Gene Takagi & Amy Sample Ward: Looking To 2025: Is It Paranoia Or Prudence?
Our esteemed contributors share what they’re looking to next year, with the uncertainty of a new president and administration. On the table is HR 9495, which some call the NonprofitKiller; government agencies no longer given deference by the federal courts, with the Supreme Court overruling the long-standing Chevron Doctrine; and, uneasiness around the economy rippling out to preemptive nonprofit budget cuts. Our legal contributor is Gene Takagi at NEO Law Group. Amy Sample Ward, CEO of NTEN, is our technology contributor.
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And welcome to Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio. Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. I’m your aptly named host and the pod father of your favorite abdominal podcast. This is our last show of the year. I’ll have more to say about that. Oh, I’m glad you’re with us. I’d bear the pain of a para nia if you pointed out to me that you missed this week’s show. Here’s our associate producer, Kate with what’s up this week? Hey, Tony, we have looking to 2025. Is it paranoia or Prudence? Our esteemed contributors share what they’re looking to next year with the uncertainty of a new president and administration on the table is hr 9495, which some call the nonprofit killer government agencies no longer given deference by the federal courts with the Supreme Court overruling of the long-standing Chevron doctrine and uneasiness around the economy rippling out to pre-emptive nonprofit budget cuts. Our legal contributor is Gene Takaki at Neo Law Group, Amy Sample Ward CEO of N 10 is our technology contributor on Tony’s two. Our last show of the year and timely holiday wishes were sponsored by donor box outdated donation forms blocking your supporters, generosity, donor box, fast, flexible and friendly fundraising forms for your nonprofit donor. Box.org here is looking to 2025. Is it paranoia or Prudence? It’s a pleasure to welcome back Gene Takagi and Amy Sample Ward for our final show of 2024. Gene is our legal contributor and principal of Neo, the nonprofit and exempt organization’s Law Group in San Francisco. He edits the wildly popular nonprofit law blog.com and is a part time lecturer at Columbia University. The firm is at Neola group.com and he’s at GTC A AMP award, our technology contributor and CEO of N 10. They were awarded a 2023 Bosch Foundation fellowship and their most recent co-authored book is the tech that comes next about equity and inclusiveness in technology development. They’re at Amy Sample ward.org and at Amy RS Ward Gene and Amy. Thank you for your contributions through the year and welcome to the final show of 2024. We made it sounds like drudgery. No, I’m just saying like it, you know, here we are, we made it all the way to the end of 2020 four. All right, thanks. OK. She says it, they say it with a smile. So thank you. Thank you. It sounded like uh it might have been a laborious chore, but no, hopefully not. I’m I’m sure not. All right. And one thing maybe Tony that, that will spur talking about what we might foresee in the future is that change in social media handles. As many of us are migrating to blue sky and to other. Exactly. But just thought, I chime in with that quickly, we can, we can talk about the, the, the seasonal migration. I, I am slow to adopt new networks. But uh yes, I, I’ve started being active on uh on blue sky as well. Indeed. All right. Uh We wanna start with something that, uh, both of you have seen me post about and has been getting a lot of attention, uh, for months before I joined, before this, uh, came within my ken if you will, uh, which is ho House Resolution hr 9495. Uh, in the Senate. It is, uh, 4136. It is the stop terror financing and tax penalties on American Hostages Act. Uh, J uh, I don’t know, terror financing and not penalizing people who were held hostage for paying their taxes late. I mean, those, those both sound like very worthwhile endeavors for the government to do. Uh, especially I’m thinking of hostages who may not have filed their 1040 on time. I mean, I think, I think being held hostage is, uh, uh, a legitimate reason for not having paid your taxes and then the penalties that would have ensued on top of that. So, II, I think that’s a fair, uh, but it’s the, uh, it’s the stop terror financing part that is, uh, rankling nonprofit organizations, the nonprofit community generally. Um, what, what is it about this house resolution? It passed the house. It’s now in the Senate, I guess I’ll just set up the, the, the, the, uh, timing of the thing. So, uh, it’s unlikely to be taken up in the current Senate. I mean, it’s possible but it’s not likely, uh, having passed the house. Uh, but we have a new Senate, uh, beginning on, um, January 3rd and, uh, that Senate could very well take up hr 9495 Senate 4136. What’s, uh, what, what’s the, uh, what’s the issue here for the nonprofit community? Gene? So, II, I think when we take a look at the name of the bill, this is the game of politics that some of us get frustrated with. Right. So who could be against stop terror financing? Of course, nobody wants to, it’s worthy and it’s worthy and benign. But what does it actually say about how we stop terror financing? What are the checks and balances? Can anybody just say you are supporting terror and that’s it. You are like, shut down. Do you get executed for doing that? I mean, so we, we need to look into the bill and I think the first time this bill came across was actually, um, late last year, Tony, it was under a different name. Uh, it was hr 64 08 in the house and it passed 382 to 11. So I don’t think a lot of the legislators got past the name of the bill and then they decided, hey, we’re going to pass this because how can our constituents see us oppose a bill against supporting terror? Of course, we are, are for, you know, stopping terror financing and the hostages too. Don’t forget the, the, the late, the late filings for the, for the hostages. And that’s the other part of politics, right? Is we bundle things together so that you’re trapped, right? There’s no kiss to, to, to promoting that bill. But here’s, here’s why it’s, it’s scary for, for the nonprofit sector. The addition in the bill, the, the part that’s not to do with hostages is about the Secretary of the Treasury having the discretion alone to strip the tax exempt status of an organization because they feel like they are supporting a terrorist organization, they are providing material support or resources to a terrorist organization. And if they deem that to be the case, they give 90 days notice to the organization, they should supply some evidence of that support um, or resources unless it’s a national secret or it’s not in the best interests of the government to do so. In which case, it could all be done in secret. It could just be, we’re taking away your 501 C three status because we’ve decided that you are supporting terror a terrorist organization, give us 90 days to prove that you’re not in return any money that, that, you know, you sent out to the terrorist organization that we might not really tell you much about. Um, and what is all of that mean? I mean, so now as we sort of dig into how this might be impacted and how, uh, an executive branch might use this particular bill to attack organizations or even if they don’t use it broadly how it will just chill free speech across the sector. There’s already organizations terrified with this bill and afraid to speak up on things like, um, the Palestinian people in Gaza, which is sort of what prompted the bill in the first place. Right. But, you know, now they’re thinking, oh my gosh, can we speak about reproductive rights? Can we speak about other things? Are we going to be called a terrorist organization or a supporter of a terrorist organization? And what if the organization we were supporting wasn’t branded a terrorist organization at the time, but later was declared by some other entity or some other agency to be a terrorist organization. Now, do they go back and do they ding us on that as well? And I won’t go too far down the line. But humanitarian aid is another huge issue to, to talk about later. But let me, let me stop there. Well, even even on the domestic side, suppose you are supporting the, uh, the civil rights or the legal rights of people who protest openly in the streets, uh, about anything that, that we have a right to seek redress from our, from our federal government around. So you’re, then those protesters are perhaps arrested, um, and charged and you give legal support, you give material legal support to those, to those charged. Are, are those, are those folks deemed domestic terrorists? That’s another thing, the bill does not distinguish between federal or domestic, sorry, between domestic or foreign. Uh, are you now giving material support to domestic terrorists who were exercising their first amendment rights of assembly and speech in the streets? And so now you’re, now you, this legal aid society are a, uh, terrorist supporting organization. So there’s an opportunity. Um, it’s just the, the, the bill is vague on standards. In fact, I think it’s, it’s silent on the standards for being deemed a terrorist supporting organization. It’s, it’s at the Secretary of the Treasury’s uh discretion, what is deemed a terrorist supporting organization? And that vagueness is critical. I don’t want to overstate it, Tony, because I’ve seen on various other podcasts. People are making more into this bill than is actually there. So to be a terrorist supporting organization that could be subject to being stripped of tax exempt status. You have to be accused, uh, or, or charged with, um, the designation that you are supporting a terrorist organization. And the terrorist organization is defined in other sections of the bill, the bill is very hard to read because it starts to refer to other places in the code where you could be described as a terrorist organization. So if you give support, material support or resources to that terrorist organization that’s typically been defined by somebody else, some other branch of the government, um, usually with a little bit more, you know, some people have been mistaken about this saying that the legislature had to define you as a terrorist organization. That’s not quite true. There are other sort of members of the executive branch that could still define you as a terrorist organization. If they have, then the secretary of the Treasury has the ability to say you supported them, but they’ve got to be on some list of a terrorist organization. So protesters on the street, if you’re supporting them in their legal aid, unless they are deemed part of a terrorist group that’s been identified as a terrorist organization, then that won’t apply. It’s time for a break. Imagine a fundraising partner that not only helps you raise more money but also supports you in retaining your donors, a partner that helps you raise funds both online and on location. So you can grow your impact faster. That’s donor box, a comprehensive suite of tools, services and resources that gives fundraisers, just like you a custom solution to tackle your unique challenges, helping you achieve the growth and sustainability. Your organization needs helping you, help others visit donor box.org to learn more. Now, back to looking to 2025 is it paranoia or prudence? Suppose they’re supporting Black Lives Matter in their local city and Black Lives Matter has been deemed a terrorist support, a terrorist organization. I mean, we, we, uh, by some, by some other agency as you’re, as you’re describing, that doesn’t seem outside the realm of possibility. The, the claim could be that Black Lives Matter members as if there’s as if there’s like a, a strict membership list or something. But let’s just use the, the worst possible instincts of uh the federal government uh are, are, you know, they, uh they, they uh they create crime in mayhem and they burn buildings. Well, it sounds like a domestic terror organization to us that other agency has determined. And now the, the uh the legal aid society uh is providing uh material support to a terrorist organization. Doesn’t that, isn’t that within the realm of possibility and plausibility? It kind of is Tony, it’s not really kind of projected right now that this is going to be focused on domestic terrorism. It seems like the executive branch doesn’t actually want to identify domestic organizations as terrorist organizations because many of them support the, the, the current administration, uh those who, who were responsible for the insurrection, for example, on January 6th. So the focus here right now is on foreign terrorism. That’s sort of the identified groups, um, that, um, if you support foreign terrorist organizations that seems to be the focus but it doesn’t mean that they couldn’t go down the route that you’re talking about. Terror. Does the, does the bill? I thought the bill was silent on foreign versus domestic terror. It doesn’t define it except through references to other sections of the code which are focused on foreign terrorist organizations. So, you know, it doesn’t mean they can’t expand it. It doesn’t mean that maybe the Secretary of the Treasury couldn’t interpret terrorist supporting to, to give themselves a little bit more power to say, hey, this is a terrorist group as well. But I, I think that would be something that, that would not be, I, there’s, there’s lots of law already where the executive branch can do far worse than under what they have in 9495. So the first thing to know is 9495 takes away tax exempt status. It does not stop you from operating, it just takes away 501 c three status or 5014 C four, whatever. But doesn’t stop you from operating, they have tools that can stop you from operating. They can criminalize you if they say you’re terror supporting same words, terrorist supporting. There are other laws which is why we go, well, why this law, why did this law come up? There’s already other laws that prevent you from supporting terror and the reason in my mind is they’re going to use this not as the hammer but as the chisel to silence dissent. So they’re gonna chisel away at certain organizations scare everybody else at it. And that’s, that’s gonna be the impact. So rather than like take down all these protesters or like a whole movement of civil rights organizers think they’re going, what they’re going to do is they’re going to the target. Why this bill came about was because of what’s happening in Palestine and Gaza and the support that um some of those organizations have given to the Palestinian cause they’re gonna use that and they’re gonna scare everybody else from, from speaking out on it. And I think that is the danger, the real danger of 9495 because there are other laws where they can strip away your 501 C three status for acting against public policy. There are other laws that say, hey, we can criminalize your leaders for supporting terror. There’s a whole bunch of worse things they can do. This is the lighter touch, which is a terrible light touch, but this is the lighter touch that might be more useful to an administration that wants to attack dissent, prior restraint on speech, self censorship, correct. Amy. What, what are you, what are you thinking? Yeah, I think that we’ve seen a lot of organizations feeling concerned about this. Um Actually for Gene’s point, not necessarily for the, you know, your organization is or eradicated and no longer exists. But what does this mean for how organizations position themselves, talk to their community, who they talk to, you know, the, the feeling that this is kind of um chilling the sector on building power and trying to work together. Versus um as jean said, there’s, there’s already options that if, you know, the government wanted to completely remove an organization, there are already ways that they could do that. Um But this feels both the, the timing where it’s come from, you know, how, how it came in response to organizations really trying to make more visible conversations about um Palestine, even not about Palestine, but even just organizations trying to say, you know, our, our government is complicit in so many harms around the world. Um And that, what does that mean for nonprofit organizations who felt like that is maybe not their explicit mission? Like to your example before they’re not a legal aid organization, they’re not a humanitarian aid organization, but they wanted to be um in the conversation with their community and acknowledging that there’s a lot going on in the world and even trying to acknowledge that maybe feels like it’s risky for them or what does it mean to be in a partnership with a lot of other organizations? Again, even on a different topic? But what does that association mean? And, and are we not able to collaborate across the sector because of perceptions, you know, gene, anything more we wanna say about uh 9495. Maybe, actually, instead of the substance, maybe some things that some of the organizations that are speaking out against the Bill Council on foundations, uh independent sector, the National Council on nonprofits. Those three and one other organization have a joint statement against the Bill. The advice that I’ve seen a lot is contact your senators. Thanks Tony. It’s since it’s passed the house, I think that’s sort of where the immediate fight is, is with the Senate. And um even if the the majority of the Senate changes, um uh next year, as you, as you noted, Tony, um there are, you know, possibilities of a filibuster by the democratic senators if they so feel like this is something that they can stand up on again again, the rhetoric and the naming of the bill. Um and how much constituents are paying attention to the actual details. I know a lot of nonprofit folks are, but, you know, the general population may not be looking past the title of the bill. And so if their representative is saying I’m voting against this when the exact same bill was there before with like a 95 or 97% vote for it, trying to, to explain that um might be hard. So while there’s hope for, you know, for some that the Senate uh might have a filibuster and not approve this, um or listen to the public if there’s enough of an uproar um across party lines, um, that, that, that maybe they don’t do it. So the, the immediate thing is yes, advocate against the bill. The second thing is make sure you’re informed about what this bill does and doesn’t, again, really a lot of misinformation out there right now and people are scrambling, they’re like trying to create subsidiaries, they’re trying to create LLC S to throw, you know, assets in just in case they lose their 501 C three status because they’re thinking that this bill will shut them down completely. Uh Again, not just lose 501 C three status and prevent them from operating, freeze their assets. That’s not what this bill does. Again, there’s other tools that, that the federal government or even state government already have that can do that, but they haven’t used it in the past. So it’s hard to say Tony, we, we may be in for New Times and really just egregious uses of these, these laws. Um but it may be premature to make huge decisions unless you’re really well informed about them. So I, I would say for, for people looking at this bill, don’t just listen to all the sort of the talk that’s out there right now, like sit down and really get well informed about this, listen to nonprofit radio because we will thank you because we will continue talking about it. Of course. Yeah. All right. Um, good, thank you. Context, context understanding. Let’s talk about, uh, something else that’s on your mind for, uh, watching in 2025 something that came out many months ago. Uh, Gene, which was the, uh, overruling of what, what’s commonly called the, the Chevron Doctrine where government agencies get a lot of deference in the courts when the issue is interpretation of regulations, uh, rules, uh, that, that doctrine of, of deference to those government experts uh was overruled by the Supreme Court was the middle of this year or so. Can you uh explain why this is concerning? Yeah, so it doesn’t, it’s kind of this sort of lawyer geeky thing that goes on, but it’s, it’s important to take a step back and say, hey, the legislator makes statutory laws, right? But the laws are full of like empty spaces for there to be, there needs to be regulation about how to implement these laws. And so like the different agencies including like the Treasury Department and the IRS um start to make regulations. Um and these regulations interpret the law in ways to enforce the law in a practical way. And it’s a lot of law uh and agencies like the EPA the Environmental Protection Agency will take kind of the meaning of the law and sort of all of the legislative history behind it and try to create regulations. They put out the regulations for notice and public comment and then they draft final regulations after that, taking into account those comments, hopefully taking those into account. The courts feel like these regulatory agencies use scientists like the EPA or, or experts, policy experts in creating these regulations. Um And now when a company like Chevron wants to sue uh and say these regulations are unfair, the court used to have to defer or provided deference under the Chevron deference doctrine that hey, we are going to defer to the expertise of the agencies when they created those regulations. And that’s why that is the deference. You have to prove to us if you’re the company saying, hey, no, this doesn’t really pollute or this doesn’t really affect our public health. Let’s let’s like con continue to produce this stuff um because we need it for other things. Um So now this deference is lost. So the courts can’t give deference and now they have to just weigh everything out in balance. The courts are not scientists, right? They’re not scientific experts, the scientific experts were consulted with in creating the regulations, which is why you defer to them. Now, we’ve lost that. So this is a big thing. Another reason why people were very concerned about the composition of the Supreme Court because there seems to be more or or less deference to kind of what, what public agencies see and more susceptibility to what corporations and people of wealth have, who can actually fight these and go to court all the way to the Supreme Court because they have a huge litigation war chest to work behind. It’s time for Tony’s take two. Thank you, Kate. Here we are. End of December. It’s the last show of 2024. It, it, I don’t know, it doesn’t creep up. It just, it just comes fast. I think end of the year, I hope your end of the year fundraising all important is, uh going well. Hope you have a bang up last couple of weeks of the year. I hope you get where you need to be fundraising wise. And then I hope you can take time off for family friends and yourself, you need rest. Here comes the finger wag. Take care of yourself. You gotta take care of yourself before you can take care of others. So I hope you will do that over the holidays, whatever that looks like for you, do it, take care of yourself so you can come back refreshed in the new Year this time. Uh Unlike Thanksgiving, good holiday wishes, whatever holiday you celebrate Happy New Year, these holiday wishes come on time. Not uh not the week after like uh like we saw with Thanksgiving. Unbelievable. I hope you enjoy your time off. I hope you enjoy your holidays. Happy New Year and we will see you in 2025 K happy holidays. Everyone spend it with family and we’ll see you in 2025. We’ve got VU but loads more time, here’s the rest of looking to 2025. Is it paranoia or prudence with Gene and Amy? The presumption of expertise in the, in our vast federal agency bureaucracy uh is, is no, is no longer. And so that it’s, it’s interesting, the, the standard uh one standard was, is arbitrary and capricious that uh that the interpretation or that the regulation is arbitrary and it’s so arbitrary that it, it, it uh is contrary to what Congress intended. And so that regulation should be ignored. And you know, we the company challenging it shouldn’t be held to its standards. Now. It seems like arbitrariness is, is welcome because any interpretation uh has potential validity in the courts, if you can persuade a judge and maybe in some cases, a jury, I think a lot of these would be bench trials with Ju ju with judge judges. But whatever, if you can, if you can persuade the finder of fact that uh that your interpretation, however arbitrary it might be is more appropriate than you could prevail. So it’s bringing arbitrariness and capriciousness into it’s welcoming arbitrariness and, and uh fringe theories as having potential merit. Now, they may not prevail but they’ll, they’ll, they’ll at least get a hearing. Now. Think about this too, Tony. The company that wants to bring the lawsuit to challenge the validity of the regulation might get to choose the court in which to file the complaint right. So they often go to Texas, um and they get a court that is favorable to, to maybe to, to corporate powers and, and uh not believers of climate change and, and you know, so they can choose the forum and forum shopping can be really problematic and, you know, with, with the end of Chevron deference, more arbitrariness, you can, you can file your case in any of the federal districts throughout the country that you think would be most favorable. That’s absolutely correct. Amy’s head, their head is bobbing with disbelief and I mean, I can only hit it against the desk so many times per day, you know, without a crude, the bumps aren’t showing a hat on, you know. Well, you have your hat protection but it’s also, it’s early in the pacific time, still several hours left in the day. Like the Grinch right now, Tony. No, there, there’s, there’s cause for concern. Um, the, the, the, uh, the composition of the court, the Supreme Court has enormous sway over, uh, over our, our laws, our culture just, you know, our, our lives. So these are a couple of instances we’re gonna turn to Amy. I’m probably not going to make anything sound better than g, well, it’s not a competition. I know I just, all arbitrary. I thought you were like wanting to pick up the tone, you know, but all arbitrary and capricious opinions are welcome. Your, your opinions are not neither arbitrary nor capricious. Um but uh you are hearing from folks about their concern about the, the, the potential of a, of a, a changed economy, uh marketplace and uh potential fundraising impacts. What, what are you, what are you hearing from folks? You, you have your ear to the ground? Yeah, I mean, you know, I think everyone, at least in the US, I’m sure you have listeners elsewhere thanks to the internet but have spent, I don’t know how much of our lives over the last election cycle. Constantly hearing about the economy, constantly hearing about tariffs, constant, all of these things about the market. And it doesn’t matter if any of them are real or not or have already happened or maybe one day gonna happen, it doesn’t matter. It means there’s now a real air of uncertainty about what’s gonna happen to the economy. And unfortunately, in the nonprofit sector, we know that the winds of the economy shifting also shift philanthropy and how they may have a more conservative view over their own um corpus and, and what they want to spend. And of course, that means then for the nonprofits, you know, are we competing even harder for fewer funds? Are funders kind of back to the first piece of this conversation in 9495 are funders not wanting to be seen resourcing organizations who talk about certain political situations. Um, you know, it just has created a lot of uncertainty and what, you know, we’re hearing from organizations is, um, of course, when there was a lot of uncertainty in 2020 the pandemic was shifting, everything, organizations didn’t, you know, know how to adjust organizations were laying staff off or sh you know, all of those big shifts meant the things that were really quick to go was no professional development spending, no technology spending, no training. And those were also the resources that would have allowed organizations to adjust and to be nimble and to know how to continue moving through these really um confusing or, or unpredictable times. And so I think because folks who already experienced that once they’re starting to feel like, oh my gosh, if funding is uncertain, if how we’re operating is uncertain, we can’t let go of some of our tools and training and resources that allow us to think and adjust and, you know, make really, really maybe quick but strategic choices instead of reactionary choices that maybe we experienced before, you know, and had to learn the hard way that, oh, we don’t just do everything on zoom or whatever it might be, you know. Um And I think coupled with that, with some of these uh talked about threats to a lot of different communities. Organizations are also feeling like, you know, are our system secure. Do we know what data we have and which communities, it might compromise if it was either demanded of us from the government. Or hacked and stolen from us? You know, what, what duties do we have as an organization that serves communities who are in the process of, you know, getting documentation or a path to citizenship? What if we have data on these folks because they’re in our services and in our programs, are we vulnerable as an organization? And also are we maybe making them vulnerable by having their data? And how do we think about that? You know, how do we prepare our systems to be um ready to navigate maybe threats or challenges that come up? So I think it’s a lot, it’s also December and everybody is tired and wants to put up that out of office on their email and just like take a break, which absolutely you should do, you are entitled to, to take that break. But I think folks are feeling really worried about what’s ahead and not totally prepared, you know, to know how to, how to navigate it yet. Yeah, uncertainty. We, we don’t, we don’t, we don’t do well in uncertain environments whether they’re financial, physical, whether, you know, we don’t uh it doesn’t matter. We, we um uncertainty is unsettling. Um I will say some of what you described. I, I don’t, I don’t want to uh promote paranoia, but some of that introspect, introspection and self evaluation, you know, it has value too, 0 100% and data security resilience, right? And those are not new things you know, any day of the year, any year it is. If you came to N 10, we would say, hey, do you know what data you have on your community? And do you know where it’s stored? And do you know if it’s secure, you know, these aren’t new things for us to talk about. But I think they are very new things for some organizations to think about in their systems and actually like put into place, you know, even if they’ve maybe had a more theoretical conversation about, oh, you know, do we wanna answer community questions through Facebook D MS? You know, that’s probably not safe, let’s not do that but didn’t then have the rest of the conversation of OK, well, what data do we have on those folks? What, which systems is it in? Do we know how we’re maintained? You know, and the uncertainty of what’s the common kind of threats to so many different communities that, you know, are maybe part of a lot of different missions is forcing I think folks to think about the whole rest of the equation instead of just that first part that that’s maybe where they focused in the past. I thought a lesson that came from the the pandemic was that we, we not make financial decisions that are short sighted, like, you know, cutting professional development and technology, but rather that we go to our supporters with our needs and how the, how the uh the, the missions may have grown, the, the program work may have expanded because of, in that case, the pandemic. Uh and you know, our need is so much greater rather than making the, the short sighted, you know, cuts. I think that we could say there are a lot of lessons from 2020 that we should still have and that we can point to people on learning investments in racial equity investments in equitable practices, investments in staff. Yes, absolutely. I heard many promises in 2020 about all of these things. I heard many folks say they learned those lessons and here we are folks, you know, one of, one of the biggest job areas that has turned over is any equity related title, right? People have eliminated those positions or eliminated the people in those positions. Like there are lots of lessons that I wish were deeply learned and you’re talking about one of them. But I think what we’re hearing is that organizations haven’t deeply learned that and folks are already feeling the crunch of ok. Well, we probably can’t come to the conference. We probably can’t do that course we pro because we know that’s gonna be what gets eliminated from the budget. What are you, what are you thinking? I would just add kind of on the funding issue. You know, we’ve got um um Lan and Vivek who are supposed to like get rid of $2 trillion of the federal budget, they want to eliminate head, smart head start. Um And uh just so many other programs they want to cut down on Social Security and Medicare. So, you know, there’s a lot of people who um justifiably are scared right now and um and know that their missions will, that are already operating in more demand than they can meet, it will only accelerate. Yeah, and not a lot of answers yet. So, um I, I offer everybody my own. Not that it means anything but a little bit of grace at this period because it’s, it’s, it’s tough times right now and a lot of, lot of fear and I think I don’t have a solution necessarily. I don’t think that Gene or you Tony are trying to say there’s a solution or one right path through all the uncertainty just to acknowledge like if you’re maintaining a lot of plates of anxiety, we see you, we also are spinning those plates and like it’s really difficult that actually the only thing is to wait and see what we need to do with them. You know, there, there isn’t some magic ball that tells us. Oh, actually, this is gonna be the one thing that happens. We just don’t know and that’s not comforting or helpful when we’re trying to be thoughtful in our organizations and anticipate what all of those options might be, you know, OK. Uh uh somber but uh but justified, you know. Um there there is a lot of uncertainty and on the legal side, on the uh economy and fundraising side, uh I mean, you said it, I mean, you know, we, we don’t know but it’s the uncertainty that is uh unsettling. Yeah, we know as a sector we can do hard things. We have faced hard situations, we know that we can do it. The, the real, I think tension in the air for the sector now is that we don’t know what the hard thing is we’re gonna have to do, you know. And so we’re like, you, you’re packing for a trip where you don’t know where you’re gonna go and you’re like, well, do I need a swimsuit? Do I need a hat? Like, I don’t know, I don’t know what resource to put in here because I don’t totally know what’s ahead and I think that’s what makes it really difficult, not that we’re not gonna be able to do it, you know. Yeah, I mean, look at what we have overcome uh September 11th, uh a pandemic. Uh well, before the pandemic was the great recession. And then the next milestone that I can think of is the pandemic. Um And I, I know that we are stronger as a community. If we are United, if we stand up for each other and for the community at large, we, we can overcome whatever uncertainties and challenges are ahead of us when, when we remain united, steadfast you know, all, all for 11, for all that’s uh it, it comes from the three musketeers, but it uh it applies in lots of uh lots of situations and, and this is certainly one of them. Um We’re strong, we’re strong when we’re united. I think community power building is kind of what the my optimistic hope is. Um as we face tough times, um nonprofit leaders and their supporters, um they band together, they, they work through the problems as you mentioned to, we worked through many before. Some of them have been super challenging when we look back generations before us um going through wars and other crises and nonprofits. We’re really like the, the strength and the humanity of the country when they look to the people they served. And hopefully we’re, we’re getting to that again. We’re not making decisions without the community. We’re, we’re making it with the community now. All right. Any other closing thoughts? The last thing I wanted to say because, you know, me, I’m always compelled to have recommendations um for things that people can do. And I too am a human that likes a to do list. Um And I will offer that to others. But yeah, I know we’ve talked about this so many times, Tony, you and I over the years about community committees and you know, ways of building transparency around your technology projects or, you know, having a tech committee that helps you prioritize But to Gene’s point, if you don’t already as an organization have a mechanism, whatever that might be to hear feedback from your community, not like an evaluation for somebody that was in a program or something like that. But I mean, a community committee, a committee of community members that you talk to once a quarter or a town hall event or whatever type of process you might wanna have, this is the time to have it because I think when things are really difficult, we can as staff feel like every single thing that is in the news or every single thing that could be on our community members, minds are on their minds and that they are like judging us for it. But if you have a way to, to really be in conversation with your community directly, you’ll be able to say, ok, the only thing our community wants to know from us is this and we can answer it and we can tell them or hey, our community is really worried about this thing that has nothing to do with us, but they’re really worried about it. So maybe that’s an opportunity for us to partner with an organization that does work on that and show that we’re listening and that we’re part of helping them have access to the resources they care about or whatever it might be, right? Um Because it’s a lot harder to call on a community that doesn’t exist when you’re in need than it is to be in community with people all the time. Um So, you know, if, if there’s anything to put on your January to do list while so much is still uncertain, it’s really to make sure you have some space to be in conversation directly with your community in me. Simple word. They’re at Amy Sample ward.org and at Amy Rs Ward and Jan Takagi, the firm is at Neo Law group.com and he’s at GT and we will convene again. Uh maybe not January, mid February, mid to late February, I think. Uh Well, let’s see what, let’s see what happens in the month of January, but certainly uh latest, you know, February, we will convene and uh and be in community again. Thanks Tony for always making this space. Big hugs Jean. Thank you, Tony right back at you, Amy. Happy New Year. Happy New Year. Happy Holidays. Next week, there’s no show and there’s no show the week after. We’ll be back fresh on January 6th, 2025. Happy New Year. If you missed any part of this week’s show, I beseech you find it at Tony martignetti.com. Happy New Year were sponsored by donor box, outdated donation forms blocking your supporters, generosity, donor box, fast, flexible and friendly fundraising forms for your nonprofit donor. Box.org. Happy New Year. Our creative producer is Claire Meyerhoff. I’m your associate producer, Kate Martignetti. The show social media is by Susan Chavez Mark Silverman is our web guy and this music is by Scott Stein. Thank you for that affirmation, Scotty. You with us next week. No, you won’t be with us next week. You’re with us in January 2025 for nonprofit radio, big nonprofit ideas for the other 95% go out and be great. Happy New Year.
