2024 Live Trainings
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Call, Connect, Convert: Cold Call Donor Outreach with Sales Expertise
Join us for an immersive webinar tailored for nonprofit leaders aiming to transform their outreach strategy and secure more support for their cause. This event brings together the wisdom and expertise of three renowned professionals: business coach and speaker Ryan Botner of Cornerstone Consulting, fundraising guru Patrick Kirby of Do Good Better Consulting, and digital marketing expert Sami Bedell-Mulhern of The First Click.
In this dynamic session, Ryan Botner will guide you through the art of the cold call, a technique mastered by top sales reps, and show you how to apply these principles to engage potential donors effectively. Learn how to build instant rapport, handle objections gracefully, and steer conversations towards meaningful commitments.
This webinar is more than just a learning experience; it’s an opportunity to reshape your approach, refine your skills, and revolutionize your nonprofit’s impact. Whether you’re reaching out to individual donors or large corporations, the insights from this event will empower you to approach each conversation with confidence, strategy, and a touch of sales magic.
View Transcript
Unknown Speaker 0:03
I love it. This is great. Excellent. Welcome, everybody to one of our, our infamous, can we say infamous at this point, famous trainings for for bootcamp.
Unknown Speaker 0:16
One of the topics that we get asked all the time, like, I don’t know how to fundraise, and I don’t know how to ask people for money. And I don’t know how to do this. I’m scared and frightened and everything sucks. And I don’t want to be said no, and that’s terrible. Sorry. We heard you. So we’re talking shot today about how to make cold calls. Because I think if you can make cold calls, you can make warm calls and hot calls and everything else falls down from there to get out of your own brain, about how to pick up the phone, what to say how to approach how to just navigate the waters of sales, if you will. Once you overcome this, I think you’re going to be a home some rocks or a homerun Rockstar for all of your nonprofit needs. So I’m excited about that today, Sammy. Hi. Hi.
Unknown Speaker 1:01
What a
Unknown Speaker 1:03
stressful start to the webinar here. So thank you, everybody, for your patience in me sending the absolutely wrong zoom link, but we’re gonna have fun anyway. You thrive. We thrive in chaos. We’re all nonprofit members. We’re trying to rise above it. Yeah, we do. Alright, so let’s get started right away. I’m sure we’re gonna have some questions that filter and I’ve got my own questions. So we’re going to start right out of the gate, introducing our buddy Ryan Butner. He’s going to be navigating the cold call
Unknown Speaker 1:32
for conversation today. Ryan, I could read a giant bio, but that would be very boring. I’m gonna have you introduce yourself. Who on earth are you and why are you hanging out with us today? Right. No, thank you. No, I
Unknown Speaker 1:45
I’m from Litchfield, North Dakota. I know, village Phil, South Valley City. If you drove through it, you blink you miss. But it says population sign more or less, grew up in a farming community worked hard. And if I were to just continue to work hard, they would just give me more work, Patrick, so I decided to work smarter. All right. And so how I got into that is I got into insurance sales. And so I started selling life insurance when I was 22 years old. I didn’t know anything about it. But I knew that they said I could train a monkey to do this good. Because I’m about like a monkey. Here I am. Alright, so we’re gonna do some monkey training today. Is that sound good? Pat?
Unknown Speaker 2:22
Yes, you all yes. So. So the biggest thing, you know, this is the biggest fear false evidence appearing real. Okay, is what the fear of failure, what’s the worst thing that can happen? When you call somebody and ask them for help? They say no.
Unknown Speaker 2:42
That’s the worst thing. First and foremost, we just got to be in a mindset. I gotta get in a mindset that I’m ready to make some phone calls today, or I just walk in, right? Just walk in. Here’s my business cards. Here’s what we do. Do you guys have anybody that you already currently giving money to?
Unknown Speaker 3:01
Do you have anybody you’re passionate to do to have any burdens? Those are just great questions to ask. But when it comes to phoning, voting is way more efficient, because I don’t drive around all day and maybe only see like 10 people, but I sit in my office, I can call 30 in an hour. Right? And have impactful conversations. Now what I will urge you is if you’re gonna make phone calls, okay? Stay in the box. If you can stay in the box, what is the mission of the phone call?
Unknown Speaker 3:31
To schedule the meeting? Okay, schedule the meeting, stay in the box. Like if and if you can, first and foremost, talk to your board. Okay? And say, Listen, if you did what I do, which is fundraise,
Unknown Speaker 3:47
Pat, who would be the first three people that you would call?
Unknown Speaker 3:52
I want those people it’s kind of it’s kind of the old technique that they use at sales or insurance sales, right? And so you’ve got a list of zero people, right? You start with nothing, you’re like, Well, who on earth am I going to call you, you know, you got to write down that, that entire list. So there’s, there’s a lot and again, you’ll find in Duke University, you’ll find a lot of these sheets with templates to kind of just figure it out, write down your connection mapping exercise is a great idea for this. But that’s the first thing you want to tell anybody.
Unknown Speaker 4:22
My question would be out of the gate, I’m already asking questions. It’s gonna be curious. Because you want to start with you want to start with a mindset kind of shift here. Because I think mentally mentally picking up the phone, calling somebody have no idea who they are, if they like you, if they even want to deal with you. That’s hard. But but you don’t want to sound like a salesperson and you don’t want to sound like a
Unknown Speaker 4:48
you know, the old How do I get you to give to my organization?
Unknown Speaker 4:53
What’s What’s the initial approach when you’re picking up some of these or you’re picking up the phone
Unknown Speaker 5:00
out of the gate? Well, you know, I think the first topic is building rapport, right for trust and rapport. How can we do that instantly? There’s a reason. There’s people there in this life and you met him that you like you. Like, we think we know each other for 10 years, we haven’t known each other long. But we can build instant rapport. How can I do that? In other words, how can I reach through the phone and shake your hand?
Unknown Speaker 5:23
And so now to make it feel genuine, and real? How can I do that? Well, first off, you probably want to just have some basic strategy stand up, because when I stand up, I’m more excited. You can hear it in my voice. I’m more enthusiastic. You know, hey, Patrick, Ryan botter with CSV now, how you doing today? Great, right? The reason for my call, is actually work for a nonprofit. Are you familiar with nonprofits? Did you do any work with nonprofits in the past? And so right away, I’m asking questions, building rapport, but I want to educate but I really want to just stay in the box. The reason for my call is I want to stop by put some information in your hand or just share a mission, share a vision, be passionate, I know everybody on this call is passionate about what they do, they won’t be doing it. Be passionate about it. But stay in the box, you’re not trying to sell anybody over the phone. Okay, I’ve got some time tuesday at 10am, or Thursday at 2pm. Which one works, I’ll stop by your office, I’m excited to meet you.
Unknown Speaker 6:25
Okay, so there’s two things I really love about this. Number one, is that you’re not cold calling to sell anything you’re cold calling is just to get next step. So a lot of when you’re getting into fundraising to like I gotta pound phones, I’m gonna I gotta raise a lot of money. Well, that’s not necessarily the case, you’re on the phone, to build your pipeline of individuals you meet to figure out if they’re the right fit for an organization. And that’s why you just that’s why you can dial in a million numbers at a time with a goal of not being I need money. Yes, I’m really just trying to share my mission, my vision, my core values, I just want to share what we’re doing. But I do also want to know, if you are giving to nonprofits right now, I want to know why. Like, I do want to know that why are you giving because I want to be able to try to find that why in our organization, right. But I think the biggest thing is, you know, if you can avoid cold calling great, because if you can get referrals from your board members, now you really talk, right? And so we did this last month, I really put pressure on our board. And I said, Listen, guys, this is on me, like I’m going to be making the phone calls if you want me to. Ideally, if you can make the phone call schedule a coffee with me and you Let’s go. But if not give me three names. And tell me about them. I’ll call them. And if you want to come to the meeting, I think that would be great. Are you guys okay with that? You see me just taking initiative now. It’s a referral. Okay. I’m calling Joe. Greg says great things about you. He’s on our board. Did you know he’s on our board?
Unknown Speaker 8:02
And so now but I’m just staying in the box? Do you have time at 9am? On Thursday, I’m going to be in your area. So what bring you some donuts to your shop? So what is because I don’t I think I know the answer this too. But you’re giving them very specific dates and times that you are available, not them available. Try I want to control my schedule. Right. Talk Talk to that, though, because I think a lot of nonprofits years ago, whenever is convenient for anything. Right? So, so two things get me this, which is that gives an air of like, I’m desperate. Whatever time you will give me right. I think that I think there there is a bit of a, I think that actually makes sense to me. Like I’m available Thursday, I’ll be in the neighborhood, I can stop. I’m not like, whenever you’re available, I’ll drop whatever I can for you. Because I’m just I’m just that much of a we need your money.
Unknown Speaker 8:56
So but I think there’s got to be after technique around that. Even if you’re not like okay, like right now I’m very thankful I’ve got my schedule is absolutely slammed. I’m thankful to be useful, right? I’m thankful that I’m busy. But there was a time where I didn’t have that. But I still remember my old sales language. And I said, Oh, no, no, no, I’m not gonna let them control my schedule. I’m going to control my schedule. And so I would just have time slots of either I’m seeing people or I’m fighting to see people. That’s all you should be doing. If you’re fundraising, by the way, seeing people or fighting to see people from nine to 5am or 5pm. Okay, seeing people. So what you want to do is if you have that power hour, that’d be great. from nine to 10. That’s your time a phony scheduling, scheduling five days ahead. How many are you ahead? I asked that question all the time. How many meetings? Are you ahead? Why? Because that just tells me. What do you have for activity activity equals sales or fundraising equals less stress? Does everybody agree with that?
Unknown Speaker 9:59
Right
Unknown Speaker 10:00
We just need activity activity. And the only way to do that is to have that sacred phoning hour I call it the power hour from nine to 10. My first meeting is at 1030. My next meeting is a lunch, then it’s a 130, then it’s a three. So now I have time slots, I can feed those time slots. Pat, I’ve got time on Tuesday at 130. Or I’ve got time on third, Thursday, Thursday at 10am. Which one works? Well, for you, I’ll come to you. Would you like to be able to meet at a coffee shop? What What would you rather do? If you’ve got a great space that they want to be able to come in? And see, I would probably not do that right away? Because you haven’t met them? You want to go to them? If you want to keep your main to kept ratio higher. Does that make sense?
Unknown Speaker 10:42
Yeah, otherwise, if you’re getting them to get to do too much, they’re just not going to the media probably not going to keep. So that makes sense. Yeah, I want to backtrack to something you said because about engaging in your board. Because I feel like this is a group effort, right? You just because you’re the one in charge of fundraising doesn’t mean that you’re the only person that should be out pounding the pavement. But what I love about what you said, and kind of in the framework of how do we build the list that we’re talking to or reaching out to cold? Is the specificity that you said, so like, I feel like a lot of times, I’m a marketer, and will say to people, I need more content, give me more content, right? And you get nothing in return? Because like, what does that mean? So I think getting maybe speaking a little bit to like, how do we get out of our own way? Because we assume our board knows what they need to do. So how like, what types of things might we want to be super specific about in asking, or even just talking to a donor, if you if you cold? Call somebody and they say, you know, we’re not interested? Okay, great. Do you have three businesses that are similar? Or have values like you that you think like, how can we kind of frame some of those scripts so that
Unknown Speaker 11:54
we get quality referrals and things that are in alignment?
Unknown Speaker 12:00
Yeah, I mean, I think first and foremost, the people on your board should be there. Strategically, right? Okay. So they shouldn’t strategically be there. We’re not putting them there. Because they’re rich, and they got a bunch of money. We’re, we’re putting them there. Why? Because they’ve got a burden. They’ve got a passion, they believe in what we’re doing, right. But as we grow that rapport and trust with them, and they know, like, we’re being transparent, like, Hey, we’re out. We’re doing everything I can I need your help, Patrick, I need your help. The natural human reaction is, I want to help Patrick, I want to help run.
Unknown Speaker 12:36
But we need to ask, I need your help. And this is how you can help me I need two coffee meetings this month. Okay, now, I’m going to give you a couple days, but I want to names and I either I call them or you call them. But we’re having a coffee meeting with somebody that you know, is going to be influential in what we’re doing and where we’re going. The specificity of what you’re asking your board to do is super key. Because if you ask them blanket like, hey, I need some help fundraising. Everyone’s got like, yeah, yep, you sure do.
Unknown Speaker 13:11
Right? You’re right, you’ve, you’ve assessed the situation, Ryan, I need help getting this meeting with this person at this time. That now they can do that they’ve got clear instructions, that’s a lot easier to sell to a board who’s busy who’s got to get the crap they got to do as well, you’re respecting of their time you’re giving them you know, real?
Unknown Speaker 13:34
You’re shepherding them to the answer that you need? Yes. And you’re handing them a win, because when they do complete that task, they feel like I’ve contributed. Absolutely. And so the other thing is, like, I have to go out of my way to make sure and engage with my board members. Maybe even what like if I have for I tried to do one a week, like, Hey, I’m going to meet with you, or we’re going to do a virtual call. I just want to share you with what I got going on. But I’m going to keep building a list of people that you know, and I’m going to have a spreadsheet of that. And then I’m going to be like, Okay, I’m about to call this person, can you give them a heads up like I’m building literally a lead in list from sales and building the lead and sit list with my board members? I might not call on that person for six months, but I’m going to be making sure I’m communicating. Hey, want to call them? Have you touched base with them? Were like, Is this their busy season? Are they farmers? I’m not going to call them in April? I’m not gonna call them in August, right? You know, but I also probably want to know when should I call them that they have the ability to be able to give some money to like when it’s harvest time? I don’t know do they get a big bonus? Do they? Do they do they have dividends that to get paid out? Like I need to know information is my most valuable commodity when it comes to making phone calls and building relationships. So when you’re on the phone with somebody you’ve never met before and you’re
Unknown Speaker 15:00
Curious about if I can stop by?
Unknown Speaker 15:03
That that’s a cold outreach when you’re calling a meeting, right? And again, it’s warm enough that you met with them or you it’s warm enough that they’ll continue the phone call.
Unknown Speaker 15:12
General curiosity is going to win the day all the time, right? What are some of the best questions that you want to ask? Or the best questions that engage them? Regardless if it leads to a gift or not? How do you how do you figure out? Where are your go to questions that you like, just to have in the back of your brain? I know now this person a little bit better than I did before? Well, we work in a lot of recovery world, right. So my question and my go to question is, like, are you familiar with seeds of eating? No. Are you familiar with, you know, addiction? Do you have anybody in your life that has suffered from addiction, alcoholism, drugs, whatever it? Is there anybody in your life who is suffering from addiction now?
Unknown Speaker 15:58
If I get a quiet moment, okay, like we’re there. And it could be gambling, it could it be anything, could be pornography, it could be anything we don’t know, to get to just an addiction, you know, like, addiction has no bounds on on discriminating, right? And so whether I’m calling the CEO or I’m talking to a janitor, I’m asking that question, do you know anybody? Or have you been close to anybody that is suffering from addiction? So that’s something that’s close to my heart? That is who we help? So it’s a qualifying question.
Unknown Speaker 16:31
And I would say 90% of the time, maybe even more like 95 and the day we’re living in today, right? They’re gonna say, Yes, I do. So when you establish out, you know, again, are you into animal shelters or whatever, that whatever that is, right? Do you know or do you have you ever adopted a pet? Have you ever done those things?
Unknown Speaker 16:53
What are some of the additional ones that you want to know about the person themselves that either indicate that they would be of interest to to meet with? Are there any qualifiers that you have that you’re looking to? Whether how busy they are, they’ve got flexibility in their calendar, what are you looking for? That’s going to indicate this opens the door to Can I stop by rather than just like cold? Yeah, right.
Unknown Speaker 17:18
i What’s going I think staying in the box is pretty important. So like not to ask too many questions. They’re gonna go off on, you know what I mean? Like, I’m not trying to, to get get to down a rabbit hole, right? I want to stay surface enough to be like,
Unknown Speaker 17:35
I just want to bring value to you any way that I can. I’ve got a great network, like I you know, that I have, I don’t know what you do. Like, would you be open to even just having a networking meeting?
Unknown Speaker 17:47
And if there’s a well, yeah, that’s, that sounds good. That’s great. There. So like, I have the business side and the nonprofit side. But really, when it comes to, you know, have you done any felt like work in the in in philanthropy? Right. I mean, that’s just a great question to ask. But I think, you know, even more like understanding that these calls are not entirely cold. Right? There, they’re not entirely cold, like, you should probably have enough information if I don’t, when I drive by and I see, even
Unknown Speaker 18:19
if I see a realtor, like on a billboard, I’ll call them like in a town and be like, Hey, listen, why, because they know a lot of people. But they also probably like we’ve got a relationship with every house, a realtor sells, she gives a little bit to us. That all started from a cup of coffee, a cold call off a billboard. So when you’re when you’re meeting with folks, are you looking more for alignment with
Unknown Speaker 18:44
the goals of the individual? Or are you trying to align with like, we know similar individuals? Let’s let’s have well, how do we know each other? Right? There’s a there’s a, there’s a lot of techniques that you can use on LinkedIn. Hey, Ryan, you and I are connected through x, y, z. Yes. I’d love to tell you more about this. Is that is that A is? Because again, I don’t know. Any? You say yes to a lot of people on social media, right. And you’ve got a lot of numbers.
Unknown Speaker 19:19
If I lead with we’re connected here. So there’s like that you went back to kind of what you said like how do we how do we
Unknown Speaker 19:27
I’m not a cold person. We’re connected in some way whether my board or whatever, this is how I’m connected. It’s not an entirely it’s not entirely a cold call. I love that as a mental as a mental block, right? You’re not picking up the phone randomly calling Hey, is Phil Hey, Steve available.
Unknown Speaker 19:45
After you’re not an enemy, you’re right. You’re a friend. Hey, my name is Ryan. I’m your friend. Yeah, yeah. Here’s how we’re here’s how we’re connected. And that’s a good segue right into that. Yeah. Okay. And I’m that type of personality already. Like I’m a high. I just people are just friends.
Unknown Speaker 20:00
That’s it I haven’t met yet?
Unknown Speaker 20:03
Well, that’s a really good question too, though it’s right. You’re not a high, because you’ve probably got an individual in sales who have to pick up the phone. They’re not great at it, but they’re technically technically good. Yes. Personality wise, what are you looking at non high eyes to go make lead in on those things? That person needs to first write a script.
Unknown Speaker 20:22
literally write a script out, what are you going to say? My name is Ryan Bottner. I work with CTV, the reason for my call is this. Right? And then you’re going through like you’re having a script, now you want to just read it, you want to make it your own, but that Hi, acids and C’s, they need to process that they need to make it the process and the system has to work, right? I do a high D, I’ll just call and say, Hey, Patrick, we’re gonna mean I’m coming over.
Unknown Speaker 20:48
Now, with that being said, most of the people that are calling probably are higher DS, because if they own businesses, if they’re influential, they’re higher DS. That’s why it’s so important to give an option, give them two times, give them some options, because they want to be decisive and make decisions. You know, so the majority of the big decision makers, ddd decision makers are going to be those high DS. Well, you know, two is that this gives you to get this gets down to being specific for your ask for your board.
Unknown Speaker 21:17
Very much. So I need you to give a call. Here’s a script to follow.
Unknown Speaker 21:24
Yes. And a lot of times, like it’s always good. Like, I’ll, I will have a pre sent text that I will send to my board members saying, okay, Chris, I know you’re a hot like, I know, you’re introvert. So I want you to send this text introducing me to Tim, can you do that? Yes. Great. Did you receive my text from Chris? Now? It’s not a cold call. Now. I know your voelen like, Oh, I did receive that. I’m curious seeds. I mean, what is that?
Unknown Speaker 21:54
Right. And so it depends on what type of personality that you’re working on your board. You want to be able to get the most out of them. Does that make sense? Right. writing the script, writing scripts is going to be important anyway. Yes. I mean, we’ve got a question. Sorry, I have to turn my camera off. Because my internet sucks. Um, Rebecca is asking if you could explain the idea of calling a realtor off the billboard if you’re not wired for it.
Unknown Speaker 22:17
Well, that’s good.
Unknown Speaker 22:19
Well, so for me, I first started doing, you know, professional speaking and life coaching by walking in and cold calling realtors. So like, I can talk to realtors pretty well. And I was an insurance and financial services. So I’ve got a pretty good connection now. Like, the another reason I call Realtors is because we have Sober Living houses, and I need them to be my eyes and my ears. For our sober livings, hey, this is what we’re looking for. Can you just keep an eye out? Now I’m helping their business as well. But I’m also planting seeds with seeds of Eden with everything else that we do. And that’s how the, like I said, that turned out. So I’m want to try to find a connection. everybody communicates you guys, but few connect, right? Find that connection, find that 1% You have in common with that person and go 100% At that, does that make sense? But be very clear on your mission and your goals? Right? And if you’ve had some prior successes with a,
Unknown Speaker 23:19
a sector or a you know, like I said Realtors you know, if you’ve had prior successes, lean on that what worked before it works. So Well, Pat, we stopped doing it.
Unknown Speaker 23:32
Um, I like that a lot. One of the things that I think our challenges in the nonprofit realm, especially when you’re a fundraiser, especially when you’ve got a number of calls to make, you’ve got a big data list, you’d maybe get a list or you have a list handed down from you. Is your, your your ROI on how many calls you make. What do you benchmarking, and when you address, right, so data tracking, I think, again, for all the data nerds out there, this this tracks for all those who don’t like data, who hate like, again, I don’t want to put anything on a piece of paper, Sammy, this tracks with you, I get this, you know how much I frustrate you with this. However, what do we what do we want to do about data tracking? So like, what are the number of calls to the number of appointments to the number of leads to the number of closes? And again, that sounds salesy, because that’s what the sales always talks about. I think doing this in the nonprofit realm is so good. Because you can track up to the board you can report up to your IDI to yourself, you can keep yourself accountable if I have 10 calls, is it 10 calls to three meetings to one commitment to one call or close is that a rate? What’s what’s a good number that you’ve seen? Yeah, that’s a great way and you’re just you’re planting seed with me like, if I come to the board, let’s say I have five people on my board and say hey, listen, I need everybody give me to two referrals, because that’s 10 and I’m going to probably meet with three
Unknown Speaker 25:00
For, and one or two is going to, is going to actually donate to us on the spot. Now, the other eight are going to be down the road, I’m gonna make sure and follow up, I’ve got a CRM system and you’re telling them this is how I track it and move them along versus the call, then it’s the meeting, then it’s the, the, you know, the ask, like, you know, and then or if it’s not, specifically, you’re asking for money, which you should be, because that’s what we’re in the business of asking for money, right? And so don’t be afraid of that either. Like, it’s alright, and have maybe some strategy behind that as well, which Patrick can help you with that, like, I always be having a project, right? Like, always be having a mission, a goal, a drive, something that we’re moving forward to every quarter every month, so that you’re able to share that, you know, it’s an idea it’s a concept, and building momentum behind that, if that makes sense. Yeah. Um, you’re not for everyone. I’m not for everyone. Our organizations aren’t for everyone. We’re gonna get told no, a lot. And that sucks. Again, hi, eyes. anagram threes. We don’t like nose because it makes us feel bad. Like it’s our fault. We did something wrong. I think when the nonprofit world too, we take it personally. Because we’re invested in the organization. We put our Blood Sweat Tears in our heart on sleeves when we’re talking about this kind of stuff. And when we get a rejection note, or someone straight up tells us No Not interested. The immediate emotional responses like Wow,
Unknown Speaker 26:31
huh, I guess dry him of like, that’s gross.
Unknown Speaker 26:35
I think we need to work through like, what a no means. And then how do we counter that? Or what do we do afterwards? Because,
Unknown Speaker 26:43
yeah, I’m thankful. I don’t track the nose. Ah,
Unknown Speaker 26:49
I don’t track the nose. I only track the yeses. So I know, it’s just bringing me closer to Yes. Right. But you have to be ready for rejections. Especially if you’re going to be making calls. Even in the referral world. Now, like I said, I’ve learned I want you to really embrace, you know, it’s going to be much easier, but like cold calling is punishment for not being able to get referrals. I’m gonna just tell everybody that right now. Okay, you’re absolutely going to be punished by having to make cold calls, because you can’t ask for referrals. And so the key is just to ask for referrals and your board is a great start, also would be a great start. Anybody that’s given in the past? Ask them for referrals, right? Sit down just to have a phone call, say hey, I just want to tell you thankful. Thank you. Thank you for coming to the friend raiser. I work so excited that you came, would you think of it? Could you would you like to do a cup of coffee, I didn’t get to connect with you much. But I’d like to connect. And if they’re not, if they’re not, you know, in a position to give, which in the addiction world, a lot of people they’re just not ready yet. It’s taken their time. But they might work for somebody because if they are employed, that means that their employer believes in employing people that probably have a little bit of a shattered pass. I want to be right in the heartstrings of that. Does that make sense?
Unknown Speaker 28:10
Do you ever do follow up questions with your nose?
Unknown Speaker 28:13
And what I mean by that is is
Unknown Speaker 28:16
I respect now tracking nose? I love it. I’m always curious on either what, what didn’t match? What didn’t align what didn’t work? How can they and I almost think that your engagement with individuals who say no, you’re going to learn a lot more by the why behind there. No. And that opens the door to either another relationship. No. Right. And Ryan, before you jump in also, as like a digital marketer. Like earlier what you said about being specific with the ask, what I love about the nose is scripting out for people specifically also in
Unknown Speaker 28:59
okay, but can I get you on our email list? So you can still stay in touch with us? Can I connect with you on LinkedIn so you can still like having some of those specificities built in there as well so that the nodes don’t become nodes they become not right now in what you just said.
Unknown Speaker 29:15
And kind of a way that we can still connect with them passively.
Unknown Speaker 29:20
Yeah, absolutely. And even on that phone call, like, we want to understand like, hey, the reason for my call is this, but I want to if I can get a two way conversation right away. It’s gonna it’s gonna only build that much more connection, right? Like, do you support any other organizations? Yes. Okay. That’s great. Now I you know, like I’m okay with that, you know, because if I can, if I can share my mission and get in there, build a report, and maybe it’s not this year, but next year, I It’s alright. I want to try to engage probably a little more than I wouldn’t sales. I’m engaging a little more on the phone than if I was just trying to say
Unknown Speaker 30:00
schedule a meeting to sell you something. Does that make sense? It’s a little different in the nonprofit world. That’s how I feel anyway, Patrick, I don’t know if you would say the same? No, I think so. Because again, you’re on, you’re on the clock. In a sales position, you’re like, I got 50 phone calls, because they’re tracking how many I’m dialing. If I’m not closing this, they’re gonna see the ROI. And either they got to retrain me on how to do X, Y, and Z, or whatever. And there’s a product at the end. And again, I realized that our products ticket to heaven, I get it. But you’re, but there’s a product that you get to sell. And there’s a need that they probably have, right? I have a I have a copier, you need to make copies, this is the copier that you should buy, you have a problem because you can’t make copies, I have a solution to this blah, blah, blah, right? So how do you how do you shift on the
Unknown Speaker 30:49
it’s not a tangible bid
Unknown Speaker 30:53
to keep them in the loop, because they might know somebody, they might have a reference, we might have some of those pieces. You know, I for me, I always, you know, if I if I get an opportunity to just to share a little bit of my own personal testimony, or if I don’t have a testimony, I’m sharing, like Pam Thompson, she shared testimony from one of her people that CF today. And I thought that was great. She’s sharing testimonies of things that are happening. And if you have an opportunity to share your testimony, it’s absolutely powerful chair testimony of something that has recently happened. And they everybody knows right now that the world is absolutely a mess, right? And so if I, if you’re calling me, and you’re, and you’re really selling hope you got my hope pinned on, if you’re selling hope, like I’m gonna be a little more inclined, like, Okay, I am interested, I do notice that the world is falling apart and like you’re, you’re, you’re doing something good, great. I want to hear more, tell me more. And so anytime you get an opportunity to share your testimony or testimony of people that you work with, have you helped, that is going to be I mean, it’s biblical, the word of their testimony, there’s going to be something that’s as good as the power that comes with that, you know, and so that’s really like, I always look for an open door there, if they’re ready to hear it. The Tell me more question, or the statement of fact, I think, is a really good one. I’ve always I’ve heard that from a handful of people. And it puts you on the spot as a person who’s like unexpected phone call, but people like to talk about themselves, they like to tell their own story too. And I think as a fundraiser or a salesperson, you the the amount of work it takes to actively listen to somebody while they’re talking at the same time navigating where your next question is going to be. And then diverting it based on what they say, is a real talent. And I think it’s only honed by doing this over and over again. Right. So if I’m talking with you, and Ryan, you know, what kind of organizations are you supporting? Or like, why supports, you know, seeds of Eden, you know, here’s where my backstory is, whatever. And you mentioned faith by any means, I’m going to have to have, and again, this is I think you have to have a general, this is where like going up at school not being an expert at anything, but just being a dangerous to know about a lot of things is helpful, I think in the in the sales game, or the nonprofit game, is how can you make some sort of connection after asking the question of saying, Hey, have you thought of this, and you go here, or reference, whatever they’re into, whether it’s sports, or religion, or vacationing or whatever, and your ability to then relate with a story. You’re already not even talking about donations, you’re not talking about anything else, you’re just talking about human to human interaction? As a bit. Yeah. And maybe I think you really want to just, you want to cut through the noise, because we’ve got so many voices coming into their lives. So especially if you have money, like you’re getting asked all the time, right? You’re getting asked everywhere, everywhere you open your phone, you’re getting asked for money, you know, this and that, and this and that. And so how do I cut through the noise of potential donors and ask you for their support, you know, but not just being like a normal solicitor, I want to be different. I guess I want there to be a different feel about what we’re doing, you know, and who we’re helping, and I want these people to be on board long term. So I’m not trying to make a quick sale. I’m building a client list, really, so that they can be consistent every year. And they come to our events and they and they, they get on board with the things that we’re doing and all starts with just having a conversation. But there is so much anxiety that goes with calling that goes with meeting new people, especially if you’re a high C or a high s there’s just way more anxiety like like I said, Patrick and I, people we haven’t met, they’re just future friends. That’s all it is does. You find Yeah, that’s true. Do you find that there’s value in stating a general problem and trying to relate to like, do you find this
Unknown Speaker 35:00
To be a problem and do you find this to be an
Unknown Speaker 35:04
unacceptable as a problem? Do you rally around?
Unknown Speaker 35:09
Because again, I think there’s there’s a place in time for like all positivity of positive pet everywhere to go. Right. But I think rallying around of like this,
Unknown Speaker 35:18
this isn’t an issue, this is a reality. Do you think this is awful to you find this in, in a lot of political phone calls? Right, you know, so and so’s running for president? I don’t think that you are you afraid and terrified that they’re all going to break loose? And whatever, you you rally around a terrifying moment, it’s a pressure point on either the community or the things that they might be interested in? Do you find value in maybe leading them down that path at all? Absolutely. I mean, like the first start of like, how we have our mission, vision, core values we have the problem is number one. So the problem is homelessness, drugs and alcohol are destroying families and lives and people are dying every day, only 11% of the people that want to get help actually get help. We want to help that other 89%. So that is our mission, that is our vision, to be able to provide more services and gaps that aren’t being addressed right now. So I think it’s very important to address that problem. And you got to know it. Right? You know, I repeat it every week with my staff and my board, we go through and we I have a core values mission problem, like we’re worried I’m reading it every time we’re going through it. And it’s getting even deeper in my soul, as I do it every week. So consistency is important. Most of the time people will have their core values on the wall. They don’t even know what they say.
