Tis the Season for Goal Setting

All right. Hello, everyone. Thanks for joining me today. We are working on getting the presentation up. So I’m just going to go through my brief introduction. While we do that, my name is Sam Stuart’s with DonorPerfect, Happy New Year to everyone. Read More

All right. Hello, everyone. Thanks for joining me today. We are working on getting the presentation up. So I’m just going to go through my brief introduction. While we do that, my name is Sam Stuart’s with DonorPerfect, Happy New Year to everyone. Not sure how long after January 1, we’re supposed to say happy new year. But, you know, one of my resolutions is to be more positive and happy new year seems happy. So I’m sticking with it. Even though it’s January 11. Today, we have a great presentation lined up. It’s called tis the season for goal setting. Robbie Healy is going to be walking you through setting up a comprehensive development plan for your nonprofit in 2018. So before we get started, I just want to go over a couple of housekeeping things. First, the webinar is being recorded, and will be sent out along with the slides to all registrants in the next day or two. So keep an eye out for that. Second, we blocked off about five or 10 minutes at the end for questions. So if at any point throughout the presentation, you have questions, please feel free to submit them in the question box, and we will save those for the end. And then lastly, if you’re having any trouble with like audio or visual, you can also submit that in the question box, and I will do my best to help you out with that. So onto the presentation are presented today, as I said is Robbie Healy. Robbie has been in nonprofit organization management for over 40 years, and was recently named Chair of the AFP ethics committee. So I’m going to turn it over to Robbie now to get us started, Robbie.

Thanks very much. Thanks, Sam. And I assume we got our visual thing straightened out. Is that true? Yes, we are looking good. Okay, thanks very much. So welcome, everyone. Thanks for the opportunity to share this time with you this afternoon. We have a couple of very specific objectives for the session today. First of all, to look at possible potential development tactics in the context of your organization’s culture. I think most staff would agree that oftentimes, we have aspirations to do things in our development plan that we don’t really quite have the infrastructure to positively implement. So how do we match the tactics we want to use with organizational culture. And of course, culture of philanthropy is one of the most popular buzzwords going around today. And we’re going to talk a little bit about things you can do to help advance and shape culture. We’re also going to talk about possible elements of an effective development plan. The broad objectives being annual giving major gifts plan, giving board and staff training and development office operations, we’re going to look at examples of language and metrics around performance indicators. And Sam distributed to all of you in advance several documents, including a Word document that is a writable template for your development plan draft. So I intentionally had him send that one to you as a Word document with lots of duplicated pages. So if you decide to use this particular model, you’ll have that available to fill in. So looking at revenue streams is one of my favorite things when I work with boards and with staff who are not experienced in philanthropy, we really have as most of us probably would agree, three revenue streams, we can tap, operating revenue, public funding and philanthropy. I tell everyone, I’m on a one woman crusade to have this never say government grants to only say public funding or government contracts, so that we differentiate for our non philanthropy colleagues and volunteers, that these are two very distinct revenue streams. Public funding contracts are only awarded to not for profits when we engage in something that government feels responsible for philanthropy on the other hand of as we know, our free will gifts from generous individuals and institutions. So helping our decision making colleagues and volunteers really understand how these three revenue streams fit together can be part of the baseline for establishing a philanthropy culture. So when you look at budgets for example, do you actually To share with the board, where the money comes from, does it come from fees that clients, participants, members, students pay, if in fact they can, a homeless shelter doesn’t charge its clients a lot of money obviously. On the other hand, private education does. So depending on the sector in which you serve, operating revenue may or may not be a robust source of income. Public funding, on the other hand, may also not be a robust source of income. But philanthropy is that constant. So no matter what your mission no matter what your focus, philanthropy can be part of what you do. Looking at the relationship between the development plan and the strategic plan, I always find this one fun. You can’t have a really well crafted development plan without a well crafted crafted strategic plans. And of course, what we know is the board is ultimately accountable for making sure that the organization has a robust, accurate and timely strategic plan. I’ll never forget a job I once was hired for. And I was doing grant proposals and asked my executive director for a copy of the strategic plan because I needed one as an attachment for proposal I was writing and the response I got was, oh, just write one, we haven’t had one in a long time, just write one and send it along. And of course, while I certainly and I’m sure many of you as well, are competent to draft a strategic plan, sitting in a cave, as a single staff person writing a strategic plan is not the way they happen. So we’re all smart enough to know that strategic pant plans are typically a collaborative exercise between board and staff. But nonetheless, the Accountable group for a strategic plan is the board that then is shared with staff so that business plans can be developed. The development plan is nothing more mysterious than the development objectives within the overall business plan. So if you look at an organization that has a Human Resources plan, facilities maintenance plan, a marketing or membership plan, a communications plan and development plan, all those plans, blended together become the business plan. So there is a linear, as well as circular process of all of these connecting. But the strategic plan that board policy document gives us our marching orders. And technically, we have staff cannot fundraise for anything that board and hasn’t approved. And we can’t, we can obviously have instruction from the board to fundraise for things that are board approved but not yet funded.