That’s Donald Summers’ new book, where he introduces the seven phases of nonprofit growth derived from his research and practice. He walks us through assess, align, plan, test, fund, execute, and lead, so your nonprofit scales to meet the demands of your mission and vision. He’s the CEO of Altruist Partners.
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And welcome to Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio. Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. I’m your aptly named host and the pod father of your favorite abdominal podcast. I’m traveling this week and a couple more weeks. So my sound quality won’t be up to what you’re used to. Oh, I’m glad you’re with us though. I’d suffer the effects of osteochondrosis if you inflamed me with the idea that you missed this week’s show. Here’s our associate producer, Kate with usual high quality sound and what’s on the menu this week? Hey, Tony, I hope our listeners are hungry for scaling altruism. That’s Donald Summer’s new book where he introduces the seven phases of nonprofit growth derived from his research and practice. He walks us through, assess align plan, test, fund, execute and lead. So your nonprofit scales to meet the demands of your mission and vision. He’s the CEO of altruist partners on Tony’s take Two Tales from the plane. A savvy survey were sponsored by donor box, outdated donation forms blocking your supporters, generosity, donor box, fast, flexible and friendly fundraising forms for your nonprofit donor box.org here is scaling altruism. It’s a pleasure to Welcome Donald Summers to nonprofit radio. He is the author of the book Scaling Altruism, a proven pathway for accelerating nonprofit growth and impact. He’s the founder and CEO of Altruist partners, an advisory boutique firm with over $1 billion in new revenue and program growth for nonprofits around the world. You’ll find the company at Altruist partners.com and you’ll find Donald on linkedin Donald Summers. Welcome to Nonprofit Radio. So happy to be here, Tony. Uh And the first thing I wanna say is thank you for all the work you do to make the world a better place. It’s always an honor to, to chat with, with leaders like you. Well, thank you. I’m glad that you are with us. Uh You have particular poignance for uh nonprofit radio because we are big, as I said, uh in the introduction, as I always do big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. And you uh make some very clear distinction between the 95% who are listening to nonprofit radio and the other 5% or roughly 35,000 nonprofits that have, that have figured out scaling growth, acceleration, uh efficiencies. So we’re gonna uh I, I don’t want people to leave nonprofit radio, but we’re gonna help people move from being uh their nonprofit being among the 95% to the uh to the wealthier and higher scaled 5%. I think that’s uh that, that I, I think we can achieve that, but I don’t want to lose listeners in the process either. I don’t want listeners to leave nonprofit radio when they go from the 95 to the five, there’s a whole new set of challenges. We can talk about those. But we, we all, we all aspire to better problems. All right. Let’s start with the basics. Why this book Scaling Altruism? What’s the, uh, genesis of it goes back into your practice. There’s research around the, the work we’re gonna talk about. What’s it all about? Well, there’s a tremendous barrier to nonprofit growth and, and as you’ve accurately um pointed out, you know, we’ve got over a million nonprofits stuck below a million dollars a year in the have, it’s a have and have not landscape and they’re struggling to stay afloat. They can’t access the, the, the money and the resources and, you know, Tony, this is a fixable problem and it is so exciting and, and simultaneously frustrating because there’s so much snake oil out there. There’s so many people saying, hey, they’ve got the solutions. Uh but those solutions are often not backed by evidence. So we’ve spent uh 20 years translating the best practices from the high growth, high performing uh nonprofit and the entrepreneurial space, hybridizing everything and putting it in an operating system into which any nonprofit program can fit. And just recently, we’ve, we got the book and we’ve got an accelerator. We’ve got a low cost support program. So I’m just delighted to be here today to talk about uh while it’s still not easy, it’s clear and it’s doable. So any nonprofit founder or executive with courage and grit and tenacity and focus and discipline, which there’s so many out there, if we can just get them away from those subsistence tactics, those survival strategies and get them into the growth strategies with all the tools and the processes and the support we can un unleash a wave of social impact that this country has never seen. And I truly believe that we have the evidence basis. Now, all we have to do is get the word out uh because there isn’t any barrier to, to learning and executing. And, and I’m just again, delighted to share with you today, you lament. Uh And I’m, this is the only time. Uh I think I’ll probably quote the book is that uh the nonprofit sector is decades behind the for profit sector in the rigorous use of organizational growth methodology. And you have this methodology, we’re gonna talk about the seven practices tested, researched uh evidence based, right? So we’re trying to, you’re trying to fill this gap between the for profit and not for profit knowledge basis. And, and it’s problematic to say we want for pro we want nonprofits to run like for profits. And that’s not my message. We want, we want to give nonprofits access to the same tools that everybody else has when you look at MB A programs, you’ve got venture capital markets, you’ve got 350 accelerators you’ve got in incubators, you’ve got mentor programs, the ecosystem for, for profits is incredibly wealthy and it’s incredibly rich and founders can find all these resources. There’s a culture and a practice gap that’s holding back nonprofits. They use different language, different terms, different processes and all it does is create barriers and it makes them hard to understand and, you know, we call it the myth of uniqueness. Yes. Thank you. I was, I was, I’m glad you got there because I was gonna lead you to it if you didn’t. Yes, me. But I’m a, I’m a nonprofit or my, you know, my, our work is hard to quantify. It’s, it’s an after school program, you know, we, we can’t track the Children after they leave or we’re feeding or we’re sheltering. We’re, we, we can’t use business practices because we’re working in, in social, social good. And as, as uh you know, we say whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re probably right as Eleanor Roosevelt says, um you can measure, I’ve never met, you know, having worked with hundreds and, and touched thousands of nonprofits around the world never run into a program that can’t be rigorously quantified and measured either with, with qualitative or quantitative data. Everything is provable. Everything has an evidentiary basis. So, um it just has to be, you have to be creative. Um, you know, and again, it’s a cultural barrier. So if you have, you don’t, you don’t buy this uniqueness. Uh No, it’s a myth of uniqueness. And I’m, I’m working on getting this article um uh published and it’s propagated by very respected people. Jim Collins who wrote Good To Great, which is this massively successful and, and tectonic piece of literature about what are the best practices driving growth in the for profit space completely uh with great respect to him. But he lost his mind and says these practices don’t apply to the social sector. And he wrote this book uh Good For Great for the social sector. That’s flatly, it’s flat wrong. And he, he’s misguided. Uh He’s well meaning individual. Uh But there’s other people that say, oh, you don’t understand business dynamics because they don’t apply, that’s not the case. And you know, and we don’t say we gotta get out of this distinction between four and nonprofit because it’s a, it’s a false dichotomy. You’re talking about when you need to solve a problem, not just nibble around the edges if you want to accomplish something and you need to put teams of people together and you need to capture the resources and you need to execute with efficiency and effectiveness. There’s a single unitary body of practices and tools that work your corporate, your tax status, your, your corporate tool that doesn’t, that’s just a tool and people get stuck on their tax status and what they, there’s these false labels and they miss the forest for the trees, you know, this in your daily practice. Uh, but, you know, we, we’ve got a, there’s a very small movement and I don’t even like to call them nonprofits. These are social impact organizations for impact, you know, these linguistic frameworks themselves are prisons. So when you free yourself and say, hey, I want to accomplish this. What’s the tool? You know, I just did an interview with Fortune talking about, you know, uh open A is challenges with their fort nonprofit status and, and even the smartest people in the world um often don’t understand what it means to be a nonprofit and what the power is. And the fact that you can have a nonprofit, you can have a for profit, you can have an LC three. You can have a public benefit corporation now. And, and, and again, the revenue in the nonprofit sector is crazy complex. You’ve got individuals, foundations, corporations, government agencies in the US. It’s a $2.5 trillion sector. Half of the money is earned nonprofits earn hundreds of billions of dollars every year, just like any other business. And it’s, it’s gifted, it’s earned, it’s invested, they can take on debt. You can, we have nonprofit clients, we’ve started up for profit subsidiaries. So what you need is good guidance that says, all right, if you have a goal, understand your strategies and then understand your revenue, your execution, your KPIS, the team you need and get out of this nonprofit mindset. Because chances are, uh you know, the social proof. Oh, all these nonprofits are doing galas, everybody’s doing a give big, everybody’s doing end of year appeals. They’re all small and look what’s happened to individual support for the sector. So we’ve got to break out, we’ve got to establish new paradigm and it’s got to be clear, it’s gotta be practical and it’s got to be actionable. It can’t be just this hazy, you know, academic, you know, here’s what to do. We need, how to do it and in what order and, and that’s what we try to do, Tony. Well, you do, you uh a lot of people are trying, you’ve succeeded because the book is enormously actionable. Um And it’s not only look what’s happened to individual giving, look what’s also happened, you know, we at to the scale of the problems that we’ve, some of these that we’ve been working on for generations, not just decades, generations. And we’re still tackling uh poverty, homelessness, uh uh uh uh clean air and water and we’ve been at these things for generations. So we’re not scaling to meet the, the needs. All right. So, so let, let’s get to the, can we get to the, the practice? Let’s start 100%. And I’ll say we have examples where we have scaled solution. It’s, it’s amazing. We just got to get it out. We got to break through the information, overload, break through the noise. So, again, that’s why I’m grateful for this opportunity to try to do just that. Yeah, there are organizations that have scaled. You’re right. Uh, and they’re the, they’re the 5% that they’re the ones, they’re the, uh, future, uh, nonprofit radio former listeners because they’re gonna, they’re gonna, they’re gonna leave here and they’re gonna move into the over a million dollar and they’ll scale to the $50 million and the elite, you know, 1/10 of 1%. It’s time for a break. Imagine a fundraising partner that not only helps you raise more money but also supports you in retaining your donors, a partner that helps you raise funds both online and on location. So you can grow your impact faster. That’s donor box, a comprehensive suite of tools, services and resources that gives fundraisers just like you a custom solution to tackle your unique challenges, helping you achieve the growth and sustainability your organization needs, helping you help others visit donor box.org to learn more. Now, back to scaling altruism, you’ve got seven phases, phases. The book is all about the seven phases. Why don’t you just step us through, you know, quickly, each one and then we’re gonna come back. Can we do? You don’t look 100%? You look like you have consternation on your face, you. Ok. Ok. Good. All right, you look. All right. So you’re brief, you know, just brief on each of the seven and then we will come back to each of the seven in more detail after 30 years as a fundraiser nonprofit, executive foundation CEO and, and catalyst for the growth of dozens and dozens of, of nonprofits around the world. We, we built this methodology which says do it in order you first need to understand that what the capabilities and assets and skills drive growth and impact many are known, many are not known. So the first part of the book is assessment here are the questions to ask you and your team do. We are do, where do we, where do we line up on a set of benchmarks? Two, you’ve got to align your board and your team around a clear goal, a clear strategy and KPIS so many organizations have these watered down missions and lack a goal because they haven’t had the hard conversations. They let everybody have their own individual version of the truth and they sort of muddle along so that you’ve got before you can write a good plan. You’ve got to nail a couple the tips of the waves and get it done well. And we do that in a one page, what we call a business framework. Thirdly throw out theory of change, grow out your logic models. That is just woo woo I’m tired of that stuff. It doesn’t work you need a goal, you need Kpis, you need a strategy, you need metrics, you need a market analysis. You have to have a clear um compelling uh crisp statement of your value proposition. There’s 15 elements of what comprises what we call a world class investment grade business plan that will allow the organization to have a clear road map for its staff, an actionable guide for governance for its board and a compelling investment prospectus for sophisticated uh wealthy individuals, agencies, corporations and earned income clients. So number three is plan number or you do your best with it and then you test it in the marketplace. You don’t mistake your confidence for actual knowledge. You test and align it with your stakeholders. There’s a process for that. Then we get to funding so many nonprofits are moving ahead with fundraising efforts before they’ve got all the tools in place. And that describes why they’re struggling with growth and trying, you know, surviving on these galas when they’re unable to capture the growth capital. So defining the mix of earned contributed and invested income from those six sources, individuals, foundations, corporations and so forth that strategy, you got to nail the strategy. You have to understand the staffing, how to monitor pay and improve the team. Yep, then, so finance, then you have execution. So all that’s the easy part, then you get to execution, which is hard. How do you actually track? You have to score your strategies and continuously improve them. So we help organizations set up dashboards leading you love, you love your dashboards. Then after all of that, so you’ve got assessment, alignment, planning, funding, right? Execution, right? And then you’ve got lead in the middle. What does it mean to lead? How do you build equitable? Um uh Well, compensated teams. What’s the role of the board? There’s so much information out there. A lot of it’s confusing. It’s very verbose. So you put all these pieces together. It’s a circular process, it builds a flywheel and it’s proven to drive. And this is the one thing I want your listeners to, to, to really focus in on when you apply this tool kit. It typically takes anywhere from 6 to 12 months with a median adoption uh time of about nine months when you apply it. The median annual growth rate of organizations who execute this methodology with fidelity is 25% a year in their revenue and their social impact. These are organizations that were either declining or flat growth. They do the hard work they invest in, in, in adopting and using this operating system. And you know, anywhere from 6 to 12 months afterwards, they get a growth, hockey stick that we have many, many data points. There’s a lot of variants in there. Some organizations take off and get 50 100% growth, others, 5 to 10% growth. But that median of 25% is real. That’s the value of doing this work and it’s not just a pop and drop capital campaign. It’s not a one time win. This is gained growth over time. This is an iterative process which we’re gonna talk through in detail. All right. So let’s go back now to uh number one assessment. The what what grabbed me here is that you’re uh the, the, well, let’s just assure people there’s a lot of detail that we’re not gonna be able to cover you. Just if you want, if you want to scale, if you want to be a former nonprofit radio listener, you gotta get the book because we can’t go through the 50 or so practices in the remaining, you know, 30 or 40 minutes together. So, uh but we will hit the highlights. So assessment number one assess, what I liked to hear was that you, you don’t just say benchmark, but you say benchmark against robust standards. I mean, so you’re already sitting up, you’re already setting the bar high for, for just the, the threshold benchmarking. I like, I like robust standards. You’re competing against the, you know, people. Well, what’s our market rate compared to other nonprofits? Well, guess what? You’re already starting, you know, why don’t you, you have to compete against everybody for top talent, for top people, for top funding. It’s a competitive world. You need benchmarks that are realistic. We’re not trying to, we’re not playing life on easy here, right? You have to understand what it takes to succeed, not survive. And Tony, I want to say this whole process is only for the most ambitious nonprofits. You make the point in the book that it’s, this is not easy, it’s not, you’re not pollyannaish about, about it taking time. I actually, this is, this is not for social impact tourists or people who want to make themselves feel better because they work at a nonprofit. These are people that want to have the courage of their convictions, get their skin in the game and execute and, and there’s a lot of them out there that haven’t been served. All right. So say a little more about assessment before we move on. But uh you have to have top pay, you have to have a, a robust, you have to have KPIS, you have to have board members who have grown companies before the number of nonprofits with nothing but subject matter expertise on their board. You know, we see these um healthcare associations with nothing but doctors on their board. You know, things like that. There’s so many. Uh and again, there’s 50 known drivers and the book allows uh people to walk through and say, do we have these or not? And it’s very factual and clear. So there’s none of this. We, we try to eliminate the ambiguity. And you know, we also give throughout the book, people um can distribute this form, we have the assessment online so people can take it and they can have these conversations that are actually productive and get organizations focused on the right things. So many assessments are, are long, they produce these narratives, nobody can focus on it. So we, we try to keep it short and sweet on the stuff that counts. Number two, let’s move to alignment. You uh you talk about a growth mindset, powerful language, hit these, you know, hit these highlights for, for, for our listeners. Again, you know, I’ve got a, we’re launching a national initiative with, with clients right now. And the core cap, the core capability of organizations that succeed is optimism and courage. And you know, some people, whether through their own past experience or their own trauma, just don’t believe they can succeed, right? And they have a poverty mindset and you know, those are understandable, but if those folks are on your executive team or your board game over, right? And again, choose powerful language. If you want to create confusion with people outside the sector, used words, use or, or even suspicion, use words like charity and gift and logic model and theory of change. Why don’t we all use words that everybody knows like investment, right? Like business plan. So, you know, these are examples, these are uh two practices of many in the alignment sector in the alignment chapter that help give people these traction points. And whether you agree or not. I don’t expect everybody to agree with these and there’s cultural uh and, and historical barriers against using this language in the sector which I acknowledge. Uh again, it’s not for everybody, but for the folks that want to go big, there’s also a set of organizations like you sit down and ask people, hey, imagine Warren Buffett’s gonna write us a check for as big a dollar amount that, that we want all the money we need. How are we gonna spend it? You’ll get folks saying, well, we need a new copy machine. We’ve got to hire an executive assistant and you get other folks saying, well, we want a 500 million endowment. We want offices in every major metropolitan area. And when you do these exercises among people on your board and your staff, you start to understand the enormous practical variance among the, the visions. So it’s exercises like this, you’ve got to do the hard work, you gotta stop and do the work and get people aligned on the big goals and how you measure it and how you’re gonna get there. And you know, these organizations say, well, we don’t have time to do that. Well, you know what? You get to pick your hard, you get to pick your challenge. You want your challenge to be doing the doggy paddle and, and barely staying above water for the rest of your career. Go ahead and do what you’re doing. And until you carve out the time to get these traction points and build a team, uh you’re not gonna succeeded. So, um we don’t make an apology for the investments and the focus that these alignment practices require. And if folks can’t focus and can’t get aligned, they shouldn’t be on your team. Right? So these are hard choices that every organization has to make. But you’ve got to get the building to getting at people on the team. So many board members are supervisory, we’re all, you know, they’re just there to be critics and we all know the problem with the space. But again, clear concise, concrete, comprehensive, very actionable steps for getting your team aligned and agreed on just a one pager breaking through the information overload. And once you have that one pager, then you can get to creating a business plan, which is uh which is the next piece. Yes, we’ll get to three planning. But I wanna uh flesh out uh what’s a b hag bhag this again. I thank Jim Collins, a tremendous scholar in the world of entrepreneurialism. Uh a professor at Stanford uh Management School of Business who studied the stock market. And he, he looked at all the positive outliers and distilled their uh behaviors that drive growth, right? And he settled and he and his research team settled on a set of practices is defined in good to great and great by choice. I’ve learned a ton from those books and be hag having a big hairy audacious goal. You know, you’ve got to have that North Star and you have to have the courage of your convictions and so many organizations aren’t, it’s called audacious for a reason. Right. They don’t want to. And this is what kills me. I don’t care. I like the hairy part. Big, big, hairy. Yeah. It’s, and scaring. They’re not just o, they’re hairy goals. It’s not supposed to be delusional, right? But you’re supposed to stretch yourself if you’re working on behalf of the vulnerable, if you’re working on behalf of those without a voice, if you’re working on behalf of, of creatures or trees, you know, you owe it to your mission to try some, to do something big and so many organizations fundamentally lack the ambition that their mission deserves. Right? And they think that’s because, well, we’ll look bad. Actually, you look worse if you’re behaving safe and you’ve got these wishy washy goals, big dollars follow big visions. So you start with a big vision now, you have to have a credible plan to execute on that vision. But getting that B hag and getting this is what, why we want entrepreneurs on the board. We don’t want risk, averse, you know, people that are worried about taking risks. I mean, yeah, you’ve got to have some of those folks, you’ve got to have a balanced team, but you got to have people that are willing to put it out there for the mission and that’s what a be hag is all about. Not all doctors and lawyers on the board or, or, you know, and you know, and CPA si don’t want to leave out CPA S. They’re, they’re wonderful. You’ve got to have them. You’ve got plenty of entrepreneurial doctor, lawyers and CPA S, it’s more of a personality than a profession. Um And we know what personalities cause that. So when you get into the leadership chapter later, we’ll talk about where that entrepreneurial gene comes from and how to create what we call neuro balanced teams because you can’t have just aggressive entrepreneurs. Otherwise you get out over your skis and things blow up, you need the risk uh managers, you need the administrators and the integrators. So there’s a whole methodology there. But we talk about that later in chapter seven under leadership. All right, you’re the balanced, right? The balanced board of advisors. All right. Uh So the plan number three, the, the, it’s, it’s a business plan, but it’s, but it’s more than just your average business plan. Flush it out, please. Well, you know, you, you Google business plan templates and the variety that comes up is amazing. It all over the road. Small business association. You have nonprofits, the templates that I, that I found early as a practitioner. II, I was a fundraiser um for nonprofit organizations for the early part of my career. And I got uh tons of practice, thousands of meetings with high net worth, sophisticated individuals about passing due diligence, about earning their credibility that we would use their dollars. Well, and having done that all over the world with from everywhere, from modest investors to billionaires and looking at all the templates, we came up with our own that we think is the best because it works. It’s got 15 pieces to it. It’s clear, it’s got lots of examples. So there’s 15 sections to a business plan. It’s all backed up in the literature. It’s a template and we provide nonprofits with not just the template and the explanation of each pieces. There’s a case study in the book, we talk about how we walked uh a wonderful agency for foster Children tree house through the business planning process. We took them from analyzing 22 pages of data per child to under to analyzing only four KPIS. We took them from spray and pray financing to focused targeted strategy. We took them from seven layers of management down to three. You know, the business plan is, you know, really it takes that business framework and builds it out into all the aspects you need to succeed. And here’s the thing. No brochures. I, I had the, the, the great honor of working with Connie Kravis, the Vice President of Advancement for the University of Washington who raised billions of dollars and like many geniuses who I think you say they, they raise $2 million a day on average every day of the calendar year, the UW and major universities raise millions of dollars and, and he asked Connie, hey ho, Connie, how’d you do it? He says, well, I make insiders out of outsiders, right? You establish trust and transparency, no brochures, no videos. None of these tear jerking events. You show them how you’re gonna succeed with a credible concrete, very, very clear plan. These are hard to write, which is why we break it into a bite size chunks, right? Most strategic plans, totally, they’re not strategic and they’re not plans. And this is true, not just in the for profit sector. It’s true anywhere. Very few people understand how to really write an action plan that lines up your staff and will attract investment. We know exactly how to do it. And it’s a very prescriptive process you put your content in but do it the way that this plan says because we know it works. It guides. We iii I published an excerpt in the Stanford Social Innovation Review and I said, look, a good business plan is a Swiss army knife for nonprofit leadership. It’s a guide. It’s a clear roadmap for your staff. It’s a governance guide for your board. It’s a prospectus for investors. It’s, it’s a, it’s a recruiting tool, right? It it captures all your marketing and communication language. It really should be the center, the access of your organization and so many people as you know, produce these plans and sit on shelves, we produce plans that are continuously updated and, and again, the devil’s in the details. Um Not everyone has the focus to really learn all of these uh uh particular steps and really engage in the level of rigor and discipline that’s required to, to achieve a world class business plan. But again, you know, anything hard, how do you eat an elephant one bite at a time? So again, if you’re, you don’t have to be brilliant, you just have to be tenacious. We show people how to bite it off one piece at a time. And guess what? When you’re done with chapter three, you got a completed business plan, it ain’t complete, you got to go to chapter four and test it and refine it so that process can take months, but it will be transformational. It gets you out of the legacy, you know, soft folk, you know, kind of in, you know, not credible, you know, woo woo, you know, strategic plan model, that’s the dominant paradigm and into something far more uh useful and, and able to catalyze organizational performance and growth. And you’re talking about the testing, uh you know, you want us to identify the key constituents who we’re gonna be testing this with and we’re gonna get feedback from, say more, say more there about the, these, you gotta start with your team. So the executive team writes the plan, build it, you know, get the feedback from your staff. These are peers, these are not serfs, they’re not, you know, robots, you’ve got to get alignment among your team. You’ve got to get your board members bought off on the plan. They’ve got to understand what their swim lane is. They stay at the high level. So, testing that plan and revising it just with your team and moving quickly, time is money. You don’t have 69, 12 months, these nonprofit strategic planning processes that take, you know, more if it’s more than, you know, 60 days, it’s broken process. So moving with precision and quickly and