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Nonprofit Radio for June 10, 2024: Future-Proof Your Nonprofit With Apps, Tools & Tactics

 

Jason Shim & Meico Marquette Whitlock: Future-Proof Your Nonprofit With Apps, Tools & Tactics

Jason Shim and Meico Marquette Whitlock return from the 2024 Nonprofit Technology Conference, with their annual collection of tech to help you manage your tech. From collaboration to inbox management, from transcription to hidden Zoom tools, this panel will help you find greater balance and efficiency. Jason is at the Canadian Centre for Nonprofit Digital Resilience and Meico is The Mindful Techie.

 

 

 

 

 

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Hello and welcome to Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio. Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. I am your aptly named host and the pod father of your favorite abdominal podcast. Oh, I’m glad you’re with us. I’d suffer with Jejune. Oily, JJ June. Well, uh JJ June, Jun Ol, did you know I, I did you know ill. Did you know? I welcome to Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio. Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. I’m your aptly named host and the pod father of your favorite abdominal podcast. Oh, I’m glad you’re with us. I’d suffer with Je Juno iliitis if I had to digest the idea that you missed this week’s show. But first we have a listener of the week, Sharry Smith or it could be Chary. It’s either Cherry or Sherry. I’m gonna say Sherry, but it could be Cherry Sharri Smith from Portland, Oregon. Sharri gave us a shout out on linkedin when she was listing her favorite podcasts for nonprofits, Shari Shari Shari Shari. Thank you. Thank you very much for doing that. Uh You had a couple of other podcasts listed. Um Yeah, they, they’re, they’re good, you know, II, I know them. Uh hm. Ok. They’re good. But nonprofit radio is on the list. That’s the one that’s the one you want. So Sharry Cherry, thank you very much listener of the week this week. Thank you so much, Sherry. Here’s our associate producer, Kate with what’s going on this week? Hey, Tony, congratulations, Sherry. This week we have future proof your nonprofit with apps, tools and tactics. Jason Shim and Miko Marquette Whitlock return from the 2024 nonprofit technology conference with their annual collection of tech to help you manage your tech from collaboration to inbox management, from transcription to Hidden Zoom tools. This panel will help you find greater balance and efficiency. Jason is at the Canadian Center for nonprofit Digital Resilience and Miko is the mindful techie on Tony’s take two chatty gym guy were sponsored by virtuous. Virtuous, gives you the nonprofit CRM fundraising volunteer and marketing tools. You need to create more responsive donor experiences and grow, giving, virtuous.org and by donor box, outdated donation forms blocking your supporters, generosity, donor box, fast, flexible and friendly fundraising forms for your nonprofit donor box.org. Here is Future Proof your nonprofit with apps tools and tactics. It’s a pleasure to welcome back, Jason Sim and Miko Marquette Whitlock to nonprofit radio. Jason is Chief Digital Officer at the Canadian Center for nonprofit digital resilience. How can we harness technology to make a difference in the world? That’s the question. Jason loves to explore with organizations. He’s on linkedin and the center is at CCNDR dot C A Miko Marquette Whitlock is the mindful techie. He’s a workplace well being strategist who helps mission driven professionals prioritize their well being so they can elevate their well doing. He’s also on linkedin and his practice is at Mindful techie.com, Jason and Miko. Welcome back to Nonprofit Radio. Thanks for having us for having us. This is a tradition. Uh We, we didn’t get to talk at the nonprofit technology conference proper, but uh we’re, we’re, we’re filling in now uh with your annual sort of review of apps techs and uh uh apps, apps uh tools and tactics. And it’s actually quite appropriate, I believe because we’re recording on uh May 1st. It’s May Day in much of the world, not celebrated so much in the US and Canada uh celebrating uh labor organizing and labor rights. However, in the US and Canada, nonprofit workers certainly uh have a right to the apps, tools and tactics that will make their work more balanced and productive. So I’m sure you agree, you both agree with that, right? We can come to terms on that. So, so why don’t we proceed? Uh Let’s go alphabetically by uh first name. So Jason, uh you go first, you get to introduce the first uh apps tools and, and tactic. Yeah. So thank you, Tony. Uh So before we jump into the, the tools, I think uh you know, 11 thing that we definitely, you know, keep in mind when talking about tools is, you know, the concept of tiny gains. And so, you know, having um the uh kind of perspective that, you know, uh one to the power of 365 is one, but 1.01 to the power of 365 is 37.7. And so, you know, that that notion of improving bit by bit, you know, 1% each day is kind of how we look at these tools that, you know, it’s not going to be, you know, uh you know, one tool isn’t necessarily going to solve all the things. But, you know, we’re going to be sharing uh various tools that can, you know, help kind of nudge things, you know, 1% at a time, you know, in that regard. So the incremental growth is uh is valuable, of course. Yeah, totally. So, so you know what the first tool that we want to highlight for folks is that it’s, it’s a tool that is actually built into uh Microsoft Word already. But uh um folks may not necessarily be aware of it in as much detail. Um And that’s that, that there’s actually a built in transcription tool, right in Microsoft Word. And so you can actually um uh when you find a little microphone icon on it that you can dictate directly into word, but you can also upload files uh into it. And so that, that’s a feature that’s not as well known uh that you can upload up to five hours per month per user inter software for automated transcription that is bundled in uh with your uh word online. And where is this microphone found? Maybe I’ve seen it 1000 times. I just haven’t noticed it. Where, where do we find the microphone? So typically it’ll be in the menu bar in the uh the, the top right hand corner uh of uh of Microsoft Word online. So if you’re accessing it in the browser, uh it should be in the top right hand uh uh section. OK. We had a session uh uh uh a panel at uh at NTC about tools that you already have that you may very well not be using. And they covered uh all of the office, office 365 has a lots of, lots of value in there that, that people don’t know about. And also Google, a lot of very uh free Google tools. Um Yeah, we, we, they focused on Microsoft 365 and, and Google. Um interesting, you know, they had like a dozen things that, that are, that you’re already paying for or getting for free and you’re just not, you, you just don’t know that they’re there, they’re hidden. So, OK. So consistent with that is the uh the transcription tool. OK. So up to five hours, you said up to five hours a month. Yes. And it’s, it’s super handy if you’re doing, you know, things like uh interviews or if you’re doing um uh uh yeah, the meeting notes, you know, those types of things, you know, some other tools already have, you know, the transcription part built in. But in the specific, you know, use case where, you know, you may be doing, uh say uh a program interview or something like that, that this is an additional functionality that’s uh that’s in there. So you’re uploading the audio file. Yes. All right. Interesting. I know, I know a guy who does a podcast. Uh II I believe he already has a transcription process in place. But uh I have to re evaluate because uh maybe this is, maybe this one is simpler. Uh And I don’t know if he’s paying for the uh that transcription process. I, I can’t recall what he’s, what he’s been doing for the past several years around transcription. But uh I’ll have him look into it. Miko. Welcome back, Miko. Good to see you. Good to see you. Thanks for having me. My pleasure. Congratulations. Also on your new book, uh which you and I will be talking about in a couple of weeks. We’ll, we’ll get you back on exclusively for uh how to thrive when work doesn’t love you back. Thank you. I appreciate it. Yes, I know you and I will be talking in a couple of weeks. Um What’s next? What’s next on our uh hit parade of uh apps, tools and tactics. Well, so if you want to stick on the theme of things that people aren’t using, I would add Zoom to this category. And if I could, I wanna walk through just a few things that I think are pretty interesting in terms of developments with, with Zoom. So similar to Microsoft Office and Google workspace. Um Zoom is one of those platforms or tools that many organizations are using. Many folks have at least a basic paid subscription at the organizational level. And um these are tools that are constantly evolving. And so sometimes because we’re using them all the time, we’re not aware that there are certain features that have been added. Um So I’ll, I’ll share, I’ll just go through these really quickly. So the first is for lots of organizations, you know, it’s important that when people are identifying themselves, important, people identify pronouns. And so one of the ways people have been doing that is they modify the name in the way that that shows up and they add their pronouns. Uh But now for folks that didn’t know Zoom actually has a dedicated pronoun field, so you don’t have to do that. So um if your administrator has enabled this in the web-based um login for Zoom, um You can set that by default for your, for your own profile. Um And you don’t have to update your name when you pop into zoom to do that. It’ll your, your pronouns will appear automatically. So I think that’s one cool feature um where, where that’s appropriate and where that uh makes sense for folks to, to look into that uh another option. And this is about accessibility. This is also about making sure that um we recognize that people learn and process differently. And so you and I are talking uh we’re able to see each other um Right now as we’re recording this interview. Uh But for some folks, maybe they process differently and they actually need to be able to see the, the captioning, they maybe need to see some form of a transcript to be able to follow along and process information. And so for that, there is automated captioning that is built into zoom. Now, it’s not 100% perfect, but it’s there. Um It’s uh essentially computer generated captioning. Um There are a lot of languages that are covered by default in your basic paid description and similar to the pronouns field, your administrator or whoever is managing your Zoom account for your organization and log into the web based portal and enable this feature if it’s not already uh enabled. And what this allows folks to do is if someone is in a meeting um and they need access to um to, to close captioning that particular individual can enable that um for themselves. And for folks who don’t need it, they can leave it turned off or if they’re turned on by default, people can turn it off, uh, completely up to you as the user in terms of what, what you need. Um, I’ll share one final, um, thing and then we’ll toss it back to you, Tony. So one final thing that I think is pretty cool. So, uh, you know, many of us have probably seen like the news, um, where they’re doing the weather report and you have this, this person standing in front of a screen and they’re pointing here and they’re pointing there generally, what’s happening is this person is standing in front of a, a green screen and their technical team is projecting the images. So it looks like this person is actually pointing to a map of where you know, fill in the blank wherever you are, right? Well, you can actually simulate that when you’re presenting. So many of us are used to traditional screen share where you share your slides or you share your screen and then a box if you appear in a different place in zoom, but you can also share your screen in such a way that you are overlaid on top of your slides so that you have that weather man or weather person effect as well. Um Now the caveat here is you have to be aware of how this is showing up your lighting. In some cases, you might actually need to have a green screen in order for this to be effective. And it’s gonna require you to format your slides or your presentation a bit differently because obviously you’re taking up now a slice of the screen in addition to the content that you have on the slides. But a really interesting way to create a different type of experience um for folks that, you know, you are meeting with um or doing a webinar with, I think you can have some fun with that. Uh Like at the beginning of a webinar, like you’re immersed in your slides, you know, I’m, I’m surrounded by my valuable content. Uh you know, you could have, but I don’t know, can you uh can you control where you are or how much of the frame you get in proportion to your slides behind you or whatever, whatever the content is, I guess let’s just use slides. Yeah. So you like, I’ll be in the lower left so that you would make format your slides so that the lower left is always blank and you can do it that way you choose where you would have to test this out and, and, and, and try it out. So there are some limited features that allow you to do this directly into zoom. Um The other which is thinking about physically positioning yourself in reference to the camera. So you think about where you’re going to physically be and try that out, test it out for yourself. The final thing I’ll say is there are third party tools that work with Zoom that do this better. But nonetheless, I just wanted to point out that Zoom does have this built in feature for folks that at a basic level that want to try it out and have some fun with it. OK? So that’s the uh so pronouns can be uh automated, automatically populated, you don’t have to go and change your screen name. Um There’s the automated captioning and then the what is this, this background feature called? It’s called, it’s called set powerpoint as virtual background. OK. It’s aptly named, said powerpoint as virtual background. All right. Um Are you guys familiar with or, or recommending any zoom alternatives? I mean, there’s, I know there’s teams, of course, uh although most people iii I don’t know, 95% of the meetings I’m in are on Zoom. Uh Are you, are either of you finding alternatives to zoom for any, for any reason or, or something that other folks are using? That’s valuable. So what, what comes to mind is uh well, this isn’t necessarily an alternative to zoom for the video conferencing itself. Uh There, there is a tool called the O BS uh that if folks are looking for advanced uh video streaming capabilities, uh that uh O BS actually sits as an additional layer to your video feed so that you can further customize some of the green screen effects or being able to move um yourself uh uh into a corner, you know, like uh like Miko described, but it uh it gives a ton of functionality as well and it kind of sits as in um sits in between your video feed and something like Zoom or Teams or Google Meet and allows you to, you know, do all sorts of things like you could um the directly do like a picture in picture, you know, type thing if you want to do like an advanced video broadcast. So O BS is used quite a bit by uh uh streamers and such. But that, that’s uh uh definitely a tool that uh if folks are looking to explore uh for some more advanced functionality, uh it’s called uh O BS and it’s uh uh available and free. Oh OK. Cool and live streaming, live streaming. Yes. Yeah. Not just for live streaming. It’s also like if we’re on a Zoom call, that isn’t necessarily be live stream that you can activate it and it will uh you know, it will help you control, you know, some of the outputs of your video feed that way. So yeah, O BS stands for open broadcaster software. So essentially go to build on what they are sharing. So going back to the example of the weather person, if you wanted to create a highly produced and polished uh you know, presence that doesn’t look like a typical, you know, zoom or uh teams meeting um screen or presentation, you could add lower thirds, you can change a ho there are just so, so many different cool things that you can do using what Jason was was saying. Um And to pick up on, you know, your original question around alternatives. So to my, in my awareness, um you know, the Zoom, there’s Google Meet and teams I think are probably the top three and there’s, there’s a good reason for that, you know, there’s, there’s broad compatibility across um platforms and devices. Um And there’s, you know, some built in trust there that organizations have in terms of those, those big three. that, that said, I think it’s also a good point to make in terms of thinking about when we think about the expansion of tools we don’t have to use necessarily the the latest and greatest. Everything doesn’t have to be high tech, right? Everything there, there’s a, there’s room for mid tech and low tech and when it comes to meetings and collaboration, sometimes we forget what happened when we didn’t have these tools, right? We picked up the phone, we, we met in person. Um we had conference lines where people called in and we, we couldn’t have seen each other. You know, when I first started working in the tech space, I work with colleagues and manage teams that of people that I actually never met in person. And, you know, we would have phone calls and conference conference line um conversations and meetings. And that was the the primary way that we communicated and collaborated. And we’re seeing that in terms of digital wellness, there’s actually a benefit to that, right? Because we’re spending too much time in front of our screens. There’s research that shows that it increases, you know, cortisol levels and increases stress levels. And over time, too many of those back to back video mediated types of collaboration actually reduce engagement, reduce productivity. Um And actually, in some cases can be counterproductive. So we wanna be able to find that balance and also recognize that, hey, depending on what your intention is, what your outcome that you’re trying to get to sometimes just having an old fashioned phone call or working asynchronously um can be just as effective or sometimes more effective to get to where it is that you’re trying to go. Thank you for that. That, that’s a valuable reminder. Uh Yeah, because you can feel like, you know, unlike an in person meeting with, with many people, several people, you know, you can feel like you’re being stared at uh or, you know, you’re not, but people are looking at their screen, they’re not necessarily looking at you, but it looks to you like everybody’s looking at you and uh I can see why that interesting that cortisol levels rise like by the after a few hours of this, I guess or. Absolutely. And, and what you just described is a very real phenomena. So part of it is um the self view, right? You seeing yourself on screen and being self conscious about that and you can turn this off in zoom. So this is another feature you can you can turn off self view. So if you click on the three dots on your particular image, there’s an option that should be allowing you to turn off your self view if that’s an issue. Um The other thing, others are still so others are still seeing you. So you’re not, you’re not stopping your video, but uh you’re stopping your own self view. OK? And uh one final consideration here is that there’s, there’s research from Stanford University that actually shows that um this particular phenomena that you just talked about is, is compounded for women. Uh because we have different expectations about how women are presentable and show up on screen. And oftentimes there’s this um un assessed costs that we, you know, we just take for granted that that in some cases, women have to do more work in order to be what we think, what we deem of as presentable, right? So if you’re requiring folks to be on camera all the time, that sometimes is one of the the side effects if you’re not aware of that. Excellent. Yeah, valuable reminders. Thank you. It’s time for a break. Virtuous is a software company committed to helping nonprofits grow generosity. Virtuous believes that generosity has the power to create profound change in the world and in the heart of the giver. It’s their mission to move the Needle on global generosity by helping nonprofits better connect with and inspire their givers. Responsive. Fundraising puts the donor at the center of fundraising and gross giving through personalized donor journeys that respond to the needs of each individual. Virtuous is the only responsive nonprofit CRM designed to help you build deeper relationships with every donor at scale. Virtuous gives you the nonprofit CRM, fundraising, volunteer marketing and automation tools. You need to create responsive experiences that build trust and grow impact, virtuous.org. Now back to future proof your nonprofit with apps tools and tactics. Jason, you have, you have something else for us. I know you do. That’s a rhetorical question. When I’m talking to me and Jason, we can go on for hours. It’s purely rhetorical question. Absolutely. So, uh the next step is, uh you know, along the lines of we talked about transcription earlier is uh some of the text to speech tools. So they’ve developed quite a bit in the last few years. And you know, the there’s a few that are out there that I’ll rhyme off, you know, Natural Reader 11 labs. And uh nr and so, uh in particular, um I’ve used Naet before and it’s super helpful when you need to record uh voice greetings. Um And if anyone’s ever experienced, you know, having to record a voice greeting and say like for a voicemail and you have to do like 20 some odd takes to do it that, you know, something like Naki can, can help streamline that. Now the, the special thing is that they have a lot of uh voice models that are available in different languages as well. So it really nails uh some of the uh the accents around the world as well. So, you know, uh given that I live in Canada that when recording, um some of the uh greetings for an organization that it uh uh it needs to be delivered in English and Canadian French. And they have specifically Canadian French models as well as many other language models uh uh for the, the text of speech so that we’re able to provide a script in both English and French and that it’ll read it off and, you know, you’re able to get it in one take rather than having to do, you know, 10 or 20 takes or trying to get multiple people to coordinate around the recording of that. So that’s an example of a tool that can help streamline uh in that regard. And, you know, there’s many other, you know, potential use cases that one was called is called N Yes, like parakeet with an N N and also natural reader and 11 laps. Sorry. What’s the last one? 11 labs? 11 labs. Yeah, and similar to the, uh you know, text speech and also uh editing you know, audio files and text uh is uh there’s a few different tools that, that do this, but the one that I, I’ll name specifically, um you know, with this functionality is a descript. Uh So descript is a tool that can help with things like uh let’s say if you have a transcript, um we have an audio file that you’ve uploaded to uh to descript is that they can do filler word removal. So, what it does is that it imports an audio file and then it produces a transcript for you and you can edit it like a word document and it’ll detect things like if you say, um ah and it’ll, uh it can automatically help you remove some of that. So, you know, let’s say if you added a few extra words and you’re speaking and you can edit the text that is uh in descript and it’ll automatically remove it from the audio file. Uh So, uh it without having to, you know, uh splice the audio file itself and looking at the waveforms that you can do it as uh edit the transcript and it’ll give you a clean audio file afterwards. That to me is, that’s incredible that you can edit it as text and then it, it goes and does the, applies those edits to the audio file? Yeah, it’s good. Uh I, I don’t know. To me that’s amazing. I don’t, I, you know, descript, it’s called D the letter D script. Yes, de D E. Yeah. And there’s additional functionality as well uh in, in the script called overdub. So let’s say if you are recording something and you left out a word that overdub can actually fill in the word for you. Uh If you, you trained a voice model to do it. So let’s say, you know, if I intended to say um you know, an extra word or a phrase or something that, you know, similarly you can enter in, you know, the word that you intended to say and it’ll uh fill it in for you so that it can uh it sounds seamless uh there. So, you know, for something like a podcast or, you know, whatever other um uh function that, you know, folks may be looking to accomplish there is that it really helps streamline some of the audio editing process rather than having to rerecord an entire section against placing and placing and everything that uh you can uh just, you know, type in the word and it’ll drop it in for you uh in uh your voice. So it learns from the rest of the file, how to pronounce the word or words that you’ve just inserted into the text file. You, you, you, you, you may have to do some training on it where you um Yeah. Uh but it, it does use E I voice cloning to uh to replace some of the uh the audio there. Damn. And, and I’ve used this, so I’ve used it for my podcast. My podcast producer uses this and um it’s, it’s, it’s saved us so much time. And as a matter of fact, Jason was one of the folks that we interviewed for the first season and we use this software to clean up our episode with, with Jason. Yeah, that’s incredible because I do some of that work uh in my own post production. But I’m, I’m using audacity. But like you said, Jason, I’m looking at the wave forms. Uh Anyway, it’s, it’s eminently doable. You just have to make sure you have the right spot and you play it a few times to make sure you have exactly what you want to take out. Uh but it’s not nearly as swift as text editing and, and, and you can’t add unless you go, you know, go record again and then the, the ambient noise is never gonna sound the same as it did on the day you recorded even sitting here at my same studio office, the, the ambient sound is different. Uh Wow, I, I’ll add one more thing in terms of how this works. And so you, Jason is right in terms of being able to edit the transcript. And so let’s just say, using that example, if I thought Jason gave a long, would it answer or maybe Jason said something? And he’s like, oh, well, actually, I don’t want to share that with my employer, can you take this out? Right. We can go in and edit the transcript that way. Uh, and then for the fillers, you can set it so that you don’t have to go in and manually remove the fillers. You can just tell it which fillers you want to remove and it does, it automatically, um, for you. And depending on which uh, subscription level you have, you can fill in, you can do not just fillers, but maybe there are specific keywords that are significant to you and your audience or to how you wanna edit that you want to remove. You can train the software to remove those specific things automatically. Oh, that’s very robust. That’s remarkable. I think uh descript. OK. Cool Miko. What’s next? All right. So I wanna talk about collaboration tools and training tools. So I do a lot of training for organizations, a lot of things I do virtually. And Google Jam Board is a digital um white board that I used. Um And I still use. But unfortunately, um Google is winding down that particular offering. They’re getting rid of it as of this fall. And so I, I wanna talk about a few alternatives for folks that either have been using Google Jam Board um and are looking for alternative white board tools or maybe you haven’t been using white boards and you just want to get, you know, you wanna come to the party, you wanna be a part of the all the fun. So I wanna give you three really quickly. Um The first is Fig Jam. So this is a white board tool by the company fig A uh F I MA is uh in the space think of think of Adobe. For example, uh a lot of designers use their UX tools and, and web developers use their UX tools to design products and design websites. But they have the separate product, Fig Jam, which is specifically for uh white boarding. And one of the ways that I use white boarding tools is if I have people doing exercise where maybe we brainstorming together, you know, we can the same way that you’re in the room in person and you get people stickies and people stick them on the wall or they sort them into different buckets, you can do the same thing, but you can do this essentially virtually. Um And so Fig Jam is one of those tools you have mirror uh which is another tool that’s in this bucket. And I know that the the Intend team actually uses this a lot. I know that when Jason and I served on the board at Intend, um that was a tool that we used a couple of times as part of our collaboration and you know, strategic planning process um to be able to do that virtually. And then the final tool going back to Zoom for a moment um is zoom has a white board feature. So for folks that weren’t aware of that and you’re, you’re not using it. Zoom has a whiteboard feature um and tied to the Zoom also has an annotation feature where you can annotate things on the screen. Um Both as the presenter, you can also have I I in my presentations, I sometimes have questions on the screen or like a scale and I’ll have uh participants use the annotation tool to indicate where they are on a scale. People can write on the screen or in this case, you know, if you want to use the Zoom whiteboard feature, you could do it that way as well. But those are three alternatives to Google Jam boards. Uh So fig jam mirror and Zoom White board and they all allow uh all the participants to contribute to the white board. Yes. And so they, they, they, they, they, they all allow that feature uh with the caveat that um they have the all three have the basic white board functionality, but they also serve, they have some distinct reasons why you might want to use one over the other. So just picking on mirror for an example um from my perspective, mirror has a very steep learning curve. And so as a trainer, I probably would not use mirror in a training where um folks haven’t been together before, they haven’t used a tool before. But if you’re using it over the long term and you’re able to train people on some basic things. So use your team over time. Then mirror is a, is a great tool for that. Um Fig Jam and Zoom white board are a bit more intuitive. And so depending on your audience, you wanna take those things into consideration if you’re using the Zoom whiteboard, which I’ve, I’ve never, I’ve never used. Um Are you just collaborating with your, your, your mouse? Is that how you, is that how you contribute to the whiteboard, your