an artist, any content creator, creating audio art, right? Um And what do we gain by pretending that we are fundamentally different because you work in the arts and I work in the environment, guess what? In an equitable world? We have to have the arts and we have to have an environment, right? We all of our missions are important and necessary. So pretending that we are so different that we aren’t sharing knowledge with each other. We’re not building that power together. We’re not both saying, hey, we both use this vendor. Let’s go together and ask for access and influence, right? So this segmentation and I think often it isn’t the nonprofit saying, oh no, we’re not like you, we don’t want to collaborate. It’s funders saying we only fund this city or this region or this topic or these three portfolio goals, you know, um and and technology providers who are also saying, oh, this is just for higher ed, really like really? So it isn’t, I I want to give people space that it’s not just your own making, you know, that that, that the segmentation exists, but it isn’t serving us and we need to do more to say, yeah, I have something to learn from this human rights organization and this housing organization and this environmental organization, right? That all of those groups, we are all trying to make this world better. So let’s do that learning and, and power building together. Let’s go. If it’s not a book, it’s a keynote. At least I’ll give you that. That’s just 45 minutes or so, you know, just listen back to this recording and you’ll have, you’ll have your keynote. Alright. Lots of good wishes for the rest of NTC. Let me ask about 25 NTC. Uh It’s on the website, but I, I in April of 2025 and we will be in Baltimore, Baltimore, Maryland at the Convention Center at the Convention Center. Not the, not the gaylord. No, that’s, that’s something different. That’s in Maryland. Yeah. Yeah. Ok. Baltimore Convention Center, right. So we’re going east coast, we’re going west coast to east coast. Um Do we know the dates? I don’t, I did not. That’s, it’s on the website because the 25 NTC is already like, it’ll be in the notes below the stream. You know, like one of those, I’ll try, I’ll try. It’s on the website. That’s reliable. N ten.org N ten.org. All right. Good wishes for the rest of the conference. Thanks so much and thanks for being part of the conference for another year. It’s really magic and it’s such a gift to put more speakers who don’t have access to microphones on a literal microphone. So, thank you. It’s my pleasure. And this is our 10th. Wow, congrats. Yeah. Amazing. They’re Amy Sample Ward. They’re the CEO of N 10, the grand high exalted mystic ruler of uh event 24 NTC. And they are, of course our technology contributor here at nonprofit radio. Thanks so much to the pod father. Oh, thank you. You did like that. You’re giving me this wild title. I’m gonna remember Pod Pod. And thank you. For being with Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio coverage of 24 NTC where we are sponsored by Heller consulting, technology strategy and implementation for nonprofits. Thanks so much for being with us. It’s time for Tony’s take two. Thanks very much, Kate. Great conversations from the 2024 nonprofit technology conference. I was there all last week in Portland, Oregon. We were in our booth sharing with the sponsors Heller consulting. Let me add my thanks to Heller. Very grateful to them for second year in a row, sponsoring nonprofit radio at the NTC. So these conversations that I got 24 captured 24 interviews, conversations. I like to call them conversations. The two today living your values healing over everything. I mean, you wouldn’t think of healing and, and wellness in the workplace as belonging in a tech conference. But that’s because this is not a, you know, you know, that this is not a tech conference for techies. It’s a conference for everybody who uses technology and wellness is essential for everybody using technology. So just starting with today’s. But then we uh uh we, we, we’ve got conversations coming up on artificial intelligence. There are a couple of those matching gifts, email deliverability, uh which is a big issue. The uh the email providers are tracking your recipient’s actions and they’re penalizing your emails when folks that you email to uh put you in the junk mail or mark you as spam or don’t interact with you. So, email deliverability, very topical, timely. Um redefining generosity. That’s a very good one, avoiding tech debt, designing good surveys. Switching to a four day work week. That’s an interesting provocative 14 day work week, 32 hours, not, not four day work week, 40 hours, four day work week work week, 32 hours, no reduction in pay. Very interesting conversation. And um, the last one I just, um just hitting a couple of highlights leaving your job. So another very interesting one, lots of good conversations coming up over the next several weeks from the nonprofit technology conference uh and happy to taking off our NTC coverage this very week. That’s Tony Stick too. Ok. Well, I hope you had fun in Oregon. But also I must say I’m excited to hear all these new conversations and stories and hearing about the people that you talk to. If you met anyone new, I want to hear about that too. Oh, lots of, lots of new folks. Yeah. Lots of folks who have not been on before. That’s awesome. Plus plus uh plus some repeats. Yes. Love them too. Well, we’ve got Buku but