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Nonprofit Radio for September 29, 2017: Giving Tuesday Friday

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My Guests:

Jessica Schneider: Giving Tuesday Friday

It’s not too late to make a splash for Giving Tuesday, November 28th. But “too late” is fast approaching. Jessica Schneider from the 92nd Street Y has your last minute tips, tricks and strategies.

 

 

 

Amy Sample Ward: Giving Tuesday Friday

Amy Sample Ward

It may not be too late but “too late” is fast approaching. Amy Sample Ward has what you need for Giving Tuesday success in the social networks. She’s our social media contributor and CEO of NTEN, the Nonprofit Technology Network.

 

 

 


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Schnoll oppcoll 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 it’s, laura packard she’s been a guest on the show and she got dissed directly personally by donald trump. You may have seen her story. She has stage four cancer, hodgkin’s lymphoma. She was tweeting to the president about health care policy and the collins gray and bill, and he blocked her. He doesn’t know that. He’s messing with a non-profit radio guest now he’s out of bounds. Laura, i’ve got your back. You have a lot of courage. Congratulations on being non-profit radio listener of the week. We love you, laura packard and i so admire what you’re doing. Congratulations. Oh, i’m glad you’re with me. I’d be thrown into ginger vos toma titus if you come to me up with the idea that you missed today’s show e-giving tuesday it’s not too late to make a splash for giving tuesday, november twenty eighth jessica schneider from the ninety second street why has your last minute tips tricks strategies, then it may not be too late, but too late is fast approaching amy sample ward has what you need for giving tuesday success in the social networks she’s, our social media contributor and ceo event in the non-profit technology network it’s giving tuesday for the hour today on tony’s, take two e-giving tuesday, responsive by pursuant full service fund-raising data driven and technology enabled pursuant dot com and by wagner cps guiding you beyond the numbers wagner, cps dot com you’re not a business you’re non-profit apolo see accounting software designed for non-profits non-profit wizard dot com and we’ll be spelling supercool spelling bee fundraisers we b e spelling dot com what a pleasure to welcome jessica snyder to the show. She is the director of strategy and collaboration at the ninety second street wise belfer center for innovation. She spearheads several i love that word spearheads levin. Use that in a long time. That’s good that’s a good buy a word, good resume word, too. I should remember that my never search for jobs, but for friends. She spearheads several initiatives and programs, including e-giving tuesday, the women in power, fellowship and social good summit she’s worked at rent the runway, general assembly and the paley center for media. You’ll find the y at nine to wide dot or ge and she’s at your pal jess. Welcome, pal, your pal. Just i love that. What would you do that twitter ideas? Very clever like that your pal? Just, you know, by the time i got around to joining twitter, which is sad that i didn’t join it right away, kind of every form of jessica or just schneider on been taken on. Yeah, i don’t know where how that came to me, but i i thought about changing to something more professional, but at this point, i think it, you know, stay with it, no latto partnership work, and i feel like i’m you know, people spell well, i love it. Yes, you should stick with it now don’t it’s not unprofessional, it’s, just different messes difference. Clever falik um, okay, so let’s kick off our power on giving tuesday with a little bit of history? Sure, that’s things started it with henry, tim’s and who’s been on the show, henry in twenty fourteen. I’m talking about giving to them, but give us a little background. Sure, i think i’ll start just by explaining a lot of people when they hear i work at the ninety second street y and giving tuesday what the connections there is. So if you don’t live in new york city or you aren’t familiar with ninety second street y, we are one hundred and forty three year old community in cultural organization on new york city’s, upper east side. We are everything you associate with the community center. We have a very renowned pre school programs for the elderly school of the arts dance classes with jim, i work in the belfer center for innovation, and our center is really tasked with taking ninety uae’s mission core concepts that have really been the foundation of the institute for the past hundred forty years of building community, of civic based dialogue of philanthropy and thinking about those in a twenty first century context. Okay, so i give him that background just because of people like why is this community centre the hump of giving jesus thats why don’t your that’s the connection e-giving tuesday, i think is supported by all those exactly fit so well into all those. So back in two thousand twelve, henry tim’s, who is now our executive director at the time he headed up one of the centers at ninety y he just had this this idea there’s black friday and cyber monday, two days that unite the retail community, as we all know, to great advantage for them. Great advantage for us. And what if there was a way to unite the philanthropic community as well? And he often jokes, you know, someone was going to claim that tuesday, why am i not the good guys? So, yeah, from the beginning, it’s been a very simple idea, but we spent very little time planning it. Our first year, we kind of last year was when two thousand twelve we’re going to our six year now you spent a couple months just gathering a coalition of people in the philanthropic world and by that, i don’t just mean non-profits a nutritional sense, there were houses of worship, schools, corporations, small businesses, families, associations, way they’re the first year i was there the first year starting oh, yeah. Okay on. And it was really just kind of put out a call that we want to make this day special. We want to bring everyone together. You want to incentivize giving one? To get people excited about giving and let’s, just as an experiment put it on the calendar all kind of got into the world together and worked very closely at the time with our friends at the united nation and foundation in there brilliant communications team helping kind of home dellaccio nastad watch your show, she also runs gelato get us out of d c, where you went to school, you went to georgetown, runs gelato shop for shops? I don’t know, but she still i don’t think she would, you know, she’s, now that we work heading up come some of their social condition and we were, which is sure fascinating and definitely worth reaching out to her because they’re doing really interesting work there. Yes, so we just kind of launched and he said, we’ll be cool. One hundred people participated, a hundred organizations did something that first year on ultimately we ended up with twenty, five hundred participate organizations that we knew of who could kind of officially registered through our site and then just on social media, that data start hearing about all these cool things happen around the country, so we knew we were we were onto something and i’ll just say the first year and this kind of continues to be our ethos, so talk about it, but more as we go along it’s always been a very open movement. We’ve never said this is the right way to participate in giving tuesday or the wrong way. We’ve never supported one platform over another and one cause over the other. We just want to see people uniting, um around the idea of giving back and not just money, but also time probono work advocacy, it’s all any form of giving is what i have to say. Now, what was the moment of we’ll be able to talk about fertilization? Like what was the very first thing about giving tuesday within an email from henry to some people who said, i’m thinking about this let’s have a meeting or when did you first come up that you can remember? Yeah, i was brought into it about a month into the process. From what i remember, it really started with henry and our other colleagues, asha curren just traveling around and having cheating on the show with us, i think, if not last year, two years. Ago talks e-giving tuesday. Yes, yes. He’s, our chief innovation officer at ninety y but we didn’t want to ever be the owners at this movement. And even though we always say we’re the home where the stewarts but we wanted this to be built by the community to start what do you remember? Is the starting the first time you heard? I think it was even the phrase giving tuesday. But like the first time you had this concept, i think the first time for me personally was henry pulling me into his office at the time. There’s. No, even now, there’s no one who works on giving tuesday full time. And i was doing different work at nine to and he just said there’s, this cool idea immediately clicked with me and intercepts if i would help with some partnership work for it, i think on henry’s and it maybe start with a conversation with kind of u n f and kind of that was the start. I think there was a dinner party where the idea was first tossed around and people reacted very positively to it. But i think henry would remember that better than i do there? Okay. So you were near the near the you were like a month in? Yeah, yes. Labeling the embryonic. We’re still in the embryonic stage. I think ways when there was enough momentum that henry realized he couldn’t do this on his own and manage a massive department at a large non-profit where he needed a someone else on his team e-giving sometime and and brain power to it. So let’s assure people now, september twenty ninth so i got all of october and most of the vast majority of november. It’s not too late right now, it would have been better if you had been planning. Like since the summer. That would have been better. But it’s not too late. No, no, definitely not. And i think there’s again, i will go back to c p times there’s no right or wrong way to bird to spain giving tuesday. So i would say the there’s many non-profits for whom giving tuesday is really the cornerstone of their fund-raising for the year and in january, when they lay out their fund-raising plan for the year more their volunteers and plan or their advocacy plan e-giving tuesdays a cornerstone. Of that, and they kind of plan all year around it. But there’s other organizations who are new to giving tuesday who exactly at this time, two months out or like, yeah, maybe we should try something this year and i think what’s really great about how e-giving tuesday he functions and how it is a great opportunity for non-profits to try something new, to do some experimentation, way about rule without rules. And if there is some idea that’s just been circulating on your team, maybe e-giving tuesday’s the perfect time to give it a chance. So not too late at all earlier, you planning the better, but especially if you’re kind of new to giving tuesday and aren’t sure what you’re going to do just the first year doing something smaller. Small start small, right? Exactly, yeah, don’t be overwhelmed, right? It’s not an overwhelming thing. There’s not rules and reports. And aside from what you want to do internally, there’s no, act like this is this is why so many people thinking has flourished because has not managed centrally there’s there’s a resource there’s, a page of sight of tools will get to the tools and resources. And then from there, it’s, you’re own your own desire. Start small. Do something modest, make it the cornerstone of your your fourth quarter, if you like exactly. Okay. I like tio. What else? You know what? Also we gotta go to break. Where was your two fingers? Two minutes ago? I didn’t see them. I didn’t see them these. And then i didn’t see the one. All right, sam says time for break. I didn’t see any fingers. Okay, let’s, go out for a break and then we come back. Of course, jessica and i just getting into giving tuesday 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 schnoll ideas for the other ninety five percent and when i was about to say was that another thing i like about it is there’s so many vastly different calls to action? People think of giving to say nothing of money first, but by no means is it limited to raising money? Give me some other examples that you’ve seen yeah, i think one thing i love about giving tuesday is it really is a way to bring people together, and giving is just such a universal value, it’s something that really unites us. And i think one of the reasons giving tuesday last year really resonated with people. I think we’ll see that again this year is you no matter your politics, no matter you know, the many things that divide us, giving tuesday and the unity that can happen around giving it’s just really amazing to see how that can bring people together is such a common a common thing, so in particular kind of volunteer events on dh in person activations are some of our favorite things to see around giving tuesday. One thing that just popped into my head from last year is there’s, a group called city dads so that’s it it’s in many cities it’s ah meet up group it’s organized around meet ups on and it’s a just dad’s getting together to do volunteer work and kind of create camaraderie and sabat the fact their dads it’s just kind of organizing principle it’s more of a volunteer group, and they partnered with plum organics x, which is a baby food company. And on giving tuesday in cities around the country, they went, teo homeless shelters and other places where people drop off clothing and food kind of assemble little packets that could be given to those in need. And it was just it was giving tuesday, people are looking to do something, and they were able to just organize this event that brought all these dads together, and often i feel like it’s mom to get a lot of the credit or we’re getting out and volunteer work and two year old to shine a light on that kid’s and baby food exactly be moms, but school exactly, and and for plum organics just a great opportunity for them to highlight there social good work and how they give back to the community justice. Such a natural fit so that that pops to my head one of the really most exciting elements of giving tuesday that’s developed over the past few years, and we kind of recognized it was happening and have been trying to support it, but it started very organically are giving tuesday community movements, so these are kind of locally organized coalitions of non-profits businesses, governments, schools in cities, towns, counties and states around the country. Last year, they’re around eighty five of them. Everything from e-giving tuesday, illinois e-giving tuesday, new york e-giving tuesday, charlotte e-giving tuesday, dallas sometimes they re brand more significantly than that to tiny little towns. There’s one in bethel, alaska, which is just a thing just a couple thousand people, they have one one stop sign in town and all the non-profits throughout the day took turns standing at that non-profit and collecting money, but also raising awareness that was then split amongst the non-profits in town and then they had almost like a science fair, but for non-profits, where they call to set up booths and people could come and learn about the different services, either because they want to give back or because maybe that could benefit that from them and really isn’t giving tuesday as a rallying point, but i also want to mention the community campaign so just really what happens if someone steps up and each one of these cities not even necessarily? Non-profit but an individual sometimes soc with non-profits eyes like i see the power of giving tuesday, i see how it can bring people together, and i want to create something grassroots in my hometown and really own it and really personalized giving tuesday not just in my organization, but for the people around me i wanted for the community it’s so lovely, and we as a team, i’m have someone on our staff now, um, who works with us part time, really? To support those community leaders and excellent okay, so let’s get it. I want to get some of the support that’s there, and i’ll just add, though, but what’s really exciting to see in the community aspect is how they support each other and how, when there’s a new community leader that comes on board how people within the already on the giving tuesday team not at ninety weinger out in the world offer advice and say this is what we learned. Oh, you’re a comparable size city here’s how we there’s there’s a ninety white community around community work exactly exactly. You know, i should have asked you just let’s get some basic stats out of the way? How many organizations do we know participated last year? We’ve talked you talked already about some of the things they’ve done, but i want you working how many tens of thousands this’s not me evading the question, but we’ve stopped counting because really, when we reached movement capacity, it’s just impossible to do b of activations and over one hundred countries that we know of it’s so vast we ask people to sign up on our web site, they could be little official partner would or not, but because it’s open source there’s no reason for people tio need to do that, and it’s isn’t a good measure of where we are. So we say hundreds of thousands of organizations on bank lose again, not just non-profits some of the stats we do like to quote is last year online, the twenty five’s e-giving tuesday, one hundred seventy seven million dollars was donated that we know of on lauren homes on, so that does not include offline. It does not include anything that happened outside of those twenty four hours, eight and that’s only dollars and that’s only dollars and just kind of other exact action we talked to talked about and get and and, you know, if a boardmember does one hundred thousand dollar match that day, that’s not in that amount, so it really is just a small fraction of the total giving but it’s nice for us because we can use it to kind of benchmark year over year and see where xero growth is, at least from from that metric i’ve seen petition drives, you know, it’s critical petition for your cause. All right, so let’s get into what people confined if they maybe they’ve done something in the past, they like to do a little more whatever or if there’s the first year, and they’re not that acquainted with it. What are they going to find at e-giving tuesday? Dot org’s? Sure. So i would say the best place to start is the download our complete tool kit, which is a very long document. I would at least art by skimming that which has kind of the basic language e-giving tuesday timeline, timeline, press really sample social media and i think also it’s helpful, because when the best things you khun dio when you’re starting giving tuesday at your organization is to get e-giving tuesday, team going not just one person running giving tuesday, so the toolkit isn’t just for you to read and like, oh, now i can run, giving tuesday starita lead to read and then become a leader of your organization around giving tuesday, but there’s lots of plug and