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

Crystal Mahon & Christian RobillardDonor Surveys

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

 

 

 

 

Celina Stewart & Gloria Pan: People-Powered Movements

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

 

 

 

 

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 Unbelievable were sponsored by donor box, outdated donation forms blocking your supporters, generosity.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

Nonprofit Radio for October 30, 2023: CRM Selection & What To Ask Before Your New Website

 

Rubin SinghCRM Selection

Rubin Singh returns to help you focus on what matters in CRM selection. To keep you safe from a serious misstep, he also shares his thoughts on what else might be the problem, besides your CRM database. Rubin is CEO of One Tenth Consulting.

 

 

Marc PitmanWhat To Ask Before Your New Website

 Stephen Tidmore from Mighty Citizen built his first website in 1999, and hasn’t stopped. He shares the questions you need to ask up front, before you embark on a new website project.

These both originally aired on June 14, 2021.

 

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[00:01:04.26] spk_0:
Hello and welcome to tony-martignetti Nonprofit radio. Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. I am your aptly named host and the pod father. We’ll just start again with this take. Hello and welcome to tony-martignetti Nonprofit radio. Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. I am your aptly named host and the pod father of your favorite Hebdomadal podcast. Oh, I’m glad you’re with us. I’d come down with Hypo is Phoria. If I saw that you missed this week’s show, here’s our associate producer, Kate with what’s up this week?

[00:01:57.85] spk_1:
Hey, tony, this week it’s CRM selection. Ruben Singh returns to help you focus on what matters in CRM selection to keep you safe from a serious misstep. He also shares his thoughts on what else might be the problem besides your CRM database. Ruben is CEO of 1/10 consulting. Then what to ask before your new website, Steven Tidmore from Mighty Citizens built his first website in 1999 and hasn’t stopped. He shares the questions you need to ask up front before you embark on a new website project. These both originally aired on June 14th, 2021 on Tony’s Take two

[00:02:00.29] spk_0:
loving. The donors

[00:02:37.56] spk_1:
were sponsored by donor box, outdated donation forms blocking your supporters, generosity. This giving season donor box, the fast flexible and friendly fundraising platform for nonprofits donor box dot org and by Kela grow revenue, engage donors and increase efficiency with Kila. The fundraisers, CRM visit Kila dot co to join the thousands of fundraisers using Kila to exceed their goals. Here is CRM selection.

[00:02:42.65] spk_0:
Welcome to tony-martignetti nonprofit radio coverage of 21 NTC. You know what that is? It’s the 2021 nonprofit technology conference with me now is Ruben Singh CEO of 1/10 consulting Ruben. Welcome back to nonprofit radio.

[00:03:00.00] spk_2:
Hey, thanks so much, tony. Thanks

[00:03:40.48] spk_0:
for having me. My pleasure. My pleasure. Your topic this year is CRM selection. When you don’t know what you don’t know which is kind of related to what we did, uh talk about last year, which is don’t get played by the product demo that was listeners can go back to listen to that. That was uh when we talked about the uh the flash bang demo that doesn’t turn out to be so you, you can’t replicate the of which you cannot replicate the wizardry when you’re, when you’re posting sta it just doesn’t seem to fly, fly quite as fast as that product demo. So that was when we talked about last year. Um This year. What’s the trouble around CRM selection and these unknown unknowns?

[00:04:42.84] spk_2:
Yeah. Yeah. No, thanks. Tony and, and um uh yeah, this seemed like a good, good way to, to spring board off off of last year’s presentation with the demos because, uh still, you know, with all the organizations, with so many of the organizations that I work with, uh the selection process has just such a challenge. Uh And I even took the opportunity during the conference itself to ask, you know, what is it, what is it so challenging about these CRM selection processes? Is it that there’s just too many options in the market? Too few options? Is it uh you know, just uh confusion about the features they offer? Is it just, you know, if you right? No, or is it more on the internal side, you know, decision making as I suspected? II, I guess it is, it’s across the board there, there’s all kinds of reasons that people are really um struggling right now when it comes to selecting Cr MS. So, so that’s why we wanted to look at this top is, is really um try to unpack some of the reasons that make it so challenging and also give some advice on what can make the process go a little bit smoother.

[00:05:00.60] spk_0:
OK. The one thing that you ticked off that I, I imagine the problem is not, is that there’s too few Cr MS available? I don’t think that’s a problem. Is it?

[00:05:02.58] spk_2:
Uh Well, II, I think, yeah, I wouldn’t say there’s too few but then once you get into, you kind of dig in a little bit past the surface and really look at, you know, the types of functions that you need. So um you know,

[00:05:16.44] spk_0:
you might have a few options based on your specific

[00:05:25.98] spk_2:
exactly like, you know, everybody will have, you know, the the constituent management side of things and everybody will have, you know, basic activity management, donation management. So no, no shortage of solutions in the market there. But then you say, hey, you know, is there a solution out there in the market that does outbound funds management really well? OK. Well, now you’re down to like two. So, so I think so. So there is too few but yeah, there is a nuance there for sure,

[00:05:42.31] spk_0:
I understand. All right. So you know, how do you help folks? Where should we start with this? How do, how do you help folks make sense of this uh confounding landscape?

[00:07:45.53] spk_2:
Yeah, you know, there’s, there’s a few things I think that, that, that folks can do and, and the first and foremost is, is really uh when you have a selection process, uh you know, what I think you can do to make the most of it is, is first make sure that you have the right team internally. Um because uh you know, oftentimes I walk into situations like this where we do selections and, and you know, I I’m told, OK, you know, it is gonna make the decision here or leadership is gonna make the decision here and, and neither of those really work out particularly well. So I think really having a uh a cross functional team, not only in terms of where they sit in the organization, uh you know, across the organizational hierarchy, but also looking at the diversity of the team. And this is something that I, I personally feel is very important, you know, even even diversity in terms of race, ethnicity, age, you know, uh tech, technical, technical skill, capability, um ability, ee everything, you know, all those things are gonna matter, you know, even if you uh work with external constituents, uh perhaps even engage some of your uh program participants in the process, the more diverse that you can have your team, uh you’re really gonna have uh a solution in the end that that really represents what they need. So I, so I think really assembling a team, the the right team is, is a key part and often gets overlooked. Um Another thing is really just being honest with the, the expectations of the system. So, you know, I have some organizations that I work with that say, ah you know, well, we don’t have much budget and we don’t have any resources that can manage this system really ongoing. We need something that, that can, we can plug and play, it’s gonna work. So, so tell me about sales force or, or you know, tell me about razors edge and I’m like, wait, wait a second, you know, those are not the only, you know, two products in the market. There’s a lot of other tools that are out there that are more aligned for you that you can uh that is more plug and play. And then, you know, now granted you might be trading off some opportunities to, to, you know, it may not be as customizable or it may not be uh all the, the depth of functionality you need in certain areas. Um But uh going the other direction and having a highly customizable system that needs a lot of maintenance and, and when you don’t have the, the team and the resources and the budget to maintain it, it, it can really put you uh in a, in a tough spot. So, so those are kind of a couple of things I I have more but, but those are a couple of things that I think that often get overlooked is really starting in with those, those right expectations and having the right team to help make that decision.

[00:08:09.17] spk_0:
R unfortunately, you’re stuck with me as a lack of host. II. I should have asked you initially, how do you know if you need a new CRM before you even wade into these waters? Maybe CRM, maybe your CRM is not your problem. How do you make sure it’s, it’s AC RM. That is your problem and not not your processes or your leadership or something

[00:08:29.25] spk_2:
else. That, that’s a great question, tony. And, um I wish I had asked

[00:08:33.11] spk_0:
it five minutes ago.

[00:08:56.72] spk_2:
No, no, no problem. And, you know, it’s, uh I’ve worked for, um you know, product companies in the past where, you know, we have a specific methodology, specific product to, to come and solve your problem. And I’ll be honest with you, tony, you know, over the years I’ve, I’ve implemented CRM solutions. Uh you know, on time on budget, we’re sitting there after go live, everybody’s celebrating. And I, I walked out of those clients thinking to myself, this is not gonna end well, this is not, this is, they are not set up for the success and it really has nothing to do with the CRM. And you felt

[00:09:13.69] spk_0:
that way even on your champagne high after their champagne ate their hors d’oeuvres, you still, you still walk down, feeling, feeling

[00:10:28.25] spk_2:
unsatisfied. Well, I tell you walking to my car in the, in the parking lot. I sit there in the car and I’m like, oh boy, this, I’m gonna hear from these folks in, in two months and, and I don’t know what I could have done differently, you know, and, and it’s, it’s really for the things that you said that, that I i it’s uh it’s really making sure that uh do they have the right support ongoing? Do they have the right governance structure? Do they have good decision making, you know, uh uh processes when things come up. Um Do they have the right executive buy in? Um are the processes really well aligned to help them be successful in the new system or did they bring their own sort of broken promises into the new s uh sorry, broken uh broken processes into the new system? Uh or uh even their data, you know, oftentimes these, these projects kind of run overboard and then they just say, ah, well, let’s just, we don’t need to clean the data, let’s just push it into the new system and, and we’ll figure it out later. Uh These are not, these are things that are not going to uh lead you to success and, and oftentimes things go awry. It’s like, ah, you know, we shouldn’t have gone with this CRM or we shouldn’t have gone with this. And it’s really, uh you know, and that’s one thing at 1/10 we’ve, is really one of our key principles is it’s the people process and technology. Um It’s the strategy. It’s, it’s having everything aligned in order to make your technology successful. So it, it is, it is. Yeah, it’s, it’s a little bit science, a little bit art to make that, to make sure that balance is there.

[00:11:15.11] spk_1:
It’s time for a break. Are you looking to maximize your fundraising efforts and impact this giving season? Donor Box’s online donation platform is designed to help you reach your fundraising goals from customizable donation forms to far-reaching easy share, crowd funding and peer to peer options. Plus seamless in-person giving with donor box like kiosk. Donor box makes giving simple and fast for your donors and moves the needle on your mission visit donor box dot org and let donor box help you help others. Now back to CRM selection

[00:11:36.59] spk_0:
after an 18 month or maybe 24 month conversion, you know, the whole process of search and then narrowing down and you know, the thing, the things we talked about last year. Um And then, and then for it not to be the success that everybody is expecting. Um Let’s spend a little more time with this. What, what, what, where else should we look? You know, if we suspect our CRM is the problem but where else should we be looking? We, we’ve talked about processes, leadership buy in but, but be drill down a little bit, you know, you have the experience, what have you seen that? That is often the cause not the, it’s not the software.

[00:14:03.66] spk_2:
Yeah, you know, definitely the, the buy in is key. Um And that’s something that starts from the very beginning. Uh And, and I’ve see, I, you know, I, I don’t want to sound super negative here because I’ve seen, I’ve seen some organizations do this really well, you know where, you know, before they uh you know, let’s say they’ve made us, you know, they, they’re kind of getting close to a selection or they’re, they’re uh they’ve done sort of the initial vetting of solutions. Uh They really bring the leadership in uh and have them have, have a stake in the, in the, in the matter. I think that’s, that’s key, you know. So when I even talk about assembling a diverse team that also includes leadership and management, um you know, they, they’re not just, they shouldn’t just be Spectators of the process, they should be very engaged in the process. Uh Because that’s when I see things kind of fall off the rails a little bit is the moment something goes wrong and everybody just, you know, throws their hands up in the air and says, oh, well, you know, I never really, you know, subscribe to this or I, I told you you should have gone with, you know, such and such tool anyways. So that executive buy in is, is just super important and that really is, you know, it’s, it’s the project team sitting with leadership and making sure they understand what is the, the business this case for CRM in the first place? Uh What needs to make us successful. So if that means uh additional resources like we need a part time or full time administrator, uh or we need to have uh a, a tool to, you know, manage tickets and ongoing incidents. So we have a way of tracking things that we need to improve with the CRM or we need a governance process that we can make decisions uh um more effectively and, and I think tony that the governance is, is key. Um, because oftentimes like you, you go live and then sure enough as folks are using the system, uh there’s all kinds of requests, there’s, there’s bugs, there’s uh enhancement requests, there’s, you know, fundamental problems that need to be addressed. And oftentimes it’s like, ok, well, let’s just, you know, go to the person who’s, you know, you know, clamoring the loudest and, and solve their problem, but that’s not really the right way to do it. You want to be methodical and think about. Ok. Well, you know, let’s prioritize, let’s evaluate the, the urgency of the issues, the severity of the issues, let’s put together a road map. So everybody knows what’s coming when. Um, and, and so it, it sort of, you know, goes to that point that this, that CRM is not a project, it is definitely an ongoing journey. Uh And, and, and so, you know, when those kind of expectations are aligned, I see a lot more success. Uh So, so, so, yeah, the solution and that is completely solution. Agnostic.

[00:14:47.87] spk_0:
Yeah. Yeah. All right. Thank you for that digression. But I, I think it’s important. I think, I think there’s a lot of orgs that, that blame their software, but they have much more inherent problems that, as you said, no application is gonna solve because that’s not the pro those aren’t the problems, that’s not the problem. All right. Um, you mentioned prioritization. I want to get to that. I wanted to get to that because you, you, you alluded to different features and, you know, but how do you decide what you really need versus what you, you could, you could use but you don’t really need it, you know, to try to winnow down your, your alternatives in this vast landscape.

[00:15:15.54] spk_2:
Yeah, that’s a really important question, tony because um you know, especially as I’ve sat through as, as perhaps you have to just sat through so many demos of systems and I think often times, uh the organizations I work with, they are very impressed with the breadth of functionality. Um But you have

[00:15:16.61] spk_0:
the, well, I haven’t sat through as many as you have, but you also have the experience of having done the, done the

[00:15:21.44] spk_2:
demo. I’ve been on both sides,

[00:15:44.30] spk_0:
thousands, I think when we talked last year, you know, you’ve done thousands of these things and you were the Whizz Bang. You were the guy flying through the, flying, the cursor through and showing everybody how easy it was, how easy it’ll be for you. It’ll be just like this to your experience is gonna be identical to mine, you know, give yourself 24 hours with the system and then you’ll be as good as me. I’m making you out to be a, a huckster. You’re not.

[00:18:32.05] spk_2:
Well, I, I’ll tell you a little story, tony and I shared, I shared this with the folks at, at the NTC. Um, you know, a couple of years ago on my last trip to India, I, I went on a shopping trip with my wife and, uh, we went to this, um, garment store, clothing store and she, she walks in there and she says, I’m looking for something specific. I want this dress that is, uh, turquoise. And the, the shop owner said, oh, ok. Yeah, no problem. And then he starts showing, um, all these different dresses and it’s just like, you know, unpacking and, and showing and demonstrating. He has 23 assistants, unpacking different garments and showing different things. You know, some of them are light blue, some of them are dark blue. Some of them are shades of green. Some of them are teal and, uh, you know, you know, about maybe 30 40 different dresses into this II, I kind of figured what was going on here. And I whispered to my wife, I said, I think he’s gonna show you everything in the store before he tells you he doesn’t have a turquoise dress and, and I feel every time I, I sit in some of these system demos, I kind of think of the same thing that, you know, the, the, the, the, the, um, and no disrespect to the, the account executives out there. They’re, they’re doing their job and, and trying to present the best elements of the products they have. Um but they are gonna show you everything. Uh They’re gonna show you everything, whether there’s breadth or depth, it doesn’t really matter that they’re going to impress you with um with, with all the features and functionality that the system offers. So what I try to uh encourage uh my client and prospective clients to do is, you know, you, you kind of take control of the demo, say, say, you know, no, I’m I’m not really interested in, you know, I know all these solutions do fundraising. I know all these solutions, you know, can, can send out an email. I know all these solutions will track activities, but here are my three or four priorities. You know, I, I need to do long term case management because we’re a human services nonprofit or uh you know, we get grants that we re grant to other smaller nonprofits. So we want to do outbound re you know, re granting or, you know, we, we focus heavily on the social listening or the volunteer management. Pick those four or five areas that mean the most to you and you want to see the, the, the real depth in those systems there because I think once you do that, you’re gonna find there, there’s fewer options than you might have thought. Uh And, and really kind of, you know, rather than just getting into this demo, uh process uh demos are nice. But what you really want is a working session to say here are my use cases. Uh And, and, you know, show me how we can solve very specific problems in these four or five areas. And, and I, and, you know, there are some uh vendors that will say, oh, you know, I don’t have time for that. You know, I, I, I’ll give you my can demo. You know, that’s the best I can do and you probably don’t want to work with those partners. Uh You really, you know, there, there, there are other vendors that say, oh thank you. Like, thank you. I don’t have to waste my time on this can demo. Uh And we can really focus on the things that matter to you. There, there’s some that really, really thrive in that situation. So, so I think it’s really um looking at what are those three or four things, those five things that really matter to you. Um That, that is not only something that you need to maybe replace in your current process, but looking 3 to 5 years down the line, uh you know, you really want to get into program management or you really want to get into more direct mail. Uh You think about what those three or five things are and really focus the sales process on that.

[00:19:19.25] spk_0:
Is that hard to do? Focus on these 3 to 5 when you’ve got 10 people from an organization clamoring for, for their, there used to be a top priority. You know, the, the the the event folks are saying, well, we need better ticketing but it doesn’t feel like ticketing is really a priority, but we do ticketing. You know, how do you, how do you manage these internal battles?

[00:20:56.00] spk_2:
There are always, there’s always gonna be that battle, there’s always gonna be that healthy debate and contention intention there. So, uh you know what, what I tried to frame up is, you know, as an organization, you definitely have to prioritize uh you, you surely have to prioritize and I know everybody expects it, but they just don’t want to be beyond the, the losing end of, of that prior organization. So, so I, I think, you know what, what I try to encourage folk is uh even though you may not get everything you want to make sure that you’re selecting a tool that does not preclude you or do not prohibit you from getting the features that you want. So maybe event management is not a priority right now. Um But let’s pick a solution that if even if it doesn’t have very strong event management capabilities, perhaps it can integrate with other tools that are out there that have very strong uh event management capabilities. So, um so, so it’s uh so you definitely want to focus on the, the key priorities you have. Um But you also want to be, make sure that you’re selecting a tool 3 to 5 years out can still support what you need. Uh So, so that’s it, it’s a little tricky and, and, you know, it kind of goes to one of my, uh you know, I, I gave a lot of suggestions and a lot of, you know, tips and tricks on, on how to really make the selection process work for folks. But, you know, one of the last points I did is, is it may take AAA trusted advisor to help in this process because, you know, the non profit I work with, they’re, they’re very busy, you know, doing good for the world and, and, and uh don’t always have time to keep in completely aware of what all the, the latest technologies and trends are. So sometimes it takes, you know, bringing in a trusted advisor, whether that’s in a pro bono capacity or a paid consultant, uh who can really, you know, help get you through some of the fluff and say, all right. Well, you know, I I know that program management is not a key priority for you right now, but it is something you want to do in the future. And here’s three or four tools that might want, you might want to consider that can get you there at a later point.

[00:21:11.22] spk_0:
There’s also the importance of leadership that, that you stressed, you know, it’s, it’s incumbent on the CEO to decide what the priorities of the organization are.

[00:22:09.41] spk_2:
A absolutely. Absolutely. And, and, uh you know, when I was sort of working more on the vendor side and, you know, with specific products, I, I wasn’t, you didn’t really have the flexibility to have these discussions. But, you know, now, uh you know, running our own practice, we have the ability to, to kind of start start selection processes with very different questions. So, you know, the questions I’ll ask is OK. Well, let’s talk about your fundraising strategy. Well, you know, let’s talk about, you know, your organizational goals. Uh Let’s talk about where, where you are now and where you want to be 3 to 5 years from now. Um You know, what’s, what’s the, the, you know, what are the kind of decisions, let’s say, you know, to speaking to the executive director or the leadership team, you know, when you walk into work Monday morning and you, you turn your, uh you turn your computer on, you log into your CRM. What do you want to see on your dashboard? What, what is it, what are those key decisions or, or key insights that you need to help you make decisions for that day, for that week? Uh Let’s start there and then from there, we, we start figuring out um what are the right tools, what are the right solutions and all that? But, but, but really, you’re absolutely right. It starts with the strategy and it starts, starts from the top.

[00:22:33.70] spk_0:
You have some tools and, and resources to help folks make better decisions.

[00:23:36.63] spk_2:
Yeah, absolutely. Um You know, making better decisions just means uh means a lot to us at 1/10 you know, whether you work with us or not, we, we, we feel it’s, it’s best for the non profit sector and, and, and best for the non profit tech sector um to, for, for everyone to really have, be making informed decisions when they go for a solution. So, um on our website on uh uh uh 1 10 dot consulting, you will be able to see. Um you know, we have webinars, we have um uh blog post all to really help you uh in that process. Um Also on our social media, we do have um uh from time to time, we are either posting articles, sharing articles, other content that we think is are, is really gonna help people make good decisions. So I would, I would suggest and all our, our web um all our webinars all are, are all on demand free. Uh So we, we encourage folks to, to take a look at our website and, and really um take advantage of all the, the content that’s out there, you know, uh combined with, with uh myself and others that we work with. I mean, it’s many, many years of experience, good, the good, the bad, the ugly. So we, we try to put as much as we can in that content on our website to make it available to everyone.