loads more time here is healing over everything. Welcome back to Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio coverage of 24 NTC, the 2024 nonprofit technology conference in Portland, Oregon. Our coverage is sponsored by Heller consulting technology strategy and implementation for nonprofits. With me. Now is Beth Lee, director of development and stewardship at Village of Wisdom. Beth. Welcome to nonprofit radio. Thanks for having me, Tony, pleasure. And you are talking about a very interesting subject. We are gonna talk about you, your expert in it and I’m just learning your session topic is healing over everything. I’m just going to say, explain, explain the session, explain your title. Healing over everything is a mantra for me that I often say and it’s healing over everything, meaning any and everything that comes up, right? Because often if we center ourselves on healing and positivity, distractions come up, right? If you want to focus on being more financially stable, that’s often when an emergency shows up and takes all your money, right? And you’re like, oh, this is not what I should be doing, but in the world of nonprofits healing over everything, it’s more about healing over what your supervisors say or what the environment is telling you which is work 90 hours a week or pour all of yourself out despite feeling yourself back up. And so this is why the topic is important. There’s a couple of levels to it. Players healing over everything. I see. I was thinking of healing coming first over being supreme over everything else that’s going on in your life. But, but so that’s got different levels. That was, that was my, my take, which is a great take. You’ve been thinking about this for years, overcoming, overcoming everything over all. Love it Um So you, you thinking of this in three different, I don’t know, three different realms, three different ways, mental health, creativity and unity. How do these work together? How do these work together? Where’s this energy? So, for me, this all comes from research that I did for a small bit of people, 100 and 75 people from 2018 to 2020. For obvious reasons. The research stopped in 2020. right? And it was finding out what happens to people once they leave the nonprofit space, how do they feel what’s going on? 100% of the people mentioned having some sort of battle with PTSD. And so 100% 100% of the 175 people. And so that was to me pretty baffling that everyone felt in some way that they had been damaged by this space and they were damaged, mentally, emotionally, physically and spiritually, they mentioned different areas of that damage. So this is why I focus on the different creativity, healing and unity. And so in giving that research and talking about it this week, it’s really like diving into the environment of nonprofits. Why are they toxic? And why don’t we talk about it? And also in that we found in the research that and these are all ages, ages 22 to 60 eight, I was going to ask you about your sample sample, what part of the country or geographically diverse? So we were geographically diverse. I’m going to pull out just some of the stats. It’s 100 and 75 people. 100% of nonprofit employees that had left. They’re all former. Their time in the nonprofits range from one year to 33 years. Um Gender 128 women, 35 men, four, non binary, eight prefer not to identify their gender race. 40% identified as black indigenous or person of color. 30% Caucasian, 10% 2 or more races, 12% Asian and 8% prefer not to answer. And then ages ranged from 22 years to 68 years and I can tell you just off the bat we had probably more than 50% are from the east coast. Um And then 20% about the Midwest and the rest are coming from the west coast. Ok? I mean, I I presume you, you were you were trying to trying to achieve a representative sample of nonprofit employees, ok. Trust that you’ve done that. I mean you’re the expert, but thank you for the details. Um Alright, so mental health, mental health, you’re talking about mindfulness, but there’s so much more to it, help us. I’ll help you all through it. Yeah. So given that data and talking to everyone and then aggregating the data and talking to people about what they wanted out of this. If you could redo your journey again, what would you do? And each person, you know, in their positions were management to entry level positions were saying I wanted someone to tell me it was ok to take a break. And so when we talk about nonprofit spaces and mental health, where’s the mindfulness? Where are we saying? Ok, mental health has a place here on our day to day, 9 to 5 work. Right? And often I don’t see it even when I’m consulting or working with other nonprofits, we say it a lot. We want our employees to be healthy. But what are we doing? Where’s the walk? Exactly? Where’s the walk? And so we’re not seeing it. So, where do we put that in? For me? It’s a very simple 12 to 1 that’s a lunch break. But I also ensure that I also make it my mindfulness break. So I break it up for myself. But when I do these consultations, Tony, no one is going, oh, and maybe I can put that in my calendar. Yes, you can put lunch in your calendar. Yeah. So people are just like, oh, this is mind boggling. I’m not quite sure I could take a break. You can time for me. CEO S do it. Executive time. The president of the United States has executive time that nobody knows it’s some black box. But CEO S CEO s too trickle down closed door time or