play tools like tweets and press releases if you wanted to work on being a mayor or a proclamation mayoral proclamation tool kit yeah, which i know seems very specific, but it’s something that people love to do and it’s such a great just morale booster when that proclamation comes in a few days before giving tuesday and you’ve been plugging along just to know i remember our first year was mayor bloomberg time gave did one and and we were it was one of those moments that first year where it made us feel really so i just want to share that feeling with people, but i would say one is going to get through the tool kit and just going understanding what it’s all about case studies are a great place to go so that we all have a case study which has for non-profits and kind of the other types of organizations that that could participate local non-profits larger non-profits and with the case studies, if something piques your interest because the others, they’re pretty short, you can just kind of google the organization and giving tuesday and and find out much more see, you know, but the page look like and, you know, really delve more into that, and the other thing you do on the site is signed up for for our newsletter that also get you listed as an official giving tuesday partner in-kind of one and the same and then you’ll get when we add resource is you’ll be aware of those webinars webinars webinars coming? I can’t listen about the top of my head, but bojan e-giving tuesday at orc slash events now you’ll see a list of what’s coming up i know we have one with fire spring next week yeah, there’s always new things being added and leslie, we have a blog’s so as we have examples of what’s coming up for this upcoming year, we update that and we love it when people submit to our blogged what they have in the works less like tio here where this great organization or run e-giving tuesday campaign and more where they were great, we’re a great organization run e-giving to state campaign here’s what our campaign is here’s what we learned last year and how we’re changing because we really want the community to be learning from each other ideas to make the pie bigger, not to get you a bigger slice of it. Excellent and that’s all giving tuesday dot org’s exactly all e-giving tuesday, there was even a year there’s a plan giving toolkit that’s what you do plant giving consulting so everything is close to me close to my heart yeah, you could make plan giving part of your of your giving tuesday plan giving workplace giving if you work with a of for-profit who or even your own non-profit if they do workplace giving, you can think about how to use giving tuesday to incentivize enrollment to poor, bigger gifts on that day. Really limitless. Okay, bonem so i pulled together some some stories from that from this’s from the toolkit, like local non-profits, you know, and again to emphasize your point, this is not only by no means is this only for big organizations. There’s a of the naacp rat free library in baltimore, maryland there, when they’re one of my favorites, somebody from you know, what, two people i got two interviews from people at at ntcdinosaur provoc technology conference, i think we’re talking about energizing volunteers, and they were to ana panel two out of a panel three were from the naacp rat free library, you love them e-giving tuesday wise, yeah, what i personally love around giving tuesdays is when people use it to be collaborative and creative, and i think their campaign is a great intersection of those two. They’ve run a similar campaign the past two years where there’s they find, like the closest football game closest in time football game this year, it was against cleveland, and they challenge a library in that city teo fund-raising contest and then the losing flues and everyone’s a winner except one’s, raising less money but the executive director of the losing library has teo like, if i can remember if they want or not last year, but as much of a football fans, i yeah, but the executive director of that of the other library would like to dress up like edgar allan poe and have to read the ravens and it’s all under the hashtag book bowl e-giving tuesday on they raised i think around forty thousand dollars from that and i mean for a library, when you think about library fund raisers, you know, make sales, i mean it’s it’s online it’s bringing young people in social it’s fun, it’s kind of goofy and just the celebratory nature of it is is so in the spirit of giving tuesday dahna xero i love it’s a small organizations, i mean that’s, what non-profit radio is small and midsize shop from ours from our survey results we which is not so i’m not scientific. About ninety percent of respondents have budgets of less than ten million, so that’s at least we know it’s kind of taking advantage of our website and our resource is but also data we’ve we’ve seen from organizations like blackbaud about who’s participating and mohr and more every year, donations are going to smaller and mid size non-profits okay, people think that, you know, i think it’s one of the misconception people have around giving days or coming tuesday is it’s like the big guys, your elbow, their ways, and but this is really an equalizer, and you know what? Just just to dispel that that myth, i’m going to read some of these organizations that are that are that i got from the e-giving tuesday took it home of the sparrow in extent, pennsylvania, right? That’s not that is not an international organization table in chapel hill, north carolina, in tulsa stem alliance, tulsa, oklahoma, better future facilitators, akron, ohio. Malvin, pennsylvania baker industries so you should not be you should not be put off by your size around giving tuesday. In fact, you should be energized by your size lawyers for children don’t meet me these organizations. You just not heard of operations supply drop in austin, texas okay, so we’re putting that putting that mr bed killing it? Actually, i’d rather not die just sleep because it could wake up let’s, just kill it and it won’t be resurrected because it’s not a holy body. So all right, what else? What else can we say about giving tuesday for a couple minutes? I’m sure i would say another thing we’re just really excited about going into this next year, and i mentioned that we had one hundred global activities and one hundred treyz last year, but specifically there are now thirty five, global movements. So these are countries where an organization like a ninety second street y equivalent has stepped up and said, we want to really own giving tuesday not just at our organization, not just in our town, but for our entire condor country. And these are places have no thanksgiving, no no tradition of black friday or cyber monday. It is so amazing to see we just had in the past couple weeks giving tuesday india e-giving tuesday, panama e-giving tuesday, liberia is new this year and kind of like i mentioned with our community leaders e-giving tuesday here in the u s we kind of bring everyone together, but then just to see how they all learn from each other, it’s been one the most fascinating aspects of the movement as we’ve grown and i think it’s a really powerful on giving tuesday, which has been since the beginning to say to people, no, every act of generosity counts. It means more when we get together something really cool when you give on giving tuesday and you go on your facebook page and you see all your friends are also giving and talking about it. And then to think this is having a global scale. There’s someone in tanzania painting a house, there’s someone in, you know, bangladesh donating blood and to know that’s all happening on this single day. I think that messaging really resonates with people. And again at that time of year, it’s goingto holidays just to be celebratory. And how cool is that? They were all coming together to do something positive. Awesome. You know, you were gonna leave it there because i think you’re not standing that’s outstanding. Get involved with giving tuesday. The place to go is giving tuesday dot or ge? I’m sure jessica at your pal, jess. You having to help you? If you want a tweet, her, your pal jess on. And, of course, the ninety two, ninety secretary. Why, you know, shout them out because that’s! What started? But that’s not where you going to find the resource? Is there at nine to why dot or ge, but really the place you want to start he’s giving tuesday dot or ge? Is that right? Direct and also, of course. Follow us on social media on twitter and facebook. What the organization on twitter on twitter it’s e-giving choose e-giving two’s okay, no day, rios. Guess e-giving twos and at your pal just thank you so much. Of course. Outstanding court also. Know what you can hang around, right? I like that. Okay. Okay. When? When amy sample ward comes on, i will introduce you. All right, so we got a lot more on giving tuesday. Coming up first. Um pursuant the intelligent fund-raising health check. Have you gotten this thing yet? You’ve heard me talk about it for a couple weeks. Download it for nine key performance indicators. Those kp eyes. Hippies. You gotta have your kp eyes. You gotta have, you know, it’s the best practices that’s out now. It’s kip he’s okay. Or alive. That’s what? I call them hippies. That sounds like a breakfast seal. Like i want my i want i want chocolate milk. With mike hippies this morning, but kp eyes there’s ten universal characteristics of organizations that are thriving in fund-raising universal this is this is big the’s. The ten biggest ideas in the universe. This is duitz wait. So which is which is bigger? A solar system. No solar system is inside the universe, right? Isn’t aren’t solar system subsets of universes? Yeah, yeah. So this is not just i mean, if yeah, if these were dying, um, solar system ideas are no ten. If these ten solar system characteristics of thriving org’s, then i would say, you know, it’s really not worth it, but he’s a universal. So you’ve got you’ve got to go get the ten universal characteristics, not merely solar system. Um, get the free paper it’s at its on the non-profit radio listener landing page that pursuing has set up. And, of course, you know where that is. It’s a tony dahna may slash pursuant. Remember the capital p you’ve got to do that well, your cpa’s they do go way beyond the numbers that’s what they say and actually do it weinger cpas. They’re adding value way beyond accounting. They have all these policy statements free. Resource is for you again, just like just like giving tuesday. Dot org’s. They have something on fiscal sponsorship policy. They have a fiscal policy agreement. Now. We just talked about fiscal sponsorships. About a month ago, jean takagi was on with andrew shulman, and the subject was physical sponsorships for the hour. So if you want a lot more detail on that, there was september first september first show. So if you want a lot more detail on that, you can find an agreement. You could find a policy rechner, cps, giving these things away. They have ah, accounting policies and procedures manual ah bank statement review form. You know you’re reviewing bank statements. Hopefully you’re doing it every single month. Are you are you checking everything that you should be? Let the cps tell you what you should be reviewing when you do your monthly bank statement reviews each month your monthly each month that’s redundant. When you do these, you want to have a checklist in front. All right? So somebody more policies sepa is giving free advice. Go to regular cpas. Dot com quick resource is then guides stop wasting your time using business accounting software for your books. Quickbooks sage? Yeah, they’ll be fine if you were a business, but you’re not you’re non-profit you’ve heard rumors to this effect, right? You’re non-profit kaplow’s accounting. It is designed for non-profits from the ground up meat from the outset, from the ground they have non-profits in mind, not corporate entities. So make your non-profit accounting do it easier, appaloosa counting easy, affordable designed for you. They’re at non-profit wizard dot com now time for tony’s take to my latest video is giving tuesday. All right, now, that’s. That particular video introduces this. Show so if you’re listening to the show podcast or affiliate or alive, you don’t really need the video because you skipped that you could skip that step, but there are links below. Teo e-giving tuesday roundup that i’ve got, including a video that where there’s possum shooting in the background you gotta you gotta check out this possum shooting video that i did in the in the mountains of tennessee. Um, yeah, just check out the possum shooting. So e-giving tuesday sort of video and round up that is all at aa my site, which is tony martignetti dot com, which i momentarily forgot. Okay. Um, let’s see? Got any sample ward on the phone on? Dh jessica schneider can hang out with us. You know, any sample ward is she’s a social media contributor. She’s, the ceo of antenna non-profits technology network. Her most recent co authored book is social change any time everywhere about online multi-channel engagement she’s at amy, sample ward, dot or ge and at amy rs ward. They are, of course, is for rene. Welcome back, amy rene. Hi. Hi, that’s. Why i give you this if you serve. Yeah, if you serve intro. That so you could get a little high so you can do slow. It felt so appropriate after such a long intro, it was just like the period at the end of the sentence. Okay, meet jessica schneider. Any sample ward? Hi, jessica. Hi, amy, nice to meet you, telefund lugo jessica can hang out with think we’ve even emailed before, but this is our first time getting teo talk on non-profit radio together. That is true for sure that, ok, eso jessica can hang out with us, and i, uh, i took the liberty of ah, hailing us of her of her extra time. So is that okay, right? I would love that. I knew you would. I knew you were giving person. All right, we’re talking about giving tuesday. Let’s see you. You have some, you know, you’re you’re a strategist and also a tactician. We talked a lot about strategy. I think with jessica let’s, get into some tactical ideas you like you like having people set up in advance. To who, you know, we’re going to be your champions. Well, when we talked about this before and other contacts now for that same, like a e-giving day, like giving to this whillans, you know, so it will not be new tto learn that i’m a fan of letting your community lead instead of the organization be the one out in the lead. I really think that a day let giving tuesday where you’re trying to reach as many folks as possible, but we all know and a lot of what’s going to capture their attention is storytelling and people really being able to speak clearly about the value of your mission. And i think it’s much better when other community members are making that appeal versus just the organization, because everyone’s going to respond to that same? Well, of course, the organization thinks it’s important. You worked there. You know where? Hearing that from a community member. Can can actually be really powerful and potentially change people’s mindset click through and learn a little bit more so i always recommend for organizations, especially organizations where this will be their first time participating and giving tuesday to set up. It doesn’t have to be an overwhelming, like fifty person list, you know could be five people, but make sure you have kind of a social media champions list of people who already have social media accounts, they already know how to use them. They’re probably posting frequently so there, you know, the folks that are connected to them on various channels aren’t going to be surprised when all of a sudden they’re posting about this, but they don’t have to be, you know, quote unquote vips, they don’t have to be superstar, don’t teo? Yeah, what matters is that the people that they are connected to like them and respond to them and engage with them, right? That doesn’t matter what their job title is are or where they live, anything like that, they haven’t engaged group of friends and family and an extended network that’s really what’s going to make him a great champion i’m giving to you so recruit them ahead of time, make sure they know that yes, i’m often in to do this for you, but you’re not making them do a bunch of work, so you’re telling them will send you example, facebook posts their example tweets, we’ll send you photos you can use so they know that what they’re being asked for as their voice in their leadership. But you’re not making them to a bunch of work to come up with what to say and some of those example resource is people will find at giving tuesday dot or ge jessica, how about that idea of the community speaking for you? Yes, i hundred percent agree with everything that amy just said, and it reminded me, i think those of us who work in the nonprofit world, everyone listening right now, um, often thinks on giving tuesday, you know, you get a lot of emails it’s giving tuesday donate to our cause and it’s very important to think about how you’re going to stand out in that crowd, but at the same time, there are so many people who aren’t part of the philanthropic community who don’t give online who are. Going, tio not get any of those emails on giving tuesday and that’s, why it’s so important to think about how you’re going to reach them as well and thinking of your community, is your ambassadors, you know, i might get five or six e-giving tuesday emails, someone else might not get a single email, but they’re going to see something in their facebook freed from there. Best friend from high school saying, no, i support cancer research, it’s giving tuesday. It would mean a lot to me. If you gave to this organization, they do amazing work, so just just think about that and ah, and how you confess, utilize those ambassadors on giving tuesday, amy let’s, go back to you. What else? What else do you think? Well, i think beyond just engaging folk, something that we have heard a lot of organizations ask us about or rather kind of complain about is something very, very tactical that i think often organizations don’t think about until they’re in the moment, and that is a number of organizations have discovered that, you know, it’s giving today they’re participating, you know, dollars air coming in there, super excited, you know, they’re trying to keep that momentum going throughout the day, and they want to post on twitter on up state that says, oh, my gosh, you are goal for the day was to raise five thousand, and we just hit seventeen hundred, you know, help us get to the next amount and all of a sudden they’re hearing from their executive director or maybe their development director that that is not an improved post and that, for whatever reason there executive director or whomever else is giving this approval doesn’t want to share that kind of a milestone, and they’re like, well, but i’m in the middle of typing this tweet what else am i supposed to say? What’s going on? And it may sound surprising, but we have i’ve heard this dozens of times now from organization saying what what should i have done in that situation? Well, i guess my advice is to not get yourself in that situation. It is not yet giving. Tuesday is not the middle