mouse, your stylus or if um I believe there are just like with Google Jam Board, you know, the, the way that Google Jam Board works is, you know, you, you can drag and drop text boxes and type in the boxes. Um And so that, that’s one option as well. Jason, I’m not sure if you have if you have familiarity with this or have other thoughts about the use. Yeah. Iii I believe uh yeah, you folks would drag their mouse and they can type in and uh it has a lot of parallel features to uh to jam board and, and, and neural although lighter for sure on that front. OK. Cool. Right. It’s your turn Jason. Yeah. So the, the next one that comes to mind is uh Minimus launcher. So it’s minimis. And what it is is that it’s an alternative launch screen for your phone. Now it’s uh launched initially in Android. And uh I believe the the iphone version is now out as well. And what it is is that it helps you get control over uh addictive apps. So if folks are finding that, you know, they are um in a loop or cycle of, you know, constantly checking their phone or things, you know, this is one of those apps that can help uh uh make a dent in trying to break that cycle a little bit. And so what it does is that it actually limits and changes uh your initial kind of phone screen uh and gives you a primary access to, you know, the apps that you need for, for work or basic functions. But if you do want to access uh something, you know, like social media um that it will prompt you and ask you, you know, are, are you sure that you would like to do this and you click, you know, yes. And then it will actually prompt you again, like, you know, you’re absolutely sure. And then, you know, you go to another screen and then they’ll say, OK, now give a rationale as to why, you know, you would like to, you know, check your, your social media. So it puts, you know, additional barriers up. Uh and then when you do move through it, it’ll allocate you 15 minutes uh to, you know, time box it so that you’re not necessarily stuck in that loop of, you know, looking down the screen and then you know, looking back up and like, oh my gosh, you know, an hour has passed. Uh so, uh really um uh a tool that can help regulate, you know, some of the uh the, the instincts that, you know, may be triggered around, you know, some of the uh those addictive algorithms that keep on feeding content that, that may keep us hooked to a phone and social media. This is like a uh a mother looking over your shoulder or you know, your own, your own conscience being, being uh awakened. Are you, are you absolutely sure. And then, and then you get a time limit even when you’re absolutely positively 100% sure. You, then there’s still a time limit. Absolutely. That Minimus Minimus launcher. Yes. OK. Cool. These are, these are really fascinating. Um I mean, so there are tools that can help us. We just, you know, we need to be conscious uh Miko, this is right in your right uh right. Aligned with your practice. We just need to be conscious about our uh or intentional and conscious about our desire to be, be uh be more productive, be less distracted. I mean, you know, you, you’re the mindful. Absolutely. I think the underlying thing here, both personally and professionally is uh being clear about what your overall intention is and what is the outcome that you’re driving for. So, being clear about those things is gonna number one help you determine which tools are the best tools for you to use right now. And as I mentioned before, sometimes the latest high tech tool isn’t the best tool. There’s the, there’s the, you know, the the mid tech and low tech also option exactly. Going to the phone. Exactly. So those are options as well. The other consideration is to consider that not only is it intention and clarity about outcome important for the reasons I just stated, but also because you have to remember that particularly for for profit entities, a lot of companies don’t necessarily always have your best interest in mind. What I mean by that is that they have to generate um time on screen. Um They have to sell ads and so their incentive is slightly different. Yes, maybe they want to provide a useful product, but they want you to use that product in a certain way or for a certain amount of time so that they can increase the share of the revenue or profit that they’re making. And so when you are aware of that, um it it becomes easier for you to identify the ways in which you might want to um recapture your time and recapture your attention using something like what um Jason just shared in terms of the Minimus stauncher. It’s time for a break. Donor box open up new cashless in person donation opportunities with donor box live kiosk. The smart way to accept cashless donations anywhere, anytime picture this a cash free on site giving solution that effortlessly collects donations from credit cards, debit cards and digital wallets. No team and member required. Plus your donation data is automatically synced with your donor box account. No manual data entry or errors make giving a bre and focus on what matters your cause. Try donor box live kiosk and revolutionize the way you collect donations. Visit donor box.org to learn more. It’s time for Tony’s take two. Thank you, Kate. In the gym. I like to go to the gym and do my work. I work out on the ellipse elliptical and then I go on the floor. I do a bunch of planks. I have to get some upper body work in. I’m not, I haven’t done that yet. I like to, I like to just get the work done, you know, take my time not rushing, but I like to get through the work. And it’s my uh kind of, you know, it’s my time. Theres a guy I know more about this guy’s life. I’ve learned over the past many months that his wife had a stent when they were on vacation in Florida. Uh And the surgeon said it’s a good thing, you’re not in the Caribbean because the medical care wouldn’t be as good. And you, you, she’d end up with an infection. She had to have a stent. She was have a suffering shortness of breath in Florida. It was, I know where it was, it was Miami. They were in Miami. It’s a good thing. They weren’t in the Caribbean. The surgeon says the guy’s boat, he’s having motor problems with his boat. Now, his boat is leaking oil and he’s got a, you know, this guy with the boat and the, and the, the, the, the wife needs a stent. The boat needs, uh, uh, a repair to the, to the oil line. Um, he went to an air show last week. Uh Cherry Point is a local uh the, well, not that low but it’s within a half an hour or something. It’s a Marine Corps Air station. He went to the Cherry Point Air show. I had over Memorial Day. The, the Blue Angels were there. I heard all about the show, like the guy was narrating the show but he, but he’s not even talking to me. He’s talking to somebody else. But, you know, it’s a community gym. It’s not that big. It’s certainly adequate, but it’s not huge. It’s not a 10,000 square foot gym. So, you know, you overhear people. So I, I hear him, you know, I like I got the narration to the Blue Angels Air show, you know, personalized uh to for us in the gym. So this chatty guy. But are you the chatty guy? Oh, don’t be the chatty person, the guy or gal don’t be the chatty person, you know, I don’t know. I’m not watching who he’s talking to. So, I don’t know if they’re suffering or they’re, they’re maybe just, um, you know, being polite, uh, you know, condescending a little bit but he gets his, he gets his oratory out. I mean, he’s, uh, sh, don’t be the chatty person in the gym to do your work just, you know, it’s nice to say hi. That’s different. But, you know, you don’t need to narrate the air show for everybody who didn’t get to go over Memorial Day weekend and the, and the motor with the, the oil line with the testing and you use a soapy water to, to spray it on the line to find the leak. And I know more about motor boat mechanics now than, uh, uh, than I’ve known in my entire life. I’ve learned in the past couple of weeks. I got, I got a short course in, in, uh, outboard motor maintenance and mechanics and, and troubleshooting chatty guy. Don’t be the chatty person in the gym. Just do your work. Just do your work. That’s Tony’s take two. It’s exhausting. It’s just recounting. It’s exhausting. Eight. You meet some of the funniest people in your gym first with the birthday guy and now with the motor guy. Yeah, Tim. Tim was sad with the birthday. This is a different guy. This is not Tim. Yeah, I don’t know the characters. Well, we’ve got Vuk but loves more time. Let’s return to Future Proof. Your nonprofit with apps. Tools and tactics with Jason Shin and Mikko Whitlock, Mio. I’m gonna ask you about one that, uh you have uh in your email signature. And we, we talked about this, uh I remember either last year or the year before, uh, but it, and I clicked on it as we’ve been, uh, you know, scheduling together, uh inbox when ready. So I’m, I’m, I’m imposing one on you. I know this is not on your list because we, we talked about it a couple of years ago or last year, but please reacquaint us with uh Inbox when ready. Ok. So Inbox prim ready is one of my all time favorite tools. And so I use Gmail. So for folks that are gmail users, this is a free plug in that you can um essentially install into Gmail and this only works on the, the desktop. So I wanna make, make sure people understand that if you’re dogging it from a computer or, or a web browser on a computer. But the idea is that um your inbox is if you’re able to hide your inbox after a certain amount of time or you are able to set it by default. So when you log in your main inbox is hidden, so that you aren’t sucked into the rabbit hole of sort of going down the hole responding to emails when your intention might be something completely different. As an example, maybe I was looking for the, the zoom link for today’s meeting and as opposed to logging in and seeing like, oh, I have, you know, 50 new emails. What if I don’t see any emails and I can just go to the search bar and, and type in Tony, uh you know, zoom link and I get directed directly to that email. I’m more likely to follow through on that and not be, be distracted. Um One of the other interesting things too is that we know from behavior change, being able to see metrics that actually show us, for example, in this case, how long we’ve been engaged in a certain behavior or how long we’ve actually been in our inbox for a day? Sometimes that awareness like, oh my God, I spent, you know, six hours like with my inbox open, that would be quite alarming, I imagine for a lot of people, right? And so those this particular tool allows you to see how much time you’re actually spending in your inbox in Gmail on a web browser. And that can sometimes be a tool that can be a catalyst um to help you shift um behavior if your desire is to actually spend less time um in your inbox. Now, the the the beautiful thing since this tool has come out, both Gmail and uh Microsoft outlook, which are the two, I think I would say most of those are the biggest sort of email providers in terms of the organizational space. Um they have introduced new tools including, you know, the ability to be able to snooze your inbox, you know, to be able to temporarily pause, you know, emails coming in for a certain period of time. And there’s a host of other ways in which you can um you know, manage your time in your inbox. Um that are something that you can use to supplement or to actually replace Inbox when ready. But I’ve been using Inbox when ready for so long. And it’s, it works for me that it is one of my, my go tos the idea of pausing your inbox. I mean, so it seems so simple and, but I never thought of it until you said it. I mean, the there’s just this simple functionality like maybe I just don’t wanna, you know. Uh Yeah, I, I just don’t need to see the incoming messages. Um There’s another simple thing that I, I think it was you guys who shared it with me years ago, which I did, which is just turn off the notifications. The little, well, I use apple mail. So for me, it’s a little, it’s a little red dot red circle that has a number of unread messages in it, just turn that off, just turn that feature off. Just let the email sit there in the in the dock for me. It’s a tool bar for others and you don’t have to be prompted uh that you’ve got 15 unread messages. It’s, it, it’s anxiety producing. Yes. And so one of the things that folks don’t re realize so, and I think um this happens in both the Android and the Apple device ecosystem where when you’re downloading a device or downloading an app, sometimes we’re still in a hurry that we don’t read the pop ups that let us know what’s happening. And so we just click. Yes. Agree. Yes, agree. Yes, agree. Because we want to get to the app. And what happens is generally what’s happening is what you’re saying. Yes to and agreeing to is in addition to sharing all your good data, you’re saying yes to um all the notification, right? Not a badge, the alerts, the badges and so on and so forth, right? And so the particular feature that you’re talking about are the badge notifications. Uh where for it could be for email, it could be for Facebook or Instagram. It shows you not only the app, but it shows you a little red dot on the apple device, for example, oh, you have, you know, 2000 unread Facebook messages or you have, you know, three new likes on, on Instagram and for many people, that’s a source of background stress every time you pick up your phone. And so I recommend for folks that unless there is a compelling reason, like uh like you’re some kind of first responder and you’re doing important work where you have to be, you have to know the minute someone is sending you one of those things because if you don’t, someone’s gonna die for most people. That’s not the case. Right. So, um, turn that off. Turn that shit off. Absolutely. And don’t be, you’re absolutely right. When you download a new app, they ask all those questions. Also. Location, share your location. Why do you have to share your location? Yeah. Right. Google Maps needs my location. That really, that’s about it. My bank does not need my location. I can deposit the check without it knowing what my uh well, you know what my IP address is or what or my, my my coordinates are. Um Yeah, don’t. Right. Mindful, mindful. You’re the mindful techie. That’s right. It’s, you’re aptly named as well. There’s a lot of aptly named things here. Um Yeah. Right. They, when you get the app, you’re anxious to get to the thing, take a breath and read. You know, you don’t, you don’t need all the notifications and alerts. OK. Let’s stick with you since I imposed one on you. Uh I took your, I, I took your uh your, your, your chance. So you had one teed up. Go ahead. All right. So I, I’m gonna share one I think is a favorite for both me and, and Jason so much so that I think we probably share this in virtually every presentation because it’s just such a phenomenal school. So it’s called Toby and it is a browser tab organization uh plug in. Uh That is, I think pretty much cross browser at this point. I know that you can get it in Chrome and Firefox and probably a couple of the other browsers. But the idea here is um you know, we routinely have meetings where, you know, you have to open a gazillion tabs that are relevant to that particular meeting. And for many people, you may be doing that manually. So you have a meeting with Tony and you’re like, OK, I gotta pull up the podcast together. I gotta pull up this, gotta pull up this. And so you’re, you’re, you’re trying to scurry around as the meeting is starting to open up all these different tabs. What uh Toby allows you to do is to essentially create collections of tabs and you just press one button. Um and you, you, it opens all those tabs automatically, right? And one of the interesting things with Toby in comparison to the built in bookmarks and, and mini browsers is that then you can share the collections with your team. So if, if you’re working on it, let’s say, you know, Tony, you have a, a humongous podcast staff and you have a central by set of tabs that you all have opened during your, your planning meetings. You could or someone else on your team could create a Toby collection, share that with everyone and then everyone has the same access to the same collection and it sort of standardized and people didn’t have the ability to create their own collections or customize uh on their own. And so it’s one of those things that it’s one of those going back to what Jason was saying about 1% better, you know, that ability to be able to save those few moments and to save that uh mental stress that we go through at the start of a meeting um adds up tremendously over time. This is another good, yeah, good point you made before to accumulated accumulated like background stress, even the the anxiety of seeing the badge with the 2000 Facebook uh messages unread or something, you know, just uh I didn’t get to, oh I’m so far behind and then, and then it becomes pointless to do it. But the number keeps increasing but you’re so far behind, you may as well let it go, but it’s causing more anxiety, more agita. All right. All right, Toby. So, so that falls under like uh um browser, browser tab management, browser management. OK. Toby Jason. Yeah. So the another tool that want to chat about is uh this may be something that is available for folks that they may not necessarily be using, but they just want to draw it to folks awareness. So, um for those that may already have an 03 65 subscription, you know, through their organization is that uh being copilot um has a commercial data protection uh uh flipped on. And so what that means is that, you know, when, when folks are using, you know, some A I tools that, you know, there, there may be a concern that it is the data is being used to train the model or that, you know, you don’t necessarily know that it’s going to end up, you know, being uh you know, pop up somewhere else, you know, down the road is that uh the, the commercial data protection feature, uh actually uh assures you that it won’t be used for the training of the model and it’ll be contained uh when, when you’re using it. And so, uh if you are using it, you just have to be logged in to your 03 65 account at bing.com/chat and then there’ll be a little green um shield on the top right hand corner that says protected. And so, you know, you’re, you’re able to use that and uh resting assured that, you know, the data that you’re, you’re putting in there isn’t being used to train a language model uh for the folks who are using um the generative A I function. So, uh so what it is is that, you know, it’s uh you know, the similar to things like, you know, GP T or uh you know, Google’s Gemini in that for this particular instance, uh that uh it’s uh the, the little green uh icon in the in the top. Right, assures you that, uh, uh, it, uh, stays contained to your organization. Ok. So it’s like firewalled off from, from, uh, the, the generative A I learning. Mhm. Yeah. And, and as a general tip for, for folks as well as for the other, uh, uh, you know, tools that they may be using around generative A I is, you know, to make sure that you’re checking the settings and the fine print uh that, you know, if you are using, you know, one of the free uh options as well, that there may be uh settings in there to uh turn off the um use the data for training data models uh uh for folks that may uh like to uh be a little bit more secure uh with uh their privacy and what they may be um putting out there. There’s also a concern uh when folks give one of these uh tools, their own data to learn, like, you know, I want you to write a letter to a donor in, in my tone and you, so you upload, you upload to the using in your prompts some of your own letters. And I want it in my tone with, you know, you, you need to be very aware of what you’re, what you’re providing for the learning act because I don’t know that it’s only, it’s keeping, it’s keeping your data only to this conversation, this, this uh this purpose that we’re we’re going back and forth about and whether it uses, it uses that your data that would otherwise be proprietary to you because it’s, it’s your letters, uh for some larger purpose. Absolutely. And that’s something to be aware of when, uh flipping on some of the features in some of these programs where, you know, they, you may be prompted you to flip on an A I feature or, or something, but, you know, in the fine print uh or even not so fine print, you know, it may say something along the line of like, you know, uh this will submit your data to a third party, uh you know, just giving you a heads up, but there’s a lot of additional subtext there where it’s like, OK, well, after it’s submitted to the third party, you know, what happens like is this going to be used to train, you know, the language model, you know, is, you know, this going to pop up, you know, somewhere potentially in the future or is, you know, or is it going to stay contained uh and not used to train the model? So, uh you know, those, those are questions that are worth asking, you know, as um you know, more and more A I features, you know, pop up along the way as well. What what third parties, third party is in the world, I think the broader point that I would make here too. And this is with social media. This is with um anything you post on a website. Um we technology has evolved to a point where essentially there’s a forever memory, right? Even if you take stuff down, it’s still there, still findable. It’s somewhere. Right? And so I always, particularly with younger folks, you know, say, don’t share anything, don’t text anything, don’t post anything on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and Snapchat and tiktok that you would be embarrassed to see on the news, right? If you’re embarrassed to see it on the news, then don’t post it. Don’t, don’t share it very wise, sage, sage advice from the mindful techie. Uh Let’s do uh let’s do one, each 11 more each Miko. All right. So uh we know that the amount of information the V information has continued to increase and it’s virtually impossible for us from a human perspective to keep up with all of that. And so in this case, one of the ways that A I can be very powerful is by actually helping us to summarize, you know, voluminous um documents, videos and so on. And so one of the tools that we shared during our session is uh a plug in for chrome that’s called youtube summary with chat GP T and cloud. So chat GP T and Cloud are both um two different types of um A I tools. And one of the interesting things about this youtube summary with chat GP T and cloud tool is that it allows you to summarize youtube videos, web articles, and PDF documents. And so I don’t know about you, but I don’t have time to watch your two hour training on fill in the blank topic. Maybe I just want, you know, just give me the cliff notes, give me the, the, the bullet points and let me dive deeper on the points that are most relevant to my particular question or my particular curiosity at that moment, this particular tool you just plug in a URL and it gives you a summary um to help you to really focus your time and maybe you decide or determine that, hey baby, this video doesn’t have what I need or maybe it does. I want to look at the last third of this and actually dive a little bit deeper. Um but it can be a powerful tool to save you um lots of time um with particularly with lengthy videos or lengthy documents, say the name of the, the tools again. So this is a long one. So it’s called youtube Summary. It’s all one. Yeah, I’m just reading the title that they gave us. So youtube Summary with Chat GP T and Cloud. OK. Yes. Thank you, Jason. Yeah. The, the, the last one I’ll share is uh it’s more of a mental model and a tool and uh you know, to, to really think about things on a two by two grid. And so the the, the model is called the, it’s also known as the Eisenhower matrix. And so when thinking about, you know, the various tasks that one has to do, and, you know, we, we shared a whole bunch of tools that help, you know, automate and speed up things. But it’s also to look at the tasks themselves and really take a look at, you know, what’s, what’s urgent and what’s important. And so on the two by two grid on one access, um you know, you would have an important and not important and on the on the other access, you would have urgent and not urgent. And ideally, you know, you um you’re spending your time on the not urgent and important things because you know, that’s where you can make, you know, a lot of your long term impact and you know, the things that pop up that are urgent and important, you know, those uh is uh you know, important for you and your organization and when you make short term impact and when you think about, you know, things that are not urgent and not important, you kind of have to ask, you know, well, why are we doing them? And so we want to make sure that these tools aren’t automating things necessarily that, you know, if it’s not urgent and not important, you know, automating but not, not urgent and not important is, you know, spending more time and resources to do things that aren’t important and urgent then you know, those things just need to be eliminated. So those can be thinking of the like the the email inbox is a very good example of non urgent, not important. Most of it obviously there are exceptions but most of email is non urgent and non and non important. Mhm. Yeah. So things like starting to, you know, junk mail, you know, checking through, you know, a lot of, you know, social media, you know, they can be, you know, distractions and time wasters and, and then uh you know, and then the other quadrant being the urgent and not important uh part where, you know, that’s where a lot of the tools can help, you know, automate or help, you know, kind of you’re delegating it out to, you know, the, the tool to help accelerate, you know, some of that and, and so, you know, I think this is a really great conceptual framework to as folks are looking at, you know, their tasks and matching it up to the tools that they’re, they’re using as well. And I know that, you know, Miko speak to, speaks to this, you know, really knowledgeably in his trainings and um around uh how, you know, it can be used effectively and uh I’ll throw it over to Miko as well. Uh uh If there’s any additional things to add on this front. Yeah. So Jason, I, I think you’re spot on, I think that the key here. So in the context of the tech tools that we’re talking about, um we shouldn’t just be using the tools just for the sake of using them. Like you want to be clear about the purpose and at least in terms of the organizational context, and I think it’s critically important as you think about urgent versus important. Also thinking about, you know, what are the resources that we have? What’s the capacity that we have? You know, when I was communicating director, one of the the the the the common pieces of wisdom from some folks when social media was emerging is that oh, you gotta be on all the platforms. Well, that was impossible. We didn’t have the staff of the resources nor did it make sense because our audience wasn’t on all the platforms. So asking yourself the question, what resources do I have? What time and capacity do we have? And you know, what goal are we trying to achieve and what’s good enough for now versus what we can build toward for later or perhaps what we can eliminate all together because it’s simply not relevant, even though everyone else is doing it or the conventional wisdom says we should be doing this or be on this particular uh platform. Um And I think we can apply that to A I right now, right? So um I am of the mind that it’s not an all or nothing, right? Not every organization needs to be using every single type of A I tool out there. Um It’s simply inappropriate in some cases and some cases that actually can be counter productive. So you wanna be clear about what outcome you’re trying to get to. Um And how the tool can support you and help you. Not how the tool can sort of replace you being a critical thinker and that’s, that’s actively involved in the process. Yeah, loss of creativity is, is my biggest concern about artificial intelligence. Use that, that we’re, we, we could see some of the most creative things that we do. Uh And listeners have heard me talk about this with uh we had an A I A couple of A I panels. Um The one, the first one was with um Arua Bruce and George Weiner and Beth Cantor and Alison. Fine. And we kinda uh I aired my uh my concerns there in, in more detail just about giving away the most creative things that we do. And over time us becoming less creative, less creative thinkers, less thoughtful thinkers or less critical thinkers. Um All right. So why don’t we leave it there? And, and Jason, I’m just going to reiterate it’s the Eisenhower Matrix, which I’ve followed for years and I try to think that way, but I don’t, I don’t do it routinely but that, that’s uh that two by two that you were describing is uh the Eisenhower Matrix and you said it, I’m just reiterating it for folks. So that, because it is a, it’s a very, it’s a very sensible way of, of planning. And Miko to your point earlier, uh, you know, it’s, it, it, it’s been around for generations. Old tools can still be valuable. Absolutely. And I, I would offer to your audience, Tony if I’ve reworked this, um, for the mission driven context. And I’ve, and I’ve annotated it. Um, and I’ve, I’ve given sort of a road map of how you work through this in a practical way. So if folks are interested in that, they can email me or, you know, we can give you a link to put in the show notes or however, it makes sense. But folks want access to that annotated version. Ok. The annotated version of the Eisenhower Matrix. Ok. All right. That’s Miko Marquette Whitlock. He’s a mindful techie. You’ll find him on linkedin and his practice is at mindful techie.com. Jason Sim Chief Digital Officer at the Canadian Center for nonprofit digital resilience. He’s also on linkedin and the center is at CCNDR dot C A. Jason Miko. Thank you. Thanks very much. Real pleasure each year. Thank you for sharing. Thank you. Thanks for having us. Next week, we’ll take a hiatus from 24 NTC with Gen Z career challenge. If you missed any part of this weeks show, I beseech you find it at Tony martignetti.com. You’re gonna be interested in the Gen Z you, you’re Gen Z. That’s me, Gen Z career challenge. We’ll see if it holds true for you were sponsored by virtuous. Virtuous gives you the nonprofit CRM fundraising volunteer and marketing tools. You need to create more responsive donor experiences and grow, giving, virtuous.org and by donor box, outdated donation forms blocking your support, generosity. Donor box, fast, flexible and friendly fundraising forms for your nonprofit donor. Box.org. Our creative producer is Claire Meyerhoff. I’m your associate producer, Kate Martignetti. This show, social media is by Susan Chavez. Mark Silverman is our web guy and this music is by Scott Stein. Thank you for that affirmation. Scotty be with us next week for nonprofit radio. Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95% go out and be great.

