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Nonprofit Radio for June 24, 2016: How We Got Here & New Overtime Rules

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Robert Penna: How We Got Here

Features of today’s charitable community emerged from clear points in history. How did women come to outnumber men in the sector? Why is the northeast dominant? Dr. Robert Penna returns to reveal the formation of our modern charity complex. His book is “The Nonprofit Outcomes Toolbox.”

 

 

Gene Takagi: New Overtime Rules

Gene Takagi

The Department of Labor has issued new rules for classifying which employees are eligible for overtime. They’re effective December 1 so you need to know what’s up. Who’s got your back? Gene Takagi, our legal contributor and managing attorney of the Nonprofit & Exempt Organizations law group (NEO).

 


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Hello and welcome to tony martignetti non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent on your aptly named host our listener of the week is aubrey burghdoff, our she’s executive director of the california symphony, she tweeted, i love this episode! I listened a second time and took notes. She was talking about the march twenty fifth show this year on lead and matching gif ts and corporate matching gift she’s at aubrey. Why? Why that’s aubrey with two extra wise on the end thank you very much for loving non-profit radio aubrey, congratulations on being our listener of the week oh, i’m glad you’re with me i grow a gibbous if you backed me into the idea that you missed today’s show how we got here features of today’s charitable community emerged from clear points in history how did women come to outnumber men in the sector? Why is the northeast dominant? Dr robert penna returns to reveal the formation of our modern charity complex. His book is the non-profit outcomes, toolbox and new overtime rules. The u s department of labor has issued new rules for classifying which employees are eligible for overtime they’re effective. December first so you need to know what’s up, who’s got your back. Jean takagi are legal contributor and managing attorney of the non-profit and exempt organizations law group neo on tony’s take two fund-raising fundamentals round up. We’re sponsored by pursuant full service fund-raising data driven and technology enabled, you’ll raise more money pursuant dot com my pleasure to welcome dr robert penna back to the studio he’s, author of the book the non-profit outcomes toolbox first brought him to the non-profit radio studio in september two thousand eleven he’s been a consultant to charity navigator and has presented in canada, africa, the middle east, europe and australia. Nothing in the antarctic and oh, i see he grew up in the bronx, lives in wilmington, north carolina, and knows more about dc comics characters than an adult should admit you’ll find robert penna at outcomes toolbox. Dot com bob, welcome back to the show. Thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure. Pleasure. Thank you for hustle on your way to the studio today. The train was late. I understand, but you’re you’re not you’re not. You saved it non-profit outcomes. Toolbox. Last time you were here was five. Years ago, how’s the, uh, how’s the book doing it. Just come out when it’s been phenomenal. Yeah, it was that just released two thousand eleven. It was released in two thousand. Okay? Yes, it was sixty days before i was here. It’s it’s got me all over the world. The response has been incredible. Not antarctica, but not an article. I think the the penguins and the puffins and particular interest serious in the performance. But the good news is that word has been spreading that there’s nothing else like it out there for non-profits they want to learn howto tio be performance based on dh really start working on outcomes. And it’s got me all around the world. Places i never, ever thought i’d get to see. Saudi arabia and nairobi australia’s been phenomenal. Outstanding. So international organizations are interested in outcomes measurement as well out the united states actually is the leading non-profit sector in the world. Everybody hopes to see what we’re doing. Eso when non-profits started looking outcomes here non-profits in other parts of the world started looking as well. And so i got invitations and there i was. Excellent. Love it. Okay, i’m glad. He’s doing well, i’m i’m i’m even happier than you are. Not literally. The checks are pouring in. Finally, the first one. All right, the first one takes five years. Depends on how big your euro your advances. Jeff, work off the eye. I see. All right, but i finally did. Okay, i don’t want to get details about your personal finance is all right. Just get a a short subject. You know, we have to film. Remember, you have to be together twenty five minutes to fill twenty. We’re going to because we’re going to talk about the history of the charitable sector, which is a part of a new book, part of a new book that you’re working so and so exposes to what the new book is not out yet. Yeah, what’s that going to be about the new book is basically a donor’s guide. It really is basically what you should know about the sector every year we individual americans give billions of dollars. Last year was two hundred seventy eight billion dollars from us, and most of us know nothing about the sector. And so i am, depending upon the metaphor you choose, i’m either. Lifting the curtain or lifting the fig leaf and we all know what usually has been so all right. Ah, fig leaf, i, for that matter for all right. Okay, so when is that? You have a big fat advance that you’re working on now? Yeah, yeah, i’m working on a big fed events. I really can’t tell you because the book is i’m trying to do very, very thorough job. There’s an awful lot that we’re going to talk about today is just some of it today, when we talk about the history part, right, this is not it’s, not a history. Mode is not understanding. This is one chapter isn’t right, you know, one piece. Okay, so all right. So let’s, uh, still into it. Okay, let’s, go back, tio, old england. Oh thing. Which is where our charitable sector started with with queen elizabeth the first what was going on under her fig leaf? Oh, don’t do that to me! Latto charity, as we think of it, was, was vastly different back then. It was it was virtually all individual. But it was not really designed to help the poor. The old christian idea was that by the act of being charitable, the person who was being charitable got some sort of divine grace e-giving charity had nothing to do with ameliorating poverty or helping the poor. It was i’m doing this so i will get good graces. Most of the poor laws had to do with trying to corral and chase the poor from place to place to place. But they were also the divergence of opinion as to really what was charity. And so what elizabeth did was she did a there was an actor. Royal acted in sixty no one. The the charitable uses act and what she did in one fell swoop was she secularized charity. Because in addition to the usual type things poor, the needy, the infirm, the agent she now included as perfectly valid charitable uses things like building roads, building bridges, building causeways, supporting the troops. If you donated money to to to raising an army that was considered charity, the things that you might consider to be almost social engineering a fund for the marriage of poor maiden’s. Because in those days you needed a dowry. If you had no dari your chance of being married, we’re even lower. So this was a fund for the dowry of a poor maiden so they could get married. There was ah, charity was seen to be also thie encouragement and support of young learning artisans and artists and things of this nature. So what she did at that point was expand the concept of charity beyond the usual idea of helping an individual or helping individuals, and more towards what you and i would consider efforts of public benefit public good. And that strain has never left us. Okay. And also similar mints of social engineering. Yes. Helping see the women get married? Yes. You said you said moving the poor around moving the paralysis is moving the poor round. That is the poor laws we don’t talk about. That was that was not very nice. That was not there was rather know thiss was. This was in terms of helping young artisans helping argast supporting them, supporting young young academics. All of these. Were included in the list had never been thought of his charity before they’re they’re after yes, okay, as part of explains, it can just finish white today you can have the opera, you can have a bird sanctuary and you could have a battered women’s shelter all considered charities because going back to elizabeth, all of these sexual things became part of chuck, and now we have just a minute before break, we brought this concept over with us. Well, the puritans i shared i’m in italian, so i didn’t bring it over. We brought something else over, but, um, puritans brought these concepts with them. Yes, it is, yes, but they also brought some. They also had some very, very important individual ideas of their own. I’m not quite sure if you’re trying to go into it right now, but i could go over just over the top number one. It was every person’s responsibility to take care of his neighbor. That was your duty to god, and that was your duty to the king arika secondly, very, very important thing, the puritans, unlike anyone else who came to north america, had the sense that they could use the law to enforce changes in attitude and behavior so if we’re talking about moral standards and we’re not talking about that shot, not till we’re talking about ideas towards social behavior, their idea of a city on the hill, their idea of the new jerusalem, they were going to create a better society, and if you wanted to live there, you had a full flowing line one hundred percent we always see these pictures of them wearing dark clothes that said, all of this was enforced by law, we can get back to it after the broker. All right, well, we’re going to move on from the puritans, actually, because i want to start talking about some of our features of charity today we only have twenty five minutes and, uh, okay, so we’re going to look a tw. What? What characterizes charity today and how that how we got here? That’s what it’s all about let’s, stay with us. You’re tuned to non-profit radio tony martignetti also hosts a podcast for the chronicle of philanthropy fund-raising fundamentals is a quick ten minute burst of fund-raising insights published once a month. Tony’s guests are expert in crowdfunding mobile giving event fund-raising direct mail and donor cultivation. Really, all the fund-raising issues that make you wonder, am i doing this right? Is there a better way there is? Find the fund-raising fundamentals archive it. Tony martignetti dot com that’s marketmesuite n e t t i remember there’s, a g before the end, thousands of listeners have subscribed on itunes. You can also learn maura, the chronicle website, philanthropy dot com fund-raising fundamentals, the better way. Oppcoll welcome back to big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. This is our two hundred ninety fifth show. The three hundredth show is coming up on july twenty ninth. That’s the sixth anniversary of non-profit radio july twenty ninth. Very special show for you with us. Okay, bob. So the so i want to look at some features of charity’s today. Like on this has relationship to the puritans the northeast. So is sort of the first explain. How is it that way characterized the northeast as being dominant in charity philanthropy? It’s, not the northeast is nominated ways going culture is what you have to go again. I hate to do this. You have to go back to pilgrim’s idea of creating a better society. The pilgrim’s. This was their fat. One of the founding ideas you and i chatted briefly before about the split between charity and philanthropy. Weight of these two split well, one of the things that happen is that when philanthropy started developing that that protestant strain of creating a better society informed what they were doing and that has never changed. Most people would think would agree today that in terms of its humanistic goals in terms of the kinds of things that embraces that, more or less, the non-profit sector truly has sort of a liberal caste or a liberal bent by no means to be political. But in terms of things that it embraces. Those all go back to creating that better society that started with the pilgrims and through the eighteen hundreds through the organized benevolence that they spread, this stuff was not down south dahna south at a totally different kind of culture. This all came from the north east. When you look at the non profit sector today you’re looking at the direct descendants of the of the organized beneficence off the northeast going back to the eighteen hundreds. Okay, and today we see that way see just concentrations of charities in the northeast. But you but you always did a cz early as eighteen. Twenty. There were over two thousand of these voluntary associations in doing a little, vastly outstripping the numbers. Any places? Yeah, americans have a have a penchant for tokyo breeding association doesn’t talk to us. You have a quote in the chapter from the total talks about that and he says anyplace. In in europe, will you see a great man at the head of some endeavor, or in france, the government in the united states? You will find an association and that the world that in eighteen thirty? Yeah, and the association’s became associations are non-profit non-profit we’ll talk about how we got there, through laws and recognition and etcetera. Okay, all right, what about women will be very interesting sixty percent of the employees in non-profits air women do i have that rough? If you pray it’s probably more than that, and several women, when they’re friends of mine, would point out that ah, shameful number of directors are actually women, particularly with not latto yeah, with larger number i mean that’s. The staffs are overwhelming when i when i speak in front of groups of very often, there’ll be a hundred people in the room and they’ll be like four males. Honestly, that’s normal where this start this actually was in the early decades of the eighteen, eighteen, twenty just again thinking about this society due to the social mores of the day, women were not allowed to do it in twenty there weren’t even voting well, they weren’t voting they weren’t working. Certainly the middle class and upper class when we’re not working, however, this was a victorian era that had this notion that women were more sensitive, that women had a more perceiving i was also something very, very important going on male world. And that was the beginning of what we call today. Contract theory. It changed. Changed working relationships. I created the world we think of in terms of dickens. What means? Contract theory. Contract theory was its. We write it down. I owe you nothing past what’s in the contract. And if i fire you, i don’t owe you anything. It changed working relationships throughout europe and it hit the united states, the northeast, particularly the east coast. Particularly in the very late seventeen hundreds. Early eighteen hundreds it began to change the relationships amongst people amongst neighbors amongst the merchants and the people with whom we do business. Life got very, very sharp, hard angled and different. Almost a cruel is supposed to have had been women. Women started to see in ways that men refused to recognise the downside off of this, you know, hyper capitalism on the crass commercial world every other evan who was close to them. But this was not. They started pushing for a cz earliest seventeen. Ninety five women were behind the idea of pushing for penal reform. I had a list here i think i could have looked at but every they were against war, they were getting against press gangs. They were against dueling there against inebriation. They were against the abandonment of children. One thing that was a big issue throughout the eighteen hundreds was women being, shall we say, would seduced and abandoned. There were numerous groups, but if you look back as early seventeen, ninety five was the first formal women’s association for social betterment. Again, i have the name somewhere. My notes here. Wait, we don’t even know so we don’t need the name. But the point is it goes back to seventeen, ninety five. Yeah. And by the early decades of the eighteen hundred eighteen ten, eighteen twenties, this movement was almost entirely driven by women of the association’s thes associate these associations that were geared toward social betterment. Now yes, there were associations. There were associations of fishermen there with grange, as they were. Those were not female dominated. But those warm or those worm or industry related those one male dominated because they had to do with the trades. Okay, trades right? Because the men were but doing use the work this think about abila first of abolition. Where was the capital of abila? Abolition? It was boston. It certainly wasn’t down south. And yes, there was a gentleman whose name escapes me. Who ran the paper. But most of his field troops. The shock troops were women. Abolition, suffrage, suffrage, temperature tendered. Yes. Take carrie nation. Yeah. Thes wall women driven and there’s. Many, many, many more. Particularly when it gets around the, uh, child welfare and abandoned women. Orphans, widows. Ah, help the prisoners. All right. Reform price. You mentioned a prostitute. Refund forms pressure not only help for prisoners, but penal reform, penal reform. They recognized the cruelty of the institution. Well, actually, you know, they thought the institutions are better than what preceded it, which included the pillory that stock in public whipping and branding. And so they thought the penitentiary is we’re better than that. And so they were pushing initially for jails rather than bilich stop whipping and brand. Okay, that should have his peanut that’s that is penal reform is compared to what had been okay. Yes, all right, i thought so. They didn’t. They didn’t move out of the prison system or no, they were trying to prove that they were trying to get to a person to person comes whipping, etcetera, whipping, branding, and all right, so it’s ours and feathers. So there was so it really emanated from the with women recognizing the softer side of of life actually know. And there were a diversion and performing over contract the capital prize, the emergent males perception that they had a softer side. They were very shrewd. They knew what they were doing. It was this was not they were soft, and they had these these flowery ideas that just happened to work. They knew exactly what they were doing. But the thing was that the male population stepped aside because it deferred to what it saw. Women’s keener insights in other words, they weren’t playing, that they might have been playing the gender card. But they did very, very, very intelligently. They got what they want. They had their male allies when it came to having people write checks deeply. Clinton for mayor of new york. He was the mayor of new york and the head of one of the biggest societies of social improvement societies in the city at the same time. But it was all being run by these with women, sisters and daughters of the ruling male elite and let’s. See, what they did was they used the ruling male lead to get money for the rest of the men had it? Yeah. Okay. See, i think that’s cool. I get hysterical. All right. Anything you want to say about women, how they emerged as dominant. Well as as the century jin is very, very interesting. Because dominant in numbers, i should say, i mean, there are yes. There are a good number of women, ceos, executive actors, but a very small proportion of of the one, point, one million charities. So what are led by women? What is very, very interesting is the way they kept running and having the kipping resurgent. There was a move towards the early twentieth century which would have replaced a lot of them with male managers who was thought to be much more scientific. But when the sector got basically got into trouble and ones saying that trump latto did anything wrong. But it suddenly found it’s ah it’s, ah, its raison de tre questioned not to mention its sources of funding. It was the women who came back and were able to answer the need when the sector moved to the middle class as its salvation. And this was after the war. This was an era when the non-profits hadn’t what we call non-profits today they were called that, then they really know had no idea what they were going to do it, a lot of them there weren’t that many of them, but they were starving. They were drawing upon the vine, and they didn’t know really what to do with themselves. And it was literally women who saved them by virtue of thinking in terms of things like family counseling and marriage campuses around. This is nineteen forty, nineteen late nineteen forties nineteen fifties. Okay? And we’re seeing so so i guess another another area that i want to cover is services to the middle class. Yes, and it it emerged around the new deal when new deal legislation sort of the new deal captured the poor away from the association, the new deal people think in terms of the new deal is a couple of things i think of the w p a they think of the ccc they think of high was being built in things like this, but they they didn’t offer a lot more because they weren’t not just laborers and construction people that were out of work. They were thinkers, they were, they were artists, there were musicians, and so under some of the new deal programs, an awful lot of these people were hired and they provided services they provided thing, for example, there was one course really interested me how to how to teach people to think critically, and so they were offering this ah, for free public expense. But what was very interesting is that when after the war, the the public, particularly the middle class, liked a lot of these services also think about it in the earlier days, you really couldn’t talk about marital problems that was very probably right, but you sure as heck couldn’t talk about sexual problems. You really couldn’t talk about having problems rear your young because in the earlier days it was but it’s supposed to be the male had a strong hand. Spare the rod, not the child, you know. Spare the rod, spoil the child, etcetera. It was only after the war that these things became started become things people could talk about. It was the salvation in many cases of a lot of these these non-profit agencies, because what they started doing was providing specifically these kinds of surfaces to the middle class. Interesting enough. One of the rationales was the middle class could pay for it, at least in part it didn’t have to all be free. You have to understand that a lot of the agencies that you think of now things like community chest, they really and truly number one wanted to get get away from relief. The experience of of the depression and the new deal when they’ve been pushed out of relief and forced to find other ways to survive. You had really gotten them to the point where they did not want to be back in the release in really space, which was really seen as a descendant of charity. They were much more comfortable in the benevolence, the philanthropy, the betterment of society kinds of kinds of efforts. And they said that on the brothers, all right, rather than charity. So we talked about that before the division between charity. We didn’t get into detail we’re going through, but this is where they were much more comfortable, and that led them directly in the path to be ready for when eventually came along. Great society. It’s such like that. Okay, now, is this the beginning of the divergence between charity and philanthropy? Now, at the beginning of the divergence is actually in the eighteen hundreds. Okay, what was the history of that? The history of that was life was we’re looking back, we think we have this picture of this very bucolic america, if you know, from the colonial era, most people don’t even realize all the things that happens. Say, from eighteen hundred eighteen forty we sort of jumped from george washington to the civil war, but an awful lot happening, like you’d be in the wilderness if you went to fill it beyond philadelphia. That was true, but it off. A lot of things was happening, and one of the things that was happening was that cities were growing new york city was growing exponentially. You had a lot of immigrant groups coming in you had but also think about the older areas of new england, massachusetts, et cetera. These have been farmed out that was there have a great soil to begin with. The ohio valley was opening. People were moving the tightness of the you know, we all have this kind of notion of ah, sturbridge village and the cute little yeah that existed at one point. But by the time eighteen hundred rolled around, ah, lot of that was changing. So that whole idea of direct community responsibility for charity was breaking down. Secondly, when you got to the cities, the city’s had anonymity and that alone attracted a lot of people. There was the structures that had created charity before, on allowed upon which charity had been based before. We’re breaking down tremendously. Number one, number two. The numbers were increasing. And the idea was that charity was a waste. It was a waste of time. Charity comes from the latin word careerist, which means tenderness, mercy and love. Philantech becomes from the greek, which means love of mankind as early as seventeen o four. It was recognized as a term meaning somebody who was interested in the public good in public works in public benefit. All right, they started looking not to help tony or bob because we had problems, but rather while the but problems that tony and bob facing exist nowhere when did this thinking this thinking started by eight by eighteen ten by eighteen. Twenty early very, very early. It was also seen as much more organized and much more scientific. All right, where is that? We can help? We can help the masses rather than one person at a time. They were we could get to the cause is exactly what they were looking to do. Was copy that. Go back to securing that center. I want to go back to the puritans, create a better society. Why do we have poverty? All right now their answer in many cases was very still to their answers. Was if only the pool without more like us. All right, that is. But that is true. Very helpful. No, it isn’t very helpful. But it was awful long for roughing long time. That was the answer they had was the whole period. Called the friendly visitors who went into places don’t like fight like five points, and basically the message is, if only you would be more like us. However, even though they were misfiring because they didn’t have the knowledge we have today, they didn’t have the theory today certainly didn’t have computers where they could crunch numbers. Their idea was this benevolence. The idea was they were trying to change society, not necessarily help people. So that was the division between charity, which has always been direct and specifically focused on individual family and philanthropy, which is always had much broader goals and has always been much more abstract. But that that split literally tony goes back to the early decades of the eighteen hundreds. Well, okay, cool. Um, let’s move forward a little bit, tio. Some of the recognition in the in the tax laws. That’s, that’s. Really? Not really about really, like two minutes left. So you’ll have to go through this little quickly charity’s. Well, first. Well, there was first non-profit status was like nineteen. Nineteen o nine. Okay, let’s, let’s, go back. We only have about a minute and a half. Now then let me do. The talking like men and they haven’t finished. Ah, before the before the turn of the last century, almost all taxes were levied by states churches had never been. Churches have never been taxed. It started with churches, property belonging, the church’s libraries. But all of this state law it was not until eighteen, ninety five something in that area when the federal government first mentioned not the charitable organizations that in caldnear non-profits charitable organizations, they were exempted. Then later it was codified that they had to be non-profit it was charitable organization first then non-profit what we think of today with the whole tax loss set up with the five o one sees that did not happen until nineteen. Fifty four and they were not in those days twenty nine categories