whatever they call it. It’s time that they don’t want to be interrupted. I have my time that I don’t need to be, I don’t want to be interrupted as well. So be conscious, conscious about time for yourself. There’s gotta be more to it conscious about time for yourself. And in that time, what am I doing? Right. So, is that, and I’m, is it breathing exercises? Is it journaling? Is it that you’re taking time for your spirituality? What is it that you need to do for you? So this is where we talk about emotional assessments and assessing that. What do you need to be your best self as you do this work in the nonprofit field? Right? Often in the nonprofit field, we’re seeing people at their worst because whatever our mission and vision is, it’s to help someone get out of something, I mean, very, very, very curt way of saying that, right? And if that’s the case, then you’re expelling a lot of energy you’re pouring from your cup often. So now I’m telling you take a break, maybe an hour a day in this hour, a day after assessing what you need to do to make yourself and keep yourself whole as you’re doing your work. That’s how you program your one hour, right? So for me, I’m going to program my hour to have breath work because that works for me. And that’s just taking time to, you know, do some deep breathing. But there’s also probably going to be movement yoga, walking just outside, being with nature or that’s going to be journaling. And that journaling is normally for me where I pull in my spirituality. So it might be writing prayers or it might be reading the Bible, anything like that, whatever feels good to you and your spirit and whatever you’re practicing. But that comes after you have assessed what you need in your environment. I’m going to presume that we’re going to discourage, you know, I want to be on Facebook for half of my one hour. This is not social media, it’s not social media, catch up time, it’s not social media, catch up time or text, catch up time, right? You know, and this is barring the normal checking in with your family type of stuff, obviously, right? But yeah, this is the time for you. Ok? I I’ve said for years that you have to take care of yourself before you can take care of others and we’re all taking care of. Well, if we’re not, if we’re not explicitly others, you know, humans or animals, we’re taking care of the environment, we’re taking care of forests, we’re taking care of uh churches, whatever it is, you know, we’re expanding. You said it, I’m just I’m reinforcing and I believed it for years, whatever it is, whatever you’re engaged in, it takes energy, it, it takes some of you, it takes some of your heart and you have to take care of yourself before you can do this other work. For other agencies, people, entities, whatever, however you define your work. Because so that, that’s what caught me about this, you know, because people are not, you know, we’re not, we’re just not taking care of ourselves and we’re seeing it in rates of, I think depression, obesity, high blood pressure, suicide, right. These, these bad behaviors that we’re only increasing inflicting on ourselves are showing up in very bad ways. I mean, fatal ways sometimes. Absolutely just take care of yourself. And that’s why we’re talking about how, how to do it be purposeful, purposeful. I’m your cheerleader. I’m here for this, Tony. I’m here cheering you on. I appreciate this. This is work that I want to cheer on. Alright. Suppose, I suppose we have uh some leadership objections like, well, you know, yeah, you do get an hour but uh or you don’t even get a full hour or well, but we still need you to be on email during, during your lunch break. Uh You know, this, this your time is, it’s, it’s not working for me or us. How do we, how do we push back? We get some allies. I mean, how do we, how do we make the case for our own healing time? I’m glad you asked during the work in the workday hours. Yeah. So my biggest supporter has been hr right? And I know that sometimes hr isn’t always the best supporter because they’re there for the company. They work they work for the company. And I say that in the sense of using research to work for them and what I’ll do is say, well, I’m more productive when I have this hour, I’m less productive when you don’t give me the hour and then I actually back it up. You know, like when I don’t have this one hour, you can see that my work starts to dwindle, you can see the excitement in the work that I’m doing or the ability for me to do this work or now I’m frazzled and I’m not even bringing my best self to the office any longer. That has always worked for me with working with other supervisors who may not say I don’t want you to take this hour. I need you to still be on call. I also have learned to push back just personally. Are you adverse to me being my best self? Is that what you’re saying you’re opposed to that? Are you opposed to this? You don’t want my best self at work, work and often that stumps them and you’re like, take the hour, just take the hour. Ok. Those are very good. Anything else? Those are the two that have worked really well for me. And even though I’ve helped other people, those have worked really well. So those are two. I lean on now. You do consulting on an individual basis as well as the organizational level. Anything else you want to say about mental health before we move to creativity. So one thing I’ll say here on mental health too is leaning on allies, as