[00:24:00.17] spk_0:
It’s 1/10 dot Consulting. That’s correct. All spelled out 1/10 dot Consulting. Ok. That’s right. Are you familiar with the, the Tech Impact reports? The, the, the surveys that they do across different systems, you know, they, they agnostically survey and, and study different, different elements of, of lots of different, uh, program uh, applications that can be valuable too. Right. That tech impact the survey.

[00:25:12.42] spk_2:
Absolutely. I think tech impact does a great job on that. And that’s one of the things that we, we often share around on our social media when, when it becomes available or new, new uh visions of that is posted. Uh I’m a big fan of their work. Um There’s just so much out there, like I said, and you really don’t, uh I don’t expect any of the nonprofits I work with to be knowledgeable about everything. That’s, that’s, that’s out there. So, so I really do like what temp tech impact puts out and it really gives you like a baseline of what are the different tools out there? What are the key, um you know, from, from a pricing perspective and, and all that. So, uh you know, strengths and weaknesses, pros and cons. So I think that’s like always a good place to start. Um And, and then, you know, sometimes when you need to get uh where it gets a little bit more complicated and is when you are like, so, so for example, if you are thinking about CRM or it’s, this is like a first step for you and you know, you want to move off of spreadsheets, you know, the tech impact, I might be all you need to, to kind of make a first decision. Um What gets more complicated oftentimes is if you’re switching from system A to system B uh and, and you want to kind of know how, what that migration might look like. That’s where the guide may not help you as much. And, and you might need to look at other resources that are, that are available.

[00:25:24.42] spk_0:
OK. OK. We say we leave it there, Ruben. Does that sound like we’ve hit this? Anything that we’ve omitted that you think is important?

[00:25:30.34] spk_2:
No, no, that, that sounds great. I think I enjoyed the, I enjoyed the conversation very much. Always appreciate the opportunity to speak with you, tony and uh have a chance to engage with the audience. So thank you so much for the time.

[00:25:40.60] spk_0:
My pleasure, Ruben Singh CEO at 1/10 consulting again, 1/10 dot consulting. And thanks so much for being with tony-martignetti nonprofit radio coverage of 21 NTC.

[00:26:40.34] spk_1:
It’s time for a break. Keyla increased donations and foster collaborative teamwork with Kela. The fundraisers. CRM maximize your team’s productivity and spend more time building strong connections with donors through features that were built specifically for fundraisers. A fundraiser CRM goes beyond a data management platform. It’s designed with the unique needs of fundraisers in mind and aims to unify fundraising, communications and donor management tools into one single source of truth visit. Kila dot co to sign up for a coming group demo and explore how to exceed your fundraising goals. Like never before. It’s time for Tony’s take two.

[00:29:42.12] spk_0:
Thank you, Kate. I just had 10 days of donor meetings. I was in New York City, met with lots of donors and potential donors to a client there. And it, it just reminds me how much I love doing the donor meetings. Just the face to face. Some are in people’s homes, some are over lunches or coffee. Not too many breakfasts and dinners, uh, in, in planned giving the, the older folks, eighties and nineties. They don’t really wanna get out early in the morning for breakfast and they don’t really want to have dinner out either, especially in the winter and in the summer, summer time, you know, longer nights you might get more dinners, but, uh, not, not so many this time of year, not any actually for me. So lunches and coffees and meeting in people’s homes. But it’s just, it’s, it’s such a pleasure, you know, getting to know folks listening to their stories about, uh, their, well, in most cases it was their husbands who have died, uh, their Children, grandchildren. And of course, why they love the work of the non profit that I was representing while I was there. Uh It’s, you know, it’s, it’s moving. They’re, they’re just, they’re fun. The donor meetings are fun. You know, that’s the, that’s the beauty of fundraising is the meetings with the, with, with donors and potential donors. So thankfully, as a consultant, I don’t get bogged down in a lot of administration, there are not a lot of meetings, people want me to go to clients occasional but not so often. So I hope for you that you can or you have, you know, freed yourself from a lot of the administrative work that is not anywhere near as stimulating as the, the meetings, the face to face meetings with, with folks. I, I hope you can unburden yourself from administration and, and get to the heart of fundraising which around major giving or of course planned giving is meeting folks, meeting them and, and talking to them, getting to know their stories. I, I have a natural curiosity about people. Uh So I find these meetings just delightful and, and fun and fun. So I hope you can enjoy that part of fundraising, whether you’re a full time fundraiser or maybe you’re a CEO perhaps you’re on a board. I urge you to uh embrace that really fun part of fundraising that is Tony’s take two, associate producer, Kate.

[00:29:44.92] spk_1:
Well, it sounds like you had a very fun week and I’m sure the people that you met up with were having fun as well, you know, getting out, doing something, not being stuck in the home. So, it’s very sweet to, you know, go grab a cup of coffee with the old people, you know.

[00:30:14.79] spk_0:
Well, it’s ok. Yeah. So it’s a little more, a little more than grab a cup of coffee with old people. But, uh, II, I got you. Yes, it, it is. Some of them do like getting out. Um And I, I believe they enjoy our meetings too. At least, at least that’s what they say. We’ll, we’ll leave it at that. That’s what they all say.

[00:30:27.30] spk_1:
We’ve got buku but loads more time here is what to ask before your new website.

[00:30:34.87] spk_0:
Welcome to tony-martignetti Nonprofit radio coverage of 21 NTC, the 2021 nonprofit technology conference. My guest now is Steven Tidmore. He is VP of Technology at Mighty Citizen. Steven. Welcome to Nonprofit

[00:30:50.83] spk_3:
radio. Thanks so much for having me.

[00:31:01.44] spk_0:
Pleasure, pleasure. Your session topic is eight questions to ask before you start a new website, correct? And you, you, um you describe yourself as a technical savant.

[00:31:07.75] spk_3:
I don’t know if I describe myself as that. But um oh,

[00:31:11.71] spk_0:
that was that. It’s in your bio. That’s

[00:31:13.83] spk_3:
not our, our marketing folks may. That’s the

[00:31:17.12] spk_0:
marketing marketing phrase. OK. All right. I won’t ask you to define the technical.

[00:31:24.46] spk_3:
I would just say I’ve been involved in technology websites for um a long time, probably about 20 a little, well, over 20 years now of, um, experience building websites and for various size organizations.

[00:31:34.38] spk_0:
Yeah, indeed. Uh, that, that same market marketing team written bio says you built your first one in 1999?

[00:31:41.49] spk_3:
That’s cool. What

[00:31:42.46] spk_0:
did, what did websites look like in 1999? What, what did, what did it mean to build a website in 1999 or, or 2000? Oh,

[00:32:41.81] spk_3:
that’s, that’s a good question, I guess in some ways it was a lot simpler. Um Depending on the type of website you were building small websites. You know, you didn’t have to worry about all the um extra learning that comes these days from trying to figure out if you’re gonna build a single page application or if you’re gonna use this javascript framework or that javascript framework or, you know, really complex hosting setups. Um So that was simpler, but to do more complex things at times were a bit harder. Um I started at Dell um back in 1999 and I remember I kind of got into the web world because they were transitioning to the Dell dot com to a new technology. Um Well, not a new technology but a new build process using XML. And so coding back then was writing this whole custom XML um code that they had come up with that. Then Knightly would go through a big spider and spit out html and everything else. And so that was more complicated, I guess, in some ways then at least we have standards now and can do, uh, more dynamic things in a standards compliant way. Um, back then a lot of it was all custom

[00:32:58.63] spk_0:
was, that was, that was 1999 remind me, was that the, the, was that the years of, uh, dial up service where we hear that crackling

[00:33:23.49] spk_3:
it still existed? Um, but probably was a little more popular before that, you know, in the, in the late, in the, you know, a little bit earlier in the late nineties. Um but dial up still existed. I remember I still had dial up in 99 but a lot of people had already moved on to DS L or? That’s

[00:33:35.82] spk_0:
right. That was the follow on. Yes. Ok. Digital subscriber line, Ds L? Oh, that’s interesting. Ok. So you got eight questions to ask before you start a new website. Um Are these, are these internal questions that you should be asking before you go to maybe an outside provider? Because our, our listeners are small and mid size shops. So the likelihood of them having a development team, you know, uh I is small. So, so let’s assume that you use outside help for this. Are these internal questions you’re asking or you’re asking of the provider outside

[00:35:10.63] spk_3:
too either or so. So the goal really of the, the eight questions presentation was to just to get people thinking about some of these questions that we ask typically on a web project. So we’ve been doing lots of projects, you know, for a long time. And so we’ve gotten better about identifying these questions. We need to ask upfront on the technical side to avoid some pitfalls that we’ve seen on a lot of projects over the years. Um And so these questions are questions that you may have to go to, you know, if you have an it firm you work with or if you have uh you know, developers, either in house or partner, you know, partner agency like ourselves or other developers, you work with contract developers, you may have to talk to them about it. But some of the, the questions aren’t really that technical at all. Um Just, you know, a lot of the things that seem technical at 1st may be organizational questions around content. Um whether you’re gonna migrate content, who’s going to be in charge of publishing content. And um some of those could have a technical answer. But oftentimes we found that there may be organizational um processes in place that are causing some of the barriers more so than the technology itself. People tend to blame the C MS for, you know, it’s really hard to get content published on our website. And while the C MS could make that easier, most likely, um uh you know, turning to a new C MS immediately to solve that problem probably isn’t the first step. You need to figure out organizationally what you need to do in order to publish content and then find Ac MS that fits, you know, that need as opposed to trying to fit your process into something that C MS is gonna force you into.

[00:35:39.77] spk_0:
I’ve had other guests say the exact same thing uh as recently as earlier today. Oh, really? You know, uh software is often blamed for uh lackluster readership, poor processes. You know, people not understanding what the, what the limitations of the software are. So they look for something else that’s gonna have similar limitations, but they, they think it’s gonna be, you know, the grass is always greener and it’s gonna solve all their problems. And uh so it sounds like your, your eight questions. Let’s get into your questions because it sounds like some of them are gonna probe whether software, whether a new website is really gonna solve the problems that you’ve

[00:36:31.59] spk_3:
got. Yeah, I think just uh before you jump into mosaic questions, we um technology certainly can play a part and, and is to blame for a lot of issues I think in organizations. But um the way the way we look at it is, we, we try to, you know, figure out your organizational goals, publishing goals, um you know, technology goals, all that kind of all that kind of thing first and then find a technology solution that meets that. Um As opposed to just choosing a technology and trying to force your entire organization to use it when it, you know, you could build, like you said, a new website on a new content management system and still have the exact same problems if you haven’t figured out what your goals are first for your organization and, and um your, your visitors and you know, your members or whatever else it is.

[00:36:58.22] spk_0:
So, should we get into our, our questions knowing we just have a couple of minutes to spend on each one? Where, where do you like to start?

[00:37:07.03] spk_3:
What’s, what’s our first? Uh The first question we had in the presentation was do we need to migrate content? And if so what content, why

[00:37:14.10] spk_0:
is this important to know

[00:39:03.22] spk_3:
upfront? Well, so uh I’ve seen this come up on a lot of projects is that people automatically assume oftentimes that all of their content is going to move 1 to 1 into a new website. They may say, OK, we want a new website, we want it to look different and perform different, but we want to just move all of our content over. So you don’t have to rewrite anything. Um And that often case that that doesn’t happen most of the time there may not be, you know, a 1 to 1 fit. So during our, we go through a fairly robust information architecture and discovery phase and we don’t want our information architects to be held back from architecting a page or an experience that um meets your goals simply because they know they have this content that has to fit into the new architecture. And so you may end up with um you know, an events calendar that has new content on it, that you have to go in and add, you may have to add categories or something like that. So we can do fancy filtering and javascript filtering um or um you know, the content may not need to exist anymore. Uh So there is, you know, we see cases a lot where the it does make sense to migrate content, particularly with content that’s already structured. Well, like press releases or blog posts, that kind of thing, usually we’ll have more or less a 1 to 1 fit. Um But there’s lots of content that maybe it’s just in one big Wizz wig field, you know, which is what you see is what you get. I’m, I’m sure you’re familiar with that term, but it’s just basically like a word document or formatting inside a content management system. But now on a new site, there’s a bunch of structured content for a team page that has like your title and your um the department you work under and your phone number and your email address. And so you know, that content can’t migrate easily. So it’s something that we, we talked about way at the beginning and try to figure out does it even make sense to migrate content or do we really need to kind of take a fresh look and, and intercon, um, like

[00:39:05.23] spk_0:
this is like moving your home, you know, changing. Exactly. You need to bring everything with you, you know, maybe, maybe you don’t

[00:40:51.16] spk_3:
or you, yeah, you had three living rooms in your old house. So you have three sofas in your new house. You only have one. So, what, what do we do with those? You’re gonna try to shove them into the, the same one living room or are you gonna get rid of what’s next? Uh The next question is about hosting, just where will the site be hosted? Um So there’s some technical things you have to look at and our recommendation was if you don’t know the answer to questions about just some, you know, basic questions about your, your analytics hard drive space on your current web host ra MC PU bandwidth um that you need to talk to either your web host or your it vendor or someone to figure out those questions. Um But the, the important thing with hosting is that you want to make sure you don’t take into account just your regular activity, you need to look for any traffic spikes. So maybe your organization once or twice a year puts out a controversial press release or something happens that just causes the traffic to jump up. Um You wanna choose a web host that’s robust enough to handle that traffic. But ideally, you don’t want to pay for all the resources to handle that traffic throughout the entire year. Um So, you know, you wanna look for something that’s scalable, ideally where the resources can scale up and the resources you can think about it, just like your computer, you know, you add more ra M or you add more hard drive space. You know, there’s, there’s web hosting setups where they can kind of automatically add those resources whenever the traffic increases and that’s a great solution. Um So you’re not paying for that all the time. Um And then just make sure you’re finding a, a host that supports the technology you’re working with um you know, some hosts specialize in one type of technology versus another. So don’t want to get stuck with a host that doesn’t know your technology. And then if you are working with a, a web um vendor, maybe someone who’s building your website, then you need to make sure you have um an agreement between that web vendor and your host about who’s supporting which pieces of the website in the web hosting environment. You don’t want to get into a situation where the site goes down and the web host says, talk to your website vendor and the website vendor says talk to the web host and everyone looks,

[00:41:10.16] spk_0:
yeah, the finger, the finger pointing.

[00:41:12.30] spk_3:
Yeah. So you wanna, you wanna work that out in advance. It’s very

[00:41:15.18] spk_0:
frustrating for the person

[00:41:17.11] spk_3:
in the middle, for sure. Yeah, it’s not their fault, you

[00:41:19.08] spk_0:
know, who’s lying and who’s telling the truth or both? Half. Right. You know. All right. Um What else?

[00:41:26.88] spk_3:
Um So the third question and I could do, I could go in deeper into hosting, but I’ll pro I’ll just, we’ll go to the rest. We don’t, we,

[00:41:34.99] spk_0:
we, we need, yeah, we only have a couple of minutes to spend on each one. So

[00:43:30.23] spk_3:
OK, the third question is how does content get published? Um And this is one kind of like what I was talking about earlier where you really first wanna consider your organizational goals and your existing procedures for publishing that content. First. Um One thing we recommend is just, just ask is your content up to date and relevant now and if it’s not, then why is it, is it really a limitation in the content management system or your technology or is it an organizational issue that is causing that? Um So that’s the first question and oftentimes it is an organizational issue or content governance issue. Um And then we recommend you think pretty strongly about an approval work flow built into your content management system. What I mean by that is you want to force people to um have to log into the C MS and then post content and then, but they can’t actually publish it that goes to someone else to approve it, maybe it goes to someone else after that to approve it and then it gets published. Do you want to build that process into your C MS or do you want to leave that outside of the C MS? We have um built sites before where it was a requirement to have an approval work flow built in the C MS. But then, you know, we find out halfway through the project that the person who’s actually going to prove the content doesn’t want to do it in the C MS, they want someone to email them and they want uh they don’t want to have to log in and manage that. So, you know, you don’t want to get stuck paying for something or building in something that you don’t need. Um as well as oftentimes, you know, non profit organizations and a lot of organizations, other organizations may have time sensitive content that, that needs to get out there. And if you have a forced approval work flow and one person is the bottleneck and you have to post this content immediately and that person is out of the office, then that can cause issues where you’ve kind of roped yourself into not being able to, to uh publish timely content. And so those are just considerations that we start talking about at the beginning of a project. OK. Um We also talk about along with content. Um you know, you want to talk about the few at the beginning, if you’re ever gonna need Multilingual content in the future because you don’t want to get stuck with a platform that makes that hard. Um So is your, is your website going to need to be translated into multiple languages? And if so choose a platform now that makes that uh pretty similar. Uh I mean, sorry, pretty simple.

[00:43:53.99] spk_0:
Move us, move us to number four, get us halfway home.

[00:45:11.94] spk_3:
What third party systems you need to integrate with. And so this is a big technical question. Um Your website is most likely not an island. It is a um part of an ecosystem that involves lots of other third party tools. Um And this, these can be things like, you know, an event management system, a membership management system, a donor management system, a um mailing list, you know, product, um whatever that is, there’s tons and all those have to be taken into account. And um the first step really is just to sit down and make a list of every third party system or tool that is going to interact with your website. Um And you know, just think about how you handle lead forms and tracking code and social feeds and newsletter, sign ups and events and payments and all that kind of thing and just make a list. And then after you have that list, look at each of those and think about what type of integration do you need. And again, this may need a little bit of technical help um from either someone outside or someone on your team. But there’s, you know, sometimes people think it’s gonna be a complex integration where oh, we have to integrate this third party donor management system with our website. But really all you need is a link or you need some piece of embed code that they give you, you know, for a donation form and you just block that embed code on. That’s a pretty simple integration and then it can start to get more and more complex. Where do you actually need to send data back and forth through PD systems? Do you need to hire a developer to, you know, program, how that’s gonna happen? Does your event system need to send data into your website? So you can publish that in a different way? Um So third party systems are a big part of our technology discoveries we do now, they

[00:45:41.61] spk_0:
are right. There’s a lot, I mean, all the things you ticked off finance and events and uh uh yeah, petitions and things. All right. All

[00:46:40.59] spk_3:
right. Yeah, it can be a big list. What’s next? And then the fifth question is related is if you do have third party systems, um do any of those have websites that your visitors are going to interact with that need to be skinned and by skinned? Um What I mean is that, you know, you can often customize a third party site with design elements like logos or colors or graphics um to make them match your brand and, and we call that process skinning. And so you want to think about all the third party websites that exist that someone, you know your visitors, your website, visitors are going to need to interact with. And if they can interact with those, you want to see can you skin that to make it match your, either your new or current website? Um And if so great, uh you wanna, you wanna try to do that? Um But you want to figure out what the limits are. Some third party sites may just allow you to change the color. Some may allow you just to add a logo. Some may give you full control over fonts and um you know, a bunch of a bunch of styles. Um And if you can do that, then you need to figure out the responsibility. Uh Is that something that third party provider is gonna handle? Is that something you have to handle? And when does that need to happen in your project process? So we start talking about talking about that at the beginning because you don’t want to get to the end of a project and realize, oh, there’s this major third party website and now it doesn’t look anything like our new website, we’re gonna hold up launch so we can take the time to, to make that match.

[00:47:07.31] spk_0:
Um we’re five races of the way through and before we get to, uh, three quarters, uh, I wanna ask you about your six year journey around the world.

[00:47:16.23] spk_3:
Yeah. What

[00:47:17.22] spk_0:
was that? You told me? You bought a one way ticket to somewhere? Was it Portugal? Spain?

[00:47:21.80] spk_3:
Uh It was Spain. Yes. All right.

[00:47:28.00] spk_0:
And so how, how does, uh, how does AAA technologist benefit from seeing other countries for

[00:49:24.51] spk_3:
six years? That’s a great question, I think. Um, so I spent my last semester in college on this program called semester at sea where I had the amazing opportunity of traveling around on a big ship around the world. And um after that immediately, I started working at Dell here in Austin, Texas um on Round Rock technically, but Austin and um ended up working there for three years and um really got a lot out of experience, but I was kind of craving that, that travel. Uh Again, I got the travel bug and um I was young and didn’t have a whole lot of, you know, responsibility and things tying me here. So I bought a one way ticket to Spain and quit my job and had saved up just a little bit of money. And um that led to six years of kind of working my way around the world and various jobs, um lived in Spain for a while. Um lived in the British Virgin Islands, lived in Belize and Nicaragua worked on some native American reservations up in, up in Montana. Um and, uh, you know, bounced around Costa Rica a bunch and had an amazing time. I think, you know, the thing that it gave me, if, if we’re kind of applying it to technology and, um, more of a traditional working world, I think it’s just perspective um on, you know, how technology fits into the, the broader world. Um, there, I think it’s really easy to get stuck or hung up on. Um something that maybe, you know, maybe isn’t super important in the grand scheme of things that maybe seems really important for a week or a day or two. And so I think I have a little bit better perspective on just um the world as a whole and the importance of tasks that we um end up working on. Um And I think uh just the opportunity to live in other cultures. Um I’d recommend it for anyone because it does give, uh well, it gave me, I’ll say, um just insight into how other people live and what’s important to them. And, um you know, I think I, I got a small taste of that. I wouldn’t claim at all, but I’m an expert in all those cultures that I lived in by any means. Um But just a small taste of how people around the world are, are different and um ultimately how they’re all similar and have the same needs.