of five a onesie. But just let again your listeners understand what we have today in terms of the tax exemptions. Number one this goes back centuries number two it’s started with the state’s number three. It became the law of the land when the feds put it in around red, around world war on dh that actually the exemption, the personal exemption for giving it inevitably goes back to the world will want here. Okay, so again, everything we see today, tony has roots a long time ago and that’s the overall theme of this particular part of the book. They’re working outstanding. We look forward to the book when it when it comes out, we’ll talk more. I’ll be back. Okay? Sounds like charity navigator between, uh, on the bookshelf. Dr robert pennant. You’ll find him at outcomes. Toolbox. Dotcom thank you again, bob. Thank you for having me. Future of e mail is coming up. No future females not coming. Who writes this copy? New overtime rules with jean takagi is coming up. All right, what i need you’ve heard me say this before. I need an intern. So i have somebody to blame for this crappy copy. So if you have, if you are interested being an intern, i don’t know. Or if you have a son or daughter andi, you don’t mind them being blamed for my mistakes. Sammy. Sammy the resume. Tony at tony martignetti dot com new overtime rules with jean takagi that’s what’s coming up first, pursuing there’s an opportunity for you to join a groundbreaking panel to raise the bar for us fund-raising pursuant is partnered with rogue hair, which is a fund-raising think tank in england. Dr adrian sergeant was a guest. Oh, maybe four, five, six weeks ago, roughly from from rogue hair to bring this. This joint venture is to bring what’s called critical fund-raising to the u s and they are recruiting a panel of pro fundraisers to make sure that new ideas come out of rogue ares research like the relationship fund-raising study that dr sergeant and i talked about was the march there was a march eighteenth show, so it was more than six weeks ago, march eighteenth so they want to put this you know this this thought into practice and that’s why they are recruiting a panel and also help the two companies identify while one’s accompany one’s a think tank let’s be precise. Now identify gaps in fund-raising knowledge so that rogue air can research them and fill them in. And, you know, i keep saying no, gary, i don’t know if it’s rogue array that’s the latin that it comes from, which is to ask, i don’t know if i don’t know if over there they’re pronouncing it. Rogue air or rogue ira, but any case they’re they’re partnered with pursuing. You can join the panel. The deadline to apply to be a panel member is july first. So you still have about a week. Go to tony dot, m a slash pursuant rogue air r o g a r e and you have to put a capital p and you have to put a capital r, because that’s, the way bentley works. So tony dot m a slash pursuant rogue hair and get your application in before july first. Hopefully you will be on the panel and improve fund-raising practice in the us. That’s the whole purpose of this now tony steak too fund-raising fundamentals it’s the podcast that i produce for the chronicle of philanthropy but doing this for three or four years you know that part i put together a round up of shows that are excellent that i think deserve your attention. There’s one on donor empathy called put yourself in your donorsearch news ideas for giving tuesday there’s ideas for boosting your plan e-giving and there’s more now this is a short form fund-raising fundamentals. Only each one was about ten minutes, so i could never squeeze dr penner into fund-raising fundamentals. It wouldn’t work. Um, he’s still here. So he i’m not saying anything behind his back. Um, anyway, i did a round up the video and the links to the to those short episodes of fund-raising fundamentals are at tony martignetti dot com. And that is tony’s take two. Jean takagi. I know he’s on the phone and you know who he is. He is the managing attorney at neo non-profit and exempt organizations. Law group he’s, our monthly legal contributor times. Many, many years he edits the popular blogger at non-profit law blogged dot com. And on twitter, he is at gi tak gt a k welcome back, jane takagi. Thanks, tony. Happy summer school. Happy somebody. You do? It’s a sweltering one here in in here, in washington. I almost said new york city’s the mid eighties what’s it like in san francisco. It’s actually a pretty comfortable, like, seventy two out here. No big deal. All right, san francisco’s. Always bragging about their weather. You always boasting about that? Not in juno. You have june gloom you had. Did you have fog earlier today, june gloom we’ve had some june gloom way we’re headed towards july and the sweet whether or not yeah, well, we’ll worry about that. All right? Another time, all right, overtime rules, overtime rules have changed, gene, and it take a takes effect december first, so there’s still time to plan, but this has some serious implications for non-profits it does, and i think most of us are sort of generally aware of overtime rule that enough if you’ve had hourly jobs before, like i have tony, but, you know, we sort of get used to that idea of if we work more than forty hours per week is a narrowly employees were entitled to overtime time and a half, so i remember being an hourly workers that was actually sometimes a great thing to have to have that extra income, no, but i think what’s less known is that even if you’re paid a salary and so let’s say you’re paid, you know, thirty thousand dollars per year or something and not on an hourly basis, you might still have the time. The right tio overtime if you work more than forty hours per week that sometimes little known and little understood both. By employees and employers and generally the way people think is that salaried employees if you get a salary and not an hourly wage, you’re kind of in that category of exempt employees, which are those who are exempt from the overtime pay right, but not all right. And so that the most common forms of exemption are referred to as the white-collar exemptions. I mean, those are the executives who are, you know, usually managers managing two or more employees. Um, the professionals who are like, you know, teachers, lawyers and doctors. And usually it requires a degree and some sort of certificate, our license and the administrative imp ploys that are performing office and non manual work that’s directly related to management or business operations. So those are the typical salaried exceptions, the white-collar exemptions from from overtime. Okay, let’s, let’s acquaint listeners were, uh, and me with what what’s what’s changed. What’s the that’s not bury the headline what is new about overtime? So what is new is those white-collar exemptions were subject to a minimum amount. So even if he falls under the definitions of executive, professional or administrative straight of professional if you were making less than twenty three thousand six hundred sixty dollars, which is currently the threshold. You were entitled to get overtime if you work more than forty hours. So that’s what little known if you made less than twenty three thousand six hundred sixty dollars, you were entitled to overtime even if you were a salary. Now the law that’s changing says that minimum threshold is going up by more than double, so the new threshold is going to be forty seven thousand four hundred seventy six. So more than forty seven thousand where the old threshold, which will apply until december first, is only twenty, twenty three, twenty three so many more people now eligible for overtime pay, right? So basically, everybody who was salary between twenty three thousand six, sixty and forty seven thousand four hundred seventy six are entitled. Teo will be entitled to overtime pay time and a half based on their salary starting december first. And how do you calculate? What is the hourly rate? You just you just divide the weekly salary by forty? Yeah, i think you’re just going to do on on a pro rata basis. You, khun divided by the number of hours that you work in a year for for for a worker and then that’s the hourly rate your time and times it by time and a half. Okay, now this applies to all employers, right? This is not just non-profits that are being hit, it applies not all employers, but non-profits don’t have a special knows i’m from there. Okay, no special exclusion for non-profits and it comes from the us department of labor, right, not california law. Now this is not right for once it’s, not california, but people should know that they need to look at the state laws because the state laws sometimes might be even more strict than the federal laws. In some ways, that could be more difficult for employers, and in some ways, this increase will be much, much less for for state law. Under under state law in california, for example, are current minimum for exempt employees is forty one thousand, so that jumped to forty seven thousand isn’t so big. The federal level is jumping from twenty three thousand forty seven thousand much much hyre increase affecting many, many more employers and employees. Are there any states going above the forty? Seven, four. Seventy six and none that i know of. Okay? No. None being more generous. All right. Right. But i understand important. You do need to check your own state law. Yeah, and california will will probably be over that that amount in a few years as they’re targeting a fifteen dollars, minimum salary, hourly rate and the example categories will go up with that over a number of years. All right. You said no special exemption for non-profits, but some non-profits are accepted. No, no, no umbrella exemption for non-profits. But there are some excepted non-profit categories. Yeah, so not non-profits so generally you khun get you can fall under the coverage in three ways, and one way is just by operation of state law. So i’m going to leave that out for now, because the states will all differ on that. But the two other main ways to get covered is one if the non-profit is considered a covered, enter surprise. So a little bit of jargon there, but generally that means one of two things. One is that they’re one of these named enterprises. So if it’s a hospital or an organization that takes care of older adults or people with disabilities who reside on on the organisation’s premises or schools for children who are mentally or physically disabled or gifted preschools, elementary school secondary schools and in colleges and universities all covered so all their employees air covered as well the other type of non-profit but that would be great, but i need to understand something covered means they’re they’re subject to this rule, or they are not right. They’re subject to the new to the new law, right? So, employees, uh, all of those named enterprises are going to be subject to those those new rules in the new threshold for overtime. Okay, so those are categories named enterprises. All right, so you still might be outside the named enterprises? Absolutely. Okay, most non-profit they’re probably not just in the strict categories hospitals and schools. So the other way you get covered is if you have ordinary commercial activities that result in sales or business done of at least five hundred thousand dollars. Bonem so that the church here is its commercial activity, so they’re not talking about donations, and they’re not talking about income that’s directly related to furthering your charitable purpose, they’re talking about commercial activities that they’re more like unrelated business activities. So if you’ve got that type of commercial activity and i should say that commercial activity and unrelated business activity under the tax code with unrelated business income tax, they’re defined slightly differently. So i’ll just say this is more broader. So if it’s a commercial type activity that’s being done for-profit and you’re you’re intending, tio, i run a business to generate income for the non-profit no matter where the profits go, you’re just running a real business, and if it’s you’re making at least five hundred thousand dollars on it, then you may be a covered enterprise, and then all of these the new thresholds for for the overtime are going apply to your organization socially. So still a lot of charitable organizations that are not covered yet, but well, based on what we’re going through because you’re right, you have the named enterprise. Is the covered enterprises the named ones? Yeah, half a million dollars threshold in commercial activity. If you’re over that in commercial activity, then this these new rules apply to you, but okay, we’re still talking about a lot of charities that are not going to be impacted? Not yet. Okay, what’s your other category. All right, so any non-profit who has employees who are engaged in interstate commerce so that business transactions basically between or amongst different states and including whether you’re on on the phone or whether you’re doing business not on a very, very rare basis, but somewhat regularly interacting with folks or businesses or other organizations across state lines that does that include fund-raising activity? Yeah, that could that could. Well, this is a close one having this’s not not not going to just be donations there so it’s beyond just simple fund-raising it’s beyond okay, now i’m gonna i’m sort of putting you on the spot, so if you can’t say definitively, you know, of course, you know, use your usual loyally skills toe qualify, but this is going to be the biggest one that would potentially potentially that’s why i’m asking the question sweet lots of non-profits in if you’re if i’m a california charity and i’m making calls to nevada for fund-raising or sending e mails or any of these other things that our solicitations that you and i have talked about when you get into that whole charity solicitation registration realm, if you’re doing these things across state lines, is that the kind of activity that you’re talking about? Yeah, if you do it on a fairly regular basis, that could be activity that that we’re talking about. That’s, a book category, if you’re looking for donated items that are going to cross state state state lines, that maybe what we’re talking about, a swell. So any movement of persons or things including donated goods across state lines, that’s going to trigger and just the employees who are engaged in that activity that doesn’t cover all of the non-profits employees it’s just the employees that are engaged in that particular activity. Okay, so most likely this is going to be your fund-raising team, if you’re going across state lines and, you know, depending how big you are, you might have ah, corporate sponsorship team that just just does that sabat crowd funding is going to be implicated, right? Yeah could be we’re not really sure crowdfunding is so so new and not really caught into how the rest of the laws are our thinking about interstate commerce, and i don’t exactly know how that will. Work, especially with different intermediaries that that help out in the crowd funding. Provoc okay, yes, the intern, yes, those platforms as well. All right, gene let’s. So let’s, go out for a break. When we come back. Of course, we’ll keep talking about this, and you know, you have some ideas for what non-profits need to do and also coming up. Live listener, love, stay with us. Like what you’re hearing a non-profit radio tony’s got more on youtube, you’ll find clips from a standup comedy, tv spots and exclusive interviews catch guests like seth gordon, craig newmark, the founder of craigslist marquis of eco enterprises, charles best from donors choose dot org’s aria finger do something that worked and they only levine from new york universities heimans center on philantech tony tweets to, he finds the best content from the most knowledgeable, interesting people in and around non-profits to share on his stream. If you have valuable info, he wants to re tweet you during the show. You can join the conversation on twitter using hashtag non-profit radio twitter is an easy way to reach tony he’s at tony martignetti narasimhan t i g e n e t t i remember there’s a g before the end he hosts a podcast for the chronicle of philanthropy fund-raising fundamentals is a short monthly show devoted to getting over your fund-raising hartals just like non-profit radio, toni talks to leading thinkers, experts and cool people with great ideas. As one fan said, tony picks their brains and i don’t have to leave my office fund-raising fundamentals was recently dubbed the most helpful non-profit podcast you have ever heard, you can also join the conversation on facebook, where you can ask questions before or after the show. The guests were there, too. Get insider show alerts by email, tony tells you who’s on each week and always includes link so that you can contact guests directly. To sign up, visit the facebook page for tony martignetti dot com. I’m jonah helper, author of date your donors. And you’re listening to tony martignetti non-profit radio. Big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. Welcome back live listener love as promised! Oh my goodness, we’re gushing! San jose, california, stamford, connecticut, south bound brook, new jersey lovett welcome, south bound brook, morristown, new jersey live listener loved to you, boston, mass talking all about new england today with with with bob penna, rockford, illinois live listener love, i think that’s so that most of the domestic up st louis, missouri it was early early on live listen love, so grateful to have ah, that many live listeners love goes out to you. Of course we got to go abroad. I would be remiss if we don’t i have to do it. Tokyo, japan three three different listeners in japan in tokyo, specifically konnichi wa. We have three, listeners in seoul, south korea, anya haserot lot of times we can’t see had just how many? We just know it’s multiple, but, uh, you see three today and also multiple from tehran, iran welcome live listener loved to tehran three listeners, they’re also love it love it, my voice cracked little bit malaysia, we can’t see your city i’m sorry, but we know you’re with us live listen love to you and we got any other let’s see? Oh, yeah, of course. Hustle be sweden. Welcome live listen, love in noble park, australia live listener loved to you also, i believe that is all the yes. If we didn’t shut you out, then i’m sorry, but live love love to the live listeners. Absolutely. Podcast pleasantries. You know how many you are? Well, over ten thousands of you listening, whatever it is you’re doing. You know, i get tired of me in nouma rating the activities that i’ve heard. So just simple pleasantries to the over ten thousand podcast listeners, the vast majority of our audience and they affiliate affections. Got to send that out to our am and fm listeners throughout the country. Our affiliate stations. Let your station know that you listen. You listen to non-profit radio. They would love that feedback. I would be grateful. Thank you very much. Am and fm affiliate listeners. Jean takagi. Thank you for that indulgence. Thank you for being on the phone with me while i, uh well, i think all our listeners it’s important, important it’s. So impressive in an international scope of your listeners. It is it’s cool. Did you know? I don’t know if you were listening earlier today. Did you catch our listener of the week at the top of the show? The executive director of california symphony. I did not. I’m sorry i missed that’s. Okay, aubrey burghdoff hour. Do you don’t know? Do you patronize california symphony? I patronize symphonies in california. Ok, well, hopefully audrey’s. Not listening any longer. Okay, um, let’s. See? So we have ah, you know, we have our standard, like five minutes or so left. What? What are some things that non-profits should be looking at doing to make sure that they are in compliance come december first? Sure. So, first of all, make sure you check to see whether you’re covered or not. And the one broad categories i just refer to very offhandedly was coverage through state law. And note that there’s the national council of nonprofit says that in at least eleven states, including new york and new jersey, the federal rules will apply to virtually all employees and employers, including of non-profits. So watch your state law coverage as well. In addition to the different coverages we talked about, can you a gene? Can you name any of the other states in that eleven has, according to them, it was alaska, dc, illinois, maine, maryland, massachusetts, missouri, new jersey. In new york, they said north carolina and ohio ok, and, uh, the national association non-profits believes most of the non-profits most or all non-profits in those states will be covered by this subject to this bye operation of state law regulation or administrative ruling will automatically apply to virtually all employees and employers. Okay, thank you very much for that in nouma rations. All right, so you got to know if you’re if you’re subject to it, then what if you are? Well, then you’ve got to do a lot of planning, right? So if you’re going to be subject to it, then you gotta start managing and figuring out your budget and what’s so difficult about this is it starts in december, so not too many people are going to have a chance to react to this with their next year’s budget. They’re gonna have to figure out how this is going to impact. They’re this year’s budget um and so so then they’ll have to figure out what do we do? Are we going to do we regularly use over? Time first of all, on our employees covered on are we going tohave teo find different alternatives? Do we need to maybe hyre part time employees or spread out the work in a different manner? So we discourage? Oh, our lesson are need teo give overtime pay? Or do we provide pay raises that increased the worker’s salaries to the new threshold? So so we are sort of been sink overall on we don’t have to pay overtime if we can get them up to that new threshold, and if they’re very close to it, that might be a cost. So one of those is heartless and the other is altruistic, but if we start cutting workers, reducing them to part time that’s ah that’s bad for them. Oh, actually, what i was suggesting and, you know, there’s there’s good and bad to all of this, but when i was first, suggesting is hyre part time employees, new employees so your current employees don’t have toe work the overtime. Oh, hyre new employee. Okay, i was thinking, reducing current employees to part time and bringing on more. Yes, so what? What the critics they’re going to say, though, is that that may not happen, but what may happen is that with the increase costs that are going to result because of the additional overtime taste, some non-profits they’re goingto have to pay starting in december, they may just lay off workers or cut programs instead. That’s a scary thought has that i’m sure somebody has raised that. That doomsday scenario yeah, i mean, it’s interesting. I’m not sure how you feel about it, i’m you know, without having a chance to sort of really study it, but there were over two hundred thousand comments that were sent when the first proposed these regulations to the department of labor. Most of them were pretty negative, and a lot of those negative comments came from non-profits that we’re saying, you know, first of all, we had no chance to really react because the rules come in place so quickly by december, and we didn’t really account for different geographic, you know, cost of living issues. So, you know, making you know that amount forty seven thousand in new york is probably one thing or san francisco and making it in oklahoma city or somewhere else, maybe very, very different. So there’s some really good criticisms about it and some difficulties, some non-profits especially in those rural areas that are going to have to face, on the other hand, they’re people that say, you know, we shouldn’t be taking advantage of workers just because we’re a non profit organization and paying them at a rate that’s below poverty level for a family of four. And that was the reason why the administration had justified that shift has not been changed since two thousand for so where twenty three thousand is below the poverty level. Yeah, family. In fact, i think the twenty three thousand is well below poverty level for a family of four serving one person making the income from that family okay? And where does the new forty six or forty seven and where’s that in respect to the poverty level, do you know what this is? How they defined it’s? I’m not exactly sure how they compare it exactly to where the poverty level is defined, but they say it represents the fortieth percentile of earnings the forty forty out of one hundred forty percent of that’s not very a fulltime salaried workers in the lowest wage census region, which is the south so forty percent out of full time salaried workers, that’s forty seven thousand in a place where the cost of living is lower, right is the lowest and okay in south. Okay. All right, well, you got to take these things, maybe incrementally, but it definitely, you know, it’s yeah. I mean, it has budget impact. And, you know, i’m not surprised that a lot of the comments from non-profits were negative. This this is gonna cost. Yeah, it’s definitely going to cost and it’s going to hurt some people in services, you know, maybe the counter is sometimes you’re gonna have to take some steps back is on on an organizational level. So on a national or or broader level, we’re moving forward. All right, gene, we’re gonna leave it there. I want to thank you very much. Thank you so much, tony. My pleasure. As always, jean takagi, you’ll find him at non-profit law block, dot com and also at g tak next week. Purpose driven branding and the new guide star platinum. If you missed any part of today’s show, i beseech you, find it on tony martignetti dot com. We’re sponsored by pursuant. Online tools for small and midsize non-profits data driven and technology enabled pursuant dot com. Remember to check out the three hundredth show. Hope you’re gonna be with us july twenty ninth. You could play the music, sam, go ahead, don’t be shy. July twenty ninth, thirty three hundred show, sixth anniversary. Our creative producers, claire meyerhoff. Sam lee broots is the line producer. Gavin dollars are am and fm outreach director shows social media is by susan chavez, and this music is by scott stein. Be with me next week for non-profit radio. Big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. Go out and be great. What’s not to love about non-profit radio tony gets the best guests check this out from seth godin this’s the first revolution since tv nineteen fifty and henry ford nineteen twenty it’s the revolution of our lifetime here’s a smart, simple idea from craigslist founder craig newmark yeah insights, orn presentation or anything? People don’t really need the fancy stuff they need something which is simple and fast. When’s the best time to post on facebook facebook’s andrew noise nose at traffic is at an all time hyre on nine a, m or p m so that’s when you should be posting your most meaningful post here’s aria finger ceo of do something dot or ge young people are not going to be involved in social change if it’s boring and they don’t see the impact of what they’re doing. So you got to make it fun applicable to these young people look so otherwise a fifteen and sixteen year old they have better things to do if they have xbox, they have tv, they have their cell phones me dar is the founder of idealist took two or three years for foundation staff to sort of dane toe add an email address their card it was like it was phone. This email thing is right and that’s why should i give it away? Charles best founded donors choose dot or ge somehow they’ve gotten in touch kind of off line as it were on dh and no two exchanges of brownies and visits and physical gift. Mark echo is the founder and ceo of eco enterprises. You may be wearing his hoodies and shirts. Tony talked to him. Yeah, you know, i just i’m a big believer that’s not what you make in life. It sze you know, tell you make people feel this is public radio host majora carter. Innovation is in the power of understanding that you don’t just do it. You put money on a situation expected to hell. You put money in a situation and invested and expected to grow and savvy advice for success from eric sacristan. What separates those who achieve from those who do not is in direct proportion to one’s ability to ask others for help. The smartest experts and leading thinkers air on tony martignetti non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent.