Nonprofit Radio for June 3, 2024: Your Four-Day Work Week & Intergenerational Communication

 

Vishal Reddy, Karim Bouris & Pattie Carlin: Your Four-Day Work Week

This 2024 Nonprofit Technology Conference panel introduces you to the national campaign for a 32-hour, 4-day work week. They’re the executive director of the campaign, a company that made the switch and a nonprofit that did, too. They’re Vishal Reddy from Work Four, Karim Bouris with Mixte Communications and Pattie Carlin at NTEN.

 

Dr. Lauren Hopkins & Dr. Carla Torrence: Intergenerational Communication

Our panel of two Ph.D.’s discusses common communication challenges in the workplace and shares its strategy for overcoming them. They are Lauren Hopkins from Prepared to Impact and Carla Torrence at i.D.R.E.A.M. for Racial Health Equity. This is also from 24NTC.

 

 

 

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Welcome to Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio. Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. I’m your aptly named host and the pod father of your favorite abdominal podcast. Oh, I’m glad you’re with us. I’d be stricken with trauma Tonia if I had to breathe while you told me that you missed this week’s show. Here’s our associate producer, Kate with what’s on the menu? Hey, Tony, we have your four day work week. This 2024 nonprofit technology conference panel introduces you to the national campaign for a 32 hour four day work week. They’re the executive director of the campaign, a company that made the switch and a nonprofit that did too. They’re vishal red from work for Karim Bori with Mixy Communications and Patty Carlin at 10. Then Intergenerational communication. Our panel of two phd S discusses common communication challenges in the workplace and shares its strategy for overcoming them. They are Lauren Hopkins from prepared to impact and Carla Torrance from Ire for racial health equity. This is also from 24 NTC on Tony’s take two summertime planning time were sponsored by virtuous. Virtuous, gives you the nonprofit CRM fundraising volunteer and marketing tools. You need to create more responsive donor experiences and grow, giving, virtuous.org and by donor box outdated donation forms, blocking supporters, generosity, donor box, fast, flexible and friendly fundraising forms for your nonprofit donor box.org. Here is your four day work week. Welcome back to Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio coverage of the 2024 nonprofit technology conference. You know that we’re coming to you from Portland Oregon at the Oregon Convention Center where we are sponsored by Heller consulting technology strategy and implementation for nonprofits. What you don’t know is that the conversation we’re about to have is about a four day work week. And with me to have that discussion are Vishal ready the executive director at work for the national campaign for the four day work week. Also Karim Bori, principal at MD Communications and Patty Carlin Finance and operations director for our host at uh N 10. Vishal. Karim Patty. Welcome to nonprofit radio. Thanks Tony Pure. Alright. Alright. I’m glad um you gave me like, like excited to be here, but you were smiling. I want, I want folks to know you were smiling when you said it. So I am very excited to be here. Yes, maxing out the volume and everything. All right, outstanding. Now. Thank you. The four day work week, Vishal, since you’re the executive director of the campaign, the national campaign for the four day work week, why don’t you kick us off? What, what are we? I think we know what we’re talking about. Why should we be talking about it? Why should the nation, the national campaign? Why should the nation go to a four day work week? Yeah. Well, first of all, I just want to say really excited to be here and, you know, when we talk about a four day work week, we want to be really crystal clear about what we’re talking about. We’re not just talking about a four day work week with 10 hour days. We’re talking about a four day, 32 hour work week with no loss in pay or benefits. And that’s very important to know. Thank you. And the reason we’re really excited about this is because, you know, there’s been a whole host of research and organizations, as we’ll hear from Patty and Cream that have shifted to a four day 32 hour model. And, you know, over the last few years, what we’ve seen is that this is a win, win, win. This is a rare triple dividend policy for workers, for companies and for society. And so what we’ve seen for organizations is that, you know, 91% plus of organizations that shift to a four day work week are piloted, stick with it because of increased productivity, improve retention, better work life balance for their employees for workers. 95% of employees that get to try a four day work week want it. And 80% of people in public in the public want it because, you know, better work life balance, you know, and more time to care for their loved ones. And then for society, this really is a policy that has potential to improve the environment, advance gender equity and give more time to people so they can participate civically. And so, you know, we’re really excited by what we’ve seen, you know, hundreds of companies already do across the US And we believe that this is a policy that can be scaled uh through, you know, public policy and through more and more workplaces implementing it. And we really believe that, you know, the evidence and the research is on our side to show that this is something that all workers in all workplaces in America should have. All right, Kareem, why don’t you just give us uh an overview of what it’s been like at uh mix the communications for uh for a 32 hour four day work week. Sure. Um So Tony, Tony would, it’s probably worth knowing is that our industry, the digital marketing and public relations space is often in the top five of high burnout industries, we’re dominated by the news cycle 24 7. We are addicted to the social media platforms, algorithms and we feel compelled to be on all the time. So high turnover um in industry where folks just don’t necessarily have this balance, we work in the social justice space. So as an employer it is super important for us that we practice what we preach. So we always look at our habits and our practices to make sure that what we say we fight for is what we do in our own company. So when the four day work week happened, it was the perfect or not happened. But when we realized that there were all these pilots with data around the world and especially in the UK and we started seeing data in the US that was showing what Vishal just mentioned. 90 plus percent. We just kept compiling and making the case internally for it. And there was no doubt that it was the right move. So we didn’t just move into it overnight. We took six months to plan it and it was a fundamental rethinking of everything we do and how we do it. Um I’ll probably point to three things that we did that helped us a lot. We tested and measured and surveyed our employees um every month for six months and we were measuring what’s working, what’s not working. The one thing we know that our employees all agreed on and we had 100% results from the get go was that nobody wanted to go back to five days a week. So as hard as it was to try to figure things out about how we communicate about how we run meetings about how long we do things and how we’re, we’re measuring productivity and efficiency. Nobody felt compelled to go back to five days in the grind mentality. The second thing we did is that we figured out that the model that worked for us was staggering. So half of our team is off on Fridays, half of the team is off on Monday. We use group emails for all our clients so that it doesn’t matter when they email everybody on that account. Team gets the message so that if you’re there on the Friday, somebody else on, if um on the team who’s out will know what’s going on on the Monday. But there’s never a loss of coverage for our clients. And then the third thing that is worth mentioning is that we actually didn’t tell our clients for a year and no client knew that’s, that’s a great test. All the black box test. You’re, you’re unaware. All right. And no, no, there were no complaints and no nobody really Patty Carlin at N 10. 00, I do have, I’m sorry, one more question. Um How long ago did you uh did you make the final transition? We did in January in January of 2023. And in 2023 we finished a year, a couple of months, we finished a year in 2023 hitting a record revenue first time in our 13 years. Um We intentionally decided that the year was about um rethinking all of our operations and systems. So the, the investment for us was prioritizing this transition. So we weren’t letting profits dictate what we were going to do. So we intentionally went through the year expecting single digit profits, which we hit still because that was the biggest investment for us. We are a fully digital and remote company. So virtual company. So our largest asset are people. So we needed to make sure that we prioritize them. So um it worked. Sorry about that, Patty. Not at all. Please tell us the N 10 4 day work week experience. Well, we started July 1st of 2023. So we’re not quite a year in, but I think that was there a transition the way Kareem was explaining or six months. No, it was a couple of months. We spent a couple of months talking about. Do we need all these meetings? Do we can we just not have a staff meeting if no one really has anything to say, we don’t have to show up and talk about nothing. Is it still a meeting if no one comes and is it a meeting that could have been an email? You know? Yeah, don’t, don’t have it. Uh Thinking about what’s really important to us as a finance and operations director. Maybe bookkeeping is not the best use of my time now. So I’ll hire one. Um What else we do? Um Monday through Thursday, we’re closed on Friday. There’s the whole team. You’re not staggering the way mixed up. And, um, the person in me that was raised to believe that someone should always be there. Wishes we staggered, but we didn’t. And I’m ok with it. Now, was it a conscious choice in the organization? Did you consider the staggering? I don’t think so. Not seriously. But when said they did it, I went. Oh, no. But, um, it’s been great. Uh, and basically I think that this very conference is a testament to what you can do on a 32 hour week. We did this. I did not know that we were talking about a 32 hour week. I’m glad you explained that right from the get go. Um Yeah, I just assumed that we were talking about a 40 hour week in four days. Um Patty, what happens on Fridays when work emails? Uh I know N 10 does have an office. I don’t know how many calls they get but you have an office here in Portland. No, you don’t get calls. We don’t have the office in Portland anymore. We are, you know that IP O box? You used to be on North Aldert, you on OK. No more. Just a po box. Just a po box where 16 people in eight states. What happens on Fridays when, if an urgent email comes from a member or no vendor? Basically, we also have shared customer service emails but on Friday, an out of office goes up and says, and tens closed on Fridays. We’ll see you Monday and all of our staff does that every Thursday when you log off your out of office goes up and it says antenna is, is a four day, 32 hour, 100% pay 100% benefits. See you Monday. So this is very hard for me as I pointed out in our session. I am gen X. I was, I’ve been a nonprofit for years and you are expected to be there first in the morning out last at night, never take a break, you know, don’t eat, don’t sleep. And this was a big deal for me. What was the impetus at N 10? It was just, you know, we’re, we’re always looking at social and racial justice. We’re always looking at what it’s like to bring your whole self to work. What is it, what we want to be the world that we want? You know, we’re gonna be what we want to see and, you know, at any time, we’re really into modeling those things for everyone. So it’s just like, you know what, this is the right thing to do and we’re gonna do it and it got done and it wasn’t that easy. I make it sound really easy. It wasn’t that easy. And I think there were some of us that were really nervous, but like I said, this, this conference happened because 16 people committed to each other and trust each other and did this on a 32 hour work week and it’s been less than a year. Alright. Alright. Um Michelle, what’s the, what’s typically the impetus for a company or a nonprofit? Doesn’t matter whatever a workplace to to embark on the at least at least the consideration of a of a four day, 32 hour work week. And what kind of factors are, are creating the the the discussion? Yeah, I think you know, one place to start at this is a lot of organizations look at their employees and you know, they’re looking around and you just realize a lot of people are burnt out, right? So I think there was a study that came out last month from our partner center for work time reduction. And they showed that organizations that are on a five day work week schedule, typical five day work week schedule, the burnout average burnout at those organizations is 42%. And meanwhile, now organizations that are on a shorter workweek model, the burnout is 9%. So I think, you know, 99, yeah, so 33% difference. And so I think what people are realizing is the way that we structure work is weird. You know, this is just sort of like this. Um the work that we have right now is, you know, it’s a relic from the 19 forties, right? And so, so much of the way we work, how we work when we work has changed in the last 80 years. And, you know, when we see an epidemic of burnout, an epidemic of stress or, you know, just the sort of instinctual feeling, you know, you go to meetings and you’re like, what the hell is the point of that? Right? And so I think people are recognizing that there’s a way to, you know, make our work more efficient, more effective and also meet people’s needs. And, you know, right now, I think one of the really powerful stuff that’s been happening is four day week global. They’re in organization in New Zealand and they’ve been doing these incredible workplace trials over the last few years. And so, you know, like from Cream and P’s perspective when their organization see these studies and trials and they see, oh, this is, this really is a win, win for both, you know, workers at the company and the company. It can be a really powerful impetus to, you know, explore and pilot the change themselves. Kareem, you said you planned for six months, I think before you actually flipped the switch, what kinds of things are you planning for? What were we working through in those six months? It’s a good question, Tony. Um Finally, jeez, it took, how many years have you been doing this the second day of the conference? It’s the end of the second day. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Um Let’s see, we wanted to make sure that it was not an edict from the two principles that this was something that our staff wanted. So we had a group of staff get together and be part of the planning committee at every level. So they thought through all of our operations. So how many meetings we have? How long do they have? Why do we have them? How many touch points internally do we have to share information? So we went through all of the exercise and the fun one that we mentioned this morning at our, at our session is for a whole month, we removed all meetings from the calendar. We canceled all our client meetings, we believe we did that, but we did, we kicked off, we kicked off the year and we had told our clients when we come back, we’re not going to have meetings in January. We’ll plan our work differently. We’re going to communicate with you, but we’re not having the meetings that we typically do and we usually meet with clients twice a month. So wipe the calendar, clean, internal externals, everything. And we basically had staff work on a rebuilding from the ground up. Why do we have this meeting? How often, how often do we need it? And that was part of the process. So the second thing was the measuring and the iterating. We did this monthly survey and we looked at the data, we shared it internally, we discussed it. Um But that was part of the kickoff part of the planning looked at our budget as well. So we went into the year, as I said earlier, anticipating that this was an investment in staff. So we didn’t get to a single digit profit just because we switched the four day work week. Part of the, the switch was making everybody a salaried employee. So we reorganized and we let three of our more junior staff go. So everybody now is a manage manager and above, we only have 18 employees. So it help, it helps to be at this scale, but everybody’s now an a salaried employee. So the reason that mattered is because if we’re going to move to a four day work week and we need to be efficient. We need our people to be trusted and autonomous. So we could not have folks who were waiting on someone else to tell them what to do. So part of that was changing the salary structure and changing the job descriptions to match that as well. So all that administrative work as patty knows, it takes a while of rewriting job descriptions of having conversations with the team of saying, ok, with this what we’re doing. We so for some of our team, we said, we think you could be a fit for this new role and some of our junior people, we, we let three of our people go and we transitioned through the year. So you don’t make those decisions lightly. And it’s why it took us six months to go through it, Patty. So your transition was, was quicker, quicker. Um Your head was exploding when Karim said that uh they canceled every single meeting for a month. Um I don’t know. But you, but you mentioned there was I, I want, you wanted. So that’s sort of leading into something that you said uh earlier. It wasn’t that easy. No, it wasn’t that easy. Talk about some of the challenges maybe and, and how you overcame them as an organization. We had a lot of meetings, we had meeting on top of meeting on top of meeting. And it, it seriously was about, do we need this? Can we make meetings optional? You know, if you don’t have something to say, don’t and you have something to do. You had meetings about meetings. I said that in our session, I said we had a meeting about meetings and then we formed a subcomittee of people that wanted to talk about meetings and then they came back to the group so we could all talk about meetings again and then meetings were done and you scaled back a lot of meetings and we do have um every other week on a Monday, there’s like a placeholder. And if you go in and say I wanna talk about this for 15 minutes, everybody will show up if nobody needs, has anything to talk about, we’re not just gonna get on their so anybody can call the meeting. But, but it’s, it’s just a placeholder. If no one calls a meeting, there’s no meeting that week and we do and, you know, some of that is complicated at N 10, we have live captioning for every meeting, even staff meetings. So, you know, somebody has to remember to call off the caption and all this and that. But it’s really just to be able to say I have work to do and have everyone trust you that you’re not just going off to hike in the woods. It’s, we talked about that a lot in our session about how we trust each other. We have a commitment to each other to support each other and do what we’re meant to do. It’s time for a break. Virtuous is a software company committed to helping nonprofits grow generosity. Virtuous believes that generosity has the power to create profound change in the world and in the heart of the giver. It’s their mission to move the needle on global generosity by helping nonprofits better connect with and inspire their givers responsive fundraising puts the donor at the center of fundraising and grows giving through personalized donor journeys that responds to the needs of each individual. Virtuous is the only responsive nonprofit CRM designed to help you build deeper relationships with every donor at scale. Virtuous, gives you the nonprofit CRM, fundraising, volunteer marketing and automation tools. You need to create responsive experiences that build trust and grow impact, virtuous.org. Now, back to your four day work week with Vishal Reddy Karim Bori and Paddy Carlin K you. I would love to jump in because the meetings are one element of how we work. I’d love you to jump in because your voice is so base. You have a voice for some people. Tell me I have a face for radio. OK? I’ve heard that about 1500 times. You have a great voice for radio. Thank you. So I’d love for you to chime in. I promise I won’t do the only other time I did a voiceover, I started doing voices and the folks in the studio did not like that, we could probably skip that. I would love to jump on to something. Patty just said meetings are one element that suck our time there. We looked at the other things that our employees do that are also indicative of waste. And um and just just this rabbit holes, two tools we use internally are our Asana, which is how we communicate on threads, on different channels, on different topics for clients, operations, marketing. So we have all these threads. It’s basically a chat, right? So if we’re a virtual company, this is where we go for the communication in between meetings and then there’s Asana, which is the project management tool we use. So those are two places where we do a lot of exchange of information. One is organized on projects and we have to say, ok, I’m working on this part. We’re all doing this. Here’s my piece, here’s my update and those are basically nonstop updates. So we have an average of 25 to 30 clients on any given month and we are 16 to 18 people. We’re 18 now, that’s a lot to balance. So it’s not just how many meetings you’re in, in a day, but it’s how much of your time gets sucked. Every time you that chat function dings with a notification, how often you’re on, you’re checking your email, but you also have that slack open and you have a sauna and you’re watching the projects change and you go watching notifications on one and two and three things that’s overwhelming. And we work in the digital marketing space. So we know how these algorithms create um this toxic dependency and mental health breakdowns. So we’re super aware of it. So one of the other things we did is that we told nobody on our team can have their sauna and their slack notifications active. You cannot get a ding or you shouldn’t be able to see when it’s coming. You should be able to shut that stuff off and focus. So it takes a lot of habits to undo. And the one thing we talked about this morning that one of our former employees said was he called it The Great Unlearning. And I think that’s a beautiful umbrella for what it means to transition as a company and as an employee love that the great unlearning Michelle, why don’t you add some larger context to what uh what Patty and Kareem are sharing? I mean, I think their journeys are so indicative of what’s happening nationally, right? So in the last four years, hundreds of companies have shifted to a four day work week in 10 states have introduced bills that help shift, you know, mandate companies shift to a four day, 32 hour work week or, you know, create incentives for companies to shift to a four day work week. Last fall, the United Auto Workers Union led by Sean Fein proposed a four day 32 hour work week in their contract demands. With the big three automakers. Just this morning, my colleagues were tested in front of the Senate. Uh the Senate Health Committee had a hearing about the four day 32 hour work week. So, you know, this is a movement and you know, and a cause that is bubbling and we’re seeing, you know, really courageous workplaces that are, you know, led by courageous people like Kareem and Patty, you know, lead this effort and you know, take it to a place where, you know, it’s going to move in a direction where every worker in every workplace has this. And you know, we really see this as the future of work and not out of our goal isn’t to just make this a thing that is a nice to have, but a must have for an organization. And so I think one of the really amazing parts about this work that we’ve seen on our end is just that, you know, when organizations take the dive head first and they jump in and do the four day work week, when they are on the other side of it and they have a four day work week and everything is humming along nicely, they become really powerful advocates for it, right. So to us, that’s really proof that this is something that works and can work in even more places. And you know, one of the ways that we’re the most helpful too is often connecting similarly situated workplaces to each other, right? So we’ll often have organizations reach out to us and say, hey, we’re really interested in a four day work week. But, you know, just as we know, the five day work week is not a one size fits all model, the same is true of a four day, 32 hour work week. And so what we often do is connect similarly situated workplaces to each other. So that, you know, somebody who’s in a similar field is another field can sort of connect with that organization directly. And what we’re is the organizations that have already shifted are just always so excited to share their insights and best practices from what they’ve learned. And so, um this is something, you know, that’s organically grown so fast in just a few years. And if six years ago you were talking about a four day, 32 hour work week, people would have just laughed at you. And now people are like, they’re like, wait, that sounds amazing. And I know organizations that can do it. And even today during our session, we, um, I think cream asked people, you know, do you know any organizations that are on a 32 hour work week? And I want to say a third of the room maybe raise their hand, which is just a really powerful testament to what organizations can do when they think about their workplace. In a non zero sum way. You talked about gender equity earlier, you, you mentioned gender equity, say more about that, please, Michelle. Yeah. So, you know, a really important part of our work is really couching the advocacy for the four day work week. And our goal to build an economy that gives people time to care for their loved ones and care for their families. And we know that, you know, traditionally and disproportionately, you know, women hold the double burden. They often work full time jobs and then have to do unpaid domestic labor at home too. And so what we’ve seen is that, you know, one way we think about the four day work week is that it gives people more time to care for their loved ones. And one of the really amazing things is that in the trials that we’ve seen, there’s actually been, it’s not just about, you know, giving the people that are already doing the unpaid domestic labor more time to do more unpaid domestic labor. But actually, what we’ve seen is that, you know, amongst heterosexual couples, there’s actually a, a balancing too. So in those couples, men take on more of the domestic labor. And so, you know, part of what we’re seeing is, you know, this is we don’t give people enough time to care for their loved ones, to care for their families to do the necessary care, giving work. And what’s really amazing is just that it’s not just about giving people more time to do that, but also rebalancing it. So that work is better distributed amongst more folks. I’d like to spend more time. We have uh we have more time set aside. Uh Let’s uh I I’m going to your session description um how to ensure productivity and business outcomes are still achieved. I mean, we’ve touched on some of that accountability metrics measuring Kareem. You’ve been, I mean, are you still measuring productivity or it’s not necessary anymore anymore? We’re done, we’re done. All right. So that we put a lot of metrics and we say we’re not measuring that anymore, but that’s a lifetime journey. Very rare. Although we are, we are, we’re not measuring the four day work week anymore. What we are continually measuring is how are we using those tools that suck our time? So this slack tool, we are regularly going back to it and we just finished a three month pilot of how do we limit it? So we are constantly saying, are we seeing the small signals that tell us that our staff are reverting back to those bad habits and old habits? So let’s put a pilot together where we iterate test again, do before and after te uh measurements, surveys of our employees and then see if it’s worth continuing. I also, I, I think in, in, in ensuring productivity and business outcomes are still achieved. Um I, I’d like to talk more about the trust. I mean, the trust between employees, between the team members. Um You know, I, I think some of that I from the pandemic, you know, eroded. We, we, we hired a lot of people that didn’t get on boarded the way folks before 2020 got on boarded and they didn’t have the, they didn’t have the benefit of that. Now you have to. So a team has to be very, very conscious about bringing those folks in. Um and, and engaging, but let, let’s, I don’t know, I don’t know what more to say about Trump, but you all are experiencing it. So Patty say, can you, can you say more about the, the, the trust factor? Where is that from a movie or something? The trust factor I don’t know. I don’t know. As long as it’s not a slasher film. No, we don’t want to go in that direction. But, yeah, employee trust. Yeah, I, I think that feeling like you have to be able to see each other to trust each other is something that we’ve actually kind of gotten through partially because intens been distributed for 24 years. We did have an office in Portland, but only eight people live in Oregon. So we’ve been distributed all that time. So there was already a little bit of you don’t have to be in someone’s face to understand that they’re there and have that um feeling like you can trust them. We hired, mm I think the last three or four people that we hired were complete virtual hires. None of us had ever seen them other than on a little screen from stranger to colleague without ever an in person meeting and I completely trust them. We did have to get very intentional about on boarding. Um making sure that everybody knows how to use those tools because it’s crucial. And the other thing that has been a goal of mine for the last almost two years and it started with the pandemic was making our asynchronous work work better. And a couple of people have come up to me since our session and said that might be the next session for next year is let’s talk about asynchronous word because we have people in every time zone and how do we make that work? So on boarding is important, trust is important and just committing to each other to do our thing. Part of that onboarding has to be the A AAA lot of discussions or maybe even before, maybe even be in the hiring process, the culture, the culture of intent, the culture of mixing what, you know, what we stand for. You know, we’re, we’re not, I’m, I’m getting a little misty here. I don’t know, this is so lofty, but we don’t only hire for uh for skills, but we hire for value and, and trust, um values, values and trust. Um I don’t know. Do you want to add something Kareem on trust and on boarding, I saw you shaking your head. I do and I want to jump on the soap box and I’m going to be singing the gospel of leadership and the role and importance of leaders because I happen to be in this capacity. And that’s, I think where it starts. If we want loyalty. If we want folks who are going to stick around, it’s on us to set the tone for what trust is, it’s not going to be given to us just because we hired someone and you can be really talented and this is probably the message for any other business owner, CEO or nonprofit executive director. You can be really knowledgeable in a certain field that doesn’t make you a good business operator and that’s on us. Culture starts with us to have the humility and the flexibility to hear ideas that we don’t know. So I don’t assume that people just because we give them a paycheck and hired them owe us anything. We have to set the tone for what transparency, accountability, honesty, trust looks like. So I get really irritated very fast when folks start saying, well, our employees, I’m like stop, We create the conditions that employees walk into and we get to choose the environment that we create for people and we get to choose if we want them to come to work from a place of love or a place of fear, period. And that’s something I will hang my hat on and I will go to a fight with any executive director or CEO out there who disagrees with me, please. I am super easy to find. Ok. Did, did you uh avail yourself of the, the advice and council of uh work for as you were as you were embarking on your planning, your planning? No, no. Where were you all my life, Michelle, I introduced them. I’ll take the credit for that. 10. Avail itself of work for while you were preparing Tristan and Amy and I met with V Tristan Penn Equity and Diversity director at 10. I have it was just a guest. I think I think I it’s equity and Amy s everybody here knows her. So as we were making the transition. We had a call with Michelle and it was just such a good, you know, you’ve heard the things that he has to say and he asked us how we were doing and how we did it. And so when, um, you and Jamie reached out to say, let’s do this, I’m like, I got the guy, I got the guy and, and so it was kind of like we talked to you because we were doing it and then it just all came together. I’m really, really honored to be sitting here with these wonderful people. And if I could just chime in quick time, just that, you know, I think one of the amazing things that, you know, I connected with both Cream and Patty after they had begun to transition. But one of the reason, the reasons that we had, I reached out in the beginning was just because the way they were talking about the four day work week, you know, hated all the things that they’re saying today. And so it was just really one of the things that we want to continue building is just, you know, building a network of organizations that are interested in this and it’s so exciting to be here with them because they’ve already taken such leadership within their organizations and want to take such leadership with this cause that um it made so much sense to connect and collaborate and um and you know, it is very helpful for organizations to have outside support as they’re going through this change. It’s not a prerequisite, you know, these organizations. And so it’s really amazing to sort of see, to show that organizations can do this with no outside support, but we’re also happy to be that helping hand if needed. Alright, so why don’t you uh let folks know how they could reach uh work for if they wanna, or, or reach the website, if they wanna explore some resources about, you know, they’re thinking about maybe possibly considering sometime in the future, a four day work week where, where do they go? Well, so our organization is called Work For and our website is also work for. So that’s work and then for the number. So four.org and so if you’re at work for.org, you’ll see a page that says for employers, if you’re an employer for workers, if you’re a worker and if you fill out a quick form, then it’ll set up a conversation with us and we can sort of talk through what makes the most sense for your organization, but really encourage folks to reach out and we’re always happy to chat with people that are really interested in bringing this to their organization or to do any other advocacy work as well. Kareem, if I’m working at mix to do, I get my choice, whether I want Mondays or Fridays off, you can ask and then we look at which account you’re going to be on and we want to make sure half and half is well distributed between both. So my preference is considered at least it’s consideration. Well, Patty Carlin, I want to thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much. And uh Michelle Michelle, thanks very much for sharing, interesting conversation. Fun, valuable, a little touching too, Tony. There’s only one day that everyone in N 10 has to have off and that is the first business day after the NCC. That is the only day everyone is off. You must take off its mandate. So if we see you online, you are in trouble. Everybody’s off on Monday the 18th of March this year. Don’t call in 10. Ok. And Friday, Friday. Well, tomorrow is Friday tomorrow next Friday, 1920 21 the 22nd. So it, so it’s a three day week for everyone at N 10 next week and well deserved. I don’t know what day it is. I just want to make sure you’re not swapping the Monday for the Friday. It’s a complete capitulation and everything we just talked about, right? Antithetical to everything we just talked about. All right. Uh Vishal Kareem Patty. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. And thank you for being with our 2024 nonprofit radio coverage of the 2024 nonprofit technology conference where we are sponsored by Heller Consulting technology strategy and implementation for nonprofits. Thanks for being with us. It’s time for a break. Donor box open up new cashless in person donation opportunities with donor box live kiosk. The smart way to accept cashless donations. Anywhere anytime picture this a cash free on site giving solution that effortlessly collects donations from credit cards, debit cards and digital wallets. No team a member required. Plus your donation data is automatically synced with your donor box account. No manual data entry or errors, make giving a breeze and focus on what matters your cause. Try donor box live kiosk and revolutionize the way you collect donations. Visit donor box.org to learn more. It’s time for Tony’s take two. Thank you, Kate. Summertime can be a good time for planning. Uh I’m thinking specifically about planned giving, planning for a fall launch um or even planning in June and July for August launch because August is national make a will month. So that would be a good time to kick off planned giving fundraising or do a campaign if you’re already doing planned giving. But the summer months, you know, June, July uh and or August could be good, very good for planning uh for either that August or September launch. Um It’s not limited to planned giving, of course, you know, summertime, slower. Uh Now I know it’s harder to get people together because there’s more vacation. But you know, that’s, that’s overcomeable. We don’t, we certainly don’t wanna deny people vacation time and everybody calls it PTO now. Wait, I’m on PTO. You get the email messages. I’m on PTO. I’m away on PTOW. When, when did vacation become PTOPTO? Sounds, uh, I don’t know. It sounds like something military vacations, you know, vacation sounds like fun. PTO doesn’t sound like fun. Uh, I don’t know. It sounds like something is mandated. Uh, just, I’m on vacation so we don’t want to deny people their vacation so that you can do your summer planning naturally. Uh And that would contradict what I said a couple of weeks ago about taking time for yourself because you need to take care of yourself before you can take care of others. So summertime can do both though. It can be your planning time and it can also be the time that you take for, for rejuvenating for relaxing yourself so that when you come back, you can take care of others, right? Summer can serve two purposes. So thinking about planning this week using summer for planning for that uh maybe August campaign or, or something in the fall. And that is Tony’s take two Kate. I am so ready for the summer and I have all my vacation plans planned out and I’m, I’m so ready to hit the beach. It doesn’t sound like you’re gonna be doing a lot of planning for the fall. Sounds like you’re in the balance. Like if there was a balance, you’re weighted heavily toward the time off rejuvenation, relaxation side. Oh, yeah, I know. I mean, I’ll go pumpkin picking in the autumn, but that’s about it. Ok. That, that’s a pretty audacious plan you have. Uh, ok. Very, very. All right. Congratulations on that. We’ve got VCU but loads more time here is intergenerational communication. Welcome back to Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio coverage of the 2024 nonprofit technology conference in Portland, Oregon where we are thoughtfully sponsored by Heller consulting technology strategy and implementation for nonprofits with me. Now are Doctor Lauren Hopkins and Doctor Carla Torrance. Doctor Hopkins is social impact consultant at prepared to impact. And Doctor Torrance is consultant at Ire for racial health equity. Doctor Hopkins. Doctor Torrence, welcome. Thank you. May I call you Lauren and Carla? Would that be ok? Doctor Laura Carlin Car Lauren Lauren? Ok. I’ll do doctor Doctor Carla. No. Ok. Absolutely. Your names, your titles you earned them. Let’s talk about, let’s talk about your topic. Your session is strengthening organizational culture through intergenerational communication. Uh This struck me because uh I’m a baby boomer and I do a lot of work not in, I mean, I have my own company but uh I do a lot of work with folks who are younger and um and even, you know, I do planned Giving, which puts me with folks who are in there, seventies, eighties and nineties. So there’s that uh there’s that dynamic also for me. So uh so I guess maybe for selfish reasons. Uh, I was very interested in this topic but I think a lot of, I think a lot of folks are struggling at across all the generations working with folks who don’t consider work the way they consider work or don’t think about, uh, I don’t know, don’t organize their lives differently that they just, they conceive of work differently. The purpose of work, the reasons for work, they conceive of family differently. Are these some of the reasons that this session is uh critical Doctor Carlo for sure. And what it is, it’s our work, it is our community. It’s everything it has for the first time in history. Five generations are in the workplace. Traditionalists, baby boomers. Gen X millennials and Gen Zs, which they’re now calling zoomers traditionalists. Is that the silent generation also known A K A the silent generation traditionalists. Um Dr Lauren, do you want to sort of frame this up for us before we get into some of the details? Yeah, I’ll tell you how we got started. So last year at N 10, at the NTC conference actually presented a session. It was a workshop on teaching technology skills within an intergenerational workplace. And so it was a nice size crowd and Dr Carla was in there and really enjoyed the session and came up to me afterwards and we connected and here we are. And so we’ve done a couple of projects together and of course, when in 1024 came up. We wanted to create a part two for this year. And so we were really excited and we actually presented this morning. You’ve already done? All right. All right, good. So we can maybe talk about some of the questions that arose, questions or comments. OK. OK. Um So one of the I’m just taking from your session description in the, in the agenda, uh common communications challenges in the workplace. Of course, we’re talking about intergenerational. Um You know, why don’t we start with? Stick with you, Doctor Lauren. What, what, what are some of the common challenges? Yeah. And so one of the um it’s very interesting that with the various generations, how we just prefer um modes of communication best and so with traditionalist and the baby boomers, they prefer more face to face communication. Um Yeah, more face to face, more written memos and things like that. And so if they are able to get in front of someone um that is better or if they’re able to talk to someone on the phone, that’s what they prefer also for um Gen X. No, Gen Xers. Yes. For Gen Xers, they really prefer um phone or verbal communication also and they’re also very quick learners. And so with Gen Xers, if they’re able to integrate some type of technology in it, think about like slack or texting or what not, they’re very fast learners. Um I’m actually a millennial and so I, I did not even say that but um we are two different generations. So I’m a millennial and Doctor Carla is a baby boomer. And so which makes our um our relationship very unique. So will you expand in 25 NTC? Bring in, bring in a traditionalist or someone on the other end? Maybe a maybe a gen X maybe. So I was thinking maybe like a panel with all with representative. I mean, it’s all born of yours from last year. So how do we overcome these? I mean, so as the baby boomer, I would rather just get up and go walk over to your office, but you’d rather I slack you or, or pick up the phone. I wouldn’t mind the phone. But that would be my second choice. My first choice would be the more laborious, the more time consuming I admit the more time consuming, the more invasive to you. I’m, I’m admitting that I still would rather knowing all that. I still would rather just get up and go talk to you in your office. You would rather I slack you or pick up the phone. Well, it’s very interesting. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean you personally your generation. I got you. Yeah. And so traditionally, with those generations and the stereotypes, the research says that yes, that is um that is normal and stereotypical. However, we really have to consider the person. And so for instance, like me, um like millennials traditionally, we prefer texting something quick. I prefer a phone call. And so people know if they need to get me, they should just pick up the phone because I’m probably not going to text back. And so, um, and that’s just not just because I don’t like texting, but I get distracted and things like that. So we have to understand who the person is and communicate and ask them, hey, how do you prefer that I communicate with you and adapt to their preferred communication style? So we have the stereotypes but then also, you know, the person and the human aspect to it. But then I have to ask a challenging question, a question that challenges that a bit. So if I prefer the in person and you prefer the phone, where, where, where are we, we need to meet in the middle somehow and, and compromise and um yeah, and just figure out, OK, how do we work on this? And so an example with myself and, and Doctor Carla, sometimes we’ll text but often times we will um she’ll call me if she knows if she trying to get me like pretty quickly is a call or she knows that, OK, if it can wait a little bit, a text will be OK. But it just depends on the relationship and the person and just finding a common ground and communicating that from the beginning. OK, Doctor Carla, what about the different conceptions about work? You know, the generations consider work. I think different, different purpose. Uh younger folks consider it, you know, it’s a part of my life, but it’s not that big a part where I think, I think older folks consider it more, you know, they tend to more self identify around their work, you know. So you get, does it make sense? Different conceptions of work across the generation? And I think that COVID um was, was definitely an eye opener for everyone for engagement. So what you’re talking about is actually engaging with the community at work or just engaging with a person? Whereas um for years, uh baby boomers being in the workplace, you know, everybody, you know, um you know, you know, their Children, they all, everybody’s grown up. Well, once COVID hit, then we were all sent home and some of us went back. Well, they saw a difference in engagement, engagement. Those who went back to the work workplace, they saw a little bit more engaging in the whole community of work. Whereas those who were remote didn’t really engaged. So they were, they saw different generations, for example, the the baby boomers are more engaged, but the millennials and gen Z are less engaged because they’re remote, they’re remote, they’re not connecting as much. And so that connecting and engaging is very important for well being for anyone that is, is, is is on a job. So what do we do to overcome the lack of engagement. And I think that that’s where it comes in where maybe a hybrid or meeting at least once a month that there is, there is a time that we all do come together um and see one another and that meeting that coming together in person in face to face is for real, not just zooming or teams, but actually coming together and meeting and talking. And how are you doing? How’s your family? Because sometimes even when we were just tell me about your family, you don’t even know about your family, right? Because a lot of times when you’re working remote, you don’t even have to show your face. So a lot of people are not. But what we’re finding is that is making you even more, less engaged. Research is showing that there’s less and less engagement and you need engagement for well being. So we have to be intentional. Leadership needs to be intentional, all levels of leadership, not just all levels from board members, all the way down to every person within the organization needs to be intentional of wanting to engage. Because I can, if I can work on four jobs, if I can work on four projects and just give you what you need and send you on your way, I don’t have to connect with your organization. Just get, just get the money, just give me the money, pay me. And here, here’s the end result, the product I still I’m not connecting. OK. OK. Um Other challenges. I mean, we’re just, we’re just getting started. Well, you know, when you’re talking about I’m modes of communication. Um Again, we can’t generalize, we can’t use the stereotype is that traditionalists are like this, baby boomers are like this, those millennials are like that and those, those, you know, Gen Zs are like this, we can’t do that because even in our relationship, um if I text her, I mean, I, I mean, I hear from her all day whereas if she texts me, I text her right back now. That’s not normal. I mean, it’s not normal as far as baby boomer versus millennial. It should be that if everybody is saying what everybody does, she should be able, she should be calling me and it’s, oh, hi. It’s so nice to hear from you. How’s your family? Because I’m a baby boomer. Right? No, we’re to the point she, she wants to and she’s different, but we have learned and I think we’re test tubes for this and that’s why this workshop was so good for us to work it because we, we’re, we’re showing the strategies and how helpful it is to learn one another and to respect one another’s mode of communication and not just say, oh, that’s how you are. That’s how your generation is. No, it’s individual. It is and it’s respect, it’s respect of whatever it is. Whatever your mode of communication is, let me respect it and let me see where we can drop our drawbridge down and where can we come together so we can really communicate otherwise we’re, we’re just sacrificing the productivity of the, of the office of the mission. Right. I mean, we’re, we’re just, if we’re not, if we’re not listening to each other and respecting communications preferences, it’s just gonna be, uh, it’s not gonna be as an effective or an organization as it could be. It’s robotic, it’s not human, it’s, it’s just not, it’s not personable, it’s the long lasting. OK. We have um strategies for strengthening intergenerational communications conversations. We’ve talked about some share some more. Yeah. And so um so we talked about um go ahead, we talked about the um the different modes is what you’re saying, the different modes. OK. Yeah. OK. So we talked about um in what type of mode, how we will, is that what you’re saying? What’s the best way to communicate with you, whether you, whether you like face to face or whether you like text or whether you, whether you want social media. And so finding out which one is best and how can we be more effective? How do we find this out? We survey everybody with a uniform survey and then share the results or? Well, I mean, you can do that but you can also bring that human aspect to it and one get to know people, you know what I mean? Oftentimes in the workplace and even in the community, but especially in the workplace, I feel like we’re so, you know, just stuck at our desks or, um, there’s a lot of assumptions and just ask the person, especially as you get to know them, it might come naturally or sometimes you might have to ask, hey, I noticed that you haven’t responded to my teams. Um, I noticed that you haven’t even looked at it yet because I didn’t see little icon come up. Um, is there a better way that I can reach you if you, you know, if I need something? I noticed that it’s been like five hours, you know what I mean? And so they might tell you, oh, I don’t use that thing. Ok. Well, that’s not the best way to. Right. Right. Exactly. Yeah. And sort of adapt and, um, and then, and then, you know, and tell them what you prefer. Also another one of the challenges I was going to say was learning from each other. And so it’s not really a challenge but it’s one of the different strengthening aspects. And so we always can learn from each other within the workplace. And so especially intergenerationally and we all have various experiences and knowledge and we can all grow from each other. And so that communication piece is not just about being effective in the workplace, but it’s also about just growing as a person growing as a professional. We can all learn from each other. And so really honing in on that and even within the workplace, how can um organizations and employers really foster that opportunity for intergenerational learning. How can we encourage people to grow with each other and from each other? So is that a co mentorship program, maybe it could be a baby boomer being linked with a genzer or oftentimes in the workplace. Now too, there may be a millennial who is supervising a baby boomer. You know what I mean? And those are opportunities for growth. Also, next week, apps, tools and tactics to future proof your nonprofit. If you missed any part of this week’s show, I beseech. You find it at Tony martignetti.com were sponsored by Virtuous. Virtuous, gives you the nonprofit CRM fundraising volunteer and marketing tools. You need to create more responsive donor experiences and grow, giving, virtuous.org and by donor box outdated donation forms blocking your support, generosity. Donor box fast, flexible and friendly fundraising forms for your nonprofit donor box.org, fast fund, friendly, flexible fundraising forms. Love that I just, I I can’t get over the alliterations. Our creative producer is Claire Meyerhoff. I’m your associate producer, Kate Martignetti. This show, social media is by Susan Chavez. Mark Silverman is our web guy and this music is by Scott Stein. Thank you for that mission study. Be with us next week for nonprofit radio. Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95% go out and be great.