creating this alignment, that’s the trick and that’s what we show with these exercises. If you do that alignment piece first, we can produce the business plan quickly. So you do your internal constituents, then you do the next phase. Who are your stakeholders? They could be agency partners, they could be your closest funders. It could be peer NGO S. Um It could be the people obviously needs to be. If you’re serving people, you should review the plan and it’s key elements for the people you’re proposing to serve, right? And make sure you’re getting the the their input, then you can go and test it with prospective partners perspective funders. So there’s a, there’s four or five questions you can ask, you get your board involved. And again, you really practice using the plan and getting feedback. Um, really new. You, you collect new knowledge, you correct, you, you get a lot of practice, you get comfortable uh, with what the plan contains and you get a better document as a result. It’s time for Tony’s take two. Thank you, Kate. We’re back to Tales from the plane. This one isn’t exactly on a plane. Uh, it’s a company that owns a lot of planes, Delta Airlines. I had to change a ticket. I did it over the phone and they gave me a very smart, just s simple one question survey after the call. Ordinarily, I reject the, the customer service surveys. Uh, whether it’s whether I get a link by email or, you know, phone, I just say I, I usually skip them. But I thought, ok, one question they say, you know, will you accept a one question survey at the end of the call? So I said, ok, one question. So, uh, the agent took care of me. She was excellent, made the changes I needed. And the very simple savvy, one question survey at the end of the call, would you hire the last person you just spoke to if you were the CEO of a customer service company? End of quote? And I thought that’s just really brilliant. Like all of a sudden I’ve been elevated. I, I, I’m, I’m, I’m, I’ve got a promotion. I’m not just, uh, you know, uh, I don’t just work at a customer service uh company. I’m the CEO of one and now I’m called on to make a hiring decision and I just thought that was a really, it’s obviously a simple one and I thought it was a smart, uh just survey gets right to the point and just asking about that one person. Really simple. Simple. The last person you spoke to, would you hire them one through five? One? Definitely not. And five. Definitely you would. I pressed a five and that was it. So I wanted to share the simplicity of that survey with you. Maybe it can inspire simplicity for your own surveys. You know, which some of which, right? I don’t mean your surveys are too long, but we all have experienced the customer service surveys that uh you know, they promise it’ll take like 3 to 5 minutes. That OK, that means 15. So um maybe some inspiration for simple savvy surveys by you for you. And that is Tony’s take two. OK. That is so smart. That’s a better way to get feedback. Just something so simple. I think so. Yeah, absolutely. It worked on me one question. Other companies should start doing it. Well, maybe some of our listeners will do it for their nonprofits. Well, we’ve got Buku but loads more time. Here’s the rest of scaling altruism with Donald Summers. What about including these stakeholders, especially the internal ones in the plan development process that happens in phase two that happens in, in phase two, the alignment, it again, but you can’t just write a business plan from scratch. You got to get the, the right alignment. And so you start that in chapter two, gives that one pager that’s got, that’s got executive team and that’s got staff and it’s got board input for and just pieces of it and do it again. You go deeper. So the trick is Tony and it took us many years to figure this out and, and many missteps, how do we create a business plan that people own? That’s not the lowest common denominator. We, you know, you, you’re not gonna, most plans are written so that anybody can believe that they got their piece in there, right? They’re so ambiguous. They don’t mean anything. How do you get something that’s really clear and audacious and courageous and very, very crisp yet everybody’s bought into it. That’s why we spend two chapters on the planning. OK. So it, it all right. Yeah, the, the buy in is included. OK? It’s, I want folks to understand it’s not AAA C Suite developed plan and then you’re bringing it to, then you’re showing it to your staff after, after it’s been brought down from on high, right? It’s not that, no, it’s, it’s got to be inclusive and democratic and at the same time, if there are people like no, I don’t agree. You say goodbye. God bless you and good luck. You’re forming a team here. This is not something where we’re going to have critics and people serving as sea anchors on our sailboat ain’t gonna happen. So also in that planning process, you’ve got to get the right people on the bus and if people don’t believe in your plan and you keep them on your team, what you’re asking for problems and that goes for board members and it goes for staff. So it’s when we talk about alignment and planning, you’ve got to have people that really believe that this can happen and anything short of that will kill your execution. And you know, you have to decide, are we running an organization to keep our, our own people happy and keep everybody in a comfortable space where we’re not going to have any conflict, right? Which is a lot of nonprofits, right? Or are we going to have a team that’s gonna change the world? And we got to get the right people on the bus and we got to make some hard decisions. It’s not a family, it’s a professional sports team. You don’t choose your family, right? You love and you, you, you, you respect whomever is in your family but a sports team. Hey, you don’t have somebody that’s able to pass the ball or doesn’t wanna, you know, adopt your strategy, you cut them. So it’s like what paradigm are you in? You’re not a family high performing organ and this is uh I’m, I’m, I’m quoting from a famous uh uh deck, a Netflix deck that, that set these paradigms many years ago, everything I’ve learned, I’ve, I’ve read somebody else has figured it out. Uh I’m just putting the pieces together. So think of sports teams, not families when it comes to planning. Awesome. Uh I just wanna make sure everybody understands that each chapter has the resources that are talked about in that chapter. So for instance, when you’re, you know, you have, uh when you’re going back to step three, developing the business plan, you have a template business plan at the end of the chapter, it’s all, it’s all on the, it’s all on the website. Oh, it, it, it goes, it goes even deeper than that. Tony, you know, uh nonprofits have spent millions of dollars hiring my firm and we’ve generated many, many multiples of those millions of back. We’ve, we’ve generated over a billion, right? And the whole point of writing this book is to democratize access to these tools. I’ve always been frustrated by books that tell you what to do and not how to do it. So I said, I’m gonna go big on this. I’m gonna say, not just what to do, how to do it. I’m gonna say here are the tools, here are the practices, here’s the exercise, here’s a case study with organizations that went through the same process and we can talk about this later. I, I spent years building an online community that’s now active. It launched in August where nonprofits can join for incredibly low sum of 79 bucks a month and get support from me and my partners and our expert affiliates and from other nonprofits to say, ok, what practice are you on? Here’s what it means. Here’s a tool, here’s a template and you can get feedback from the experts who’ve been to the movie before. So you have all of the depth of resources that you have all at very little cost. Um So there’s no excuse not to do this other than the fact that it requires hard work discipline and focus good old grit. So we go, the book is a portal and every chapter says, hey, go to Altruist accelerator.org and you go to that website and you’ll see a landing page that describes the Accelerator and there’s a sign up and a free trial for the online, for the online accelerator community. It’s based on a platform called Circle. It’s a learning management community and it’s now staffed by about, you’ve got about 15 nonprofits on there now, some really, really cool ones, they’re already showing they can march their way through the practices. Now, many nonprofits, particularly those that are more resourced, are hiring us because, you know, they just don’t have the time and they have the resources and they can bring us in. But for the nonprofits below a million dollars a year, uh this is the fastest and best way uh that, that we’ve been able to see uh to, to adopting this methodology. So it’s a lot more than a book. It’s a, it’s a community and what I really want to do, Tony, if my own bag is to create a movement, right? My friend and, and the chair of the advisory uh of the, of the Accelerators Akhtar Bods Shaw, he’s a brilliant man who is the former head of uh Microsoft Philanthropy. And he’s now a professor of social impact at the University of Washington. And you know, he says something that I’ve taken years to understand. He says, don’t try to scale your organization, try to create a movement, right? Try to create a movement and the movement. I’m trying to catalyze here is empowering social impact leaders with the best tools and practices so they can do their best work. There’s no barriers, they don’t have to struggle and they can, they can share and they can bring these tools and practices to others and we can form communities around this and we, we want to see this, this activate. So hopefully, the, the book is just the, the the entry point. Let’s continue in the book uh with funding which you are careful not to call fundraising you like uh in I MP investment and partnerships. Let’s talk about the funding phase. Oh, gosh, there’s so much to talk about now. All right, let’s start with All right. Yeah, there is. All right. So let’s start with the sources. You, you teased them earlier. Uh you identified six sources, individuals, corporations, et cetera. So let’s, let’s name the, let’s name the six sources that are potential uh for funding before we start that there needs to be a reckoning in the sector. 999 out of 100 small nonprofits identify fundraising as their number one concern and they all know it. But there’s for some reason, it’s like, hey, definition of insanity is, you know, repeating some the same thing and expecting different outcomes. So we’ve got to get out of serial grant writing, begging for money via events, uh uh sending appeal letters, uh you know, tear jerking videos, emotional appeals, uh individual contributions of the sector have plummeted, have plummeted. You know, my uh uh we’ve got a book called The Generosity Crisis. So if you’re a small to mid size nonprofit, you know, we the first thing, whatever you see whenever a small nonprofits that you see zig, you need to zag, you need to do something different. Ok? So the first thing is there’s no pro tips, there’s no quick fix. You need to get your head into a completely different space when it comes to a building a revenue engine and you have to learn the entire funding stack. It’s earned, contributed and invested. It comes from five sources via three means, contributed, earned and invested. There’s a lot to learn here. Five sources uh name the five sourcess, individuals, foundations, government agencies, right? There’s earned income and impact capital investors. There’s debt, corporations and corporations and corporations. So 666 buckets they, and they give, give you money a charitable gift which, which we prefer to call charitable investments or charitable contributions. I don’t like the word gift. It’s got terrible associations, right? Um You have a contribution then you have, right? You earn income, half the money in the sector is earned. These are entrepreneurial businesses who happen to be C threes. They’re getting, they’re, they’re running for profit subsidiaries. They have uh grants and they have contracts, right? They’re, they’re running a typical business, right? And then you have invested income, you can take on debt, you can get peer to peer loans, you can get risk and rate adjusted capital. Um There’s all this money sitting on the sidelines that nonprofits can capture if they have the sophistication and the tools to get it. So, you know, sorting out what a nonprofit should be going for and shouldn’t be going for, requires expertise and experience. We go through the strategies and we go through the high performing and the low performing strategies. If you’re earning money through events, if you’re running a gala or an auction, you might as well commit yourself to a life of poverty and mission, you know, forget, forget scaling your mission. And this is just standard operating procedure. Everybody does it. So everybody thinks they do it. And transitioning organizations away from this is like getting them to quit a heroin addiction. It’s terribly hard. Don’t know any better. You know. You read, I think the reason people don’t know any better is we grew up with the, uh, boy scouts, girl scouts and, and cheerleading squad model of fundraising, which was, which was right. We sell, we sell, I mean, cookies. I mean, I do love, uh, the girl scout cookies. The thin mints especially. And then the Samosas are my number two. But, you know, but in terms of scaling, you know, that’s, that’s, well, that’s right. But that’s, that’s, those are, you know, those are youth activities. That’s a troop level. Yeah. No, that’s fine. If you’re a, if you’re teaching a girl scout how to sell cookies, that’s awesome. But we, but we carry these things, we carry these processes over like the girl, like the cheerleading squad. Uh, you know, Saturday car wash, we carry these into adulthood and then we remember, oh, well, back in the PT A days, we had a bake sale. So why don’t we scale the bake sale and have a gala and, and, and then we end up and, and if you have, if you had spent that the amount of time on the gala, uh uh, instead talking to individual investors about investment level, uh, investment level. Well, I, I do call them gifts but, uh, investment investment level contributions to the, to the contributions to the organization. You, you would have had a lot more, you, you, you end up with a lot more profit and you wouldn’t have the headache over whether the flowers match the bunting and the, the second course came out 12 minutes late. So now, now the, now the chili, the chili course is cold. Yeah. But we, my point is we carry our childhood fundraising activities into adulthood. And then we, we scale that to like galas and auto, you know, car shows instead of instead of building deep relationships. And you do have a lot of strategies and tactics around relationships with individual investors who are gonna partner with you for the long term and give you 567 figure gifts, you know, regularly and the greatest source of money comes from individuals comes from your very, very desperately needed line of expertise, which is planned giving. Yeah, but we got to start in the lifetime giving and those folks become so deeply invested that they want to put you alongside their husband, wife, Children and tell you how many charities I’ve seen nonprofits. They’ve been in business for 40 50 60 years, the millions, the hundreds of millions of dollars they they’re leaving on the table because they’re not cultivating these major investments and these, these these legacy commitments, you know, this, I’m not going to please, you know, refer them to me, refer them because that’s what I keep a 100%. That’s the difference. That’s the difference between a survival tactic, which is immediate gratification money right now for a little transaction. And this is the distinguished, this is, this differentiates the, the the organizations that struggle from the organizations that succeed. Leaders who struggle are oriented towards immediate gratification transactions. Give it to me right now. I gotta have it now. Now, now they’re like Children. They don’t invest in the future. The the adults understand they delay gratification to get a bigger return down the road, right? They in that, that’s what the principle of investment is. They put in focused, intelligent time and effort now for many multiples of return later, right? So you want to be a hunter gatherer running around, grabbing, you know, grabbing hands and your nonprofit will stay small. If you follow you, you’re not able to raise this type of money until you have the business plan and the financial projection and the alignment of your organization that’s critical. The order of operations is essential. You can’t do this high, you know, high value fundraising with tools that don’t pay past due diligence that aren’t comprehensive and and incredibly well written. But once you have those tools, it takes time 69, 12 months, not forever, but you can start capturing six and seven figure investments. If you show how you’re going to allocate that capital to drive your mission. So it’s not again, Tony, I can’t say it enough. This is not for everybody, but I’m telling you, there’s tens of thousands of nonprofit leaders out there that really are ready for this stuff. And, and once they see the light and they get their first six and figure first seven figure investment and I’ve done that so many times in my career, gotten organizations, their first million dollar gift, gotten their organizations, their first multimillion dollar corporate partnership or their first multimillion dollar, you know, plan giving or their first when that happens, then they get it. Let’s move to uh executing you. Love uh executive dashboards. Let’s talk about the, the value we’re on steps. We’re on phase phase six, the, the executing, but talk about the value of solid dashboards. Well, it breaks through the information overload in the clutter. We’re all information overload victims and you know, again, we’re in a paradigm, a space where you wanna do analysis and reporting. Well, we’re gonna, we’re gonna produce a long annual report and we’re gonna look at it once a year that ain’t gonna fly. That dog does not hunt if you want to grow up. If you want to create a high performing high growth organization, you have to have frequent what we call short cycle analysis. On a very small set of key performance indicators. You need to know the outcomes you’re gonna create and the activities that you need to execute on to drive those outcomes. Those are called lagging and leading indicators. And you need to have them at the program level and you need to have them at the organizational level and you need to track them on what’s known as the cadence of accountability. There’s a book written by a brilliant guy and his colleagues called the four disciplines of execution. When I read that it was like the lights coming on, like the heavens opened up and saying, here’s what success looks like for high performing organizations. Once they have their resources and they want to succeed, they might not get it right first, but it’s continuous improvement. And so programs, your finance, your hiring, your governance, your, your, the the scale, the quality, everything that uh an organization needs to measure and communicate both to its staff, its board and its funders and its stakeholders can be wrapped up in a very concise dashboard, takes work to build it. What it does is you think of it is we have a plan instead of sticking that plan on a shelf. Let’s score the plan. Let’s see how we’re performing against the plan. Strategies are meaningless unless they are scored and we collect data and we can’t collect very much data. So many were like treehouse. My famous example of my book was looking at 22 pages of data for each kid. They had all these fancy phd S and all these consultants coming in, bunch of academics going look at all the data, we can analyze everybody was so too much data. You might as well not have not anything at all because you’re drowning in it. You boil it down key performance indicators in the book. They’re very, there’s, there, there are very few of them. They’re not, you can’t subvert them. Everyone knows what they mean. So again, you gotta understand what a KP I is. You gotta understand how to collect the data. You got to nail the workflow, you gotta have good visualizations. Again, a lot of stuff here around creating a dashboard. Um We’ve seen, we’ve tried to help many organizations and they couldn’t get to the dashboarding phase. They didn’t have the focus and the discipline they couldn’t get themselves over the hump of getting out of, you know, uh those organizations, we, we failed to help them. It’s critical, you know, planning is easy, executions, 95% of it. And, you know, until you actually get into starting that we’re going to be really gonna sacrifice what we want to talk about and focus on these core sets of measures when you get there and you do it regularly two weeks for the staff, one month for the board members, quarterly, for your partners and investors have the right cadence of accountability and you have the right KPIS, you’re gonna know real quick if your plan is good or not and you’re gonna know what to adjust and you’re gonna have your strategy, your data is gonna drive your organizational improvement and you do it with fundraising, you do it with programs, you do it with everything and when you get that culture and you get that tool sky is the limit dashboards executing. All right, practice uh practice seven of seven leading leading talk, a little talk some again, more than we can go into here, talk about psychological safety in the workplace. Oh gosh. Hit that. Please explain it very well known again. This is a, this is a, you know, it’s another uh uh the, the, the, the author of the article, I quote, the Harvard business Professor, you got to have an organization where people are, are comfortable telling each other the truth about what they’re thinking, you know, and the nonprofit sector is full of top down uh tyrants just like the for profit sector, right? It’s full of people that are, that are poorly trained, that are insecure, that don’t want to hear bad news again just because you’re a nonprofit doesn’t mean you don’t suffer the same challenges of any other type of organization. It also includes permission to take risks 100%. So psychological safety and this is something that the executive team and the board needs to hold themselves responsible for. And I hear so few organizations talk about it. What risks are we to take? And you know, Jim Collins talks about confronting your brutal reality. What challenges are we really facing and can we talk about them without getting, you know, caught up in this, you know, emotional grip of, oh my God. I don’t want to talk about it. I, I’m anxious. Psychological safety is a fundament of, of if you don’t have that, there’s again, there’s 50 practices in the book. You take out one, forget it, you got to have them all. And psychological safety is a great example of that. Let’s talk about another one, investing in great people money. We we martyrdom should not be part of your compensation strategy. And you know, we talked about the, the great Dan Paata wrote about this in 2006 or seven with uncharitable that we’ve inherited this puritanical impulse to, you know, be unemployed ministers in the space. So we put out job descriptions for our clients with six figure salaries and incentive plans. I just wrote a job description today offering uh um AAA chief ac suite officer of my fast growing nonprofit client equity in their for profit subsidiary. You got to compete with the best brains right there. There’s no, there’s no sacrificing. So um and, and oh my God, what if we pay our people? You know, the highest paid nonprofit staff in, in every state are Tony. This is I do because you have it in the book. But go ahead if the f football coaches, football coach, nobody complains about paying football coaches. 2030 40 some guy down in Texas got like A 70. These are nonprofit guys. Now, the IRS doesn’t want, you know, excess, you know, compensation. There is a ceiling, right? And you’ve, you’ve got, but, but there are procedures around, there are procedures. Again, it’s a mindset thing. People get the right people on the bus. There’s ways to structure it. You know, you can have incentive pay for fundraisers that are still in, in line with the A FP ethical guidelines. Again, there’s a lot, there’s lots of specifics and nonprofit executives need to understand all of them. There is a lot in the leadership chapter uh uh for that practice, the uh you open the, well, you in each chapter with a quote and that the one to that chapter is we manage things we lead people. Oh, you know, I have a, another uh uh uh uh uh great thinker, you know, there’s a, there’s a small set of books that have helped me, you know, deliver catalyze growth to our, our many clients and, you know, another, you know, um I shock a de uh the, the great um and, you know, thinker, it, it uh uh understands, you know, one of the founders of Bank of America pointed me out to him, one of the, one of the old time executives, he’s been long past and he said you need to read this book to if you’re going to be a management consultant and he shows how people are either pro some combination of producers, um, entrepreneurs, administrators or um integrators and it was a light grow going off, you know, so many empathetic people from nonprofits get together and if they’re all integrators, they’re, they, they’re all worrying about how each other is feeling and nothing ever gets done. If they’re all entrepreneurs, there’s nothing but arsonists, then there’s fires getting put out. So, and, and there’s nothing but drivers, they can end up being lone wolves, flush this out in, in, in regard to something you said earlier. Uh the board, you the, the balance, you know, the, the balance on the board and then we’ll, we’ll, we’ll wrap up again. So again, I don’t write about everything that nonprofit leaders need to know about leadership. There’s a lot of resources out there and I’m, I’m pointing out these are the tools that you must pay attention to. If you do. If you’re ignorant of these tools, you risk um organizational, you know, constant struggle. So it’s not trying to be everything that’s ever been written about governance. There’s a lot of books and there’s, there’s more information that you need. No, no, but I want, I want you to hit, I Donald, I want you to hit on uh flesh out uh the balanced board, you know, getting, getting that, that getting that personality as well as skills and right. So everyone knows you’ve got to have diverse skills. I hope everyone knows you need, you need people that know technology that no law that no finance that no operations, that hr advertising. So you want to get diverse skills, right? Obviously, you want diverse backgrounds, ethnicities, gender and so forth. But the other thing that people don’t talk about is diverse thinking styles. You need people who are entrepreneurial, who are risk takers. You need um risk mitigators, right? And you need people that are uh do this the structuring piece and the same holds for boards and executive teams. So again, we give a, a very shorthand uh uh introduction to the concepts. And again, there’s tools and there’s, there’s a whole set on the accelerator website on how to identify folks and help them talk across their differences. So many organizations are in conflict because people don’t recognize is that someone else has a different neurological style that they’re born with and I don’t know how to talk to them. Now, you probably wouldn’t be surprised to understand that I’m a driver and an entrepreneur and I’m terrible with details and I’m not much of an integrator. I’m the guy who’s driving out head making stuff. I’m a founder, my team, my firm will struggle if I don’t have strong administrators and strong integrators and it has, I’ve made this mistake myself. So, and I’m going to naturally uh cause the hairs to go up on the back of the neck of an integrator because I’m outspoken and I’m ambitious and executive and I’m not worried about their feelings and that integrator needs to know that they’re not gonna succeed without me in the organization. And I need to know that I’m not gonna succeed without them. And we better understand each other. And that is, and it took me years to learn this lesson and it’s just one of seven practices in the leadership piece that it’s hopefully it’ll, it’ll turn the lights on for leaders so they can create what we call neuro balanced teams, not just on the board but on their staff c street also. And staff and below. All right, the book is scaling altruism, a proven pathway for accelerating nonprofit growth and impact. Where do folks go if they want to join the Accelerator program online, which the book is integrated into where, where just where do we go? You go to scaling altru, excuse me. Uh Let me start over Altruist accelerator.org has a landing page and a link to the platform where you can altruist accelerator.org read the book before you start the Accelerator, right? You got to read the book and then the Accelerator goes through and reviews each practice. There’s short videos and a full library of tools and you’ll find people like you in different nonprofits that are working their way through the tools and there’s no barrier to entry, there’s no application and you expect to spend an hour or two a week. That’s all it’s needed. Low dose, high frequency. It’s like getting a gym membership, you, you’re gonna get out of it, what you put into it. And I’m there along with my colleagues, my affiliates and our partners to answer questions and guide people. So no cost, all you have to do is have the ambition to join. And if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. Right. It’s month to month and it’s 79 bucks. It’s about the price of a cell phone. Altruist accelerator.org. All right. That’s it, Donald. Thank you very much for sharing all this. Thank you. Thank you for all the work that you’re doing to help me share and for all the help you’re already delivering to nonprofits and helping them capture um plan giving, which is so critical. It’s such a big piece of this next week. Another author David Rode with his new book, passion isn’t enough. If you missed any part of this week’s show, I beseech you find it at Tony martignetti.com were sponsored by donor box, outdated donation forms blocking your supporters, generosity, donor box, fast, flexible and friendly fundraising forms for your nonprofit donor. Box.org. Our creative producer is Claire Meyerhoff. I’m your associate producer, Kate Martinetti. The show social media is by Susan Chavez. Mark Silverman is our web guy and this music is by Scott Stein. Thank you for that affirmation. Scotty be with us next week for nonprofit radio. Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95% go out and be great.