[00:49:50.92] spk_0:
Thanks perspective and it’s a big world out there.

[00:49:53.87] spk_3:
It is a big world.

[00:49:55.16] spk_0:
We’re not the center of the universe. I like to say that I am the center of the universe personally. But, but our nation is not the center of the universe, the

[00:50:01.56] spk_3:
universe.

[00:50:14.36] spk_0:
I could say it that way. Well, no, but I like to say the universe, I get carried away with some narcissism. Um, let’s, we just have a couple of minutes left. So let’s um, but do me a favor, le let’s do it this way. Just read off. Uh just uh questions 67 and eight and then we’ll come back, go into a little more

[00:50:38.53] spk_3:
detail, but we can do it pretty quick. So I think question six is, um, are you going to need single sign on question seven is how are you going to handle site, search? So, searching inside your website and then question eight is what standards are you required to follow? Um So I can hit this pretty quickly. The single sign on question is just basically, yeah. Yeah, we do. We have time to do this. Why,

[00:50:46.77] spk_0:
why do we need to know this in advance?

[00:52:40.96] spk_3:
Yeah. So the single sign on question is, is a big one. So do you have, um do you already have a system that holds records for, you know, members or visitors or whatever they are that people currently sign into in order to manage their account or do something else? And if So do people also need to sign in to your, your either current website or new, new website in order to do to do something. Um Most of the time that will be something like gated content where content on your site is only available to members. Um And so if you have that, you have to have those member accounts that allow you to access that content. And if so you need to know where those member accounts are stored. And so single sign on basically is a configuration that can allow someone to sign on to multiple different websites or web applications without having to have different accounts for all of them. Um And there’s some standard technologies that you can use that make that fairly easy. But um you just, you just need to start by asking if you need it. And if so do those member accounts exist anywhere now that you can hook into um to, to allow your website to um let people sign in to them using the same accounts. OK. Site search could do, we could talk for a long time about site search. But um you know, the the search on your website is super important. Um And you want to start by asking, you know, where does the data live? Is it in multiple systems? Do you need the site search engine to pull data from a third party site as well as from your website? Do you need a a search engine that’s going to search through the content of files like PDF files. Um Do you need to have a search engine that indexes content that’s only available to logged in users or members? Um And if so, you know, you want to start thinking about search solutions, there’s a lot of great third party search solutions out there. Um That can do a lot of advanced things while at the same time giving non technical users the ability to configure the search. You know, if someone types in a certain search term, these a lot of these third party solutions have a a dashboard where non technical people can say, OK, with this search term, I want this result to appear at the top no matter what. And then the rest of them are ranked by uh relevance. Um Some of the third party search solutions we’ve used that are great. Um Funnel back Pluto a search and swift type are just a few I’d recommend looking into. Um They do have a cost but they offer a fantastic solution.

[00:53:02.92] spk_0:
All right. So search is important. And then our last question

[00:55:03.44] spk_3:
standards, what standards are you required to follow? Um This is something you just want to find out upfront. You may not have specific standards in your organization, especially if you’re a smaller nonprofit. Um But you want to find out things like what browsers does your website need to be compatible with. You’ll have to look at historical data to see, you know, are people still coming to your website using old browsers like internet explorer 11 or can you ditch that and, and move on to more modern coding standards? Do you have any specific security requirements or policies in place? You know, maybe you, you do work with federal government and you have to, um, to adhere to their security standards. You want to know that upfront and then privacy laws are, are pretty big. Um now as they should be. Um things like H IP A which is the um health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act or GDPR, which applies to um eu citizens. Maybe you do some business with EU citizens or the newer one here in the States is called the C CPA, the California Consumer Privacy Act. I’m not a lawyer. I won’t get into the details of all of those. Um But you know, you want to find out upfront if you need to um do anything different on your website to meet those standards. And then you want to think about accessibility from the get go. So what accessibility standards do you need to follow? Um most likely um you need to follow wick a AA. And what that means is um basically, if you’re not familiar uh which I’m sure you probably are, but basic accessibility is making websites, tools and technologies that um people with disabilities can use so anyone can use them regardless of their disability. And WC A is a set of very accepted guidelines um that define how you can make technology accessible. Um more or less at a high level. And there’s a, a level in there called WC AA that the federal government points to now and most other organizations point to. And so you want to be thinking about that from the beginning of your project because if you wait till the end to just run an automated scan, um It’s gonna take a lot to get your website um to be uh compatible with those guidelines. If you’re not thinking about it from the beginning,

[00:55:07.78] spk_0:
we have at least one session from NTC on accessibility.

[00:55:12.24] spk_3:
Yeah. Yeah, there were a number of them, which is great. I mean, the guidelines. Yeah. Yeah. Um And you cannot, you cannot say that your website meets with a AA standards just by running an automated stand. It’s impossible. It, it won’t, it’s impossible for it to check all the guidelines. And so it, it requires manual testing. So you want to plan for that?

[00:55:29.88] spk_0:
All right, we’re gonna leave it there. Great. All right, Steven. Thank you very much, Steve Steven Tidmore, Vice President of Technology at Mighty Citizen. Thank you, Steven.

[00:55:39.93] spk_3:
Thanks for your time. I appreciate

[00:55:41.04] spk_0:
it. All right, my pleasure. Thank you for being with nonprofit radio coverage of 21 NTC.

[00:55:52.68] spk_1:
Next week, tony is working on

[00:55:54.53] spk_0:
it. That’s true. I am. I swear

[00:55:59.13] spk_1:
if you missed any part of this week’s show,

[00:56:02.18] spk_0:
I beseech you to find it at tony-martignetti dot com

[00:56:41.86] spk_1:
or sponsored by donor box outdated donation forms blocking your supporters, generosity. This giving season donor box, the fast flexible and friendly fundraising platform for nonprofits donor box dot org and buy Kila grow revenue, engage donors and increase efficiency with Kila. The fundraisers CRM visit Kila dot co to join the thousands of fundraisers using Kila to exceed their goals. Our creative producer is Claire Meyerhoff. I’m your associate producer, Kate martignetti. The show’s social media is by Susan Chavez. Mark Silverman is our web guy and this music is by Scott Stein.

[00:57:09.71] spk_0:
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 September 19, 2022: The Tech That Comes Next

 

Amy Sample Ward & Afua Bruce: The Tech That Comes Next

Social impact orgs, technology developers, funders, communities and policy makers can all do better at technology development, argue Amy Sample Ward and Afua Bruce in their new book, “The Tech That Comes Next.”

 

 

 

 

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[00:02:21.94] spk_0:
Hello and welcome to Tony-Martignetti non profit radio big non profit ideas for the other 95%. I’m your aptly named host of your favorite abdominal podcast. Oh, I’m glad you’re with me. I’d bear the pain of pseudo ag raffia if I had to write the words you missed this week’s show the tech that comes next social impact orgs, technology developers, funders, communities and policymakers can all do better at technology development for greater equity, argue Amy sample Ward and Bruce in their new book, The tech that comes next tony take two heading to the Holy Land. We’re sponsored by turn to communications pr and content for nonprofits. Your story is their mission turn hyphen two dot c o and by fourth dimension technologies I. T. Infra in a box the affordable tech solution for nonprofits. tony-dot-M.A.-slash-Pursuant D Just like 3D but they go one dimension deeper. It’s my pleasure to welcome Amy sample Ward returning she’s the ceo of N 10 and our technology and social media contributor there at AMY sample ward dot org and at Amy R. S Ward and to welcome Bruce. She is a leading public interest technologist who has spent her career working at the intersection of technology policy and society. She’s held senior science and technology positions at data kind, the White House, the FBI and IBM She’s at a few a underscore Bruce who is a F. U. A. Together they’ve co authored the book the tech that comes next how change makers, philanthropists and technologists can build an equitable world. Their book is at the tech that comes next dot com. Amy welcome to nonprofit radio Thanks

[00:02:26.04] spk_1:
for having us.

[00:02:27.35] spk_2:
I’m glad to

[00:02:28.07] spk_1:
hear what you

[00:02:29.25] spk_0:
think both of you for the first time. Very nice to meet you. Glad to have you.

[00:02:34.51] spk_2:
I’m so excited to be here.

[00:02:53.06] spk_0:
Thank you, excited. That’s terrific. You may be more excited than I am. I don’t know, but I know I’m very excited. I’m very pleased. I already said I was pleased, excited. Is excited is even better than pleased. Thank you. Uh let’s start with you since people know AMY sample ward voice. Um I feel like we should start with a definition of technology the way you to see it.

[00:03:45.79] spk_2:
Absolutely technology can mean many things to many different people and even when people just simply hear the word of technology here, the word technology contra and hope of the future and assistive devices that may transform our world, but it can also bring up feelings of in trepidation and confusion and so in the book, when we talk about technology, we define it very broadly as to what our tools that exist to help us really exist in the world. Um and so this can be anything from digital systems and websites and like AI for example, but it’s also more basic things such as you know, pay deeper or other tools that are just used. And so we define it extremely broadly in the book. The focus of the book does focus on digital technologies though and really looking at adoption and use and development of digital technologies especially as it relates to the social impact sector

[00:04:07.28] spk_0:
and what what troubles you about our relationship to technology?

[00:04:36.38] spk_2:
Um, well I am an engineer, a computer engineer specifically. And so I love technology. I love being in technology. I love doing all sorts of things with technology. I love designing new ways to use technology and figuring out how to design technology to support new ways of interact that we have. I think one of the things that

[00:04:41.22] spk_1:
does

[00:05:34.13] spk_2:
give me pause though is how some see technology or some try to position technology as the be all and end all the magic solution that we could have to solve all of our problems. And that if we simply find the right technology, if we simply insert technology into any societal problem that we’re facing, that that technology will magically fix whatever we have been facing. And that’s simply not true technology not a natural phenomenon. It is something that we could create. It’s something that we should be intentionally creating to minimize bias to make sure that technology is developed and used in inclusive ways and really does enhance what we want to do as humans, which is hopefully live well together in community. Um and not just be used as some big tool to force uh different, often um different, often disproportionately impacting outcomes

[00:05:45.54] spk_0:
and you have a lot to say about development specifically more more equitable development.

[00:07:43.75] spk_2:
Yes, absolutely. Um I think equitable development of technology is something that can and should be continuing to grow. I think historically, especially when we look at the past several decades of the rise of digital technologies and technology more broadly the um the power, the money, the education has been concentrated in one group and a lot of other groups, it includes a lot of historically underrepresented or overlooked communities um based on ethnicity, based on gender identity, based on sexuality, based on ability, physical ability, mental ability or more um have really been left out or forgotten about. And so when we talk about a more inclusive design process and more inclusive development process for technology, we’re talking about one being more inclusive to who is actually allowed in the room when we talk about technology design. So who do we see as capable of being technologist um and who have who has those abilities to engage that way, but also recognizing that because technology does not exist alone, but because technology doesn’t exist in a vacuum, because technology can’t magically solve all of our problems on our own. Even if you’re not a technologist, you should be at the table in some of these design conversations because you are part of communities that have needs and those needs should be articulated at the start of the design process. You might understand a particular subject matter. I think in the book we talk about using technology in the education space, in the food space in other spaces as well, you may have some of that knowledge that is critical to making sure that the technology supports the overall goals of those sectors. And so it is important that as we think about being inclusive in developing technology, we make space for not just different types of people who are able to be technologists, but also different types of expertise that we need in that developed process.

[00:08:09.00] spk_0:
So you’re not so pleased with the model where rich, privileged white males develop technology develop, identify what’s going to be solved and how best to solve it. I I assume that that model is not working for you.

[00:08:27.26] spk_2:
I would say I would go even further than

[00:08:30.25] spk_0:
going out and

[00:08:30.92] spk_2:
it’s not working for most of us. Um so it is not working for most of us to have the power concentrated in that

[00:08:52.64] spk_0:
way. Okay. And in fact, uh someone see, I don’t know who wrote which sentences, but somebody wrote. We can’t continue to perpetuate the belief that those with the most money know best. I don’t know, maybe your editor put that in. You may not even be one of the two of you. I don’t know. Maybe

[00:08:57.13] spk_2:
I

[00:08:58.76] spk_0:
trust

[00:09:36.43] spk_2:
me amy and I spent many, many hours on many, many aspects of writing and editing to make sure that what is in the book. We both stand behind. And so absolutely with that sentence. Something that I think we we both stand behind. Um We can’t let you said we can’t let one small population in this case rich privileged white men be the ones who design all of the technology and decide all of the outcomes for everyone. We really need to. And in the book we talk a lot about how it’s so important, why it is so important to go back to communities and communities who understand their needs to understand their priorities and let communities drive that process. That would then include um policymakers. That then includes funders that that includes um technologists themselves and that includes

[00:09:53.21] spk_0:
uh

[00:09:54.53] spk_2:
the leaders and employees at social impact organizations.

[00:09:58.85] spk_0:
Another aspect of it is that just what’s what problems get solved? What what what gets attention?

[00:10:06.18] spk_2:
Absolutely. And um I think we have lots of ideas on this, but I have been talking for so long. Um I would love to pass it.

[00:10:29.88] spk_0:
We’ll get a simple word gets amy sample Ward will get their chance. Okay. Um Alright, if you insist for All right. Um Okay, if we have to go to Amy Now. All right. Uh You say somebody wrote this sentence. Uh Exactly related to what I was just saying. We dream of community centered work that builds from community centered values and there’s a lot of emphasis on going back to values. Um Why don’t you uh just sort of introduce us to the some of those values amy

[00:14:05.53] spk_1:
sure. Happy to. um I think that you know one thing we say in the book and we’ve we’ve enjoyed getting to talk to a lot of groups about since the book has come out is that everything we do as people is centered on values, but often times we don’t talk about them, we don’t make sure that our values are aligned when we start working on something. And so then those values become a some and I think we’ve all heard many different puns about what happens when you operate on assumption. Right. And so that’s that’s kind of part and parcel of also assuming that the only people that can make technology are people with certain degrees or that have a certain amount of money or that you know look a certain way. Um again that that’s those are values that we’re not talking about and that we need to talk about so that we can be really intentional about what we want to focus on. Um and in the book, you know of who has already been speaking to some of those values that there’s important role and we need to prioritize lots of different lived experience as an important part of any technology project. Um that a lot of different people should be involved in every single stage of that process, not like at the end, once we build something and we like pull the pull the little cover off and are like today we built it, what do you think there should be no pulling the cover off? You know, everyone should have already been part of it and known it was being built this whole time. Um but also values that I think are important to can it name early in the conversation around accessibility, so much of the barriers and the walls around technology projects that are there, you know again, whether people are talking about them explicitly or not that are maintaining this this false reality, that only certain people can be involved are coming from a place of saying oh we speak a certain way we use these acronyms. We we talk about things without slowing down for other people to be involved. So what does accessibility look like? Not just that a tool could be used with a system of you know devices but really that you are not using jargon that you’re making sure things are being held at the time of day when those folks that you want involved can be there. Um that child care is provided that your user group meetings, you know every level that you are operating in ways that really do make things accessible to everyone. Um and I think another value that we like to talk about early in conversations is the book is kind of a big idea like the world is not the world we have right now, like what if it was not this, what if it was equitable and just and wonderful. Um, and I know you want to talk about the illustrations colorful uh, you know, so to get there. It’s not like two steps. It’s not okay. That’ll be on like the 2024 plan, right? It’s a lot of work. And so technology and the relationship and expectations we put on it just like social change are that we can make incremental right now immediate changes and at the same we can be working on really big changes. The shifts that get us to a very different world that we have to do both. We can’t just say, well let’s live with harmful technologies and and harmful realities until we can all of a sudden just change over to the like non harmful one. Um, you know, we need to make changes today as we’re building for bigger change.

[00:16:31.93] spk_0:
It’s time for a break. Turn to communications. They have a bi weekly newsletter that I get. It’s called on message and they had something interesting in the, in the last one, it was five ways to find the timely hook and I’ve talked about news hooks with them that can be a great opportunity for you to be heard when there is some kind of a news hook. So how do you find these timely hooks, couple of their ideas track recognition days and months. I just did that in august, it was national make a will month and I did a bunch of content around that and there was, you know, there are days and months for everything like pickled day and a lot. So you can search for, you can search for the the recognition days and months, find something that fits with your work. Another one was just staying current with the news. They said they were gonna send their e newsletter on the day that queen Elizabeth died but they thought better of it because you’re not gonna be able to get people’s attention. People are just gonna be deleting emails more rapidly because they’re consumed with the death of the queen. So they held off a day or two. Um, and tying to a trend is another one that they suggested. Uh and they give the example of when um including salaries in job postings was trending and they used the example of somebody who actually wrote contrary to that idea. But it was timely because it was something that lots of people were talking about. So there’s a couple of ways of identifying the hooks, You can get their newsletter on message. Of course you go to turn hyphen two dot c o. Turn to communications. Your story is their mission now back to the tech that comes next. How is it that technology is not neutral? Amy

[00:16:36.71] spk_1:
well,

[00:16:37.09] spk_0:
humans, humans,

[00:17:26.74] spk_1:
I don’t think humans have the capacity to be neutral. And we are the ones creating technology. I mean even before digital technologies. You know, the number of um, pieces of farm equipment that could be considered technology, you know, humans built those that kill people who are left handed because the tool was built by right handed people to be used with your right hand, right? Like there’s there’s not a lot of evidence that humans can be neutral. And so then you add to that that we’re building it with a often very small group of people not talking about values for something that is meant to be you know, used in a different context with different people. It’s it just doesn’t have the capacity to be neutral. Let’s

[00:17:43.78] spk_0:
take something that’s so ubiquitous. It’s an easy example. Let’s take facebook. How is so somebody’s facebook is there, you can use it or not use it. How is that not just a neutral entity sitting there for you to use or not use,

[00:19:31.46] spk_1:
I mean you are welcome to use or not use facebook but just because you have the choice to use something or not use, it doesn’t mean it’s neutral. The platform is collecting your data is selling your data is deciding whether and how you can use the tool to connect with other people or to create groups, right? It is not allowing you the control over how your data and and use of the platform goes. So it’s kind of a false choice really. Um and for a lot of people, it is very much a false choice. There. There isn’t the feeling that they cannot use it if it’s the only quote unquote free tool that they could use to find certain resources or to otherwise, you know, talk and stay in communication with certain people, but at what cost, you know, and I think that’s the kind of conversation we’re trying to spark in the book is technology isn’t neutral, we just accept that and then we say and so at what cost at what harm are people having to make these choices around how they navigate technology? And we we have never presupposed in this book or in our lives that facebook or any other platform is going to necessarily make the choices that are best for the community and that’s why policymakers have an entire chapter in the book. You don’t need to be a text specialist or have a who is you know, technical background to be a policymaker that’s making smart protective policies that for users we need to say, hey people should be able to access and protect and restrict their data. Let’s make some policies around that. Right? Because the platforms are not going to make that policy themselves that that restricts them. Um and so I think again, all of these different groups together, get us to the tools that we need and not just the technology developers themselves,

[00:19:56.28] spk_0:
a few anything you want to add to that. Uh My my question about why facebook is not a neutral tool.

[00:20:50.18] spk_2:
I I think Amy gave a really good overview as to why technology and facebook in this case is not neutral. I think um you know, a lot of people now you’ll hear say they algorithm made me see it, the algorithm didn’t make me see something and that just also goes to the fact that someone has programmed the algorithm, someone has decided what will be given more weight or what will be given less weight, what will be emphasized won’t be emphasized. And so that then drives your interactions and the biases that the programmers have or the stated goals that the owners of the platform have then get seen to encoded into the technology that you use, whether it’s facebook or any other platform that then can affect how you interact, even if you do decide to often to using the technology as Amy mentioned, you always well not always, but you often have a choice as to which technology you want to use, what platform you want to log into, you want to engage with or not, but once you’re there, your choices are often limited in ways you might not realize because of the fact that technology is not neutral.

[00:21:20.02] spk_0:
We’re getting into the idea of oppressive systems which which the book talks about for you wanna explain. So, facebook may very well be an example, but what what what what’s oppressive systems generally,

[00:23:01.71] spk_2:
you know, I think one of the underlying themes of our book is that technology can really be used to enhance goals and to sort of enhance missions, and we argue in the book that we want to, you know, social impact organizations, especially communities to find ways for technology to enhance their mission, to help them accomplish their goals more often. But the reality is that technology again sits on top of people because it’s created by people and so to the egg extent in which extent to which um there are oppressive systems and society, whether that’s around how people get jobs or access education or access other resources, um that is then I can just be translated into the technology systems that then help facilitate our lives. It’s the same principles for different sort of outdated policies that have been rooted in unequal access. For example, if you just take those policies and write code then um that directly relates to policies, the new system, this technical system you’ve created has those same oppressive oppressive aspects in that system. And so again, when we talk about designing technology does need to come back to what communities are we designing for? Are we talking to them? Are we letting communities really drive that work? And through the development process are we really keeping in mind some of the historical context, some of the social context, some of the knowledge about biases and how that appears in different technology and what ties doesn’t have to how organizations function and how policymakers do their work, Um what we need to be funding to make sure that we have the time and the money to invest in a more inclusive process.