Nonprofit Radio for April 29, 2024: Acquiring Email Leads On Social & Matching Gifts 101, 201, 301

 

Melanie Schaffel: Acquiring Email Leads On Social

This 2024 Nonprofit Technology Conference conversation helps you ensure your email acquisition efforts are targeting those interested in your work. You can incentivize your social audiences so they’ll willingly share their emails and you can measure the success of your acquisition campaigns. Melanie Schaffel from Parkinson’s Foundation helps you get started.

 

Julie Ziff Sint, Alison Hermance & Mark Doty: Matching Gifts 101, 201, 301

Julie Ziff Sint, Alison Hermance and Mark Doty, also from 24NTC, explain the different types and styles of matching gifts and challenge grants. How do you ethically message and how do you establish your own matching gifts asks? What if you don’t have a matching gift to take advantage of? And more. Julie is with Sanky Communications. Alison is from WildCare. And Mark is at San Francisco SPCA.

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Welcome to Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio. Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. I am your aptly named host and the pod father of your favorite abdominal podcast. Oh, I’m glad you’re with us. I’d get slapped with a diagnosis of primary sclerosing cholangitis. If you inflamed and scarred me with the idea that you missed this week’s show. Here’s our associate producer, Kate with the highlights. Hey, Tony, this week we have acquiring email leads on social. This 2024 nonprofit technology conference conversation helps you ensure your email acquisition efforts are targeting those interested in your work. You can incentivize your social audiences so they’ll willingly share their emails and you can measure the success of your acquisition campaigns. Melanie Saffle from Parkinson’s Foundation helps you get started then matching gifts. 101, 201 and 301. Julie Zant Alison, Hermance and Mark doty. Also from 24 N DC. Explain the different types and styles of matching gifts and challenge grants. How do you ethically message and how do you establish your own matching gifts? Asks what if you don’t have a matching gift to take advantage of and more Julie is with SI Communications. Alison is from Wild Care and Mark is at San Francisco S PC A on Tony’s take two travel convos were sponsored by Virtuous. Virtuous. Gives you the nonprofit CRM fundraising volunteer and marketing tools you need to create more responsive donor experiences and grow, giving. Virtuous.org here is acquiring email leads on social. Welcome back to Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio coverage of the 2024 nonprofit technology conference in Portland, Oregon where we are sponsored by Heller consulting technology strategy and implementation for nonprofits. Before we start the conversation, I wanna let you know that you may hear sounds of a uh a AAA tear down around us. There’s uh 24 NTC. The, the archive is uh being taken down booth by booth around us. But nonprofit radio perseveres, this is irrelevant to us. Uh We have our own power. I have a generator outside uh uh and 50 gallons of diesel fuel. So we’re, we’re prepared to continue regardless of what happens around the nonprofit radio uh booth. And for our, this is our final conversation of 2024 and it is with Melanie Saffle. She is senior manager of digital advertising at the Parkinson’s Foundation. Welcome to nonprofit Radio Melanie. Thank you, Tony. Thanks so much for having me. It’s my pleasure. Thank you for rounding out our, our many conversations. I won’t say save the best for last. That’s a lot of pressure, but it’s a little no No, no, don’t do that to yourself. It is breaking down, but it’s irrelevant. And uh I’ve been looking forward to this because I think, I think these conversions are important. So we’re talking about acquiring email leads on social. We’re trying to uh convert our folks, right? Take a next step. You’re active with us on social. You might like us on social. Have a finger, grab a hand, we’d like a little more come over. We’ve got more things to offer on email for sure. So um a lot of the discussion we had was about all the social email website, all of our digital channels working in tandem. Um So we know that there’s a lot of people on social that have proven interest in us already. So if they don’t know already that we have an email series that they can join, we want to let them know how to easily get into it. Uh Let’s let’s start with identifying who the best prospects are for uh for this upgraded engagement opportunity. Let’s call it the uh the uh the upgraded, yeah, the Eoge og we always know that upgraded opportunity. Um who who should we be focusing on uh in our in our social channels? So an efficient way that we found to focus on the people that are proving interest is to use that first party data that for us meta provides these ads will be right through meta, right on the platform and we can upload our lists, we can create lists from different engagements that people are taking on Facebook, whether they’re watching our video or D ming us sliding into our D MS, right, ending up in our inbox and using that first party data. Just because in this more and more cookie less world that the whole wide internet is joining in on that. The first party data is key here. So we want to focus in on that and a lot of the session also focused on creating look alikes of those. So people that act similarly to the people that have proven interest to help broaden the reach a little bit wider, creating look alikes. That sounds like something phony. What does this scamming and fishing and ransomware? What is this? It is my favorite way to sound really impressive to my colleagues when I tell them that this is an option at all. So meta can create a whole new list based off the way that people act online, they act at least similarly online. And so whether the places they’re visiting, uh the actions they’re taking online based off their emails, based off the list of emails that we provide uh meta can generate a lookalike list. So just people that are acting similarly to the ones we already know like us and hopefully they like us too. OK. So these are folks that you don’t know and meta is finding them bringing them well, they’re not bringing them to you, but they’re identifying them for you. They’re not currently engaged with Parkinson’s, but they act like a lot of people who are, is that the algorithm is working in our favor that way? I see. Well, I’m glad it has some value for somebody somewhere that’s mildly reassuring. Infinitely reassuring. But I’m glad it’s helping you. Um All right. So then what might you do? How do you then reach out to those folks? So we’re targeting. That’s right. So the whole discussion did focus on the lead generation ads that we create right in meta. The idea behind it is that people are scrolling in their news feed when we want them to do an action. A lot of times we don’t, they don’t want to be taken away from their scroll. They don’t want another app to pop up or a browser to pop up. So by keeping them right in the platform, there’s a form that pops up from the ad that they can fill out real quick um in exchange for a resource that uh we hook them in with already and just give us a quick piece of information. A lot of it. Also, if the user has already approved autofill and whatnot on, on Facebook, then it kind of just pops in and generates there already. So it’s a really fast track to the finish line for the user and they just give us their name, email, we get out of there. They get their resource. Everyone, everyone wins. What’s your resource hook? So we’ve tested, this was like uh over six months, we ran about six ads only for about a week each and we tested different resources each time. A lot of times we focus on things that we know our audience wants and likes uh based off of seo social learning. Um You know, whether it’s a highly trafficked page or a resource that’s already, that usually performs well and highly engaged with organically on social things that we know people want. We can um kind of hang that like a little carrot on the stick, right? I don’t know if that’s the same carrot for the user, right? Carrot on a stick, carrot on a stick, but the carrot on a stick works too. Ok? Ok. Um So in our case, um maybe exercise content performs super well. Um I’m at the Parkinson’s Foundation and exercise is really important for people with Parkinson’s disease. So they’re always looking for what kind of exercise should I be doing or how often? And so if we have a PDF fact sheet, something like that, we let them know like if you just give us this little piece of information, we’ve got a PDF on the other side for you. OK. And you’re asking very low threshold, like first name and email, first, last name and email, hand, first, last email. So very low boundaries. I always object and I never fill in the phone. You know. What, what state are you in? I even object to state. I mean, I’ve been asked state. I don’t know if I’ve seen zip code, but I would find that equally annoying. Look, you’ve just given me a little PDF or a link to a video or something or a white paper for God’s sake. You know, I’m not, it’s not a marriage proposal. That’s right. I think we’ve done lead generation ads and where we have asked for state, if it’s like a volunteer opportunity, we just want to be able to sort them through to the right person. But for this, we just want you on the email list and I think there’s an opportunity here for people. Uh we, we can get them in a different welcoming series, right? All the people that joined us through the lead generation ads, maybe we start setting them up in a welcoming series where we get to know them and can ask more intimate questions. Like, do you want to join our local chapter or, you know, when were you diagnosed or different things that might help us get them into the right um journey, right? Uh Depending on how specific we might have those options. But, but yeah, there’s opportunity later to get to know them a lot better and we’re just starting off just by collecting their email and we can work with that from there. Don’t ask for everything at the outset. It, it’s a journey. There’s a chance of getting the band in from there and we just want to maximize the, you know, the, the efficiency here. Something to the finish line. You said, sprint to the finish line and then we’ll take our time. We can get to know you. There’s plenty of time. Um What did you call it? That, that meta will give you the, the, the people who act like the people you identify a look alike just called lookalikes ads. Yeah, when you upload a list or you create a list that’ll ask you, do you want to create a look like? And this is something that even if so one of the ways too that we try to what we’re after are new emails. We want new people into the database. We’ve also found that people that we’ve already had in the database that found these ads, they’re finding like new value from this. So it’s also OK if new people are seeing this ad, but the focus here is trying to grow the email list, grow our email size. So the focus is with that. But in order to kind of exclude the people that we already have, we upload our email list and we exclude that. But when we upload it, Facebook says, do you want to generate a look alike list of this? So while we’re excluding the ones we already had, we can include the look alike. So it’s a nice and you trust Facebook when you upload these email addresses and that it’s not a perfect science. Let’s put it that way because hey, maybe you logged in with your Facebook with an email from 2010 and maybe you don’t use that one anymore. So maybe you’re on a different one and that’s why it’s not a perfect science with this strategy. About 50% are new um in total to our database. So like I said, it’s not what we’re after is, you know, repeating customers, but we are re-establish value in a different way. So it kind of works out well. There’s that, there’s that too, but I was asking about trusting Facebook with the emails, but you’re giving them, you trust them with that. You don’t have a choice, I’m sure. Well, do they say something like, you know, well, this is a subject to our privacy policy which you can go read at 79 pages. And ultimately, you know, ads in general digital ads in this world we live in is like they get a super bad rep a lot of times and rightfully so, right, wrongfully using different pieces of information. But as a nonprofit, we’re just trying to accelerate our missions good. So we’re, you know, targeting certain people, but they need our resources and so we want more people to have them. It’s time for a break. Virtuous is a software company committed to helping nonprofits grow generosity. Virtuous, believes that generosity has the power to create profound change in the world and in the heart of the giver, it’s their mission to move the needle on global generosity by helping nonprofits better connect with and inspire their givers. Responsive fundraising puts the donor at the center of fundraising and grows giving through personalized donor journeys that responds to the needs of each individual. Virtuous is the only responsive nonprofit CRM designed to help you build deeper relationships with every donor at scale. Virtues gives you the nonprofit CRM, fundraising, volunteer marketing and automation tools. You need to create responsive experiences that build trust and grow impact virtuous.org. Now back to acquiring email leads on social with Melanie Schaffel. Is there another way to do this? Get these conversions from social besides targeted ads? This is the easiest way to do the in platform form solution, right? You can do an organic post that sends them to your website where it might be parkinson.org/subscribe or something, right? Where they can put their email in on our website. We have different forms like that here. You can hear the booths coming down around us literally uh as the carts go out, I hope there aren’t bodies in these carts. I can’t tell they, they have opaque of law and order. Those don’t look like that. Oh, you’re an expert, you’re an expert. Those are, those are clean. I was talking to a law enforcement expert. Forensics. She’s also a digital forensics expert. Uh, she can, she can find your, uh, your date of birth. Not through this. A no, but she’s seen a lot of law and order. So expert. Ok. Those cars are clean. Um, there may be forklifts coming around too so soon. So we may hear backup buzzers. You know, this is a, it’s a menagerie here, but nonprofit radio perseveres. Ok. Um, so I was asking about other methods besides digital ads. Yeah, of course, there’s the organic way to get people. It’s really efficient just to get them right in the platform. I think, you know, there’s other social platforms that have similar opportunities to do these foreign lead generation ads, but a majority of our audience is on Facebook. So we’re just grabbing them where they are and what, what um what age cohort is the largest proportion for you. We find a lot of our audience are Children of the people with Parkinson’s. So the Parkinson’s patients, there are, there is a large audience of people with Parkinson’s too, but let’s call it like, you know, 5060 year old, older adult Children of people that are living with the disease later in life. Yeah, we have a lot of caregiver care partner resources as well for sure. Uh Just so folks know, you know, what age group we’re talking about, you’re talking mostly people, 50 plus we have opportunities for, you know, a lot of people are on Instagram too. And we’re also trying to engage grandparents of people, grandchildren of those living with Parkinson’s. There’s a lot of really fun fundraising opportunities that we provide for them as well, but the information going right to the source. A lot of time. Yeah, right in that Facebook opportunity. Um So just drawing from your, your your description, um we’ve talked about how to, how to do this, how about measuring ro I metrics? What do we look for? So, one of my favorite parts of the lead generation ad is that it hits on all these different points on the marketing funnel, right? We’ve got awareness. So at the very least these ads are going to reach people that may have never heard about our brand and the ads that we’re creating the creative part of it. We’ve got our blue, we’ve got our logo. So at the very least we’re going to have a brand awareness moment. Then one step down, we’re informing, we’re informing that we have this resource and we’re also informing that we’re in the business of sharing resources. So we might get some new followers along the way on top of the reach and the brand and the impressions. And um so one and two checked off, then we’re also like converting people to move away from just being interested to uh loyal um advocates for us as well by joining our email list. So they’re, they’re working their way down the funnel, maybe the first time it doesn’t hit them and they convert, but it’s a series and maybe the second resource we’re offering is more appealing to them. So we might get them on the next try. So it’s an interesting ad because we’re also, we’re doing impressions, brand awareness, reach kind of arbitrary, but it still counts for something. We’ve got website traffic. We’re going to get people when they click on the resource to um get this, they’re clicking through to the website itself. And then we’re also opening up our email leads at the same time. So it’s hidden a lot of pieces at once. What was interesting for this presentation? It went back into each constituent profile and kind of looked at what their journey was since they were served the ad and we saw enough donations come through after they were served this ad to justify the whole spend of our series. So positive row as on top of it all, we love it. What a turn on ads not return on a ro I thank you. Otherwise you’d be putting drug in jail return on ads. Yeah, we have, well, it’s related to your, your law enforcement background. I hope not. Nobody listens to the show. It doesn’t matter. No, that’s not true. That’s not true. Um OK. Roa, we turn on ads be, thank you. But we do have Jargon Jail on nonprofit radio, but you skirted it very quickly by defining your jargon. Um What else can we talk about? We still have a few minutes left. What else did you share with your audience that you should share with nonprofit radio listeners? I also shared how, you know, maybe you don’t have the budget right now to invest in an ad strategy. Maybe you and your boss haven’t had that conversation yet. One, the examples in the strategy that we talked about, maybe this is a good opportunity to ask the powers that be the purse that maybe this is a good opportunity for you to uh trial, maybe get a little small investment. You never know what the results can turn into. Maybe they’ll be super impressed and they give you more of a budget and it kind of opens up your ad advertising program from there. But even if you’re not there just yet, there’s a lot of steps you can take for when you are there, like growing your audience now um and doing a lot of social listening and seeing what is working in your other channels, like your email, what are people clicking through? What do people want? You can create more of that content on your website so that when you are ready to launch these ads, you have like the perfect piece of content that will push people over the ads. You can have something ready for them to offer up anything else we can do in preparation to getting the budget for the ads, I think going back real quick to growing the audience and just kind of doing a lot of organic work. It’s just going to help you with that first party data when we’re doing all the targeting and everything. So putting in that work up front is only going to benefit you more down the line. Are you ok? If we leave it there? I’m great with that. We haven’t, we haven’t given short shrift to nonprofit listeners. It felt good. I don’t know. I, I want them to get the full, this is a 30 minute, this is a 30 minute session or it was a short 30 minute session. Just a little me up there. And uh yeah, a lot of positive feedback. It’s been a good week. It will continue as folks hear you here. She’s Melanie Saffle, senior manager of digital advertising at Parkinson’s Foundation, Melanie. Thank you very much. Thank you so much as, as 24 NTC comes down around us. I thank you for being, she’s giving a queen’s wave to the forklift truck that’s uh going by. I thank you for being with our coverage of 20 the 2024 nonprofit technology conference where we have been sponsored by Heller consulting, technology strategy and implementation for nonprofits. Thanks so much. It’s time for Tony’s take two. Thank you Kate while I was away for the two weeks, uh doing lots of donor meetings uh that I talked about last week I had the chance to talk to two guys, uh, one in the airport and one on a plane. Vaughn and Jorge and they’re both very different. Uh, Vaughn is uh mid seventies, maybe even, uh, maybe even 80 but still working. Uh, he’s from Kentucky and he owns 13 Papa John’s franchises and very interesting talking to this guy. Uh, you know, deep in the baby boomer ages, uh about how work has changed. Uh He, he cites that labor is his biggest problem. You’re keeping 13, Papa John’s franchises staffed uh people who with, you know, in the face of people who just don’t show up for work. They, they don’t just, they don’t even, you know, people don’t call and say they don’t want to work there anymore. They just don’t show up often often and I’ve heard that from lots of other folks too. Uh But so just, you know, very interesting talking to Vaughn about how work and, and attitudes toward work have changed uh that he’s experienced, you know, as a 7580 year old. Uh and hiring lots of folks in their twenties or even teens, so teens, twenties. Um and, and, and thirties is, is mo mostly where his workforce comes from, but it’s actually mostly teens and uh and twenties and then Jorge uh talk to him on a plane. So he is about, I’d say he’s about 32 or so. Uh And he has an interesting career he, you know, he works in finance for one of the big tech companies full time. Uh It has a finance MB A but then he also develops real estate projects. Uh And he, he’s on his second one, which is a 32 unit residential building with two or three commercial units on the ground floor. So, you know, talk about the way career has changed. I mean, here’s a guy who wants to be doing something different and he’s gonna make you making that transition on his own happen by reengineering himself as a real estate developer and, and all the financing that goes into that, getting loans, getting investors, you know, permits and hiring the, the contractor. Um So, you know, uh Jorge was kind of exemplifying what bond was telling me about, you know, the way he has seen work and career change. Uh So very interesting conversation. So I would, uh you know, I guess I’m always curious about people. I mean, if they don’t want to talk, you know, I’m not the annoying guy who keeps talking to them, you know, even after they put their air pods in, you know, I’m still talking to them. I, I don’t do that. I asked them to take their airpods out. No, I just, I just leave them alone, leave them alone. But uh you know, but I’m naturally curious about people. So if they’re willing to talk, um I, I uh these two guys were quite interesting. Vaughan and Jorge and how work has changed, career has changed. And that is Tony’s take too date. I think the coolest part of public transportation is meeting a bunch of different strangers. And like, that’s what I miss about taking the Amtrak train just back and forth from home to, to the city. You used to talk to a lot of folks on Amtrak. I remember one girl, this was my first time on the train alone. I couldn’t find a spot and she was getting off the next spot and she told me to come sit down with her and then we started talking about college and all this stuff and she was actually designing um public playgrounds for different schools. Um And like, we just got to know each other in that like 15 minutes that we had together and like I really connected with her, it was so it was a good experience. That’s it. Yeah, connections. You’re right. You’re right. Well, we’ve got Buku but loads more time here is matching gifts. 101201 and 301. Welcome to Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio coverage of 24 NTC. It’s the 2024 nonprofit technology conference. We are all at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, Oregon. Julie Alison Mark. Welcome. Thank you so much for having us. It’s my pleasure. Julie Zin is Vice President account and strategic Services at Sankey Communications. Alison Herman is at, is Director of Communications and Marketing at Wild Care. And Mark doty is Director of Annual Giving at San Francisco S PC A. And we are talking about matching gifts. Your, your session is matching gifts. 101201 and 301. So we’re gonna run the spectrum, not the phd level, I guess that’s, that’ll be next year. We’re still undergrad here. This is undergrad and you took your senior year off. Indeed. We’re not doing the 401. Ok. Um Combined it all into one hour. Ok. Well, we’re gonna, we’re gonna condense it down even a little more, a little more. Um Mark, I’m gonna start down there with you. Ok. Um What? Well, just generally just like sort of tee us up. What, what could we be doing a little smarter better? Uh generally with matching gifts with matching gifts? Uh two things, there’s a lot of different kinds of matching gifts. So there’s a perception out there that if you’re doing a matching gift, you need large amounts of money, you need to double triple, quadruple it. There’s actually a number of different kinds of matching gifts you can do and they have different uses. So you don’t necessarily need a lot of money. You can do what we call a contingent match. For example, where if we’re gonna get into the details. Ok. So in general, I would say, um, consider doing a match, even if you don’t have large amounts of money. Um Make sure you plan it out and make sure you work with your organization, like your major gift officers and maybe communications department to make sure it’s well publicized and that you can actually get the dollars for a match. Ok, thank you. Um Alison, I I’m taking from your session uh description uh and Mark started to allude to these different types and styles of matching gifts. Can you? Uh Now, since he mentioned, contingency, is this, is this an OK place to talk about. Contingency. Am I the person to talk about that? I mean, I’ll be the person to talk about that specifically. But no, it is, it’s, it’s uh the thing about matching gifts that I think people really, we want people to take from our session is that they are incredibly effective and they are incredibly, it something that people get very excited about both your donors and your team members. So introducing the concept of a matching gift to your donors is something that’s going to inspire their giving and also inspire your team to reach new heights and do better things with your fundraising for your organization. OK. OK. So let’s start to get into some detail then Julie, but uh I’ll try you. That Mark mentioned contingency. Are we, why don’t you acquaint us with different types? Yeah, no problem. So most people think about the standard of all gifts up to $100,000 will be doubled, right? And that, that’s kind of your standard double match or you could say tripled and that’s your standard triple match. When you get into some of the other, other types of matches, you can say things like if we get 50 new sustainers, 50 new month donors will get an additional $10,000. That’s a contingency match where we have to reach this threshold and then we’re going to get this lump sum of money. It can be a much easier ask, especially when you’re asking for a certain number of donors. You don’t have to give dollars. You just have to be one person. Um You can also get into different types of matches where if you have the money already in hand, you can say this major donor is ma has made this donation, will you step up and match their gift? Um You can even have a campaign where you ask your donors to create a matching gift fund to then inspire their peers. So there’s a variety of different types of tactics and ways that you can use, talk about and create matching gift campaigns. Are we considering corporate matching gifts here too or is that something? Is that something different? We are. It’s in our 101201301. So corporate matches are a little bit different. We’re not really going to be talking about corporate matches as much. Although corporate matching gifts are certainly very valuable it’s more of a individual um individual technique that, that is often valuable on the back end. So someone makes the gifting and you say, do you work for a, for a corporation for an entity that’s matching your gift? So we’re talking here about individual donors doing different types of matches or collectively. OK. Go ahead. I was gonna say at my organization Wild, what do you do at my organization in Wild Care? There is some confusion between the two ideas of matching and so you have corporate matching, which is I work for a company and I make a donation and then I request for my corporation, my company to match that gift. So that’s what we consider corporate matching. You can also have a corporation that gives your organization a gift to be matched. So we’re talking about that idea of money that’s being donated, that will be an incentive for individual donors to match. And so sort of two different things with sort of the same name. So a source of confusion for us as well. Thank you. I mean, you all have been thinking about this for a long time. I’m a neophyte. Um Mark, how about you at uh at San Francisco S PC A? What, what do you, what are you doing there around uh matching gifts around matching gifts? We plan those into our annual planning process. So we will actually sit down and say, oh, we’re gonna do a big campaign around the holidays. We’re going to be do a big campaign around the end of our fiscal year. We’re going to need a match for those s so we will actually um go out to our major gift officers plan out our timing, say we’re going to need, we’re going to need you to secure some matches for us by this date. And then we actually integrate that into actually producing campaigns which we then promote with the hope that the match is going to inspire more people to give and when they give to give more and indeed it does. Ok, they do work. I mean, otherwise we wouldn’t be here. This is a, this is an upbeat, don’t do matching gifts. There’s no question here and we were actually just talking about how you never test this because you would never want to give half of your audience something that didn’t include the matching gift. They are that successful that you don’t eat. We test that we know how well they work, our consultants on the team on the panel. You agree with that. Absolutely. We have done a lot of testing around things like match length, for example. So there are a lot of giving. Exactly. So for example, giving Tuesday a lot of organizations have a match. If you don’t have a match on giving Tuesday, you’re going to need to think about something really exciting to cut through the match clutter and the match language that other organizations are putting out. But there are now a lot of organizations that have started promoting their giving Tuesday matches before Thanksgiving, we have tested things like that. And when you’re, when you’re looking at, at elements like that, that giving Tuesday preview match before Thanksgiving, it doesn’t actually work. You’re not going to get a substantial lift on it. So there are definitely times and ways that you want to use your match and promote it to have the most efficacy. But overall, all of the data, both data around the industry and data from our clients where we’ve done a matching gift campaign versus not a matching gift campaign or have multiple clients where we can see who has matches and who doesn’t. Um, every, every data point shows that having a matching gift of some sort is always going to be, be beneficial for your campaign. Ok. Ok. Um Alison, what type of different asks do you have? Can you acquaint us with? You started to allude, you know, you made the difference between corporate and individual on the individual side. What are some of the sample asks? Well, we’re very lucky at wild care. We take care of injured and orphaned wild animals. So I have uh absolutely adorable animals like baby opossums or baby raccoons or baby squirrels or an animal that’s going to be really compelling. But one of the matches that we frequently do is our summer match and the summer match is to help raise funds for our wildlife babies to help them to grow up healthy and be released back to the wild. And so that gift is that matching campaign is really, really effective because you can show the benefit of the match for the actual individual animals that are, that are being raised and being uh being treated at our wildlife hospital. So, uh that is a really, that is a really fun one. Another one that we do is uh Julie talked about not making a preview for your giving Tuesday match, but we do have started doing every year a matching gift fund which is asking individual donors to contribute to the match before the giving Tuesday. Actual matching gift goes into effect. So it’s building that matching gift fund and same thing uh you know, doing it for the animals giving the, the care that the animals need and raising that money to be an inspiration for other donors on giving Tuesday. It’s alright. Now Julie, let me go back to you. How is that different than what you said? Doesn’t do well pre pre giving Tuesday, we’re only 10 minutes in. It took a while, but finally a decent question. We’re only seven minutes in. So I give myself a break. These are all excellent questions. Thank you. Oh, no. So how, what’s the distinction here? So that is not, you’re not previewing a match. You’re actually asking people to make a gift to build a match fund. Um which it sounds, it sounds a little bit nuanced. But when you say in early November, we have a donor who’s giving $20,000 to create a giving Tuesday match. But we know we’re going to raise a lot more than that. On giving Tuesday, we need your help to match more money. Will you help us increase the matching gift? And then, and then what care does? And it’s, it’s an incredibly successful campaign is their broader donor base will actually contribute to the matching gift fund. We have several clients that do a similar type of campaign with their mid-level donors where donors who are giving $1000 plus at $1000 plus level will contribute to that matching gift fund. That particular audience type is typically not always less focused on making a gift for a matching gift campaign, but they can be really, um but but they can really help contribute to building a match campaign. So then let’s say at wild care, they would say, ok, now we have a matching gift fund of $42,700. Then on giving Tuesday, they go back out and they say we have a matching gift of $42,700. Will you make your gift for this matching gift campaign? Ok. And then what, what do people have to do to, to qualify for their gift to for you to get the 42,700. I’m missing something. Well, it’s kind of, you don’t necessarily have to have it be a challenge or a contingency. It can simply be that we have this money. We want you to help us match it. It’s not that you help us match what we’ve already help us match what we’ve already earned. And it’s, those are sort of two different types of matches. You can have challenge match, which is essentially if you don’t do this, we have to offer to give the money back. And that’s one type. And you hear that a lot on the N pr fundraising. Exactly. But it is, it seems to be exactly as effective to say we have this. Will you match it? Will you bring us this funding? Yeah. And I think that’s a common misconception about matching gifts. You ok, go ahead, Julie often times what we often times what happens is when you have a matching gift campaign or a matching gift effort, you’re not really relying on the gifts to bring in the match. You actually want to have a matching gift such that you will absolutely hit it and your matching gift donor has already committed to it. So if your matching gift donor says I’m going to make $100,000 gift, you say I’m going to create a matching gift campaign with the specifications and the timing and the length and the channels where I think I’m going to raise 100 and $30,000. So I’m absolutely overreaching that 100,000 and I’m absolutely going to have that money in hand so that you’re raising money on the match doesn’t actually, um, is, is not actually necessary for the gift for the matching gift to come in. And I think that’s one of the biggest misconceptions is for the general public is, it really is a fundraising tactic. It’s, it’s a strategy that, that we all do and that we all know in the industry. But when you look at folks who are outside of the industry, they don’t necessarily realize that this is a tactic that isn’t actually meaningful that when if you give your $100 gift to an organization that says your gift will be tripled. It doesn’t actually mean that they’re going to be getting an additional $200 because of your $100 gift. It means that they have this money in hand um or pledged or committed and that, that you’re, they’re using that to inspire that giving mark. Can you share with us? Uh Some specific asks that you do around matching gifts at San Francisco S PC A. Yeah, actually, most recently, we basically did what’s called Gamification of a match gam game playing radiation, radiating the animals or Gamification, Gamification. And this is where we try to turn, uh we introduce a lot of many goals and ask donors to help us achieve those goals like you might find in a lot of apps or uh or anything else. But um what we did was for giving Tuesday sat down and said, ok, we need to raise this much money that actually corresponds to uh the amount we spend for in a full year on our mobile vaccine clinics where monthly we go out and vaccinate about 4 to 500 animals in the space of a few hours. So uh we actually sat down and messaged to donors, hey, we need to fund 12 months worth of this mobile vaccine clinics. Will you help us do it? We’ve got matching funds and every dollar you you donate will be matched as well and then kept them updated over the course of giving Tuesday to say, hey, we’ve matched, we’ve achieved four months. Can you help us get to five? We’re at six months by the 11 o’clock, we’re saying we’re at 11 months. Can you help us get over to that? 12 months? And just introduced a lot of little goals to ask donors to help us match, um match their gifts and get to that goal. I love the, I love the time. You know, the the time challenge we’re at 11 months, help us get to 12 for God’s sake. Don’t leave us hanging with 11/12. You often do find that that deadline is what’s so critical. You can, you can message as much as you want, but three weeks out from a deadline. You’re never going to have quite the same sense of urgency as saying our deadline for this match is tonight at midnight. And I honestly, I have no idea why people are sitting at home on December 31st at 11 p.m. making their donations. But there are so many people who decide that that is their moment, don’t we all wait for the last minute for things? I mean, pretty routinely. I mean, I know I do, you know, I have a two week, I have two weeks and then I’m doing it the night before. I don’t know. I just, I think that’s our nature. I wanna, I wanna get to something that comes directly from what you just said, Julie is what if gifts come late? What kind of policies do we have? Do we, do we bend the rule or what, what’s best? It’s a terrific question. Um We actually, recently you have a lot of these, you’re with this, Tony, we had this conversation recently with one of our clients. They are based, um, they’re based in New York. Um They have an international presence and an international donor base, both across the US and internationally and they had a matching gift deadline at and we had countdown clocks. We had all sorts of things saying get your gift in before midnight on the matching gift deadline. And one of the staff members said, is it midnight Eastern? Is it midnight pacific? What about our donors who were in Dubai. Um And so fun question. Um So a lot of the tactics that we can implement technologically actually allow us to let that, that, that deadline, that exact 11:59 p.m. uh be catered towards the recipient’s home schedule. And so countdown clocks on emails, search engine, marketing ads on light boxes. We can, we can actually direct all of those to the recipients um time zone At the same time, most organizations are going to have some fluidity around it. And so if a donor calls you up at 3 a.m. God forbid, you’re answering the phones at 3 a.m. But if you get that message at 3 a.m. from the donor that says I just got in my gift, will it be, will it count? You just say yes, just say yes. You don’t want to say no to the donor. Exactly. We are flexible and you also can set those policies based on your own needs within your organization and be fluid about them within your own parameters. So it’s, there’s not some hard and fast like overall arching rule about matching gifts. It’s a, it’s within your own organization that you can determine that. One of the things you can do is actually plan a strategy around people not making it in, in time. One of the reasons we know matches work is if you look at hour to hour donations, the minute that match ends, you see donations drop off like a cliff. So people really are giving up to the last minute. But one thing you can do is um follow up and say, hey, we’re gonna do a small mini match for those people that missed it and that can be a very effective tactic. So in giving Tuesday, we’ve actually sent out a smaller match the next day and said we have a little extra money. If you missed it, please give again very effective for our large end of calendar year uh uh a month long match. Uh We’ll actually plan in January to send out direct mail and email that says in case you missed it by the end of the year, here’s a small smaller follow up match just for those guys that didn’t give. So people don’t feel bombarded again. Very effective tactic works very well. So it’s very humane and gracious too if you missed it, you know, if you still have more opportunities to give us money, right? You do. Yeah, even if you’re worse than procrastinating like you the deadline, you didn’t just wait till the end of the deadline, you blew it. There’s still a chance for you. There are still puppies and kittens and babies, squirrels and baby opossums that need help, that need you one of your uh session uh objectives, how to apply matching gift tactics across each channel. We haven’t talked about specific channels. Mark, let’s let’s keep with you. What do you do across channels. This is an important part of keeping your organization looped in on what you’re doing with the match. And we will actually sit down and have people from marketing communications. We’ll have people from development. Um We’ll have the major gift officers and we’ll all talk about, we’re gonna be having this match. What can everyone do in their channels to support this match and support this effort? And we’ll have a group conversation about what we’ll be talking about what the messaging will be and get everyone on the same page and then everyone is sort of in charge of uh going off and executing in whatever it is they’re due. Whether that’s the website, we will get it on the website. Uh If we’re on social, we will get it in social. Um We will put it in our DM and email appeals as well. If we have newsletters going out, it will go in the newsletters. Our MGO will again be talking to people about what the match is about and will they support it? So we just get everyone on the same page and that way everyone in the organization that’s in charge of some kind of communication um can, can communicate that out and whatever, whatever they’re working on. We uh we have Jargon Jail on uh Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio. Now you didn’t, no, you didn’t really transgress. I mean, you, you mentioned MG OS and D MS but, but I think people understand major gift officers are, those are, those are basic. I’m just alerting everyone that we do have jargon jail here. And I’d hate to see anybody, uh, imprisoned not wrongfully, it would be rightfully imprisoned. But, but you don’t get a jury. It’s just me. But no, you are fine because DM, everybody knows direct mail. Um, I, I do one thing. That’s, that’s interesting about a multichannel. Yeah, that’s interesting about the campaigns is you do have different timing for the different channels. And so you obviously have your direct mail pieces that go, you know, significantly in advance and there’s a much longer tail, a much longer time for those to have been effective. And then you would have the model that goes up on your website, which usually corresponds with the time that your direct mail is hitting mailboxes in case people open the letter and then go to your website and then, oh, sorry. Yes, I’m doing jargon. That’s the pop up thing that shows up on your website when you open up a website and something pops up in front of you. That, that’s what’s called a model and there’s a link on that that would go to a donation page. So we don’t call them pop ups anymore or light, what do we call them? Moss I learn that pop up a pop up. Technically speaking, a pop up is different technology. A light box and a model are interchangeable Um And the, the technical term, this I consider one of my key roles in my company being translating between our developers and everybody who doesn’t speak, developers speak, which I don’t. But a modal is the technical way that a lightbox is coded. And so a motel and a Lightbox are the same thing. You can say. Either one pop up is a little bit of a different story and that gets blocked by pop up blockers and all of that sort of thing. So you’re fine. I’m fine too. None of us are in jail. My language is not ancient anyway, but I love this because I just learned something new as well. So Lightbox modal being the two things that pop up. Exactly. So you would have that correspond with the time that your direct mail piece hits people’s mailboxes. And then you would also have a, an email campaign and a social campaign that usually start and run on a faster schedule. You would want that to be closer to the deadline and be able to send those messages out. So you’re getting, you know, people often participate with your organization’s communications on many levels and having that same messaging the same images, the same compelling ask that goes with the match coming both in your mailbox also on the website, also on your social feeds and also on your email is a very, very compelling and effective way to raise donations and having that match with the timeline, just makes people jump in with both feet and donate and donate more. It’s wonderful. You had asked about what happens when people make their gift after a deadline as well. Direct mail has an extremely long tail. And so it’s very common that people will, I mean, people will hold on to direct mail and then send a check. Two years later, I don’t understand that. I’ve seen that I do plan on giving fundraising. I’ve seen two years. I’ll send me information on including you in my will. It’s wild. But so what we do when we’re promoting a matching gift is direct mail. We actually won’t promote the deadline. So you just don’t lift the deadline. You can put in very fine print at the bottom. Nobody’s going to read it anyway. It’s fine. Um Whereas when you’re looking at the digital channels, you’re gonna have your countdown clocks and you’re really pushing the deadline and increasing your frequency as you approach that deadline and people don’t get tired of this. Shocking. No, no, especially as you’re increasing the frequency as Julie said, when you get closer to the deadline. No, it seems to just inspire them and you will have people that give again when they see the countdown clock when they actually the same challenge. Yeah. Yeah, we see that as well. Ok. All outstanding. We, we’re busting potential uh misconceptions. Um Well, we still have some time left. What else? Uh do you plan to talk about in your session that we haven’t or a little more detail that you want? I think one of the things that I think is really interesting is what happens when you don’t have a match and that is something that it’s valuable to have to have matching gifts. You don’t want to have a matching gift for every single campaign, but most organizations in an ideal world, you have a few matching gift campaigns over the course of a year. But on these key days, like giving Tuesday or 1231 most organizations, most of your competitors who are, who are hitting people’s inboxes have a matching gift campaign and there are always a few organizations that don’t. And so I think that that is an important thing to think about is what happens when you don’t. Um So for some of those campaigns, we often will fundraise around tangibles. We work with an organization habitat for horses. Um, out in Texas that um this past year on giving Tuesday, we were raising money for a new rescue trailer last year. On giving Tuesday, we raised money for a batwing mower. I didn’t even know what a batwing mower was, but it is really valuable. So don’t leave us all hanging a bowing mower. It’s a mower that has those off board things so it can mow a very wide path path. It’s a wide mower. But when you’re a horse rescue, when you’re a horse rescue, you need a lot of mowing capacity. Um And so, so we could run this campaign that really gave people a tangible and a goal even though we didn’t have a matching gift or um we work with Glaad, which works on LGBT Q issues. And this past giving Tuesday, they didn’t have a matching gift campaign and we had a really terrific campaign. Our creative team did a bang up job on it. But the whole I’m not sure if I’m allowed to say it, the whole theme of the campaign was it’s time to give an f and we’ve had people say fuck, OK, great. So the campaign was, it’s time to give a fuck. And we replaced the you and fuck with the heart from the Giving Tuesday logo. And it worked really well. And so if you have an organization where you can, where you don’t have a matching gift campaign, but you don’t have a matching gift available, but you have a tangible or a goal or um leadership allows you to curse across all of your, your direct marketing channel. There are different ways that you can break through, break through the clutter. This is swearing for a good cause I wanted to say actually, on that note, the opposite problem is I know a lot of organizations swearing enough, not swearing enough. 100%. No one of the opposite problem would be something that my organization certainly deals with, in that I wouldn’t want to necessarily fundraise every time for the bat wing mower, which I’ve never needed in my life. But because once you put a specific thing into your fundraising, that means that fundraising becomes restricted unless you’re very careful with the language. But one of the things that I love and my organization loves so much about matching gifts is the match gives you that specificity. It gives you that goal without having to restrict the gifts that are coming in in any way. It, it has that same psychology of oh yeah, I wanna give $20 for the batwing mower. That sounds amazing. But instead of having to say it’s for the X ray machine or it’s for specifically opossum formula or whatever you are saying, it’s for this monetary goal and this time goal and it has that same psychological benefit of. This is something I want to contribute to. This is something I want to be part of. And this is a goal I want this organization to reach. And that’s, I think the one of the main reasons that match is so matching gifts are so powerful. And I think uh so we know that there is hope in case you don’t have a matching gift, there is, there is the tangibles as Julie described. And I think um one take away from this and it’s important to keep in mind is to just stay creative with your matches. I have seen so many conversations where it’s like, well, we’d like to do a match but we don’t have sufficient funds to double or triple or quadruple what people are giving. There’s a whole lot of different ways, uh, to work with matches. Uh, we had a small match come in and it was just $10,000 and it was like, well, what can we do with that? Uh So we did a challenge grant and actually brought in 100 new sustainers uh just by sort of shifting it and saying, let’s just do a number of instead of dollars, we can absolutely use that money and we did and it was very successful. So stay creative, think of creative ways to to to get the message out and what you can do matches around and for a lot of listeners, $10,000 may not be such a small match at all that may be impressive for them. Um Alright, I I kind of wanna let Mark uh kind of bookend it us. We opened with Mark, we closed with Mark. Is there anything else anything else anybody? Ok. We’re gonna wrap it up then. Terrific. Good luck on your session. It’s gonna be a fun session. It will. And this is a little preparation for you. They are Julie Zin at Sanki Communications, Alison Herman at Wild Care and Mark doty at San Francisco S PC A. Thank you for being with Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio. Coverage of 24 NTC where we are sponsored by Heller consulting technology strategy and implementation for nonprofits. They are booth mates and thanks so much for being with us. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you next week. Prompt Engineering and getting the most from your current tech. If you missed any part of this week’s show, I beseech, you find it at Tony martignetti.com were sponsored by Virtuous. Virtuous, gives you the nonprofit CRM fundraising, volunteer and marketing tools you need to create more responsive donor experiences and grow, giving, virtuous.org. Our creative producer is Claire Meyerhoff. I’m your associate producer, Kate Pinetti. The show, social media is by Susan Chavez. Mark Silverman is our web guy and this music is by Scott Stein. Thank you for that affirmation. Scotty be with us next week for nonprofit radio. Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95% go out and be great.

