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16NTC Videos: Virtual Orgs & Volunteers + 17NTC + Hair News

New video interviews from #16NTC, the Nonprofit Technology Conference. And you need to take a look at #17NTC in Washington, D.C. in March. P.S. Hair news. 

Nonprofit Radio for September 16, 2016: Happy Healthy Nonprofit & Your Job Descriptions

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Beth Kanter & Aliza Sherman: Happy Healthy Nonprofit

Beth Kanter & Aliza Sherman at 16NTC

Beth Kanter returns with co-author Aliza Sherman and their new book is “The Happy, Healthy Nonprofit.” They urge you to make employee wellbeing as important as organizational performance. We talk through how. (Recorded at the 2016 Nonprofit Technology Conference)

 

 

Heather Carpenter: Your Job Descriptions

Heather Carpenter is co-author of the book “The Talent Development Platform” and she’s got advice for your often-rushed-through, lifted-off-the-web job descriptions. (Hint: Stop doing that!) (Originally aired September 25, 2015)

 

 


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Hello and welcome to tony martignetti non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent on your aptly named host oh, i’m glad you’re with me. I’d suffer with quadra tano pia, if i saw that you missed today’s show happy, healthy non-profit beth cancer returns with co author eliza sherman, and their new book is the happy, healthy non-profit they urge you to make employees well being as important as organizational performance that was recorded at the twenty sixteen non-profit technology conference and your job descriptions have the carpenter is co author of the book the talent development platform and she’s got advice for your often rushed through lifted off the web job descriptions hint don’t do it. Originally aired on september fifteenth of last year on tony’s take two my new plan e-giving video responsive by pursuant full service fund-raising data driven and technology enabled, you’ll raise more money pursuant dot com, and by we be spelling supercool spelling bee fundraisers. We be spelling dot com here’s the happy, healthy non-profit and this book that they’re about to talk about is number nine in the amazon non-profit books category. Let’s get this thing, but just by the darn thing skyrocketed. Let’s. Get it up to number eight. Let’s. Get it? No, we get it upto one by this book the happy, healthy non-profit hello and welcome to tony martignetti non-profit radio coverage of sixteen ntc non-profit technology conference this is also part of ntc conversations. We are in san jose, california, at the convention center and with me now are beth cantor and eliza sherman. They’re session topic is happy, healthy non-profit using tech for healthier work and life we’re going to get to that very shortly. First have to highlight our swag item for the interview and that is this papal very fine crafted would a pencil those of you just on ntcdinosaur say shins and the audio stream i’m sorry you can’t see the fine craftsmanship and the way this is burned in the papal logo burned into the woods like i used to have a little wood burning kit when i was a cub scout and we usedto carve nasty words and our names but more nasty words independent to wood pieces, and then burned them before our parents saw them and then also there’s this nice papal book notebook very handy for keeping track of your wellness and health goals and your and your achievement toward them. This goes into our swag pile for the day, second day here at ntc and ah, what a not so subtle transition i made teo happy health and wellness. The two of you are working on a book. Beth, eliza and what’s. The book is called happy healthy non-profit is that right? Yes. Strategies for impact without burnout, judges for impact. Without burnett, when can we expect this book it will publish in october. Okay, your co authoring eyes there. Another author. We should know the two of you. Okay, now, beth, you’re last year and t c you were here talking about walking as part of work. Not as not as part of your health and wellness regimen, but working, walking at work. You have a you have a wellness kick? Yes, you know well, that was the genesis for this book. Because it’s not just about individual wellness. It’s also about well being in the workplace. Thie organizational health. Yes. So i see we’re talking to an organizational level now. Yes. And not just health, not just health. Because, you know, health is important that’s, physical energy, but well being, the well being of the organization, well being of the staff, which translates translates into the well being of the organization and its stakeholders. Okay, eliza, now i neglected teo properly introduce either of you. I’m sorry. Beth is a master trainer, speaker, author and blogger at beth blawg, and eliza is tech wellness advocate tequila’s on dh, author of eleven books. This will be your twelve, right. This is the eleventh, so ten, but she’s, just such a great writer and collaborator, i just i just thought it was twelve. You have an interesting this deeply are all your books about health and wellness? Actually, all of my books are about business or the internet. In fact, i started the first woman on internet company back in the nineties, and so i wrote a couple of books, cyber girl books about the internet for women, and this came out of my interest in tech wellness, which is obviously an important part of our lives because of everything we’ve been doing with all of our gadgets. And i got in touch with bath and she’s into the walking and she’s into all of the sleep habits, and we combined it all and that’s what the book is going to be. Okay, wait, hold on. Beth tech wellness. What is tech wellness? What do you mean by that? Well, if you think about the fact that the technology we use has gotten smaller and portable and nobody has taught us how to use it well, so now we’re all getting strained next. Strange eyes, strained brains. So hold it like this. Yeah, like that. Like it like that. Try to do that. Pose that’s a good pose. It’s hard. Maintain it is. Okay, what we’re gonna say back. Oh, i forgot. I know what i want to know why. I also want to say that lisa and i have actually known each other for twenty years. You have no rights. Okay? Out of the blue oversignt no, no, because, you know, i sort of had a front row seat at the creation of this field, the non-profit tech field. And so when i was looking around doing web stuff for non-profits back in the early nineties, i ran into at least met her at one of ah, web girls meet ups. Okay. Okay. So let’s go. All right, so we want we want tohave happy, healthy non-profit by having happy, healthy people eyes that. Okay, so you have some strategies, i presume for well, especially from you gaining more from technology with fewer intrusions. So we is that the way we start there, with sure minimizing intrusions in our tech beings? Sure. Okay. From what kind of lens? Of of the individual. Okay versus the organization. Okay, so, for starters, i stop sleeping with my iphone. Okay. You had your iphone goes to your head. Yes, i know. I used it is an alarm clock, but i had no impulse control. Teo actually not look at all my social media feeds before bed, and that disrupts your sleep. It disrupts your circadian rhythms and if you don’t get good sleep, you’re not good to anybody. You’re worthless, you’re worthless that air sleep by keeping your iphone out of the bedroom and bask in your office alarm clock. Sabelo well, i did a sony said, no, no, i don’t want radioshack final radio shack. What about one with that? Wakes me up with pulsating light fancy. And then i set up a charging station at the house. So as soon as i walk in the door, my entire family has to put their devices at the door, plug it in, and then if they want to use it, they have to walk through the whole house and think about the fact that they’re going to use the device. Ok, that is similar to me to what we learned in the italian, my italian background eat less by not putting the big platter of food on the plate. Exactly. You keep the platter in the kitchen and plate there and then and you have to get up and go and, you know, attempted by the beautiful sausage in the pasta that wolber so close, it’s. Just a fork. It’s a fork length away. Okay, okay. Makes a lot of sense now. I was just reading something about the iphone. Then the new iphone that’s going to be technologically equal to the six but smaller inside were like, five. They’re changing something about the blue, the blue tones, the blue light and the way you dropped your sleep. There’s a blue shades or something that that makes it hard. It’s a strain on your eye or that you know, but it’s it’s not so much. Just it’s. That but it’s also, if you read your work emails right before you go to sleep, you’re gonna have stress dreams about it. I mean, you know, you should have a better night time rich team that allows you to go to sleep calmly and wake up refreshed about a better morning routine. That too i do. I’m trying. I try not to look at my email now, my phone is not well. It is today now, because when i travel yeah. When you travel, you travel you. Use a little little nightstand radio club. Now, i use my phone, but i keep it. Try to keep it a faraway so have to get up out of bed. Okay? And i’ve conditioned myself to say don’t don’t do it right now. The morning routine that’s a tough one. No, i have one. Guess what it is. Well, it’s not checking your email? No, i don’t know. I walked five thousand steps, so you get out of bed. Well, i shower and, you know, show kids to school, you know? And then i walked my five thousand steps or your coffee drinker. I make coffee, i meditate while the coffee’s brewing okay, three short meditations. Yeah. Three minutes, three minutes. Cycle right. Five thousand steps on dh then start my day. Okay, let’s, turn to release it. Now, before you did something like the cookers hyre well that’s supposed to be related to the circadian rhythms. Exactly. The blue light affects your brain and its tricks your brain into thinking it’s daytime. And that is something that so subtle and none of us are realizing it’s happening. Now what i was going to say about the iphone is they’re taking that out over there, changing the shade in the new, smaller iphone that’s still going to be technically so all that does is change the light that doesn’t change. What beth was saying is that you’re compulsively checking all your messages and getting sucked into the tensions and stress of work keep the phone away from the bed, you don’t get it right, and i don’t need it in the morning. You don’t it’ll be there, you know, there are things in the world will be trying to make space in your life for reflection and contemplation and some were somewhere in this always on, always on, always thinking, always doing world yeah, okay. All right. What else? Elisa, you give us one self care so self care is important. So we were talking about technology. But there are so many other things that have to do with taking care of yourself. So tack, wellness is one of them getting good sleep. We’ve talked about movement. The fact that we sit so many hours of every day at work almost all of us are trapped behind our desk. So beth has been really good at training me at doing this i considered the computer for hours on end and never budge. She forces me to get up, we walk the halls, we walk around the block, you live in the same house. Are you sharing a home together way? No, no, what do you know when when we’re doing princessa presentations together and we’re traveling together working on the book, working weekends, right? Yeah, so we’ve been working a lot of the book and we get sucked in as well to the book, but then she is incredibly disciplined to get up and get her steps going, so i’ve gone from two thousand steps to hitting ten thousand every damn with her when i’m not with her, i’m not as disciplined, but you have reminders you can use your technology to remind you to be mindful of using it or to remind you to stop what you’re doing and get up and move around, or two meditate toe, listen to some guided meditations that are free on your iphone or on your android phone, and take that times or use your technology to advantage you’re tuned to non-profit radio tony martignetti also hosts a podcast for the chronicle of philanthropy fund-raising fundamentals is a quick ten minute burst of fund-raising insights, published once a month. Tony’s guests are expert in crowdfunding, mobile giving event fund-raising direct mail and donor cultivation. Really, all the fund-raising issues that make you wonder, am i doing this right? Is there a better way there is? Find the fund-raising fundamentals archive it. Tony martignetti dot com that’s marketmesuite n e t t i remember there’s, a g before the end, thousands of listeners have subscribed on itunes. You can also learn maura, the chronicle website, philanthropy dot com fund-raising fundamentals, the better way. Now, is this a simple is you referring to just setting an alarm to remind you to get up? It could be, but there are apse. There are acts that will remind you. All right. So they just have a few apple fit ball fit. Bolt? Yes, old fitted bold because actually is a plug in on your browser that will ding every fifteen minutes and show you exercises. Actually, pictures of exercises step by step that you khun dio i can still be productive if i stop my work every fifteen minutes. Yes, yes, yes, you can. It’s it’s a different kind of interruption because you’re what you’re doing is training your attention. Have you ever heard of a book called eighteen minutes a day? You’re pregnant. You can tell me about the last time. I think. You know, you have a really good memory. Yeah, i think so. Let’s, look back. We can check the video, but i think yes, you told me about it. Okay, but go ahead, summarize because everybody doesn’t have my memory. Give us well. And this is more if you’re cliff notes. Right? Right. So let technology makes us distracted. And what you’re doing is training your awareness, so if your beep yourself every hour and say to yourself and my own task, am i doing that most important task? You’re actually trained yourself to think that way, right? Right? Staying on task versus you know, i yeah, somehow i ended up, you know, in an endless loop of youtube videos, couto they’re very nice people, but, you know, it could be a little distracting. Yes, they have a big president like, i have to have two floor here, but it could be a little distracted, right? How did that happen? But if i have a little bit of a reminder, i’m not present, i’m somehow i wandered down this path. I don’t know how let me get back to where i need to know. It’s changing bad habits it’s becoming aware of your bad habits and changing them is being really conscious, mindful of how you’re using the technology and making those changes consciously making those changes because if nobody is, they’re nudging you if i mean we could be accountability buddies to each other, i might say to beth beth, you’re on your phone at bedtime, but if if nobody is there, at least your technology can remind you and make yourself more conscious and aware. Because once you’re aware you can do something about it and they wear. This is important too, because the technology provides monitoring. Like i can look down, i can say, well, i’ve only had twenty seven hundred steps so far. I better get moving. Okay, for sure that a simple benefit, but yes, the search search. Ok, it does everything okay? We name any other apse for wellness. Well, there’s a desk desk, yogi is one for your computer that will help you pull that bolt and yogi. Okay, there, spire spike. Oh, that’s a wearable it’s unbearable zubair aspire u s p i r yes, fire it’s a device. You either talk in here or in your pants and your brawl or your pants, and it measures your breath and it’s based on your breath patterns. It tells you whether you’re calm tents are you or you’re focused and it sending data to your phone. So i mean, it will tell you if you’re tense and so it’s a reminder to a nudge toe. Take a deep breath. You’re tense. Upset? Yeah, alright moment. There’s so if you’re in the meeting with your boss and things in your annual evaluation is not going well, you can say, well, my bride’s beeping i gotta stop fired-up spire was telling me, buy bras buzzing, you know? Well, i can’t have any more i can’t have any more flat attend. Well, what what it is is helping you with, you know, emotional intelligence of self awareness and knowing what your reactions are so you can then manage them and be intentional about it. Okay? That’s the awareness. Yeah. Intentional intentionality. Okay, what else we got? Oh, moment there’s the moment at which tells you how more okay, moments where tio, check your it tells you how many times you’ve been looking at your iphone. I have that really embarrassing. You haven’t mastered that. So how many times through the day today, i astronomical. Are you over? A hundred? Probably is. I mean, well, yeah, you use it for so many days, sequential things. I look at the time of day sometimes, you know, that’s over and over. But then but then there is mail on your facebook wear. How embarrassing, you know? Well, i was i was consciously trying to in this might somewhere because i’m a social media person to consciously think what i’m on social media and my butt being intentional and they getting stuff done are just wind this lee scrolling through the feet and saying what everyone else is doing. So how much time in my wasting on facebook and how much time i actually getting stuff done with her? Same thing? I mean, they’re also short looking another hundred fifty and it’s a way to procrastinate. Do you want to share your your number? What is gold with moment a moment you wantto make moment number, moment number i i actually just used it to t get a handle on it said he was embarrassed. It was embarrassing at first. What was i looked at like there was one like two hours of facebook today, two hours of yeah, but no cumulatively alt-right yeah, yeah, thank you, but also tell you how many times you looked at your phone. Do you remember how many times you were checking? Oh, you know, she’s not going to tell you that i’m going to tell you that i should tell you i can’t remember tell you her cholesterol numbers before i know it was like three hundred eighty years for eighty or something. Yeah, great. Well, no, no, no, no. Yeah. Three. Ninety nine, ninety four hundred. Okay. It’s one. Fifty now. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yes. That was from last year. Also. That’s. What? Got you on the walking? Yeah, four hundred. That was yes. Okay, our other ideas. Way wellness. Okay, let’s, go up to the aps. And when we started to talk about relationships in the workplace, okay, so we talk, you know, that does affect your emotional well being. So we talked a lot about techniques that you can use. Teo, you know, man it. How to say no. For example. Boundary setting down decent but foundry said on reset and enforcing forcing i think lots of people set boundaries and then they don’t get enforced. I had our excellent pia is yes, that’s true. Given those i thought we were getting into the session i was looking at was, like, fifteen minutes. Ok? Yes, that it happens. You have these things in your mind. But you never. You never tell them to anybody, so nobody else knows and your boundaries get trampled and you don’t say no, you say? Yeah, how the first thing you say is yes, i’ll do that. Yes, i think you’re thinking. Are you okay? Yeah. Now. Okay, let’s, give some of the tips. So how do we enforce our boundaries? You say now we got to buy the but you’re going to say by the book, but you use it. You say nufer out on non-profit it was right. No way this little exercise around practicing feeling what no feels like in your throat. So i’ll say, eliza, we jump off a cliff. No, come on, alisa. You’re really good at jumping off cliffs. No, but why? I’m too busy right now. I have a full plate, but thank you for asking, okay? It was was this one act play festival, which is what is that? Well, we’re just just practicing saying no, and then and overcoming objections and if people practicing practicing and and also coming up with really legitimate reasons, because people want to hear a reason they don’t like to take no, they don’t want to take no for an answer. So come up with your reasons are and value those ok, i’ve heard a strategy? I don’t know necessarily related to boundaries. But you people want to hear. Yes. So you thie answer is yes, but even though everybody knows but is the universal no gator yeah, here. Yes, yes, yes, i will do that. But i won’t do it until tomorrow. Or yes, there’s that technique as well. Okay, is that is that bonem cards that make way didn’t make the book? I mean, our book is really just learning to say no and benefiting from saying on being okay with saying no so here’s another technique and sort of down the my mindfulness path, if you will drawling, meditative, drawling something called zen tangles. So rather than zoning out on your phone zen out with drawling so it’s actual it’s the meditation technique technique demonstrate this one your swag we have are going she’s so good at they’re people. So you now you’re gonna have to describe it for listeners because everybody does not have the benefit of the video. I need a pen. Of course. Give me the paper would burn. Oh, is that so gorgeous? What a gorgeous pan. The wood burning. I’m just gonna have to go. Go to their booth and hear what they’re doing. Zen zen circles with no it’s god’s entangles. Okay, okay. It’s, meditative drawing. Okay. And you’re usually doing on the small piece of artwork so you can complete it in less than a half hour. So we draw. You gotta do the cliff notes version four dots on the page. You connect them four dots. You drew a rectangle, i draw a rectangle. I then i draw a scribble or tangle. And then the next part is to fill it in with repetitive patterns in silence. Okay, stop now! Show that to the camera. So a rectangle than her squiggle and that we’re filling it in with repetitive vertical lines. She’s chosen right to write and keep on changing it. Okay, my head feels and or can i could? You could do circles or whatever, but the idea is, it helps your focus. You’re telling it’s intuitive there’s no right or wrong answers. And what it’s doing? Is it’s really lighting up a different side of her brain? Then you are in front of the screen. Is this research based we have researched? Approved? Yes. Yeah. It’s, therapeutic art. This is their feet in guarding the cars and houses, drawing the courthouses. Yes, about that. Oh, it could be that. Tell us about that. I don’t know. I like to make little court. I mean, i’m no artist naturally. But i thought you literally through no, i draw cars and houses. And i thought you threw carson. Elsa? What? What is this called? Xan. Tangle. Entangle? Yes. When i said is this better than drawing? Okay? Cars and houses. You know that i draw when i’m there. I mean that’s, my there’s mine, there’s there’s my own u do that over and over again. Well, i’ll fill it in sometimes. You know, sometimes a shingle house like that. How you do it might be bricks, you know, i might make it a stucco. Ah, it could be a plaster. Which would be no, you no, those are the main ones. And then i feeling the roof, of course, usually tar shingles. I don’t like the stucco roofs, and i don’t really like slate roofs either. So i do the the national sabat are there things? Do you do? This is there is my house. Relax, say, to relax or while you’re bored? Are you not to relax? I’m not paying attention if you’re doodling, which is a very different part of your brain, you’re losing its not enjoying this. You’re not, you know, dahna screen doing this? No, i’m not so it’s a different part of great. I might be on the ground on easy phone call, you know, a casual phone call like with friends and not business. I think i pretty well. So you’ve been in a bookstore recently. Have you seen, like adult men in the bookstore recently recently? Yeah, i was in barnes and noble. Okay, so, have you seen all the adult coloring books i have? Not. So this is the hot new trend? Yeah. Wait. But that means that we’ve grown up coloring books, not dahna way. Don’t bother. Although there is a swear e coloring book, we won’t say those among terrestrial radio. Now, don’t get in trouble with my am and fm affiliate stations. No, of course not. Like you would have two years ago. You know, of course not. All right, right. So these are adult themed right coloring book. Not a mean of a non sexual nature. They’re they’re they’re meditative. Drawings? They’re flowers. They’re butterflies, whatever. Highly detailed, though that’s. What? That was it’s different than a child. One very highly. Let’s. Go back to my course is a research backing up? Yes. Therapeutic art thieves entangles there are yes. Entangles. Okay, meditative art, art therapy. You can look at a dog clolery cubine google it. Everybody knows art therapy. Like yeah, yeah, yeah, same thing, same thing entangles all right. And adult coloring books, adult coloring book and there’s some right here in this sum. And this exhibit blackbaud blackbaud has them with pencils. In fact. Other says, i’m not blackbaud handup who had the pencils and the colored and it wasn’t black there’s three but there’s a thumb up your lady was upleaf saturday’s swag pile had coloring pencils. Very nice. Find pencils. You know that the adult coloring book trend has caused a color pencil shortage. All right? Yeah. There aren’t enough colored pencils produced in the world. Yes. Not anymore. Not anymore. They’re not. They’re doing putting extra shifts in the factory, and they want the big sets of one hundred fifty different colors. Right? You’re you’re young and you’re full spectrum? Yes, exactly. Red orange. Yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, the rainbow, you know, but you gotta have the full spectrum. All right, let’s, let’s, get back to our wellness. We were in the office that can put us in the office. All these. What do you have? Office. We talked about boundaries, nandi on the office, standing and sitting what’s. The combination there’s, an ergonomic combination of twenty minutes standing eight minute sitting in two minutes stretching and moving around it’s, twenty minutes sitting a minute, standing two minutes stretching a minute. Standing. Yes, it. Yes, as long as you’re breaking up the siting. Okay. Okay. Well, sandy or treadmill desks for movement while you’re healed. Now, i’ve seen motorized desk that are both. Yeah, i’m standing and and sitting there, vera desk. There will be a narrow desk. Very desk because they have lovers and they can raise them. E i saw that at south by okay. Okay. I want one. All right. You could have you could have. I have the old one with the lover. Yeah. That’s those air, those air, certain stops. The details. Yeah. You want the motor where’s unlimited stopping, right? And you don’t potential and, you know i actually have to buy a fancy desk. I’ve seen non-profit people use cartons and music stands okay. You know, let’s get people a decent death. Yeah. Or even on amazon? Yeah. I’m not saying you’re advocating that, but no, but let’s not have people standing standing on creates and no elevating their desk with milk milk boxes. You know, let’s, let’s get you people, but some krauz organizational policy offering that as an option if you want to standing and encouraging it or even a community one have a standing desk there that people take turns and they encourage each other. Okay, it’s, your turn. It’s returned eight minutes, eight minutes and that’s. Another thing you know, going into the office. That design and layout of the office can encourage or be nudges too certain healthy happy behaviors. For example, walking trails inside the office. They have that robert wood johnson foundation walking trails in the office. Right. They lay out here if you do this track around the office. It’s this many steps. Take a break. That’s not you know, i’m not joking. Alright, i believe you, you know sign it. Don’t take the elevator. Take the stairs. Two up, one down. You know, there’s a one up, two down, but even even doing something as simple as like, if your workplace offer soda in the refrigerator or put it down, i don’t have it. Don’t have it at eye level. Put the water in eye level dahna very simple stuff the baskets of fruit within reach through no chocolate doughnuts, right? Right, i’m ok. I’m feeling bad about something that just occurred to me that we said earlier again for people who don’t have the video, we were talking