So the baseline is a good strategic plan upon which we can build our development plan. The next piece is looking at how do we understand this linear process. The philanthropy tactics have to tie to the board, the development plans a subset of the business plan, but how does the life stage and the personality characteristics, blend and impact what we can do as tactics and what we want to aspire to do as tactics. So looking at the revenue model, that blending of operating revenue, public funding and philanthropy, looking at what the strategic plan is asking us to fundraise for the next piece of the puzzle is the organization’s governance and development life stage. So I’m a huge fan of board source. And board sources, of course, has done a lot of writing on board accountabilities and board responsibilities. And among the things that they’ve written about is the progression of board engagement in our philanthropy plan. So we’re going to take a look at that in just a minute. But first, I want to outline what I see as the three essential stages or chapters in a typical evolution of a fundraising department. If you have a level one program, and some of you may, may relate to this. You’re doing a lot of transactional fundraising. The things you are doing are things like direct mail campaigns, a lot of special events. So are in level one development offices. Typically, you as the staff person in the development office, meet with your executive director or your CEO. And he or she gives you a wish list the punch list of everything thing you are expected to go forth and find cash for. So it becomes really a matter of trick or treating. You take the list, you go talk to people and hope that at the end of the conversations, you’ve raised the money and you are pretty much a solo act. Oftentimes, the entire responsibility rests on the development staff, and most other colleagues and many volunteers won’t see fundraising as their responsibility. At this white stage of the organization, you’re raising smaller gifts, and you’re doing a relatively large amount of work for each one of those gifts. When you progress to level two, this is where we begin that process of integrating individual cultivation, solicitation and stewardship as tactics. And you may notice I keep using the word tactics because quite frankly, my opinion is, we as staff don’t do any strategic work. The strategic work is the purview of the board. As we get our marching orders around the strategic plan, we are really integrating tactics on a quarterly or annually multi year basis. So level two tactics tend to be that transition stage when we move from highly transactional towards relationship philanthropy. This is the place where people who’ve heard that old saying if you ask for advice, you get money. If you ask for money to get advice, they begin to realize if we start asking for advice, we might actually develop closer relationships and begin to develop donors who will be leadership givers leadership givers to the Annual Fund, as well as major gift donors. So personal contact starts at this level. This is when we begin to invite people into our buildings if you’re a building based program, this is when we begin to have home parties, porch parties, den parties, whatever they are so that prospects can begin to meet some of the leadership. We have interactive q&a Instead of lectures. And what winds up happening here is, we begin to integrate many more members of organizational leadership on the fundraising team. Now these people are not all happy that they have been defined to this. Some of them are still scratching their heads thinking when did fundraising become my job. But the bottom line is you will find if your experiences like mine, you will find some natural allies who really get it. And if you begin to partner with them, and experience success with them, the people who are a little bit more skeptical will decide they want some of that and may timidly, but gradually join the team. what winds up happening then is you begin to get larger gifts, and people begin to identify as regular supporters of your organization of your mission. When it really gets humming, and you get to level three, this is when we’ve differentiated two sets of tactics. We’re never going to abandon that transactional point of entry, fundraising, where we are doing direct mail, doing events, doing e solicitations, doing those very entry level tactics, we will always have those. It’s kind of our farm club or feeder system. But once we get to level three, we have a subset of activities that are really looking at high level prospects. High quality interactions, one on one assignments with the right person meeting with the right person for the right opportunity at the right time. And everyone begins to realize just like marketing is everybody’s job. Turns out philanthropy is everybody’s job. A couple of other comments about the staff behavior, before we transition to board, level one shops, oftentimes have policies or practices to not invite staff giving. Level two, when when we began to realize that we need to have leadership staff present, and invite other staff to give, people are still really nervous about that, oftentimes, they will comp, staff participation. And by the time we get to level three, everybody is realizes staff have an equal opportunity to have their skin in the game. And many staff are quite frankly proud of the work they do and the work that they do with the clients they do it for, and are very willing to be donors, and how dare us deprive them of the opportunity to make their own choices. When we look at it from the board perspective, board level one, I call this the navel gazing stage where they sit in a board meeting with their hands in their laps, staring at their navels hoping no one will ask them a question or give them an assignment. Oftentimes, they see their responsibilities as approving the plans, the staff have drafted, setting goals that the staff have been assigned, and approving priorities. It’s at this level where you still may be struggling to get all the board members to actually be donors. As the board transitions to level two, you’ll see some parallels here. And the parallels are, of course, that you will begin to identify those individuals who actually get it who want to be actively involved. And at that point, they will begin to raise their hands or say, yes, when you tap them on the shoulder, to take on their own assignments, they’re probably going to do it as teams, maybe even teamed with a staff member. But this is where they begin to truly experience the satisfaction of talking with donors and prospects about the work you do and they begin to discover. donors don’t see those conversations as a burden, they actually see them as a very satisfying piece of their civic engagement. At level two, every board member knows they have to be a donor. They aren’t necessarily generous yet. And by generous, I mean generous relative to their individual means as as individuals or couples.