Nonprofit Radio for April 29, 2016: Secrets of Google Analytics & What’s Permissible Advocacy?

Big Nonprofit Ideas for the Other 95%

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Devon Smith & Julia Robinson: Secrets of Google Analytics

With Devon Smith & Julia Robinson at 16NTC
Devon Smith & Julia Robinson at 16NTC

Do you want to use Google Analytics smarter? Devon Smith is co-founder of Measure Creative & Julia Robinson is manager of communications at Business for Social  Responsibility (BSR). We talked at the 2016 Nonprofit Technology Conference.

 

 

 

Gene Takagi: What’s Permissible Advocacy?

Gene TakagiHow much can your nonprofit participate in the presidential election? Can you educate? Endorse? Lobby? Gene Takagi walks us through what’s allowed; disallowed; and questionable. He’s our legal contributor and principal of NEO, the Nonprofit & Exempt Organizations Law Group.

 


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Hello and welcome to tony martignetti non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. I’m your aptly named host. We have a listener of the week, the child care resource center in palmdale, california, at the non-profit technology conference, three people from there signed up to be non-profit radio insiders to have unsubscribed now that’s not true these three very special thanks jamie smith, lucy capurro and evelyn juarez thanks for being non-profit radio insiders. Thanks for loving non-profit radio shout out to our listener, the weak child care resource center in palmdale, california. Oh, i’m glad you’re with me. I’d get a barton ella insula infection if you cattle e told me that you missed today’s show secrets of google analytics do you want to use google analytics smarter? Kevin smith is co founder of measure creative, and julia robinson is manager of communications at business for social responsibility b s are. We talked at the twenty sixteen non-profit technology conference and what’s permissible advocacy. How much can your non-profit participate in our presidential election season? Can you educate endorse lobby? Jean takagi walks us through what’s allowed disallowed and questionable he’s, our legal contributor and principle of neo the non-profit and exempt organizations, law group on tony’s take two don’t let plan giving questions go unanswered. We’re sponsored by pursuant full service fund-raising data driven and technology enabled. You’ll raise more money pursuant dot com, also by crowdster online and mobile fund-raising software for non-profits now with apple pay for mobile donations. Crowdster dot com here are devon smith and julia robinson from the non-profit technology conference on google analytics. Welcome to tony martignetti non-profit radio coverage of sixteen ntc it’s, a non-profit technology conference. Of course, this is also part of ntc conversations. We’re in san jose at the convention center, and my guests are devon smith and julia robinson. They’re session topic is hidden secrets of google analytics. We’re going to get into that very shortly, right after we cover today’s, thiss interviews, swag item rich is these small stickers from benevolent dot net they read, be fierce bowl. Be inspired. Benevolent dot net and these join the swag pile for the conference. All right, let’s. Get into hidden secrets of google analytics with devon smith, who was co founder of measure creative and she’s, sitting closest to me, and julia robinson, manager of communications at b s our business for social responsibility. Welcome, julia devon, welcome. Thank you. I have his backwards, devon, you’re sitting closest to me, i am, yes, i did, i just say this backward don’t know, i said, devon, sitting close to me, yeah, julia, you’re over there. That’s correct, you are doubt you are julia, okay, you’re devon’s all right, very good. Google analytics. Now, this is sort of an advanced session that you ran. But i am not an advanced person, a knowledgeable person of google analytics. So you’re going to help me along. And, okay, we’ll do the best we can. Using let’s. See what you talked about here. Oh, labyrinth in corners. So let’s, start with this. Devon, what is it that non-profits sometimes have trouble with around google analytics? What are we not getting quite right? Yeah, good question. So i think a lot of non-profit organizations get really intimidated by google analytics because there’s so many buttons to push and reports to look at so many options of what you might want to look at. And so people just open up google analytics, get kind of nervous, click around and then shut it down and are like, no it’s too much, i can’t handle it. S o this session was trying to show them if you only looked at four reports in all of google analytics and what should those four reports, speed? And then with a couple of other topics as well? Ok, but so we could break it down to four report that on dh still be an advanced user. Exactly. Oh, so did you so hard. Your move, people from from my voice cracked again front, like i’m sixteen fourteen. Did you put people from basic teo advanced? Or they were already advanced that now they’re super users. Good question. I mean, i think it was a mix of people in the audience? I mean, there were definitely people there who, you know, we said, if you’ve opened up google analytics, got nervous and tried it down like that’s, okay, we’ll hope that or if you are pretty advanced user, but you want to kind of take it to the next level. We can also help you do that with new front in code, a new kind of administrative setting, so it actually help you take it even further than you’ve been able to before. Okay? All right. So, julia, why don’t we start with he’s four report you what? You concur with devon, i presume four reports and ok, make sure there’s no dissension thiss pamela too. Okay. All right, so why don’t we start with four report these reports that give us an overview of the four reports? What? How way what would we gain from these four reports that we’re gonna talk about shortly? I would say first off it, as devin says, that it does kind of help you narrow down what you’re looking at. It could be a little bit scary at first to start in google analytics. And i would also say that it having that narrow focus means that you can actually go much deeper toe understand what you know, google analytics is an extremely powerful tool, and i think a lot of non-profits don’t realize that that you can go down to even understanding who specific users, maybe not a person’s name, but a certain institution or a founder fun foundation or something like that. You can really that information what they’re doing on your site exactly. So that’s, the first report that we looked at is whose browsing your website. What are you doing? What a transition. Okay, devon, what is this first report called it’s called the service provider reports service provider reports, which is not a very descriptive name, but it’s basically the internet service provider. The name of the organization who is using internet browser website. Oh, so we get s p i guess, exactly. And to and from that, we could gain glean what julia just said exactly. Yeah. So google knows the name of the organization who owns that s p and so they will tell you what the name of that organization is. We’ll give you the organization. Yeah, sure, exactly. Oh, i mean, not just the not just the number, but that number called myself, but yeah, you’re you’re you’re here. I’d be addressed. Thank you. They will not give you not just i p address actually name of exactly so it’s. An incredibly powerful report and probably the most underused report and all of google analytics is actually saying who is looking at your website? Alright, this service provider report. How do we selected? Set it up. What do we do? Yes, it’s it’s. Just a selection. It’s called in the audience section and then technology and then service provider. So there’s kind of a couple of layers of tio pulled down or something. Okay, i don’t do the analytics for my sake. We have analytics. Yeah, tony martignetti dot com. But i don’t set them up, but we do talk about them every month. Run and we react to them. And so i think i feel like you should ask your analyst to provide you. But which of the organization’s looking service provided report. Okay, so lead us through the path again. I was amazed by what it goes from audience to technology to service. Provider okay, and then what do we do? Just select this report? Yeah, just like that report. And what we actually talked about in the session is when you first see the report, it actually doesn’t look very useful because a lot of the top results are things like verizon t comcast there, although like generic internet service providers that, you know, serve internet to you at your home or on a mobile device on dso what we looked at and the session was actually screening out those not useful results just to look at the organization’s you actually care about, like the government, like funders like other non-profits appears depends who you wanna look. So so, julia, how do we screen out the ones that are not interesting to us? So you actually do have to go in and look at what the what list is coming up? And it will usually give you i mean, even thousands of results, and you have to go in and see who are the top users, and then are those people that you want to hear from? So sometimes i’ll go into a segment for government, maybe, and a communications agency will pop up on that list, and then we’ll just make sure to exclude them. How do you exclude? I am not sure. Devon. Yes, it’s. In an advanced segment, you have to build a segment of those organizations that you care most about. So in the, you know, government segment, you might say, i want the name of any organization that includes city of state of department of agency of, and i’ll just bring you back a list of all those organizations who include that particular siri’s of names and the same works with an exclusion. So if a name appears on that list because there, you know, the city of new york library, but library isn’t really. A government institution issue might exclude the word library from argast you, khun khun, select or exclude exactly in the same way, exactly. Okay. All right, so we need to get down let’s assume that big ones like horizon comcast, etcetera, not of interest us need to get down to where we really want to be out. Otherwise, i mean, they’re in the report, right? But we have to continually sift through all these top level ones that were not interested in yeah, so once you apply the right so once you apply that advance segment, then those ones you don’t care about go away and you just see the ones you actually care about, okay? An advanced segment. What does that mean? We have george in jail on twenty martignetti number on radio. I’m concerned that this session is going to be free. It’s gonna go? Yeah, google analytics jargon it. Yeah, it is. What is an advanced session on advanced segment is thin named by google analytics, so unfortunately, i can’t change the name it all but in advance segment as a way to temporarily exclude information from the report you’re looking at. So if you say i’m looking for support, but i only want to see, you know, couple of the organizations in this long list of a thousand you would apply in advance segment to that report, and then you only see the organizations you care about, ok, every time, every time you, every time you get this report, exactly, you’re tuned to non-profit radio. Tony martignetti also hosts a podcast for the chronicle of philanthropy. Fund-raising fundamentals is a quick ten minute burst of fund-raising insights, published once a month. Tony’s guests are expert in crowdfunding, mobile giving event fund-raising direct mail and donor cultivation. Really, all the fund-raising issues that make you wonder, am i doing this right? Is there a better way there is? Find the fund-raising fundamentals archive it. Tony martignetti dot com that’s marketmesuite n e t t i remember there’s, a g before the end, thousands of listeners have subscribed on itunes. You can also learn maura, the chronicle website, philanthropy dot com fund-raising fundamentals the better way. Oppcoll how do we receive these reports? We get to my e mail, you have to goto analytics dot google dot com what good questions? So we covered automated email reports in the session, actually, so once you’ve gone through all those clicks to get to this really kind of sophisticated report, you don’t want to have to recreate that process every time so you can actually set an automated email on that email can get sent out with a pdf of that report on any time siri’s you like to the list of stakeholders that would actually care about that information. Dahna okay, like yourself with the website if you didn’t want to wait for the monthly reporting, but you wanted, you know, every week a list of the top organizations browsing her website, you’d actually get that sent it to you straight from google and what they were looking at. Ok, very good for the social manager could. Exactly all right, what else? Julia, should we know about the service provider report anything more noise? I would say that the thing that’s that could be tough going from getting that information is two then knowing what to do with it. So you have the information. You have this great data. What do you then do? How do you change your strategy so that you know, you can take advantage of it. So, for example, we use it to look at dahna potential partners on then we can understand. Okay, this partner is visiting our web site a lot. Maybe it’s time to give them a call. Do we know what pages different partners or potential partners of organizations on the list have have visited? Absolutely along. They’ve stayed on each page. You know that all that information is available. Yes. Service provider. Report. Yes. It’s. Incredible. So by organization, i can see that they looked at my contact page and they looked at this particular podcast pay whatever this show post and that they’ve downloaded a podcast that they, you know, spent twenty minutes on the site listening to the broadcast. You know any of those things? That’s, pretty scary service provider report. Okay, let’s, go to our next for what’s. The other one, it’s the next one was, i think a channel source reports. Oh, kind of how people arrive to your website from someone else’s website whether that was twitter or some other organization who linked to your website it’s an acquisition report. Okay, this’s, referring, referring the referring domains, domains. Exactly, don’t we know that our that’s not very commonly known? So what we did in this particular instance is google just gives you a long list of thousands of different websites who sent traffic to your site it’s helpful when you khun group those names together that are similar. So in bazaars case, you know, they have a bunch of kind of job listing sites that some traffic to their site for job seekers. They have other media partners, like new york times or fast company, when you can see all those sources that are similar together, and then actually start to see the trends of traffic from media or says partners were says, you know, other types of organizations, so just being able tio kind of put mohr finer detail on this poster close closer that type. Exactly. Julia, can you explain how how we do this in the channel? Sources report source. Singular gentle source report source reports that report in and kick that back over to devon actually cause she’s our she’s. More technical than me, okay, we’ll give you a chance, you’ll introduce the next yeah, so just give a little bit of background. So julie is a client of our agency, so more often, the ones kind of building reports are or talking to julie about what she wants to see in a report, and then we’ll build a financial built actually used the information with her stakeholders. So when you’re building, when you’re clustering, these organizations together it’s really applying that same advance segment technique. So you’re building an advance segment but defines who you consider a media source. And so you might say, here the top twenty media sources for organization and now when i want to see just what those twenty media organizations are doing buy-in advance segment and any report and google analytics, i can actually see projects from this because you choose the names of the different groupings clusters exactly, yes so it’s all it’s, all defined by you the organization or buy you the client, then s o that you’re using keywords in the organizational name exactly define what you want. How are you using the channel source report? Same same way or yeah, we’re we’re using it, you know, similarly, to understand where people are coming from, i actually use it quite frequently as as a gut check, so because i work on our social media side, i you know, seo, this tweet got really good engagement that must have driven traffic to the website, and if you go and look back, you can say, oh, maybe it didn’t actually do so well or yes, this did perform it did send people back to the website. One thing that was interesting is that we have a much bigger twitter following than a facebook following, but we actually get more traffic from facebook than we do from twitter, which means that maybe we wantto change our strategy so that on twitter, we’re using that to share announcements and things that we want people to make viral or spread more broadly and then on facebook, maybe where using that for more called actions or getting people to the website. Okay, would you conclude from that that you’re facebook users arm or engaged though fewer in number than your twitter users follow-up home? It’s a good question, i think it’s just that the platforms serve different purposes. I think that twitter’s more about staying on the platform. And maybe facebook isn’t. In our case, i don’t think that’s necessarily true for everyone. Okay, okay. Now, anything else we should say about the channel source report a little something. So i mean, the key to it is really using it to adjust her marketing strategy. So once you see how people are getting to your site, making sure their adjusting your approach to marketing based on the kind of return that you’re getting from that investment in those different channels. All right, julia, you wantto introduce the next next report report. Let’s say we did audiences. What are they looking for? The search reports, right? Yeah. So search reports on you can do this in a couple different ways. So one is to go into your ceo and look at the search terms that people are using on google to get to your website. And then you can also do an internal search report. So if you have a search function on your website, you can go in and see all the key words. That people used to when they got on your web site, what they were looking for once they got on your website. Okay, this one, this is it’s, also something to set up. Back-up yeah, yeah, sort of your google analytics uses google analytics. Yeah, not not when you’re searching on your own, obviously on your own side within your own site. Exactly. But okay, so you set up another so in the report in the search engine optimization report is basically what it’s called seo queries. You have to kind of connect it with this web master tools account that kruckel gives you, which is totally separate from google analytics, and then it’ll give you more information about not only what words people are using in google when they got to your site, but even just that your organization appeared in a search result, whether or not someone actually clicked it from google in tears whether or not someone actually okay, okay, i don’t feel like i have a grasp on this one as well as i did the first two. Yeah? Why is that? Yeah. So think about it. Anybody not one report. This is searching. This is not a report that schnoll analytics produces it. It does? Yeah, the report what it looks like is a bunch of search queries, so that could be everything from, you know, what is non-profit radio to how do i get help with google analytics? And if this podcast was was, you know, posted on the website on git yeah, you know, it’s really tagged exactly was properly tagged in-kind had all the right key words. You could actually see what words people are using in a google search to find that piece of content, and so the kind of point of our conversation er during the session and wass look att the content needs of your users and make sure your website is delivering on those needs. So we went through an example of searching just for the word other words, who, what, where, when, why and how? And all of your google search results and see what are those questions people have about your content that they want answered and make sure that you’re actually answering those questions on your website? Okay, that’s all thank you. Bringing me alone. Thank you, both of you. Thank you, julia. Your experience. With the with the search report, i would say there’s two things the first is that helped us understand when we had a report that an actual, you know, research report that was well titled it would get a lot more downloads or hits directly from google because people were searching, you know, how do you do this thing? And the report would be, how do you know how to do this thing? And so those would come up a lot more. So it’s learning better titles is one thing or sort of better, better tagging better content in that way on and then the other one is learning the gaps. So what are people searching for both on your website or on google? And you’re not providing it to them? How would you know that in the report? S o for the internal, if its internal search so on your own site, maybe they’re searching for a term and you know that that term isn’t on the website. Maybe you start creating some content related to that, or maybe you more closely match the words that people air using from google s o that you appear hyre in search. Or so it looks so that you are look like a better resource for them to click on, okay? And you could do that within tags to right. You could do that, you know, that meta tags you could do that in the title. You could do that in the earl and also in the body of whatever the pages. So sometimes it’s just about using the language that your audience is using instead of your own kind of internal jorgen so we went through a recent project with b s are around women’s in a quality women kind of women’s impact on the economy, and there were lots different opportunities, so you could think about gender inequality, a female inequality, just women, girls you could think about using lots of different terms in your content, but actually look to see what what words your users are actually using in their own language, and then try to adapt more of your content of their language patterns for sure doesn’t matter what you’re talking about in the office, exactly like the ones who who we’re trying to bring to the cause and to our content, right? All right, so this report helps me figure out what? What? That language is that they’re using, right? All right, very good. Fourth what’s, our last report. What did they do on your site? So did they download something that they give money to you? What other kind of events that happened on your website what’s? This one called so it’s in the behavior section and then events is that the nemo record events co-branding this’s events? What? They they they consider people traveling through your sight to be an event? Yes, the skiffle thiss gets technical any non earl based change is an event. So if you think about someone browsing your site, they go from one page to another page, not an event. If they take some action on a page that doesn’t result in a new girl. That’s an event so that could be scrolling down. The page is an event clicking on a button could be an event clicking on on anchor link that, like, drops you down the page suddenly is an event. Anything that happens on the page that doesn’t result in you moving to a new page, isn’t it so? I always thought this was totally on trackable. It’s uncrackable by scrolling down on a page is track that is one of the topics we cover in the session that’s called scroll depth tracking and we actually provide the front and code that you need to install on your website so that you can see how far down every page on your website people scrolled for a particular piece of constant incredible. I always thought that only clicks which which i guess what result in a new page we’re trackable, but i was very vastly wrong. Yeah, so about a week so about a third of the session ended up covering event tracking and how to implement new code on your website that you actually can’t track all these events. Okay, is that anywhere that listeners confined? It isthe slideshare dot net slash devin v smith slideshare dot net slash devon de vo and the smith? Yep. That’s correct. You can download all the slides from the session and it has all the code there. Korea. Whoa! That’s. Incredible. All right, so what do you do with it? You know, on whatever page people scroll. Only twenty five percent of the way. Another page they scroll thirty three. Percent away and that’s when the scrolling what else? Tell me, what else was trackable on? Don’t generally any non non earl? Yeah, changing event. But so are our item, which is an event because if you don’t change girls, it’s an event? Yeah. Okay, what are the events besides scrolling us? You could look at clicking a button on the site on dh that might, like give you, like a pop up form where you might submit an email address and then go into something else. You can even use event tracking if you’re like having event registration system that’s a third party platform. If you want to see what other sites people go to from europe site to some third party platform, that would be event tracking kapin yeah, anything that’s not just going to a new page on your site could be an event. This is vast. Julia, what do you do with this? S so we actually use probably the biggest one for us is report downloads because we have a lot of research reports, and so that helps us track how many reports they’re getting downloaded versus people just going to the page looking at the page and then going somewhere else. So there’s the you know, the page that has the report on it, and then you click on it to download. Not everybody downloads. So it’s, good to know who’s doing that. Um, i think scroll dept is great because it means that it can help understand if we should change with the designer layout of the page so that the most important information is up top or understanding how far people get down the page. Maybe we adjust what the page looks like or what information we put where, depending on what we think is the most important thing. Thanks. Okay. Anything else? There’s a ton of stuff in this? Yeah. It’s a pretty big one. There’s also con contact. So when people contact us it’s good to know which we have a bunch of different contacts for. You know, if you want to do research report, if you’re from a specific industry, we have a lot of different people. You can talk, teo. So the ones that were the most popular maybe we’ll put that button somewhere that’s, more prominent, or will ensure that the person is on the other end. Of that is properly responding to all of those e mails. Okay, ladies, we’re gonna wrap it up there because it was slightly technical and, you know, without official pretty one. Yeah, yeah. All right. It’s about as technical as they get, but perfect place to end it with joy and again slideshare dot net slash devon v smith. Okay, said it three times. And devon v smith is co founder at measure creative and julia robinson manager communications. P s our business. Is it business or business is business business for social responsibility, ladies. Thank you very, very much. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Twenty martignetti non-profit radio coverage of sixteen ntc non-profit technology conference. Thank you so much for being with us. Jean takagi and what’s. Permissible advocacy coming up first pursuant and crowdster pursuant has a free webinar coming up. They’re inviting you donorsearch relation’s the disney way. If walt disney was your ceo, how would you treat your donors? How would you inspire your staff? What would you do differently? Webinars on may third. Registration and info are at tony dot m a slash pursuant disney. Have you checked out crowdster for your next peer-to-peer? Event, maybe that’s a run walk? Um, i just referred someone to crowdster for a lacrosse tournament, they’re micro sites and dashboards are they’re simple. They’re elegant, easy, flexible for your donors and for their friends. Who, of course, they’re broad drawing in rights all purposes. They’re drawing your networks in easy for everybody to use. The back end is easy and that’s important for your oversight of the campaign, they added apple pay for mobile donations. You can talk to the ceo jo jo the ceo joe dot ferraro at crowdster dot com tell him you’re from non-profit radio and when did you get the ceo of kickstarter? Never gonna happen now time for tony’s take two. My video this week is another story from my client baruch college and alum asked about including the college in his will. We answered his questions. We gave him what he needed. And indeed he put a bequest in his will for the college. Then he e mailed us and told us about the three colleges that didn’t answer his questions. Ah, what happened to them? The video is that tony martignetti dot com if you want to be a non-profit radio insider if you want to get advance notice of the guests and an advanced link to my weekly videos, also go to tony martignetti dot com and in the operate click the email icon that’s tony’s take two time for live lister love podcast, pleasantries and affiliate affections. I know you didn’t think that i forgot them. Perish the thought i know you didn’t, lovelace their love is going out tio. My goodness. Whole new list. Sam, give me a double. But woe. San francisco, california, san jose. Portland, oregon. Bensalem, pennsylvania. Orza, bensel. Um, it sounds like bensonmum. That’s from was that movie from a murder by death. Bensonmum. Anyway. Ben salome, pennsylvania, then for colorado. Wilmington, north carolina. I’m going to be there very shortly, not-for-profits, but buy a new home in emerald isle. They got new yorkers. We got new york, new york, brooklyn, new york and staten island, new york. That’s. Three of the five boroughs. Where where are queens and brooke? Queens and the bronx? Don’t know. Not with us, but staten island, manhattan and brooklyn are focus on the positive. Albany, new york, upstate and st louis, missouri. Thank you so much. Lots of domestic live listener love today love it! We got we got brazil has checked in brazil. We don’t hear from brazil all that often. So i’m going to say ah, is buenos tardes is would that be correct? No. That’s that’s, that’s, that’s spanish that’s, right? Brazil? Of course you speak portuguese, so i’ll just shut out the city salaries daemon treyz, brazil! Thank you so much for being with us. What is the portuguese opening? Gado? Gado gado. Thank you. Are ah ho! Jon are our intern. Thank you. We’re going. We’re going to asia. Seoul. Of course. Always always counting on seoul, south korea. So generous. Annual haserot and also in china beijing and tai yun ni hao. Naturally, tokyo is with us always counting on tokyo too. Konnichi wa lots of live listen. Love today lovett affiliate affections that comes next in the same breath i mean it’s all this it’s all the same. You know it’s just there’s. No distinction, really. Between the love and the affection of the pleasantries, it’s all the same. I just get carried away with a liberations. That’s all affiliate affections are am and fm listeners throughout the country love you. Thank you so much for being with us whatever time your station is playing us whatever day so glad you’re with us on am and fm, those terrestrial listeners and the podcast pleasantries are over ten thousand whatever event, whatever device, whatever day, whenever you’re listening binge listening, i was talking to some ah, a binge listener on twitter last week she was catching up with like the last six episodes or so six hours of non-profit radio love it podcast pleasantries to those listeners. Jean takagi is with us. I know he’s there you know him he’s, the managing editor, managing attorney of neo non-profit and exempt organizations law group in san francisco and he edits the popular non-profit law blogged dot com, which is a very popular block, by the way non-profit law blob dot com gets a lot of traffic because it’s xero smart info there, done by jean and, uh and his firm and on twitter you want to check him on twitter he’s at g tak gt a k welcome back, jane takagi. Thanks, tony. Hi. Hey, how you doing out there? San francisco doing great and nice to hear all the love affection in pleasantries out there. Yes, thank you. Are you look ng segmented them. Thank you. See that gracious you are. Thank you. Yeah. That’s. What? I love it. I love it. Um, so we’re talking ah, jean because we’re in the presidential election cycle very, very timely about advocacy what you can do, what grayce area what you definitely better stay away from but, you know non-profits you know, they have interest in the outcomes here. I mean, they can’t just be totally on the sidelines. Yeah, absolutely. Tony. And, you know, i think non-profits everyone of us, if i include myself in the group, is being a boardmember way all supporting promote some cause right now, i think that’s just natural with non-profit organizations were furthering our mission. We’ve gotta support to promote our cause, and i think particularly with some of your audience tony fundraisers know that more than anybody, i’m sure they do absolutely but it’s critical, you know, supporting and promoting our cause goes beyond just talking to prospective donors. It goes to talking to the general public and making sure that they’re aware and we really can’t forget about the policy makers like the legislators. Andi even the administrative agencies out there because they set all of the rules for our playing field and there’s non-profits we want to make sure that the rules take into account our organizations and communities needs a swell because the laws can sometimes be on our side, and sometimes they can be very much against what we want to do. You know what non-profits have done in the past? I mean, really responsible of the community for really the most important public policies that that we hold most dear to us, and that really shape our country like civil rights, women’s rights, disability, right. Some education, health, religion, environmental protection, animal welfare. You know, no matter what are our causes are, um, a lot of that has been shaped by the non-profit sectors it’s just groups of individuals coming together in an organized manner and telling the lawmakers out there, be aware of our needs and our causes. We reflect ten percent of the employee population in america. We are a strong block out there on our views are important to us, and the public thinks our views are important as well. So holding potential elected officials accountable for promoting the issues that we have is important, and we can do a lot in an election year. I know a lot of organizations are afraid because five of twenty three is all about, like you can’t engage in substantial robbing, you can endorse political candidates, but there’s still a lot you could do you know what, jean? What an articulate, oh, and heartfelt endorsement of what are non-profit community sector is is all about really? That was that was very touching. That was that was wonderful. You’re absolutely right. I mean, ah, the only thing you didn’t mention is ah, what? Fifteen? I think between ten and fifteen percent of our gross domestic product is held in assets or flows through the non-profit community every year, which is around one and a half trillion dollars or so. So that was really i could. I could i could feel the emotion in that gene. I know why i know why you do the work. You do? I mean, i’ve known for years, but i felt it wonderful. Um, yes, and absolutely. Ah, there are things that we can do. Um now the things that that are some potential places where you can you might be participating in some areas? They’re basically ones that either have, i think, a direct impact on you as an organization or your mission or those who you’re serving. So i sort of capsule ate that. Yeah, i think that’s that spot on, and i’ll just give you an example of a bored i used to serve on, and they turned us off. It was a fantastic organization that worked with children and youth in san francisco, and there is a local budget cut two services to children and youth. Oh, and, uh, the leadership of the non-profit quickly organized parents and told them to bring all of their kids along to city hall. The next day, about two hundred showed up with their kids, and they also invited the news crews to come out there as well. Well, within a week, budget cuts restored back to the back two children. Snusz alright, zoho really that advocacy and action and advocacy totally makes a difference whether you’re talking about a small non-profit or or a large non-profit and you’d likely have a lot of friends out there so really important things you can do out there, yeah. Thank you for saying that you got turned off off the board. You weren’t. You weren’t thrown out my back, which would be a huge mistake. I mean, i wouldn’t even let you turn off aboard. I would amend the bylaws to keep jean guy, which explicitly say, jean takagi, lifetime or as long as desired, but, um, but i don’t run and that’s why i’m not an executive director or ceo. So all right, so budget cuts are good if there’s a law to write, if if there’s ah, law that’s going to affect you as an organization or the people you’re serving, you know those those could be advocated. Tuas well, write as well as budget. Yeah. I mean, i think think of all the non-profit listeners out there right now. And and what does minimum wage? Wass what? How did that theo used equality, equal access, you know, environmental stuff, the federal government government funding just a couple years ago. And it just got put into regs last year about recognizing the need for federal grants to start to pay for your overhead as well. I mean, before it could escape, you know, government wanted to pay. For your programs, they don’t want to pay for any of your overhead, and now there was kind of recognition and thanks tow advocacy by non-profits saying, recognize that we can only run programs with some overhead? This isn’t an all volunteer arika so all of those things are laws that affect mission, the people you served, and i’ll just give you another example because it’s just a little bit outrageous and this one is from california, but it it could spread into multiple states and there’s a bill right now that originally proposed that every non-profit raising funds in california, no matter whether they were located in california or not, if they raised funds in california, they had to put their overhead figures on their website. Now that bill has changed because that was probably unconstitutional. But now that bill has changed and it’s still being being running through committees right now, effectively putting requiring that every non-profit who’s raising funds in california again, regardless of where you’re located in the nation of these funds here on every single fund-raising document you send out every letter, every mailing, every postcard, anything, every email you’ve got to put a consumer. Protection warning label latto oh, my goodness gracious, you guys a ridiculous law that is hoexter organization that creates costs and, again, probably unlawful anyway, but without non-profit standing up and saying, hey, you’re really hurting the communities that we serve, not just us, you know, and these air based on a few, you know, bad examples of some non-profit scandals that hit the newspapers, some legislators want to jump on that you’ve got to push back yeah, california’s remarkable, i mean, it’s, it’s, it’s so progressive in some respects, and then so i guess the progressivism becomes so ah, so extreme that it becomes burdensome, i mean, and burdensome and and della tiberius yeah, you know, just some people are on our extreme progressive for mo are just don’t have enough information, and they make laws that they are going to make them champions of consumers, and they’re just not looking at the big picture and and non-profits have gotta educate lawmakers. Yeah, you and i talked months ago about the charity registration requirement that that all well, if you were fund-raising in california, you had teo you had teo comply or be subject to your your your your activities being ceased and then transferred to other other other agencies. If it was an extreme case, where does that where’s that one stand gene that that went actually passed? That’s the administrative regulation? Um, not enough, non-profit, you know, probably knew about it and spoke up against that and that actually passed through the attorney general’s office. We don’t know how it’s going to be enforced, but yeah, boardmember personal liability if you if you continue to spend money and you’re suspended or you’re not properly registered and that could affect, you know, literally a couple hundred thousand organization. Yes. Yeah. Okay. I don’t want to revisit that one because it has impact as import outside california, does it not? Yeah. You know, whenever one state makes a law and if it’s not really seen as an out liar in california because you notice you noted that it’s known as a progressive organizations are progressive state. So, you know, other states going well, we should be able to pass laws like that as well. Which sounds quite conservative and hot. So progressive right on. So, yes, you have a big state like california passing fairly draconian laws and that khun spread throughout the states. A zoo, other charities, regulators. Alright, everyone. I displayed a body’s. Think about that. They want to talk about that next time. Um, okay, um, it’s interesting with the political spectrum. It bends so far that the left meets the right. I think i think we’re seeing that in some of the presidential media coverage to but in case um, okay. Let’s, let’s continue with the advocacy let’s talk about some things that are that are permissible actual activities, not just things that you could be advocating about, but, like bills and balls, etcetera. But just we just have about two minutes before a break. So let’s, just start to get to the subject of some of the activities that you can actually do. Yeah. So? So let’s talk about first stating the organization’s position on a public policy issues. So we listed a bunch of them earlier. So let’s say it’s, equal rights like you, khun state that position and in an election year may get more visibility. Thanet might in another years. So you know, whether it be gun control or better schools are, you know, women in minority in positions of power. Whatever it is, state your organization’s positions on public policy issues and continue doing so during an election year. That’s. Absolutely. Okay, okay, so stating on your on your website on your facebook page, etcetera, that’s permissible, yeah, absolutely not. Just teo, you know, tio in your fund-raising documents, but just, you know, to get your mission out there and make sure everybody’s educated about it. Okay, okay, i’ll tell you what, let’s, let’s, take our break now and will come back. We got a lot more, ah, permissible, advocate, and you talk about with with jean. Stay with us. Like what you’re hearing a non-profit radio tony’s got more on youtube, you’ll find clips from stand up comedy tv spots and exclusive interviews catch guests like seth gordon. Craig newmark, the founder of craig’s listen marquis of eco enterprises charles best from donors choose dot org’s aria finger, do something that or neo-sage levine from new york universities heimans center on philantech tony tweets to he finds the best content from the most knowledgeable, interesting people in and around non-profits to share on his stream. If you have valuable info, he wants to re tweet you during the show. You can join the conversation on twitter using hashtag non-profit radio twitter is an easy way to reach tony he’s at tony martignetti narasimhan t i g e n e t t i remember there’s a g before the end he hosts a podcast for the chronicle of philanthropy fund-raising fundamentals is a short monthly show devoted to getting over your fund-raising hartals just like non-profit radio, toni talks to leading thinkers, experts and cool people with great ideas. As one fan said, tony picks their brains and i don’t have to leave my office fund-raising fundamentals was recently dubbed the most helpful non-profit podcast you have ever heard. You can also join the conversation on facebook, where you can ask questions before or after the show. The guests were there, too. Get insider show alerts by email, tony tells you who’s on each week and always includes link so that you can contact guest directly. To sign up, visit the facebook page for tony martignetti dot com. Duitz i’m dana ostomel, ceo of deposit, a gift. And you’re listening to tony martignetti non-profit radio. Big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. Welcome back to big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. Thank you very much. Dahna ostomel, um okay, gene. Uh, so yes, talking you can. You can put your position out there. That’s totally fine. Even if it’s something controversial, right? That’s, right? Yeah. Okay. Okay. Um, what else but let’s talk a little about lobbying? Kendry? Sure. Yeah. So certainly we can attempt to influence legislation, including ballot measures, and they’re certain limitations involved. But charities actually have pretty broad, generous limits would respect to their lobbying the code again? Five twenty three says no substantial lobbying, really? And that scares a lot of organizations so that most charities don’t engage in any lobbying at all but lobbying released influencing legislation, so influencing the creation of laws, or i’m getting rid of laws or proposing new laws. The attempt to influence that is generally called lobbying and certainly non-profits when, when laws are going to directly impact them in the many ways we talked about should attempt to influence legislation and they can. And if they make something called the five a one h elections, um, that’s a way of measuring lobbying where lobbying is just measured on expenditures, it doesn’t look a volunteer activities or what portion of your website or your you know your staff is devoted to lopping. It just looks at how much you spend on lobbying and that’s how much the limit is it’s very, very clear. It’s very easy to elect. And we recommend that for any charity, that’s really got less than a twenty million dollars annual budget. Pretty much all public charities. Except they’re really, really big ones. Five o n h election it’s formed fifty seven, sixty eight from the irs. Sorry, but the technical dahna but it’s like a half page form the easiest form that the irs has. And it’s just my my strongest recommendation for any groups. So you can engage in lobbying and feel really safe about it. Okay, cool. A fiver. One h election. So what’s the number, the number of the form again. One more time. I arrest form fifty seven, sixty eight. Just google it and it’ll be right there. Outstanding. All right, cool. Love that of that. All right. So lobbying. Why dope now? Lobbying could be laws. We could also be regulations. Right? Like that. Attorney general regulation california. That regrettably passed, but it could be either one. Yeah. Great point. So the limitation, the lobbying latto limitations that they can’t engage in substantial lobbying on ly refers to legislative laws. So not the administrative laws which come from an executive branch of the government for executive actions and administrative regulations. You can advocate changes in those without limit as long as it’s in furtherance of your mission, you can go ahead and do it to your heart’s content. No limitations on that. Oh, wow. Okay, that is not considered lobbying. Alright, so any any agency regulation? Right? I arrest environmental protection agency, federal trade commission, all of that stuff in state, state and local as well. Yeah, state. Okay, as long as it’s not coming out of your state capital or your city legislature. But like you said, non executive branch, right or executive branch? Right. It’s coming from the executive branch, not the legislative. Sorry. Sorry. Right. My fourth grade civics class? Yes. It’s coming from the executive branch of local, state or federal. Okay, so that’s, really? I mean, regulations are enormous. I mean, the irs operates on the internal revenue code. That’s that’s a vast regulation body there’s there’s. Lots to advocate. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So regulations are wide open and then for the laws of cars we’ve got our five oh, one h. Okay, let me not miss state that educational activities probably the main way you engage in advocacy. So not just stating your position, but educating the public, educating lawmakers, educating candidates, even that’s. Okay, you can provide a briefing to them on the organization’s issues and priorities. Absolutely fine, as long as you do it in a nonpartisan manners to just give it out all your candidates. So that there where k, maybe those non-profits constituencies are really looking at this issue when you’re not telling them how to vote, you’re not asking them for, you know, for them to take a position, you’re just giving them information, but about the organization’s issues and priorities, and you’re just educating them. Okay, so educational activities we could host events, teo teo, promote our opinion of of ah homelessness or something like that. Yeah, absolutely. You can. You can hold events. And if you want, you can invite all the candidates. Now. If you have have them speak, they’re going to be certain. Things that you’re gonna have to require, but as long as it’s done in a non partisan manner, you can be super big advocates on your issues, okay? Or you don’t even have to have candidates, but you could have you going issue nights to educate the public. Yeah, absolutely. Okay. And they don’t have to be directly related to your mission. Work. Yeah. I mean, they should advance your mission in some way. Okay? And all of the activity should advance your mission in some way. But yeah, they don’t have to necessarily be pinpoint. Yeah. Okay. Like you said earlier, minimum wage, for instance. Right? Ok, we could take a stand on minimum wage. You know, maybe we don’t work with people in poverty, but we have employees. And we we believe they should be paid a living wage. And we believe all organisations and companies in the state should pay a living wage. So we’re advocating for ah, for increase in the minimum wage in our state is that? Is that okay here? Because your organization, it sort of has a broad admission of working for a mission of out of community values and families and things. Like that? Yeah, absolutely. Minimum wage impacts all of that stuff. Okay, okay, so we get so lobbying and then ah, the administrative changes, which is not considered lobbying, so i don’t want to watch my terms here because i’m talking to an attorney. So, so advocating for the regulations that’s not lobbying, but its vast. And then you got your lobbying for laws, and you got your education activities all permissible, right? Right. Okay. Should we switch gears? Tio what you can’t do? Oh, wait, no that’s a good idea. Okay, but before we do that let’s talk about what individuals who are employees of your organization can do so excellent. So, yeah, what? What we talked about impermissible for non-profits doesn’t mean it’s impermissible for their employees or boardmember zzzz individuals. So, yeah, everybody has first amendment rights. Of course, individuals could endorse candidates and support candidates all they want. And they just have to be careful if their organizations are put next to their name. In terms of, like supporting a political, a particular political candidate that there’s some sort of footnotes. Listeners probably have seen this before. Some sort of footnotes that says that the name of the organization is there for identification purposes on lee and is not an endorsement by the organization of that candidate. Okay, yeah, don’t use the organization named okay, we just have about a minute and a half left. We’ve got to run through what’s impermissible. I know. Endorsing a candidate. You can’t do it right. So easy ones. No endorsements, no contribute contributions to a candidate and not just money, but using other organizational resources. And that gets subtle sometimes. So don’t let your employees use their organizational email address to engage in their first amendment rights election year. They got to use their private email for stuff like that. Okay, give us give us amore impermissible sure, be careful of working on a wedge issue that you haven’t been working on all year. So it’s an issue that that the candidates in a particular election are have a different opinion upon and that may pivot the way the election results come out and you’ve not campaigned on that issue are done. Any advocacy all year and all of a sudden, two weeks before the election, you start doing it. Looks like that’s really election nearing. Okay, getting candidates. To find pledges on an issue or endorse the organization’s agenda, coordinating activities with candidates evaluating or grading candidate positions, those air all impermissible. Okay, we’ve got to leave it there. Gene takagi. Thank you so much. We squeezed it in, but but we covered a lot. Thank you very much, gene. Great, thanks my pleasure. Always you’ll find him at the non-profit law block dot com. And on twitter at g tak next week, your emotional intelligence and peer-to-peer fund-raising tips if you missed any part of today’s show, i entreat you find it on tony martignetti dot com. Where in the world else would you go? Hyre please show me the path i need to know the way with this. Responsive by pursuing online tools for small and midsize non-profits data driven and technology enabled pursuant dot com and by crowdster online and mobile fund-raising software for non-profits now with apple pay for mobile donations. Crowdster dot com. Our creative producer was claire meyerhoff. Sam liebowitz is the line producer. Gavin dollars are am and fm outreach director shows social media is by susan chavez and this outstanding music is by scott stein. Thank you for that information. Scotty, be with me next week for non-profit radio. Big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. Go out and be great. What’s not to love about non-profit radio tony gets the best guests check this out from seth godin this’s the first revolution since tv nineteen fifty and henry ford nineteen twenty it’s the revolution of our lifetime here’s a smart, simple idea from craigslist founder craig newmark yeah insights, orn presentation or anything? People don’t really need the fancy stuff they need something which is simple and fast. When’s the best time to post on facebook facebook’s andrew noise nose at traffic is at an all time hyre on nine a m or eight pm so that’s, when you should be posting your most meaningful post here’s aria finger ceo of do something dot or ge young people are not going to be involved in social change if it’s boring and they don’t see the impact of what they’re doing. So you gotta make it fun and applicable to these young people look so otherwise a fifteen and sixteen year old they have better things to do if they have xbox, they have tv, they have their cell phones me dar is the founder of idealised took two or three years for foundation staff to sort of dane toe add an email address their card it was like it was phone. This email thing is fired-up that’s why should i give it away? Charles best founded donors choose dot or ge somehow they’ve gotten in touch kind of off line as it were and and no two exchanges of brownies and visits and physical gift. Mark echo is the founder and ceo of eco enterprises. You may be wearing his hoodies and shirts. Tony talked to him. Yeah, you know, i just i’m a big believer that’s not what you make in life. It sze, you know, tell you make people feel this is public radio host majora carter. Innovation is in the power of understanding that you don’t just do it. You put money on a situation expected to hell. You put money in a situation and invested and expected to grow and savvy advice for success from eric sabiston. What separates those who achieve from those who do not is in direct proportion to one’s ability to ask others for help. The smartest experts and leading thinkers air on tony martignetti non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent.