about how to use your howto hold your phone and i said like this, not like that. Well, that’s no value to people who are just listening to ntc conversations or non-profit radio, they don’t have the video, not on my youtube channel. Riel, oriel tony martignetti so they don’t have the benefit of video. I could do that. You cannot no, i like give shout out some, you know, best knows i’m kidding, lisa, i hope you know. No, you’re good, you’re good to chat about what was my point. Oh howto hold, explain how you’re alone, right? So so instead of your neck is down and your shoulders are hunched and it’s close to sixty pounds of pressure on your non-technical on the cervical spine. Yes. So it’s close to your body that’s not good. Hold it out a little bit forward. And if you don’t want to look like a geek, you khun sort of put your guests want to make a little more human looking you put you, you cup your elbow into your other hand and you’re sort of holding it up like that. You’re walking like this, you know you’re not supposed to be doing while walking. No, no. That’s distracted one thing you know, they’re not gonna do that when you set me up. No, but you know, that’s. All right. That’s, another issue. There’s been a thirty five percent increase in accidents do to distract and why i’m not surprised you walk the streets of new york city now because you’re on the west coast now. But anyway, i walk the streets of the east coast of new york city, and you have to you have to get out of people’s way, right? Because they’re not watching in tokyo. They have a texting lane in the sidewalk. No, they do. Where you can walk without a walker? Yeah, that’s. I wouldn’t do that because you get bumped into suppose you, but is there one for each direction yet? Is that a yeah? Yeah, is it too late? There was an article in the guardian recently to a really bizarre i think we should just about a fire handup ratify our environ. Exactly what exactly does that enables? Yeah, so so enabling modification to know, but modify your environment in different ways that create a relax using space that give you these cues that trigger your brain to say, oh, going into work, it’s not so stressful because i’ve got some really good lighting i’ve got maybe aromatherapy or some nice plants, i’ve got an environment that i’ve created at my workplace that makes me actually calmer, more relaxed, excellent didn’t even have to ask for your ideas. Were you right or or workplace? Where? There’s communal space where i can connect with other people and inspires collaboration? Yeah and that’s playful play way at work, but we need to have in our little in our shared space that makes it playful toys, adult court on always white ports and all. Clolery yes. Puzzles, markers, a communal table. Stress balls, balls. Yes, robots. One of one of the people you talked about has robot robot. Yes. Okay, cool. Yesterday we had did you see the group? I’m trying to see them. Corner shop. They’re here they have squeeze balls that are fruits today’s yesterday swags pile which got stolen overnight. But we had to squeeze eggplant. Yes, i have squeezed tomato. Some guests i could tell, you know, whether they were under stress or not, or whether you put there squeeze toy down, but they have fruits and vegetables out of squeeze toys. All right, buy-in we got to leave it there. I think we’ve from barton people. Yes, we have a deal. Ok. We only just talked about very little of what’s in the book. Well, of course you go by the book. The book is going to be called. I don’t know the subtitle of it. I’ll let a little lead to say at this time but the title is going to be happy. Healthy non-profit strategies for impact without burnout published by wiley wiley and coming out october of this year. Twenty sixty? Yes. Look for the book. Maybe we’ll have you on when it may. Well, have you want again? Keep that mind. Beth cancer. I may not remember so right. You know me better write. You can always find it happy, healthy non-profit dot org’s. Okay. Okay. Beth cantor out. Master trainer, speaker, author and blogger. You know she’s at best blogged. And lisa sherman, a wellness attack wellness advocate and, uh, multi book author as as beth is. Well, this is tony martignetti non-profit radio coverage of sixteen ntc non-profit technology conference. Thank you. Wish, ewing, we’re showing you wishing you health and wellness in your office place. Thanks so much for being with us. You can preorder that book right now on amazon. It is available. Let’s. Shoot those numbers up your job descriptions coming up first. Pursuant, they’ve got a free webinar. Best kept secrets for upgrading donors. Well, secrets are going to be so best kept after the ribbon our wednesday september twenty first, one o’clock eastern, you’ll learn the latest don’t a research keys to advancing donor elation, ships and surprising strategies to upgrade your hidden gems. Tony dot m a slash pursuant webinar needed capital p and a capital w and that’s, where you go for registration, we be spelling spelling bees for non-profit rid fund-raising if you want to bring millennials into your good work, this is perfect, not grandma’s spelling bee you can check out their video, which has examples of the live music, the dancing, the comedy fund-raising and spelling these air terrific millennial events, usually in a bar or restaurant, and they’re very fun video is that we be spelling dot com now tony steak too. My latest video is don’t be in the woods on planned e-giving there’s a lot that small and midsize non-profits can do with planned e-giving i explained how to get started it’s at tony martignetti dot com and that is tony’s take two here is have a carpenter with your job descriptions. I’m very pleased that heather carpenter is with me. She is a phd was a non-profit manager for ten years. She’s, now assistant professor in the school of public non-profit and health administration at grand valley state university. She teaches grad and undergrad courses in non-profit management, financial management fund on profit technology, leadership and human resources management. The book that brings our two non-profit radio is co authored with terra qualls. And it is the talent development platform putting people first in social change organizations published by josy bass this year on twitter she’s at heather carpentier, which is at heather carpenter. But take off that last are have the carpenter. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, tony that’s. A pleasure. You’re calling from grand valley university. Where’s that michigan. Right war in grand rapids, michigan, which is on the west side of the state. Okay, okay. That was the summer there in grand rapids. It was really nice. We have a great summer. I’ll bet a little harsher winters, but yeah, no, but you do have harsh winters. Yes. Okay, heather, our job descriptions he’s often get very, very short shrift, don’t they? Yes. Yes. Well, having worked in non-profits for many years and done h r and operations, i know how busy we get. And often, when people leave organizations, we scramble and pulled together what we have on dh and send out a job description that is often outdated and hasn’t been updated in a few years. Or sometimes, i think even pulled off the web. Yes, yes. You’ve seen that? Yes. Ok, not that you’ve done that when you were leading your non-profit. I understand, but i think it’s i think that’s also a pretty common practice. Why do we need to focus more on job descriptions? Well, job descriptions are really an important part of helping an employee to understand their roles and responsibilities within the organization. It also helps to track employee and volunteer performance and success. And this is ah living document, right way. Need to keep these current as job responsibilities change. Yes, we recommend that non-profits update their job descriptions, actually on an annual basis. Okay, okay. Sabat do you do you think that poor job descriptions lead tio? I don’t know hyre turnover or lower morale? What consequences do you think result from not having accurate descriptions? Yes, i i agree with your assertion. We’ve found that a couple of things can happen with outdated Job descriptions 1 that it’s for a new hyre they might not really fully understand the role let’s say hypothetically, speak about how when organizations lose employees and they have someone coming in and they used a job description. That’s out data from the labs it’s not clearly showing the response the accurate responsibility so the person might get burned out pretty quickly, finding out they have a lot of additional latto responsibilities, or maybe they don’t even have the adequate qualifications for for the rial responsibilities. So the job or, if someone’s been in a position for a few years, there’s what we call the pile on effect, where often more and more responsibilities added, but that’s not actually reflected in the job description or in compensation so so employees can get and volunteers can’t burn out that way, and then sometimes people become overqualified for the job or might be overqualified when they come in. The job description is accurate. Does this apply also to organizations that are mostly volunteers? Should should be job descriptions for volunteers? Oh, yes, absolutely, we believe that that will our book applies to not just paid staff volunteers as well, and we actually have sample job descriptions for board board positions and key volunteers as well as come common staff within various non-profit organizations like your executive director, development director on bury the book is loaded with lots of resource is sample job descriptions but goes way beyond that just job responsibilities. And forms, you know, and we’re just taking one piece of the book and talking about job description, but there’s a lot more to it. And the thing is just loaded with but templates and resource is yes, thank you. I really wanted it to be as practical as possible, having worked in the nonprofit sector for many years ourselves, it’s more of a workbook where organizations can pick and choose the chapters that they need the resource is from. But it is a whole platform. If an organization decides to go through the process for from everything from understanding the organizational learning and professional development culture to actually assessing stats, professional development and creating professional development goals, an objective tied to the strategic als of the organization. All right, so where do we start this job? Description process. I mean, i know who it starts with its doctor, the supervisor. How does that what is the what the person need to do to get started? Well, the supervisor should really look at the position itself and often there’s different philosophies on job descriptions. And our our philosophy is that the organization, the supervisor, should build the job around the position and not the person because people change andi really, to really get an understanding of what is needed to advance the organization forward. So we have something called a proficiency mapping cool and are in our book where supervisors can really identify the called common confidences that the knowledge, skills, abilities and other characteristics needed to perform the job and then rape those competencies on different proficiency levels. We use a proficiency level scale created by the national institute of health, and they’ve been doing this type of job description, worked for many, many years and really getting understanding of what level that the position and the responsibilities you need to be at when we talked earlier a few minutes ago about outdated job descriptions common, another problem with outdated job description says they’re not often at the level that the position needs to be on a smaller non-profits with great to have people who could do lots of different responsibilities, but sometimes we have very high expectations that someone in entry level type job might be more responsibilities, say, manager or leading the organization through some sort of process when that’s not necessarily the right level for that. Job you have these 5 proficiency levels, fundamental novice, intermediate advanced and an expert, yeah, way provide definitions and also example words and responsibilities at each level. I like to tell you, i jump pretty quickly from fundamental expert on i think if i’d done something once, that makes me an expert, so i don’t know if that fits within your construct, but like, one time i’m not the expert the first time, but after i’ve done it one time, i consider myself an expert and that’s cause that’s cost me a lot of money and, like home repairs and things, but i can’t get around it. That’s that’s but that’s probably not probably fit within your your definitions well, generally the expert and advance our our our director level positions on responsibilities. So at the executive director, we would hope a most size organizations that the person, the person holding that position would have advanced on expert level. But we understand that at the lower level positions the coordinators, the entry level positions that they’re more at the novice and the intermedia level. And yes, i mean, we’ve found that it’s helpful, starting with the supervisor to create these confidences and proficiency levels on dh, then down the line. Wei have employees assess themselves and not do a real comparison over the competencies profession? Okay, yes, we’re gonna get that. So so after the supervisors part, then then what’s next in creating these optimal job descriptions, the next step is really getting documenting the employees responsibilities, and they don’t see what the supervisor has done. But if you do have someone in that particular position just making sure that all the responsibilities are are documented because the supervisor might not have a son of everything that employees doing. But obviously, if it’s a new position, or if the job description ever been done before, then they would have the supervisor just do the proficiency mapping. Ok, ok, but but the the next step now is the is the is the employee e-giving their input into what their responsibilities are around the competencies and the proficiency levels. Yeah, the next up is just the employees identifying their their responsibility. Okay, a faster proficiency levels. Quite yet just for the job description itself. It’s really making sure that all the responsibilities are identified and the supervisor is really the one that making sure that all the proficiency levels are identified. All right, ok, ok. And we mentioned these competencies. Can you give us some examples of competencies? Sure. Before you do that, i want to tell you about the process that we took to to identify ten core competencies for non-profit managers like holly and i actually did some some national surveys and looked at literature around training needs of non-profit managers and assassin what their confidence cesaire needed. So this is really backed and research that we identify the ten course set of common confidence ease that non-profit managers possessed. They’re very general there everything from advocacy to communications, marketing, financial management to fun development hyre we also have human resource is way also in the book go through the process of has helping organizations create their own sub confidence ease, because since the time core competencies are very general, we know that each organization is different in their culture and each position and as well as department, it’s organization, house, apartment, that they have their own core competencies that are important to that organization. So we’ve also provided of examples of different size organizations and the subcontinent use that. They have so well for example, intercultural confidence he is a very important sub competency for many organizations, two working, working well under pressure are working with certain population, so we’ve we’ve worked with various organizations and their different types of missions require different competency. So we worked with homeless organization last semester, and they, you know, they require their staff to have confidence he’s in understanding people who have housing have challenges, okay, let’s see, we have just about a minute before, before we take a break and then we’ll continue. I should do this. We haven’t mentioned the board should be job descriptions for board positions. Definitely we have. We have a sample job descriptions for board chair board treasurer, board secretary on various board general boardmember on there’s a there’s. A lot of resource is not just in our book, but out there on the web is well for creating and managing board job descriptions. That’s an important piece we’ve we’ve done this process with all volunteer run organizations where it’s just the board teo organizations that have paid staff, maybe they’re smaller, they have all the board do their Job descriptions and then the 1 to two staff members that they have so it’s important that it’s not just a staff process that boardmember look at their job descriptions and revise them. Okay, let’s, go out for a break and when we come back, heather, of course we’ll stay with us and we’ll keep talking about your job descriptions, and then we’ll move to mapping, mapping you thies competencies and proficiency levels to the job description. Stay with us like what you’re hearing a non-profit radio tony’s got more on youtube, you’ll find clips from stand up comedy tv spots and exclusive interviews catch guests like seth gordon. Craig newmark, the founder of craigslist marquis of eco enterprises, charles best from donors choose dot org’s aria finger do something that or neo-sage levine from new york universities heimans center on philanthropy tony tweets to he finds the best content from the most knowledgeable, interesting people in and around non-profits to share on his stream. If you have valuable info, he wants to re tweet you during the show. You can join the conversation on twitter using hashtag non-profit radio twitter is an easy way to reach tony he’s at tony martignetti narasimhan t i g e. N e t t i remember there’s, a g before the end, he hosts a podcast for the chronicle of philanthropy. Fund-raising fundamentals is a short monthly show devoted to getting over your fund-raising hartals. Just like non-profit radio, toni talks to leading thinkers, experts and cool people with great ideas. As one fan said, tony picks their brains and i don’t have to leave my office fund-raising fundamentals was recently dubbed the most helpful non-profit podcast you have ever heard. You can also join the conversation on facebook, where you can ask questions before or after the show. The guests were there, too. Get insider show alerts by email, tony tells you who’s on each week, and always includes link so that you can contact guests directly. To sign up, visit the facebook page for tony martignetti dot com. Lively conversation. Top trends and sound advice. That’s. Tony martignetti non-profit radio. And i’m lawrence paige, no knee author off the non-profit fund-raising solution. I know. I say it every time. Maybe maybe you listeners get here. Tired of hearing me say this, but i wish lawrence would pronounce his last name. Panjwani he’ll be so much more beautiful than paige. No. Ni lawrence. I’ve said this a large his face. So no it’s it’s. Not like i’m going behind his back. And pandiani will be so beautiful. Lorenzo? Lorenzo panjwani okay, okay. Heather let’s. Move now. Tio mapping what is this? What is it? What is that? The mapping process that comes next? Well, this is the mapping process is really about revising the job description and making sure that it matches up with the responsibilities really, that are needed. We advise organizations to separate job responsibilities by the competency categories. So we often see job descriptions that have a whole long list of job responsibilities. But were our processes to separate them by category? Cory so that it’s clear on the difference competencies that are needed with that particular job. We also have the manager identified perfect since he loves based on the job responsibility, action words. And so this is where hyre this is the revision process, the different levels and making sure that the wording really matches up with the proficiency level so we might have a position that is hyre up than it needs to be or lower and can be a giant. Now you mentioned job responsibility, action words. What defined those for us? Well, the action words are provided in the proficiency mapping scale. So as we talked about before there’s five purpose into levels from fundamental awareness, novice, intermediate to advance and back first. And each of these have a different level, and we have action words that are associated with each level. So as i mentioned about the higher level positions, we have the dance level there there’s facilitating, leading liaising, managing and the expert level. We’re synthesizing. We’re training were troubleshooting. And so these hyre level action words are associated with hyre level job responsibilities. Okay, yeah. And that’s me. Well, i like to focus on the expert. You know, like i said, i would skip over novice, intermediate and advanced. I go right from fundamental to expert one one one one time. So i’ve gotten used to use those expert use those expert examples. That’s where? Just in my mind, that’s where i belong let’s. See? Okay, so in this job in the in this revision process now it’s, the employees and the supervisor working together, uh, well, family it’s the supervisor making sure that the job description is aligned because as much as we’d like to be an employee involved in the process, the next step in the talent development platform which i don’t have time to talk about here is the individual professional development assessment and that’s where an employee actually haserot their confidence season proficiency level. So it’s really helpful that they don’t see realign job description before that, that there going off of what they i think that they’re expertise is and their proficiency level is. And then that way, you could do an accurate comparison. So what the job requires. Okay, well, you might be surprised we might have time to get to assessment a little bit. We might be surprised. Um, now for the mapping, there are there’s having six steps. Andi don’t really have. You know, we don’t have time to go through all six of them, but help help us understand an overview of the process. A little more detailed. And then we have so far yeah, so, as i mentioned in the first step of separating the job responsibilities by competency category, you’ll see then if there’s gaps and if you’ll have competency categories that you’re not covering it’s amazing how many organizations that we’ve worked with through this process, where they are missing competencies for specific positions, like operations manager, or or the executive director where often maybe, you know hr is a part of the operations manager job, but it’s not really accurately included are reflected in the job description or the job responsibilities or information. Technology is often a part of someone’s job, but not necessarily included, so it really helped helps organization to identify gaps with responsibility and say, well, we don’t have anything in this competency category. So let’s, let’s talk about what we need to include, i see, okay, it strikes me that this whole process to is going to i guess you said it, but just is going to make sure that you’re not bringing in let’s say, entry level people and having expectations that are unreasonable for them in terms of responsibilities and competencies. Exactly way also talk about degree levels as well in compensation we worked with quite a few smaller non-profits that, like tio, take all the responsibilities that we, we provide his examples, and and use them to hyre their new entry level staff at the masters level were like, whoa, you know, let’s think about it’s entry level, do they really need a mask spurs or do they even need a bachelor’s for that regard? So this really helped to think through the position responsibilities that you need for the organization and ok, if i really need all those responsibilities and maybe it’s two positions, not one or i’m i think i’m being unrealistic with how many responsibilities that i’m requiring in this in this position. So having those sometimes difficult conversations about what’s realistic for the organization since restarting tio, we’re talking about the possibility of entry level employees what’s your feeling on starting people at at low salaries? Well, i’m a little biased because i advocate for living wages because i teach graduate students in a lot of them are often on the job market, either during their degree program are afterwards and it’s really disappointing to see them have to take very low wage starting jobs also research, so that it costs between seventy five to one hundred for fifty percent of its employees annual salary when they leave. And so what i’ve seen with my students and former employees is that bill, if they’re not getting adequate living wage compensation, then the leave within a few months and that actually costs the organization a lot of money organizations, i don’t think we often realize how much time and effort it takes toe post the new position to interview the people to do the training and that’s that’s money, and what will when in fact, we could pay a living wage and a good starting salary for entry level employees and have them stay longer even if they stay a year to that’s that’s better than the cost of done, leaving within a few months because they find a better opportunity that paste on better excellent, we gotta leave it there. Unbelievable! You were right. We didn’t have a chance to talk about assessment. You’re right, but you got it by the book it’s talent development platform she’s heather l carpenter, phd and you’ll find her on twitter at heather carpentier carpenter and take off that last are thank you very much. Other next week, data disruption and small data rocks. If you missed any part of today’s show, i beseech you, find it on tony martignetti dot com, responsive by pursuant online tools for small and midsize non-profits data driven and technology enabled, and we’d be spelling supercool spelling bee fundraisers. We be e spelling dot com. Our creative producer is claire miree off sam lee boots is the line producer. Gavin dollars are am and fm outreach director. The show’s social media is by susan chavez. On our music is by scott stein. Be with me next week for non-profit radio. Big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. Go out and be great. What’s not to love about non-profit radio tony gets the best guests check this out from seth godin this’s the first revolution since tv nineteen fifty and henry ford nineteen twenty it’s the revolution of our lifetime here’s a smart, simple idea from craigslist founder craig newmark yeah insights, orn presentation or anything? People don’t really need the fancy stuff they need something which is simple and fast. When’s the best time to post on facebook facebook’s andrew noise nose at traffic is at an all time hyre on nine a m or eight pm so that’s when you should be posting your most meaningful post here’s aria finger ceo of do something dot org’s young people are not going to be involved in social change if it’s boring and they don’t see the impact of what they’re doing so you got to make it fun and applicable to these young people look so otherwise a fifteen and sixteen year old they have better things to dio they have xbox, they have tv, they have their cell phones. Me dar is the founder of idealised took two or three years for foundation staff to sort of dane toe add an email address card. It was like it was phone. This email thing is right and that’s why should i give it away? Charles best founded donors choose dot or ge somehow they’ve gotten in touch kind of off line as it were on dno, two exchanges of brownies and visits and physical gift mark echo is the founder and ceo of eco enterprises. You may be wearing his hoodies and shirts. Tony talked to him. Yeah, you know, i just i’m a big believer that’s not what you make in life. It sze, you know, tell you make people feel this is public radio host majora carter. Innovation is in the power of understanding that you don’t just do it. You put money on a situation expected to hell. You put money in a situation and invested and expect it to grow and savvy advice for success from eric sacristan. 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Nonprofit Radio for April 22, 2016: Virtual Orgs: Managing Remote Employees