Nonprofit Radio for April 22, 2024: A Step Back On Artificial Intelligence & Get Your Team To The Next Level

 

Beth Kanter & Philip DengA Step Back On Artificial Intelligence

Beth Kanter and Philip Deng urge you to consider the ethical challenges your nonprofit should grapple with before fully adopting generative AI in your work. They’ve got advice for an ethical use policy and guidelines for training. Beth is an author, master trainer and facilitator. Philip is CEO of Grantable. Our conversation was recorded at 24NTC.

 

 

 

 

Kim TruongGet Your Team To The Next Level

“We do our best work when we’re at our best,” says Kim Truong, as she explains how to evaluate your team’s roles and responsibilities, meetings, reporting, and communications. She also reveals what belongs in your Team Ways of Working Guide. Kim is an independent consultant. This is also part of our 24NTC coverage.

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Welcome to Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio. Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. I’m your aptly named host and the pod father of your favorite abdominal podcast. Oh, I’m glad you’re with us. I’d bear the pain of aico mycosis if you touched me with the idea that you missed this week’s show. Here’s our associate producer, Kate back from sick leave with what’s going on this week, Kate, how are you feeling? Hey, Tony, I am feeling so much better. I’m at like 90% better. But yeah, thanks for checking in. We missed you terribly for the past two weeks this weekend. A step back on artificial intelligence be cantor and Philip Dang. Urge you to consider the ethical challenges your nonprofit should grapple with before fully adopting generative A I in your work, they’ve got advice for an ethical use policy and guidelines for training. Beth is an author, master trainer and facilitator. Philip is CEO of Grant. Our conversation was recorded at 24 NTC and get your team to the next level. We do our best work when we’re at our best says Kim Tong, as she explains how to evaluate your team’s roles and responsibilities, meetings, reporting, and communications. She also reveals what belongs in your team ways of working. Guide, Kim is an independent consultant. This is also part of our 24 NTC coverage on Tony’s take. Two loving donor meetings were sponsored by virtuous, virtuous. Gives you the nonprofit CRM fundraising, volunteer and marketing tools. You need to create more responsive donor experiences and grow, giving virtuous.org. Here is a step back on artificial intelligence. You know, it is kind of nice having a second voice. Uh We’ll see, we’ll see about the future. Welcome back to Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio coverage of the 2024 nonprofit technology conference. We’re all together here in Portland, Oregon at the Oregon Convention Center and nonprofit radio’s coverage of the conference is sponsored by Heller consulting technology strategy and implementation for nonprofits. This conversation is with Beth Cantor and Philip Deng. Beth is an author trainer and facilitator. Philip is CEO at Grant Beth Phillip. Welcome. Thanks, Tony. Nice to have you, Beth. Welcome back. Great to be here. I lost count. How many times I’ve been on your show? Yeah, many, many Nt CS and Philip. You’ll be welcome to come back. Thank you very much. It’s great to be here. Thank you, my pleasure. Your session topic which you uh unburdened yourself of uh yesterday, right. Taking care of you did. Your session is embedded, ethical and responsible use, generative A I and nonprofit work. Um Philip, why don’t you get us started as a, as our first time guest. Um Why did you see the need to be concerned about ethics and, and responsibility around generative A? I? Well, I think, um Beth and I have been talking about the topic for a few months now, maybe over a year. Um And I think that generative A I, I, I’ll start kind of in reverse is a transformative technology that is shaping the world every single minute now. And all of these nonprofits, their missions, their clients, this, this all is being done in a generative A I world now. And I think nonprofits in particular have a, a sort of native inclination to consider things from a perspective of responsibility and ethics. And so I think there’s this really important work to be done uh led by folks like Beth now for quite some time. But to help them figure out how to take these really powerful technologies, these really important tools and then apply them in ways that are aligned with their missions and most importantly with their values. I’m glad we’re having this conversation because it’s important to take a step back and, and evaluate, you know, our, I guess our values, uh you know what our, our core, what we stand for, what we, you know, the walk that we, that we wanna walk um and not be talking about uh the use cases and, you know, use it as a draft and then then it’ll be iterative and you’ll have a conversation with your, with your, uh, with chat, chat GP T, et cetera. Uh, uh, so that’s why I wanted to take a step back because Beth, you and I had that conversation in a, in a panel with, um, uh, last, it was last June, I believe with, uh, AUA Bruce and George Weiner and, um, Alison Alison, the four of you, the four of you. Yes. So we, and uh so, I mean, there’s value in that we, we do need to know what, what are the best use cases and how best to interact with this Philip, as you said, absolutely transformative tool. But let’s, let’s take a step back. Beth, why don’t you help us off as well? Um Sure. And I think as we talked and we’ve been talking um and the reason I wrote the book about it with Alison published two years ago now because we saw this coming is that most, for most that we leave with our human centered values and that we do no harm because there’s a lot of potential to do harm. Um Given um that this technology is working on ingesting a large amount of data from the internet and it’s ingested all its biases and in the ways that we can interact, we can inadvertently, you know, harm people through divulging private information or maybe using it to block people out people of color, out of service. And a whole host of other things. Right. Um, and I could give you that whole list, but that’s like a college ethics course. But the important thing is that, um, nonprofits need to be aware of it and have a way to navigate through it. And luckily intens released of uh ethical framework tag fundraising dot A I and organizations I think are um overwhelmed, their concern. They should be, um, but they need to be prepared and to move thoughtfully. And so the session that Philip and I did was more, you know, how do we operationalize our values in the context of this technology? As uh Philip mentioned before, it’s something that we’re used to doing in this sector leading with our values. But now we need to apply it to the use of this tech to this transformative moment. That is, is, is only going to become, I don’t know more. It’s, it’s, it’s only going to accelerate I I think. Um All right. So Beth, let’s stay with you. You know, what, what should we be? What should we be thinking about talking about? Not just thinking, what should we be talking about consciously? Um at, at, at the CEO level, I don’t know, maybe at the board level help us help us understand what the, what the issues are that we should be grappling with. Um There’s a few things and I’ve been having a lot of those conversations. Um first is educating, understanding what the technology is and actually getting hands on it in a safe way, low risk cases. So you understand, like the limitations of it without just being concerned, it’s a double edged sword here or I don’t know the right metaphor, but it’s there are tremendous benefits, but we want to be careful, right? We don’t want to be so scared of it that we don’t use it. We need to, we do need to use it but carefully. So we need to think about this in terms of, you know, humans always in charge, humans always in the loop, humans making decisions. And I think the most important skill that leaders need to understand is when, where does that human intelligence come in? And where do we let the machine do some of the work? Right? It’s called Cobo. We talked about that before higher up what what’s going to happen is more nonprofits adopt. Um It’s going to free up time, it’s not going to disrupt jobs necessarily, it’s changing and automating job skills which redistributes time and leaders need to reinvest that time into more mission driven, important tasks which are really about relationship building, right? With our donors um within, with um the people we’re serving and, and within that as staff begins to use this and, and they have acceptable use policies and we’re taught how to use it well and carefully. Um and time shifts, they’re going to need to be reskill right there gonna be reskilling and there’s going to be an emphasis on soft skills, they’ll become way more important, like creativity, empathy, communication, interpersonal communication, those things are going to become all the more important. Um There’s been some and um uh linkedin data recently, I don’t know if you’ve seen their, their economic graph but they actually crunch some numbers related to nonprofit jobs and the use and adoption of A I. And they’re saying that um 12% of nonprofit job skills will change and 39% will be redistributed. So leaders need to be thinking about this in terms of their talent retention plans, talent retention plans, Philip, what can you add, please? What, what should we be grappling with? Well, so I think one of the things that I’ve sort of appreciated about working together with Beth is that, you know, there’s been, there’s such a body of work there to consider and then sometimes what I find myself doing partly just, you know, to, to make sure that I’m, I’m not getting overwhelmed with all of the information is to step back and try to come up with maybe sort of memorable or, or um uh tactics to, to see the forest again uh when you’ve lost them for the trees. So where Alison and Beth coined the term the dividend of time. So basically what you get back from using one of these smart tools, I think one of the uh a rough formula that I’m kind of playing around with is that the idea here is to use generative A I to create a dividend of time. And one of the things that I think we have to practice is to use as much of that time as we can as we can manage to build trust. So, uh Beth was just talking about how a lot of soft skills and, and relational work is going to become really important. I think, you know, thinking back to before so much of our work happened within the, the digital world. We were out there doing the work and running into one another and a lot of that relational work was done just as a matter of fact, that’s no longer the case when we’re sending a lot of emails or having A I, right? A lot of our communications from now from now on. Um So I think what we have to do is be intentional about saying, hey, some of this time that we’ve gotten back, we actually have to allocate it thoughtfully back to going out into the world and forming these relationships because the thing that uh the A I lacks most of all relative to, to people is the context of our work. There’s an incredible amount of data in these models. They are really amazing at certain tasks. They don’t really have any idea of what, what the world is that our work exists in. So that context I think is absolutely crucial. And it’s actually the understanding of our work paired with as Beth and Alison say Cobo, that’s where the magic really happens is when you pair your human intelligence, your understanding of the situation, the nuance of your work and then know how to leverage a really powerful technology like generative A I to do that work more efficiently. And of course, in a, in a human centered and, and values align kind of way you mentioned building trust, say more about that. Do you mean trust of the tools? No, I mean trust between us as humans. Yeah, I definitely mean between us as humans and between organizations as stakeholders within a community or within a movement. Um I think if you use A I in a way just to say, give yourself some time and maybe just throw that time back into more productivity. Um Beth and I talked a lot about um a a few cases where folks kind of rushed A I chat bots out into the world into front line situations, really sensitive ones where people in crisis were reaching out at one point and getting a human being. And then all of a sudden they were talking to an A I model and the A I was giving out really, really problematic advice. Um And that is an instance where the tech was used to save time or money, uh you know, in terms of human resources and it harmed the, the very people that the organization was trying to serve. So in that case, it wasn’t used to, to build trust, the, the time was saved, but it wasn’t reinvested in strengthening the relationship between the organization, the community, the stakeholders, the donors. So when I talk about trust, I mean, good old school person to person, uh stakeholder trust. Uh Beth, can you share one of those uh one of those anecdotes, of course, um I think the one that a lot of people know about because it was got quite a lot of media attention is the National Association of Eating Disorders Nita. And uh they put what was happening because of the pandemic, there was an increase in eating um disorder because if you’re by yourself, you’re more pro you know, you’re more prone to that, right? Um So, and they, for many years had a hotline, you know, actually humans answering the phone and um, and what happened was they were completely overwhelmed. They went to senior management said we need more help. Um um the staff responded, we’re going to organize a union if you don’t get us more help. Um And what happened is they put a, they rushed a chatbot out to answer questions of people reaching out for help and pink slipped a lot of staff. Ok. So first of all, they, they, they saw it as a cheap replacement for staff, which we, which is doing harm and we don’t not human centered and then it wasn’t thoroughly tested, there weren’t enough guard rails on it and it was dispensing harmful information. So they’re, they were in the middle of a media crisis, um, reputational damage. And I saw a, um, article even a couple of months later, they had a bill into one of the state legislators, um, to get more funding for, uh, to support people with eating disorders. And it was turned down because of the, the lack of trust based on what happened. So their community was harmed on a couple of different levels from, from the, from the firing of some employees from the poor advice from a, from a chat bot and the legislative funding was, was refused and the reputation as well. Ok, disaster. Um So what do we take away from that? Uh ok. So, uh well, don’t do those things, but are, are there larger lessons Philip that we can, you can see from that? Yeah. Um Another thing that I was thinking of when you were speaking with Beth earlier was one of the ways that I advise leaders that are contemplating bringing A I into their to their toolkit is to come at it from a sense of playfulness, a stance of playfulness. You know, a lot of people do pretty dangerous things for fun. You know, if you’re mountain biking or rock climbing or skydiving, we, we do a lot of stuff that, you know, is, is fast paced and there are real risks involved. But because we’re in this mindset where we, our senses are heightened, um We’re very aware of danger and failure, but also motivated um in a, in a way that is honestly kind of enjoyable. Um I think it’s a really great place to start just, just as a mental framing for taking on this task of learning about generative A I, some of these technologies are really fun to play with. I mean, if you, if you interacted with the language models or the image generators, if you do it in a safe way, in kind of a sandboxed way, like Beth was saying where you aren’t starting off with anything sensitive or mission critical, you’re doing it in a way to honestly play around and explore the limitations of the tool doing so with sort of a playful mindset, almost the child’s mind, as some people say, I think it’s a really great way to make yourself attuned to uh the, the risks, the rewards uh in sort of a game like format, but also to reframe failure. If you don’t get it at first, if you, if you don’t get the right results in a game, what you do is you try again, it’s the next round, it’s the next shot. Um And kids just get back up and try again. And I think that’s a really, really good way to become uh very aware of generative A I to know what it is to, to feel it and become fluent. So I often tell people think about that or, or watch a kid playing, uh, think back to memories of, of learning a sport or an instrument or, or some, some kind of art that, that you have. I don’t think it’s terribly different from that. So, uh it feels different and we oftentimes speak about this really powerful tech in terms that are overwhelming or sort of uh difficult to relate to. But at the end of the day, I think the the people that I see excelling a lot of them, I think a disproportionate number are having fun. And I think the reason that they then get so good is because there’s a nice feedback loop there. Um So that’s what I tend to tell people. It’s time for a break. Virtuous is a software company committed to helping nonprofits grow generosity. Virtuous believes that generosity has the power to create profound change in the world. And in the heart of the giver, it’s their mission to move the needle on global generosity by helping nonprofits better connect with and inspire their givers responsive fundraising puts the donor at the center of fundraising and grows giving through personalized donor journeys that respond to the needs of each individual. Virtuous is the only responsive nonprofit CRM designed to help you build deeper relationships with every donor at scale. Virtuous. Gives you the nonprofit CRM, fundraising, volunteer marketing and automation tools. You need to create responsive experiences that build trust and grow impact virtuous.org. Now back to a step back on artificial intelligence with Beth Cantor and Philip Deng. I love the, I love the idea of having fun with it, treating it like a sport safely. Yeah. Yeah. Um You all have advice around um an ethical use policy and, and guidelines for training practical tips and examples and processes who who wants to start with some, some of the practical tips, strategies, tactics for for ethical use policy. Um Sure. So let’s just break down quickly what’s in an ethical use policy, right? So there’s four sections, there’s our values and that should be the easy part, right? Um Most of nonprofits I know have a value or vision statement and it’s kind of relating that to the use of the tech. Uh the next step are norms, how are we going to use it? Um What and where are we not going to use it? Right? And those are things like thinking about the use cases and not just the use cases and the tools, but about there is a conti of risk with different types of uh use cases at the lower into the spectrum. We have individual use to do a task like a writing task or create an image or analyze some data, right? So it’s under what are the potential risks? And I think one big one is if we’re interacting with public um uh uh generative A I writing tools and models, chat, GP T Copilot. Um You know, what’s our point of view about putting data into those? Right? Are we gonna put, we gotta be careful, we’re not going to put any personally identifiable information into the prompt that then goes into a public model. Um like someone’s email address or God forbid their social security number. Um There’s another principle about like what is confidential information, right? Like do you want to be uploading someone’s performance evaluation as an example of our, our organizational tone written in this tone and here’s their performance about you just bring up a very good sort of tactical thing that, that your prompts are part of its learning universally. It’s not only is this, it’s not a private conversation, you and chat GP T well, with public models, right? The free public models that where we start. But if you have an enterprise model and you’re using your own data, then that’s safer. OK. That’s a different story. So it’s understanding that difference and also um you know, you can redact, right? Think of it. Um This comes from Rachel Kimber, great person to follow on linkedin. Um Like maybe you do have some information, you redact the organization’s name and you redact the person’s name so that there’s no association of it, but you could get an a summary. So that’s lower risk individual task, move to the middle, we have it for internal purposes like internal communication, hr operations financing. There are medium sized risks there. One example, um, let’s say someone in hr uses a generative A I tool to write the employee handbook, right? And they fall asleep at the wheel, they proof the first paragraph or two and say this is fine and they, it’s there, you know, a couple of years down the road, there’s a sexual harassment issue and they go to the employee handbook and oh, this doesn’t protect anybody. So you, you really need to audit the output from it. You can’t trust it. It makes, makes stuff up, mix facts up. It’s hard to believe and that’s the medium risk. You’re still in the middle of the spec it does that with at the low risk too, we get to the high risk and we do what we described before. We’re having it on the front line interacting with our stakeholders. And I think that’s where we need to have at the board level. We need to have a data privacy governance, you know, discussion, we need to have, we need to operationalize that. And if we’re testing something that is running on AAA large front tier model like open A is Chat G BT or whatever, we need to have the appropriate guardrails in place, right, to prevent it from going off the grid and you know, preventing and providing information that’s potentially harmful or excluding people from our services. Philip, anything you want to add? Is there more about the ethical use guidelines? I think in general there are a number of really great frameworks coming out. Uh N 10 has one that just came out yesterday. Um I’m part of a group fundraising dot A I, that’s the website. Um That’s also coming up with ethical and responsible use frameworks for this sector in particular. I think what I would just say is the important part is to have the continuing conversation. And when you have a reputable framework, that framework is a tool to guide that conversation to make sure that you’re being systematic and thorough. Um I think what it’s going to come down to though is a posture of the organization that you understand that this is a tool that can help but that the seriousness of the work, which was there long before A I demands that you approach it with care. And so everybody in the organization needs to be looking for the risks, the benefits kind of just being aware and then when something seems beneficial, get together and have that conversation using the framework to say, OK, this is what we want out of it. But let’s go through this framework, let’s assess it step by step and see if there are risks that we can spot as a team and then to make the approach course correction. So the frameworks are a tool for the continuing conversation, which is going to have to continue. Because every time one of these new step up models gets released, there’s an incredible new amount of landscape that we have to analyze because these models are gaining capability so quickly. So it really is changing what it means. I mean, the terminology itself is almost a placeholder and we, we really have to go out there and have our eyes open and understand what is generative A I in 2024 it’s gonna mean something different in 2025. I think I’m so glad we’re having this conversation to step back. And I realize as you were speaking, Philip, I, I’m sorry, I fucked up. Uh You were, you were, you were only in two out of four. You said there were four. I, I moved on, we were only on number two of your 44. I at least I realize but, and then I said, you know, and then I deferred to Philip and no, sorry, I apologize for that. We’re only on number two of your four elements of the, the, the policy for use. You were very gracious and not saying Tony, you’re fucking up. So you told me not to swear anymore. No, I, no, I, no, you said you said fuck shark. And I said you could say that and I almost said shit, but I didn’t say it. I said chat G BT makes up shit. I said sh stuff in New York City once you were talking about. So now we can say fuck sharks and that I admitting that I fucked up. And so let continue with the four elements that belong. People listening are probably thinking like, why did the guy move on after she’s only on number two? Why did he move to Philip? When Beth is only halfway finished values? We talked about values, right? We talked about nor nor do and don’t and that’s where we talk about use cases and that’s where we were and then we were on the spectrum. We’re on the cases. We completed the spectrum. We’re at the most risky, the forward facing the outward face. That’s the most risk requires the most testing, the most guidelines around the boundaries around the use, right? And that’s what’s called guard rails, right? Rules like don’t fall asleep at the reel at the wheel, read the output and check the first two paragraphs of the, don’t fall asleep at the wheel and don’t disclose personally identifiable information or whatever comes up through your organization’s conversation. And then the other piece kind of relates to what Phil was talking about earlier is the playbook, right? Um How do you share information within staff about prompts or what you’re learning? So that’s an important piece. And there was something actually, wait, say a little more about that, wait, say that one more time because I’m only hearing this the first time. Say that last sentence again. OK. So I call it the playbook section, right? So there’s a lot, you know, sharing, not knowledge and skills on staff so that there’s a shared playbook and it could be a Google Doc, right? Where people share. I tried this prompt. It produced a really great fundraising appeal. Uh I had to work with it but here it is, if, if somebody else wants to try it. So that kind of ongoing learning is really important. Um There was something else while Phil was talking but I forgot it with the fuck sharks thing. I derailed you. Alright. Well, we had fun. It’s, it was, it was worth it, it was worth it. And it may very welcome back to you. Um What’s the board’s role? Uh Beth, you mentioned the board but you just kind of been passing what’s the board’s role here and that the CEO should be bringing the board in for, for conversations about, about what two things. All right, I think, you know, while we in this sector understand responsible and ethical use, we don’t necessarily have that expertise on all boards of nonprofits. Hospitals do cause possible uh hospitals have to navigate ethical situations, right? So they might have ethicists on their board. So it’s also important to think about maybe we want to recruit some board members with that type of expertise with a grounding in ethics. And we probably also want to bring some members in who have an understanding of the technology and we also want to be having um some governance level policy discussions leading to our policy around that. Um, as well. It’s not just something that happens on the staff level and for senior leaders, it’s not something that gets punted down the hall to the IT department, it should, you know, leaders need to be thinking about it as well. Yeah. Yeah, it’s, it’s, uh, it’s, it’s systemic, right? It doesn’t, it doesn’t belong in the IT department. Um The idea of uh recruiting ethicists or I guess if not that bringing a consultant to help, to guide the discussion by, facilitate the discussion, raise the issues that we’re all talking about here. Um Because board members are not, you know, they may be all in or they, they may not even be paying attention, you know, depending on their work status, they may not be paying attention to artificial intelligence. So the issue, the issues need to be raised. I don’t know, I’m finding at least with the, the boards that I’ve been brought in to speak with and maybe Phil, you’ve also seen this um that it’s either they’re really concerned about it and never put their hands on it and have all these perceptions or misperceptions about it and that might be holding them back or they want to move full in this is transformative. We need to change with the world or we’re going to be left behind what else? Uh We have a couple of minutes left. What else did you talk about in your session that we haven’t covered in as much detail? I don’t know, maybe other cases or we talked about the dance floor and the balcony. Ok. Go ahead. Ok. So um this comes from the, the leadership lab at Harvard, um that