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Nonprofit Radio for January 15, 2024: Performance Measurement

 

Bryan ShanePerformance Measurement

There’s a systematic method for you to get feedback on your nonprofit’s finances; programs, clients; and employees. It’s both art and science. Bryan Shane explains this management and decision-making tool. He’s co-author of the book, “The Leadership-Driven Method to Performance Measurement.”

 

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And welcome to Tony Martignetti Nonprofit radio. Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. I’m your aptly named host and the pod father of your favorite abdominal podcast. Oh, and my goodness. Did I sound terrible last week, Echoy? Like the Holland tunnel without traffic. Uh Like I’m in a brick, I don’t know, brick echo chamber. Uh I’m, I’m between mics. Uh I know it’s much better this week. It should get even better when the really good mic comes. So, uh but apologies for the sound. My sound last week. Oh, I’m glad you’re with us. I’d be hit with LEVO version if you left me with the idea that you missed this week’s show. Here’s our associate producer, Kate with the highlights. Hey, Tony, this week it’s performance measurement. There’s a systematic method for you to get feedback on your nonprofits, finances programs, clients and employees. It’s both art and science. Brian Shane explains this management and decision making tool. He’s co-author of the book, the leadership driven Method to performance measurement on Tony’s take two Planned Giving Accelerator were sponsored by donor box, outdated donation forms, blocking your supporters, generosity. Donor box vast flexible and friendly fundraising forms for your nonprofit donor. Box.org here is performance measurement. It’s a pleasure to welcome Brian Shane to the show. He is co-author with Patricia Lafferty of the leadership driven method to performance measurement. The how to book on improving performance measurement in the public and not for profit sectors. With Patricia. Brian is also co-founder of B PC management consultants, a client centered management consulting firm based in Ottawa, the capital in the province of Ontario, Canada. The book is at B PC gallery.com and Brian is on linkedin. Brian, Shane. Welcome to nonprofit radio. Good morning, Tony. Pleasure to have you. Uh We’re, we’re recording just uh early January and uh it’s cold, it’s cold for you in uh in Ottawa. It is um actually we had no snow in winter and uh we’re under a, a major uh snowfall warning, I guess it’s coming from the States down here. And uh so actually I love, I love winter. I love, I love the cold. I love skating and skiing and, and all that stuff. So, um when there’s no snow, it’s kind of like just bad weather. You can’t do anything except for go, go for walks and uh, oh, so you look, you look forward to the snow. Um Yeah, I’m a, I’m a photographer on the side and um, um I, you know, winter is when um, a lot of the Raptors, you know, owls and eagles and hawks come down from the north. So it’s, uh, it’s, it’s fun to do that. And, uh, so this is the time of year when I actually do a lot of my raptor photography because, you know, it’s here and I’m sure it’s the same, not, probably doesn’t extend as far South Carolina, North Carolina, but certainly in New York and, uh, the upper, upper northern states of the US. So, uh, those predator birds. Yeah, there are hawks, hawks, raptors. I don’t know, I don’t know if owls are considered predators but anything that eats, anything that eats. So, II, I enjoy, I enjoy doing that. And, uh, um, so, um, and when, when, when we, before we started, you said, uh, it’s minus 10 °F and not too cold, you said it’s not so cold, it’s minus 10. It’s minus 10 °C. So, so it’s about maybe minus four °F. No, that was Celsius. Ok. Ok. So it’s still, it’s probably five or six °F. So, it’s, it’s cool but it’s not, I love that. It’s cool. It’s cool. I consider cool to be 50. 50 is cool here in North Carolina. It’s, it’s funny, I was in Florida a number of years ago and a friend of mine kept saying it was cold at 50 degrees and I kept going, it’s cold at 50 degrees. I mean, try 20 boulevard when I got down there and it was 80 it dropped to 50. I said, yeah, it’s cold. Yeah. Well, of course, it’s all, it’s all relative. Right? If you start at 8050 is, that’s, that’s what I’m accustomed to. So, you’re in North Carolina? All right. Um, all right. So you’re a photographer and a, and a performance measurer. We’re gonna spend more time talking about performance measurement than photography. I hope that’s ok. That’s ok. Ok. You’ve written books on, you have a book on performance measurement. I feel like we should talk about that. Um There are other podcasts for uh for photography. So let’s let’s get people just acquainted with um what performance measurement is. What, what let’s make sure we just have a simple definition. OK. Sure. Um I, I’m gonna start with what it’s not, it’s not performance appraisal and most people make the assumption that when you’re measuring performance, you’re measuring it at the individual level with this performance appraisal. It’s not that it’s, it’s measurement at the organizational level and it can be measured at lots of different levels, it can be measured at. Um Here we have departments that have broken up the branches and records and you can mark, like I’d say most of my stuff is, is helping people measure at the director or the branch level. The government wide performance measurement approaches um For the most part don’t work very well. They give the client, they give the government’s plausible deniability, but they actually don’t give the people who are running the program, the information they need So what is it? It’s feedback, it’s feedback, it’s feedback on your program. It’s feedback on your, on your finances, on your people and on your clients. It, it actually would to, to make it, to give you a metaphor. Um It’s, uh it’s a navigation system. So you can imagine running a business in the public sector, you’re inundated with conflicting um, problems and issues that you have to navigate. So it’s kind of like driving a ship without a sonar and a radar system. You, you don’t know where you are. So the, the measurement system allows you to um navigate through all this and yet still maintain your course, which is to help your department or your branch or whatever it is, get to where they’re going. Um, and the type of feedback that you get, um, you know, you get, you, you basically the one that most departments are most interested in are the finances that is, are your operations cost effective. But you have to know if your programs are working. Um, and your services, I mean, when it comes down to it, the government, most governments, whether they’re public sector at the national state or the city level, spend half their money on people. Yeah. Well, we’re not, we’re not in the, we’re not in the government sphere. We’re, we’re in the, we’re in the nonprofit, you know, on the nonprofit side. So, yeah, so the nonprofit is, it’s probably similar, I mean, we spend half the money on people, half the money on programs, just, just the norm of it. Um So the navigate, it’s a navigation system that allows you to, to navigate through the ever changing willow of financial changes, cuts employee demands, plan changes and program program initiatives and, and, and so, so we can, all right, so we, we can do this at the program level, we can do this at the, at the macro organizational level. Um You know, our, our listeners may or may not have departments, um smaller, smaller shops aren’t going to have departments, but, but some of our larger listeners could very well have departments, um hospitals, colleges. So most of, most of the people I work for are running a program at a branch level or a or a record level and they uh can’t cope with the ever-changing flood of changes that come down from the department levels or, you know, from the, from the outside. And so this helps them to say, ok, we’re not doing this today. We’re doing that today, but we’re still going north um north being the strategic direction of the organization, your mission, your mission. Um And so, um you know, you get the, you know, the four pro project, you know, they call it the balance score card, which is, you know, your finances, your programs, your clients and your employees, you have to have that full picture because I mean, if you ignore your clients. Um, what are you doing? I mean, you, you, if you’re not satisfied who you, who you’re helping it doesn’t work and if your employees are just disgruntled, you have poor motivation, more poor productivity. Um, so to keep your people and your clients happy, then your programs and your finances usually work, work well. So that’s the way. So, uh, decision making, this is gonna help with decision making, identifying problems, which is gonna help you solve problems. Yeah. I mean, you know, when it comes down to it, um, um, the basic problem with those organizations is that they, um, they follow that bad practices, for example, they buy something that’s the cheapest. So, if I’m a big, uh, company and you buy, let’s say an, it, I mean, most of what government spends money on, are it information technology and large construction program. So that’s where they spend all their money, roads, bridges, uh, whatever, whatever it is. Um, and a lot of places like in Ottawa, for example, they bought, um, the, uh, a new transit system. Yeah. But again, we’re, you know, we’re on the nonprofit side so it’s not the government side but this is, it’s a city government. It’s, it’s, it’s still go and they, they bought a transit system, um, that says it’s been disastrous. I mean, they bought the parts from one place and they bought the rails from another and there’s the, the integration of the system doesn’t work So it’s been functioning very poorly um uh for, you know, for a number of years now and they spent like over a billion dollars and because they bought the cheapest solution. Um So there’s a lot of, a lot of things uh that people do in the public sector that are um endemic. They don’t, they don’t think about the consequences of doing it. It’s just, it’s a hoop. Oh my God, they just gave us a li a license to print money. Um So, um they get all their money on fixes and maintenance. And um this approach to performance measurement is, you know, it is written in this book and it, like I said, it applies to the nonprofit sector and like I said, a lot of the problems whether in the nonprofit sector, um is that the writing, the choices made in that sector are um ones that um if you were an individual, you would not make that choice. You, you would make it based on how the, the, the purchase of an it system or a new office or whatever would, would best suit your organization. Um That doesn’t happen in a lot of cases and it, it’s because um people don’t understand what measurement is. I mean, it’s a, it’s a go, it’s a, it’s an approach to making decisions based on a full spectrum of, of information that you require to run your organization on your finances, programs, your services, your employees and your clients, right? And we’re gonna, we’re gonna get into the, the process. I just want folks to understand that first at a higher level. And so this is, this is a continuous process too, right? This is not just something discreet, we do it and then we check a box and it’s, it’s done. This is an ongoing iterative iterative process. So for example, um the finances and program services are measured on a continuous basis. Usually you, you, you want to get reports, feedback on a monthly basis. Now on your clients and on your employees, that’s usually an annual measurement that you get uh on your clients is usually a client satisfactory survey for your uh for your employees. It’s usually an employee satisfactory survey. But then there’s also a lot of metrics related to staffing and uh that you want to take a look at as well. So that’s a yearly process. So different times, but it’s an on, it’s a, it’s a yearly ongoing process that process feeds back into your plan. You can adjust your plan based on that feedback to deal with the issues that are, that are uh revealed by the measuring and who’s involved in this. Uh I know it, it, it needs to be, it’s leadership driven obviously. So what, what, what leadership and, and who else besides leadership? There’s three groups that they get involved in this film. So the first one is that you need, I I call it leadership driven because it has to be sponsored by a leader. So if you are um in a directorate, you might have, uh or some point, you have to have the leader of that group be the sponsor of it. They introduce and make sure that um people feel comfortable doing it. Um Then, um you need the people who are your, that every organization has a planning and measurement unit within their group that feeds into the larger part of the organization or the organization as a whole. Um And then you have the programs and services who provide the information to you um on how they’re doing. So there’s three groups and they all have to be functioning um within each with each other. And um it works, like I said, it’s, it’s an ongoing process. Um When you started initially, people will say, well, I’m not comfortable with that, but again, they’re, they’re confusing performance appraisal, right? With perform measure. So that, that’s one of the big issues uh with it. Um There’s not much written on performance measurement um in terms of how to do it. Um And so that’s why the need for, that’s why the need for the book, the Leadership driven Method of Performance Measurement. Yeah, I mean, when I got into this, um I, you know, I started doing it. Um basically, um you know, I was trying to make sense of it. How, how would I improve performance measurement because everybody has one but not many of them work well. And um even in the outside of the not for profit, I mean, only very large companies have them. Now today you can see that changing um when you purchase things in the private sector, a lot of times you get a transaction based request for how did we do on this transaction? Somebody will give you a phone call or something. And so that that’s happening more, not so much in the not for profit sector because organizations are much smaller, they have less money. And so you have to make things simple. It’s time for a break. Open up new cashless in person donation opportunities with donor bucks 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 in 2024. Visit donor box.org to learn more now back to performance measurement. So let’s let’s talk about your simplified process, the leadership, the leadership driven method. So you have these four phases. Is this uh so why are we talking about the four phases? So the first one is readiness assessment. Um Are you ready for its measurement? So you have to have some kind of a business plan that, that is measurable. So in that, in that case, um you need a vision, you know, where you’re gonna go, your mission part is what you have to do and then you have objectives, you have, you know, like the four parts, you have finances, the programs, the clients and the employees. So when you have those four pieces, you say, in order to understand what are the, what’s the feedback? And I, and I should mention that um another thing that, that always gets completely forgotten is that the feedback is at two levels. One are, what are your achievements? And the second one of your issues and the achievements part is universally forgotten. Um because in any organization, there’s always gonna be achievements, um things that happen that are good in, in, in the not for pro non for profit sector, um the achievements will be smaller but they’re still there. I mean, they’re fine. Yeah, we still, we still want to celebrate them. Yeah, I mean, you wanna, you wanna know what’s good? I mean, if and, and what people often forget in doing this is that you have achievements and they, they focus in on, on it’s kind of like daily news, you know, the only thing they focus on is on the bad stuff. They don’t say this person, say that person or, or whatever. And so like there’s a balance. So in the, in the four aspects of measurement, which are the finances, programs and people and the and the employees you have achievements and you have issues and you celebrate the issues and you, you celebrate the achievements and you deal with the issues. So it’s really important to understand that your feedback is of two kinds, achievements and issues. Issues are issues aren’t bad. Everybody has it. It’s just the nature of dealing with people and yeah, no, the the the bad part come, the bad part could come in, could come, hopefully it doesn’t but could and how you react to the issues, the obstacles, how does the organization deal with them and it doesn’t have to be bad. It could be very proactive and positive. Yeah, issues are things you have to deal with. They’re not good, they’re not bad. They just are right, but you need to reveal them through the leadership driven method to performance measurement. Exactly. So um if you understand that you get achievements and issues across four parts of the organization, you’re way ahead because most of what is measured is just finances are we cost effective, we need to move beyond that. So, so as part of these four phases that you have, we can this is very customizable, right to the to the organization. Yeah. So it’s really an art and a science, the art, the science is there’s a methodology we have 44 steps to building mement system. And the science is how you adapt that to the organization. You’re working for the art, the art is how you adapt it. Yeah, the art is how you adapt. Right. Right. OK. It’s funny when I was preparing for this, I’m going, how am I gonna um regurgitate this book? Well, that’s my, yeah, he’s Brian is holding up his