Big Nonprofit Ideas for the Other 95%

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Heather Martin, Karen Graham & Amy Sample Ward: Virtual Orgs: Managing Remote Employees

What does it take to successfully manage offsite employees? You start with the right mindset, people & jobs. You also need tools, rules & etiquette. Heather Martin & Karen Graham are in the trenches on this and they share their wisdom. Heather is COO at Interfaith Family & Karen is executive director of Idealware. We talked at the 2016 Nonprofit Technology Conference.

Then, Amy Sample Ward is with me live to share her tips and lessons learned as CEO of Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN), an organization with several remote employees.

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Heather Martin & Karen Graham at 16NTC
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Oppcoll hello and welcome to tony martignetti non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent on your aptly named host we have a listener of the weak dan kimble in fresno, california. He’s, product specialist at apple owes software at ntcdinosaur just was non-profit technology conference just last month, dan couldn’t say enough good things about the show. So, dan, i thank you so much for loving non-profit radio congratulations on being our listener of the weak dan kimble okay, last friday, i made a mistake last friday was not tax day last week was a pre recorded show, and i hadn’t realized two weeks in advance that you had until the eighteenth for your taxes. I you know, i have accountants and bookkeepers and and attorneys and financial planners dealing with these these mondo ass ity mundane when two triviality things i have a show to produce. Please, i’m glad you’re with me. I’d suffer. You’re a thrill incontinence if you leak the idea that you missed today’s show virtual organizations managing remote employees what does it take to successfully manage offsite employees? You start with the right mind set people and jobs. You also need tools. Rules and etiquette heather martin and karen graham are in the trenches on this, and they share their wisdom. Heather is ceo at interfaith family and karen is executive director of idealware we talked at the twenty sixteen and to see non-profit technology conference, then amy sample ward is with me live to share her tips and lessons learned as ceo of non-profit technology network and ten they have several remote employees on tony’s take two between you’re good data worth fifty thousand dollars, we’re sponsored by pursuant full service fund-raising data driven and technology enabled, you’ll raise more money pursuant dot com, also by crowdster online and mobile fund-raising software for non-profits now with apple pay for mobile donations crowdster dot com from ntcdinosaur are heather martin and karen graham on virtual organizations managing those remote employees welcome to tony martignetti non-profit radio coverage of twenty sixteen non-profit technology conference hashtag is sixteen ntc we’re in the convention center in san jose, california with me now are heather martin and karen graham. Heather is sitting closest to me and she is the chief operating officer. Your faith family. Karen graham is executive director at idealware. Ladies. Welcome. Thank you. Thanks, it’s. A pleasure to have you both. I’ll be here. Oh, thank you. Your topic for the session is virtual organizations managing remote employees in the leadership track. All right, back-up we need to be a little more open, i guess, to virtual employment opportunities. Is that right? Yes. Yes. We’re finding that there’s more talent out there that you might not be able to tap into if it’s only in your local community on dh just there. So you can open yourself up to the whole world. You can potentially the whole country if you’re willing to do that on dh. However, it’s not an easy thing to do necessarily. And so we’re hoping to give some tips and techniques for people who are managing virtual employees or who are virtual employees themselves. Karen so you think it’s a combination? We’re not doing it as much as we could and those who are not doing it. Maybe you’re not doing it as well as they could, right? I think some organizations are held back by fears of, like some of the ms about remote employees. You know, i won’t be ableto know what this person is doing. They’re going to be folding laundry and eating cupcakes all day, things like that and that. Okay, it’s not always untrue, but almost always. But, you know, most most people are pretty conscientious and very productive at home, and in fact, i think i’m probably more productive when i work from home or away from a group of people than i am when when i’m in the middle of all those interruptions. Okay, heather, you you virtual also, i am not virtual, but i manage virtual employees in eight different cities. Oh, excellent. So we have a manager of a different city employees and someone who works virtually you’re virtually my entire team is virtual okay? Arika, uh is the whole company? Yes. Idealware all right. And that’s a recent change for us. So whereas other has a great deal of experience with this it’s really nufer me. And so for the last year, i’ve been learning what it’s like to convert from almost everybody in a brick and mortar office toe having everyone worked from home offices. So i’m really curious what brought about that change? It started with one person who was remote and then as new staff were hired, we just looked for the best talent wherever we could find it and didn’t worry as much about having everybody in one central location. And so just gradually, we’ve evolved into having people in three different time zones and things spread across the country. Ok, whether it sounds like we need to first get over our own objections to know it’s got to be a local employees, i don’t want to take this on somebody wrote. One of the things that we’re finding is the old culture within some organizations is if i don’t see it happening it’s not happening. Ah, nde. We were that’s embedded in a lot of cultural, a lot of older organizations, and once we get over that and we put in some processes to handle that, people get more and more comfortable. One of the things we’re finding and karen alluded to this also is if you hire the right people, then that idea that i don’t see it it’s not happening and trusting your employees is really key in managing virtual organizations. Where do we, since you’re the manager of a different location, people in a different city? Where do we start with this? Should we start with the hiring process? Cerini so i think what’s, very important, is identifying before you’ve been hyre someone what the skillsets that this person needs, what are their goals going, toby, what is their job going to be? There are definitely some roles that cannot be done, virtually so that it’s, not for everyone, it’s, not for every organization, it’s, not for every position, okay, so identifying where it belongs, okay, can anything you want to add that stage? Not yet, okay. The let’s, let’s. Start with some tips. Okay, wait. We’ve identified what types of people we need, what kinds of skills we need up. Well, actually, i’m taking a step back. What are some things that were sometimes of jobs? Heather, that definitely should not be virtual. You think i think that if you’re a type of person that needs teo, if your role needs to be interacting with people on a regular basis to get something done within an office. So an office manager, um, things that need to have interactions with other people on a regular basis and i don’t know if you come up. I’m talking, karen, if you came across any of this as you all went virtual, but i’m finding that it’s been very difficult to have a virtual employees if their job is to sit down with you and communicate with you on a regular basis and get stuff done enough physical environment. Okay, okay. Gary, i would agree with that and that’s a challenge that technology khun partially solve. But it can be really challenging. Okay. All right, let’s, move it to technology. Will get the tips and, you know we’re playing time together. What are some tools that you find just essential for this? Certain? Here we are at a technology conference, so it makes sense too, really focus on that one of the tools that we use most often at idealware to keep in touch and to sort of simulate the water. Cool the water cooler. Conversations that tend to get lost with a virtual team is chat. And and so we use google maps for our email and calendars and document management and everything. And so it felt natural for us to just use google’s chat tools as well. And we have a channel set up called the virtual break room and there’s usually a little bit of activity on there every single day and people will just post like, oh, it just started snowing outside or my cat is sick. O r, you know, just kind of that casual conversation. That’s not really work related. And yet it’s, so crucial to building a cohesive team and feeling like you really are part of each other’s full lives. How cool is that? Because you have to try to simulate what? What? Being in the office is like you mentioned the water. Cooler tryingto virtually simulate that so that it feels like on office space, another that makes it mine. Yeah, going backwards, you know you’re you kind of have to go backwards in order to make this effective communication is key. What all of the tips, all of the technology, everything you use, it goes back to the ability to create cohesive communication between people who are not physically in the same space. So the same way karen has her virtual water cooler. We use skype for business on a regular basis, and if you want to talk to someone, you’re usually on skype, you click on it, you have a video and you have a quick conversation something that may not necessarily be as effective if you try to do it through email and it probably faster on email has been detrimental somewhere, sometimes to our employees, because they’re just getting hundreds and hundreds of these. And if you want a quick answer, there’s all these other tools like these chat tools that make it a little easier. Okay, okay. Karen, please aren’t our process. That idealware for kind of identifying what technologies we needed to help us as a virtual team really started by looking at what gaps were there that were left by by not being in the same place together. So one of the things that you misses, a lot of nonverbal cues, tio what people are thinking, how they’re reacting to something, and so we use video a lot as well and that’s always our default, what video platform way use google hangouts primarily, but we also have some other, like peskay and other tools that we use for external meetings as well. And so with heather, you know, we actually just met for the first time about five minutes ago, you were in person, yes, but were bent on we’ve been on video chats together several times before, and i feel like we kind of know each other. I knew what she looked like, michael workers know when i get a haircut when i get a new outfit, even though it might be four or five months between seeing each other in person, you’re tuned to non-profit radio tony martignetti also hosts a podcast for the chronicle of philanthropy fund-raising fundamentals is a quick ten minute burst of fund-raising insights published once a month tony’s guests are expert in crowdfunding, mobile giving event fund-raising direct mail and donor cultivation. Really, all the fund-raising issues that make you wonder, am i doing this right? Is there a better way there is? Find the fund-raising fundamentals archive it. Tony martignetti dot com that’s marketmesuite n e t t i remember there’s, a g before the end, thousands of listeners have subscribed on itunes. You can also learn maura, the chronicle website, philanthropy dot com fund-raising fundamentals, the better way. Duitz are using video every day. Yes, i probably spend, on average two to three hours a day on video chat there’s that comment through a lot, a lot of video in depending on the positions and who’s working with who? Yes, we actually have a staff meeting through webex, where all twenty eight employees get on to video chat, depending on who’s available and who is not in their pajamas. Sometimes people bow out because they don’t want to be put on video, but it’s really helpful to see people and to connect with them at a visual level, even if they’re not physically in the same space where where humans we want way respond to community and and i think visual visual cues as well, it helps a lot to be to be seeing people. People have a tendency. One of my first experiences with this virtual nus was i was working at ibm, and i was project managing. I was doing strategy consulting as project managing the implementation of lotus notes, and we needed the tech team to do work in in order to get the implementation done. The tech team was in armonk, new york, i was living in virginia and we were implementing this to staff nationwide, and what you do is each project manager had to get in touch with the tech team, get them to do stuff, something broke. You had to go back to them, and what we found was i happened to goto, our monk, for our training, and i went into the room where the tech team was sitting and introduced myself. After that, everything seemed slightly easier. And it was just because when i picked up the phone and i ask them to do something, i knew who i was talking to, and they knew who i wass and just having that physical connection made things so much smoother, okay, you said a lot more eloquently than i did. Thank you. Thank you for helping me recover let’s, identify other tools, it’s gotta be google docks, google calendar or something else, what do using collaborative document systems are very helpful for virtual teams, and actually so at idealware, maybe, not surprisingly, since we’re ah, research and knowledge organization, we have mostly introverts on our staff, and i’ve actually found that when we do brainstorming, sometimes it could be more productive. When we do it virtually by typing notes and ideas into a shared google doc than when we actually do it in person, it helps those introverts kind of get there, get there, say, without feeling like they have to jump into the fray of a really lively conversation and gives them space to think a little bit when they need teo and then participate when they’re ready. Cool. So that’s an interesting benefit of working in this manner you see anything like that? I do. I also think that not only the technology tools are important, but laying the groundwork with expectations is key to making sure that everyone’s on the same page so we back in the hiring no, no, no, not unknown in the hiring, but how? How you’re actually running it. So with karen, if you’re if you’re having a conversation, they do it through video conference for us. We’ve set out some and i know you also have communication charters to make sure that when people are connecting with each other, they know how to connect with each other. Charter, what is this? So, for us way, d’oh, d’oh! Basically, what we do is when we hire someone new when they first come on, they get oriented. One of the things we asked them to dio is to talk to us about how they like to be communicated with and sometimes they can’t answer that question up front. But for us, it’s really important to understand if you don’t like email or there’s people, especially we hear this from various employees, they hate the phone, they don’t want to pick up the phone, they don’t talk to someone, the phone rings and they actually like shake. I don’t want to, but if you were to text them or chat with them online, they’d be more than happy to respond to you. And so understanding how people interact on to communicate with their communication makes it so much easier because you don’t have those visual cues. You can’t see if you’re walking into someone’s office and they’re super busy or super stressed or someone’s sitting there on dh, so we like to set it out ahead of time, so let people know what works for them. And similarly, we have eleven golden rules for working as a virtual team and they charter or the golden rules. Whatever we’re gonna call them, okay? They mostly addressed communication. Our number one rule is assume positive intent, which can be hard when you don’t know that somebody didn’t sleep last night because they were up with their baby or, you know, you missed some of that stuff that you might find out at the water cooler, so assume positive intent is is the number one rule. But then we’ve also talked about, for example, with video chat, it can feel very intrusive to just have that turned on all of a sudden, like someone is calling you and without warning, so we have a practice of doing kind of a virtual knock on the door through chat, and if i want to talk to dan, i’ll send him a chat and say, how are you free right now? Is this a good time? And then then we start the video conference, so there’s just a lot of it’s, a lot of etiquette and respecting each other’s time. Um, another thing we do is with email if there’s an urgent reply needed, then we’ll put that right in the subject line because we get such a huge volume of email. That that helps us to scan and know how to be responsive, teo each other when it’s really needed way have to avoid abusing the urgent your gym tag, too, right? Right. Okay, share another golden rule of the eleven golden rules. I wish i had the memorized, but i don’t want to know what well, okay, we start with positive that’s a great one, right? Another one we talked about was email length. And at what point, when you’re writing a four screen email, does that mean it’s time to pick up the phone or or do a hangout? So that’s that’s another one? We have some guidelines about that. All right, let’s. See so cem cem, other tips about doing this successfully emails a big one for us also, my rule is if i have, if i’m on the third email on the same topic, i’m picking up the phone the minute that you have to go back and forth at least three times it’s too much and it’s so interesting. I was at a session this morning and i just heard the best. The best line about email email should be five lines it should tell me who you are, what you want me to do when you want me to do it by why i need to do it for you. And there was one more that i don’t remember, but if it’s longer than that, you’re going to lose people’s attention it’s gonna go into a file and people may never get to it. If you really need something urgently, whether you flag it or pick up the phone like this is the phone is there or create a chat and do it immediately like don’t put it out there into the ethernet and then hope that someone’s going to respond to it in the way that you would expect them to take time to get comfortable with us? Absolutely. If a person is not accustomed to being a virtual employees very much so. And i also think that setting the expectations up front and letting people know that this is not an easy thing is very helpful because some people feel really lost out there, and what we try and do is when a new employee comes on or someone starts to work virtually who wasn’t working virtually before, let them know that that this might be difficult, there’s going to be a learning curve, and we’re here to work with you on it. You’re not just out there by yourself, and you have to do it without anyone any support, karen, have there been people who decided not to work for idealware because it was one hundred percent virtual, has that ever been a ish? You know, we haven’t encountered that. We did have i’m thinking of one staff member in particular, who is very social and enjoys that aspect of working in an office. And so when he became a home based employees that it was an adjustment for him, perhaps more than some of the rest of us who aren’t quite as social and interactive and, uh, it just it took a little bit of of patients and adjustment on his part, i think, for all of us, it also was very important for us to have our own local networks and people that we could interact with, and so many of us will occasionally work from a coffee shop, or i have a group of local friends and colleagues who also work from home for for various ventures, and so one thing we did was because none of us get to have a holiday party with our co workers. We had one with each other, and i i hosted it at my house, and we had maybe six or seven people there who all work independently from home. And so that was a really fun thing to do to kind of a substitute for the social aspects of working with your own team at an office every day. Is there an annual or semiannual gathering of all the tell us? Fifteen employees of idealware uh, dr bonem right? Fifteen? No, we have five. Oh five oh, yes were fairly small teams and you get together physically at least once a year or so way don’t have a set routine, but yes, at least once a year, we’ll all get together. And in the past year, we have gotten together a little bit more often, too, because, well, various reasons i don’t need to come into here. But, you know, there are times when there’s a big change in the organization there’s a big project that you’re working on that just require you to be together more often. Mother, how about you you have to bring these people from eight cities together. We dio way do, and it was a really interesting learning for us when we first started to expand into these other cities. At first, we didn’t bring that anyone in to meet the internal staff in our boston headquarters. Now, anytime a new employees starts at whatever level, if their virtual they come and do a couple of days training in boston with us just to meet everybody, see what the national office looks like and annually. We have a staff retreat in boston where we bring everybody in for two days to get together and brainstorm and talk and just get to know each other. Okay? That’s interesting like the onboarding process has to be face to face. I think that you can’t you can’t get away from what you get the value you get of meeting someone in person, and if you can and if it’s available financially resource wise, timewise, even if you can get together once a year or even at the beginning so people can meet each other in person, it’s invaluable karen would be one hundred percent virtual doesn’t do employees would they get to meet someone face-to-face physically, we have not made a hyre since we became one hundred per cent virtual, so i’m not. I’m not sure what our plans will be for that, but a related issue that non-profit should think through if they’re considering going to a virtual team is is off boarding our when employees exit, how do you handle that? And we were dealing with that right now. We have an employee who is going to be leaving idealware and so we’re thinking about well, ok, how do we collect the stuff that is in storage at her house? The equipment that is ideal wears equipment that that she has in her possession right now? How do we have a farewell party for somebody on really make that a meaningful event when we can’t physically be together? Those those air, all they require creativity and thoughtfulness, and i’m sure we won’t do them perfectly, but that’s something we’re learning. Okay. Interesting. Yeah. The off boarding right. All right, hyre we still have a couple more minutes together. Uh, you well, party. Your session was gonna be ten key steps. Way covered. Any of the ten key? Steps i think you’ve covered most of them in a variety of different ways, but the other thing that we do just one other tip while we’re at it is i’ve spoken to other organizations who have virtual friday drink beers, get togethers, and friday afternoon everyone gets on video, gets their glass of tea, glass of wine, glass of beer, whatever it is and makes it a very low key social environment on video, which takes getting used to when you’re not when it’s not something you do on a regular basis, but it does give you that personal connection again, that you don’t normally get on a day to day basis. And so there’s things like that that you khun dio that seem a little farfetched sometimes that are really helpful. Hi, great, we’ve i’ve had lunch with one of my co workers where we just get on video together and we’re eating and and just chit chatting about things, and it felt very awkward at first but ended up being a really enjoyable experience for both of us. So i recommend just taking some risks getting out of your comfort zone a little bit. I’ve done a wine, wine, chat with who’s there were maybe half a dozen of us the furthest was in in vancouver. I think so. But, you know, you know, half a dozen people what kind of wine do you have? We’re toasting mean, it could be fun. I mean, it is fun, it could be done. It doesn’t have to involve alcohol way happening. Choose wine, you could do a cough, you can do a coffee date and have everyone you know, on video drinking, whatever their seventeen dollars, coffee is heather would use for video, so we use webex when we do our staff, our staff meetings, we’ve used skype for business. We’ve tried google hangouts also, it depends on who’s running the session and what technology they want to use. We haven’t found the perfect one yet we’re still looking. I think that some of the challenges with video are the number of screens you could get on at one time and who you can see equality has improved significantly over the last five years, even but at first, when we were doing this, the line would drop or you couldn’t hear someone or it was pixelated, you know, i’m feeling like i’m talking old school a little bit, but the technology has improved enough that it makes it seem a little bit more realistic and in person and you can get the visuals, which was something that was a challenge. You couldn’t get the facial expressions without the high definition and the faster response time. All right, so i’m gonna wrap this up and bring it full circle, that kind of belief in the technology i can help listeners overcome their reluctance. We talked about initially and in mindset because that’s really what you got to start, and i would also say the technology isn’t the savior to this it khun definitely help it, but you need all of the other pieces to i feel like you shouldn’t use the technology technology to drive this, but there are some great technologies out there that can help with pieces of this. I couldn’t have said it better. All right. Wonderful. Thank you very much. Heather martin is chief operating officer at interfaith family and karen graham, executive director idealware ladies. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thanks. Great advice. This is tony martignetti non-profit radio coverage of sixteen ntc san. Jose, california, thank you so much for being with us. Amy sample ward is coming up first pursuant and crowdster pursuant has a free webinar dahna relations of the disney way if walt disney was your ceo, how would you treat your donors? How would you inspire staff? What would you do differently? 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I sure am every sample word our social media contributor and ceo of intend, the non-profit technology network there it and ten dot or ge she’s at amy r s ward her latest book is social change any time everywhere kayman sample ward. Welcome back. Same it’s. Fun to get to follow-up anew. Interview from the ntc. Yeah, no kidding. And congratulations on a very successful non-profit technology conference. Thank you. I can’t believe it was already a month ago. Hard to believe i agree. That’s that’s. True. Now you sound a little echo here. You and your ah, you in your office. And and ten, i am in my office. If it sounds a little echoey, i can it’s not bad. No, don’t have. It just sounds. It sounds different. It sounds different. Cubine, have you, uh, have you hung all your your artwork? You have your carpeting down in the new office. Maybe that’s a way. Do have carpeting, and i have a big print right in front of me. Well, it’s under it will get better as we unpack even more. Okay, just sounds like a different environment. That’s all you’re, uh you’re all settled now in the new office in portland. Yeah, we’re all settled. Word. We’re up and running. Yeah. It’s fun to be in a new space. Cool. Congratulations. All right. Thank you. So i know you. Were listening. Teo, heather and karen and and ten, of course, is a virtual organization. How, how many, uh, in office versus virtual employees does then ten have good question we have i think this is something that i thought was interesting that i wanted to bring up from listeningto, karen and heather’s interview with you from the conference was i actually think there are mohr organizations who have teams or individuals that maybe virtual while they still have a physical office than there are organizations who are one hundred percent virtual all right, and they have no physical presence, so i think a lot of organizations, when they’re thinking about this, how do we adapt to virtual staff? And what of the policies with the advocate ex center? I think a lot of that comes from, they still have a gn office, but now they’re trying to incorporate folks and make people who aren’t in the physical office feel included versus just everybody is having the same kind of remote situation, right? That’s. Interesting because heather and karen idealware, where karen is ceo is a hundred percent virtual and heather at interfaith family is not so right. And you are you are hybrid too, yet you have i know you have people in the portland office, and then you have remote employees? Yep, exactly. Someone ten people. You have ten people here in portland, and then we have five people that are remote, okay? And they’re in different time zones to write not all pacific. Exactly. And i think that’s one of the big considerations with a physical office versus remote staff is that it can become easier or the default time for everything to be in the time zone where the office is, even though you have staff that are another time zone. So i think it’s a challenge, but very important. Try and be mindful of time zones when you try and say, oh, my gosh, you know, we’re having a conversation. We should totally loop someone in to realise thirty six p m their time, they’re not online. They’re not waiting for you to invite them to this meeting. Yeah. Interesting. All right, so how do you how do you manage that, then? On dh something early in the morning? If your east coast staffers are talking, you know your office isn’t open yet. Same thing. Exactly, i mean, when i previously was based in new york as a remote employee of intent, whereas now i’m in the office, there was another employee that was on the east coast, and we found the morning to be super productive because the two of us could just, you know, get through all kinds of things on, and we we often worked together on projects it in that way. It was very convenient that we were the two awake early and could get some stuff done and then present it to other staff when they woke up and got online. But now and ten has just one person in east coast time, one person in mountain time and then remote or, i guess, to eastern and then to pacific outside of the office. So it spread enough that i think it helps us force that conversation. You know, we have to say, okay, we have people in enough time zones. What time is it? Really? Right now on dh once, once it gets after two or three o’clock in the portland office, it gets pretty quiet because we know we can’t engage other staff across time zones. Yeah, all right? Do you have mindfulness? Basically means you have to be mindful of this not planned meetings for three o’clock pacific. Exactly. And you know so many of our meetings, and i don’t think this is unique to intend, but so many of our meetings are already kind of reserved on the calendar, right? You you already know when your staff meeting that’s going to be because it’s a recurring meeting and so just making sure that you use those recurring calendar items as a way that start building in that pattern of this is these are the times during the day you could meet with folks. I think that really helped, because then outside of that is when people, maybe, you know, just kind of go head down and work on their own. Whatever is on their to do list. And you set a pattern by the meetings that you schedule in advance. Okay. Yeah, i see. All right. What about the personalities the heather and karen mentioned one of them mentioned. You know, then a lot of introverts, karin said i do. Do you find that in a few different people’s personalities when we’re talking about virtual hi. I actually don’t find it to be different than if you were all in the office together. I mean, i think that if everybody was all in one office, you’re naturally just by probability, right of humans. You’re naturally gonna have some folks that maybe regardless of their personality or just not folks who maybe process in real time in a meeting and are gonna have something to say there people who want that information and they want to go back and think about it before they have an answer, whether they’re an introvert or not. That’s just how they process information. And so in a in a meetings, they were all in one room. Whoever is running that meaning it’s probably i would hope, you know, reaching out to folks who are quiet in the meeting insane. Do you? You know, pulling something out? Do you have something you want to share? Their questions that’ll help you think about this, you know? What are we not considering and that that process, that kind of managing a meeting happens whether everybody’s all in the same room or you’re all of that google hangout? Or you’re talking to two people? In a instant message conversation, you know, i think being thoughtful and intentional about how you interact and kind of manage meetings and manage conversations, it’s the same lessons it’s the same processes, andi, i think, you know, karen’s point about sometimes using those online tools that folks feel like they can participate when maybe they wouldn’t have spoken up in a meeting that could totally be true. I think for me and that antenna it’s really about just regardless of how this meeting is happening, is everybody contributing or does everybody have the answers they need so that we can end the meeting and you know where to go back? Do you find it difficult? Tio include members, employees when if the meeting is by phone, you know and like three or four people are sitting in the conference room or something. And then however, many people are remote and it’s just and thereby phone, not video. Sometimes you have to be very mindful that there are two other people on the phone and it’s hard for them times for them to speak up because they don’t know when the pauses air coming. I mean, you find any awkwardness? Around that, yeah, that’s a good point, i think. Well, two things they’re two strategies one if it’s i think anton has a similar experience, as karen and heather both shared in the interview that if it’s an internal meeting, if it’s really just with other staff, we wouldn’t use the phone, we would use video conference people can kind of raise their hand, or they can post a chat that says, hey, i want to bring something up once we’re done with this point, you know it, and we can manage that easier when it’s on video and then the other strategy that that i think is really helpful, just like best practice generally for mediums, is that if we’re having the meeting, we have a shared document where we’re taking notes, so sometimes that means we could kind of go down a rabbit hole, right? And three of the five people in the meeting are going off on this thing with the other two people maybe don’t want to lose a thought they could just put it into the notes, doc, and we come back to it once we’re done with that rabbit hole, right? We’re we’re still capturing things in a couple different channels, plus as the best practice. Now you have notes from that meeting, right? Yeah, school. All right, all right. Um, what about the part about bringing new employees in who aren’t accustomed to working remotely? Yeah, i think it can be very overwhelming for a new staff person. We try and include processes, best practices, etiquette, social norms in our orientation, but not we don’t do it as a great you’re an employee for the next two hours. We’re going to tell you how we do everything in this, like, remote team versus office environment instead, you know, maybe there’s a section of the orientation where you’re talking with your manager, whoever you’re going to be working with and they’re talking about, okay, these are the meetings were goingto have regularly here’s how you and i are going to check in here’s how i encourage you to check in with others and then in that conversation, you know, talking about some social norms around how to engage folks that are remote verses in the office and where to post content for others to see it and, you know, so we kind of embed the lessons around how we want to operate together into the full process of orientation it’s not a stand alone great here’s how to use instant message er, right hand here’s, here’s, howto chat with folks or hey, remember that these folks were in these time zone, so send them a quick ping before you try and call them, right? Because you don’t know, you can’t see them, so maybe they’re gonna call already or something. You know, i like the suggestion of some virtual knock on the door before you open a video chat with somebody well, and, you know, we honestly we do that in the office, i can see you, but that doesn’t mean that i know if you’re actually muted running a webinar just because it looks like you’re sitting in your desk, so because we are all online or on the phone or running webinars, whatever it might be, it doesn’t matter if you’re in the office or not that’s become kind of standard practice. I am somebody before you walk over to them anyway. Eyes that right? Okay, see, it’s so been so long since i had to work with other people in an office. You had to work with you one of punishment that wass well, okay, i don’t think i’d be a very good employee anymore. We’ll put it that way. Yes, i can see that. Thank you. I don’t think i would hyre myself. I would. I would. I would kill it in the interviews. I mean, why kill it? I mean, i would i would i would kill a possibility. Yes, i would ruin my chances in the interview stage. I would not be a good employee, but so i didn’t know that. So so so in offices, people you i am someone before you, uh, you go and knock on their door anymore before you just walk down and see them. Well, i think part of it is that most staff don’t have a door because we’re working in an open, more collaborative space. And so folks may go behind the door to run a webinar, for example, and then you definitely know they’re offline or not available for you to go talk to, but sometimes you might just be on a phone call and have your line muted for a minute, right? Because someone else is speaking of course, because you’re not speaking out loud doesn’t mean you’re ready for somebody to walk right up to your desk and say something because one ear can still hear the phone call, so okay, i yeah, it’s been since ah nineteen when’s the last time i worked for somebody else was nineteen, no, two thousand three, two thousand three was my last employer for you. Did you know, i think defect tio the idea of being in office where people have really accepted that norm of let’s, just quickly hop on a video call right and have this conversation kind of face-to-face even though your remote, it also means that the folks who really are in the office have to anticipate that at any given moment of the day, they could be in the background of someone’s video, you could be walking past somebody who’s on, you know, has their camera on or maybe the way they’re seated, you know, you’re kind of close enough to them that if they hop on a video and don’t move their screen, you’re kind of in the background doing your email on dh i think that’s just part at least at an ten. It isn’t seen as a negative it’s seen as like, oh, well, i was talking to you, i saw that so and so was was, you know, talking to this person, i didn’t realize they were in the office. Could you tell them this for me? You know? And it makes it feel that much more connected. I can see what’s going on right now that we’re in a new space. As you noted, when when i first talked on the phone, we’re in this new office, we’ll remote staff haven’t seen the new office, and so on monday, everybody in the office wanted to have a conversation about okay, we’re in here now, like, what else do we need? Do we need more chairs or tables? Is there any? Are there any problems we need to address in? There? Were you know, there were problems with, you know, sometimes if we turn the air on it’s too loud for webinar rooms, it’s just too noisy in the room and, you know, just surfacing these issues that you don’t know until you get into the space. Well, all of the remote staff requested to be part of that conversation because they want to know what we’re struggling with. They want to know that if they hop on a quick, you know, video call with us and somebody’s complaining, or or something, they could say, hey, is it because the air is on and it’s really loud, like i understand what you’re going through? I have some insight into that. They want to be a part of it. Cool, all right, that’s, a human, human connection. All right, we gotta take, we got to go away for break. We come back, you and i’ll keep talking about remote employee management. Stay with us. Like what you’re hearing a non-profit radio tony’s got more on youtube, you’ll find clips from stand up comedy tv spots and exclusive interviews catch guests like seth gordon. Craig newmark, the founder of craigslist marquis of eco enterprises, charles best from donors choose dot org’s aria finger do something that or an a a me levine from new york universities heimans center on philanthropy tony tweets to he finds the best content from the most knowledgeable, interesting people in and around non-profits to share on his stream. If you have valuable info, he wants to re tweet you during the show. You can join the conversation on twitter using hashtag non-profit radio twitter is an easy way to reach tony he’s at tony martignetti narasimhan t i g e n e t t i remember there’s a g before the end he hosts a podcast for the chronicle of philanthropy fund-raising fundamentals is a short monthly show devoted to getting over your fund-raising just like non-profit radio, toni talks to leading thinkers, experts and cool people with great ideas. As one fan said, tony picks their brains and i don’t have to leave my office fund-raising fundamentals was recently dubbed the most helpful non-profit podcast you have ever heard, you can also join the conversation on facebook, where you can ask questions before or after the show. The guests are there, too. Get insider show alerts by email, tony tells you who’s on each week and always includes link so that you can contact guess directly. To sign up, visit the facebook page for tony martignetti dot com. If you have big dreams in a small budget tune into tony martignetti non-profit radio, i d’oh. I’m adam braun, founder of pencils of promise. Welcome back to big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. I mean, what about the face-to-face like, do you have face-to-face orientations for new employees? Or do you have annual gatherings where everybody’s together? How do you manage the face-to-face part? Definitely. I think the face-to-face piece is huge. I mean, we we consider some amount of the video calls to be, quote unquote face-to-face you know, we don’t want things to be completely removed into just documents, so we have ah, move a few different layers so that every day at nine thirty pacific, regardless of where you are in the world, if you are working that day, you are expected to be on aa meeting, where every single staff person is able to check in and say, hey, tony, i’ve been waiting on this thing from you so that i can follow-up or this is my big priority today, so if you see me in my head bowed there on, don’t bother me. I got a big deadline, you know, whatever, it might be this on your list, but away for every single staff person to be visible to everybody else, whether they’re in the office. Or not. And then every monday, we have a full staff meeting. That’s actually programmatic. So you know whether it’s a proposal first from somebody or a certain team wants to give an update whatever that might be, you know, formal agenda every monday, but twice a year, all staff come to portland for a full week of planning meetings and happy hours and lots of eating. And and then outside of those two meetings, you know, we have our conference. We have our own events that also bring all the staff together. Okay, off course. The portland food scene is it was worth gathering around exactly so cool sametz priority than planning meeting second. Yeah, we have the trucks, the trucks, air. The trucks are key. You can have. Yeah, there are only two blocks from the office now, but that would mean a lot of trucks, but i’m being a new yorker. I’m calling them trucks. They’re called cart their carts, right? Not trucks? Yes, their carts. Right. And what you call a collection of carts? What is that called? A cart pod. A court pod, right? Right. Just like whales. Write a card pot. But, you know, you call it a pod? Or would you say i’m going to the cart pod? Or you just say, i’m going to the pod, you say i’m going to the cart, the cart’s? Oh, you don’t say pot. Ah, ok, ok. Yeah, it’s. Very important. But anyway, so you do this twice a year, twice a year. All in ten step. Okay, very good to know. Alright. So that’s different than the heather and karen managed things, but cool. Okay. Okay. And then, of course, yeah. You’re conferences drop the whole staff together. Two leading change on tc, right? Yeah. Okay, exactly. And i think, you know, as much as there were all there to run the conference. We’re also there a couple days early. Everybody gets to catch up and see each other in person. But i also think there’s a lot to be said for doing something together, you know, by the end of the week, even though we didn’t spend the weekend casual planning meetings and eating food from the food cards, you know, we get to the end of the week and feel like everybody has certainly bonded has certainly had all kinds of conversations because we just we just ran the whole conference together, right? It really creates an opportunity for there to be a lot of connections. What else came out of that conversation that you want to talk about? We still have a couple minutes left. Yeah, well, i thought one thing that we could chat about were some justice, you know, kind of kind of boring things around policies think at inten we’ve found to be really important so something that organizations may not think about, but karen alluded to this at the very end when talking about, you know, staff person, that leaving the organization and they have all this equipment, the organization really should be providing that equipment, just like you would to someone that’s in the office. So even though you’ve been hired as a remote employee, that doesn’t mean you don’t need a laptop in a second monitor and a phone and all of those pieces. So thinking about policies that treat a remote staff person just like you would a staff person, as in the office, and i think that also goes further to say in the office, right? And ten pays for all of all of the office for the electricity and the internet and everything else. So, do you have policies that they for staff who were working from from their home as they’re expected space, that you will reimburse them for some of their internet or some of their phone cost? Etcetera? Okay, very, uh, very thoughtful policies you have. Okay, do what i think something else that karen heather brought up was, you know, remote staff feeling like, oh, today i’m going to go work from a coffee shop or today, you know, i just need to get out of my house has been sitting in my living room for four days straight, right? I think it also goes a really long way to make sure that feeling of freedom is shared between folks in the office and folks who are remote so that you don’t create this feeling that, like remote staff have it better or folks in the office have it better, everyone should feel like, hey, i really need to write this article and i want to focus. I’m going to go to a coffee shop and sit by myself for two hours. It doesn’t matter if you work from home or you work from the office. If you’ve created that culture, everyone should get to be a part of that. No. Okay. Egalitarian. Right. Okay. Yes. Um what else? What else came out of that that you want to talk about? Well, one thing that i thought was interesting that was brought up right at the end that end ten has a different version of is that idea of ah, kind of virtual happy hour. And i think part of it for us, the reason why it isn’t necessarily happy hours because again time zones, you don’t want to tell somebody that is three hours ahead. Hey, you should wait until eight. Get back on your computer, have a glass of wine. Would you like to be part of the team right now? That doesn’t feel very fair. So instead, what we have is a weekly lunch. So in the office here we turn on a google hangout and, you know, open up the line, essentially and that any of the remote folks can also call in if they’re free. It’s not required it’s. Not like people in the office have to stop right at noon and start eating. Lunch on video. You know it’s just anybody that wants to have lunch together and chat the line is open, you can hang out and you know, it’s gonna happen every single thursday. So if this thursday you can’t do it, no big deal. But next thursday, you can call in on dh. It just creates that kind of open conversation space where you can chat about sometimes work sometimes good ideas for work, but also just random things. What are you doing for the weekend, etcetera? Excellent. Excellent. Thank you. Alright, we have to leave it there. Any sample ward? Our social media contributor. Ceo of antenna and ten dot or ge she’s at amy rs ward. Amy, thanks so much for sharing. Intends remote, you know, management stories. Thank you. Yeah, it was a pleasure. Thank you. Next week, gene takagi are legal contributor returns with election year advocacy. What’s allowed. And what gets you in trouble? Plus, we have another excellent interview from ntcdinosaur. If you missed any part of today’s show, i beseech you, i implore you, find it on tony martignetti dot com. Where in the world i’m very uncertain the way forward with this. I need to know the path i have to find the path ahead. We’re sponsored by pursuant online tools for small and midsize non-profits data driven and technology enabled pursuant dot com, and by crowdster online and mobile fund-raising software for non-profits now, with apple pay for mobile donations. Crowdster dot com. Our creative producer is claire meyerhoff. Sam liebowitz is the line producer. Gavin dollars are am and fm outreach director shows. Social media is by susan chavez, and this great music is by scott stein. Be with me next week for non-profit radio. Big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. Go out and be great. Buy-in buy-in what’s not to love about non-profit radio tony gets the best guests check this out from seth godin this’s the first revolution since tv nineteen fifty and henry ford nineteen twenty it’s the revolution of our lifetime here’s a smart, simple idea from craigslist founder craig newmark yeah insights, orn presentation or anything? People don’t really need the fancy stuff they need something which is simple and fast. When’s the best time to post on facebook facebook’s andrew noise nose at traffic is at an all time hyre on nine a m or eight pm so that’s, when you should be posting your most meaningful post here’s aria finger ceo of do something dot or ge young people are not going to be involved in social change if it’s boring and they don’t see the impact of what they’re doing. So you got to make it fun and applicable to these young people look so otherwise a fifteen and sixteen year old they have better things to do if they have xbox, they have tv, they have their cell phones. Me dar is the founder of idealist took two or three years for foundation staff to sort of dane toe. Add an email address card. It was like it was phone. This email thing is right and that’s why should i give it away? Charles best founded donors choose dot or ge somehow they’ve gotten in touch kind of off line as it were on dno, two exchanges of brownies and visits and physical gift mark echo is the founder and ceo of eco enterprises. You may be wearing his hoodies and shirts. Tony talked to him. Yeah, you know, i just i’m a big believer that’s not what you make in life. It sze, you know, tell you make people feel this is public radio host majora carter. Innovation is in the power of understanding that you don’t just do it. You put money on a situation expected to hell. You put money in a situation and invested and expected to grow and savvy advice for success from eric sacristan. What separates those who achieve from those who do not is in direct proportion to one’s ability to ask others for help. The smartest experts and leading thinkers air on tony martignetti non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent.