Unknown Speaker 36:38
Right? And so I think being able to share, first and foremost the problem, but then what is your mission? What is your vision? Why are you doing what you do? Right?
Unknown Speaker 36:50
When we’re talking with boards, and we’re talking with them as our partners, even opening up doors or whatever, they’re going to probably set a precedent or expectations of we need to make this much money, this many calls, etc.
Unknown Speaker 37:03
What’s what’s a reasonable, you know, somebody runs a nonprofit, somebody who runs also runs a business to
Unknown Speaker 37:12
what’s a reasonable amount of dialing, that a human being can do understanding that you’re an executive director or fundraiser, CEO, whatever, what’s an unreasonable number of calls to make,
Unknown Speaker 37:28
to set up the number of meetings you need in order to build that pipeline? And because I think you need to go back to the board and go I it’s reasonable. I can do x, y, z. And again, I realize everybody’s different. But just as an example, where do you lie on the number? I mean, I will first and foremost,
Unknown Speaker 37:47
I would say, most people aren’t really making any phone calls, they really, we lean too much on emails, we lean too much on LinkedIn messages, or Facebook messages or whatever that is not a phone call. Like when you reach and you make the actual phone call, and you can get through and talk to the person, which I understand it might be hard. But once again, if you’re getting a referral from your board, you need to be making that phone call staying in the box and getting in front of that person. It’s just handling things in a professional manner. So the really the answer is, first of all, make one phone call, and then text me or pat and tell us how wet
Unknown Speaker 38:26
because that’s really the key. Like you just need to start doing it and feeling more comfortable with it. And it’s really it’s so much false evidence appearing real it is because you’re so afraid, like of what that what are they? What’s the worst thing they’re gonna say? No. You know, like, they might say, I’m busy. Okay, well, let’s schedule it out a month from now, whatever it is, just stay in the box, schedule it. You know, so we, we, you know, and I’ve deal with, I’ve dealt with salespeople my whole life. And it’s always been the same
Unknown Speaker 39:00
phone calls and asking for referrals. That’s it. Those two things are if you can do that, you’re you’re gonna be way ahead of the game and just having a schedule that’s full like, well, I don’t have anything today. Well, why? Because you’re there’s no activity, right? You’re so about about the LinkedIn stuff and about email acquisition, some people will defer. Or they’ll say, Okay, I need to reach out to a handful of people. What do you do first you send them a LinkedIn message, then call them do you send an email first and then call them? You call them and send an email as a follow up? I’m gonna leave it up, you leave a message. Okay, I’m gonna follow up this. What technique Have you found as the best 123 piece there? Well, first if it’s if it is a referral, which likes let’s just try with verse first. Right? So if it is referral, I want the person that referred me to give them a heads up, whether it’s a text, I often coach them through that or ideally a phone call mentioned that Ryan is going to be giving them a call, right? And then what
Unknown Speaker 40:00
I’m staying on in the box on the phone. I’m scheduling that meeting with the reason that I want to share with you what we’re doing. But more importantly, I just want to learn more about you. Okay, I want to I want to be able to, to bond and network and connect with you. And then I’m scheduling once I schedule it, I send them an email link. So I said, What’s your email? Patrick, let me send you an email invite. Why do I do that? Well, because I want meetings to keep. And if they’re not on people’s schedule, the chances of them keeping is really, really high, they’re not going to keep okay, but if I send them an email link, saying, This is where meaning I’m coming to, you sent me your email, pops right up on their schedule. That is awesome. Honestly been revolutionary for me, in the amount of meetings that key to not keep now they see it on the schedule, chances are, they’re gonna be like, Hey, Ryan, I can, something came up great. You gave me a heads up, I didn’t just show up, because it was on your schedule. So I think that is a very big best practice to send them an email, invite now they see your email, they see your reel, it might have your website, it might have some of the whatever we also want to send them don’t send too much, though, do you just want to stay in the box? Okay. And so and then from there, you know, now they’re in your CRM as well. And you keep rolling donor doc, right. And they plug in Arna, you know, and so we want to keep them now they’re just they’re there. They’re active in there, where are we moving them along? In the CRM, you know, and they can add them to our email newsletter, get their permission to do that, whatever it is, I want them to get in that circle, right? It’s a spinning circle of them being a part of seeds of Eden, they get an email newsletter, they’re, they’re getting notified of things there. Whatever it is, if you’ve got a podcast, like all those things, we want to get them in that circle, because we want them to hear that consistent voice. Right? So cold calls on the phone cold calls and email. Awesome. What about a cold called drop in? This terrifies people more than anything else, but we’re looking at, you know, we’ve got executive director of a Chamber of Commerce on this call, right? So that’s a b2b drop in and say hi, kind of thing that I think makes sense, as long as you’re just providing, you know, info or being curious. But if you’re a nonprofit, and you’re roaming the streets of your community, what is the value of a drop by if it’s cold, and you don’t know anything about?
Unknown Speaker 42:31
Well, first off, hey, I’m real. I’m in person, here I am. Right? And that, that right there alone is going to be if I have anybody who’s anybody that leads organizations that, that they’re gonna be like, Wow, I wish my guys would do that.
Unknown Speaker 42:50
You know, and so you’re really setting yourself apart on so many other levels. Plus, when you walk in, you need to be looking and thinking, how can I bring value here, I’m looking at the walls, I’m looking at the pictures, I’m seeing their core values, I’m looking at what they believe in, right? I’m paying attention to everything, so that I can want when I do meet that person, it’s an instant connection, I can start having a conversation about, can I bring value to you, in any way? Because I guess that’s our mission statement were people of value who value people who bring value to people.
Unknown Speaker 43:31
So much value so much about the ultimate value. Okay. Hope we’ve been here, this, this goes back this again, this goes back to that being self aware enough to know how to make, how to drag some sort of connection to Oh, I see you played on this softball team exact blah, blah, blah. Has it the same way when you play or you see that thing on the wall? Or, hey, congratulations on your chamber Choice award that you did, we were nominated three years ago, couldn’t have won that. Couldn’t have no better group of that you do? Actually, they do bring anything with you? Do you drop anything off? Are you just there to say, Hey, do you know anything? Would you like more info? Can I send it to you again? I like one says, here’s a bunch of stuff. And I know it’s gonna go in the trash most of the time, right? Kinda like the idea of Could I come back and send you something I just wanted to I was in the neighborhood. I just, I was led here by somebody suggested I stopped by to get permission to do a follow up. Absolutely. It’s always good to me, I have your permission. May I have your permission to stop by again next week? May I have your permission or what time right there. Ideally, you want to schedule a time with them. It’s just the same as a phone call. I want to schedule a time obviously now it’s probably not the time or place. But I would love to schedule a time we’d have a cup of coffee, you know, sit down, put it put more of a name with the face. Are you open to that? Right and
Unknown Speaker 45:00
A lot of times, you might just be working with their gatekeeper, right their secretary in doing that, like my business cards. So like I have, first of all, I spent, we spent a little extra to have nice business cards, the gloss like not the flimsy garbage ones. Okay, nice business cards. But then on the back, we put a little flyer, like, these are the things that we work with, right on the back of my business cards. So now I don’t have to give them a flyer on top of that. It’s right here. They can just see it, okay. You work with people in addiction, you help them get housing, you help them with employment opportunities. Wow, you guys do all that?
Unknown Speaker 45:34
Yeah.
Unknown Speaker 45:35
Sammy has a really good question too, by the way, which if we’re national, how can we call it virtually?
Unknown Speaker 45:42
And I’m curious on a virtual zoom, cold call.
Unknown Speaker 45:47
I don’t think I’d book an hour. Because it would be a little weird. Like it would get an hour of your time. And that I’ve done I’ve done it before, and I’ve heard from people are like, that’s weird. Like, I didn’t even know that person they reached out and LinkedIn or IBM or something. But we booked an hour like, well, what are we going to talk about? That’s dasa D alone.
Unknown Speaker 46:06
But what would you suggest for for for a zoom introduction? Do you do any pre work or pre questionnaires or ideas? I like the I like the question out of general, if I hop on a call, or somebody calls me like, hey, what’s the most important thing that you want to accomplish on this call, like, out of the gate, or at least right away? How I can establish some of those relationships? So how would you national cold call virtual? Well, if they’re reaching out if they’re reaching out to me, like I want to know, like, well, what is the you want to accomplish? In our time today? Right? That’s a great question. If they’re reaching out to me, like you need a lot of times, you have like the 15 Minute cup of coffee, cold, call it national, and I’m okay with it. Listen, I’ve had great doors open for potential grants, and, and all kinds of things that things I don’t know, people know, way more than I knew about nonprofit Well, I’ve only been in it for a year, you know. And so I want to learn all those things. And so I’m open to it. I think it’s really important to keep to have an agenda. What do you want to accomplish? What do I want to accomplish? What area do you work in? Right? I mean, that should be right there. Like what have you had? What have you had great success? In the past? What areas have you had great success in when it comes to the nonprofit world? Right?
Unknown Speaker 47:27
And so we always want to you want to know people’s strengths? And how can I help you but once again, people value value people bring value to you, I want to bring value, how can I bring value to you? One of the things that I’ve really enjoyed is if it’s a cold call for like a sponsorship for an event, is the question of what’s the best sponsorship that you’ve ever experienced? Or you’ve had the pleasure of having Right?
Unknown Speaker 47:54
Right? What’s the best golf tournament sponsorship you ever did? Oh, man, it was like, We got fine here. We had two teams here and blah, blah, blah, Oh, great. Can I build that for you is that’s because you already then know what they love, they’re gonna reminisce about it, etc. So I love that as a as a as a lead, or at least a follow up piece. One of the best sales techniques that I ever been taught was, when you’re closing the call, you’re doing your you’ve figured out that you eventually want to work together, or there’s a there’s an alignment there is not only getting the next meeting, but clarifying whatever the like, what’s a good next step?
Unknown Speaker 48:37
Like, ask them straight up, what is it? Do you need this for me? Do you need the whatever? Like that, I think is a really interesting question, to ask to get them to tell you what they expect to have happen. And now you’re not guessing. Right? So a cold call that came in to say, you know, what’s the most important thing that you want to accomplish today? Here’s what I’ve got. What else am I missing? And then what’s a good next step? You know, what can I send you? Where is that? Where’s there a gap that I can help fill? Yeah. And then you want accountability with it. And if you can put it in your shoes, that’s great. Like, Hey, okay, you know, I’m going to work on this. This is the action plan. So I’m going to do this in this. When should I follow up with you? Like not say, like, don’t put it in their shoes, you have to be assertive, and be like, I’m gonna put it in my calendar, my CRM, and you know, so when, when when’s a good time to weeks you’re on vacation, whatever it is, I just want to know, when can we keep connecting because my best relationships are consistent, right? Like I’m having it’s a consistent conversation. Patrick, you and I, we have a consistent conversation pretty much monthly. Why? Because we want to keep that on the schedule. Keep going with that. We see we bring value to each other. So if we feel like if I feel like those are going to be great relationships, I want to stay consistent.
Unknown Speaker 50:00
With that, you know, and keep getting on their schedule again. So now we’re like, okay, let’s connect what’s been going on, tell me the good, the bad, the ugly. One of the things that you just said, which is really important, too, is that you don’t put any more stuff on anybody else’s plate, you’ve already asked it to their time to pick up the phone, you’ve already asked them for 15 minutes worth of conversation, to have them do something for you at that point, probably not a great ask like, hey, just, Hey, can I remind you to remind me to tell you something like that? No, no, oh, I will do this for you. Right? I know what they’re doing you they have this. And this is something in business, but it goes very much in the nonprofit world to like, I want to be extremely easy to do business with.
Unknown Speaker 50:47
Like, I want it to be free flowing, like that was effortless. I just did business with Ryan and his organization. They sent the link, boom, boom, boom, boom, I didn’t have to do anything. Like if you because otherwise, you’re gonna get stopped in that cycle. If you’ve got some problems here where they have to go out of their way. I don’t want any part of that I got enough problems. Yeah. Yep. So be extremely, extremely easy, like, overly easy to do business with. Yeah. And if there’s something in your process, you just need to figure that out. And a lot of times, it’s just the lead in so I do have a I have a coaching call here in a couple minutes. So I love it. Well, this is great. We’re just gonna wrap up already, because I think that was, again, super easy as Hey, lead into a website. And then of course, if you don’t have a an availability to donate immediately online? Well, that’s a question that you have to ask Sammy too, because you lead them to something simple. I think that’s great. Um, I’ve loved this as a conversation again, just to think a little bit differently, that you don’t have to be terrified of a cold call, it’s not called it’s your job to get some sort of warm lead, asking, I think a handful of questions, being generally curious about all of that about them, whether you align or not, so that you don’t have to bother them. Again, this is going to free up your time. If it’s not a good fit. Great. You get to move on, you get that? No, a no doesn’t mean they don’t like you as a person and no means they’re just not aligned. I think that’s another Yes. You know, note that we got to keep telling ourselves be very specific with the asks that we’re making. And being very clear, I think, let me just go back to the stay in your box, in X, excellent reference to just observe being don’t go all over the place, you don’t need to being very clarifying in why you’re picking up the phone in the first place, I think is another great tip. And again,
Unknown Speaker 52:41
these are just people who want to feel good about donating somewhere. You’re, you’re facilitating their joy, and didn’t even know it yet. And you get to be a sort of a humble
Unknown Speaker 52:56
curator of their cash back to a place that they feel really good about. And if you can do that through a cold call, I think it’s pretty it’s really freaking fantastic. My friend, Ryan, how do people get a hold of you if they need to? It’d be curious about all things. Seeds of Eden or anything else you have going on? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I’m more than happy to help and coach actually have a coaching business. It’s called Cornerstone speaking.com. And you can actually schedule a call on there if you guys would want more any help. I love phone call. You know, whenever I do it, great things happen. Like literally miracles happen. And so would love to love to talk to anybody, everybody on this call. I know you’re doing great things you’re working with Mr. Do good, do good, better. Well, I just want to help you as well. And so I have a passion for this. So I’m thankful for the opportunity. Thank you again, Pat, for all that you do. Sammy, it’s great to meet you. Thank you for facilitating being are we Hi eyes we need. We need everybody around us because we go quick.
Unknown Speaker 53:56
I love it. Ryan, thanks again for your time. Thanks again. For your perspective, your talent. Sammy, thanks as always best partner in crime here at nonprofit boot camp. This will get uploaded here. In a matter of I would say a day or so did day a week. I’m gonna give a week. It’ll be
Unknown Speaker 54:13
Yeah, it’ll be up tomorrow because Damn, he’s a genius. We’ll have all the transcripts as well as links to the replay. Thanks for everybody who came on live. Nice work on the replay stuff as well. Ryan, thank you very much friend Sammy. Thank you my friend. Thank you guys. Bootcamp. Friends, we’ll talk to you soon. See ya.
Make Your Own Luck: How to Be the Leader You Want Without the Burnout with Rachel Carey – McElwaney
Burnout is very real, but totally avoidable. Learn strategies for how you can change your mindset and build a more fulfilling work-life balance. It doesn’t just stop there. You’ll also learn strategies for supporting your team and creating an environment that allows everyone to thrive, therefore growing your impact.
View Transcript
Unknown Speaker 0:02
Hello, everybody, it is March we are here with our March guest expert training. I’m here with my cohort Patrick. Say hi to the people. Hello, people welcome.
Unknown Speaker 0:16
And our guest expert today is the wonderful Rachel Carrie Nicole Waney. I have known her for what’s been like five years ish. It’s been a long time.
Unknown Speaker 0:29
I don’t remember business life without you in it.
Unknown Speaker 0:32
But just always adore her energy, her approach to kind of the practical things of life. But you know, kind of not allowing us to say, well, this is just how it is. This is what life is like, this is how I you know, need to do my job, but really pushing people to live their best lives and make great impact on the communities that they serve and kind of helping us have it all we can have it all we can have our jobs that we love, we can have a family life, we can kind of balance it. So I’m excited to have her here today to talk to us about burnout, what it really is and how we can kind of push through it and how we can help our teams as well, especially during those busy time. So Rachel, welcome. Thank you for being here. Thank you both for having me. I would love it if you would just kind of introduce yourself a little bit about your background, and then just kind of jump right into kind of the burnout buzzword and what it means. Yeah, so I am an energy leadership coach and a people strategist. I have 20 years of HR behind me, which backs that Sherm certified a CP that we were just talking about a little bit ago. What do all these things mean? So Sherm is kind of the party that is over all of HR. And SCP just means I’m a senior level,
Unknown Speaker 1:49
professional, and HR. But I’m also an ICF, certified coach, and a mindfulness facilitator, certified workplace mindfulness facilitator and a Reiki Master. And really where all of that swirls together is, I just identified that every workplace is all about people. And people are all about energy, the way that we connect the way that we show up the way that we do our work. And the way that we avoid burnout.
Unknown Speaker 2:17
That was amazing. And better than I could ever say, because energy is so important. Okay, so let’s talk about let’s start with, kind of, how do we know that we’re coming to burnout? Like, what is burnout? How can we kind of differentiate burnout from like, we’re just in a busy season, like, how do we kind of start to understand that we’re going too far down that hill, that we might need to kind of rein it back in?
Unknown Speaker 2:44
Yeah. And I think that’s a really great question. One of the things that’s really important is that burnout can look a lot like depression. So if we’re starting to feel some of the things that we talked about today, and we’re not sure we might need to have that checked out, just to make sure that we’re addressing the correct thing. But at the end of the day, burnout is not having enough energy being completely depleted. I call it the puddle on the floor, right? Like oh, we just we’ve given we’ve gone gone gone gone so much for so long, with with emotional and physical and mental stress, that we now have nothing left. So it can feel hopeless, it can. I know that I’m headed to it. And when I start making the bed, there’s my first sign but my second sign is when I’m just like a puddle after work and just watching TV or and I can’t even watch the stressful shows because it’s too much. I can’t handle the drama anymore. I’m I’m at that point. So those are the things when you start noticing that there’s a difference in how you’re showing up that you’re you don’t have the energy to make dinner, you don’t have the energy to even watch a show, right? Like your your normal activities are being disrupted, you can start looking at it, it’s
Unknown Speaker 3:51
hopeless, unsure, overwhelmed, exhausted, and overstimulated are kind of the terms that are associated with burnout.
Unknown Speaker 4:01
And so like in fundraising, and Patrick, I’d be interested in your kind of thought on this. But in fundraising, I feel like there’s a cycle that we live in, right? So you’re kind of in these phases, where things are like, okay, we’re just kind of in between events, or we’re in between, like, we’re not at year end giving yet or we’re not like we’re not really in a busy season, and then all of a sudden, you’re like in a super busy season. So how like, is there like a healthy amount of those kinds of stresses where we when we know we’re in like a crazy period? Like, would we want to look at how quickly we bounce back how quickly we recover from those busy seasons? Or how can we kind of manage different levels during different times, if that makes sense? Absolutely. I think that one of the things that comes up is that there’s a spike in activity. And when we have that spike in activity, what we start thinking about is like I shared I stopped making the bed because that’s something I can skip.
Unknown Speaker 4:56
But when we start cutting out the things that are refueling us
Unknown Speaker 5:00
We start to harm ourselves a little bit. So I’m making sure that we are taking care of that self care and things like that. When we’re knowing that there’s a spike, instead of just letting go of everything, making sure that we’re just very intentional about what we’re doing to refuel, I think it was listening to Brene Brown on an interview recently, where she said, You know, I come in, and my partner’s, like, I’m at a 20. And I’m like, Okay, I got you at the ad.
Unknown Speaker 5:27
So that there’s that support. So we’re aware, there’s an intentional approach to when we are lower in space. And I think that we need to do that for ourselves and say, I know my job has a spike every year here. And in order to manage that, I need to make sure that while I’m making space for that spike, I still make space for XYZ that helped take care of me during that spike. And I know I had, I actually had a career strategy client who was all in the fundraising space for a nonprofit. And it was all done, all done, done done with it. And we had to do a lot of kind of work around. Well, what parts are we done with? And what are the shifts in it? And how are we looking at that? And how is that draining us?
Unknown Speaker 6:07
To realign and after the work that we did, they were like, I love my job. For the first time in my in my entire career. I love my job.
Unknown Speaker 6:16
So
Unknown Speaker 6:17
So I’m reading this list, and I’m like, Oh, this is just this is just like other duties as assigned for a fundraiser is just like going through like these are this. These are the feelings that you have to have as a fundraiser, apparently, because that, I think is where people live in the nonprofit realm. They don’t know any different because everything is chaos all the time. But my question is, and so and this, maybe this is hyper specific to me, but I don’t think it is because I’ve worked in this space for 20 years. The things that refuel me, simultaneously drain me because right so it’s the peopling peopling gets me like to that high that you’re like, Okay, I love this. I’m having a great conversation. But it’s also active listening, that requires me that drains all of my energy that I need to reboost I’m really boosted by having additional conversations with other people that I’m doing hyper listening at. And so my burnout becomes the thing that I love, because it takes the most amount of energy. Riddle me this because I think a lot of fundraisers are in this boat in which they they keep chasing that adrenaline high of having wonderful conversations, getting a quick win getting these these wonderful nuggets of information that makes you feel like you’re related better to someone else. And at the same time, that takes an enormous amount of energy that you put out. What haha, now what do you do, I’m stuck in this endless circle that I will never recover from unless I go and recover ourselves. Yeah, it makes me think of people that are gym people. And it’s like, they don’t always go in and do leg day, every day, all day.
Unknown Speaker 8:01
Because if they do, they’d be off balance. And they probably start wearing out those muscles too, right? It’s a balance, you hear about them going in and they work this part and then they work this part and then they work this part. So if you’re in a period where you’re fundraising, and that means a spike of peopling that’s really fueling you and exciting you but also is draining you because you’re tapping into active listening, which is where you’re holding space so deeply that you’re hearing not just what’s being said, but But hearing what’s between the lines that are right. So you are you are putting all of you into that conversation.
Unknown Speaker 8:34
What can you do that the opposites like in mindfulness, we have a practice where, like in life or just go go going and doing doing doing thinking, thinking thinking. So mindfulness gives you that opportunity to just whatever minutes a day, sit back and not think as best you can practice not thinking really, truly right? And practice coming back to yourself to create that balance and that forward motion versus the push of the pole. Right? You need to have that balance in it. So what I’m hearing you say, Patrick, is I love having conversations with people, it really energizes me but when I’m in a spike for fundraising, I have to have a lot of that. So what is your counterbalance? What is the other thing you can exercise that refuels you, but is not overextending that one specific skill set. What I love about that, too, is that it forces you to schedule out something and I think I think a lot of times when we are, you know high personalities that we think scheduling is inauthentic, right? If I’m scheduling a thank you call. It’s not as authentic of me just picking up the phone and randomly thinking about somebody etc. When it is the most purposeful and the most meaningful if you’re scheduling it out because then you can actually take those mental breaks too. So I just I love your reframe on that, that it’s okay to just compartmentalize some of these things into into pieces and it’s not in authentic to me
Unknown Speaker 10:00
manually put in your to do list. And it’s probably better for you in the end as well. I just I like that as a reframe. It’s so good. So appreciate I think being intentional about our time is really, really important. And what I hear you saying is like, well, I don’t, don’t then don’t schedule I’m calling Susie yet to say from two to three, I’m going to make these types of calls. And Suzanne’s who I’m calling today, I might call Paul to write like, just that way you can you can create the space of I’m going to make these intentional phone calls, and you can then authentically decide in the moment, who am I going to call? Love it? Well, and I know being intentional with your time is one of your strategies that we were going to jump into. So maybe like expand on that for us a little bit like what other ways might we want to think I mean, you’ve already talked about making sure we schedule in like the self care like the refuel time. But like in general, like what tips do you have for us to be intentional with our time? And how can we as leader support that for our team so that we are working a little bit more
Unknown Speaker 10:56
cohesively are we have the space to kind of do this work and kind of like practice that as a group?
Unknown Speaker 11:03
reframe the question or not reframe but repeat the part with the team. So I want to make sure I grab that part of the question. So just I mean, because I think there’s two parts, right? There’s like, how do I work best? And how do I want to be intentional with my time, but you know, then sometimes when we work within a team, not everybody works the same way. So then how, as a leader, can we kind of help support our teams to make sure that we are being functional as a team, but also supporting this the individual pneus of our our players? Yeah, absolutely. And so I think that being being intentional with your time is one of those things I am big on it started, my acupuncture says I’m the poster child for self care, because I’m so intentional about my time. But the reason for that is because I used to not be intentional about my time. And what I find especially in with compassionate leaders, and I find a lot of compassionate leaders in the nonprofit space is we want to give and we want to serve and we want to help others and we have this mission that’s really, really important. And it’s bigger than ourselves. So we want to give all of us to it. But when we are giving all of us to it, and we don’t have anything left, then then we go from giving them our all to giving them nothing it’s on off. So for me as an HR professional, what it looked like was I was giving my all I was working late hours, I was really cranking it as making things happen. And then I was chronically ill like I was just so sec, right? Because my immune system dropped. So being intentional is is identifying what are the key things, the things that are most important to do. So in in like the fundraising, you’ve got like that the income producing activity kind of thing that you’ve got to be really targeted, what are the things that are doing? Those are going to be the most important? How often do I need to be doing that? But also, how often do I need to be making sure that I’m taking care of me? So that push pull that we just talked about?
Unknown Speaker 12:51
And also what are the other things, the deliverables that I still need to show up on? So you figure out what are your key things? What are your goals right now? And what are the key activities that you need to make space for? How often do you need to be doing those things? And how often do you need to be doing the things that take care of yourself and then look at your schedule. And so the thing that I really focus in on with in the wind down method that I have is a four step process. And it’s really about taking into consideration each week. What is it that are on my what’s my key things list? What are the key goals? What are the key activities that I need to be doing? Let me sync up all of those places where I’m committed to somebody else I’ve made. I’ve got meetings I have to show up for I got deadlines that I’ve got here. And now with the space that’s left, where am I making sure that I’m touching all of these other things. But in addition to that, we have this step of looking back and saying how well did I do on that last week? Did I cancel my yoga class that was my that was my first go to like I cancelled my my yoga class. And I stopped showing up for this.
Unknown Speaker 13:54
What are the things that were very important, that are showing me that I need to make sure that I’m making space for it. Because to Patrick’s point before about the spiking is, you might you might not be able to do that this week. But make sure you don’t go further out than another week to make sure that you’re taking care of you and that those things are being plugged in. So I recommend pre week planning and just finding a place in your schedule. I usually recommend for those of us that are Monday through Friday that we pick Thursday afternoon or Friday morning to do our pre week planning so that we can look ahead, see what’s ahead, make sure that we have time and space in this week to wrap up what we need to in preparation for that. And also we can reschedule things as we need to and create buffers. And the other thing I recommend is tweaking your time where your meetings are 50 minutes instead of 60. That way everybody gets 10 minutes. So to go to the point of the team, and to ensure that we are working with an awareness of when people are working best and what works best for them for meetings versus like Tuesday’s or the days that we have no meetings or something to that effect so that we can get
Unknown Speaker 15:00
They’ll work done whatever works within that culture to start building that and being aware of it and being intentional about how you’re executing. The culture building thing is a really interesting concept around this sort of valuing time. And
Unknown Speaker 15:14
I’m sure you’ve seen this, it feels generational. Right? So if you’re in the nonprofit space, you’ve got a lot of founders old school old guard. I’m using old and that’s probably not right, because there’s people who are
Unknown Speaker 15:28
certain age that get this kind of concept. But there’s a lot of individuals
Unknown Speaker 15:33
out there you go, experience. There you go. Thank you.
Unknown Speaker 15:36
But Rachel, I’m sure, in your number of years of experience in the HR world, there are those groups of individuals that hey, thanks for the woowoo fufu stuff here. I was, when I was your age, I was just told the buck up. And just and just deal with it. I didn’t need any of this personal space. I don’t even take personal space. How come you get to do this, when I been blocked, you know, the whole like routine. So this, I love this conversation, because it’s so important, because I think everything is completely changed and everything is different. But how do you approach it from a knot, they get this opportunity, and they get to do all this, but I don’t and I sort of have that resentment in it that they are, they’re soft, and they don’t like because that is a real massive
Unknown Speaker 16:26
butting heads of personalities within a culture, specially old school nonprofit stuff. Hmm, that’s a really good question, Patrick, that kind of like, opens up so many things. And I’ve shared with Sammy, I have ADHD. So my brain just went into like, it was like a firework of directions. I was I was I was warned about this. And I warned Sammy, that myself with my undiagnosed adult on ADHD that you and I are gonna have a great time with this. But that means that means a lot of rail tracks are gonna go in a different direction. But I feel like that’s why it’s like this. So I tried to pull it into a picture.
Unknown Speaker 17:01
But I think that there’s a lot and there’s, there is a lot. I have had the honor of working with a lot of clients and the nonprofit for multiple different reasons that they come to me. But I have seen and heard the stories of
Unknown Speaker 17:19
the executive nonprofit leader who feels like well, you should, you should want to give all of yourself to this mission, because that’s how we do things. And that person’s like, yes, and money is also very important to me, right? Right there. There’s a balance, there’s always a balance, there’s going to be different values that are coming through generationally. And to be honest, culturally, we don’t live in a world that is like,
Unknown Speaker 17:42
isolated, and culture were now meshing. And so I think that what’s really important, especially for these executives, that might have a more mature experience, as Sammy said that they have been doing these things for a while and are coming from the
Unknown Speaker 17:58
the old ways of doing things, what no matter what age they are, some of them are just indoctrinated into the old way of doing things, and that this shift is happening. So if you really want to drive it, it boils down to the people. So we want to be compassionate about our mission and this amazing thing that we have to serve, you have to start with internal service, if you want to have that external service. So looking at it, like you want to add value to these other people you want these people to show up best, you gotta be able to like work with them first. So what is losing 510 minutes on a meeting really going to do other than allow them have tough time to have water and a potty break? So they’re not doing sessions, right? Or what? What is it and so
Unknown Speaker 18:40
as an HR professional that has had to navigate multiple generations and values that have come up with them, I think that it always boils down to your ability to influence others by tapping to the values that they have. And figuring out what that value is for that executive that might be coming into the conversation of why I’ve always had to do it this way. So for me, it’s that it would depend, it would be my answer. And it would depend on that executive and getting to know what’s important to them. And speaking to that as to why it’s important to create these shifts. Well, isn’t there studies out there that show like if you want to pull the woowoo piece out of it, and say like this type of thing leads to productivity, increase productivity and increase employee retention? I want to tap into just a timeout for a second because woowoo is if I brought my tarot cards into this conversation, right? Well, I’m waiting for that, by the way where I got you I got a poster on the desk, but in the crystals are in the background, but the thing of it is, is that it’s not woowoo it’s right human. And what we did as a culture as a society back in the early 1900s was we created factory line workers and the way that you did things and it needed to be time oriented and it needed to be this is when you execute things. We’re not in that world anymore. We’re in a world that
Unknown Speaker 20:00
cannot deny the human that is in it. And so we’ve got to work with the humans, because it’s not, the organization is not the thing. It’s the humans that are in it and the spirit that drives them the energy that drives them into executing, we need to take care of that. First, if we want to have any, any idea of an organization. We’re not, we’re not machines, we’re humans. And we have to make sure that we’re building organizations around that human component. What I love about this too, though, it forces you to ask the question to the to the Old Guard, the mature ones, the old school ones, like Hey, what did you use to unwind? Right? What what’s your what’s your go to unwinding thing? It might not be yoga, it might be a Scotch after the end of the day, it might be like, right.