[00:25:40.82] spk_1:
I just want to add as I was talking about that um, and kind of trying to like hear our own conversation while while we’re in it and to share the reminder that while of course like facebook is this giant huge technology platform. Um, we are also talking about technologies that nonprofits make, you know, an organization that decided to have their staff or hire a web designer to help build something on their website that allowed users to complete their profile or to donate on their website. All of these things that organizations are doing with technology is also developing technology, right? It also needs to be inclusive. It should also have a lot of your community members and users part of that process the whole way, right. This isn’t just for for profit giant tech companies to hear this feedback, this is everyone including the way we fund our own technology inside of organizations, the way we prioritize or build or don’t prioritize or you know, don’t build technology and when we, when we think of it that way and you know, it’s just so easy, I think or I think it is easy to to say, oh my gosh, facebook is an oppressive platform, all of these things are horrible. It’s done all of these things. We can, you know, we could search for news articles from a decade of issues, right? But that kind of shifts the attention. Um, and acts like we as organizations don’t have any blame to share in that not that we’re sharing in facebook’s blame, but like we too are part of making not great decisions around technology, you know. Um there’s an organization that I I experienced this as a user on their website and had to give them some feedback that there they collected demographics as you’re creating your profile super common to do right? Um, their race and ethnicity category for like all humans that would answer this category only had four options total of all of the races and ethnicities in the world. There were four. Not one of those options was multiracial, not one of those was other. Let me tell you the thing you didn’t list here, right? You had to pick required question with four radio

[00:25:52.25] spk_0:
buttons.

[00:26:29.98] spk_1:
That’s that is that is harmful, right? Like you and maybe there was a good reason, not a good reason. Maybe there was a reason that you felt, you know, your funder makes you report in those four categories. I totally understand how hard it is to like manage your work as well as meeting all these funder reporting requirements. That’s something we talk about the book that is an issue. We need to go fix funders reporting requirements, but just because a funder says give us state in these four categories does not mean those are your four categories right? You have an obligation to your car community to be better than that. Um, and so I just want to name that as an example that we’re not just taking the easy route of complaining about facebook, which I would love to do for like five more hours.

[00:26:41.44] spk_0:
No facebook is not even facebook is not even,

[00:26:43.71] spk_1:
you know what I mean? Also trying to name it as something we’re doing inside our organizations to

[00:28:58.50] spk_0:
your example reminds me of the example you cite from jude shimmer who says, you know, she’s filling out a donation, they’re filling out a donation form and there’s no mx option. It was mr mrs Miss, I guess no mx um, by the way, you had several nonprofit radio guests quoted in the book, Jason sham steve hi jude. So I’m glad non profit radio brought these folks to your attention. You know, elevated their voices so that you, you became aware of them because you would not have known them outside. Well that’s elevating voices. That’s exactly exactly right. It’s time for a break. 4th dimension technologies, technology is an investment. Are you seeing this? You’re investing in staff productivity, you’re investing in your organization’s security donor relations because you’re preserving giving and all the actions and all the person’s preferences and their attendance and things. So you’re certainly investing in your donor relationships, uh, in your sustainability. So because technology is gonna help you preserve your mission into the future. So I don’t want to just throw something out and then not explain it. So see technology as an investment, fourth dimension can help you invest wisely. So, uh, make those savvy tech investment decisions. You can check them out on the listener landing page at Just like three D. But you know, they don’t want to mention deeper. Let’s return to the tech that comes next. All right. So let’s bring it. All right. So no, as I said, facebook is not mentioned in the book. I was choosing that as a ubiquitous example, but let’s bring it to something that is non profit created. Who wants to talk about. I kind of like the john jay college case because I used to do planned giving consulting for john jay, who, which of you knows that story better. Nobody

[00:30:43.41] spk_2:
looking at other resume. But I will, I will happen and talk about the john jay college example. So just briefly for folks who might not have read the book or gotten to that section of the book yet. Um, john jay college, an institution in new york city that had recognized that they had a lot of services geared towards making sure people finished their freshman year and started their second year, but not as many services geared towards people who, um, not as many services geared towards me, making sure people then ultimately graduate. And so specifically they had noticed that they had a large number of students or a not insignificant number of students who completed three quarters of the credits they needed to graduate but didn’t ultimately complete their degree and graduate. They partnered Data kind, which is an organization that provides data science and ai expertise to other profits and government agencies. Um so they worked with those data scientists to really understand their issue to look at the 20 years of data that the academic institution had collected. The data. Scientists ran about two dozen models, I think it was and ended up coming up with ended up developing a specific model specific tool for john jay college To use that identified students who are at risk of dropping out and potential interventions. The John Jay College staff then made the final determination as to what intervention would be done and how that would be done. And two years after this program was started at John Jay College credits the program with helping additional nine 100 students graduate. Um and so that is, I think, you know, one of the examples that we’re talking about of really the technology coming together with the subject matter experts really being used to enhance the mission and then really again, technology and humans working together to make sure that the outcomes are our best for everyone.

[00:31:04.33] spk_0:
There’s some takeaway there too in regard to ethics, the use of the data collection and use of the data. Can you talk about that? Absolutely,

[00:31:51.44] spk_2:
Absolutely, absolutely. As we think about data collect data collection data use data analysis, I think in general, especially in the social impact space, you want to make sure that you got consent when you collect the data that you’re collecting it in ways that make sense, that you’re not necessarily over collecting um you’re storing in the right way is protected in the right ways. Um and then as you need to do something with it, you can you can access it, you can use it as a way to foster communication across a different departments. I think one thing that was really exciting and talking to the john jay college staff as they said this program in that development actually force conversations across departments which if you’ve ever done any work at an academic institution, you know, working across departments on campus can be challenging and so sometimes the data can force those conversations and can also help strengthen arguments for the creation or um termination of different programs.

[00:32:15.79] spk_0:
Thank you because ethics is one of the one of your core values ethical considerations around around technology development and

[00:33:23.63] spk_1:
I think that’s I like that you’re bringing that up tony because I think it reinforces, I mean a fool was saying this, but just to kind of like explain those words when we’re saying that technology is there to help humans, it means that algorithm that was created is not moving forward and sending, you know, a resource or sending an inch invention to a student, it is not there to do the whole process itself, right? It’s there for its portion and then humans are looking at it, they are deciding, you know, who needs, what resources, who needs what intervention. And they then do that outreach right? Versus that idea that I think nonprofits especially think of all the time. Like if we just got the tool then this whole like thing will be solved and it’ll just like somehow run its course, you know, and like the robots will be in charge and that’s not great. We don’t need to do that. We’re not looking for robots to be in charge but also in this really successful example of technology being used, it’s still required people, you know, the technology isn’t here to replace them. It’s to do the part that we don’t have the time to do. Like crunch all those numbers and figure those things out and then the people are doing what people are meant to do, which is the relationship side, The intervention side, the support side, you know. Um and

[00:33:43.70] spk_0:
I just want to kind

[00:33:44.49] spk_1:
Of separate the two right?

[00:33:46.71] spk_0:
The tool was to flag those who are at greatest risk of not graduating after they have I think three quarters of the points or credits. Uh so so that

[00:33:58.99] spk_1:
that

[00:34:13.73] spk_0:
right, that that’s an ideal day. That’s an ideal uh data mining artificial intelligence task. Just flag the folks who are at greatest risk because we’ve identified the factors like I don’t remember what any of the factors were. G. P. A. I think was one. But whatever the factors are identified them now flag these folks. Now it’s time for a human to intervene and give the support to these to this population so that we can have 900 more folks graduating than than we expect would have without without the use of the tool.

[00:35:19.70] spk_2:
Yeah, absolutely. And just to continue to build on what Amy was saying. I think sometimes as nonprofits are considering technology or maybe hearing pitches about why they should use technology or why they should select a particular technology. It can be overwhelming because sometimes the perception is that if you adopt technology it has to then take over your system and and rem move sort of the human aspect of running your nonprofit and that’s simply not the case. You can always push back as to what those limits need to be sort of in general but also very specifically for your organization for your community. What makes sense? What doesn’t make sense? And so really prioritizing as Amy said, the using the technology to take advantage and to do those tasks that or just simply more efficient and computers are more capable of doing that while you use the humans involved for the more human touch and some of those more societal factors I think really um it’s important to emphasize that as leaders of social impact organizations, as leaders of nonprofits, you have that agency to sort of understand and to decide where the technology is used and where it isn’t used.

[00:36:57.67] spk_1:
Yeah, we, we were really conscious when we were working on the book to disrupt this pattern that you know, it’s like you learn a new word and then you see it in everything that you read. Um once, once we talk about it here, you’re gonna like go and everything you click on on the internet, you’re going to see it. But technology companies have been trying to sell us for a long time very successfully that their product is a solution and technologies are constantly using that language when you’re looking at their website, when they’re talking to you, you know, this is an all in one crm solution, this whatever, they are not solutions, they are tools and as soon as we, as you know, non profit staff start adopting that, they are the solutions, we then start kind of relinquishing the control, right? And thinking, oh well the solution is that this too, tool has all of this, It is just a tool, you are still the solution right? You are still the human and we, we didn’t want to have that language in the book. So you know, we’re always talking about technology as a tool because with, without humans needing to put it to work, it doesn’t need to exist. We don’t need to have a world that’s trying to make sure we can maintain all of this technology if we don’t need it anymore. Thank you for your service. Like please move along. We don’t, we don’t need that anymore. And that’s okay. We don’t need to feel bad that a tool isn’t needed anymore. It’s not needed. Great. We have different needs now, you know, um and changing that kind of dynamic and relationship inside organizations.

[00:37:24.77] spk_0:
A Crm database is a perfect example of that. It’s not gonna, it’s not gonna build relationships with people for you. It’s just gonna keep track of the activities that you have and it’s gonna identify people’s giving histories and event attendance and help them ticket etcetera. But it’s not going to build personal relationships. They’re gonna lead to greater support whether it’s volunteering or being a board member or donating whatever, you know, it’s

[00:37:39.88] spk_1:
not the mission, It’s not the food at the gala. Even if it sold the tickets to the gala right? Like it isn’t at all.

[00:38:13.47] spk_0:
So I, so I gathered so the Wiley did most of the writing on the book is what I gather because I managed a couple of quotes and nobody like nobody claimed them. So um and also the I I see there’s only two pictures, I like a lot of pictures in books. You only have two pictures and then you repeat the same two pictures from the beginning, You repeat them at the end and and they’re in black and white, they’re not even four color pictures. So there’s a little shortcomings

[00:38:15.70] spk_1:
that’s because in the book they could only be black and white, but in the e book they can, the one that’s meant to be in color can be in color.

[00:38:25.00] spk_2:
And also we knew that our readers have imaginations of their own and the words that we have on the page would evoke such strong images we didn’t want

[00:38:33.81] spk_0:
to overly

[00:38:34.58] spk_2:
provide images in the book.

[00:40:08.82] spk_0:
Very good, well played. Okay, it’s time for Tony’s take Two. I’m headed to the Holy Land in november. I’m traveling to Israel for two weeks and I’m wondering if you have suggestions of something that I should see? We can crowdsource my my sight seeing a few things that are already on my itinerary, of course the old city in Jerusalem um Haifa and the Baha’I gardens the Dead Sea and uh mitzpe ramon. You may have some other ideas, things that uh you found or places to eat, maybe that would be that would be great little uh terrific places that I should try in either Jerusalem or tel Aviv I’ll be spending a lot of time in, in those two places but also near these other, these other ones that I mentioned to Haifa So if you know a good restaurant eatery, I’d appreciate that too. You could get me at tony at tony-martignetti dot com. I’d be grateful for your Israel travel suggestions and anything else that you may recommend about Israel travel. I haven’t been there, so I’d be grateful to hear from you that is tony steak too. We’ve got boo koo but loads more time for the tech that comes next with Amy sample ward and a few a Bruce. Let’s let’s talk about another story. Talk about, let’s talk about, yeah, you, you all pick one, pick one of your case cases stories to talk about that that you like,

[00:44:39.78] spk_1:
I can talk about one since the flu already talked about one, but I was thinking because you already said it earlier, the food sector, so there’s one in there on rescuing leftover cuisine, an organization founded in new york. Um, and I think a pretty classic example of non profit trajectory like someone has personal lived experience they want to address, you know, make sure people don’t have the experience they had and create an organization kind of accidentally like they just start doing the work and they’re like, wait, what am I doing? Wait, we’ve just created a nonprofit, you know, and and kind of want to build because they start to have success actually doing the thing that they set out to do. Um, but like many nonprofits you reach the limit of human scale, like you get to the, this is only the number of people I can personally talk to or physically carry food, you know from one restaurant to to a shelter or whatever. Um and realize, oh we’re gonna need some tools to help us make this thing work. Um and grow beyond just the handful of initial people and also like many nonprofits, that was a very reactive process, right? Like oh gosh, we need a calendar tool, here’s one, oh gosh, we need a, you know, a phone tool, here’s one and not what is the best, you know, what what do we really need? How do we solve these goals? So they found themselves a few years in with very common nonprofit sector, like little patchwork, you know, all different kinds of things. They’ve kind of forced and often the the integration to use the technical term, the integration between tools was humans like answered the phone and then typed it into the tool because the person on the phone doesn’t have access to type it into the schedule er right? Like I they were having to be the tech integrations as humans, which meant humans were not doing human work, right? Humans were doing work that that the robots should be able to do. Um and that’s when they brought in more strategic dedicated technology. Um staff helped to build and again, what they didn’t really realize at first is they were building a product, you know? Um I think this is a bigger conversation of you and I have with organizations is we are we have products, we’ve built products. It’s not bad. And I think especially in the US, we’ve come to think that product is like a for profit word and we will have nothing to do with it. But what it just means is like it’s a package, it is a thing that’s doing what it’s meant to do. And we should think about how we make sure it works and who can access it. And you know, we bring some strategy to it. Um, but their process is really what drew us to including them in the book. They had a really inclusive process where all the different folks from, you know, that were users. So the volunteers who physically like went to the restaurant and picked up that food and and took it to an agency, the people in the agencies, the people in the kitchen of the restaurants, all those different people were able to say, oh, I wish the tool did this. I wish that I could do this every day when I need to pick up food. I wish I could get this kind of message. Everyone was able to give that feedback and then see everybody else’s requests so that as the staff and community and the tech team prioritized, okay, well what works together? What can we build next? What’s in line to be built next? Everyone had transparency. Everyone could see that everyone understood, okay, my thing is last or like I know why my thing is last, right? Like people could really see and give feedback and be part of the process the whole time kind of back to the very beginning of this conversation with us said, even if they were not the technical developers themselves, they had important expertise, Right? It was good to know, oh, these five different restaurants all want the same thing, what’s happening, right? Like what is the thing that’s happening for restaurants trying to offer food? Let’s figure that out. We know who to get feedback from, you know, um, we’re just such a wonderful example of people really having everyone involved in the whole process. Um, and as they have done that and continue to do that, they were able to move people out of, you know, answering the phone to type into the calendar and move people into human jobs. Um, grew the organization, it’s now in eight different cities in different states. Um, and that’s just more of the mission happening, right? Because technology was invested in in the right kind of way.

[00:45:02.73] spk_0:
So takeaways are transparency in prioritizing development inclusiveness, including

[00:45:10.61] spk_1:
the, including

[00:45:11.71] spk_0:
the community, all the, all the different

[00:45:14.65] spk_1:
people

[00:45:15.63] spk_0:
who are impacted, giving them agency

[00:45:18.80] spk_1:
to

[00:45:19.70] spk_0:
contribute and not not have it developed.

[00:45:24.33] spk_1:
Yeah. And they had,

[00:45:25.28] spk_0:
I don’t know how much

[00:46:40.74] spk_1:
of this made it into the book, but you know, in talking with them and having conversations, you know, there were a number of times where the thing they were hearing from, all these different users that needed to be prioritized wasn’t something as staff, they maybe would have identified or at least prioritized, but when you’re really listening and having the community drive that development, you know, is that what you’re investing in is actually going to make it better for your community, right? It’s the thing that they’re asking for versus you saying, Gosh, we have, you know, what’s next on our development docket, wonder what we could build, Like let’s think of something you’re not kind of guessing, you know, exactly what needs to be built and that’s kind of reinforcing for your users that you are listening that you are valued that they want this to be as good of an expiry as possible for you, right, Which is really kind of um bringing people in closer and and I think we all know, especially tony as the fundraiser, like keeping people, it’s a lot easier than bringing in new people. So if you can keep those partners in great, you know, you keep those volunteers in instead of having to recruit new ones because you’re burning them out because they don’t like working with you, it’s not a good experience, you know? Um yeah,

[00:47:26.71] spk_0:
let’s talk about the funding, but but not from the funders side because most of the very few of our listeners are on the, on the funding side, they’re on the grantee side and so from the, well the book, you talk about social impact organizations, but this is tony-martignetti non profit radio not tony-martignetti social impact organization, radio So so if we could use, please use nonprofits as an example in their funding requests, they’re doing grants, what what can nonprofits do smarter about requesting funds around technology, the development and the use that’s going to be required for the, you know, for the, for the project that they’re trying to get funded.

[00:47:32.08] spk_1:
Yeah,

[00:47:32.45] spk_2:
absolutely. This is a question that Amy and I have gotten so many times since the book has come out.

[00:47:42.97] spk_0:
Okay, well I’ll give you a milk toast bland ubiquitous question that not that

[00:49:01.18] spk_2:
it’s a milk toast question, but it is one that is so important to organizations and that even for non profit organizations that have thought about technology before, then the question becomes how are you going to get it funded right? And so, um, it’s an incredibly important question. And so I think that there are a couple of things that non profits can do. One is to seek out funders who are explicitly funding technology, we’ve seen an increase I think over the past several years in different foundations, different companies who are specifically funding technology and so looking for those types of funders. Um, I think it’s really important, I think then another thing to do is to really make the case as we make in the book that um, funding technology is part of funding programs of the organizations and part of funding the running of the organization. Um, it’s not simply an overhead costs. That is a nice to have that. If you get around to it, you can do it, but really you need to have strong technology and data practices in order to design your programs to run your programs. Um people, you know, are used to being out in the world and interacting with technology in certain and so when they come to your nonprofit, they still probably would like to have a website that sees them that recognizes them. That’s useful. They might like to know how to get connected to other people in your community, other staff members and what those communication technologies might look like and more. And so really looking for ways to write technology into program design as non profits are doing that

[00:49:25.77] spk_1:
as well. And

[00:49:25.97] spk_2:
then I think thirdly, just being connected with other nonprofits through organizations such as N 10 and listening to other great podcasts such as this one um to hear what, what other nonprofits are doing and what’s been successful as well. And applying some of those techniques to your own organization.

[00:49:47.95] spk_0:
I feel bad that I gave short Shrift to the, to the foundation listeners. So, I mean there’s there’s lessons in what you just said. Um, are there one or two other things that we can point out for uh for foundation listeners that to raise their consciousness.

[00:51:25.89] spk_2:
Absolutely. Um, I think one of, I think, you know, there are many things about technology that can be funded, especially with nonprofit organizations. And I really encourage foundations to think about what it means to really fund that inclusive innovation process and to fund when I say innovation. I mean recognizing that version one is might not be perfect. And so funding version 1.1 and 1.2 and version two point oh, is just as valuable as funding version one. We see this all the time in the private sector that, you know, my phone gets updates on a regular basis and I still have a, and that’s okay. And so really wanting to make sure that funders recognize that we don’t need to just create new technology every time for the sake of creating something new, but really allowing the space for that iteration and really adjusting to the community needs is really important. I think also making sure that we’re funding inclusivity and so that can be things such as uh compensating people, you know, from the community for time, um, as they are involved in this development process, making sure that there’s money in the budget for all staff, not just a member of the tech team to get training on technology, but there’s money for all staff to get training on the different technologies that the organization is using. Um, and also the timelines that are given to nonprofits doing their programs allows for that really critical community listening and community input process into developing any technology and then ultimately developing and executing programs,

[00:51:49.02] spk_0:
I’m glad you just used community as an example because I wanted to probe that a little deeper how

[00:51:55.99] spk_1:
I

[00:52:11.32] spk_0:
guess, I guess I’m asking how you define community because you say that, you know, technologists and social impact or eggs and policymakers and communities can can be should be more involved in uh, technology development. How are you defining communities there?