When we get to level three, this is when it all really starts to percolate. Board members will have their own activities and prospects. Some of your board at this level will actually be willing to ask for leadership, annual gifts or major gifts. They recognize that they are the ambassadors and advocates and askers on behalf of the organization. And at this stage, hopefully, you’ve gotten them to take seriously that while they sit in a governance role on your board of directors, your mission should be in their top three. And if not top three, at least their top five priorities. I am smart enough to know that very few of us sit in the rooms where the dialogue happens around who will be invited to serve on the board. To the degree that we can provide input or influence around the structure of that we would probably all agree that transparency and recruitment is one of the most important things. And if we don’t share with board members, their expectations around philanthropy, and they get on the board. And then we tell them, It’s bait and switch. We’ve essentially hidden from them. One of their key accountabilities, some of you may be thinking or having someone say to you, oh, my glory, if we actually tell them the truth, they’ll never join. Actually my experiences that’s not true. And if we don’t tell them the truth, and they join, and then they don’t behave the way we need them to. It’s because we’ve lied to them essentially in the first place. So part of this shifting of tactics and behaviors and outcomes is really around transparency and honesty and recruitment. If you look at the Lay Here’s the land as I’ve experienced it, we often have level one boards, who are expecting level three staff. And doesn’t work that way. We can have level one to level one, we can have a level one board, and staff approaching level two philanthropy. But unless and until everyone understands this interconnection between implementation of tactics, and behavior of leadership, we will always be at a disadvantage. So, one of the things that I think helps us figure out how, what, how to approach our tactical planning is to really take a critical look at what are we today. And if we all agree on the lay of the land today, we have a much better chance of progressively adding tactics that will help us get to where we want to be. So one of the documents that was shared with you in advance is a PDF, and it has several pages. It is called culture change templates. So as I show you on the screen, the first page of that template, if you opened it, and downloaded it, this would be a good time to look at it. Sam, while I give people a chance to find that, are there any questions you’d like me to answer before the end of the session? Oh, yeah,

I have one here that I can ask sort of related to what you just spoke. And I guess it comes to what you would sort of said, This person feels that their staff is at level one, but that the board is at level two, or three. And the board, I guess, isn’t really grasping where they’re at right now. And how can we get them to pause and help focus the message to get the staff I guess, to the point where they need to be.