book. Everybody’s not going to see the video, but that’s my job to help. You don’t, don’t, you don’t uh Yeah, I’ll, I’ll, you know, we’re gonna hit highlights and people want more detail, you know, their choices, they gotta buy the book. That’s why I, that’s why I said the book is at B PC gallery.com, Bravo, Papa Charlie, gallery.com. Uh going back to my Air Force days, Bravo, Papa Charlie Gallery. So, yeah, we, we can’t, we can’t, you know, it’s, it’s too technical. Um There are a lot of acronyms and phases and things, you know, but, but so, you know, don’t worry, we’ll, we’ll give, we’ll give folks an overview and those who, those who want to know more, they go forward and, and, and buy the book. So I, I want folks to know that this is uh it is, I’m glad you said it’s part art and part science and, and the art part is customizing this to your nonprofit. So the, the, the customizable part is, is um the things that, you know, how do, how do I make it fit your organization? Um What are the security requirements? What are the uh timing requirements? How does it fit your planning and uh measurement process, all that kind of stuff? How does that, how do I that this approach to measurement to make it something that’s self sustaining within the organization? In other words, it works like a machine. It just, it provides the feedback that you need. It spits out the, the finances on the programs every month and it spits out the people and the clients annually and then how does that be back into your planning process? So you can adjust your strategies and initiatives to deal with it and it, it’s an ongoing process because whatever you deal with now there’ll be something coming up later. It’s like a machine. Um you know, the machine keeps functioning and um, you know, that’s the, that’s the part that’s missing is often is that you deal with your finances but you’re upsetting your clients or you’re upsetting your employees or you know, something like that. Yeah, Brian, can you, can you share an example, uh a case study of an organization that you worked with that, that, that benefited from this or maybe they, they had a challenge and they didn’t really know what the problem was. Identify it and overcome it. Share a story. Can you actually, before I got into consulting, I ran two national volunteer organization, one was a Canadian 4h Council and one was a Canadian Ore Federation, which is a sport governing body. And in both cases, orienteering, I, when you said orienteering, I, when I was in boy scouts, I had orienteering merit badge. You had to find your way out of the woods with a compass and the southern. And, uh, I mean, the leaders weren’t too far away. I mean, they were, they didn’t drop you off in 1000 acres. You know. Uh, it wasn’t, it wasn’t survival. It was just orienteering. But yeah, we used the compass, the sun. Uh, you could measure heights, you could measure distances, things like that. Orienteering. Yeah. And, you know, and depending on where you live here, we live in the land of trees. You live, you live in the land of wide open spaces. So it’s a little when you have, I mean, you can see for, you know, for miles when I have the ocean, the ocean helps if I, if the ocean is on my right, I know I’m walking north. If it’s on my, it’s on my left. I know I’m walking south, which is actually not quite true because my, uh, that’s the way it would be if you would think the ocean, but my island is actually oriented east west. But I, in the normal course of ocean walking that that’s the way it would be. So, yeah. So I have, I have, I have a good, you know, it’s there every morning I wake up the ocean. Is there so I can orient myself pretty well. Yeah, when you’re in the trees you walk 2020 yards into the trees and you don’t have a compass, you’re lost. I mean, you could be walking in circles. You gotta know how to walk a straight line. Look at that next tree ahead, look at the next one ahead. I know all about. I had orienteering mud badge. So I know, I know. So you, so anyway, I was the first or I was the first guy that ran. So we had to do, we had to develop a business plan because we had nothing. I mean, we had paper clips and a desk and um then when we started that, um that was back long, long time ago. Um Then we started to say, ok, how, you know, we had a very small budget, we had to make sure we were cost effective. Uh We had programming services so we developed it from, from scratch and um it became very prepared to me very, very clearly that um I had to be very, very, um frugal with my money so that the, the organization can run. We had national championships. We have provincial championships. Um And then there would be a national national champion the first time that I went out orienteering. There’s, there’s like they, there’s like five or six levels and the one level where you get out of the trails is the orange level. And I was, uh, I had been oriented more than three or four months when I got out. And, and I remember this fellow from, um, Alberta and I was in this, uh, I was walking down, I know I was in the middle of a, a stream walking, um, with water up to my knees, not to my thighs. And I said, what are you doing? He said, well, we’re pulling the, uh, the, uh, flags up. I said, I haven’t finished yet and he said, well, it’s open and, and I’m going, don’t, don’t tell anybody. And so he said, you’re the guy, you’re the guy who takes 11 hours to run the New York City marathon. Well, if I could do it in 11 hours, I’d probably do it, but I did not run. Um, anyway, so I said, don’t say anything. And, uh, and I said, if you do, I’ll, I’ll get it. And as soon as we got into the, you know, back and everybody was in. This guy does not oriente, he’d never been orienteering his life. I found him and I said, how fast can you run? So, all right. So that was an embarrassing moment. It’s time for Tony’s take two. Thank you, Kate. It’s time for Planned Giving Accelerator the 2024 course I’m promoting it. Now, the class is gonna begin in early March and it runs through the end of May will be done by Memorial Day. So no impinging on your summer plans. If planned giving is on your to do list, you wanna launch Planned Giving in 2024 or in the future, you can take the class and then apply everything later on. Then I would ask you to take a look at Planned Giving Accelerator over the 12 weeks. Uh We meet once a week for an hour over Zoom and I will guide you step by step how to launch Planned Giving fundraising. There’s also lots of peer support because I set up the weekly meetings as meetings in Zoom, not webinars. So you can talk to each other, you can talk to the other members of the class bonds form. People get to trust each other and talk about stuff that you might not talk about with. Uh Well, you certainly wouldn’t if it was, you know, somebody in a one off webinar, um the, the classmates Bond and there is a, a good amount of peer support too as well as the teaching that I’m doing each week. If you are interested in Planned Giving Accelerator, check it out at Planned Giving accelerator.com Aptly named. And if you’re interested in joining, you can use nonprofit uh the code Nonprofit Radio 1500. The numbers 1500, nonprofit radio, 1500 that will save you $1500 off the accelerator tuition in the month of January. So you have to join this month January to use that discount plan giving accelerator.com. That is Tony’s take two. Ok. Um, take a class and don’t forget to use the code nonprofit Radio 1500. Well, thumbs up. Absolutely. We’ve got just about a boatload more time. So let’s go back to performance measurement with Brian Shane. It, it got to the point where I said, ok, uh, and this is what, uh, sometime before the balance score card. But I realized I have to run this, like my own personal business. I have to understand my finances. I have to understand what I do my programs. How do I relate to, you know, we have a few employees but mostly volunteers. And, um, so I know I, I began from, or from that orienteering to develop the business plan and of course, nobody knew how to do a business plan back then. It was like more of an operational plan, which is, you know, a yearly basis. So we, I wanted a, a five year approach and so we use some facilitation to develop a business plan that people agreed to. And we started measuring it, um, measured our finances and, you know, we had a strict budget from the federal government here to run that organization. And, and it, it grew, I mean, we had, we had national championships, we had provincial championships and um, it, it grew now cheering is a very technical sport as you. I mean, you, you’re doing it with an ocean. But if you’re doing it in the forest, it’s different. I mean, you have, uh, you, you’re trying to find a flag in a forest and you’re running through meadows and trees and if you’re up here in Canada, you can’t go 10 ft without hitting a tree. I mean, at least on Ontario there are parts of it in the western part of Ontario that you could. But so it’s a very challenging sport and you can be lost and try and find something. So, so just so just so folks understand you, you’re given a set of directions to follow, right? The flag. So 214 m and at, at uh 86 degrees, right? So you have to measure distance and direction, right? And if you mess up, you, you, if you mess up at one step, you screw up the rest of the way pretty much because the is small right now. I know we’re not, yeah, we’re talking about a small flag, not a, not a national Canadian flag is flying 1000 ft high. So you’re given directions and distances and you got to follow the Yeah, and you follow the court. There is no course. I mean, you have to make your own way, given the directions you got and the people, the best of the Oriente are the people in Scandinavia, the Swedes and the Fins and the Norwegians. Um That’s the way it was back then, I’m not sure now. And anyway, we, we, uh, improved quite a bit in our ability to navigate and, uh, to, to do, to do this. But it tended to be people who were, uh, people who are cross country skiers or, uh, you know, people who enjoy the outdoors or people who, um, just the ordinary person orienting is this my thing that helps navigate. And so we do all the plan and we, we measure our finances and we measure our programs in terms of how many people we had and how we were compete, how we were competing and, and progressing against the Swedes and the people from Scandinavia. And we did well, I mean, um for a number of years, um I, I was only there for a couple of years but, you know, I laid the basis for them to um develop and, um, and like I said, that’s, that’s where I learned that, um, you know, I wanted to do project work, people work and get paid well. And, um, so I involved in, I didn’t know I was a consultant back then and that was way, way before. And so, and then I ran the four, the 4h club um was similar, but it was much more established. And, but let’s get into the insights that you, you gained from the performance measurement. How did that help you grow the organization? Well, we, we learned that we didn’t know how to compete with these, with these elite people. And, um, so we had to improve our training, we had to improve our orientation to it. Um We had the thing is that, um, so much work goes into actually providing the facility. We realized we did not have great facilities for intern. So we developed some courses in, in, in wooded areas, uh, you know, across Canada. So you have to have a diverse ST woods, you have to have ponds, lakes, you have to have uh you know, different things you can run to. It, it has to be um I think uh like a full uh Wareing courses like 1010 to 12 kilometers. So you gain these insights through the, through the performance measurement. When you uh you, you, you talk about uh after you do the data analysis, you have windows, you have these windows of sort of insight, talk about like the organizational climate, window, business planning, talk about the, the, the, the windows that you gain, that gain you insight into your operations after you’ve done the, the data analysis. So at, at, at, at one point in the year, there’s a planning and measurement cycle. So um that was usually uh just after we got our budget in April. So at that point, I knew that I had to have the information on how we did in our programs and services, finances were easy because they’re trapped financially. Um Then I had to get insight into how we were doing in terms of employees. It wasn’t that many, it was only like 20 but I mean, there were provincial offices and there were, you know, those 10 provinces, most provinces had offices. So I had to get insight how we were doing with our employees and with our clients. And like I said, our clients, people who did orient here tended to be cross country skiers, marathon runners, that kind of thing. And when we got all that data, we, we said, ok, how can we improve our competitiveness? How can we improve the number of people who are actually doing it? Um And we did, and so we, you know, our championships got better. We had um many more people playing. So in an orienteering event, you would have six or seven levels and we would, so the first level would be just, well, let’s go, Brian, let’s go a little broader, you know, outside the, outside the orienteering organization. But, but generally, what will, what will nonprofits gain generally from the, from the windows, these windows that you identify around organizational climate, business planning governance. So the main thing you’ll get in a nonprofit is you’ll be more cost effective because you, you in, in a nonprofit. Um you know, like I said, I ran two of them, you have to be almost 100% sure that when you’re making an investment that it’s the right investment, whether it’s on facilities whether it’s on an it system, new employees. So you make sure you’re cost effective and, and make sure your programs work because if they don’t work, you don’t get any, you don’t get any return for your investment. So those are the two things now that the employees, you have your employees, it tends to be a lot different because you have very few employees compared to um public sector or private sector. So your employees, you know, but you also need to understand who your, who your clients are. So they’re stratified in order cheering or in most, in most um nonprofit into, you know, the people who are doing a lot of your stuff and the people who are not doing that are doing sort of the 8020. And so you get more people, more people involved, whether, you know, whatever kind of uh nonprofit it is, and a lot of them tend to be health related, they tend to be uh activity related and you just want to get more people involved because you believe in what you’re doing. And uh whether it, like I said, whether it’s health, whether it’s uh an activity or sport or whatever, it doesn’t really matter. I mean, you, you need to get people to see the advantage of what you’re doing and, and, and, and join in now um in the orienteering, you realize that the biggest advantage would be um trying to get people to, you know, find stuff and it was, uh, and, and this is taken off. Now there’s a lot of this, it used to be car rallies but there’s all kinds of things where people try to find stuff and they have to use drawing skills to find it. And in Canada, the States you can’t go in the woods if you, I don’t care, you get, you’ll get lost in our national, in our national parks. Right. I, I like that. You, uh, you know, and you analogize this to a navigation system. Uh, so that, uh, you know, you, you, your understanding as, as you’ve said, you know, your finances, your clients, your programs and your employees, I think, uh, I think that’s, I think that’s valuable for folks. Um, just, uh, you know, just leave us with, uh, inspiration for why we should take this to heart performance measurement. Um, you know, it, it comes down to, um, when you’re running a nonprofit, um, you do it for the love of it and you see how it’s affected your life and you want to share that insight with other people and the only way you can do it is to prove that what you’re doing actually works. And you see, um, you’ll see people who come and say to you that, um, if you had introduced me to this, I would never believe that I could have actually improved myself. And, um, a lot of what you’re doing in, in non profit is you’re improving your mental aspect of some part of your existence. It might be a physical, it might be, um, like some aspect, it might be like a really technical thing. It might be, it might be a really small thing, but that’s what I found is that I was able to show people and, and especially when I was working authoritarian, a limited budget that, you know, we actually had an, we actually had a measurable impact on improving our programs here. We had 50 people or 100 people in our last national championship. This time we had 500. All right. All right, we’re gonna, that’s the enormous, enormous, uh enormous progress from 10 times. All right. Thank you very much. The, the book is the leadership driven method to performance measurement. You will find it at B PC bravo, Papa Charlie gallery.com. You’ll find Brian on linkedin, Brian. Thank you very much. Thanks Tony. Next week. Team engagement tips. That guest got back to Tony second after Brian Shane. If you missed any part of this week’s show, I beseech you find it at Tony martignetti.com were sponsored by donor box, outdated donation forms blocking your supporters, generosity, donor box, fast, flexible and friendly fundraising forms for your nonprofit donor. Box.org. Our creative producer is Claire Meyerhoff. I’m your associate producer, Kate Marinetti. The show’s social media is by Susan Chavez. Mark Silverman is our web guy and this music is by Scott Stein. Thank you for that affirmation. Scotty be with us next week for nonprofit radio, big nonprofit ideas for the other 95% go out and be great.