Unknown Speaker 20:43
And I go, Okay, well, this is our version of how you unwind. And and I think that relatability from asking the question to them is like, how do you do this? And you come from a place I think of curiosity, which I which I think is the underlying piece here that you’re that you’re just explaining in wonderful detail, it’s, it’s being curious on how to meet everybody where they are. And that’s that people element that I think is so missing, that we treat our donors the same way. But our co workers in our leadership team, we have a different standard of curiosity and engagement. And it should be the exact same, you got a playbook for this, you wouldn’t go and just assume your donors are obnoxiously chaotic, because they have this, you know, piece of whatever it’s, it’s, it’s totally different. Right.
Unknown Speaker 21:33
I wanted to jump back into your question or your conversation about like setting up the schedule in regards to this because
Unknown Speaker 21:42
I love what you said about if you skipped yoga this week, or you skipped your refuel this week, just because it was a week on that that’s fine, but don’t keep doing it. So at what point do because I know I have struggled with my morning routine. And I’ve changed it several times, because I haven’t quite fit that like sweet spot for what works best for me, I keep trying different things. But how often should we be kind of assessing? You know, is this working for me? Or am I trying to work within this framework? And like, let things go versus like, I’m gonna keep trying this for a period of time? Like it’s kind of an ever evolving?
Unknown Speaker 22:18
situation, right moving target?
Unknown Speaker 22:20
A little bit? And my answer to that, unfortunately, is it depends. And it depends a lot, because we’re humans, and so every human needs a different thing. So what I would say is just to be intentional about how long are you going to give something ago, I usually try to give it 90 days.
Unknown Speaker 22:36
And truly, I just didn’t checking any each week. And so with each week, I’m like, is that still important to me? Yep. Okay, then that stays on the list. And it’s important to me, how did I do and, and what do I need to change? So for me, I’m checking it each week, as far as what’s on the list? And is it still important, but my overall, my overall, like, morning routine doesn’t shift very much.
Unknown Speaker 23:03
At least in the last 90 days, it hasn’t shifted very much. But if I compare it to two years ago, it’s very different. So I’ve made the minut changes over time for me, it depends family, it depends on that human but, but for them to decide for them to decide, You know what, I’m gonna give this a go for three weeks and see how I feel about it. And then and then check back in, or I’m gonna, I’m gonna check in on it weekly, and see if it’s different for me and the week ahead. And what, what does it take? Because I know if you asked me five years ago, in fact, I think Facebook just reminded me from 10 years ago that I had posted, what do you do when you have an hour to yourself? Like, I have no idea, no idea what to do with it? And I think that’s a lot of us, right? We don’t know, we’re just going through the motions of doing so kind of when you have that first hour, that first moment to go, what is it that I enjoy doing? I have a ton of books, a ton of books that I haven’t read, because I wasn’t making space for reading, but I loved the idea of reading. I love learning. So then I started being intentional and making space to read books. Now. I just built it into a habit of well, this is why I do it.
Unknown Speaker 24:11
So I hope that answers your question. It really is dependent on the person. But look at the things that you wish you were getting to and start making space for that if you haven’t yet. Okay, so then what do you say, cuz you brought up a great point. And I think this is something we’re getting a little bit away from the work stuff, but I think it it all relates to like, how do we come up with how we refuel ourselves, because
Unknown Speaker 24:33
I was also someone who struggled with like, Okay, I’m a mom, I work a lot, I run my own business. And if I have free time, I should work more because I run my own business and there’s always more work to be done. I work from home, it’s right outside the kitchen. Like I can always just pop in and respond to a couple of emails. I had to do a lot of work to like really make lists of things that actually refuel me or that are my own interests or my own things that excite me that have nothing
Unknown Speaker 25:00
to do with anyone else, like that’s really a much more difficult thing I think, than what we might think. So do you have any kind of exercises or ways that we can kind of start to either brain dump the things that refuel us, or how we can kind of come up with some of those ideas? If we’re sitting here, like, I love what she’s saying, but I’m stuck on like, I don’t even know myself enough to figure out what that might be.
Unknown Speaker 25:21
I think that the first place is to look at the things that you’re watching other people doing going, I wish I could do that. That’s like the first thing. But then also, you know, for example, my I have a ton of books that I haven’t read, why am I not reading? I’m not reading because I’m not making it a priority. I’m not making that as as a time for me. So let me make sure I’m doing that.
Unknown Speaker 25:44
And just play with it. So just notice the things that you’re attracted to notice the things that you’re drawn to what magazines are you buying? Are you buying mindfulness magazines, but never practicing mindfulness? Perhaps making space to try mindfulness for 30 days is a thing to do?
Unknown Speaker 26:00
Are you really drawn to the pictures of people hiking and beautiful places? That’s it? How do you make space for you to go check out your common trails, like what’s an you know, download the app that that gives you the, the local trails and start hitting them? When can you do that maybe I make it every Sunday, that’s gorgeous, I’m gonna go do that in the morning, and then build and then build that into the practice of that and folding it in. I mean, if you read atomic habits, it’s all about connecting it to things you’re already doing. So
Unknown Speaker 26:30
you know, I always go to the grocery store on Sundays, I always change the sheets, Sunday mornings, that just became a thing. Now I go to the gym between the two of them, right? Like, and I go with my husband. So it’s like, and it’s a date. Um, but like, folding things in and just trying it and connecting it, but really looking at what are the things that you’re noticing other people do that you wish you could try and try it just pulled it in? And give it a go? Can I jump off on that? Is there like watching other people do what they’re trying to do? And like, okay, that kind of actually sounds fun. Um, there’s a moment, I think, where we as fundraisers, look at what others are doing. And then we have that moment of like, I will never be as good, I will never be as big I will never be as even capable of doing X, Y, and Z. Well, that becomes almost like that comparison is the thief of joy bit where like, I’m now looking at other people’s successes. I shouldn’t be doing this. Oh, crap. I’m not doing enough now. And then it collapses internally. I’ve worked on this a lot. And I feel like I need to address it. Because a number of people who are in this fundraising community will look at that you look at like LinkedIn, for example. LinkedIn has now become a, and it’s great. Kudos to everybody else who’s doing this. But he comes a brag bullet place now, where you’re like, it’s now become this. This fortress of mental hurdles, I have to get through to God, Jesus, and they’re doing this now. And I gotta shut it off. So how do we Yeah, so how do we, like get through that? Because I love what you’re saying, like, I want to try this, because that sounds good for me without getting overwhelmed of like, I’m not doing enough. Well, So Patrick, first, you just kind of took it into what you’re doing. workwise. And I want to anchor it back into like, this is what you do for yourself, care and enjoy that. Comparing within work is a whole other thing. But I’m dying. Because legitimately last night I saw someone post How are you guys making time space and the finances for all of these like facial care regimes, and taking the time to do all of that like an hour to get ready in the morning? Who has that anymore? And whatever? And what happened to just being able to journal for 30 minutes? Like why do I have to do all of these things for self care now, too, and I had a client recently tell me that somebody had come forward him and like, I am now diving into my woo book as an escape to my whatever else, everything else was, and now I’m still in that making space. And so to anchor it in, this is just more of an exploration phase of I don’t know what fuels me what fuels me.
Unknown Speaker 29:00
And when you’re fueling yourself, it doesn’t matter if you’re the best hiker in the world or not. You’re just going out into nature, because you want to be amongst nature and it brings you joy, there’s no more it’s not a it’s not a competition or a comparable, it’s just I saw them going out into nature that looked like that would bring me a lot of joy. So I want to go try it. Do I really like it? You know what? No, I didn’t because there was a lot of bugs. I don’t like bugs rightly whatever. It is just a self exploration of what really fuels you.
Unknown Speaker 29:30
I feel like we could we could spend a long time chatting about work comparison, but I think we’d go off course. Well, I think the word but I think the word comparison is really interesting too. Because I think a lot of in the nonprofit realm we take this work so personally, right? It is this is a personal business giving us personal donating his personal the career choices that we make within whatever program or service that we’re trying to get into becomes personal. So I think there’s this really weird blurred line, but I love that I love the again, it’s reframing
Unknown Speaker 30:00
Back to this is a little focusing on you. A It’s okay. It’s not selfish, it’s not in you’re not taking anything away from anybody else by just concentrating on you for a little bit. But I love that the fact that you’re hammering it home, I get it. Yeah. But it’s like what you want. This is not what everybody else is doing what you want. I mean, I think to hammer that home to people who are, especially in the nonprofit realm is so, so unbelievably important because it’s not done a lot. But Rachel, would you say that if we work on like, because I know we haven’t gone? We’ll we’ll dive into this next. But your your other strategy was like kind of a shift in mindset? And would you say that if we kind of shift into this internal space, and if we can really figure out what fuels us what lights us up, what makes us feel more
Unknown Speaker 30:48
productive, more engaged with our family, like we’re kind of building this kind of space for ourselves so that we can show up as our best version, that some of those comparison things, whether they be work related or personal, can kind of minimize a little bit because you feel more dialed in and connected to what you’re doing and why you’re doing it as opposed to needing to find validation in other places, to kind of, I think, I think it boils down to how much energy you have so many ties into the burnout, right? So like, as we’re sliding down the scale of energy, we’re getting in and before we’re quite on that puddle on the floor, we might have a lot of judgments and fear that are kind of building. And so it would make a lot of sense that that comparison would start kind of coming in Well, I’m not enough, because I’m not doing what you know, Sally Sue over here is doing. And that comparison part that can definitely come in. And
Unknown Speaker 31:38
I think that there’s an additional weight, kind of hitting on the space with people in nonprofit because like you mentioned, it’s so important to them to do the work that they’re doing, the mission that they’re serving, they want to serve so powerfully, and want to give so much for it. And I think that the invitation, ultimately is to pause for a moment and think about
Unknown Speaker 32:02
a time where you showed up into your workspace where you had so much joy and so much excitement. Versus the day you showed up with a lot of fear and judgment.
Unknown Speaker 32:13
Like what does that look like? And what are the results that you’re getting? Because I’m willing to bet that the days that you show up joyful and excited, you are able to serve even more powerfully than the days when you show up afraid
Unknown Speaker 32:30
and fearful and judgmental of how you’re showing up that it’s not enough, the more you you like have that internal dialogue happening, your the the results that you’re producing are a little bit different. And if I’m stepping into the shoes of specifically the fundraising part that Patrick brought up, I’m thinking that if you come to me from a space of oh my gosh, this is so amazing. And I’m so excited about this opportunity and this mission, and I want you to be a part of it, and I want you to put your money in it and back this, I’m more likely to give to that version, then we might close, we might not be able to like keep this going. Right? Think about like the strategies that you use when you’re fundraising like really like where do we tap into whichever the one of we might close might get people to push money at you quickly. But that won’t stay for a long period of time. Because if you’re constantly at fear of closing, you’re not doing something right with your money. And I’m not sure that I want to put any money into you.
Unknown Speaker 33:24
So if you look at that, from that same standpoint,
Unknown Speaker 33:27
investing in your self and your well being is critical to the mission. Because when you show up as your best self, because you’ve taken time to refuel yourself, and you’ve taken time to sleep and you’ve taken time to like move and you’ve taken time to eat healthy and and to pause to exercise the not just your legs, the other parts of your body or whatever, you know what I’m trying to say with that, right? Like I’m not just leaning into among taking a step back, to have that balance, you’re going to show up even more powerfully, you’re going to drive your mission even
Unknown Speaker 34:01
even stronger, I think is the word I was going for. So I think it boils down to creating boundaries and identifying. So shifting your mindset around some things, one, create boundaries, it’s going to be easier, especially as Patrick brought in, like the old world order of leadership. And the way that we show up and you’ve got to give it all and you got to be putting in 80 hours and you got to do whatever to be able to strongly put in those boundaries of I hear you but in order for me to do this, I need this and just set those boundaries and boundaries could be a whole other conversation right but like to be able to say it is important for me to do this.
Unknown Speaker 34:36
So I will but also to identify that if they are responsible for volunteers or they’re like leading up to like board board members or whatever. And they’re like, Oh, well, I’ve got to try to take on all of this work because then they’re not getting to it. They’re not showing up. They’re not able to hold them accountable to their work. That’s the other thing that kind of can lead to the burnout of this compassionate leader, especially nonprofit because you’ve got people that are showing it for free
Unknown Speaker 35:00
and you don’t want to put too much on them. And oh, they’re not quite getting it all done, I’ll just take care of it because I want to take care of them. And I just I know what needs to get done. So the more you’re taking on your plates, now a platter, and they’re walking around, like, I volunteered for this, but I didn’t really do anything great. But to shift that mindset to, you’re actually serving them by saying, Hey,
Unknown Speaker 35:26
this is this is yours to do, and you’re going to do it. And I’m not going to take it because you don’t want to take from them what they’re adding as value into the organization, shifting your mindset from, I’m asking too much of them to show up and do the work that they volunteered to do, because I feel bad about it, well, then then you can’t operate in an organization of volunteers. So you start looking into your your assumptions, your thought processes, and where are those boundaries needed to be an anchor back into why it’s valuable for you to take care of yourself? I think those mindset shifts are important. I think one of the real key parts that you mentioned, too, is actually having a conversation about it with the team and leads and everybody else you’re involved with board members, leadership team, yourself, your your friends and family. I think we do a disservice to us if we’d like to, we’re working through this in ourselves, but we’re not talking about it to anybody else. So we assume that they know that we’re doing this because we need to get into a mental clear space, and then they get mad because they’re not doing the fit, we’re not being transparent about it, or we’re a kind of sheltering it. And there’s a huge support group, I think that would be interested in getting you to a place that makes you feel great. And that puts you as you’re at your A game, if you communicate it in the first place. And actually and again, being curious about, you know, how would you handle this? Or what, what are you doing about this as Oh, how was your journey on, on giving yourself boundaries. And then because it’s talking about the boundaries, they’re gonna let you to describe and actually lay them out, you can’t just imaginary imaginarily, like, make your boundaries without explaining to everybody else, what your boundaries are in the first place. So you got to talk about it. And I think that’s Unbeliev, that’s one of the more crucial pieces that you added here is like, be open, say them out loud, number one, and then just like, then you can, then other people are held accountable to it as well, because they’ve heard it, can I add a very specific example to that,
Unknown Speaker 37:19
about communicating boundaries. So like we’re going into a crazy season, personally in my in my life, because my daughter is in a musical and my son’s starting spring tennis. So they’re like back to back. My afternoons are just crazy. And instead of just feeling stressed out and like having to decline meetings or whatnot, like I let all my clients know, hey, from this from April or from where are we march from, like from March until like the end of May, I have a very heavy load of things in the afternoons I didn’t, you don’t have to get specific, but my schedule is really shifting in the afternoons, I will not be able to take meetings after 2pm My time, or this period. So please just be prepared for that. Because I just set that expectation, it’s not doesn’t mean I’m not gonna get my work done. It doesn’t mean that anything else is changing with my contracts with my clients. But it’s just literally like, there is a shift in my schedule for the next month and a half. I just want you to be aware so that we can plan accordingly. And nobody gets mad about it. Like I think we also think people are going to assume we’re lazy, or we’re not doing the thing, but like they were Oh, great. Thank you so much. Now we can make sure that we set up our schedule accordingly. And we know in advance. So that’s just a real life example that just happened for me.
Unknown Speaker 38:29
This week. One of the things that happened during COVID was the rules kept changing, the rules of engagement kept changing, right? I remember going out to a restaurant, and we were eating outdoors. And I was like, I don’t know what to do, like, do I wear a mask doing not wearing masks? Do I need to have on blood? Like where do I put my hands? How do I engage with humans? I don’t know how to do any of this anymore. Because all shifted and changed and was constantly changing. And there was an anxiety about that, you know? And I think about that anytime I think about rules of engagement, which is what you just kind of hit on Sammy, I now know when I can show up. I now know when it’s good to put meetings on I now know when you’re thriving with that. So being able to sit down and communicate is really powerfully but I will say that one of the other biggest challenges for people that are compassionate leaders that are very heartfelt leaders is to set boundaries because there is something within our society that has taught us that we need to pull back our boundaries make space for other people to be gracious to like take care of them. That’s how that’s how we take care of them. And so one of the books that I’ve been recommending to all of my clients as of lately, I had to go back and listen to it again because I read it the first time this time I listened to it while I painted about them because I needed to re anchor into it because it’s coming up so much and that is to say it’s set boundaries find peace
Unknown Speaker 39:50
by
Unknown Speaker 39:52
NIDA, Glover
Unknown Speaker 39:55
to walk I think is her name
Unknown Speaker 40:00
I’ll make sure to link that in the replay of this video too. I just confirmed that is the author’s name mujer, Glover to set boundaries, find peace, a guide to reclaiming yourself. It’s a phenomenal book for this, because she really even teaches you like, as you set forth and make those boundaries. So Sammy, let’s say you make your boundary that I can’t call after two, I can’t do a meeting with you after two because you’re not available. And then I am like, oh, my gosh, I can only do this a time at three o’clock. And you’re like,
Unknown Speaker 40:32
Okay, let me figure it out, I’ll make it work, I’ll have to zoom in. Well, now I know I can do it.
Unknown Speaker 40:37
Thanks, think under personality, you’re gonna pull it back. And so your boundaries really, really weak. And what happens is, when we start setting boundaries, people are going to challenge it, not because they’re like, I’m going to challenge your your two o’clock, it’s more just they’re living in their own world. And forget, per se what that specific boundaries, or they have a difficulty adjusting to it. And,
Unknown Speaker 41:00
and so what we see is like, we’ll either get angry that they’re not honoring our boundaries, or we will get frustrated and pull our boundaries back and then have this whole thing like, I’m not even I tried to set boundaries, and it failed. But if we look at it from this other standpoint of, it’s just an adjustment period, and I have to hold on to it and how to continue to support and that boundaries are helpful for all of us that it is the rules of engagement. And then that gives you that confidence that lowered anxiety, you know exactly when and how to show up and engage can be really tremendous. But this book really touches in on what to do when you see that pushback and how to like navigate the mindset of it, and how to really kind of give yourself space, and even setting boundaries for yourself with your technology, because we all need to have a tech break every so often too. So I don’t check my emails after such and such time at night, and I won’t look at it again until such and such right, like giving yourself permission to do that. Whereas I grew up with the old world mentality of here’s your Blackberry. Yeah, BlackBerry, I just dated myself. And I’m also you will respond on Saturday, Sunday and forever. Because you now have this on you. And what a great what a wonderful gift we’ve given you. Yeah, so I grew up in that world. And I had to kind of adjust to and say, Okay, now this is my boundary and the mind blowing moments for people. Yeah.
Unknown Speaker 42:20
15 minutes left. And so I want to make sure I asked one final question, which is like, if we’re listening to this, we’re like, okay, I want to create a better culture for my team, I want to make sure I’m integrating some of these things, I don’t understand my leadership style, or how you know, I can best go through this, I know you have a tool for this, but could you kind of talk about what a leadership archetype is, and how your tool can help kind of us navigate through that? Yeah, I found one really fast path. And for me to identify the mindset of the thought processes of the leaders that I was working with was to identify their archetype. And I do it through the way that they are setting up their goals, the way that they approach their goals can tell me so much. And
Unknown Speaker 43:03
so leadership archetype really kind of gives you that that snapshot of okay, this is the this is the archetype that I have. This is the type of leader I have. I am.
Unknown Speaker 43:12
I’m a warrior, I go in and get it done. That’s kind of maybe a little bit of that old world.
Unknown Speaker 43:18
Burn it, burn it, it all ends, or I’m the nurturer. I really want to take care of everybody I want to show up, I want to make sure you’re taken care of, or the optimist that’s looking at it, like, oh, it’s all gonna work out, it’s all gonna work out, it’s gonna be fine. It’ll be fine. And, and the way that we navigate and show up with that can show so much not only on how we’re showing up for ourselves, but how we show up for the people around us, whether we ourselves have teams that are reporting to us, for working with volunteers, or we’re just working to get things done for an individual contributor. I think knowing your leadership archetype can tell you so much and offer you quick tips on how to create those minor adjustments. Where do I need to plug the hole so that I am not burning out? And I’m not I’m not draining it out?
Unknown Speaker 43:58
And where can people access that. But they go to my website, which is www dot emerging Lotus coaching.com. At the very top, there’s a banner, click on that it takes you to the page, click the button and and it’s like five or six questions, and you’re done. You’ve got your results. So you can start there. And then also, I think that there’s I’m looking into your energy levels, which is that like, you can do an energy leadership index assessment with me, or anybody else that’s certified in there. And it really helps you break down like, what are the lenses at where, where’s my energy going, when things are good? Versus when where’s my energy going? When I’m stressed out? And how is that impacting me? And where’s my cycle of burnout? I can, I can often identify where the cycle of burnout is with my clients and just the ELA.
Unknown Speaker 44:43
That’s great, Patrick, any last questions that you have for Rachel? Yeah, well, it’s kind of like it would be a question, but it’ll be in the form of a comment, I’m sure because that’s how my brain works. It is it’s so part of the boundaries piece, which I think is just a fascinating
Unknown Speaker 45:00
As
Unknown Speaker 45:01
individuals in the nonprofit realm specially in fundraisers Don’t, don’t think of boundaries right out of the gate, right? Like, I just want to be everywhere to everybody at all times.
Unknown Speaker 45:11
Ironically, the best salespeople who eventually become the best, the best fundraisers have a very strict boundary. And it’s almost in a sense of not even offering people who you’re trying to meet with your entire calendar. It’s being very specific about the dates that you are available. And it does a couple of interesting things. I think, psychologically, to those who are potential funders and potential donors of like, this person, it makes you better in sales, because there’s a confidence about you. I’ve got this date on Thursday, between two and four is that does do these times work with you? You’re like, Oh, Jesus, yeah, this one does, right? You’ve forced them into a box. So you get to control yourself. They’re, the fewer options seems like you’re more wanted, that you’re that you’re a more
Unknown Speaker 45:57
booked up individual that people are just clamoring at the bid to get in front of you all the time. You’re not saying it, but you’re like, not not saying it. Grab a spot, there’s a sense of, of sort of urgency. And there’s almost an appeal of like, I’ve got this time, which means you’re not going any time is good for you to get some money, whatever. And there’s just like lack of lack of confidence when you offer them everything. And there’s this almost self control, self confidence you have when you say I’m available on these particular dates, and I’m not available here that you almost like, lose out when you’re just having a conversation that you don’t need to say I have boundaries. These are the times I’m available. And I just I when you were talking about that I just said, what a great thing to lean on. As somebody who is in sales are fundraising, that this is the key to sounding like, you know what the hell you’re doing, and you give this confidence booster, and you get your boundaries. At the same time, it was just a remarkable way that you laid that out. And I think that was fascinating. I think that brought me to a couple things that I think are really important to clarify, when I say I only have this, that’s my boundary with myself, even so like you’re setting boundaries with yourself, like I’m not saying that I’m not going to accept any calls after to during this this season. There’s a win by Daniel Pink, that really targets on when you are your best whatever for whatever type of work you’re doing, Patrick that even leans into, I can be intentional about my time, my time block for taking these types of calls. And these types of meetings, or here or here. Nobody needs to know what you’re doing in the other one, you’re just not offering them that time block, because that’s not the space for that for you. And then you’re able to show up as your best self and drive that mission even even fuller, Billy Yes, 100% people embrace it. And they respect it. I remember as a volunteer to an organization, I was like, I have exactly two hours a month to dedicate to this project. And they’re like, how did you figure that out. And that’s why I did a time budget. And I was able to set a boundary because I had complete awareness of that. And I think that that’s the other thing is just being aware of what you have available. And
Unknown Speaker 48:08
that by limiting it doesn’t make you less, it actually makes you more on demand. And it shows that power of oh, I only have this room to work with. Let me figure it out. Let me work with what they’ve got, you know, the consultant colleague that I meet with every month, and we just kind of hold these each other accountable. And
Unknown Speaker 48:29
she fascinates me because she comes every month with this Google Doc. And she lines out her big projects. And she lines up her hours that she’s willing to work each month, and then she’s like, Okay, well with these hours and the income I need to generate, I can do X amount of VIP days, I can, you know, take on X amount of clients. And she like breaks it down by hour, even though she doesn’t Bill hourly. But she’s taking in all of her things. And she’s like, so that means I’m going to be short X amount of this month. So now I have to decide if I’m like what it helps her prioritize so quickly, because one of her boundaries is I’m only going to work X amount of hours a month. And so she frames everything that way. And I think nonprofits can do the same thing, especially in fundraising, if you take a look at data and you’re tracking. So if you know, if I do 10 in person meetings each month, that’s going to lead to five, follow up meetings about whatever, like you can run your closing rate. And then you know, your boundary can be I only need to do 10 calls this month because I know if I do that consistently that’s going to yield the results that I need to hit my goals. If I increase it to more, that’s going to generate more money. So maybe that’s worth it or not, but like I think you can use a lot of those triggers to kind of generate from a money perspective as opposed to a scarcity perspective where you’re like, Well, I have to do all of the calls, because and burn myself out because otherwise I’m not going to make the money. Well who’s telling you that whose story is that? And that’s coming from a fear based lack kind of mindset and that’s creating your own limitation. So to
Unknown Speaker 50:00
To reduce that limitation, you step into like a broader, there’s your Will you step into that broader, like less judgmental, how, what is the opportunity and the time that I have available? What can I do with this bear? And as you got there 52 minutes, it took us there, but we got it, and I’m so happy about it.
Unknown Speaker 50:18
And I requests a crystal Tarot reading afterwards. So just no one does a crystal reading, but we’ll figure it out. No, don’t have a good time. I know, here’s but here’s, again, what you’ve said today is so unbelievably important to reiterate to everybody who’s in the fundraising space. And again, we laugh about the whoo kind of things we laugh about mindset. If you’re an old, if you’re an old guard, human being like mindset, my mindset should be you should work for 90 hours a week like that, we get it. But it’s so unbelievably important. If you don’t show up for yourself, he can’t show for anybody else. And we hear it. And it’s just a great reminder. Yeah, I just want to add one more thing. And I think that this is kind of what framed me and shifted me into this space and doing this work is that I watched that generation burnout, I watched them sacrifice their health, for their organizations, only to be laid off and not be re hireable. Because they were too whatever, at that stage, them waiting to learn how to play guitar, because they were too busy delivering for the organizations and not finding those moments of joy. I saw what that did. And I think that
Unknown Speaker 51:35
what we were doing to that generation was telling them that you’re a machine. And then when you’re used up, we’re done with you. And then you can go live your life and be a human. And instead, what I think I’m encouraging all of us to do and shift to as this mindset of we are humans now we will be humans later. And we need to start taking care of ourselves and taking care of our teams as humans, and identifying what those things are, what space is needed. How do we take care of we’re not we’re not a machine, we need sleep, we need nutrition, we need an outlet, we need physical movement. And truly we need connection, compassion. And a lot of that comes through the lens of communication. So really stepping into who you are as a leader. And understanding how you connect to and influence others, you can really produce some strong results when you start leaning into the magic of your organization being the humans that are in it, and treating them as such. I think that is probably the most perfect, beautiful bow to put on this session. I love I love that. And I think that was very well said.
Unknown Speaker 52:44
Rachel, this was amazing. We will have this in the student dashboard with all of the resources and links for everybody to watch the replay.
Unknown Speaker 52:54
Patrick, any final words that you have this was none of none will be better than that. That’s the problem. So I had a lot of I have a lot of words. Just none will be better than how that ended. So that was beautiful. Rachel, thank you again for your time. I really do appreciate so reading and figuring out what those words are. We’ll get exactly yes. Yeah.
Unknown Speaker 53:16
Thank you for having me. Thank you for inviting me to be here and to share this with your community. I appreciate it. Love it. We will see everybody in April for our next guest expert training and Happy Wednesday. Happy first day of spring, officially. I love it. Yay. We’ll see everybody later. Bye gang.
The 2024 Fundraising Outlook: What Nonprofits Are Saying About the Year Ahead
It seems like things are changing all the time when it comes to fundraising. How can you even know what’s working anymore? Yes, it’s true that donor behavior ebbs and flows over the years. Couple that with economic craziness and an election year and it can feel overwhelming. Luckily, we have OneCause and their insights from nearly 1,000 nonprofits to give us all the goods on the latest trends and strategies that are working RIGHT NOW! Join us for a discussion with Steve Lausch, Director of Product Marketing at OneCause, as we break down the strategies that will help you reach more donors and raise more money.Â
View Transcript
Patrick Kirby 0:03
Well, hey, boot camp friends, welcome to another one of our guest experts, webinars talking about all things that are going to pertain to you and how are you going to manage and today, event specific, and fundraising event specific pieces to your puzzle, and I know that’s one of the big hang ups that a lot of you have. So I’m super excited for today. I’m super excited for the topic, we’re going to have Sammy, tie. Welcome to another adventure with us today.
Sami Bedell-Mulhern 0:35
Glad to be here.
Patrick Kirby 0:36
It’s gonna be a blast. Okay, so um, I’m gonna get we’re gonna get right into it, because there’s a ton of information that you are going to want to know. Our guest today, he is the Director of Product Marketing at one cause one of our favorite human beings, one of our favorite companies do to work with in the nonprofit space. Steve, welcome to a nonprofit boot camp. And our webinar series, my friend
Steve Lausch 0:59
is so good to be back with you and Sammy on a podcast with you for the first time and kicking off a great new series of podcasts like I’m so highlighted my week so far. Patrick, good to be back.
Patrick Kirby 1:11
I love it. Alright, so for those of you who don’t know, one cause, Steve, I’d love to give you kind of a some ramp up here on what cause is? Why kind of we’re talking today. What makes this sort of fundraising outlook report that we’re going to talk about so unique and interesting within the nonprofit industry? Yeah,
Steve Lausch 1:32
awesome. Well, one cause offers powerful fundraising solutions to nonprofits of all shapes and sizes, whether the need is around texting and fundraising, event fundraising online giving, it could be peer to peer fundraising strategies, consulting support, etc. Your your listeners are more than welcome to check out what cars.com To learn more, but I will tell you that a lot of the great value that is on what cars.com is in the resource that we offer for free. So yes, we have this wonderful solution in the one cost fundraising platform. But Patrick, as you know, that saved me, as you know, the our resources section contains this report that we’re gonna be talking about today, and a whole library of other resources that nonprofits can check out in their leisure.
Patrick Kirby 2:22
It’s, it’s really good. There might be one that might be one or two, or we just have those and again, what I love most about your position at one, cause two, and again, this is a setup to kind of the fundraising outlook report that we’re gonna talk about is that you’re seeing and involved boots on the ground with nonprofits every single day. This isn’t theoretical. This isn’t sort of like Phil philosophical. I wonder if or maybe we should talk about what could be, you’re seeing results of what’s happening in real time with your team. And that’s what makes I think this conversation and what you produce as content so valuable, is that it is reality, not hypothetical,
Steve Lausch 3:06
for sure. And this specific report that we’re going to be reviewing today, the findings from it come from our fundraising outlook report published for the year of 2024. Now, we’ve been surveying nonprofits for years, as you know, this is the sixth year, however, for what we term, our annual nonprofit survey. And the fourth year that we’ve been releasing the findings of that survey in an annual report, we do two annual reports each year, this one the fundraising outlook, which is a fantastic view, into the what nonprofits are telling us how life is going, what’s successful, what’s challenging, how we’re buying tech, how we’re investing in tech, what the year ahead is going to look like. And then the second one that we do comes out typically each spring, maybe early summer. And that’s the giving experience where it’s a fantastic compliment in that it is the view of donors. It’s the voice of supporters. And so nonprofits are the like the ones listening today can download both of those studies, compare them is two sides to a coin, really get a great view as to what’s going on now. I can give a very quick background on this report, and I think tells our listeners why they want to stick around for the rest of the podcast, please. Very cute. Yeah, please do. So we launched this survey, the annual nonprofit survey at our arrays conference. It happens at conferences every September. I need to be careful not to get off on that topic. It is a fantastic conference, but we launched this survey with those attendees. It’s that survey spends about a month in market. And then here’s the great part. While you have plenty of fantastic research that is out in the nonprofit space, so much of it is reported by data collected maybe within a CRM or it’s it’s it’s data being fed into a solution. This is self reported data. This is a nonprofit saying I’m going to take eight 910 minutes to really fill out this information. And guess what we all get to benefit from that. So this year 939, unique nonprofits, all shapes, all sizes, all segments tracked by tracked by full time employees tracked by annual operating revenue, a different AOR is tracked by roll tracked by how how those roles that are, are involved in tech acquisition for that nonprofit, it’s all broken down. It provides tremendous insights, not only for us, but then we get to share it through great avenues like this podcast.