of you know the morning and you want to post that update so as you’re doing, you’re planning for this year’s giving tuesday think about what milestones you’re going to want to celebrate and get those approved ahead of time. Maybe it isn’t. Every single dollar that comes in your organization feels comfortable reporting that’s fine figure out what kinds of milestones you do have approval to celebrate so that you don’t have to be in the middle of typing that tweet and find out you can’t send it really think about how you khun frame different milestones throughout the day, as asked anybody that’s ever listen to public radio is going to know that they are ex first that that thinking about hey well, you know, our goal for this hour was two thousand and we’re eighteen fifty who, you know, do we have collars in the last ten minutes to get us up to two thousand? Figure out what those milestones are and how you can celebrate them and how you can use them as kind of another motivational asked throughout the day. All right, how come some organizations might not want to share dollar amounts that since you used that as an example, what? Well, the feedback i’ve gotten, i mean, at least in organizations where to come to me for advice about this is that today? Well, there are a number of different situations, but the majority of them is that they were worried that they wouldn’t hit the ultimate goal for the day and that they would be posting these messages about, you know, we’ve made it to this number, can you keep giving? And that people would perceive that as we’ve on lee made it to seventeen hundred, and we thought we’d make it to five thousand. Um so it was it was like they were intimate painting a perception issue, so they didn’t want to say the numbers i said, okay, okay, jessica, anything you want? Not maybe if not that specifically just about getting thinking ahead in your community i had about communications, that is, i think amy brings up a really great point that the milestone issue? Definitely i hadn’t heard that specifically, but it makes a lot of sense to me, but in general, i would just line up tons of potential tweets and facebook post you probably do less frequently on giving tuesday, but a few facebook posts funny gifts, which ifs like to pronounce it some images using that giving tuesday logo just have it all ready to go, because once the day starts, you know who knows what’s going to happen and having those just said you can cut and paste them if you were running around that someone else can cut and paste them in and you know they’re approved, we’ll just you don’t. Toby developing graphics that day more you could get ahead of time. Agree? Just make your life a lot easier if you and i have talked about that again. Other contacts having having images lined up in advance. So you’re not scrambling. I mean, you do that for you do that for ah, for ntcdinosaur non-profit technology conference. Yeah, exactly. And a lot of for a lot of organizations getting images lined up in advance also means making sure you have approval there. Probably, you know photos of people. So making sure that the photos that you want to be able to use on that day, or one where you actually have approval to use those photos, everything is good to go. So that, again, you don’t get stuck in the middle of drafting, opposed, because you don’t have approval. But i also think giving tuesdays a great time to think about images that aren’t just, you know, like a photo that you have taken of a room full of people, but an image that you create with some easy online tools, so that they could be more like graphics. Mostly, i’m making the recommendation because you’re probably going to be posting many times during the day compared to a normal day. And so, using different graphic struck, they can help. Just keep the post feeling fresh and new content out there. A little bit more appealing for folks to share when there’s a graphic sametz chart about all that you did in twenty seventeen that goes along with that tweet that’s asking people to get so it feels like you can get a little bit more information into the post and i’ll just add one more thing to that. Just a best practice we’ve seen is just using the giving tuesday has to hash tag often people. The first tweet of the day, the first facebook post they say it’s giving tuesday and don’t think to continue that throughout the day, and if they’re talking about campaign or doing this great storytelling work-life so i think as much as possible and in terms of approval when it comes to the giving tuesday logo and e-giving tuesday heart, we love to see creativity around that so well in advance. If you want, take the heart and give it to your graphics team or find some twosome probono work for you and change the colors. Whatever you want to do, you don’t have to run it by us and we love it when we see images pop up on giving tuesday that air. Using our logo in a creative way. Cool, cool, me, that’s. What you’ve always loved about giving tuesday is the decentralization. So exactly, and i think for a lot of organizations e-giving tuesday’s the first time, or the only time during the year that they really operate like this, that they would participate in a more global campaign, but also that they are asking for money in a way where they’re actually asking their community member for to make that asked, or that they’re doing it on social media versus, you know, really relying on a direct mail appeal, etcetera. All right, ladies, we’re going to take our take our break. When we come back, we’ll continue the convo. Everybody 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 they are levine from new york universities heimans center on philanthropy tony tweets to he finds the best content from the most knowledgeable, interesting people in and around non-profits to share on his stream. If you have valuable info, he wants to re tweet you during the show. You can join the conversation on twitter using hashtag non-profit radio twitter is an easy way to reach tony he’s at tony martignetti narasimhan t i g e n e t t i remember there’s a g before the end he hosts a podcast for the chronicle of philanthropy fund-raising fundamentals is a short monthly show devoted to getting over your fund-raising hartals just like non-profit radio, toni talks to leading thinkers, experts and cool people with great ideas. As one fan said, tony picks their brains and i don’t have to leave my office fund-raising fundamentals was recently dubbed the most helpful non-profit podcast you have ever heard, you can also join the conversation on facebook, where you can ask questions before or after the show. The guests were there, too. Get insider show alerts by email, tony tells you who’s on each week and always includes link so that you can contact guess 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. No big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. Oppcoll we’ve got to do the live listener love, of course, we’ve got live listeners right now in laos, people’s, democratic republic of laos welcome live love to you and federal argentina also germany, gooden, dog, united kingdom don’t know which country i never, never just assume it’s, england, i don’t do that. Could be scotland islander whales united kingdom live love to you bring it here into united states who got younkers a little above new york city, brooklyn multiple brooklyn, multiple manhattan, tampa, tampa, florida live love to you, boston, mass. Bensalem, pennsylvania. Woodbridge, new jersey live love going out there all those places we’ve got someone in ukraine can’t see your city i’m sorry, but we know you’re with us and also in ah, china knee, how we’re south korea, but they’re out there there’s always someone from south korea, always always have sole on your haserot comes to harm nita. I know you’re out there on the heels of the of the live listeners love has to come to podcast pleasantries because there’s over twelve thousand of you listening on whatever device, whatever time and i am very glad that you are with us pleasantries to the podcast listeners. Thanks for being with us and the affiliate affections to our am and fm station listeners throughout the country. Affections to you. Thank you for your thank you to your station for hosting us. And thank you to you. Thanks to you for listening. Non-profit radio affections to our affiliate listeners. Okay. Um example, word. Let’s. Go back to you and find out let’s. See what else? What, what? What advice do you have around giving tuesday? Let’s? Keep it so simple. Well, some advice that i have e-giving tuesday actually come from other a crowd funding type situations and research from crowd funding black forms who, you know people are using for all different types of campaigns all throughout the year, but their research of what makes a successful campaign one of the indicators of a campaign that will be successful and meet it, um, you know, posted goal are ones that regularly post updates on the page so that the content is different even throughout the day or throughout the campaign. If you know another it is not giving tuesday, i think that’s a really smart because you’re sending people to the same link over and over and when they click through, they’re going to want to see that something different, right? So making sure that you’re sending them to that link over and over, that you’re, you know, just like you would if it was a little like news ticker kind of page, you can edit that paige and make sure that you’re putting an update at the top, not the bottom. Every time folks click through, they see oh, it’s, an updated eleven thirty a m and we’re halfway there, great that’s something really short and exciting that maybe i’m one of your champions. I could just copy and paste that as a tweet myself, right? So it’s just a way to keep it fresh on the page, but also to give other people fun, exciting things to share on and help spread your message. Yeah, cool, you could do that right on your on the e-giving page? Absolutely. Okay, okay, jessica, anything you wanna add with respect to keeping the content fresh all day? Yeah, i would say that you’re giving tuesday doesn’t have to be a single day event again based on our limited survey research, about only about a third of organizations just do something on giving tuesday either it’s the middle of a campaign, the start of an end of the year campaign, sometimes the end of a november long campaign. So just a long line of what amy was saying if you are sending people to a page on giving tuesday and then throughout the course of a month or even if it’s a week long campaign, just think about what you could do on giving tuesday throughout today to make it make it unique and incentivize or different stories you could be telling, especially if the page is going to be up for longer than a day. Yeah, okay, and you you, of course, you always want to know what we’re measuring, what what ar metrics going to be for this campaign that we’re engaged in? Well, in my experience, something like giving tuesday feels like a very fast, action packed type of campaign, even a jessica saying, even if more than one day it’s still a pretty intensive, fast moving thing on dh. In my experience, that means that other folks in the organization, whether that means other staff leadership or boardmember i want to know if it was successful, justus quickly, they don’t want to wait three months for your next, you know, development update to learn about the success of the day and being able to report on that means you’re going to have to know in advance. So start thinking about this now is you’re doing, you’re planning, what are you gonna want to be able to measure and report on to know if it was successful or not? Because it may be that you didn’t set up yourself to be able to report on those things that you hadn’t thought about it. I used to give me an example aa lot of folks like tracking on giving tuesday kind of the reach of their messages because as we know, it isn’t just about the dollars range that day, but new folks who signed onto your newsletter people who maybe saw your messages and shared them so folks who were engaged in other ways and that means that you might want to set up certain tools you might wantto have a customized bentley or or other girl short ner link for your donation page that you’re using in all of your tweet so you can really see within that girl short ner screen how many tweets retweet that’s getting? How many folks are looking at how many people are clicking through you might wantto dive into your google analytics and set up some campaign you girls so that you can separate facebook traffic from email traffic from twitter traffic, for example, on dh you know, maybe you don’t care about those things just using those examples, but if you haven’t set them up ahead of time, it’s going to make it really difficult if you wanted to be able to report against those goals and of course, those air going to flow from what are your goals for the day, which which you’re always a proponent of, and we’ve also again talked about it many times. Why are you? Why are you in giving tuesday? What? What at the threshold what do you want to do for the day? Which jessica and i were talking about earlier? It could be any number of things from ah, community. A community day of service. Teo, i mentioned petitions. Could be dollars? Could be new volunteers, you know. What do you what’s your goal or goals for? The day and then that’ll drive. What you going to measure? What have i learned? Something from you through the years. I like it. At least that if i learned at least that much through the years. Okay? Yes, i like it. Okay, i’m trainable. Just anything you’d like to add, you know, metric wass no, but when one nava metrics, i think amy made a great point. But when, when she brought up reporting to board members and senior leadership, it just reminded me how important it is in advance of eating tuesday to get buy-in from that. Like, i love that you need to report to board members because it means that board members know it’s giving tuesday, and they’re excited and engage with your campaign and whenever there’s a reason i know all boards or different, but to engage your board around fund-raising in a new and different way, as opposed to kind of the traditional ways is great. So, yeah, i just i love that idea of getting the board onboard early and keeping them in the loop throughout the day and seeing how you can leverage their connections. And, of course, if a boardmember is willing to do a match always huge that especially if they’re planning on making an end of your gift anyway, saying to them, why don’t you use your end of your game, teo, as a match to kick off our giving tuesday campaign? Okay, cool, uhm ehm anything you’d like to add about e-giving tuesday way, i guess i’m the last thing i would want to say is that i don’t want to feel intimidated by the idea of participating and e-giving teams we have a small community of supporters are because i’ve never really done online fund-raising before, like you were saying, it doesn’t have to be a big fund-raising goal for you, maybe it’s just a chance for you to go get more people in your community to know about the programs you offer, recruit a new boardmember figure out that you have a handful of champions, right? It might just be kind of an introductory year with a lot of other goals that are still really important. Ilsen jessica, i wantto clothes with you tell tell me what you love about the work that you’re doing. I love that every giving tuesday i hear stories that we didn’t know campaigns, we don’t know we’re going to be happening happening that are just so heartwarming and show that there is such creativity in the nonprofit sector and that people are really thinking outside the box and want to experiment and want to try new things and in a way, that’s just just relate to it the more i just that it’s just so heartwarming that that e-giving tuesday khun really be this opportunity. Teo, bring us together to show, like, with the best in people and in just a fun, celebratory way. And i just love being witness to that. And you know where the home of giving tuesday, but really is a movement that’s built by families, individuals, all the non-profits out there so just yeah, thank you guys. Roll. Participating are considering participating. Absolutely. And you’re little more than a witness. You know, you’re a facilitator. Facilitator? Yes, but it’s it’s what all of you are going to do? That’s going? Teo make e-giving tuesday, two thousand seventeen. Amazing. Awesome. Amy, you wanna leave us with anything inspirational? Last? Well, you did. You know i don’t want to jump spot again. You did? You said you said don’t be put off by the size of your organization. Jessica and i had said that earlier, right? Small lords jumpin goto give it go to giving tuesday dot or go check it out. Okay, so i i don’t mean to put you on the spot again. You’re awesome. No, alright, that’s amy sample ward, our social media contributors ceo of inten you’ll find her at amy rs ward and jessica schneider. She is at your pal jess. Ladies thank you so, so much. Thank you for happiness. Thanks so much, tony. And thanks for paying for the conversation. Just said i was fun. Yes, agreed indeed. Thank you, jessica. Next week, oracle net sweet. They have lots of free offerings for non-profits you don’t know about this from oracle, that sweet you shall next week. If you missed any part of today’s show, i beseech you, find it on tony martignetti dot com and these are our sponsors. Pursuant online tools for small and midsize non-profits data driven and technology enabled pursuing dot com regular cpas guiding you beyond the numbers. Wetness. Cps dot com stoploss accounting software designed for non-profits non-profit wizard dot com and we be spelling supercool spelling bee fundraisers we b e spelling dot com. Our creative producers, claire miree sam recruits is on the board is the line producer show social media is by seeing shadows in this cool music. By scott steindorff. Do with me next week for non-profit big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent go out green. What’s not to love about non-profit radio tony gets the best guests check this out from seth godin this’s the first revolution since tv nineteen fifty and henry ford nineteen twenty it’s the revolution of our lifetime here’s a smart, simple idea from craigslist founder craig newmark insights orn presentation or anything? People don’t really need the fancy stuff they need something which is simple and fast. When’s the best time to post on facebook facebook’s andrew noise nose at traffic is at an all time hyre on nine a, m or 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 and applicable to these young people look so otherwise a fifteen and sixteen year old they have better things to do if they have xbox, they have tv, they have their cell phones me dar is the founder of idealist took two or three years for foundation staff to sort of dane toe add an email address 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 i’m a big believer that’s not what you make in life. It zoho, 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 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 September 15, 2017: Run Like A Biz & Program Your Board