Nonprofit Radio for November 13, 2023: Fundraising 401

 

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That’s Laurence Pagnoni’s latest book. When this first aired, it was his new book, but Laurence’s strategies and tactics are timeless. It’s a series of masterclasses for all levels and a collection of revelations he gained over 35 years in nonprofit management and fundraising. (This originally aired May 29, 2020.)

 

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Nonprofit Radio for December 14, 2018: The Encouragement Show

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Sarah Olivieri wants you to shed fear-based decision making, scarcity mentality and reflexive negativity, in favor of confidence, abundance and an open mind. Your host has encouraging words of his own to contribute. Sarah is principal of Pivot Ground.

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Hello and welcome to Tony Martignetti non-profit Radio Big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. I’m your aptly named host. Oh, I’m glad you’re with me. I’d be hit with Geren Topia if I saw that you missed today’s show. The Encouragement show Sarah Olivieri wants you to shed fear based decision making scarcity mentality and reflects of negativity in favor of confidence, abundance and an open mind. Your aptly named host has encouraging words of his own to contribute. What a surprise. No surprise. Sara is principal of Pivot Ground Tony Steak, too. Train. We’re sponsored by pursuant full service fund-raising data driven and technology enabled Tony dahna slash pursuant by Wagner. C. P a’s guiding you Beyond the numbers. Regular cps dot com By Telus durney Credit card Processing into your passive revenue stream. Tony dahna em a slash Tony Tell us, and by text to give mobile donations made easy text. NPR to four four four nine nine nine My Pleasure to introduce Sarah Olivieri came down from upstate New York. She’s a non-profit digital strategist, helping Non-profits bring their mission and services to life on the Web. At Pivot Ground, she leads her team of digital experts to help clients increased capacity, deliver better programming, attract more funding and make the world a little better. In college, she studied in Spain, Tanzania and Cuba, then moved to Japan to teach English. Sarah’s company is at pivot ground dot com and she’s at pivot ground. Welcome, Sarah Olivieri. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Pleasure. Pleasure to have you in the studio. Thank you for coming down from upstate. I love it when guests come to studio. Thank you. Always my pleasure. You’ve been abroad. You would’ve brought a good bit in your in your life. Yes, I traveled quite a bit. I studied international studies as an undergraduate. And so that took me abroad. And the University of Chicago University of Chicago led me. Tio move to Japan afterwards. Then I came back and to my home community in the Hudson Valley. Start getting involved with the local non-profit. They needed a conference organized which led to running a program which led to starting my own non-profit on. And then I went and got my graduate degree in humanistic, multicultural education. Humanistic, multicultural education. Alright, break that down to make some sense and what was what’s the non-profit thatyou started. Tell us a little about that. Your first? Sure. I started a non profit called the Open Center for Autism. It was following in. The program they had been working at was a school for kids on the Spectrum. High school on that program was shut down. And so I went and started my own program. If if the state isn’t gonna provide it or whatever, the counties that if the school is gonna provide it, I’ll do it myself. That’s right. And hope you mentioned it myself. Okay. All right. All right. Andi, what? How long were you with that organization? What? What happened? Well, kind of good and bad. You know, what happened was the need became so clear that a number of the other local public schools picked up their own programs. So we ended up not starting this school as we anticipated because the need was filled. S o. That was all right. But it was a great It was a great start to learn all the elements of not just starting a nonprofit. But when you charter school in New York State, there’s a whole bunch of extra things that need to happen on that happen when you’re a fundraiser, right? Right. And, you know, thinking about what you do that really led me to go in, like, Wow. I couldn’t find lawyers who knew about how to register a school in New York State s o. I just dove into reading the law myself, and that kind of even deepened my like the stuff isn’t so hard. No one knows how to do it. I’m just gonna dive in and figure it out, okay? And, uh, how long at pivot ground pivot ground has been since, uh, we had another incarnation that started in around two thousand five. But we’ve been in our current state about three years. Okay, you you brought along some some words of encouragement. Like so sort of some symptom and problem areas on DH words of encouragement. I thought this would be a nice wayto. This is really wrapping up the year because the next the next two shows the next two weeks, there are no shows. So this is our end of year Show so and like, end of your encouragement, looking to the future. Ah, people can be feeling overwhelmed. In this In this hectic fourth quarter, Lots of listeners may not even hear this until January, so it could be the look forward kind of show for them. Um, so what are some of the What are some of the symptoms that you hear in your practice that dahna raise your raise, your consciousness raised red flags for, you know, maybe we should be thinking a little differently. Yeah. I mean, anybody who works with Non-profits have heard these things like, we just can’t do it or we don’t have money for that, or we can’t spend on overhead. All our money has to go directly to programming. Actually, had it was part of a local group, kind of a support group for non-profit. Leaders run by front of mind Susan Ragusa. And we talked about this one day, like, scarcity, mindset. And a lot of it, I think, boils down to money. Um, and a lot of people in that room that day said, Yeah, you know, like, I don’t have a good relationship with money. And my non-profit doesn’t have a good relationship with money on guy. Think that it’s a little self identified when they really raised their hands and say, You know, we have we have issues with money. Yeah, but only in the situation where we said this is a safe space and we’re going to talk about scarcity mindset. Otherwise, I don’t hear a lot of people realizing that that that’s kind of one of the cores of the issue is the This relationship with money and resource is just I think that the people say, like, Oh, we’d better like, do it ourselves And I think the reality the worst reality is what I call D E. Why do everything yourself? Yeah, well, we can’t afford the expertise that we need. We’ll just have to learn it ourselves, which takes you away from core work and distracts you terribly down some rabbit hole that someone could come in and be so much more efficient at it. Um, so these are there’s a lot around you talk about money. There’s a lot around fund-raising, too. I just in your own personal experience, how aware of the fact that you had to raise your own money. Were you? When you started the school program? I was pretty aware my mother had actually run a school in much the same way. She just kind of fell into it and figured it out on the job. I did have some family experience, but, you know, related to the money question. I think, Ah, lot of people, you know, when they start feeling in non-profits like we don’t have enough money, the only they see have tunnel vision. They’re like fund-raising. We need to raise money. But that’s only half of the picture. Like you have to be good at spending money as well as raising money. So there’s two sides to this coin about money, and it’s not all raising money, you know, outright gifts. I mean, there there could be revenue opportunities. Yeah, so look, think strategically. You met you, whether you’re capable of producing product or service is or some form of revenue, that other non-profits or government or individuals and whatever will pay for lots of lots of non-profits have a thrift shop. That’s one way of what’s won. Simple way. Not simple that it’s one common way, I should say of raising raising revenue. But you know when we think of fund-raising, it’s not all grants and gifts from individuals. Absolutely not. Right, your revenue stream of revenue right When you’re non-profit, you’re like revenue. What’s that? But that’s that’s just your total money coming into your non-profit fit, and you want that to be somewhat diversified. And now it might sound like we’re talking about a stock portfolio, but we’re talking about your non-profit. You have to think about having some of you know, if you can charge a little for your programs you want, you may want some revenue streams that way. If you can have a donor base of donors who give small donations more regularly. Some donors who give larger domain donations some grants. Maybe there’s some government funding you can apply for. You want a mixed bag, because if one of those pieces goes away, you don’t want to go under. You wanna have a few Resource is you can pull on and the one you didn’t mention. Eyes events which we see I see sometimes a little too much. If we’re going to take our first break, though pursuing they have two. New resource is on the listener landing page. The field guide to data driven fund-raising is practical steps to achieve your fund-raising goals using data. Plus, they have incorporated case studies and demystifying the donor experience guides you through creating a donor journey, plus savvy stewardship strategies for your existing donors could check those out. Tony dahna em a slash pursuing Capital P for please. Now back to the encouragement show. So events sometimes you know, actually often to too much too much reliance on events. I think that comes from a fear of asking someone directly across their desk for a five thousand dollar gift or a fifty thousand dollar gift or whatever it’s going to be. We’d rather invite people to a big party and have them pay tickets, pay money for a ticket at a table we got, You know, you got it again. Diversify. You see Too much event. Definitely, too. I think you know, it’s natural you get into a room of people is like, What can we do with the like our hands? You know, with with an event, but events, most kinds of events that you’re probably familiar with, that non-profits air doing are the least return on investment, meaning you’re going to spend a lot of money and a ton of energy. But I have event you’re absolutely and you’re going to get a relatively small amount of money back. And when I see happens, is if when you lead with events, then you’ve used up your entire fund-raising capacity, your money, your energy. It’s all spent on those events, and you don’t have time for those activities that actually generate a lot more money. I love the example you just shared, like picking up the phone and calling them and asking for money is like super super effective and the non-profits I know who are really great at Fund-raising their executive director Nose, like a handful of twelve major donors who are interested in supporting their non-profit, doesn’t have to be twelve. It’s just an example, and when they need money, they call them up and say, Hey, we need twenty thousand dollars for this program or we’re going to have to close it or, you know, whatever the thing is that they want if they want to take a step forward. And usually when you ask people for something, they give it to you. I love to test this out, and I encourage people. Tell it out like that. Go, you know, go over to your your friend or your relative or somebody on the street and be like, Oh, hey, could I borrow your pen? They’re going to They’re going to do it. Probably They’re going to feel extremely compelled to do it on DH. It’s same thing. When you ask people for money, people are compelled to give something just because you asked. So this this kadre of close, you know, major donors. However, you define major donors based on your needs. And your work, um, is, you know, you’ve recruited them because you know that they’re committed. I mean, they’ve risen to the top. They’ve they’ve been perhaps been volunteers for you. There were people who asked, What can I do? What do your needs, They shine. You know, as you as you’re listening to this, people are probably occurring to you. Oh, yeah, like she’s she’s like that. We’re that couple. Is that you know where the So those are the people you want to continue to cultivate that they do become sort, of course, supporters of yours. So that when you have a big need, you know, those are the people you can go to when you kick off a campaign. Those are the people you talked to initially before you go public with your number so that when you do go public for your hundred thousand dollar campaign, you’ve already got forty or fifty thousand dollars or sixty thousand already committed. And now you’re just asking people to get you to the margin. You know, the other thirty or forty percent those having that kind of a kadre of donors you can go to who, you know, love your work, cultivate those people that is time very well spent and don’t only cultivate them when you need the money. You know, this is a this is a long term process of cultivation bringing people to your Yeah, I think a great way to start with That is what? What some people call the friend raiser. If you’re nervous about, start by just getting those people in the same room just for the purpose of, like having a positive interaction with them. And that’s a great way to build that relationship. I think that there’s another piece to this where a lot of people, when they think about asking people for money, they feel like they’re there feel like they’re a fraud. Or that, like the person who’s giving them money isn’t getting anything in return. You gotta you gotta cut that shit out way Don’t have. We don’t have AA affiliate AM FM stations anymore, so I’m free. I could I could do the George Carlin. You know, seven words if I if I felt like it, we’re not bound by the FCC anymore. So, yes, you’ve got to cut that out and they are getting something. They are getting really the most valuable thing that you could spend money on. They’re getting a positive feeling. They’re getting the feeling of fulfillment. How else do people spend money to get that feeling? They buy food, alcohol, drugs, people who go shopping to feel that feeling of fullness. What? I can’t think of a better way to trade in money for a feeling of doing. You know, that positive, fulfilled feeling than giving money to a non-profit. And the peace of that is, you know, I just was reading about a business book about you know, what is the most motivating thing for employees, and it’s when they feel they’re making a positive contribution. That lead that creates progress. For an outcome that they’re interested and having fun. It’s not salary. It’s a salary, no snack. It’s not exactly so. It’s the same for donors. They’re interested in the outcomes that you’re having. And when they give, they want to feel like they’re helping in that journey there. Making that step a little piece of that step now belongs to them. A little piece of that progress and that’s worth that’s worth real money to people and share it with them. Invite them in. I don’t mean just right. A right. A direct mail letter that shares a story. Yes, storytelling is important, but I’m talking about, you know, if you’re talking about major donors, bring them in, let them see the impact of your work. How can you show it off if you haven’t figured that out yet? Brainstorm with your staff. Brainstorm with your board. How can you show off the impact that you do? There are ways If you can’t bring people to it, you can video it and present it to them. Uh, you can prove your impact. Do it. That’s how you know that. That’s how they’re going to get the positive feeling that you’re talking about, right? That’s what they’re buying their buying. Something from you. You’re not there. Not just giving you money. I think another piece to this is I remember this one in my early days working at a non-profit cause I know I’ve never had a corporate job on DH. And for a moment, I felt well, thank you for money. I would be a terrible employee. I vacation request forms, Please. Can I have the week between Christmas and New Year’s off? Oh, please. Oh, please. What? Are you kidding me? I just take it and I can’t. I can’t. I would be a terrible employee. I believe the interview. I won’t even show up. I show up late because I Because I don’t care. You know, I’d be an awful employees. I would never even get hired. Yeah. What do you make? The second interview got bounced. I won’t even make the full interview. I’d like I probably walk out. What? You kidding me? I don’t need this shit. Why am I even here? I made a big mistake. I’m sorry. I’m getting out. I won’t even make it through the first e here yet, so yeah, So you know when that came in those early on, I was like, This person makes a high salary, like theirjob is making money in some way. That’s why they have their job, and my job, like the purpose of my job is not to make money. I might be making a salary at my non-profit, but ultimately my purpose is to do good. And so somehow I felt like initially that that the person who is giving me money knew something about money that I didn’t and it felt like the scales were because they have it because they have it on and I need it more than we have, right? So they’re smarter about exactly have your about money than I am, and we are right. But now I know better, and I want non-profits to know better, too. What you’re doing is important, and it’s worth money and and you’re savvy because you’re getting people to give you money in exchange for a valuable experience. You know just a CZ much about money, if not more than for-profit businesses. And in fact, I dive a lot into business. Operations for Non-profits and Non-profits are more complicated than for-profit because you always have to target customer groups, even if you’re you know, even if you’re a teeny non-profit, you have the people who donate and give you money. And then you have the people you serve or the impact you’re trying to make and the people who are going to help make that happen. And so by that very nature, by having you always have to audience Ah for-profit company that small can have just one audience, the people who want to buy their product or service. So it’s it’s more simple in that nature to be a for-profit goodcompany before you have shareholders, right so on. But you know, as a board, as if as a small non-profit you have aboard. So that’s like having shareholders when you’re just a teeny cos. True enough. I’m not a financial stake, but yeah, but absolutely. But there’s certainly commitment, right? Commitment, opinions, human relationships. So be proud of yourself. If you’re running an non-profit, you already probably know a lot more than many for-profit business. You’ve got your three constituencies thie service you’re doing whether it’s two people or animals or the environment, there’s that’s considered outta constituents. Your community and your donors and your board. Absolutely. Right now and then, if you have a staff, you know, whenever there’s relationships involved, I like people think about like, imagine you know, you’ve got one person in the room that’s no big deal. You got two people in the room. You think you just doubled. But you actually tripled in complexity because you have two people and hopes you have the relationship between those two people at a third person to the room. You’re not three times bigger than you were when you were one person, you know, have three people, plus the relationships between each two of those people. And when all three of the people are in the room in your mind and now it’s nine, right, Zack, growing exponentially. Which person you add to any kind of dynamic, whether it’s your board, your staff, the people you’re working with you now are exponentially increasing in complex ity on. I think that a lot of non-profits as they start to grow there, like this spaghetti mess starts to begin. And that’s why Because you didn’t expect that you were growing exponentially in all these relationships. Right? It takes people off guard. Doesn’t it often reflect itself in the board? Because