leaders have to have the balcony view, which is seeing ahead, the big picture. But you also need to get on the dance floor and get in, you know, get into those steps. So for uh from a leadership perspective, you need to think about the ethics responsible use, move slowly know the use cases, all the things we’ve been saying. But you also need to put your hands on it as well and really understand do it playfully make the time for experimentation. And I think that’s a mind sh shift in our sector, you know, to make you happy, the time to actually experiment and learn. And that’s the kind of shift that our cultures are going to go through. If we free up time that we’re going to be, we’re going to make space for innovative thinking and make time for experimentation because hopefully we will release some of the busy in our busy cultures and make space for that. And that is the typically the promise of new technologies that there’s gonna be uh extra time, there’s gonna be greater productivity. But, but, well, well, your point was let’s not, let’s not apply it directly to productivity. Let’s, let’s apply it in relationship methods, uh, relationship building things that humans do uniquely that I, I, I don’t know, maybe I’m being risky here but I’m presuming that robots will never be able to do bots. Uh, artificial intelligence will never be able to have the depth of relationships that we have human to human. And is that you think that’s a risky statement? Any, anybody, you think you think we’ll get there. So not that I, not that I aspire to it. But I mean, I like to think that there’s, there’s some things that separate us from artificial intelligence. Are there, are there reliably like 10 years from now? Well, that’s the thing, that’s why I don’t like to read all the being risky. Yeah, I don’t know, 10 years from now for the time being, we are uniquely positioned. Uh We can say that right in, in 2024 and probably 2025 I think we’re uniquely positioned to have relationships. So that’s where the, the time ought to go in. The things that we’re uniquely qualified to do. Versus more office productivity is the point that both of you made. I would maybe uh come at it from another angle as well that we have never maybe appreciated how important human choice is. And I think one of the things that differentiates this technology from the software that we’ve been using for decades now is that increasingly it’s making decisions. I mean, that really is one of the, the Hallmark, uh you know, distinguishing features of these intelligence systems, more and more they are making choices for us. If they write something for us, they’re literally choosing every single word and then, you know, we added it, but a lot of decisions, tiny, tiny little decisions are being made by these smart systems. And I think what we have to really come to appreciate and not take for granted anymore is that the human choice, the, the decision making, power and responsibility that we have in the world, in our teams, in our organization, in our communities. That’s really what I think we need to, to focus back on and say, how do we choose to use this technology in the right way because once we do, the technology is going to start making choices for us. So human choice, uh I think is maybe one of the things that, that I’ll be meditating on a lot for the next uh the foreseeable future here. I’d like to leave it right there. That’s a great step back. Thank you. Thank you, Cheers. That’s Philip Deng Ceo of Grant. And with Philip is Beth cantor, author, trainer and facilitator, Philip. Beth. Thank you. Thank you so much. Appreciate, I appreciate. Did you just say fuck shark? I might have, I hope you don’t hear from the shark folks. Thank you for sitting through this uh this raucous uh provocative session uh where we are sponsored by Heller consulting, technology strategy and implementation for nonprofits. Really? Thank you very much. It’s time for Tony’s take you. Thank you, Kate. I’ve been enjoying uh a week and a half and I have another several days of meetings with um uh my client uh visiting nurse service of New York uh in New York City. And just, you know, as I think about all these meetings or as I’m, as I’m having them, I’m just reminded how much this is the real joy of, uh, for me, planned giving. But I think for any type of individual fundraising, it’s, it’s just the getting to know people. It’s being curious about people. Of course, we’re talking about the, the, the work that VNS health does, but I, I always make sure we go deeper than that and it’s me getting to know the person, all these meetings are, um, with folks in their seventies, eighties and nineties. Uh, most of them nearly all are, are women and it’s just getting to hear their stories, you know, what, what they did in their careers, what their husbands did because most of them are widows, their, what their Children are doing where they used to live, what was school, like, what was growing up like, uh, you know, these, these are the, the, this kind of, you know, deepening of, of understanding of people that is, um, is, is really a joy in individual fundraising. So, uh, I hope that you have relationships at, at that level. Uh, it doesn’t have to be about planned giving. That’s, you know, that’s the work I do. So, those are the conversations I’m having. I just find it really, uh, sort of uplifting, having all these meetings over breakfasts, coffees, lunches, uh, a couple of dinners, but a lot of folks, those ages, uh, this time of year don’t want to go out at night. So it’s uh not too many dinners, but I hope you’re enjoying relationships like that because they are the real heart of individual fundraising, getting to know people and working with people on the, on that level. And that is Tonys take two Kate. I think we really take for granted the face to face connection that we make with people, you know, by storytelling or just getting the wisdom from anyone really. Not just the older generations. Yeah, I think you’re right and we, you know, we obviously lost it during the pandemic. Uh I see more people getting back to face to face in person, events, meetings. Uh And I, and I hope folks are, are open to that and not just open to it, but, you know, looking for it, seeking it out because, uh I think, you know, that just, it’s human connection and virtual connection can only go so far. It’s, it’s just, it’s not the same thing, not even, not even close for sure. No, I completely agree with you. But anyway, we’ve got buu but loads more time here is get your team to the next level. Welcome back to Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio coverage of the 2024 nonprofit technology conference. We’re coming to you from the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, Oregon. We sponsored at 24 NTC by Heller consulting, technology strategy and implementation for nonprofits with me. For this conversation is Kim Chang. She is independent strategic communications campaigns and an operations consultant. Welcome to nonprofit radio. Kim. Hi, nice to meet you, Tony. You got a big portfolio there. It is a mouthful strategic communications campaigns, not stopping there. That’s only two out of three and operations consultant. It’s true. I’ve played around the title many times. It’s like, how do I explain to people what I actually do? Is there a company name that you can compact all that into or have you? No, presently just Kim TRONG consulting. Yeah, letting the name speak for itself. But it’s simple, but it says it all your session topic. Have you done your session? I did do my session yesterday. All right. Congratulations. That’s over. So we can recap a little bit. It is work smarter, not harder, easy tips, easy. That’s, that’s an important qualification, easy tips. She promises to get your team to the next level. All right. Um What was the genesis for the session? What brought this topic to you? Oh, this is funny. Honestly. I kind of ended up at NTC on a whim. I quit my job last July 2023. I met up with an old boss and she mentioned to me, I was telling her about some of the things that I’ve been doing around project management, strategic operations, just helping um you know, folks at my old company get to the next level, managing their team ironing out some of the issues. And she said you need to do this with nonprofits, you need to go to NTC and you need to present on this. And I don’t know if I have much expertise to share, but sure, I applied to be a speaker and here I am, it’s my first NTC and it really does already feel like I’m coming home to the topics and the people I care about. So that’s really the genesis of this. It’s very touching your first NTC. You feel so comfortable. Yes, I do. It’s a great community. It really is. It’s a welcoming, supportive community. You know, folks living their values. I mean, we certainly see that in, in, in 10, living their values of equity centered. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Smart use of technology, but also um the conscious use. Absolutely for good. Right. Maybe not necessarily for growth. Indeed. Yeah. All right. So um should we just start talking about some of the easy tips? Let’s dive in? Ok. OK. What do you, where do you like to start Um Well, I always like to say that, you know, the basis of a really well functioning team is um how you staff the work and whether or not you are using your individual staffers and teams capabilities, their strengths to the best of your team’s abilities. So, one of the practical ways in which you could operationalize this and that I recommend it to folks is simply to put together a roles and responsibilities, matrix, right? And when you put together roles and responsibilities, matrix, you’re identifying, not just the role, I think a lot of times people start with just the role that folks are supposed to take on a team. And then they don’t actually quantify the responsibilities that are in the act, the weekly, daily activities that are associated with those roles. So making sure that those two are aligned. So that’s the first thing I flagged. The second thing is once you notice that those two things are aligned, you don’t want to match them up with your staffs. Um you know, existing personality traits, work personality traits as well as the hard skills that are required in that role to be successful. And once you do that audit, you have a clearer picture of the gaps that remain. And whether or not you need to train folks, you need to hire people in and how folks can work with each other. So you’re seeing the gaps between the skills that are needed and the skills that exist? Is that yes, am I oversimplifying? No, that’s great. And then also how those skills or the activities you take on because you have those skills complement each in a team, right? Because you don’t want folks stepping on toes, right? Let’s say you’ve got two people who write social copy, right? Or two people have been asked to write social copy. Maybe you want to split the two and have someone write a press release and someone write social copy instead. So folks aren’t stepping on toes, but all of this can be illuminated in a roles and responsibilities matrix and help you make better decisions about how to manage your team. What else we got? Well, that’s just the first one. And then the second thing is I love the word matrix. I use it a lot and I probably need to stop. But the second thing is just making sure that you use the time that you have with your team effectively. So that’s coming up with a recurring meeting cadence that you codify in a, in a meeting matrix. That’s the second one. Um And then making sure that each of those meetings comes with an agenda that everyone like a standing agenda that doesn’t change every week, but covers the general main topics that everyone needs to be read in on or be aware of or action on. And then once you have these agenda templates available and folks see them every week and it’s just a standing agenda template. You’re actually creating accountability and ownership over some of the pieces that, you know, someone who’s maybe more entry level in a team might be uncomfortable sharing, right? So it’s when you create a standing agenda, it creates predictability, it creates regularity, it makes people feel confident. It uh also reduces a lot of the anxiety that folks have when they’re like, oh, I don’t know when we’re going to meet or I don’t know when we’re going to talk about that, right? Just put it right into the standing agenda. Um And it also helps to reduce a lot of these slack and email noise sometimes, right? Sometimes we’re trying to do a lot of work, especially if you’re managing a team, you’ve got lots of things that you need them to do, but you’re pulling them into these meetings all day, right? Let’s simplify a lot of that and maybe meet just twice a week. And folks know that during those times you get a chance to ask your lead all the questions that you need to ask. So it’s just creating this predictability and the way that you use your meeting time and how often you meet goes a very long way in keeping your team running well and keeping your team feeling at ease and empowered in doing their job. What are some of the things that belong on that standing agenda? Well, it depends i on when you meet and what the purpose is of each meeting. But I’d say, for example, if it’s the start of the week meeting, and you just want to make sure that everyone’s on the same page at the beginning of the week, then I would say a couple of things. The first is you want to make sure that any updates you hear from leadership or at the C suite level that are relevant to your team are shared in that team meeting. So anything that people need to know so that they can do their work for the rest of the week should be shared. So any important updates, action items, sorry, not action items, but tasks, right? If there’s something that you need to get done that week, you want to start there, you want to have a conversation in that meeting and you also want to share how you say, ok, I want you to write the first draft of this communications plan, right? Um You want to actually use that meeting to explain. OK, well, this is what I want out of it. These are the goals, these are the audiences, these are the tactics. And then the last thing is actually discussing and recapping those action items at the end of that meeting. So people walk out and they know this is my remit for the week, right? So that’s one type of meeting I would say is really valuable and that’s how I’d run that meeting every week. Um, another meeting that’s really valuable is a risks. Meeting. People don’t like the term risks. I think to them it signals looming problems. But I think what’s really great about having a risks meeting and the fact that it is a looming problem is that it’s looming, it’s not actually a problem yet. It’s not actually an issue yet. And when folks get into the habit of regularly identifying and logging risks super early, a lot of the times they’ll resolve it within two or three weeks before those risks actually become issues that derail your team dynamic, your team progress your delivery against a certain timeline or deliverable. All right. So deal with it while it’s a risk before it becomes a crisis. Well, have you seen examples of that where folks have teams have successfully dealt with risk, like you’re saying, maybe over a couple of weeks or maybe even a few months and, and then they, and then they, they just feel better. I mean, there, there may be other, there certainly are other risks. There’s always something out there but it, they put their minds at ease over something that was kind of had been looming, but they never had dealt with. Have you seen of that? I mean, I see that, you know, every day in our work once you start identifying and codifying a lot of those risks, but I think a really good example probably is, um, during the 2020 census when I was working at my old organization, a company called Fenton’s, the US, one of the US oldest social impact communications firm had an amazing experience there. One of our clients was the California Community Foundation and they were working on 100 organization. Get out the census campaign in Los Angeles County. It is one of the hardest, it is the hardest to count region in the United States. Just super diverse. Um Lots of languages, um lots of barriers to actually getting an accurate count. And a lot of those, when you’re trying to reach a lot of those communities, you’ve got to go right into the community, you’ve got to reach, talk to, talk to them, you’ve got to knock on doors, right. Um What do you do when the world goes virtual and shuts down? Right? When, during the 2020 COVID crisis? Right. So, it was amazing because we started to see one of my vice presidents. Now, he’s a senior vice president at Fenton. He could see the writing on the wall. Right. And you can see we’re going to have to pivot to virtual strategies soon. Right? Because it’s opening doors, no one’s going to grocery stores, no one’s going to grocery stores. No. Exactly. Exactly. No one’s out in the community. And so what we ended up doing was we had to completely pivot and we pivoted early, which allowed us to actually take resources like the funding that we might have allocated to door to door canvassing or allocated to, you know, ads at bus shelters or ads in grocery stores. Right. We pivoted a lot of that into virtual tactics where you can actually just reach folks right on their phones or as they’re scrolling through at home where they were in front of the TV. So we completely pivoted. Oh, we also did a lot of peer to peer texting. So you couldn’t speak to a here in person about getting out of the count, but you could text them about it, right. So we were able to identify that the crisis was coming and it was going to come early. And as a result, we were able to reallocate funding and resources and our activities accordingly. And I think if we had waited a little bit too late, we would have wasted a lot of money and resources. When you were talking about the meeting matrix, you talked, you mentioned the uh the meeting cadence, you know, something is that um I mean, it’s, it’s, I’m I’m sure you can’t say, you know, how often should a team meet that depends on the size of the team, the responsibilities of the team, the experience of the team, the, the comfort of the team, you know, but uh what about, what about um engaging virtual team members in meetings where some folks are not virtual, you know, some are, it’s a hybrid meeting, somebody some half a dozen are in the office and three or four are, are virtual. You have strategies for engaging those, those virtual folks so that they don’t feel left out. I mean, they, they’re one dimension on a screen in the meeting room. And meanwhile the other, the dozen people or so are chatting pleasantly among themselves and essentially ignoring the one dimensions. See, it’s interesting because I’ve had a couple of conversations about hybrid situations and at 10 and at NTC right now, and I think the there isn’t really a consensus on it, but there’s an, um, there’s a reality in which to be completely honest that the conversation, to be honest with nonprofit radio listeners. Ok, perfect. There is a reality in which the conversations that you are having virtually, if other people are in the room, um, you know, in person, the conversations you’re going to be having with them are just simply not going to be as rich. That’s just what I’ve noticed so far. And, you know, in talking to a lot of folks at NTC, you know, folks are saying, you know, I think that sometimes it just makes better sense all the conferences that they’ve been to over the years, especially after COVID, they’ve been most successful when they are all virtual or all. Um, we’re all in person, the hybrid ones are challenging to facilitate. Um So I guess I don’t have a great answer for that. But, um, it is, I think just caveat that with the reality, right? The conversations you have are probably just not going to be as rich and consciousness raising. You know, you bring in those folks whenever you can. It’s just, and I’ve been on the virtual side, um, it feel, it feels a little excluded. You know, it’s nothing intentional. It’s just that there, it’s not the same experience, you know, it’s just, you know, you’re not there, you’re not there, you’re there virtually, but that’s not there when people are, people are in the room, not when it’s all virtual. I mean, that’s a different dynamic. And how do you get your hand up and, you know, you get your voice heard, make sure everybody speaks and that’s a different dynamic. Uh Yeah, I’m talking about the hybrid meeting. It doesn’t feel so good on the virtual end. OK. Well, at least you’re, you’re honest. I mean, there isn’t really a great answer. It’s just not the same. So that’s, you have to be intentional to bring the team together, you know, whatever, semiannually quarterly. So that, so that the virtual folks do feel included just maybe not in the interim meetings, but they don’t feel excluded 100% of the time. Yeah, I think I would feel irresponsible saying, you know, you can make the experience amazing because, you know, there are just nuggets of conversations you have by the water cooler or when you go to Happy hour after something that just enriches the conversation you simply can’t have when you’re virtual again. But that’s why you need to be intentional about bringing the team together in person. I guess, to me, if I was a CEO at least annually, but even that doesn’t sound like I feel like enough, but semi annual, I mean, obviously there are budget constraints around that too, but it’s a challenge. I mean, everybody’s struggling with it. I think still, I think, I mean, things are emerging, you know, we have emerged and models have emerged. I’m just not sure that they’re uh they’re as successful as they could be. In some cases. I think some of some of the choice we’ve made, you were kind of getting at it. Um But I think you wanted to ask you or you kind of assume, you know, there probably isn’t like a strict, hard and fast rule for how often, you know, team should be meeting. And I would agree, I think it really comes down to the needs of the organization. But what I will say is paramount is creating that predictability, creating that regularity, you might not meet as an all staff, um except for once a year, but maybe you have a quarterly virtual three hour meeting strategy meeting every quarter, right? And that’s something that people look forward to, they’re aware it’s happening. That’s when you’re going to get to strategize, that’s when you get to the bigger picture Exactly. And it’s on the calendar. People are aware. Yeah. So I’d say creating confidence in how you use your meeting time is really more valuable than, you know, all the bells and whistles of an in person meeting or all the bells and whistles of a virtual meeting. Just get the basics right first. You know, more tips. Oh, my goodness. What, let’s see. I talked through the ways of the roles and responsibilities, Matrix, I talked through the meetings, the risks. You know, I think a really great tool that folks can use is any kind of infrastructure tool, documentation that your team feels like is the master hub. And when I say master hub, it just means it’s this one key resource that you redirect folks to over and over and over again. It’s probably got to be a little bit more robust than your slack channel. Um For certain teams, you know, Google Docs with your running notes, with your roles and responsibilities, your project plans could be sufficient, especially if you’re in a smaller team. Um And then if you’re on a bigger team, a cross functional team, um you might want to invest in a dedicated project management tool like a Sauna or Trello or click up. But I wouldn’t necessarily jump to a tool to solve some team management problems right away. I think just really, especially if folks are, for example, if folks in your team have low project management tool literacy right. It just makes more sense to get them comfortable. The most basic Google sheets or basic trackers in Google Docs to start, right? So you really got to evaluate your needs. But the key tenant here that I emphasize is just redirecting folks to this one place, keeping it updated every week, right? So that everyone knows this is where you go to get your information shared. I mean, that becomes part of a shared culture, even exactly expectations, you know, everything that that document covers, everybody knows that they can rely on that. It’s a, it’s a common resource culture. Yeah, but uh important to talk about. Alright. Alright. Um You had something in your session description about codifying best practice, best practices in a simple team ways of working guide that sounds related to what we just talked about is that is that essentially is that it? Yeah. So the team ways of working guide and when I did my presentation, I essentially split up the tools that I was recommending in two different categories. There are foundational operational tactics, tools, resources that you want to use that simply maintain the function of your team week by week. So that’s the foundational operations and there are project specific tools that you want to use, right? And so for the project specific tools, that’s when we get into work plans, that’s when we get into um you know, who is the manager, the owner? It’s called the Moca matrix manager, owner, consultant, helper approver on a specific project on a specific deliverable, but you need the basic foundation. Yeah, I know, I it’s actually from the Management Center, I can’t take credit for that, but you need the basic foundation in place before you you can activate for these different big projects, right? And so the ways of working guide is such an example and that to me is the baseline, you codify, this is who’s on my team. This is what they are responsible, this is how we work together, this is how often we meet. So all the resources that I mentioned are in that way, working guide. All the resources that I mentioned that are foundational operational resources, not necessarily project specific resources are in that way as a working guide because it sets both the expectation, but it also sets a culture as well for how you’re going to work together and that’s not project specific that is about managing your team. Yeah. Hi, Kim. So why don’t you leave us with some final motivation and uplifting thoughts about, you know, these, these easy tools for getting your team to the next level? Yeah, I would, you know, I think I started my presentation saying this um the 2023 report from the Center for effective philanthropy, I think they say 63 or 68% of nonprofit leaders, you know, they’re really concerned with burnout. Um And I think that has only been exacerbated by the economic downturn. COV ID 19 folks really need the services that folks in our nonprofit sector are providing. Um And I think when we do mission driven work, um we feel this need to just spend all the time that we can and work the long hours that we need to because our work is so mission critical, it’s so important. And I think the biggest thing I’ll say is social impact does not have to come at the expense of our well being. We do our best work when we are our best. And when you are a manager, a team lead, a department leader, you have the, you have the opportunity, but honestly, also the responsibility to set that team culture around well being around operational excellence, right? And so that’s what I would really encourage every nonprofit middle manager, department leader to walk away doing. You got four or five tips, four or five tools you can use to really set your team up for success and um you know, improve their well being. That’s it, Kim, independent, strategic communications campaigns and operations consultant. I make sure that folks understand that it’s the three, the three, the three legs of your tripod, the three legs of your stool, the uh the three sails of the three masts on your uh on your schooner of your schooner, the three TYS on your fork. I don’t know. Everybody knows you got a big portfolio. Alright. Thank you very much for sharing. Thanks so much for having me, Tony and thank you for being with our coverage of the 2024 nonprofit technology conference hosted by N 10 where we are sponsored by Heller consulting technology strategy and implementation for nonprofits. Thanks for being with us next week. Matching gifts. 101201 and 301. If you missed any part of this week’s show, I beseech you find it at Tony martignetti.com. We’re sponsored by Virtuous. Virtuous, gives you the nonprofit CRM fundraising, volunteer and marketing tools. You need to create more responsive donor experiences and grow, giving. Virtuous.org. Our creative producer is Claire Meyerhoff. I’m your associate producer, Kate Martignetti. This show, social media is by Susan Chavez, Mark Silverman is our web guy and this music is by Scott Stein. Thank you for that affirmation. Scotty be with us next week for nonprofit radio. Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95% go out and be great.