So the board is ahead of the staff. That’s not a common environment. Typically, it’s the other way around. I think one of the, I’m assuming, without other information, that perhaps the Development Office is not at level one. But the other management staff or senior staff are at level one. I think that becomes one of the ways that I tried to approach that is by being involved in all of the staff onboarding and staff meetings, so that when new staff are recruited and hired and oriented philanthropy is part of that onboarding, looking at whether or not everyone’s position description includes a responsibility to work with donor cultivation and donor stewardship, some of those fundamentals again, so that we are not shocked by duties and accountabilities, that we didn’t understand would be hours. So looking at the systems that you have in place for recruitment, onboarding, performance, and performance appraisals, can begin to be some of that transition, I truly believe that one of the mistakes we make is to come to a seminar or a webinar or something like this, here, what it ought to be go back to our offices and decide, we’re going to set a six month goal to change. It’s too fast if people can’t move that quickly. So I think we need to be realistic about looking at a 1218, maybe even 24 months timeframe for evolving. But the other piece of that is, once you’ve made the decision to progress, do it incrementally and don’t backslide, nobody gets a bye. You need to do in service and orientation and mentoring and coaching so that people have the opportunity to learn, but don’t give anybody a pass. So I hope I’ve addressed that question. And I hope everyone has found the worksheet. So I’m sorry, real quick. Just

because some people are typing in they have haven’t received the worksheet. I typed in the chat a link to the three different worksheets that were shared prior to the webinar, so you should be able to access all three of them in the chat of the GoToWebinar panel. And if you have any trouble after that, you can type into the question I should be able to send you them directly.

Sorry, go ahead. Oh, that’s all right. I want to make sure everybody He’s comfortable. And again, the the document that I’m showing on the screen right now I use this as a pretest. So if I’m the staff person, I’m going to take this document, and I am going to check off only those things that we are doing at a fully deployed best practice level. So if you talked about it once, or tried it once, and it didn’t work, you don’t get a checkbox. But look at all of the activities you’re doing the methodology you’re using, what your stewardship looks like, who is an enthusiastic participant, and what kind of results you’re getting, that will help you benchmark, whether you’re at level one, two, or three on the staff side. And on the board side. Once you have the packet, you will see that there’s an adaptation of these tactics written as a three year time horizon. So as you begin to plan your transition from where you are now, to where you want to be, you will complete your culture change action plan, as a collective committee of a whole, identifying which governance practices and which philanthropy practices, you want to integrate in your tactical plan, in your one of your evolution in your two of your evolution in your three. So one of the things that I find particularly fun is to give the culture change action plan to every leader, as an individual exercise, have them anonymously check off, which activities you’re not yet doing, do they think you might accomplish in year one, or year two, or year three, and then tabulate them all? And see how close or far apart people are on their thinking about which year do they think we might be able to get to these, and it’ll give you a sensitivity to their comfort level. The other thing I would say is as you adopt a more focused, best practice model fundraising plan, you may have some board members, or some staff who choose to opt out, because it’s just not something they can or will do. And we have to let them do that with dignity, no shaming, affirming what they’ve done for us when they were doing exactly what we had asked them for. But again, letting people move on if they’re never going to catch up with us, because we need to have people on board who are going to move us forward in order to achieve the kinds of outcomes that we really want. So typically, what we are looking at in our development plan, then are how are they related to the strategic plan? Of course, but are we going to use an annual giving approach, a major gifts approach, or plan giving approach? And then from an infrastructure perspective? What are the things we need in place for board and staff education? And what are the things we need in place with our back office operations. So in your word, document, the Word document that I sent, that if you don’t have already I know Sam’s going to solve that problem. You have development plan worksheets that are completely blank. In each of them, you will have the opportunity to direct your development goals, a series of objectives and action steps and then your baseline and stretch, financial or participation goals. And financial and participation are equally important. Not every development objective has $1 sign in front of it. Some of them are I call them the body count. How many people did we identify how many people did we engage with? What were our touch points. So we’re looking at participation as well as dollars. So this represents what one of those development plan worksheets looks like. When you get them and open them up. You will see their legal size pages because I wanted to give you enough room to really write good, thorough objectives. I have populated a couple of them for you. Just as samples So the template that you have is completely freeform document for you to be able to write your own text. So imagine that in your Annual Giving Program, your number one goal is to identify, cultivate and solicit annual capital in plane gift prospects. So we’re really looking then at parsing out that goal into objectives. So objective number one could be the identification, rating and qualifying the URI, you initiate it 2018. Maybe your target goal is 100 new qualified prospects, your stretch goal is 125 new qualified prospects. I think you can all see from this, there are no dollars associated with this. What we have however identified is the need to find at least 100, if not 125, not warm bodies of people that we think are actually qualified to fit into our Annual Giving Program. The action steps here I’ve populated the first one, the chair of the prospect rating and review committee is ultimately responsible. If you are not paying for research, then you would have no budget implication. If you are paying for prospect research, of course, you would have a budget implication. If your prospect rating and review committee is going to meet monthly, then your completion date will will not be finite, it will be ongoing. And perhaps you are going to expect everyone to attend at least 80% of the meetings. So you are putting a burden on the chair of the committee. But you’re also putting a burden on the individual members to be present when the meetings happen. Objective number two that I have drafted in the cultivate and solicit annual capital in playing good prospects is developing an annual fun donor recognition program donor recognition being part of the cultivation program. So this one tends to be more staff centric, where you are the successful the to approve and launch a program. But staff will be responsible for collecting and compiling samples. The committee then for reviewing and selecting best practice features and benefits. Action Step number three, once you’ve got your proposed plan drafted, testing it with some of your selected donors. Finalizing the plan for board consideration is action step four. And then announcing and implementing the plan is step number five. So if you launched this at the beginning of 2018, you’ll see the target completion date for the launch isn’t until September. So again, you can see that as you go progressively through each of these stages, you’re going to have to phase it out over a series of months, you can’t say we’re going to develop and launch a donor recognition program by March 31, if you’re going to do it thoughtfully and thoroughly, and get enough feedback.