as the especially in early phases, as the board is growing, we need more expertise. You know, etcetera. I see it in the board, but I see in the way staff and departments are organized more as you grow and you start adding programs. Sometimes it’s like you might add a program and you might suitable who in our non-profit, like, has capacity to, like run this new programme and you just throw it in. And then often with my clients, who tend to be a little bigger, they they have these kinds of organizational structures that don’t make sense like that. They don’t work efficiently because they just started throwing things in on DH. They didn’t think like very carefully about how exactly should we organize it? We should just They just threw it in where they could. And then we go through a process of kind of reorganizing. So they get so much time back in their day, Are they going to fill it up again with amazing work delivering their mission? Absolutely. But at least then it’s It’s faster progress towards their mission. Yeah, it’s a more deliberate rather than just let’s throw it in, you know, foisted on somebody who they can learn they can train up. That’s the that’s the kind of you know, Yeah, that goes back to the scarcity mentality. We can’t afford the expertise that we need to help us develop this program. We’ll figure it out on our own. Yeah, and I want I want people to stop, Stop thinking that way because there’s two things that I think if you had, if I had like two dollars left in my pocket, I would buy one of two things or both of these things access to expert advice, not even like how you know if you can’t get help doing it, if you don’t have money for the tool getting an expert to tell you which way to go, I think, is like, one of the most valuable ways because they’re going to see things that you don’t. You’re in your own bubble. Even if you were that expert, you wouldn’t be able to see it for yourself. And once they point you in where your next step is, you have a step to take forward the other thing these days that I think people who are really strapped for money will get a huge return off of is investing in some automation. So we have, you know, computers and the Internet can take off a lot of the busy work that your staff might be doing right now. Or if you’re a solo, you know, solo operation. They’re things that you’re doing right now that the computer could start doing for you and free you up to take some real positive growth. Steps to resource is come off the top of my head in that vein non-profit Technology network, which helps, which helps non-profits used technology smarter so that they can focus more on mission. Listeners know Amy Sample Ward are regular social media contributor every month. She’s the CEO of and ten non-profit technology network and ten Dot or GE, and the other one is idealware idealware dot org’s ah, they They are essentially the consumer reports of technology for non-profits. They don’t accept grants or GIF ts off of technology, but they evaluated and they evaluated objectively. The CEO Karen Graham has been on the show. I think she’s been on twice, just really loved when I was an object strenuously, but I don’t think she loves when I make the analogy between idealware and Consumer Reports. But to me, it it works. So those are two excellent resources that are agnostic, you know that They care about platforms. They’re trying to help you in ten and on idealware. Yeah. And you shouldn’t care about platforms. The biggest thing, you know, I work a lot in technology, and I talk about automation and digital strategies for people and the people. They always come like, what tools should I use? And that is the very last question you ask. First you ask, what problem? And I’m trying just trying to do with it, right? Exactly. And if it’s we’re talking about automation. You need to have a process in place of how you do something. So if if it’s not something you repeat and if you don’t haven’t written down how it goes on like what the process is, then you’re not ready to automate. But, you know, and automation can get, like, really complex. It takes like a bit of like mind shifting to think about automation. But people should start simple with automation, and I often like to just remind people that, like there’s elements of your email that can probably already be automated and say Pierre, which is one of the most common tools for connecting things it can actually automate without connecting to ass. I got I got connected to Zippy or some other from someone else do it just this week gdpr you create zaps and and it links like, Aah! Sales force with your with your outlook, right? And actually, Khun, do some automation is just with one app. So, like, if you if I use it. Teo, you know, if you receive an email with a certain subject, it can then, you know, send a reminder to somebody else. Sorry, it’s very company. We just think the tax that it can automate yes between thousands of it. Very good guts, but they’ve got partnerships with that. You can start simple. Lt’s a Piers has a free level, but for Non-profits, you can get their pro level for free if you put their logo on your website. Oh, yeah, so it’s You can really do a lot with Napier. It’s what a lot of the automation people kind of use at some point to connect things, even if they’re using more advanced tools. So I think that’s a great starting step for people. Symptoms of this. If you if you can use automation, I think of If you’re if you find yourself entering the same data in multiple places, doing a lot of copying and pasting routinely. Yeah, there’s a good chance that that could be automated. Sarah, you mentioned email so there are. There are lots of email tasks that could be automated. What you’re following up with people is huge. If you set appointments or need to remind people to do things, automation is great. For that, you can create a Siri’s of emails that remind people to do something on and for non-profits you, especially if you’re a human service non-profit. You can use automation to help deliver some of your programming programs. If you teach a course in your in your organization, you could turn it into an online course. You could make it what we call in Evergreen Online course, which means that it’s like video. The content is written, content and video that as soon as somebody signs up for the course they can, then access the material, so that’s one great way. And parenthetically, is a revenue possibility. There absolutely will be. So think about it. You could charge for your course. You could have, you know, get a donor to commit to like a matching sponsorship. Everybody who enrolls in the course they’ll make a certain donation. Lots of possibilities for that. Andi, just which other symptoms of we could technology could help us here? Absolutely. And you know, I love still of the classic email course email miniseries, um, the kind of tool that you used to this. Anything that does what’s called a drip campaign. That just means email one goes out. You wait two days or however amount of time you set email to goes out. Then email three goes out. It’s just on a timer. And you, Khun, deliver education that way. One of my favorite uses for that is internally, a lot of non-profit struggle with keeping their staff trained or keeping them up today on policies that they really want them to remember. That might not be that fun. We send out reminders of the critical policies and the organization that the staff, especially if they’re like direct support staff need to remember. We often rewrite them and make them a little more fun in the email. It’s like if you want to read the real, you know the original policy, go to the handbook. But we’re going to make this a little more fun and remind you to, you know, drive safely or whatever those key policies are. So it’s a great way people aren’t going to read like if I give most people like a book and say, Here’s the man, you want to read it yet? Do they read it? No, it’s not. But if I turn it into five or six emails that air just like one or two paragraphs long and remind people in a fun way of the things I need to remember their going to read it. Yeah, Provoc could also be part of a campaign. Exactly. Do this with your volunteers with their donors. Um, okay, Automation. All right, so we’ve spent almost the first half of the show just like spitballing. But this is great. You know, I feel like I’m at a bar and we’re just having drinks and, uh, and there’s thirteen thousand people listening in um, but you know, so, uh All right. So you came with more orderly. You know, this is not all just a spitball thing, but leader now, I mean, this show does get planned, but I love this just back and forth. And, you know, it’s what we’re what we’re seeing through the years. Um, okay. We just have about a minute or so before a break. Let’s introduce this idea of overhead. Yet we haven’t, uh, yeah, the lingering overhead myth. Let’s introduce that, and then we’ll pick it up after the break. Sure. The lingering overhead myth, I think Damn pelota grave. A great Ted talk on it, dates back, apparently to the Puritans. But it’s this idea that there’s your programs that where you deliver all your impact and then there’s your overhead and that the overhead has nothing to do with the impact. And overhead is bad and impact is good. So all the money should go towards those impact. And I’m putting quotes around that because, yeah, around those programme activities and nothing should goto overhead because that’s a waste of money s O. But really, that’s not true. May be after the break. We’ll dive into that. Absolutely will. Because that is not true. And we need to I see it being eroded, but we need to kill it. Well, your C. P s. You need help with next year’s nine. Ninety perhaps. Or you are you doing? You’re nine ninety. I hope to God you’re doing You’re ninety for country. Are you thinking about a c P A change, perhaps in twenty nineteen or changing audit firm, maybe time for a fresh look at the books. Look at Wagner. Talk to partner yet each tomb. You know, he’s been a guest on the show. There’s no hard sell. There’s no bullshit duitz It doesn’t matter. We’re That’s right. We’ll have to see free. So I’m getting carried away. Ah, good weather cps dot com Now, time for Tony Steak too. Train your staff. Basic plan E-giving. I’m encouraging you to get them comfortable. Just opening conversations about the most popular type of plan gift, which is the charitable bequest in people’s wills. There’s no lifetime cost to your donors that can keep it private if they want to. I mean, you, you always want them to tell you, but if they want to keep it private. They can. They can change their minds. These air a couple of reasons that bequests are always I don’t care what size organization always the most popular planned gift. And so that’s the place to start. So that’s the place you want to start getting your staff trained just on the basics again, opening a conversation you don’t need in house expertise. You don’t need a lawyer. You don’t even need a consultant like me. You don’t need a lawyer on your board. You don’t need all that because you’re going to refer people to their own attorney because we’re doing this on a You know, this’s a streamlined which is trying to get you into plant giving. You don’t need the expertise. You can open those conversations. All right? I say more about this on my video. Aunt, I bring in the holidays. You see, as I talk about training is awesome. Holiday in search there as well. Ah, and I did it from a beach. And you’ll find that video at tony martignetti dot com. Okay, let’s go back to Sarah Olivieri and the encouragement show. Okay, So the overhead myth. Ah, yeah. So what do you counsel clients? On who? Who say that they’re concerned about possibly spending too much. And are donors going? Think we’re wasting money on overhead? Yeah. I mean, first of all, be brave, be intentional. Know that it’s not true that this I don’t even like to use the word overhead. I call, I say, its operations, right? So, like operations is the backbone of your organisation. Nothing happens without it. It’s the core. It couldn’t be more opposite then. This overhead myth. You need good leadership. You need structures and processes in place in order to make your whatever you’re delivering consistent and efficient. I love to talk about efficiency with non-profit. Okay? You need technology. Just technology, fundez technology. All these supporting you that costs money. Exactly. You need tools. Oftentimes you invest in a tool and you’re going to save so much time for so much money. But people are hesitant. That’s that D y. We’re going to do everything ourselves mentality. And it’s literally when you have that mentality, you’re sinking your own ship because your your ship is your overhead. It is your operational structure. And then it’s like the cargo is all the stuff you’re going to do to deliver your mission. So if you have a teeny ship and you just load on a ton of cargo, you are just going to sink it and you’re not going to deliver any mission. You’re not going to go anywhere and you’re not going to solve any major problems. So you need to make sure that if you’re going to grow programs, you grow your capacity. That means growing your ability to operate, right? So I hope people can begin to think like overhead is operating its function, its investment. In other words, yes. An investment in in your office, in a nice place for people to come to work on investment in professional development for your staff, an investment in technology investing in the future, right? You’re saying, you know, make you tea to be sustainable and have it be the right capacity. These are all investments, right? This is not wasted overhead. It’s investing in the future right here. If you’re planning something new, you might have to invest for a year or two in it and lose money at it. T get up to speed. That’s an investment in a new programme. Exactly. Yeah, I think I think you’re absolutely right and end its fundamental, you know, too many times to talk about, You know, of course, there’s the Non-profits are messy right on Dne on people say not, You know, a lot of non-profits. I’m like, Oh, man, we’re kind of dysfunctional, that dysfunction. That means you don’t have good functioning, Good functioning. That overhead is how you get good functioning. That’s how you become not dysfunctional, that that’s how you become not messy. That’s how you become a clean, effective, oiled machine that just is doing good in the world and can scale that up. If you want Teo and deliver, you know, deliver to more people, um, or whatever. If your environmental organization make a bigger impact, that is the key to making a bigger impact. It is not, you know, spending. You know, I think that the mindset shift that people need to make is they think, Oh, if we’re spending money on operations, it’s like we’re spending money on ourselves and we don’t spend money on ourselves. There’s kind of like that martyr mentality. Yeah, it’s got to go. Really got to go. You are worth investing in your staff is worth investing in your office is worth investing in. Technology is worth investing if you go to. If you go to your office on Monday and you’re boarding up windows X P you are not investing the way you need. Thio technology. Bring that shit to your boss and tell them this has got to go. We’re eight years behind on and just since this is the you know, I want to give some motivations of encouragement for people. You know you are, but you’re more the story and the story. That’s alright. Bien and Yang. Positive. Negative. You have this in you already. The story of Dorothy, right? Dorothy has the power to return home all along, but she has to go through this great journey. All she has to do is click your heels three times and say there’s no place from home. Well, you if you’re running a non-profit right now, or if you’re involved in one no place like home That’s right. I want to go home. I like to be really directed. Right? So you already believe in your non-profits mission? Like I know this about you like listening, right? Now you believe that your mission is worth investing in, which means you already have the power to believe that this is that it’s worth investing in. But you are part of your non-profit. And so you have to believe. Now you have to take that same belief that you believe in your mission and just convinced yourself you are worth investing in. Because if you don’t invest in yourself and in your organization, you’re not investing in your mission. And so if sues you, connect those two dots you already have that power to believe that you’re worth it. I don’t even. Yeah, the overhead myth. The way we gotta bury it, we got to kill it and bury it. It’s gone. All right. Um, something you have some ideas around feeling like you. You appear that you don’t have enough or appearing that you have too much Teo. Donors what? What is this? What is this second guessing? Why we looking over our our shoulders at ourselves? Why? We’re looking over our own shoulders. How did we do it? Yeah. Why are we looking over our shoulders? Wear we second guessing where we how we’re perceived, you know, I had a nice coincidence. I had two clients start where he will be around the same time on DH within within a week of each other. Had these two conversations, one client was a non-profit who had money and they said, Well, we’re afraid that, like if our website and our brochures and stuff look good, people are going to think we have a lot of money and they’re not going to want to give to us right. And then the other client who was a very small startup didn’t have any money, said We need our we need our brochures on our website to look really good because if people know that we don’t have money, they won’t give to us. And guess what? It doesn’t matter if you have money or if you don’t have money. You have just be authentic. Be yourself, play your own game, run your own race. If you have money, people will say Hey, this organization’s impact is important. That’s always the first thing and wow, they’re stable, They’re sustainable. They have enough money I’m going to give to them because I know that they’re going to keep going for the other one people want to give to their impact the primary driver. Is that like that emotional return? Yes, For some people, there’s the tax benefit. But I really think that secondary or twenty three year, twenty years in fund-raising consulting and it’s absolutely secondary. Yeah, for they’re buying an emotional return. They’re buying a feeling on DH And so but if you don’t have money, then you say, Hey, we don’t have money. We’ve got this amazing thing that we want to do. We have a great way, way so far, right? We want to scale do this with a thousand people instead of the dozen that we’ve served so far. Right. So you’ve got a great argument whether you don’t have money or you do have money with one caveat. If you’re worried that you’re not really delivering the impact that you say you are, measure it. Measure your impact. And if you’re not, if you if you take it and you’re like, man, we’re not really two making the changes. We thought you were just reorganise. Start time to pivot, right. It’s time to invest in that overhead and utter and figure out you know how you can make that impact cause you probably didn’t. You know, there’s a need there. There’s always a need. This goes to also just you touched on, you know, be genuine. Be honest. People can people when they’re talking to you less. So when they’re reading your material, that’s one dimensional. But but it applies somewhat. There. Two people can tell when you’re genuine and when your phony you know, if if you’re a small shop in your producing fancy four color brochures or you’re spending money on lavish video production, when when low production value could be just a sincere and jet or more sincere and genuine people see through that stuff, you know, be yourself. You said it yourself. Don’t And don’t don’t be ashamed of who you are and what you’re what you’re coming, too. Yeah, and when the way you look exactly. And both those problems, you know, relate to those air marketing marketing concerns, and I just like his marketing gets thrown around a lot. I like to just clarify, like what is marketing and because it’s not a department. Marketing is a means to an end. Marketing is about finding people whose who have an issue or problem that you can solve. So if it’s a donor, it means they’re looking for this positive experience. If it’s somebody who you might serve, it means they