Sami Bedell-Mulhern 5:44
Well. I’m sorry, I’ve been really quick because as a marketer, like the hardest thing, as things are evolving in the nonprofit space, and as we’re kind of working with organizations on like, okay, like this is how we need to be stepping into the digital space and how it can support your fundraising and your events and all the things because nonprofits are pretty slow to kind of jump into this space. But as a marketer, the hardest thing is like the perception of what should be done versus the data of what’s showing that works. And so I love this report, as a toolkit for you know, whoever is working on the marketing side, or the creative side of your, your organization to give you that kind of tangible piece to say, Hey, I think this would work really organization. And not only that, we are seeing it work in all of these other places. So like it’s worth a go.
Steve Lausch 6:36
And if I can throw in this real quick, I love what you just said about being a marketer, and that I’m a marketer by trade as well, right? Product Marketing, and I’m constantly asking, who’s giving me the input? And how can I get into their head and into their sandals, we had 27% of those 939 unique nonprofits, 27% of those be responses from executive directors. So we get some really good high level strategic insight into this data. But then 29% of those aren’t development directors or VPS, 60% event directors and VPS. So, Patrick, you talked about the importance of of events, for nonprofits, we’ll get that perspective in this in this research piece, the importance of that kind of mid tier strategy of development in general, we get that breathing into this. So yeah, it’s fantastic. It’s great to have that voice. And it is what is working, Sammy, as you said, not just not just kind of thinking about what we might try and what will stick out if we throw it against the wall.
Patrick Kirby 7:39
The other thing too, and the self reporting thing is super important to because there is a level of transparency and honesty because they’re not recording up to a board. They’re not. This is this is very No, there’s no white washing with anything, this is just very clean as it is like, we know that this is happening. This is the thing, this is our honest feedback on on our what we’re seeing and how we’re seeing it real in real time. So you don’t have to worry about someone who’s putting a gloss or a shine to the numbers. So you’re getting like what is really working, but you’re also getting like this is just chaos to us. I don’t understand how this is gonna go. So we can track those. And then And then really work on it, whether you’re at a conference at race or where they’re their board or whatever, taking this information, and then really using it, knowing that that is real time data. Yeah, so true. I just like that a lot. Alright, so let’s maybe start with the big picture. Steve is kind of general findings that we have in the in the Outlook report for 2024 things that stand out to you things that some of our audience or listeners might find the real intrigue and value and some of the trends that are just kind of rockin and rollin in your in our in our fundraising brains today? Yeah,
Steve Lausch 9:03
I think a great place to start is just this overall topic of event and online fundraising. And there it really is no surprise, a critical piece. For nonprofits success. 96% of our respondents held at least one online campaign one on one online fundraiser, if you will, 95% held at least one fundraising event. Now we’ll talk a little bit about different event types. But these are driving revenue, almost 60% of nonprofits said that they raised 21% or more of their annual operating revenue this way. And by the way, that number goes all the way up to 70%. When you look at smaller nonprofits, so if you’re joining today, and you’re listening, you’re a small or even grassroot volunteer driven nonprofit, this there’s a lot of great stuff in here for you and some really encouraging The findings. But listen, if your AR your annual operating revenue is below $1 million boiboi, those events, those online campaigns are important. And I’ll throw this in Sammy and Patrick, that speaking to the smaller orgs, you fared better than your larger counterparts when it came to fundraising performance last year. So again, this this, this survey was in market in September and October last year, its catalog, cataloging how things were going in 2023, at that time, and projecting 2024. So that’s what we’re talking about today. But medium and large organizations that we surveyed, they saw anywhere from a five to seven point, jump in the number of orgs, raising less than they anticipate in 2023. So follow that with me, again, we saw more orgs, raising less among medium and large. For mega organizations, those are just like big budgets, $50 million. fewer of them reported that they were raising more than budgeted last year. So that was down seven points. But boy, oh, boy, those small those grassroots organizations they are making great things happen. When it comes to success with those online campaigns. And those events. Do
Sami Bedell-Mulhern 11:26
you think that’s because people, you know, because I guess one of the trends that we know is that people are giving to less organization, so they’re not giving less, but they’re giving to less nonprofits, and that they can see their impact from their dollar more, like more clearly, when they’re in giving to a small medium sized organization, they can have a better connection versus feeling like they’re, you know, these larger organizations don’t need my money, we just be a drop in the bucket, they’re already getting funds from everywhere else I can make a bigger impact over here.
Steve Lausch 11:57
I think that is entirely possible. So I mean, I think that could be one of a couple things going on. Certainly, as we’re not sure about, you know, are we talking more recession? Are we talking more inflation and what my, my dollar has to count, then I have a face to face relationship with this nonprofit in my community, I want to give to them. I love attending their event. It’s it’s something that our family goes to every certainly I think that can that can be happening. But let me let me postulate one other thing that I think could be happening. And this is just Steve, again, just kind of thinking through the larger dynamic. And that is that if you think about what happened coming out of the pandemic, everybody adjusted their budgets, and the medium and large, and especially the really mega organizations had to come down considerably. I think there may have been a dynamic in 2023. That, okay, that chapter is done, it’s time to get back, we got to move our budgets back up, we got to get the bar set again, where we need to be where we think we need to be. And I think what may have happened is that bar got set too high. I think it may have been set a little too high, or it was spritely set, but we didn’t then have the path in place to get there if you’re a medium larger mega organization. But that’s just me thinking through a potential dynamic coming out of the pandemic.
Patrick Kirby 13:22
Why I think there’s two things I think both as we’re seeing, we’re hearing about this a lot. I think you’re right, Sammy, I think you’re right. I think the other thing too, is that people really want hyper personalization, when it comes to that impact conversation, right. And they don’t feel as if they are getting enough TLC from the larger institutions, because there’s so many people involved. And really, when you get down to it, I think people are realizing that local impact is something that they can feel. And then they can they can touch. And they can manage a little bit better. They there’s this scrappy, we can do it as a community attitude, I think in those small and again, where we’re trying to touching base and the and the the chambers that are involved here at the boot camp or that rural and that sort of outside or outside of the box sort of thinking kind of ways. And I think there’s a rally the troops sort of mentality to a lot of those particular events, as they’re seeing some of those growth. So I think it’s that is this nice little combination. And I love that idea that we can talk about a lot of different aspects and so that if nonprofit says, you know, this sounds a little bit more familiar, this actually feels a little a little piece, you know, you talk a little bit about online engagements to in person. And I think that we need to talk a little bit about that because I think people have the perception of like or what’s now the difference. Do we have to do hybrid do we have to do only online? What are we seeing trend wise? Can we kind of talk a little bit about what you’re seeing or what you’re forecasting here for 2014 on? Yeah, absolutely.
Steve Lausch 14:53
We actually had a section where we looked specifically at what online and gauged judgments and which imperson event engagements were producing the greatest success. This success can be defined through a couple different metrics, right? It’s not just fundraising dollars, it could be engagement, it could be that next conversation that to take a donation to a recurring donation to a to a plan gift. But we saw two major areas of success when it came to these. And I mean, we track them across the board, I’m gonna look at my other screen here. And just we checked everything from online giving to online auctions, ticket sales were moral tribute campaigns, supporter driven peer to peer, then we looked at in person events like auction donation events, run walks, rides, competitions. So just to give your listeners, Patrick and Samia, the idea of the breadth of what we tracked is all available in the in the research for them to download take a look at but I digress. Two big areas of success number one in person auction events, in person auction events was one of top two performers in 2023. And it was the same in 2022. Over half of the respondents rated in person auctions as very successful compared to some of these other initiatives that I that I shared with you interesting insight. We also saw that the nonprofits who who either had all in person, or a mix of virtual and in person fundraising events, were more likely to meet their goals in 2023, versus those who either a didn’t get back to holding events or be remained only holding a virtual event. Now, I know I just said a lot there. But the bottom line is put a bow on it is if you can get back in person, if you can get back nose to nose, toes to toes and engage your supporter base in person, or at least a mix of in person with more of a hybrid approach. You’re more likely to see fundraising success through the those types of engagement. I don’t know if there’s any other thoughts on that one before we move on to the next one that’s successful. But
Patrick Kirby 17:12
what were Did you Did you find anything maybe specific to pieces within the live or the auction like events? Is it? Is it fun to need as that sort of catalyst here? Is it a? Is it? Is it items? Is it things? Is it stuff? Because I think there’s a there’s a challenge within some of the nonprofits and like I need to maybe shorten my program, I need to give this funding need an opportunity that that that maybe people are maybe hesitant on? Are we seeing anything specific with in those auction events that are surprising or interest? Or even, you know, conversations you’re having that maybe didn’t end up in the report, but you’re like, you know, analytically, I can’t really say this, but we’re vibing with and we’re seeing this in generally as your feedback. Yeah. So
Steve Lausch 17:59
there are more details in the report to kind of take both and approach to the way you asked your question, which I love. Where we’re seeing that that appeal is carried through every single event like I mean you cannot get rid of that is connection. That is vision, that is empathy, that I mean, whether you’re you’re getting an interview, you’re you’re witnessing an interview of someone benefiting from the money that you are about to give, whether it’s that video that just tugs at your heartstrings, whatever it is that appeal is critical. However, what I do hear often is that the silent auction or the live auction is becoming a little bit too much work too much, too much squeezed for the juice. Yeah, I don’t think that’s true. The data is not proofing that out. There’s more success seen with an event that has an auction associated with it, then those events that are donation will call it a donation only event. So there’s something to be said about it. And so the question that we want to ask them, Patrick, is not do we include an auction or not? But how can we do that simpler, faster, easier, more effectively?
Patrick Kirby 19:14
Yeah. And that’s, again, using using a platform like one cause to where you got the real lease of the silent auction a week before and let everybody sort of see what’s happening. Let even it becomes more inclusive, that makes people who maybe can’t attend the event, they can still bid on the items that builds the momentum into the live event, that live event which has these components of a funding need and a small live auction or a raffle or whatever interaction that you have. That’s the type of momentum builder you’re going to see in this particular report, which I love. I mean, that’s the metadata. I mean, I’m talking super nerdy, dorky data that we love, which we won’t necessarily get into because you can enjoy that on your own. But that’s the type of thing that you’re going to get in this particular report is that you can make a case for a lot of these pieces that maybe in your brain you don’t think of as worth the effort. But if set up properly, and you’re looking at all these trends, your your event is going to be kicking off a way better than you anticipate.
Steve Lausch 20:16
I think that was a great agency description,
Sami Bedell-Mulhern 20:19
can I say something that might make me a little bit unpopular? Go,
Patrick Kirby 20:23
oh, please love this.
Sami Bedell-Mulhern 20:26
If the trends that you’re seeing that are working for this bulk kind of picture of organizations, and you’re doing them and they’re not working for you, you’re probably doing it wrong. So like, if your options aren’t working, then you’re not connecting with your audience enough to know what are the things that they actually care about, that they want to participate in? If your appeals aren’t working, your storytelling and your messaging isn’t resonating with your audience. And so I think if you’re looking at some of these things, and I think that’s probably what you’re hearing, Steve, when you see the trends of the data showing auctions and appeals are working, but people are telling you that they’re not worth the juice, then it’s time to streamline that process. Think about how you do it differently, you start actually talking to your donors that are key players in those events, find out what they want, what do they care about? Make sure like, you just go back to the drawing board, because I think that’s what we tend to do is we say, Oh, well, that doesn’t work for us. Well, if it works for 90% of the organizations, and it doesn’t work for you, then you’re doing it wrong. Like, I mean, I know that’s a little harsh. But I think that’s just the mindset we have to go into to like, re evaluate what and how we’re doing it and have more conversations.
Patrick Kirby 21:39
To piggyback off of that, to say, Me, too, I’ve got a client recently had an event, and they’re off to their live auction was down. And then you they’re like, I’m bumped, I go Hold on a second, your goal initially. And this, I think this is going to wrap this whole section up nicely with that, again, we’re gonna go with the bow analogy like this was their goal was to get younger individuals into the event, they succeeded, the auction items have been the same for four straight years. And the locks and items that went for the last three years went to an older audience, the younger audience that showed up, didn’t like it. And now you have an entire path forward on getting the experiences rather than stuff, which is I think, exactly what our Gen Z and beyond at sort of our older, younger millennials, I don’t know, whatever, whatever the the new generation that’s coming to some of these events want experiences that they can’t go out and buy already. And then that becomes now the new playbook. It’s taking exactly what Steve said, it’s taken exactly what you said, Sammy, and then taking real life scenarios that we just saw in the last couple of weeks, and, and mapping this wonderful case for continuing to do what you’re doing. But now you got to ask the questions. Now you got to follow up with the data on why on earth we need to get the certain things that are going to make your event stand out and be different from everybody else. Love it. Yeah. Love that. See, this is so good. And so fun isla. So again, it is it seems like it’s all sunshine and rainbows and puppy dogs and ice cream, Steve, Everything’s going according to plan. I know that’s not exactly right. I know there are challenges galore. And I think part of the report really sort of draws some of these pieces out. What were some of the big and I’m not gonna say red flags, but some of the warning signs or the pieces to the puzzle like okay, well, this, I think deserves some time to evaluate some challenges that are going into 24. Beyond. Yeah, and I,
Steve Lausch 23:34
I love the way you frame that, Patrick and we asked have asked about challenges as long as I can remember, because one of the things that we believe is important at one cause is to understand how challenges grow and shrink and change and evolve year over year. And we have tracked I believe it’s 13 different challenges year over year since we’ve been doing this. There was a time of course through those weird 2020 2021 and 22 years where we fold it in some challenges related to financial impact from the pandemic planning impact from the pandemic. But essentially, well we look at things like recurring giving in year over year growth, sponsor acquisition and management, donor retention, donor fatigue, donor engagement, and so on. There are more than than those that I just named. We love to capture how those have all year over year. And so we do, it’s not a negative thing. It’s a life thing. It’s a realism thing. And so folks can download the research and see that but all in all in the ratings here it’s really tied to okay donor fatigue was listed as a top challenge followed by donor engagement, recurring giving, and then it goes from there. If you look only at those responses, where the respondent rated the challenge as a concern or critical were the they were the top two of five tiers to read a challenge. It really is focusing on recurring giving, year over year growth. And Sammy, there’s the one that may tie back to that year over year growth. And do we hit our goals? Do we aim too high, right. But donor fatigue, again, was was was mentioned. And I’m just going to camp here real quick. I don’t know if this will be popular savvy to borrow your terminology from earlier, let you guys weigh in on this one. But I always find it a little. I don’t know, sad is the wrong word. But I always find a little sad that donor fatigue gets rated so highly as a challenge each year. And then donor acquisition is really the number one focus for for nonprofits in terms of how they’re going to solve that. So yes, acquiring new donors is important. But I think a lot of nonprofits, we got we got a bad metaphor, but sorry, it’s the first one that came to mind when we got to high on all this new, all these new donors that we were like meeting virtually and had got their emails and were able to reach out to them in 2020 and 2021. It’s just not the case anymore. Yeah. And so there’s a huge search for a lot of orgs and new donors then and now they’re kind of returning to those norms. And they’re saying, All right, well, what am I doing? I need more donors, I need more donors, I need more donors. I’m fatiguing the donors that I have, wait a minute, maybe we should talk about engagement. Maybe we should talk samey, like you said about what connects with them? What are the stories? Am I missing it? Am I still serving the food that the that would appeal to maybe a different audience of yesteryear, to then the food that I want to be really serving up to the newer audience today, food being auction items, etc, etc. But where they’re engaged, they’re not going to get fatigued. So I would encourage that, when we think about these challenges, and overall, think about think about the recurring giving. Yes. What can we do with year over year growth? Yes. What can we do to really deepen sponsor relationships? And be able to prove the value of what you do with a sponsors money? Yes. And you shouldn’t be able to work with your technology providers to accomplish every single one of us.
Patrick Kirby 27:31
Yeah, one of the things that I really like about that frame out is well, it’s, there’s a lot to like, but I think, to Sandy’s point is I think, if you just talk with your donors, and ask them what their perspective is on how they like to be engaged, you’re going to find that they’re not really fatigued. They’re just maybe bored of the same old, same old and asking them the simple question of like, what would engage you a little bit more? How would you like to be thanked? Or how would you like to show up at this event? Or what would you like to see instant donor fatigue goes away? I think a lot of the fatigue might come from the nonprofits that hear from one or two people and the exhaustion mentally of like, oh, I can’t believe I have to go do more of this. Then translates are we projected onto our donors, which is probably not the case at all. But we don’t do a good job enough of carving out time to have conversations with those who attend our events, give to our organizations, etc. And we just a lot of this is assumption, Steve, I think I’m with you on this where I think it’s relationship building first, and we’re not taking the time out to go and ask and go engage and ask, you know, just pick up the, the super computers in our pocket, also work as phones. Did you know that I didn’t know that? It was interesting. And I think those simple pick up the phone techniques allow you an insight that’s a lot greater than your assumptive nature of people not showing up to an event because they think they’re, they’re exhausted when they’re busy. And they’re trying to give to you and they want to give but they don’t maybe have an outlet, because you haven’t asked them what they think of his best. Well, if I
Sami Bedell-Mulhern 29:04
could just jump in here to I think this is where Patrick and I really bonded because of our our end result is always the same relationship building, connecting with our audiences, but with marketing strategies that, you know, I work with all my clients on it’s like now you have the opportunity to touch them over and over and over again in ways that free you up to have those personal conversations and call random people and just connect with your donors. One on one because I agree with what you said, Steve, it’s not donor fatigue. It’s they’re literally just not being connected with you know, we have a client that was doing barely doing quarterly newsletters to their whole list because it was just too much and now we’ve popped in and we’re doing them twice a month and just sending out value and just sharing with them like what we’re doing. We’re not asking them for anything. And they have all of these lapse donors that are starting to come back now and give again, because they’re Like, Oh, we kind of forgot about you, because we hadn’t heard from you in a while, you know, we forgot we liked you and we wanted to give to you, or now we’re starting to see that you’re actually getting momentum, we’re seeing all these cool things that you’re doing. So we’re now really excited to be like, reengaged with your organization, because we know you’re doing good things with the money. So it’s like little things that you can do to just stay engaged digitally in mass can help you then free up that space to be able to have conversation. And then you know, the age old always having to go for new, you know, that’s hard work. And both your donor retention rate up, you know, three 5%, like how much more money does that raise for your organization,
Patrick Kirby 30:44
it’s still 45% retention rate across the board on average, which means you weren’t spending the enormous amount of time every year trying to collect 55% of your donor base, and then grow on top of that, where you could just pick up the phone or email once or twice more, and engage them to say your money did this. And that’s going to save your headache, and heartache. I think of losing donors that really love you because they just want to hear from you. And not in a way that makes you have to beg for money the entire time. It’s okay, by the way. So bucks today, it’s okay to call him just saying hi. And just say thanks for your gift. And here’s what it’s done. You don’t have to ask people for money every time you pick up the phone. And I think that’s really the hammer home. point here is just do that. And I’m wondering, Steven, is there any data or data that’s pertains to donors, retention, fundraising, that stuff that we can get in that? This sounds good. But Is there proof? Are there the hard data numbers that you’re finding that you can sort of relay to us as we’re, as we’re looking into this specific report?
Steve Lausch 31:51
Yeah, so fundraisers are focusing on donor retention? It’s not that right. I think we all know that number, we probably all cringed a little bit of that number. And I think we can all put our arms around each other and say, we’re trying to work on this. And Patrick has sent me you each just gave very, very practical next steps as to how we can start doing that. So 95% of nonprofits said, our top priority donor retention, okay, donor retention. And of course, they’re looking into that new donor acquisition. But here’s a point that that I thought was very interesting. And personally, I’m encouraged by this, that those stats were followed very closely by the priority of increasing funds from existing campaigns. So how do we make as my grandfather used to say, how do we make Water Wetter, right, and another one that’s right on the tail, so that we saw 82% of nonprofits are willing to experiment with new ways to fundraise. And typically, when we talk, when we talk with our customers we talk with, people are just learning about one cause, time, rightly so is so much a preview, right? But I’m so encouraged, that means more than three out of four nonprofits are saying, if you can show me a better way to fundraise, or a different way to fundraise or a slightly new lay, or to add on to my fundraising I’m in if you can show me the proof. And I’m gonna give you one practical example for listeners today, we talked about how this research is really around the whole umbrella of online and event fundraising. I’m gonna I’m going to suggest to the audience today that that those are no longer two individual buckets. And your new way to fundraise that may pay off more than you realize is to narrow the gap between what you consider your online efforts and your in person efforts or your event efforts. And there are new ways. There’s there’s technology ways to do this, or best practice ways to do this. But to blend your online fundraising into your event, maybe it may be maybe your event is the capstone of an online effort. Maybe your event is the kickoff of an online effort. Maybe that online effort then uses peer to peer technology that can say, okay, Sammy, you attended. Patrick, you attended. You’re both believers in what the louche Foundation is doing. We’re equipping you with part of our online abilities to go and you become fundraisers on our behalf. And you know what we’ve done, we’ve turned 500 people in a ballroom to 5000 people strong that are donating for that same campaign. So I kind of went off on a little bit of a Yeah, yeah, reaching around there, but but I think that’s huge. 82% are willing to experiment with new ways to fundraise. I hope that some of our audience today Yeah,
Patrick Kirby 34:58
well, again, it reiterates the fact If that were not fundraising in a vacuum in certain, like, you know, you can’t compartmentalize a lot of the messaging that you have, the wise, it doesn’t have a flow, it doesn’t feel as everything is connected, it feels that staccato like feel doesn’t doesn’t have a good natural vibe in the same way that we would have a conversation of like, hello, Steve, I’m here to talk about a thing. And now here’s another topic that I’m going to talk to you about, like, it sounds gross. That’s kind of how we’re thinking about it like, alright, for the next month, we’re gonna fundraise for this. And then for this and then for this, well, there’s no, what do you build upon. And I know that’s very difficult for people who have a lot of different programs, but that one voice, or that one sort of momentum building piece, allows you then a little bit more leeway to have individual conversations about certain programs and products, whatever that you’re delivering to the community that you serve. If it all fits into one thing,
Steve Lausch 35:56
I’m not going to talk differently about our nonprofit and what we’re trying to achieve, just because I’m like, online. Yeah, now I walk through the ballroom door, and I’m going to talk to you for that. Well, that’s our that’s our capital. KP. That’s right, let me go ahead. I,
Sami Bedell-Mulhern 36:11
I was just gonna say, but that’s like, again, the beauty of where your digital comes into your in person, because every single person has different motivation. So now, if you’re creating video content, that is addressing all of the motivations of the different types of donors that you have. So it might be your one campaign, which is, like, you know, pet adoption, but then you have videos that are talking about big dogs, little dogs, you know, whatever, like you have all of these pieces of content that you create and put out there so that you build trust, you connect with people. And then when you’re having those one on one conversations, you’re talking to Steve, and you’re like, oh, Steve, this part of our program is what you’re super interested, I would love to just send you this quick video, you’ve got stuff in the can or you’ve got blog posts, resources that you can just push out to them and say, Here’s more information. Let me know what questions you have. You’ve got everything all tied together. And you can just kind of pushing those buttons, right? I mean, if you have a client that comes to you for one, cause I’m sure your sales team is doing the exact same thing. You’ve got a plethora of resources, okay, this is really where you’re stuck. Here’s some stuff that can help give you a quick win help you out right away, while we continue to see if this is the right opportunity. If this is the right platform for you. I mean, it’s an easier way to have conversations, while also still being educated, able to educate the masses on who you are and what you do. Love it.
Patrick Kirby 37:35
It’s brilliant. Steve, I have a random question. That’s so random, because it’s very strategic in the way that everybody is talking about it. And the robots? Yeah, the worry that they will take over through AI. It is been, you cannot get away from any conference, you cannot get any way from any online training with the concept or the topic of AI in the nonprofit sector. We got to talk about this. We do. We do? I think that is a thing from from the report. Maybe we’ll start there. And then we’ll maybe dive into what we’re kind of seeing is what’s the vibe in the fundraising realm as it pertains to AI? In general, and I think we get into details from there because yes, it is. It is Top of Mind everywhere you go can’t get away from it.
Steve Lausch 38:27
The robots are a thing. Yeah, they are. Well, let’s get Yeah, I love it. Let’s get back to some stats for the report. So 41% said that they think AI will greatly benefit the nonprofit sector. So there are some who see the benefit. And I frankly, 1% is no small number 36% said it will directly impact their fundraising strategies. And the way that question was asked is leaning into a positive sense that it will grow our fundraising. However, the word I would use is uncertainty. That’s what describes the the larger swath of respondents. So here’s a couple of sets for you. Lots of folks who said, Hey, I don’t know how I would use it. I don’t know how I would get started. 43% said, Hey, I don’t know if I even have the time or money to implement it. Now. We should talk about that in a second when we when we wax eloquent about implementing ai 65%. So they were sure how it would impact donor privacy, which I think is legitimate. Another question. The same two thirds basically said, Hey, I’m uncertain about how this could change oversight in the sector, maybe from the government, and again, rightly so. But I wouldn’t say the word is uncertainty at this point.
Patrick Kirby 39:50
It’s interesting that I think a lot of people also have this worry of like, well, if AI is around, maybe I will lose my job and I’m I’m no longer needed. I got two points to this too, which is one, I like to quote and I’m probably gonna butcher the heck out of it, which is AI won’t be the reason that you lose your job, not knowing anything about AI is going to have you lose your job. And I think that is really you got to know enough to be dangerous. And you have to know that it exists. Because if you ignore it, then I think you’re going to be behind the time. So that being said, I think what are some of the pieces to the AI puzzle that we are, maybe want to dip our toes into, so that we’re not sort of blindsided by what everybody else is doing? And that we’re almost ahead of the game, knowing that it is in every part of our digital culture going forward?
Steve Lausch 40:41
It is in Patrick, at every point of our life, whether we realize it or not. And I think that’s probably the first hurdle to kind of get over is that if, if I use Siri on my phone, I’m interacting with AI. If I am on Netflix, I am interacting with AI to recommend content based on what I’ve watched and my preference and so on. So and So AI is already embedded in my life, I just need to accept that. It doesn’t mean I am I am going miles and miles and miles with it. But where can I take my next first step? And I think this goes to the heart of your question. And if it’s okay, I’m going to speak out of our experience here at one cause and some of the things that we’re doing to help nonprofits we were talking about auctions earlier, and how that does require a little bit. And I’ll use the same metaphor that we use a little bit squeezed in order to get the juice, right, and is the juice worth the squeeze? Here’s the thing. We have, because we’ve been doing this since 2008. We have 40,000 auctions in our database, we have 4 million auction items that we processed over the past 16 years. So as a result, we have this beautiful large data set that we can apply AI and machine learning specifically to recommend auction lots to our listeners, guests, let’s assume that they have an event with an auction. That is Ay ay ay. You don’t even have to do anything with it. It just works. And it drives engagement. And by the way, that engagement and the revenue from that engagement is 25% Higher. Since we’ve been implementing that then prior 25%, the nonprofit does nothing. That’s AI and fundraising. Another one and this is probably where people want more think of AI as the generative AI, right, Chad GPT and whatnot. But you can use a AI within the product to at least get a first draft of your descriptions for your auction items for your story on the front page of your event site for the fixed price items that you want to really razzle dazzle with the way you pitch it, and so on throughout the product. And so instead of staying up till 230 in the morning with my 47th auction item, and I’m staring at a blank field, and I’m like, I don’t know what to write about this. It’s a plant. I don’t know, I’m just saying that all of a sudden AI makes it sound like I need five of them. And immediately we have nonprofits who say, Oh boy, wait a minute, I’m going to just use what the robots Tell me. Absolutely not. I never post the first thing that come, you know, that comes off my keyboard. But it’s a great place to start and done right? It will help. It’ll take a lot of effort out. It’ll take a lot of headache out. And it just works forward. So here’s my pitch.
Sami Bedell-Mulhern 43:47
Another way that AI is stepping in that I think you know, nonprofits should lean into in the future. Depending on what software sets you use, I there’s not a tech tool that you have that doesn’t have AI in it right now. Like it’s everywhere. So my favorite project management tool is clickup. And so I’m just going to speak to this example. Just because I think it’s really cool what they’re doing, it will end up in all of the project management tools at some point, I believe. But AI now, through that platform, if you’re really diligent about putting all of your problem your tasks in there and everything, you can use their internal AI to actually pull information for you from the tools that your from what you’re using, it will pull from your Google Drive, it will pull from your Dropbox. So you can you know, if you’re popping in and you’re like, hey, I need to work on the script for my fundraising event. Can you pull the tasks that have information related to the gala, it’ll just pull it off for you. So now it’s not necessarily doing the writing but it’s saving you time because it’s collecting all the information that’s already been put in there from your team to populate it right there. Or if your boss is like, hey, what have you been working on this week? You can say okay, what was I work? And then this weekend, it’ll generate everything that you did with the links to all the tasks so that you can easily report back on something like. So there’s ways that AI is also being used for productivity and time management things that can really kind of help speed up how you’re processing and how your whole team is getting things done. And I do believe that will start to pop up in more tools, but that kind of opportunity.
Patrick Kirby 45:24
Well, and again, I think AI used as a tool and as a as a place to begin the process or to, to whiteboard with or to come up with creative ways on to engage what it does not do. And I know that this is a thing that will reiterate for the next number of years, it doesn’t take the place of picking up a phone, or having a cup of coffee, or looking at someone’s face and looking into their eyes, or hugging them when they lose a loved one or they lose a dog or whatever, like that personal relationship with your donors will never change. And the robots, not yet don’t have the ability to do that. And so your value as a fundraiser, your value, as an individual that works in the nonprofit space has to be doubled down on on those soft skills, those personal skills, those that curiosity, that listening skills, the self awareness, the engagement with your audience that asks better questions. That’s how you’re going to use AI to your advantage rather than the disadvantage that comes along with not knowing about how to use it. I’ll
Steve Lausch 46:33
let me comment on that real quick. I love that what you just described is what I’ll say a day non binary approach, we tend when something’s new, we tend to put it into this is good or this is bad. It’s just where we tend to go, right. But But what you just described is Wait a minute, there’s there’s aspects of this that I can and perhaps at least need to learn about. And I can use today, but it will never replace x, y and z. So I can do both. I can at least learn about it. We know we can benefit from it. I just gave a stat where we could, by average increase our auction proceeds by 25%. I mean, who doesn’t want that? And at the same time, yes. The time? Yes. Yeah. So yeah, great, great subject. I’m sure we could talk more and more and more, but what time is flown by?