So the next one in the same goal is, again, looking at identifying rating and qualifying prospects. But here, we’re looking at 10 qualified prospects or 15. qualified prospects, not for your Annual Giving Program, but for major giving. So if we think about the scale of magnitude, lots of annual fun donors, fewer but higher quality major gift donors, the differentiation between 100 and 125 10 and 15 Speak to the magnitude of the importance of these individual prospects. So again, we’ve got a whole series of action steps under this same kinds of things. People need to show up at the meetings, looking at developing cultivation plans for each of the identified prospects, then we actually get to implementation here, securing and holding face to face visit appointments with no fewer than 80% of the prospects identifying priorities and soliciting gifts from no fewer than 50% of the prospects and securing gifts or pardon my type out from no fewer than 30% of the identified prospects. You are not going to close gifts on 100% of 10 people. So if we look at it At 5030 80% of give you an appointment 50% may receive a solicitation and 30% may say yes, these are the kinds of sequential, logical based on outcomes data that we need to build into these plans. So looking at monitoring your plan, you’re going to be looking at a variety of things, year over year results. The prospects themselves identified appointments, presentations, then donors acquisition, retention, and upgrading volunteers, how many volunteers are involved? What are their roles? What are their assignments, what’s the rate of follow through, and obviously, within your own program, you may have others. As you look at the development plan worksheets that I’ve given you as samples, you will also see some of them have headings for plant giving. Some of them have headings for board and staff education, and some of them have headings for development office operations. So following that same sequential logic, looking at what’s the strategic plan, where did the development goals, what life stage are we at, you can begin then to draft sane, challenging, but achievable development plans, with goals, objectives, action steps, and timelines. I’ve also given you in your material, some worksheets to use with your prospect and rating teams. And with your solicitation planning process, you may have these of your own you’re already using, there’s no magic to this. But as you look at the third set of materials that I’ve provided, the last one is called individual giving worksheets. And these prospect rating and review tools are part of that packet. So what you’re going to be doing with these is actually make staff will be making a list of the names, addresses of the prospects, and then having conversation around linkage and interest and ability. If you if you’re a student of the late Hank Roscoe and his writing, you will, the LMI principal will be familiar to you. We are assigning what may seem like an arbitrary, but it shouldn’t be rating of high, medium and low. And as your prospect rating and review committee actually meets together and talks about each prospect, you will be asking them to decide whether someone has a close connection, a medium or a weak connection, whether their interest is high or medium or low in your program today. And their capacity to give at a high medium or low level. There’s no magic around a number one being $1,000. And number three being 5000 or more, you can play with these ranges and make them logical for your organization. But at the end of any session, what you’re really looking for is people who are rated seven, eight or nine, and concentrating your energy and your time that you have for tactics on those people. The volunteer assignment is one of the most critical pieces of this. Because if we don’t have the right person asking the right person, we’re automatically setting ourselves up for a disappointing outcome. And I would urge you to adopt a rule that says we will never ever, under any circumstances, make a cold call on someone that we don’t have a warm connection to is the fastest way to make an enemy for your, for your program for your department. So you can have people in your parking lot or on your bicycle rack, who you don’t yet have a warm connection to. And as you go through the iterative process of repeated meetings, bring those parking lot bicycle rack names up so that if someone’s joined the committee who actually does have a warm connection, you haven’t lost the opportunity to take advantage of that connection. I think looking at the app the next piece, once you have identified your sevens or eights or nines, you need to draft an individual steward. trip plan. Back in my beginning, very naive days, I used to think I would have to write scripts for my volunteers. So you have to say this, you have to say this you have, and I would have fantasies about making them practice their scripts. I find this kind of planning tool to be much more dignified for volunteers who are successful in their business life and are very nervous about role playing and practicing. So if you look at the kinds of conversation that you need to have for leadership giving, whether it’s leadership giving to the Annual Fund, or major gift, asking, What are the things you want to know about someone before your first visit? What are they interested in? What is their career, their education, their family? What other charities do they support? What could be their motivation to support us today? What cultivation techniques would appeal to the donor, and what kinds of methods are appropriate relative to the magnitude of the gift are asking for, so having dialogue around each of these will help you prepare your volunteers to be well prepared in advance of their appointments? I have to hear myself say this out loud. But it’s our responsibility to make sure that when our organization where there’s a volunteer staff goes to visit with the prospect that they are fully briefed on that person, there’s always conversation around, I don’t want to gossip about these people, I’ll just go ask them to tell me this stuff. Donors expect us to be well informed. And what often happens in younger programs is because the organization is new to fundraising, they think the donors new to being asked. And more often than not, that is not the case. So a donor will expect you to come fully briefed and fully prepared. And this template can be a tool to guide that conversation. Hopefully, you’re using a software system to track all of the calls that you’re doing. But you may need to give your volunteers a checklist so that they can be reminded of what it is they need to tell you. So obviously, we know you can’t put stuff in your donor database that that you’d haven’t heard about. So call reports and tracking tools can be a wonderful reminder for your volunteers, to give them a structure for keeping you informed. So whether it’s a new appointment and introduction, someone you’re trying to bring back into the organization, a live bhuntar assignment donor, whether it’s a an asset, or a solicitation, those are important things to track.