Code. Blockchain. Proofs. Wallets. Exchanges. Coins. If foreign words like these keep you from accepting a gift that tens of millions of Gen Z and Millennials invest in and gift, Pat Duffy will set your mind at ease. He defines the terms in plain language and explains why crypto giving belongs on your donation page. He’s co-founder of The Giving Block.
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And welcome to Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio. Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. I am your aptly named host and the pod father of your favorite abdominal podcast. Oh, I’m glad you’re with us. I’d be forced to endure the pain of kyphosis. If you twisted me around the idea that you missed this week’s show, here’s our associate producer, Kate to introduce it. Hey, Tony, here’s what’s up accepting Cryptocurrency gifts, code, Blockchain, proofs, wallets, exchanges, coins. If foreign words like these keep you from accepting a gift that tens of millions of gen Z and millennials invest in and gift. Pat Duffy will set your mind at ease. He defines the terms in plain language and explains why crypto giving belongs on your donation page. He’s co founder of the giving block on Tony’s Steak too. We have a new president were sponsored by donor box, outdated donation forms blocking your supporters, generosity, donor box, fast, flexible and friendly fundraising forums for your nonprofit donor box.org here is accepting Cryptocurrency gifts. It’s a pleasure to welcome Pat Duffy to nonprofit radio. Pat co-founded the giving block, creating the new fundraising category, crypto philanthropy. The giving block helps thousands of nonprofits, fundraise cryptocurrencies, stocks and donor advised fund grants. He was a Forbes 30 under 30 in social impact in 2022. You’ll find the company at the Giving block.com and you’ll find Pat Duffy on linkedin. Pat. Welcome to nonprofit radio. Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. It’s a pleasure. I’m glad you’re with us. Uh, ok, let’s start with basics le let’s make sure everybody understands the, just the essentials, the basics of what Cryptocurrency is before we start talking about how your nonprofit can benefit from it. Yeah, definitely people overcomplicate it a lot. So in very simple terms, it’s a digital form of asset. It’s kind of like money in the sense that you can move it anywhere in the world really quickly. You can sit in an account. Um, it’s fungible divisible. Um But it kind of plays the role of a stock um or of gold kind of stores, the value in the sense that a lot of these cryptocurrencies have a set, um number of units that can’t be increased. The code is written that way. So there’s a scarcity element where you can buy into something and know that it won’t be um manufactured and won’t be creative of it. Uh And then it’s kind of like stocks and that a lot of these cryptocurrencies have speculative values where people are kind of betting on whether or not they’ll go up or down. Um But all of them for the most part are built off of Blockchain. And that is just uh kind of computer riddles, cryptographic uh proofs that are solving uh problems. And when they all um agree on the solution to that proof, a transaction is authorized and money moves so really secure way to store value, to move value. Um super cost efficient, just kind of a really effective version of digital money. Ok. Now it has been with us for years in, in, in the mainstream uh are fairly mainstream. There’s probably argument about that but it would be generous, you know, say mainstream at least or at least fairly mainstream. OK? But when you uh when you start to say, all right, so it’s, it’s sort of like you mentioned gold but then there’s code and you talk about scarcity and some people for some people, it’s speculative and it’s on the Blockchain and you talk about proofs, this is the stuff, this is the stuff that I think makes people like what the what are we talking about here? So, so, all right, that is an overview but we gotta, we gotta drill down what you know, like code and scarcity and speculative and Blockchain proofs uh reassure our listeners that this is something that is safe. Uh you mentioned safe, but you got to explain why the Blockchain and the proofs make it safe. Like why? OK, why is this something that we should just think about before we even start about how to get into it. We’re not there yet. Why should we consider bringing this to our board? Uh you know, with scarcity and speculative and Blockchain and proofs? Yeah, definitely. So every technology that you’re interfacing with sounds like this if you dig into it. So it’s just at a super high level. If you think about Bluetooth and Wi Fi, I even say like if you’re going to buy a car, like most people aren’t really in tune with the fact that like pistons are firing and like, what is the transmission? Like there’s all these things, it would sound infinitely more complicated than it needs to with every technology. Eventually you get to a place of like, why should I care? Do I need to use it? Has it been made easy for me? Um Those sorts of questions when it comes to crypto are important, we’ll get into those to answer the question first about like the complexity of it, like the Blockchain and the proofs and everything else. Like why do we even need something like this? We had money, we have gold, we have stocks. Like what’s the point? Um When you are sending money from one place to another, there’s no real system for it. Like ultimately what’s kind of happening is people are updating numbers and spreadsheets and there are automated processes for it. But like there’s no formalized system that’s authorizing that like there are lawyers authorizing whether or not an agreement is actually legitimate, right? Or that both parties have agreed to it. There are banks authorizing whether or not funds are in one place or another, right? There are people who are initiating transactions and kind of choosing where to park their money. Um When you think about stores of value, you can’t really store value with something like cash. Um you have to have something like gold and gold isn’t fungible, right? You can’t take a piece of gold and divide it and send it on the internet real quick. What do you think about something like stocks? You’re speculating on these assets that are tied to a company but doesn’t really function like money. You can’t move stocks between individual will or try to like stake your stock somewhere and earn interest very conveniently because it’s not technologically driven. There’s a lot of inefficiency in all these different types of money and stocks and gold. So what these cryptographers were trying to figure out is like, can we create a more um useful financial instrument? And in doing so, could we make it so that it’s infinitely more scalable than something like dollars in terms of where the dollars come from? In terms of how difficult it is to move money to one place versus another. Like ultimately, the money isn’t actually moving. We have something called fractional reserve banking where a bank is kind of pretending there’s more money in the bank than there is when you wire money to a bank, they’re not actually getting a bag of cash from somewhere else to kind of back it. Um So what you have with Cryptocurrency in short is you write this code and the code is formalized and it can’t be changed and it says it’s gonna do a few things. We’ll take Bitcoin as an example. So with Bitcoin, they go, there’s only ever gonna be this many Bitcoin and we write the code in a way where it can’t ever be altered. So people will know for sure in the way that when you have dollars sitting in the bank, the Federal Reserve during COVID, for instance, could print a bunch of money devaluing your uh savings. That can’t happen with Bitcoin if people go. But that’s great. There’s a 0% chance that more supply will be injected, but I can still have this asset. It’s easy to move around. Ok? I like that. And then people go, well, if I wanna send it to somebody else, how do I know it’s gonna get there? Right. Or if I have it, how can I prove that? I actually have it and someone can’t just take it away or say it isn’t sitting in my account. Um The code is again written with the cryptography where you would have to get more than half of the computers involved in Bitcoin to all simultaneously agree on the false premise that it isn’t your Bitcoin or the false premise that you send it somewhere else? You’d have to orchestrate what is an impossible level of scale and it packing all of these devices at once, maybe the most secure way and the most provable way to say, I actually have a thing or it’s actually gone where I said, I’d like it to. So you go, ok. So I have a more guaranteed way of saying I own something and a more guaranteed way of saying I’ve moved it somewhere else and people say I like that too and then there’s an efficiency component. So because it’s all code based, you don’t need banks to code is what authorized the transactions. You don’t need banks to prove that you have the asset or to say I moved it to someone else. It’s so much more cost effective and um you don’t have to spend as much money moving it from one place to the other. So you go, oh I could move a billion dollars instantaneously, you know, within a matter of seconds at the lowest cost possible without all these middle men and infrastructural components. So you’re writing code more or less to replace what are a bunch of inefficiencies in the asset types from like cash to stock gold and then the institutions necessary to move those asset types or prove that they’re in a particular position or pretend that they’re in a particular position with a lot of finance So it’s just a really efficient alternate financial system that solves for a lot of problems that cash had, the stocks had that gold had. So people are betting on it when people hold something like Bitcoin, they’re kind of betting on it as if you had a share of stock. Like cell phones are gonna be used more often because they’re so much more convenient than a landline. People are holding Bitcoin oftentimes as a correlated asset saying, I think this cryptography in finance, this uh cryptographic proof of work system. These blockchains, I think these tools are gonna be used more and that companies are gonna use uh these crypto assets to make their systems more efficient. Uh So that’s explaining the technology. Second half of your question was why should nonprofits take it seriously? Well, ok. All right. Before we get there, we, we will, we will, we gotta, we gotta tick off a few things. Um You, well, first of all, let’s reassure people, you said you’re writing code, but let’s just reassure people they’re not writing code, you’re not, you’re not profit is not writing the, the code is written in, in such a well, the code is already written for cryptocurrencies, right? I just wanna make that like when you’re on Google, when you’re using your iphone, when you’re using your tax software, the code is serving a particular purpose. Definitely, you’re just clicking buttons. There’s just making sure that somebody doesn’t say, well, wait, I have to write code. No. OK. If there was a listener who didn’t quite understand. OK. Um You, you said it’s uh now you said it’s scalable, but then you also said there’s a, there’s a finite amount. Those, those two, those two sound incongruous to me. So what am I not? What am I not getting about your explanation? No, great question. So, scalability in terms of the infrastructure, like how much money you can move over a particular period of time or how effectively it can solve different problems. And like if 100,000 people send the transaction or one person sends a transaction, it doesn’t become more difficult, right? You can fit more of these transactions into one block and have them approved. It actually becomes more energy efficient. The more transactions that happen in the sense that if you’re doing one transaction, you’re cracking all these codes to solve it, it kind of takes a lot of energy. This is one of the complaints of something like Bitcoin, but the more people who end up using the technology is actually uh authorizing more transactions at less cost. So it’s scalable in the sense that it allows for, if you wanted to scale the traditional financial ecosystem, you would need skyscrapers, you would need human employees, you would need a bunch of cars, taking them to buildings, you would need more lawyers, more agreements. Um When you do that off of a code base you can make an infinitely larger financial system to offer infinitely more transactions um at infinitely lower cost and more uh effectiveness. So, not scalable in the sense that you create more of the assets themselves. Um but scalable in the sense that more people can participate in that network at lower cost. Ok. Lower cost, greater efficiency, right. So, I mean, comparing it to uh you know, checks, you know, there’s a lot of, if there’s a heavy mail volume in the week, let’s say it’s the final week of December and is a heavy mail volume. You have to wait longer for your check to get to the nonprofit. You have to wait longer during certain periods for your broker to make a stock transfer for you. Even if it’s, to me, it’s just, it seems like it’s only a couple of keystrokes. But sometimes you say, well, it takes up to 3 to 3 business days to, well, it’s like you, you, you, you’re typing a couple of keys. What, what is the three business days? But anyway, uh but brokers, brokers can be all right, broke. All right. So, and to your point, you know, you made the same point. You’d have to build, build a bigger buildings and have more bank employees to scale, you know, billions of transactions or something. All right, I see. I understand. Thank you. Explain the scale up. Um Another one, you talk about, uh you know, security, you’d have to convince more than half of the servers that are, that are part of the chain that you own, the asset that you’re claiming that you own or you’re owning the, uh, we’re not talking about dozens. Reassure people. How many, what’s the scale of the server, the servers that are involved in? You know, let’s just stick with Bitcoin. That was your example for the, for the currency so far. Oh, yeah, I’d have to look up the number but I mean, there’s millions. It could be tens, hundreds. I, I’d have to look at what it is. Um, but in short, when you, when I say I’m gonna send Tony, you know, $100 in Bitcoin, what it does is it wraps it in a cryptographic riddle more or less that these miners. When you hear about like Bitcoin mining, you have all these computers that are waiting to crack riddles. These are riddles that like humans can’t solve it. A computer needs to figure it out and the faster they solve it and by getting it correct, they get a little reward that’s like released on the network. So they, they get a little bit of money off that. So they’re all university incentivized to solve it correctly. You would have to hack into all of these individual computers and get them to simultaneously, uh, agree that an incorrect proof is actually a correct proof that says instead of your wallet is the endpoint someone else’s wallet is the end point, which was impossible. More or less when there were even like 50 of these computers doing it. You’d have to orchestrate and crack into everyone’s system which all has their own security protocols. Um, it just becomes infinitely more impossible over time. So at a bank you can log into one bank uh computer and you can change the records on the spreadsheet or you could push money out of an account to another person. You’d actually have to convince, um, you know, millions of these super computers more or less that the money isn’t actually an Tony’s accounts in someone else’s. And then the same thing is true for changing a transaction record, which is why law enforcement um prefers crypto transactions to cash. Why they think it’s so much more traceable and safe. Um If you’re a criminal who’s moved Bitcoin, let’s say, from one wallet to another, you could never change the record or cook the books like it has moved from a wallet to another wallet. You would need that same level of computer takeover to just pretend you didn’t move money or you took it somewhere. So at an individual level, it allows for its privacy if I send it to you and we’re not being investigated by the FBI. If you’re a company, I could transfer funds without having to go through all the protocols. But if law enforcement were to try to investigate, did you do something you weren’t supposed to do. There’s no way for me to pretend I didn’t commit a crime or move money to that other person. It’s permanently locked in and traceable. All right. Reassuring. It’s time for a break. Imagine a fundraising partner that not only helps you raise more money but also supports you in retaining your donors. A partner that helps you raise funds both online and on location. So you can grow your impact faster. That’s Donor box, a comprehensive suite of tools, services and resources that gives fundraisers. Just like you a custom solution to tackle your unique challenges, helping you achieve the growth and sustainability, your organization needs, helping you help others visit donor box.org to learn more. Now back to accepting Cryptocurrency gifts. All right. So let’s let’s move to um the value, you know, why, why should, why should nonprofits pay attention to this? I mean, I let’s talk a little about like giving trends a bit to, I’m sure this skews by age younger, I I happen to be a baby boomer, young, young, very young, very very young, baby boomer, very young baby, boomer uh mathematic. No, but mathematical proof by, by, by birth year. Uh I, I’m very young baby boomer. Um in case I hadn’t mentioned that I am young baby, but you know, I’m sure there are not many boomers uh giving crypto donation. So let’s talk a little about the giving trends but, but also just, you know, generally why, look, why bother. We’ve been doing this fine with checks, stocks, wire transfers. Why, why should we bother? Oh, it’s a great question. So, if, if the methods of payment you accept as a charity were driven by the nonprofit trying to solve a payments problem, you wouldn’t really have to adapt at all. Right. The nonprofit gets cash through a check the same way they would from a credit card. But you take credit cards as a nonprofit because eventually there are so many people using them and they’re so much more convenient to the ability to get that donor and convert that donor and have them pay in a way where they’ll actually send you the money. Once credit cards become their thing, you eventually have to just adjust to it. Right. The same reason nonprofits take stocks, you don’t take stocks because it’s easier than a credit card. You take stocks because it’s so much more tax efficient for a US donor. If they’re gonna send this appreciated stock to the charity and it’s a million bucks or they send a million in their bank account, they might be erasing an extra 150 grand in capital gains tax liability because the donor doesn’t pay capital gains tax on the donate stuff and neither doesn’t charity. So the example I use is like, think about credit cards, merged with stocks. Credit cards are used because people move money using credit cards and actually there’s so many people doing that, that if you don’t have that option on your site, a lot of people come there to look for it. You ask for bank details or a check instead and they just drop off. They go, this isn’t the way I like to move money. Um And there is a conversion issue with that and then people take stocks again because if you’re gonna get a big donation, 5 to $15,000 average gift size, plenty of them, a lot higher than that. Donors who get into those types of gift sizes. They’re thinking about the numbers, they’re thinking about the math. And if I can give 100 grand to one charity and save $20,000 more, I’m gonna consider that nonprofit. Um, a lot more often than a charity I can always send the cash to. So there’s a sort of a supply side push. That’s right. You can say the donors, there are donors, the supply side of the charities being on the demand side. There’s a, there’s a, there’s a push among don’t when checks became popular, when stocks became popular, when credit cards became popular. Absolutely. Right. Ok. That’s right. So there’s, there’s tens of millions of people in the US who use Cryptocurrency and there’s about 600 million worldwide. So it’s, it’s at a size and scale in terms of the user count and people participating in these systems that it’s not, you can’t not have it as an option at a certain point. So like there’s more users on Coinbase than there are on fidelity or Charles Schwab at this. Like it’s, it’s at a scale that most people who don’t participate in. It aren’t really aware of. Like Gen Zs are more likely to trade crypto than trade stocks, like more likely. And then millennials, 90% of millennial millionaires are crypto traders. Like it’s if you are a millennial or gen Z, that cares seriously about investing in any capacity, it’s a part of your world. It’s part of your portfolio and it’s part of the way you think about money. So when it comes to giving, it’s the same thing. So there’s that element of just the widespread uptake and then there’s the element of it’s so tax efficient. So when something appreciates again, you don’t pay capital against tax on it. So if I have a million dollars in Bitcoin, that’s gone up a lot. And I have a million dollars sitting in the bank, I can move the million dollars in Bitcoin to the charity if I want to make that kind of a donation. And let’s say the 150,000, 200,000 that I owed in state and federal capital gains tax on the appreciation of that investment that evaporates the charity gets the full million. I give them the full million to get the full million dollar write off. And that $200,000 tax burden disappears. And then I, as the donor can even take the million I had in the bank and buy more Bitcoin or whatever crypto I’m donating and now I have a million dollars of Bitcoins if I gave the cash. But it’s at today’s cost basis. I don’t know any taxes on it yet. So it’s this magical tax liability eraser that people have always dealt with stocks, especially older donors, younger donors never really did it because it’s inconvenient. We need to work with the broker. But with crypto, you can send the transfer as easily as you said it with a credit card with this enormous additional tax benefit. And the more of these younger donors who keep their cash in crypto to interest and then move out of those stable cryptocurrencies into investments like Bitcoin, the more of their money that’s parked there, the more convenient it is for them to send it that way, the more tax efficient it is because crypto has outperformed all the other asset classes for the last 10 years. All of those things compound to the point where if you want younger donors in particular young donors to consider that major gift pathway. So you can kind of future proof that donor base for the great wealth transfer and beyond, they’re becoming this larger and larger swap of what that world looks like. Now, what about the charitable uh federal income tax uh deduction? Is there, is there that for a Bitcoin gift. Is there a charitable deduction? Yep. You get the same deductions if you gave anything else, you the tax liability and it’s really convenient. Ok. So you avoid the capital gains and there is a charitable deduction which would be at your, whatever your marginal tax rate is. Ok. And that’s been locked in by the IRS year after year over and over. It’s not going anywhere. Ok. Just making it, making sure the basics are covered. Ok. OK. What more, what more do you want to say uh about uh value, importance, relevance, anything? II, I didn’t wanna, I didn’t wanna end your, your explanation. I just wanted to make uh I wanted to make sure people understand the basics. No, that was it. I was out of important things to say, I guess. Uh the only other thing I would say is um for nonprofits to understand the uptake. So like the majority of the Forbes top 100 nonprofits in the US already have crypto fundraising programs. So it’s, it’s more common than not the bigger and more established. The nonprofit is, it’s becoming pretty much universal for small and mid size nonprofits. Um It’s less common in the same way that they tend to lag on other technology adoption, but it’s, it’s not like a fringe thing from the charity side either. Right. Billions of dollars have been donated. Um Nonprofits actively present this to donors in particular younger donors and it generates revenue, increased average gift size. Like it’s, it’s pretty well adopted over the last 67 years. All right. How do we reassure folks about the headlines that they see, you know, a Bitcoin dropped from? Yeah, I don’t, I don’t really know what the numbers are. I know, like at the low end it went down to $30,000 but it had been as high as, I don’t remember how much, you know, per per coin. How do we reassure folks who read headlines about crypto, Bitcoin? Well, they’re not synonymous. Bitcoin is a, is a, is a coin, one of many cryptocurrencies, but people read headlines about Bitcoin the floor dropping out. How do we reassure people about that? That’s a great question. So there’s um in short, there are several considerations that matter a lot for folks involved in crypto that don’t matter for nonprofits depending on how you’re using it. So, one of the big misconceptions charities think about with crypto is that they have to hold crypto to accept it. So like one of the first things we built into our tool is it immediately liquidates any balances instantaneously. So it’s just a program that scans you have a crypto exchange account on a heavily regulated crypto exchange platform tied to your institutions. Ein it sits there and as soon as crypto hits any wallet in that account, it says automatically sell for the US dollar going rate value instantaneously. So from a volatility standpoint, as an investor or as a nonprofit who wants to add crypto, let’s say to your endowment. Um and invest in it long term price volatility is a concern for sure if you’re investing and you’re not interested in things that are that volatile. Um Or you worry about the, the risk of losing value on the funds that you’re holding and the idea of holding crypto or investing in it as a, a donor or a nonprofit isn’t for you. But for 99% of nonprofits, they use that auto liquidation feature. Even the nonprofits who hold it for the most part liquidate the crypto that comes in and they’ll invest in more stable cryptocurrencies like a Bitcoin Ethereum. They’ll make sure that if there’s some of these smaller all cryptocurrencies that are extra volatile, they don’t hold those things. So as a nonprofit, you can accept the fact that let’s just say us, for example, that there’s 60 ish million people trading this stuff, they have decided to participate in the system. Despite the volatility, this is how they’d like to invest and potentially give to us when it’s up. We’ll probably get more when it’s down. We’ll probably get a little bit less. But ultimately, that volatility is not something we have to endure because it hits our account and it automatically liquidates. So the price volatility thing is optional for charities, whereas it’s not optional for investors. Ok. Right. You’re making a distinction between accepting it and investing in it. Uh, and there’s also price volatility in the stock market. Absolutely. And that’s why stocks, stocks are quickly liquidated. It’s so, it’s, it’s identical. Nonprofits don’t hold stocks that are, that are donated. They, uh, they liquidate that day usually and, and then they can decide to invest or, or spend, you know, what, whatever and if they’re gonna invest in stock it, it’s, it’s obviously a decision that they make independent of the, the, the stock that was donated. That’s right. And it’s probably for the best because there are a lot of, a lot of our nonprofits, like, around this time, like Bitcoin almost hit a new all time high yesterday. Like, cryptocurrencies has been doing really, really well. It’s up like 100 and 50% over the last year. It’s, it’s like, tripled since the bottom of the last Bear market. Um, a lot of nonprofits. I mean, dozens in the last couple weeks have been, like, turn off the auto conversion and I’m like, let’s have a meeting and let’s talk about it. It’s just bad. It’s just natural. You see a thing go up for 12 months and you’re like, it’s gonna keep going up forever. I feel like an idiot. I’m not a sucker like I know. And it’s like, well, let’s just, let’s say let’s not time the crypto market anymore than we’re gonna try to time the, uh, the New York Stock Exchange or you know, or the S and P, we’re not, we’re not gonna be able to, let’s not time these things. Let’s not get carried away either. All right. So now that not only that, not only accepting it, but let’s keep it, let’s hold it. So, so our general, we cannot give financial advice back. We can’t tell anyone not to do. But like, usually after a conversation it’s very rare that any of our nonprofits ever don’t have auto conversion on. And some people get annoyed about that because we’ve been doing this for seven years. So the nonprofits who haven’t had auto conversion on have actually made uh an extraordinary amount of money. If they actually held it through, they didn’t pan excel at different points. It’s gone up a lot over the last seven years, of course. Um But there’s a lot of volatility. So like we said, ever, it’s just like you could turn it on today or turn it off tomorrow and easily lose money. Like there’s a lot of risk in investing and a lot of no in particular, let’s just say if you don’t have an endowment making, the only asset you’re deciding to hold and invest in Cryptocurrency is I don’t think reasonable. And even if you have an endowment, it should be a very small percentage if you’re even considering it just because of like you’re saying, there’s some volatility there, you mentioned different kinds of coins. Uh Let, let’s do we, we’ve used Bitcoin as an example. You mentioned a couple of others. What do, how, how does all that? And there are many right, there’s, there’s hundreds, hundreds, aren’t there maybe thousands? Thousands? All right, thousands of different coins. How does that play into uh what we accept? Uh do we need to accept certain coins? Only ex explain that the basics there? Yeah. So there are some cryptocurrencies that solved really important problems just from a technological standpoint that made it really easy to write codes called smart contracts that like automate processes and allow people to build these kind of applications that tie into the networks. And then there are some cryptocurrencies that are, it’s like open source code related to some other crypto and you make kind of a copy and paste version of it. Like you hear about these meme coins where it’s just kind of um you’ll see a Cryptocurrency and it’s got like a picture of a dog and there’s like $30 billion invested in it. And that’s sort of like baseball cards or certain types of art where it’s like people are investing in it because they’re trying to catch a wave and there’s like momentum and timing and it’s not really doing anything that’s fundamentally changing anyone’s life. It’s just like people want it because other people want it and those tend to muddy the water in terms of people understanding the value because they’re like, oh all cryptos kind of feel like this. But in short, um there’s probably uh you know, a few 100 that are doing unique technological things and those tend to be the top Cryptocurrency. So even if you get down into the top 2030 5080 these are very high market cap um assets, like more than most other types of investments. Like I think on the stock market with the Bitcoin ETF S for instance, like I think the Bitcoin ETF S have well surpassed silver. Like there’s a lot of interest in some of these technologies. But if you made an ETF O one of these like Doge coins, um you probably wouldn’t necessarily see the same level of interest. Um What a nonprofit needs to understand is similar to what we said about the auto conversion. This doesn’t need to be a consideration of yours because again, you’re not investing in these cryptocurrencies or choosing which ones to invest in. You just wanna make sure that whatever is being sent to you isn’t like a scam or something that like the SEC or some other regulatory agency would consider. Um not OK, or maybe classify as a unregistered security. And then you want to make sure that there’s enough liquidity on the order books to accept this and not get caught, hold in the bag you don’t want because we’ve heard these horror stories of very small cap crypto gets donated to charity. It’s $100 million type donation and then they try to move it to an exchange and sell it and they lose 80% of the value because again, the volatility. So that is solved for by using an exchange on the back end instead of just a wallet. So these exchange accounts that we use through Gemini, it’s just like Coinbase, it’s like fidelity. It’s like e trade. It’s a uh exchange with a ton of order book liquidity. Um millions of users people trading into and out of assets and the uh assets that get listed on that