Nonprofit Radio for April 8, 2024: Email Deliverability & Email Welcome Journeys

 

Jamie McClelland, Natalie Brenner & Alice AguilarEmail Deliverability

In our age of rampant spam and artificial intelligence, you need to know how to give your emails the best chance of getting delivered. What are DMARC, DKIM and SPF, and how do they help with deliverability? This 2024 Nonprofit Technology Conference panel is Jamie McClelland, Natalie Brenner and Alice Aguilar, all from Progressive Technology Project.

 

Patty Breech & Elizabeth Sellers:  Email Welcome Journeys\

What happens after your emails are delivered and folks want to support your cause? How do you bring them into your family so they’re engaged and stay with you. Also from 24NTC, this panel is Patty Breech at The Purpose Collective and Elizabeth Sellers with Humanity & Inclusion.

 

 

 

 

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Welcome to Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio. Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. I’m your aptly named host and the pod father of your favorite abdominal podcast. Oh, I’m glad you’re with us. I’d be stricken with Eisenmenger syndrome if you broke my heart because you missed this week’s show. Our associate producer, Kate is sick and lost her voice. Of course, I wish her a speedy recovery to good health. But then a question comes to mind. Do we need an associate producer? Let’s see how it goes this week, email deliverability in our age of rampant spam and artificial intelligence. You need to know how to give your emails the best chance of getting delivered. What are D mark D Kim and SPF? And how do they help with deliverability? This 2024 nonprofit technology conference panel is Jamie mcclelland, Natalie Brenner and Alice Aguilar, all from progressive technology project and email. Welcome journeys. What happens after your emails are delivered and folks want to support your cause? How do you bring them into your family? So they’re engaged and stay with you. Also from 24 NTC. This panel is Patty Breach at the purpose collective and Elizabeth Sellers with Humanity and Inclusion. I’m Tony take too. I love the wise. We’re sponsored by Virtuous. Virtuous. Gives you the nonprofit CRM fundraising, volunteer and marketing tools. You need to create more responsive donor experiences and grow, giving, virtuous.org. This is getting exhausting here is email deliverability. Welcome to Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio coverage of 24 NTC. It’s the 2024 nonprofit technology conference. Of course, we’re in Portland, Oregon. You know that you’ve heard this already. Our continuing coverage is sponsored by Heller consulting here at 24 NTC. Heller does technology strategy and implementation for nonprofits with me now is Jamie mcclelland Technology Systems Director at Progressive Technology Project, also Natalie Brenner, Director of Resource mobilization at Progressive Technology Project, and Alice Aguilar, the leader, the executive director at Progressive Technology Project. Jamie Natalie Alice. Welcome. Thank you. Thanks for having us, Tony. Thank you all. Uh Your session topic is email deliverability in the era of spam and artificial intelligence. Um Alice, let’s start with you. What could you just kick us off? We have plenty of time together but general strokes. What, what could we be doing better? What are we ignoring? Why do we need this session on email ability? This session is really, really important for nonprofits and, and grassroots organizing groups, you know, um in PTPS 25 years, we know that email has been really critical to organizations and, and organizing. Um It’s a critical communication vehicle, um, to get the word out quickly to groups so that they can, and their community so that they can take action. Right. There’s no stamps. Right. It’s pretty instant. As long as somebody on the other side is watching. Right. And, and you know, the thing about email, it’s also the place where we control our own messages. Uh, we control our own lists, you know. So it’s, it’s democracy at work. we control the timing, the timing of it, right? Um So there’s nobody there, you know, like, you know, to like to look at our content. At least that’s how it has been, you know, email is Federated. You know, anybody could be an email service provider and send out your email. But now here’s the thing that we’re seeing, right? There’s this concentration of ownership around technology and you’re seeing this in email. So when organizations are sending out email, about half are going to gmail Yahoo or Outlook Microsoft, right? So, um if you think about that, it’s like now with this most recent changes, if you had seen there’s changes in, in uh Google and Yahoo had changed the rules about what emails are gonna be sent. So there’s a concentration and the rules are changing by the, the companies that control 50% of and so they’re controlling the deliverability, correct, you know, and, and like email is supposed to be different than platforms like Facebook or, you know, X you know where they’re monitoring your contact and the algorithms. Email is your, that’s your words, your story being told. And so, you know, it’s, it’s really critical for our groups to get their messages out. Right. And so now because of these rules and these changes and, and eventually they could just totally, they’re gonna make all sorts of decisions about what email is gonna go. Um We have to, we as organizations have to jump some hoops and take responsibility now to make sure that our emails are delivered and it’s really hard for folks to keep up with this. And that’s why our session is, you know, PTP is gonna help uh groups figure out how do we at least get our messages through these corporate gatekeepers, right? To be able to get that out. So that’s the, that’s the purpose of the session, Natalie. Um Who uh can you expose us to some of these rules or, or one of the rules that’s changed? We have plenty of time together, but Alice mentioned all these rules changing. What, what, what the hell is going on? Thanks, Tony. I knew you were going to ask me the technical question. Are you the person? I’m the accidental techie of the. However. Yeah, absolutely. Does that mean Jamie is the technician is I should say he surely is. Yeah, absolutely. So as Alice was saying, you know, email is kind of kind of the dinosaur of the technology world at the moment, but it’s also so critical still like Alice was saying, even after our 25 years, we’re seeing groups still relying and counting on it. And now they have all these acronyms to work through D Mark D Kim SPF. And what in the hell do those mean? Most of the groups we work with don’t know, I don’t know what the hell they mean. And so our session is going to expose that for folks and tell them how to work through all that Mark Net non profit radio. We have jargon jail. You just transgressed terribly like you are in it to bail you out. Obviously. D Mark D Kim and I am in jargon jail and I totally accept that will get you out. Pf to me is some protection factor because I live on and I probably even said the wrong jargon. We don’t even know, but I live on a beach in North Carolina. So to me, that’s my 50 at least help us just before we get into the technical details. Just what are these rules about, right? The, the main goal of the rules is to stop fraud. Um You’ve probably received an email that was sent from Tony Martignetti and it wasn’t you? Yeah. Yes, I have. It’s another guy out there and there are other folks I think I might have just called you Mark. By the way, it’s Jamie because we have another, it’s not D Jamie. It’s D mark is the acronym and Jamie is the, that’s where it came from. Thank you. That’s very gracious of you to bail me out. It was my fault. It’s mine. I made the right Jamie. So the main idea is fraud because Google and Yahoo, in this case, at least they’re trying to impose new limits for a noble cause which is they want to stop people from being able to send messages that claim to be from your domain name, but they aren’t. And your domain name is the part after the at sign in your email address. And you don’t want, I don’t want to get a message from Alice at progressive tech.org that says, hey, Jamie, your payroll didn’t go through click here in order to make sure it’s proper, that’s what we’re trying to stop. Have there been problems with Mark’s payroll payroll? No, I get it from Natalie asking me to like, hey, I forgot the login for our bank account. I need to get these checks. Can you please just click here and just give me you hover over the email address and it’s like that’s not Alex dot ru when you hover over. So they’re doing it for a noble cause they’re doing it for a noble cause. And you might, you know, 10 years ago you got these also, but they were full of typos and they were so obviously not from Natalie or not from Alice, but now with artificial intelligence. It’s possible for anyone you don’t even like, you can be anywhere with any kind of language skills and you can have a perfectly written email that’s very convincing. And, and they’ve also cut down on the, uh, the estates, you know, a $45 million estate greetings of the day, you know, from one of the African countries, you cannot, they are smarter, they are smarter and they’re closer to the real thing, close to the real thing. And so, you know, if you hover over and it says.ru it’s easy. But what if you hover over? And it says Alice at Progressive tech.org which it can you just to make clear.ru is a domain, a Russia, it’s a country level domain name. It’s owned by Russia and it could be anything. Tony dot Ma Ma is Morocco, it’s country of America. So every year I think I pay 75 or 100 and $75 or something to the, to the to the my domain provider. Of course, but they’re paying the country of Morocco for my dot Ma U so.ru is Russia, which means it’s very likely spam. I’m sorry, Jamie. That’s great. So the deep dark secret is that from the beginning of the internet, you could send an email that was from progressive tech.org and you still can send an email, you can put whatever from address you want in the email protocol. It allows it, you can put whatever you want in the from address and it really will be whatever domain name you want it to be. So these new rules and regulations are intended to stop that. And there’s two main rules that are used to test and the test, one of them is called SPF for Sender policy framework, policy framework. And that one says I can, I love the energy between the three of you, Natalie and Alice are giggling while, while Jamie is talking, I love the energy we’ve been working. Plus there’s this guy Mark who’s presence is hovering over us. We’re channeling Mark even though he’s 3000 miles away. Are you, are you based in New York or a Texas, Texas? Paul Minnesota. I’m in New York is somewhere. We’ve worked together for over a decade and he’s only five 100 miles but his presence is felt we’re channeling. So SPF again, SPF is center policy framework and this allows us as progressive tech.org to publish to the internet to say if you get an email that claims to be from progressive tech.org, it has to be sent from one of these 10 servers. And if it wasn’t sent from one of these 10 servers, you should consider it fraudulent because there’s only 10 servers that legitimately send our email. Those are the email servers of our internet service provider. So that center policy framework, if Google or Yahoo or proton mail or may 1st mail, whatever, that’s an email that claims to be from progressive tech.org. That email provider can look up our SPF record check to see if it was sent from the right server and if it wasn’t sent from the right server, it fails the SPF test. D mark. Let me do D mark last DKIM. Let’s work on Kim. There’s no, no job description. Your name must be Kim. We’ll accept middle name, first name preferred. We’ll keep an open mind. Kim is a signature. It’s a digital signature. When we tell us what the acronym stands for, can I on the domain key identified? Male? Yes, there’s math involved. There’s math involved. There’s some very cool math involved. So he said cool math what I was saying? I thought it was redundant. So dkim, when a message is sent by us, we insert a digital signature into the header part of the email, the header is usually hidden from most people. So you can’t see it, but a digital signature is sent with the email message. So when the receiving server gets the message, the receiving server sees the signature and then it has to look up your DKIM record to see if it’s a valid signature and if it is a valid signature, then you pass the DKIM test. So two tests every does every email have to pass all three of these tests that we’re talking? Right? So that’s where Mark comes in. This is the rule. Oh jeez, don’t ask me what that one stands for the D mark is when you make those two tests and then the receiving service says, well, what do I do if it fails? And a dar policy can be, none says, don’t do anything. It’s OK. You can be fraudulent and two is reject and three is quarantine, which are in practice mostly the same. So in other words, you can set your SPF and your DKIM so that the receiving server can tell whether it’s valid. And then you can say this is what you should do if it fails either one of those two. So if the rule is you only have to pass one, so you can fail SPF. But if you pass DKIM, you pass, you can fail DKIM. But if you pass the SPF and the reason is because there’s actual legitimate reasons why you might fail one or the other, it’s still valid and you could fail one or the other. So you just need one. It’s time for a break. Virtuous is a software company committed to helping nonprofits grow generosity. Virtuous believes that generosity has the power to create profound change in the world and in the heart of the giver, it’s their mission to move the needle on global generosity by helping nonprofits better connect with and inspire their givers responsive. Fundraising puts the donor at the center of fundraising and grows giving through personalized donor journeys that respond to the needs of each individual. Virtuous is the only responsive nonprofit CRM designed to help you build deeper relationships with every donor at scale. Virtuous, gives you the nonprofit CRM, fundraising, volunteer marketing and automation tools. You need to create responsive experiences that build trust and grow impact virtuous.org. Now, back to email deliverability. This really is getting exhausting now. All right. So we’re acquainted with what the rules are rules, these are new rules. So this is, this is, I mean, if you consider relative to the internet, this is ancient history. These rules have been around for over 10 years, but the way rules become adopted is very slow. So what Yahoo and Gmail have done is they’re trying to speed adoption of these rules by saying we’re going to reject your email if you don’t have these three things in place. And it’s kind of interesting because D Mark is supposed to say no, you’re supposed to accept it if the policy is none, but Gmail is breaking that protocol and say no, we’re going to reject it. If you don’t, if you don’t have one of SPF or Din, we’re going to reject it regardless of D Mark. If you send more than 5000 messages a day, we’re really going to make sure you have at least one of these two and you have to have ad mark policy, even if the D MARK policy says none, you still have to have that D Mark policy if you’re a bulk sender and we’re gonna stop you. We’re gonna, we’re gonna break away from the technology part of it. I wanna talk. No, no, we’re not abandoning. I mean, it’s important, but we’re gonna move to leadership Alice. What, what is a nonprofit leader’s role in ensuring email deliverability? Well, you’re the executive director. What, what do you feel you take on in, in, you know, in your role obviously as your role as executive director, what do you think is your responsibility around email deliverability? Our responsibilities are responsible to our help our groups because that’s what we do. We support community organizing groups, that’s our niche. Um really think about like, you know, because we care about their work and we care that they get the communications out. It’s our responsibility as our team to understand these rules to be on top of this stuff, which is really hard. I mean, we’re a team of three plus mark out there. Don’t forget I can’t, you know, and so we have to like sift through and keep up with these rules because our groups don’t have time for that. We work with small to medium sized organizations that don’t have a tech arm. They don’t have a techie, they have accidental techies like Natalie, um which we make Natalie do a lot of things, right? They make me do a lot of, you know, so, so that’s our responsibility to move. We were there to really help groups navigate this world and also help them understand the role of technology in their organizing work and the impacts um that technology has in society and for social change. And this email stuff is critical because there’s so much dependence, we call it dependence on the master’s tools. You know, Audrey Lord, uh the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. You know. So for us, it’s like having we, we throw in a lot of political education around the role of technology. Email is like the one that everybody understands, but they don’t realize that as organizations that their emails are not getting sent. And they’re wondering like, why can’t we move our folks just because they’re not receiving an email. And so our responsibility is to help them get that word out. And so we deconstruct this stuff, figure it out. Jamie memorizes these acronyms and we hold trainings, we actually hold trainings, we help them navigate, help them get things set up. That’s our, that’s our role. My role is to work to move our team to make sure that this is we’re doing the best we can. We work with almost 100 and 50 organizations, nonprofit, uh grassroots organizations. It’s, it’s our job to make sure that we’re on it and in a timely way and we keep up with it and also translate, right? We got to translate this stuff for the groups that don’t have a technologist. They don’t have the benefit of a Jamie, right. And also the, the understanding is not, it’s, it’s again, understanding that role because we sort of like use whatever is easy. But to do this stuff is actually takes a little bit of, you have to dig in a little bit and that’s our job to help dig in and we’re gonna get to what to do very, very, very shortly. But this is why this is perfect for our listeners because most of our listeners small and mid-sized nonprofits, they don’t have the benefit of a full time or even maybe even an outsource technologist, like you’ve got Jamie. Alright, Natalie, how do you, how do you fit into this? So, um I have been with progressive technology project for 11 years and I started in an administrative role um and in a small organization that doesn’t take a whole lot of time. Um And so I started to learn how to do technical support and started working on the programming aspect of things. Um started training alongside my colleagues. Um We provide several trainings a year online and we’re going to do our first in person since COVID this year, probably this fall. Um And so I do a little bit of everything and it’s wonderful. Can you so can you help us start to get into the topic of how to design your own emails so that they, so that they meet, meet the criteria? Don’t suffer the uh the consequences of, of D mark. I got these acronyms down. Now, you got to do one of the two SPF or D Kim and D Mark will evaluate, will instruct the internet. Well, the email provider, what to do if, if one of those two tests is not passed, I’m, you’re like your name. I didn’t say hirable. You don’t want me as an employee. I’d be a terrible employee. You wouldn’t want me as an employee. But yeah, there’s a lot of things you can do to help before you get to the acronyms. There’s a lot of things that you can do on the front end to help your emails get delivered. And that has to do with setting up your template, not including weird characters or you know, animated GS like the word free can sometimes be, don’t use the word invoice or free in your subject line in your subject line. Don’t send an email to 20,000 people and include an attachment, things like that. And so we do train on things like that as well. And then on the technical end of things, you’ve got all the acronyms to work through and there’s lots of ways that you can get help addressing those if you don’t have a technologist at your organization or if you’re not with a social justice partner, like progressive technology project, um where we provide uh really awesome support to help you through that. So I want to go into a little more detail about the structure of emails, the planning of emails. So that uh Jamie, you want, I mean, I don’t know, Natalie, should we stay with you? I, I’m just, I’m still concerned about the subject line. Leave out free, leave out invoice free at if you’re sending to thousands of people that don’t do attachment. What else just about? Yeah. So, you know, there’s a lot going around these days from different consulting firms or organizations talking about how to craft a subject line that will gain attention. And that’s really important. But you also have to just be careful about the buzzwords that you’re using to avoid the pitfalls. And it’s not that hard if you’re talking about a subject line. Do you guys have anything to add? I think everything Natalie said is straight on some of it. It is common sense. You receive lots of spam messages and you don’t want your email to sound like that and look like that. And some of it can be obvious the no free act. Now there’s a lot of exclamation points, things like that sometimes get picked up. But I think that’s important. It’s becoming less important as these new rules and regulations are happening because it’s getting bigger, the data’s getting much bigger. And I feel like the big providers are really getting a little bit better at differentiating between the spam and the non spam. So I think that really important is following these rules and getting your domain names properly set up. Um, the only other things I would add are just, there might be personal preferences. Like a lot of people have the subject line newsletter number three, number 12. And it’s like, no, it’s the same thing I find too. I think most personally and this is very, like, there’s a matter of taste. I’m not a big fan of the newsletter that has 12 different stories in it because I see a subject line and I decide whether I’m going to open that message based on what’s in the subject line. You can’t put 12 things in a subject line. Yeah, but then whatever is not in the subject line is buried and it’s difficult. I’m a bigger fan of sending out more frequent emails with um that are shorter that like you, you see in the subject line, what it is and then you’re going to open it and you’re going to read it as opposed to a long newsletter. Now, do things like frequency. Does that impact your deliverability? Frequency? So too many, too much. No. In fact, it’s the opposite quantity and volume help you because a lot of these are percentile rankings where the providers are going to say, oh, wow, we received 1000 messages that were successfully sent and not complained about and you got two complaints. That’s a, you know, very tiny percentage. If you send 10 messages and you get two complaints, it’s, you know, it’s like a complaint can sink you more. So they’re tracking, there are, aren’t, aren’t the providers also able to track what people do with your message, whether they, whether they, whether they, whether they put it, whether they market junk, do, are they able to track that you’re doing in your inbox? They’re 100% able to track it. And it’s a black box as to what the algorithm is as to what they’re doing. And this is one of the, when you’re talking about, I think what leadership as a nonprofit sector, a lot of that has to do with paying attention to the power we’re giving these corporations. You’re familiar as a media person in the nineties, we were really fighting hard against the concentration of media ownership. It was a huge threat and it’s still a massive, massive threat. The same thing is happening with email, there’s a concentration in owner within the internet in general and with email in particular with Google Yahoo and Outlook. And we think, you know, Google is free and it’s not, it is like it comes with a price cash. Right. Exactly. Exactly. Surrender, privacy, surrender. Yes. What did you say? Free as kittens? Ac RM kind of thing. Free. Yes, exactly. So, but that’s where this black box comes in is that we’re giving the power to a very small number of corporations to decide based on our actions and based on who knows what, whether the message should arrive in the inbox. Now, these new regulations, I think they are in the public interest. I’m very glad that Google and Yahoo have decided that they’re going to cut down on fraudulent email. I applaud that, I think that’s good, but they’re doing it for their own reasons. And that means next time they might have other changes that they want. And I’m not at all comfortable with us as a sector saying sure, we’ll give three corporations the ability to dictate what messages land in the inbox, especially during these really crazy political times, it’s un predictable what could happen. And I prefer for us as a movement for us as a nonprofit sector to diversify. I really encourage people to look at other providers. Don’t just go to Outlook or Google because your a technologist says, oh, this is a simple thing that everyone’s doing. It’s really important to diversify to go to other providers. And I just want to say like, you know, we can make a choice, we make a choice to voluntarily give up our, you know, work, go to gmail because it’s oh, it’s so easy and, and it does all these things, but we can make changes now, right? I mean, I think that’s what PTP, what we stand for is we believe in people controlled technology for social change because then we can control, right, our data, our messages, how we wanna get things delivered. And so and, and also design it the way we need it right? To design it, the way organizations and organizing, really need to do the work and in our language, right? So this is where we can make choices. But it’s, um, it’s usually most folks get directed, right? Because of whether it’s consulting or sometimes it’s foundations. I hate to say it. But, you know, because you’ll get free money if you just like, everybody get on 365 Microsoft. right? It’s like without thinking and it’s like, but meanwhile, here they are doing work, you know, and that’s anti corporate work or something, you know, and so be conscious about your choices, especially how it may, may uh coincide with your own cause you were going to say something. I am in total agreement with all of that. And I just wanted to go back to a little bit about email deliverability on the recipient’s end. A shout out to all email recipients out there. I know the spam button looks very inviting for every single email that you don’t want to see in your inbox. However, if it’s not real spam, if it’s from an organization where you went to their gala maybe and you decide you don’t want their email, try to click unsubscribe because when you click spam, you know that goes in to mark against that organization and maybe that’s not what you intended. The user actions that do get collected aggregated. I was gonna ask you too, Natalie about Alright. So as a recipient, be thoughtful. Not real spam and we get it. You don’t want our stuff. That’s totally cool. You get to make that choice but just like unsubscribe instead of a spam. What about cleaning up your list? I mean, isn’t there in, in having a smaller list that’s not gonna mark your spam that’s more engaged with your emails and having a bigger list and, and lower quality receipt actions. That’s such a good point. And uh with power base, the database for community organizers through our support, we do a ton of work with um the groups we work with on duping, making sure you have valid and correct email addresses, you know, having a sign up sheet at your gala or your event is great. Um However, if those people are clicking unsubscribe, make sure they’re actually getting unsubscribed in your database. Um You can even go so far as to if you want to keep them in your database, remove their email address, just you brought up such a good point. Make sure you’re not sending it’s, you know, quality over quantity. Definitely you don’t need to send to the world, you know, do some searches in your database for who is the most engaged and send them a particular email segmenting your list can be very helpful for that. Yeah. Did you have more to add? No, I was just saying it’s like, it’s sort of interesting because the idea of unsubscribing, people should know that they’re only unsubscribing from that one list. And organizations are great at like, creating multiple lists for multiple different things and just like, I have 1625 30 different communications lists and like, people are wondering why am I getting all these emails? Because, well, you only subscribe from the one list, you know, so what that email list was on and sometimes you may not know what list you’re on so organizations can do that too. I mean, if you think it’s good to have 25 communication lists, maybe you should pair it down to 10, maybe like limit. I have another technical question. Mark Jamie. I want to ask you to myself. Don’t be so harsh if I was a DJ DJ. Got it. Alright. Um You mentioned setting your domain name up properly. What did you mean by that, please? So with Dkim Dar and SPF these all are referred to stop laughing at the, stop laughing at the acronyms are bona fide. He got you out of jargon jail. Some gratitude. I would, I would charge you interest on the bail payment. I just made quite an acronym. Yeah. Jeez. So how do you do? How do you put up with this? This is a virtual organization. I was glad you’re not all based on the laugh at your technology. So your domain name, she’s I know she’s going to apologize for that. I know she feels bad already. I can say she’s blushing. I’m putting, I’m putting her on the spot. Does she feel she feel bad? I do. I sorry, deeply sorry, apology accepted. I know they really care about setting up your domain name. So if you own your own domain name, then you have a company that’s called the Registrar, which is where you pay an annual fee. Usually about $20 a year for the right to have this domain name. Domain 10 one is a big one. Hover name.com, gandhi.net registrar.com. There’s a number of different ones. The company you’re paying for your annual registration exactly. Now, that often is different than the company you’re paying to host your domain name. Now, these are really subtle and nuanced differences but they are important differences. The company that you pay to host your domain name is usually the same company you pay to host your website or your email or something like that that’s usually packaged together. Now, the company that’s hosting your domain name is where you can set what your domain name records point to. So that’s what you say DNR S domain name records. Yeah. Well, DNR, I don’t know if I haven’t heard that