[00:54:23.04] spk_1:
We’re not in a way because technology that N 10 builds for, you know, the community that that we have is very different than um, you know, that would be a bunch of nonprofit staff from mostly U. S. And Canada, but also all over the world, um of all different departments. Right? That that would be the community that intent has, but the community around, um, you know, the equitable giving circle in Portland. Well, that’s Portland’s specific very, you know, geographically different than the N 10 community. Um, it’s folks who can do monthly donations that want to support, uh, you know, black community in Portland, it community is meant to be defined based on what is trying to be built and and for whom it’s meant to be used. Um, and that’s going to be flexible, but I think where it really comes in is what we talked about in the book, in the funding section, but also all of the sections is what does it look like when we expect that transfer to community ownership is the final stage of technology development. Right. And so if that is the final stage, if um the community, you know, owning the technology that was developed by someone, um is the final step well, there needs to be a level of training and an investment that is very different than if you’re planning to keep this privately yourself the whole time, right? If you’re going to turn it over to the community to own it and maintain it, you’re going to be investing in that community in the process in a very different way. You’re going to be including people in a different way. You’re going to be thinking about knowledge transfer, not just technical transfer, right? Um and so that relationship with the community is inherent to the goal at the end. And I think that’s for us, part of what is so important about thinking about that big question of what does it look like for community to really own technology? Like even in the biggest widest sense, because right now, We as users don’t own the Internet, right? Really, there’s there’s 45 million people just in the us that can’t even access broadband. So the idea that the any of these tools, even in the widest biggest, you know, most access sense are are collectively owned isn’t real. And so that goes back to community, but it also goes back to policy, it goes back to how we’re investing in these tools, what values we are even using when we, when we access them? Um, that’s the whole book right there, I guess.

[00:55:00.40] spk_0:
Uh, the book is also, uh, a lot of questions. I always hope to get answers. When I read books this, this book, lots of questions questions at the end of every chapter and then they’re compiled at the end. They’re organized differently at the end. Why did you take that tack?

[00:56:06.65] spk_2:
Absolutely, yes. Our book does perhaps answer some questions, but it does provide questions. And that’s because what this work looks like varies based on the community you’re in based on your nonprofit organization, based on your role as a policy maker based on your roll thunder perhaps. Um, it varies. And so what your specific solution will look like. There’ll be some of the same building blocks, but the actual techniques you use will need to vary. And so the questions that we have at the end of each chapter at the end of the chapter on social impact organizations. For example, there are, I think 25 questions and five of those are questions that you ask someone as a nonprofit can ask of other nonprofits about technology. You as someone as a nonprofit can ask of your funders to start that conversation with some funders that we were just sort of summarizing now. What are specific questions that you should be asking of your funders were specific questions you should be asking of technologists that come to you and say, have we got a solution for you? Um, what are specific questions that you should be asking? Policymakers? Um, within the realm of what’s allowed for nonprofits to do part of the policy making process. And what are some real questions that you can ask of the communities that you serve and the communities you partner with to really get out, what are their needs and how might that tie to some of the technology needs for your organization?

[00:56:43.69] spk_0:
So what have we uh, what haven’t we talked about yet? That, that either of you would like to, uh, you feel like I’ve spent enough time on the well, here, I am asking you and then I’m proposing something. So I’ll cut myself off what, what what would, uh, whatever we talked about yet, either of you. That

[00:58:18.09] spk_1:
I mean, I think one thing that we have experienced is that there are some topics like how do we do this or how do we fund this or how do we make change? Um, you know, there’s some topics that recur throughout a lot of conversations, but ultimately, we have never had the same conversation about the book twice because that’s part of writing a whole book. That’s just questions, you know, and isn’t all the answers that isn’t Oh, great. You know, turn to chapter three where we list the 10 things you need to do tomorrow? Like there are no, I mean there’s probably 100 things, right? But um because of that, what we wanted to do when we wrote the book, even if, you know, we said at the beginning, even if no one reads this but ourselves, we want to feel like we are starting a conversation that we are just going to keep starting and keep having and keep getting closer to figuring out what’s next because it’s gonna be a whole long path. Um, and if it if we’re here to write a how to book that, who are we to write that? Right? Who are we to write the how to book on how we completely change the world? But what if we wrote a book that said, y’all, how do we change the world? Like really truly how let’s go, let’s go figure that out that motivates us. And so if it motivates us, it probably motivates others. And these conversations, I mean, I just love them because this yes, we had some of those recurring themes that all of us think about all the time. But this was a completely different conversation than we’ve had before and that, well, you know, different than we’ll have tomorrow. And I think what we’ve talked about the two of us is when we have

[00:58:31.93] spk_0:
not only not only different, but better,

[00:59:15.21] spk_1:
but when we have opportunities to talk about the book together with folks like you knowing that people are listening, right? Thousands of, of non private radio listeners, we want to, in a way have this be like a practice session for all of them so that when they finish the podcast and they go to their staff meeting, they’re like, hey, a food amy like never had their sentences thought out before they started probably said a million times. The bar isn’t high. I can just start asking questions, right? That’s why we have all the questions at the end. I can just start talking about this. There is no perfect, perfect doesn’t exist. So let’s not worry that I don’t know the exact way to talk about this technology project. Let’s just start talking about it and and get in there and have these conversations that we have almost model that process of just practicing the work of, of changing things.

[00:59:33.45] spk_0:
Anything you would like to uh leave us with anything we haven’t talked about that you would like to,

[01:00:00.54] spk_2:
you know, the subtitle of the book talks about building a more equitable world and we call out a few specific roles. But really I think it’s just important to recognize that we all have a role to play in building a more equitable world. And so if you see something in this world that you want changed. Hopefully this book does give you some real ideas about how you can go about doing that, some real questions to ask to find other people who can help you along that journey because really building an equitable world is an inclusive process and that includes you. So that’s that’s all I would add.

[01:00:43.80] spk_0:
She’s a for Bruce at a few uh underscore Bruce, her co author is Amy sample ward at Amy R S Ward and you’ll find the book the tech that comes next, how change makers, philanthropists and technologists can build an equitable world at the tech that comes next dot com. Amy, thank you very much. Pleasure.

[01:00:46.45] spk_1:
Thanks so much Tony.

[01:00:48.33] spk_2:
Thank you.

[01:01:39.63] spk_0:
You’re welcome. Thank you. Next week. Gene Takagi returns with Trust in nonprofits. If you missed any part of this week’s show, I beseech you find it at tony-martignetti dot com. We’re sponsored by Turn to communications pr and content for nonprofits. Your story is their mission turn hyphen two dot c o. And by fourth dimension technologies I. T. Infra in a box, the affordable tech solution for nonprofits. tony-dot-M.A.-slash-Pursuant D just like three D. But they go one dimension deeper. Our creative producer is claire Meyerhoff shows social media is by Susan Chavez. Marc Silverman is our web guy and his music is by scott stein, Thank you for that information Scotty B with me next week for nonprofit radio big nonprofit ideas for the other 95% go out and be great

Nonprofit Radio for April 11, 2022: Measuring Equity

 

Danielle Fox, Ellonda Williams & Raj Aggarwal: Measuring Equity

We’re kicking off the 2022 Nonprofit Technology Conference (#22NTC) conversations, with a discussion of how equity can be incorporated into your nonprofit’s performance measurement. Sharing their collaboration are Danielle Fox at Union of Concerned Scientists, Ellonda Williams with B Lab and Rajneesh Aggarwal from Provoc.

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[00:02:45.84] spk_0:
mm hmm. Hello and welcome to Tony-Martignetti non profit radio big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%,, I’m your aptly named host of your favorite abdominal podcast. Oh, I’m glad you’re with me. I get slapped with a diagnosis of pollen, euro Maya’s itis. If you inflamed me with the idea that you missed this week’s show measuring equity, We’re kicking off the 2022 nonprofit technology conference conversations with a discussion of how equity can be incorporated into your nonprofits, performance measurement, sharing their collaboration are Danielle Fox at Union of concerned scientists. Alando Williams with the lab and Rajneesh Agarwal From provoke On Tony’s take two, you’re responsible for donor relationships. We’re sponsored by turn to communications pr and content for nonprofits. Your story is their mission turn hyphen two dot c o here is measuring equity. Welcome to tony-martignetti non profit radio coverage of 22 N T C. By now. You know what that is. You know that it’s the 2022 nonprofit technology conference, you know that it’s hosted by N 10 very smart savvy organization helping everyone use technology in their social change work. You know, all this. What you don’t know is that my guests now are Daniel Fox, Alando Williams and raj Aggarwal but now you do now you’re informed now, you know, as much as I do Daniel Fox is campaign and Science network manager at the Union of concerned scientists. Alando Williams is director of justice Equity, diversity and inclusion Jedi at B lab and raj aggarwal is president of provoke Daniel Ayalon garage welcome to nonprofit radio and and Farage welcome back. I hope I’m, I hope I’m as excited to have you back now uh, in half an hour or 45 minutes as I am now, Rogers already given me trouble before we even started recording. So I’ll have to check in with me every 15 minutes to see how my raj meter is is is jumping. Okay,

[00:02:47.88] spk_1:
what about what about my tony meter?

[00:03:07.24] spk_0:
It’s less important because that’s the relevance of that is raj Aggarwal. non profit radio that’s where you can measure your tony meter, but tony-martignetti non profit radio I can measure my raj meter anytime I want to. So pardon me, Yolanda,

[00:03:08.51] spk_2:
it’s House Rules,

[00:03:33.94] spk_0:
House Rules, House rules, get your own show essentially it was what my advice is to, to raj. Okay, let’s see, So let’s give everybody a chance to give a brief, let’s, you know, we’re not, you’re, you’re talking to an audience of 13,000 folks who are already in nonprofits. So you’re you’re likely not talking to potential donors, but for a little context please, you know, briefly Danielle, what’s the union of concerned scientists about?

[00:03:37.34] spk_3:
Sure. So the concern of concerned scientists is a science advocacy organization, essentially. We’re all about how do you put science and the scientific community to work for a better world. Uh, and that also means more just policies and political systems and so we’ll get into it a little bit soon but working with the justice and equity lens is fundamental for us to actually be able to fulfill our mission. Um And so that’s why I’m excited to talk about how we measure it.

[00:04:33.84] spk_0:
Thank you for supporting the work of scientists. Uh it’s especially now, but please thank you. You know, science scientists, they’re I think they’re not to be marginalized and and mocked there to be central to a central to a conversation and essential in a in a rational world. So thank you for doing that, Yolanda. Please tell us about B Lab

[00:05:26.14] spk_2:
you too. Yes. Um so the lab is a non profit network that transforms the global economy to benefit all people communities and planet. Basically what we do is really our vision is to create a collective vision of inclusive, equitable and regenerative economic economy. So we really come into organizations and businesses known as the corpse. Um and we certify them using our set of standards to really take a look at their organization. How are they treating them? How are they treating their community? How are they paying their staff? How do folks feel showing up as part of a member of that organization? And so collectively we have over 4000 dead corpse across the globe. Um and we all come together to really assess how to do things in a more um Jedi forward and equitable way with really um centering around economy and how do we change? How do we think about business

[00:05:29.74] spk_0:
is B lab the certifying like agency or not for for B corpse? It’s isn’t where folks apply for for for B corp status.

[00:05:41.24] spk_2:
You got it. That’s a really good question. So be lab, which is where I work. Um It’s part of our entire B lab global network. So we are movement. So be lab itself is the certifying body and that is where individuals kind of start um taking our basic impact assessment in terms of your organization to really assess how do you fare as it as it as it is against our current standards. Um and that kind of gets, gets your foot running in terms of getting certified to become a B corporation.

[00:06:20.24] spk_0:
Excellent. Alright, thank you raj. Tell us about provoke which is spelled P R O V O C. When I first met Roger, I thought it was provocative. He corrected me. Of course it’s provoked raj, Tell us about the the agency,

[00:06:29.74] spk_1:
thank you. tony So provoked is a brand, the narrative strategy and uh communications and campaign um firm that roots are that does their work through an ever deepening racial equity lens.

[00:07:08.94] spk_0:
All right, thank you all again for being here. Um Daniel. Let’s start with you. Oh well, I didn’t introduce the session topic which is can equity be measured lessons from a great collaboration Danielle. It seems that you’re the you’re the organization that was interested in as you said, Centering I guess you know, walking the walk now of uh justice equity, diversity, inclusion Jedi why why did that become important to you when whenever it did versus some other time.

[00:08:22.04] spk_3:
Yeah. Absolutely. Well I think it’s I think that the organization has had to do its own unlearning relearning and thinking about, you know, as we look at the political systems and systems of racism and injustice that we need to change how we do our work frankly and how we show up. Uh it’s a different definition of success if we’re going to be true to our mission and our stated values and so with that um we’ve tried to work hard and continue to continue to learn, continue to mess up, continue to make progress and continue to take steps forward. Uh, but the work that we did with provoke was specifically around our science network. So we have this network of about 25,000 scientists and technical experts that come to U. C. S. To say hey I want to grow as an advocate and get involved and put my skills to work for social and policy change now for us for us to truly be successful. That meant that we also needed to ground how we were organizing and cultivating scientists and researchers and putting their skills to work to rectify social wrongs. That includes fighting environmental racism. That includes addressing the disproportionate impacts of all the health and environmental hazards that are going unchecked that we’re trying to put science to work to help tackle. So at the end of the day, that is really what it’s about. I think we truly

[00:08:54.34] spk_2:
when

[00:09:42.84] spk_3:
you know better you have to do better, Right? So we needed to change how we define success. And one of the things that has been so fantastic is to see the power of scientists as authentic partners with communities most impacted by the issues we’re tackling. And so the initiative that we were working on is looking at how do we scale up the ability for scientists to join us and get active? And that was through building local teams. That’s a distributed network of now, more than 50 groups throughout the country who are getting involved, but we knew that we needed to hold ourselves accountable and learn deeply about what did it what did it mean to have inclusive teams and what did it mean to integrate a lens of justice and equity and how we did our advocate building and engagement. And so that’s where we teamed up with provoked for and that’s how we’re trying to um you know, put metrics and accountability to the progress and what we’re trying to do here.

[00:09:58.74] spk_0:
Okay. And I love when you know better you need to do better. Excellent. Um Yolanda, how did how does B lab fit into this collaboration?

[00:12:30.04] spk_2:
Well, there’s there’s a couple of different ways that we fit into this collaborate. So this particular collaboration uh was between um you know, as Danielle mentioned with garage um and collaborating, collaborating provoked provoked as a report. So the fun thing about that is that I worked really closely with other be corpse that are in this space. And so not only is provoked A B corp but provoke is a B corp that that works in the Jedi space that works in the equity space. And so we’re able to constantly um share learnings, share what we share what we um discovered in in our our dialogues and our policies and our practices and and from the results um of surveys and internal work that we’re doing. So we all always able to kind of like iron sharpens iron. Right? So I’m in good company um with provoking those over, over in that space to be able to think more about, okay if provoking the people up and we’re working with other organizations to really identify how do we show up what role does the lab have in that and how do we kind of take the ideas that are that are that we’re starting at the lab in this conversation while we’re trying to tackle eyes some of these critical challenges. These are global challenges. So um sharing learnings and adapting what we learned is really a way to uh drive the learning forward. And then these types of collaborations, we can learn what went well and a really fun thing is when I was even spoken speaking with Danielle like a lot of this stuff is the same thing. There’s a lot of similarities in this realm and I think what it does that drives the, the understanding that Jedi is everybody’s job, equity, bility is everybody’s job there. It doesn’t matter what your role is, right? I’m quote unquote an expert, I didn’t give myself that title, right. People see people in the space and we give each other these titles, but we’re all accountable to this work. We’re all accountable, we’re showing up differently and I love what Danielle said as well around when you know better, you do better because then that means that you have to think differently and so our session and when we talk about how do we measure, how do we measure equity? It really starts with asking ourselves a lot of questions, why are we doing this way? You know, why do we always do it this way? Who who, who are we thinking about? Who’s in the margins and in these intersections there is no one size fits all. So something that Danielle and and and their team might do might be very different. But in the learnings of what went well, what are the challenges, what, what, what we still need to elevate um is where we can all try to come together to identify solutions that are gonna be solutions that we all can, can, can use.

[00:12:42.41] spk_0:
Yeah,

[00:12:43.18] spk_2:
alright,

[00:13:34.14] spk_0:
now raj despite your, your pre recording admonition that I’m not turned to you too much. I promise. Trust me, trust me, I won’t, but I will at this point because you were the um I don’t know, maybe it’s not fair to say the catalyst, but you were the you were the, the, the helpers. That’s a great word, that that’s a sophisticated technical term. You were the you were the you were the drivers for the union of concerned scientists. So what should, what should nonprofits be thinking about? Like at the very early stages, what did you advise Danielle and her team, you know, at early stages to be, to be, I don’t know, assessing uh measuring or you know, given where they were at the time. You know, what was your advice at the earliest stages is what I’m trying to get at.

[00:16:02.34] spk_1:
Yeah, so first of all, um I just really appreciate Danielle and Yolanda and I learned so much from them all the time and just how we show up in partnership. So I was really taking this as an opportunity to learn from them. Um I appreciate the term catalyst and also with our work with the Union of concerned scientists, I was reminding the client just the other day that, you know, the term catalyst is a is a term and chemistry, which I actually have a degree in which I rarely use and the purpose of that is a catalyst is something that helps to reduce the activation energy of a chemical process. So, so it’s going to happen anyway. But hopefully through an intervention through hopefully our team, we can maybe get there a little bit quicker. That’s that’s what a catalyst does. So I’ll take it. Um um so you know, with with so obviously part of the reason that we participated in this work is we do a lot of work on equity. And often people ask this question, you know, because of just the nature of the world. Business capitalism is are we really getting there and how can we measure it? And how can we report on it? Um and that’s obviously really important to do that as well. And so some of the things that we asked, you know, for certain scientists to do was to really think critically about why they want to change the world, how they plan to turn that into reality and what best metrics represent that success. And so for example, sometimes we would hear language from um union of concerned scientists around things like high impact actions. And so we asked them to specify what is the list of those actions or underrepresented scientists. And then we asked them to get really specific about what does that mean race, economic status, gender identity, disability. And to amplify and support. And what does that mean? And one of the big things that came up in our session with uh N. T. C. Just last week is this idea of impact and how that’s been so much that comes up in nonprofits, but we don’t really define it. So this practice that really was a whole practice of definition and then determining what tools and measures you can go about doing it. And Danielle will talk to you also about like what has happened since they started doing this and where did it work? And where did it didn’t, where does subjectivity come into this? Because some of that, so many of these things are going to be subjective through how a person might perceive what they’re actually doing. Um, and it may not be measured by a specific number. So, um, that was, that’s just one thing in here. So what the union concerns scientists did was they established six key performance indicators and 15 supporting metrics to evaluate the growth of local engagement program across the US, um, including an equity specific KPI

[00:18:39.74] spk_0:
it’s time for a break. Turn to communications. Here’s the ways that they can help you media relations. You’ve heard me talk about this, that’s the relationships building those relationships with outlets like the chronicle of philanthropy, the new york Times Market watch fast company Washington post. All places where turned to clients have gotten placements, content marketing. If you’re interested in white papers, Your annual report falls into that. You want them to do research for you. Maybe research on a program and then publish that research for you to share with donors, foundations. You know, other supporters research. They can do research for you and write about it. Speech writing, ghostwriting training on media management, media relations website. They can build website for you website creation redesign. I haven’t talked about that one. But yes they do that too. So all you know media relations, content management thought leadership web social media social marketing turn to communications, right? Your story is their mission turn hyphen two dot C. O. Now back to measuring equity. Raj said this is all very subjective. I was thinking ethereal you know, but it’s it’s uh it’s it’s it’s hard to it’s hard to grasp however you you know how every whatever word you use to describe it. So Danielle, you know how did the U. C. S. Start to start to start to grasp it. You know, start, I mean eventually you end up with like raj said, you know, six KPI s and 15 supporting metrics, you know, whatever. But you know, how do you take that incrementally with this? Very subjective these very subjective concepts.

[00:21:57.84] spk_3:
Absolutely. Yeah. I’m happy to I’m gonna try to discuss it. It might sound a little messy when I discuss it but that’s so actually symbolic of what the processes and the fact that it’s just messy. Let’s do it. Oh no, it’s fine. Honestly if we’re going to talk about equity, it should always be a little uncomfortable. Um so one of the uh you know, one of the very first things I think we did with roger and the team and I really appreciated it was to just hold space for dialogue about why this even matters and what impact looks like. And I don’t mean that vaguely, we had to do a tactical visioning exercise. What described, what does impact look feel smell like when you see it, when does it take place? Um, and I think that that was so critical because we took the time to ask ourselves questions before thinking we knew anything just like Yolanda had said. Um, and so it was the time to ask ourselves those questions and overlay that with our theory of change. Why are we even saying that these local teams need to be organizing with the commitment to equity, What is equity scientist organizing really looked like. And so we held some time to really build that, which was so critical because it ultimately served as a compass for when my team of organizers waited through all of the possibilities of things we could look at and measure. And we’re from a science based organization. So you might imagine we are curious souls that want to learn a lot of information and bless rajan their team. They sat with us through it and said, well it sounds like you’re interested in your heart is telling you you need to know all of these things that might have something to do with it. But at the end of the day when we just talked about that compass of what does impact actually look like? What are the most fundamental indicators that you can consistently track that will tell, you will do the real learning of letting you know if you’re making progress or not. And so it was really the process of starting big and messy and then running through all sorts of variations of how we may or may know whether we are in fact grounding equity and inclusion in our teams based organizing and then painstakingly. But we had we built good trust along the way. So that was so critical um narrowed down to core um things that we were going to measure. So we ultimately had two of our six core keep key performance indicators that helped us measure three things, diversity of the team’s inclusive practice of our team leaders and how they are building and running those teams and the members education and engagement in terms of what is explicitly addressing equity or amplifying underrepresented upper underrepresented voices and the issues that we’re working on. And we had to define those throughout the way to be able to measure that. So that was a little bit of the process.