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Gene Takagi: Program Your Board

Gene TakagiYour board probably recognizes its fiduciary responsibilities, but does it know its role in overseeing programs? Gene Takagi is our legal contributor and principal of the Nonprofit & Exempt Organizations law group (NEO). (Also aired September 18, 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. Oh, i’m glad you’re with me. I need a pancreas. Ole affected me for last week’s pancreas volodya, sis, if you hard into me with the idea that you missed today’s show, run like a biz hillary shaefer brought her twelve years on wall street to the jefferson awards foundation, where she is executive director. She shares her ideas from building core infrastructure to employee policies that originally aired september eighteenth, twenty fifteen and programmed your board. Your board probably recognizes its fiduciary responsibilities, but does it know it’s rolling overseeing programs? Jean takagi is our legal contributor and principal of the non-profit and exempt organizations law group neo that also aired september eighteenth twenty fifteen tony’s take two five minute planned e-giving marketing responsive by pursuant full service fund-raising data driven and technology enabled pursuant dot com and by wagner cps guiding you beyond the numbers wagner, cps dot com you’re not a business you’re non-profit apple of accounting software designed for non-profits they’re at non-profit wizard dot com and we’d be spelling supercool spelling bee fundraisers. We b e spelling dot com here’s hillary schaefer run like a biz. I’m glad to welcome to the studio hillary schaefer. Prior to joining the jefferson awards foundation as executive director, she worked as the head of us institutional equity sales in new york. For citigroup, she was one of the highest ranking women in the equity business in the late nineties, she was the executive director of economic security two thousand fighting to save and remodel social security. The foundation is at jefferson awards dot org’s and she’s at beard hillary on twitter welcome hillary schaeffer. Thank you very much. Glad you’re in the studio. Thanks to be here. Eight and a half months pregnant. Eight and a half months pregnant. We got you at the right time. What what’s behind this twitter id beard? Hillary it’s. My maiden name is beard. Okay, until re beard was taken, i presume and hillary beard is probably taking swiped by some. I had that done on youtube. Some joker i hope he was named tony martignetti stole the channel name tony martignetti and i have you riel tony martignetti but he doesn’t use it. So it’s ah, people don’t have trouble finding me? Not that anyone’s looking, but if they were looking, they wouldn’t have trouble finding me on youtube. Um, tell me about wall street what’s it what’s it like making a living equity say institutional equity sales what’s it like, what does that mean, that’s that place, like, actually, frankly, loved it. I did it for twelve years. I went into wall street thinking i would do it for two. Yeah, we’re really, really fell in love for long enough to stay for twelve instruction equity sales is basically where you manage the relationships for the largest institutional investors who invest in stocks. Okay, so on behalf of citigroup, so on you’re like, on account, uh, liaison to big companies buying stocks. Sort of. Yes, i minimize their eyes like so egregiously. Okay, clearly egregiously. So, what do you how do you how do you keep big institutional buyers happy? What you have to do, too, with more of their blackness is making money, right? So investing in stocks that go up and shorting stocks that go down. And so ah, lot of the business of the equity business of citigroup is to provide really good insights and ideas and research into the companies that they care about and delivering that content into your clients in a way which is consumable. Smart fits with their investment style. It helps them make money is really the core of what you do. Okay, but then there are all of these other services that citigroup offers and help clients run their money from financing stocks. Teo, all of the things that go around the core of running that business, okay, banking and credit relationships, things like that, things like that. Okay? And so core of that business is sort of managing that entire relationship to make sure they get the resource is that they need in orderto successfully run the business and a transition to non-profit work. What? What occasioned that, frankly, hurricane sandy, i had left wall street. I have two little kids already at home. And i decided that i wanted teo figure out what i wanted to do next. I had no idea what that was. Actually, frankly thought it would be in the finance world. Yeah, and hurricane sandy hit new york. And i was sitting in my living room working on a business plan for a finance business okay, and i just got really passionate about the idea that there were children who had gone to bed safe and sound the night before that woke up with no signs of food or shelter or warmth, their security. And so i went to work from my living room to create programs that generated millions of more meals, hundreds of thousands of blankets and warm winter coats for families all over the tri state area and my husband on dh, the executive director of robin hood both basically sat me down and said, please don’t go back to finance the passion that you feel around helping people is so significant. Do something else. Stay in the non-profit so you gave away your entrepreneurial dream, the plan you’re working on, you’re going to start your own business. I did put that aside, although running a non-profit is inherently credibly entrepreneur. Okay, if it’s done right, i think that’s done right. All right, all right, tell us a little about the jefferson awards and the and the foundation. Sure. So we we basically power public service. We’ve been around since nineteen seventy two started by jackie kennedy. Senator robert taft. Junior and my father, sam beard and the original idea was create a nobel prize for public service in america. Celebrate the very best of the country. You celebration to not only say thank you to people do amazing things, but also as a force multiplier to inspire others to do something good. We then translated into programs that accelerate and amplify service for people of every age. So, starting about ten years ago, we became one of the largest creators of public service in the country through training mechanisms and programs that engage individuals again of all ages to do service ranging from the donation of a single book from a child to a child all the way up. Tio young people in adult toe like who are impacting millions of lives and it’s ah, jefferson awards so what’s the awards side of this. So when the awards is the celebration peace. So we are effectively the gold seal of service in america. We give out a we give out jefferson awards the national level, you would know basically every name. Okay. Who’s, one of jefferson word over the last forty three years. And then we have a media. Partner program, where we partner with ah, local affiliates, newspapers, etcetera but primary news outlets in communities all over the country. But today, reaching to seventy eight million households on dh, they are empowered to take the jefferson award and celebrate local grassroots unsung heroes. All right, a nobel prize for ah, for outstanding program work and and saving lives for impact impact. How about the foundation itself? Just number employees, just a quaint little bit number of employees annual budget. So it’s about twenty seven, employees, we have a, uh, about a ten and a half million dollar annual budget, of which much of that is in-kind it’s about a three and a half million dollar operating revenue budget. Okay, and we’re going to go out for a break in roughly a minute or so. So just, uh, give us a little overviewing of what? What some of the lessons are that you brought from equity sales on dh wall street. Teo, your charitable work. And i think the biggest thing is just that any organization, whether it’s for-profit or non-profit, needs to be world class in order to be successful and that starts with everything from how you manage and set your employees up for success to your back end systems that govern how you pay your rent, you know, pay your expenses and collect your revenues to don’t hurt management. Teo everything that you do needs to look and feel like you set for-profit world, but it’s really for impact. So i’m guessing you believe non-profit is your tax status? Not your mindset? Correct? Yeah, cool. Okay, of course. Hillary stays with us. We go after this break. I hope you do too. You’re tuned to non-profit radio tony martignetti also hosts a podcast for the chronicle of philanthropy fund-raising fundamentals is a quick ten minute burst of fund-raising insights published once a month. Tony’s guests are expert in crowdfunding, mobile giving event fund-raising direct mail and donor cultivation. Really all the fund-raising issues that make you wonder am i doing this right? Is there a better way there is? Find the fund-raising fundamentals archive it. Tony martignetti dot com that’s marketmesuite n e t t i remember there’s a g before the end, thousands of listeners have subscribed on itunes. You can also learn maura the chronicle website philanthropy dot com fund-raising fundamentals the better way dahna welcome back to big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. Hillary schaefer let’s ah, let’s, dive into some of these lessons that you’ve brought with you this world class let’s start in the back end investment in infrastructure like c r, m databases, data management so that’s a that’s a terrific place to start because really every non-profit is powered by who they reach and how they reached them and how they communicate with, um and management of relationships, whether that’s a whether that’s, a donor, whether that’s, somebody, who’s won an award from our perspective, whether that somebody who has just invested in you are in your programs and how you understand that relationship, how you manage that relationship is all driven by the back end. Traditionally, people would use spreadsheets or just use, you know, sort of word and lists in their own brains, and fundamentally, it doesn’t get you as far as you need to get, and technology today is so sophisticated and there’s so many great great data pay systems that can integrate seamlessly with your website and with donor management tools and with, um, all mechanisms that you need to communicate effectively and really segment that communication into something that makes sense for that individual. It’s. Almost a shame not to you not to use it. Yeah, segmentation, and we’ll get to the benefit of that. I’ve had other guests. My voice just cracked like i’m a fourteen year old. I’ve had have a congratulations e. Everything else operates at, uh, the requisite age at fifty three. But my voice occasionally. Yeah, so we’ll get to the value of segmentation because people want to talk to personally, not not and mass and like everybody else, but so but this can be hard to invest in me, we’re talking about this is not serving program directly. This is not helping people directly. How do we overcome that mindset that we can get by with, you know, the lackadaisical, the the database that we’ve got her the internal processes we figured out our work arounds, you know we’re okay. It’s it’s finding you say that, right? Because they actually when you invest in a really good database management system and and client relationship manager, which is what c r m stands for, um, what you get out of it, that multiplier effect that you can get from having true, powerful relationships and understanding of all of your constituents, all consolidated is worth every dollar you know, and frankly there’s so many great systems which are out there, and they’re not that expensive. The most expensive part is the time of your staff, an external consultants, which you often need teo, take what is all of the stuff that you’ve cobbled together and to make it work for your organization. So an organization as an example we had brought in sales force. We use sales force. Um, we frankly had the wrong system installed with sales force. It took us a long time to figure out how to get the right system installed in all of those things. But it’s also taking us the better part of eighteen months to clean our data. Teo optimize our data to segment it appropriately so that we can communicate effectively with everybody in the way they want to be communicated with and a fair amount of staff time. And it’s that investment of taking somebody away from something that looks like perhaps it’s more important to their day to day life and put them into what’s really tedious work in order to be a better organization. But for us, if i think about it, if we have a database that reaches sixty thousand people, our ability to grow from an organization that reaches sixty this sixty thousand two, two, six hundred thousand to six million all contingent on us having optimized rc era this is key. So if you want to scale, you have to have the infrastructure to support that every organization wants to be at the next level i get so many questions about, you know, how do i get to next level? Can you refer me to somebody help us get to the next level? But i think often they don’t they’re not set up to get to the next level. They don’t they don’t have the support that they need, even if they were able to teo, multiply by ten there, you know the size of their their outreach. Without data, you have no chance. I’ll give you a great example in the nonprofit world statistic terrifies me, but something like sixty percent of donors don’t repeat on average across the non-profit space every year. Yeah, don’t come back, right? Well, don’t patrician right that’s because we’re not loving the people who are there. Everybody is focused on the next level. No, you’re focused on the next person you forget about the person who’s already said to you with their dollars. I care about what you d’oh at the heart of that is your database management system. I had a guest, peter shankman, um social media expert and marketing guy and his book is called zombie loyalists and basically had a last december. I think i had eternal you’re all your clients and customers into zombie loyalists that love you so much that they’re zombies for your work, and they’ll do your marketing, your pr, your communications for you, but ah, some of what he says boils down to the way to get the client you want is to be awesome to the client. You have that’s exactly right? I mean, i think about it from a from a fund-raising perspective. What the great fundraisers tell you is you should have four contacts with a donor for every time you ask them for something. No in orderto have those four contacts but matter to them, you need to know what they care about that needs to be in your database. You need to understand them that meets not only being your head. It needs to be institutionalized in your database. Ah, and then you need to have systems which set up, which push you to reach out to that person to make sure that you’re not forgetting to touch them four times before you go back to them and say, here’s, your invoice your sales force is a really cool example that you mentioned because for small shops it’s ideal, they’re the first ten licenses from sales force are free to non-profits and then they have a very deeply reduced ah fee for going beyond ten licenses. But i think for a lot of listeners ten licenses is enough for more than enough. So, you know, on i’ve had guests on from the non-profit technology conference and t c talking about the benefits of salesforce, you know, i think that’s right and sales force khun b a terrific tool it’s also it could be not that expensive or if you have the budget, the amount of tools that they have that you khun scale in two really optimizing take you to the next level are huge, so we don’t have we personally don’t have the budget we would love to have to spend with sales force, but we have a big, long wish list of things we would like to spend on specifically with sales force, with the tools that they have something bothering me to my head. Now, i didn’t mean to say lackadaisical databases, i meant to say lackluster, lackluster debate. Lackadaisical database doesn’t make any sense, it’s lazy, lazy self, you know, so that people could be lackadaisical. But the databases lackluster let’s talk a little about the segmentation of the benefit of communicating with people and showing that you know what their interests are when their birthdays are what they, how they like to be communicated with let’s, explore this know people are people, and everybody wants to feel touched individually. Nobody wants to feel like they’re part of a marketing campaign or that they’re part of a sort of a blast. People want to be touched individually. It’s why things like instagram work because they feel touched by a photograph ah, it’s the same thing with with donor or constituent segmentation everybody wants to feel like especially in the nonprofit world where you’re talking about emotion, you are effectively touching people where where they want to improve the world, but you’ve gotta understand which part of it inspires them. Yes, ah, and and also people like being cared for around the things that matter in their daily lives that have nothing to do with you. Ah, their children, their children’s ages what they d’oh? Ah, what their hobbies. Are where they like to travel all of those things. It just matters it’s all about having one on one of relationships. And the better your relationship is, the more likely you are to be able to maximize. And everything you’ve mentioned is data worth preserving its all data. You have to have people love it when you send them a note that says, happy birthday, no, super simple. It is very simple now. So what kinds of reminders do you get? Based on what kinds of things aside from birthday? What? Yeah. What others? Ah, it tends to relate to things that people have told you. Okay? And so for us, it would relate specifically to our program. So we have five different programs that have very, very different calendars. So that could relate. Teo, i i just need to get us a of the date because i know you desperately want to come to our national ceremony in new york city in march. Ah, but it could also be i know you really want to be. Ah, judge at our students in action conference in minneapolis. Ana and so getting that date to you in plenty of advance. Notice it really gets down to that level. All right? So the the value of segmentation and investment in infrastructure what about investment in consultants? You mentioned consulting? Nobody knows everything they need to know, but this could be tough to bring, bring other people in and have a fresh set of eyes evaluating you. It’s interesting on the consulting sight because i i personally have two two minds about consultants. Often i feel like you get charged too much for a percentage of somebody’s brain no on dh that’s the greatest risk with consulting. Ah, but also often they’re just expertise. You don’t want to bring in house. You can’t afford to bring in house, but you need somebody who has fresh eyes who knows something really specific that you don’t know ah, and with without which you can’t can’t go to the next level, you can’t execute effectively. So sales forces a terrific example. Um, there are so many tools inside sales force that enable you to do things like optimize your data and get rid of redundancy and all of those things, um and to, uh, to make it spoke for your organization for think the ways. In which you want to connect with people, i couldn’t do that myself, and i don’t have anybody in house who could do that for me. Could you just send your data data manager, database administrator to a sales force conference or course, yes, we do that too, okay, but it’s not enough, and for the cost of bringing you know you’ve got you’ve got away out the cost. So the question is, can you find somebody who is affordable to you in your organization that helps bring in those that kind of expertise in? I’m their things like building out an effective communication strategy where if you don’t have a big, robust communications team who can think about everything from database management, teo email to social media to all the things that go into digital infrastructure ah, and communications calendars and all of those things. At some point, it becomes really smart to bring in somebody from the outside to say, i’m building you a structure i’m helping you think about inside your organization, for you what a structure would look like, that you can afford let’s turn to our people i think my voice is my voice was crack again, it’s. A big bag, maybe. Yeah, you know. Uh, so you’re important asset, probably your most valuable asset. Most important, most expensive it’s expensive. I would guess inside most non-profits that that people are seventy eight percent of cost big, big, big percentage, um, and making impact in the world all relates to the people who you were in power to make that impact on your behalf as as either a full time employee or an independent contractor and losing employees is as expensive as losing the donors we were talking about, if not more so, you know woobox the amount of time you then need to spend teo find the person, bring them in house, and on average, it takes six to eighteen months to really optimize an employee. That’s a long time to invest in somebody new if you have somebody who’s good who’s sitting there right in front of you. The most important thing with people always is that they feel like they’re being set up to succeed. And they’re being given the tools that they need. Ah, to succeed. All right, how do we do this? Ah, well, that everything from the really basic and can feel very cumbersome to a management manager piece. But ah, gold setting and reviews, letting people know where they stand, being really straightforward with them about what they’re doing that’s terrific, and where they need to develop development goals is a big, big, big piece, and i don’t mean development is in fund-raising i mean, personal development, professional development around how can you be a much more effective employees? For the most part? Certainly in my experience, whether it’s on wall street or in the nonprofit world, when you sit in a review with somebody, they barely hear the good stuff ninety nine percent of what you tell them could be good. Everybody waits for the butt, the but needs to be real, meaning it needs to be i understand you here’s, where i see helping to take you as a human being and as a professional to the next level, and being able to deliver that in a way which is non threatening but having systems and structures around delivering reviews around goal, setting around, holding people accountable to those goals and around understanding them and wanting to be on their side are all the the most important things you can do, and it doesn’t matter what. Kind of an organization you’re out to do that my guest last week, we’re from the university of pittsburgh, and they were talking about incentive pay something that pitt has set up. They’ve defined what an exemplary fundraiser is. It’s basically achieving two hundred percent of your goal. But that’s a big organization, university of pittsburgh, might there be other ways of implementing incentive pay around? Aside from strictly money, money comp, you know, incentives are interesting in non-profits because, um, a, for the most part, non-profits don’t use sort of base bonus type structures, but there are tons of other ways that you can make somebody feel really good about what they do and whether that’s simply celebrating their accomplishments to the other employees into your board. People really thrive on that, but it can also be other things, like giving them an extra days vacation. Um, you know, sending them home on purpose when their kid’s sick and you tell them that family comes first, you know, all those things that’s really more around culture, but there are there are smart things you can do where you say, you know what? I don’t have the dollar to give. You. But i do have a day to give you or two or whatever it is. Whatever it is, that you’ve earned benefits structures are very important. Um, covering people and their families, and how you do that and how you communicate it. Incredibly important and totally under sort of undervalued in the mindset in the nonprofit world about what that means to an individual. And you say, i care about you and your health, and i care about your family in there. We have just about a minute left or so we have a couple more than more than a couple minutes. How much time do we have left? Sam? Okay, dahna then let’s. Ah, my mistake. Let’s. Keep talking about some some policies around employment. Maybe around training. You’ve got a new employee. You’ve spent the requisite amount of time recruiting you believe you’ve got the best person, the orientation, the training process, the onboarding process oven employees that one of the single most important things that you d’oh. So with us, justus a simple example. First, everybody gets a very long, very detailed employee manual that they have to read where they really understand what the operating premises are of the organ you’re holding your hands, like four inches apart for inches. It’s not four inches thick. Okay, okay. They’re recording, so that would be way too much street. All right, but i use my hands a lot. I think i’m going to italy and one hundred in italian, so i didn’t think you were using them enough. That must be the eight and half months. Pregnant part. Yes, i understand. Ok, the but having that set of expectations in somebody’s mind where they read it? They have to affirm it. They have to tell you that they’ve read it. That tells them everything from how many vacation days they do have, how they can accrue more vacation, what the benefits are to them, how they can get in trouble, how they can stay out of trouble. What a whistle blower policy might look like. All of those things very, very important, but then bringing people into the culture of the organization into your programs where they really feel armed. Tio ah, to be an effective employees. Ah, it’s. So fundamental. So we we set up a schedule time with all of our program managers. We have our end of its