We also have a brief summary call reports so that they can write down just brief notes on what the conversation was about when they promised to get back to the prospect. So if you give them a tool like this, it’s probably better than simply saying, well, once you’ve been to see Robbie Haley, why don’t you shoot me an email and let me know how it went. So give them a structure for being responsible to you, and it will probably be a lot more successful that way. And again, if it’s not in your electronic database, you don’t have any record of it happening. As you do that, as you put these conversations and visits in your electronic database. I always like to remind myself that I don’t want to write anything down, that I wouldn’t be proud to let the donor read. So which a visit didn’t go well. You’re not going to write negative things, you’re going to always try to use positive language around a difficult conversation. So you will need to be very careful as you track whatever you’re writing so that if a donor wants or needs to see what you’ve tracked about them, that you’ve done a good job in summarizing what happened, but also making sure that if the donor read it, it would not embarrass you or them. So I know we’ve covered a lot I think we’re about at the end of the content I had wanted to cover. I know that Sam has been tracking questions and is going to help With that, but I do want to say that my email address is here. And if we don’t get to your question, and there’s something you’d really like to ask about, I hope you’ll feel free to email me. And I don’t promise I’ll do it in the next 90 minutes. But I do promise that I will get back to you and try to answer your questions, if we don’t get to it in the q&a. So, Sam, I think we have a little bit more than 10 minutes left, which was our goal. So I’ll turn it back to you and let you fire away.