[00:22:06.04] spk_0:
You were able to capture those three Concepts in two Kpi s.

[00:22:46.24] spk_3:
Yeah, we we collected we collected for a few different things. So that is, you know, a number of instances where underrepresented scientists were supported or where partners were grounded in the work that uh some of the team members were um, taking up, uh, that also includes things like number of teams. What is the diversity in the makeup of that team and discuss the actual practices and how you’re running those teams. So we did that through some collection of different survey questions which we can dive into a little bit later. It was an iterative process. I’ll tell you that much.

[00:23:06.94] spk_0:
Yeah, no, I can tell for sure. And and and just for some context, I guess, how does this relate then to um, performance measurement? Like is this, is this is this drill down to individual employees or volunteer? No, I don’t know. It’s volunteers or employees like performance evaluations.

[00:24:23.14] spk_3:
Yes, that’s a good question. This for us is more about impact measurement. Um, and so the reason why we did this all along is to make sure that the data, we’re going to need to collect data about how these local teams are working and building. And it seems fundamental to us to make sure that equity inclusion were part of those because we were talking about this earlier. You manage what you measure, right? And so we needed to make sure that our key performance indicators included equity and inclusion and how we were building out our program. So the whole goal of those indicators are to help us learn as the people, the practitioners and the people who are building out this program are we actually making progress on those things that we are saying we care about and then to hold a space for accountability when we actually have to assess the growth and impact of our program. And then also just finally to invite a culture of learning both for us as staff who are trying to do things differently and for our science network members who are trying to join us in a movement to evolved scientists engagement and advocacy with a stronger equity lens. So it served more of a learning and accountability versus a performance performance evaluation.

[00:24:46.04] spk_0:
Okay. Okay. Um Alondra, your you wanted to take away, you know, you wanted to learn lessons takeaways like what, what are you hearing as as Daniel is describing this?

[00:27:56.34] spk_2:
Ah what I’m hearing is excitement, right? I’m hearing, I’m hearing alignment. Um uh we, we talk a lot about accountability especially at black. So, so um when you’re thinking about KPI S and I’m something that Daniel said around like you when you’re measuring, like that’s what you’re focusing on, your focusing on what you’re measuring. And so if you’re not measuring something that is a clear kind of like red flag of like if you’re not measuring it, you’re not tracking it, you’re not paying any attention to it. Um and so you’re measuring what really matters. And so it’s an outward depiction of what an organization truly matter, what matters to an organization, look at what they’re tracking and look at what they’re measuring. Um and so as a network B lab and we have all these reports, thousands of people were measuring what matters. But how are we if we’re trying to build an inclusive economic system and business is at the center of that? How do we do that? How do we have conversations with people? I might be an expert in the area. Um and raj talked about his degree and we’ve got we’ve got scientists and I’m not a scientist, right? Ah And so how do we educate people around how to approach their job? A lot of times we have conversations around Jedi and someone will say what you’re the Jedi expert? Like why do I have to do that’s your job? And I say, but it’s not, it’s not. Um we talk about what makes a leader, what makes a good business, what makes a leader someone you want to follow? Um if you’re doing things and how do you make people feel, how do you make other businesses feel? How do you make your community feel right? And so if we are we’re all knowing better and doing better and sharing this information, how do we take this information and have further dialogue around things like our standards are certification requirements? How do we measure what matters? And if we have conversations with our community that helps us understand what are the needs of the most marginalized in order to center in order to think more Jedi forward. We have to always ask ourselves who are the most marginalized. Um who who who are we not thinking about? Who are we creating barriers for a lot of times. We look at the outcomes and what’s gonna happen. But we don’t ask ourselves the question around, have I created a barrier? And more specifically, have I created a barrier for a representation that is traditionally or historically marginalized? And the only way to do that is to ask questions. Right? And so what Daniel said around dialogue. So we’re learning around listening to the community. What are the challenges that organizations are having when they’re trying to approach? Not only their KPI but whenever they’re approaching their supply supply chain, whenever they’re approaching their community communication, whenever they’re working with community, uh what are the challenges that they’re experiencing? Because if we’re looking at that, that is the information that we can use to build more resources, more uh more policies that are actually going to help uh create equitable outcomes. It’s gonna help our tools and our programs and just general accessibility of the work that we do.

[00:28:17.34] spk_0:
So, so Alondra is this is this work that’s going to be um spread among the b corp Among these 4000, you know, be corpse that that they’re going to start to be held 2, 22 Jedi standards, as I don’t mean, I don’t mean tomorrow, but tomorrow’s Saturday. But I don’t mean

[00:28:26.24] spk_2:
monday monday

[00:28:34.34] spk_0:
either. Give yourself some time. But um, this is this is this is this eventually going to be part of b corp I don’t know the approval or

[00:28:37.74] spk_2:
certification,

[00:28:39.02] spk_0:
certification,

[00:30:08.34] spk_2:
certification and verification. Um, so let me clarify so a couple of things we already tracked. So Jedi Jedi and equity bility, um, inclusion. These are already built within our standards. Um, but we are an organization, like many other organizations where trucking along and we’ve been in existence for some time and so, um, what we used to do to measure the past or not the things that we’re going to be able to measure the future as things are growing and as things are changing. So why we have always measured Jedi, why? We’ve always measured things like what’s the difference between your highest paid individual and the organization and the lowest paid individual in the organization. And the farther across that spread is indicates that there’s less equitable ability built into your systems in the organization. So we already looked at things like that. But what we’ve done in this past year is we’re really, really looking at all of our requirements. We’re looking at how we measure what truly matters. And so how do you measure equity? What is, what is that question that we write in the basic impact assessment that is gonna give us the information that we need to track how well an organization is doing identifying those questions if it’s difficult identifying those parameters were global. So it’s not just us, it’s not just Canada, I mean we’re a global network and so we have a lot of things to take into consideration. Jedi is not one size fits all, um, something that one global partner might do might not be suitable in another region of the world. So we are constantly challenged the lab Global with creating standards that are actually going to be not only accessible, but something that’s going to translate across the globe. So that’s why it’s important for us to ask lots of questions ourselves.

[00:33:34.04] spk_0:
It’s time for Tony’s take two. You’re responsible for donor relationships. What do I mean, I’m talking about keeping relationships strong, moving relationships forward. I’m also talking about when there’s been a solicitation not lettering, not letting, not lettering, not letting that solicitation sit fallow, but you follow up on solicitations right? You never want to have a solicitation hanging out there that looks like you didn’t take the thing seriously to begin with. So it’s your responsibility to keep relationships strong and moving forward with your donors. You do that in ways like remembering milestones, birthdays, anniversaries, uh, the anniversary of their very first gift to the organization. Their 20th gift to your nonprofit, their 50th gift milestones like that. Um, so milestones in their personal lives, but also related to your nonprofit, keeping in touch with just, you know, handwritten notes, phone calls where it’s appropriate. Not every donor wants phone calls. I realized that however they want to be communicated with keeping in touch in those ways, email phone notes. Keeping relationships strong and moving forward. This is your responsibility as the leadership, as the fundraiser, as the board member involved in donor relationships and fundraising. It’s not your donors responsibility to keep in touch with you. It’s your responsibility to keep in touch with your donors. And that’s what I mean by keeping those relationships strong and moving forward. That is Tony’s take two. We’ve got boo koo but loads more time for measuring equity with Danielle Fox, Alando Williams and raj Aggarwal, Danielle. Let’s talk about leadership by end. I don’t know if, you know, maybe maybe it wasn’t an issue for the the union of concerned scientists ceo necessarily or you know that c c suite level, but there must have been leaders at some at some levels in in U. C. S. That were um, I don’t know at worst, you know, unwilling at best unaware and and and so for either reason, you know, not not accepting what you C. S. Was trying to do. How do you whatever management level we’re talking about? How do you what’s your recommendations for getting that kind of buy in among leadership because it’s it’s essential otherwise this work is going nowhere, you know. So what do you recommend there?

[00:33:37.34] spk_3:
Oh that’s such a good question. I will try

[00:33:39.69] spk_0:
To finally only took 29 minutes. Almost all right.

[00:33:43.25] spk_3:
Yeah. The other ones were no, you’re

[00:33:45.83] spk_0:
suffering a lackluster. There’s no question about it. There’s no question.

[00:33:52.24] spk_3:
I uh I’m happy to to try to take a crack at that. Um and but also I’m really interested with uh with what Yolanda and Roger have that, so if you don’t mind, I’d love to have like that be a team effort. Um

[00:34:05.13] spk_0:
but

[00:34:21.54] spk_3:
but I’d say, you know, there there was no sort of, there was no overt objection to it. It was just more of a sense this understanding that when you want to track when you redefine success and you want to meaningfully track that, that means we’re gonna have to have a hard look at our systems and our status quo of how we usually track and monitor things and to to unpack some of that and potentially to have to change um

[00:34:41.64] spk_0:
what

[00:34:42.02] spk_3:
we’re defining as success and what even systems or tools or capacity we have to be able to then consistently monitor and learn from it. So I would say that it wasn’t, there wasn’t a particular opposition, it was just more of a question of,

[00:34:59.74] spk_2:
well,

[00:37:28.33] spk_3:
what does new success actually look like. Uh and I think for that the approach was more just creating an authentic space for learning that no matter what level you are in an organization of space to ask critical questions together and to relearn and re envision together and have really difficult conversations about what we might need to be doing differently and why that’s important for what contribution we’re trying to have is so fundamental and that it doesn’t from my perspective and maybe this is my personal opinions towards like hierarchy were all at the end of the day, people with different ranges of responsibilities that hopefully if we’re showing up at that meeting and that conversation and good faith want to do better. Um, and so maybe that’s naive of me perhaps, but I think some of it was just creating a lot of spaces without particular judgment, but very honest, candid conversations about um what what’s different, what does success actually look like that needs to look different from how we’ve defined it before and then um what do we need to do as a team to be able to outfit ourselves to authentically monitor that and hold space to check back for whether we’re really um meeting the markers that we have and if we aren’t how we’re willing to adapt. And so maybe this is my own opinion every I’m an organizer at heart. So everything’s a campaign and part of that is a mix of sure pressure, but also persuasion and bringing people on board to join in a collective vision with you and see their role in it. And so I think there’s a lot of conversations along the lines of that and then a lot of conversations about if we’re going to do more of this, what are we going to do less of and having to make difficult decisions about what we prioritize and actually invest in. Uh those were difficult conversations and that is a okay. And so just giving yourself the time to work through that so that when it comes time to start up these key performance indicators and this initiative with equity and inclusion as barometers for progress that we’re all on the same page and were brought in and we know how we’re going to do it.

[00:37:57.13] spk_0:
Well if any of that was naive then I share your naivete. So I don’t think it was, but that’s because I’m with you all right. Uh Irlanda, do you wanna Danielle opened the door? Do you want to talk about? You know what I want to focus on leadership? Leadership buy in for Again, it could be anything from unawareness too. I don’t know. It could be blatant racism and just unwillingness, you know, at the at the extremes. What about leadership by in which again I think is essential to this work.

[00:42:30.50] spk_2:
Well uh it is right, it’s not, there’s no guests, right? Uh leadership buying is absolutely essential. Um And it is going to help drive longer term change and success, but a couple of things that Danielle said makes me think like that. So I’ve had a couple of experiences. I have had a myriad of experiences, I’ve had experiences where your your stuff trying to like you’re back at the business case, right? You’re back at business case. So so for those of us in the in the Jedi, I say look at Danielle Danielle, for those who can’t see, Danielle is vigorously nodding her head. Um the business case. So when Jedi hit the scene, when equity diversity E. D. I hit the scene, um the business case was like a really big thing because when we think about Jedi, it’s really rooted in how people feel the experience that people have or lack thereof, and how those experiences create inequities that can show up in education, obviously in business um in the health care system, you know, pretty much any system that we have with that inequities can can show up in. So what’s important for us to take into consideration, how do we get this by it? And so what we had to do was is we had to make the business case which was a lot of contributed in money, right? We had to say this is this is relevant to a business because businesses that are diverse that have diversity of thought, not just the color of someone’s skin, diversity of thought, thrive, They do better. And there’s years of evidence for that. Um so long before we really were having conversations about inclusion and justice and how people feel we were having conversations around your business should do this and it’s worthwhile for your business because you will get a return on your investment financially. Um, and I love the fact that we’re kind of shifting away from that and uh I’m having a lot less of those conversations and a lot more conversations of I know that there’s a problem. I recognize that something must be done. I have no clue where to start or I know that there’s a problem. I just don’t see it, help me learn how to see it and in that work it’s very, very difficult and it takes a long time. And so I’m lucky that in my current experiences I have with leaders that that know that there’s a problem and want to do something about it. But the struggle sometimes is what one thinks is the solution to the problem is not the solution to the problem. So what I see happens is you get the buy in. Sometimes you might have an organization where you have buy in from leadership. However, when you talk about what the actual solutions are, that’s when there is discrepancies, there’s discrepancies on whether or not we can actually solve this problem by by enacting that solution. And so we have to have a lot of conversations around resources and for me, I’m able to really elevate vision right, what is the vision of your organization? So I could ask that all the time. Staff say how I would love for my organization to put E. D. I first right to elevate equity. What is the conversation that I need to have with my manager, with my boss, with my supervisor, with leadership? How do we have this conversation? And I really challenge you to kind of like look at the vision and I’m encouraging those who really feel like they want to be a part of organizations that are putting this type of work forward. Take a look at the vision of the organization that you work at. We have an inclusive equitable regenerative system. So I was able to say if we want to do this work, we have to think about equity, but we have to take into consideration if we know that we’re not only going to get a return on our investment are people are going to feel better. They’re going to want to be here. They’re going to um, feel valued being here. You don’t have to work your employees to the bone to get dedication from them and treating them like human beings is how you’re actually going to be able to work together to create not only solutions but a space where everyone can show up as their true, authentic selves and feel good about being at work. Um, and we’re not there yet. You know, we’re not there were not there at the lab right? We still have these challenges internal to our organizations. Just like other organizations.

[00:43:03.80] spk_0:
I am gratified that you’re having fewer conversations that are based around money. You know, bottom line, that’s, that’s encouraging in the end it is all it is all about the bottom line but that you’re having fewer conversations that are rooted in that, you know, that are, that are explicitly about why it’s better for your, you know, how it will help your bottom line um, Raj. I’m only turning to you because Danielle suggested that you might want to comment on this. So uh would you, would you like to on the, on the buy in? We just have about 10 minutes left or so.

[00:43:18.30] spk_1:
I don’t have anything more to add than what these folks do.

[00:43:22.05] spk_0:
Yeah,

[00:43:22.68] spk_1:
I did share though, Danielle with Lane frisco and Denise done. Um how happy it makes me here? How happy it makes me to hear you share this in this way. So thank you so much.

[00:43:35.90] spk_2:
Oh,

[00:43:36.50] spk_0:
you’re thanking me.

[00:43:37.80] spk_1:
Yeah, I’m always thinking tony and I’m thinking Danielle and of course dr Williams all the time.

[00:43:54.20] spk_0:
Yeah. Well, these voices, right, the conversation needs to be elevated and I can help deliver it to another 13,000 folks. So, um Yolanda, I have a question um, I am, I am, I am, I am I because you’re the Director of, of Justice Equity diversity inclusion. I am. I am I to 2019 If I refer to D e I

[00:44:07.89] spk_2:
am

[00:44:08.83] spk_0:
I am I if I’m if I’m three years old, if I’m living in the past. Tell me and I’m asking you d i is what it used to be. But now I see Jedi more, I see Jedi emerging, I know

[00:46:07.58] spk_2:
are you 2 2019? Ah that’s that’s a lot of pressure to put on. Maybe you’re not there and you’re jeremy Tony and I respect that. But I will say I will encourage folks that are still really focusing on like, quick. The fastest Jedi training that I ever can give right is um, the justice aspect is is really, really important because it takes into consideration where we are, And it’s really difficult for us to look at how the existence of things as they are right now in 2022 without paying homage and respect to the fact that there is a very specific reason why we are facing the inequity that we face today. And so it’s important for us to bring that element to the conversation, because then we can say the reason there’s a really good reason why we need to have a conversation with our HR department about whether or not this level to position needs to have a bachelor’s degree, and that is that role actually necessary? Or have we are we a product of a of a society that folks of privilege and power decided what was necessary in order to be able to succeed again defining what that success looks like. And so we are just perpetuating that same ideology, even though we know that’s not true, and so how do we really root equity diversity and inclusion in in, you know, in a way that allows us to change from the way things used to be with recognizing that it’s not going to get us to where we want to go. So that’s why justice is a really key component. But again, some folks aren’t there in their, in their Jedi journey. Um, and I aspire okay,

[00:46:43.58] spk_0:
well, and I regret that I personalized it. I got, but I was thinking, I was thinking to myself, but you know, because I don’t mean to put pressure for Jedi, I love Jedi Jedi warrior. You could be a Jedi warrior. Um, yeah. Okay. Okay. Um, let’s see Danielle, why don’t you, why don’t you leave us with some, uh, inspiration if you like or something that you think we haven’t talked about yet doesn’t have, doesn’t have to be, uh, doesn’t have to be grand inspiration. Maybe just something that we haven’t talked about yet that you’d like folks to know about, uh, this work, this journey that that you see us went through. I’m gonna give you the chance to, uh, to leave us.

[00:48:52.87] spk_3:
Sure, you know, it, this is gonna sound a little atypical, but I think the for me, what’s been inspiring is that we’ve already learned, What isn’t working from what we did with provoke. Don’t take that personal rush. I mean, that is a wonderful wonderful thing because what weird doing is we’ve built in an invitation to ourselves as I would invite our advocates and any other organization that um is questioning whether they um have the knowledge or expertise to deepen equity and justice in their work and have to measure that. Um I think we’re a perfect example of organization that doesn’t have a deep expertise in this, but still wants to do it and is trying to do it, had built out something that I think really has helped ground us to be able to see how we need to keep improving. Um and that, for me is uh pretty inspiring because Ellen and I were talking a little bit about this before very often this can feel like an such a high stakes topic that can sometimes paralyze people from investing in it in taking steps. And I think the inspiring thing here is we’re already learning in the first couple of years of using these KPI s ways we can organize the local teams to to be a little bit better and more thoughtful in justice and equity, and we’re also learning that um there’s opportunities to reiterate and and strengthen our key P. I. S. That is an invitation for more learning and accountability, and for me that’s pretty, pretty exciting because this is ongoing work. I don’t think there’s gonna be a year that you see us as check we are an anti racist organization, it’s going to be ongoing work, and that’s exciting.

[00:49:21.27] spk_0:
Perfect inspiration. Thank you. And I realized that uh I made a mistake, Yolanda, I’m gonna let you take us out because B Lab, the lab is in this for takeaways. What what you what you can share with your your your 4000 certified companies. So you take us out with some with some takeaways.

[00:50:59.06] spk_2:
I love that. Um don’t let perfection be in the way of doing something right. Doing doing nothing is never good enough. So I love what Danielle said about a moving target as well. Um lean into uncomfortable that we don’t know what a utopian world looks like. We do not know what an equitable world looks like. We don’t know we haven’t had it yet. That’s the beauty and all of this is like we can imagine whatever we want and so be a part of what the new normal looks like. Step up and take apart to stake your claim because we’ve all we are all a product of of systems that were created before we got here. We are in a unique juncture in society in history that we can take a part in what success and the new normal books like moving forward and we can create systems that actually are inclusive for everyone that allow everyone to succeed regardless of where they were born, what they looked like, their social and economic status, um sexual orientation. We have a weird and unique space that as our leadership and when I say leadership, I’m not just talking about organizational leadership, I’m talking about in the world humans and and society members who have been a part of making decisions for a long period of time. That shift of power and influence is shifting and we’re all getting apart and we and so this is a unique opportunity, don’t squander your opportunity to be a part of something different for your Children, for our future for youth. Um we get one shot. Um and and this is gonna be, this is gonna be shaped the next 500 years of society. And so I want to take, I want to encourage everyone to kind of step up to the plate and and take ownership of your part in what the future’s gonna look like for others.

[00:51:45.46] spk_0:
Perfect, thank you. That’s Alando Williams, Director of justice, Equity, diversity and inclusion at B lab, also Daniel Fox Campaign and Science Network Manager, the union of concerned scientists and the other person around was is raj Aggarwal, president of provoke who asked me to not focus on him too much. So I took him at his word. I assume he was. I assume he was honest when he’s when he made that recommendation, made that made that request, I should say so.