Patrick Kirby 47:26
I know, isn’t that crazy? So Steve, when we’re talking about this particular report, and you know, again, it’s it’s taking everything that we learned in the fall at 23. Looking at the numbers projecting out to 24. And then really where there’s a ton of resources that you have, where on earth do we find said report? I don’t want to search the internet forever. Steve, where do we go for this? Well,
Steve Lausch 47:49
I believe Sammy dropped in the link into our chat for those who are joining live. And I don’t know if that will transfer over to the recordings. But let me go ahead and tell you, one cause.com/research will show you all of the amazing pieces that we have available. I described our giving experience research that gives you donor sentiment. And then there you will find our fundraising outlook report, which is what we’re talking about today. And that is the nonprofit sentiment, looking at projecting into 20. Here’s what’s fun to me raise a raise conference, you may recall earlier in the podcast me saying that we kick off this report each year at raise that’s coming in September. And so we will do that again. And so we are almost on a new cycle to get a new yet new fundraising outlook report for 2025 Can you believe I just said 2025 but one cars.com forward slash research. There’s all kinds of webinars, all kinds of ebooks, all kinds of papers, all kinds whatever you need, use it for free. Have at it Have fun and be a better smarter fundraiser.
Sami Bedell-Mulhern 48:54
Yeah, and we will link up that below this video as well as well as information on arrays if you’re interested in attending that conference also. Where’s it at?
Patrick Kirby 49:06
Res Nashville,
Steve Lausch 49:09
Nashville. We’re going back we had a great
Patrick Kirby 49:13
time. I’m not saying it’s the best conference of all time but I’m not saying it’s not the best conference of all time. Yes, it is so good. And again, I will give a pitch to this because I’ve been involved in last couple of years because I it’s one it’s the one that I make sure I go to or get to every year. It is everybody there has the same objective. There’s no one who doesn’t stop to have a conversation with anybody. It is the most awesomely transparent and friendly and open and like was like it is a you’re you’re there in your family. I’m not under selling this am I Steve like it is it you feel you get to Rome in New York. You are literally locked in with friends that you get that you will not get Be able to prevent from calling immediately going, Hey, what would about this? Or hey, would you think about this? It’s one of the best things. And I will link that down there as well. It’s all and
Sami Bedell-Mulhern 50:09
you met the our friends at memory Fox at Ray’s last year. And they’re coming to speak in September to help fundraisers tell better stories for your urine giving campaign. So, connection happened at race. Yep.
Patrick Kirby 50:22
It’s all of our best friends go to this thing. So if you are on bootcamp, and you want to make more friends, you get there. Steve, thank you so much for not only your time, your perspective, your brilliance in sort of explaining some of the nerdiest data that you can get into practical ways that we can use it at nonprofits. Thanks so much for what you do for the industry. And thanks so much for hopping on here for our nonprofit boot camp members and our webinar series that we host every month. You’ve been great. As always,
Steve Lausch 50:53
such a pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Patrick Kirby 50:56
You’re the best. Alright, well, the recording will be up very soon. If you’re catching this in the replay, click on all the links below. Get your learn on Gabby questions. Send us any of them that you have. Deep. Thanks, Sammy, as always a pleasure and we’ll see you next time on nonprofit boot camp.
Guest Speaker
Steve Lausch
DIRECTOR OF PRODUCT MARKETING AT ONECAUSE
Steve Lausch is the Director of Product Marketing at OneCause, which helps nonprofits reach more and raise more with powerful event and online fundraising software. Steve has more than 25 years of marketing experience, with his last 7 years serving nonprofit organizations of all sizes. He also serves as the managing director of Indy Tech Gives™, which brings together businesses within Indiana’s thriving tech community in practical support of nonprofit organizations that are making a real difference across Indiana. Steve lives in Indianapolis, IN, and loves the outdoors, cooking, and doing life with his wife, Andrea, and two boys, Matthew and Noah.
The Power of Hyper-Personalization
People crave personal connection. Its what keeps you coming back to the same brands over time and donating to the same organizations. Building in personalization takes that connection to the next level. When you create personal experiences for your donors, you are increasing the chance that you’ll get a repeat donor and that they’ll share your organization with their network. And that you’ll stand out amongst other nonprofits. The question is, how do you do that with limited time and resources?
Join NonProfit Bootcamp Co-creators, Patrick Kirby and Sami Bedell-Mulhern as they dive into offline and online strategies to make your donors the VIPs they are and grow in their connection to your organization.
We’ll also dive into creating personalized experiences to increase your membership and retention in that regard.
View Transcript
Patrick Kirby 0:02
Well, hey, gang, welcome to another guest expert training today guest experts, myself and Sandy, Sandy, how are you?
Sami Bedell-Mulhern 0:09
Great, how are you?
Patrick Kirby 0:10
I’m fantastic. Ah, topic a conversation today. And I think it’s something that a lot of people are just beginning to sort of gear up towards, but maybe don’t have a lot of direction for, which is the idea of hyper personalizing interactions with their consumers, their donors, their supporters, their stakeholders, because Netflix and Amazon, know you, your customers and your donors better than you do. And that’s a problem, Sammy, this is been an epidemic. I know that a lot of the tech side, a lot of the communication side is into this. This is like an actual roadmap that today that that we can get people to start thinking about this overwhelming sense of like, I don’t know who I’m talking to, let’s get you in the weeds a little bit to make sure that those who interact with know that you know, them as a human being.
Sami Bedell-Mulhern 1:03
But Patrick, I don’t have time to do that. There’s no way I could have personalized conversations with everybody.
Patrick Kirby 1:11
Oh, nuts, if only there was some tech stuff that you could use to make that. And so here’s how this is going to work. We’re going to we’re going to kind of banter back and forth with a number of different themes. I’m going to attack it from like a personalized, like, question, how do we interact from a human human side sent me Scott a real good corner on how to use actual programming to make sure that there’s time to actually do it, and combine our superpowers today to really get you to think about how you interact with your stakeholders and your donors and your supporters and your businesses that you work with, to better the situation and have people remember you because and this is kind of how we’d like to start with, which is you’re competing for the attention of everyone, and then competing against everyone, you’re competing with football, you’re competing with Coke and Pepsi, you’re competing with Buffalo Wild Wings, I mean, you’re competing with every other business on the planet for the attention span of everyone else as your customers. And they have now the attention span of gnats, that ain’t going to work. So in order for you to really separate from distraction to Oh, my God, I think I think about you guys way more than I should, is to be authentically knowledgeable about the individuals that you serve, or that that you have as a customer base. How are you seeing this? I think in the, you know, maybe communications world a little more often now than you have in the past?
Sami Bedell-Mulhern 2:50
Well, I think you kind of started with authenticity, you started with conversation you started with getting to know the people that you’re engaged with, and like, hey, we think about you all the time, that top of mind piece is where the digital space becomes the most important. And we’re going to talk more about some other ways that you can personalize mass communication. But I think that we forget that if we are constantly pushing out content, I know that sounds overwhelming. But if we’re constantly pushing up emails, we’re constantly pushing out social media posts, that we then stay top of mind, even in the background for people. So they’re seeing our brand, they’re seeing our company all the time. And so that when you do maybe pick up the phone to have a conversation, or send them a personalized email, or text them or whatever. They’re like, Oh, yeah, I’ve been thinking about you guys, I’ve seen that you did this. It’s all just staying super relevant and super, super time sensitive. That being said, it doesn’t mean that you have to be creating new all the time. So I think the biggest piece, the biggest trend that we’re trying to drill home with people is your social media posts can be a direct snippet from your email newsletter can be a direct snippet from the blog post. So for example, I just posted the podcast episode I released today. And I literally copied and pasted the first paragraph of my show notes as my social media post, I did not write anything new. And with AI you can have it helped generate new things. So I think it’s we’re in a we’re in a period where there yes, our brain is not paying attention to things. So it makes it even easier to repurpose over and over and over again because you know, people aren’t reading the whole thing that you’ve given them. So
Patrick Kirby 4:31
let’s let’s start there. Let’s start with alignment. Because I think when we’re talking about either getting new money from donors or getting new business from potential customers, alignment is all that matters. So I’ll use an example from the nonprofit realm which is if I am a person that hates cats, and you are a cat shelter that exclusively services and say It was cats. I don’t want to get stuff from you at all. And so you are wasting a lot of energy, sending me information and mailing me letters and sending me emails and getting frustrated that I’m not opening anything, because I don’t like cats Madog person. So if you’re a dog shelter, and we all have dogs, I want all the ducks. So when you’re when you’re thinking about crafting content, crafting messages, crafting sales, pitches, crafting solicitations for money, it has to go to the people who know and love what you do, rather than wasting all of your energy trying to get in front of anybody who will listen, get in front of the people who really, really love you. Now, that’s very difficult when you have a board, we’ve got a leadership team that says we need more eyeballs on all of our stuff. Well, more eyeballs might be a great vanity number. But it has nothing to do with your bottom line has nothing to do with that. So from a nonprofit standpoint, for example, you want to get in front of the ones that love you the most because the ones that love you the most hang out with other people who love your mission to write we hang out with like minded individuals. That is an easy, easy win. And it will save you a lot of headache and heartache for hyper personalizing messages that you’re not getting the same message in front of everybody else. So to your point on the communication side, how do we do that digital? Yeah, that with a with a ball, let you say all the cool buzzwords. Well, no.
Sami Bedell-Mulhern 6:37
Cool buzzwords. But what I want to I want to say we’re in this for the long game, right? Like you and I talk a lot about our first conversations we have with donors or a potential donor should not be the ask right. And maybe even our seventh conversation is not the ask. But what we’re doing is we’re gleaning information. And so I think when it comes to this hyper personalization, it’s about, okay, how are we learning about the people that we care about and feeding that information into our CRM. So let’s just say we’re an after school program, we kick off, right, we kick off a big fundraising drive every single year in the fall to support the new programs and services that we’re offering for our kiddos. And we have three cores, we have stem, we have arts, and culture, and we have athletics, right. These are the three core programs that we offer, you know that you do this campaign every single year, then one of the things that you should be doing in your conversations at large is asking people what they care most about, so that when it comes time for that campaign, if you’ve tagged them in your CRM, when those emails go out about the campaign, you can most platforms allow Conditional Formatting, or they allow for field merge things. So now you can either literally just segment your list by people, so they get a specific email just about sports. Or you can even send the same email to everybody. But where it says, we’re so excited to kick off our Insert program here, right, that’s a field merge that just merges directly from your CRM. So now you’re hyper personalizing these emails for people at scale, because you because you’ve been having conversations with people and you’ve tagged them in certain ways. So being thoughtful of what your what are the things that you do throughout the year, what are the campaigns that you do throughout the year? And those are the types of questions and things you need to get to know about your donor so that you can have better conversations and then right segmenting to say, Okay, well, these are the people that are going to get bulk mass emails. And then these are the 10% of people that we’re going to make individual phone calls because there are high capacity network people that we know, we want to have give a little bit more VIP treatment.
Patrick Kirby 8:46
So that that gets to the asking better questions portion of your jam, my jam, I love this more than anything, right? So when when you’re thinking about when you’re listening to that, you’re like, Well, that sounds great. How the hell do we know any of that? Well, you got to ask better questions, you have to actually ask that physical question of What program do you like the most? Or what program? Do you want the most amount of information from? Or if you had your druthers and money wasn’t an option? Which one would you support? Now, you’re probably thinking, Well, I got 1000. Donors, I got 10,000 names in our system. I can’t ask everybody have that. Okay, take a deep breath we survey right. We send them a survey. It’s short, it’s four questions. Do you know anything about our organization? Yes or no? Do you? Do you think what we serve our mission? Well, yes or no. Of the three programs that we do? What do you like the best? Number four, how often is too often to connect with you and to show what the impact that we make or questions you learn a lot? A they know who your organization is, they love what your mission is? They’ve pointed out which one of the programs that they love the most. And most importantly is you probably ask a question of how regular contact with look like for them as an individual, upload that information into the CRM, and then you’re doing exactly what Sammy suggested, which is being able to segment all of those things. Now, for the one on one conversations, you can get into a little more depth, how do you like to be thanked? Is there something that you would really love to see happen at an organization? Those are great for your high capacity, high potential high influencer, individuals who are at your organization, that’s great. But the better questions are just pointed questions. They aren’t these big like, hey, if the universe was so big, and you had a time machine, what would you do know? What program do you like? What do you want to see happen to that program? How often can we mail you and then really, the Sami side of your brain, which is kind of how we’re gonna go today, which is like magic side and Sammy side, works together to take that to segment everything to ask better questions. What other questions do you ask? Or how do you ask questions in the digital space, that might be a little less daunting, when you are faced with I don’t know, my donors, as well as I should.
Sami Bedell-Mulhern 11:07
I mean, I love a good survey post event, again, short and sweet. So if you had a bunch of people coming to your fundraising event, in your follow up emails, not the first one right after but you know, maybe one or two, after sending them an email just being like, we had a great time with you, we’d love to, we want to make it better. And we need your feedback to do so. So framing it from the standpoint of like, we need you, we need you to give us all the amazing things in your brain so that we can make it even more fun. And again, one of those questions is literally like, hey, in the future, I’m interested in volunteering for volunteering, or being on a committee or blah, blah, like some of those little things like I think we missed those opportunities, because we think we’re going to annoy people. But if you just send it out, the people that don’t want to do it aren’t going to do it. But the people that are looking for another way to engage with you, because they really love what you’re doing are going to be excited about the opportunity to give you their input. So questions like even pointed questions like, Hey, do you follow us on social media? Or here? And here’s the links to be able to do that? Or would you send us a testimonial about why you chose to give tonight so that we can connect with other potential donors things that are going to allow them to be we talked about this all the time? How can we continue to have the donor be the hero in the story? So I think questions that make it about them as well, are super, super important. But I kind of want to flip this a little bit on just this conversation of asking for things because I’m curious how you feel about what we think hyper personalization is, versus what just just makes the donor feel like it’s being super personalized for them? Because nobody else is doing it that way. Right?
Patrick Kirby 12:56
Well, I love that because I think it actually goes back to your they’re getting their input. So I think the curiosity piece here is is how do you lead in with I’d love to get your perspective and your opinion on this program this service. So you’re not even asking him if they like it or not. You’re asking them I’ve loved your perspective on how this feels, how this looks how this hits in in context. I’ve got a bunch of things that we’re going to produce, but you’re one of our biggest supporters. I’d love your thoughts on it. So then they’re telling you, rather than you guessing, or assuming on a grander scale. So again, what does everybody loves to talk about? themselves? Right? So you’re prompting them through, like, I’d love to get your input, or I’d love to give your perspective. And that opens the door to having them answer the phone in the first place, or open an email, right? Because everybody sends emails, everybody sends these kinds of things. They’re passive until they’re prompted or they’re in, or they’re inspired, or it’s inquisitive enough to like, I don’t know, I wonder what this is. Everybody wants to give their opinion. And if you make it easy for them, or it’s a question that matters more than please take our survey in general, yes, ask them for something specific. And I love that as a prompt, Andy because that helps you hyper personalize the interaction about the what’s in even in depth. And now you know something about the inner workings of the program that they developed fall in love with or why they support in the first place, which is this meta understanding, and no one else. And no other organization is going to be doing that except for you. Which means they’re less likely to walk away from you to be a donor. They’re or they’re less likely to not choose you if they’re have to. Maybe shorten or limit the amount of organizations they donate to. You’re going to be one of their favorites because they know more intimately what you do. That’s, I think, absolutely critical.
Sami Bedell-Mulhern 14:56
Can I say something radical, please? Because I know you’re gonna have thoughts on this? And I think this is good. So you started off by saying, If I am a dog person and you only have cats, I don’t want to hear from you. Yeah. So how crazy would you be? Would you feel? Or what would it feel like for you as a donor or potential donor, if you got an email from a dog or from a cat rescue, and you wrote them back, and you said, You know what, thank you so much. I think the work that you do is great, but I’m more of a dog person, or somebody gives you that feedback in a one on one conversation. And you flip around and you say, You know what, I totally get it. That’s amazing. We have this cat rescue that we partner with that super awesome, I would love to put you in touch with them if you can, if you want to learn other way around dog anyway, you can. Yeah, like, I feel like that’s something that we don’t do as nonprofit leaders is say, okay, I get it, you’re not the right fit for me. But could I maybe introduce you to somebody that might be a better fit for the things that you’d like to do in the in the involvement you have in our community, because I think they’re doing something really cool that you might really appreciate. Now, we might say, well, they’re not going to give to us anymore. So why do we care about them, but kind of that can be a really cool personalization thing, also, to kind of still have them maybe refer people to you or connect you to people.
Patrick Kirby 16:14
So they weren’t going to give to you in the first place. Because you’re a cat organization, they will give you a dog or organization. And what you’re doing is you are as an active development director. And again, this goes for anyone who’s into fundraising, whether you’re an executive director or a board member, whatever your responsibility as a fundraiser is to make sure that the donor is aligned with whatever organization they’re in, if it’s not yours, sorry, but someone else is. Third party endorsement is exponentially more important than first party solicitation, I want you to jot that down, if you’re listening to this, because it’s so important is that they will talk about you better in the public square to other people who are aligned because of what you just did it get a Sammys thought process of like, listen, I totally know that you’re not a cat person. But there’s a dog rescue down the road that does really good work. And I think you should be I’d be happy to introduce you to them. Because you’d be really curious to see what cool programs that they’ve got and how they’re keeping a pet population low blah, blah, blah, they will remember that they won’t remember what you ask them, they won’t remember what sort of programs you have to save cat but they will remember the human being the human being talking to another human being about hyper personalizing the experience with another human being. And they’re going to tell other people about it. And that’s what makes, that’s the hyper personalization. It is not ignoring the call scientists being very self aware about how you might not be in this position, but you could be in one to help another group that doesn’t go unrecognized, ever, it never goes unrecognized. And I think that’s not even crazy. I think that’s actually should be a best practice mentally as you are navigating the hundreds of 1000s of potential people that you have to meet in your life, that that states that that really sets a precedent of how you interact with other human beings. And that’ll come back to really bite you in the best sort of weigh. Well, I
Sami Bedell-Mulhern 18:19
think it just goes back to when we look at personalizing our interactions with our donors, it goes back to authenticity, it goes back to patience, it goes back to abundance. And it goes back to just we’re doing this because this is like you just said the right thing to do. And also ends up building better relationships with people in general, which ends up to building better connections with the right people. You know, I just got off a call with a potential client, not in the nonprofit space, and I was struggling with that kind of niching down of, well, we want to talk to anybody who posts on social media at all anywhere. And I was like, Well, how are you going to message and have thoughtful conversations with your Gen Z influencers? And your boomers on Tik Tok? Like, that’s not me. There’s no synergy there with those conversations. So I think the personalization piece just forces us to really hone in on Okay, well who are the right people for us to be talking to, because when you do that, it makes it easier, because you’re like you said you’re personalizing it more for like people who are hanging out with like people. So it just makes it easier.
Patrick Kirby 19:26
One of the questions that I have for you is when you’re in the solicitation space for like a sponsorship, or some sort of event or some sort of partnership that you have, I think traditionally in the nonprofit realm we have this here are the three options to gold and a silver and a bronze. And these are the things that you get to choose in this hyper personalized realm that we are creating. And we are in what say you to let’s just talk crazy, customized everything And then not to make it more work for you as an organization, but to make it work better for a potential donor who just wants this? Or who’s always wanted that. And you being able to say yes to this, because it doesn’t cost you any money, because folks, we make up sponsorships all the time. It’s all made up. It’s just make believe, but because you are have the ability to customize or ask the question, what works best for you? Or how can this be a good win for you and us both? How does that play? And how do we do that?
Sami Bedell-Mulhern 20:33
Well, foundationally, I think I’m a huge fan of tracking your data. So having like, you can, you know, as your event grows, you can say okay, well, we get X amount of traffic to this event page it like, you know, we have this many people on our email newsletter that we send this out to. So having some of those core stats is helpful in also that you can kind of set some basic boundary. So like up to 5000 10,000 like they get we can we can validate that these types of things make sense, right? So you don’t get yourself in a situation of, oh, I promise this $5,000 donor, all this stuff? Sure. Now, we have to do a whole bunch more for this $50,000 donor, because we kind of screwed up there, right. So I think having some core things in your brain are great. But I love this because I think that the sponsors that you can personalize it for are gonna stick with you a whole lot longer, long term. And I love being creative and doing things like can we do a blog post just about the sponsor, and we’re talking to them and their team about why they love this organization. I love having them help create content, like let’s say you’re doing a run, walk, to be able to go to the place of business and say, Okay, we want to do like a 32nd reel with each of your team captains that are running teams, and we’re going to do some little internal competition. And we’re gonna share that on our social media, because it allows you to talk about the event or the campaign in a fun way. That’s not just like, Hey, join us, hey, buy a ticket, hey, donate money. Right? Right. And then also, I think nonprofits are in a unique space. And I don’t know about you, but I haven’t seen many people take advantage of this in the way that they could. But as we see that more than half of Gen Z is of working age, they care deeply about working for organizations that give back to their community. And they care deeply about buying from companies that care about their community. And so you as a nonprofit, if you can really just go in there and be like, we’re an open book, like, let’s just collaborate, let’s figure out yes, we want you to sponsor a golf tournament, we’re gonna do this thing or that thing. But how can we take this to the next level and do something, create content around that, that is going to be fun and engaging, and we’ll promise you X amount of posts will will create the content, like all of that, I think is is fantastic, and not something people are doing right now. No.
Patrick Kirby 22:50
And I think the general curiosity about that experience to a potential donor and a business owner especially right, because the business owner gets inundated, inundated with requests for a golf tournament, or this gala or whatever, this gift or whatever. It’s the same stuff. So here, here’s how I would even ask that question. If you’re getting in with a business owner, and maybe they’re a sponsor for an event that you’ve had for a very long time. Okay, whatever. Um, you could ask them, what’s the best sponsorship experience you’ve ever had with whatever company, whatever, organization, whatever, have them talk about? Yeah, right. What’s the best? What’s the best experience you ever had? What was the biggest bang for your buck? What was the most joy you got out of giving? And then listen, that’s the key. First of all, you have to actually ask the question and listen. And then your secondary follow up. Question is, if we came up with something along the lines of that experience for you, could we come back and pitch that instead of these three dumb options that I’ve got sitting in front of you? When would that be something you’d be interested in having a conversation about? And everyone is going to say yes. Because you’re like, hey, you know, that experience on stage, or you got to do this. And this sounds like a pretty amazing, you know, quid pro quo from a business to nonprofit. So like, if we create something like that, would you be interested? That’s how you say it. And everyone’s gonna say yes. And then what you come back with is something that you listened, you created for them, they understand you understand them a hell of a lot better than everybody else now. And so your future engagements are remember that time that we did x, y and z, we should figure out how to top that this year. And then topping it every year allows you to raise the price every year because it’s a bigger and better thing. It’s such an amazing way to engage your future and current donors in a way that nobody else is doing.
Sami Bedell-Mulhern 24:51
Well, I think like there’s some fun ways you can do that, too. So like, let’s say you’re approaching I mean, banks get approached all the time and let’s say you’re an after school care programs. Serving minority, a minority population, right? So maybe you say, hey, as part of the sponsorship, we would love it if you would come in and teach a financial literacy class to these middle schoolers, right? Or to these high schoolers. So now these kids are gonna go home to their parents, they’re gonna say, Oh, we learned about this, we can save money like that, and they’re gonna get excited. And they’re gonna, you know, it’s like, another way to give visibility to that bank is somebody who gives back to the community. Or maybe if you are the cat rescue, you say, hey, you know, we have a pet adoption thing that we do every year, if you come in at this level, we’d love to do it at your location. So now we’re going to drive all this traffic to your physical location where you would have an opportunity to meet and engage and or your employees can volunteer very easily for one or two hour shifts, because we’re right there on site making it easy for you like, you know, or we’re going to do a college campus. Information Session, can we hold that in your lobby like there? I think there’s so many ways that you can get creative and bring the value back to the sponsor, just like you’re saying and tied into your sponsorship.
Patrick Kirby 26:03
One of the big, customized conversations that I think we, I think we say we have, I don’t think we do it as well as we could, which is impact stories. Right? So I mean, again, every time somebody gives you a gift, you have to send a thank you note, once you send a thank you note, you probably have to follow up and say here’s what our money did we raise blah, blah, blah. When you’re talking about hyper personalizing, it’s not just our money did this. It is your gift of this money. Did this and this is what’s happening now in the community based on your gift. And I’m talking hyper personalizing to let’s just say business gives you $1,000. easy math, right? From the time that they gave you that $1,000. What was the impact that that 1000 that would follow the money, the money went into this pool, to educate these kids and produced these results. Without your $1,000 you backtrack, the whole thing that would have not happened. And these three kids are now going to do X, Y, and Z. And it all started with your gift. Yeah, it has to get that meta and it has to get that super, like, personalized, so that they can associate that four figure check with like, boy, I wonder what a five figure check would do? Or whatever. Or I wonder if we then volunteer on top of that, what that what that does? Yeah, no longer can you I think you get away with very big high level, we serve more than 1000 people this year. Nobody cares. We served Dave. And let me tell you a little bit story about Dave, because the minute you gave our gift, Dave walked into our facility and needed X, Y and Z and your money provided it here. And now we still have money left over for in case an emergency happens here, here and here. That’s that’s the personalization. And that is way more intimate than a here’s an annual report about numbers that nobody can associate a name or personality or a destiny or some sort of human interaction, which is what the whole point of this is. Okay, well, I have a question
Sami Bedell-Mulhern 28:12
for you. Because I think it’s easy to think about some of these impact stories in personalization when it comes to a campaign or an event or something that we’re trying to raise funds for. But I think we would both agree that this personalization piece is even more critical in the off moments when we’re not in a campaign. So how can we think about kind of these experiences in this outreach, and kind of making people still feel connected to us in a one on one scenario, and throughout the year when we’re not in the middle of a campaign.
Patrick Kirby 28:46
So part of the part of the storytelling that I think has to go along with these hyper personalized things that you have to know, if you’re having a one on one conversation, either you’re doing two things, one, confirming all the things that you’ve talked about with them or know about them, and just sort of like confirming the field that you’re playing. Right. The other one is taking the opportunity to daydream with each one of these potential donors together. Not a lot of organizations do that, because everyone’s so obsessed with the task. The ask is really the last thing you do. It takes the smallest amount of effort, and yet it looms the largest in the back of our head, right? So if you’re making a gigantic ask and you’ve got a giant proposal, they know you, you’ve done your research, you’ve had your friends with them, your your colleagues, your partners, whatever they know you’re coming in for an Ask that’s the easiest part. The hardest part is to have them get on the same page with you. So I would almost imagine that your hyper hyper personalized conversations one on one look more like instead of sitting across from somebody, and having a conversation that while they’re sitting next to you and you’ve got an offer arm over them. And you’re almost projecting of like, imagine if we did this together. And I need you just to bear with me as I walk through the program that I’ve had envisioned in my brain a long time. And you use all the skills we just talked about, which is being curious, asking better questions. Starting with alignment, you’re checking off all the boxes while telling a story, and asking them, you know, if we got to get together and cure this, or if homelessness or food scarcity wasn’t an issue in your community, what would that look like? To us? Your would we go? And actually asking them an interesting question, which is, once we see our main issue of food scarcity here, where are you going to go? What organization are you going to go and expect yourself to when you and I figure out a way to finish this finish the job here? Because that’s a legit question. If you’re doing this for not if you’re just for, you know, in perpetuity, that’s not the ultimate goal, the ultimate goal is to work yourself out of a job because you solve whatever issue you’re gonna do. Having that conversation is interesting, because there might be something that that individual says that sparks something, a program, a service, a deal that they could create together. And that becomes the partnership that you have referred to. So it’s visioning. Yeah, very long winded way of saying it, spending time to vision together, sets the table for every ask ever, because they will tell you what they want to do, they will tell you what they would like to see the community become or go towards. And then you are just there to help navigate the number. That’s it. That’s all fundraising is to be honest.
Sami Bedell-Mulhern 31:39
Well, and how amazing is it to get called to be like, Hey, let’s just go let’s just go have a conversation and chat. And like pick, I just want to pick your brain outside of Yeah. You know, when they’re asking themselves? Well, it’s not urine giving time yet. We just got done with the gala. You know, what could they want to be asking me for? And you’re like, No, no, we’re not going to ask you for anything like to have those touch points, I think, that aren’t asked in between digitally and in person, I think is super important. I think that circles all the way back to kind of what we talked about the beginning. With that segmenting, I think no matter how big your list is, I think that’s where the thing the core starts is really understanding who you are, as an organization, what your goals are, and how and when you need to raise that money and connect with people so that you can create those segments thoughtfully. So every time you’re having that conversation, you know exactly what to put into your CRM, you know exactly what questions to ask, you know, exactly, then how you can follow up with them with personalized emails, or like a variety of social media posts or one on one thank you videos or whatever that might be, um, and, and be thoughtful in those touch points so that people do feel like they’re getting more personalized conversations, even though it’s not necessarily always one on one. Yeah.
Patrick Kirby 32:56
That’s a lot to kind of navigate in your brain. And then, like, now, what do I do the information? I know you have this in the back of your head, how do I automate some of this? How do I take some of this off of my shoulders as a human being because I got 10,000 things to do every day, Sammy, and I don’t have the time to do publish this and write this and be curious about this, or whatever. There’s got to be a handful of programs that exist out there that allow me to not kick up my feet. I’m not I’m an active participant in this, but at least gets me out of the weeds to do the work. That takes up the most amount of time because my zone of genius is having conversations not creating and producing either an element of social posts or, or creating or content or whatever, how do I wrap my brain around?
Sami Bedell-Mulhern 33:45
Okay, well, there’s a couple things. The first is start with what you can be consistent with, because consistency matters. So if you are like, Well, okay, well, so I’ll start sending out an email newsletter, and you do it consistently for six months, and then you drop off the planet again for six months until you need to run a campaign. Like that doesn’t doesn’t work. So let’s be consistent. So let’s figure out what we can do. And then let’s pick one long form thing that feels good. And leave it at that. So whether it’s you know what we’re really great with video, it’s easy for us to create video, we’re going to create video or I can write really well. So or we have volunteers that are writers. So we’re going to write, you know, either email or blog, whatever, just pick the one longish form piece of content that you’re going to create. And then that just gets repurposed everywhere else so however you can be consistent just gets repurposed everywhere else. And there are a lot of AI tools that are out there so you can definitely dabble in the AI tools. But just know that it’s not just hit generate and then copy paste and send it out right like that can be more damaging to you in the long run. So just be thoughtful in how you use that. I’m much more prefer as you get started, that you write some pieces and you Even if you write three or four paragraphs, then you can put that into AI and say, Hey, could you turn this into a 3000? word blog post something that’s already got your words and voice? I had a really interesting conversation the other day with an, a platform that I use. And she was teaching me. And I don’t know if all platforms do this, but she was teaching me how to train the AI. And so yeah, when I put in a piece of content and said, Okay, how would what words would you use to describe this content? So that she could tell me what was friendly? What was funny, what was creative? What was, you know, so that I could learn how that AI? What words they use, and then I could use that then when I’m, like, regenerating? And I know you can talk more about this here in a second. Um, yeah. So I think that’s really important just to start with one piece, and then repurpose, but start slow, you do not need to do all the things all at once. And then the second thing is really think about some of the ways that you can use AI tools to help you automate with while still being super genuine, especially with video. So for example, there’s tools that are out there where especially after an event, you can record a video that says, you would record the video that just says, Hey, there, I’m so thankful that you came to the event, it was such a great night, we had so much fun, blah, blah, blah, you do your whole thing. And then you go back in and you record, hey, Patrick, Sani Gil, John, Bill, all of the names of the people that came and it will automatically change the their to that person’s name. So now you’ve only recorded the video one time, but it’s going to automate that personalization for you. So I think there’s things that are great to help you do that. And again, going back to what we talked about earlier, that video goes out to like segmenting your list. So maybe that video goes out to everybody who gave that night. But then the follow up is have your whole list of people who didn’t give that night and now you’re going to separate that segments up into your high capacity donors, maybe some of your first time donors, people that you don’t know. And you separate those calls out to people. So now you’re kind of using a combination of things to make sure everybody’s getting a personalized message, but you’re making the most use out of your time.