Nonprofit Radio for September 25, 2015: Smart Interviewing Makes Great Hiring & Your Job Descriptions

Big Nonprofit Ideas for the Other 95%

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Sherryl Nufer: Smart Interviewing Makes Great Hiring

Sherryl Nufer, a founding partner in Pareto Consulting, explains why Behavioral Interviewing is superior to traditional methods and how any size nonprofit can get better hires through more sophisticated interviewing, whether you hire once a year or many times a month. This is from April 13, 2012.

 

 

Heather Carpenter: Your Job Descriptions

Heather Carpenter is co-author of the book “The Talent Development Platform” and she’s got advice for your often-rushed-through, lifted-off-the-web job descriptions. (Hint: Stop doing that!)

 

 


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Hello and welcome to tony martignetti non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent i’m your aptly named host. Oh, i’m glad you’re with me. I’d be forced to endure the pain of a cute ryan al gia if i just got a whiff of the possibility that you missed today’s show. Smart interviewing makes great hiring cheryl nufer, a founding partner in peredo consulting, explains why behavioral interviewing is superior to traditional methods and how any size non-profit khun get better hires through more sophisticated interviewing? Whether you’re hiring once a year or many times a month, this is from april thirteenth, two thousand twelve, and your job descriptions once you’ve made the hyre it’s time for job description. Heather carpenters, co author of the book the talent development program, and she’s got advice for your often rushed through lifted off the web job descriptions gotta fix that on tony’s take two social media videos responsive by pursuant full service fund-raising data driven and technology enabled, you’ll raise more money pursuant dot com here is cheryl nufer if smart interviewing makes great hiring, i guess now is cheryl nufer cheryl is a founding partner of peredo. Consulting, providing small to medium sized organizations with business tools that are often available only the large for-profit corporations sounds like she’s sort of stole the tagline for this show. She’s, a strategy and organization development consultant with more than thirty years of experience, and i’m pleased that her expertise brings her on cheryl nufer welcome. Thank you so much, tony it’s really a pleasure to be here. It’s a pleasure to have you thanks, snusz what’s wrong with traditional interviewing? Cheryl well, we have a top ten list of what goes wrong in interviews, but really, they’re too big and the first one is that it’s? Hard to believe, but a lot of interviewers don’t really know what they’re looking for in a candidate, and so they just figured that the more people they interview, the better their odds it’s kind of like vegas, and they don’t know when they see it. The second big problem is that they ask risky questions when i say questions. Yeah, what is that? Yeah, i don’t know. Just wait. Typically think about what we call illegal questions. Is that a problem? But risky questions, questions that back-up candidate can prep for that. They can anticipate that they can prepare a candid answer for which may or may not be the truth. So the data on which to base your hiring decision is a lot. So those sounds like questions like what’s your strengths and your strengths and weaknesses, like those types of questions are risky that’s exactly right? Because people can anticipate them. Yeah, common ones we here are what you just said there, but it’s also questions like, what would you do in a situation? For example, if you were faced with an angry donor for this job is going to require a lot of long hours. Will that be a problem for you? Or my favorite is tell me about yourself. Why should i write? And these are risky because they’re predictable is unmentioned. Secondly, they solicit the candidates opinions and, you know, i don’t want to sound harsh, but the candidate doesn’t know a lot about what’s required for success in the job interviewer does interviewers opinion it’s most important and then laugh so you can say that? Not sound harsh if i say it, it sounds harsh coming from you. It just sounds very matter of fact unprofessional. And final thing is that they also asked the candidate to hypothesize, so if you ask me, what would you do in a particular situation? They can tell you just about anything now? Is that what they would do if they were faced with that situation? Your organization, they may or may not so again, all of these risky it’s interesting that you call very typical questions risky, but i understand. I understand why. Yeah, well, it’s all about making it’s all about collecting data to make a decision to predict how someone is going to perform in your organization and risky your your database here, your hyre decision. Alright that’s so that’s the interviewing that we’re all most familiar with, we either do it or we’ve been through it. Or both. Why don’t you just started acquaint us with behavioral interviewing? Okay, well, behavioral interviewing is not just about the interview. It’s really a business process, just like your financial processes review hr processes and it has a set of steps. And so it starts off with identifying and defining the skills for success. And then you create a line of questioning that’s based on those skills you put that in an interview guide, follow the guide. After you interview you right, candidate based on the data you collected, and then all of the interviewers get together and share their example of make a hyre or no hyre decision. So, first of all, it’s, a repeatable process. In terms of knowing what you’re looking for, i think that’s a really big difference what we talk about is looking for a balance skills well and what we’re looking for doesn’t that come from the job description? Well, not necessarily, but good question, because a lot of organizations job description are nothing more than a list of responsibilities that they will fulfill once they’re hired, but what i’m talking about is a list of skills that are required to be successful in executing those responsibilities. And so we look at those in terms of technical skills, which are really job specific and things maybe like marketing the iranians fund-raising sales and then another set of skills that we call professional skills. You might also call the sauce skills and these cross jobs and these air things like planning and team work and initiatives and judgment, integrity, those kinds of things wei have a saying that a lot of organizations hyre on technical skills when they have to fire someone. Cheryl, we have to take a break when we come back. We’ll continue this and start exploring why behavioral interviewing is better than what we’re all accustomed to please hope. Everybody stays with us, we’re talking smart interviewing makes great hiring what’s not to love about non-profit radio tony gets the best guests check this out from seth godin this’s the first revolution since tv nineteen fifty and henry ford nineteen twenty it’s the revolution of our lifetime here’s a smart, simple idea from craigslist founder craig newmark yeah insights, orn presentation or anything? People don’t really need the fancy stuff they need something which is simple and fast. When’s the best time to post on facebook facebook’s andrew noise nose at traffic is at an all time hyre on nine a m or eight pm so that’s when you should be posting your most meaningful post here’s aria finger ceo of do something dot or ge young people are not going to be involved in social change if it’s boring and they don’t see the impact of what they’re doing so you gotta make it fun and applicable to these young people x somebody’s a fifteen and sixteen year old they have better things to dio they have xbox, they have tv, they have their cell phones me dar is the founder of idealised took two or three years. For foundation staff to sort of dane toe, add an email address their card, it was like it was phone. This email thing is fired-up that’s why should i give it away? Charles best founded donors choose dot or ge somehow they’ve gotten in touch kind of off line as it were on dno two exchanges of brownies and visits and physical gift mark echo is the founder and ceo of eco enterprises. You may be wearing his hoodies and shirts, tony, talk to him. Yeah, you know, i just i’m a big believer that’s not what you make in life. It sze you know, tell you make people feel this is public radio host majora carter. Innovation is in the power of understanding that you don’t just do it. You put money on a situation expected to hell, you put money in a situation and invested and expect it to grow and savvy advice for success from eric sabiston. What separates those who achieve from those who do not is in direct proportion to one’s ability to ask others for help. The smartest experts and leading thinkers air on tony martignetti non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other. Ninety five percent. Dahna welcome back with my guests, cheryl nufer of peredo consulting, you’ll find peredo consulting at parade o p r e t o hyphen h y p h e n but don’t spell hyphen just put a hyphen in consulting peredo hyphen consulting dot com. Cheryl, why is this method behavioral interviewing superior to what we’re all accustomed to? Well, that has to do a lot with the questions that you ask, i said before the other questions, key behavioral questions are based on principle that past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior, so if we can figure out in an interview how a person behaves in the recent past in situations that are similar to what they face in our job, then we have a pretty good idea how well behaved if we hire them. So this is the opposite of stock investing, investment advisors who will say past results or no indication of future returns, right? Okay, but past behaviour is predictor of future behavior. Yeah, because we are creatures of habit. So there is a great formula for creating a behavioral question that your listeners could start using right away. So what you do is you start with the phrase something like give me an example of the time in the past, or maybe describe the past situation, and then what you do is you go back to those skills i was talking about a minute ago, the rooms that are important for success and you plug in burbage that describes the skills so let’s say we were talking about initiative, then we’d say something like, give me an example of the time in the past when you went above and beyond job requirements or a time in the past when you anticipated a potential problem and you made contingency plans. So what you do is always in behavioral interview issues asked what people did in the past versus what they would do in the future, which is a hypothetical. So this sounds harder to fake, but i have to tell the whole story. Now you have to tell a whole story, and it is very difficult to fake because they’re hard to anticipate. And a good interviewer should be asking specific follow-up questions. I mean it’s, easy to just ask the behavioral questions, but it’s an interview are you start listening for what you want. You want a real situation? You want to understand what they said or did in that situation, and you want to know what happened, what kind of results this is scaring the heck out of me if i’m in it, i’m nervous that’s a good thing i have my own business, so i’ve never run into this well. So what if i don’t have a story about initiative? Alright, i’m under pressure. I can’t i can’t think of one well, that’s a common thing, and our goal is the interviewer is to bring out the best in the candidate. So what? We can dio that’s good that’s, that’s reassuring it’s too, because when you’re comfortable, you’re going to share more information with me so i would prompt you with questions such as what about in this specific job? Or i may rephrase the question where someone doesn’t have work experience, i’m my nasco and to think about project that they did in college or maybe a summer job so anything that i can do or i can say, you know, we can come back to that question and give you a few minutes to think about it if you’d like. There are a lot of ways to handle that it’s not uncommon for someone to freeze up. Yeah, okay, i pulled listeners before the show. One of the questions i asked is, do you feel you’re hiring? Process is efficient and you’re hiring the right candidate, and about seventy one percent said yes and about twenty nine percent i said no, so we want to help the other third, but that two thirds may not be may not be as efficient and hiring savvy as as they think. That’s, right, that’s recorders almost sorry even if they have a good track record of getting good can bring one good talent. Beauty of a behavioral approach is that up? You don’t necessarily have to interview a lot of candidates and pick the best of the lot if you know what you’re looking for and you have a good screening process and you interview the candidates and their experiences match the criteria success. Technically, you could hire the first candidate you interview, which reduces your cycle time, and it also keeps you from potentially losing a good candidate because you’re hiring cycle is too long. Have you seen organizations do that either? For-profit or non-profit don’t they don’t they typically say, well, she was very good, but maybe we’ll find somebody better, absolutely, and that they are not confident in their process. There’s something in there got that says, you know, i’m just not confident in the data, my process for evaluating it and that’s where a good process really builds confidence to make that decision when you see that good step, okay? Andi yeah, these air interesting ondas you said very these type of questions very hard to anticipate that they’re going to come. How does the interviewer prepare? You talked down a little bit, going a little more detail on and then shortly we’ll get to how many interviewers there should be, but but but how do we prepare as an interviewer? So as an interviewer, well, basically you identify the skills that are required for success in the job. Based on those skills, you develop a line of behavioral questions using the formula that i shared with you. Typically you will type those up in an interview guide or just list if you have multiple interviewer shall divide that list up among all of your interviewers, so that there are no gaps in your questioning and there’s no redundancy safe, so everyone has their game plan they interview based on that. So that’s the primary way that you would prepare a search would review the resume common things, write what you want you want it certainly want to be prepared. So if it is a a siri’s of interviews interviewers, they don’t ask the same questions then no, they don’t that’s really a waste of time, and you have so little time in an interview. You want to make sure to use it wisely. Now they ain’t me ask multiple questions about a specific skill, but they typically don’t ask the same question because if they asked the same question, the candidate will probably give the same example and that’s kind of silly. You still tell the same story twice, exactly, and you would expect that so it’s not the interview each ball that’s the interviewers fault for not being prepared. On the other hand, what if all the interviewees stories, anecdotes come from just one of their jobs or something? Or just too? And they’ve got, you know, thirty years of experience or something like that? Well, that would absolutely be a red flag either there bread through depth of experience is not what it means here on their resonate, or perhaps there’s something that they just don’t want to share with you so that’s something that you may, if you find when you bring your interviewers together, that the same stories were told to everybody, then you could either make a no hyre decision or you could make a decision to have a follow-up phone interview where you would try to clean examples from some of their other work experience. Okay, so you’d like to follow up interview to be by phone, but the first one to be in person is that right? What i’m talking about here is typically you would do a phone screen organisations and then bring the candidate in for face-to-face what i was saying is, if you feel you can’t make ah hyre no hyre decision, you know, you always have the option to follow-up again by phone and asked more questions, okay, okay, um and so since we’re talking sort of around this, what is your advice around having just one interviewer or having a siri’s of interviewers, or even having a panel. Okay, well, we would always recommend more than one interviewer, if at all possible, and you can is that just to eliminate bias of one person, it could eliminate buy-in it? I can get you more data because if you have two interviews that you have more data on which to base a decision, there are two ways of doing what we call a serial interview, which is cheryl interviews candidate hands candidate off tony who interviews to hands it off to joe, and then when you separately and then after all the interviews, you come back together and share your example and make a decision. There’s also the panel interview where you have multiple people interviewing the candidate at one time and you can do multiple panels panels are great ways to involve more people from your organization and getting exposure to candidate. You just don’t want the panels to get too big. You know what is to become a panel? Interviews khun b scary. I’ve heard stories from people who were interviewed by five people or so that’s pretty intimidating it’s very intimidating i’ve been interviewed by many has six at one time. I know a lot about interviewing and that that was a nerve ng me, what we recommend is either two or three. When it gets above three, it can not only be intimidating, but it’s difficult for the interviewers to kind of it should be choreographed. So you should have someone out of the panel who is kind of the host and is kind of orchestrating this interview. There’s not anarchy, everyone’s firing questions at the candidate and it really doesn’t set the candidate up. Cheryl nufer is a founding partner of peredo consulting. You’ll find them on the web, but peredo pr e teo hyphen consulting dot com we’re talking about smart interviewing, making great hiring, cheryl. Is there an advantage of serial interviewing over the panel or or the other way around? Well, there is an advantage in the advantage is that when you’re in a panel, if you conduct one panel interviews, all three of you are hearing the same stories, the same situation in a serial interview it’s more likely that you will hear different stories, or sometimes the same story told different ways, and so you know, that sounds bad, but it can be bad if in fact there are vast differences in the story, like your fourth step in the supposed be the results. So if the results were different in the same story across to different interviews that’s about sign that’s a red flag may be the results keep getting better and better. Three interview that’s a great way to start catching a candidate who may be fabricating for people actually do that. Is that true? Absolutely, they do. I’ve heard rumors to that effect, but i always hoped it wasn’t so another question i asked listeners before the show is our hires in your office typically interviewed by more than one person and seventy one percent said yes, fourteen percent said no, so most people are doing the multiple interviewing and then fourteen percent said depends on the job. Um all right, is there a job where the solo interview makes sense or no, you really just don’t like that at all or there’s a situation, i guess i mean when just one interviewer makes sense. Here’s what i would say in some more straightforward job, maybe some entry level jobs it could perhaps the appropriate that i say it’s no more appropriate in bigger organizations bigger cos you have a really small organisation. You have to hire the right people. You i have no where to hide them. You have no one to cover for them hyre abad a bad fit so i think it’s always good in a small organization, if possible, to have a second set of eyes and get that second set doesn’t have to be somebody that the person is going to report to, right? It could be a colleague. I mean, taken officer just four or five people. They’re going to be hiring of fifth or sixth, like a cz you’re saying that’s a big percentage of the staff, it doesn’t have to be somebody that that person would report to write absolutely not. And in a small organization of horrified people, i mean everyone’s wearing multiple hats, they really have to depend on each other. So everyone has a big stake in making sure the best person has brought onboard, so it could be a appear. It could be someone that maybe is performed well in a similar job in the past. You’re absolutely right. It could be just as long as they’re good interviewers they would be appropriate? How do we gauge technical expertise? We’ve been talking about behavior? Well, you can use behavioral questions to get that technical competencies, but technical skills are a little bit easier. For example, if you were hiring someone for fund-raising you can actually have them bring in and explain fund-raising approaches that they’ve used in the past. I mean, i would ask a lot of follow up questions to make sure that what they brought us, something they actually did. There are tests that you can use for certain technical skills. You can also do simulations, so for example, if you were hiring someone for a sales position, are fund-raising position you could actually have them come in and do a presentation to a team of you, and so you were potential donors and see how they would handle it. So there are a lot of ways to get technical. Wei have just about a minute left, cheryl, what potential problems should people look out for us if they’re goingto implement behavioral interviewing? I think the biggest problem is asking a behavioral question and assuming you’re going to get a behavioral answer, so you have to be able to sort out hypothetical responses through a good line of follow-up questioning about the situation there. Action in the results. Okay. Situation, obstacle action and results. Cheryl nufer is a founding partner of peredo consulting, which provides small to medium sized organizations with business tools that are often available only the large for-profit corporations. Cheryl, thank you very much for being a guest has been a pleasure. Thank you so much. And i hope that this information will help your eye. I think it will help listeners. Thank you very much. A pleasure to have you. Thankyou, tony. Stick to and your job descriptions coming up first. Pursuant, they have this tool. Billboard it’s integrated management for your multi-channel engagement strategies. All right, s o jargon jail. I plead guilty for that. You, khun. I could throw myself in there. Let’s. Break it down. You communicate in lots of different ways. Email landing pages, micro sites, donation forms mobile, all the social networks best to manage them all separately. No, don’t separate. Integrate! I thought that myself that’s, that’s not pursue it. Language. I thought of that billboard is integrated management and the all important analytics that go along with all these. Tools so you know which channels move more people and which don’t from mayor you learn you improve, continue that it oration, that innovative process of learning and improving based on the analytics, and you’ll raise more money. Check out billboard it’s at pursuant dot com. My video this week is the next set of non-profit technology conference videos. They’re all about social media there’s a panel of three on visual social media, another panel on email deliver ability so that those e mails that you sent through billboard actually arrive at people’s inboxes video strategy and embrace embracing emerging technology and social media. They’ve been on non-profit radio if you’ve missed them or you want the videos because you like to watch the videos, then the links are under my video at tony martignetti dot com, and that is tony’s take two for friday, twenty fifth of september thirty eighth show of the year. I’m very pleased that heather carpenter is with me. She is a phd was a non-profit manager for ten years. She’s, now assistant professor in the school of public non-profit and health administration at grand valley state university. She teaches grad and undergrad courses in non-profit management, financial management, fund-raising technology, leadership and human resources management. The book that brings our two non-profit radio is co authored with terra qualls, and it is the talent development platform putting people first in social change organizations published by josy bass this year on twitter she’s at heather carpentier, which is at heather carpenter. But take off that last are heather carpenter. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, tony it’s. A pleasure. You’re calling from grand valley university. Where’s that michigan. Right war in grand rapids, michigan, which is on the west side of the stage. Okay. Okay. That was the summer there in grand rapids. It was really nice. We have a great summer. A little harsher winters, but yeah. No, but you do have harsh winters. Yes. Okay, heather, our job descriptions he’s often get very, very short shrift, don’t they? Yes. Yes. Well, having worked in non-profits for many years and done h r and operations, i know how busy we get. And often, when people leave organizations, we scramble and pulled together what we have on dh and send out a job description that is often outdated and hasn’t been updated in a few years, or sometimes, i think, even pulled off the web. Yes, yes, you’ve seen that, yes, ok, not that you’ve done that when you were leading your non-profit i understand, but i think it’s, i think that’s, also a pretty common practice. Why do we need to focus more on job descriptions? Well, job descriptions are really an important part of helping an employee to understand there roles and responsibilities within the organization. It also helps to track employee and volunteer performance and success, and this is, ah, a living document, right way need to keep these current as job responsibilities change. Yes, we recommend that non-profits update their job descriptions, actually, on an annual basis. Okay, okay. Do you do you think that poor job descriptions lead tio? I don’t know hyre turnover or lower morale? What consequences do you think result from not having accurate descriptions? Yes, i i agree with your assertion, we’ve found that couple of things can happen with outdated job descriptions, one that’s for a new hyre they might not really fully understand the role let’s say hypothetically speak about how when organizations lose employees and they have someone coming in, and they used a job description that’s out data from the labs it’s not clearly showing the response the accurate responsibility so the person might get burned out pretty quickly, finding out they have a lot of additional latto responsibilities, or maybe they don’t even have the adequate qualifications for for the rial responsibilities. So the job or, if someone’s been in a position for a few years, there’s what we call the pile on effect where often more and more responsibilities added, but that’s not actually reflected in the job description or in compensation, so so employees can get volunteers burn out that way, and then sometimes people become overqualified for the job or might be over, claude will decide. When they come in, the job description is accurate. Does this apply also to organizations that are mostly volunteers? Should should be job descriptions for volunteers? Oh, yes, absolutely, we believe that that will our book applies to not just paid staff volunteers as well, and we actually have sample job descriptions are bored board positions and key volunteers, as well as from common staff within various non-profit organizations like your executive director, development director on bury the book is loaded with lots of resource is sample job descriptions but goes way beyond that just dahna job responsibilities and forms, you know, and we’re just taking one piece of the book and talking about job description, but there’s a lot more to it, and the thing is just loaded with but templates and resource is yes, thank you. I really wanted it to be as practical as possible, having worked in the nonprofit sector for many years, ourselves it’s more of a workbook where organizations can pick and choose the chapters that they need the resource is from, but it is a whole platform if an organization decides to go through the process for from everything from understanding the organizational. Learning and professional development culture to actually assessing stats, professional development and creating a professional development goals and abducted tied to the strategic als of the organization. Yes. All right, all right. So where do we start this job? Description process. I mean, i know who it starts with its doctor, the supervisor. How does that what is the what the person need to do to get started? Well, the supervisor should really look at the position itself and often there’s different philosophies on job descriptions. And our our philosophy is that the organization, the supervisor, should build the job around the position and not the person because people change andi really, to really get an understanding of what is needed to advance the organisation for words. So we have something called a proficiency mapping cool and are in our book where supervisors can really identify the called common confidences that the knowledge, skills, abilities and other characteristics needed to perform the job and then rape those competencies on different proficiency levels. We use the profession into level scale created by the national institute of health, and they’ve been doing this type of job description, worked for many, many years. And really getting understanding of what level that the position and the responsibilities to need to be at when we talked earlier a few minutes ago about outdated job descriptions common, another problem with outdated job description says they’re not often at the level that the position needs to be on a smaller non-profits with great to have people who could do lots of different responsibilities, but sometimes we have very high expectations that someone in entry level type job might be more responsibilities, say, manager or leading the organization through some sort of process when that’s not necessarily the right level for that job, you have these five proficiency levels fundamental, novice, intermediate advanced and an expert yeah, and we provide definitions and also example words and responsibilities at each level. I like to tell you i jump pretty quickly from fundamental toe expert on i think, if i’d done something once, that makes me an expert, so i don’t know if that fits within your construct, but like one time i’m not the expert the first time, but after i’ve done it one time i consider myself an expert. Andi that’s cost that’s cost me a lot of money in like home repairs and things, but i can’t get around it that’s, that’s but that’s, probably not talking, doesn’t fit within your your definitions well, generally the expert and advance our our our director level positions on responsibilities. So at the executive director, we would hope a most size organizations that the person the person holding that position would have advanced on expert level. But we understand that at the lower level positions the coordinators, entry level positions that they’re more at the the novice and the intermedia level. And yes, i mean, we’ve found that it’s helpful, starting with the supervisor to create these confidences and proficiency levels on dh, then down the line, wei have employees assess themselves and not do a real comparison over the competencies profession? Okay, yes, we’re going to get that so so after the supervisors part, then then what’s next in creating these optimal job descriptions, the next step is really getting documenting the employees responsibilities, and they don’t see what the supervisor has done. But if you do have someone in that particular position just making sure that all the responsibilities are are documented because the supervisor might not have a buy-in of everything that’s employees doing. But obviously, if it’s a new position or if the job description has never been done before, then they would have the supervisor job. Do the proficiency mopping. Ok, ok, but but the next step now is the is the is the employee e-giving their input into what their responsibilities are around the competencies and the proficiency levels. Yeah, the next up, it’s. Just the employees identifying their their responsibility. Okay, a faster proficiency levels. Quite yet just for the job description itself. It’s really making sure that all the responsibilities are identified and the supervisor is really the one that making sure that all the proficiency levels are identified. All right. Ok. Ok. And we mentioned these competencies. Can you give us some examples of competencies? Sure. Before you do that, i want to tell you about the process that we took to to identify ten core confidences for non-profit managers like holly. And i actually did some some national surveys and looked at literature around training needs of non-profit managers and a what their confidence cesaire needed. So this is really backed and research that we identify the ten course set. Of common confidence ease that non-profit managers possessed. They’re very general there everything from advocacy to communications, marketing, the financial management to fund of elopement way also have human resource is way also in the book go through the process of have helping organizations create their own sub confidence ease, because since the time core competencies are very general, we know that each organization is different in their culture and each position and as well as department, it’s organization, house, apartment, that they have their own core competencies that are important to that organization. So we’ve also provided some examples of different size organizations and the sub confidence juices issues that they have so well, for example, intercultural confidence. He is a very important sub competency for many organizations. Uh, two working, working well under pressure are working with certain population. Uh, so we we worked with various organizations and their different types of missions required different confidences. So we worked with homeless organization last semester, and they, you know, they require their staff tohave competencies and understanding about people who have housing, have challenges. Okay, let’s. See, we have just about a minute before before we take a break. And then we’ll continue. I should do this. We haven’t mentioned the board should be job descriptions for board positions. Definitely we have. We have a sample job description for board chair board treasurer for secretary on various board general boardmember on there’s a there’s. A lot of resource is not just in our book, but out there on the web as well for creating and managing board job description. That’s an important piece we’ve we’ve done this process with all volunteer run organizations where it’s just the board teo organizations that have paid staff, maybe they’re smaller, they have all the board do their job descriptions and then the one to two staff members that they have so it’s important that it’s not just a staff process that boardmember look at their job descriptions and revised them. Okay, let’s, go out for a break, and when we come back, heather, of course we’ll stay with us and we’ll keep talking about your job descriptions, and then we’ll move to mapping, mapping you, thies competencies and proficiency levels to the job description. Stay with us what’s not to love about non-profit radio tony gets the best guests. Check this out. From seth godin this’s the first revolution since tv nineteen fifty and henry ford nineteen twenty it’s the revolution of our lifetime here’s a smart, simple idea from craigslist founder craig newmark insights orn presentation or anything? People don’t really need the fancy stuff they need something which is simple and fast. When’s the best time to post on facebook facebook’s andrew noise nose at traffic is at an all time hyre on nine a m or eight pm so that’s, when you should be posting your most meaningful post here’s aria finger ceo of do something dot or ge young people are not going to be involved in social change if it’s boring and they don’t see the impact of what they’re doing. So you got to make it fun and applicable to these young people look so otherwise a fifteen and sixteen year old they have better things to do if they have xbox, they have tv, they have their cell phones. Me dar is the founder of idealist. I took two or three years for foundation staff to sort of dane toe add an email address their card. It was like it was phone this email thing. Is fired-up that’s? Why should i give it away? Charles best founded donors choose dot or ge somehow they’ve gotten in touch kind of off line as it were and and no two exchanges of brownies and visits and physical gift. Mark echo is the founder and ceo of eco enterprises. You may be wearing his hoodies and shirts. Tony talked to him. Yeah, you know, i just i’m a big believer that’s not what you make in life, it sze you know, tell you make people feel this is public radio host majora carter. Innovation is in the power of understanding that you don’t just do it. You put money on a situation expected to hell, you put money in a situation and invested and expect it to grow and savvy advice for success from eric sabiston. What separates those who achieve from those who do not is in direct proportion to one’s ability to ask others for help. The smartest experts and leading thinkers air on tony martignetti non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent lively conversation top trends and sound advice that’s tony martignetti non-profit radio and i’m lawrence paige, no knee author off the non-profit fund-raising solution. I know i say it every time. Maybe maybe you listeners get here. Tired of hearing me say this, but i wish lawrence would pronounce his last name. Panjwani. He’ll be so much more beautiful than paige. No. Ni lawrence. I’ve said this a large his face. So no it’s, not like i’m going behind his back. And pandiani will be so beautiful. Lorenzo lorenzo panjwani okay, okay. Heather let’s move now. Tio mapping what is this? What is it? What is that? The mapping process that comes next? Well, this is the mapping process is really about revising the job description and making sure that it matches up with the responsibilities really, that are needed. We advise organizations to separate job responsibilities by the confidence categories, so we often see job descriptions that have the whole long list of job responsibilities, but were our processes to separate them by category? Cory so that it’s clear on the difference competencies that are needed with that particular job. We also have the manager identified proficiency levels based on the job responsibility, action, words. And so this is where? This is the revision process, the different levels and making sure that the wording really matches up with the proficiency level. So we might have a position that is hyre up that it needs to be or lower and can be a giant. Now you mentioned job responsibility, action words. What defined those for us? Well, the action words are provided in the proficiency mapping scale. So as we talked about before there’s five perfect into levels from fundamental awareness novice, intermediate to advance and experts and each of these i have a different level and we have action words that are associated with each level. So as i mentioned about the higher level positions we have the dance level there’s there’s, some facilitating, leading liaising managing and the expert level. We’re synthesizing. We’re training were troubleshooting. And so these hyre level action words are associated with hyre level job responsibilities. Okay, yeah. And that’s me. Well, i like to focus on the expert. You know, like i said, i would skip over novice, intermediate and advanced. I go right from fundamental to expert one one one one time. So i’ve gotten used to use those expert use those expert examples that’s where hyre just in my mind that’s where i belong let’s see? Okay, so in this job in the in this revision process now it’s, the employees and the supervisor working together, uh, well, family it’s the supervisor making sure that the job description is aligned because as much as we’d like to be an employee involved in the process, the next step in the talent of altum platform, which i don’t have time to talk about here is the individual professional development assessment and that’s where an employee actually haserot their confidence season proficiency level so it’s really helpful that they don’t see realign job description before that, that there going off of what they i think that they’re expertise is and their proficiency level is. And then that way you could do an accurate, um comparison. So what the job requires? Okay, well, you might be surprised we might have time to get to assessment a little bit. Way might be surprised. Um, now so the mapping there are there was, i think six steps on don’t really have you know, we don’t have time to go through all six of them, but help help us. Understand an overview of the process a little more detailed, and then we have so far. Yeah, so, as i mentioned in the first step of separating the job responsibilities by competency category, you’ll see then if there’s gaps and if you’ll have competency categories that you’re not covering it’s amazing how many organizations that we’ve worked with through this process, where they are missing confidence, ease for specific positions, like operations manager or or the executive director where often maybe, you know hr is a part of the operations manager job, but it’s not really accurately included are reflected in the job description or the job responsibilities or information technology is often a part of someone’s job, but not necessarily included, so it really helped helps organization to identify gaps with responsibility and say, well, we don’t have anything in this competency category. So let’s, let’s talk about what we need to include, i see, okay, it strikes me that this whole process to is going to i guess you said it, but just is going to make sure that you’re not bringing in let’s say, entry level people and having expectations that are unreasonable for them in terms. Of responsibilities and competencies exactly. We we also talk about degree levels as well and compensation. We worked with quite a few smaller non-profits that, like tio, take all the responsibilities that we provide his examples, and and use them to hyre their new entry level staff at the masters level were like, whoa, you know, let’s think about it’s entry level, do they really need a masters? Or do they even need a bath? Kottler for that regard, so this really helped to think through the position responsibilities that you need for the organization and ok, if i really need all those responsibilities and maybe it’s two positions, not one or i’m i think i’m being unrealistic with how many responsibilities that i’m requiring in this in this position. So having those those sometimes difficult conversations about what’s realistic for the organization since restoring tio, we’re talking about the possibility of entry level employees what’s your feeling on starting people at at low salaries? Well, i’m a little biased because i advocate for living wages because i teach graduate students in a lot of them are often on the job market, either during their degree program are afterwards and it’s really disappointing to see them have to take very low wage starting jobs also research so that it costs between seventy five, to one hundred for fifty percent of employees annual salary when they leave. And so what i’ve seen with my students and former employees is that bill, if they’re not getting adequate living wage compensation, then the leave within a few months and that actually costs the organization a lot of money organizations, i don’t think we often realize how much time and effort it takes latto post the new position to interview the people to do the training and that’s that’s money, and what will when in fact, we could pay a living wage and a good starting salary for entry level employees and have them stay longer even if they stay a year to that’s that’s better than the cost of done, leaving within a few months because they find a better opportunity that pays better. Excellent! We’ve got to leave it there. Unbelievable! You were right. We didn’t have a chance to talk about assessment. You are right, but you got it by the book it’s talent development platform she’s heather l carpenter, phd and you’ll find her on twitter at heather carpentier carpenter and take off that last are thank you very much. Other thank you. I’ve been a real pleasure next week. I just don’t know, because i’m recording this a couple of weeks ahead. It won’t suck, i promise you that if you missed any part of today’s show, find it on tony martignetti dot com where in the world else would you go? I told you i was coming back pursuant full service fund-raising you’ll raise laundry carts more money. I’m not talking about those one person metal things that you pushed down the street to go to the local laundromat or your stuff him in the in the back seat of your minivan, i’m talking those big plastic monsters on the loading docks at hotels and jim’s with sheets, and the towels are spilling over the sides, but instead of sheets and towels filled with money pursuing dot com, our creative producer is clear meyerhoff sam liebowitz is the line producer shows social media is by susan chavez susan chavez dot com on our music is by scott stein bourelly next week for non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent go out and be great. What’s not to love about non-profit radio tony gets the best guests check this out from seth godin this’s the first revolution since tv nineteen fifty and henry ford nineteen twenty it’s the revolution of our lifetime here’s a smart, simple idea from craigslist founder pregnant mark insights orn presentation or anything? People don’t really need the fancy stuff they need something which is simple and fast. When’s the best time to post on facebook facebook’s andrew noise nose at traffic is at an all time hyre on nine a m or eight pm so that’s, when you should be posting your most meaningful post here’s aria finger ceo of do something dot or ge young people are not going to be involved in social change if it’s boring and they don’t see the impact of what they’re doing. So you got to make it fun and applicable to these young people look so otherwise a fifteen and sixteen year old they have better things to do if they have xbox, they have tv, they have their cell phones. Me dar is the founder of idealist. I took two or three years for foundation staff to sort of dane toe. Add an email address their card it was like it was phone. This email thing is fired-up that’s why should i give it away? Charles best founded donors choose dot or ge somehow they’ve gotten in touch kind of off line as it were and and no two exchanges of brownies and visits and physical gift. Mark echo is the founder and ceo of eco enterprises. You may be wearing his hoodies and shirts. Tony talked to him. Yeah, you know, i just i’m a big believer that’s not what you make in life. It sze, you know, tell you make people feel this is public radio host majora carter. Innovation is in the power of understanding that you don’t just do it. You put money on a situation expected to hell, you put money in a situation and invested and expect it to grow and savvy advice for success from eric sabiston. What separates those who achieve from those who do not is in direct proportion to one’s ability to ask others for help. The smartest experts and leading thinkers air on tony martignetti non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent.