accurate. That makes me think of testing Department of Natural Resources. We can name them. All right. Look, I have the board here. I can shut your mic down. Not supposed to make fun of the host that consolidation of power. You’re damn right. This is not progressive technology project. Nonprofit Radio. This is Tony Martignetti, Nonprofit Radio. You’re damn right. The middle aged white guy is taking over explicitly. At least I do it explicitly. I acknowledge the power so I’ll shut you down. All right. So no domain name record if we spell it, DNR do. So that’s what you’d say. This domain name points to this IP address. If you want to send an email to this domain name, it should go to this mail server. Those are the historic ways that domain names have been used and they’re being added to and order to support the SPF, DKIM and D Mark records. So SPF is a kind of a domain name record called the text record. And DKIM is also used as the text record. So you say for progressive tech.org, show me the text record and it will say SPF policy is this or you say, OK, and you look it up just the same way you’d say for this domain name. That’s the IP address. How do we make sure we’re set up correctly? You know, I would love technical help with this. I would love to explain to you how to do that. That would take a diagram in 45 minutes. It’s painful. I’m embarrassed as a technologist, how complicated it is to do this. The best I can say is first ask your consultant, staff or volunteer if you’re lucky enough to have one, if you’re not then ask your web host and if your web host can’t do it and you have a database, maybe you have power base or maybe you have um sales force or maybe you have networks nation or any of the other corporate places. Ask them because they’re the place you’re sending your bulk email, they have a responsibility to help you and they should be able to help you solve this problem. That’s valuable. Natalie, I’m going to choose you to bookend us. So the Accidental Techie, which a lot of a lot of people find themselves in that position. Uh You know, just take us out with uh with final thoughts. Yeah. Um Well, we really appreciate this opportunity this time. It’s been a while since we’ve done a radio show and progressive technology project is growing. Um We’re a social justice nonprofit organization that believes in transparent and democratic technology. Um like Jamie said to get help with this stuff, your database provider should be helping you, your technology providers should be helping you with this, so seek their support. Um And then, yeah, we’d love to hear from anyone out there who’s interested in learning more progressive. Tech.org is our website. Ok. Thank you. And just to set the record straight, it’s a podcast. It’s, it’s called Tony Martin TI Nonprofit Radio, but we’re, we’re a podcast, weekly, weekly podcast. Alright. So they are Jamie mcclelland, uh at Progressive Technology Project, Natalie Brenner with progressive technology project. And Alice Aguilar, the leader, the executive director, progressive technology project, Jamie Natalie Ellis. Thank you very much Tony and thank you for being with Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio coverage of 24 NTC, the 2024 nonprofit technology conference where we are graciously sponsored by Heller consulting our booth partners, technology strategy and implementation for nonprofits. It’s time for Tony take two. I’m at the National Association of Y MC A Development Officers Conference, the National Association of all the Y MC A s in uh Mexico, Canada and the US. We’re in Denver, Colorado and I have to admire the w for just all their camaraderie, you know, their support for each other. Um I saw it today at uh two round table conversations that I hosted the desire to help each other. Um These were all small and mid size wise and the sharing of ideas, you know, the, just the, the getting along the collegiality. Uh It’s really delightful to see. Uh There are about 1800 people at this uh North American Y MC, a conference and I’m delivering uh a session on planned giving, not surprising, planned giving 101. I haven’t done that session yet, but from everything I’ve seen the two days I’ve been here, the WS really do support each other throughout North America and it’s uh it’s, it’s inspiring, it’s really, it’s, it’s uplifting to, to see everyone just desiring to help each other so much. Uh sharing ideas, you know, and just laughing and understanding. Yes, understanding, empathizing, even if there isn’t a solution or a suggestion, but, you know, just the empathy. So my, my hats off to the Y MC A s of North America. It’s a real pleasure and a privilege to be at their conference. And that is Tony’s take two ordinarily I would say Kate, but she’s not with us. Uh uh III I think she’ll be back. Uh I think we’ve got Buku but loads more time here is email. Welcome journeys. Welcome back to Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio coverage of the 2024 nonprofit technology conference where we are in Portland, Oregon at the Convention Center and where we are sponsored by Heller consulting technology strategy and implementation for nonprofits with me. Now are Patty Breach and Elizabeth Sellers. Patty is founder and CEO of the purpose collective. Elizabeth is us, Director of Communications and Development at Humanity and Inclusion. Patty Elizabeth. Welcome. Thanks for having us. Good to be here. Pleasure, Patty for you. Welcome back. I think this is your third spot on nonprofit radio at NTC. You’re a perennial. It’s great to be back. I’m glad, glad. Thank you and Elizabeth. Welcome. Welcome. First time we’re talking about the secret to loyal donors. Email, welcome journeys. Um Elizabeth, why don’t you start us off with how important because we’ve heard from Patty on this subject in the past. Uh I believe it was two years ago, but it, that was two years ago. Uh start us off motivation. Why is the email? Welcome journey so important? Sure. So we’re all nonprofits. We all rely on donors to do our work and have impact. So we’re welcoming donors into our organizations every day. Um But so often we’re not nurturing them in a way to share the impact they’re having and share other opportunities for them to get involved. So welcome journeys, really provide an opportunity for us to introduce people to the organization, to our work and to ways that they can take part in our work with us. Um And of course, whenever you’re able to automate a welcome journey, it helps small teams like ours at Humanity and inclusion to welcome those donors out as much capacity or or resource of a manual welcome series. So for us, the initial need for a welcome journey that kind of pushed us over the edge was two years ago when the Ukraine conflict started, we work in situations of conflict and disaster mostly with people with disabilities. And we saw an influx of thousands of new donors who really didn’t know much about our work. And we’ve caught ourselves with the problem of how do we tell them who we are, why we’re managing this emergency situation. And the answer to that was the email welcome journey. And we’ve now added more of those to our repertoire to bring new donors into our space. And and Patty, we can do this with, with uh automation, but also, as Elizabeth said, also nurturing we can, we can automate and nurture together. Yeah, absolutely. Um I think the primary goal of any welcome journey is gratitude. Um We want to thank the supporter for whatever their most recent action was, whether it was a gift or joining an email list or signing a petition. We really want to validate that decision and say um you know, we really appreciate you and we’re so glad you’re here. Um Patty, I gotta ask you a question from previous years. Are, are you the person who told me that you, you, you go on dates and they google your name and they find your nonprofit radio appearances was that you, it wasn’t you? I thought it was, you know, well somebody did tell me I thought it was you. Uh no, you’re not, you’re not seeing that. Ok? No, you would remember all. I’m just sorry I I remembered the wrong person but uh it is happening. I I can’t say that there are any uh marriages have spawned from nonprofit radio appearances. Not yet, but I’ve only been at it 14 years. So I’m still working to get to reach that marriage threshold. Somebody did tell me that their dates were, were mentioning their appearances. Yeah. Yeah. Alright. So it could happen in your future, you know, I don’t know if you’re dating or not but let’s talk about uh is this, I mean, there’s a series, you have a, you have a kind of a, this is a series of like four or five emails properly timed. Ok. Now, let me ask, uh Elizabeth, are you working with the purpose collective in your email? Welcome journeys. We presume we’re here, we’re here together. Ok. Um So Patty, you’re the expert here. Uh How do we, how do we get our plan started? We got to think about the timing, the messaging, right? Like isn’t the first one supposed to be within, within 24 hours, 20 four hours? Ok. Describe what that first message should look like. Yeah, so that one is just a simple. Thank you. Um We usually recommend that it comes from someone recognizable within the organization. So like the executive director or anyone who has name recognition with your supporters. Um and the email can be really simple. It can even be plain text. And the goal is just to say I saw your donation come in and I wanted to tell you how much we appreciate your gift. Ok. So really simple. It doesn’t have to be formatted. Like plain text is great. It’s like like the digital equivalent of a quick handwrit note. I saw this come and it moved me and I want to thank you. Of course, you’ll hear from us, you know, you’ll get something more formal maybe or something. Yeah, that’s a great way to describe it. OK? Ok. And that within 24 hours, I mean, with automation, I mean, should we do this within 15 minutes or 30 seconds? Yeah, it depends on the system you’re using. Sometimes there’s like an overnight sink that it happens between like your, your database, your donation platform and your email program. I’m also thinking timing wise, if you want it to look authentic, if it comes within 15 seconds, it’s unlikely that your CEO could have, would have typed that and now you’re giving away the authenticity of it, the authenticity. Yeah, so that’s, that’s actually why wait until the next day, we usually wait at least a couple of hours if it’s a more automatic sync. But if you have an overnight sync that can, that can work in your favor because it looks like the executive director saw your donation come in first thing the next morning and wanted to send you a note. Ok. Alright, Elizabeth, what kind of responses have you seen? You? You’re getting emails back. Like people believe that the executive director really did take the time. Yeah, we do sometimes get emails back. Um just thanking us for the work that we’re doing asking if there are other ways that they can get involved. Um So yeah, we do see some people who reach out on those um on those emails and, and the best thing about those emails is they’re when someone is super warm to your organization. So our open rates are are much, much higher. So we’re automatically seeing more engagement from those folks. After that first email. Are you adhering to the patty breach purpose collective best practice of doing it within 24 hours that first? So yeah, so our donors, they actually do get an immediate thank you receipt if they’re donating online. Um So they get that immediately and then that first email from our executive director lands within 24 hours. And what’s what’s the next step in the in the journey? The next step is story of impact. Um So for us to her validation, for nonverbal validation, story of impact, gratitude and validation happening with our glances at each other. So yeah, have you done your session yet or no? It’s coming up. Oh, good. Let’s have some fun prep. Ok. Alright. So next uh story of validation. No, no validation is of impact is what you get from your consultant of impact. What does this one look like? What’s the timing, story of impact? Um We’re letting the donor know the difference that they’re making with the gift that they’ve sent. Um So for us, we typically will feature someone who’s directly impacted by our services. So our most, I guess most used donor welcome journey features the story of a little boy who was injured by a landmine and actually lost his leg to that explosion and went through our rehabilitation services and was fitted with a brand new artificial leg. So he’s, there’s a photo of him happily running through the streets and just the story of his recovery and, and the life that he’s living now thanks to our donors and I’ll let Patty answer the exact timing of that timing. Well, what is the format? What does it look like it? Now, this is, this woman has pictures and or maybe video or something. This is not the not akin to the first one, right? This is not plain text. We want people to actually be able to visualize the impact that they’re having. So um your typical kind of designed email with, with photos with text, maybe bolding certain um certain pieces that you want to stand out. Um That’s what it’s gonna look like. And what’s our timing? Timing is 2 to 3 days after the first email, we have data behind these uh these timing the flow. I mean, like if it comes too soon or if it, if it’s a week, it it it diminishes the uh the engagement with it. Yeah, exactly. We found that if you wait too long to send these emails, um people kind of forget about the donation that they just gave you and the email feels like it’s coming out of the blue and they’re like, why are you, what is this? So we definitely have clients who are nervous about. They’re like you want to send two emails within the first week that feels like a lot. Um How do you reassure them? We reassure them with the data behind it so we can show them that the open rates, the click rates are really high, usually double or triple their usual email newsletters. So that shows that people want to get these messages and they’re happy to receive it. And we really are striking while the iron is hot and we’re not annoying people with too many messages. And Elizabeth, you haven’t seen push back that, you know why? Two messages after I made my first gift or something. I mean, it seems it’s, it doesn’t seem likely. I mean, II I just made you a gift. I mean, I actually appreciate the attention and knowing now from the second one, what, what my gift is doing but, and just validate, you’re not, you’re not seeing no push back on that. People are opening them, people are engaging with them. I think the important thing on that second email is that we’re not making any sort of ask. We’re just providing them information on the impact they’re having no follow up. You know, if you want to do more for you, it’s too soon. Let’s talk 2 to 3 days much, too soon. Patty, what’s uh what’s our third? How many, how many are there in the The Journey Series? How many emails? Yeah, for a donor welcome series, we recommend five. Ok. Um and we’re about to do number three. And what are the other types of series you folks might have um you could have one for new subscribers. So whenever anyone joins your list, you could send them a welcome series. Um You could also get more specific about your donor welcome series. Like you could have one series for people who give a one time gift and a different series for people who sign up to give monthly. And then depending on your organization, um like Elizabeth’s organization has petitions that people can sign. And so we have journeys tied to those. So if you add your name to a certain cause we can send you a personalized series of emails about that, that cause. Um but yeah, if you also, if you’re recruiting volunteers, that’s a great time to send a welcome series. If someone signs up to volunteer or maybe after they do their first volunteer experience, they spent their first half a day or whatever. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Alright. So bring us back to number three, the third one in our journey. What’s our? So the first one was 2 to 3 days after the first email, which was within 24 hours. When should this third email be timed? This is one week after email number two and this is an invitation to become more involved. And so the key here is that this is also not a donation ask, but we’re asking them to take some sort of action with the organization. Um That could be anything from, you know, will you, will you become a volunteer with us? Will you follow us on social media? Um In the case of humanity inclusion, it’s, will you take a survey because we want to get to know you better? Um And the goal is basically saying like, we appreciate you so much. We want, we want to invite you into our inner circle. We want to get to know you. We wanna, we wanna have more interaction with you, Elizabeth. What does that survey look like in this third email? Sure. So we really wanna get to know our donors, so who they are, what motivates them um and what it is about our work that matters most to them, which then of course, helps us tailor our communications to them in the future to really make sure that we’re nurturing them and nurturing their interest moving forward. It takes like two minutes. It’s three questions um very, very easy to complete. So at this point, you’re not asking how, how do you like to hear from us or how often or anything like that? You’re saying it’s only three questions we’re not asking much on um on preferences of that nature, but really just what, what areas of our work they want to know more and and why so you can segment your future communications. OK? Anything else on email? Number three? Either of you that it is important for us to know we wanna do this journey correctly. Now, we don’t wanna, we don’t wanna uh we don’t want to uh walk off the path to follow the path correctly. All right. So we’re OK. Don’t message number three. Yeah. The only other thing I would add is that you can test this out for your organization, you can try a survey and if you’re not getting a lot of responses, you can try something else. OK. How about number four, kick us off with that one. Number four is another story of impact. So we as human beings interpret the world through story, we love stories. So I don’t think that there’s such a thing as too much storytelling. Um And this is just another opportunity to say um Here’s how you’re changing the world, here’s the impact that you’re having and again, that gratitude message, we really appreciate that you’re helping with this work. And again, no, no, no. And what’s the timing for number 41 week after the previous email? Ok. So we’re about two weeks after the right? Aren’t we about two weeks and 2.5 weeks or so after the action that began the journey another week? OK, Elizabeth, what are you doing? And number four? Sure. So number four clients. So we actually, we do have a story of impact, but it’s a little bit interesting because this email actually comes from one of our staff members on the ground in Columbia who works as a Dinor. So, clearing weapons contamination from communities and she’s actually clearing contamination from community, the community that she grew up in where she actually herself as a child stepped on a land mine that fortunately did not explode. Um And she opted to become a de miner and later went back and cleared that same area where she had had that interaction as a, as a kid. So, yeah, so it’s a really, it’s a really nice like behind the scenes stories getting to know both the impact of our work. But it’s another opportunity for us to showcase the boots on the ground that we have as an international organization. And that um you know, the staff that we’re working with are local and are working to improve their communities and they’re doing that. Thanks to our donors, anything you wanna add about? Uh your email number four feedback. Are you still? Uh So it’s through the journey, we’re doing five messages. Are you getting feedback? Uh like through you said when you get the first one from the executive director, you do get some messages there. Do you find much response to 23 and four? Yeah. So sometimes we, yeah, sometimes we get responses. Sometimes we don’t, I think the important thing on these journeys is to recognize that it’s really about keeping your audience warm and informed and familiar with who you are. Um So that whenever it it it’s right for them to take the next action, they know what they can do and why it’s important that they do it. Um So we do sometimes hear back from people. Um But for us, I think the most important thing is just knowing that people are reading those emails and they’re seeing about our work and the impact that they’re having. Um, so that we know that they’re gonna continue to engage with us and that goes to Patty’s point that some folks will forget that they even made the gift of you said, if Patty, if the second email comes too late, folks will wonder why you’re writing to me. You know, they don’t even remember. So you’re trying to keep them warm and engaged as you’re saying, Elizabeth. OK. And how about your, your fifth email, Elizabeth? What is that the the fifth email is the ask? So we’re looking for validation in that one. Yes, we’re asking. So um in that fifth email, um we are typically asking and encouraging those one time donors to now take another step forward and become a monthly donor and join our monthly giving community. Um What if they, what if they were monthly donors to begin with, if they are monthly donors to begin with? So we do have a separate, we have a separate journey for monthly donors. And so in that one, we’re asking them to upgrade their monthly gift so they can give extra and that’s actually a really good point. There’s a filter before this email. So in case anyone signed up to give monthly in the meantime, um they’ll be excluded from this message. The last thing we want to do is ask someone to give monthly who is already giving monthly. It makes it seem like we’re not paying attention a little bit, just a little. Ok. Ok. And what’s the timing patty for this fifth male? We want ideally be a month after the gift. So it should be about two weeks after email number, right? Ok. And so, and you feel comfortable Elizabeth that asking for do more within a month after about a month, right? Yeah, I think, I think that can initially be scary to folks. How is this, you know, are we going to offend anyone? And if we’ve offended anyone, they haven’t told us that we’ve offended them. Um So you got that right? No, we haven’t gotten that feedback. And in fact, we’ve seen people who have either made a second one time gift or people who have decided to start um that monthly gift or maybe they don’t take an action immediately after that email, but two months from now when we continue nurturing them and showing the impact that they’re having, maybe they make that gift, you know, two or three or six months down the road. Um But yeah, we haven’t had any, any negative feedback. I think the important thing is that, you know, donors choose their philanthropy and they choose when to give and how to give and where to give. And so for us, you know, I think Patty and I were talking about this earlier, you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. And so, you know, we’re just asking, we don’t expect anyone to do anything that they can or don’t want to do, but we’re giving them that opportunity to make another gift and broaden their impact. If that’s, you know, if that’s on the table for them. And at this point, they’ve learned how important that gift can be and the, the life changing um actions that it can, can fund Elizabeth if it, if it was a petition, that was the first action that began the embarkation on the journey. But I love this journey. So I’m sticking with this journey metaphor. You have the path and it’s a cruise, maybe it’s a cruise ship or um if, if so, if they were uh they signed, they signed a petition, then I assume your ask in email five is for a gift. And how do you decide how much to ask for? Um We actually don’t, we don’t include amounts. Um So, you know, that’s something really up to the donor. We actually um I will give a plug to fundraise up, which is our donation platform and we actually use their machine learning um which A I is, I’m sure gonna be a focus of some of your other interviews. Um but we use their machine learning and they actually will suggest gift amounts. That makes sense to the person who is, you know, coming to our site and opening that donation form. Um But yeah, if they, if they sign a petition that last ask is just to make any gift, whatever the amount um to fund our work. Ok. Ok. Patty gift number, email number five. You haven’t said anything about this one yet? What do you want to add? Um Yeah, I would just add that. I really recommend acknowledging the donor’s previous gift um explicitly in this email. So saying like we remember that you donated to us a month ago, we’re still thinking about how great you are over here. Um We’re still really grateful for that and we wanted to invite you to become a part of this monthly giving program because we think it would be a good fit for you because we know that you’re passionate about this cause it’s because you gave us a donation a month ago that we’re now asking you to do this. So again, we want, we want to make it seem like we’re paying attention. We remember you, we see you um and we’re not just blindly sending out donation requests. I appreciate that. It’s because of your first action that we’re we’re asking this. Alright, we still have some time together. Is there more that you’re gonna share with NTC attendees? That you have not yet shared with nonprofit radio listeners. I mean, I don’t, I don’t appreciate you holding back on uh on our listeners. Is there, is there more that uh we haven’t talked about yet? Um Yeah, I mean, one thing that we’re going to mention in our presentation is that if creating a five part welcome series, feels daunting to you, you can always start smaller, you could start with 123 emails in the series. And as time allows, you could add more emails to them or not like the petition series at Humanity Inclusion. It’s a three part series and that’s it just three emails. Um So we believe having something is better than having nothing even if the something isn’t like the full recommended journey link. But you can set these up as automations in probably any decent email provider, right? I would think contact mailchimp sales force. All the big ones have automated series features. And Elizabeth, is that just a capacity issue for now? I thought you said, I thought you have four and five on the donor Impact Journey. We do have on the on the donor welcome journey. We have five, the subscriber series. We have five, our petitions, we only have the three. So we have two petitions that we ask people to sign. So um so on that one, the j it’s a thank you for adding your name. And then the second one is again that story of impact. And then the third one is that one time ask. Um So I think it depends on to the action that someone is taking. What makes the most sense and what kind of that final ask how it compares to the one before. So if someone’s already given you money, I think nurturing them a little bit more before you ask them for more money is important where if someone is, has taken an action like adding their name to a petition, then for me, it feels a little bit more comfortable to more quickly ask them to, to make a gift. So they get the shorter journey. The three messages makes intuitive sense and you’re seeing good results. Yeah. Another thing I want to mention is that we really recommend segmenting anybody who’s on a journey, segmenting them out of your general newsletter list until they finish the journey. So, ok, your regular list. So like we don’t want someone to get email number two in this journey and then six hours later get your monthly newsletter that might feel like email overload for someone. And um we also feel like it’s the point of this is to nurture someone to the point where now they’re ready after the five emails, now they’re ready to be added to the general list. But for that first month, let’s really make sure we’re just talking to them about their donation and their donation only. Ok. Yeah, it seems disruptive to the, to the, to the whole cause of the whole purpose of the journey to, to have other communications in there. There might, there might be an asking that you might be asking that a newsletter, right? I mean, there probably is and now it seems incongruous like what? But I, I thought you were. Yeah, II I thought I just gave especially if it comes too close to the gift to the initial gift that started the journey, I could see. All right. That makes sense. It’s confusion. It’s disruptive. Ok. Ok. Ok. This is exclusive for the first month. They are exclusive communications. Ok. Is there anything else I I would just say for nonprofits, especially smaller teams, it can feel daunting to set these up at the start, but it’s really worth the time and investment to do that because you, you are now having these personal tailored touches to every donor that’s coming through or every subscriber that’s coming through and there’s a little bit of work on the front end. But really these journeys, once they’re, once they’re set, you can kind of set and forget, you know, maybe do a refresh every 6 to 12 months to make sure that the is still relevant to make sure that, you know, maybe you have a new story of impact that’s more recent that you wanna change out. Um But once you get these going, um they make your job as a fundraiser as a communicator as a marketer, a lot easier um to, to meet these donors where they are. That’s a perfect place to end. Thank you. That’s Elizabeth Sellers, us, Director of Communications and Development at Humanity and Inclusion. And with her is Patty Breach founder and CEO of the purpose collective, Patty Elizabeth. Thank you. Thanks very much. Thank you. Thank you and thank you for being with Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio coverage of the 2024 nonprofit technology conference where we are sponsored by Heller consulting technology strategy and implementation for nonprofits. Next week, the generational divide. That’s not a joke. You’ll see, you’ll see it’s coming. It’s next week. If you missed any part of this week’s show, I beseech you find it at Tony martignetti.com. We’re sponsored by Virtuous. Virtuous, gives you the nonprofit CRM fundraising, volunteer and marketing tools. You need to create more responsive donor experiences and grow, giving, virtuous.org. I think this went pretty well. Uh It’s, it is exhausting. Uh um And I’m a little tired of hearing my voice. Uh But you know, I’m the 1st 600 40 shows were all me and I didn’t get tired of hearing myself for those 13 years. So we’ll see, we’ll see the, the jury is out still about uh whether we need an associate producer on nonprofit radio. Our creative producer is Claire Meyerhoff. The show’s associate producer for now is Kate Martignetti. Our social media is by Susan Chavez Mark Silverman is our web guy and this music is by Scott Stein. Thank you for that information, Scotty. You with us next week for nonprofit radio, big nonprofit ideas for the other 95% go out and be great.