have, you know, you have a solution to the issue in their lives and then engaging those people who you found who already basically need what you have so that they take action with you. That’s marketing. Yeah. We have to take a break. OK, Eso look over your page air and you’re goingto welcome you to introduce the next topic right after this break. Tell us. Start with the video at Tony Dahna em a slash Tony, tell us don’t think what companies can you talk to toe? Ask them to switch their credit card processing to tell us maybe it’s one owned by a boardmember. It’s a local company that supported you or one that you’ve been thinking about approaching because you have a relationship of some type. Talk to them, have them watch the video. If they switch, you get the long stream of passive revenue from all those credit card um, transactions that they process. Tony Dahna may slash Tony. Tell us for the video. It’s not for the live listener love. We’ve got to do it. Did you think I had forgotten because I didn’t do it after Tony take to perish the thought? Hell, no. I could get it going further than hell. No, but I’ll just stick with hell. No. Um So where are we? So let’s go abroad. I want to go abroad. Russia. We cannot see your city But we know that you’re with us. Russia, Live Love out to you Toronto up north. Welcome. Live Listen, love to you Mexico We can’t see a city And we got multiple Mexico. We have more ellos Mexico as well So we can see more ellos live love to you point a start is and the city we cannot see live love out to you Also, we got multiple New York, New York. Always got multiple New York, New York, Brooklyn, New York is in Queens, New York. Thank you very, very much. I don’t see anybody upstate. Sarah. Olivia. He didn’t bring her tribe, but they’ll listen to the podcast. And that’s the podcast. Pleasantries that come on the heels of the live listener love. You know, it’s the podcast Pleasantries that one dreaded follows the other can’t have. You cannot have one without the other. You cannot. It’s actually matter pleasantries to the thirteen thousand plus podcast listeners throughout the mostly in the US But I know throughout the world, but I know the UK checks in I know we’ve got listeners in Germany and now we’ve got Mexico podcast listeners also Ah, pleasantries, pleasantries to you, the vast majority of our audience. Thank you for being with Non-profit radio. Okay, What did you pick? What we were talking about Next. We’re gonna talk about wasting money, wasting money. What do you got? Well, I think you know a lot of people. It goes back to what we first talked about, right? This bad relationship with money and that a lot of people feel like when we spend money at Non-profits were flushing it down the toilet. When we spend it, it’s gone. That’s what’s happening. And that’s not the relationship I want youto have with money. I want you to realize that the way you should be spending money the way you hopefully our is thinking about what am I going to get back for my money and my getting Mohr value back than the money costs me. So you know, I get excited about spending money, not because I love spending money, but because whenever I choose to spend money in my business, I’m always getting something back that’s worth even more to me than the money that’s going to take me to the next level. So it’s great. It’s always like this exciting moment of growth where I’m getting something on DH. That is the mentality they really want people to adopt this coming year is that when we spend it, we are not throwing it away. But if you’re not thinking about what you’re getting back then, you might be wasting money. S O. This is one of those like, it’s a self fulfilling prophecy. If you feel like spending money is wasting money, then the chances that you are wasting money are away. Hyre if you feel like spending money is a process of trying to get more back then you spent then you’re probably not wasting you want value for the dollar that each dollar you spend exactly. So I definitely want you to think about that. Another thing that’s related to this, I think, is a lot of people think about, You know, we need something it costs. I don’t know. Two thousand dollars, twenty five hundred dollars. We don’t have that money. Now. When we have that money, then we’ll spend on this. And that’s just like a process. I was just like in the future, if you have more money, we’ll spend on that. That money is never going to come. There’s not going to be a delivery of money that says you’re marked for this purpose that you’ve been putting off for eighteen months. Exactly gonna happen that way. So here’s the way I want youto think like time. Sorry. Exactly what? You’re not gonna find time now when I could find the time. I’ll do that. No. If it’s something that’s worth, well, you gotta make the time. That’s consciously put the time. Put the time aside now. And if you’re constantly putting it off, then you need to evaluate. Maybe this thing that we think talking about is not that important. Or maybe you’re not prioritizing correctly. Exactly. It’s just it’s it’s recognizing the value of time and the fact that it’s just not gonna land on your desk a week. Oh, here’s that project time you’ve been thinking about for eighteen months doesn’t happen that way. You need to be much. You need to be intentional about it. Exactly. Attention about time. Attention about money. So here’s the new way. I want people to think about it is that if you’re thinking, I need something stop and say What is the problem that I’m having? If you think you need a website if you think you need automation, stop for a moment and say What’s the problem I’m having If you think I need fund-raising say what’s the really cool Rob? What is the real problem? Get down to that problem. Could be a person. It could be a person, right? A process could not be working. A person could be in the wrong seat. It could be You know, it could be any number of things from outside influence, right? Once you’ve found that real problems say, if I fix this problem how much is that worth to me? If I don’t have this problem? If this problem is gone, how much is that worth to me? What can I do next? If this problem is gone and then say how much time money resource is. Am I willing to spend to have this problem gone? And then then you have your budget, if you can solve it for less bio all means. But then you have your number. You have your number, and then you go get that money. You say I need this problem solved. I see this probably the most painful area where I see this is with employees. If you have the wrong people in the job and you’re just, like, afraid toe, let them go or afraid to change their position. That is really hard. But if you ran the numbers, you bilich I’m wasting, like, fifty thousand dollars a year on this person. Shopping, energy and other people see it as well, right? No, it’s about the other people in the organization know it’s a bad fit that they’re seeing a day in and day out of their employees. It’s draining you. Yeah, so your problems are probably costing you more than you realize. And if you really think about that, you’ll be like, Oh, yeah, we’re going to raise that money right now, and that problem’s going to be gone. Let’s talk about something you mentioned early on fund-raising events, events sucking the life blood. What did you What did you say? It caught me. But But I But I also want to talk about you know, that over reliance on events. Sure. Yeah. I mean, I said I think like it sucks the capacity. All of your fund-raising capacity goes to putting on an event because the time Yeah. And then you have nothing left in you to do the more important fund-raising. Like, if you’ve done all other fund-raising strategies and you still have a ton of time and energy on your hand, do an event. But if you haven’t just, like, try not to do that event, try to stop doing it trying to do any other fund-raising strategy event. Also, a lot of times you have tio, um, defeat on argument by a boardmember. Yeah, that events. You know, I just went to this great gala, and they raised two and a half million dollars. Yeah. Okay. Well, so what size organization was that? Did they have entertainment that cost him three hundred fifty thousand dollars? You know, to get to get Don Henley on stage or something. Oh, are the Eagles, you know? So Don Henley here’s the Eagles. Okay, so you know, board members often come with these gala ideas because they just played, and they just they just played in a golf tournament. Or they were just at this lovely event at a restaurant. Is it? You have to help your board members recognize that you likely don’t have the capacity to produce the event that they’re trying to get you to do and then want something you might do is ask them to chair it, right? Exactly. And the event that they went to probably didn’t actually like after expenses. Probably right. And sometimes people think just about you know what they netted at, you know, based of costs, but put on that event, but they forget to calculate that it took, like, one of their employees full time work for three to six months. So you factor in there that salary chances are you’re taking a loss, and a part of the argument is, but think of all the people will bring. We get hundreds of people thinking about us and giving to us. Whoa, Thinking about us? Yeah, they’re thinking about you that night giving to you. That’s a big stretch. That’s a huge stretch, and there’s enormous follow-up That has to happen. And notoriously, event attendees who came because they’re friends invited them are unlikely to become long term sustainers for you. They were happy to do that. They were happy to buy the fifty dollar table or the fifty dollars seat with a two hundred fifty dollars ticket, whatever it was. But beyond that, it takes a lot of cultivation to get them to become close to you that they give beyond the annual event. So don’t let your whoever espousing this this great gal idea talk you into the idea that every everybody who comes is going to become a major donor instantly. It does not happen. There’s enormous cultivation and has to take place after that event. In fact, you know a pivot ground. We don’t really focus on fund-raising that much in a lot of people who come to me with, like we need to do fund-raising I say, Okay, well, what’s your capacity to like, manage donors like, Are you able to follow-up donor follow-up with donors? Do you have somebody who can like put together a fund-raising strategy. No, you need to do that for because there were these hundreds of people who come right reportedly come to this event exam you have No, you have no capacity to fall to do the follow up. Right. And for small non-profits out there, you know your thing thinking like, Oh, I need to do my end of your fund-raising letter. Ask yourself first, Do you have a list of people to send it to? No, but don’t worry about the letter. Move on to an activity you can do Move on to list building host a friend raiser host a holiday party that costs you almost nothing. Get some contacts on your list. Someone someone’s home, right? I love small events are great Hold that thought will come back to get take our last break text to give Talk about email many courses. Sarah was talking about the drip campaign. The five part email Many course debunking five myths. Do you think text donations have to go through a phone bill? And so they take ninety days to collect? No, not true. Doesn’t have to be that way. Do you think there are high startup costs? No, not so. There’s a lot of misinformation around. Text e-giving. You can raise more money, get the email many course from text to give you text. NPR to four, four, four nine nine nine, five Emails. Okay, We’ve got several more minutes for this encouragement show. All right, sometimes, as just now happens, as sometimes happens, I forgot what we were just talking about many events, but I’d love to talk about our pieces in the buying process, wake and finish up with many of them. That something? Yeah. In someone’s home. Right. Deal. This is ideal for the boardmember. Who says I hate fund-raising? Okay, you can help us. Friendraising you can bring some people will bring some of the some people to you’re not only responsible, but we’re gonna have We’re going twelve or fifteen people on DH. There’s going to be a short presentation by me. The CEO on We’re going toe that, you know, that’s something manageable, right? Weaken follow-up with twelve or twenty people. Exactly. And it should cost you roughly nothing. Like usually, like you get a host who has a nice house and we’ll buy dinner and, you know, make dinner you get. Maybe someone else donates the wine. Or you might have a host told Burghdoff grantmaking dinner. Exactly record make dinner or Kate or whatever their level is, there’s lots of people who would host a dinner for eight to twelve people in their homes. You know, you somebody from your organization, a couple boardmember show up and then you just have to Between your organization and the hosts contact list, you invite a small group of people and those can have fantastic turnout’s a great way to spend money and energy that you spend money. But spend energy. Yes, not so much money. Right? So eight to twelve. You could cook for that. But I was thinking, like, twenty might want to cater that right? Exactly. And it all depends on what your resource is air like. Who’s you know who’s house? It’s at what you’ve got. What you waiting get to think about. These cultivate small cultivation events, right? Much, much more manageable in terms of both front end and the follow-up. After that, what’s your point? Right? And you’ve got a follow-up after the event, and you know you really want to focus on that moment. That the donation is given and then expanded out from both ends. What happens? What’s their experience after they gave their donation? And what’s their experience just before? So a lot of people focus on making a great experience so that somebody gives them the donation. But then they forget about the follow-up after somebody gives, which is just a CZ important because you want them to give again and tell their friends that was great. That was the, uh, what What about the donor journey that pursuant as they have a whole, they have, ah, resource on this demystifying the donor experience. It’s exactly what, at twenty dollars slash pursuit with a Capital P. It’s exactly what you’re talking about. That donor journey mapping the experience out exactly. Exactly. It’s really important. Another tip I have for people is, you know, if you have a website, you can probably make a unique donation landing page for each of your board members. That way, when they go out and start soliciting their personal contacts to say, Hey, would you give to my organization? They can send them to a landing page. It’s like This is the donation page for my organization. But it’s got, like, as if I’m the boardmember. It’s got my name and picture on it and what my pitches to most of my friends and that way I know that when I give my friends and I’m asking him to make a contribution when they do, they’re having an experience that’s connected to me and that I know what that experience is going to be. And then for the organization, you know, exactly like you could give me credit as a boardmember, you know, you’ll know whence one of my contacts makes a donation because they came through my painting at the organization’s all trackable personalized boardmember landing page. Yeah, yeah, simple, even a short shit that you like for landing pages. I’m not particularly, you know, we do website, so we actually usually build them in the in the site itself. Um, and otherwise, you know, lead pages. Oftentimes if it’s a donation page, Whatever tool you’re using to list your pages, this is an area where it can get kind of complicated for non-profits picking the right tech stack we call it. That means the tools you’re going to use that all work together, so But yeah, there’s no specific recommendations. Really matter what you have already in places where you need to bring in experts in this, that is the moment. Like private group. Yeah. Pivot ground. That’s right. All right, so there was something we just have, like two minutes or so left you lying process, You know, r r f. P s and the buying process. You know, I think a lot of non-profits rely too heavily on our piece. Like our peace, Our good. Ifyou’re like, we have plans for building and we’re now going to build the building, we need a contractor doing R F P. But you don’t need an r f P for everything. And especially if you’re going to get, like, expert advice or have your situation assessed, You don’t need an r F. Pierre, you don’t need a complicated r f P. It could be like, What are you selling and what’s your process? Or maybe it’s like rather than rpm, it’s an announcement. Like it doesn’t have to be this giant document like, Hey, we’re hiring for this. Come, tell us if you if you solve this problem. And another thing is you, when you make complicated R F P is especially no in the marketing space. Like most good marketers, I know good Web people. They won’t respond to our I’ve had guests on the show talking about the R F P process for tech. Protect provoc. You’re going to get the bottom of the barrel. They won’t respect. You have to intensive. So if you can avoid it at all, costs like don’t do are of peace for tech projects. And then I think another thing is I’ve come across this concept that doesn’t I don’t understand of non-profits thinking, we have to be fair in who were hiring. And I think that this comes from like, we don’t want to be corrupt or we don’t want to, you know, have a conflict of interest that causes us to hire someone out of favoritism. But and you should make sure, though instead that you’re getting the best value for your non-profit. Don’t get this fairness. What do you mean? I heard it a lot like, Oh, well, we just left. Sure. So here’s a great one. We can’t hire someone who’s on our board. Who’s an expert in this because they’re on our board, and it wouldn’t be fair. They already know what the project is. And that’s just silly. I think people get confused about conflict of interest versus confluence ditigal hyre them, they become an employee, and then they shouldn’t. Probably they should not be on your board anymore as an employee, but but they could still be some kind of. Now you’ve got their expertise, right? Or if they offer a service, you know, you know, they shouldn’t be the only one. You asked for it, but chances are, if your board members a professional, I’m sure if you were on a board, you would give your services at that. Probably a better rate than anybody else would. Well, so you know this process of going out and getting a few quotes on something that’s great. But the purpose is to get the best value for your organization. Not to be fair to all the people out there. We’re gonna leave it. There grayce Sarah Olivieri. You’ll find her at She’s at Pivot Ground and the company’s pivot ground dotcom. Thank you very much. Thank you. It was a great conversation. Thank you. Next week, there’s no show. The week after that, there’s no show, no show. For the next two weeks. We’ll be back on January fourth. I hope you enjoy the hell out of your holidays. Take time for it. Make time for yourself. Don’t just look to find it. Make time for yourself some quiet time over the holidays. Enjoy the hell out of it. If you missed any part of today’s show, I beseech you. Find it on tony martignetti dot com. We’re sponsored by pursuant online tools for small and midsize non-profits data driven and technology enabled Tony dahna slash Pursuant Capital P Wet Nurse Oppa is guiding you beyond the numbers when you’re cps dot com. Bye. Tell us credit card in payment processing, Processing your passive revenue stream. Tony dahna slash Tony Tell us and by text to give mobile donations made easy text. NPR to four four four nine nine nine A creative producer is clear. Myer, huh? Chris Gutierrez is today’s line. Producer shows Social Media Is by Susan Chavez Mark Silverman is our Web guy, and this cool music is by Scott Steiner. Brooklyn. You with me next week for Non-profit radio Big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. Go out and be great. What? Great. Go. You’re listening to the talking alternative network e-giving. Xero cubine you are listening to the talking alternative network. Are you stuck in a rut? 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Nonprofit Radio for August 11, 2017: Master Google AdWords & Master Your Decision Making