[00:51:50.41] spk_1:
tony what do you think? Don’t you think it was better to focus on Dr Williams and Danielle.

[00:52:03.35] spk_0:
I do, but I’m I’m disappointed that you didn’t expect me to do that anyway. So little faith after the third time on the show and still still thinks I’m an underperformer. Thank

[00:52:10.62] spk_2:
you like I know how to do my job and I didn’t, I didn’t need you, but thank you, thank you. All right,

[00:52:31.55] spk_0:
maybe the fourth time if there is 1/4 for you, I’m not sure I would say anybody wants to be on nonprofit. radio Uh, don’t partner with Raj in 2023 because you’re greatly reducing the likelihood of being of being selected. Uh, Alondra Danielle raj, thank you very much.

[00:52:34.42] spk_1:
tony it was really nice when we received your emails, valuable

[00:52:43.75] spk_0:
conversation, I appreciate it and appreciate you all for being good sports to while I uh, make fun of raj, especially

[00:52:49.43] spk_3:
thank you

[00:54:07.05] spk_0:
and thanks to all of you for being with tony-martignetti non profit radio coverage of 22. Ntc the 2022 nonprofit technology conference with the hope that we will be together in person in 2023 in denver colorado. Thanks so much for being with us Next week. More from 22. NTCC asking for receiving and giving feedback if you missed any part of this week’s show. I beseech you find it at tony-martignetti dot com we’re sponsored by turn to communications pr and content for nonprofits. Your story is their mission turn hyphen two dot c o our creative producer is claire Meyerhoff shows social media is by Susan Chavez. Marc Silverman is our web guy and this music is by scott stein, thank you for that affirmation scotty be with me next week for nonprofit radio Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. Go out and be great. Mhm mm hmm.

Nonprofit Radio for January 17, 2022: Legal Outlook For 2022

Gene Takagi: Legal Outlook For 2022

Gene Takagi

Gene Takagi returns for a mix of checklist items and emerging trends. It’s a good time to look big picture at your HR investments, corporate docs and financials. Also, what to look out for in crowdfunding, donor disclosure, data protection, and more. Gene is principal of the Nonprofit & Exempt Organizations Law Group (NEO) and our legal contributor.

 

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[00:02:10.34] spk_0:
Hello and welcome to Tony-Martignetti non profit radio big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. I’m your aptly named host of your favorite abdominal podcast. Oh, I’m glad you’re with me. I’d bear the pain of proto psychosis if you infected me with the idea that you missed this week’s show Legal Outlook for 2022, Gene Takagi returns for a mix of checklist items and emerging trends. It’s a good time to look at big picture items like your HR investments, corporate docs and financials also though what to look out for in crowdfunding donor disclosure, data protection and more, jean is principal of the nonprofit and exempt organizations law group Neo and our legal contributor On Tony’s take two 50% off planned giving accelerator. We’re sponsored by turn to communications pr and content for nonprofits. Your story is their mission turn hyphen two dot c o. It’s always my pleasure to welcome back Gene Takagi to the show. You know who he is. It’s almost it’s almost superfluous for me for me to do the intro. But but jeanne deserves it. He’s well credentialed and I want to make sure that he gets his due introduction. Gene Takagi are legal contributor and managing attorney of Neo, the nonprofit and exempt organizations law group in saN Francisco. He edits that wildly popular nonprofit law blog dot com, which you should be following and he is a part time lecturer at Columbia University. The firm is at neo law group dot com and he’s at jeanne, Welcome back.

[00:02:11.94] spk_1:
Great to be back. tony how are you?

[00:02:13.98] spk_0:
It’s always a pleasure. Thank you. I’m well happy New Year.

[00:02:17.99] spk_1:
Happy New Year.

[00:03:05.74] spk_0:
Thank you. And let’s, so let’s let’s talk about the new year. Um and just before we do I want to remind folks that not too long ago we have genes one, our legal audit which you might want to look back at. That was a sort of a condensed version of some of what we’re gonna talk about today. Although we have lots of new subjects to talk about today too. But there was the one our legal audit and also with jean recently Risk management Part one and then a different show. Risk Management Part two. So those are resources that you can look back at just from a couple of months ago and we’ll go into and and those go into more detail on some of what we’re gonna talk about today jean. Uh where would you like to start for the new year, throw it open, throw it, I throw it open to you. What would you like to start with?

[00:03:58.64] spk_1:
So it does seem like kind of this chance that restarting, getting reenergized and thinking about our organizations and where we wanted to go. Um Yes, we have to keep in mind some of those um risks that we talked about in previous shows but we also have to think about kind of where we want to go. What of our, what our dreams are um what our vision is for the organization? Had we properly captured it? Um, what is our mission? Is that sort of properly captured? Is everything because our environment seems to be changing week by week. It seems to be new stuff that comes up that we have to consider. Are we still on track with where we want to go? So having these sort of broader discussions. I like sending those organizational priorities for the new year.

[00:04:06.64] spk_0:
Okay. Okay. Um, what would you, what what priority would you like to start with?

[00:06:07.94] spk_1:
Sure. So, um, being the lawyer, I say, okay, let’s talk about legal compliance just to make sure we’ve got some systems in place, mission and values, which we’ve frequently emphasized them when we’ve had discussions about not just existing to further your mission, but to do it in a way that advances your values and if equity and inclusion of part of those values, then, you know, that’s something you should be thinking about as well, definitely considering some of the trends that are out there. And I know we’ll get into that a little bit later in the show, but also including kind of the times that we’re we live in and acknowledging that yes, we’re under the impact of Covid, which seems to be shifting constantly in both how it’s affecting us and how we might need to respond to it. The great resignation, which certainly isn’t completely unrelated to the Covid, but that is a huge trend and movement as we’re trying to figure out how do we keep our workers, are we burning them out? The mental health issues that are, you know, hitting pretty much all of us, um, from the isolation, remote, working from the uncertainties of health, from sick family members and loved ones and all of that and saying, well, are we going to be able to keep our team together? Should we be keeping our team together the way we’re working now? Do we need to shift our work practices? Do we need to shift what type of benefits for giving to them? All of those things have got to be sort of raised? And I would say raise at the board level, you know, together with the executives and senior management team. Let’s talk about it. Let’s brainstorm think about this and get what our organizational priorities are this year, because things can change rapidly and rapid change if you don’t have any plans um, to anticipate some of them don’t have contingency plans can force you into very, very stressful times where immediate actions are necessary and you can sometimes make bad decisions if you’re under that type of time stress. So

[00:06:18.63] spk_0:
then it because then it becomes a crisis

[00:06:20.30] spk_1:
right? Exactly.

[00:06:48.64] spk_0:
And and a crisis in staffing, especially knowing how hard it is to hire folks now, you know, you talked about, you know, keeping the team together or should we keep should we keep the team together? But, you know, I’m sure you’re seeing it with your clients. The difficulty in hiring, you know, you want to, that, that, that’s a, that’s a huge factor in, you know, do we have the right team? Well, putting the right team together, it’s gonna take a lot longer than it used to?

[00:08:01.94] spk_1:
Yeah, absolutely. And if you’re talking about retention, you got to figure out what are you going to invest in this? I know you want to, you know, provide as much as you can to your beneficiaries. But if you’re not really considering the team of people in, you know, on your team that are providing those services that are supporting those services, the whole thing can collapse. So just remember where your infrastructure and when your groundwork is and how important the human resources are in your organization to being able to deliver services and provide goods for your charitable missions. So really important not to neglect that. And that requires an investment both on retention and if you aren’t able to retain everybody and you need to recruit, you’re gonna have to be able to show what you’re going to invest in those new employees and give them time to learn. You can’t expect them to perform like experience people have, um, in the past. So it’s, you know, some patients, um, and definitely investment in education and training and orientation, um, and all the rest and again, um, to the extent that your executive is probably also overwhelmed with everything else going on. The board is really pivotal in trying to be able to come up with plans that help invest in their teams.

[00:08:10.44] spk_0:
This goes to legal audit the conversation we had a few months ago. You’d like to see a review of governing documents to.

[00:09:31.74] spk_1:
Yeah, I I always think that that’s a great thing to check out in the new year. Just even if you have somebody, you know, a higher up kind of a board member or where your executive or senior manager take a look At your articles and bylaws, even spending 30 minutes on it and saying is our mission really reflected in these documents or have we evolved into something else? And these documents are like stale and old and outdated now in that case those documents still rule. So if you have the I. R. S. Or a state regulator coming in audit you, if you’re not performing within that mission statement in your articles and bylaws, you could be acting completely out of compliance and worst case scenario, you can really threaten the organization through penalties, etcetera. So that’s something to take a look at. Also just take a look at a lot of organizations. I find out their their boards, they’re like, oh, you know, we forgot to elect them. You know, we, we, you know, we’ve had terms, you know of two years but they’ve been on for like 10 years and we’re happy with them. So we just don’t do elections that can be really, really harmful as well for multiple reasons. But you know, sit back, see what you’re doing and what you’re not doing consistent with your articles and bylaws. And if you need to change things determine that you have to change. And if you need the help of a lawyer, try to find somebody that can help you with that. And there are some good resources on the web as well.

[00:09:48.64] spk_0:
What’s, what’s one of the good resources?

[00:10:15.04] spk_1:
A little bit of a self plug because I’m a board member, but board source has excellent resources on board of directors, governance things of that nature. Stanford University also has excellent resources in terms of sort of template documents that are just a guide for nonprofits. It’s not one size fits all, but it just gives you a general idea about how some things operate. Um, so those are just too good resources to look at.

[00:10:18.35] spk_0:
And, and again, we, we talked about this extensively in the show called your one

[00:10:24.34] spk_1:
hour legal audit.

[00:10:30.14] spk_0:
You have some last one. You have some financial performance advice for the new year.

[00:13:04.74] spk_1:
Yeah. Well I think probably, um, most people take a look at their financials throughout the year on the board level and on the executive level. Um, but the new year, you’ve actually sort of completed your financials and they might not be, um, in final form yet, but you might have what some people call it pro form, a set of financials, um, sort of close to final, where you get to assess what you’ve done in the year, you know, for, for most organizations, this goes without saying, but you want to make sure that you’re performing in a way that you’re not becoming insolvent. So you want to make sure what your balance sheet looks like and whether you have net assets, um, if you don’t have net assets, that means that you are either insolvent or, you know, in the zone of insolvency, you have to think about how you’re going to address that very serious issue. And I would say you don’t have internal expertise on dealing with it, get outside help right away if that’s the case. But your, your statement of revenues and expenses as well, are you sort of operating what people call in the black so that there is, you know, some net income in there or are you operating in the red where you’re very concerned because you’re losing money, timing is always important. So it’s misleading to look at one year in isolation because sometimes grants are given in one year, but they’re actually uh received in another year. So the timing issue can pose different challenges about reading financials. So you want to be able to read it sort of collectively through a multi year period just to know where you stand. And again, if board members aren’t able to help an executive and the executive feels like they need some help with understanding financials, to reading financials invest in everybody’s training in this area and there are a lot of people, even pro bono, that, that are offering this training pro bono and a lot of resources on the web. So make sure you understand your financials and what they’re indicating. You don’t need to know every single financial ratio that you know, business people use, but just generally no. Are you healthy financially or are you trending bad? And if you have several years where you’re in the red, where you, where you’re not making money, it looks like you’re bleeding money, then that might be indicative of some change that’s necessary in order to make your organization sustainable on an ongoing basis. So again, you don’t want to hit crisis mode financially. So this is a good chance, take a look at your financials, not just last year, but over a multiyear period and see where you are, get help if you need it.

[00:15:08.54] spk_0:
We have a show that I replayed, oh, I think within the past six months, uh, the guest was Andy Robinson. So you could go to tony-martignetti dot com and just search his name Andy Robinson, but it was something like teaching your board basic financials and he wrote a book, I’m pretty sure it was published by charity channel, uh, with, with a title similar to that. So if you, and the show is a few years old, but reading financial statements and and balance sheets hasn’t changed much in probably 100 years. Um, so it’s just all in and out now now, it’s all in Excel. But uh, so if you’d like some help with that, there is a, there is a show where Andy Robinson was the guest talking about, you’re improving your boards, financial literacy. It’s time for a break. Turn to communications, your 2022 communications plan. Does it have lots of projects? Lots of writing projects? You can get the biggest projects off your plate and outsource them. Free up staff time to devote to the work that it’s not feasible to have others doing for you. Like the annual report, just because it’s been done in house in the past, doesn’t mean it has to be done in house this year. What about research reports, White papers, your other heavy lift pieces. Do you need help with writing projects in 2022, Turn to communications, your story is their mission turn hyphen two dot c o. Now, back to legal outlook for 2022 with Gene Takagi. Okay, so let’s talk about some trends then, jean, you have a, you have a case we haven’t talked about, we haven’t talked about an actual case for a while. Americans for prosperity.

[00:19:16.54] spk_1:
Yeah. So um that was a huge U. S. Supreme Court case at least huge for the nonprofit sector. Um, but with deeper implications for if I if I’m not over hyping it for democracy itself. So um so americans for prosperity, Foundation versus Banta, who was the California Attorney general basically it was about the schedule be disclosure of donors who donated more than $5000. So for nonprofits who know how to prepare their form 19 nineties, you’ll know that on schedule B of your form 1990. Eur actually disclosing to the I. R. S. It’s not public information. Um But it’s to the I. R. S. The name and address of your donors who donated more than $5000. Now that hasn’t changed, you still have to disclose it to the I. R. S. But certain states, including California where volunteers from as the attorney general um New york I believe New Jersey I believe Hawaii also included Um all asked for a copy of the 990 including an unredacted schedule B to be given to the state regulator because they also want to look at that information for state law compliance purposes. A lot of them are concerned about donors who give money but get something back in return that’s not being disclosed. So if they ever have to have an investigation of that, that information turns out to be very helpful to the state to be able to say ah they were giving money but they also took in this huge benefit, this huge contract for example, which you know, reap them millions of dollars. Um So there was a legal case um that went up through the courts um finally hit the U. S. Supreme Court and the A. G. Lost here, The California G. Um So the court decided and we know the court’s composition is fairly conservative right now. The court decided that uh the states don’t have this right. Um It was based on the fact finding of the lower courts which is a little bit unfortunate because if the higher court could have considered more facts, then it might have been decided a different way but based on kind of how how our legal system works and and and how the Supreme Court works and the composition of the Supreme Court. They held that, hey this is not disclosed able to the states essentially that’s the impact of it. The broader impact on why I said democracy might be uh issue here is because well what about sort of campaign finance disclosures? And what about the I. R. S. Should they be entitled to that information as well? So it’s really helpful in compliance. But the counter argument and why some organizations charities, we’re also um not in favor of the disclosures is because of the protection of the donor. And the old case cited um in this part of the argument was an N double A cp case that said, well, if we disclose our donors, the KKK had threatened to kill all of them. Um And you can see why privacy was important in that issue and this issue, it was nothing like this. I think it’s a Koch brothers, um, kind of funded charity. They wanted really to keep their identity, um, more hidden because they have desires to influence politics in many ways. And if it always gets associated with them, then the impact lessons. So if they can look like they’re ground swells of movements that are funding these things rather than individual donors, um, it looks better for for what they’re trying to do. So that’s, you know, that’s what’s at stake here is not only are the state’s not allowed to get this information that would really help them in state law enforcement of whether there’s diversion of charitable assets that benefit

[00:19:29.74] spk_0:
donors. But

[00:19:30.15] spk_1:
in the broader sense, are we going to allow more dark money to enter into our political systems without knowing that there are donors, heavy donors that back these, you know, politicians or political parties or political movements. So that’s the scary part about this decision.

[00:19:57.94] spk_0:
What’s the, I think infamous Supreme Court case that that allowed the allowed the dark money into, uh, into politics. United

[00:20:02.73] spk_1:
Citizens. United

[00:20:27.54] spk_0:
United. Yeah. Um, All right. All right. And so I just want to repeat this. So this case that Gene was just talking about is americans for prosperity Foundation V. Banta B. O. N. T. A. What about crowdfunding you, you point out that there’s a new crowdfunding law. Hope is this a little more optimistic? I hope?

[00:21:22.54] spk_1:
Uh, well, depending upon how you look at it. And I think in one sense it’s inevitable. Um, a lot of our laws that are developed regarding fundraising, um, don’t even, and never anticipated the internet, right, johnny. So, uh, you know, now crowdfunding platform is, you know, not just the internet, the use of the internet, but it’s a lot of different for profit companies getting involved, um, to enable charities and organizations and people who are not charities to raise funds that look like they could be for charitable purposes, Right? So you want to help victims of a fire, but you want to help them directly, because some individuals said, I want to start a Go fund Me campaign, right? And say, well, you know, chip in 50 bucks and let’s try to get these people some help doesn’t, that doesn’t go through a charity. Often it just goes to this person, right, who promises to give these other people money

[00:21:35.90] spk_0:
and go funding the person’s goodwill. Honestly, yeah,

[00:21:58.14] spk_1:
Go fund Me is, you know, reacted to this and they’re probably the biggest crowdfunding platforms. So they’ve reacted to this in terms of having their own internal policies to help prevent a check. But overall, there’s, you know, hundreds, if not thousands of crowdfunding platforms out there that do this to make a profit. Um, and they may not have those types of controls or checks to not to just, you know, prevent somebody from saying, let’s raise money to help fire victims and then just keeping it. Um, so,

[00:22:11.97] spk_0:
what, what, what is the import of the law for, for us?

[00:23:21.34] spk_1:
So I think the import of the law is, if you’re going to get on and decide, hey, we want to do crowdfunding, um, you’ve got to select your platform provider carefully and this law, which is in California, but is likely to spread across different states in various forms, says, well now, if you’re gonna do that, you’ve got to make sure that this crowdfunding platform is registered. Um, and they’re reporting and there are all sorts of rules involved. So if you have a contract with them, it should be subject to these rules that might say things like, well, if they collect money, they have to give the money to the charity within a certain time period. Right? So they couldn’t say, well, it takes this administration, so maybe a couple of years before you get that, you know, nobody’s gonna be happy with that, but without rules, why not? Um, so these are, this is why it’s important for charities to have rules. The actual details of the rules. So I can see why some people have some, some issue with them. And we haven’t had all of the regulations yet, they’re still in discussion. So this is very, Still very trending, but the crowdfunding law, the law, the general law that’s in place now will become effective in California in 2023, and the regulations are being developed right now,

[00:23:58.04] spk_0:
let’s turn to remote work, which is obviously so much more common now. Hybrid work, you know, return to work dates are being pushed off and off. Um What what are what are what are what trends are you seeing? What should be on, will you be on the lookout for with respect to uh remote work and employment law issues?

[00:25:10.84] spk_1:
Yeah, it’s, you know, this is a really tricky area. Um you know, for sure, Covid where people were suddenly not permitted to to go indoors in some cases for months. Um and who knows if, you know, we’re going to return to some of those scenarios with the omicron variant out there, We’re hoping that it’s less um severe in terms of its impact, even if it might be a more transmissible, but if we if we keep worrying about this and saying, you know, our workers aren’t comfortable coming to work, even if the law allows them to come to work. Um Maybe we’re going to let people work remotely, and many of us have gone full remote, some of us have gone back to partial returns, some have gone back to full returns and then gone back, you know out the other way and said, okay, you know, it’s at the workers discretion whether they want to come in or not. So what makes us a little bit tricky. Um is that you don’t control the work environment as the employer, if they’re working at home, right? Um but that becomes the work environment, if they’re doing work from home, that’s their work environment, and, you know, the employer is responsible for the work environment if they should get hurt, for example,

[00:25:22.94] spk_0:
um

[00:26:56.24] spk_1:
So it becomes a little bit tricky about, well, how do you, how do you handle that for workers comp reasons, for safety reasons, for OSHA reasons? Um and I think there’s an understanding by regulators that, you know, this is out of control of most small businesses, small charities and, you know, to to that extent, we’re not really gonna look to enforce things on that level, but there are other things that, that are also concerning, because not everybody goes when, when they decide to work remote, we work in the same city or in the same state, right. A lot of us um have decided to, you know, maybe move back with family, which might be in another state. In some cases it could be another country, or some of us have decided to travel and spend a little bit of time, you know, in different places. Um So how does allow treat that? And basically, you know, the old rules, which are the rules, many of us are stuck with. Um the old rules are, well, you have to comply with the laws where the worker is doing the work, so if you have a worker in new york who’s now working remotely and came out to florida, well, then all the employment rules regarding worker safety and wage and hour laws and salary, overtime, sick pay benefits, all the florida laws apply to that worker now. Um, and so now it’s like, well, you’ve got to work in florida, you’ve got to think about, are you qualified to do business in

[00:27:00.21] spk_0:
florida,

[00:27:36.94] spk_1:
charity registration in florida? Um, and you may have had no connection to florida before, but all of a sudden you have a worker working there. Um, so a few states, um, and they’re not very many, but a few states that said, well, you know, during covid, we’ve got these temporary rules where we’re relaxed, where you don’t have to do that. And there’s also state tax issues, right? State payroll taxes, and, and other times, all of those things, some states said, you don’t have to worry about it. A lot of organizations are simply not complying with, But,

[00:27:37.49] spk_0:
but you said it’s only a handful of states that said, we’re we’re we’re not enforcing

[00:27:42.14] spk_1:
right. Exactly.