Sure. All right. And with that, thank you, Robbie. That was great. I’ll just go ahead and encourage everyone that if you have any questions that you haven’t asked already, please send them in now. We have a couple here to get us started. So first, sort of going back to what you had touched on in the beginning, related to sort of the levels for staff and board, is there a typical length of time that organizations spend at each level, or sort of like, you know, different benchmarks, the concern being that you may be stuck at a certain level if you haven’t progressed to from one to the next, over whatever? Time Period?

I understand the question completely. And I think I will answer it, but not perhaps exactly the way that question was phrased. And that is, I believe that making the decision to move from a level whatever to a level three board and staff is not a fundraising decision, but actually a governance decision. So if an organization wants to be an excellent best practice provider of services, it needs to be governed in an excellent best practice manner. So it was a Board Governance Committee, and I’m using that word deliberately not nominating committee. But Governance Committee examines what life stage the organization is currently at. And makes a decision to transition from one 1.5 to wherever they are to level three. That’s a governance decision that has to be accompanied by in service and training and mentoring. My opinion is that from the moment you decide to go from where you are, to level three, it will take at least two, two, if not three years, for everyone to either get up to speed or choose to opt off. And you do as I said before, you do need to let people opt off, if they need to, there’s no one important enough to hold you back by keeping them on the board, or quite frankly, keeping them on the staff. So I think, be realistic. If governance makes a decision that this is the direction we’re going. You need to give yourself at least two years. But it has to be active coaching and training and mentoring to help people get there. So I hope I’ve spoken to that question in a way that that met the questioners needs. All right.

All right. Next, and I’m sure this question is probably asked a lot. But the general gist of it is the organization I work with the board is very passive, what suggestions do you have to bring the board into active participation for an organization that has just been initiated?

So when I guess I would love it, if I could get a little bit more feedback on what it means organization has just been initiated. That sounds like a young, perhaps founder led organization. But I can’t be sure. So if whoever asked ask that question, can give you more information, that would be helpful. But let me let me speak to those two pieces separately. Passive boards are passive because they aren’t expected to be active. And again, I’m I’m going to go back to the fact that I think that’s a governance issue. One of my favorite things to do with a board is a board self assessment. So the one that board source offers is very reasonably priced to these days, and is an interesting way for a board to compare their own behavior with what BoardSource has defined as the standard behavior for excellent boards. And oftentimes, a board self assessment that’s comprehensive, such as there’s board members will be brutally honest about their lack of participation, their lack of engagement and it gives you an opportunity to create an action plan around a governance transformation. So I think that’s one way of looking at it, I think the other. And as if they look at it and realize we’re not doing the fundraising or the strategic planning or whatever it is up to par, they can make an action plan for themselves. Passive members who are serving on a board that becomes an active board will often opt out. And again, that’s okay. If they really just want to come and listen to reports and go home. That’s not governance. So that that can be pretty easily solved. Although recruiting new board members, as we all know, is not always as easy as we’d like it to be. The founder lead board is is a different thing altogether. Because I think oftentimes founders are almost larger than life personalities. And the board members who serve in a founder led organization often differ out of reverence derived respect, not out of whack of inertia. So I think it’s difficult to know precisely the best answer to that one without knowing whether it is founder LED. But BoardSource, again, has done a lot of writing around founder LED boards and founder transitions and founder syndrome. So if that happens to be what this questioner is asking about, I would refer them to board source to look for information about founder culture and how to evolve to the next level.