exchange. These cryptocurrencies are ones that, that exchange and their legal team in uh relationship to all of these regulators that they interface with have decided are OK to list and have enough interest in market activity um where they can easily liquidate, um buy and sell orders. So when you’re taking crypto through the giving block, it’s only the assets that GM and I the most regulated Cryptocurrency exchange in the US has listed. And then if a donor came to you trying to send you something else, we have something called private donor services where we have a, a lawyer on our team and we can talk to the exchange and other partners to decide like is this a legitimate asset to accept from that donor? But those cases are very rare. So you should almost never. And for pretty much every nonprofit work with the answer is never um be in a situation where you’re deciding, should I accept a particular crypto or not? That should be handled by this exchange with a giant legal team and strong relationships with all the regulators. It’s time for Tony’s Steak Two. Thank you, Kate. We will have a new president. My thinking is around our national nonprofit community. Um And I feel that there’s potential for some of our work to be uh defunded or threatened or, or just minimized. And if we see any of that, we all, all of us have to speak out against it. We can’t only support our, our lane, our mission. We all need to stand together as a nonprofit community. So, like I’m thinking, there’s the potential for nonprofits that do work for uh immigrants rights. LGBT Q plus rights people who fight climate change, those who product uh protect uh reproductive rights and women’s health. Those of us who are advancing public education, fight for uh uh fighting for economic justice and equality and equity, protecting vulnerable populations. Those who work for safer gun laws, advancing social justice and the rule of law. Those of us who champion first amendment rights of speech, assembly and religion, the folks who promote a free press, those who assure ethics in government. Those are the ones I have so far that you may very well think of others. It might be your work or the work of other nonprofits. But the point is that we need to stand up for the work of each of our nation’s nonprofits, not just as I said, not just our own lane. Um, and I’m very willing to say, you know, if these things don’t happen, you know, if, if agencies, uh, aren’t threatened, if, if there, if there isn’t that kind of trouble then, uh, you can call me, uh, an alarmist. I’ll, I’ll accept it six months a year from now. If it’s not happening, Tony, you’re an alarmist. But I do think it’s more likely now than it was before the election. Um, and some of the things I’m thinking of potentially, um, maybe a tax on the, uh charitable deduction, maybe carving out some nonprofits that are no longer considered 501 C three and, and eligible for the federal charitable income tax deduction. That would be enormous that some people, some nonprofits donors can’t get a deduction anymore for giving. Um, it could be rhetoric, you know, it could just be talk whether it’s official or it’s just some random asshole or so it could be some official asshole. Uh, you know, or it could be some random official. You know, if, if we’re talking, if we’re hearing, talking down missions or even specific agencies, we need to all call that out it. We, we, we have to stand together. Um, maybe, maybe the federal government starts unfairly favoring some nonprofits over others in, in some other way, you know, beyond the charitable deduction or rhetoric. We have to all stand up for each other, please. Because if we’re divided, then our community is weakened. We all need to stand for each other. And I do think the potential is there because the country did vote for big change and we’re gonna see it. I also want to salute my fellow veterans, Monday where the show is being published on Monday the 11th Veteran’s Day. I admire your service. You made enormous sacrifices to serve the country in any of our military branches. So I admire that service. I salute you on Veterans Day and those are the issues. Those are the things for Tony’s take two, Kate. A lot of things might change. But what will never change is the love for our veterans. Thank you guys. That is very well said, Kate, you’re right. We can never waiver our support for our veterans and, and our admiration for their service. Well said, well, we’ve got bookoo but loads more time. Here’s the rest of accepting Cryptocurrency gifts with Pat Duffy contrast in exchange which you just explained very well with wallet wallets, which you’ve, you’ve mentioned a couple of times. Uh, what, what, what’s the difference here? Well, well, first, what is a wallet? What is a wallet? And then how does it differ from an exchange? Yeah, this is why nonprofits should be set up with some even if it’s not us. But like a solution that has an exchange account and everything else because donors will often tell nonprofits just pop open a wallet. So for each of these cryptocurrencies, you can participate in them and move value back and forth by having what’s called a wallet. So, like we talked about with Bitcoin, there’s an end point where the Bitcoin we’re sending needs to go and there’s an end point where the Bitcoin was originally sitting. So those are referred to as wallets. So exchanges when you’re holding, um, Bitcoin on exchange, for instance, they have the Bitcoin wallets and they’re holding on to the keys to those wallets. Um You’re kind of giving over the security component to them similar to when you’re buying and selling stocks on a lot of these exchanges. You don’t actually have like a paper stock sitting in a safe somewhere. Um This would be the equivalent of that paper stock example, but digital. So you can actually have Bitcoin sitting in a wallet that you have and it’s your own wallet that you can open up, not a wallet held by the exchange and you can take that Bitcoin keep it in a wallet. Um, that only you have like a private code phrase to get into. So that was the original idea behind the technology. This, when you hear it decentralized and disintermediating, like part of what’s really cool about something like Bitcoin or theorem is you can, if it was just you and I, and we were working on some deal, I was building you a fence and I wanted to send you money. I could send you that full amount of value using something like Bitcoin for my wallet years without ever needing to use an exchange or a lawyer or someone else as a middleman. And the code is written to allow for that. And, and if II, I remember this about wallets too. If, if you lose your, if you lose the key to your wallet, that’s it. You’ve lost, it’s like a 16 digit code or something like that or maybe it’s even longer. I don’t know. Maybe, but if you lose the key, you’ve lost what, everything that’s in your wallet, you can’t prove, you can no longer prove that, that you owned what, what was in, what is in your wallet that you can no longer access. Yeah. And that’s the trade off. There’s a lot of misinformation on this or I wouldn’t even say misinformation. But misunderstandings like, um, the only way that can happen to you is if you lose the information, right. So on, there’s nothing, there’s no security issue with the technology when you hear, like this person lost $100 million of Bitcoin. It’s like, well, it’s like losing your email password but you can’t get another, like, be careful with it is what a lot of people say. Like, if you’re gonna do that, like, then if you have $100 million and you lose the information you wrote down about it, like it’s kind of on you is done. And then the, there’s an inverse to that too, which is sometimes exchanges that you’re trusting with that money. Um, they get hacked and now people think about that as a Cryptocurrency hack. But it’s actually the opposite. What the crypto people will tell you is like, well, if you had your Bitcoin sitting in a wallet and you had the private keys to no one could have ever taken it. So in both scenarios, people think about it as a, uh, Cryptocurrency and security issue, but it’s actually the opposite. There’s a 0% chance you will ever lose your money if you have it in a wallet in your own private keys unless you lose the password. Now, if you’re, and like my parents and other folks, like they will lose that password. I know it just put it on the exchange because the odds of an exchange being hacked for crypto is still less than even traditional banks and find it. Like, it’s, they’re very regulated, they’re very secure. It’s the same as having money in a bank. And a lot of the like cash that you have there is FDIC insured as well, just like you would in a bank. So like there’s a lot of reasons to use an exchange for institutions like a nonprofit. You should definitely be using exchange, not a wallet because if you put in the wrong code and you send it somewhere. It’s not supposed to go, you can’t get it back and if you lose the code that you wrote down to get into that wallet, you can’t get it back. So if you’re very careful and pretty libertarian in nature, it’s an amazing technology for actually having stuff, but being able to move it, um, online, it’s like having gold in the safety, you can actually use to buy goods. Um, but if you’re not that specific person just use an exchange. It’s, it’s like having a bank account. OK. OK. Let’s move forward then to w what we, what we uh like we wanna bring this to our board or our, you know, we’re not, we’re not the CEO we’re gonna bring it to our vice president. Help folks. Um uh We’ve done a lot, we, we’ve, we’ve done a lot of that already. I was gonna say help folks make the argument. But what, what would be steps that we would take? I mean, II I think is there, I think we’ve helped folks understand what it is. Why it’s valuable to accept. Uh Are, are, are you ready to move to? How would we, how would we start to implement a AAA crypto acceptance platform? Yeah, absolutely. So if I were a non bro, let’s say I’m, I’m talking to the board, I’ll just like hit the key points here both in terms of the why and the implementation. I would say there’s trillions of dollars invested in it. There are Bitcoin theory, ETF s. Now on the actual stock market, every hedge fund has it or is moving money into it. Every millennial or gen Z has some invest this way if we want to grow our major gift program, which generally speaking, probably has an average donor age of like mid sixties um and not slowly have that eaten away if we want to win out the Great Wall Transfer. Um We want to get a a younger, more robust uh donor base that actually has major giving potential. Like we wanna grow this nonprofit and kind of not get left behind by a very serious financial trend. Like this is a donation method. We need to accept kind of point blank period like it just needs to be an option for our donors. Um Now, in terms of how we implement it, there’s a couple of really important things we need to do. One. We need to make sure that it’s easily discoverable on our website. Um This mistake has been made with stocks, with donor advice funds, sometimes even with bank transfers where it’s really hard to find alternative giving options. Um which is why platforms like ours, in addition to this donation form that we give to nonprofits, um We aggregate all of our charities on the giving block.com with a search bar where donors go search for charities that take crypto and give and we get tens of millions of dollars donated through that channel because donors look on the nonprofit site, they don’t see it and then they just go to Google, Google take this donation. It’s too, there’s too many tax implications for me to not give it directly. We don’t want to be that charity because like every day so it goes to the giving block looking for some heart related charity, they don’t see it. So they give this giant crypto donation to American Heart Association instead, like our donors need to know we take this. So I would take seriously like our ways to give menu and then like the donate button on our site where it takes you to this giving interface. Like I wanna make sure that I’ve got a very clear other ways to give type options, crypto stop donor avi funds a bank transfer. Like let’s get that infrastructure right? So when donors are on our site looking for a way to give, they’ll find this if they’re looking for it. Um Then two, I would say in terms of how we integrate it on our site, I would remind the board and it’s a copy and paste donation form, just like anything else. There’s nothing crypto technological involved here. All of that is built into the code on the back end, we are just pasting a giving form on our site where donors select which crypto they wanna give, enter their details and then send uh money. What happens for us is that crypto hits an account, it cashes out, it swept to a bank account. We get cash as if they use the credit card or anything else. But the donor gets the crypto giving journey they’re looking for. So to explain that we are accommodating the best in class crypto donor journey. They can send money from any of the major exchanges or wallets, etcetera. It’s fully accommodating. And for us, we’re just getting cash. This price volatility concerns which cryptos we take, how do we hold it? When do we hold it? All of that is off the table. These things have been solved for. Um And then the real conversation from there is like, how do we fundraise it? And that final step is one that a lot of nonprofits missed our 1st 30 clients that we signed for the giving block were charities that already took crypto that we signed over to our product instead. Not even because our product was so much better. It had a lot of features that were good. Um But because we knew how to fundraise it and we helped them do some basic stuff like talk about the fact that they take it on social and add in other ways to give button in their capital campaign emails. We added QR codes to the direct mailers people were sending out and people started ho their phone over a piece of paper and sending $50,000 in Bitcoin because so it’s available for them. Um, those sorts of considerations often get missed and then you could still do all of those other things. Right. And end up being one of these great nonprofits with a donate Bitcoin button that just sits somewhere collecting dust because you never really told your donors about it. Um That’s the final consideration. Do you have any more fundraising tips? Oh, yeah, I mean, sure. All right. Well, uh infinite. Uh That’s a lot. But uh we could, we could do with AAA very small, finite number like two, just another couple more fundraising tips because it’s very analogous to gifts we’ve been taking for, for decades and generations. I mean, you, you mentioned, you know, talking about it on social, uh adding a button making it clear on your ways to give, drop down menu. Yeah. So to reassure folks that this is not so something esoteric and uh, I don’t know, forbidden or, you know, whatever nuanced share, share a couple more simple, you know, fundraising methods. It’s, it’s probably an overstatement anyway. I’ve probably got, I’ve probably got three good ones and then a bunch of share a few more. But yeah, so to your point, I feel like this is, it’s, it is fundraising advice. It’s, it’s like a bit more um high level but like just pretend it stocks is like a really important thing for every fundraiser to think about for at the organization. They just pretend it stocks. What would you do. And unfortunately, for a lot of nonprofits, when you make that list of what you would do for stock, what you realize is everything you’re writing down you’re not doing for stocks. You know, like, well, I’d make it really easy to find on my website when I am having a major gift meeting. I would of course, bring it up as an option with the donors because maybe they don’t think of their stocks as a donation method. They think of it as an investment. And maybe this donor who gives us 10-K a year is like, well, the S and P is up 25%. Like I would, can I fulfill my $100,000.10 year pledge right now because I have a huge tax incentive to do it at this. It’s like I would have it featured there. I would make it really easy. Again, I put a QR code that opens up this giving page slash form so younger people could send this stuff from their phones. I would make sure that if I’m sending a capital campaign email that like this is such an important giving option with a way higher average gift size, like let’s make sure it’s easy to find. So think about it like a stocks is what I would say first and foremost. And then the second piece I would say is blended with stocks and with donor advised funds, right? And with these other tax efficient giving options, if you take real estate, whatever that is, blend it all together. Because what that solves for is one of the biggest sticking points for nonprofits donor segmentation and strategy. They’re like, who is a crypto donor? How do I know when to ask for crypto versus something else? How do I find a crypto donor in my database? Like, how do I know for sure that I should be asked for crypto and not these other things. It’s really hard to figure that out and it takes time and depending on the quality of your data and Wealth engine tools, like not every charity has availability um or access to those things. If you just take crypto and you mix it in with stock and that whatever other things you take. Now, suddenly every email you send makes sense. It could be going to every donor you have at every agent just goes, hey, we take tax efficient options like stock d crypto, et cetera, right? It’s, it’s all directly analogous to forms of giving that you just named. I mean, how do you know if somebody has a donor advice fund? You don’t? So you could just mention in your, in your, in your over your lunch that, you know, you know, donor advice funds are, are, are a great way to give. Stocks are a great way to give. We accept Cryptocurrency, you know, and there’s something resonates with somebody then they’ll say, oh, crypto, crypto, oh, I have a donor advice fund. So, you know, you don’t need to know, you know, just like you don’t need to know someone’s wealth necessarily to ask for a gift. You can look at their giving history and you can just promote, promote it in the same breath that you’re promoting stocks and stocks and donor advised funds. And we accept, we accept crypto as well. 100%. No, you nailed it and it, it’s helpful to know. It’s nice to know. And even then it’s a lot less complicated. People think leave cryptos up a lot in a particular year. And you have these donors who gave crypto the last year, like my version of stewardship is like, we just email donors and we’re like, hey, cryptos up a lot like you feeling generous and if crypto is down a lot, sometimes we’re like, hey, we know crypto is down a lot. Like we’re not gonna ask you for money right now because it’s the way you like to give. But maybe you could introduce us to some friends or run a fundraising for us, maybe some like, like maybe there’s other kind of crypto things we could be doing. Like it’s helpful as an indicator, but it’s to your point, it’s not necessary you can just open up the options. And I guess the last thing I’ll say is that if you’re trying to get them to come out of the woodwork. A match is so powerful for all these giving options. I, until we started this company, like it’s, it was seven years ago and still throughout this period, I’ve never found a nonprofit who independent of us did a crypto specific match, a stock specific match. A da A specific match. And das was always the one that blew my mind the most. I’m like, there’s $260 billion sitting in accounts earmarked for charity. It’s the only money these donors have that they can’t spend anywhere else. It’s already sitting in, it can only ever go to a charity and what they’ll probably do, especially if they’re in their thirties or forties, they’ll let it sit there for decades and they’ll add it to an estate plan eventually. Like there’s no urgency they got the taxes out of when they parked it there. So how do you get the money out? Like if a donor gave me 25 grand tomorrow, I go. Can I use this as a match? They always say yes, you’re like, yeah, but why not help you fund raise? And I would just put an email out and be like if you have a DA account will match the next 25 grand in given. And I wanna know who in my donor base, who has the debt, how much will they send? And once I get 1000 bucks for someone who has one of those like now when I’m steering that donor, like how much money do they have in that account? Can we block it in as a commitment to us? Like, you wouldn’t even have that conversation without prompting it? So, in short matching the specific giving options occasionally, especially with the targeted email to particular high value donors, let’s say really nice way to get people coming out of the woodwork in addition to just sprinkling it in as a passive option. Let’s talk a little about something you you mentioned in passing like to flush it out a bit. Uh mining energy consumption. Uh The popular press uh explains that uh these, these mining operations can be very energy intensive. Let’s uh can you flush that out? I don’t know if you can reassure folks, but at least explain what it is. We’re explain what it is that I’m talking about. I’m explain, explain, explain to the listeners what I’m talking about because I don’t, I don’t fully understand it, but I know there’s a lot of energy behind all these calculations and proofs and they have uh they have an energy, they have an impact on our energy infrastructure. No, 100%. So there’s like there’s warehouses with these computers, like thousands of them sometimes and they’re like running these computers that are trying to solve um these proofs to authorize transactions um for a network like Bitcoin in particular, like it requires the most they use crypt or cryptographic proof of work is what it’s called. And there’s a lot of value in it that other types of um networks don’t have in terms of like the utmost security and traceability and everything. Like it’s, it does a lot of really powerful things, but it uses more energy than it should. However, it’s exponentially less than is reported. Um because a weird thing happened, like the, the media more or less than it came from a Columbia research thing that was like quickly debunked, but no one seemed to care. Um They confuse what’s called a block with a transaction. So we talked about it earlier. You could have one transaction like one Bitcoin transaction that goes out to the network. And if it was the only one, that’s all that would be in one of those blocks on a Blockchain. So once uh once the system gets a block, then the computers all fight to try to figure it out as fast as possible and it cracks the code. But when there’s a lot of transactions happening in each of these blocks, there’s usually between like 1000 and 2500, they took a number like the amount of dollars per Bitcoin transaction. And I think they said it’s like 100 and 5 to 100 and $35 worth of energy per transaction. One, if that were the case, no one would do it. Obviously, just everyone would be losing a ton of money all. Like it just mathematically, people should have seen that number. But like, well, that’s impossible. Obviously, people wouldn’t spend more than what they’re sending hundreds of thousands of times a day. Like, it’s just not a thing. Um But you, when, once you divide it down, it’s like a few sets of transaction for the most energy intensive. So like Bitcoin and a zillion zeros and ultimately a decimal like fractions of a cent for every other Cryptocurrency that uses proof of work with these more efficient systems. So even at that scale, it’s a ton of energy for something like Bitcoin and people are always trying to find ways to make it more efficient. Um but it’s exponentially less than what’s reported. And I think it’s inarguable that Bitcoin is still more efficient than the traditional financial system. Like no one runs numbers saying like, well, if we want to use banks, like we said, we have infinite skyscrapers and commuters and like lawyer, like there’s just an infinite amount of waste and energy and like little sheets of plastic getting dumped into landfills to like make traditional finance work. Like the Bitcoin ecosystem is not nearly as significant as I feel like people reported on. Um However, it’s definitely the least energy efficient of the cryptocurrencies and it’s like, it’s a good thing that people are like, let’s make it a lot more efficient because it’s using more energy than it should over time. I’m just kind of like you said about the postal service. I’m betting on Cryptocurrency even something like Bitcoin over the next five years in particular to become exponentially more efficient. In the same way, I would bet on emails over time being a less energy intensive way to move mail than like the post office. Like, just having code versus infinite, like actual physical infrastructure and commuting. Like, it just, it’s a better bet from an ecological standpoint even though it started off, I think, pretty inefficient. OK. And, and that’s where a lot of the press came from. All right. Plus this, plus this misunderstanding that you said was debunked. But you know, the that rarely sees, sees a lot. It gets anywhere near the number of eyes as the original reporting does. OK? All right. Um What, what proportion of all the crypto transactions is Bitcoin? Is it, is it an enormous proportion? Is it, is it, is it as outsized as it seems uh to, to AAA non crypto investor or, or do you know what? It’s a great question. I don’t know if there are more versus all of the other cryptocurrencies out of all the transactions as the denominator. How many are, are Bitcoin in the numerator? I’d have to look usually not a lot. So what’s interesting is a lot of people because um Bitcoin requires more energy like this is what happens, right? It requires more energy to send a Bitcoin transaction. It costs more to the users. Um They tend to move their funds using different networks. Um So even people have like Ethereum, which is more efficient than um Bitcoin. It gets kind of technologically. It’s, it’s, it’s not extraordinarily complicated. But what happens is like, you can take a Cryptocurrency like Ethereum and you can what’s called rapid. So you can have a asset that’s sitting on a different chain. So like, let’s call it solana totally different Cryptocurrency. Um You can have a asset sitting on the Salana chain that’s just pegged to the value of Ethereum. But you can move it across their network at which point you can then move it back on to like a the, you cash out the salon and you exchange it for a theorem. So people do that kind of stuff all the time, um where they’ll move Ethereum or they’ll move Bitcoin or other assets, but they’re moving it across other chains that use less energy because it saves everybody money. So I’d have to see the actual number. I think it’s a Bitcoin is, I think more than half the total crypto market cap. But I’d be shocked if it was more than like 10% of the overall network activity. Like I think a lot of people tend to move value on some of these newer cryptos that, that got a bit more efficient. But in terms of the total value, it, it’s, you’re saying a little more than half yeah, a lot of people park it, they treat it like a lot of people call it digital gold. Um It’s the least um the least volatile versus some of these other cryptos that just have smaller user bases and more kind of uh speculation on it. Um So a lot of people will kind of invest in other cryptocurrencies and they rotate back into Bitcoin in the same way. Some people rotate back into like cash or gold uh store value type thing. It’s valuable. You make all these analogies to the, the traditional, you know, the longest established um stores of value methods of exchange. No, because I think it’s comforting for folks. You know, it’s, it’s just like, you know, you promote stock gifts. You, you accepted, you decided to accept credit cards 40 years ago, et cetera, right? You know, there’s, there’s value in these analogies that are based on known understood uh exchanges of value. Oh, definitely. I mean, I wouldn’t understand. I have a political science degree. And the other guy that I found the company with was the crypto guy. Like he got me into it and like it took a lot of these types of analogies for me because I was like, it’s sounds like vaporware, it’s backed by nothing. It’s just like code based money. Like I don’t. And then he was like, no, it’s the double spend problem. It’s like, wait, this is the only kind of money you can’t counterfeit. He was like, yeah, I’m like, that’s very valuable. That’s interesting. And you can’t make more of it. Yeah. So it’s like, cool. But you could actually move it like you can move it like, instantly anywhere, like, yeah, and then you can write code that moves it around and it’s all, like I say, yeah, I’m like, this is ok, I get it. This is kind of cool. This does a lot of things that nothing else does. He’s like, yeah, that’s why people are buying it. They’re not just dumb. I was like, OK, it makes more sense. I, I, one quick thing on this, I listened to a podcast before starting the company maybe six months before where I’ve gotten into trading crypto at all. And I went on a trip with friends and which, you know, we drank beers and we were at the beach and I talked about 10 people out of ever buying crypto because I listened to this podcast and I was like, backed by nothing. It’s paper and I told everybody about it. Just traditional financial guys I was listening to and then eventually got into it and invested and like, never circled back with some of those people. And then they saw that we had started the company and the stuff we were doing and I tried to like, what the hell dude, why didn’t you tell me to buy this? It’s like quadrupled. And I was like, I was being gen, I wasn’t trying to trick you. I just didn’t get it yet. Not only why didn’t you tell us to buy it? Why did you tell us not to buy it? I was adamant before six months before you co-founded a company based on the, the exact, the exact store of value that you told people to avoid. All right, I needed to do some research. You’re a hypocrite. You’re a hypocrite. All right. All right. Leave us, leave us with some closing thoughts. Pat or, or maybe there’s something we haven’t talked about that. You want folks to know, I’ll throw that out first before closing thoughts. Anything, anything I didn’t ask you, maybe that you want, you want to talk about? Uh I touched on it lightly but it’s a timing thing. So, uh Bitcoin almost hit a new all time high yesterday, like the market’s done really well this year. So in a year where crypto is down, you have significantly less people who have appreciated assets uh to donate for that tax incentive. Like this year is uniquely good for that. Like we’ve had a huge recovery and are looking at new all time highs. Um And then the other piece is the end of year giving for crypto similar to stocks, um is even more extraordinary than um the end of your search we see for things like cash because they’re trying to get up against that end of your tax deadline. So a lot of these transfers happen in November and December. So the main thing is like, if you’re a nonprofit who isn’t taking crypto now is definitely the time to consider it seriously. Um You don’t wanna be like, we’ll look at this in February of next year just from a timing standpoint. Like it’s a really, if you’re at all thinking about it now is the time to like have a conversation and do a bit of research. Uh Just cause like for us, generally speaking, in that end of year window, it’s like 60% of our donation volume um in just a couple of months versus the rest of the year. So it’s a significant um fundraising opportunity. Ok. That’s a good place to wrap, I think because we’ve talked a lot about why do it, what, what the value is? Thank you. All right. This is the, this is the time, it’s the fourth quarter and values are very high. Pat Duffy co-founder of the Giving block at the giving block.com. You’ll find Pat on linkedin. Pat. Thanks for sharing your, your wisdom, your uh your expertise on this and uh your hopefulness. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. This is great pleasure next week, scaling altruism with Donald Summers. If you missed any part of this week’s show, I beseech you find it at Tony martignetti.com. We’re sponsored by donor box, outdated donation forms, blocking your supporters, generosity. Donor box fast flexible and friendly fundraising forms for your nonprofit donor. Box.org. Our creative producer is Claire Meyerhoff. I’m your associate producer, Kate Martignetti. The show social media is by Susan Chavez. Mark Silverman is our web guy and this music is by Scott Stein. Thank you for that affirmation. Scotty be with us next week for nonprofit radio. 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In a lot of ways, we can see typical strategic planning as a flawed process. Veronica LaFemina shares a more collaborative endeavor, with more staff collaboration and stakeholder inputs, resulting in a more actionable plan with greater decision-making value. She’s the CEO of LaFemina & Co.