Patrick Kirby 37:10
Yeah, no, that’s, that’s such a great way of doing it. And you can you can teach AI to kind of sound like you and your organization to do I mean, that’s the other thing, you don’t want to leave it to chance. And you never want to get to a point where you are suggesting that you’re suggesting that you’re copying and paste out of it, you want it to sound like you. So if you have a lot of blog posts, or you’ve got a lot of content on your website, you can upload all of that and say, Hey, listen, this is the type of sound type of voice type of, you know, look and feel verbiage wise that is that we want to continue to do, then it starts to learn, and then it starts going, Okay, well, now I get that. Patrick uses a lot of exclamation points. And so now it uses a lot of exclamation points. And it gives me answers, which is really interesting. But you could also do it where you allow it to schedule that schedule out, but create a schedule for you. So asking it to make a content calendar for you, I think is an easy way to automate some of your brainpower. You say you wanted to post like three times a week, and then you wanted to post on each platform. And then you want to have a balance of posts that are both engaging and entertaining and calls to action. Right. So you say that in your prompts, that you wanted to promote that we were gonna have a, a fundraiser here in there. And so you just tell it to like you need me to help you with this. So provide the whole content calendar, and then it will drop out. It’s like, the real cool thing about AI too, and to help you automate, have it ask you questions that it doesn’t know already. So prompt your chat GPT prompt your AI, whether it’s copilot, or whatever it is, ask me questions about my business, about my nonprofit about my audience about who I serve. And it will take the answers you give the questions that it asks because by the way, check up D is becoming hyper personalized, and it wants to help you weird, right? And it’ll take all of those questions and then it then churns out actual content that works for you. That I think is going to be the real revolutionary way that we use a lot of the automating tools is that you’re having it engage with you in a way that super hyper personalized the same way that you would hyper personalized engagement with another human being, and then it produces things that actually sounds like you because it is your answers. Right? So if we have a blog, if we have a transcript of this call, and we’re bouncing back and forth and AI is listening to our personalities, it’s gonna give us totally two different responses. Whatever voice it’s trying to hit. Same thing in human life. I
Sami Bedell-Mulhern 40:00
think it’s the blinking cursor thing that stops us from like, figuring out how to use some of these things. So I think even using it to say, hey, I want to if you’re like really nervous about creating video, because I going to challenge you all to do video all the time as much as you possibly can. Because it gets you out there nonprofits video, and they get to see your face and connect with you. Um, so even just saying, like, Hey, could you write a script for me, that I can say like that I could share post event to thank donors for helping us raise money, whatever, whatever the whole thing is that you want to do write, it can do things like pop out scripts, or pop out bullet points, it doesn’t have to write the whole thing for you. If you’re somebody who’s like, I really liked the creative part of writing or recording video, I just don’t know what to say or where to start. You know, it’s a great way to kind of spark that conversation and spark that energy. Or even if you get objections, let’s say you go and have a meeting with the donor, and you’re like, I thought this was going to be a shoo in. I thought there’s no way this person was going to say no, had everything prep. And they give you some weird objections, even going into AI and saying, you know, how am I want to respond to, you know, these were this was the conversation that we had, these are the things that we talked about, you know, what, what might I want to do to respond to this objection, or you have a donor who’s really angry and is upset with you, and you want to kind of pull some of the emotion out of it, you don’t know how to maybe respond, or you want some additional feedback. It’s a great bouncing tool for some of those conversations, when you might feel a little bit stuck or uncomfortable, and want some ideas for how to how to respond because that is also personalization.
Patrick Kirby 41:39
Of course it is. I think the last part about the hyper personalizing piece, too, is I think there has to be a gratitude part, ya have to do on a fairly regular basis. You know, it’s easy to send a thank you note, when they give you a gift. It’s easy to say thank you note when they you know, show up at an event. It’s a lot harder to prompt, gratitude randomly. But it’s probably more important that it goes back to your touchpoint piece. But it has to lead to gratitude. Otherwise, again, the noise is just going to be overwhelming. And nobody’s going to realize how much you know that that gift helped. What sort of ways have you found me from a digital standpoint? Yeah. Again, handwritten, thank you notes. So that’s the the all encompassing, but again, a lot of people don’t have the luxury or the time to maybe knock out five on
Sami Bedell-Mulhern 42:37
AI automated handwritten cards now. That’s pretty freakin fantastic. So,
Patrick Kirby 42:45
again, it doesn’t make it less authentic. If the note comes from you, does it mean that’s I think we have to get over the idea as if you are being purposeful in your gratitude that is as authentic as. Right. Yeah. So
Sami Bedell-Mulhern 43:01
I mean, I think there’s a couple of things. And again, this is all going back to segmentation, right? There’s going to be people in your in your list that are that you have set the criteria for where automation is great, there’s going to be people on your list where you you want to send that, you know, you know that their dog, Benny passed away last year, and it’s National Dog Day. And so you want to send them a cute photo of their dog and just say we’re thinking of it, right? Like there’s there’s definitely sides to all of those. I love a good handwritten card. And I think those can be automated in a lot of ways. But I love thinking about what the mission is of your organization, for example, it’s May it’s mental health awareness month, it’s foster care Awareness Month. So it’s a great month to send out a bunch of random cards or like impact stories like handwritten cards from the kids that have been served and saying like, you know, I’m so grateful that I have access to mental health care because of this organization. XYZ right. So it’s not tied to anything with that donor, but it’s tied to the fact that this is mental health care Awareness Month Right? Like what can you kind of do messaging wise that makes sense? Um, I also love donor bursaries especially with monthly monthly donors so but doing it on like a weird month so maybe your organization was founded in like a now I’m not gonna come with a good example. Let’s just say like you started, let’s say you started 15 years ago and you’re celebrating your 50th anniversary and so now we’re going to send a card to everybody on their 15th month of giving and just be like hey, it’s our 50th anniversary you’ve been giving to us for 15 wanted to say thank you. Totally weird and random You of course can do birthdays and things like that but I am with you. I love kind of doing things that are a little outside the box. I love a good Thanksgiving card or Thanksgiving something as a thank you have gratitude that again doesn’t for money because it tees you up brilliantly to go into your urine giving campaign Giving Tuesday. Because the thing for me that’s cool. I think it’s just, you know, paying attention to the mission and what you’re trying to do and kind of being creative and thinking outside the box of just like who what is your personality? Like, let your personality shine?
Patrick Kirby 45:12
Yeah, I think I think we don’t we don’t. I think that comes down, that authenticity becomes hyper personalized. Because you’re not putting up a wall, you’re not becoming the salesperson or the development director, you’re just Sammy or Patrick talking to another human about how to make the world a better place. And that right there is, I think, what people are really looking for. So whether it’s in a digital square, or whether it’s sitting over a cup of coffee, or whether it’s in a boardroom, and you’re addressing a handful of execs, or you’re just with a family in their living room, it doesn’t really matter. Those hyper personalized experiences are going to make or break your organization going forward, because everybody else that that’s dealing with robots are doing it. And if you aren’t behind the times, so I hope that is an actually helpful exercise to kind of get your brain into this hyper personalized mode. You know, whether you’re using digital assets, traditional handwritten assets, or whatever thing in between, or a combo platter of both, which is best. I think that’s really what you’re going to have to do going forward, it’s going to help.
Sami Bedell-Mulhern 46:18
Can I ask you one real quick thing before we wrap this up? Because I think there’s also this common thing of, well, we don’t want to send people stuff because then we’re spending money. And we don’t want our donors to think that we’re not using their dollars. Because, you know, this idea just kind of came into my head is like, you know, if you if you have a large amount of like banks or financial people that are involved in your organization, like right around tax season, like February, March, sending them a Starbucks gift card just says I know you’re slammed right now. So we just want you to know, we’re thinking of you. And here coffee is on us today, like fun things like that. But then my brain quickly right as I write, as I was saying that in my head went to but we can’t spend money on our donors, because that feels like we’re not using their funds wisely. What say you to that?
Patrick Kirby 47:03
I know, I don’t necessarily think that it’s a good use of Yeah, I don’t think it’s, I don’t think it is, again, it’s it’s a gift for recognizing their support, number one. Number two, it’s really unique. And number three, if they don’t like it, they’ll send it back. Yeah, that’s an easy one. And I don’t think you need to do with with everybody, oh, there is a real big percentage of your of your population that is giving to you that needs and deserves to be recognized above and beyond everyone else. And that little TLC is a great thing. I love it. I think it’s great. Hey, thanks for spending some time with us. Your guest experts today here at nonprofit boot camp. Replay will be up as well. If you’re in the replay, great. Take some show notes. Look at the transcript. There’s a couple of really goodies that we came up with today that give you at least a framework out of where to start, what to do, whether it’s automating some of your processes, when it’s like thinking differently about what to ask your individual donors. I think it’s going to be brilliant, Sammy has always been a great co host with me. Yeah, no,
Sami Bedell-Mulhern 48:11
thank you. And I just want to add that if you’re curious about some of the AI tools that we’re using for some of the solutions that we talked about, I mean, chat TPT has kind of been around for a while, whatever. But it’s improving and changing so fast. So I think we’re hesitant to really mention specific tools, because, unfortunately, and fortunately, some of our favorite tools, add and subtract features and the new ones pop up. So if you heard something today that you’re like, Okay, I really want to know what that tool like what tool I can use for that, feel free to reach out and we’ll share what we’re using right now. But I we we shared all the tools we’re using right now. They would might not be the same when you watch this in three months. So reach out to us if there’s something particular that you’re looking for because it is changing all the time. And so we would always love to share our current vapes in real time
Patrick Kirby 49:00
it’s perfect. I love it. Well thanks for stopping by. Thanks for watching in the replay. We will check you out next time here on non profit boot camp. See you later guys.
Guest Speakers
Patrick Kirby and Sami Bedell-Mulhern
NONPROFIT BOOTCAMP CO-CREATORS
Recruit the Board Members of Your Dreams
Finding and landing that ideal board member is easier said than done. Join a conversation with Barry Sackett and NonProfit Bootcamp Co-creators, Patrick Kirby and Sami Bedell-Mulhern as we talk through the best ways to recruit the board members you want.
We’ll talk through setting expectations, having that first conversation, creating a pathway for success and more.
View Transcript
Sami Bedell-Mulhern 0:00
says Here we go. Hello, everybody. It is June, end of June. And we are here for our guest expert training with the wonderful very Sackett today. Hang on. I’m trying to pin some people here so we can see everybody. I’m Patrick. Hello, Barry. Hello. How’s everybody doing? Doing great.
Patrick Kirby 0:26
The light fall.
Sami Bedell-Mulhern 0:27
Yeah. And we’re talking today about board recruitment, which I know is a super, super fun conversation because nonprofits struggle with this big time. And so I’m excited Barry to have you here. As a board member, as a philanthropist, as all of the things volunteer and nonprofit organization, we’re excited for your insights in how you can maybe help make this process smoother, not just for the staff that are trying to recruit board members, but for those that are being reached out to and recruited to make it kind of a better win win. So before we jump into that, varied, you just want to introduce yourself briefly and kind of share a little bit about who you are and why you love kind of working with nonprofits and being in the space.
Barry Sackett 1:14
Sure, I very saccade, I am currently sitting in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, I grew up in northwest Iowa. I am an attorney. Although I don’t play one on boards that I sit on. At least that’s what I tell them. But I also do represent boards in that area. And I’ve helped a lot of them with governance and recruiting and things like that. So I’ve done a lot of work around the Okoboji area, and started some 501 C threes there and operated on some very well established ones as well. Currently, I’m on three national boards and more than I should be, it’s my wife says if you get on another one, you gotta get off of one of them. So I try to try to do that. Or maybe I don’t always tell her exactly what I’m doing. So we get away with it. So you know, I boards are amazing they can be you can get into trouble if you don’t stay in front of them. So happy to help in any way that I can.
Patrick Kirby 2:16
I love that here. I think the first question that I would love to ask, because I think a lot of nonprofits look at their boards, and they’re like the board, they’re looking at potential board members. They’re like, where on earth do I start? Because they’ve got a list of people, or they’ve got a list of ideas on who they want to be involved or what they have an idea of what a board member looks like. But the first step is the hardest one to take. Because nobody really knows what it is or what their responsibilities or roles are. When you are talking with organizations, where do you say, All right, let’s begin here?
Barry Sackett 2:52
Well, you know, I think you start with the stakeholders of the organization that you’re talking about. So who are you represented? And what voices from that group of stakeholders need to be heard on your board. Because often I see boards that are developed around a group of people that are like minded, which, you know, is not always successful, because they, they have one solution for maybe a myriad of problems, or they they get groupthink. And, you know, there is no discussion, there is no ability to have other ideas. You know, the other thing that I always stress to people is there is formality and governance around the board. And don’t dismiss that. Often, you know, the board is run by a volunteer that may not be familiar with Robert’s Rules of Order. Get familiar with Robert’s Rules of Order. You know, creating, creating some of that structure initially is going to save you a whole lot of problems down the road. So I don’t know if that quite answered your question, Patrick. But no,
Patrick Kirby 3:58
it’s really because I think everybody gets stuck on like, what, what to concentrate on first. And I think, again, if you can organize Alright, here’s how we’re going to structure the board and here’s how we’re the rules that we’re going to follow or at least agree upon. So you know, again, I realized that Robert’s Rules or suggestion as our you know, bylaws can be adjusted. But But I don’t think people think about that they said they’re either stuck in this is how we have to do it. And, and anything else is completely out of the ordinary or out of the difference. And, and and maybe even to jump again, Sammy, I apologize. Now I got a microphone in my hand and I can’t stop asking questions. But you know, when you were talking about your introduction, which I think is fascinating, which is I’m a lawyer, but I don’t play one on a board. Can you describe that because honestly, when we’re looking for board members, we’re like, Okay, I gotta get a lawyer who can answer all of our loyalty questions, and they can’t use their big sexy brains for anything other than does this affect law number statute? 260 4.68 When we’re Looking to recruit members and specific skill sets, but they can come to the board as human beings. Can you talk a little bit about what you mean by that? Because I found that phrase to be extremely fascinating. And I think a lot of other organizations would.
Barry Sackett 5:13
Yeah, no, absolutely. Because, you know, as a lawyer that represents nonprofits, I totally understand what my role is, when I am representing a nonprofit, I am giving that nonprofit, its board its executives, legal advice on how to move forward. Now, when I’m sitting on a board, and I happen to be a lawyer, do I completely shut off my lawyer brain when I’m thinking about, you know, what decisions we should make? Of course not. But I’m very careful not to say, This is my legal opinion. You know, there is always that moment when a legal question comes up, and everybody stops and turns and looks at me. And I say, you know, again, you can’t not be yourself. But the other place that shows up is in financial folks, you know, and I was gonna say earlier as well, be careful not to kind of require everybody to do the same thing. And often, that means everybody has to fundraise, because you’re gonna chase a lot of people away, if everyone has to fundraise, and you don’t need everybody to fundraise, you need people to do other important tasks on a board. Obviously, it’s nice if everybody fundraisers or everybody participates in your board. But there is a skill set that is good at fundraising, that not everybody has. So kind of along those same lines, you know, if you put if you put your executives on your board, all of a sudden, everybody defers to the executive, you know, what are we going to do? What should we do? What do you want us to do? And you’ve really lost your function as a board to give strategic advice to that organization, and you’re all sudden led by one person, and you’re, you’re a dictatorship instead of a functioning board.
Sami Bedell-Mulhern 6:54
Yeah, so to that end, you know, if we’re, I think a lot of times when we’re trying to think about who the people are, that are on our list that we want, we tend to target specific people, as opposed to maybe just having different kinds of conversations and kind of figuring it out. So like, how might we want to craft questions when we’re even just getting to know somebody who we might potentially want for our board? Because I might come to you and think, Well, I want you to be on our board for your legal expertise. And you’re gonna say, Well, no, that’s not what my feel like my best support is for this organization. Like, how can we kind of have those conversations with board members to find those right fits and kind of make sure we are creating that diversity in both skills and experience and knowledge?
Barry Sackett 7:40
Yeah, you know, there. Again, it really depends on the nonprofit and who your stakeholders are, and making sure that you’ve got representations from all of those. And then also what relationships are important. So if you’ve got a nonprofit that works closely with municipality, or you know, with with a public sector agency, that is an important role, that you’ve got to have somebody that can speak to them, have relationships with them, those kinds of things, when you go to them, and you say I want you for this board, you know that the first question is, what does that mean? What what are you asking me? Do I have to come to a meeting once a month? Do I have to do anything in between? Am I going to have to raise money? You know, do I have to sign in blood that I will be devoted to this thing for the rest of my life. So you really, you’re the best recruiters are your current board members that have done it, and you know, enjoy doing it, and can sell that to the people that are doing it. You know, or it’s an important nonprofit that really affects this person. And you know, they have a stake in the game. And their voice is important. So again, when you’re going back to those stakeholders, usually that’s who you’re talking to somebody that is in that stakeholder set, or has a relationship with that stakeholder set, that it’s important that the mission of the organization is important to them.
Patrick Kirby 9:13
What sort of attribute do you think, makes the best board member and there’s a billion and a half of them, I kind of have a three sort of thought process is like a big dreamer, the practical fiduciary, or someone who is just hell bent on I’m connected to this organization. I think all of them have their bonuses and their pluses or minuses, but outside of those three, is there anything that you just like or maybe start with those three and go, well, this person would be great for this, this individual would be great for this. But do you find that there is a personality type or a value driven human being that makes the best type of board member? Well,
Barry Sackett 9:55
I mean, you’re right, Patrick, you need a balance, right? I mean, if you had all of One time, that doesn’t work very well, I think, you know, experience is important, you know that you’ve got experience in the community and in the organization. But it also can, it can swell to other voices, if you wait too heavy on that you need, you need to think about succession planning, you need to know that this person is going to be around for a while, or have a system of succession planning, because again, especially these days in the Midwest, we don’t have enough people, there’s just not enough people in particular, you know, I’m, I’m 55, I grew up in the, you know, the farm crisis of the 80s. And I started high school with 200 kids in my class, and I graduated with less than 100. And there’s really this dearth of, you know, people from 65 to 45, in the community, so now you kind of skip a generation, and you’ve got to bring in somebody that’s, you know, 45, who’s got two kids and doesn’t have time to do stuff, or 35, who doesn’t have a lot of experience. And unfortunately, you got to bring him in, because there’s nobody else to do it. So you think about them differently. You think about, you know, you don’t expect the same stuff from them, or you create additional, you know, onboarding, and additional training for those people that make sure that they’re, they’re going to be able to handle it, and they’re not going to be frustrated. And then, you know, I think having a, what I would call a wise, you know, wise gray hair that can sit in the bag, and be patient and listen, and allow your new board members to make the mistakes that they need to make. But be able to put out the fires that they create when they do that. And, you know, generally that’s the the person with the biggest opinion that is going to be hell bent on getting something done. And won’t listen to anybody else when they’re doing it. So I’m probably better at it spotting the bad characteristics and the good characteristics, I apologize.
Sami Bedell-Mulhern 12:10
Well, no, but you kind of teed that up perfectly, because we do have inside the boot camp. So if you’re watching this replay, you know, don’t forget, we have a whole board member onboarding, training to talk about governance and background and all that stuff. So you can check that out and go through that if you do have new people. But um, it kind of leads me also to like, when you’re recruiting, and you’re meeting people, and you’re talking to them, and you do come across somebody who you’re like, well, this person might not quite be ready yet. But we definitely want to stay in touch with them, because they’re going to be ready. Like, how important is it? Or has this happened to you where you’ve had a conversation with a potential board, and it’s just not the right fit? Not the right time to kind of have in your back pocket? Okay. Well, we also these volunteer opportunities, or we have these task forces that we’re putting together, like, you know, like understood conversations, the difference
Barry Sackett 13:00
in backs, right? Yeah, those are huge opportunities. And you always, you know, again, in most nonprofits, you always gonna need those volunteers. And whether it’s an event, you know, committee, or you have a fundraiser, and you’re gonna put them on a team, to go ask some people. I know, I’m on a big fundraiser right now. And I just got scolded for that, calling all the people that are under me that I had to ask that, you know, and that’s, that’s part of being on a board certainly is feeling comfortable with, with the message. And I think that’s an important part of training. And as far as a good attribute of something, somebody somebody that believes in your mission, because if if you’ve got to sell it to them every time you’re asking them to do it, that’s that’s a big, uphill push. So somebody that is committed to your mission, and not that they think it’s a nice thing to do, but really believes in what’s going on.
Patrick Kirby 13:54
You mentioned earlier that you got to be clear on what your expectations are. You talked about fundraising for shame. You didn’t call your people as a fundraiser guy. I listen. Shame.
Barry Sackett 14:09
But trust me,
Patrick Kirby 14:10
I got three last I think I think that’s that’s probably one of the biggest, contentious or even concerns that a lot of organizations have is like, how do I get my board to fundraise? I we’ve always taken and again, in the training, it’s like you either are an asker or a minimum a door opener is Is that Is that Is that a reasonable expectation of board members when they come on? I do one or the other. And I don’t like to give her get kind of thing that kind of annoys the living heck out of me, but at least someone willing to introduce you to their Rolodex or their contacts or whatever. Is that Is that a reasonable thing to request from from?
Barry Sackett 14:53
You know, and I think it is and again, I’ve been through enough of these things that when you when you’ve got somebody that’s passionate about what you’re doing, they’re gonna talk about what you’re doing. And that’s really all you got to do. I mean, when you tell them, you’re not raising money, you’re just raising awareness of this thing that we’re doing. And, you know, that will lead people to offer well, how can I be a part of that? Or how can I help? It’s, it’s tough, especially when you’ve got a capital campaign, and you’ve got dollars that you got to hit. And I’m part of a chamber appeal right now that, you know, we’ve got specific dollars we’re asking for, of all these businesses. And luckily, you know, that’s a preset list of people that we have a good feeling are going to answer answer the call. So to get people new board members over that, who it’s good to give them the low hanging fruit that they’re going to be successful at. So that they understand it’s not, it’s not as bad as they think,
Sami Bedell-Mulhern 15:47
well into that end, like you said, we want you want to make your board members feel successful. So pairing them with a task that makes sense, is going to also encourage them to do better work, because they’re doing stuff they feel more comfortable with. And so like, you know, that kind of leads to the conversation of retention, like, once you’ve worked hard, and you’ve got this right person, and you set the right expectations, and you’re super excited to have them there. Like what are some things that you see boards do that are great to keep their awesome performing board members, and maybe, on the flip side, things that people have done that is just kind of stupid, and causes some of the great people to leave?
Barry Sackett 16:27
Yeah, you know, I, I would, I would put a lot of the burden on the executive director or whoever the professional, there is, you know, I remember I was on a on a board that I slaved away on for a long time, we did a lot of great work. And, you know, when I left never heard from him again, which I was thinking, Boy, you missed an opportunity, you know, I’m still in the community, I still have these connections. And, you know, and I turned out, I mean, it wasn’t that I left for any other reason. And, you know, in some ways, I know that they’re busy, and they, and they don’t blame, you know, but to have have a retention, or recruiting or an onboarding subcommittee of people, because again, you got people that are good at making people feel good, and you got people that are good at getting stuff done. So put, put the right people in, in those roles. There are those times where you don’t have good internal leadership, that are really stressful on board members. And, you know, so if you are a board member, in that case, reach out to others reach out to professionals, accountants, lawyers, other people that can support you, because you can get yourself really sideways in a hurry. And maybe that’s that’s a little bit of the lawyer coming out in me. But I’ve seen some bad situations there that really create a lot of problems.
Patrick Kirby 18:05
I think one of the maybe confusing natures of a board and Executive Director relationship is, does the executive lead into the board? Or does the board lead the executive like? And what I mean by that is, do you prefer an organization with the executive director saying, Alright, I’m gonna go find a board that’s going to be here? Or do you find them or more? Or the boards that go, alright, we’re the board, and we’re gonna tell you what to do. And I think it’s like, it’s like, oh, it’s one or the other, it seems like you’ve got a powerful board or a powerful Exec. And where have you found maybe this to be a best case scenario, or best practice, as as you’ve worked on boards?
Barry Sackett 18:49
Well, it kind of goes back to what I said earlier, when you’ve got the right structure. You know, there’s tension, there’s gonna be tension there. Because the executive director lives and breathes this every single day and wants to get shit done. The board, you know, wants to be a part or you’ve asked them to be a part, you’ve asked them for their time. And if they come in, and they just have to rubber stamp everything this guy’s doing, they’re kind of like, well, what am I doing on here? Right? So the problem the right answer is that you’ve got to have tension there. There’s there’s got to be that you got to tell the executive director no once in a while, but you don’t want to tell them no all the time, or they’re gonna get frustrated. You know, I’ve seen I’ve seen organizations with a really strong executive director. They, you know, they burn hot and they they burn out fast, right, they can get something done, but they don’t last. And I’ve seen organizations that turn through executive directors because they have a very strong board that you know, there’s a guy that put the the bylaws together 50 years ago, but he’s still sitting there you know, nothing’s gonna happen very much and and certainly the stakeholders but not being heard of or, or seen. So in that sense, don’t be afraid of tension. But if you’ve got the right, if you’ve got the right structure, tension is okay, Executive Director brings in initiative to the board, the board weighs in on it has a healthy discussion around it. And then you know, says yes or no, or go back and bring us something a little bit different. And so when when you talk to your executive director, make sure they’re comfortable with that. And when you talk to board members, say, you’re gonna have a voice, you know, you’re one of five or seven or nine, so you don’t have veto power. But, you know, it’s important that you participate in this conversation and bring any concerns of your stakeholder group that you’re representing, to that answer.
Sami Bedell-Mulhern 20:48
But I love the way that you’re framing this, because this is a lot of how Patrick and I teach on the marketing. And the on the fundraising side is like, really, if you have that core foundation, and you start with the basics, like we try to go to the shiny objects, like the new fancy things, we try to speed through the process. But if you have the process down first, and that starts to breed, that culture of the whole organization that you can then recruit the board that’s going to match the culture of what you’re trying to accomplish, which can build that synergy, right? Like I think my daughter when she was seven said, Mom, I don’t care if you say no, but you can’t just say because I said so. Because that really I don’t get it. And so like even if we gave her if we gave her a reason, even if she didn’t like it, she was like, Okay, fine, at least you’re not just saying no to say no. And I think that’s kind of what you’re saying here is that if you can build that strong foundation, you have the right parameters in place, you have the right culture, you have the right tension between when the other party says no, you’re like, Okay, there’s a reason for this, this isn’t just because I’m trying to flex and show my power, because our favorite term here is, well, that’s how it’s always been done. And that’s your guy who wrote the bylaws 50 years ago? Yes,
Barry Sackett 21:55
exactly. Well, and so you know, when you’re when you’re setting up expectations for new board members, come to the board meeting, but be ready for prepared for the board meeting, you know, know the agenda, have read the issues that need to be addressed. And if you’re a part of, you know, if you’re a part of one of those, because again, you can, you can engage your board members. But if you don’t want your board members to be managing the organization, and so that, again, there’s that that tension, you’re like a board member, I’d love your expertise here. But the you know, you’re not you’re not running the day to day operations, you don’t get an extra vote in this, you know, this matter, because you’re you’re volunteering for it. But you know, at the same level, and I know I’m kind of contradicting myself in a couple of ways here, but you do have to have some trust in the people that you’ve assigned a task to. And, you know, you’ve asked somebody outside of their, you know, duties to come to the board meeting, to be on a subcommittee, figure out, should we renew the lease, or whatever the case is, and they come back and they’ve got a recommendation. I do think it’s pretty destructive. If you don’t give some deference to that, to that effort that they put forward, you’re going to make it so people don’t want to volunteer for anything pretty quickly. Part of the
Patrick Kirby 23:16
tension and even recruitment of board members is how they experience the actual meeting itself, right? I mean, if you’re just sitting there, and you’re like, I, I thanks, consent agenda, blah, blah, blah, do you find that there is a most valuable moment in the meeting, that is sort of the tried and true thing that you should have at every meeting, that’s the most engaging, for example, like a mission moment out of the gate or time at the end or in the middle to vision to solve a problem? Is there something that that you have seen that is really a good way to make sure that everybody’s involved, energized, engaged pieces to that, making a board meeting? Not a br Ed meeting? Right,
Barry Sackett 24:01
right, exactly. You know, and the Size matters, right? I mean, a smaller group, it’s either going to be easier to kind of keep people involved. You know, have everybody if you’re, again, if you’ve got enough subcommittees have everybody on a subcommittee and give a subcommittee report, that can be really useful. So they, you know, they know they’re going to have to speak and they know they’re not going to get away with just looking at their phone in the back of the room. You know, the other thing that I’ve seen that is useful but can be destructive is having an executive committee inside a board. So the executive committee meets before the board and kind of comes in with the slate of what’s going to happen. When you have a bigger board that’s somewhat necessary because otherwise you can get lost in in a bigger conversation. But when you do that, I think that adds another difficulty in getting everybody to engage As they kind of come in and say, well, the Executive Committee has already decided, What do I have to do here. So, again, tension is is one thing that kind of comes around, right? I mean, if you’re, if you’re a highly effective organization, you’re going to have tension, because you’re going to be working hard and getting things done. And so knowing what good tension is versus bad tension, and, you know, somebody doesn’t show up to a couple board meetings or, or somebody is in the back of the room not paying attention, or you ask them to accomplish something, and they didn’t, it’s important to get those people out. And not, you know, even though they may be very valuable, right, they’re the destructive hero on the board, like, well, they’ve got the, the ear of the richest guy in town, and he’s gonna bring a bunch of money, we can’t get rid of him, put them on a subcommittee, you know, make sure they’re not standing in plain sight. And everybody can see that there’s, there’s people that aren’t kind of doing anything. Well,
Sami Bedell-Mulhern 26:00
and so to that end, I think, like, sometimes, too, like, we keep people on boards, because we’re supposed to have a certain amount of people on our board, right? So how do we, you know, decide how, and just kind of look at how you decide how many people is the right fit for our board? And at what point as the organization grows? Do we say, okay, you know, what, maybe now it’s time to add another board member. You know, just to kind of keep things healthy, and, you know, keep that tension in that good.
Barry Sackett 26:31
I mean, you know, again, there’s so many different boards and ways to do it, I always think, you know, five is a minimum, I mean, you can go down to three, but you’ve really kind of, you really get in trouble quickly, if there’s any kind of disagreement in that. You know, seven to nine is probably ideal. You know, I think if you get into the teens, you’ve got to have a more complex structure, you’ve got to have an executive committee, and maybe some subcommittees and things that and if you get bigger than that, and I’m on boards that are bigger than that. Yeah, you know, you don’t want to do it, you don’t want to do it.
Sami Bedell-Mulhern 27:14
I worked for nonprofit once, and the board was like 21 people. And it was like, the most insane experience I’ve ever been in, in my life it was. And they were all type a financial type people. So it was like, it was chaos. Anyways,
Barry Sackett 27:29
on board with with 60 members that met once or twice a year, it was the most dysfunctional organization ever. So you know, some of those things, you may have to just say, Alright, our structure is broke, we got to change that whole structure. And particularly when you’ve got a shrinking board, that that can be tough. Because you know, you have three, because there’s only three bodies that you can possibly recruit to do it. To add board members, you know, I think what I said, you know, you get up to 11, or 13. And it may not be time to add more board members, but to add more structure to your board. So that you’ve you’ve got, you know, you’ve still got a position where people can be heard and utilize their, their, what they’re doing and everything else. So I don’t know if that answers your question, Sammy.