staff. When they come in they go. They shadow individuals who do either their job or even other jobs inside the organization. Because you’ve got to understand the entire organization. I think in order to be effective in your silo. Um ah, and then we do profession. We were very open to paying from people doing professional development and encourage it. Ah, and then we do regular staff retreats where everybody comes together and we work on pieces that feel like they might be holes in the skill set to the entire organization again. Investment where its infrastructure or people? You just you can’t shortchange these things and expect to scale on grow the organization. I mean, for the amount it costs me, tio run a staff retreat every year, eyes about one percent of what it costs me to pay my staff. Yeah, that is a very worthwhile investment to make that staff be a leverage oppcoll army. We’re gonna leave it there. Hillary shafer she’s uh, executive director of jefferson awards foundation there at jefferson awards dot or ge and again on twitter. She’s at beard, hillary. Thank you so much, hillary. Thank you. Real pleasure and gun muzzle tough. Congratulations on your pregnancy. Thank you very much. Jean takagi and program your board coming up first. Pursuant acquisition campaigns. They had a free webinar to help you acquire new donors. That was back on august thirty first. But it’s not too late. This is not a date news. No, no one current news. You can watch the archive. Go to tony dot m a slash pursuant capital p please. And the info was there to watch. The archive video tony dahna em a slash pursuant for the archive on acquisition campaigns. Rechner, cps. They do go way beyond the numbers. They have lots of policy statements for you. Ah, more than from last week. Ethical conduct for board members, disaster recovery, investment policy, independent contractor versus employee checklist i know non-profit struggle with that. We’ve covered it and there’s a lot more resources at wagner cpas dot com quick resource is then guides that’s where you get all this good info stop wasting your time using business accounting software for your books you aren’t a business you’re non-profit appaloosa counting is designed for non-profits built from the ground up to make your non-profit financial management simple and affordable. Please check this out. Our new sponsor, apple, owes its fund accounting, advanced reporting, donation tracking and there’s mohr included in annapolis. Accounting it’s all in one, easy to use. Go to non-profit wizard dot com now for tony’s take two. I still got this five minute marketing for planned e-giving i condensed down to the to the, uh most essential information twenty five minutes. Hard to believe that i could talk for twenty five minutes and it not all be critical. I had difficulty with that, but the whole concept of distilling it down. But i did. And i got it down to about three minutes. Roughly and that’s the best of the five minute marketing tips that i’ve got for you for planned giving. I want you to get started with your plan giving marketing. Watch the tips. Check out the video. Three minutes worth it’s at tony martignetti dot com. And that is tony’s. Take two. And here is jean takagi with program you’re bored jean takagi he’s, a principal of neo the non-profit and exempt organizations law group in san francisco. Gene has been gene has been a regular contributor to show it’s got to be going on three years. Gina i if it’s not three it’s very close. He had it’s, the non popular of the non popular beautiful he had it’s the popular non-profit law blawg dot com non-profit law blogged dot com it’s very popular. And on twitter he’s at jack g t k happy new year jean takagi. Welcome back. Happy new year. Tony it’s. Great to be on. Thank you. I love having you. How long have you been? A contributor every month, i think it’s been a little over three years. A zit? Is it over three? Love it. It could be i think we met three years ago at a bar in san francisco, if i remember, right? Oh, for sure. It’s not like we pick. I picked you up there where i knew you before. I’m not that easy with contributors. I mean, yes, we we knew each other. And then we certainly did meet that’s, right? With along with emily chan? Yes. That’s. Right. Um, let’s see, our board has our board has some responsibilities and around program you’re concerned that they’re not they’re not fulfilling those responsibilities. Yeah, i just feel like there’s there’s, maybe some lack of attention paid on the boards roll on program oversight? I think so often went especially when you talk with lawyers or accountants were talking about financial oversight and we’re saying we’ll make sure you’re solvent. Make sure you have enough money to pay off your debts. They become do we don’t really talk very much about programs, but certainly the management folks and the thunder’s air talking about programs and whether they’re effective and efficient that furthering the mission. So, you know, i thought we should explore a little bit about what the board duties are in in that event as well. Can you just remind us first, we’ve talked about this a while ago. There are three duties that board members have. I was faith, hope and chastity, or on the greatest of those is but yeah, the three duties are the duty of care and that’s act with reasonable care in providing direction and oversight over the organization, the duty of loyalty, and a lot of that has to do with avoiding conflicts of interests that are not in the best interest of the organizations, but are more for the best interest of an insider and the duty of obedience which lawyers air very interested in, and that’s a bang with both the outside laws of you know, that apply to the organization and the internal laws like the by-laws and other policies that the documents may have those air the three to be to be concerned with. Okay and and around program program is essential. Man. That’s what charity’s exist for his programs? Oh, my voice just cracked like i’m a fourteen year old exist that’s. Exciting stuff. Now that it is, it is that’s. Right? Well, you make it interesting. That’s. Why? I love having you back. You make the what could very well be a dry topic. I think you make it interesting. And listeners do too. Yeah. That’s. What? Charity’s air here is for a program. Yeah, exactly. I mean, who cares? The indie at the end of the day, if we’ve got great financials, it’s none of our programs are effective, and we don’t do a service to the community. Precisely. So what? What do we need to be doing? What to boards need to be doing around around program. Well, i think in meeting those three duties, the critical aspect for boards to make sure they’re reasonably informed. Ah, and just get a program report every month or every two months. You know, a ten minute program report from the executive director or program director is fine and good. But does that mean the board really understands the programs and whether the advance the mission on do they understand how the program’s advance emission? And did they ever ask you more difficult questions about are the programs effective? At advancing the mission. Or do we have alternatives? Or should we think of alternatives that might be able to advance that mission mohr effectively or more efficiently, given the limited resources that we all have? First up in this is and we have talked about this, your mission needs to be very clear. Yeah, and one of the things you have to do is make sure you go back. And this is the lawyer speaking, make sure you go back to your articles of incorporation and by-laws and make sure that the mission statement that years, thinking that you’re furthering is consistent with what the law says your mission is, and that’s that’s how it’s displayed on the governing documents and figuring out whether we are effective at meeting our mission. Now we’ve gotto identify cem numbers, right? I mean, it’s, not just gonna be a ten minute report from the program director, we’ve got to be looking at some numbers to figure out whether our we’re having the outcomes that we want, right and it’s such a such a difficult question and that’s, why it’s it’s all about keeping informed? Because you know the whole area of program. Evaluation and that cantor and and a lot of institutions like the stanford center on philanthropy in civil society and mckinsey and, you know, the non-profit cordially foundations under the all have been raiding all sorts of things on program evaluation and how we need more metrics and, you know, but all of that is great, but this is really hard stuff for a lot of non-profits to do so, yes, trying to figure out what what measurements are are important for us to figure out. Are we advancing our mission effectively? And then are we advancing it efficiently is really hard stuff, i think tip typically non-profits will, you know, measure how much money we’ve raised, how many visitors we’ve had or people with served, how many members we have? What is our overhead ratio on? We’ve had discussions on that topic as well, and, you know, those are interesting figures in all important, and i don’t want to downplay that, but what about, you know, then, you know, the number of clients served, for example, does that really tell us what impact that’s done? No before the clients and you know, the program staff may know that, but how does the board know that if we have? If we served two thousand clients last month, did we did we serve them by giving them one meal? Did that change their lives? Did we do more than that? Did we provide services? What? What and impact are we trying to aim for? And what results are we getting those air really difficult things to try to figure out. But i think the board needs to push the organization in that direction. Of trying to figure out are the programs that write programs? Are we effectively implementing it? And if you want to, you know, evaluate your executive and evaluate your programs. You’ve gotta have a good understanding of that. I feel your passion around this, jean. I really do. It comes it’s it’s palpable. Now, in managing these programs, it’s not the board’s roll. Teo to be day to day there’s clearly there’s a delegation that has to be happening. Yeah, absolutely. And and the board certainly has the ability to and should be delegating if they have staff in an executive director. Particularly, um, delegating those duties on those people. And especially, you know, holding the executive accountable. And tasking executive and making sure the executive has resources to be able to do this, to try to figure out what measurements should we take? Teo, evaluate our programs. What what’s important? What do we have the capacity to do now? And what? What do we aspire to do? What are outside stakeholders wanting? What are the foundations saying we must have? And what are the donor’s expecting from us and how to our competitors provide that type of information back? I think we just need to push our executives. We’re lucky enough to have them to figure some of those things out. And none of this has done overnight. Of course, tony. But you know, you you’ve gotto work at this, and sometimes you’re going to move forward, and sometimes you gotta move backwards. But you’ve got to keep pushing, pushing ahead. You just asked five or six really difficult but critical questions. Um, it’s a good thing. This is a podcast cause now people can listen. Go, go back to the past one minute and listen to those five or six questions. Jean just just named, you know, difficulty, but but but critical. And and yet the board’s oversight responsibility remains, and that can’t be delegated. That’s, right? So you know, the board, khun delegate management, but the board can’t delegate its ultimate oversight of the organization and it’s, you know, it’s responsibility to plan the direction of the organization. So status quo, if you know if that’s all you’re satisfied with and you don’t aim to do anything else with that, you know, that may not that may indicate that you don’t have the best board in place, and i was a little shocked. Teo learned, i think two days ago guidestar held a web cast, and there was a survey done of executive directors, and seventy five percent said they were unhappy with their boards and there’s a big disconnect there seventy five percent approved. Okay, what else? What else, uh, is part of the boards oversight of program? Gene? Well, you know, one thing i kind of want to emphasize as well is that i don’t want to put all of this on the board of directors, and i realized that the vast majority of board members are volunteers and have busy lives otherwise and are doing an amazing job. Trying to contribute to their organizations, the disconnect with the exec director is usually because of communications and a lack of understanding of their respective roles. So i just want to put a little bit of a burden on the executive director as well, to make sure that they are emphasizing board development and helping the board understand its responsibilities and sometimes bringing in experts, even though they may cost a little at the outset. Khun b really valuable to an organisation to try to figure out what these roles are, and again put in a little investment up front, and you can get payoff down the road even if you have some failures along the way. But it’s just that continuing to push forward to trying to understand what you’re doing who’s responsible for what? On figuring that stuff out the metrics themselves again. Our khun b, you know, exceedingly difficult if if i asked you give us metrics on changing laws when we were fighting for civil rights, well, that might take years or decades to get any measurable results per se that might make a thunder happy. And you know what would have happened in the early sixties you know, civil rights organizations just had their program shut down because boards didn’t get the right metrics. That would have been ridiculous, right? So we have to understand the limitation of these measurements as well, but continue to try to figure out what important steps or benchmarks we’re shooting for and what’s important to do, even if we don’t get the metrics. Ah, and make sure our funders and donors and stakeholders understand those limitations. Well, just a minute or so before before breaking what? What kind of expert would help us with this? What would we search for? Well, there there are some consultants out there who specialize in program evaluation, and there there are definitely resource is out there. I have named a few organizations already, but let me give you a few more the foundation centre and they’re grantspace website has got some excellent resource is on program evaluation, the national council of non-profits also has some excellent resources. They’re they’re definitely resource is out there. And if you look for non-profit consultants who got program evaluation exper thirties, i think that can be a starting place. This is also a ripe area for collaboration. Amongst organizations that are serving similar populations, or half similar missions, to try to meet together and talked about how they’re measuring, you know, their program, results and what would work for maybe, you know, across the sub sector that that they’re serving, all of those things are really important. I think again, executive leadership is really important to get the board in motion, but the board also has to hold the executive responsible for making sure that happens as well. Let’s, take a break. Gene and i, of course, will keep talking about the board’s responsibility around program and the executive director’s, too. Lynette singleton and at lays, right. Thank you for thank you very much. For those very, very kind thoughts on twitter. Hang in there. Like what you’re hearing a non-profit radio tony’s got more on youtube, you’ll find clips from stand up comedy tv spots and exclusive interviews catch guests like seth gordon. Craig newmark, the founder of craigslist market 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 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 guess directly. To sign up, visit the facebook page for tony martignetti dot com. Hi, i’m kate piela, executive director of dance, new amsterdam. And you’re listening to tony martignetti non-profit radio. Big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. More live listener love junction china ni hao, the netherlands gary indiana the home of christmas story, right? I’m pretty sure a christmas story that movie took place in gary, indiana live listen, i’d love to gary, indiana, and we’ve got a couple checking in from japan, hiroshima and kobe konnichi wa, farmington, michigan live listener love out to you. We have a question from twitter jean very loyal listener lynette singleton asks, do we know why there’s this lack of love between executive directors with and their boards, any ideas what’s contributing to that? I think i’m sorry, tony, that i think there are a number of factors that make be contributing to that, but i think the first is lack of understanding of the rules at each place and then it’s it’s a matter of communication between the two parties there are greater vacations that that board’s place on executives and reliance on the executives tio tio make do with limited resources to produce amazing results, and that can sometimes be a very heavy burden on the executive without a lot of support from the board and exactly what the board’s role is in supporting the executive director’s. Also, i think they’re many areas where there’s a lack of agreement or understanding between those roles and, you know, fund-raising is actually one of the areas of ax. Actually, some controversy, i think, you know, is the board involved. Is the board’s role no to raise funds for the organisation. From a legal perspective, i might answer no to some extent, from a more operational perspective, i would say, of course it is, so they’re they’re different considerations, and that was a charity navigator study, right? I’m not sure. I thought you said i’d start with, i’m sorry, the organization that did the webinar. Okay, okay, god start. Pardon me. Ok wave talking, talking about program meeting the mission, but there’s also legal requirements around program as well. Sure, and then the board should make sure that the executive is ensuring that the program is in compliance with whatever applicable laws might be there, whether it have to do with the facility of the organization or the employees and volunteers working for it, their basic risk management steps that they may want to take a swell, including ensuring that there’s proper insurance that, for whatever activities are are involved. Obviously, if you’re doing a summer day camp involving rope climbing and like that that’s going to be a little bit more significant in terms of risk management than if you’re just doing administrative work, but lots of legal compliance things, licensing, permitting and in all of those think, well, can board members be personally liable if laws are being broken and that’s why we have directors and officers insurance, isn’t it? Yeah, part partly why we have that it’s usually, you know, if there’s some sort of negligence involved when the board members acting not as a boardmember but is a volunteer for a program, then you’re probably looking at commercial general liability insurance to protect against, you know, somebody slip and fall and blaming the volunteer who was right supposed to set it up on the board members, directors and officers. Insurance will really protect against decisions that the board made that ultimately, you know, in hindsight, we’re negligent or grossly negligent, and, you know, if they decided to hold a program in involved involving bungee jumping with six year olds and without adequate supervision that, you know, that would be the type of negligence that could get boardmember personally liable for something like that. But volunteermatch boardmember czar really, really, really rarely held personally liable absent some sort of malfeasance or self dealing really benefit themselves. Okay, i’ve seen some six year olds on the subway that i wouldn’t mind having participate in that that bungee jumping off a cliff i could i could give them a little shove to get them started, but not not kids. I know nobody related to me only only what’s people i’ve seen in some pipe it that it go well, now they’re real. I’ve seen him in the subway, i just don’t know who they are. I can’t name them, but i could point them out easily. Probably on my way home. I’ll encounter a few. Um, what else should we be thinking about? You know, your get before i asked before we do that, you’re an anarchist. Also, you’re making us. I got two troublemakers on the show today. You are making us ask questions that are very difficult, but but critical? Yeah. You know, i think of lawyers and consultants more broadly, that’s what what we do, we can implement the changes that we talked about, what we want to raise the questions because we want boards and executives to really be thinking about these things and discussing them. And that’ll help break down the barriers and the misunderstandings and hopefully make more executive directors feel that their boards air great, make more executive, make more boards feel that their executive directors are doing a great job as well. As i said, i feel your passion around this. We have just about two minutes. What? You have another thought around this? Yeah. You know, just tio, make sure that again and i’ve talked a little bit about this is that there are limitations to what metrics can provide to an organization and some things just take a really long time to figure out research i mentioned lobbying on civil rights issues is one example, but research as well, you know, for going to engage in research of a new program and how it’s going to work or developing a new medical device or drug that’s going to be beneficial to developing nations and that the people there who might not have the resources to be able to afford these things, we’ve got to be a little bit experimental. And i know you know, there’s been preaching to the choir about embracing failure and sharing it so we can learn in advance, but that really is something that all echo as well, that, you know, we’re going to get metrics and sometimes the metrics they’re going to show we failed, but if we never fail, that means we’ve never really pushed the envelope of making a more substantial change, and we’re just sort of, you know, relying on making little incremental changes, and we have to think about our organizations and say, are we detective organization that just wants to stay status quo? Do we want to make little tiny? Incremental changes year by year or do we actually want to look at solving or advancing our mission in a really big way and actually take some risk and find some programs out there that might be more risky and that might fail and help educate our funders and our donors and our supporters that this is what we’re doing and not everything is going to work, but this is the way to advance, you know, our cause lawyer with a heart, jean jean takagi, really so grateful that you’re contributing to the show? Jean, thank you so much. Thank you, johnny. And thanks for basing this serious subject today. That’s all right, uh, we have a little fun with it. You’re an anarchist is no question cubine you’ll find jean at non-profit law blogged dot com that’s the block that he edits and he’s at g tack on twitter. Thank you again, jean, thanks so much. Next week it’ll be a good one. You have my word. I don’t know anything about fermentation. If you missed any part of today’s show, i beseech you, find it on tony martignetti dot com and these are our sponsors pursuing online tools. For small and midsize non-profits data driven and technology enabled pursuing dot com wagner, sepa is guiding you beyond the numbers. With your cps dot com. You’re not a business. You’re non-profit stoploss accounting software designed for non-profits non-profit wizard dot com, and we be spelling supercool spelling bee fundraisers. We b e spelling dot com, a creative producers, claire meyerhoff. Sam liebowitz is the line producer, shows social media is by susan chavez, and this terrific music is by scott stein of brooklyn. Be with me next week for non-profit radio. Big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. Go out and be going. Buy-in what’s not to love about non-profit radio tony gets the best guests check this out from seth godin this’s the first revolution since tv nineteen fifty and henry ford nineteen twenty it’s the revolution of our lifetime here’s a smart, simple idea from craigslist founder craig newmark yeah insights, orn presentation or anything? People don’t really need the fancy stuff they need something which is simple and fast. When’s the best time to post on facebook facebook’s andrew noise nose at traffic is at an all time hyre on nine a m or eight pm so that’s, when you should be posting your most meaningful post here’s aria finger ceo of do something dot or ge young people are not going to be involved in social change if it’s boring and they don’t see the impact of what they’re doing. So you got to make it fun and applicable to these young people look so otherwise a fifteen and sixteen year old they have better things to do if they have xbox, they have tv, they have their cell phones. Me dar is the founder of idealist took two or three years for foundation staff, sort of dane toe add an email address card. It was like it was phone. This email thing is right and that’s why should i give it away? Charles best founded donors choose dot or ge somehow they’ve gotten in touch kind of off line as it were on dno. Two exchanges of brownies and visits and physical gift mark echo is the founder and ceo of eco enterprises. You may be wearing his hoodies and shirts. Tony talked to him. Yeah, you know, i just i’m a big believer that’s not what you make in life. It sze, you know, tell you make people feel this is public radio host majora carter. Innovation is in the power of understanding that you don’t just do it. You put money on a situation expected to hell. You put money in a situation and invested and expect it to grow and savvy advice for success from eric sacristan. What separates those who achieve from those who do not is in direct proportion to one’s ability to ask others for help. The smartest experts and leading thinkers air on tony martignetti non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent.