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And welcome to Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio. Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. I’m your aptly named host and the pod father of your favorite abdominal podcast. Oh, I’m glad you’re with us. I’d be hit with exophoria if I saw that you missed this week’s show. Here’s our associate producer, Kate with what’s coming? Hey, Tony, we’ve got your one page strategic plan in a lot of ways. We see typical strategic planning as a flawed process. Veronica Lahaina shares a more collaborative endeavor with more staff, collaboration and stakeholder inputs resulting in a more actionable plan with greater decision making value. She is CEO of LAFA Mia and company. Finally, we got Veronica La Finna. I’m tired of introducing her when she’s not showing up. She’s here. She’s here on Tony’s Take two Tales from the plane. A new captain’s briefing were sponsored by donor box, outdated donation forms blocking your supporters, generosity, donor box fast, flexible and friendly fundraising forms for your nonprofit donor box.org. Here is your one page strategic plan. It’s a pleasure to welcome Veronica La Finna. She is founder and CEO of La Finna and company working with nonprofits and social impact businesses at the intersection of strategy, change management and strategic communications. She is a strategist facilitator, trusted advisor and certified Change Management professional. With nearly two decades of experience as a senior executive at National US Nonprofits and as a high impact consultant, you’ll find your company at La finna.co and Veronica is on linkedin. Welcome to the show Veronica. Thanks Tony. It’s great to be here. Yeah, it’s a pleasure to talk to you. We uh we chat a lot on linkedin. Uh This is uh this is much better. Yeah, it’s nice to have the chance to chat in person. Absolutely. After we met, uh we had a very nice lunch in uh in uh in Raleigh because you’re in the Raleigh, North Carolina area, right? That’s right. Yeah, it’s great here in the time and it was great to see you as you were passing through. So it’s always great to see other nonprofit folks in North Carolina. Yeah, I love it when, when social media can actually bring us together in person, which doesn’t happen too often. But as I’m traveling, uh it, it doesn’t sometimes does. Yeah, that was, that was a lovely lunch. You’ve got some thinking about a one page strategic plan uh which we have plenty of time to get to the details of. But, you know, let’s start more broadly. What uh what difficulties do you see with strategic planning? What could we be doing better? How do we avoid these things becoming lovely binders on a dusty shelf and that never get looked at again after, after their approval by the board. Yeah, I, so um I’ve been at this a long time and in the beginning of my career when I was doing strategic planning with organizations, um you know, you spend so much time on this beautiful process and you bring people together and over the course of six months, you develop these, these big ideas and these big goals. Um And I saw how much effort and energy and wordsmithing um would go into those plans and then I would see that, you know, it would get back to the organization and it’s crickets, you know, people are confused, they don’t know what’s going on or it just feels like this big pie in the sky Fairy tale and not actually something that we can accomplish as an organization. And so both as a consultant and then when I was working in house as an executive leader, you know, I’m a practitioner, I want stuff that works. Uh And so I started developing new ways of looking at strategy to say, like, how could we be doing this better if this isn’t actually getting us to where we want to go? What do we need to be thinking about? How can we make it easier for the people who work in this organization or the volunteers who are helping do um on the ground work actually accomplish what we’re saying we’re trained to accomplish. Um And so I think, you know, there’s not just one way to do strategic planning, which is a really important recognition. You know, I think a lot of executives in the sector have kind of been doing things in a similar way because that’s how well we were all taught many moments ago. Um But we’re now at this place where the speed of information, like how we get feedback from our communities and how frequently we can get that feedback is much faster than it used to be when we would, you know, convene people once every three years. Um our ability to make different kinds of choices because the technology that may be available to us or our ability to partner with other nonprofits in our community is a bit different. Like we’re not just creating plans for ourselves as organizations, we have to be really mindful of the context and the other partners in the space or others who are working to advance our issue area. Um And we’re not able to be everything to everyone. And so making sure we have a really clear understanding of our own identity as organizations actually makes a big difference then in what we choose to do and the kind of strategy we choose to pursue. So I talk a lot about, you know, the aim is not to build perfect plans, it’s to build strong strategy. And so how can we have a better understanding in our sector of what strategy is and how we use it, um, to achieve the impact we’re looking for, to raise the money we’re looking to raise, to, to bring that, um, impact to life. But how, you know, how can we be? OK, not getting an A plus on the perfect plan process and instead focus on strategy that sticks and it works and gives us the kind of impact we’re looking for. Uh let’s flush out your meaning of strategy because the, the prevailing sentiment and not sent the prevailing professional opinion is this needs to be a binder. It’s gonna be all kinds of tabs about, you know, the five year plan, the 15 year plan, uh the staffing, the, you know, the programs that we’re gonna expand or move into the partnerships that we’re gonna have, you know, this is so to reduce this to a one page actionable strategic initiative plan, it’s still a, it’s still a plan, it just doesn’t have 100 and 75 pages. It’s, it’s reduced to uh to 1, 175th of that. So, so that uh so you’ve, you’ve hit on strategy a couple of times. So what, what, what, what’s your sense of uh strategy? Yeah. So, so at its heart, right? Strategy is a series of interconnected choices about what we will do and what we won’t do to achieve our goals, right? So I sometimes will write that like when I’m doing workshops or presentations as strategy is vision like where we headed plus the decisions that we want to make to get there. Now, that doesn’t mean we have infinitely documented choices or all of the details or task lists in place. What it does mean is that we have enough information, agreed to and documented so that we can keep applying that strategy when new opportunities arise. So, you know, often what happens with those long documents is they become a task list instead of a way of understanding how we work in the world, right? It’s a good strategy, you know, and I, I will also say um the main audience for your strategic plan is your staff, right? Or the people who are doing the on the ground work in the organization and that’s a little bit different, you know, we tend to or in the past, we wrote plans with our funders in mind and with these other, you know, audiences in mind. And that’s great if we want to inspire funders or get people excited and behind our cause. But if our staff doesn’t know what that strategy means or how to execute it, um if it doesn’t make sense to them, then it’s not gonna happen. So we’ve just kind of sold a false dream of where we’re headed. Um So being able to instead really document key choices about who we are, who we serve, where we’re headed what we’re gonna focus on to get there and what it will look like when that success happens, it gives us the flexibility then to make great choices when new opportunities or challenges arise, that we might not have been anticipating. And I think a lot of organizations if you look at um at the COVID pandemic, right, at this moment where there’s a lot of clarity about how much we can’t predict about what comes next, right? None of us is a fortune teller. We don’t have crystal ball. Um And you know, certainly if I did as a strategist, that would be wonderful for me because I could tell organizations do exactly this and that’ll work for you. Um But it became clear that we needed to better understand what is our way of doing this and of making the impact we want in the world. Instead of here is a list of all the programs and, and tasks we do as an organization. So are you describing a process that’s more staff driven or at least staff pa participating more? Because II I to go back to the, the prevailing way of doing this is more like at the board level, at the C suite and board level. Yeah, I’m, I’m a huge advocate for staff being quite involved in strategy development for a couple of reasons. One is staff are living this every day. They’re seeing what’s working and what’s not working. They, they have the real time feedback from the community or the people you serve. And so their uh the internal wisdom of the organization is really important. You know, our board members play such an important role in governance and in enabling um the success of the organization in a number of ways. But most of them have day jobs or have other things that they’re experts in and focused on. And so to ask them to be responsible to make choices that will drive the operations and way of working of the organization is not super fair to them as board members, you know, they need to be involved in the process, but we should be involving staff and their expertise um from the beginning. Um I’m also an advocate of the fact that um sometimes when we go out and gather input from our community, we are doing it with good intention, but we are not necessarily honoring our community’s time, right? So we’ll go out and we’ll do like a big survey or, or deep dive with them on all of the things that they need or hope for or would love to see change in the world. And we as an individual nonprofit may only touch a tiny percentage of that, an important one, but a tiny thing. And so when we’ve asked them to spend all this time with us, sharing everything they need, and then we come back to them when the plan is fully baked later saying we’re only addressing this one little thing and we we it’s a mismatch of expectations and reality. So I think there’s opportunity in our strategic cleaning processes to start with our internal wisdom. Like what do we already know? What do we know about ourselves? Our strengths, our role that we play in this issue and use that to put together some informed hypotheses about where we think we should be focusing over the next several years and then go take that out to folks and talk to them about it to say, what do you think about this? Does this make sense to you? What are we missing? What are we getting wrong? But giving our community the chance to engage with us in a process where we’re setting more realistic expectations about where we can play and contribute as an organization. But also then giving them more say in, yeah, we’re, we’re on board for that. That makes sense. That will actually help us, right? That’s something that we’re looking for or listen. I know you guys want to do this, but that’s no one cares about that, right? What we need instead is this and that gives us more useful uh feedback so that we’re valuing people’s time and their ideas and insights in a way that we may not be able to do or haven’t necessarily been doing in how we’ve been doing that process previously. It’s time for a break. Imagine a fundraising partner that not only helps you raise more money but also supports you in retaining your donors. A partner that helps you raise funds both online and on location. So you can grow your impact faster. That’s Donor box, a comprehensive suite of tools, services and resources that gives fundraisers, just like you a custom solution to tackle your unique challenges, helping you achieve the growth and sustainability your organization needs, helping you help others visit donor box.org to learn more. Now, back to your one page strategic plan. You said the audience for this is primarily the staff, the people doing the work. They’re clearly they’re contributing a lot to the, to this process, to this plan. They’re in the process developing the plan. Um What, what is the role of the board then? Because we’re, we’re shifting from what again, I’m going back to the typical, you know, there’s a weekend uh board retreat and board members spend as much of their time as they can at this retreat. It might be off site even uh to try to get people’s attention and, and keep them away from distractions. You know, we’re gonna do this two night thing or, or it’s on or, or we’re in the office and you come as you can and the people miss miss the introductory section, but then they come to the, the fundraising part, you know, it’s so, I don’t think it’s ideal, but that’s the, that’s, that’s the, the most popular way of doing this. Right. The board bangs something out in over two days. Uh, what, what is the board’s role in, in the way you, you work? Um, so I’m going to answer that question. But isn’t that wild Tony that we, that, that’s the prevailing process, right? We spend two days determining our future for the next 3 to 5. I have a couple, a couple of, a couple of outside speakers, but it’s, and maybe a fil a hired facilitator. Um But yeah, you know, and, and it’s, it’s, I don’t, I don’t think it’s a very informed process, uh because you’re talking about community, you know, community input, you know, so they might get, there might be a speaker, maybe, maybe a 45 or 60 minutes speaker comes from the community. I don’t know somebody on the town council or maybe it’s uh an agency head that works in the area that your nonprofit works. But, you know, we’re, we’re kind of, we’re, we’re like, we’re assimilating all this stuff and then we have to think about how to pay for it as well for the next 10 years it seems, or even just five years, I’ll be, I’ll be even, I’ll be fairer to this typical process. It’s only 55 year plan, but still, you know, like we’re banging this out over a weekend. I, I just don’t think companies, you know, companies work this way. I mean, they spend a lot more time thinking about the next five years than two days of, you know, join us whenever you can over the weekend. Yeah. I mean, it’s just, it’s, and so that’s part of why, um, it’s a partnership, right. So, so I’m not saying the board is not involved. The board is very important, right? They need to be, they have governance responsibility. They need to be excited and for it and behind what we’re doing, but it’s a partnership. So retreats shouldn’t just be board members right there. I listen, I still facilitate retreats where it’s primarily board, but I really encourage organizations that we at least need the staff leadership on board. So if you’re a smaller organization, that might be everyone on staff, if you’re a large organization that might be department heads or division leaders. Um But we need those leaders involved and able to correct misconceptions which come up often, right? In these conversations, um We need them available to talk about what’s working, what are our most effective ways of achieving the impact that we wanted to achieve thus far? Um But also what are we really good at, you know, part of, you know, you brought up like corporate strategy. So in a corporate environment, you don’t see strategy um come to fruition where we’re building something that we are not at all equipped to do, right? So in, in a sense of um like an organization that or a company that is in tech, for example, right? They’re continuing to build on their core capabilities and say how can we keep leveraging these core capabilities with new innovations to build a new product line or create a new service line? Right? They’re not like all of a sudden gonna go into agricultural production, right? Like like but in nonprofit world, we because we are are, you know, givers because we’re trying to take care of the whole humans, right? That are um part of our community that are part of, you know, the issue or disease area that we serve. We sometimes start creating programs that have no overlap in operational efficiency or in our strengths. You know, we, we put out stuff that is an aspirational, that we’re actually not well equipped to run. And so then we keep make like all of our investment financially, then it starts getting thinner and thinner because we’re having to fund all these different kinds of operations instead of really understanding, hey, what are the skill sets or capabilities or operations we’re great at? And how can we keep using those leveraging those building on those to deliver better services or better value or better, better advocacy, whatever our mission may be for the people who are, are cause we serve. And so that’s why that staff board partnership is really important because staff leadership can say here’s actually what we’re really good at, you know, the things that we do better than anyone else, the things we’re able to deliver efficiently or effectively. Um And that we think there’s opportunity to grow. Um staff are also really essential. Um There’s an exercise I do in strategic planning that I think it’s a big gap um that we have in the sector right now, which is I ask leaders, you know, what it could be, executives, could be, board members could be both together to really think about what is our organization’s role in the cause we serve in the issue area. Um And often what happens is we come up with a list of 25 different roles. It’s really hard to be 25 different things really well. And so I ask organizations and leaders to think about what are our three main roles that we play. And the reason that’s important is because who we are shapes, the choices we make about how we’re going to get to our goals. And when we, I I sometimes use a transportation analogy to talk about it, which is to say like if you, if your goal is you’ve got to get from Washington DC to San Diego in the next two days, there are lots of ways to make that happen, right? Not, not infinite possibilities, but lots of different choices. You could make plans for how to get there. You could, you know, hitchhike, you could, you could fly, you could take a bus, you could do a lot of different things. But what will help you make the decision about which route to take is knowing. Are you, do you happen to be a commercial pilot with access to a plane and you can get people there quickly that way? Do you happen to be a bus driver with intimate knowledge of all the routes and the best places to stop? Right. And that’ll get you there. Do you happen to be neither of those things but resourceful and know which partners can help you along the way? Um Because a pilot can drive a bus, but they’re not going to know all the bus routes, right? And a bus driver might be able to get a plane down the runway but not up in the air. And so knowing those roles that we play has a big impact, right, on the choices we make about how we’re gonna get to where we go. I can see how staff are, are important to uh you mentioned, you know, clear up misconceptions on the board. You know, I can imagine a board thinking, well, we do this so to, to provide this additional program or service, it should be very simple, you know, they’re, they’re so close and then you find the the staff member who says no, that they’re actually as much as your intuition may lead you to believe that they’re so close and this would be so easy, you know, we can’t, we can, your intuition is not, is not, right. And to do that means bringing in, I don’t know, additional funds or a new person or, you know what you’re, you’re making a, you, you’re making an incorrect uh assumption about how easy it would be for us to expand what you think is slightly. So these misconceptions, you know, that, that um that even, even the, even the senior leadership may not appreciate but the people doing the work or the people leading the teams doing the work, you know, to them, it’s it comes, it comes instantly to mind, right? And that’s not to say we don’t want to be bold or ambitious, right? We still want to share that vision of what’s possible. We need smart choices, we need to be realistic too about what this conversation, you know, if the conversation is going awry about how simple it would be to do. Uh b because it looks so closely related to a to all the people who don’t do the work of a, you know, then we need to straighten out the conversation and lead it the right way just so, you know, that you’re understanding, well, that means an additional staff person actually because we don’t have anybody skilled in what you’re now talking about. So that is roughly an $80,000 a year job plus 30% for benefits. So we’re now talking about fundraising for roughly 100 and 20 100 and 10, 100 and $20,000 that we don’t currently fundraise for. So, and we made that expectancy from a program like that for 3 to 5 years because we need to build it and make sure we have the right partnerships and resources in place. So it’s the the operations have to inform the strategy, it can’t be done separately. You know, I think sometimes something that happens often is um strategy gets confused for new, right? So what are the new ideas? What are the new things we’re going to do instead of recognizing that strategy is about being really good at getting to where we wanna go accomplishing our goals. And so, you know, when you think about companies that have been placed and in place for a long time, organizations have been in place for a long time. And it’s very clear like this is what they do at their core, they haven’t stopped doing the thing they’re great at, that’s still the base of everything, you know, but they may innovate, they may expand, they may choose a new direction to learn in. Um But they’re not abandoning the stuff before. And so sometimes when strategic plans focus so much on what’s new and leave out, you know, the core aspects of the work, then we have even a bigger divide right between, how are we supposed to accomplish all this when we don’t, you know, we’re, we’re still trying to accomplish this main thing we’re known for or best at or most capable of. And so I find that bringing those bringing staff and board together do a lot to help us have shared expectations, instead of really divergent expectations about where we’re all trying to head together and the kind of impact we want to have, it’s very collaborative uh versus being top down. Um You, you have three critical components to strategy that you think you see most nonprofits. Miss, let’s talk about these. What are these? So if you think about again, sort of the the general process, right, with traditional strategic planning and what we produce at the end of it, right? We end up with our mission vision values, we end up with our goals and the strategy is to achieve those, we might have specific objectives within um that, that align with those strategies and then the tactics um we may have also thought about the budget it takes to get that done. Um But there are, I find are a couple of key areas in there where some additional important detail can really make a big difference in us, not just having a, a big long task list, but instead a way of understanding how we’re going to work and being able to apply those decisions going forward. So the first is when we think about who we are, right, that’s typically expressed as mission vision values that we, we talked about this a little bit already, but knowing our role and stating it clearly is so important and like sometimes organizations will say they want to get really inspirational here, right? They’ll use language that is, that feels really good to say and feels really good to hear. But then when our staff member has to make a choice about an opportunity that comes across their desk and say, is this a fit for us that inspirational role is not as helpful as something concrete? Right? And so, um there are lots of different roles we can play as organizations, but knowing that we are an advocate and convenor rather than a direct service provider, uh is a big difference then, and what kinds of programs we’ll undertake in the way that we’re hoping to change the world? Um So that’s the first one is having a clear understanding of our role in our mission area and the issue or cause or community we serve um or in the lives of our constituents. The second is, you know, we set these big audacious goals. Um And again, if we’re, if we’re doing well, we have financial goals as part of that. Um But there are two areas that we don’t always define that I think are really helpful for a lot of organizations. So one is um being explicit about the investments that we are intending to make. So if we need to, um if, if we need to hit a certain financial target, if we’re going to introduce, you know, some new programs or some new focus areas. Um or we want to be building skills or capability in a certain area. We’re going to need to make investments and it’s not just, hey, we need a new CRM, it’s we need a new CRM and we also need the training and ability to help our team get great at using it, right. So being really thoughtful about articulating what the key investments are to make our overarching strategy possible. Um The other part up there too, um It is what do we want to learn? I find a lot of organizations spend a long time, not entirely knowing what works and what doesn’t work with what they’re doing. So they may have programs that have been running for a long time and they serve a certain number of people and we, you know, get our, our output metrics from them each year, but we’re not entirely certain which parts of them may or may not be working. And so when we know what works, that’s great. And we want to document that when we can identify stuff that we’re pretty sure isn’t working and we want to leave behind that’s good too. But usually there’s this gray area of like what we’re not sure about, right. And so being able to set some learning objectives so that we can gain more clarity on those is important. So those might be related to um we want to learn if the way that we’re delivering this program is um is as effective or more effective. You know, like, let’s say we’re launching a digital component. We want to learn if that works better than how we’ve been delivering this in person in the past. Or we want to understand um if this technology or marketing approach or fundraising approach is helping us get to our goal faster than an alternative, something along those lines. But just being clear about a, we do need to keep learning these things. And b what is it, we were specifically are going to try to learn, understand, get more clarity on over the course of this, this plan. Um And then the last area, you know, is like how we’re going to get there, how do we get to these objectives? What are we focusing on? And so um with those focus areas, um it’s important to, to find owners, right? So sometimes what happens is as an organization here are three pillars and we’re gonna put an equal number of initiatives or priorities in each of them. And then we go on to the list of tactics and things along those lines. Um I encourage organizations instead to think about what are we focusing on over the next few years. Um And doing a brief narrative description of that. So we can have more clarity instead of just like a one word pillar um and defining, you know, so who’s the lead on this and it could be, if we are an organization where we have pretty tenured staff, it could be a specific person or it could be a department um or area of the organization because again, opportunities and challenges will come up and someone will need to be the decision maker or have ownership over how will we need to adjust as things come up over the next few years? So being able to say yes, everyone’s contributing and working towards these focus areas. But this is the person or the department that has um a the accountability to move this forward. But b also the opportunity to make decisions when those decisions you make. Um And so that creates a sense of ownership and accountability and momentum that sometimes gets lost from like the energy of announcing a new plan to then putting it into practice. It’s time for Tony’s sake to thank you, Kate. There’s a new captain’s briefing that I’ve been seeing at the beginning of uh some flights that I’ve taken. And I wanna thank and uh congratulate and shout out these, these captains who have done it. I usually fly Delta because I’m near two small airports. And most of the flights from those two tiny airports are are Delta flights. Uh And these captains have been, this is tails from the plane, by the way, I hope, you know, this is not tails, it doesn’t sound like tails from the gym, right? This is tails from the plane. I forgot to say that these captains have been getting out of their captain seat and coming out of the cockpit and they face us, they’re looking at us from the galley. That’s, you know, uh, the front galley and you can see them as they’re saying, you know, we’ll be cruising at 35,000 ft and might have a little turbulence on the climb out. But, uh, you know, it should be smooth after that and uh, et cetera an hour and 25 minute flight. You know, that briefing, I like seeing the captain. It’s just uh a little bit more reassuring. I, I mean, I, I know they exist because I hear them in the average briefing, but in these ex extra special briefings, uh you know, you get, you get to see the person, you get to see the person who’s flying, you who’s in the, who’s in that left seat, that captain seat. It’s, uh, it’s just comforting. I find very comforting. So I, I did let Delta know on uh X Twitter that uh, I appreciate it. Uh And um I’m sharing it with you. So let Bravo. Bravo to the captains who get up out of their chair and come and look at us, look at us in the eye and give us their captain’s overview. Thank you very much. And that is Tonys take two K. I would like to, I mean, when we fly, when you and I take my first time to go flying. I know that they do that because I would like to know who’s, uh, I was about to say, driving the plane, whoever is flying the plane, like you said, I think that adds more comfort and see it’s reassuring. We’ll, we’ll get you up there. Yeah, just so, it’s not like, I think my fear. Have you seen the, um, the cars that drive themselves? Like the no driver cars? Yeah, I’ve seen those prototypes. Yeah. My fear is like, that’s gonna be our future with like airplanes and all that and it, like, freaks me out that it’s gonna be like