Nonprofit Radio for February 5, 2016: Volunteer Giving & Wounded Warrior and Overhead

Big Nonprofit Ideas for the Other 95%

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Greg Cohen: Volunteer Giving

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When is it OK to ask volunteers to donate? How do you get started? What about objections? Greg Cohen is senior associate at Cause Effective and he knows the ropes.

 

 

Gene Takagi: Wounded Warrior and Overhead

Gene Takagi

There is such a thing as bad press and Wounded Warrior is the latest example. They’re under withering criticism for excessive and lavish spending. Gene Takagi returns to explain good overhead versus bad overhead and how to avoid trouble. He’s our legal contributor and principal of NEO, the Nonprofit & Exempt Organizations Law Group.


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Hello and welcome to tony martignetti non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. I’m your aptly named host. We have a listener of the week, chris john’s from burton, michigan he called maria semple are doi n of dirt cheap and free prospect research ideas. You know her well to tell her that her suggestion to use your local library has been helping him because she says that she has that advice often has been helping him a lot to raise money for a dog park playground, movies in the park and other projects. So chris john’s following maria’s advice. Very smart man. Congratulations on being non-profit radios listener of the week oh, i’m glad you’re with me. I’d suffer focal segmental glomerulosclerosis if you wasted my time to say you missed today’s show volunteered e-giving when is it okay to ask volunteers to donate? How do you get started? What about objections? Greg cohen is senior associate at cause effective, and he knows the ropes and wounded warrior and overhead. There is such a thing as bad press and wounded warriors, the latest example, they’re under withering criticism for excessive and lavish spending. Jean takagi returns to explain good overhead versus bad overhead and how to avoid this kind of trouble. He’s our legal contributor and principle of neo the non-profit and exempt organizations law group on tony’s take two youtube we’re sponsored by pursuant full service fund-raising data driven and technology enabled, you’ll raise more money pursuant dot com, also by crowdster online and mobile fund-raising software for non-profits now with apple pay amglobal donation feature. Crowdster dot com welcome and greg cohen back to the show. He’s senior associate itcause effective he’s worked in and consulted for hundreds of non-profits cause effective is the non-profit itself, that is, counsel to non-profits over more than thirty years, they’ve helped over five thousand organizations. They’re at cause effective dot or ge and at cause effective. Welcome back, greg cohen. Thanks really happy to be here. Pleasure. I love cause effective. Tell us more than i was just able to say what the programmes are all about. How you’re helping non-profits i love your work. Sure. Thanks so much. S o we work with me with non-profits in the new york city region. And we are though it’s called in the business a capacity build there. So we teach a man to fish or woman, and we focus on three areas relationship based fund-raising, which is mostly fund-raising from individuals and institutions where there’s a single gate keeper making the donation decision like a family foundation or ah ah, privately held business, strengthening boards for both their governance and stewardship for ditigal thank you for tonight boardmember is confident and effective fundraisers. Everybody needs that in the third area is the strategic use of special events, so not event management, but the bigger questions of what events are right for our strategic objectives and the audiences we can reach what’s a realistic budget, but for revenue and what we’re going to spend and what should be the objectives for our events. Your colleague susan gabriel has been on talking about events and strategic use of anniversaries and events. Yeah, i refer you when when someone comes to me and says, you know, how do we get to the next level? I think of cause effective? Actually, i haven’t. I haven’t been thinking of you only for the new york area. I don’t know if i’ve been making referrals from throughout the country, but you will talk. To anyone but tend to build coaching relationships, which are promoted through face to face contact, so we tend to keep in the new york city area. Um all right, so we’re talking about volunteered e-giving why are volunteers potential good potential donors? So, uh, after staff who knows your program better than those who are coming in and participating in providing your services but your volunteers so if we think about the basis for wanting to contribute to an organization, of course they’re many forms. Ah, yeah, of resource is that you can contribute one of the most valuable, of course his time. Thes air folks who are already your donors, they’re giving you time, not yet money, and we ought to be treating them as donorsearch exactly talk a lot more about that. We’re gonna get there exactly, but they’ve already shown a deep commitment to your work. They haven’t understanding it’s logical that out of the context of what they know about your work, that you could make a strong case for them providing monetary support as well. And it’s well documented that volunteers are among the most ready to make a monetary contribution on top of time. Ok, now i notice you say you say valentine, you almost say valentine’s, there was volunteers where you from, what part of country? From i’m from connecticut. I don’t know why i’m hearing, right? Yeah, it sounds like a look. Volunteers right now now made yourself kind of guy. I’m sorry. No it’s. Okay, but it’s essential that all that you’re going to volunteer, valentine and i should say that, um, i’m drawing upon more than my cause effective experience and talking about this prior to cause effective. I was executive director of the youth development group based in a public high school, and i had a stable of over one hundred volunteer tutors. Ah, so i interacted with a large number of very committed volunteers overtime. So most of my ideas actually have grown from that experience because they became very generous financial contributors as well as givers of their time. Our volunteers are seeing the need every time they’re they’re they’re working with our our staff for our program beneficiaries. I mean, they see the needs day in, day out. They name you know, it’s. Too bad. This is too bad they don’t have morgan is more. Money to do this because we could be doing this so much better. I mean, they’re living their living it exactly, although often, and this happened in my own organization where i had boardmember sze, who started as volunteer tutors and then became board members. They were very hesitant for us to ask for money because they felt it was intruding on the generosity that was already being shown by people giving their yeah, that’s, where i want to go next, actually overcoming these objections, but i think, you know, if you’re careful not to minimize the volunteering right on dh, just recommending the e-giving but let’s, talk about overcoming these objections. Boardmember tze mei say, oh, no, no, you know, they’re giving enough, you know, which is kind of contradictory because five thousand dollars donorsearch e-giving enough, but they could be giving ten or fifty we don’t know until we ask, right? But so overcoming objections, right? Well, so the first thing is to make sure that you’ve got the basics, as you say, of treating your volunteers in a steaming them well for what they’re already giving, so you wouldn’t want to jump into asking for money if you aren’t already treating the donation of time as something of great value, and and you want us to do this? Not just at the time were asking for a monetary gift from day one on so in walks in and says i’d like to give you my time. I would like to treat it as if they took out the check book and said, i’d liketo make a donation you have to treat, in fact, it’s harder these days for people to give time than write a check. I had so many donors who said i’m sorry, all i can do is give you money. I wish i could i’m in and give some time like and they actually envy the volunteers, so it starts with a steaming volunteers for what they’re already giving. If you haven’t done that, then don’t move on, okay, asking for donations and so let’s let’s spend ah, little time on that. How can we buildup that that culture within our organization, that volunteers are donors are communications? You know? How could we be doing this right? So one way is to make sure that volunteers have a holistic view of your organization and understand how you operate, so it starts right when you orient volunteers when they come in. Of course, you’re oriented to the specific work that they’re doing in the case of two djing with students and exams they face. But you also want to explain here’s the context in which the organization operates ah here’s, where we get our funding, these air, the different programs that pays for there’s, a big role for donations to help cover it so that they have a mental model that it operates. That was particularly important for my organization because people, when they first came in, assume that we were part of the department of education and that we were one hundred there are funded by state government indeed, we had a million dollars of funding all private, so when they heard oh, my goodness, you raise a million dollars privately all of a sudden there they were attuned to thinking about what role could they play in helping bring in that money? We’re raising awareness of the importance of individual giving exact to our to our revenue right before we’re asking were telling stories argast orientation, this is about the organization, all right? He’s got to go away for a break, okay, we come back, greg and i going to keep talking about volunteered giving stay with us, you’re tuned to non-profit radio. Tony martignetti also hosts a podcast for the chronicle of philanthropy. Fund-raising fundamentals is a quick ten minute burst of fund-raising insights, published once a month. Tony’s guests are expert in crowdfunding, mobile giving event fund-raising direct mail and donor cultivation. Really, all the fund-raising issues that make you wonder, am i doing this right? Is there a better way there is? Find the fund-raising fundamentals archive it. Tony martignetti, dot com that’s t i g e n e t t i remember there’s, a g before the end, thousands of listeners have subscribed on itunes. You can also learn maura, the chronicle website, philanthropy dot com fund-raising fundamentals, the better way. Dahna xero welcome back to big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. Greg cohen and i talking about volunteer e-giving okay, so we’re starting this process at orientation and training of board members, and we’re making this ah, clear to them that individual giving is important from the beginning. That’s right? Okay, okay, if we’ve laid the groundwork, um, we have some other ideas, like communications, like sending send your your volunteers, your donor communications. Exactly. So some of the rules that apply to donors again, you’re treating that time as a donation. So you’re profiling volunteers. You’re helping communicate to them the connection between their work and the outcomes for the beneficiaries of their tutoring and generally including volunteers as valued members of the community. So already before you’ve asked him there feeling very connected to the mission and to the other people who are doing the same work. Okay, now we have boardmember zoho are going to object and say, this is it’s, not appropriate. Volunteers are doing enough. How do we overcome? And maybe not only board members? I’m picking on bouchard’s. But how do we overcome these objections? Wherever they come from? So it caused effective we love to answer questions by actually asking them of the people who are going to be affected. So one of the most defective things is talk to some volunteers who say yes, i’d be open to contributing or who may already be contributing on their own initiative. Have them come in and talk to the board members, have the board members have the chance to ask them, what does it feel like when you asked, do you take offense, what’s the nature of an ass that feels comfortable and respond to their legitimate concerns about being too pushy with people who are already giving and let them hear it from the horse’s mouth? I think that would be my my primary oppress, ok, that’s. Very simple. Yes invite volunteers to the board members or to have a conversation with the board members or there or wherever it is that subjecting right? Interestingly, for the board members who put up resistance. In my case, we’re very generous donors themselves, but they weren’t ah, recognizing that there were other, maybe less affluent volunteers who would be as happy to give us their do you see much objection among the volunteer managers? Or directors, you know, are on staff, is that does that come up? It doesn’t usually because they know the volunteers best, and they recognize the generous spirit of the volunteers. And also, if a volunteer says, how come you you don’t have this, you know, study guides or whatever, then the answer is, we can’t afford it. They hear from the volunteers will let me help their interest, and we had some incredibly generous offers from volunteers even before we’re soliciting buy-in laptops for their students and in other ways, making material available to there, to the students they were working with and and other tutors and not surprising. I mean, they’re already committed, like you say they’re giving something so precious their time, and they see the need and they would like the need to be minimized or eliminated, right? So they fill the gap exactly so thie other thing is that many volunteers for us came through corporate programs and the culture of those corporate volunteer programs. Ah, encourage them both to give time and it’s. There are incentives for them to give money often a matching grant from the corporation if you’re a volunteer in an organization you give money will match it in a larger proportion than no. What for? For just a normal that donation donation by not volunteer and there’s even broken mohr of incentive if you’re on the board of an organisation for some corporations. All right, so if we’ve we’ve laid the groundwork, we have the right culture. We’ve overcome our objections. How should we get started? So i think one of the most effective ways for soliciting donations from anyone is to encourage up here of the types of people you want to donate to be your solicitor. So i would form a little asking group of people who are volunteers who are already e-giving and work with them to say, would you appeal to other volunteers to use the most powerful words? And fund-raising would you join me in supporting this organization as a fellow volunteer? So that would be a first step, which is to gather some folks around me who are already committed in that way to both give time and money. Alright suppose we just have maybe half a dozen volunteers from small organization. You know, if we recruit yes, a committee that’s half the volunteers. I mean, i guess we could do two or three on the committee latto recruit the other flavour for if you have six volunteers, i would still try to recruit one to be really ask her the other five, okay, at least in partnership with me, not alone, necessarily, but because, in fact, if you don’t get stumped by these questions, overviewing you’ve seen it all. This is not okay. We’re going into actually our thirty fifth year. So we’re at about five thousand organs at your web sites that they always pushing thirty five. All right, all right, all right. Um that’s great. I mean, that’s. Why, that’s? Why i refer refer people to you. Um okay, so we have a little volunteer committee do some training for that, the way we would sure help everybody has to learn to ask it’s not a natural thing. So some training. And then the other thing to think about is what are we explaining? We need the money for and as you pointed out, if we can connect it to providing resource, is that a line with the work they’re doing? Is volunteers it’s going to make a natural connection between the synapse in the heads of the volunteers. You don’t necessarily have to do that, because most individual donors will make a gift and trust this staff to put the money where it’s most needed. But if there are clear needs within the realm of volunteering that you can meet that’s, a powerful connection toe offer to broker between the money they donate and strengthening the program that they were here, it seems like a grand slam. Okay, okay. Uh, let’s, um, let’s see about knowing, you know, getting to know your volunteers mean, you have ah, bigger organization would have a volunteer director, i guess, but you’re lucky enough. Yeah, ok, but if not maybe it’s the executive directorate or, you know, maybe the director development, right? You want to i mean, this is a relationship fund-raising if we’re asking peer-to-peer ass right, you want to know the people you’re talking to exactly and in fact, that’s one of the precursors toe asking, which is do i know my volunteers why they’re volunteering, what their life stories are, what their interests are, and if you haven’t created enough of a relationship for them to exit to be known in front of you and seen, you’re probably not ready to ask. So building that personal relationship between that someone on the staff and the volunteers is another important step before asking. Okay? And again, you know, parallel, tow your monetary donors, you get to know them before you ask, right? This is a colt cultivation process, right? So we’re doing something parallel. We’re just working with volunteers, and another thing that comes from getting to know someone is from a technical point of view. You can assess how large your ask i should be. So i’ll give an example of a long time volunteer who i was in a conversation with who told me that he had lost his daughter tragically early in her life, and he had been with us for a long time and ah, i was able to say, peter, would you? I knew he was interested in kids being able to go on to college. That was one of hiss. Ah, personal motivations for tutoring. I said, would you be interested in creating a little scholarship fund to memorialize your daughter? And indeed, he he created that fund and annually funded it, but it came from me understanding he was retired. He was pretty well to do. Then when he told me that story, i was able to connect something he was very interested in to an important personal fact, which is is the memory of his daughter. And in a way, i think he connected his work with those young people with with her life. Yeah, yeah. Was she roughly the age of of the time? Wand, don’t you don’t ok, ok, the other the other natural thing to connect, to which we saw a lot of which is volunteers tend to associate ah good part of their identity with their volunteering, and so it’s known in their families that they are connected there going i’m telling their friends today is my day at the center is actually talking about the kids, the people at the soup kitchen, they’re coming back and sharing those stories and it’s because it’s part of who they are as people, so a very natural thing is to suggest to people, you know, to the couple that has everything, uh, if an occasion comes up, when people want to give you a gift, you could suggest making a gift in honor of the anniversary, the birthday to the non-profit in place of buying a present and that very volunteers, i love that idea, and i had a whole siri’s of people who gave regularly to honor the work of volunteers, including, actually i was in this public school. There were two teachers who were lived together for a long time and then decided to tie the knot after twenty five years of living together. Of course they didn’t need any toasters or blenders? So they said to all the guests, please make a contribution to the school’s. Non-profit and not only did people make gifts at the time of the wedding, but because we were good at communicating what we were doing, even though the bulk of the guests came from minnesota, where both the couple had grown up. Some of continued to be significant donors years afterwards, because now they felt a connection to the organization through our communications with them. Brilliant. I mean, that’s, that’s, another grand slam. You guys are good. You know what you’re doing? Something that you were just you said it’s just a couple minutes ago rings true. I was just having dinner with my mom and dad and, um my dad had just met an organization that he got connected to. That is, they don’t have shelters for young, young single moms, but they have day programs and referrals and counseling and education programs. And andi came, you know, he came home motivated by about this and my mother and he goes to the kitchen. My mother whispers under breath. There goes another day nobody’s boasting alright, has even started. He brought a donation of ah, gifts in-kind he had bicycles for the for their children and things like that. Um, but, yeah, you know, he’s boasting already has he really gotten started? But people like to talk about their volunteer time, right? And come father’s day there’s a chance for you to honor his service by making a gift in his honor to that organization. Thank you very much. Let’s. Not get carried away. I’ll get your good work. You’re too good. Now five, fifty four years old. I’m living at home, but it’s only temporary that’s. Only temporary. I’m in transition. Please. I’m in transition. Sabat. Okay, well, i guess we’ve talked about well, when we started every really covered, like when is the right time to ask? You gotta know them very well, right on they they have to be well embedded as a volunteer, so they have to have spent some time with you and built that sense of affiliation. Um, and then i think any time after you see, people are comfortable and in the routine and understand your work and you’ve oriented them and you know their story a little bit it’s appropriate to ask and then every organization has its own rhythm of program. So schools june graduation time. Ah, organizations that work with young mothers. Mothers day, of course, the holiday season for programs that work with underprivileged families. Those air kind of natural times to be asking are carrying out simple appeals to volunteers to participate. Do you find that volunteers become sustaining, you know, regular committed donors arm? Or just ah, one time when as and no and absolutely committed donors and and even if their schedules change and they and no longer volunteers? If they started a regular pattern of giving you money annually, they’re likely to continue mohr than other donors. Wow! After volunteers, as in cool, cool. Um, let’s. See, what about? We kind of covered, you know, who’s. Best to ask about how much? How much should you be? Right? Well, so that’s ah, that’s that’s always a tough question for any kind of fund-raising so partly its by talking to people sing are they generous with other causes? Find out a little bit about their other terrible involvement. You’re going toe in time. Learn more about the socioeconomic status of your volunteers through conversations and then you bring some of the same rules of judging how much to ask, but i’d say for the first gift, the most important thing is that they become a donor rather than the amount so it’s, just two to get that person to becoming donors of both time and money. In the first instance, i wouldn’t worry much about the size of the gift. And then over time, you can work on increasing the size of the gift. Then, of course, we love for the average doner to become a monthly sustainers because that’s going to last longer, and they tend to give maura’s an ad average gift than people give once. Here arika, um, let’s, talk a little more about treating your volunteers as donors. Um, you know, we talked a little about communications events. I mean, they should be invited as donors are let’s. Talk more about that. Uh, sure. So my philosophy is time should be treated in the same way. Money is, as i say, if in most of our lives it’s a more precious commodity than money. It’s hard to give time for things. So i would definitely include volunteers in all the activities that you include for financial donors, you indeed can have volunteers who are helping you run those events, for instance, and one way actually, it can work in reverse, which is if you have donors, one way to increase their affiliation with your group is to invite them to volunteer. S o there’s very good, some back and forth in that. Yeah, yeah, cool. Um, would you ah, if you have a aa, an expensive annual gala or some kind of an event, would you offer a reduced price for your volunteers? We’re getting carried away. Well, i’m going to go. Yes, and now i’m going to channel my colleague susan and say, if your primary objective for the event is raising money, then you don’t want to discount too many seats. Ah, but if i start with the objective, i want to celebrate my volunteers work that i’m going to create an event specifically to celebrate the volunteers so oh, and not worry about how much money i’m raising. If my primary objective is make those volunteers feel good there’s going to be some overlap because some of your volunteers, they’re going to become significant donors and you can move into those events that have fund-raising as their primary objective, but i’d be careful about crossing the tooth objectives of raising a lot of money and celebrating, yeah, ok on this would be susan’s more, but have have a cultivation event for earth a celebration for years. For your volunteers, you must be having volunteermatch condition events if you could bring in volunteers can’t save all your events just for those who are expensive tickets. What about volunteers at at board meetings that we, you know, we mentioned having them talk about their experience in giving to overcome that objection, but but just, you know, as a way for board members to relate to the what’s going on in the program areas, having volunteers, come talk to the board, i think it’s a great idea if you’ve got a significant volunteer program it’s a way of the board understanding the dynamic of that program and to check in on it the other important thing i mentioned some of my best boardmember tze had started as valentin ears and then became board members so it’s another aspect of the volunteer pool, which is it becomes ah farm team for discovering people who have skills and talents who ah, our perspective boardmember zoho all right, we just have about a minute and a half left tell me what you love about the work you do show him a nosy person and every non-profit represents a distinct subcultures, so i don’t feel so bad about asking where you’re frightened. No, not at all on dh with every client, they have wonderful missions and it’s fascinating to see who they’ve grouped around them and then personally satisfying to give them the tools to further that mission and see them grow and become more sustainable. You wantto give a shout out to an organization that you’re working with now comes to mind, or even if you don’t want to say the name just some. So i’m going filling here to ah wonderful organization called i challenge myself that challenges high school kids who maybe never rode a bicycle, too, participate in a health and fitness program and write a hundred miles by the time they they finish school in the spring, i challenged myself excellent, we should be challenging ourselves. Great life lesson, greg cohen, senior associate at cause effective there at cause effective dot or ge and at caused effective. Thanks so much, greg. My pleasure school. Thank you for sharing. Ah, wounded warrior and overhead with jean takagi coming up first. Pursuant you have a problem, you have a pain point, you need to raise more money. Pursuing is your solution one of your solutions? They have online tools like velocity for managing fund-raising ah, another tool is prospector to find your donors who are upgrade ready that five thousand dollar donors that could be giving ten thousand or that five hundred, dollar