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

Big Nonprofit Ideas for the Other 95%

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Sherryl Nufer: Smart Interviewing Makes Great Hiring

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

 

 

Heather Carpenter: Your Job Descriptions

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

 

 


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

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

Big Nonprofit Ideas for the Other 95%

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Hillary Schafer: Run Like A Biz

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

 

 

Gene Takagi: Program Your Board

Gene Takagi

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

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Nonprofit Radio for September 6, 2013: The Overhead Myth Letter Signers & Good Overhead, Bad Overhead

Big Nonprofit Ideas for the Other 95%

Listen live or archive:

My Guests:

Art Taylor, Jacob Harold, and Ken Berger: The Overhead Myth Letter Signers

Art Taylor
Art Taylor
Jacob Harold
Jacob Harold
Ken Berger
Ken Berger

 

 

 

 

 

 

Written “To the Donors of America,”  The Overhead Myth letter created a lot of buzz in the nonprofit community this summer. My guests are the three co-signers, the CEOs of Better Business Bureau Wise Giving Alliance, GuideStar, and Charity Navigator. Art Taylor, Jacob Harold and Ken Berger will explain what led up to the letter, why it was necessary and why they feel “many charities should spend more on overhead.”
Gene Takagi: Good Overhead, Bad Overhead

picture of Gene TakagiGene Takagi, our legal contributor, helps you understand what may be sensible and appropriate non-program expenses for your nonprofit, and what you should avoid. How do you protect your board, officers and employees, but not go overboard on overhead? Gene is principal of the Nonprofit & Exempt Organizations law group (NEO).

 