you mentioned earlier and outside resources. I have a great therapist and I just, that’s my personal therapy. Yeah, I love my therapist and she’s a huge cheerleader and proponent of writing up breaks for me. If I need them at work to say, you know, Beth, if you need a week or you need a couple of days, let’s make sure we actually write that out and I’m just going to write you out. Your therapist writes to your employer to give you a break, a mental break, like a surgeon would say she needs two weeks for, you know, whatever surgery, mental health, mental health, she needs this. How do you fight with that? That’s medical back understanding. She’s got to go and there is no justification of, well, she’s out and she could still check email, she’s out and she can still do text message. No, she’s out and it’s a mental break and it’s medically recorded and given to hr and there’s no more questions about it. And I think we need to lean on our therapy resources more often for things like that because we don’t, I think we also, as we were talking about all these bad behaviors, we have an understanding and if someone were shot that they’re bleeding, they need immediate assistance. And we talk about those bad behaviors or negative behaviors, I should say of, you know, bad eating habits or mental health decline. That’s often because we don’t understand how emergent it is for us to get help. Someone says I’m exhausted at work. Those words, I’m exhausted are often not, I’m just tired. It’s, it’s everything, it’s work, it’s home life, everything is compounding. And they’re telling you I really need a break. So when they need that break, let’s give it to them. And if we can’t give it to them, let’s lean on outside resources to make sure you get it. So, tapping into your therapy network will help you with that as well. I think that’s brilliant. I mean, any, any hr department or CEO is gonna take a doctor’s note, an MD note. So this is the therapist note. This is mental health instead of physical health practitioner that brilliant. It’s time for a break. Virtuous is a software company committed to helping nonprofits grow generosity, virtuous beliefs that generosity has the power to create profound change in the world and in the heart of the giver, it’s their mission to move the needle on global generosity by helping nonprofits better connect with and inspire their givers responsive fundraising puts the donor at the center of fundraising and grows giving through personalized donor journeys. The response to the needs of each individual virtuous is the only responsive nonprofit CRM designed to help you build deeper relationships with every donor at scale virtuous gives you the nonprofit CRM fundraising, volunteer marketing and automation tools. You need to create responsive experiences that build trust and grow, impact, virtuous.org now back to healing over everything you want to move to creativity. Yeah, we can go to creativity. Let’s do it. Yeah. Creative spaces, creating creative spaces in the workplace that used to come up like 1020 years ago about, oh, we have a creative workspace. And what that meant was that your office looked like Google’s office and that you all had couches somewhere pong table. Exactly. Were you productive? No, you weren’t really that productive. You just had moments to play, which there is research that suggests that play is necessary for your brain to have a break, right? So I’m not doubting that. But what I am saying is let’s be intentional about creative spaces. And for me, when I’m working with individuals, I love to take pauses whenever we’re meeting or we begin meeting to do something creative together. And that may be, we’re going to just literally have a paint session, paint parties or, you know, we’re all building something together here. There’s a painting kiosks painting here. There is, there’s painting here and I love to see that type of stuff because what that shows you is that there’s an understanding for health, our abilities to tap into our creativity are so important. It’s important to just our daily lives. It helps us move forward, it helps us think of things that we’ve never thought of before. And again, we’re more productive when I’m tapping into my creativity, I’m thinking I go back to that problem and now I see it in a different lens because I’ve spent so much time on it. So, you know, introducing that in the workspace is really brilliant as well. And I think that the way we do that, at least that’s worked for me. The way that has worked for me is, you know, back to the arts, really bringing in the arts. I’ve worked at a place where we had an art table and it was really the old school kindergarten table which is paint and paper you squeeze and it’s just like a good jump in, just go for it, just go for it. And even if you were stressed out, just go for it and have a good time on those tables. And that was an environment that felt really good. It was an environment that when we had conflict, we took it to the table, like I’m still upset with you, but I’m going to go to this table for a little bit and then we’re going to come back and have a conversation. Those conversations were a lot more pleasant than if we just sat there and tried to bicker with one another and get to some kind of plausible solution that really didn’t work in the end because someone felt like they weren’t heard. And So introducing creativity truly in that way, there are rooms and spaces here