Patrick Kirby 28:24
Conversely, what about addition, by subtraction, I think a lot of boards have a probably that one toxic member who has been there forever. And nobody knows what to do with this person. And so we tolerate or we try to, like, you know, tell them that the meeting is on Friday, and it’s really on Thursday, or whatever the tactics we’re using for our board. How do we suggest they leave and then let them know that it’s their idea, besides, you know, reading everything, like how to win friends and Influence People How to like that. Besides that? How do we have an approach a toxic board member, a board member, that’s just surpassed the time that they are given value on the board without burning that bridge? Because again, like you said, if they if they’re the one link to a lot of people, or the history, they have a lot of institutional knowledge about the board. And they we don’t want them to burn the house down before they leave. But we need to get rid of them. How do we have that conversation in the first place? Or what do we do to approach some of those individuals?
Barry Sackett 29:27
Wow, that’s that’s a, you know,
Patrick Kirby 29:29
my most loaded the most loaded?
Barry Sackett 29:33
Question. Thanks, Patrick. No, you know, I think where I’ve seen that really be tough is where there is somebody that is, is providing a service to the board, you know, they’re the Secretary, they, you know, arrange the meetings, they, you know, fill out the grant applications, this this function of the board, that the board is really getting me in trouble without it. And so at that point, You really need somebody to come in and take that one over. Right. And usually that’s their, that’s what it’s trying them. So they’re not willing to give that up and all of those things. You know, and fortunately, I can’t tell you a lot of stories of how that happened Well, without some sort of a, an event, I just was involved in one as an attorney that was, was really bad. That, you know, it took going all the way to the national organization to get them to get this person off of a children’s nonprofit that was for the children with this person didn’t have children. I mean, I mean, didn’t have any kids that were involved in it anymore. So you know, that’s something, that’s something I think that’s important. The founders, the founders, issues, that somebody founds a board puts a lot of effort into it, and all of a sudden feels ownership for it. The other you know, the other issue is the donors. Problem. So, you know, you were the initial donor that had this problem. And you know, that donor is really calling the shots, because they’re the donor, you know, there’s IRS tax laws that kind of can help you with that as far as tapping, but you know, that that can be problematic, or the donors appointee, right? The donors person, that is the connection to that donor, that that can be a problem. So those are times as a board, that it may be really helpful to bring somebody in from the outside. So an attorney to given a legal opinion about, hey, this isn’t balanced, right, or you’re doing things that you shouldn’t be doing, or an accountant that says, you know, tax wise, we could be in trouble for all of our donors. Or if you’re working with, you know, a public entity that public entity can, can come in. So I think the best path, Patrick is to find somebody that’s not, you know, not on the board to create, because the other thing that you see all the time is this side of the board and the side of the board, and now we’re fighting and who’s gonna win. So that that outside voice can be the only one that can solve those issues.
Patrick Kirby 32:08
I do think that’s an important thing to do, just to say, because I think a lot of people who are white, who will watch this and who are watching this go, Oh, God, it’s not just us. Because I think when when we’ve got our head down, and horse blinders on, it must be us, we must be the only people who have ever experienced this board trauma as like, no, no, it’s, it’s pretty much most of them. Very few have gone out without any hitch whatsoever. So it just, it’s, it’s nice to hear that this is a more typical experience than not.
Barry Sackett 32:39
So and again, you know, the people that are running boards generally aren’t professional board runners, right. I mean, they’re volunteers that, you know, maybe watch the movie with Robert’s Rules of Order once and kind of have some idea. So the training that you guys are giving people is invaluable to make them effective. You know, the key to me to have an effective organization is to have a well structured and attended board, and a good executive team or a good, you know, the people that do all the work in between the board meetings, because ideally, you know, every board meeting you have every month is giving marching orders for the next month for those things to be accomplished. And then the next month, did they get accomplished? They did? Okay, let’s move on to the next one. So they didn’t get accomplished. What do you need to get them accomplished? You know, that’s where you’re really common as an organization.
Sami Bedell-Mulhern 33:32
I’m, the one kind of last question I had was, you know, if you’re a younger organization, you’re starting out and your board is playing a much more active role in the day to day functionality of your organization. And then as you grow, and you raise more, and you have more staff, and your board kind of starts to transition from kind of that working board to a more Advisory Board, naturally in that space. I think a lot of people, there would be a transition in skills and needs and what people what the role of the board is, you know, how do we kind of start to maneuver through that to, you know, again, maybe transition people off the board and put them in in volunteer roles where they can help still do the thing. But then, because you mentioned earlier, this is very long winded question. You mentioned earlier, like your board members are your best recruiters. But if you’re in a transition, you know, that might not be the case. So any kind of quick tips not to solve the whole problem, but to just kind of guide.
Barry Sackett 34:31
You know, I think another way that that happens is you’ve got your foundation, your foundational board, your initial board that creates this organization, and everybody’s kind of wearing five hats, and we’re just making this thing happen. And at some point, one of those people kind of stands up and they become your executive director, so they actually go off of the board and become your executive. And it’s an important thing to to explain to them. am the difference explained to them why it’s important for them. And usually it comes around, I’m spending 30 hours a week on this thing I need to get paid. You know, I need some compensation, or you need to support me in some way, because I can’t, I can’t give this much anymore. And that’s usually the breaking point. And you know, and then that’s tough too, because they say, Oh, I’m doing all this stuff. And now I’m giving up some control by giving it to the board. But that’s an important time to make sure that executive director gets enough control and gets enough compensation to say, you got this, but you know, you’re we’re not going to grow unless you do this unless we changed the structure. So I’ve certainly seen that. And, you know, I’ve been through that a couple of times. And that’s an important point. That really is, it’s kind of like the new business, you know, that you get to a point where that’s the maker break. That’s that’s an inflection point that really matters. You
Patrick Kirby 35:55
know, again, anybody on on if having any questions drop into the chat, because, you know, I know, we’re kind of closing soon. The opportunity and again, very, so thank you so much for your expertise and awesomeness, because it’s pretty great. I think a lot of those who are in boot camp, and who again, we’re in flyover country, Midwest, right. Not a lot of people. I think Rural and Small town board recruitment is one of the toughest things that that that I think we’re experiencing right now, right? There’s a lack of experts or people that have the time and energy and effort into you know, being on a board when there is a small town, but a lot of nonprofits. How do we not lean on the same people over and over again, so that someone like I don’t know, a berry saccade? Isn’t on 29 boards, and does a person who’s on multiple boards like that have have a real brain drain or, or empathy brain drain in it just like gotta it’s another one, I’m just gonna become a better human being because I got to be on X, Y, and Z. But if there’s nobody left, who do we go to? And I think a lot of rural communities are suffering this sort of conundrum. Like if I don’t go to bury, there’s nobody else. Yeah.
Barry Sackett 37:14
Who’s going to and so Exactly.
Patrick Kirby 37:16
And so it’s, it’s almost guilt on its guilt on you. Because you’re like, Well, I know, I could be a really unknown a good board member. I know, I could help but it shouldn’t rely on your shoulders all the time. How do we start maybe the conversation or recruitment or training of that next generation in rural communities specifically?
Barry Sackett 37:33
Well, I know and Sammy is probably familiar with this, you know, we have a youth philanthropy group and Okoboji. You know, getting kids to do that, at that level and be engaged in your community a is a great way to retain them and community and B starts giving them some of these ideas and puts them on, you know, a grant panel or, you know, what are we going to do next? You know, the other thing is, I think, go to employers and say to them, Hey, you want to keep people you want retention, get these people involved in your community, they’re going to stay here if you do that. So, you know, that’s something with with attorneys that we, you know, again, people love attorneys on board, so it’s a fairly easy sell. But, you know, they the other, you know, I think the other kind of really tough part is when you’ve got young families, we’ve all you know, we’ve had young families, it is hard as hell to find any time to do anything. And when you’re asking those people to do something, make sure they can do it, you know, find opportunities for them to stay engaged in your organization without putting too much of a burden on them. And understand when they can’t understand when they don’t show up. And there’s some flakiness there, because kids come first. You know, I think the other good thing about COVID, you know, which is kind of an oxymoron, you can make it easier for people to be on a board when we can be on a zoom, and you don’t have to have them travel somewhere. And you can be flexible in timing on that. And, you know, so use technology to make your board meetings, effective. You know, there’s you can have too many, you it’s important to have people connect with each other. I mean, I’m not kind of advocating against that. But at the same time, you know, use all the resources you have is we have fewer and fewer people, because who knows, you may find somebody that lives in New York City but from your small town and really cares about you know, the nonprofit to keep the local museum up and they can be very, very influential and helpful board member, even though they don’t sit in that place anymore. So it can open up your aperture a little bit on who you might recruit.
Sami Bedell-Mulhern 39:44
Yeah, you know, I had a similar experience as you did Barry where I was actually asked to leave a board because I didn’t live in town anymore, but it was like a very personal connection to me like I would have stayed and helped them and done a whole bunch of work for them for are a long time, but they were very stuck on Well, if you don’t live here, you can’t be on this board. And I think I think that’s, again, a big missed opportunity, we need to think about these things differently. And I think also, to your point with young people and allowing them to make mistakes, I think another big misconception people make is that will, if I’m bringing on a 35 year old board member, they don’t have the connections that are going to bring in the money, which is also a huge missed opportunity, because they might not yet but they likely will in the future and the skill set that they can bring in different ways from technology to different like connecting to the under donor baseball, right, all of that stuff they can be super helpful with so I think, I think to your viewer, Patrick’s point, like, we have to think differently about how we recruit people onto our board and the skills that we need in order to support or to support our organization.
Barry Sackett 40:53
And I think the other selling point to, you know, young professionals or people that are growing is, this is a great opportunity for you to see how an organization works. Because you, you may have an individual job that you know, you are good at, but you’re never going to grow into an organization unless you get some exposure to how they work. And because it’s a volunteer organization, you kind of get a raise your hand and be the treasurer of the thing, even though you you know, you’re not an accountant, or whatever it is. So it’s a great way to get exposure to, to the community. The other thing, you know, you’d mentioned earlier, the very sack of the 729 boards, you know, the good the good part about that is I know what all the other 28 boards are doing. And oftentimes, there’s there’s things that you can create synergy. The bad thing is I may be in conflict, right? I may be have information from one board, that is I shouldn’t be sharing with another board. So those you know, having conflict policies is very important. But having that connector, that community connector, you know, don’t ask them to be too much, but they can be so effective in getting things done inside the community. So good.
Sami Bedell-Mulhern 42:02
Well, Barry, so many good things for people to think about. And I think it’s great, because wherever you are in your board recruitment strategy, there was some great negative wisdom to get you kind of through whatever it is that you’re going through and on to bigger and better things. If you are going to leave maybe one last piece of advice, or something we didn’t ask about, is there kind of one last thing that you might want to leave everybody with?
Barry Sackett 42:30
Well, you know, I think I remember a couple of points in my board kind of timing, I remember early on when I signed up for too many boards, and I felt really stressed and I had like, three of them three days in a row and was I ready and I was about Oh Allah, you know, there’s, there’s a, you know, you are volunteering, you need to you know, you want to engage, but try to stay away from feeling guilty about it, you know, they’re going to be in there, like, you gotta get money, you got to do this, you got to do that. Really try to not make people feel guilty. I think that’s a great retention tool and a great recruitment tool. You know, the other point in my, my career, I was caught up through the ranks, and I had been president and then, you know, past presidents, and I remember the board meeting, after I was past president, where I was just a board member. And, you know, I’d been so used to being in this role of kind of leading the meeting and everything else. And now I just am a fly on the wall there to listen, and you know, to participate in a much smaller level. It’s not bad to be in both of those situations at the same time. I mean, when you’re leading one board, don’t try to leave every board, you know, step behind a little bit. And really, you know, take it in from another perspective. So I think you’ll be a lot better leader, if you can do that. But no, this training is so important, because it can make people feel you know better about being on boards, and also being so much more effective. Because again, you’re giving your time you’re taking time away from your family and everything else. The last thing you want to do is go waste time and you know, fight about Robert’s Rules of Order instead of actually making decisions for your organization. So thank you guys for putting this together.
Patrick Kirby 44:20
Well, thanks again for expertise. Again, I think it dissolves the mystery of board stuff in general. And I think that’s a lot of the hesitation on making an actionable item or doing something about it is I just don’t know, I just don’t know enough. And again, like you said earlier, I go a lot at most, I would say most board members don’t have a formal training don’t really know what they’re doing anyway. And so just doing it and working through it and being personable enough and empathetic enough to know that nobody else does either, I think is a good first step. You are great in answering that and appreciate your time today as well as super awesome. Awesome.
Barry Sackett 44:55
Thank you guys.
Sami Bedell-Mulhern 44:56
Yeah. Bye, everybody. All right
Guest Speaker
Barry Sackett
PHILANTHROPIST, LAWYER, AND BOARD MEMBER
Barry Shaw Sackett is your company’s trusted advisor and the Managing Partner of Trust Law Counsel. He helps business leaders find solutions and engage in business opportunities by fostering trust and promoting action. Barry’s business and legal experience stems from years as a business owner, chief financial officer, in-house counsel, assistant county attorney, and legal consultant. His current business involvement and past experience gives him perspective into the clients and leaders he interacts with in his work. Barry’s formal and informal education gives him the language and structured thinking to handle pressure and complexity. His practice areas include development, mergers and acquisitions, real estate, tax, estate planning, probate, and mediations and is licensed to practice in Iowa, Minnesota, California and South Dakota. Barry has been lead counsel for an equity infusion into a Northwest Iowa Company, which brought a $60 Million valuation. He also served as lead counsel for the purchase and development of Boji Bay in the new Headquarters for the company – $16 Million project. In addition to his notable M&A and development experience, Barry negotiated with USDA for additional compensation and helped develop insurance products for euthanized flocks during the Avian Influenza epidemic for the 3rd largest liquid egg products producer in the United States. Barry’s clients include owners, investors, business leaders, executives, developers, and entrepreneurs among the construction, manufacturing, banking, agriculture, commercial & residential real estate development, commodity sales, technology, and government relations industries. He helps these clients reduce risk and compliance expenses, manage opportunities, and set their businesses up for success to grow and find top talent. Barry is curious and fluid in everything he does. He loves seeing visions become a reality, and this is the reason he became an attorney.
Craft Your Year End Campaign Story
Year-end will be here before we know it. Now is the time to start planning for your campaign and collecting stories. Join Chris Miano and Carly Euler, from Memory Fox, and your NonProfit Bootcamp team, for an engaging conversation designed to help you create a compelling narrative for your year-end campaign. Learn how to highlight your organization’s impact, connect emotionally with donors, and drive engagement. Whether you’re a seasoned fundraiser or new to campaign planning, this workshop will equip you with the tools and strategies needed to make your year-end campaign a success.
View Transcript
Carly Euler 0:00
US, hello, hello, hang on. I’m got to make sure I let Patrick in.
Chris Miano 0:10
You guys hear me, yes, oh, wait.
Speaker. Oh, that’s my
Carly Euler 0:24
we hear you just fine. Crystal clear,
Chris Miano 0:29
Okay, gotcha.
Carly Euler 0:31
There’s Patrick,
Chris Miano 0:32
hello, Oh,
Carly Euler 0:45
what,
Chris Miano 0:47
what’s going on.
Patrick Kirby 0:48
It’s blast from the past, and I cannot wait to chat with you today. How are you guys?
Carly Euler 0:53
It’s also almost blessed to the future, because we’ll see you again in a couple weeks. Not
Patrick Kirby 0:59
I’ve got to be somewhere else across the country, and I can’t make it. Oh, you’re
Chris Miano 1:03
not going to be there.
Patrick Kirby 1:04
I know. I may, may do a fly in and out of
Chris Miano 1:13
the bills, backers, bar,
Patrick Kirby 1:15
I know. Well, I mean, there’s going to be football, and it’s going to be amazing. How are you guys? Good?
Chris Miano 1:24
Yeah, yeah, everything’s going really well. It’s, it’s pretty awesome to see everything come together and get to work with such great people. And you know, although I just came from Toronto, I just drove down after seeing a concert last night. So I did literally 15 minutes ago, I rolled into the driveway. I was like, yes, thank God.
Patrick Kirby 1:45
This is a very important question. What concert Did you see? It was a band
Chris Miano 1:49
called no FX, who is a band from the 90s and 80s and last tour. And so me and a couple of boys from high school were like, We gotta go. We gotta go. I
Patrick Kirby 2:03
missed them on their tour, the punk and drublic album, since I was 16 years old, and I have never loved a live show more. And now I follow Fat Mike on all of his stuff that,
Carly Euler 2:22
oh my gosh, okay, I should have known. Just talk about this for the next hour.
Patrick Kirby 2:27
This might be better take than any fundraising thing whatsoever. We will have to have a sidebar conversation about now you have to come to Nashville. Well, now I do, yeah, we’re just gonna have to follow, you know, whatever other 90s punk rock bands. So Green Day was in Minneapolis two nights ago. They’re touring with offspring, is it? No, they’re with so it’s green day,
Chris Miano 2:52
another 90s rancid
Patrick Kirby 2:56
and, oh, who else was playing there? Yeah, I thought it was like a 90s throwback kind of thing. It might be. But anyway, though, drummer in rancid, I got a photo from my buddy who went to the Green Day show, and the drummer from rancid was wearing a ghost t shirt, which is my favorite band of all time that I’ve been following around the last decade. Yeah?
Chris Miano 3:18
Oh my god. Well, cool man. Yeah, I could definitely. I mean, it was so much fun. And, like, it’s Canada, so everything’s a little bit looser, everybody’s a little bit nicer. And it was like, they played the decline at the end. And it was just like, transcendental. I was like, totally vibing. So good. I
Patrick Kirby 3:38
tried to show my kids, my 12 year old, my 10 year old, a concert from Lollapalooza. No, yeah, it was, it was, I think they played Lollapalooza. It was that, or warped tours, Warped Tour or something where they headlined. And I was trying to explain to him, like, what, how linoleum fit into my brain. I was like, I don’t understand any of this. This doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t matter.
Chris Miano 4:06
Oh, so good. Sorry. Carly, that
Patrick Kirby 4:10
was a little I needed a nerd out.
Chris Miano 4:12
He’s a big pump rock fan too, and so’s her husband. So, yeah, we’re all in good company here. All right.
Carly Euler 4:19
Yeah, we actually, Chris and I, sometimes we talk about starting, like, a podcast that could be somehow related to use, like, punk rock music and nonprofit storytelling. And what’s the connection there? Maybe you can help us with
Patrick Kirby 4:32
that. We’ll make it happen. I don’t care if that, that could be a thing just for us, even if we just, like, it’s
Chris Miano 4:37
just for us. It’s
Carly Euler 4:39
actually just a coffee chat.
Chris Miano 4:43
Some podcasts are like that. They’re just hanging out.
Patrick Kirby 4:45
Totally is alright. So we’re going to do a thing. Typically, there aren’t a lot of people who come on here, but we just put it in replay over and over again, and that’s kind of how we do. Sami may or may not pop in, so we’ll, we’ll grab her if she does. Otherwise, we’ll start there. I’ll do a quick introduction. I’ll welcome everybody. I’ll introduce you to you get to brag about each other for a little bit. And then we’ll dive into some questions on like how we do sort of end of year storytelling, what that means and everything else. We’ll have fun doing it. I would say 45 minutes is probably a really good time, and unless we decided to go off the rails and we talked for longer. So good. All right. Ready to rock?
Carly Euler 5:26
Yeah, do it.
Patrick Kirby 5:27
I love it. Here we go. Nope.
Well, hey gang, welcome to another guest expert training the friends from nonprofit bootcamp. There are excited moments when we have guests on and then there are moments like these where, like, I’m so giddy I’m almost like, and again, I realize I’ve been drinking coffee since 430 in the morning. That has nothing to do with how jittery of excited I am for today. We’re in for a treat. We know it is coming up to the end of the summer, and the thing that is sitting in the back of our brains is, how on earth do we set up the end of year asks for all the things that we are doing, because we have been bred for years that we have to ask in the final quarter. If you’re not asking, you’re not raising money. So let’s do it the right way. Shall we? We have two very special guest friends. I get the pleasure of meeting these two fantastic human beings in Nashville. I will save those stories for past the end. But regardless, you kind of just knew out of the gate that they understood storytelling in a way that was way better than everybody else, and so you get to be treated to a conversation that we’re going to have today, the same way that I was exploded in my brain when we had a conversation many a moons ago. Chris and Carly from our friends at memory Fox, how are you today? Welcome to nonprofit bootcamp. Welcome to guest expert trainings. So grateful that you are here with us today.
Chris Miano 7:03
Couldn’t be happier than to be here right now. This
Carly Euler 7:06
is really been talking about doing this for a long time, so it’s very exciting to like finally be here and finally doing it. It’s really great.
Patrick Kirby 7:13
Put it out. We put it out into the universe. Many months ago, we finally made it happen. I’m so moved. That’s alright. So before we get started, because we’ve got a lot of questions. To sort of walk through, and a lot of sort of strategic, if you will, on why we need to plan this for the end of the year. I want you guys to give you a 5000 foot view on who you are, what you do, and why we’re talking today.
Chris Miano 7:37
Carly, want to go first?
Carly Euler 7:38
No, that’s all you Okay,
Chris Miano 7:41
let’s do it then. So, well, I mean, I guess I could go back and tell a little bit about how I got into memory Fox and kind of how, how it came to life, because I think it’s kind of interesting, very organic, in the sense that I did not grow up around like technology or anything like that. And, you know, I just grew up telling stories around the dinner table, like a lot of people, you know, a little bit of a very Italian family, and so a lot of big personalities that are telling stories all the time. And when I got a little bit older, I joined the army. When I was in the army, I traveled all around the world, got to interact with some amazing people in Iraq, Afghanistan, Alaska, Germany, and a lot of places in between and one through line that I really, really learned to understand and cherish is the power of storytelling to connect people across different cultures and different socioeconomic backgrounds, and everything that makes people different is a storytelling has the ability to connect all those people to transcend those things. And so when I got out of the army, I actually originally built memory Fox as a way to interview pre dementia elderly to be able to get their life stories. That was actually a thing that I experienced. And along the way, museum here in Buffalo asked if they could use memory Fox to collect stories from veterans for a fundraising campaign. I said, that’s pretty cool idea. I don’t know a lot about that, but I would love to help. And you know, we did a we did a run through, and it went really well. They made some introductions, and it’s kind of like one of those, rest is history, kind of things where now we’ve helped over 400 organizations collect over 100,000 pieces of content, videos, pictures, stories. We just hit that milestone, I think, like last month. And so, huge, huge, so exciting. And we’re so privileged to be able to help and and share our energy with nonprofits and like, really help with fundraising and telling great stories. Right? Love
Patrick Kirby 9:40
it. I love it.
Carly Euler 9:43
Yeah. So when I joined the team, I actually originally learned about memory Fox because I was a memory Fox customer. So I worked at a nonprofit that was interested in telling impact stories. And, yeah, I became a memory Fox customer. And you know, a few years later, Chris was like, hey, what do you think about joining the team? We don’t really have somebody on the team that’s worked at a nonprofit before, like, as, you know, as much as I had, and I was like, well, all right, that’d be kind of, that’d be pretty cool. I guess I’ll do that. And really great, because I get to work with, like Chris said, you know, so many different missions that serve so many different purposes all across the world. It’s just so interesting to think about all the impact and really all the stories that are showing the impact. So, yeah, that’s just a little bit about me.
Chris Miano 10:31
It sort of fits our personality, too. I mean, there’s a little bit of like, you know, there’s a little bit of punk rock and telling great stories, right? And like, being thoughtful of people and elevating people’s voices, giving voices to people who usually are not part of the conversation, right? And so it like, really fits me and Carly and the team is like, how often you get to do things that you love and are super passionate about, and that aligns with your work, it aligns with your personal life, and like you really, when you have that. It’s so so special.
Patrick Kirby 11:01
Yeah, I love it all right, so we’re gonna dive in, because I have so many questions. We probably should have spent at least three hours catching up prior to this. So boot camp people know that when we are enthusiastic about this stuff, this is literally this how we interact, because this is, this is kind of our favorite thing, which is storytelling. But at the end of the year, I think a lot of nonprofits who know they have to ask for money, who know they have to set the table for engaging some of their bigger donors, or reminding you know their community, that they exist and they serve an amazing purpose. We’ll do the following, which is, this is what we did this year, and here are the stats you should give us money. Typically great idea. But when you are in a season of giving the difference between rattling off a bunch of stats and relating to people with stories that hit their heart are two totally different things. So I want to kind of maybe start with this idea of stats versus stories, and why you prefer the latter over the former, just because, well, why?
Chris Miano 12:18
Well, I think at a very high level, when you are only looking but people are not numbers, right? A lot of these nonprofits have very complicated missions, and they’re very complicated people they serve because people are complicated, right? Humans are complicated, and so there’s something to be said for not looking at them only statistically, right? Because a lot of inequity was built, you know, began because people looked at like, well, this nonprofit is not their impact. Numbers aren’t as good as this nonprofit. Well, have you really looked at that organization and look at, you know, the complexity of their mission? Do they have the resources to be able to collect all this data? So I think like, on an emotional like, like, on a high philosophical level, that’s important. But I think also, you know, stories are how people have connected for 1000s, since the beginning of we first were able to talk right, the values, the mores, the the history of peoples were transferred through stories, across generations. You’ve got, you know, Gilgamesh, Virgil, Homer, all these ancient, traditional storytellers, because people couldn’t read. You know? They could. They weren’t reading. They probably could. There was no like, statistics, right? They weren’t like, doing that sort of thing, right? It was all about stories, and that was how you conveyed things. So I think it’s organic to who we are, and it really affects us in the most visceral way. But I wouldn’t say the statistics to throw the baby out with the bathwater, as they say, because at its most optimal, these two things are aligned, and they synchronize together. And when you do that, then you’re really, really, really, can achieve powerful things
Patrick Kirby 13:58
Carly, what sort of human, humanizing pieces do we see in the storytelling that you have seen and you’ve worked on with the nonprofit realm, like, because, again, you see all the numbers you’re you’re asking nonprofits question like, What? Tell me a little bit about your your your impact, and tell you about these things. But where there have been a moment where you’re like, Okay, well, this now proves everything that we had in our you know, in our brains, that the humanization of all these impact numbers makes a difference.
Chris Miano 14:29
Well, for me, I always like when it involves when you can give a platform to children, like I’m a father, and so I’m very affected by children. And what’s so interesting, it’s so hard to use content with children because of consent and various legal difficulties, that memory Fox makes a lot easier, and so it makes it so much easier for these nonprofits to collect Stories from children. And like nothing moves me more than than than a child, talking about, like a mission, right? Talking about how they were affected, or how this is improved their lives, or just telling the story about how much fun they had, right? Like that to me, just warms my heart. And that’s when I see, like the real, real exciting thing for me, but I’m sure Carly, everybody’s a little bit different. Well,
Carly Euler 15:22
I was kind of thinking somewhat on the same line as you which is, we do have that one story that we share a lot. We when we do external, you know, webinars and things we have, like this 16 second clip, and it’s just this mother and her child, and she’s just saying, you know, I had a great time. I learned a lot from my counselors this summer. It was the best summer. You know, I’m not going to say like, the exact words that she said, but it was. It’s just really makes you smile, and it really makes you think, like, wow, they really are helping that family. And then when you follow that up by saying, well, actually, we’re helping this many families, you can really picture that that one story is really just a symbol of many, many families that are having a positive impact at that program. And it makes you really want to be a part of it, because you’re like, Well, I can see it, you know? I can really put myself in that mission. I can see that that is really making a huge difference,
Patrick Kirby 16:14
well, and you can hear it, yeah. So, I mean, there’s, there’s so many different, like, there’s so many different components to, I think storytelling in general, especially on video right, you can see you can put a face to a an organization, but the same way that you want to as a nonprofit leader, pick up the phone and talk to your donors, is that you can convey a lot more enthusiasm and passion than you can on Making sure that you got every exclamation point right in the email that you sent, and that you hope you didn’t put an ellipsis where you shouldn’t have, because that sounds a little weird, or people didn’t read that caps correctly. Like there’s a lot of ways that you can maybe take data or info or stories in just only print, and again, we’re not ostracizing one or the other. Oh, no, all those combo plans. These are the combo platters, right? But through video, through storytelling, you can really feel a lot of extra emotion that you would have not necessarily done if you’re just in this linear way of of sort of selling your organization.
Chris Miano 17:18
Yeah, and you’re, it’s even a step further is like you’re when you present your the people that you support, you are platforming them, right? And you are saying, you’re telling the story of your organization that you care about this stuff. It says so many things, other than just this person’s story, right? It says these are the values that we have. These are the people that we care about. These are we’re going to take that time to share their stories and elevate them like even even a video of somebody a happy birthday from the staff to a key volunteer. Or it could be a volunteer, right? Or it could be a donor, right? It doesn’t always have to be a donor. It could be someone who’s volunteered for 30 years, right? We are saying when you present a video or a story like, you’re really telling a lot more than just, like, the functional aspect of what that story is meant to accomplish. Yeah, yeah.