Nonprofit Radio for September 18, 2015: Run Like A Biz & Program Your Board

Big Nonprofit Ideas for the Other 95%

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Hillary Schafer: Run Like A Biz

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Hillary Schafer brought her 12 years on Wall Street to the Jefferson Awards Foundation, where she’s executive director. She shares her ideas from building core infrastructure to employee policies.

 

 

Gene Takagi: Program Your Board

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Hello and welcome to tony martignetti non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. I’m your aptly named host. We’ve got a listener of the week naralo brancati on twitter he’s at bronco leggio he’s in roma italia, where i’m headed shortly and he’s a frequent retweet er of non-profit radio posts, which i very much appreciate so listener the week carlo hey, congrats to latto you messed it up. Lincoln got two lattes cioni carlo chaillou bello, thank you very, very much, carlo. I’m glad you’re with me. My cat would bear the pain of odo psoriasis if she had to hear that you missed today’s show run like a biz hillary shaefer brought her twelve years on wall street to the jefferson awards foundation, where she’s executive director she shares strategies from building core infrastructure to your employee policies and program. You’re bored. Your board probably recognizes its fiduciary responsibilities but doesn’t know its role in overseeing program. Jean takagi is our legal contributor and principal of the non-profit and exempt organizations law group neo and this is from our show on january tenth, two thousand fourteen on tony’s take two work smarter, responsive by pursuant, full service fund-raising data driven and technology enabled, you’ll raise more money pursuing dot com. I’m glad to welcome to the studio hillary schaefer. Prior to joining the jefferson awards foundation as executive director, she worked as the head of us institutional equity sales in new york. For citigroup, she was one of the highest ranking women in the equity business. In the late nineties. She was the executive director of economic security two thousand fighting to save and remodel social security. The foundation is at jefferson awards, dot, org’s and she’s at beard. Hillary on twitter. Welcome, hillary schaeffer. Thank you very much. Glad you’re in the studio, thanks to be here. Eight and a half months pregnant, eight and a half months pregnant, we got you at the right time. What’s behind this twitter id beard hillary it’s, my maiden name is beard. Okay, until re beard was taken, i presume and hillary beard is probably taking swiped by some. I had that done on youtube. Some joker i hope he was named tony martignetti stole the channel name tony martignetti and i had you riel tony martignetti but he doesn’t use it so it’s ah, people don’t have trouble finding me. Not that anyone’s looking, but if they were looking, they wouldn’t have trouble finding me on youtube. Um, tell me about wall street what’s it what’s it like making a living equity say institutional equity sales what’s it like, what does that mean, that’s that place, like, actually, frankly, loved it. I did it for twelve years. I went into wall street thinking i would do it for two. Yeah, we’re really, really fell in love for long enough to stay for twelve instruction. Likely sales is basically where you manage the relationships for the largest institutional investors who invest in stocks. Okay, so on behalf of citigroup, so on, you’re like, on account, uh, liaison to big companies buying stocks. Sort of. Yes, i minimize their eyes. So egregiously okay, clearly egregiously. So, what do you how do you how do you keep big institutional buyers happy? What you have to do, too, with more of their blackness is making money, right? So investing in stocks that go up and shorting stocks that go down. And so ah, lot of the business of the equity business of citigroup is to provide really good insights and ideas and research into the companies that they care about and delivering that content into your clients in a way which is consumable smart, if it’s with their investment style, um and helps them make money is really the core of what you do. Okay, but then there are all of these other services that citigroup offers and help clients run their money from financing stocks. Teo, all of the things that go around the core of running that business, okay, banking and credit relationships, things like that, things like that. Okay? And so core of that business is sort of managing that entire relationship to make sure they get the resource is that they need in orderto successfully run the business and a transition to non-profit work. What? What occasioned that? Frankly, hurricane sandy, i had left wall street. I have two little kids already at home, and i decided that i wanted teo figure out what i wanted to do next. I had no idea what that was actually, frankly thought it would be in the finance world. Yeah, and hurricane sandy hit new york, and i was sitting in my living room working on a business plan for a finance business, okay? And i just got really passionate about the idea that there were children who had gone to bed safe and sound the night before that woke up with no signs of food or shelter or warmth, their security. And so i went to work from my living room to create programs that generated millions of more meals, hundreds of thousands of blankets and warm winter coats for families all over the tri state area and my husband on dh, the executive director of robin hood both basically sat me down and said, please don’t go back to finance the passion that you feel around helping people is so significant. Do something else. Stay in the non-profit you gave away your entrepreneurial dream, the plan you’re working on. You’re going to start your own business. I did put that aside, although running a non-profit is inherently incredibly entrepreneur. Okay, if it’s done right if it’s done right. All right, all right. Um, tell us a little about the jefferson awards and the and the foundation. Sure. So we we basically power public service. We’ve been around since nineteen metoo started by jackie kennedy, senator robert taft junior and my father, sam beard. And the original idea was create a nobel prize for public service in america. Ah, celebrate the very best of the country. You celebration to not only say thank you to people do amazing things, but also as a force multiplier to inspire others to do something good. We then translated into programs that accelerate and amplify service for people of every age. So, starting about ten years ago, we became one of the largest creators of public service in the country through training mechanisms and programs that engage individuals again of all ages to do service ranging from the donation of a single book from a child to a child all the way up to young people in adult toe like who are impacting millions. Of lives and it’s ah, jefferson awards so what’s the awards side of this. So when the awards is the celebration peace. So we are effectively the gold seal of service in america. We give out a we give out jefferson awards the national level, you would know basically every name. Okay. Who’s, one of jefferson word over the last forty three years. And then we have a media partner program where we partner with local affiliates, newspapers, etcetera but primary news outlets in communities all over the country. But today, reaching to seventy eight million households on dh, they are empowered to take the jefferson award and celebrate local grassroots unsung heroes. All right, a nobel prize for ah, for outstanding program work and and saving lives for impact impact. How about the foundation itself? Just number employees. Just a quaint little bit number of employees. Annual budget. Yes. So it’s about twenty seven employees, we have a, uh, about a ten and a half million dollar annual budget. Um, of which much of that is in-kind it’s about a three and a half million dollar operating revenue budget. Okay, and we’re going to go out for a break. In roughly a minute or so, so just, uh, gives a little overviewing of what? But some of the lessons are that you brought from equity sales on dh wall street. Teo, your charitable work, and i think the biggest thing is just that any organization, whether it’s, for-profit or non-profit, needs to be world class in order to be successful, and that starts with everything from how you manage and set your employees up for success to your back end systems that govern how you pay your rent, you know, pay your expenses and collect your revenues to don’t hurt management, teo everything that you do needs to look and feel like you set for-profit world, but it’s really for impact. So i’m guessing you believe non-profit is your tax status not your mindset? Correct? Yeah, cool. Okay. Ah, of course hillary stays with us. We go after this break. I hope you do, too. You’re tuned to non-profit radio tony martignetti also hosts a podcast for the chronicle of philanthropy fund-raising fundamentals is a quick ten minute burst of fund-raising insights published once a month. Tony’s guests are expert in crowdfunding, mobile giving event fund-raising direct mail and donor cultivation. Really, all the fund-raising issues that make you wonder, am i doing this right? Is there a better way there is? Find the fund-raising fundamentals archive it. Tony martignetti dot com that’s marketmesuite n e t t i remember there’s, a g before the end, thousands of listeners have subscribed on itunes. You can also learn maura, the chronicle website, philanthropy dot com fund-raising fundamentals, the better way. Welcome back to big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. Hillary schaefer let’s ah, let’s, dive into some of these lessons that you’ve brought with you this world class let’s start in the back end investment in infrastructure like c r, m databases, data management so that’s a that’s a terrific place to start because really every non-profit is powered by who they reach and how they reached them and how they communicate with, um and management of relationships, whether that’s a whether that’s, a donor, whether that’s, somebody, who’s won an award from our perspective, whether that somebody who has just invested in you are in your programs and how you understand that relationship, how you manage that relationship is all driven by the back end. Traditionally, people would use spreadsheets or just use, you know, sort of word and lists in their own brains, and fundamentally, it doesn’t get you as far as you need to get, and technology today is so sophisticated and there’s so many great great data pay systems that can integrate seamlessly with your website and with donor management tools and with, um, all mechanisms that you need to communicate effectively and really segment that communication into something that makes sense for that individual. It’s. Almost a shame not to you not to use it. Yeah, segmentation, and we’ll get to the benefit of that. I’ve had other guests. My voice just cracked like i’m a fourteen year old. I’ve had have a congratulations. Thank you. Everything else operates at, uh, the requisite age at fifty three, but my voice occasionally. Yeah, so we’ll get to the value of segmentation because people want to be talked to personally, not not and mass and like everybody else, but so but this can be hard to invest in me, we’re talking about this is not serving program directly. This is not helping people directly. How do we overcome that mindset that we can get by with, you know, the lackadaisical, the the database that we’ve got her the internal presses we figured out our work arounds, you know, we’re okay. It’s it’s finding you say that, right? Because they actually when you invest in a really good database management system and client relationship manager, which is what c r m stands for, what you get out of it, that multiplier effect that you can get from having true, powerful relationships and understanding of all of your constituents, all consolidated is worth every dollar you know, and frankly there’s so many great systems which are out there, and they’re not that expensive. The most expensive part is the time of your staff, an external consultants, which you often mean teo, take what is all of the stuff that you’ve cobbled together and to make. It work for your organization. So an organization as an example we had brought in sales force. We use sales force. Um, we frankly had the wrong system installed with sales force. It took us a long time to figure out how to get the right system installed in all of those things. But it’s also taking us the better part of eighteen months to clean our data. Teo optimize our data to segment it appropriately so that we can communicate effectively with everybody in the way they want to be communicated with and a fair amount of staff time. And it’s, that investment of taking somebody away from something that looks like perhaps it’s more important to their day to day life and put them into what’s really tedious work. Ah, in order to be a better organization. But for us, if i think about it, if we have a database that reaches sixty thousand people, our ability to grow from an organization that reaches sixty this sixty thousand two, two, six hundred thousand to six million all contingent on us having optimized rc era. This is key. So if you want to scale, you have to have the infrastructure two to support that every organization wants to be at the next level i get so many questions about, you know, how do i get to next level? Can you refer me to somebody help us get to the next level? But i think often they don’t they’re not set up to get to the next level. They don’t they don’t have the support that they need, even if they were able to teo, multiply by ten there, you know the size of their their outreach. Without data, you have no chance. I’ll give you a great example in the nonprofit world statistic terrifies me, but something like sixty percent of donors don’t repeat on average across the non-profit space every year. Yeah, don’t come back, right? Well, don’t patrician right that’s because we’re not loving the people who are there. Everybody is focused on the next level. No, you’re focused on the next person you forget about the person who’s already said to you with their dollars. I care about what you do at the heart of that is your database management system. I had a guest, peter shankman, um social media expert and marketing guy and his book is called zombie loyalists and basically had a last december. I think i had eternal you’re all your clients and customers into zombie loyalists that love you so much that they’re zombies for your work, and they’ll do your marketing, your pr, your communications for you, but ah, some of what he says boils down to the way to get the client you want is to be awesome to the client. You have that’s exactly right? I mean, i think about it from a from a fund-raising perspective, what the great fundraisers tell you is you should have four contacts with a donor for every time you ask them for something no in orderto have those four contacts but matter to them, you need to know what they care about that needs to be in your database. You need to understand them that meets not only being your head, it needs to be institutionalized in your database. Ah, and then you need to have systems which set up, which push you to reach out to that person, to make sure that you’re not forgetting to touch them four times before you go back to them and say, here’s, your invoice your sales force is a really cool example that you mentioned because for small shops, it’s ideal, the first ten licenses from sales force are free to non-profits and then they have a very deeply reduced fee for going beyond ten licenses. But i think for a lot of listeners, ten licenses is enough for more than enough. So, you know, on i’ve had guests on from the non-profit technology conference and t c talking about the benefits of salesforce, you know, i think that’s right and sales force khun b a terrific tool, it’s also it could be not that expensive or if you have the budget, the amount of tools that they have that you khun scale in two really optimizing take you to the next level are huge, so we don’t have we personally don’t have the budget we would love to have to spend with sales force, but we have a big, long wish list of things we would like to spend on specifically with sales force, with the tools that they have something bothering me to my head now, i didn’t mean to say lackadaisical databases, i meant to say lackluster, lackluster debate lackadaisical. Database doesn’t make any sense lazy, lazy self, you know, so that people could be lackadaisical. But the databases lackluster let’s talk a little about the segmentation, the benefit of communicating with people and showing that you know what their interests are when their birthdays are what they, how they like to be communicated with let’s, explore this know people are people all right, everybody wants to feel touched individually. Nobody wants to feel like they’re part of a marketing campaign or that they’re part of a sort of a blast. People want to be touched individually. It’s why things like instagram work because they feel touched by a photograph ah, it’s the same thing with with donor or constituent segmentation everybody wants to feel like especially in the nonprofit world where you’re talking about emotion. You are effectively touching people where where they want to improve the world, but you’ve got to understand which part of it inspires them. Yes, ah, and and also people like being cared for around the things that matter in their daily lives that have nothing to do with you. You ah, their children, their children’s ages. What? They d’oh? Ah, what their hobbies. Are where they like to travel all of those things. It just matters it’s all about having one on one of relationships. And the better your relationship is, the more likely you are to be able to maximize. And everything you’ve mentioned is data worth preserving its all data. You have to have people love it when you send them a note that says, happy birthday, no, super simple. It is very simple now. So what kinds of reminders do you get based on what kinds of things aside from birthday? What other kind of yeah, what others? Ah, it tends to relate to things that people have told you. Okay? And so for us, it would relate specifically to our program. So we have five different programs that have very, very different calendars. So that could relate. Teo, i i just need to get us a of the date because i know you desperately want to come to our national ceremony in new york city in march. Ah, but it could also be i know you really want to be. Ah, judge at our students in action conference in minneapolis. Ana and so getting that date to you in plenty of advance notice. It really gets down to that level. All right, so the, uh, the value of segmentation and investment in infrastructure. What about investment in consultants? You mentioned consulting? Nobody knows everything they need to know, but this could be tough to bring, bring other people in and have a fresh set of eyes evaluating you. It’s interesting on the consulting sight because i i personally have two two minds about consultants. Often i feel like you get charged too much for a percentage of somebody’s brain no on dh that’s the greatest risk with consulting. Ah, but also often they’re just expertise. You don’t want to bring in house. You can’t afford to bring in house, but you need somebody who has fresh eyes who knows something really specific that you don’t know ah, and with without which you can’t can’t go to the next level, you can’t execute effectively. So sales forces a terrific example. Um, there are so many tools inside sales force that enable you to do things like optimize your data and get rid of redundancy and all of those things, um and to, uh, to make it spoke for your organization. For think the ways in which you want to connect with people, i couldn’t do that myself, and i don’t have anybody in house who could do that for me. Could you just send your data data manager, database administrator to a sales force conference or course, yes, we do that too, okay, but it’s not enough and for the cost to bring and you know, you gotta you gotta weigh out the cost. So the question is, can you find somebody who is affordable to you in your organization that helps bring in those that kind of expertise in? I’m their things like building out an effective communication strategy where if you don’t have a big, robust communications team who can think about everything from database management, teo email to social media to all the things that go into digital infrastructure ah, and communications calendars and all of those things. At some point, it becomes really smart to bring in somebody from the outside to say, i’m building you a structure i’m helping you think about inside your organization, for you what a structure would look like, that you can afford let’s turn to our people, i think my voice is, my voice is crack again. It’s. A big bag, maybe, you know. So your people important asset, probably your most valuable asset most important, most expensive it’s expensive. I would guess inside most non-profits that that people are seventy eight percent of cost big, big, big percentage, um and making impact in the world all relates to the people who you were in power to make that impact on your behalf as as either a full time employee or an independent contractor. Treyz and losing employees is as expensive as losing the donors we were talking about, if not more so, you know woobox the amount of time you then need to spend teo find the person, bring them in house, and on average, it takes six to eighteen months to really optimize an employee. That’s a long time to invest in somebody new if you have somebody who’s good who’s sitting there right in front of you. The most important thing with people always is that they feel like they’re being set up to succeed. And they’re being given the tools that they need. Ah, to succeed. All right, how do we do this? Ah, well, that everything from the really basic and can feel very cumbersome to a management manager. Piece, but ah, gold setting and reviews letting people know where they stand, being really straightforward with them about what they’re doing that’s terrific, and where they need to develop development goals is a big, big, big piece, and i don’t mean development is in fund-raising i mean, personal development, professional development around how can you be a much more effective employees? For the most part? Certainly in my experience, whether it’s on wall street or in the nonprofit world, when you sit in a review with somebody, they barely hear the good stuff. Ninety nine percent of what you tell them could be good. Everybody waits for the butt, the but needs to be real, meaning it needs to be i understand you here’s, where i see helping to take you as a human being and as a professional to the next level, and being able to deliver that in a way which is non threatening but having systems and structures around delivering reviews around goal, setting around, holding people accountable to those goals and around understanding them and wanting to be on their side are all the the most important things you can do, and it doesn’t matter. What kind of an organization you’re out to do that my guest last week, we’re from the university of pittsburgh, and they were talking about incentive pay, something that pitt has set up, and they’ve defined what an exemplary fundraiser is it’s basically achieving two hundred percent of your goal, but that’s a big organization, university of pittsburgh dahna might there be other ways of implementing incentive pay around? Aside from strictly money money come, you know, incentives are interesting in non-profits because, um, a, for the most part, non-profits don’t use sort of base bonus type structures, but there are tons of other ways that you can make somebody feel really good about what they d’oh and whether that’s simply celebrating their accomplishments to the other employees into your board. People really thrive on that, but it can also be other things, like giving them an extra days vacation. Um, you know, sending them home on purpose when they’re kids sick and you tell them that family comes first, you know, all those things that’s really more around culture, but there are there are smart things you can do where you say, you know what? I don’t have the dollar to give you. But i do have a day to give you or two or whatever it is. Whatever it is, that you’ve earned benefits structures are very important, um, covering people in their families and how you do that and how you communicate it. Incredibly important and totally under sort of undervalued in the mindset in the nonprofit world about what that means to an individual. And you say, i care about you and your health, and i care about your family in there. We have just about a minute left or so we have a couple more than more than a couple minutes. How much time do we have left? Sam? Okay, dahna then let’s. Ah, my mistake. Let’s keep talking about some some policies around employment. Maybe around training. Like you’ve got a new employee, you’ve spent the requisite amount of time recruiting you believe you’ve got the best person, the orientation, the training process onboarding process oven employees that one of the single most important things that you d’oh. So with us, justus a simple example. First, everybody gets a very long, very detailed employee manual that they have to read, but they really understand what the operating premises are