that have little fidget spinners and things on them, right? Small creativity. But it’s for the introvert that wants to be alone, but still have an opportunity to color things like that. And then they can come back to the space when they need to. And so introducing that creativity in the workspace and your work flow in your scope of work even with at Village of Wisdom, one of the things that one of my colleagues is always saying, you always champion rest. They’ll give us these huge scopes of work which are amazing scopes of research and understanding. And then I’m like, well, where’s the rest built in? Did you build in the rest? Did you do that? Did you build in the creativity? No. OK. Well, let’s go back and do that, you know, and I think that’s just an amazing thing to do. But I love the environment of Village of Wisdom because they accept it because it’s one of those, you know, I can say let’s rest and we rest, we collectively rest. And I think that’s the thing is that you need an environment and space that will offer you the opportunity to rest. There’s something about the tactile, we’re talking about creativity, finger painting. I’m thinking of Legos clay, clay. I used to love clay. Uh I, there’s something about the, yeah, the tactile, you know, now all we touch is our phones and hopefully our families in loving ways. But aside from that, I mean, in the creativity side there’s, there’s nothing we don’t unless we’re, unless we’re devoted to the arts, you know, or it’s a big part of our life. Maybe as a hobby, maybe not a profession. But aside from that and that’s not, that’s not very many folks. We don’t have the touch. Right. And it’s so important, Tony coming out of the pandemic when you were shut off from touch, stay 6 ft away. I couldn’t touch a person for a while. We thought we couldn’t touch our groceries. We were wiping our groceries down for a while until we realized we’ve learned through science that it’s not on your grocery. The device is not on your groceries. But, uh, doorknobs, we installed the, uh, those things on the bottom of the door, open your shoes. You couldn’t even touch a doorknob. So we lost, yeah, the pandemic was enormous for isolation and loss of tech time. The sensation. So what else, what other kind of creative space you talking about? Painting? You talked about the clay, which is great, silly putty. And even I found that making those things together, you can make clay, you can make silly putty. You know, I have the benefit of living in North Carolina. So we actually sit on clay in Durham. I live in Emerald Isle on the beach and then I have a place in Pinehurst too. Even closer to down there in Pamlico. Yeah, you’re right there. You do in Durham. Durham is close to Pinehurst is, it’s right there next time I’m in Pinehurst. That’s not the one I don’t live there. But you go visit that one. Yeah. No, Durham is a very nice town. Great college town. Great food. That’s another good food town. Durham culture, universities. That’s a great place to live. I didn’t know that. So creative spaces in the workplace, what else can we do? What works for you? I say get involved in your community that way. What’s creative happening around you? Right? There’s some great exhibitions. There are great little opportunities to go visit different shows. I know that seems like a strange thing to do. Me and my group are going to go visit a show. We are and we’re going to talk about it afterwards. How did that make you feel? It’s really bringing field trips back into the workspace. You know, that’s one way to do that. The other way is, you know, like you mentioned Lego, Lego is great because it has so many different things. Now I introduce my best friend to it. I do it. I build cars. That’s my secret. I build cars. She got into the plants, they now have plants and so her home has all these little plants all around it, plant, decorate it that way. And so bringing that in where each person can maybe bring in a little tiny box. These are small boxes and build something together and talk about it. But you learn about each other video games. Another thing, right? Card games, old school uno we did that and that brought out some things but fun is another one. Yeah. And I mean, it’s just a matter of bringing play and creativity. And I say creativity because in the workspace, anything that’s counter to just sitting at a computer oftentimes is creative. At this point, journal prompts writing time, you know, working with your colleagues. OK. Well, together, we’re going to set aside an hour and that’s our meeting time. But in this meeting time we’re going to write, you know, I’ve seen that multiple times that’s been introduced into village of Wisdom as well, not by me, by another colleague. And so I think it’s great. You have something you haven’t mentioned that. I think it would be counterproductive. But I want your opinion. Uh We, we’re all gonna play for an hour together between 11 and 12. We’re gonna do it all together, we’re gonna do the same thing is that, is there value in that or is that counterproductive? There’s value in that like it’s mandated, we’re all going, we’re all going to do something. So if we’re all going to, there’s value in that the word mandate often is what takes the value off of it, right? Because I’m a big proponent of choosing, you know, just for that person during the day, you might not have the energy for it. If we’re talking about healing, it’s acknowledging your