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What is that music? This is tony martignetti non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent and i am your aptly named host. Yes, we have new music, new music this week that was cheap red wine and it’s going to be our music going forward. It’s by scott stein and if you’d liketo meet scott, you can go to the facebook page. We have a little q and a with scott stein. I’m very glad that you’re part of the show. Welcome scott. New music and a new year luciana tova for those who are celebrating fifty seven, seventy four oh, i hope that you were with me last week. I would suffer idiopathic ridiculous apathy if it came to my attention that you have ms trim tab marketing. James eaton is president and creative director of the tronvig group. He explained how something small and seemingly insignificant, like the trim tab that’s it helps to steer a ship can make a big difference in your marketing and more social. Now what amy sample ward, our social media contributor and ceo of non-profit technology network and ten, had thoughts about how to manage the internal changes. When you make social media a part of your office culture this week, the overhead myth letter signers written to the donors of america, the three co signers of the letter are the ceos of the better business bureau wise giving alliance guide star and charity navigator our tailor jacob harold and ken berger, who explain what what led up to the letter, why it was necessary and why they feel many charities should spend mohr on overhead. Plus your questions and good overhead, bad overhead. Jean takagi are legal contributor helps you understand what may be sensible and appropriate non-profit graham expenses and what you should avoid. How do you protect your board officers and employees, but not go overboard on overhead gina’s principle of the non-profit and exempt organizations law group neo-sage san francisco i’m very pleased to welcome the three ceos who are the co signers of the overhead myth letter. Art taylor is president and ceo of the better business bureau wise giving alliance they’re at give dot or ge and he’s with us from arlington, virginia. Jacob taylor is president and ceo of guidestar there at guidestar dot or ge jacob’s calling from washington, d c and ken berger is with me in the studio. He’s, president and ceo of charity navigator at charitynavigator dot orb, gentlemen, welcome hi, good afternoon, glad to be here. It’s. A pleasure. Glad to have all three of you. I do want to ask you in the beginning, tio, try to be concise with your answers, because way, have lots of info to cover and just about twenty five minutes together. So tree, please try to keep that in mind. Really my first question. Art galleries for you. How did you get to be the first signer on the letter? How did you guys decide the sequence of the signatures? That’s, what struck me? Well, actually, i’m not sure about how that came about. I think we probably just threw a golf tee around. And whoever got the point got the name of their first. Okay, i don’t think there’s any significant. So about the order of the names. I think we used different orders for different events that we appear at and different communications that we send out. So, there’s. Nothing to be read into my name being first on. Okay. That’s. Very cordial of you to say. The only pattern i could see was alphabetical by first name art jacob and then ken that’s all that’s all i was able to discern, um, let’s, let’s, stick with you there. All right, you guys are the three. You represent the three leading sources of information about charities. Um, let’s start with you first and then jacob, and then can tell us what’s special about your organization, the wise giving alliance how’s it has it has a little different than the others. Please aren’t well, we’re one of the organizations that will actually make a judgment about how we feel about charity’s accountability and where, as i said, we’re primarily focused on whether a charity is accountable to the public, and we have a set of twenty standards that we use to measure the extent to which we believe charities are accountable. The’s standards were developed with the assistance of the non profit sector. It took us a little more than two years to devise the standards back in two thousand one when we last revised. Hm. And so we really feel that they represent the interests of donors, as well as the aspirations and hopes of charities that want to be accountable to their donors. All right. Thank you, jacob. How about how about guide star? Sure. You know, the big contrast i would make with my two colleagues organizations here gets right to something that art said, which is that guide star itself is not an analyst or raider or provider of judgment. What we are is a platform for data from all across the sector. So we have data on every single non-profit in the country for many, many sources, and we want to share others analysis, because we do think that the sort of analysis done by better business bureau wise giving alliance charity navigator can be very informative and important for the field. And we see it as our role to bring together the many different voices and and present them in a systematic way. And jacob, how many hits are you getting on the web site each month? Let’s, let’s. Just establish how relevant thes sites are for donorsearch schnoll sure. So last month we had about one point. Two million unique visitors. Excellent. Okay, unique visitors. Excellent art. I should have asked you how many? How many hits are you getting or if you can say unique visitors each month? Yeah, i don’t know if it’s unique visitors, but we get about one. We get about five and a half million report hits every year. So five and a half million times. Someone will come to our website to see a charity report can. How about charity navigator? What makes it different and and how? How popular. Well, you know, i just want to say first that i think, you know, between the three organizations were about fifteen million dollars in budget trying to oversee a one point five trillion dollars sector. So there’s, this much need for their, you know, all of us. And there’s a lot of us, i think similarities even more than the differences. But we also i do make a judgment, and we have a, you know, five level star rating system scale from zero to four stars. And we have about thirty metrics that we used to make those judgments. We also engage the sector in that. And also we have all one point six million non-profits on our website with information about them, even if they’re not currently rated. Let’s, let’s. Move to the letter itself. The overhead beth letter from believe june is when, when it was formally announced. Jacob the letter cites the misconception that overhead is a poor measure of a charity’s performance. How did that misconception arise? You know, when there’s a vacuum, something has to fill it, and i think there’s a desire on the part of donors as well as journalists, academics, researchers and non-profits themselves tio try to have a way to make judgments about the non-profits sector, which is very diverse and where there certainly are variances been in quality. Uh, and i think people saw the overhead ratio of something that had some meaning i’m sure my colleagues will talk about how it is not meaningless. It’s just what i would call a filter that helps us still filter out a few bad cases, but not a proxy for for equality and, you know, it fiddled it filled that vacuum, and my hope is that over the next few years, as we systematically gather a number of other types of information across the field, that we can offer an alternative that is much more meaningful and useful and helpful for the field on broader that that alternative being much broader than looking right just that overhead, anybody else want to add? To what you feel led up to this serious misconception about our ways, you know, we at the wise giving alliance, we’ve always i believed that you should look at a broad spectrum of things when you’re assessing a charity’s accountability, and while we have financial ratio metrics, address fund-raising and administrative costs, those are just two of twenty different areas that we look into. And, boy, we must ask charities almost three hundred questions before we can actually no of all twenty of those standards, okay? We’re actually met, so we’ve always group believe that there should be a broader look at what a charity does in order to really know if they’re accountable. And so when this opportunity came up for us to come together and share with the public that belief, we were all for it. So that’s sort of how we come into the table can how about you? How’d we get to this misconception? Well, i think it’s been over a lot of years, and i think that there’s been an ongoing debate over the question of what accountability measures should be those that we use the urban institute has done studies, of course, dan piela has gotten a lot of traction, and i think, you know, the views are wide ranging from we should have absolutely no accountability for overhead. There should be it’s meaningless. And i think all three of us were concerned that we be not throw out the baby with the bathwater that there’s a sort of a balanced place. We need to get to. We’re going take a pause for a couple seconds and course will continue with the three ceos of three co signers of the overhead myth letter and live listener love. When we come back, stay in there, talking alternative radio twenty four hours a day. Do you need a business plan that can guide your company’s growth? Seven and seven will help bring the changes you need. Wear small business consultants and we pay attention to the details. You may miss our coaching and consultant services a guaranteed to lead toe. Right, groat. For your business, call us at nine. One seven eight three, three, four, eight, six zero foreign, no obligation free consultation. Check out our website of ww dot covenant seven dot com are you fed up with talking points? Rhetoric everywhere you turn left or right? Spin ideology no reality, in fact, its ideology over in tow. No more it’s time. Join me. Larry shot a neo-sage tuesday nights nine to eleven easter for the ivory tower radio in the ivory tower will discuss what’s important to you society, politics, business and family. It’s provocative talk for the realist and the skeptic who want to go what’s really going on? What does it mean? What can be done about it? So gain special access to the ivory tower. Listen to me. Very sharp. Your neo-sage tuesday nights nine to eleven new york time go to ivory tower radio dot com for details. That’s. Ivory tower, radio dot com e every time i was a great place to visit for both entertainment and education. Listening. Tuesday nights nine to eleven. It will make you smarter. Hey, all you crazy listeners looking to boost your business? Why not advertise on talking alternative with very reasonable rates? Interested simply email at info at talking alternative dot com dahna duitz i love our new music, scott stein, live, listener lover get live listeners all over the country, in fact, and, of course, all over the world. Asia checking in, but we’re going to start domestic san francisco, atlanta, bloomington, indiana what if that’s the centre at indiana university. Leesburg, virginia. North kingstown, rhode island, south portland, maine. Walnut creek, california in san diego, california lots of californians live listener love there’s lots more coming, lots more live listeners glad you’re very glad that you’re with us and i never want to forget podcast pleasantries for the nine thousand or so that listen in the podcast love you too. Um, let’s see ken berger, you’re sitting here in front of me. It’s true i am. You are the only shill willing to come to the studio. How do you feel about this? That the rating organizations bear some responsibility for the evolution of this this overhead misconception? Well, i think you know, when i when i learned about the origins of charity navigator, part of the challenge for us was that the only standardized information that was available to us way back when was thiss financial information on the nine. Ninety. That’s, really all that there was that we could look at it. We always tried to communicate to our users that finance and overhead is just part of what you should look at. That’s always been part of our message, and i think part of our problem part of our responsibility is, we never really got that message out loud and clear enough. And that was where charity navigator one point o had to start. Yeah, it was all that was available. Yes, yes, but, you know, and so we’ve been trying to do bang the drum louder and louder over time, to let people know there are other things that are critical that have to be considered in the most important of all, being the results of the work. Okay, you other guys, anybody wantto weigh in on your organization’s responsibility leading up to this? No, i take it, you know. I’ll just say that i think, you know, we what we didn’t do ratings, we certainly presented the ratio on our site, and, um, i don’t apologize for that, but i think there was always room, as can said for further context provided to users and two donors about how that could be a meaningful peace, but not a full, full story. And then i would also argue that the blame where the credit or the responsibility, however we want to characterize it, goes far beyond any organization that did a rating but all the way to non-profits them cells, which, you know, reinforce this myth by literally, quite literally, billions of times a year, you know, prominently displaying their own ratios on their sites and at times they do that with complimentary data about programmatic results, which i think is very powerful. But when they do that alone, when they they on ly share that information, they really reinforce the myth in a problematic way, and so i would encourage all non-profits to ensure that if they are sharing, they’re they’re financial ratios, that they only do that in the context of their programmatic work and the results they’re achieving their communities, and they might have been doing that in response to donors who were, you know, picking up on it and picking up on the misconception i mean, there’s been a lot of talk about it and that that may have been, albeit sort of, you know, inappropriately waited response, but it may have been a response to the public, so the demand for those for those numbers, i think that’s absolutely right and it’s essentially create a vicious cycle where i think no one wanted it tio kind of spin out of control, and it hasn’t. So now where we’re pulling it back, trying to put things inappropriate contact trying teo affirm this multidemensional approach that we’ve all been talking about write your letter is is addressed to the donors of america, not to the charities of america. Dahna um yeah, go ahead, there’s some something more okay, there’s something i would like to say. You know, i think one of the things that really strikes us is that when a message goes out there, as some people are promoting that what? You should look at his results and results alone and forget about all this overhead. In this other financial business and what not in these other ratios? I think that it’s really ridiculous, and i think it’s really unfair to donors, i think that in a sense donors have made a very rational choice in looking at proxies to some degree, because the reality, as we know from years of research, is that is that the vast majority of non-profits do not publicly report on their results, and in fact, if you take it a step further, the vast majority of charities don’t have any data on their results to report upon. And so it’s not fair. I think two entire, you know to say, well, donors, you know, you should be looking at this when in fact there’s nowhere for most of them to go for most cause areas. For most types of charities, you don’t have robust information. So in addition to the advice that jacob gave about the overhead being paired with the results, i think there’s a fundamental message that charity’s more and more have got to step up to the plate and really take on this matter off results if you want people to look at things other than overhead. You have a really obligation to give them the most meaningful. The most important information which we agree all is about your results. Yeah, the conventional wisdom for for a lot of years has been that our results are unmeasurable were too complex for the work that we do is too abstruse, teo quantify results and that’s still happening. And in fact, we spicy and increasing drumbeat. There are more and more of these kind of particles we see coming out saying, well, we’re too complex. It’s two unique were too it’s, too expensive, there’s any number of a litany of excuses, quite frankly, and we’re not saying that you have to be perfect and it has to be robust. We just want to see charities begin to get on this road and do the best you can just started. Don’t say that. It’s. Impossible. We know that it’s, not there’s. Plenty of resource is out there to help our tailor. The point i would. Oh, please go ahead. There. There are the reasons people give to charities are very complex. And quite a bit of it goes to the extent to which people trust the organization the extent to which they trust people are trying to achieve the organization’s mission and trust can be measured. You are sensed by people, sometimes more so than it can be measured. You know, when we feel that the people in an organization are giving it an honest effort, that they’re working hard to achieve the goals of the organization. We tend to trust that organization, mohr and their different ways of looking at that it’s not always extent to which, you know, we see these results printed so, you know, that has to be factored in, and sometimes trust goes to the extent to which people feel comfortable with how they’re spending their money. And while we don’t like that, it’s still part of the complex mix of what drives people to give to chairs art the letter goes so far as to say that many charities should spend mohr on overhead. What what was behind including that? Well, you know, you can certainly look at some organizations who like to tout the fact that they spend, you know, very small sums of money on overhead and and want to point out that that makes them somehow better than organizations that maybe spending mohr that’s. Dangerous, because if an organization really needs to spend more money on overhead and and that amount is reasonable, they should move in that direction, rather than in a direction that would keep them from being an effective organization by not spending that money. So, i think, that’s, the point that we’re trying to make here. If an organization needs to spend more money on overhead, and they’re still within reasonable boundaries for what would be comfortable for for them and for their board members, they should look in that direction. They should. They should do that, including overhead for long term growth. Minute. This constant struggle between the immediate need and and the the desire to have build scale and capacity for the longer term. That’s, that’s very, very challenging. Yes, that’s. You know, that’s, what boards and executives of non-profits are charged to do? We have to balance the challenges of explaining to a doubting public that he spent expenditures are worthwhile and that they will lead to results. Uh, that’s the role of the board and that’s the responsibility, i think, of the executive running that organization to make sure that the people understand the directions that they’re headed in art taylor is president, ceo of the better business bureau wise giving alliance jacob harold, president, ceo of guide star, and ken berger, president, ceo of charity navigator. And we’re talking about there overhead myth letter that the three of them signed i want to take a moment, send a little more live listener love, hillside, new jersey, yonkers, new york, new york, new york, baltimore, maryland and bloom dale, ohio live listener love out to all of you let’s, go to some some questions we did a lot of pulling for listener questions, and i want to thank all three of your organizations. Thank you and your staffs for retweeting my tweets, looking for questions and really, i wantto do one think all three of you and your and the staff, they were working with me. Really very, very, very helpful. Thank you for that. Um ah, question came from amanda. Pee on da on twitter, she’s at living united who decides and how do you decide what is program and what he’s overhead? These areas can be pretty overlapped and sort of pretty vague boundaries. Who want to take that? That question from amanda p about program versus overhead. How do we decide? I think part of that can be in discussion with your your auditors to help ferret out. Make sure that you’re using the best practices in the policies that air in place to make that determination. We do know that, you know, i bought it. Work is as much an art as a science and there’s some ambiguity there. But there are some experts that have worked with a lot of organizations that you can, i think, rely upon, you know? And the other thing is to remember that were typically looking at larger organizations, those of us at least those of us that are doing these ratings. So those kind of organizations that need to do a gnawed it and to have that kind of expertise they can work with that professional to help make certain that they’re allocating those costs appropriately, that our overhead and that are not overhead and let’s also remember that when we’re talking about overhead, there are two subsets of that in particular, one is fund-raising and the other is administrative, and there was some important differences between those things, and as we’ve been talking about the importance of overhead, a lot of what we’ve been talking about is especially in the area of the administrative, the infrastructure jacob can mentions the fund-raising overhead is there a another? This is another question i got from a couple of listeners about the cost of raising a dollar that phrase, the cost of a dollar raising the dollar, any any guidance around that? What can we what can we offer charities? Well, so you know, i would say this distinction is is an essential one, um, and that when we talk about investing in yourself and investing in training or strategy or internal systems, that really falls into this category of administrative overhead and that’s something that in general, i’m very sympathetic when an organization says we need to invest in ourselves on we need to be able to think in the long run and that ultimately the way that we’re going to maximize effectiveness is by being a strong and effective healthy organization with fund-raising you know, i think that when you look at the cases of fraud, which i believe are rare but it’s still important for us to address, they more often fraud and or gross mismanagement, um, they more often fall into the category of fund-raising fraud or front fund-raising mismanagement, i’m not going to offer any sort of a, uh, redline a particular number where it’s, fine, if you’re below and it’s bad, if you’re above because the non-profit sector is simply to divers for that, i will say that, you know, the vast majority of a dollar raised is going teo fund-raising costs, especially when those air outsourced to professional fundraisers, you know, that’s something that to me is not a red flag at least a pink flag is worth exploring, but i also recognize that, you know, philanthropic capital is the fuel of the non-profit sector, and it does cost money to raise money, and we have to defend non-profits ability to invest in their own fund-raising while recognizing that there are those cases where it goes too far, aren’t we have find it interesting? Yeah, that in our evaluations, about forty five percent of the organizations we evaluate failed to meet one arm or of our twenty standards, but only about twelve percent failed to meet because of some financial ratio issue, whether that be fund-raising or administrative. So, you know, we like to help donors appreciate that if you’re just focusing on these overhead numbers, you might be giving to organizations that you wouldn’t give, too, if you knew more about him. So there’s also the flipside of overhead, which is over relying on them, can can lead you to support organizations that you might not want to if you do so, we think that our financial ratios are probably at the right place, given that so few fails to meet those financial ratio stands. Okay, that puts it in perspective. Thank you. All right, let’s, stay with you. We have a question from the council of non-profits in washington d c on twitter. They are build np capacity. Should we still use overhead? Is it so charged a word? Now that we should be using something else instead, well, you know, the word overhead is a generalization, as we’ve just discussed, what we’re really talking about here is where their charity spending a reasonable amount on administration and program and fund-raising and those are the three categories that we use should we continue to use that those three descriptions? Absolutely, because organizations do need to know how much their spending on these particular categories for purposes of comparing their effectiveness in these particular areas, effectiveness isn’t simply program effectiveness, it’s also, you know, making sure your administration is effective and making sure your fund-raising operation is effective, and i don’t think you can do that without keeping score financially to go along with what you’re doing. From programmatic jacob question from jean takagi who’s, our legal contributor and on twitter he’s at g tak wonders, why did it take so long for the overhead myth letter? Um, you know, a fair question, and i’ll i’ll say that, you know, part of it is just the coordination and that you know, the power here it that our three organizations that have some differences have different approaches, sometimes differences of opinion. Came together because we did share a belief that we have the field could move beyond are our focus on on overhead, it just takes a while sometimes to coordinate that across organisations that even as we are friendly there there elements what we do that are in competition with