Patrick Kirby 18:13
So there’s a difference too. And I want to get this out of the gate before we get into the practical elements of, like, what, how do you tell the story? How do you ask a story? Like, how do you do that? And I think the more you know, some people will say, Well, you shouldn’t do that. I mean, that’s, that’s taking advantage of whatever downtrodden or whatever. We’re not talking about inspiration porn. I love that term. It’s, you know, it’s, it is about descriptive as possible when you’re trying to talk about how to showcase a story. It’s not that, but it is giving a glimpse of the reality and maybe the massive feels that you have when you work in, you know, the nonprofit realm. And I think there’s an honesty that comes with this type of storytelling, this type of video capturing that you don’t find in a lot of other platforms, that is so refreshingly interesting that it holds and grasps the attention of those that you’re trying to get in front of. I think,
Carly Euler 19:14
yeah, I think that is such a good point, because most nonprofits, especially small, grassroots nonprofits, one of their biggest issues isn’t necessarily proving what impact they’re having, but it’s even just letting people know they exist, and letting them know there’s a problem that we’re solving. So that’s something you can do a lot easier with video, but yeah, that’s like you have a couple obstacles you gotta overcome, and number one’s definitely just letting people even know you exist like you’re, you’re having your whole brand,
Patrick Kirby 19:44
yeah, yeah. No, I love it. Okay, so let’s, let’s, let’s think like a nonprofit. We’ve got the end of the year coming up. We’ve got a bunch of great things that we have done over the years. We got to do something a little bit different. We’ve gotten memory Fox on standby. We’re, we got, but we got to do a little bit of pre work right now, right so now we need to figure out what, let’s talk about the what, what on earth do we do first, when we’re trying to craft a great story about our organization as it pertains to capturing the attention of potential end of year donors? What are we doing? Step number one. So
Chris Miano 20:22
one of the things that we’ve been talking about recently is the idea of, like, story structure, right? A lot of nonprofits, people listening to this have, have been told that, like, the way to tell a story is, you know, you got your exposition, your inciting incident, your rising action, your climax, you’re falling, falling action, your resolution, right? And it’s Fritos pyramid. It’s called, and that’s the traditional way that stories get told. And, but, but what are we doing here? Because you mentioned this and, and you hinted about this is, like, the ethics of storytelling, right? And so if we’re forcing a story structure on our the people we serve so that they look nice and it’s all presentable. Like, what are we doing, right? We’re just, we’re just forcing them into, you know, that’s not authentic, right? And now more than ever, like, if you’re a nonprofit standing out, and I always say that standing out in the attention economy is impossible, like, it’s really, really hard. And so what we try to pitch is like, instead of thinking of like, oh, we need a success story. Oh, we need this story, instead of, instead of forcing that function is tell a more diverse amount of stories. So like, it could be volunteer stories, like a older volunteer mentoring a younger volunteer. Or it could be two, top two volunteers that became friends as a part of it, or, you know, it could. There’s hundreds of different stories that you could tell. It could be a veteran who goes through a program and now they’re paying it forward. We’re showing strength based messaging that says, like, how are they contributing to their community? And when you use the old style of storytelling, you force this like artificial structure onto it. But when you, when you commit to telling stories about themes that our organization represents and values, now you’re telling more inclusive stories, and you can tell more stories instead of just being like, Oh, we’re only going to show success stories, oh, show everybody. Show people who are going through things, so show someone who just showed up today, right? Show all the full spectrum. Because today there’s like, such a demand, insatiable demand, for content. You gotta have a wide diverse of stories. And also people are used to like now they messaging is very specifically tailored, and so you might have a lot of different stories. Only one or two may resonate with this person. One or two may resonate with this person, but if you’re only telling one impact story, you’re actually being exclusive, yep, and you’re separating people. Whereas, what do we want to do? Right? We want a big welcome sign that says, join our community of donors, volunteers, right? Like, yeah, welcome sign, versus, like, an old school, you know, Fritos pyramid,
Carly Euler 23:07
Yep, yeah. And I think similarly to that a lot of nonprofits, it kind of used to be like a traditional way of talking to your audience, where you’d only speak from the CEO or from the founder, or maybe from the board chair. And I think, you know, people are really interested in hearing from everybody on staff, or they’re really interested, Chris already mentioned volunteer stories, for example, but people are really interested in hearing from, you know, why did you join the board? Why did you decide to work here? Why did What made you start volunteer? Volunteering with us? There’s so many different stories that somebody’s going to see themselves in. And maybe that means they become a donor. Maybe that means they can work for you. Maybe that’s somebody really talented that you you know, can bring on your board you never know, like, what story really is going to connect in, what outcome it’s going
Patrick Kirby 23:54
to have. I’m telling you that so you guys hacked into hyper personalization before it actually became a thing that themed out. I’m serious, because where the the the retention level of a lot of donors is because we got the attention span of gnats, the retention rate just falls off because we’re get distracted by this or this or this, and the idea that you can have multiple themes or multiple stories within a donor or a client or a someone you’ve served or a board member, etc, could be one story part parceled into five different themes, so that if you meet somebody who’s not interested in board leadership, but really interested in what that person did to do X, Y and Z, and you’ve got a clip about it, you now have hyper personalized that experience for that potential donor. And they go, Oh, this makes way more sense than anything else. What I also love about your concept in the storytelling pieces is that the outside of the box, way in which you tell it is way more interesting now because people are seeking out that that’s their that’s newer. I’ve never seen that before, and I always make it akin to, like, a breaking bad episode. So remember back in the day where, like, they would show you at the beginning of the show, they’d show you the end of the actual show, yeah, and they’d go right into the credits, and you’d start the entire show, and then the entire episode would be how they got to the thing that you just saw beginning. And I go, what makes it Breaking Bad? So brilliant story writing, right? They’re just, they’re telling you what the end of the show, of the of the episode, is going to be, and your whole concept, like, how the hell do you get there? Like, and you had to walk through the entire story, like, this twist and this thing, whatever, the way that your brain works, that way, the way that you can actually tell stories about it is, is that’s That’s brilliant. So I love the what, Alright, so we’ve got the the What is this? Well, we need to think about it from an inclusive sense of of storytelling like we so let’s throw it all out there. What questions are we asking those that we’re interviewing? Or what questions are we asking ourselves on what we want to accomplish that might help us sort of navigate these stories, like, right? We got the how, or that we got the what, multiple angles. What questions are we asking ourselves to sort of help navigate the storytelling?
Chris Miano 26:17
I love that, and that’s kind of the most it’s the most important part, you know, it’s like, and one thing I’ve learned is, like, it’s, oh, it’s not about the answer. It’s always about the questions. Like that is what, yes things, and that’s what changes the world. Is good questions. And so when you’re when you’re talking to your storytellers, or you’re however you’re collecting the content, there’s just, there’s many different ways, um, right, sit down and really think about construction of these. So for example, you know, what is it like to volunteer here? That’s fine. That’s nice, right? They might fill in the gaps, or you might get some poor content where they just sort of rambled, right? But what I like to think about is, like, with my kids, right? If I asked my son, how was school today? He’s like, Oh no, yep. But how was your math test? You know, what was it like the first day of volunteering? What was your first volunteer experience? What was your experience as a beneficiary of your first moment when you walked in that door? Like visceral, like very intentional moments that that like, even when you say them, right, you can feel the energy of that, because, yeah, everybody likes that, like I so I just think of like, frame it like, how you would ask not to be insulting about that. But it’s really true, like being specific about what you’re asking for to elicit, like, a great, a great response,
Carly Euler 27:39
yeah, right. It also makes it a lot easier to answer, right? When you say something that specific, tell us about the first time you volunteered. Then I in my head, I say, Okay, the first time I volunteered with your nonprofit, I felt this. I did this. I performed in this way. It’s a lot easier than when you’re just saying something super open ended. I might not know where to start. It might make me feel self conscious, like I don’t have a good story to share, or that something I’m going to say might come out stupid. And people get really nervous about sounding stupid, right? You hear that all the time, but really, if you kind of set them up with a good prompt, then they’re able to feel much more empowered to give the answer that they know that you’re actually going to be able to use,
Patrick Kirby 28:22
well, your follow ups, yeah, all of your follow ups are just genuinely curious. Yes, well, that’s interesting. Tell me more about that, or explain that a little bit more, right?
Chris Miano 28:33
No, yeah. So it’s really you have, and it’s some of it is, and I hate to be like you, you, but it’s, it’s us, right? It’s about having true empathy who you’re collecting from, and not seeing them as an object or a means to an end, right? But just but giving them the platform, giving them the pathway. You know, because depending on who you’re collecting from, there could be there could be fear, there could be anxiety, or there could be embarrassment, or there could be and so crafting those things in a way that elicits positive responses, makes them feel better, right? There, you’re, you’re you’re affecting them. When you ask somebody a question, you are affecting them by the way that you ask that. And we should do no harm, right? We’re not just trying to get you to cry. We’re trying to, we’re trying to, you know, get to the heart.
Patrick Kirby 29:18
How much, how much background information or research do you need to do with the interviewee before? Or do you genuinely come at it with a blank slate? There’s two different ways you can go about any of these interviews. Or these stories that you’re trying to elicit is hyper researched. Or, Hey, I’m going to let it flow. I think I kind of know where we want to go, but I’m going to let them control the narrative, because, either way, requires you to be so actively you actively listen, right? Because it’s naturally to kind of get a little bit more. So you’re gonna have to, like, pay attention and go what you said. There was really fascinating this, and now you just want to take a nap afterwards, because that’s a really big amount of information and concentration you have. But do you have a preference on which way that you find stories to be more appealing?
Chris Miano 30:06
Carly you want to go? Because I’ve got some ideas.
Carly Euler 30:10
I would say, well, first, it depends on who you are collecting the story from, right? So I think probably this example, let’s talk about somebody, a program participant, somebody that you maybe helped at your nonprofit. And I think that most of the time, when you’re finding someone that you’re planning to capture a story, especially if it’s a long form type of interview, you likely know a lot of the background from their story, because they were probably brought to you from your program manager or somebody who works in the program says, Hey, this person’s really interested in sharing their story, and they have, they have an interesting perspective to give to you. So I actually think that when it comes to something like that, it is really important to do your research, have an idea of what the story might entail, and that really is mostly so the person you’re interviewing does feel comfortable. You want them to feel like they won’t be surprised by any questions, or that you’re going to maybe ask them something they’re not comfortable speaking about, and even in most situations, I would say, let them know upfront the questions and say, Hey, is there any topic that you need me to avoid? Because there’s not. We don’t want to be asking something that they don’t that they aren’t comfortable speaking about so I think that I do like really off the cuff discussions most of the time, maybe staff members, maybe donors. You can capture somebody, maybe at your fundraising event in real time, having a good time. What are they doing? What are they saying? What are they feeling? But in terms of a long form interview, I think it’s very important to be prepared and it that’s the
Chris Miano 31:44
that’s, I think the heart of it is like, well, how are we collecting these stories, and what kind of stories are we wanting here? So if you use a tool like memory Fox, it’s, it’s more for breadth rather than depth, because we want to collect a lot of different stories, so we have the right story for the right person at the right time. Whereas, if you bring someone into the office, you really gotta be prepared, because, you know they’re, they’re busy people too, right? And so you want to make sure that you’re very prepared for that. And there’s a place for both, right? You want your like you’ll you’ll want your great story that you can show the video all the time to gal and things like that. But you also want your more diverse stories as well. And so some of it, it depends a little bit on on, on the method that you’re going to be collecting all those stories are going to go. Do
Patrick Kirby 32:31
you have individuals that you would suggest people watch or or listen to in the way that they conduct interviews that I find fast. There’s certain people where I just like, I will listen to that person either on a podcast for hours, or I’ll listen to a show just because they ask really good questions. The hot ones, for example, is like an amazingly crazy right? But like Sean Evans, who’s the host of there asks such good questions, his research team is just like they’re impeccable of finding little, little things and nuances about stories that I find that sort of methodical move from point A to point B just brilliant. Is there anybody else you know Chris that you love watching telling stories or or asking questions that you just go, if you’ll watch this person, you’re going to get exactly what we’re talking
Chris Miano 33:27
about. So, so one of the things I’ve been working on is a presentation in a in a deep dive into what I like to call Springsteen stories, because I’m a huge Bruce Springsteen fan. But it could be Springsteen, it could be Taylor Swift, it could be Beyonce, anybody who’s a storyteller musician, that’s actually where my heart goes on. In terms is, I don’t think of these things as interviews. I think of them more like people centric, of them just saying what they are. And if you look at like the way an album is constructed, right? You have a theme, you know, the album title and the theme Born in the USA, right? And then you have 1015, songs that riff on that. They’re all little sub stories that that play into that theme. And so that’s the way that I think about story construction, is you’re identifying the themes, and then you’re doing story campaigns to collect stories from people that fit that theme, and then now you’re approaching that theme from here’s a veteran’s like, view of it, here’s someone else’s view of it, you know, and then you have that such a diverse array of stories that will, like I said, you’ll have the right story for the right person at the right time. So that’s the way that I think about it, is, like, how do we construct it in that way? Yeah,
Patrick Kirby 34:39
no, I love that. Which means, clearly, you’re, and this is just going to be the niche, most niche reference of it all time. You probably love a Coheed and Cambria album. So all of our real good, nerdy punk Rockies are going to go and get that one that’s going to be really good, absolutely. So when you’re when are you thinking about it from a donor’s perspective, or are you thinking about it from a campaign’s perspective? Because again, end of year requires us to think a little bit differently and outside of the box. And so when we are piecing together our themes, our theme might be end of year fundraising for this program in particular, and then we want to build, maybe our stories that go around and match the theme for the end of the year. So it all makes sense, because I think one of the things that you because, again, we want the diversity of thought, but we also want to build right? So it’s, you know, we’re doing this live as a training in August, which means September, October, November, December, should have some sort of trend towards a thing, right? So we don’t want too diverse we want diverse opinions, what I think, but we want our theme to be sort of that kind of what we’re looking for. Yeah,
Chris Miano 35:54
so I think like a good theme would be like paying it forward, right? Is like people in the organization who’ve either come through as a graduate of a program, or the volunteers, like everybody at some point felt something, you know, so they’re paying it forward. And so like the idea of people who are graduates of the program paying it forward, like, that’s the way I think of the theme is like something a little more, something more like that. There’s probably some other examples too that Carly could think of. But I like that one because it’s, like, a very visceral thought. And then now you could build in these beautiful stories of people who’ve been through the program, and now they’re volunteers, yeah, you know. And so, like, I think that’s just so cool, and it really gives, like, a very rich and warm feeling of just like, Okay, let’s get our success stories in, and let’s only show them Well, everybody’s, it’s a little more complicated than that, right, right? Like Carly. I’m sure you, you could think of a bunch of themes too, that, nope, did you freeze? Well, I
Patrick Kirby 36:52
think, I think the other thing too, is that when you have a when you have so, well, so,
Chris Miano 37:08
no,
Patrick Kirby 37:09
she would say those things, it was gonna be good. It was totally gonna be good. I love that. Yeah. Well, part of that thing, and I think where, where she’s going to is that you can, you can pick and choose now what matters specifically to your end goal as well. So you don’t necessarily have to, like, just be, I’m gonna get out in the open and do all these they can fit which I which I really, really, really like, okay, so we got the what we’ve got the how we’re sort of establishing, kind of that base execution wise. And Dick, maybe let’s even get back into like memory foxes as a product itself. How do we use it to collect all of this? And then where are we? Where are we storing it? It doesn’t make any sense. I don’t know anything about technology, because that actually makes a big difference.
Chris Miano 37:55
Well, that’s the hardest. That ends up becoming the hardest part, and I think it’s the biggest barrier to collecting a lot of stories, is it can be really expensive to hire a videographer or have someone on your staff. Would be even you know, would be amazing, but, and so, how do you collect them? Right? You add them to email them to you, like, record a video of yourself and then email it to me. The emails, it’s the file’s too big. That’s kind of was the foundational thing is, like, it’s actually really hard to collect videos and, oh, by the way, like you could put up a Dropbox, which is the DIY way to do it, and I reckon you can do that, right? But how do you collect consent? Right now, you’ve got a different form that you have to handle consent. Oh, by the way, you have to track that and then reach out to them later down the line to make sure that they still have consent. Oh, by the way, where do you record like, who’s in the video? Right? What? How long is this consent for all like the all the data around it, right? That to be a good steward of stories, we need to make sure that we track and we value and when you value those things, you get more stories. Because people know you’re going to be a good steward of their story. So you know the how is you can do it right? You could set up a Dropbox and just have people submit videos to it, and we’ve all done it before, but if you’re going to track consent, and you’re going to track the who’s and the what’s and the hows of that thing, now you need a separate Google Doc. You need a link to that video in it, and like, right? And so it just becomes an impossible task for small and large organizations. And so that was kind of our mission. Is like, how do we sort of streamline that process so that nonprofits are building that story bank, like a real story bank, not just like, Oh, here’s our video that we show everybody, right? But like, a real rich bank, you know, Carly. I think we’re, yeah,
Patrick Kirby 39:49
and Carly, because specific with the story bank like that. Because again, end of year is great. You have this whole sort of theme. Well, now we got all this kind of stuff. Can we repurpose it. Can we reuse it? Or is it never just now that was great to have it. I’m just going to look at it privately. When I feel sad about myself and I want to we can reuse this stuff, right? Yes,
Carly Euler 40:10
yeah. So we actually get asked that question all the time, and most of the time, when people ask about reusing content, they’re they kind of ask me, like, oh, well, what about like on social media, can I repost the same video again? Can I, you know, use this caption again? And my answer is always yes, absolutely. Because every time that you post something on Instagram, rails or on Tiktok or on Facebook, LinkedIn, it doesn’t matter, at any given time, only about 5% of your following is actually going to see that, even though you might have 1000s and 1000s of followers, still 5% is going to see any given post that’s assuming you haven’t boosted it or put any money behind it. And that’s a whole nother conversation that I don’t care to get into, because it will take all day. But let’s just say you’re posting a story organically on LinkedIn, 5% of people are going to see it. Let’s not assume everybody in your audience also reads your emails, right? Not you know, you probably have maybe a 30% open rate, 40% open rate. It’s okay to use those stories again. It’s okay to share those because different people are going to see them, especially based on the platform. I mean, sometimes you can post something at on Tiktok at 9am doesn’t go anywhere. 1pm millions of people see it. There’s, you know, there is a rhyme or reason to it, but they don’t let us, people like us, know that, because then it’d be too easy to
Patrick Kirby 41:31
go, yeah, someone’s losing a job over that. Well, yeah, too. And I think nonprofits need to hear this as well. Which is your content will get boring to you the minute everyone else is just hearing about it. And it is so difficult for our nonprofit brains to go, well, this isn’t working. This isn’t working. I gotta switch it up every two seconds, and I gotta just throw it out there where that consistency is the right so your logo in front of them, this story, this person, this face, this like, whatever. So again, leading up to the end of the year, as you are recording and you are showcasing that face, that story, every time it clicks, and like, oh yeah, I heard about that. That’s intriguing. That’s interesting. They’re enthusiastic. It’s great. So by the time that you ask for money, or you ask for them to invest in that they’ve already finally figured out that it’s you who needs it, and this is where it’s going for because you’ve been consistent this entire time.
Chris Miano 42:34
Well. And even a step further is like you, the part of it is how you should be collecting stories kind of all year round, yeah, rams and things like that. Like, you should have a volume, I say should, like, it’s that easy, but, but, like, ideally, right? We have a volume of stories that that we can pull from, rather than just like, Oh, shoot. The fiscal year is about to be over, and we need a success stories. We’re going to drag somebody in and make them be in front of a camera. And so if you’re doing it all year round, it, it makes your job a lot easier. And then you can tell those to Carly’s point, she always talks about this is, like, multi channel, yeah, right? It’s like, is, like, yeah, it might not have done well on Instagram, but it could go on Tiktok, or it could be in your newsletter. It could be in all these different places. And so, but it’s hard to have enough content for that, right? Like, that’s a good amount of content. Even if you are reusing things. You want some freshness and some new Yeah,
Patrick Kirby 43:28
well, so I have a quick So Carly, I have a question for you specifically, because I think a lot of people assume that we need to get clients, only volunteers, only board members, only people who are us, right? Chris mentioned this. Look, who’s not about us. But is it maybe? I don’t know. Can we use stories from our supporters who then eventually become the champions of that third party endorsement, which is way more important than first party solicitation. They expect us, as nonprofit leaders, to go, I think you should give to us. You’re like, yeah, yeah, we get it. You’re paid to say that, right? But what if, and maybe you’ve got examples of this. What if you’ve got champions that are influencers within the community that do these stories that say, Hey, listen, I love this organization more than anything, because they’re just this and this and this. I think you should donate. You should give, you should support, you should like. Because the setup to that is like, whoa. Why is that person saying nice? And it almost makes it more intriguing. The more these outsiders are talking nice about an organization that you don’t even have an association
Carly Euler 44:33
with, right, then you feel like the outsider, right? So, yeah, I mean, you’re kind of hitting on two things, one that is nondrin, one that is fundraising and what and the first one that comes to mind is usually when you’re looking to like go out to dinner. For example, you might go Google best Italian restaurant in my town, and you know some websites are going to pop up because they’ve trended on best Italian restaurant in your town. But you probably don’t go down to maybe Yelp, or go to like, Google reviews or something, and actually read what people are saying, right? And then you decide where you want to go. People love a recommendation. People love word of mouth. To be like, where should I give my money? Where should I support in my community? But in terms of the fundraising side, I mean, it’s no secret that peer to peer fundraising is one of the most exciting fundraising tools that people can use, because that is literally what people are doing. They’re saying, I’m supporting them by running this 5k or I’m supporting them by walking 100 miles this month. Or they don’t all have to be like a physical feat, but people don’t all the time, and we always, when I used to run peer to peer campaigns, I’d always tell people, okay, now take a video of you training for your 5k Yeah, take a photo of you. You know, rape when you’re done training for your marathon, whatever you’re doing to, like, prep yourself or take a take a photo of the playlist that you listen to today on your training run. Um, because that’s content that people are interested in seeing, and it’s going to help the people that they’re asking money from to support your mission. You know, because they support you, that’s peer to peer. You know, that’s peer to peer in one sentence. But it’s the same thing with stories. If you’re getting your donors, if you really start having, like, a two way conversation with your donors, and when they give, you say, Hey, why’d you give today? Would you be willing to record a video? Would you be willing to let us know in a written testimonial, what you find inspiring about us, or what you think we do? Well, in our community, you’re going to start getting content in that is going to just naturally have that peer to peer feel absolutely
Chris Miano 46:36
so I have a good example of that. Um, this is actually before, I think it might have been before you Carly is
Patrick Kirby 46:45
the before time free. Carly
Chris Miano 46:49
is so a United Way. I can’t remember exactly what the campaign was, but it had to do with women in sports, and they got members of the US women’s soccer team to submit videos. And what I thought was really cool about that was that there was no way these people were going to like, fly into Buffalo and get in front of a camera and be recorded. Right? The only way they were getting this content is because they were using memory Fox to like really easily collect it. They just clicked the button and clicked the link and then opened up, and then they submitted their video. They could go back and, like, fix it if they didn’t want to do it. So they had control over it, and especially if you’re faking this like you’re very concerned with your with your image, because it’s so protected, right? And yeah, and so that was really neat. I we’ve, we’ve had some celebrities, but that was pretty cool. That was pretty cool. One
Patrick Kirby 47:42
of the most annoying things, because, again, this is kind of a nerdy podcast, and it’s because kind of we can do whatever we want to talk about this on this training, if you’ve if you’re a fan of the novels, the Game of Thrones series, right? The author, George R Martin, has been writing the winds of winter, which is their next book, for 943 years. So it’s been, it’s been literally two decades since he released the last book, which is annoying to all the fans, because you got, you got up to this, this point, and then it’s like, and we’re done for a while. So please tell me that your storytelling and your end of year campaign just needs to end at the end of the year, right? We don’t do any follow up. There’s no gratitude afterwards. We don’t do anything with video until the next part of the end of the year, right? That’s the we’re done. We’re done with all content. If only,
Carly Euler 48:40
no, of course not. We would never recommend that. But one thing that we talk about, especially when it comes to storytelling all year long, is trying to find unique ways to reach out to your donors, or to anybody, all of your audience that has to do with maybe a important holiday that’s coming up, or maybe just, you know, your event that’s coming up. You know, I like to give the example of like, okay, so wrapped up your year end campaign, like you already said. You probably sent them 1000 emails at the end of December, you’ve got all your money. You know, you’re going to start saying thank you starting in January, but maybe in February, instead of just a thank you, it’s a thank you for being our Valentine. You know you’re important to us. You’re our Valentine this year we celebrate you. Or maybe in March, it’s instead of, you know, just St Patrick’s Day, you’re saying, Well, we are lucky to have you in our community. There’s just a lot of small things that you can do, that you can record in a in a video, or, you know, take a staff photo, maybe all dressed up. That makes, you know, sense for the theme, that you can find a unique way to share your gratitude that is still topical and not just in everyday. Thank you. Yep,
Patrick Kirby 49:49
one of the things all year round, yeah, all year round, well, and the other thing too is that you take a lot of notes in your CRM. You you you meet and you interview donors, and you just talk with them about, you know, your organization throughout the entire year, there’s a nugget of information that you probably have garnered. They like golf, for example, right? So A, if you’re playing golf, it should, it should be on your brain. So you’re like, God, you know, Steve really loves golf. I’m going to send him a little quick note where you hop on, you click a just a real quick video of you in the sand trap. You’re like, Hey, Steve, I am. I’m playing golf today. Terrible, but I know that I this, this, being in the sand trap made me think about you. Hope you’re doing great. I’m going to go and get a triple bogey here. I hope you’re golfing better than I am. And talk soon. There’s phenomenal, right? There’s moments phenomenal where you can collect random bits of information about your donors, and then be very going back to Carly’s point, hyper personalizing all of these experience and back to Chris’s point, where you can just theme out a bunch of different ways to communicate that are so inclusive to somebody who doesn’t think of you as just going up to them like they’re an ATM. And I think that’s where, again, where memory Fox is so brilliant, is that it’s more concerned with these wonderful relationship building opportunities that will in turn become fundraising opportunities. But you can only do that first if you are a chief relationship building executive, and whether you are an entry level person or you’re a CEO, you’re the same chief relationship building operative in your organization, and you’re using this way to make it different than anybody else. Well, I’m
Chris Miano 51:36
sure a lot of listeners would be thinking, it’s probably it’s hard to collect video all the time and have it be present in mind, and you have to motivate people to do it, not not, maybe not the even the storytellers, but even like to get volunteers like help you, and like to convince your boss that this is a good investment of time or money if you use it like memory Fox. And so a lot of it is, and this is easier said than done, but it should hopefully resonate. Is like making storytelling a part of your culture. Yes, it doesn’t happen just overnight, right? It’s like, oh, we just add a little thing to our newsletter that has a QR code on it that says we want to hear this month’s theme is this, we want to hear your first volunteer day, right? It’s making it a part of everything you do. Oh, we got a program coming up. You know? Bill’s going to be in charge of making sure that people submit stories, right? The Content Collection champion for the event, right? It’s about making it a part of your systems. And then it becomes more organic. And as people started to see the fruits of that labor it, they become very protective and very passionate of that, yeah. And then it becomes like a competitive advantage against other nonprofits. Not that that’s necessarily how it works, right, but we are trying to stand out and resonate as best we can. And so to your point, I think you mentioned that is like, it does sort of separate you. Sense of like, hey, we care about this stuff. We take the time for this. It tells a great story. Well, the
Patrick Kirby 53:10
other thing too, it’s like, at the beginning of board meetings, you should have a mission moment every single time that you gather as a board Well, what a great way to do that. If you’re collecting stories from donors and people that you’re doing show a video right show a video at the beginning of a board meeting. You don’t have to have somebody tell and rehearse a story. Like, let me tell you a story about Phil and Phil, no, you don’t have them tell it right there. And I think that begins your, you know, almost mission to make your organization a storytelling organization. It starts with those meetings. It starts with your all hands on deck meeting. It starts with you know how you promote on your on your social or maybe even on your website, if you’re visually storytelling forward, oh god, you’re
Chris Miano 53:53
gonna demonstrate gratitude, right? Sure, it does. Gratitude to your donors by presenting them with these beautiful stories, gratitude to the people that you serve. Yeah, that they’re gracious to them, that, like, they will go on this journey with you. And like, it’s about, if you have that as a North Star, like, you can get some really beautiful, beautiful stuff. And like, that’s building real relationships, real, real, long, lasting, deep relationships. One of the sad
Patrick Kirby 54:19
things about doing boot camps like this and guest expert trainings is that the time goes by faster than any point in time. We could do this all day. I go. This is that horrible thing. And again, Sami is out today, and so I could go forever, but you’ll get added up with the editing contest. So here’s what I’d love to do. Carly, I know that there’s a lot of people who would just love the idea of collecting a lot of videos, starting is the is the number one thing, because it’s I must be too expensive. It’s too complicated. I’m never going to be able to even do anything about that. Where on earth do we go to find memory Fox so that we can figure out how to do this in the easiest possible way.
Carly Euler 55:03
Yes, that is, yeah, we hear that all the time. So we you can find us on our website, memory fox.io, we also are on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Tiktok, YouTube, especially on Tiktok, highly recommend you check me out on there. It’s actually kind of my memory Fox account, because I also post fundraising tips. You know, every other day I just do fun things that can make you feel more comfortable getting in front of a camera. And, like you said, sometimes just hard to get started. But I always just like to say an infographic has never gone viral, so let’s stop pretending it’s going to start getting some video. Give it a try. It’s, I promise you, it’s a lot easier than you think.
Patrick Kirby 55:45
I love it. Of course, we’re going to have all of those things in length. So if you watching this in the replay, get down there. Get a hold of Chris, get a hold of Carly. Follow them on all the things. Watch the like, read the transcript out. We’ll pull some quotes out of it. Get your butts in there to do a test run. Is there, is there a human being that we need to talk to, or do we get to talk to you human beings as well? And then how do we do that? Is there an address, an email address? Is there a phone number that we can connect because people want to do it right away, right? I don’t want to waste my time searching the internet. How do I call you now? You could go on
Chris Miano 56:17
the website we’ve got, we built a chat bot that we put on there that goes right to our cell phones. And I’m not kidding,
Patrick Kirby 56:24
I love it.
Chris Miano 56:26
We literally will answer it. One thing that’s important is, like, it’s a very consultative, human centric process. This isn’t like you’re just going to get a platform, it’s another software, and then just like you’re on your own, like, we take it very we know this is a new habit for a lot of people, and building a storytelling culture is not trivial, and so we will be, we are part of that with you, and we are your we are your friend. You know we’re here to help.
Patrick Kirby 56:49
I love it. You guys been rock stars since the moment I found out you existed, which is great. Cannot thank you enough for your time, your perspective, helping our nonprofit boot camp members think you’re their end of year out from a storytelling perspective. And again, this is in addition to everything you do. This is the cherry on top. This is the thing that’s going to get you noticed and make a difference between somebody else getting attention. And you, I know you can do it, and that’s why we brought Chris and Carly on today. So thank you very much from our friends. Thank you for swinging by in the replay, click on the links below. Got any questions? Of course, ask Sami myself. We’ll get you connected right away. Friends, you’re the best. Appreciate you. We’ll be in touch soon. I’m sure this isn’t the last time that we’ll have a conversation like this again, because you guys are amazing. Thanks so much for stopping by. Thanks gang. Your guest expert training here on nonprofit boot camp.
Yeah,
Chris Miano 57:47
that was a good one. That’s a keeper.
Patrick Kirby 57:49
That’s keeper. Print it for your fundraising tips, I need you to do the following. Otherwise I’ll do it and I will send it to you to put it in your thing, which is you need to figure out how to write a script about how demure storytelling. Did you already do? Okay, okay. On a post one, I
Carly Euler 58:13
was gonna post one. How I write my appeal? Very cutesy, very junior. Yeah.
Patrick Kirby 58:18
This is how I this is how I do my board meeting. It’s very demure. I don’t come in telling people what the board members should do. I’m very cute, and I let
Carly Euler 58:26
them decide ahead of time
Patrick Kirby 58:29
I’m gonna totally do it. So we’ll do team we’ll do team shares at the end of this. You guys are amazing. Thanks. We’ll be got to do this. Yeah, this will be up. And we’ll, we’ll link it out into our email blast too. And then we’ll, we’ll link everything back on our our end as well. Congrats
Chris Miano 58:48
also on building all this. I mean, I know, we know how hard it is to, like, build and build a business right from scratch. And like, you’ve done that, man, like, this is, it’s
Patrick Kirby 58:57
kind of bonkers. So this is a separate side hustle. So I have other things that I want to chat with you about too. So if I don’t fly to Nashville and I don’t find you at a bills bar, I will make sure that we connect in the next couple of weeks. Fun things that I want to
Chris Miano 59:15
do we are always then
Patrick Kirby 59:16
good to the best. All right, Patrick, have a great day. Good seeing you as always. Thank
Guest Speaker
Chris Miano
Founder & CEO of MemoryFox
Chris Miano, the Founder & CEO of MemoryFox, has made it his mission to elevate the stories of real human beings. Having served eight years in the Army traveling around the world and learning about the power of storytelling as a tool to connect with people across many cultures, generations, and socio-economic backgrounds. He believes that through storytelling with grassroots Community-Generated Content (CGC), the world can become a more inclusive and equitable place for everyone.
Carly Euler
Marketing Director at MemoryFox
Carly Euler is the Marketing Director at MemoryFox. After nearly 10 years in the nonprofit world, Carly joined MemoryFox ready to elevate the hundreds of nonprofits in the community by telling stories ethically and authentically. Carly is the creator of the 2023 Ethical Storytelling Report, and has previously held positions at the Breast Cancer Coalition of Rochester, the Wily Network, and the Code of Support Foundation, where she has specialized in special events, communications, and fundraising. Storytelling has been an integral part of each role.