cup that day. So that day you might not really want to do it, but do it for those who want to, for those who don’t, you can take your personal hours and use it as you like those who want to. We’re going to, I don’t know, go to an escape room or Durham has something I love called a rage room. A room filled with things you can break and lots of different weapons. So there’s a baseball bat, sledge hammers and then there’s a whole bunch of glass plates and cups and you can just throw them against the wall. They suit you up and put on all the protective gear. So you don’t get injured and you just have an hour in there to smash things. They turn the music up and you just have a good time throwing beer bottles, all that Rage room. They also have a paint room where you can throw paint on each other in the same room. So it’s getting messy. It’s reactivating the piece of your brain that people tell you you’re too old to activate. Are you, are you too young to know Tinker toys? You know, Tinker toy. That was another Lincoln Logs were good too. I can remember the package that the Lincoln Logs came in. There was like a round thing. Lincoln Log. Blocks. Yeah. Those are the big ones that the toddlers have. They’re LEGO, but they’re real big. Ok. Again, there’s our sense of touch. It’s all on a smooth screen now. It’s important. And, yeah, I mean, even for your own health of feeling different things, right. You know, sometimes you can correlate touch to an emotion. Something smooth, reminds you of Xy and Z something crunchy. Feels like this and just reigniting those emotions helps you with just getting through your day. Should we move to unity? Creativity. We’ve given that adequate. I think. So, hopefully for whoever’s listening, you know, they can go, I can do this, you know, healing spaces, unity. You talk about fertile soil for all people. That’s what’s engaged here. Yeah. What’s engaged here? That becomes the um the evaluation of the space. That’s the part that people don’t often like and it’s the evaluation of self. And so in these spaces, we’re asking you to evaluate yourself and say, OK, do I have emotionally what I need to go through this? And so some of those questions are, you know, where am I today? Is my home life? OK. Is my work life? OK? Is my spiritual life. OK? And if everything is in balance is my physical life, OK? Can I move forward and expelling some more energy? Right? Only you know the answer to that. But then I flip this back onto the organization and the environment and say now do this for the environment. Does the environment have enough soil, fertile soil? That if this person says I’m not OK as an employee that you can hold them and if the answer is no, then what resources do you have for that person? And you say none, now we need to go find those resources because I don’t believe that everyone’s job should do everything for them. But I do believe that they should have the opportunity to provide resources. And that’s why there’s unity in that. Because I think in order to do that, you are looking at people as humans and you’re seeing their humanity, you’re not looking at them and saying, well, I don’t want to do this because I don’t like you or I don’t want to go down this path of helping you because you may be mad a little weird too. You know, it’s esoteric getting a little personal. I don’t really want to know you should deal with that on your own day. Exactly. But what I’m saying is that especially in the nonprofit space when we’ve had, like I said, the small sample size who told you 100% of them felt that they were damaged. Then we need to probably look at where we can actually provide you some fertile soil. What kinds of resources? What should we do even internally without external resources internally? So that’s where the other two, right? We talked about giving you that hour, things like that, but it is check ins and what I mean by check in, it’s meeting with your team to say, how are you feeling in the culture? And then based on that conversation, you need to have a plan for this person. Um And, you know, in my session, I’ll be talking about different ways that people can have these plans because they’re pretty extensive. We have a lot of time here but the planning is, is looking at this person and saying, all right, you don’t like the following things, recurring meetings. You know, you don’t feel like you’re heard, you don’t feel as though your work is being showcased in a way that other people’s work is being showcased. You don’t feel like you’re getting the credit, whatever it is that’s wearing on you, like diving deep into this, like why you’re feeling the way you’re feeling and then we’re gonna create a plan. What is this plan? And it’s not the same as a work plan. It’s more of what’s your feel good plan. So you can actually feel good in this space. And in that, if we need to increase some flexibility in your hours, you’re starting at 10 o’clock instead of nine o’clock and ending at six instead of five, you know, is it that you’re doing a four day week? Because some people are more productive with four days than five. Is it that these meetings, you only need to show up to every other week instead of every week, you know, what is the plan for you? Um And that’s why I was saying it creates unity because each person feels seen and held and as long as each person feels seen and held, then everyone is OK. What I’ve found is that if one person is getting more attention than