[00:27:43.33] spk_0:
The majority of

[00:29:01.34] spk_1:
states are, Yeah, well, I shouldn’t say they’re enforcing, but they haven’t the old laws or the existing laws still apply. There are no transition laws, so you’re out of compliance. And if they do enforce, which might not be like a, you know, a regulator coming out to you and saying you haven’t done this, it may be your employee is unhappy with something you’ve done, who’s working there and said, hey florida law applies and you haven’t been complying with the florida sort of benefits laws that, that apply. And maybe I could give you more specific example because san Francisco, if you came out to California, your remote employee came out to California, san Francisco has mandatory six hours and not a lot, a lot of states don’t have sick our pay. Um, but all of a sudden if you’re not paying them and they get wind of that, hey, you were supposed to pay me for this and you haven’t been, it’s the employee who could launch the complaint. Um, so it’s just to be careful of these things and, and just as your strategy for charity registration, tony when you’re sort of fundraising all over the country to, to, you’re not going to be able to maybe do all 50 states at once, but just to make sure you’ve got a plan to attack this kind of the same thing here. Um, check out where your employees are, you should know exactly where they are and check each state in terms of how strictly, maybe in terms of enforcing this and start to slowly comply

[00:30:12.74] spk_0:
the implications of state law. Yeah. What about the technology remote work? I don’t know if that’s all been figured out yet and maybe there were, maybe there were stopgap measures during the, during the, the darkest part of the pandemic, but but going forward, you know, tech technology has to be, has to be upgraded. You know, are we gonna, we’re gonna continue providing work phones? Are we going to provide work laptops? What about paying for internet access over the long term? I mean, you know, the internet access can be costly. And if if work is taking up a lot of the bandwidth, isn’t it appropriate for an employer to be paying a portion? And then how do then how does the, how does the, what’s the mechanism for the employee verifying how much they pay and you know, and then what percentage are we gonna cover of that, all the all the technology issues around, around remote work.

[00:30:58.44] spk_1:
Yeah, def definitely. And and as an as an employer, I would say, beyond sort of any legal compliance issues, um, you’ve got a, I think an ethical issue to make sure you’re providing your employees with the tools to do their job. And if you’re allowing remote work, you should make sure that they have the tools. So if they need a computer to be able to access it, so they’re not, they’re not using their personal computer. Um then you should make sure that happens same thing with the telephone. And if, you know, if those are going to be dedicated to work, um it should be explicitly written out that way. But if you force them to use their personal things, there are some states that actually do have laws that say you must reimburse your your employees if they’re using the tools that they need um for for remote work, but just ethically. Yeah.

[00:31:18.74] spk_0:
But then that’s then that raises security issues too. Absolutely. They have any kind of HIPPA protected information on their personal laptop. That’s gonna be a big problem. That that’s I think that’s probably a mistake if you’re dealing with that kind of data. But um

[00:32:01.74] spk_1:
and don’t we probably all have that type of stuff on our personal computers, right? You know, sort of HIPPA protected? We may have had emails like that are saved onto our computers. Um Right. So if if the computer is also being used for work and there’s a work issue that causes that data to be taken or corrupted, like, you know, what’s the employer’s responsibility if they hadn’t provided an alternative, it’s a great point

[00:32:50.94] spk_0:
and and it’s not only hip hop data, but other other personalized data that that maybe on now the personals, the employee’s personal computer, desktop or laptop or phone, you know, how is that? How is that private private data protected? Do they have malware prevention on their on their personal devices so that so that company emails that they’re that they’re using on their personal device aren’t potentially compromised. I mean, the use of the personal equipment raises a lot of technology and and Legal privacy and ethical issues to your right. I mean, if the person is eight or 10 hours a day, they’re using their personal laptop, shouldn’t there be some compensation for that?

[00:34:46.94] spk_1:
Yeah. And I think minimally because no matter you know how much we encourage people to have sort of work dedicated computers provided by the workplace, people are going to use their personal phones. I mean we can go back to the politicians who have all been using their personal funds. So we know it happens regardless of what the best practices. But what can the employer do, they can pay for all of that data protection stuff that that computer should have. Right, tony because now it has much more sensitive information on there and the employer is partly responsible for some of the other information that could be on there and hack. So yeah, employers should help. And that kind of leads us to the whole data security issue as well that everybody’s got to be paying attention to now is really um nonprofits have important data in their system. Some of it is, you know, hipaa protected some of it is other privacy information. You may have employment reviews on there that you don’t want going out into the real world or client, you know, feedback which might be positive. Some of it might be negative sensitive communications, all sorts of stuff that you might find on a work computer and if it gets hacked and if that data gets stolen or if somebody holds the system which might run your programs or aspects of your programs if they cause your system to crash and say that they will only sort of fix it because they’ve hacked and caused the crash. If you pay a ransom, you’ve got all sorts of problems. Uh and maybe some of that may have been mitigated with some basic steps like you mean you’re not going to be, well even the U. S. Government can’t prevent all hackers. I think we we know that, but you can take reasonable steps based on your budget, whatever that might be to to control some of this. So it really is important to have some safeguards.

[00:34:55.74] spk_0:
Another potential category of data is the G. D. P. R. Data. If if if your nonprofit is implicated at all in in that european common law law then or the yeah then then you’ve got those concerns as well.

[00:35:08.94] spk_1:
Yeah, absolutely. So if you have european donors or you’re doing business with any european entities and you have data from those entities or persons be careful and again, remote working can trigger some of that. So if if they decided to, you know their home or or they want to travel to europe and do their work from there.

[00:35:28.74] spk_0:
Um,

[00:35:29.74] spk_1:
all sorts of implications.

[00:37:44.03] spk_0:
Yeah. Absolutely right. People very good point where where people are sitting and where they’re planted when they’re working, It’s time for Tony Take two We’ve got 50% off the tuition for planned giving accelerator. That’s because just last week A donor stepped up someone who believes very deeply in planned giving accelerator and he is offering to pay 50% of the tuition For the 1st 10 nonprofits that take him up on his offer. A couple have already done it as of the time I’m recording, but there are several spots left. So if you’ve been toying with the idea of planned giving accelerator, it’s never going to be cheaper than 50% off. What the way this will work is. You’ll pay the tuition in full, which is $1195 for the six month course. This donor will then make a gift to you of half of that. So you’ll have a new donor, he’ll pay half your tuition. So it ends up being 50% off the full tuition cost. I know the donor, it’s someone I trust you have my word. Your final cost will be half of the full tuition if you’d like to jump on this and be one of the members of what is now our february class. I want to give people enough time for this because it, it just came in last week. So I’m extending, we’re, we’re not gonna start the class until february if you’d like to be part of that february class At 50% off email and we’ll, we’ll talk about planned giving accelerator and whether it can help you launch your planned giving program. Mhm. tony at tony-martignetti dot com. That’s me. That is Tony’s take two, We’ve got boo koo but loads more time for legal outlook for 2022

[00:38:01.22] spk_1:
one and one of the tools to think about and I’m a little bit guilty of this as well um is be careful of public wifi um because that often is an entryway for a

[00:38:03.83] spk_0:
hacker. Yeah, that’s totally unsecured airports, airplanes,

[00:38:09.89] spk_1:
coffee shops,

[00:38:13.42] spk_0:
coffee shops, Starbucks, wherever those are, all unsecured networks.

[00:38:29.32] spk_1:
Right? Meaning that there is the potential for somebody in there who has some malicious intent if they want to be able to hack into to your computer through that public wifi. Unsecured wifi. And there are different systems um but maybe one of the simplest for for those of us who have smartphones, which I think is most of us is you could actually create a sort of a private wifi just

[00:38:52.92] spk_0:
for your smartphone, right? Hotspot? Hotspot and don’t use the unsecured wifi to connect to, you know, use the uh the four G or five G or the five GHZ et cetera.

[00:38:56.17] spk_1:
Right? And that’s something an employer could pay to make sure that the employee has significant data and data plan that can incorporate all the additional data that they may need in their plan because of the work. So again, that would be reasonable and and ethical for the nonprofit employer to pay for their employees to have a higher data plan. Um, if they’re going to to use that and insist as a policy that they do not use public wifi. If they’re using a work computer or a computer that contains work and sensitive information,

[00:39:36.52] spk_0:
all you need is to transmit an email on, on an unsecured wifi that that has a donors credit card number, maybe

[00:39:38.77] spk_1:
native

[00:39:58.12] spk_0:
birth address, name any, any two of those things together, uh, hacked could be very detrimental to that donor. And you know, whether it ever gets traced back to you is is uncertain, but you’ve, you’ve put your donors privacy at risk in a simple email that has any two of those pieces of information.

[00:40:04.31] spk_1:
And it appears to be a myth, um, when people have relied on, they’re not going to go after us because we’re nonprofits, people don’t go

[00:40:12.29] spk_0:
after. Oh, that’s bullshit. Oh, that’s ridiculous.

[00:40:14.57] spk_1:
Right?

[00:40:22.61] spk_0:
I’m working with a client now that, that is a, is in new york city that’s, that’s, um, victim of, of a malware, uh, ransomware, so brought me a ransomware attack.

[00:40:27.61] spk_1:
Yeah.

[00:40:40.41] spk_0:
And they’re keeping it quiet so I’m not permitted to say who it is. But um, yeah, they’ve, they’ve been, they’ve been hindered for weeks and weeks with data accessibility issues.

[00:40:42.71] spk_1:
Yeah. And it’s much more common than we think because organizations do want to keep it quiet because if there is a vulnerability, they don’t want to come and say other hackers come come and attack us, we’re vulnerable. So it may be much more pervasive than we think

[00:40:57.61] spk_0:
and that myth also breaks down along ideological

[00:41:00.04] spk_1:
lines.

[00:41:21.61] spk_0:
Some some person on the left may may attack an organization on the right. Some person on the right may attack an organization on the left just because of where the organization stands with respect to the person’s political and ideological beliefs that that that’s enough. It doesn’t matter that you’re a nonprofit. It’s it’s your ideology and your mission. It has nothing to do with your tax exempt status as to why somebody would or wouldn’t go after you.

[00:41:28.41] spk_1:
Yeah and um in these times that those ideological differences have been very um pronounced and. Yeah.

[00:41:41.11] spk_0:
Alright where else should we go? Gene with trends, trends for the new year. Come on.

[00:44:24.69] spk_1:
Um Let’s talk a little bit since we’re talking about technology and data security. Let’s talk a little bit about crypto currency because I find that pretty fascinating. Um There was an organization that came together and bid $40 million on a copy of the U. S. Constitution just a few weeks ago. Um That money the $40 million plus more I think about 47 or $48 million was raised for that purpose in less than two weeks. Um So um Cryptocurrency donors um often have made a ton of money because of the appreciation of cryptocurrencies like. Bitcoin for for those who aren’t super familiar with it. Um And if you donate Cryptocurrency, it’s like donating a non cash asset, meaning that if You bought crypto currency for $1,000 10 years ago and it’s worth now several million dollars, which if you bought the red Cryptocurrency, that might be the case if you sold it, uh you would have a lot of taxes to pay on that appreciation right? The several million dollars of appreciated income that would be subject to capital gains tax. Um So if you sold it and donated some of the proceeds, that would not be a very tax efficient way to donate. When if you donated the Cryptocurrency itself, what you do is you get to take a fair market value deduction of the several million dollars. So you gave several million. So potentially you could deduct that is a charitable contribution and pay no capital gains tax because he never sold it. Um So very tax efficient way of giving um And Cryptocurrency people, wealthy millionaires and others who decided that they wanted see some positive impact um from giving these gifts are are making gifts of Cryptocurrency now and that’s that’s partly why I am so many gathered together to say hey we’d like to fund a charity to buy a copy of the U. S. Constitution so that we can ensure that this constitution is always for the public’s benefit and on public viewership and not sitting in somebody’s house, you know for for their own prestige. Um But that really opens it up, cherish. Think about there’s a lot of these people who made quite a bit of money on Cryptocurrency and a lot of younger people are investing barely heavily in Cryptocurrency now. So it’s something to not sort of blow away if we’re um kind of our age or older, tony to say, Cryptocurrency, what is that? It’s it’s something to really embrace now because it’s it’s not just this exotic tool now, it’s part of regular investment portfolios.

[00:45:56.79] spk_0:
Absolutely, it’s it’s it’s coming and and jean this dovetails perfectly with Our November 15 show of 2021 Bitcoin in the future of fundraising with my guests who are an Connolly and Jason shim who wrote a book Bitcoin in the future of fundraising. So, um it’s do you it’s just more, more sage advice that crypto donations are coming. It’s not a matter of if it’s just when are you gonna get on board now or you’re gonna wait two more years and potentially be behind the curve. Um and as an and Jason pointed out today, there are so few organizations accepting crypto that a lot of people are just searching for. Where can I donate? Cryptocurrency and probably largely, Gene for the reasons you’re describing there, They’re looking for a direct crypto donation to help them with substantial capital gains. Are there specific legal implications of crypto donations that that we need to be aware of or or is it just, you know, you just want folks to know that this trend is, it’s in the middle, it’s happening right now.

[00:48:15.97] spk_1:
So I think, you know, one of the reasons why charities are afraid to take Kryptos because they don’t know what laws apply when they receive the crypto. They’re like, what do we do with this? Um, and there are ways to easily cash that out and turn it into us cash. And in fact, most charities that accept crypto and they’re not a lot, you’re right, tony but most carriers that accept them liquidate them immediately turned them into cash and deposited into fiat currency, like regular paper currency, um, in their bank accounts. Um, So they’re not holding onto the crypto very long at all. One of the reasons why that’s, that can be very important is because there are prudent investor rules for charities that don’t apply to for profits that basically say if you’ve got investment assets, charities, this is not just endowments, but just any sort of investment assets for reserves or for a capital fund or anything you can’t invest. It speculatively, you couldn’t just throw it all in like Apple stock, um that would be too speculative. You have to look at it, uh, through what financial professionals, investment professionals called portfolio theory, are you sufficiently um, have an investment portfolio diversified across several different asset classes? So if one bombs, you haven’t tanked all of your money. Um, and the board of directors have a fiduciary duty to live up to the prudent investment laws that also sort of follow this portfolio theory of how how have you actually divest? Sorry? Um diversify Yeah. Um your your funds across different investment classes to protect yourself and there are different considerations that go along with that. Um But that is one reason why you don’t want to get stuck with all of your investments being in crypto because crypto maybe one of the most volatile type of investments where it can double in a matter of days and it could tank and disappear in a matter of days as well. So depending upon what type of Cryptocurrency you have and there are hundreds if not thousands of crypto types of Cryptocurrency um that have evolved in a lot of people and organizations that are making new coins all the time. So new new forms of Cryptocurrency arising and while we talked about crypto as being a part of more investment portfolios as a normal part of of investments. Now it’s not every Cryptocurrency that would be in that it’s certainly one

[00:48:47.07] spk_0:
1000 right? Some of these thousands trade for thousands of pennies, Thousands Yeah thousands of pennies even you know .0001 three zeros and a one is you know is the value of the currency. Um So. Alright that’s perfect as I said, perfect dovetail to that to that uh that november show because you’re you’re raising the prudent investor rule and and uh portfolio theory.

[00:50:07.66] spk_1:
One more thing on this, tony the forms the I. R. S. Forms for when you get Non cash contributions of more than $500. And how quickly you sell them. Um Also applies to form 82 83 is what the donor needs to sign when they give a non cash contribution of over $500 of over $500. And if it’s over $5000 which many crypto gifts are, they have to get a qualified appraisal for this. So that’s really important. And the Dhoni which is the charity has to sign that form for the donor. And then if the donor the Dhoni, I’m sorry the charity sells it within three years, they have to sign a form 80 to 82. Yeah so that’s again it’s not terribly hard. It sounds like a lot of just legalese I’m blabbing out but it’s not too hard but just take a quick look at those. If you decide that you want to start getting Cryptocurrency and at worst you might ask your donor to find a donor advised fund that takes crypto turns it into cash and then disperses it to the charity. So there are donor advised funds that do that

[00:50:15.76] spk_0:
interesting. Okay so so a Cryptocurrency donation is a non cash donation

[00:50:19.90] spk_1:
correct?

[00:50:58.76] spk_0:
Okay and for non cash donations of $500 or more, That’s where your your donor has the implication of i. r. s. Form 82 83. And you as the charity if you sell it within three years which your advice is that they do because it’s of its volatility Then you’ve got the implication of i. r. s. Form 80 – 82. I always thought those were backwards. The donors should have 80 to 82 because that comes first. Then comes 82 83 from the don’t to the Dhoni first the donor has it. Then the charity should be 80 to 82 82 83. But it’s not It’s 82 83 for your donor and 80 – 82 for you.

[00:51:06.16] spk_1:
That sounds like larry david logic. But that’s how I think as well.

[00:51:10.58] spk_0:
Yeah. I’ve been accused of being larry David in lots of ways. Including my my hair when it’s long like it is

[00:51:16.23] spk_1:
now. I’ve

[00:51:33.46] spk_0:
been accused of looking like Larry David. But we’re not complaining, we’re helping. That’s all right. Um Alright let’s leave us with something else. Another trend for the new year that you want us to be thinking about gene. Um

[00:51:36.96] spk_1:
Let me talk a little bit about diversity equity and inclusion. Since we’ve we’ve talked about that in the

[00:51:42.21] spk_0:
past. You could search jean and I have talked about D. I a bunch of times. But

[00:53:46.05] spk_1:
yeah please. You know I think in combination when we talk about the great migration and how the pandemic might be affecting different populations in different ways that we start to think again about kind of? Well if our charity is doing some some mission and we might not think of that mission as being really reflective of of specific races or or anything like that. Um But could D. E. I. B. Important anyway. And I think that’s where we get to think about. Well if we had more perspectives in our organization, if if we’re lacking some of those perspectives now, for example not having a lot of latin thinks Hispanics or blacks or asian americans on the board or in the leadership group, maybe we’re not really thinking about how our services that we’re delivering are affecting different populations differently. Maybe we’re just sort of providing services but we’re focused on urban centers or urban centers where if we’re center based, our center based is in neighborhoods that are much more accessible to uh white populations versus other populations. So getting different perspectives, even if we think of ourselves as being race neutral, which is kind of a charged term. But I’ll just use it for for these purposes. If we think some of us think of ourselves as race neutral and therefore we don’t have to get involved in the D. E. I work. We want to say, well don’t we care about serving our population in a way that’s kind of fair and not just favoring one segment over other segments or just totally neglecting certain segments of the population because they don’t have the same type of access. Have we ever thought about those things and having diversity can help us think about those things. Um, but it has to be done obviously in an inclusive way, which we’ve talked about and I know we just have a few minutes here, but it’s

[00:54:03.34] spk_0:
sort of it’s touching on, you know, not knowing what you don’t know without without having the perspective of diverse populations on your board, in your leadership, then you don’t know how you’re not serving other non white populations. Yeah. And even when we were perceived by other by by non white populations.

[00:55:32.64] spk_1:
Yeah, exactly. And even when we say, well when we look at a group of people and we say diversity, you know, that has one meaning. But sometimes when we just look in our inside our own heads, uh, and when people go unconscious bias, for example, try to think about what that is. It’s like, well if we don’t have the benefit of having different perspectives are being exposed to that all of our lives and none of us have all of the perspectives in our lives. So we were all going to be guilty of some sort of unconscious bias because we just don’t know any better. We we haven’t had other information that would have help develop a sensitivity or understanding or just knowledge of some of the disparities that are out there. So, and and how our organization can be either helping those disparities or hindering them. So just getting a sense of where we’d like to go. I think that can improve employee retention. It can lead us to new areas of employee recruitment and it can make us more relevant as organizations in the future, where if we’re not addressing some of these things, we could find ourselves becoming irrelevant less attractive to future donors, especially younger donors who this is very important to. Um, and so that’s my, my closing thought. Mhm.

[00:55:48.24] spk_0:
All good thoughts for uh, for the new year for 2022, Gene Takagi are legal, legal contributor, Managing attorney of Neo. You’ll find him at nonprofit law blog dot com. He’s also at G attack and you’ll find the firm at neo law group dot com. Gene again, thank you very much. Happy New Year.

[00:55:57.39] spk_1:
Happy New Year. tony

[00:56:47.13] spk_0:
next week. I’m working on it very diligently. If you missed any part of this week’s show, I beseech you find it at tony-martignetti dot com. We’re sponsored by Turn to communications pr and content for nonprofits. Your story is their mission turn hyphen two dot c o. Do you need help with any of those ready projects in 2022? Get them off your plate. A creative producer is claire Meyerhoff. The shows social media is by Susan Chavez Marc Silverman is our web guy and this music is by scott stein. Mm hmm, thank you for that affirmation scotty Be with me next week for nonprofit radio big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. Go out and be great.