donors who could be giving fifteen hundred all helping you raise more money. They are data driven technology enabled. You hear me say that and that’s their tagline what i find interesting is they’re they’re smart technologies using your data, it’s analyzing and organizing your data to make you smarter and better at fund-raising you’re going, you’ll raise more money. I can’t make it any simpler pursuant dot com and also crowdster with their new one of a kind apple pay mobile donation feature, so they’re lengthy people can pay through ah, through their their their iphone increases mobile donations again. You raise more money there, they build campaign sites because it’s crowdfunding, crowdfunding sight so they build the campaign sites that you used? They’re simple for your donors, they are savvy on the back end, so your administration is not difficult. Easy for donors to navigate. Easier for you to navigate and they are crowdster dot com now, tony steak too. Have you checked out non-profit radio on youtube? My channel israel? Tony martignetti some clown stole my name before i could claim it on youtube fraudster, in fact, trust me, if a dude, if you want to steal my identity, go ahead, it’ll get you absolutely nowhere. I mean, i have my social security number on my credit card numbers on my website. Go ahead, help yourself have at it my date of birth it’s on my lincoln. Good luck, i have a credit score it’s not negative. It’s imaginary ivan imaginary number of credit score! It doesn’t exist, so you want to steal my identity on youtube? Go ahead, real tony martignetti i’ve got over two hundred videos from conference interviews, i’ve got some tv appearances and some stand up comedy bits are also there, so my stand up comedy gigs lots of interviews with lots of smart. Guests from the many conferences have been at the past five years. The link to youtube is that tony martignetti dot com. And while you’re there, you can pick up my social security number. That’s tony’s take two. Jean takagi he’s back. I love when he’s back he’s, managing editor of neo the non-profit and exempt organizations law group in san francisco. He edits the popular non-profit law blogged dot com and on twitter he is at gi tak gt a k jean takaaki. How you doing out there in san francisco? I’m doing great. How are you, tony? Terrifically. Well, you sound you sound brighton loud and wait. Sam’s turning it down till time down. Sam, he sounds great. Sound good. You’re calling from the same phone you always call from? I think so, it’s. Just a funny in san francisco. And we’re all waiting for the super bowl this week. Oh, yes, yes. Super bowl weekend. Oh, yes. Is that the one with the, uh, with the three point shots from the from the outer rim? Is that is that football i have? Well, we got the warriors here do that. We’re going to enjoy them, too. Okay. I’m crossing over in my sports. All right, let’s. See? Okay, we you got the warriors got wounded. Warrior, the wounded warrior project gene is is not in the news for good reasons. And i’m gonna i’m gonna venture that most listeners are well aware, but why don’t you just acquaint us with some of the bad press? They’re getting around some of their spending? Sure. Well, it started last week, and cbs news and the new york times both ran some articles that were highly critical of wounded warrior project and most importantly, on how wounded warrior project spent its money. So the wounded warriors project for just in case for people who don’t know is a very prominent veterans organization whose mission is toe honor and empower wounded warriors. They’re pretty big. The total revenues are three hundred forty two million for for the last year they reported on the nine, ninety, which ended fiscal year september thirty two thousand fourteen, three hundred forty two million dollar organization, big organization. But the what, you know, the most critical, i guess. Aspects of the spending that were alleged by both cbs and the new york times is based dahna charities ratings organization that said that wounded warrior project spent sixty percent of its total expenses on programs which kind of infers an overhead ratio of about forty percent. And that didn’t sit well with a lot of people. Yes, and the press continued, cbs had aranha siri’s. The new york times jumped on, um, rating agencies jumped in a little bit. Yes. So it’s, it’s, it’s gotten unattractive? Um, we’re not goingto dissect wounded warriors spending and and nine, ninety and their balance sheet because that’s not fair and it’s it’s not appropriate, but i did want to use it as sort of a leading to another discussion that we’ve say another because we’ve talked about this before, but it was a couple of years ago, um, to be exact, it was september sixth of twenty thirteen, so i think it is bears repeating and then review good overhead vs versus bad overhead and i think i want to start with just you need to be aware of perception. Yeah, that’s so true, tony. And just before we leave wounded warriors project, let me say that while charity are charity, ratings organizations might have said that there was a sixty percent program kind of ratio program service expenditure ratio wounded warrior provoc project says that figure is really eighty one percent. So let me just add that there’s a dispute over how how you characterize income and that comes to perception. Tony on dh what one of the documents that you mentioned the form nine ninety, which is the annual information return to the irs on dh you’ve had a show on this before it’s, a really important document because it really tells the public, because it’s a public document, uh, about what the organization has been doing all year, and when you put in numbers and descriptions of your activities in that document, the public is going to read it for what it is on dh if you don’t explain some of the nuances behind it and just using wounded warrior project as an example in this time they, you know, wrote in that they had twenty, six hundred twenty six million dollars in expenditures and conferences and meetings, but without explaining that any further that just leaves it opened. Teo misinterpretation, perhaps misinterpretation. The conferences and meetings were really to benefit the veterans and the beneficiaries of the organization rather than to reflect. You know what some people might think, which would be, like kind of staff training and staff parties on dh sort of morale boosting events and that’s, you know, there’s a huge difference between those things and, uh, not anticipating that can really be problematic for organizations. And they could end up spending tons of money on crisis management and dealing with all of the perceptions and misperceptions later on. Yeah, it feels like the wounded warrior project nine ninety was not artfully completed on the show you’re alluding to i don’t have the date of it, but the guest was named eat. Oh, tsh tomb. So if you go to tony martignetti dot com and you search his name, which is why i g t yeah, you’ll find the shows that he was on hey was on. And then i replayed it once, and the subject was your nine. Ninety as a marketing document. And indeed, you know, if if they spent twenty six million dollars of wounded warrior on conferences, but ah, big part of that was a big, big part of that was scholarships for for for the beneficiaries, the wounded. Service people, then that the nine ninety would’ve been a perfect place to say that and, you know, maybe they maybe they shouldn’t have put it in that category. You know, we could argue about whether that’s appropriate to put that number in that line on that line item anyway, but but, you know, you could explain things basically using your nine, ninety as a marketing document because it’s so pervasive, it’s, it’s, it’s, so easy to get it should be on your own site. And it’s it’s definitely a guide star and the i r s and state attorneys general sites. And, yes, it has a lot of uses. And that’s, the first place charity ratings organizations and journalists who are writing investigative pieces about charity’s often run for something bad that’s the first place they go on. So when organizations reviewed in nine, ninety and i’m probably reiterating what your former guests, it said, but when the review is, you have to think not only of it is a marketing tool for good purposes, but also for defensive marketing, because if it’s misinterpreted or leads to easy, miss miss perceptions of what the organization is doing with their money that’s totally avoidable by explaining it further. Yeah, and then you have a goodwill problem in a public relations crisis and that’s what wounded warrior project is mired in right now? And i’m glad. It’s, you know, it was very timely because it’s all just broke last week. Um all right, you know, so we could refer back to them if if if you think that’s valuable but let’s, let’s talk about some of the categories of good overhead. And i know one that you believe in is education for board and employees. Yeah, i think that’s a really important one. You know, you and you want invest in education for a few reasons, but the first one is to make sure the organization is run effectively and efficiently, not just on the administrative side but on the programmatic side as well. So you want dahna sufficiently informed boardmember executive staff and volunteers who can deliver programs in the best way possible for their intended beneficiaries. And if you want to be innovative, if you want to just sort of raised the bar to providing services in a better way, you’ve got to invest in that and you got to make sure your staff is prepared on well educated and sufficiently equipped to deliver those services. So investing in education, i’m just a very strong proponent of that and that so that’s professional development like conferences and, you know, travel and meals and things like that could have been aboard retreat mean there’s value in that? Yeah, absolutely there is, and they can be misused some of those things and, you know, again how you frame that in your nine, ninety or on your web outside about what you’re investing in when you when you make certain expenditures, is really important to say you’re investing in your team so you could deliver the best programs possible to the most people possible in the most effective way possible, looking for innovative ways to do things better. That’s what you have to say, all right? And now lets you know i’m going to get into splitting hairs a little bit, but, you know, if you have the wherewithal toe, have your onboarding treat or your staff retreat at a at a nice place, i mean, there’s, nothing wrong with being, you know and like, ah, hilton hotel or a western or you know, is there, but but maybe you don’t need to go to ritz carlton. Yeah, i think that’s a good point and that’s kind of like whether you’re goingto pay for everybody to travel in first class, business class or coach and it may depend in part on what type of organization you are. So if you’re an anti poverty organization, it’s a little bit sometimes problematic if you’re if you’re celebrating kind of an event at a five star hotel, although if it’s really based on, you know, training on doing things better, there could be an exception to that. So it really depends upon again what purposes you have for putting it in tow kind of that luxury category if you are with with, you know, veterans organizations where there’s always not enough resources to provide tio some of our most who we say, our some of our most valued citizens of our country and you know, but we don’t always act that way in terms of providing services that there’s some sensitivity there a ce toe how how luxurious their lavish your stack retreats or board retreats or your travel expenses should be yeah, yeah, you know, but sort of on the other side or, you know, it’s really related it’s, um, you know, smaller organizations, teo can’t be as effective as, you know, ah, wounded warrior project type organization with with the three hundred forty two million dollars that they raise the last year that we know, you know, even i don’t know it feels like even if it’s only sixty percent, which does seem low, but even if it’s only sixty percent of sixty percent of such a large number, you know, a smaller organization with a half a million dollar budget if they’re spending ninety percent on program who i’m having a hard time gene, i mean, who’s doing more for vets? Yeah, i mean, let’s talk about fund-raising good overhead they think that’s near endeared tio what you do as well. And, you know, i think there’s their legitimate issues there, and i think, you know, investing and fund-raising is really important, but i think there are limits as well. So, you know, the question might be, is it worth spending or investing? I should say ten cents to make an extra dollar, and i think most of us would just say you know, yeah, of course it would be, then there’s a question about whether it would be worth investing ninety cents to make an extra dollars. So you only netting ten, ten cents for for programs there on dh on dh, then that’s, maybe more questionable. Now there, times when you’re just starting a brand new fund-raising program and in the first year where it maybe that’s what it takes to develop this new structure because you want to do it properly, you want to do it legally. You want to make sure everybody’s up to speed and doing it, and it takes time to develop these relationships and donor engagement. So maybe you’re one ninety, ninety percent fund-raising expenses. Okay, but year after year, i think most of us would be upset by that number. So how you invest in fund-raising? Depends on what type of organization ur depends on what stage you are in with that fund-raising campaign or solicitation early stages you got invest more later stages. Is it’s more mature? You don’t expect that high high ratio again. So is it’s it’s nuanced? For sure? What do you think, tony? Yeah, i think we ought to. Take a break, but we’re going. I’m not going to ignore your question, but i agree with you. Let’s, go away and jean, i’ll come back. Like what you’re hearing a non-profit radio tony’s got more on youtube, you’ll find clips from stand up comedy tv spots and exclusive interviews catch guests like seth gordon, craig newmark, the founder of craigslist marquis of eco enterprises, charles best from donors choose dot org’s aria finger do something that worked and they only levine from new york universities heimans center on philanthropy, tony tweets to he finds the best content from the most knowledgeable, interesting people in and around non-profits to share on his stream. If you have valuable info, he wants to re tweet you during the show. You can join the conversation on twitter using hashtag non-profit radio twitter is an easy way to reach tony he’s at tony martignetti narasimhan t i g e n e t t i remember there’s a g before the end he hosts a podcast for the chronicle of philanthropy fund-raising fundamentals is a short monthly show devoted to getting over your fund-raising hartals just like non-profit radio, toni talks to leading thinkers, experts and cool people with great ideas. As one fan said, tony picks their brains and i don’t have to leave my office fund-raising fundamentals was recently dubbed the most helpful non-profit podcast you have ever heard, you can also join the conversation on facebook, where you can ask questions before or after the show. The guests were there, too. Get insider show alerts by email, tony tells you who’s on each week and always includes link so that you can contact guest directly. To sign up, visit the facebook page for tony martignetti dot com. I’m jonah helper, author of date your donors and you’re listening to tony martignetti, not non-profit radio. Big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. It’s time for live listener love did you think i forgot? Perish the thought live listener love going out cozza dero, california! Chicago, illinois st louis, missouri! Maplewood, new jersey. I’m hanging out in new jersey these days. New bern, north carolina. I’ll be hanging out more there. Ah, not too far. Mag adore ohio live listener love let’s stay in the u s new york, new york cool! Thank you, new york and philadelphia p a i love it, let’s! Go abroad! Mexico city, mexico live listener love, locate al uh, good afternoon, bonem bonem start is tokyo is with us and kyoto. Konnichi wa iran is with us. I love we can’t see your city, iran, but we know you’re there live listener loved to iran, italy, pesaro labbate lots of live listeners today and there’s more to it. We got o sole and young son in south korea on your haserot thank you, jeanne, for that indulgence. Oh, wait, i’m sorry, jean. I’ve got to do podcast pleasantries. How could i forget? Perish the thought over ten thousand listeners podcast, whatever time, whatever place, whatever device pleasantries to the podcast listeners and the affiliate affections to our am and fm stations throughout the country am and fm stations squeezing non-profit radio into their weekly timetable whenever it is affections out to the am and fm affiliate listeners. Thank you, jean it’s. Important tio recognize our our listener donors? Uh, fantastic. Thank you. Thank you for that indulgence. Okay, so you asked me a question. What do i think about this? Um, yeah, i agree. I think it’s very fact sensitive. And i go back to if you’re if you think you might have trouble, explain it on your nine. Ninety, i guess. That’s that’s the best i can do. Yeah. Or your website, but definitely give us some context that we just don’t openly criticize it. Yeah, yeah, on dh. We don’t. Right, because if you don’t, if you don’t explain it, then people will have to draw their own conclusions. Witness what’s happening at wounded warrior. Okay. Let’s, let’s. Ah, delve into another good overhead area that you’ve got for us. What else you like? Sure. Well, i like paying employees a decent wage. That obviously hot topic these days. And, you know, even if that might be higher than the market forces dictates. So you know if it’s above minimum wage and those employees might be hired, you know, for minimum wage anyway, well, maybe that’s not the right thing to do especially, you know, depending upon the type of organization you are, maybe just paying a livable wage is really important and consistent with your mission and very important in terms of recruitment and retention. So in the long run, when we talk about wages and determining what a reasonable wages under those circumstances, you’ve got to be mission focused as well, and not just martignetti just let market forces determine where you set your wages, and if you are concerned about executive compensation, gene and i, jean, you and i have talked about this. You can you could search for executive compensation at tony martignetti dot com. We can also pick my social security number. Is there? Um, good luck with it and and you’ll find where jean and i talked about the executive calm because there’s all kinds of there’s, a there’s, a rebuttable presumption and things you can do to make sure that your executive comp is fair and appropriate. Raging yeah, absolutely. And maybe one one. No two wounded warriors. Well, when you’re talking about executive comp position of a huge, massive sized organization, you can’t equate that teo executive compensation in a tiny organization, so there has to be some reasonable understanding of that, and we have to educate everybody about that as well. Yeah, yeah, i saw the wounded warrior ceo is paid roughly half a million dollars a year. I think that maybe that was twenty fourteen. And to me, that doesn’t seem bad. I mean, he’s managing a five hundred person, three hundred forty million dollars a year organization. But but there have to be things in place too, too, that the board has done to justify that salary compensation for the ceo. And jean and i covered those on that show. You could search for executive compensation. Um, i like technology, gene, technology, infrastructure. Do you have to keep up and you do maybe not wood like the latest iphones for all your staff. But you have to, you know, be aware that old technology khun lied to inefficiencies on the lack of innovation and in a new technology, could allow for more effective and efficient ways to deliver services and engage in advocacy measure. Impact we talk a lot about measuring impact now, but you know, some some old forms of doing things that don’t lead easily to being ableto monitor those things without an extensive amount of paperwork and old system. So i mean new technologies you fund-raising and communicating with donors and engaging supporters and finding new donors, staying up with technology and investing in technology is very, very important. And as you invest in technology and get more data data protection, that is also going to be important, and you don’t want to invest in one without the other, okay, um, there’s another category that ah, i want to talk about building engagement and collaboration among employees, volunteers. Boardmember yeah, i think that’s also really important again for recruitment and retention. That’s important mint internally for collaborations outside, i think so many non-profits get told, you know you’ve got to collaborate more because that will help us, you know, gaugin and get collective impact that’s a hot button term that’s that’s been used over the last couple years, and collaboration really isn’t port knowing what your allies and competitors, if you will in the market are doing and the best way. To do that is to invest in that because those things don’t just bubble up by chance and what they really need investment. So it’s like any relationship, tony, i guess, uh, you know, when two people want to develop a relationship with each other, it’s not just sort of overnight, and you don’t invest anything in helping each other and listening to each other, you’ve got to put time and resource is into it and that’s very true for organizations that are wishing to collaborate on dh i think in terms of, you know, engagement with employees, i think the quality of your work place, you know, you want to have people, you know, they don’t want the desks don’t have to all be donated. And, you know, you should have a nice workplace professional that people come to day in and day out. Yeah, and i think that’s the education and training actually it’s helpful as well for creating job satisfaction and again, recruitment and retention are affected by that, and that ultimately effects on how well you deliver services so that’s all tied together. So when we talk about overhead and you’ve had shows on the overhead myth as well i’m just a strong proponent that overhead is a very, very bad way to assess whether an organization is doing well or not. You alluded to that earlier this program as well. There there are better ways that teo assessing organization and while overhead ratio is may be an important factor. The most important factors impact like you said, so if an organization like wounded warriors project is putting in hundreds of millions of dollars helping veterans, even though its program ratio might not be as high as some people like that impact may be important and not easily replaceable. But doing gino, we just have a minute left and actually forbade overhead. I’m going to refer listeners if you want to get the categories of bad overhead. Gene and i talked about that on the september six twenty thirteen show i’m selecting toe just deal with good overhead, and we just have about another like thirty seconds or so genes. Can you say a little about risk management in about thirty seconds? Sure. So i think i’ll summarize it by saying an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Are the old saying that our parents, our grandparents, had told us and that’s what risk management is all about it on the board level, it’s creating policies and on the management level, it may be implementing and enforcing policies because it’s no good, i have a policy and with you enforce it. So make sure you’ve got directions, rules and guidelines for your staff and your volunteers and anybody that’s, that’s, you know, helping you further your mission. Jean takagi, managing editor, managing attorney at neo non-profit and exempt organizations law group you’ll find him on twitter at g tak gt a k thank you so much, gene. Thanks, sonny. Wonderful to talk with pleasure. Thank you. Next week. Do you know the-whiny-donor on twitter she’s at the-whiny-donor and she’s. Going to be with me. Plus, amy sample ward returns. She returns willingly. No whining by amy if you missed any part of today’s show, i beseech you, find it on tony martignetti dot com. Where in the world else would you go? And i’m still not sure about that. For twenty sixteen. Responsive by pursuant online tools for small and midsize non-profits data driven and technology enabled pursuant dot com and by crowdster online and mobile fund-raising software for non-profits now with apple pay mobile donation feature. Crowdster dot com. Our creative producers, claire miree off sam liebowitz is the line producer. Gavin doll is our am and fm outreach director. The show’s social media is by dina russell, and our music is by scott stein. Thank you for that affirmation, scotty. Be with me next week for non-profit radio. Big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. Go out and be great. Hey! What’s not to love about non-profit radio tony gets the best guests check this out from seth godin this’s the first revolution since tv nineteen fifty and henry ford nineteen twenty it’s the revolution of our lifetime here’s a smart, simple idea from craigslist founder craig newmark yeah insights, orn presentation or anything? People don’t really need the fancy stuff they need something which is simple and fast. When’s the best time to post on facebook facebook’s andrew noise nose at traffic is at an all time hyre on nine a m or eight pm so that’s, when you should be posting your most meaningful post here’s aria finger ceo of do something dot or ge young people are not going to be involved in social change if it’s boring and they don’t see the impact of what they’re doing. So you got to make it fun and applicable to these young people look so otherwise a fifteen and sixteen year old they have better things to do if they have xbox, they have tv, they have their cell phones. Me dar is the founder of idealist took two or three years for foundation staff, sort of dane toe add an email address card. It was like it was phone. This email thing is right and that’s why should i give it away? Charles best founded donors choose dot or ge somehow they’ve gotten in touch kind of off line as it were on dno, two exchanges of brownies and visits and physical gift. Mark echo is the founder and ceo of nasco enterprises. You may be wearing his hoodies and shirts. Tony talked to him. Yeah, you know, i just i’m a big believer that’s not what you make in life. It sze, you know, tell you make people feel this is public radio host majora carter. Innovation is in the power of understanding that you don’t just do it. You put money on a situation expected to hell. You put money in a situation and invested and expected to grow and savvy advice for success from eric sabiston. What separates those who achieve from those who do not is in direct proportion to one’s ability to ask others for help. The smartest experts and leading thinkers air on tony martignetti non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent.

Nonprofit Radio for January 8, 2016: Don’t Burn Out in 2016 & The PATH for Charities

Big Nonprofit Ideas for the Other 95%

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Paul Loeb: Don’t Burn Out in 2016

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Paul Loeb has been doing social change since the Vietnam War and his most recent books are “Soul Of a Citizen” and “The Impossible Will Take a Little While.” After nearly 50 years of activisim, he has a lot to recommend about keeping yourself motivated day-after-day. We talked at Opportunity Collaboration 2015 in Ixtapa, Mexico.

Gene Takagi: The PATH for Charities

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The PATH Act signed by President Obama late last month includes 3 key items for charities: IRA Rollover, conservation easements & food inventory gifts. Gene explains them all. He’s our legal contributor and principal of NEO, the Nonprofit & Exempt Organizations Law Group.