a city with one at the same time, though guidestar, charity navigator and others did sign a similar agreement back in two thousand nine. So we did do this before. I think part of the differences that, you know, you have the damp a lotta phenomenon, and i also think that and jacob and guide star was very instrumental in this, trying to have a way that tangibly the non-profits could actually sign on and be involved and engaged in the process which pulled people in in a way that weren’t wasn’t in that original effort in two thousand nine. Yep. That’s right. Gentlemen, we have to leave it. Okay. Very, very quick. Back-up. Go ahead, jacob. Oh, just that. And the one thing that has that there’s now hope that their new alternatives emerging and that we can begin to fill the vacuum with something else i want to. Thank all three of you, alright, can burger just said, amen. Thank you, taylor president, ceo wise giving alliance. Jacob harold, president, ceo guidestar. Ken berger, president, ceo of charity navigator you confined art on twitter at wise giving. Jacob is at jacob, harold and ken is at ken’s commentary. Gentlemen, thank you very much for being guest. Thank you so much. Thank you, thank you. Been a real pleasure. We take a break, go away for a couple seconds when we come back, tony’s take, too. I want to express some gratitude, and then gene takagi on good overhead, bad overhead. More live listener, love. Stay with us. You’re listening to the talking alternative network, waiting to get in. Duitz nothing buy-in good. Are you suffering from aches and pains? Has traditional medicine let you down? Are you tired of taking toxic medications, then come to the double diamond wellness center and learn how our natural methods can help you to hell? Call us now at to one to seven to one eight, one eight three that’s to one to seven to one eight one eight three or find us on the web at www dot double diamond wellness dot com. We look forward to serving you. Hi, i’m ostomel role, and i’m sloan wainwright, where the host of the new thursday morning show the music power hour. Eleven a m. We’re gonna have fun. Shine the light on all aspects of music and its limitless healing possibilities. We’re gonna invite artists to share their songs and play live will be listening and talking about great music from yesterday to today, so you’re invited to share in our musical conversation. Your ears will be delighted with the sound of music and our voices. Join austin and sloan live thursdays at eleven a. M on talking alternative dot com. You’re listening to the talking alternative network. Buy-in hi, i’m bill mcginley, president, ceo of the association for healthcare philanthropy. And you’re listening to tony martignetti non-profit radio. Big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. Oppcoll got more live listener love, rocklin, california, brooklyn, new york, clinton, maryland, dallas, texas live listener loved to you let’s, go abroad. We’ve got seoul, korea, seoul so so loyal. Such always someone at least one of a couple of today from seoul. Thank you very much for listening on your haserot and chongqing, china usually have more from china, but only one today. Chung ching, china ni hao, time for tony’s. Take two and i want to use this time to just thank you very much for listening. I am grateful for your support of the show. I’m in your ear right now and i thank you for that. Radio is a very personal, maybe even intimate medium, i believe. And i thank you personally for listening and supporting the show. Thank you very much. And that is tony’s. Take two. Just my gratitude for friday, the sixth of august sixth of september. Who writes this copy? Who writes this copy to sixth of august, the thirty sixth show of the year. Jean takagi he’s, the principal of neo the non-profit and exempt organizations law group in san francisco he edits the popular non-profit law blogged dot com and as i said earlier, i’ll give him another shot out on twitter. He’s at g tak welcome back, jean tony, how are you? I’m terrific. What was what was your take on that conversation? You know, i thought it was really interesting. Tony, i really appreciate the fact that the three of the signers of the overhead myth better came onto this show and we’re willing to discuss discuss that issue. I think it’s a really important one to recognize. Excellent. And i was grateful as well it was. And that was the first time i ask can off mike that’s the first time that the three even have been together in a live for him like this. The only other time was answering a newspaper. Reporters questions and, you know, newspaper is a secondary medium to radio, of course. So very glad to be the first time that they were all three together. Live s o. You have some thoughts on good overhead, bad overhead. I got some questions, gene, that really worded differently, but fell into the category of this. How do we decide what is appropriate? Yeah, i think. That’s a great question. Tony and it’s. Difficult. To answer because it’s so specific tio the organizations in the circumstances that may be applicable to that organization so it’s hard to make generalities. Which is the whole reason why it’s hard tto rate charities based on their overhead. But i think we can, you know, lissome general principles of what might be good overhead and what might be problematic. Okay, you have some from categories, then that that we should start with the good, i believe, sure. So i think education is a really good category educating particularly your board of directors so they can understand their responsibilities and how they can best contribute to the organization. I think boards are largely an untapped resource for many charities and investing in educating and engaging them. Figuring out how to best engage report, i think, is really valuable then educating your executive director or ceo. I think that’s so important as well, often times ditigal dd is charged with implementing a plan, and that person may not have the experience or the educational background to do all the things that are required to implement that plan. Perhaps no translating their vision into organizational priorities are setting realistic budget providing. A useful employee feedback, you know, defining and delegating properly assessing organizational needs on dh communicating those two all the stakeholders of the organization, the eighties are charged with doing so much and so many different areas, and they may have tremendous skill and leadership, but they may lack certain certain skills or experience in certain areas, and i think boards have got to make sure that they put into their budget equipping that executive director with the information or consultants or other materials that she or he needs to get the job done. Thiss ah lot of what you’re talking about falls in the category, i think of professional development for the board, for the executive officer on that would also trickle down to the staff as well. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, i call it education rather than professional development, because professional development sometimes seems like a benefit that you’re giving out to your to your employees. And i think these air just crucial investments, both in making sure that you’re properly equipping your organs, you know, perhaps you’re your most important organizational asset, which people, um and also in terms of just, you know, making sure that you’re going to retain the best people if you’re not educating them, retention is going to be a big challenge, all right? What’s another category of what you deem acceptable and an appropriate overhead expense stop purposes by saying i am a lawyer, chun hee’s. I’m bringing that perspective into this and and others will have other perspective to offer. All right, jeez, what’s coming boy, go ahead regularly at the morris with for me as a lawyer, making sure that you’ve got the right policies in place is really important. I think sound policies can improve on organization’s operations, can help prevent really costly mistakes and keep in organizationally a new organization legally compliant, which can be valuable in so many ways. So that would the expense aside from time to time to create policy and then have it approved by the board, might involve consultants in areas that the organization’s lacking expertise? Yeah, absolutely so anywhere from an auditor, regardless of whether you’re require an audit or not under under laws, maybe an audit or financial review, khun raise cem cem, sufficient information or materials for the board or the executive to consider an internal control policy. Financial management policies getting other consultants involved or lawyers to deal with conflict of interest, document retention, whistleblower issues figuring out what type of gifts are ok to take and which ones are not ok to take. Most organizations don’t have gift acceptance policies and that’s something that they should look into, and i think you’re going to raise maybe an issue of expense reimbursement later on and that’s another good policy to have to make sure that everybody’s on the same page well, okay, around that you and you and i have talked about a lot of these policies in the past, in detail, so around that expense reimbursement there was there’s, an interesting case, a to college, a college president who spent one hundred forty thousand dollars on a trip to china, and it is justifying it. Could i don’t remember the name of the college. I don’t do you? Yeah. It’s, westfield state university and their president was abin da bao. Okay, he’s he’s. So that expense, among other things, it’s. Not just that expense, but among other things. But that one caught my eye because it’s on its face, it would seem so outrageous. But there’s things. We don’t know, like how many people were there and, uh what? What the outcomes were i mean, that could be a justifiable expense, that kind of money for a trip it was to china. I’m pretty sure yeah, absolutely. So i don’t know enough about it to really comment on it any more than to say that, yes, on its face, it can look like it’s going to be difficult to justify expense, but that’s, as it was characterized by the media on dh i don’t know that we have all the information or if the media has sametz displayed, you know, the information that would raise sort of public outcry where otherwise it might be kind of boring to know what justifications there were for such an expenditure. Perhaps there were good reasons teo increase the amount of revenues that coming from from china, or support or toe otherwise in attract students from from there, if that was indeed one of the goals, i think there’s more that needs to be learned about this before criticizing it, and the board or the executive committee of that board had requested and risk steve thirty page audit, i believe, and i think they’re going to need to go through that pretty court carefully. It just raises the point that it’s really without all the facts, as you’re saying, it’s really impossible to know whether one hundred forty thousand dollars for a trip to china or fifteen percent spent on program in a year or are more vice versa in a year is appropriate. You just if you just can’t draw these lines the way one of the ceos i think it was jacob, harold said, you know, and we were talking about i was talking to those guys you just can’t know and be so precise with dollar amounts and percentages, yeah, in some ways are in many ways i would say that st tony, i guess there are the exceptions and aren’t there are always exceptions, but if a charity that’s focused on poverty relief is paying for, you know, first class entertainment, first class flights to paris toe entertain their staff members for retention purposes. I upleaf that’s bad overhead, but, you know, outside of the really obvious examples, it is sometimes difficult t criticize a charity, but i don’t think we can downplay whether donor-centric tae shins are reasonable or not, if you’re transparent organization and that information is coming out through the media through the charity rating sites through your nine ninety, you’re going to want to make sure that that you’re aware of certain expenses that might catch people’s eyes and turned them the wrong way because of public relations and the goodwill that the charity has is, you know, other other than the people of this that that are supporting the charity, another one of the charity’s most important resources that that goodwill so you don’t want to harm that you want to avoid the perception of a bad expenditure. Yeah, especially if it looks like a blatant rip red flag out there. What’s another category you you have for us in the in the good overhead section. A few risks that you have the right insurance investing in the, er, right technology, kind of another area, i think, in terms of raising the effectiveness and efficiency oven organizations performance even currently, and not just building skills for the future. I think you gotta look at things like technology are using data technology, that’s going to be more expensive, upkeep and that’s creating inefficiencies. In the productivity of your staff for that hinders prevents reasonable expansion will knew technology allows for more effective and efficient ways of advancing the mission, communicating with the donors and supporters, finding new donors, you know, mobilizing advocacy efforts, measuring and analyzing impact. And i think measurement tools is another thing there’s a demand now from from lots of sources about well, if it’s not overhead it’s about, are you creating positive impact? And if that’s the big question out there now what? How our charity is measuring that i think are may have mentioned that a lot of charities, they’re not showing that in their nine nineties, we can’t really determine howto review charities based dahna on impact and part of that is because it’s so hard to measure, but what investments are you making there then? I think the last thing i wanted to mention with building engagement and collaboration collaboration is it was such an important part of being more effective and efficient and taking great ideas to scale where, where it makes sense and that all costs money, and if you’re going to label that is overhead and then i think you have to make sure that you’re putting your money in the right place. One of those questions that i read from a listener was, you know, he’s overhead, a jaded term now. But, you know, maybe i’m probably doesn’t really matter what the term is, but investment is something that i think that sounds more positive than overhead, and it seems to fall into. I think it sort of captures a lot of what you’re talking about in terms of engagement. You know, in investing in people and maybe joint ventures and things like that, we have to go away for a couple seconds. Jean, of course, will stay with us, and we keep talking about good overhead, bad overhead. Got a little more live listener, love, stay with us. You’re listening to the talking alternative network. Oppcoll are you stuck in your business or career trying to take your business to the next level, and it keeps hitting a wall? This is sam liebowitz, the conscious consultant. I will help you get to the root cause of your abundance issues and help move you forward in your life. Call me now and let’s. Create the future you dream of. Two, one, two, seven, two, one, eight, one, eight, three, that’s to one to seven to one, eight one eight three. The conscious consultant helping conscious people. Be better business people. Have you ever considered consulting a road map when you feel you need help getting to your destination when the normal path seems blocked? A little help can come in handy when choosing an alternate route. Your natal chart is a map of your potentials. It addresses relationships, finance, business, health and, above all, creativity. Current planetary cycles can either support or challenge your objectives. I’m montgomery taylor. If you would like to explore the help of a private astrological reading, please contact me at monte at monty taylor dot. Com let’s monte m o nt y at monty taylor dot com. Talking alternative radio twenty four hours a day. No. Got more live listener love, vietnam live listener love out to you, warrington uk and mara pole, ukraine live listener left each of you. I’m sorry, we don’t have vietnamese or ukrainian covered in the studio here. We do have japanese, though. Konnichi wa to you, yokosuka! That was terrible. Let me try that again. Yokosuka and osaka i could eat you are gene let’s, let’s move, teo bad overhead some something’s in the fall into that category you think probably are hard to justify. Yeah, there are certain transactions that i think or expenses that they’re going to be more difficult to justify than others think again there they’re going to be exceptions to some of these, but generally speaking, if you’ve got transactions that appeared to benefit insiders like boardmember zehr officers mohr than the charity’s intended beneficiaries, those are going to be difficult to justify, and you’re going to want to think carefully about whether you should make those expenses and then whether they’re really of reasonable advantage to the organization if that was to come out in the open. So those are one type extravagant expenses way before we before we moved to benefit another if that one hundred forty thousand dollars china trip is really resulting in very trivial benefits and never with the expectation of muchmore benefits to accrue to the organization but was really about sort of making sure that a president or ceo was traveling on a very enjoyable trip. That’s compensation, that’s that’s not that’s, not an organizational expense that that it’s going to be easy toe to justify in and of itself, and finally appears, you know, having significant expenses on furthering some other cause other than your mission other than your state admissions, then that may be a problematic expenses well, and that may be a violation of your duty. Teo ensure that the charitable, recent sources are used for that particular mission. So if you’re an organization with a mission to improve the lives of children with leukemia, you shouldn’t spend significant amounts of the charity’s money tto help disaster victims in the local community, even if that’s a wonderful cause because that’s not your mission, you mentioned the insider transactions, and one of the policies that were supposed to have when we were talking about good overhead was was conflict of interest policies, but that is not. Supposed to deal with the the insider transactions? Yeah, in part it does, but we can. We can have work transactions that are going to pass the legal requirements of conflict of trance. Interest transactions are not necessarily bad if a director or boardmember is offering an organization rent and one of you know his or her office spaces and that’s slightly below fair market value or nor more than fair market value, that might actually be the best deal for the organization to take. And that deal might be fine. But on the other hand, if you had other choices that were equally viable and it looks like you’re benefiting one ofyou, directors air, doing him or her a favor by renting out when it their offices and that can be problematic, and then you want to you want to factor that into the decision for that particular transaction. You have some thoughts about fund-raising expenses and how they may or may not be good or bad, excessive or or appropriate. Yeah. And there again, it’s it’s really about the care and the diligence at the board and the executive are exercising in determining what is an appropriate amount. To spend on fund-raising expenses and what is to be gained out of it sometimes you know fund-raising expenses are going to be expensive, and if you’re building a new campaign and intending to raise a lot of money, you may have to invest a lot in that to get the right people there. Tio use the right strategies for marketing, but again, you’ve got a sort of manage both what your needs are and what your donors and the public’s expectations are. Well, yeah, it’s a tricky area that’s very hard, though, because the public’s expectations air being set by thie overhead myth misconception, for instance, and what and what they do see some charities publicizing the way i think it was jacob harold, you know, said hey didn’t use the fund-raising expense example, he used the overhead ratio example, but those don’t expectations are very hard to two teo to manage well, impossible to manage their very hard to know sometimes, yeah, i think one of the questions that that has been raised on twitter around the show as well with what you know are the signatory to the overhead midst letter going to do about changing don’t expectations, and i think they’ve got limited power to do it. I mean, it’s, great to shut some sunlight on this issue, but, you know, your donors are your donors on dh you’ve got no, you know, here’s, another overhead expense that you should be spending on is educating your donors about why you’re spending the way you are on if you can tell them exactly what you’re doing and be open with it, hopefully that’s going to justify it for your particular backs of circumstances, but you can’t just simply, you know, expect donors to understand it very, very high overhead ratio initially, uh, let you know, let them figure out for themselves that it’s going to actually result in better impact and lower overhead ratios in the future. You know, companies deal with this, you know, expectations. I said it’s, impossible to manage, not manage, but i don’t know, maybe i’m splitting hairs here, but persuade mean over time, and it does take time, and it does take money. People’s perceptions do change. I mean, look, a tte political candidates who are disgraced and then, you know, win win congressional offices or running for mayor or something on dh, you know, and have a good chance of succeeding. Look at, you know, your own your governor in california, for instance, people perceptions about people can change perceptions about companies can change. Weii just have about a minute left. I mean, it can be done, but it’s a very long and i think expensive process. Yeah, i absolutely agree. And i think it is important for platforms like like this and be open the overhead mid letter and and your show, uh, tony, for people to understand, you know, overhead averages about twenty five percent across all industries in the for-profit world and thirty four percent across service industries, at least according to one major study and a lot of non-profits are scared at anything that approaches over twenty percent and, you know, maybe that’s not right. And sometimes you need the initial overhead expense to build infrastructure uh, before you move on to more efficient systems, and that means your overhead, rachel is going to be bigger as well. So educating more and more people about this through through the media, through other platforms, but also on the organizational level really, really important. Durney martignetti non-profit radio we’re trying to be the change that we want to see in the world jean takagi is principal of neo in san francisco non-profit and exempt organizations law group. You’ll find his blawg at non-profit law block dot com, and you’ll find him on twitter at g tak jean, thank you very much, as always. Thanks, tony, my pleasure. Next week, scott koegler returns he’s, our tech contributor and the editor of non-profit technology news. We’re going to talk about internal versus external social media and communications tools and platforms very much want to thank my three ceo guess the three tenors, i don’t know there were the they were like the three tenors. I don’t know which one would be pavarotti, who were the other three placido domingo and i put it in janice ah, former opera singer on the spot she can’t name the third just she can’t name the third she will as soon as we sign off, i know i’m i’m sorry, janice, if you like this show, then you’ll like my podcast, which i do for the chronicle of philanthropy. It is fund-raising fundamentals it’s monthly and it’s ten minutes each podcast and it’s on the chronicle of philanthropy website and itunes have some more lingering live listener love that io, doylestown, pennsylvania. Bethpage, new york. Port. Charlotte, florida. And tokyo, japan live listener love to all of you. Our creative producer is claire meyerhoff. Gemma’s taylor is today’s line producer. The show’s social media is by deborah askanase of community organizer two point oh, and the remote producer of tony martignetti non-profit radio is john federico of the new rules i’m loving this new music. What do you think you could tell me on the facebook page? What you think of the new music? I hope you’ll be with us next friday, one to two p, m eastern. Talking alternative broadcasting at talking alternative dot com. Duitz e-giving didn’t think the shooting. Good ending. You’re listening to the talking alternate network, waiting to get you thinking. Cubine are you a female entrepreneur? Ready to break through? Join us at sixty body sassy sol, where women are empowered to ask one received what they truly want in love, life and business. Tune in thursday, said noon eastern time to learn tips and juicy secrets from inspiring women and men who, there to define their success, get inspired, stay motivated and defying your version of giant success with sexy body sake. Sold every thursday ad. Men in new york times on talking alternative dot com. Are you suffering from aches and pains? Has traditional medicine let you down? Are you tired of taking toxic medications, then come to the double diamond wellness center and learn how our natural methods can help you to hell? Call us now at to one to seven to one eight, one eight three that’s to one to seven to one eight one eight three or find us on the web at www dot double diamond wellness dot com. We look forward to serving you. You’re listening to talking alternative network at www dot talking alternative dot com, now broadcasting twenty four hours a day. This is tony martignetti athlete named host of tony martignetti non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent technology fund-raising compliance, social media, small and medium non-profits have needs in all these areas. My guests are expert in all these areas and mohr. 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