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Google has $10,000 of free advertising for you each month. Are you taking advantage? Learn about the program and how to plan your campaign. Also find the best search terms to bid on and stay on track as AdWords evolves. At the 2016 Nonprofit Technology Conference I talked to Jason Shim at Pathways to Education Canada, and Mark Hallman of Evergreen Digital Marketing. (Originally aired August 12, 2016)

 

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Durney hello and welcome to tony martignetti non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. I’m your aptly named host. Oh, i’m glad you’re with me. I’d come down with trapani mitosis if you infected me with the idea that you missed today’s show master google adwords google has ten thousand dollars of free advertising for you each month. Are you taking advantage? Learn about the program and how to plan your campaign also find the best search terms to bid on and stay on track as adwords evolves the twenty sixteen non-profit technology conference i talked to jason shim at pathways to education canada and mark coleman of evergreen digital marketing. This originally aired august twelfth twenty sixteen and master your decision making you make hundreds of decisions a day, some simple, some complex what’s the science and art behind making good ones. You’ll learn how to pare down choices and ask yourself good questions. Karen headed niimi and jamie nelson are from the inside education society of alberta. Karen is director of business in human resources, and jamie is an educator. This is also from sixteen ntc it’s ntcdinosaur day on non-profit radio canada master day. Lots of mastering going on on tony steak, too solitude, responsive by pursuant full service fund-raising data driven and technology enabled, you’ll raise more money pursuant dot com and by we be spelling supercool spelling bee fundraisers we b e spelling dot com here’s master google adwords welcome to tony martignetti non-profit radio coverage of sixteen auntie si the non-profit technology conference. We’re also part of ntcdinosaur say, shins, we’re in san jose, california, at the convention center on day three of the conference. My guests now are jason shim and mark holman will meet them very shortly first have to shout out today this this interview’s not just one a day, but one interview swag item which is a brand dahna and it’s from ah on good from on good many ways to wear it and also ah ah yo, yo alighted yo yo which we don’t have enough not brought enough frame i can’t demonstrate my yo go pray yo, yo prowess i used to be able to walk the dog doo around the world, you know, rocket out horizontal butt now it was not to take my word for it that i can still do it, so this joins our swag pile. All right, jason shevawn jason is associate director of digital strategy and alumni relations at pathways to education in canada. Thank you. Very welcome back, jason. Thank you. Believe it was two years ago. It ntcdinosaur good memory and more. Coleman is president of evergreen digital marketing. Mark, welcome to the show. Thanks, tony. My pleasure. All right, gents, we’re talking about how to be a google adwords superhero waken rock this now let’s talk first about the ten thousand dollars per month program for non-profits who who knows this program best. Is it free? How do we where we find it? What is this? Who knows the best? Go ahead. Yeah. Basically it’s ten thousand dollars of in-kind advertising given by google every month. It’s rule over grantspace oh, there’s there’s no limit to it as long as you keep me in the grant requirements and basically it’s in-kind so the little adds it show up on the top the google search results and that’s what you get so it’s a great program be part of. Okay, where can we find info for people who’ve never heard of this before? Google’s website is, i believe it’s google dot com slash non-profits or for canada’s, google dot cn non-profits okay, and you get ten thousand dollars a month? Yeah, a month free. Edwards yeah, free. Albert is not a cash it’s non-cash granted in-kind advertising, but every month limited to three hundred twenty nine dollars per day. But every month on going, as long as you meet the program requirements, there is no expiration date. Okay, did you find it very hard to qualify if you’re i mean, if you’re in the u s and your five o one c three or if you’re in canada and you have the wherever the equivalent designation is, um, you’re a bona fide non-profit is that about all it takes are very much if you meet the requirements for being a registered charity, then you’re pretty much good to go. Okay, well, that’s outstanding, alright, i’m not sure how widely known that is, but it is now because everybody listens to the show. If they’re not, then they do. They ignored at their peril because then i don’t know. All right? Well, let’s, talk about some campaigning. Where should we start with our google now? We’ve got three hundred eighty nine dollars, a day forever where should we start our campaign? So i think that one of the first things to start off with is really identifying, you know what your organization’s your mission is, and then how you can align some of those add words to to align with, you know, with that that mission. So for example, for pathways to education canada, you know, our mandate is to help high school students that they’re living in low income communities to graduate from high school. So anyone searching for any topics that are related to, you know, dropout prevention or helping the high school students day in school or people that are living in communities that we serve, you know, whenever they’re searching for nothing’s, really to education and drop you? No, we make sure that we sort of an ad, so, you know, they confined our resources more easily and that we can get access to nothing’s like tutoring and mentoring and, you know, access to scholarships and things like that, so it really helps connect people with the resource is out in the community. Yeah, how do we think broadly about what keywords people might be searching for him and you know, i’m sure every organization could name half a dozen off the top of their head, but how do we go beyond that? Maybe listening on twitter? I don’t know. You tell me, how did it go beyond what it comes to it comes to mind immediately. I think it’s, you can start with a sort of ah thought experiment and just trying to get into that the heads of other people and really, you know, using your, you know, just general empathy. So when when you, for example, mark and i, we used to live in a way, we’re sort of used to work together in kitchen waterloo at a place called cries in family counseling services. And what we did was we were trying tio create ad campaigns to target people who are looking for things that couples counseling. Nothing is the market for key. Which couples counseling. You know, the bid rate is quite high, you know, for it. And then when you think about it, you know, by the times a couple realizes they need couples counseling. You know, you may have to pay more than what you have for those kind of words. You rewind it. You know, a month, six months prior. You know what? What kind of things might that couple be going through? And, you know, trying we want it that way. So the kind of things maybe bidding for it’s, like, you know, i’m having challenges, you know, communication with i suppose, you know, how do you resolve money issues? Fundamental difference of opinion about children. You know, things like that that, you know, you krauz you at the end of the path, you know, but for people who would require couples counseling you how to get to them a little bit earlier to connect them with the organization. So really, it’s just a lot of service sitting there and thinking, oh, i love that idea of thinking ahead because you actually beat the competition that is paying the higher price for couples. You know, for that phrase couples counseling, absolutely relationship counselling you can get. You can beat the competition if you’re thinking a couple of months earlier. What are they talking about? Like money? Children finance center? Yeah. Cool. On another example, i can provide and american and speak to this. Ah, as well. Let’s, when we part of the service that were offered was credit counseling, and the thing is, like payday loan places like they’re they’re willing to bid up to, like fifteen dollars per click and the google lad words krauz is limited to two dollars per click maximum. Okay, so you really have to be extremely creative when you’re thinking about, you know, for some of those services where you also, you know, essentially competing against for-profit right on do you know, how can you think about, you know, okay, so for people that are running into credit issues down the road, you know, what might have looked like six months prior? And, you know, maybe, you know, people are searching for, you know, troubles making their bills or looking for, you know, initial, you know, information about me, you know, loan consolidation or things like that, you know, before they get into that critical, you know, the moment where you know, they’re they’re living on sort of back to back loans and yeah, so it’s just a lot of thinking and but one of the greatest tips that i think we received when we first discovered head where it’s at it’s from the ultimate guide to adwords by perry marshall you know, way highly recommend that book through the ultimate guide to edwards yeah, it’s called okay. And if one of them was read cosmo magazine and, you know, i think cosmo magazine provides a lot of lessons around, you know that the way that it cost one magazine covers designed, you know, it’s it’s designed to entice, you know, people that are going through a shopping check out to pick up a copy immediately, and i mean, it’s been the best selling women’s back-up dean since nineteen seventy to know so you know, they really done that in the print industry on the transits quite well into design in-kind adwords campaigns as well, you’re tuned to non-profit radio tony martignetti also hosts a podcast for the chronicle of philanthropy fund-raising fundamentals is a quick ten minute burst of fund-raising insights published once a month. Tony’s guests are expert in crowdfunding, mobile giving event fund-raising direct mail and donor cultivation. Really, all the fund-raising issues that make you wonder am i doing this right? Is there a better way there is? Find the fund-raising fundamentals archive it, tony martignetti dot com that’s marketmesuite n e t t i remember there’s, a g before the end, thousands of listeners have subscribed on itunes. You can also learn maura, the chronicle website. Philanthropy dot com fund-raising fundamentals the better way. Dahna oppcoll is pathways to education canada using google edwards ten thousand dollar month program? Yeah, yeah, ok, and mark, you have other clients that are as well, successfully, yeah, a number a number and you’re going with jason’s saying as well to part of the big part of adwords is trying to think of you know how how our people need our programs and services are looking for us if you’re doing banner ads or magazine ads to to kind of show what your your services are in google search is very specific, you can’t think of what our people looking for it so how to use the wise all the questions for help versus the opportunity of having made a scene at where you can put a big, you know, big, full page description of what your services are. This is really an opportunity for people who are actively searching for your programs and services and bring them right back to website. So it’s a really important program tohave from non-profits okay, after we’ve set on decided on a set of add words, phrases that we can afford to bid on how do we? I’m thinking next stage is monitoring. Our our results day today is that if i skipped anything well, there’s there’s a process there’s the whole setup piece, which is your campaigns, i groups keywords creating your ads. But one side nuts and bolts piece of it is done gather it is the moderate peace and add words and google analytics are fantastic for that they show you clicked the rates that should you conversion rates if you have that set up impressions and something, and really manage actively and make wise decisions on a short term basis. And that’s what actually drew me, tio adwords and that grants program originally was the fact that i came from a auto background. We have the auto trader, which is it’s, a paper magazine, and anatoli, you’re hoping to see people come in and say, i came here because i read your magazine without words, jason first showing the dashboard the first day i’m like, okay, we can actually see that accent or people clicked this ad in this time frame. It went back to our website and took actions, so get the monitoring in the analytics part of is a really big piece it’s important? Okay, yeah, jason won’t you talk about this more? Yeah, what’s really great is that you can really make data driven kind of decisions, which is, you know, one of the hallmarks of working in digital, an example i would give us, you know, we we had run a campaign to get supporters to donate their air miles to our organization, and we worked off the assumption that, you know, people want to give their, you know, their airline miles, you know, the goodness of their hearts because, you know, you know, but what? We quickly realized that, you know, the think the ad copy was something along the lines of, like, hey, you know, i don’t need your airline miles to ah, charity focused on youth and, you know, the click to rates on that were abysmal, like they weren’t fantastic people kapin verdict, so we, you know, we sat down and went back and thought about it, and the ad copy that did perform better was, hey, i don’t have enough miles teo to go on a trip, you know, donate them to our charity instead, which reflected the kind of reality that some people face when you realize that you need like, maybe ten or fifteen thousand miles you wanna trip in just a thousand? Yeah. Dahna and they just want to, you know, do something good with it and, you know, because they can’t go anyway and that one converted three times better and it’s amazing to people to get, get the metrics around and really support some of those hypotheses around. You know how our people thinking, how are they behaving? And you can really test those out. And conversely, you know, sometimes you know the hypotheses that you come up, you know, fall completely flat as well. But it’s, you can always go back to the data rather than relying on some of these, you know, anecdotal, you know, kind of gut feelings. You can still have toast, got feelings, but you consistently validating them over and over again with the data, which makes us think, edwards, you know, one of most compelling platform’s teo, really experiment and run campaigns. Mark, you mentioned something. I want to die aggress to an add grants. You said adwords and add grants what’s with the ad grantspace program. Yeah, granted, we’re actually talking here for non-profits adwords is a platform. That google has five times in that sort of business is you and you pay for ads today, but i grantspace the non-profit program that’s just ten thousand dollars a month. Okay, exactly. Right. Keeping keeping a straight. All right. Okay. Well, all right. So now we can monitor results like day to day, right? I mean, we and at the end of a week, we can see one phrase, one word is performing quite well. Another is not so weii stop bidding on the on the underperformers that basically what what we do? Yeah, basically straight a be testing and if one odds working other ones not if it’s we’re talking incremental increases. Here is what we’re talking about. One point five click through rate versus the one point seven or two point three it’s not always an eighty twenty of this huge disparity. Okay, but over time, you can make these incremental increases and really improve your presence, and we’ll set up typically set up two ads per at group abila play them out like jason mention. We make assumptions about what’s going to work, and we’ll quickly learned that it does or it doesn’t, and they get to go on, we’ll pause the want ad, create new adam, obviously reset the process and move forward. So kind of a fun game that i have with my summer intern. So we get a summer intern every summer, and what i do is i challenge them to a competition, so every week will come up with an ad and you’ll see what the results are. And then we face off every week, so the lower performing at gets paused. And then we were both trying to create a better one every week. So, you know, by the end of the summer, you sort of have this, like, hunger games, you know, style of creation. You know, only the strongest survives the best click through and the best results and conversions. Okay, all right. Pathways, education canada benefits. All right, they’re the winners. All right, do-it-yourself time together. What? Let’s? See what else? You, uh, campaign what else can we say about a campaign but the ongoing but i think waken speak a bit to the google grantspace oh, program. So if you max oh, it’s, your ten thousand dollar grant does there’s a few of our requirements in there. You max out your the ten thousand dollar grant for two months out of the prior six months, a cz well as maintaining certain kind of quality metrics around new york like two rates and also setting up conversions non-profits are eligible to apply for the grants parole account, which is forty thousand dollars a month, which is nearly half a million dollars a year in in-kind ad revenue and, you know, that’s that’s a great way for, you know, larger non-profits or international facing non-profits to get additional kind of exposure grantspace pro it’s called that’s pro. Okay, ru is pathways, education and a grand pro now, yet we’re run away, but i know that a mark is pricked with several clients against pro against yeah, we we have a few that working with the grants provoc counts again. It’s the more than international reach or the national across the states reach the reality is a lot of our smaller non-profit to have a regional focus, a search based so there’s a limitation, sometimes near population, searching for programs and the relevancy in just the raw reach doesn’t there sometimes, but for the bigger the big organizations absolutely it’s. A fantastic way to actively manager account and and really reach out. Okay, okay. You are. You also spent some time talking about keeping your skills fresh. As as adwords evolves. What is that about? What happens? I think that the platform is constantly changing. And s o back in toronto, i teach a digital marketing classes in the evenings. And one of the things that i am costly, thomas students, is that in one working in adwords and analytics, that the platform can change at any time on do you have to adapt to it? That’s part of you know, being, you know, working in digital so an example would be, you know, if when, when google changes our algorithm for search, you know, you have to respond to that, and you read up on, you know what the new algorithm changes? Maybe an adjuster campaigns accordingly. Another one is sometimes the platform itself changes. So you log into the interface and, you know, the buttons of switch debate or there’s. A new feature or a new tab. It’s? Very disconcerting. Yeah. Especially people. We’re not, you know, native digital. You know, you just used to something for years. And then without an announcement, it’s different yeah, so you have to keep on constantly beating and adapting and everything, but part of it is that, you know, even though, you know, for people who have been doing it for a while, you know, and maybe a little