 


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Hello and welcome to tony martignetti non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. I’m your aptly named host happy new year to the live and podcast listeners happy new year again for our affiliate listeners. They had a special show last week. Happy new year, everybody! We have a listener of the week! Susan hurt on twitter she’s at susan hurt bassett. She has a thing for basset hounds clearly, and she volunteers at open door animal sanctuary in st louis, missouri. She volunteers and listens to non-profit radio, and she doesn’t merely listen, quote, i have learned a tremendous amount of valuable information from you, and i’m so inspired by your optimism and generosity, you are a true inspiration. Is that the best you can do? Susan really mean like no comparison even to god or anything like that? Susan hurt listener of the week congratulations and thank you so much for loving non-profit radio oh, i’m glad you’re with me. I’d be thrown into a log. Akufo sis, if i heard you say the words i missed today’s show, don’t burn out in twenty sixteen paul lobe has been doing social change since the vietnam war and his most recent books are soul of a citizen, and the impossible will take a little while. After nearly fifty years of activism, he has a lot to recommend about keeping yourself motivated. Day after day, we talked that opportunity collaboration twenty fifteen in x top of mexico on the beach and the path for charities. The path act, signed by president obama just late last month, includes three key items for charities the ira rollover, permanent conservation easements and food inventory gif ts jean explains them all place he’s got some other stuff for us, he’s, our legal contributor and principle of neo the non-profit and exempt organizations law group on tony’s take two thank you. We’re sponsored by pursuing full service fund-raising data driven and technology enabled, you’ll raise more money pursuant dot com. We’re also sponsored by crowdster online and mobile fund-raising software for non-profits welcome crowdster and thank you for supporting non-profit radio crowdster dot com here is paul lobe don’t burn out in twenty sixteen. Welcome to tony martignetti non-profit radio coverage of opportunity collaboration twenty fifteen we’re back on the beach in x top of mexico with me is paul lobe. He’s, the author, most recently of soul of a citizen and the impossible, will take a little while, plus three other books before those those two have sold over a quarter million copies, you’ll find paul lobe the impossible dot org’s polo. Welcome to the show. Glad to be here. Thanks. I’m glad we’re together on the beach. I want to talk about avoiding burnout. A lot of your work for decades. Going back to the seventies is in activism. Citizen activism, right? Taco actually, let’s. Start with a cool story that i heard you tell about rosa parks. So it’s. Interesting. Because rosa parks is the sort of story that everyone thinks they know. You know, i can go. I can be overseas and people know the name. I can talk to eleven year olds and they know the name. Oh, yeah. She’s the lady on the bus. But what’s interesting to me is that most people know in a certain version and they know it as one day she was writing on this bus and sort of just feed retired. She just refused out of nowhere and single handedly launched the civil rights movement. You know, all by yourself is this lone heroic woman. And i get very frustrated when i hear that story because duitz it strips away the context that’s, so important. I understand that actually is much more empowering that that story. And so i look in there several elements. There’s the one he is that’s, their mistake, the element of community. So she at that point is the secretary of the end of the civil rights organization in montgomery, alabama. And she has worked for dozen years. With the co founded by her husband, that particular chapter was a barber in the city and she’s doing these sort of humble towns, like getting people to come to meetings and all the stuff that certainly is not going to make the history books or the network news or even page six of the local paper. And when you take that away and you take out all the other people that she’s working with, it becomes a sort of lone crusade, which is very much a mythology of our culture. I mean, you know, one of things i sometimes bright lad in the language around social on for ownership is lone hero. Super person. Yeah, but she’s part of a community that she’s built and there’s others in it. There’s ah, a union organizer, gotomeeting nixon who’s, the head of the local. At that point, he’s, the person who gets a very young and reluctant martin luther king involved king is all these excuses. He’s young he’s, new in town is king was reluctant to join. He was reluctant to join. Yeah, he’s reluctant step for we think of them as leaping forward, but at that point he has not really fully he’s not embraced that path. He’s still, you know well, i i’ve got divinity school. I’m going to be a minister and it’s not at all clear, that that’s going to be his direction. So he’s looking, i think warily at it and there’s a phrase i used the perfect standard, which is the notion that you need to know everything be the perfect place in your life be the combination of sort of albert einstein, gandhi, king wonder woman, mother grace, you know, add seven other people. You know, none of us is ever going to get there so and it’s also about the perfect time and place. And of course he he’s saying, well, it’s not the perfect time in place. I’m too young. I’m do knew all the excuses, you know, in his case elements of truth, but he’s their excuses. And so it’s nixon, who persists, gets king involved. And montgomery is where the world hears the king as well as in rosa parks. So when you strip that away and you make it the long hero, it ends up, i would say, being very disempowering to people, even though think it’s an inspiring story because they have to be as her work as the perceived the problem with rosa parks pristine rosa parks as opposed to the real heroism which is doing the stuff day after day after day hyre and then the second element is that they think it is a sort of accidental action. One day, her feet hurt buy-in there she wasn’t the first person refused to move to the back of the bus. There was a young woman who was actually unmarried and pregnant, they decided not from the youth section not to build a campaign around because they’re up against enough as it is latto strategic decision and these parks had got the summer before arrests, going to trainings at a place called highlander center labor and civil rights center still going in tennessee despite being burned at once by the group klux klan and so she’s meeting with an earlier generation of civil rights activists smaller moving but still certainly present and when she acts it’s intentional, intentional doesn’t mean she knows the outcome. I always said that, there’s a two, two aspects one is, you’ve gotta have a leap of faith, the minister, jim waller’s from the social justice magazine, sojourner says hope is believing in spite of the evidence and then watching the evidence change. Yeah, so, you know, by your actions, you change and you have believe in faith about the possibility, but right next to that is intentionality, which just means you’ll be strategic. So you’re looking at you’re saying, ok, what you want accomplished? How do we get there? Who are allies are the obstacles? How do we get the resource is how do we carry it out? How do we tell our stories? All the practical stuff? Of course they had to deal with that montgomery and and when parks took that leap, she also knew that it was going to be part of intentional campaign. They would run his best they could, and, you know, they’d see where late and it is, yeah, i love the story because of the intentionality aspect, and that leads us to the social change work the people are doing now, right? And where we get to the potential for burn out in all this day after day after day after work that is so intentional and so time consuming, right? And and so and so emotionally fraught. And the stakes could be, like death and disappointing. Yes. And i just pointing, yeah, yeah, you know, never enough resource is all of those kinds of things. So so i think there’s a third element that’s missing is perseverance, which is okay, you know, twelve years, if she gives up in your tender rate, we’ve never so and so and so that that carries into that question of burnout resisted. You have to keep going. So let’s, spend some time talking about empowering people toe, right? Not burn out in their day to day work as they’re going about their struggles. Where? Wherever in the world yeah, you you believe a lot in support and they do. And the disempowerment of isolation, isolation is the killer. I mean, when you feel like you’re the only one, you’re up against everything, but when you change it to okay, we’re up against a lot. But there is a on the wii doesn’t have to be thousands of people. It can be three or four people that are the ones that you rely on but it’s so easy. I mean, i i find myself i run a project. That i found it that gets students engaged in elections using the resource is of the colleges and universities shut that out, what’s the name, the campus election engagement project, listselect dot or yeah, it’s really demanding on, you know, re sources and on also sometimes, you know, really hard personnel situations and, you know, because this comes up, you hire people and sometimes problems that you and i, rem number one particularly acute situation, which really wass i mean, it was just the kind of thing we are going to details that just wrenches your heart, wrenches yourself on it had the potential to destroy the organization and and just trying to deal with my own and then, you know, call. I talked to a friend who we have really wonderful street newspaper in seattle where i live real change that we’re homeless, people sell it, and it’s, partly professional staff partly almost poses a great model and, you know, i just called my friend who ran it it’s like, ok, tim, why don’t i d’oh it’s like, you know, you really you know, this is something that you can’t you’re not large enough to handle this on your area on you know, you just hear this, you have to be ableto, you know, hard as it is to say, this person can’t be apart the organization because, you know, it’s just this otherwise you’ll be in constant crisis that we need to have support yeah, it could be it could be colleagues similarly situated in the community or across the country, right? Yeah, i could be with funders even made the tech with technologies we have, you know, it doesn’t have to be geographically focused, yeah, but you do have tohave and you have to have a team of folks i mean, on the other side is we’re doing, like, i mean, i’m asking people in my election project to basically take the culture of a college or university, get access to the administration, and we go in through some networks that they tend to work with, but even still, you know, and the student government convinced them to do something that they haven’t done before, or now that some of them now they have done because they worked with us, which is to make a priority of registering their students to vote and getting to reflect on issues and helping them turn out of the poles and all non partisan does this last? Lorts yeah, and i mean, we’re just think, okay, here it is, here’s how we’ve done it before go do it and so it’s hard. So, you know, part of even like, working it’s harder working virtually, but we have our conference calls each, you know, in the heat of it geever and me, we’re gonna do a video and we don’t go hang out or whatever, and we’re supporting each other, we’re appreciating each other’s successes were brain streaming through the do the project, we also have coaching the cohesion in the group is what sort of were being extremely were being extremely intentional cohesion doesn’t happen automatically were laughing and making jokes were talking about did something cool happened in your personal life? Two be able to sort of give people the sense that it’s not just because in our particular case, they really are physically on their own there’s not somebody in an office, but they’re off on a college campus know whether off where if they happen to live, and then they’re either talking by phone or visit making site. This is tow campuses, but they don’t have the calling next to them. So we try and very intentionally create that community because otherwise they will burn you’re tuned to non-profit radio. Tony martignetti also hosts a podcast for the chronicle of philanthropy. Fund-raising fundamentals is a quick ten minute burst of fund-raising insights, published once a month. Tony’s guests are expert in crowdfunding, mobile giving event fund-raising direct mail and donor cultivation. Really, all the fund-raising issues that make you wonder, am i doing this right? Is there a better way there is? Find the fund-raising fundamentals archive it. Tony martignetti dot com that’s marketmesuite n e t t i remember there’s, a g before the end, thousands of listeners have subscribed on itunes. You can also learn maura, the chronicle website, philanthropy dot com fund-raising fundamentals, the better way. Yeah. About in in recruitment, there’s gotta be there’s gotta be things that you look for bringing people to the organization that are going to help create this cohesion, you know, it’s a good question, i’m not, and i wouldn’t say i’ve always been perfect at it. I would have had my share of fallibility, but i do think that, you know, as i learn and we all do, you know, that being able to i mean, have a strong sense of self but also know that you’re not going to do it all on your own know that you’re going to be working with others no, that have a sense of humor. I mean, if you’ve got a sense of humor and helps help cement slim and you see people in just, you know, dealing with the hardest possible, heart wrenching situations and there’s a sort of i mean, somebody called gallows humor, which french trenches humor has in-kind wartime or whatever guys get you through it’s so important in prison culture, they talk about the brotherhood of suffering, yeah, it helps to be that cohesive group, right? And so, you know, one of the stories i tell in the impossible. Take a little while is you know, they’re breaking it. Robben island prison in south africa. You know, they’re telling mandela and all those other folks, you know, you are going to rot here. The world has forgotten about you. You will never leave here alive. They isolate him in every way they can. And so they’re breaking rocks in a prison courtyard and they start whistling a freedom song and just just that, you know, okay, we’re not allowed to have this political conversation, but we all know what this means, and they’re they’re ice. They’re denied newspapers and, you know, further isolate him and they see a guard. Who’s got his tuna fish sandwich wrapped in a newspaper and throws, you know, it’s sam with sores on his paper in the trash, i take it, you know, surreptitiously under their shirt, they see a story that they think might give each other heart. And in a kind of coded script on toilet paper’s only paper. Most of them had access to the right, you know, just something that will tell that story of the outside world so that you are connected to the outside world into each other and then they pass it hand in hand, you know, when they’re waiting, you know, had lunch or whatever, but they have a chance in the yard. Yeah, so it’s just it’s those air extreme situations, but they also suggests to me that and this is the lesson of both soul of a citizen and be impossible to take a little while that in any situation, you know, you don’t have to be faced in prison. But if you’re doing difficult work, you need that camaraderie. You need that community. And you have got to be, you know, recently intentional about trading it about the scope of the work of the organization being judicious about what the organization takes on, right. So it’s not straying from mission and and stressing stressing in killing staff? Well, yeah, i think we are. I mean, i think we all face that challenge because if you’re trying to do something, i mean, i have the needs are so great, the needs are so great. And i always encourage people to think really large and to tackle big systems on a lot of times. There’s a tendency to sort of yeah, which describe it. It’s i think there’s a value in that more delimited personal work, it’s i don’t want to demean it in any way. Hyre but i remember stanford students saying very well meaning lee um, i’ve learned so much volunteering at this homeless shelter, i hope my grandchildren get the opportunity to volunteer at the same homeless shelter that i have and as his friends sort of try to gently remind him that really wasn’t the point. And so if you’re working at the homeless shelter, which is great, you wantto look upstream and you want to be able to say, okay, what am i learning from this one on one encounter? And how do i buy-in with others and joined together others to tackle homelessness on a larger platform? Because if you don’t it’s just going to the endless parade of need, so i think that that’s true and at the same time, well, where do you draw the bounds? And you look around at the issues and there poverty and inequality and climate change and, you know, went on and on, you know, police violence, i’ve got stuff on on on how do you deal with all of it? And so i think part of it is just you do have to think about what your capacity is. You do have to think about the past people. I tend to be somebody who thinks large and tries to get my project and staff to think large and probably, you know, maybe drives them a little too hard. But by my national directories is one of twenty eight year old is pretty good at balancing. All right? You know, this is what we can ask people to do. And if they do it, well, that will matter. But i have this wonderful friend who i nufer years who died at a hundred to is an environmental activist. And of course, you know what time she reaches our, you know, late eighties and nineties, um, you know, you’re asking your weather sees her secret of longevity is certainly but also her secret of being able to keep doing this work. Yeah, on dh. So, you know, one of the phrases she does that you know, you you do what you can, you can’t do everything you have to say no to people, but you could do what you can and then you could do some more, and you could do that your entire life. And then she also another point she was talking about reviving our spirits and she said, you know, you go kayaking, you go hiking, shooting both into her nineties, and she gets the mist of a smile and she says, then you come back ready to take on exxon, you know, so she’s willing to take on exxon, but she also knows that she has to go do those other things to renew her soul, you know? And, you know, and humor and just she on this sort of goes to the recruitment to you, right? You recruiting hole people? Yeah, you have other interests beyond the work that you’re you’re hiring them for your not recruiting robot? Yeah, no, absolutely. And so i think having, you know, having people who really are just i mean, it’s hard because i always when people are passionate about the car, but also but not one dimensional, but no one dimension. Yeah, yeah, and not, you know, we’re not recruiting robots. What about the idea of the bored as potential support you, you know, in times again, times of burnout. We’re not talking about yeah, fiduciary responsibilities, but hyre valuable to have a couple of trusted board members who, you know, i would you can’t trust confide in i mean, i would say the trusted people can be anywhere, so i think, you know, if they’re on the board that’s terrific, you know? And there was also i mean, sometimes you sort of worry, will you exposure in, er, you know, the afraid of the classic phrase about politics and sausage making it’s like you really don’t want to see how the sausage is made? I mean, there was there at least those those sure are mediators and made sausage sometimes i really don’t want to see how it’s made and, you know, do you expose the inner workings that boardmember than thinking, oh, my god, this is like, you know, we’re in crisis, we’re in crisis, you know, you know, and the same things too, with funders, i mean, certainly myself, you know, there’s funders who i have a very serious, trusting relationship you really do want to know and who i trust if they recognise that oh, everything is not going perfectly, but this is true in any organization and is not and is perfectly compatible with doing astounding work. You know, i remember i had a staffer once was running operation brilliant, brilliant guy and you, you know, innovated. A lot of the things that moved us forward is an organization about at one point he liked to plan, which is good because he brought. He brought us to a higher level of planning, and planning is really good, but at one point, he said, it’s supposed to election, he said, you planned all this stuff out and, you know, it’s all going out, it’s all happening, different blade. Yeah, and i’m like and yes, and that’s always going to be the way it isthe it is gonna happen differently and the planning with good and it makes us respond, you know more effectively, but there’s always going to be if you’re doing anything worthwhile, ambitious enough to be worthwhile, there are always gonna be things coming in from left field and purples and what not and it’s just how about sort of going backto what the one hundred two year old activist saying she kayaks, etcetera, right? And he’s mischievous? I mean, she remember us hundred two years, i think, like he was busy in your party little chablis apartment lived on second, section eight subsidence dilgence social security, which, when she was twenty three years old, is a young union activist should help lobbied through one of the first public pension programs in america became a model for social security, so something she didn’t twenty three or four benefits there are ninety eight and nine, one hundred, and i think her i can’t see what she was talking about her landlord and said, well, you know what? If something happens, you know? Yeah, just dig a hole in the backyard didn’t pretty small letter and take up my case, you know? She just was she didn’t know there was one point. Yeah, there was a reason in central america something there was a congressman did she met. It was very active in the audubon society and who very condescendingly in the way that when does towards the old and the young i said to her, oh, so i hear you’re a birdwatcher like isn’t that? And she said, yes, there’s a lot of birds in washington d c but been watching these days, but i was thinking of the kayaking, she she takes care of herself, she takes care of its just got this wonderful sense of humor, right? And she’s a kayaker and yes, you know, so having similar to recruiting people who aren’t one dimensional, not being one dimensional yourself. Yeah, i mean, you do have to take care of yourself. You do? I’m a big proponent of naps. Yeah, i’ve blogged about the the the the love i have for napping. But whatever it is you do, you need to have something outside. Yeah, yeah, i know. And it’s true and, you know, and again, i think we all wrestle with i mean, i certainly rest that it’s like, yeah, you know, my wife’s going out to see a play? I’m she works very. She works very hard, but in a more contained space, probably ad, you know, and i’m like, yeah, i got this deadline i got to do this, you know? But you know, if i over the years, i’m a runner. And run early sixties been running since i’m fifteen and fortunately, my knees haven’t given out and so, you know, if i go run, i also live in seattle, so i get to run by water. But, you know, if i’m traveling, lecturing on the road, it’s, like i take a break, which because i make it sound like my living, you know, i take a break and i run along usually if there’s water around, i’m going to run along the river or the stream of the, you know, whatever the lake and it just, you know, physically, it flushes me, you know, the toxicity out of you, but it also just, you know, it gives you a space and it’s it’s, you feel better afterwards? Endorphins, there’s lot to be said for endorphins, flood flow. All that stuff suppressing the stress hormones. Yeah, yeah, i can think of offhand. Well, dahna general in one of them. Yeah. Suppressing those. Yeah, and building up endorphins. And yet, yeah. And i think also things like diet. Yeah. He’s getting enough sleep? Yeah, yeah. I mean, i called. I mean, i called the holy trinity of, you know, exercise diet, which includes, um, good supplements. So yeah. Okay. Now, now, there’s not a not on the suicide. Very practical. And you know what? Yeah, you are dealing with serious dressed. This will help. Uh, this will lower your cortisone there’s. Another right doesn’t stretch on and, you know, and sleep, were i my sleep tends not to be that great. So i just figure okay, i’m gonna log nine hours to get a where you get seven and a half, okay? You know, and you know, and that helps about switch gears a bit to the two donor-centric dahna burnout, right? You know, i’ve been doing this. I’ve been supporting this cause a long time. I feel like it’s time to move on. I need any advice around that. Well, i think part of what happens is people have this constant pressure to sort of see the quick short term results and a lot of times howard’s in new york by accepting the impossible take a little while, the greatest story. And he talks about the optimism of uncertain you don’t know when the moment will turn you go backto parks of all the wasn’t like she was doing lots of things for twelve years as they all were one of them little spark. But you couldn’t anticipate which and so i think, it’s, very it’s. Very easy to sort of say that success is for human dignity that we’ve had were inevitable civil rights movement. Of course. Eventually they would have revealed gay rights in eventually. Well, our environmental challenges open question whether we will be able to you do what we need. Well, we are able to do what we need climate change. But they have the will is yeah, the will for it. I mean, right now, you know, the technology is there. Renewables have now passed, you know, they are cheaper than coal. There are equal with fossil fuel without any externalities at all. And you know, when next molly’s it’s not even close, so but will we have the political will? I don’t know. Um, it depends on us and you and the stakes are pretty ultimate because, you know, we’re talking about the habitability of the planet. So, you know, when i when i look at it, you know what i what i see is donors being subject to the same schools is the rest of us, but possibly possibly in a more immediate way because they’re not actual sum of money but a lot of making sure they aren’t in the field, they’re they’re dealing with, you know, with them, you know, then the publicans of hands, possibly and it’s so and they’re getting reports, but they may not even have time to read the reports and, you know, depends on how good the people are a storytelling and so i think and, you know, let’s, be honest, at least some issues, they they may be insulated by privilege, they’re not, you know, they’re not seeing in their social circle, and i remember talking with one of our funders, and she said, well, she has a couple different pieces, like one of her groups, they are just not always down in silicon valley, they are just not at all concerned about this stuff at all and, you know, so she’s in an environment that is not reinforcing her concern yeah, yeah, that’s but, you know, that makes it harder to continue as a donor, then everyone’s talking about these urgent issues and oh, yeah and, you know, here you are, so you’re trying to address them, so i think you know, the challenges well for the rest of us, to try and offer that perspective in our work, which is hard because we’re often mean again, the stakes couldn’t be life and death, you know, they’re huge, even if they’re not immediately life and death wait care passionate about our summit is to myself, it’s like this is what we can do, and we want to put these many people on the ground in our states in time to really work with the school’s for this election and the clock is ticking and, you know, so theo, from the donor perspective, if you want to try and really see that long term, you know, i mean, and of course, you want to be rigorous and you want all the rest of this stuff, but not get but see that long term goal is here long term goal recognize the the short term, the short term impacts we can have, right? And but you also see the longer the wait and see how things build on the other thing i think is, you know, there’s a certain, you know, i would argue that our our culture, including certain the non-profit donor intersection, has that has adopted on obsession with certain kinds of measurement to the detriment of other kinds of metro meant measurement. And so it’s, metrix, metrix, metrix, metrix. And i mean, i mean, i’ve been seattle in a city where it’s particularly talks because we’ve got a tech culture. And yeah, some of the numbers could be exceptionally important. Question about that. But here’s, a story that embodies the process of what’s occurring. That can be equally indicative. And so when you’re trying to evaluate impact, which is a reasonable and good things, you want to take that broad, long term picture. And you want to get the understand all the different ripples of a particular organization you’re supporting our considering supporting on. That that’s that can be as warm or important. Then then the numbers, you know, and not to dismiss the numbers, you know, but another way of measuring there’s qualitative his bed storytelling as well. Yeah, but, you know, in which can include numbers which can include numbers the air of i mean, you know, when i talked to donors, they know we have some very good numbers on our project. Yeah. Mark, best calculations. A couple hundred thousand students who voted our last year who wouldn’t have otherwise? This is huge, you know, for a tiny minute budget of labbate. Ah, half less than half a million dollar budget for that level of impact is amazing. Yeah, yeah. You have about a minute left or so you’ve been doing activism. What? Forty some years? Forty something years. It creeps up on you. What do you love about it? Why do you keep forty you? Why so long? What do you love? Well, some of it’s that the work continues to need to be doing dahna but some of it is that you do. I think the old skills and you build a sense of capability. And you can see things happen that you’ve done or and this is what i would say is that every way the books that i write try a likely impossible soul try to connect people to a broader stream of people working for such for social justice that started way before any of us were born and is going to continue long after we die. And if we feel connected that stream, it can help carry us, and we can help carry others. Add to me that’s a lot of what keeps me doing it because it means that not only do i have a community that supports in the current time, but i have a community historical time, which i could see is supporting, and that makes you an awful lot of difference. Follow-up he’s written five books, most recent, our soul of a citizen and the impossible will take a little while you’ll find him at the impossible dot org’s paul, thank you so much. My pleasure. A real pleasure talking to you. Thanks a lot. On the beach on the durney martignetti non-profit radio coverage of opportunity collaboration. Twenty fifteen. Thanks so much for being with us. Boy was good listening. To that beach on dh paul lobe sharing so much jean takagi and the path act for charities coming up first. Pursuant you know them, they’ve been with non-profit radio for six months supporting us. They have fund-raising management software for small and midsize shops. It’s it’s that simple. Use the tools you need and don’t subscribe to the other ones. I presume you need to raise more money in twenty sixteen than you did twenty fifteen growth is good, they’ve got the tools to help you do that like they’re a prospector and velocity. So check him out. You know what? What? Ah, they’re ideal for small and midsize non-profits what’re you waiting for for pizza pursuant dot com welcome crowdster just like it sounds they do crowdfunding, but not the usual. Their crowd funding sites are elegant and simple and fast, so easy for your admin, though in the back end and super easy for your donors. I had two long talks with ceo joe ferraro, and we both decided that crowdster is perfect for non-profit radio listeners, in fact, he runs a charity himself, which helps orphans globally, and he runs crowdster on the the guy likes to stay busy. What can you say? Um, you can talk to him. You know how i love picking up the phone and talking to people to do business. Give him a call. Five one, six, five o one, ninety three, double six if you want to check them out first crowdster dot com they really do make very good looking sites. Now. It’s time for tony’s. Take two. Thank you for loving non-profit radio over the holidays. I read the testimonials on itunes, which ah, i got a couple of non-profit radio listener that’s what he or she called themselves said tony’s, an animated host who knows how to conduct a good interview black oak games. Even though tony is interviewing the guests, it feels natural and they have a true, too way conversation, which i really appreciate. Back-up richard tony’s, a skillful interviewer who attracts great expert guests, thank you so much for that and all the other comments that air on on itunes and the other feedback i get, especially on twitter, thank you so much. I don’t even i don’t even have a sarcastic come back for those just thank you and you know, i hope. That i always do want your feedback, good or bad? That’s tony’s, take two. I got chink takagi on the line. You know, jean takagi is the managing attorney of neo the non-profit and exempt organizations law group in san francisco. He and it’s the wildly popular non-profit law blogged dot com and he’s at g tack on twitter happy new year jean takagi. Happy new year durney great to be here. Thank you again. This would be your fifth year. I believe we’re beginning your five. I think it’s been a good long run. I’m glad. Glad to have you back another year. That’s. Amazing. Tony and its great teo continue having our conversation. So thank you. All right, um, before we get into the path act, there is something that you alerted me to just happened yesterday. The irs had this proposal for acknowledging gif ts of two hundred fifty dollars, or more. And they have withdrawn the proposal. Can you can you get us up to date? Sure. Um, and so that’s. Ah ah, great new happening for the nonprofit sector. Although we have cem cem maybe controversial or dissenting about about that, we’ll get there. Go. Ahead. Okay. Object in your presentation, please. So let’s, start by saying what? What? What? The proposal wass and it was for providing an alternative for donors tio evidence that they actually have made a charitable contribution of two hundred fifty dollars, arm or under existing laws, donors are required to have a written receipt that contains certain information, including, you know what, the chick who the charity is, what amount of the contribution is, and importantly, there must be a statement on that receipt that says no goods or services were provided by the charity and return assuming that was the case. If donors don’t maintain that receipt, then they could get their deductions denied, even if they had actually made the contributions right. The time of getting that receipt, they must have that receipt in hand, or it must have been prepared before the donor files their tax return. It’s no good to do it after they’ve been audited and can’t produce that. So that was the original problem. So the irs said, well, you know, we should make up a rule that allows the charity tow, have some responsibility as well if they opto have it and it is really important which you’ve pointed out to me, said it is optional for the charity under this new rule, which ultimately was withdrawn. But the proposal was that the charity could file another information, return to the irs with the donor’s name, the amount of the contribution and the donor’s social security number, and that would be in lieu of providing a proper receipts the donor, and meeting those requirements of having a proper written receipt so that would evidence a charitable contribution to charity would take on the burden at its options, and you go about it there’s that the donor loses the receipt, or the charity didn’t issue the receipt with the right information about that no goods or services were provided to the charity. In return, it was still ok, everything was good. The donation was good because charity filed that information return with the irs, that evidence the contribution, that that the big dispute about that and why a lot of non-profit organizations, especially the big advocacy and national organisations got upset was because of the social security numbers that the non-profits would have to collect if they wanted to file that return, right? Ok, s o the need for the social security number makes sense because that’s the identifying part, may that’s the identifying the piece of data so it’s clear why it’s needed, and i just want to point out that this has been a problem just taking a little step back. It’s been a problem where donors and you and i have talked about this, so i make it clear for everybody. Donors have had their deductions denied because they don’t get or don’t keep well, i guess it’s more don’t get from the from the non-profits that contemporaneous acknowledgment that they need so this has been a problem area. And as you said, iris was trying to address it. You were, i’ll give you first shot we have is we didn’t really have a difference of opinion on the substance of this, that there was something around it that was troubling me. But you were very much opposed to this and a lot of others. You’re right. The big dick secure. Oops around the concern about that having that social security number metoo yeah. Thanks for letting me first time. Yeah. You know, the big problem is identity theft is a huge and growing problem both for individuals and the country itself. Identity theft is a huge problem, and the federal government has been i’m saying as a matter of policy, t people into agencies don’t collect social security numbers unless you absolutely have to, because there’s a danger in not adequately protecting them. So if non-profits opted to do this, they would have to make sure that they had adequate protections not to allow those social security numbers to get into other people’s hands. Andi so that was one of the big problems is could non-profit adequately protect the social security numbers if they didn’t really understand the rules regarding protection of what it’s called personally identifiable information that would allow people teo steal a person’s identity and there are a lot of laws around that and non-profits probably don’t know many of those laws and might accept the burden of taking on the ocean security numbers and filing that new information returned because they didn’t know about the laws, and that would create more liability for charities. That was the big problem. The other problem that comes up a scam artist would now be able to call donors. And ask for their social security numbers on behalf of a charity that they know that the donors are associating with so they might show up at a charity event. No, get to meet some people there, give them a call and ask for the social security numbers is part of the scam saying that they represent the charity, get that social security number and then commit identity, you know, theft that way as well. But those are a couple of the big, big problem that we had with this and, well, i’ll let you go next, and i have an additional tried t try to be civil about these things now in the place where we different was was not the substance i agree with your concerns and all the other agencies and and bloggers who are concerned about the substance of what opting in would mean my disagreement was why do we presume? It seemed like so many people were presuming that non-profits weren’t bright enough? Tow opt out of this, remember it’s totally optional. So why are we presuming that non-profits would opt in with great, vast unawareness of what it means to protect someone? Social security number versus presuming that the non-profits would say, you know that that opens up it’s up to some real potential liability and expenses of protection and software. So let us not opt in it’s a great point, and i don’t want to be little the expertise on dh ah skill that that non-profit leaders bring throughout the country, and certainly there are smart leaders throughout the sector, and the sector is the most trusted of all of the sectors by far and there’s reason for that. On the other hand, tony, last five years we’ve had more than six hundred thousand non-profit organisations lose their tax exemptions for failure to file with the irs. We’ve also had probably more than half of the organization’s they’ll tow register and states to engage in charitable solicitations in the state. Um, and, you know, part of that has to do just with a failure to understand some of the laws that may apply in the laws change from time to time, creating new requirements, which is case with the irs and smaller non-profits having to file all of a sudden, but also there had been a lack of really enforcement by different agencies. On non-profits because non-profits were trusted so much and a lot of scandals that have been coming up, you know, mostly because of the media attention that focused on a really pew of very isolated number. But very bad actors now has raised the enforcement level from from all the agencies. And because non-profits are not used to this level enforcement, it could easily oversee the neto to really adequately protect itself on legal compliance issues and that’s what we see a lot really well intentioned non-profits really bright leaders, but not being used to this level of enforcement. That’s our big concern with social security numbers. All right, let’s, go out for a break, gene, you and i’ll keep talking about this subject for just ah, a couple of minutes after the break, and then we got to move on to the path act. Um all right, so keep it civil. I do have to have something to say in response, but let’s, let’s, take a break and gene and i’ll be right back. Like what you’re hearing a non-profit radio tony’s got more on youtube, you’ll find clips from stand up comedy tv spots and exclusive interviews catch guests like seth gordon. Craig newmark, the founder of craigslist marquis of eco enterprises, charles best from donors choose dot org’s aria finger do something that worked neo-sage levine from new york universities heimans center on philanthropy tony tweets to he finds the best content from the most knowledgeable, interesting people in and around non-profits to share on his stream. If you have valuable info, he wants to re tweet you during the show. You can join the conversation on twitter using hashtag non-profit radio twitter is an easy way to reach tony he’s at tony martignetti narasimhan t i g e n e t t i remember there’s a g before the end he hosts a podcast for the chronicle of philanthropy fund-raising fundamentals is a short monthly show devoted to getting over your fund-raising hartals just like non-profit radio, toni talks to leading thinkers, experts and cool people with great ideas. As one fan said, tony picks their brains and i don’t have to leave my office fund-raising fundamentals was recently dubbed the most helpful non-profit podcast you have ever heard. You can also join the conversation on facebook, where you can ask questions before or after the show. The guests were there, too. Get insider show alerts by email. Tony tells you who’s on each week and always includes link so that you can contact, i guess, directly. To sign up, visit the facebook page for tony martignetti dot com. Lively conversation. Top trends. Sound advice, that’s, tony martignetti non-profit radio. And i’m ken berger from charity navigator. We have such a treasure trove of drops that occasionally people move on. So that was king burger, formerly ceo of charity navigator. Sam will have teo to take that one out of the rotation, but there are many others. Okay, jeanne, now you mentioned the way can’t devote a couple more minutes of this and we’ll get carried away. You mentioned, you know, the six hundred thousand or so now that lost their tax exempt status for failure to file three years in a row, even just a little return little postcard. But we know that a lot of those were defunct, you know, out of out of commission organizations. Not all but a lot of those were that were so they wouldn’t be soliciting. Continue. Teo, get donations anyway of any size. All right? And then you you mentioned charity registration that hits my sweet spot. Of course, we know that i do that part of my practices, keeping charity’s compliant in each state where they are soliciting donations on your right there’s a lot of lack of awareness. I say that a lot when i’m speaking in training and even for those who are aware there’s a lot of misunderstanding of it. So i i grant that i just ah, sametz dahna from, you know, it’s, just the seams, the constant presumption that charity’s won’t figure it out and do it correctly. Andi, just not up to opt in. Ah. Okay, i guess. You know, i’m pretty much just repeating myself. I don’t know anything else you want to. You want to add to that to that discussion? Well, i’ll just add that if donors really want to be sure that they’re going to get a deduction, they should really just ask the charities to make sure that they maintain permanently the receipt that was issued to them at the time. So if the donor loses at the charity will maintain it permanently, or at least for the number of years where they could go back, um, to make that deduction and that will have the same effect. Okay. Okay. But i mean, donors have responsibility too. You know, the charity sends you an acknowledgement letter or e mails it to you. You want to save it, you know. Ah, charity’s only do so much for tow. Hand hold their donors and then it becomes the donor’s. Fault. Really? Okay. Um, let’s move to the path act protecting americans against tax hike. I believe as a path and there’s ah, there’s stuff in there for charities. And most significantly, the ira rollover made permanent. Yeah, i mean it’s a really interesting act and is part of this greater bill that was signed into law but there’s three charitable giving provisions that were originally established this temporary laws and year by year they were extended for for the following year. But because congress would wait until, like, december of each year to make retroactive so effective for the previous night, that was so annoying, they would do it like november or october or something and give you, you know, thirty days or sixty days to market and promote it infinite into your your fourth quarter, but busiest time fund-raising plan. It was crazy. Yeah, and sometimes it what? There wasn’t enough time, particularly with the ira charitable roll over. So let’s talk about the diver roll over first, so that the provisions of the ira charitable roll over, which was first available in two thousand seven, allowed individuals age seventeen and a half older to donate up to one hundred thousand from their traditional or their roth iras latto eligible public charity. So no donor buy-in funds, no private foundations, no supporting work. And you didn’t have to count those distributions to charities as taxable income. Yes, very important. Yeah. And so that would be separate because i mean otherwise. At seventeen and a half, you have to start taking distribution from your iras and that’s typically taxable income to you. So instead of taking it and then making a gift of it, which you know you could get a terrible contribution from you just don’t include it in your income. It all right? So right. The nice thing about about that if you don’t get it, actually not included his income and take a charitable deduction because that would be double dipping, but but you don’t reflected in your gross income, which has a lot of different benefits that it that are even better than it’s been getting a charitable deductions so you don’t want to recognize it is income and then take it as a deduction. You want to make sure this is done right? Which means that the ira has to be made directly to the public charity and eggs. I can’t go through you first as an individual and then tow a public charity. Right there is there is an exception to that gene. If, ah, one of the years it was, it was available, there was ah, you know what they call them? Not private letter rulings, but attacks alert or something that if the charity writes the check payable to the sorry the ira custodian, your ira custodian writes the cheque payable to the charity and sends that to you and then you that you then convey that check to the charity that’s. Okay, that that does qualify as a as what? This is really a qualified charitable distributions. Technically, not a roll over, but i just want to say so that’s a possibility. And the other way, the other group of people that this could be really valuable for is non itemizers. Because if you’re not itemizing you, don’t you don’t earn a chat, you know, claim a charitable federal income tax deduction. You take the standard deduction, but you can benefit from this. Roll over and be a non itemizers. Still get the benefit? Yeah. That’s absolutely right. So most people don’t itemize their deductions, so getting a lower growth income on dh, lower taxable income, in effect is much, much better than nothing at all, which is what would happen if you’re a non itemizers and you make a gift to cherish and, of course, that’s a big benefit. Also another benefit of a lower growth income, which would happen by making the charitable roll over, is that your tax treatment of social security benefits is better and you have a lower medicare premium as well, right there they’re all based on taxable income thresholds, right? Exactly right? So the extent you can keep your taxable income lower, you’ll you’ll get you’ll have greater benefits in the store security area and and others too very true, and we don’t want to get too much into this, i think is an hour to go through them, but another big benefit of certain states charging income tax to their residents, the state income tax, but i don’t recognize a charitable contribution deduction for state income tax purposes, but they will take the lower growth income based on the charitable contribution exactly made from from the ira. So again, another benefit that you wouldn’t get if you took in the ira as income and then made a gift out, so this rollover provisions is really beneficial and has been seen tio for the years that it’s been around has been seen to be a very, very valuable tool for forgetting jean. We have to we have to move past that now because we promised people all three components of the path act and we only have about a minute and a half left, so i’m going to sort of summarize the first one for gifts of food inventory. Non si corporations can now can now deduct ah greater amount up to their basis there there cost plus fifty percent of the fair market value and for non si corpse that used to be limited to just your basis in that food inventory. If i even the playing field now so that small businesses could get the same benefit big businesses which are typical, see corporations so really nice to see that you can get not only a deduction of your coffee of the food that you’re donating, but half of the profits you would have made if you sold it and well. Seymour contributions from food to food banks because of that. Excellent. Okay. And you got to be concise on the third one. I’ll let you go. We just have a minute left. Okay? Landowners can deduct the value of a conservation easements land that they’re giving up their development rights over so that there’s preserve preservation natural resource is the old rule. Thirty percent of your adjusted gross income for up to six years could be deducted. The new rule. Fifty percent of your adjusted gross, thinkin and up to sixteen years. So really promoting land conservation. That’s why i let gene explain it. You see how much more articulately and concisely he does it than i do. Thank you, jean. Thanks. Study. Jean takagi, managing attorney of neo non-profit exempt organizations, law group and our monthly legal contributor. You’ll find him on twitter at g tak g t a next week. Tips from maria part do maria sample back with smart tips from her book magnify your business if you missed any part of today’s show, find it on tony martignetti dot com where in the world else would you go? There’s little flat on go i’m still thinking about this for twenty sixteen, i’m not. I’m not sure. Responsive by pursuing online tools for small and midsize non-profits data driven and technology enabled pursuing dot com. We’re also sponsored by crowdster. Welcome again, online and mobile fund-raising software for non-profits crowdster dotcom are creative producers. Claire meyerhoff, sam legal, which is the line producer. Gavin dollars, are am and fm outreach director, and the show’s social media is by dina russell. Our music is by scott stein. Be with me next week for non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent go out and degree. Yeah. What’s not to love about non-profit radio tony gets the best guests check this out from seth godin this’s the first revolution since tv nineteen fifty and henry ford nineteen twenty it’s the revolution of our lifetime here’s a smart, simple idea from craigslist founder craig newmark yeah insights, orn presentation or anything? People don’t really need the fancy stuff they need something which is simple and fast. When’s the best time to post on facebook facebook’s andrew noise nose at traffic is at an all time hyre on nine a m or eight pm so that’s, when you should be posting your most meaningful post here’s aria finger ceo of do something dot or ge young people are not going to be involved in social change if it’s boring and they don’t see the impact of what they’re doing. So you got to make it fun and applicable to these young people look so otherwise a fifteen and sixteen year old they have better things to do if they have xbox, they have tv, they have their cell phones. Me dar is the founder of idealist took two or three years for foundation staff, sort of dane toe add an email address card, it was like it was phone. This email thing is right and that’s why should i give it away? Charles best founded donors choose dot or ge somehow they’ve gotten in touch kind of off line as it were on dh and no two exchanges of brownies and visits and physical gift. Mark echo is the founder and ceo of eco enterprises. You may be wearing his hoodies and shirts. Tony, talk to him. Yeah, you know, i just i i’m a big believer that’s not what you make in life. It sze, you know, tell you make people feel this is public radio host majora carter. Innovation is in the power of understanding that you don’t just put money on a situation expected to hell. You put money in a situation and invested and expect it to grow and savvy advice for success from eric sabiston. What separates those who achieve from those who do not is in direct proportion to one’s ability to ask others for help. The smartest experts and leading thinkers air on tony martignetti non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent.