of the organ you’re holding your hands, like four inches apart for inches. It’s not for interesting. Okay, okay, they’re recording, so that would be way too much street. All right, but i use my hands a lot. I think i’m going to italy and i’m hundreds in italian, so i didn’t think you were using them enough. That must be the eight and half months. Pregnant part. Yes, i understand. Ok, the but having that set of expectations in somebody’s. Mind where they read it. They have to affirm it. They have to tell you that they’ve read it. That tells them everything from how many vacation days they do have, how they can accrue more vacation, what the benefits are to them, how they can get in trouble, how they can stay out of trouble. What a whistle blower policy might look like. All of those things very, very important. But then bringing people into the culture of the organization into your programs where they really feel armed. Tio ah, to be an effective employees. Ah, it’s. So fundamental. So we we set up a schedule time with all of our program managers. We have our end of its staff. When they come in they go. They shadow individuals who do either their job or even other jobs inside the organization. Because you got to understand the entire organization. I think in order to be effective in your silo. Ah, and then we do profession. We were very open to paying for people doing professional development and encourage it. Ah, and then we do regular staff retreats where everybody comes together and we work on pieces that feel like they might be holes in the skill set to the entire organization again, investment where its infrastructure of people you just you can’t shortchange these things and expect to scale on grow the organization. I mean, for the amount it costs me, tio run a staff retreat every year, eyes about one percent of what it costs me to pay my staff. Yeah, that is a very worthwhile investment to make that staff be a leverage oppcoll army, we’re gonna leave it there. Hillary shafer she’s uh, executive director of jefferson awards foundation there at jefferson awards dot or ge and again on twitter she’s at beard hillary. Thank you so much, hillary. Thank you. Well, pleasure and gun muzzle tough. Congratulations on your pregnancy. Thank you very much. Tony steak, too. And program you’re bored with jean takagi coming up first. Pursuant, billboard it’s, integrated management of email landing pages, micro sites, donation forms, mobile pages, mobile mobile communications. And this and the social networks. Really? I mean, a lot of stuff that hillary and i were just talking about infrastructure. You’ve heard guests talk about multi-channel engagement billboard by pursuing is multi-channel engagement management, including the analytics with strong data and analysis and you’re constantly learning and revising and learning and fixing and improving that’s how you get better, so supporting all this. All the engagement through multiple channels is this, uh, tool billboard, which will, as everything pursuing, does help you find tune and raise more money pursuing dot com. My video this week is the second set of ntc non-profit technology conference video interviews. The subject is work smarter there’s distance collaboration, moving your data and files to the cloud walk to work that was with beth cantor and re to sharma encouraging you to make walking part of your work day not as a break, but as part of your day, take your meetings walking and two other video interviews. Links to those interviews are under my video at tony martignetti dot com that’s tony’s take two for friday, eighteenth of september thirty seventh show of the year here is jeanne takagi with program you’re bored jean takagi he’s, a principal of neo the non-profit and exempt organizations law group in san francisco gene has been gene has been a regular contributor to show it’s got to be going on three years gina, i if it’s not three it’s. Very close. He had it’s, the non popular of the non popular beautiful. He had it’s, the popular non-profit law blawg dot com non-profit law blogged dot com it’s very popular. And on twitter he’s at gi tak g t k happy new year jean takagi. Welcome back. Happy new year. Tony it’s. Great to be on. Thank you. I love having you. How long have you been a contributor? Every month, i think it’s been a little over three years. That is it. Is it over three? Love it. It could be. I think we met three years ago at a bar in san francisco. If i remember, right? Oh, for sure. It’s. Not like we pick. I picked you up there where i knew you before. I’m not that easy with contributors. I mean, yes, we we knew each other. And then we certainly did meet that’s, right? With along with emily chan? Yes. That’s. Right. Um, let’s see, our board has our board has some responsibilities and around program you’re concerned that they’re not. They’re not fulfilling those responsibilities. Yeah, i just feel like there’s there’s, maybe some lack of attention paid on board the board’s roll on program oversight i think so often went especially when you talk with lawyers or accountants were talking about financial oversight, and we’re saying we’ll make sure you’re solvent, make sure you have enough money to pay off your debts, they become duitz we don’t really talk very much about programs, but certainly the management folks and the funders air talking about programs and whether they’re effective and efficient, that furthering the mission. So, you know, i thought we should explore a little bit about what the board duties are in in that event as well. Can you just remind us first, we’ve talked about this a while ago. There are three duties that board members have i was faith, hope and chastity or on the greatest of those is but yeah, the three duties are the duty of care and that’s act with reasonable care in providing direction and oversight over the organization, the duty of loyalty, and a lot of that has to do with avoiding conflicts of interests that are not in the best interest of the organizations but are more for the best interest of an insider and the duty of obedience. Which lawyers air very interested in and that’s obeying with both the outside laws of you know, that apply to the organization and the internal laws like the by-laws and other policies that the documents may have those air the three to be to be concerned with. Okay, and and around program program is essential. Man. That’s what charity’s exist for his programs? Oh, my voice just cracked like i’m a fourteen year old exist that’s, exciting stuff. That’s it is. It is that’s. Right? Well, you make it interesting. That’s. Why? I love having you back. You make the what could very well be a dry topic. I think you make it interesting. And listeners do too. Yeah. That’s. What? Charity’s air here is for a program. Yeah, exactly. I mean, who cares? The indie at the end of the day, if we’ve got great financials, it’s none of our programs are effective, and we don’t do a service to the community. Precisely. So what do we need to be doing? What the board’s need to be doing around around program? Well, i think in meeting those three duties, the critical aspect for boards to make sure they’re reasonably informed ah, and just get a program report every month or every two months. You know, a ten minute program report from executive director or program director is fine and good. But does that mean the board really understands the programs and whether the advance the mission? Ah, and do they understand how the program’s advance emission? And did they ever ask you more difficult questions about are the program’s effective at advancing the mission? Or do we have alternatives? Or should we think of alternatives that might be able to advance that mission mohr effectively or more efficiently, given the limited resources that we all have? First up in this is and we have talked about this. Your mission needs to be very clear. Yeah, and one of the things you have to do is make sure you go back. And this is the lawyer speaking. Make sure you go back to your articles of incorporation and by-laws and make sure that the mission statement that years, thinking that you’re furthering is consistent with what the law says. Your mission is. And that’s that’s how it’s displayed on the governing document and in figuring out whether we are effective. At meeting our mission. Now we’ve gotta identify cem numbers, right? I mean, it’s, not just gonna be a ten minute report from the program director, we’ve got to be looking at some numbers to figure out whether our we’re having the outcomes that we want, right and it’s such a such a difficult question and that’s, why it’s it’s all about keeping informed? Because, you know, the whole area of program evaluation and that cantor and and a lot of institutions like the stanford center on philanthropy in civil society and mckinsey and, you know, the non-profit cordially foundations, and they all have been raiding all sorts of things on program evaluation and how we need more metrics and, you know, but all of that is great, but this is really hard stuff for a lot of non-profits to do so, yes, trying to figure out what what measurements are are important for us to figure out. Are we advancing our mission effectively? And then are we advancing it efficiently is really hard stuff, i think tip typically non-profits will, you know, measure how much money we’ve raised, how many visitors we’ve had or people with served? How many? Members we have. What is our overhead? Ray shone with had discussions on that topic as well. And, you know, those are interesting figures and all important. And i don’t want to downplay that. But what about, you know, then you know, the number of client desert. For example, does that really tell us what impact that’s done? No, before the clients. And you know, the program staff may know that, but how does the board know that if we have if we served a thousand clients last month, did we did we serve them by giving them one meal? Did that change their lives? Did we do more than that? Did we provide services? What? What and impact are we trying tio aim for? And what results are we getting those air really difficult things to try to figure out. But i think the board needs to push the organization in that direction. Of trying to figure out are the programs that write programs? Are we effectively implementing it? And if you want to, you know, evaluate your executive and evaluate your programs. You’ve gotta have a good understanding of that. I feel your passion around this, jean. I really do. It comes it’s it’s palpable. Now, in managing these programs it’s not the board’s roll. Teo, be day to day. There’s clearly there’s a delegation that has to be happening. Yeah, absolutely. And and the board certainly has the ability to and should be delegating if they have staff in an executive director. Particularly, um, delegating those duties on those people. And especially, you know, holding the executive accountable and tasking executive and making sure the executive has resources to be able to do this, to try to figure out what measurements should we take? Teo, evaluate our programs. What what’s important? What do we have the capacity to do now? And what? What do we aspire to do? What are outside stakeholders wanting? What are the foundations saying we must have? And what are the donor’s expecting from us and how to our competitors provide that type of information back? I think we just need to push. Our executives were lucky enough to have them to figure some of those things out. And none of this has done overnight. Of course, tony. But you know, you you’ve gotto work at this, and sometimes you’re going to move. Forward, and sometimes you gotta move backwards, but you’ve got to keep pushing, pushing ahead. You just asked five or six really difficult but critical questions out it’s a good thing, that’s, the podcast cause. Now people can listen. Go, go back to the past one minute and listen to those five or six questions of jean, just just named, you know, difficulty, but, but but critical. And and yet the board’s oversight responsibility remains when that can’t be delegated. That’s right? So, you know, the board, khun delegate management, but the board can’t delegate its ultimate oversight of the organization and it’s, you know, it’s responsibility to plan the direction of the organization. So status quo, if you know if that’s all you’re satisfied with and you don’t aim to do anything else with that, you know, that may not be that may indicate that you don’t have the best board in place, and i was a little shocked teo learned, i think two days ago guidestar held a web cast, and there was a survey done of executive directors, and seventy five percent said they were unhappy with their boards and there’s a big disconnect there seventy five percent. Prove it. Okay, what else? What else, uh, is part of the boards oversight of program? Gene? Well, you know, one thing i kind of want to emphasize as well is that i don’t want to put all of this on the board of directors, and i realized that the vast majority of board members are volunteers and have busy lives otherwise and are doing an amazing job trying to contribute to their organizations. The disconnect with the exec director is usually because of communications and a lack of understanding of their respective roles. So i just want to put a little bit of a burden on the executive director as well, to make sure that they are emphasizing board development and helping the board understand its responsibilities, and sometimes bringing in experts, even though they may cost a little at the outset could be really valuable to an organisation to try to figure out what these roles are and again put in a little investment up front, and you can get payoff down the road even if you have some failures along the way. But it’s just that continuing to push forward to trying to understand what you’re doing who’s responsible for what? On figuring that stuff out the metrics themselves again. Our khun b, you know, exceedingly difficult if if i asked you give us metrics on changing laws when we were fighting for civil rights. Um, well, that might take years or decades to get any measurable results per se that might make a thunder happy. And you know what would have happened? In the early sixties, if, you know, civil rights organizations just had their program shut down because boards didn’t get the right metrics, that would have been ridiculous, right? So we have to understand the limitation of these measurements as well, but continue to try to figure out what important steps or benchmarks we’re shooting for and what’s important to do, even if we don’t get the metrics on and make sure our funders and donors and stakeholders understand those limitations. Well, just a minute or so before before a break gene, what? What kind of expert would help us with this? What would we search for? Well, there there are some consultants out there who specialize in program evaluation, and there there are definitely resource is out there. I have named a few organizations already, but let me give you a few more the foundation centre and they’re grantspace website has got some excellent resource is on program evaluation, the national council of non-profits also has some excellent resources. They’re they’re definitely resource is out there, and if you look for non-profit consultants who got program evaluation expertise, i think that can be a starting place. This is also a ripe area for collaboration amongst organizations that are serving similar populations, or have similar missions to try to meet together and talked about how they’re measuring, you know, their program, results and what would work for maybe, you know, across the sub sector that that they’re serving, all of those things are really important. I think again, executive leadership is really important to get the board in motion, but the board also has to hold the executive responsible for making sure that happens as well. Let’s, take a break. Gene and i, of course, will keep talking about the board’s responsibility around program and the executive director’s, to lynette singleton and at lays, right. Thank you for thank you very much. For those very, very kind thoughts on twitter. Hang in there. Like what you’re hearing a non-profit radio tony’s got more on youtube, you’ll find clips from stand up comedy tv spots and exclusive interviews catch guests like seth godin. Craig newmark, the founder of craigslist marquis of eco enterprises, charles best from donors choose dot org’s aria finger, do something that worked, and levine from new york universities heimans center on philantech tony tweets to, he finds the best content from the most knowledgeable, interesting people in and around non-profits to share on his stream. If you have valuable info, he wants to re tweet you during the show. You can join the conversation on twitter using hashtag non-profit radio twitter is an easy way to reach tony he’s at tony martignetti narasimhan t i g e n e t t i remember there’s a g before the end he hosts a podcast for the chronicle of philanthropy fund-raising fundamentals is a short monthly show devoted to getting over your fund-raising hartals just like non-profit radio, toni talks to leading thinkers, experts and cool people with great ideas. As one fan said, tony picks their brains and i don’t have to leave my office fund-raising fundamentals was recently dubbed the most helpful non-profit podcast you have ever heard. You can also join the conversation on facebook. Well, you can ask questions before or after the show. The guests were there, too. Get insider show alerts by email, tony tells you who’s on each week and always includes link so that you can contact guest directly. To sign up, visit the facebook page for tony martignetti dot com. Hi, i’m kate piela, executive director of dance, new amsterdam. And you’re listening to tony martignetti non-profit radio. Big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. More live listener love junction china ni hao, the netherlands gary indiana the home of christmas story, right? I’m pretty sure a christmas story that movie took place in gary, indiana live listen, i’d love to gary, indiana, and we’ve got a couple checking in from japan, hiroshima and kobe konnichi wa, farmington, michigan live listener love out to you. We have a question from twitter jean very loyal listener lynette singleton asks, do we know why there’s this lack of love between executive directors with and their boards, any ideas what’s contributing to that? I think i’m sorry, tony, that i think there are a number of factors that make be contributing to that, but i think the first is lack of understanding of the rules at each place and then it’s it’s a matter of communication between the two parties, there are great expectations that that board’s place on executives and the reliance on the executives tio tio make do with limited resources to produce amazing results, and that can sometimes be a very heavy burden on the executive without a lot of support from the board and exactly what the board’s role is in supporting the executive. Director’s also, i think they’re many areas where there’s a lack of agreement or understanding between those roles and, you know, fund-raising is actually one of the areas of x. Actually, some controversy, i think, you know, is the board involved is the board’s role dahna to raise funds for the organisation. From a legal perspective, i might answer no to some extent, from a more operational perspective, i would say, of course it is, so they’re they’re different considerations, and that was a charity navigator study, right? I’m not sure. I thought you said i’d start with, i’m sorry, the organization that did the webinar. Okay, okay, god start. Pardon me. Ok wave talking, talking about program meeting the mission, but there’s also legal requirements around program as well. Sure, and then the board should make sure that the executive is ensuring that the program is in compliance with whatever applicable laws might be there, whether it have to do with the facility of the organization or the employees and volunteers working for it, their basic risk management steps that they may want to take a swell, including ensuring that there’s proper insurance for whatever activities are are involved. Obviously, if you’re doing a summer day camp involving rope climbing and like that that’s going to be a little bit more significant in terms of risk management than if you’re just doing administrative work, lots of legal compliance, things, licensing, permitting and in all of those things, well, can board members be personally liable if laws are being broken and that’s why we have directors and officers insurance, isn’t it? Yeah, part partly why we have that it’s usually, you know, if there’s some sort of negligence involved when the boardmember acting not as a boardmember but as a volunteer for a program, then you’re probably looking at commercial general liability. Insurance to protect against, you know, somebody slip and fall and blaming the volunteer who was supposed to set it up, the board members, directors and officers insurance will really protect against decisions that the board made that ultimately, you know, in hindsight, we’re negligent or grossly negligent, and, you know, if they decided to hold a program in involved involving bungee jumping with six year olds and without adequate supervision, that would you know, that would be the type of negligence that that could get boardmember personally liable for something like that. But volunteermatch boardmember czar really, really, really rarely hell, personally liable absent some sort of malfeasance or self dealing benefit themselves. Okay, i’ve seen some six year olds on the subway that i wouldn’t mind having participating at that bungee jumping off a cliff. I could i could give them a little shove to get them started, but not not kids. I know nobody related to me, only only what’s people have seen some hype it that it go well, now they’re real. I’ve seen him in the subway, i just don’t know who they are. I can’t name them, but i could point them out easily. Probably on my way home, i’ll encounter a few. Um, what else should we be thinking about? You know, your get before i asked before we do that, you’re an anarchist. Also, you’re making us. I got two troublemakers on the show today. You are making us ask questions that are very difficult, but but critical? Yeah, you know, e think of lawyers and consultants more broadly. That’s what what we do, we can’t implement the changes that we talked about, what we want to raise the questions because we want boards and executives to really be thinking about these things and discussing them, and that’ll help break down the barriers and the misunderstandings and hopefully make more executive directors feel that their boards air great, make more executive, make more boards feel that their executive directors are doing a great job as well. As i said, i feel your passion around this. We have just about two minutes. You have another thought around this? Yeah, you know, just tio, make sure that again and i’ve talked a little bit about this is that there are limitations to what metrics can provide to an organization and some things just take a really long time to figure out research i mentioned lobbying on civil rights issues is one example, but research as well, you know, for going to engage in research of a new program and how it’s going to work or developing a new medical device or drug that’s going to be beneficial to developing nations and the people there who might not have the resources to be able to afford these things. We’ve got to be a little bit experimental, and i know you know, there’s been preaching to the choir about embracing failure and sharing it so we can learn in advance, but that really is something that all echo as well, that, you know, we’re going to get metrics and sometimes the metrics they’re going to show we failed, but if we never fail, that means we’ve never really pushed the envelope of making a more substantial change, and we’re just sort of, you know, relying on making little incremental changes, and we have to think about our organizations and say, are we detective organization that just wants to stay status quo? Do we want to make little tiny, incremental changes year by year, or do we? Actually want to look at solving or advancing our mission in a really big way and actually take some risk and find some programs out there that might be more risky and that might fail and help educate our funders and our donors and our supporters of that, you know, this is what we’re doing, and not everything is going to work, but this is the way to advance, you know, our cause, a lawyer with a heart, jing jing takagi really so grateful that you’re you’re contributing to the show? Jean, thank you so much. Thank you, johnny. And thanks for basing this serious subject to make a that’s. All right, wait. I have a little fun with it. You’re an anarchist is no question you’ll find jean at non-profit law blogged dot com that’s the block that he had it and he’s at g tack on twitter. Thank you again, jean, thanks so much next week, smart interviewing with cheryl nufer talking about behavioral interviewing and job descriptions. Heather carpenter is co author of the book the talent development platform. If you missed any part of today’s show, find it on tony martignetti dot com. Thanks for being with me today and i assure you the singing will return make no mistake pursuant full service fund-raising you’ll raise submarines more money i’m not talking about those one little person diving bells that xy ologists go down into study. 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