bit disconcerting to, you know, have everything shift, i think it’s also an opportunity for people who are completely new to the platform, i mean, it hits the reset button for everyone, right? So if you’re if you’re brand new getting into edwards, i mean, it’s a great opportunity jumpin you’re at the same level of everyone else. So, you know, it’s it’s also, i think, a positive thing and, you know, for people, you do not feel intimidated about jumping into it cause i know that when you first log into the dashboard like it’s, a lot of buttons and everything, but, you know, it’s, you know, both of us, you know, we start doing adwords about seven years ago when we were working at a smaller non-profit and, you know, it’s been a constant kind of learning and evolution, and we’ve seen so much change on the platform, but you know, the more time you spend in it, you know, it’s, the analogy we used in in our in our session was, you know, we’re not the kind of, like superheroes i got bitten by a radioactive spider and wasn’t out with all these superpowers to do add words, we would be more like, you know, the batman or the ironman in-kind things where, you know, just a regular person who, you know, that man went away for, like, five years, you know, into the mountains to, you know, train and honed his skills and everything. So, you know, similarly, i think it’s a lot of reading, so i really start off with a you know, just that the ultimate guide to edward’s weii read that book cover to cover many several times. Okay, is there a i presume there is? Ah, blogged that block for edwards. So google keeps yeah, google keeps obl argast adwords dot black spot dot com and that’s not asleep. Grants focus but that’s where all the new updates come out. Oftentimes the update will come out a few days before they get around the block post. So part of the fun as your law again and you think things were happy? Like, oh, shoot where’s my reports button, but they are constantly changing things and they are constantly improving. That’s part of the fun of google’s, they’re always innovating and, you know, a few weeks ago they went from having ads on the top, the top the searches also and decide to just the top. So jason’s thing it’s an opportunity to have you say that’s what i noticed that s o for advertisers know we were used to having, you know, three or four spots across the top, plus five or six more down the side, and i were down too two or three or four at the top. It has become really competitive, so if you’re willing to spend the time and research and learn the program, you’re competitive, you could be up there. So it’s, not it’s, not it’s, not something you’re like. Jason said begin with immediately and be up there, but you can learn it quickly and to spend the time. That’s what? We both started a lot of reading a lot of time out the side of our deaths and a lot of time at night, you know? Just just learning the craft. So yeah, it is definitely a worthwhile investment in time because i think that for all the organizations i’ve been involved with after implementing the edwards grant, like, you see a good spike in traffic, you know, in your google analytics, because people are finding the organization and all the the services you offer much easier and better. And, you know, mark has a similar kind of experience with the organization that he works with, like just getting general traffic over to your site for better awareness and, you know, connecting with existing supporters who are looking to make a donation like no one, no one google’s like, you know, i have too much money, you know, how you know who can i give it to you? I don’t, yeah, yeah, me strategic, yeah, all right. Now you had a superhero theme your your session? I see now i am not a dc comics guy or, like, superheroes, guys. So were you challenging? You’re challenging audience members, too. I identify with a superhero name themselves a superhero now? Yeah, not actually named themselves. But the whole approach was that you could be a superhero as well, and you can learn the craft. You can hone your skills, you could be a superhero. And you really do have responsible of the digital marketing record in your organization. Tto learn this and you know it’s there. It’s free it’s free money from google’s free ahjumma, google if you dont having not using it is a bit of a disturbance. So step up. Be a superhero and you know, okay, take it up. What? What is excelsior in you’re in the god zoology is thin. The session description says excelsior that’s how you ended it, excelsior all right, so that was that was just like a superhero. Kind of like exclamation that comment is the marvel comics. Yeah, okay, sure. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Part of superhero theme is also, you know, the spider man quotation. You know, with great power comes great responsibility and that’s good if you have an opportunity to connect with someone and you miss that opportunity, you know, that could be someone who was searching for, you know, help with their rent to what their anxiety or depression or help, you know, with some of their personal challenges. You can’t you can’t be serious. You’re absolutely right. We have a couple more minutes left. What have we not talked about or what you want to see? More detail may be something we covered too quickly. You spent ninety minutes in a session, so i know you got more. I got more knowledge than nineteen and a half minutes. I think that one of the questions that we ask this, you know, how much time does this take, you know, to do adwords. And to be honest, i wish i could say that, you know, it’s, you know, you can always make you know the case and be like, okay, i’m going to spend this amount of hours and you know, you’re your organization is going to support you all the way to do it. But, you know, the reality is, you know, sometimes you get you know, you’re really busy and non-profits and no this’s another thing to do on top of the you know, the ten or twenty, you know, items on your list for the for the week. And i guess what i want when i want a share is that when we both started out doing add words like we really were doing it off the side of right ask you not to try and prove that viability that you know, to bring in new traffic for our site. So you two, i guess whatever advising people are looking into adwords is you don’t know that this way. Do you know if if you to have a passion for it and are willing to do, you know, a bit in your spare time to even, like, get the initial ball rolling like it’s worth it? You know, even just to prove the viability to the organization because i know could be hired to try, negotiate for that time and resources and initially to get started, okay, but you’re encouraging. Yeah, for sure and the other part, guys don’t expect you have to spend two, three, four hours per week and build all your campaigns the first it can be a slow burn, it’s non going grant you khun step a a few basic campaigns to start with you learn the accounts, learn how things work and build from there that’s often often times your clients of just become super overwhelmed because they want to have this full blown fifteen campaign hundred. Ads that i’m going to spend my ten thousand dollars but it’s a race today you don’t need to yeah, that’s actually very good point we always talk it’s not about spending ten thousand dollars of spending the money properly, and you might spend five dollars, a month or a thousand dollars a month. But if you’re reaching your target and the people need to find your finding, you dori with ten thousand dollars, worry about doing it properly and making sure you spend the money properly and i think one of the great things about antennas that there’s ah, a community of people that are using adwords a spell. So, you know, one of the things i was really important for our session is like it’s, not only to show people how to use adwords, the google adwords grant better, but also, you know, reminding people like, you know, don’t forget to reach out to those around you because we’re all facing similar challenges, and we’re all along, you know, a spectrum of you know, your movies to experts and, you know, whenever something changes in all the experts become newbies again and so making sure that, you know people recognize you, there’s always help, you know, just around the corner just, you know, don’t be afraid to ask for help when especially in the community for is there a, uh, maybe xero community of practice around add words, you know, in in ten? Not yet, but we should wait. Yeah, i mean, you know, they’re very liberal about ah, a couple people interested, and now they’ll support it. Ok, there isn’t yet, but yeah, the entire community is very giving. So even without a formal structure around around edwards, there’s still help. They’re absolutely just posted one of the one of the one of the community boards and examine you and ask, ask for help, ok? And the one thing i would mention is that american speak to some of the more advanced you. So just so you know, i think there’s there’s certain things that you khun dio with the free adwords grant, but it also helps pave the way for a charity to explore usage of paid advertising as well and that’s, you know, the edwards grant is a great way to sort of explore those initial kind of foundational steps before moving to the paid advertising model what you have demonstrated, no clear return on investment for you’re on schnoll can about what you can persuade the leadership that there’s value, then maybe they’ll start to invest some of the organization money. Is that where we’re headed? Yeah, exactly. A string itself is an expert, as you understand there’s gaps we might know jason talked about competing with the pity alone’s places are competing with payed counselors and professionals add words is a really competitive market, but if you can show yourself is an expert and say, you know what, here’s what we’ve done but there’s a few gaps over here would like to other, you know that on some paid, you know hyre big key words or potential duitz, um, banner advertising, the google display network, or even potentially do some advertising on youtube that’s all within the adwords platform on a number of my clients and people i work with have their google grants account and also separate google adwords account is paid and google’s fine with that they there’s no wish without as long as you’re not competing on the same let’s, same keywords in your paid account and you’re free account. Dahna wish you okay. Okay. So you can you can do both side by side. Exactly. All right. Um okay. We wrap it up there. You think we’ve anything else? Well, before we do any other good, you have to raise something that made me think any other good questions that came from from the audience in your session. You want toe one highlight. Eleven were around some of the kind of technical details and that there are quite a few kind of, you know, technical, administrative details, you know, related to, you know, properly administering your adwords accounts. The one question that did come up during our session was, you know, what if you’re inheriting account that, you know, it is quite old and, you know, it may not have been well administered in the past, you know, how should you even start to, you know, fix it up, and our suggestion for that was to, you know, to break it down into buckets and just start changing it one campaign at a time to try and use proper structures and applying very method a logical approach to it, rather than sort of the scattershot approach that may have been used, but if you’re inheriting a campaign that has been a total mess, theun, you know, chances are it’s not performing very well, you may as well just wait, you know, most paul’s most of the campaigns and restart everything on the other question that came as well was just, you know, are on general support. And one thing that i like some of the google reps here at ntc mentioned is that there is a support line as well. So, you know, it’s it’s amazing, because there was a lot of companies that don’t offer, like, direct phone support. We’re talking about telephone support. Yeah, from google. Oh, yeah, yeah, it was actually a number that you can call, you know, if you’re adwords grantee that, you know, if if you need help, you know, navigating, you know, the main panel or creating ads or whatever, you know that there is, you know, entire support team that you can pick up the phone and call and they will help navigate through some of those challenges. Excellent. Yeah. So that that number is available. Okay, that is rare. Yeah. Okay. All right. Let’s, leave it there. Thank you. Very much thanks, alright. Jason shim, associate director of digital strategy and alumni relations at pathways to education canada, and mark coleman, president of evergreen digital marketing. Thank you again, gents. Thanks, tony, thanks, thank you very much for being with us. This is tony martignetti non-profit radio coverage of sixteen ntcdinosaur non-profit technology conference. Thanks so much, master. Your decision making coming up first. Pursuant is your last chance to check out the archive of the state of fund-raising midyear checkpoint that’s, their webinar with ceo trent ryker and senior vice president jennifer balat. Midyear fund-raising reports they came out last month. What’s most important to follow. What if you’re not hitting the benchmarks? How do you keep up your good pace if you are doing well in comparison with the rest of the community? Pursuant is data driven. They’re gonna help you succeed in these all important third and fourth quarters by making sense of the data that you are inundated with its at pursuing dot com quick resource is then webinars. Let them help you make sense of data. We be spelling super cool spelling bee fundraisers it’s a night of live music, dancing, standup comedy, spelling and raising money for your work. It’s a night devoted to your charity not a bunch of charities it’s for you that’s the purpose raise money for your good mission to help you make the world better. Watch the video at we b e spelling dot com and then talk to ceo alex career ninety nine to two four bees now time for tony stick too solitude i’m hitting this again this week. It’s essential if you want to do your best work helping other people, you’re in e-giving profession if you want to give, you got to take take time for yourself. It’s essential time away from phone, email, text, social media and work just me show your boss my video. I’ll get an extra view your boss will agree with you, they’ll see it. My way. And you get the time off. It’s called solitude, full cast and crew. Your boss is going to be impressed. You got to trust me. Just show this thing to your boss it’s at tony martignetti dot com and that is tony’s take two here’s karen headed niimi and jamie nelson with master your decision making welcome to tony martignetti non-profit radio coverage of sixteen ntc that’s, of course that’s, the non-profit technology conference hosted by intend the non-profit technology network. This is also part of ntc conversations. We’re in san jose, california, at the convention center on my guests are karen already said, karen headed niimi and jamie nelson and their session topic is the science and art of decision making. Karen is director of business and human resource is at the inside education society of alberta and she’s sitting closest to me. And jamie nelson is an educator at the inside education society as well. Ladies, welcome. Thank you so much. Thank you. My pleasure. Indulge me, please. While i just highlight our swag item for this interview, which is from think shout it’s a t shirt from think shout and according to our outstanding piela hanna this is a minimalist star wars theme. She can point out that there’s ah, minimalist death star and a minimalist. What else is there? Millennium falcon. See it. See the minimalist millennium falcon, that’s, an mmf, minimalist millennium falcon. For those of you who are not on the video, i’m sorry. Go to real tony martignetti dot com r e a l, and you can watch the video there. It’ll be there shortly, so we’re adding this to our second day swag pile. All right, that’s. Where it goes, the science and art of decision making. Karen what? What are our challenges around decisionmaking? Well, i’ll tell you a little bit of the back story of this session, okay. Came to the non-profit technology conference last year for the first, and i am not a techie, but i want to learn more about trends and issues. And after it was over, i was very overwhelmed. And i thought it would be really need if there was a session on another life. Important topic to kind of give my brain a break. So weii well, had to choose this one, but i don’t know. You know what? It just came out of the universe, but i was here to make decisions about technology solutions, and i was having some trouble, and yeah, so i just thought, you know what? I need to learn more about this. And so it’s been a good long years journey. And here we are spent a year curating content a little bit. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Jamie wanted to share. What did you what have you learned in this curation process? So karen invited me in after she’s done. Quite. A bit of the legwork, which was wonderful on dh, so for me, it was really trying to look at the three different kind of areas of decision making, so we talked about the science on dh. Then we talked about what it’s like to take in additional information, and then we kind of talked about some of the the influences, and i think for me, one of the big things that i learned is is too to understand the systems that are happening every time that we face a decision. And that was really, really important because, like karen said, we’re here at the ntcdinosaur decisions a cz non-profits we’re faced with all kinds of, like, really important decisions on dh, so being able to kind of understand that process was really, really valuable as part of this whole, the building of the presentation, okay? So there’s, the science, the influences and the process all around our decision making. What did the count since you did most of the duration will give you the chance. What? What did you learn about the science of decision making? Well, it drew a lot from the work of dr daniel kahneman. Who? Wrote the book thinking fast and slow and he’s very respected in his field. He’s, a psychologist. And he also won the nobel prize in economics eggs for some of his work. So okay, smart guy. He basically proposed that our approaches to judgment and choice take their two mental systems or modes of thinking one of them is sort of fast and instinctual. Then the other is slower and deliberate. So that was sort of based on the different types of decisions we have to make, like whether whether it across the road now versus whether to buy a new home are hard wiring. You know, we could come free built right way. But we have different types of thes to these two methods of decision making. Break down into the types of decisions we have to make for sure, like one is mohr sort of natural. The fast thinking that we do is effortless is just something we do is we navigate our life. We drive the car down the road. Okay? Slow thinking is more deliberate, it’s more logical thinking through procedures. Little more algorithmic. So it takes more mental effort to do logical thinking decision making. It takes longer. Okay. More deliberative process. Yes, exactly. Um, is that all you learned on it for you in the years that all the science you master and that’s it? No. I mean, we boy, you could go on forever. I mean, a decision making is such a huge topic. You can look at it from a leadership aspect. Marketing behavioral economics. It’s huge. We just sort of focused in this session on, you know, information overload in an increasingly digital world. And how that’s we process that kind of information differently. Then then what? What we’re hardwired to do? Just perfect. Because that’s what you suffered after and twenty fifteen mental fatigue you were you were distressed and overloaded. Exactly, there’s. Not that you suffer from ntcdinosaur. The after effect was it was so much value, so much value. You were you were you were shell shocked. All right, um, so how can we start to help people in there decision making and let you know, let’s, take the the normal in our conversation. Let’s, take the normal day to day decisions. Not this. Something is simple minded is crossing the street. But, you know, some fair minded. Work decisions or personal decisions, but it is not his monumental is whether to buy a home, whether they have a child. But, you know, you know what? Like, what am i gonna have for dinner tonight or ah, whether i should have my parents over or, you know, i mean, average sort of day to day decisions, sort of in the middle of the spectrum, very fair, fair enough, very good point because our brain doesn’t doesn’t prioritize all the decisions we have to make in a day so we could be spending a lot of mental energy on things that are a trivial nature. Andi and then we don’t have enough reserves for the important ones, you know, when when we’re expending mental effort in our slow thinking we are we’re the brain is using twenty percent of our body’s energy, so we’re using up more of that energy in our in our logical processes. So if there’s a new way of losing weight, i just obsess about whether across the street now definitely can i can i lose twenty pounds? Not that i have a lot to lose, but but but, you know, yeah, i obsess about whether to put the stamp on the envelope right side up or upside down can i drop some pounds? You may drop some pounds. I know, i know. All kidding aside energy not calories, energy. Okay, assuming energy. Okay, but, i mean, you do. You are depleting some of your resources if you spend too much time on thing on decisions that just ultimately don’t matter that much. Ah, so, you know, some really good advice is to look at how you are. You know, how? First of all your energy when you’re making these decisions, you don’t want to make them when you’re tired and hungry? I mean, this is just obvious when you’re feeling emotional things, you can monitor about yourself. You know, in a busy life. We did go. Go, go, go, go. We don’t have this sort of transition zone to kind of recent reset our mental mode to the next transition zone. Right? We don’t. We don’t have. Okay. Okay, jamie, anything you want to add at this? Ah, scientific stage. Yeah, well, i think a lot of people can can relate to that. And that transferred really well from kind of talking about how as an individual, we make decisions and what influences us, whether it’s past memories, past experiences, you know, the time of the day how much you’ve had to eat, i think it really translates well when you’re talking about the non-profit world is a cz well, so if you are thinking about some major decisions that you need to make, you want to make sure that you’re you’re planning your board meeting an appropriate time of the day, you know, like so people are feeling fed if you feel really happy if you’re in a really good mood than that can actually make you less thoughtful in your decision making. And so we’re not saying that, you know, everybody should be kind of new thriller on happy in a board meeting, but just keeping these kinds of influences in mind. So in your day to day life, if you’re if you’re making decisions on what project to work on or if you’re making some of those bigger organization all decisions just keeping these influences in mind, khun b can actually have quite an impact, and that was really surprising to me to find out all of these external factors, aunt. How you know, just one of the stories that karen tell told in the session today was how if you’re holding a warm liquid like a cup of coffee? Yeah, you actually feel warmer feelings towards the people person that you’re chatting with, which makes sense culturally, like we get together over coffee all the time. And so and usually when someone asks you to go for coffee, it’s not because they want to yell at you, it’s, because they wanna have ah, positive, you know, productive kind of conversation, so that was was really interesting to think about and and that’s, what i loved about this session is it helped us kind of connect with our our own processes, but at the same time, we can think about how it influences our day to day work. Excellent, i liketo like that exploration of holding a warm liquid, what other other influences are there that we haven’t talked about yet? Well, we’re we’re influenced by almost everything in our environment, you know, our natural impulses when you know if i look at you and i see i might be able to detect that you’re angry, just buy one or two. Words that you say in the tone, you know, whether makes us happy if you ask someone if they’re happy and that’s a beautiful brightstep durney day, they’re more inclined to say that they’re happy than they are on a cloudy sort of moody day. You know, we are feeling beans before we are thinking beings and so, you know, this translates in our day to day life. All right, so how do we control some of these things? The one that we can control? We can control the weather, but our feelings, our state. How do we how do we sort of harness that? So that we do make better decisions? Well, you know a very simple thing you khun dio, is before you’re making a decision. Put yourself in a neutral state of mind. You know, you can. You can just say write down everything that you did yesterday, step by step in sequins i got up, i had breakfast, i drove to work had my day of work came home walk the dog you’re just sort of reset it’s like it’s like your computer, your rebooting your computer on then you’ve shifted your mental mode, you know? You’re not bringing in, maybe your emotion and your anxiety and whatever you’re kind of reset and then take the appropriate approach for what type of decision that that it is, you’re making. You want to just take a step back. You need this transition zone, you know, it’s hard, all the switching we do all the time, you know, between with multi task. And, you know, they’re really saying, well, what you’re doing is you’re you’re, you’re just doing attention switching, and that is very depleting in our mind, in our body. So, you know, having a little like, if you go to a therapist and you have an appointment, your appointments probably going to be about forty five minutes. It’s, not an hour, because they use some time to prepare. Have your session sometime to externalize what just happened and and collect some notes and be ready for the next person, you know, that’s logical. I see myself, yeah, i see my therapist for three hours, three hours, three times a day for a week, so i don’t know how she’s managing externalization she’s got just needs she needs to download, just like on the only person we could see each of those three days or practices suffering. I’m bolin pain, well, externalizing information. I mean it’s coming at us, and i mean, we we learn our brain like spatial, you know, and and the context of the environment that we learn in having all of this information coming at us. It’s. I mean, yes, lists are still important in this digital age. It’s still important to externalize some of what’s going on in your mind so that you can look at it as an observer in your environment, rather than you know, yeah, okay, yep, little dispassionate, yes, once removed, but but clearheaded. I see your head, all right. Like what you’re hearing a non-profit radio tony’s got more on youtube, you’ll find clips from stand up comedy tv spots and exclusive interviews catch guests like seth gordon, craig newmark, the founder of craigslist marquis of eco enterprises, charles best from donors choose dot org’s aria finger do something that worked and they are levine from new york universities heimans center on philanthropy tony tweets to he finds the best content from the most knowledgeable, interesting people in and around non-profits to share on his stream. If you have valuable info, he wants to re tweet you during the show. You can join the conversation on twitter using hashtag non-profit radio twitter is an easy way to reach tony he’s at tony martignetti narasimhan t i g e n e t t i remember there’s a g before the end he hosts a podcast for the chronicle of philanthropy fund-raising fundamentals is a short monthly show devoted to getting over your fund-raising hartals just like non-profit radio, toni talks to leading thinkers, experts and cool people with great ideas. As one fan said, tony picks their brains and i don’t have to leave my office fund-raising fundamentals was recently dubbed the most helpful non-profit podcast you have ever heard, you can also join the conversation on facebook, where you can ask questions before or after the show. The guests were there, too. Get insider show alerts by email, tony tells you who’s on each week and always includes link so that you can contact guests directly. To sign up, visit the facebook page for tony martignetti dot com. I’m christine cronin, president of n y charities dot orc. You’re listening to tony martignetti non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. Anything else about these influences? Because we’re going now, we’re going to move to the process. Okay, but anything more about the influences? Well, i mean, biologically speaking, good moods. I mean, meant to us and our ancestors that environment was safe. We could we could relax a little. We could let our guard down, but that makes us less vigilant. You know, a bad mood. Singles tow us. Something’s wrong. I might need to protect myself. There might be a threat. I need to pay more attention. So, yeah, emotions. Like i said, we’re we’re thinking or feeling beings before we’re thinking. Okay? We moved to the process of of decision making. I mean, i feel like we’re sort of there, but okay, it sounds like yes. Yeah, well, i want to go there next. Well, one thing about the process, there is a lot of choice in today’s world, you know. Example, in the session we gave was going to pick out aspirin. You know, when you look at the isle of there’s, a spare for migraines and for sore muscles. And for all the different reasons you might have an ailment. But ultimately, maybe it’s the same. Product on homes have thousands and thousands of our possessions um, there’s research that shows that actually having too much choice leads us to make poor decisions, and we’re also dissatisfied with them. So having in the process fewer, fewer good options, but just a few and fewer variables, okay, karen is nodding a lot what you wantto into this? Well, i think that that ah, really translates well, when we’re thinking about that, the options that a lot of non-profits faces thinking, well, we can go in this direction, and we could do this kind of program or or use this kind of tactic, and what karen saying is is really like pairing that down and then making that decision and and the process of paring it down requires a decision as well. But i think a lot of us can agree that after a brainstorming session, it’s pretty obvious what some of the best options are, and then kind of taking a moment and taking a break, especially in, like, a working meeting where everyone has a chance to kind of reset and then that makes that actually makes the decision process easier on dh, that is really profound that sometimes people just want to kind of powerthru and say, it’s, getting towards the end of the day like we just need to make a decision. And that’s exactly right, you just need to make a decision. So in order to do that, you have to kind of think about all of these, all of the influences that air that are wrapped up in that. Okay, okay, we still have some time together. You spent ninety minutes on this and in your session, so has it goes quick, here’s a lot more to say and have enough time. This well, i mean, okay, the other the other part that we touched on in the session of the end was about creativity, because how can you choose the best option if you haven’t even imagined it? So part of it is developing some flexible thinking skills to, you know, be experimenting a little whimsical. And, um, you know, that requires sometime sometime in a calm mental state to do that kind of creative exploration. Eso we didn’t exercise in the session. We just ask everyone, what could you do with a marble? You know, similar to google? Asking what? Can you do with a pencil? Let’s? Try and see what we get. And some of the answers were like super unique. Jamie, can you ask the audience? Okay, what can we do with a marble? So it’s kind of fun? Yeah. Some people went really practical right away. Like i could hold it. I could put it in my mouth. I could put it in my head. I could put it on the table on dh. Then other folks also kind of went more creative right away. So one of our participants said you could write a haiku about it, which i she’s like it’s, not that left field, but but in the activity they had on an opportunity to work just by themselves and then to share and build upon. And i think what was really apparent is that a lot of the folks who participated said that that once they connected and started to build upon existing structure, then it it was really additive and really complimentary. And they started to go in more creative places. Yeah. Um, you know, along this line we were talking about the complexity of problems today and a lot of our problems are crossing borders and what is required. You know, i read something today about borderless leadership on dh you need a different skill set to address some of these problems. And so some of the things we talked about beyond creativity, where was critical thinking skills, you know, to look at all of the information coming at us and to be able to discern what is true and what is not true, what are some reliable sources, you know, and to be able to synthesise some of this information together with that we talked about being able to ask good questions, because that helps you ultimately make a better decision if you can clarify things so it’s kind of a lost art, you know, we reward people at work for having the answer rather than having a really good question and children asked several hundred questions a day on. Well, you probably ask a lot as an interviewer, but i do know i’m also child. I’m asking a thousand questions today in our day today, life like way asked everyone in the room, like, see if you can keep track of how many questions you ask today is probably going to be very few. Ah, very good skill to develop question answering how does that help us make better decisions? Jamie well, for me, i mean, in our work with the inside education, we we ask a lot of questions, so we do environmental programs with our students on we talked about natural resources in the environment and in that is this critical thinking piece. And so i found that if a student asked me a question and i turn it back to the rest of the classroom or or answered them with another question that it helps start to kind of peel back the layers and let’s folks realize they start to consider the question from a different perspective. So if i used the example in the session, you know, the first time a student asked me, well, what’s the difference between coal and charcoal? First of all, i couldn’t believe that i didn’t know the answer and it’s not a life changing thing, you know, like, i’ve gone so far without knowing that, and that was fine, but once i realised that it made me think to myself like, what else don’t i know about the world? Like, why don’t i know the difference between those two things and that’s the power of questions is that i know, like karen said in a professional life, sometimes if you’re if you’re in a meeting and and there’s questions about the reasoning behind the project that you’re working on, folks, khun bristle they can feel really defensive, but the power of asking a really good question is that it expands that horizon, and it helps you start to think about the bigger picture on dh then in that you’re able to think creatively and shift the paradigm and that that can only be helpful, you know? Okay, okay, we still have a couple minutes left. Let’s tease out. Come on. Did ninety minutes in a session. We’ll back on non-profit radio listeners. Yeah, never. I’ll never have your back-up billet. All related. Teo related to good questions and critical thinking is really about how we learn on dh and, you know, if you notice someone’s thinking process, if if if there’s a bias or they they they have a distorted reasoning, you know, we get defensive when people point out our errors. So the best way to help people see that they have maybe a flaw in their thinking is too created a learning experience for them to see the insight for themselves. Tohave a lightbulb moment an ah ha moment your mental mode shifts more easily when you discover it for yourself. How do you create this kind of moment? Teachers are good at creating this moment. What teachers are good you turned away from the mic, she said teachers were go to creating this moment on, i guess one of the ways that that i do that in a classroom with students is i you know, if we if we ask in opening question like what’s, a type of natural resource that we used to create energy, you know, some kids might have the answer right away and then others will be like lightning and it’s like, okay, so why did you say lightning? We don’t get electricity from from lightning, but why that? And then it helps them instead of saying no, you’re wrong because they’re they’re right. Lightning is electricity, but instead then we can kind of have a conversation about it, and then the student can come to the conclusion themselves working can work. Through the process themselves and say, okay, wait a second that doesn’t make sense, there’s nobody running around trying to capture lightning so that we can have power in our homes, but in that it doesn’t it’s that experience, and i think it resonates more with a student. I mean, this is such a trivial example, but like karen said, if, if there’s this this bias that occurs or this kind of error in thinking, i think everyone can relate to have someone if you have ah colleagues saying you’re wrong, the rest of the conversation doesn’t always go really well. So instead, you know yeah, you came, you can and it’s not avoiding the conversation, it’s just helping them kind of see, because that’s, the only way that that folks can kind of overcome is that if they experience that process themselves, it can be really hard to try to convince someone that they’re wrong and you’re right. But by building that experience by kind of understanding how our mind works and how thoughts are created, you can you can help increase that knowledge and expand the conversation instead of shutting it down and making it kind of antagonistic. Okay, okay. That sounds like a pretty good place to wrap up. Yeah, i think bernie’s consolation like you. All right. See, the closest to me is karen headed niimi, director of business and human resource is at the inside education society of alberta. And if the same society is jamie nelson who’s, an educator at inside education, ladies, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Pleasure. Thank you. And this is that i thank you for being with us. Twenty martignetti non-profit radio coverage of sixteen ntcdinosaur non-profit technology conference. Thank you. Next week. Definitely not fermentation. If you missed any part of today’s show, i’d be seat. 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