Nonprofit Radio for October 30, 2015: Don’t Be The Founder From Hell & Chilling Laws And Regs

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Jim Nowak: Don’t Be The Founder From Hell

Jim Nowak heads fundraising for the dZi Foundation, which he founded. How did he and the Foundation manage his transition from executive director to chief fundraiser? He talks candidly about the board, job descriptions, ego and more. We talked at Opportunity Collaboration 2015.

 

 

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Hello and welcome to tony martignetti non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent i’m your aptly named host it’s our halloween show ghosts and goblins and ghouls hope you enjoy your happy halloween this weekend and i’m glad you’re with me. I’d be stricken with carp itis if you came up with the inflammatory idea that you missed today’s show, don’t be the founder from hell, jim, no ac heads fund-raising for the zi foundation, which he founded. How did he and the foundation manage his transition from executive director to chief fundraiser? He talks candidly about the board job descriptions, ego and mohr. We talked at opportunity collaboration just a couple of weeks ago and chilling laws and regs thes air no tricks. Jean takagi has actual and proposed laws that will scare you into action. He’s, our legal contributor and principle of neo the non-profit and exempt organizations law group on tony’s take two between the guests tech videos from mexico we’re sponsored by pursuing full service fund-raising data driven and technology enabled, you’ll raise more money pursuant dot com here’s jim nowak and the founder from hell from opportunity collaboration welcome to tony. Martignetti non-profit radio coverage of opportunity collaboration twenty fifteen were on the beach in x top of mexico. My guest is jim no act he’s, president and co founder of zi foundation. They’re at deasy i that’s deltas, delta zulu, india from my air force days dot org’s dc i dot or ge, and we’re talking about avoiding being the founder from hell. Jim is not that jim. Welcome. Thanks, tony, for having me on the show. Appreciate it. It’s a pleasure. I’m glad we got together. What? Two days ago, right? I think we’re connected. And, um, all right, you’re not the founder from hell, and we are gonna take this really have one side of the story, so i don’t have it. I’m trusting you because one of your board to collaborate to corroborate your your side. But you’re doing a session here. Yeah, i presume you’ve been. You’ve been vetted. Yeah, i’ve done done the session for the six years i’ve been coming. Job pretending collaboration. I keep offering. You know, i don’t need to do the session, but it seems as i always say, nobody ends up at that session by mistake, you know, people and it’s been interesting people, aaron, really tough situations, very emotional, you know that the social sector is a tough space to be in and their people are very passionate and it can be really charged, but we do our best to try to give people some tools, maybe walk through these these these difficult situations, all right? And in the six years i’ve been doing, you’ve never been challenged by anyone who said, no, that guy is the ceo. That guy he’s the founder from hell, no never had that challenge, but haven’t i know, but there, you know, again, i would say i only have one perspective to bring to it there are people that have different perspectives and say that would never work that are absolutely, and i’ve had some of them as guests, but but we’re getting the founders perspective, which i haven’t had before. Yeah, um, let’s, start with your history with the organization. I’m the cofounder and now i sit is president. We started our work in the fall. Seventeen years ago. It was around an expedition that had been climbing in the fall for a number of years and small expedition to climb memoria twenty three thousand four hundred foot what’s. The name of it from maury fremery. Yeah, three miles to the west of everest, on the nepal tibet border. Doing a new route has never been climbed. I was on there in eighty nine. Now back in ninety eight and in ninety eight found out about small girls home that was financially failing, huh? Raised money in my local community to help bail this girl’s home out. That was the genesis of our work. Where’s. Your community. Where were you living then? I was living the vail, colorado, that and shortly after that moved to where were based now in ridgeway, colorado, southwest corner of colorado. Down by telling. Right. Okay. And how long have you not been the executive director? I was executive director for the first thirteen years. Okay? And then we started into a process of identifying we wanted to shift from there and bring someone in with better financial skills than than myself. But and it was early, early on, it was identified by my board that they want me to say connected to the organization i carried the history carried. A lot of the donors carried those. Relationships on. They want me to become the development director. Okay, i’m going to get to the details of how that all played out. That’s that’s, critical part. So it was for you, it’s been four years now since you were executive director. Is that right? Correct. Okay. And there is a new executive director. Hired and same person have been in the position for years. Yeah, we feel like we we did a really thorough an extensive search. Get a job and he’s still on the job saying individual okay. Okay, so, he’s uh, he’s executive director, um correct, mark. Mark. And you won’t get a shot at mark. Yeah. Mark rikers, mark rikers. And you’re the president. Correct. Okay. Let’s, uh, let’s start with the board’s role in this. What i think is really interesting eyes that it was the board recommendation that you stay it wasn’t you as founder dictating. I want to stay with this organization. Thie impetus for having you remain came from the board. And also the impetus toe hyre an executive director came from the board, so it was to phase. It was like we need two. And as my board affectionately refers to jim, if you get hit by a bus, this organization could potentially go down in flames. So the impetus came from some very skilled and wise board members that had experience in the nonprofit world. Had experiences changed management leaders. We’re just very savvy and saying let’s, make our organization more sustainable and increase our bench bench strength. There had to be a lot of trust, a cross, you and the board. I mean, you had to believe that the board actually wanted you two remain and in the capacity that you ultimately became president and which is chief fundraiser for you have put a lot of faith in you’re in your board members telling you that believing what they were telling you. Yeah, and this is a really an emotional space for founder’s teo walk into because you could certainly believed that you were in a situation where you were being replaced, you know, and, um, that certainly took ah, was it took a while for me? Because that was my first reaction. I don’t think it was an unusual one. Um, this changing roles and organizations is really tough work, i think it’s exceptionally tough if you’re the founder, if you were the very first person working on your own, you know, from monstrous hours and generating the organization. But pardon parcel of that is that i always had the belief that eventually, you know, in organizations everyone leaves eventually, and i always had in the back of my mind that the most important thing was that this organization lived on beyond me. And this was certainly a major stepping stone to that. What about the the composition of the board you mentioned? You had some change management people on your board? I’m talking about the importance of having the right skill set on your board to help this transition. Yeah, i mean, it’s it’s, kind of like who’s. Do you have the right people on the bus? You know, and early on in our evolution, you know, we had a lot of people that knew a lot about paul, and that was great, but they were all foreigners, you know? And they had great skill, great passion and that but the evolution has been to bring in buy-in people with sound non-profit experience people who were changed management leaders that basically had their own consulting firms that actually helped corporal eaters and non-profit lee, just walk through these really challenging transitions in the evolution of the nor is a t had that expertise. Oh, yeah, we have that three people that change management expertise. Yeah, that was that was really hughes. And then more than anything, maybe was that i had specifically two individuals that i trust implicitly, that they actually have my back and that that boardmember board members that this was, you know, they had long non-profit experience, but that this was the way the organization could go and that i was not being, you know, put out to pasture and that that that this would be a very fascinating time for me to be able to find out what i really wanted to do instead of having to do everything you also had to trust that the board has the best interests of z in mind that and that their vision is at least, you know, parallel to yours. I mean, it may not be identical, but they yeah, they’ve got z in their in their hearts and and that that really, you know, one of the two individuals i trusted implicitly had been there at the first board meeting in my kitchen table, you know? And now we’re actually we have our board meetings at his board table on the fourteenth floor in denver office, you know? So i mean, that’s been a long evolution, but that had been fourteen years of that relationship, so yeah, i really knew that they had my had my back, a lot of trust ways, but not without a lot of emotion. And a lot of baggage, i’m sure is a tough, you know, you know, talk about the emotional, you know, you just just feel, is this the where am i actually going? What was actually going to happen to the organization, you know, what’s gonna happen to me because i really impassioned about this work and want to stay in this space, you know? So yeah, a lot, a lot of challenges and a lot of ups and downs, and i would say that that period tow walk through that and feel confident it took a couple months, it made it really took a couple months, and we laid out a very deliberate plan on the evolution of this after about a month into it. So i was starting to get on board a month of emotion. Yeah, the emotion continued, but then it started become irrational process. Yeah, because it started to develop and expand into what could be and i didn’t see that initially. Oi! All i saw was what what what i thought was being replaced yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Initially that’s it. Yeah, yeah. All right. But you obviously overcame that. Yeah. Oh, and to add to that in this process. And, you know, one thing that was really fascinating is that our entire board bought into the concept that as we moved into a new executive director, that the executive committee and myself would be the five people that would decide, and it would be unanimous on who we decide if we didn’t find them knives like your daddy way did not find that person, we would scrap it for six months and then come back okay, you’re tuned to non-profit radio tony martignetti also hosts a podcast for the chronicle of philanthropy fund-raising fundamentals is a quick ten minute burst of fund-raising insights published once a month. Tony’s guests are expert in crowdfunding, mobile giving event fund-raising direct mail and donor cultivation. Really all the fund-raising issues that make you wonder am i doing this right? Is there a better way there is? Find the fund-raising fundamentals archive tony martignetti dot com that’s t i g n e t t i remember there’s a g before the end, thousands of listeners have subscribed on itunes. You can also learn maura the chronicle website philanthropy dot com fund-raising fundamentals the better way we’re going to get to the search. I spent more time on the board. You mentioned you had a lot of longevity on the board, not not just the one the one guy who started your kitchen table and now you’re on his floor. But you you yeah, you had other board members with long longevity, they understand the organization, they they have the best interests of z in their hearts to jury. I mean in our by-laws boardmember sze sit for three years, they have to be voted back on for another three years. They could walk away from the organization or immediately go to an advisory board that gets all the information doesn’t vote after a year, they could be voted back on the board, but wave have everything we’ve had people that stayed a long time. We’ve had people that cycled and cycled out. I think that’s a really healthy for the cycle more than anything. New ideas, new energy, new vision. You know, new new things. Yeah. Onda connection disease work. Yeah. And and that that solid underpinning has always been that people have been there to anchor it. Not just myself. Uh, let’s talk about the the search that that that search process you said it was the executive committee of the board, just four people. And you? And did it have to be? You had to be unanimous. Vote on who the successor would be. Okay. He obviously had a lot of there. Had to be a lot of trust in that process. Yeah, from the rest of the board members. So well. And you too, you know. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. All five of you have to. Well, actually, the whole board had trust the process. Yeah, they had delegated the vote to the executive committee and you, but the whole board had trust this process. Yeah, they really did. And so there were some mechanisms that engaged staff engaged other board members, whether it was an opportunity for the three final candidates to be in our office and ridgeway and people to come there and meet them and to sit in on a conference call with all the board members. Anyone that wanted to patch in, we actually had the three final candidates work with our financial officer for an hour. And as questions around that they were in a closed room also. With our the paul country director who was in country at that time. So they they all spent time with them. So it was really a deal where everyone had input. But there were five the executive committee and myself that were decided. Maybe a little detail. But i’m interested. What was the mechanism for staff to give feedback to the five people who are going to do the vote? It was basically threw the board chair. So they say the staff whether it was the financial officer in the whole country. Director, they gave that input directly back to the board chair on the board chair. Disseminated that too. The selection committee. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Was there a outside search consultant? No, we all did. With is completely just posted it publicly. Well, we posted it in all sorts of spaces, you know, on you threw the peace corps on on, were located in a remote area in western colorado. So speak on the western slope. So we had lots of people in the denver area. Certainly. Um what we ended up through our network’s way ended up with sixty for paper applications now on dh. So that was what we started to wed our way through and pretty short, or there were a third that it was really crystal clear. Yeah, yeah, way too much of a stretch. And people asking too remote work remotely in new york for this job. So glamarys and that was deal that we want people in the office, you know, you know, face to face on dh, so that i was a real process. And and once we cold that list, then all of the board members were assigned. The executive committee searching me were assigned a certain amount of people to deal with, to make phone calls, too. There was a list of questions to be asked, and then that information was brought back to the search committee, and we started to just with labbate, whittle it down. Job job descriptions. You’ve identified that as being critical, setting boundaries. About what? What you’re what you’re gonna be doing as president and not doing with the exec director is going to be doing let’s, let’s flush that out job description. Yeah, that was that was really critical, you know, so to speak. What? You know, what was mark’s role? What was my role in what was our rule? You know, and how are we gonna work? Basically in the same office. And how is that going to make this kind of lateral move to be in charge of of all development, really focusing and digging into that, which is something i certainly had done, but i was doing a lot of different things, too. So that was just really critical and also having our executive committee really get into the weeds on that. And then, you know, it’s all about really owning that once it won once things transition about assuring mark who became the executive director, but during the process, maybe at the point where he was offered the job or at some point he had to be reassured that this was not going to be a founder. Syndrome situation that he was stepping into. Yeah. What was that like? How did you? Well, we did that with all of our three final buy-in indefinite detail. And that was something that we put forth. This is how this out was this how it’s changing. Okay. And, um, you know, i mean, this is probably a good time and, uh, it’s about somebody’s ego and, you know, what’s the what’s, the main driver, is it about you is about control, is it about not allowing the organization to grow past you and evolved past you? Or you’re going to keep a stranglehold on it on dh make things miserable for not only marked, but everybody else in the organization, so i want to double it more detail on how those three candidates got god assured that this was not going to be a disaster situation they’d be walking into mean, it had to be more than just the written job descriptions. Yeah. You know, i think one of the things that was really interesting is we weren’t, you know, quite often in this the executive director search or changes organization. What happens is it’s because the, you know, the staff’s upset programs are not being delivered properly, and financially, you’re you’re in dire straits. I mean, it was a kind of that’s, a standard, why you’re changing. We actually came from a really strong position, and we felt it was inappropriate time to make the shift financially. We were in good shape, staff was quite happy with what they were doing, and programs were certainly evolving at that time. So, you know, nothing was perfect, but we certainly were not in the crisis mode that’s quite often, what happened, so we were on the front end of this, but we were again realizing the vulnerability of of me is the founder. And they also had to be assured that you personally wood abide by the job description, yeah, on everything that’s being said. I mean, you know, this is all in writing, and it all sounds good, but, you know, i was the new executive director could walk in and, you know, this guy jim is just blowing everything out of the water that we talked about, and now i’m in a bad spot. Yeah, yeah, yeah, a lot of really latto had to trust you. Yeah, and it’s a pretty standard situation. Yeah, you know, it’s pretty standard, um, that it be negative. Yeah. Is that the name? And quite often i do hear that people cycle through, though that first executive director didn’t work out. Now we’re into our second one, you know, we were fortunate, and maybe i don’t know why, but i guess mark and the two other candidates believe me, you know, i mean, i really think it comes down to you know that and reassurance from the executive committee. No or trust. Yeah. Latto trust there’s a lot of stress. Yeah. We’re taking a big step here. Like i said, the paper documents are fine. But in the end, they could be end up being meaningless. It comes down to a human connection and right and trust. Yeah. Yeah, ego. You mentioned it before, so let’s explore that mostly your ego that you had keep in check for the for the good of z. Yeah, i think so. I mean, i’m no no expert, trust me, but i guess at the core of this is i’ve always held a belief of doing your best to hyre smart people than yourself on that doesn’t intimidate me. It makes us a stronger organization. So that’s a core belief of my mind. Um, i why would i not try to bring the best and the brightest board members to the board, the best and brightest staff to the board? Um, that’s, just a core belief of mind that that’s what’s going to make a sustainable organization, you know, that’s where the oil starts for me, all right, you know, and, um you know, again, that core belief that my biggest responsibilities this organization lives on beyond me. Yeah. It’s bigger than you. It is much bigger than me. And then you, you know, from one person operation tow for people in colorado in twenty five in the fall. And, you know, fourteen girls is where we started serving over thirty thousand people now it’s way beyond me. I play an inter call roll i have in trickle power because i am the founder, but i’m on ly a piece of the puzzle and that’s that’s a healthy place for nor ization obviously there was a transition period where you had a share, a lot of corporate knowledge with mark as the new executive director. Absolutely. You know, one of the things that was interesting way we’re in an office situation where we had two basic office rooms and initially mark and i were going to work in the same room and i just was, like, that’s not gonna work. We took the office next door. We’re connected by a door, but we can be close and have our own private space that i didn’t want him to feel that i was. Looking over his shoulder, yeah, ever, you know. But there was institutional knowledge, you know, of our organization and what we done, and our relationships and our funding and our partners, and how we did things and where we worked and all that stuff that had to be transferred over. And that takes time. That’s, just a constant process of answering those questions. Mark was incredibly quick study, but, i mean i can’t imagine i’m thinking back out for years now, but, you know, he was really getting it after four months, six months a year, you know, it takes time and it’s, you know, and transferring those relationships, introducing him to those relationships is key and again, taking that letter will move away from that, you know, so that’s, what an and in a way, we also identified that it was an opportunity for me to become maur engaged in the board. You and i now sit on the board. I had never sat on the board first. No, there was not next-gen has founder no, no one. I was fonder, i said as the executive director, but i did not sit on the board and you don’t have a vote now. I didn’t have a vote that i don’t have a way or not right now you’re on the board, but you don’t have a vote, correct. So i’m basically straddled the board on the kind of clutch between the staff from the boy. Why that decision to not have a vote i already have enough power is what the board felt and i think that that’s the accurate. That definitely was another risk situation for me where i was like, wow, i’m losing control. Yeah, but founders have immense historical knowledge, respond relationships, they have immense power with organizations. And although that did feel uncomfortable, it was the right decision. Yeah, and quite a lot. Itjust wass, you know, a lot of this feels like it has to be the right people. I mean, here you’re you’re you’re saying, you know, you struggled with not getting a vote being on the board, but not having a vote, but in order for this to work and for the board to be comfortable, you had teo swallow that you had to accept that and, you know, another person might not have been able to yeah, i think a lot of this, yeah, trust and and the personalities people have to be right now, it’s, not the right people. Then you’re not gonna have the trust and and we’re going toe end up with what i’ve had guests on the show say that which is when the founder leaves the leadership role here. She has got a several ties. Yeah. That’s really the default right? But it sounds like if you arrive the right personalities. You don’t have to, you know, except the default. Well, i think there’s a couple things that play into that one is most times when people are shifting executive directors, it is a crisis situation, and maybe the management wasn’t very strong for so that’s that’s a pretty standard situation. I mean, i for us, we’re coming from ah, solid footing and the thing that was the constant phrase that we we used in our search was we need to find somebody with correct emotional intelligence to come in and not gutsy, but to build on paan what we’ve already created. And so that was it was really the baseline kind of tag line that way worked off the position as president created opportunities for you that you didn’t have as in the leadership role is founder yeah, let’s, talk a little about that because i think it was important for you to recognize that there was opportunity for you and the board was making that clear in the new president role. Yeah, and there i think the opportunity around it was too deep in my relationship with board members. And as i say, be that clutch between what’s happening in our work on the paul what’s happening with staff and that but a zai moved into the development roll exclusively. Really? What happened is at a time. I mean, i had time to follow some more creative, creative things i mentioned there was a knopper to nitti where we were invited from a little town that’s less than a thousand people in ridgeway, colorado, to create enter an event in italy and in france, where there’s a charity cycling about where it’s it’s basically a fancy count for cyclists, that i mean, they have massages and right insane amounts. That was three days of riding with over twenty five thousand feet of climbing racing. And so basically we were able to bring in individuals who had financial capacity to commit to raising a significant amount of money for the foundation. Through this this leverage point through their friends. And you would not have been able to pursue this no way, and found a rolling no on and much band with way too much band with. And then what happened out there, that is, we actually then deepened our relationships in london, in the uk, and we were a register as a charity in the uk. So now there’s the zi foundation uk and we have a board of trustees over there and they basically carried the work of the zi foundation in the uk raise funds for in the paul that money flows through the u s and then in the fall so that basically become a whole new revenue stream that we never had, nor would they have had anywhere near the bandwidth to take something like that on so it’s all those opportunities you know, and looking around the corner what’s next and being very creative about it and that’s been very, very rewarding for me. Simple question in in rap why the title president instead of director of development or institutional advancement? I think the board really wanted to honor my legacy with the organization, you know? And instead of just director of della development, they just wanted to honor my title. Is cofounder present your morning thank you for sharing really some personal stuff, talking about trust and ego and being the right personality. So i want to thank you very much for for sharing. Yeah, thanks. I’m happy to share. With anybody it’s it’s, i think one of the things that happens is in these non-profits u u you changed from being stood sometimes teacher, and i’ve been able to share this with a lot of people it’s tough work at that level and i’m happy to share with anyone. So thank you for having me on pleasure, you’ll find him at zee foundation dot org’s, it’s dc i foundation dot org’s tony martignetti non-profit radio coverage at the opportunity collaboration twenty fifteen on the beach i know you hear the waves breaking in its top of mexico. Thanks so much for being with us. Great convo with jim noah hoexter shared some excellent, really and personal stuff live listener love. We got new bern, north carolina, san diego, california, washington d c that’s alive listener loved going there how about st louis, missouri and durango, colorado live listener love to all of you so let’s go abroad. So south korea always so grateful soul always checking in on your haserot asahi, japan! Konnichiwa and buenos aires, argentina is with us love that you’ve been. You’ve been with us a couple times buy-in mazarene we know star days, of course. We never go beyond live listen love without podcast pleasantries for the over ten thousand listening in the time shift, whatever you’re doing, what’s the latest i heard was painting a house listening to tony martignetti non-profit media while painting the outside this i was very explicit. I want no was the inside the outside she’s painting the outside of her house to tony martignetti non-profit radio. Whatever you’re doing as you’re listening to the podcast pleasantries to the podcast listeners and, of course, affiliate affections began our am and fm stations throughout the country next week. I’m pretty sure it’s going to be next week. We’re going tio, we i i’m going to be welcoming a new affiliate. I’ll give you a hint. Mission await, not mission. Impossible agent ninety nine, agent ninety nine is the hint and that’s as far as much as i am permitted to say at this time. Tony, take two and chilling laws and regulations with jean takagi coming up first. Pursuant, they help you raise more money. They have online tools like prospector, which helps you. You find the donors in your database who are most likely to upgrade to higher levels of giving and velocity, which helps you manage your fund-raising time against goal, lots of analytics associated with velocity to manage fund-raising online tools for small and midsize shops that’s what they’re about that’s. Why they’re perfect sponsor for non-profit radio take the tools that you need and leave the rest behind pursuant dot com i have a video introducing other videos on technology, their interviews from ntcdinosaur non-profit technology conference, which is hosted by the non-profit technology network and ten and in ten ceo. You all know this amy sample ward who’s, our social media contributor on each month she was with me in mexico at opportunity collaboration, where i just got jim, no ac interviewed and she and i shot a video by the pool. Is this just becoming too complex? I don’t know. Amy and i were in mexico an opportunity collaboration, and we did a video all the rest was just kind of background and the video is introducing a bunch of other videos about technology, wearable and mobile tech is one of them your disaster recovery plan and a couple of others. The video is at tony martignetti dot com that’s tony’s take two for friday. Thirtieth of october forty first show of twenty fifteen. Jean takagi is with me. You know him? He’s, the managing editor, managing attorney of neo, the non-profit and exempt organizations law group in san francisco. And he edits the popular non-profit law blogged dot com on twitter he’s at g tak and i am very glad. He’s back live non-profit radio welcome back, jean. Thanks, tony. Great to hear about your your time at opportunity. Collaboration. Yes, i know you were there. You went a few years ago. Is that right? Yeah. It’s been some years. I hope to go again one day. Okay. Yeah, we had a terrific time. And ah, amy was there as well. Very smart, very smart conference on poverty alleviation throughout the world. Well, lots of bright, bright people are incredible, and we have more interviews coming up. I have a couple that i a couple more that i recorded on the beach, and then i’ve got a whole bunch of other ones book. So lots of smart opportunity, collaboration, people coming up and, uh, and you’re one of them. Your opportunity, collaboration alum with me every month. Um, we got some troubles. Well, some concerns troubles, maybe troubles for non-profits in some chilling laws and regs because some non-profits air not operating the way they’re supposed to and some government officials would like tio, have a little greater oversight. Yeah, i mean, it’s, you know, that’s kind of how, how law sometimes work and it’s scary how it works, there’s some sort of scandal that gets onto the front page of the newspaper on some legislator decides, well, we’ve gotta have a law, and sometimes, you know, they’re thinking teo, be very reactively in terms of fixing a problem, but they do not see what with the broader effect on, you know, the ninety nine percent of the non-profits that are not doing anything wrong, stealing or committing fraud and what impact that might have on them. So it’s all a little distressing, and sometimes, you know, from a cynics perspective, it seems to be a little self serving for the for the legislator who might be up for an election, teo sort of rally the public outrage over situation to get some of these laws passed if they’re if they’re ballot, measure propositions or if they’re just something that the legislators up for. Reelection on. So yeah, without their yeah bashing non-profits i don’t know. I don’t know if it’s it’s not as bad as media bashing, which eyes rampant and nobody seems to object to. But but it’s getting a little let’s get a little worrisome. I mean, you know, it’s, always the it’s. Always the bad guys, the bad actors that get the headlines. And then we get the knee jerk reaction from the politicians who, like you suggested i have their own agenda as well. Um, it’s getting a little chilling? Yeah. Yeah. Scary times first, for sure. And especially with media and the internet just ramping up all the information that’s out there and trying teo attract attention scandals to seem to be the juiciest stuff out there. Yeah, that’s zoho get the headlines, gets the headlines and and causes the reactions that could be adverse. All right, so let’s, let’s, let’s. Start here in in new york, i have seen some local headlines. You want to talk about it? To the queen’s library ceo in the county of queens in new york has nothing. Nothing. Totally above aboveboard about spending and that’s causing problems. Yeah, and that it’s their former ceo now he was terminated at the end of last year, and that was after there there are many boardmember is tryingto protect that that person as well, and i’m not sure that they were doing their their full due diligence on the matter when they were trying to protect him, but ultimately he discovered that, yeah, he was spending fairly lavishly on very, very questionable, if not unlawful expenses. Well paying for fruit executive staff to like a tender maroon five concert and then spending several thousand on batter spending several hundred dollars on wine bottles. Tio entertain. Well, now, wine i could see i like wine, but maroon five, i don’t know. Maroon five. Is that worth a couple thousand dollars? Good, i don’t know. I don’t know them if it was. If it was bruce springsteen, you know it might be justified. No, of course, it’s not just i’ve got five love that. Okay? Okay. All right. But, yeah. It’s it’s lavish to take your executive staff is an employee morale event and spend that much money. And there were there were, you know, over three hundred thousand dollars. That issue with lavish expenditures, probably. Never reported his income by the employees so that that was enough latto haven’t fired, but the stories have been breaking since the late bladder half of two thousand fourteen in all of the local new york papers on and picked up by the new york times as well. Um, and you know, this summer a city council member from queens decided that, you know, there should be something done about this, and i i think she comes from a good place and said that there should be some sort of oversight bill that requires executive level officers of organizations that are funded by the city that receive at least fifty percent of their funding from the city to file the conflict of interest disclosure forms that age city agency employees have to file and file them manually. And you know, that type of disclosure requires some normal stuff like name in home address and principal occupation, but it also asks for disclosing any business interests that the employees or their spouse receives that represents more than ten percent of their growth income now requiring that of government employees. I understand that what? Why, that may be necessary, but non-profits our private organizations come, and if you ask that from every in-kind executive type officer of a non-profit is getting compensated, and sometimes they’re just making, like thirty thousand thirty five thousand dollars a year and saying that you’ve got to disclose all of these things, including what your spouse’s making and where they’re making their income that’s going to really chilled the desire toe to serve, um, for those organizations and it’s going to cost a lot of money to for boards of those organizations to try to enforce that type of annual disclosure on what happens when when, you know, they miss a disclosure. And this is why the mayor decided that that this was something that he wanted to support, but, um, the city council member is sort of taking it back. They had a hearing, and they’re going to take it back, and then they’re going to re craft it. But there’s already state and federal disclosures required so this is going to be pretty burdensome and duplicative and sometimes not consistent with what’s already required that they do with the city in the state, i’m sorry the state and the state, the fed, right? Because iris requires conflict of interest disclosures. Is that what you’re talking about? Yeah, yeah. Ah, okay, yeah, so your concern is the the chilling effect that that this is gonna have that people going to be reluctant to take on. I think it was ceo well was certainly ceo executive director, but it was also including, i think, cfo’s. Um ah, they probably any of those sweets, right? Okay, um, you know what? What do you think? And we have other examples coming up. Unfortunately, what can? What can a non-profit do? I mean, lobby the local lobby, the local city council person, who’s, who’s coming up with these reactionary ideas? Yeah. Or just generally educate their stakeholders about what’s going on and why this might be bad for these organizations. So they’re latto small organizations out there, and then this is really going to hit them or could hit them pretty hard that they let people know that this is something that can affect their livelihood, then, yeah, certainly they can either engage in some lobbying on the bill, and public charities are allowed to engage in lobbying. A lot long does it’s not substantial, and they’re pretty generous limits. And we talked about that before, huh? But yeah, this is kind of khun khun b self defense loving too, which might be subject to the exception to the limit. So this can affect their their health and livelihood inability. Teo, do their mission. So go out there, educate people about it. And yes, send it. Send a letter to your legislators and say this is not a good idea. And yeah, as you said, jim, we have talked about the limits around lobbying and advocacy work. So if people want to go to tony martignetti dot com and just search either jean’s name or why do jean’s name and then also lobbying, you will find the show where we talked about this, that entire topic, what the limits are around lobbying and an advil advocacy. Um, we have just about a minute before a break. Gene, you want to introduce us to what’s going on in aa california there’s a proposal about suspending activities? Yes, it’s now, not just a proposal. It actually just got past a few days ago. Our problem will get it a few days ago. It d’oh the new law on january first. And i’ll just sort of revealed before the break boardmember personal liability on the ability to tell an organization to transfer all of its assets to another organization for a little technical. Oh, my if that’s not a cliffhanger of boardmember personal liability. Ham, california crazy out there, that ninth circuit. But i know this is not federal. Okay? Let’s, go out for the break. Gene and i are going to continue provocative conversation. Stay with us. Like what you’re hearing a non-profit radio tony’s got more on youtube, you’ll find clips from stand up comedy tv spots and exclusive interviews catch guests like seth gordon. Craig newmark, the founder of craigslist marquis of eco enterprises, charles best from donors choose dot org’s aria finger, do something that worked. And naomi levine from new york universities heimans center on philantech tony tweets to, he finds the best content from the most knowledgeable, interesting people in and around non-profits to share on his stream. If you have valuable info, he wants to re tweet you during the show. 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More live listener love food jiao china has checked in ni hao all right, jean california what’s going on, but boardmember of personal liability, transfer of assets and you you got you past this thing. Yeah, well, the attorney general it’s a regulation so it’s not a statutory law meaning that the legislative body didn’t elected officials didn’t come up with this law. It’s executive branch officials that passed it solicited some comments from the public and let me just give you some framework on it. First, i i understand why the attorney general’s office wanted to come up with the law that said, okay, we need thio make sure that charities are actually registered with us and are complying with the registration requirements because we need to know who’s out there. And this is probably true of every state where their tens of thousands of charities that have sort of let their registration slip, possibly because they think if they filed with the irs, that they didn’t know that they have additional state filings file in california, we have three filings with different agencies that you have to keep up with, and sometimes organizations particularly smaller ones that might not have professionals that are on top of their legal compliance and filing obligations. Sometimes they forget teo and let this one slip, and this one isn’t the one that’s done by the accountant’s. Usually either the count didn’t sort of take care of the tax for me, the i r s forms of the state tax agency forms, but this one is a charity registration for in which you’re well aware, i am it’s part of what i do, yes, yeah, exactly, but now the penalty they’re saying it’s like, we’re really wantto, you know, wrapping up our enforcement of this, and so we’re going to say if you operate and you’ve been suspended and you could be suspended for missing filing more, filing an incomplete filing, right and again in california, we have three separate filings with the secretary of state, the franchise tax board and the attorney general nypmifa miss one of the secretary of state or franchise tax court filings that can cause you to become automatically suspended with the a g’s office as well on so just slipping on those things, which some of them are very easy to file if you know about them. I can get you suspended and then if you operate while you’re suspended and this is where they’re they’re saying, well, if if you operate while suspended the age, he has the right tempos, boardmember personal liabilities, personal liability on boardmember that must be paid by the board members from their own money. This wouldn’t be covered by insurance thiss wouldn’t be covered by the organization itself. It couldn’t indemnify that boardmember for this it’s got to come out of the board members own personal pocket for operating while suspended, and there are, you know, there may be as many as one hundred thousand organizations in california. They’re not compliant with their filing regulations and charity registration regulations. You know, i think there’s some foreign organizations that are operating here that haven’t registered properly, yeah, that’s a that’s, a lot of organizations that to be subject to this draconian regulations, gina that’s important to point out that we’re not only talking about organises non-profits that are domestic in california, what incorporated non-profit in california, based in california, we’re talking about non-profits from throughout the country who are soliciting in california, that makes you subject to those three filings franchise tax board, secretary of state and a g that you’re talking about? Yep. And i think it’s more than the estimate of i i i saw was that your blogged or someone else above estimating one hundred eighty thousand? Like, i think it was fifty thousand domestic and then one hundred thirty thousand. Beyond that, i think it’s more than that. I mean, especially if you start counting online solicitations, email the california’s, the most populous state in the country. I think i think it’s more than one hundred eighty thousand that i saw that very well could be true. I was a little bit modest with numbers just because we don’t know some of those who just sort of been abandoned and dropped out. Okay, but being yeah, there are a lot of organizations that could be subject to this, and you wonder if you, you know, when you promulgate regulations like this and now non-profits air looking for board members and they’re trying to get the the most qualified in the best and support of board members that they confined, how many people are going to go? Well, you know, i’m a little bit worried about all of these. Things and ah, again, i don’t want to run the risk because boardmember is a typically volunteers and they don’t like stay on top of sort of the technical aspects of did we actually file with all three state agencies? They typically just reviewed the irs form nine, ninety submissions, if that so, yes, this is very distressing and for operating all suspended, not only can the g hold boardmember personally liable, but they can tell the organization you must transfer out all of your assets to another organization. Holy good, even big foundation you they could say literally, you must transfer out one hundred million dollars of your assets and give it to another organization because you’ve been operating while you were suspended. Yeah, so let’s talk about let’s talk about operating while suspended. So you failed to make of some arcane filing, although i it’s part of what i do with the franchise tax board now. Okay, so you failed that now you’re suspended, suspended means you’re not feeding people anymore. You’re not sheltering domestic violence victimssurvivors anymore. You’re not protecting the waterways of california anymore because you’re supposed to be suspended. You stop work and all your employees go home without pay. Is that what we’re talking about? Suspended. Yeah, basically can’t engage in any kind of operations while suspended. And if you try to keep helping the rivers and the oceans, and the and the survivors and the victims and the homeless and hungry, then you’re liable for have for the for the penalty of having a transfer all your assets, right? That sounds crazy, right off the ventilator. It’s, it’s, it’s really crazy and non-profit i’m going to do that and what the g has said to us and i launched a campaign here tryingto kapin get the a g to reconsider this and i had independent sector the national council non-profits cal non-profits united way’s, california lines for justice, the ceo, board source the non-profit insurance alliance group all fine on this so that they recognize that there was some national attention, that there was some big concerns about this, but unfortunately did not go through and the ages view is basically trust us. Even though we’ve got these broad, broad powers were not going to abuse them and we’re going to only attack use them against the very, very bad actors, and i just think that’s bad, yeah, may start out that way, but six attorneys general from now, who knows? All right, that’s a really that’s a really impactful one for anybody. Any organization operating in california soliciting in california? I don’t want to say operating soliciting donations in california. You need to make sure you are compliant. Holy cow! Okay, let’s, move. We just have, like a minute and a half left. Jean let’s. Move the federal tax court disallowed a couple of big charitable deductions, like over several million dollars in one, because donors or not, providing proper substantiation of their deductions? Yeah, i mean, so these weren’t that long ago, and the irs always wins on these cases, by the way, when donors tried to challenge them, take always win. So charities make sure you write proper forms in the first one, which was durden versus commissioner there’s just a deduction of twenty five thousand dollars for cash contributions they they were making to their church, and the church gave them a receipt. But the receipt missed the statement that you must have for donations of two hundred fifty dollars or more. A statement that says no goods or services were provided by the organization in return for their contribution. If you miss that statement, you can’t make up for it after the person the donor has filed their tax returns. It too late. Too late. Because that’s basically screwed it’s not contemporaneous anymore. Jean right. I’m sorry. I want to leave listeners with irs publication five twenty six it’s for people who make charitable donations it’s for your donors. But it has all the guidelines in it that that your donor’s need and that you need to be providing them when it’s your when it is your responsibility? Iris publication five twenty six gene, i’m sorry we have to leave it there. Great point, though thank you very much, jean takagi. You’ll find him at non-profit law blogged dot com and on twitter he’s at g tack next week. Great show coming up very, very good show coming up, but i don’t know what it’s going to be. 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