the other, it’s not going to work. This is applied inequitably disparately, then this is just going to be breed resentment. Exactly. Some of the folks will be very content and feel better and heard and the rest will be pissed off. Ok? So it’s got to be done equitably. And then all the thing too for me has been Tony talking to management to have them learn different management styles. And what I mean by that is we’ve gone through a pandemic and people have changed. We all change coming out of the pandemic. My work style going into the 2020 is not the same. Now, the way I communicate is not the same, how I interact with people is not the same. And so understanding that we need to be able to say, ok, what do we need to come back? I don’t want to say come back to self to just nurture this new person that’s come out. Um You know, I talked to the executive director at V once before and we laughed about it because I said, listen, your executive director. Yeah, right now and I said, hey, you built a team in the dark because the organization grew in 2020 from 4 to 15 people in the pandemic year. And I was like, over the pandemic over the course of two years. And I said so in doing that, I was like, people don’t know each other. We know each other on screens, we don’t know each other and we don’t even know ourselves. And so now we’re doing amazing work. I call it root work in the sense of bringing in people to talk to us about the environment and the workspace because it’s not negative, but just learning to learn each other, learn each other’s work styles and things like that. And so that intention behind it has been great and I’m always excited from him and the rest of the leadership team of just diving in, it wasn’t a, oh, we’re going to just let this thing just be infertile. We’re going to actually dive in. So they brought in people strategic planners to actually focus on doing strategic planning in a holistic way. They brought in, you know, a therapist who’s doing, you know, culture planning in a holistic way and it’s done in a way that everyone has a voice and it allows us to move as a team saying, OK, this works for me, but this might not work for you. But how can we work together and show up in our whole selves? Yeah. So why don’t you bring this all three together again? The mental health and creativity and unity, uh, you know, leave us. Uh, well, I think we’re already inspired but, you know, just, just pull it all back together. Pull it all together. Yeah. Club, the benediction and the sermon. Right. For me, if I were to put a bow on it, it’s the understanding that every last one of us working in the nonprofit space is fostering humanity in some form, shape or fashion, right? And we need to take the time to love on ourselves in a way that not only replenishes ourselves but honors our own humanity so we can give our best selves in the workspace. And we do that by honoring our mental health. We do that by honoring our creativity and we do that by knowing that in a unified approach, we will always be our best selves. I bet you’re very good at the stewardship, part of, of Director of Development and stewardship because you, you hear people, actually, I think I would recommend you for promotion to like Chief Humanity Officer Cho Cho. I I I’ll speak to your uh now you’re a better advocate than I will be. She’s Beth Lee, Director of Development. My pleasure, Director of Development and stewardship at Village of Wisdom. Thank you again, Beth. Thank you Tony and thank you for being with Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio coverage of the 2024 nonprofit technology conference where we are sponsored by Heller consulting, technology strategy and implementation for nonprofits. Next week, the generational divide, Tony, am I fired? Maybe so, as I said last week, if the generational divide didn’t come this week, there was gonna be a shake up. Uh but I’m taking responsibility uh for this. There, there could be other issues. So that’s why, you know, that’s why it’s a maybe uh around you. The generational divide. I have it, I have it, it’s recorded. It’s in the can, the digital can, but I wanted to really wanted to kick off our 24 NTC coverage this week the week after NTC. So the generational divide will come. Uh I, we’re not gonna keep promising it well, the next time you hear it, uh it’ll be for sure the next week. Uh And in terms of Kate, we’ll see about week to week. If you missed any part of this week’s show, I beseech you find it at Tony martignetti.com were sponsored by donor box. Outdated donation forms blocking your supporters, generosity. Donor box. Fast, flexible and friendly fundraising forms for your nonprofit donor box.org. Let me say a quick thank you very much to Donor Box. They are ending their sponsorship with this show. It’s been a terrific year. I’ve just been uh grateful to have you as sponsors. So we thank you very much Donor Box and by virtuous, virtuous gives you the nonprofit CRM fundraising volunteer and marketing tools you need to create more responsive donor experiences and grow, giving, virtuous.org. Our creative producer is Claire Meyerhoff. I’m your associate producer for now, Kate Martignetti. The show social media is by Susan Chavez, Mark Silverman is our web guy and this music is by Scott Stein. Thank you for that affirmation. Scotty. You’re with us next week for nonprofit radio. Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95% go out and be great.