A I cars and A I airplane. Yeah, I can see it on cars. I don’t know about airplanes. I, I think that’s a, that’s a, that’s a bridge too far. I don’t think anybody is gonna be comfortable with an, with an nonhuman piloted, uh, uh, air flight. I don’t think so. I think that’ll be going too far. Well, we’ve got vu about those more time. Here’s the rest of your one page strategic plan with Veronica La Finna. I, I, I’m distilling these, I think down to what, what’s our role, mission vision values? What, what do we use? This, this relates to the list of 25 where we need to call that down to two or three things that we do best our role. Um, what do we want to learn and what investments do we need to make and a what do we want to achieve? How are we going to achieve it and who’s responsible, who’s accountable? Ok. Ok. And you know, if you want more detail than that, just rewind and listen to Veronica explain for the past uh several minutes. But I’m just trying to, I’m just calling down to our, to our three. Ok. Um, I, I’m, I’m not here suggesting now that this is something that most organizations miss and, you know, like you should make it four, not go from 3 to 4. But, um, do, does fundraising, you know, the, uh, the funding that’s gonna be necessary. I mean, it sounds like it’s built into the three, I think. I, I think you, you, you talked about investments but, you know, do we need to increase our fundraising staff or, you know, we, we don’t want to just say, ok, well, the development team, uh, they’re gonna be responsible for a new, uh, 100 and $75,000 that they’re not now raising, but they’ll just, uh, have to do more with less or, you know, the, they’ll just have to find, find the extra $175,000 for us to achieve that, that we’re gonna need to achieve what we just, what we just laid out. I mean, how, how does funding all? Yeah, so, so in the goals we set, you know, we should have meaningful financial targets, right? So that might be revenue, it could be revenue pertaining to a specific area that we’re trying to grow. So, you know, it could be, hey, we really a key investment we’re making is in plan giving and we are expecting at, you know, whatever time in the future for that to pay off or, but in the meantime, maybe there’s another area. So yes, that’s definitely part of our targets, right? Is what kind of um financial situation we need to achieve to be able to do this work, but also in the focus areas, right? So three or four focus areas um I prefer that to pillars because pillars sometimes get stuck around programmatic work. Also pillars that give you this um like this feeling that they all need to be the same height and they’re static, right? That we need it, they all require equal investment or care. And that’s just not true in how we work as organizations. So um I always say that at least one of your focus areas should be on operational um or culture work, right? So that is exactly what you’re talking about with. We may need to hire more people, right? So if we’re going to achieve this, we may need to hire more fundraisers or we may need to recognize that this is a build over time where we will need to be bringing in funding so that we can hire more program staff and fundraisers and marketers and whoever else we need to get that done. Um I think that, you know, some people are like, well, the operational plan is different from the strategic plan. But again, uh the strategy is not useful if it can’t be operationalized. And so making sure that that focus on operational or fundraising or, or strategy or sorry, operational fundraising um or culture work is seen in that same level of prominence and priority that our program focus is um is really important to having a successful and sustainable organization. How does the process go, you know, logistically uh when you know, how many meetings do staff and board have together, do you try to condense it into, you know, AAA month long process or does it take longer? And there are iterations as we learn more about, you know, where, where we want to go uh as we make decisions about what, what, what our, what our three key roles are. How does the, yeah, just logistically, how does the process go? It’s different for every organization I’ll say. So, um some of it depends on what resources you have available, what time you actually have available to get it done again as a practitioner. I’m like, what’s going to actually work, right? So it’s not about um a perfect process, but it is about what, what do we need to make this happen? And so sometimes for smaller organizations, um the process looks like me doing a workshop with their board and staff and teaching them about this process and how it works and then they’ll go back right and do a draft and then we’ll come back together and look through it and talk about it and, and uh see where we might need to improve and keep going, then they might go to their community and get feedback and go. So it is more of an innovative process, right? We’re not trying to present this big perfect thing. We are trying to say, how can we bring people along in the process but do it in a way where they’re active contributors to the end product um for other organizations that might need a more extensive um time to get feedback from their community or key stakeholders. Um It, you know, we’ll start in the beginning again with like um some work around. Let’s get our, let’s get what we know on paper, right? Like, let’s not start from scratch, let’s talk about what’s been working, let’s talk about, you know, things that we may need to change or keep the same. So some organizations are, are set with their vision and mission and their values, you know, we might spend some time saying does this still feel true? Is there anything we need to update or make um more meaningful or understandable to people? But then we’ll often spend time on. OK, what’s our role and what are the things we do best and how does that shape our work so that we’re starting to document what we already know. Um So that we can then start to say, where do we need the most feedback? Where is it that we’re not sure? Or we could really use um some different kinds of perspective in this? And so that may mean that next, we’re going to um talk to a broader group of staff, if it’s a larger organization, right, we need more impact, input and feedback beyond kind of maybe the initial planning committee group that involves staff and board members um that might then give us some ideas about how to revise and then we may take that to these stakeholders or to members of our patient community or cause community and, and have facilitated conversations with them about, you know, here’s, here’s who we are, here’s what we’re thinking as we look to the next several years, but we want we need to hear from you to make sure that makes sense and that’s the kind of, you know, service or program or support that you’re looking for and expecting from us. Um And then being OK if they say actually none of that, right, we have to be, we have to be OK being vulnerable a little bit and, and coming to them and saying like this is a work in progress. Here’s where our thoughts are so far, but what will make it better and stronger and the kind of thing that can drive real impact is your, your insights and your input. And so it becomes an iterative process. That then means we can also say, ok, here’s the plan. But if we have to be flexible or revise or adjust, we’ve already started this kind of iterative conversation and connected conversation with our community and our key stakeholders where they’re in on it with us, right? They’re part of what’s going on. And that means that we have a, a better, more meaningful strategy, right? That actually is likely to lead to results and we’ve brought people along the way. So we’re garnering support, you know, from the people we serve, but also the people who power our organization, you know, either with volunteer hours or their funding um or in their connections to other kinds of funding streams as well. I think you’re a very patient practitioner, you must be just the way you describe it, but also the, the process that, that you help nonprofits through. Uh Yeah, I just see, I, I just hear a lot of patience. Well, thanks. I, I hope so. I think too it comes from change management work, right? Which is we don’t just say here’s the plan and all of a sudden we flip a switch and it happens, you know, people, any change requires us to go through a process of letting go of what came before and being ready to begin and accept what’s new. And so if we design strategy or plans that are built with humans and mind, we’re more likely to go farther with impact over time because we’re actually designing it for the people who are going to power this thing instead of designing it for one big pr moment, right? Or one big round of talking to our major donors that then we are not able to deliver results because we didn’t build it in a way that we could actually do it. Yeah, actionable again. Um All right. So we come together through this process which does sound iterative and learning and being vulnerable along the way. Um How strict are you on the uh the one page limit? I suppose we need a page and a half. Is that all right? Is that, is that OK? Well, I mean, I even like I already expanded the margins out to like half an inch, you know, on all four sides and I still can’t fit it on, we still can’t fit it into one page. Um You’re flexible on the one page a little bit. I am, I think, I think a one page template and approach is valuable in helping us like have the behavior of making choices, right? Because sometimes what happens is, oh, well, we’ll do all of it, but we only need three pillars. So let’s shoehorn these things together that don’t make sense together, right? The the aim is like there are trade offs, there are things you are not going to do. And so the point is, you know, not to have a gimmick in one page, but to put ourselves through the exercise of, if we really had to boil it down to what’s most important, you know, and, and when I was an in house leader and on all the teams I’ve ever led a big part of my philosophy is permission to focus. I think if we enable ourselves to focus, especially in a time when there’s so much that could pull your attention to new or shiny or different. But when we enable ourselves to focus, that means we practice and we get better and we keep delivering impact because we’re staying, you know, we’re kind of staying here instead of trying to spread all of our energy out all over the place. And so, um so when it comes to one page, right? It’s the, it’s the exercise of choosing, you know, and can we look at what’s on there and say that we’ve left something out. That’s, that’s another part of the exercise is to say. So, in looking at all this, what does it mean? We don’t do? And a lot of organizations that’s hard to define or sometimes it’s really small and that’s OK, you know, like I had a client that was a um a really impressive animal welfare organization. They’re doing incredible work that is modeling, you know, um approaches across the country and they get asked pretty often to bring an adaptable pet to elementary schools for presentations, right? And one of the things that they were able to say we don’t do is that’s some, that’s not something we do. You know, we are trying to change policy across the country by modeling what it looks like in real life. Um So elementary school students, while we love that they care about animals, they’re not one of our key audiences. That’s not the way we’re trying to change the world. Um And so it can seem small, but actually it saved them so much staff, time and energy. They had, you know, standard email response for how they handle those requests. And so it saved, you know, a lot of just time and staff being away for that and having to make the plans to do it in a safe way. Um But also just the mindset and energy of being, being given permission to say like I can say no to this because I’m focusing on these other things. Permission. Yeah, permission to focus when you say permission to focus, I think of institutional discipline. Uh But I’m not trying to co op, I’m not co op, I’m not trying to replace your, your, your thinking. But it’s a, it’s a, it’s discipline. It, it’s, it’s a, it’s a discipline but it’s a f it’s a focus. It’s, I’m just using a different phrase, same thing, same. Um But yeah, and, and to not. And that’s a tough one too because you don’t want to appear heartless to elementary school Children. How come you’re not helping the Children in our community? You know, they want, they want to relate closer to, to, to animals around them. And how can you not help our, our school Children? So it’s very, I mean, but it’s, and that’s, that takes an emotional toll, right? And in our sector, so many people who work in the nonprofit and social impact space, we want to say yes, we want this to be like a beautiful world where where everyone is getting their needs taken care of. And so it’s not always easy to say no, right? And, and it, it could be a situation like that. It could be a situation for staff members where like a director from a different department all of a sudden has a new idea and is excited and wants people to get on board for it and you know, being an organization and a leader, you know, of that department that’s able to say no, like you have my permission to focus and if someone else is asking you to pull focus for something else, like send them to me, let’s talk about it because it needs to, we need to keep staying committed instead of getting really energized by a new idea and feeling like we’ve got to act on it right in that moment, right? We need to spend the time saying, how does this fit into our strategy? Does this align with our role? Is it in line with the investments we intended to make? Does it connect with the focus areas we’re trying to drive forward? And if the answer is yes, then it becomes. So what else do we need to stop doing then so that we can create the capacity to make it possible? As you said, permission to focus. Where else do you want to go? What, what else do you want to talk about this uh this process that I haven’t asked you about? I think I just would put it out there for folks that um different organizations need different approaches to strategy and strategic planning. So there are organizations that very comprehensive processes involving, you know, broad community input. Um And you know, could be a year 18 months in the making that that’s the right choice for them again, based on their mission based on where they’re headed and based on how they interact with other nonprofits or government agencies in their area. So I am not telling you to throw out processes that work for your organization. What I am saying is that um if, if your strategic plan is coming up, you know, it’s expiring and you’re getting ready to start something new, asking yourself what you need most for your team to be able to drive impact, right? And for you to be able to speak clearly to funders and stakeholders and supporters about what you do as an organization. Um you can be open to these other ways of working. You know, they, it doesn’t need to be just the same taxing expensive process of putting together a plan that then sits on a shelf. So it’s, it’s more um I hope, inspiration and hope for um nonprofit executives that there are other ways of doing this, right? And there are ways that can be a better fit for your organization. Um And it’s ok to explore that it’s ok to be the person who brings that to your organization so that you do get something that provides value for you and your team that helps you and your board be better connected and aligned. Um You know, having done this process with organizations, uh one of my favorite conversations with a board member afterwards was, you know, we’ve been, we’ve been doing this for 15 years. You know, we all have good relationships, everyone’s working hard, but we knew something wasn’t quite working and how we had done these processes before. She’s like, I can look at this one page and I feel more clear about where we need to be focusing our time and energy than I have in 15 years. And so, you know, knowing too that um everyone, everyone is looking for that clarity and that ability to understand where we headed and where we go, where are we going. Um And so it’s o it’s ok to step into a new way of working. Veronica. La Finna, her company is La Finna and company at La finna.co. I suggest you connect with Veronica on linkedin. We’re connected, we chat a lot. Comment a lot. Thank you very much Veronica. Thank you for uh a new way of approaching the way you’ve been approaching something that uh for a lot of nonprofits just is, is, is not working, is not actionable uh is not helpful in decision making. So, thank you very much for sharing all this. Thanks for having me, Tony next week, accepting Cryptocurrency gifts with Pat Duffy. If you missed any part of this week’s show, I beseech you find it at Tony martignetti.com were sponsored by donor box, outdated donation forms blocking your supporters, generosity, donor box, fast, flexible and friendly fundraising forms for your nonprofit donor. Box.org. Our creative producer is Claire Meyerhoff. I’m your associate producer, Kate Martinetti. The show social media is by Susan Chavez. 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One size fits all rules may not make sense for your board, especially if you’re embracing diversity and equity in board membership. Judy Levine is a longtime board coach, trainer and consultant, and she led Cause Effective for 17 years. She’s now an independent consultant. This originally aired August 15, 2022.
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And welcome to Tony Martignetti nonprofit Radio. Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. I’m your aptly named host and the pod father of your favorite abdominal podcast. Oh, I’m glad you’re with us. I’d suffer the embarrassment of pseudo cholesteatoma if I had to hear that you missed this week’s show. Here’s our associate producer, Kate with what’s up this week? Hey, Tony, we have board members are people too. One size fits all. Rules may not make sense for your board, especially if you’re embracing diversity and equity in board membership. Judy Levine is a longtime board coach trainer and consultant and she led cause effective for 17 years. She is now an independent consultant. This originally aired August 15th, 2022 on Tonys take two tariffs, 101 were sponsored by donor box, outdated donation forms blocking your supporters, generosity, donor box. Fast, flexible and friendly fundraising forms for your nonprofit donor. Box.org here is board members are people too. It’s a pleasure to welcome to nonprofit radio, Judy Levine. She has been executive director of cause effective since 2006 and she has over 30 years experience as a nonprofit management advisor at cause effective since 1993. And as an independent consultant, she has trained and consulted with well over 1000 nonprofits on issues in fund diversification, donor engagement and board and organizational development. Cause effective. Is that cause effective.org Judy? Welcome to nonprofit radio. Thank you. I’m pleased to be here. Pleasure to have you. Uh I’ve had your colleagues through the years. Uh Greg Cohen and Susan Comfort, who I know Susan is completely retired now and Greg is mostly retired now. They’ve been sort of stepping stones to the top now. We have the executive director. Ok. All right. Yeah. Yeah. Here I am. I’m good. My, my apologies, Susan Comfort is someone else. Susan Gabriel is who used to be at uh at cause effective long time and, and Greg Cohen, you’re concerned about uh equity on boards. Uh But at the same time, you know, we’re trying to maintain standards, but we want, we want a diverse board standards, don’t always apply to all the, all the different cultures we’re inviting in, help me, uh set this up. Well, there’s always a fear of the difference, the difference and uh then also a fear of um acting inappropriately around the different and those two fears, um sometimes stop a board from real honest, um, an accurate reflection on what’s at the table and what’s the most appropriate way to support the organization’s mission. Um And especially, you know, ever since the racial reckoning of 2020 the understanding on nonprofits parts that they needed to reckon with their own d eib diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging. Um My sense is that, that, that ha that, that reckoning has happened on a staff level at a different, different pace than it’s happened on the board level. And some of that has to do with fundraising and people’s fear that if they rock the boat, they will not have the fundraising return that they have now. Um And I’m here to say two things. One is that there is plenty of uh salaried capacity in this country for people of color, although not as much, uh not as much wealth accumulation, certainly generational wealth accumulation. And that’s a very real factor. Um So to think that you need to diversify your board, that you need to reach into the client base, which may be true, but is not the only way to diversify your board from the uh the group. It has always been ok. Are those the two? That’s, that’s number one. The other is that yes, you may have to rethink the one size fits all package. And that’s been a mantra in our boards is that everybody has to hold the same standard and that we know that everybody is the same standard and we don’t want double standards or triple standards. Um I’m here to re help people rethink the idea of universal standards versus standards that make sense for where that person is coming from and what they can, what they can actually bring to the table if they do their best. Ok, le let’s take the first of those because there’s, there’s an imp, there’s an assumption there that people of color are not gonna be able to meet our fundraising expectation. So we’re gonna have to, we have to reduce our board giving to invite folks of color in. But that, that, that’s, that’s just unfair and unfair and racist. Um You, you’re not, if you’re not finding these folks and you’re not looking hard enough for people who do have the means uh to, to meet your, to meet your, your board expectation or your board fundraising expectation and, or you’re not looking um at the right messengers and, or you’re not understanding why your cause is going to be a deep personal interest just to a person of color. Um All of those factors have to be there. Um You can’t, you don’t ask anybody on the board, you don’t ask somebody on the board uh of an animal shelter. If they have no connection to animals, they don’t care about animals, you gotta look. Uh So in the same way, you have to understand, let’s put it this way. There are, there are legacy charities, um the Urban League. Um You know, it’s very that, that there are huge fundraising machines, there are people of color that um there’s a sense of the ownership that this is ours. Yeah, that may not be in your board as currently constituted. That needs to be opened up. Yeah, that’s a, that’s a holding on to, that’s a holding on to power and structures and not allowing someone who looks different comes from a different background into our, uh, our playground. Well, and it’s more than not allowing, it’s actually, um, it’s more than just a not doing, it’s something that you have to actually do do, um, is to understand, um, how, who makes decisions? Is there an in group and an out group? Is there a biting one’s time, uh, ethos, um, which doesn’t work well when you invite people of color on and then they have to buy their time and they’re the only ones that are biting their time. And yes, it might be historical that everybody else made their time years back but people are gonna lose, lose, you know, they lose patience. So it means that you have to do much more rapid, um, leadership development on boarding and power sharing. Then your board may be used to. Yeah. All right. II, I don’t, I don’t want to derail what, what, uh, what we were intending to talk about, but I just, I think it’s all of the, well, I mean, I think it’s important to point out the, the, the implicit bias that goes along with this, assuming that you’re gonna have to lower your standards basically. Just assuming you got to lower your standards if you left people of color in and I, I think it’s all of a piece and it’s about who is and who was a guest at the table and board members, all board members need to be owners, not guests. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And yes and not treated like guests. All right. All right. So, one of the things you said is that, um, one size fits all is not, uh, is not gonna be the right model. Not necessarily. So what, what’s, what’s an alternative? So if we’ve got a, we’ve got a, uh, $15,000 annual give, get board requirement. Uh, and, and two thirds of it has to, has to be from your personal, well, your, your personal asset. So $10,000 from you and if you want to either give or get the other 5000, you have an option there, but you have to give at least $10,000 a year. One of the things that I talk about that took me, you know, frankly, you know, a while to understand is the role of generational wealth transfer in people’s capacity to have disposable income. So that, um, you know, uh, oftentimes white people come from, they’re, they’re not necessarily coming from money, money, but they’re coming from a position of, um, comfort. Um, and so they’re not necessarily carrying family members, they’re not, they’re not pulling their family out of poverty along with them. Oftentimes certainly black people who are in a um may make the same salary, but they are carrying people in their family. And so you can’t say, oh, this person makes X salary and that person makes X salary. Therefore, they have the same capacity. You only find this out by talking to and listening to someone and I a universal give assumes universal capacity. And yes, we say, ok, just give us a floor and everybody should go over the floor. We all know that people rise to the floor. So the question is, is there a way to help this person get and to change that relationship and or is there what are we, what are, what we are after on the board? Someone who is using their connections for the to the extent for the organization’s behalf and what comes in is relative to those connections and the capacity. It’s time for a break. Imagine a fundraising partner that not only helps you raise more money but also supports you in retaining your donors, a partner that helps you raise funds both online and on location. So you can grow your impact faster. That’s donor box, a comprehensive suite of tools, services and resources that gives fundraisers. Just like you a custom solution to tackle your unique challenges, helping you achieve the growth and sustainability, your organization needs, helping you help others visit donor box.org to learn more. Now, back to board members are people too. All right. So we need to, we need to get to know our board members. Uh And, you know, uh I, I understand your point. You know, some folks may very well be supporting, helping other family members, not necessarily out of poverty, but uh I mean, it could be, but not necessarily out of poverty, but they’re, they’re, they’re helping other family members that aren’t doing as well as they are. And, and a lot of that can, a lot of that can very well come from the lack of intergenerational wealth through the generations that, that, uh, folks of color got screwed out of essentially. All right. And I still want to go back to the fact that, you know, this, I don’t want to operate under the assumption that you have to lower standards just to invite folks of color lowering standards onto, onto your, onto your board. Well, lowering fundraising, fundraising standards, but it’s not lowering, it’s broadening. Right. Well, I don’t wanna work, right. I don’t wanna operate on the assumption that you, that you have to lower standards. Right? That’s what I’m trying to defeat that assumption. Yeah. Ok. Ok. Um, all right. So what about the, uh, what about the push back the, well, before we get to the pushback that you might hear from your white board members about how we’ve been doing this for so long and it’s been fine for us. So why can’t it be ok for them before we get to that? What might, what might some of this look like? What, what kinds of, what kinds of, uh, activities can, can folks do if they, if they can’t meet the, they’re not able to meet the, the give get requirement? Are you, are you suggesting rewriting? Do we rewrite the, the expectations for all board members or I’m guessing using that as a starting point? Not an ending point? Ok. So that’s a starting point with each board member um about their, how it relates to them, to their assets, to their relationships, to their circumstances. Um And where, which areas they can go above and beyond it and which areas they need to, to uh pull back from and everybody’s gonna have a different answer to that those equations. The fact is that they are, you know, I’ve been on boards with very mixed income levels and the people who had the higher incomes understood that in order to have a board with mixed demographics, they had to do more weight pulling in the fund gathering. Mhm. That, that was part of the value system was that it was not. If they wanted everybody equal, they would have everybody just like them. If the value system was to have different voices at the table, then the value system had to be that some people did more direct fundraising and direct giving and some people did more outreach and some people did more political convers, you know, conversations et cetera. Ok. I wanna make sure we wanna be having these conversations with uh these individual conversations with potential board members. Right. We’re before we’re in the recruitment process, before we invite someone to be on a board or before we accept someone to be on a board, we want to be investigating these things. Yeah, so that they know what to expect so that they know what the expectations are and we know what we can expect. II I, you know, having done a lot of board recruitment uh with nonprofits through the years, I would say two things. I, I think you have a co before as a recruiting, you say, here’s the kinds of things that board members are expected to do. Um and um you know how these rest with you um and you’ll find out some of them are scary. Some of them are, you know, oh, I couldn’t do that. Some of them are like, oh, this, I could definitely do that. I don’t know that I would pin someone down to an exact um prescription you trying to get their temperature. Yeah. But you know, it’s a courtship process and so people go above and beyond what they thought they could do when they’re really