Got it? All right. Next question. This has been submitted by a couple of people, but maybe just some general KPIs that they can use as sort of a benchmark to see if their development plan is successful or not, I guess what, what measures or indicators should they be looking at?

I think it really depends on what life stage you’re in. One of the things I mentioned earlier is looking at comparing your own results to your own results. Because we oftentimes, depending on the sector in which you work, you have a different type a difficult time finding comparables for best practice programs. Because within the national taxonomy of exempt organizations, there are so many little splinter groups, it’s really hard to get like size KPIs for all those sectors. Obviously, we often look at things like a cost per dollar raised a very popular one. One of the things, I would really urge you to look at his donor retention rates, what we know is the donor retention rates in the US are abysmal. We’re losing more than 50% of our donors in a typical year. So looking at incrementally increasing your donor retention rate, and I cannot tell you that you need to increase it by five or 10, or 15, or some, some percent, because you will need to look at what your current donor retention rate is, in order to make sane, logical, achievable, baseline and stretch goals. But I would urge you to look at donor retention, donor acquisition, prospect acquisition, looking at some of the benchmarks that Jim Greenfield has developed over his body of work. He talks about the number of responses, you put out a solicitation, how many people reply. So I think there are lots of benchmarks that you can look at. The real question is within your own context, how well are you doing and how do you push the needle every year, year over year? comparing yourself with yourself?

Got it. All right. Good answer. All right. Another question. So this is a bit more specific. This person has a level one board, but a level two to three staff and the board is requesting that the development staff lead the strategic planning and visioning process. How you know appropriate is this to undertake this activity, and then how difficult is it to facilitate this from the staff level?

Well, it’s an interesting thing. There’s a smart remark that I wish I could remember exactly, but it’s something like in the nonprofit sector, we have groups of amateurs supervising highly qualified professional people, and we can’t figure out why things don’t always work as well as we’d like them to. Having said that, I think most of us might agree that the people who serve on boards want to be successful. I guess I would take a step back and try to help the board understand the key components of strategic planning, and why they need to be a board led, or at least partnership, rather than staff led exercise. Maybe what the board needs is some in service education around the environment in which the organization works. So that they can develop more confidence around their own knowledge of the setting the environment, the constituent situations, so they feel more qualified to participate in the strategic plan. But having a staff developed plan, in my opinion, is never ideal. So getting them at least to equal would be what I’d be hoping for. And the other thing I’d be looking for, if I were in this difficult situation, is are there at least a couple of board members who get it? And can we elevate them to leadership roles so that they can carry the responsibility to be part of that partnership. But that’s a difficult one, a really difficult one, but maybe it needs to start with more baseline education in advance of the actual strategic plan.

And sort of, I guess, related to that, but someone’s just asking, I guess, for further resources that could explain tactics and moving an organization and its board from level one to level three. So what would you recommend people trying to move up as far as resources, outside of what we’ve talked about today?

I would go to BoardSource. And I would look at they have a lot of material. They have some very user friendly monographs on board roles and responsibilities. I think that if you’re looking at methodically helping board members understand how to move the needle, not not radical surgery, just a progressive evolution. They have some really very well written very well done documents for people on the call, who are members of AFP, international AFPs, entire radio reference series are free downloads from the AFP website. So those are very nice, well written monographs on a variety of topics that are germane to some of the things we’ve been talking about today. But I think those the board source materials are my favorites for user friendly, not terrifying, nice monographs that are pretty accessible for people to use.

Alright, so it is about that time it is 259. So we’re gonna wrap up, just a reminder, we are going to be sending out the presentation recording, as well as the slides and materials that Robbie referenced throughout in an email, it will likely be coming tomorrow. So keep an eye out in your inbox. Robbie, just want to thank you again, great presentation, a lot of activity and questions coming in. So clearly, people were very interested and engaged. So thank you for that.

You’re welcome. Thanks for the opportunity. Yep, so

with that, we will shut it down. Thanks, everyone, for attending and have a good rest of your Thursday. Thank you.