excited by the mission and they’re given the tools they didn’t know they needed. So uh in the courtship process, I would put this menu out and say, you know, how does this look to you? How could you see yourself in this. Um, but I wouldn’t take that as the last word because the board service should be, uh, people should be going into places that are not comfortable for them. And that’s partly the role of the board chair is to, is to live that by example, it’s not just to be good at what they do, but to live by example, I tried this and this was, you know, I thought I was going to throw up, but actually I didn’t throw up. I did really well at it and then I tried that and I did throw up. So I, you know, somebody else will do that one from now on. Um And so I want to be honest with people, but I don’t want to pin them down to something they’re not being ready, ready to be pinned to. OK? But you, you make a good point about board bird service being uh a challenge. You do want, you do want folks, I mean, you’re, you’re, you’re leveraging the fact that they love your mission, your work, your values. They stand beside you with that in, in those ways. Um You want them to, to be challenged, you want board service to be meaningful. Yes. And you, you want them to learn something from it because that’s part of what they get out of it. Isn’t that just a happy club? But that they’re gaining a different kind of sense of themselves of what they’re capable of. Interesting, different sense of themselves, what they’re capable of. Yes, challenge. That’s the challenge. That’s the challenge. Go beyond comfort zone. Try this and see whether you throw up or not. Right, kind of. But, I mean, you need to try it with a lot of, um, support and, and with the tools, throw somebody into the lion’s den. All right. What about the, uh, the pushback from white board members that, you know, we’ve, we’ve been, this has always worked well for us. We’ve always had this very rigid, uh, uniform giving everybody’s given the same through these years. What, why, why do we have to now? Wwwww. What, what’s the advantage? Why, why should we change now? Ok. So I need to be polite here. Um, no, you can be firm, you can be firm and realistic. You don’t have to be a lot of counseling of white folks. And I think it’s part of our, um, job as white folks to help other white folks to a different place. All right. So don’t be, don’t be soft on nonprofit radio listeners. I’ll, I’ll, I’ll admonish you don’t do that. Um, it’s 2022. We know stuff now as white folks that we didn’t, that we were able to be blind to for hundreds of years. Sort of the comfort of being blind to. Yes. And, um, we don’t anymore. So there’s a moral obligation to act differently. Our nonprofit is, is, is here for the public. Good. And it, it, we believe that to do that, we need to reflect the full spectrum of voices that is that public and or should be concerned with our mission. That means that we need to have a table that is really welcoming to all those voices that they’re not just here, but they’re actually, we’re gonna share the ownership of this mission. And that does mean that we need to pull apart the stuff that we’re comfortable with. And that’s unspoken because it’s gonna be a mystery to somebody who doesn’t come from our background and it was already part of this. And what’s the advantage to the organization? Let’s make it explicit to doing this. We are living our values in our governance and if we’re not, that’s pretty um compromised. Um So one is congruence with organizational values and what we’re here to try and carry out. Um The second is sort of more robust conversation and decision making because there are different points of view at the table because it’s not people with UN, it’s not an entire crew with the same assumptions. And frankly, you’ll have more interesting conversations and it’ll be a more interesting club to be part of. That’s not why to do it, but it’s a side product. It’s time for Tony’s take two. Thank you, Kate going a little different this week. Uh Because a subject I know about is in the news, a lot tariffs uh, I know about it because it’s one of the few things that I remember from my economics degree at Carnegie Mellon University in 1984. So I’ve forgotten a ton of micro and macroeconomics. But, uh, tariffs stayed with me and they’re in the news a lot that, uh, and the media doesn’t seem to explain them fully. So I would like to take a minute to do that. Uh, tariffs, what’s a tariff? A tariff is a tax on goods that the United States imposes on goods that are imported into our country. And of course, you know, other countries impose tariffs on uh goods that are imported into their countries. But, you know, we’re talking about it from our perspective, but our, our government might do this to help an industry, like suppose you wanted to help the wine industry in the United States. You might put a tariff on wines that come from maybe France and Italy and Spain or something like that. Or if we want to help the washing machine industry or the auto industry, we might put tariffs on washing machines that come from maybe China or Mexico or wherever they might come from. Same with cars could be just certain countries or we could say putting a tariff on all of the cars that come into the country from whatever country they come from. We might not pick individual countries. We might just say all the, all the cars that come into the United States are getting an additional tax, a tariff because we want to help our US uh, auto industry. Right. So it’s kind of protecting industries. That’s why they’re used and they’re also sometimes used for punishment. If we’re angry at another country, we might impose a tariff on that country’s goods. What that does is whatever the reason that we impose them, it raises the cost of these goods because there’s an extra tax added to them. And so that hurts the, that hurts the goods that hurts the companies that are bringing the goods into the country, right? So these tariffs are imposed on the companies, right? I mean, we might pick a country but the tariff really is paid by the uh by the, by the company that makes the good and ships it into the, into the United States and who pays the tara. This is the part that I don’t see explained adequately in the media. We pay the tariff, we, the consumers pay the tariff. It’s a tax, it’s added to goods and companies routinely increase the cost of their goods that are imported into the US to reflect the cost uh the increased cost to them because the the tariff is now gonna cost them more money. So they pass that cost on that additional tax on to us, the people who pay to buy the goods, the washing machines or the wine or the car. A tariff is not paid by the foreign government, whether whatever government, Italy Spain France, China, wherever, wherever we’re imposing a tariff on imports from that government is not paying the tariff, we’re paying the tariff and then the money gets paid back to the United States government from the companies that make the goods that are tariff and that are imported into the US. Ok. So the US government does get money, that’s the tariff, but we’re the ones paying it. We pay it to the company that make, made the goods and then they pay the tariff to the United States. So like lots of things, the ultimate cost of these gets passed down to us, the consumers and of course, we have nowhere to pass it on to do. We, we, we can’t pass it on. There’s no passing the buck beyond the consumer. So I just want everybody to understand who is paying tariffs when the United States government gets tariff money. Where’s it coming from? It’s coming from us, the consumers and that to take two K, that was tariff 101 with Professor Tony Martignetti. Uh I don’t know about professor like uh adjunct adjunct lecturer, adjunct lecturer for a half a ha uh for like 20 minutes on tariffs. Maybe I could, maybe I could expand a little bit. So like one third of one lecture, Adjunct lecturer, Tony Martin. I I wish all my lectures were that short in school? That insightful is what you mean? Insightful. Well, you put a lot of information in a short amount of time and I think a lot of professors could learn how to do that as well. That may be. Yeah, I, I, right. I’m not, uh, particularly verbose unless I’m having some fun with, uh, verbosity and, and, uh, word smithing. But, uh, otherwise, yeah, I’m, I think I’m pretty, pretty to the point. Yeah. Well, we’ve got VU, but loads more time, here’s the rest of board members are people too with Judy Levine. All right. So that sort of answers. Uh, dumbing down, you know, we’re not, we’re not, we’re broadening. Yeah, we’re broadening. And there are advantages. What would you say to folks that are the advantages to them personally learning, learning, learning about, uh, uh, learning from folks with different backgrounds? There is an incredible gift to be, had to be able to listen. I’ll say this personally as a white person working in a diverse environment. Um, it is humbling and awe inspiring to be in a place where you can really hear from people who didn’t, who are just like you and have them change your mind and open your mind. That’s what you gain by being in a diverse environment. And not only will you make better decisions for your nonprofit, but you will learn more and be a kinder person who in and of itself understands the way you interact with the rest of the world in a different way folks, if you want to see a diverse team, then, uh, pause the podcast and go to Cause effective.org, go to their team, uh, team or staff page and look at the, look at the pictures of the, the, the, the, the staff at Cause effective.org and then of course, come right back and press play again. Don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t start browsing, you know, don’t go to amazon.com too. Just look at Cause effective.org and you’ll see uh enormously diverse team there. Um All right. So, you know, that that’s anything more you want to say about wh why this is worth it for the organization or for the people. Um We live in a diverse world. I mean, you know, no matter where you are, um we, we live in a world in a country certainly. And in a world with lots of different kinds of people from lots of different kinds of backgrounds. They bring a lot of different things to the table and that are really interesting to interact with um what better way to interact with them than in the support of a cause you love so that there’s, you know, you’re all putting your, you know, shoulder to the wheel together. Um It, it gives you your life spice to be doing this in a way that’s not ho homogeneous and your organization itself will be stronger. Yeah. In the ways you just, you, you talked about a few minutes ago. Yeah, you you have some ideas about, uh, how to do this. Uh, it, it sort of efficiently shave, shave some, some time off. What? Well, one of the things that, you know, we all know that executive directors, well run boards, executive directors are behind them kind of every step of the way. Um, but in boards that really take off, there’s board to board conversation that the executive director kind of monitors but is not board of every conversation. And so, and when that happens, it’s because there are, there’s not just a board cheerleader, but there are many leaders. So there are leaders of governance or there might be a leader of on boarding or there might be a leader of uh you know, there, there’s different ways to chunk it up so that it, there’s leadership at the uh which leadership leads to ownership. Um And so part of your job as the board liaison, whether uh is to understand what that web of relationships could is and could be and then to do in essence what we call, you know, hr staff development, but with board members, so you ask them to take on certain things and then your job is, is being a coach, not being a doer. We, we’re talking about the, the CEO executive director now. Yes, sir. Yeah. And, and the development director also development and, and working closely with the board chair means it, it’s gonna help enormously to have a AAA culturally sensitive board chair. Yes. Um I send board members, especially white board members to trainings and not just what is de I but to real immersive, you know, one or two day trainings about the, how this culture rests on has rested on um racial injustice. Um I say if you’re going to be part of this organization, you need to have this basic understanding. Um And we need you to do this two day training and, and here’s, you know how to pay for it. Um Because there’s a basic understanding of that, that really shifts in those kinds of very immersive trainings. I’m not talking about a two hour what hr does at a large corporation. Um And, you know, we just said these are our values and you have to really get it. If you’re gonna be part of this team, I would certainly do that with board leadership, but this is a journey and this is part of the, and, and we want the board to be part of this journey and we need the board leadership to start it out. And if the board chair won’t do that, you do a succession plan, it’s not like you kick them out right away. But ultimately, a board is not gonna progress until you have somebody at the head of it for whom this is the air they breathe. Hm. Now you can have a chair and a president, you can have an honorary chair and an honor. You know, there are all kinds of ways to move people to the side that don’t, you know, kick them off this planet. But ultimately, you need to have someone who does, who, who breathes this stuff and who you don’t have to explain why this matters. And then it’s deeper than going to a training to understand what implicit that, that exi implicit bias exists. Right? One of those two hour trainings, ok. Say a little more about joyful board service. What we, what we can aspire to. I, I, you know, I get this so often where board members, the boards that we’re working on, they’re, they’re niggling, they’re going after, you know, do I have, you know, is it 2000 or 3000? What do I have to do? That’s the question as to what, as to, you know, it’s like I’d like to get away with as little as I can. Um And, and it’s an imposition on me as opposed to I will do everything I can. I may not be successful at everything, but I’m gonna give it a shot because this mission matters so much. And if I can help it, God willing, I’m going to and there’s when people are at the table with that attitude, there can be a joy at both delivering yourself and seeing other people deliver and celebrating that. Um And you can build that in, you can build in celebrations, you can build in you know, balloons for somebody when they hit a certain mark. Um, you have to build in not just, um, the actual dollars, but you can build in. They made thank you calls and they never talked to anybody before. You know, there’s all kinds of ways to build in a sense that I can do be part of the fundraising process, which then builds more courage for the next step. But it doesn’t happen unless you think about it celebrating small successes. That’s, that’s a terrific idea. Yeah. And you wanna build in this, this sense of, for, for every board member so that they are looking for ways to celebrate each other. Mm. So it doesn’t just come from you the CEO, it doesn’t just come from the board chair but that they are trying to help each other up that ladder. You like to see board members uh, socializing outside. I mean, I, I can presume your answer but I want you to say it socializing outside, outside the, the form the board meetings. Iii I do but I also am realistic. Um, I don’t think it’s necessary for them to be personal friends. In fact, I’ve been on boards with people who are personal friends and it’s tough. Um, because then they kind of talk about things outside and there is like, becomes factions. You certainly don’t want, um, relatives on the same board that I’ll tell you right now. Um, not just married but brother and sister replaying the, you know, the childhood, you know, I’ve seen it all I can see in your face and it sounds like you’ve been there. Yes. Um, the b, I don’t, I think that people have to like each other. Yeah. And I think you need to have some social places. You know, it’s been hard, don’t they need to get to know each other outside the board? Um, but that’s different than, um, going outside their board service. I mean, maybe not, maybe not necessarily to me that’s part of their board service. Ok. Um, that part of their board service is, understand, you know, it’s team building and the organization can facilitate that. Right? I mean, can we have, can we host drinks or dinner after a meeting? Yeah. Um, it’s, that’s one of the things that’s been much harder in zoom. Um, my part, you know, cause back of itself as a nonprofit and they had a board dinner once a year, but they should have at my house and one year I had the flu and they had it at my house anyway. And I just went to bed and they, they stayed up till like midnight and cleaned up after themselves and left, um, that we miss. So we have a game night now, once a, once a year on Zoom because it’s once a year everybody comes and they do all kinds of like 322 and a lie and all kinds of stuff, but it’s not quite the same. Um, we did have an outdoor picnic this summer and about half the board came. Um, yeah, it’s hard, you know, that’s the hard thing is now getting people out of their shell because we’re all used to now doing everything by Zoom or going to work and coming home and, you know, scurrying home. What Zoom has that? I haven’t quite figured out is that time before meetings, that time in the middle of meetings, you know, those the times of the after meetings, those kinds of times when people would talk to each other about their kids, right? Building that in um what we’ve done some of this in the, you have to do it in the middle of the meeting because people run out at the end of the meeting and they won’t come early no matter, they say, you know, two board members will come early, right? Um But if you break into smaller groups in the middle of the meeting, even if it’s only dies or triads and give them something to discuss. Um You know, one of my provocative questions is how does your birth order affect? Um the way you take on leadership, which gets into all kinds of personal background, it assumes strength and it gets people talking to each other. So having a section like that in the middle of each board meeting can help people to start to bond and then obviously changing the, you know, changing the groups up. Yeah, and making that group uh a hint, make those small groupings deliberate. Don’t just leave it to the Zoom Universe to deliver the development. Yeah, you can either make them random or you can assign people to be with, with other, with other people and the assigning is, is much better. Yeah. Yeah, I’ve done that in some of my trainings. Um uh What else, what else you wanna touch on around this, uh this equity and equity in boards and, and inviting folks in and joyful board service. Um Welcoming notion of enlightened self interest, which I think uh it has to do with understanding the uh the meaning of your cause to people who are not directly affected by it. So, you know, when we’re teaching fundraising, we’ll say um OK, you don’t fundraise just for the people who have direct interest to your cause because that’s your clients. And if you could raise your money from them, that would be earned income and you wouldn’t be a nonprofit, but you can’t raise money from people who have no connection to your cause because it doesn’t make sense to them. Why are they gonna lie on it? And that’s the same thing with board members. You can’t ask board members to fundraise if you, they don’t feel connection to cause and, or to audiences that don’t feel connection, but you have to find the enlightened self interest, which is myself as a member of the city, this neighborhood, this grouping that I care about Children, having a head start. That’s why you’ll often find like a mom’s group in Westchester suburb in New York that’s fairly wealthy. Most of it um will take on fundraising for a program in the quote unquote inner city because they understand the meaning of this work for Children even though it’s not their Children. And the reason I’m bringing this up is because that’s where the ownership comes in the sense that it’s on to. It’s up to me to make a difference for this and that this matters to me even though it’s not my personal experience. And I think that’s group conversations, it’s conversation in the courtship process and then it’s group conversations at the board level to keep that fresh. And it has to be deliberate because it’s the board service devolves into finance monitoring. Oh, yeah, if it’s right, if it’s allowed to discussions about why the mission matters to whom does the mission matter? Beyond just the direct recipients are very inspiring and they give your board members personal uh you know, nurturing and the tools to go out to their contacts with different kinds of language. And you will often find, you know, I’m looking for areas in which different people can be experts, not just the people who have a lot of board experience or who are, you know, long time experienced fundraisers, but that people with different points of view can have the position of being an expert. Hm. And this is where you will find points of view that your classic cabal has not thought of conversations. Yes, I love how you pause and, and think through and then make your next point. Uh, I’ve just been talking to you for, uh, 40 minutes, whatever, 35 minutes I, I’ve learned. All right. Give her a couple, give her a couple of beats because uh she’s got, she may very well have more to say, I love you the way you reflect. I, uh I, I don’t have that gift. I tend to be more, more impulsive and II, I spew everything out in one shot. Well, that’s why you’re on the radio and I’m not interesting to, um, you know, I, I wanna, having served on a board, you’ve been on multiple boards. Not that many because I take it really seriously. Yeah, but it’s been more than one. Yeah. Um, and then being a, an executive director myself and, um, being a consultant of board gives me humility about, about the possibility of board service. Um And I feel like, uh people who are only on staff have expectations, uh and anger when board members don’t meet their expectations. Whereas I’m trying to say it’s human nature to triage the kind of people who will agree to be on a board are often fully committed. I don’t wanna say over committed because you commit to what you commit to and it makes sense for them to do what they have to do and not more because there’s always something else calling on their time, let alone, you know, the idea that they might wanna play golf or read a book. If you do that, if you understand it, that that’s rational, human behavior, then you don’t get as angry at people, you manage them that everyone’s gonna triage that they’re gonna, they’re gonna assess their priorities and they’re gonna, and they’re gonna act accordingly and it’s up to you to have a dialogue about that. It’s not that you, you know, there’s something wrong with letting people slide or something, but it’s um it’s understanding and helping them understand how to fit in with all the different priorities of their life, right? And where does this mission fit in, in your, among your priorities? Right. You know, it’s why I, I um when, when I, when groups do uh board member, um the contracts or whatever they call them, um I suggest that there actually be calendars in there so that you, somebody can say to you, I can’t do that in June because my twins are graduating high school. In which case we say, you know what, we’re gonna take you off of that and we’re gonna take you off of me so that you can have a very because they’re not gonna do it anyway. Yeah. And then they just stop returning your phone or they don’t respond to emails. So having respect for all the different po pos rationally on board members, time and life and energy. Yeah. And then helping them understand how to fit this in, in a way that makes sense. All right, let’s uh give you, I wanna give you a chance to uh talk about cost effective because it is a nonprofit. It’s a, it’s a consultancy for nonprofits. They’re advisors, consultants. What, what uh what, what’s the breadth of the work? And how do, how do you work with, with your client nonprofits? Well, I, you know, I’d say we are 40 this year, we are about to celebrate our 40th anniversary. Congratulations for decades. Um And I’d say that the common theme throughout has been changing how organizations are resourced, um changing the balance of money and therefore power in the sector. Um And it’s both increasing it and increasing it so that it’s not just that the most well resourced nonprofits get more resources but that it’s nonprofits that are located in disenfranchised communities and the people who work there and um uh and volunteer there are able to raise the money, they need to further those causes um And to govern themselves because to me, governance is integra apart, it’s more than just raising money. But if you don’t have AAA governance structure that works, you’re not gonna have a fundraising structure that works on the voluntary level. Um and that’s where you get to organizations where the staff fundraises, but the board doesn’t and the volunteers don’t. Um So we have, we work, we do a lot of cohort work where we’re looking at the development directors of color and we have um working with them over a six month period of time, um in a particular program that we have to help them really address um the barriers to their being, being successful and not only to talk about it but to actually address it. Um We, so we do a lot of individual coping with, with, with um executive directors who may have come up through fundraising and, but, you know, you need to do it if they need it. It is not part of the fundraising structure. The organization is only gonna get so far. Um, and board members, a lot of board consulting, um especially now with boards that know they need to diversify and don’t really like, they know they need the composition, but they don’t and they don’t necessarily know that they need to act differently to have different people in different seats. Um We do everything from, you know, eight hour retreats on Zoom, maybe six hours uh to year long coaching engagements to what we call deep dive um transformation, which is a lot of times people come to us and say, well, my board won’t fundraise and we get in there and we start talking to board members and we find out there’s all kinds of reasons. It’s not just that they don’t know how to ask for money, but it’s that there’s not financial transparency, there’s not, um, a real partnership between staff and the board. Um, there’s not a peer to peer accountability on the board. Um, there’s a, in a group of three board members who do everything and everybody else slides. Um, you know, there’s all kinds of reasons that we will help. We will actually go in and help address. We say that that’s a symptom. My board won’t fundraise and there are, you know, many, many causes of that and we will, we, one of the things we’re known for is that we will go in and address the cause. We’re not just gonna do the tactics. Um, we also do a lot of fundraising consulting for groups that, um, have had a lot of government support or a lot of foundation support and know they need to diversify and they don’t necessarily have, you know, a Lincoln center board. Um, but it is very possible that people around the country or world will care about what they do and will back it up and want to make it happen if they, you know, for one of the things they say is that in fundraising, the one thing that’s, that’s um limited is time. There’s only 24 hours and maybe one second or maybe now two seconds in the day. And so you need to make choices that are smart with how you spend your fundraising time, money is not the limiting factor, but time is. And so we’ll help groups really understand what are the likely avenues and how to structure the resources they have to reach those days. Get longer. What was one or two seconds? It actually they did make a ruling and there’s like they added a second or something. Oh, I didn’t hear about that. I, well, I’ve been squandering my, my two seconds a day. For. How long have we had this? How long have we had these longer days? Go look it up. Six months. Yeah, I don’t know how many seconds that is. I can’t do the math that fast. No, but six months is 100 and 80 days. Times two seconds. 360 seconds. It’s a good six minutes. I’ve, I’ve, I’ve, I’ve, I squandered. All right, I’m gonna try to get it back right now by cutting you off. No, no. All right. Thank you for explaining. And, uh, thanks for a frank conversation. Yeah, we don’t, you know, for our, for nonprofit radio, uh, white listeners. Uh, we’re not, we’re not, uh, we’re not going easy and you have to have, you have to have honest conversations. So, thank you. Yeah, I, I think this has been some of, you know, I’ve been in this field for 30 years and this has been some of the most rewarding and deep work. Um, it’s not surface, it really addresses, you know, I had to go back to everything I assumed from my childhood on and understand that there’s, there are different realities and that, um, it’s not that I can go back and change it, but I can change my behavior going forward so that I further a different kind of future. Mm. She’s Judy Levine and she’s the executive director of cause effective. Uh you should have already been at their website because you would have seen their diverse team when we uh when I suggested take a pause and then you came back. But if you haven’t been there or if you don’t remember where it is, it’s at. Cause effective.org and Judy Levine. Thank you very much. Thanks for sharing. Thank you. It’s great to have this kind of conversation. Pleasure. Next week, Professor Russell James returns with the right words and phrases for fundraising. He got sick and couldn’t record for this show. I know you believe that you believe the guy he comes up with, he comes up with uh I lost my voice. No, we’ll, we’ll have them next week. If you missed any part of this week’s show, I beseech you find it at Tony martignetti.com were sponsored by donor box, outdated donation forms blocking your supporters, generosity, donor box, fast, flexible and friendly fundraising forms for your nonprofit donor. Box.org. I love that alliteration. Our creative producer is Claire Meyerhoff. I’m your associate producer, Kate Martignetti. The show, social media is by Susan Chavez. Mark Silverman is our web guide and this music is by Scott Stein. Thank you for that affirmation, Scotty. You’re with us next week for nonprofit radio, big nonprofit ideas for the other 95% go out and be great.