Nonprofit Expert Episode 42 – How to Scale Stewardship

welcome to nonprofit expert presented by DonorPerfect.

0:14
Hello and welcome to nonprofit expert presented by DonorPerfect. My name is Julia Gackenbach, and we are so excited to be here at the SpeakUp! offices with Martie. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for joining Read More

welcome to nonprofit expert presented by DonorPerfect.

0:14
Hello and welcome to nonprofit expert presented by DonorPerfect. My name is Julia Gackenbach, and we are so excited to be here at the SpeakUp! offices with Martie. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for joining me. Thank you for having us. Why don’t you take a moment to introduce yourself and introduce speak up. Sure, I’m Martie Bernicker and I’m the director of SpeakUp!. And speak up was started by my mom, but it was inspired by my brother Bob, who died of AIDS in 1992 when he was 30, and Bob, when he was in high school, was that teenager that you were looking at looking like. He was really thriving. He was the president of the school. He was the captain of the crew team and the lead in the school plays, but and at the same time, he was also a young gay man struggling with his sexuality, and later, drugs and alcohol. And even though he had great friends and we were really close family, he didn’t feel like he could speak up and talk about what he was struggling with. And so his wish was that it would be easier for young people to be open and honest and be themselves with the important adults in their life. And so that is how speak up started. And we say, What began with one brave young man and my mom is now a proven program in 30 middle and high schools, 30. Wow, that’s that, yeah, yeah. Very cool. So tell me a little bit about the program. What do what happens in these schools? Yeah. Well, you know, young people are remarkable, but it’s hard to be a young person. They’re struggling with stress, relationships, mental health, drugs and alcohol, social media, and so it’s also hard to be an adult, a parent who is supporting a young person right now, and we can’t always see who’s struggling. Sometimes the young people that seem the best can be struggling the most. I know that was true of my brother as well,

2:06
and because of that, we are a nonprofit that works to help young people navigate their journey to adulthood by both helping the young people to speak up, to talk openly and honestly about their worries, their concerns and their challenges to trusted adults in their lives, and we help the adults to gain skills and confidence that they can use to better listen, guide and support the teenagers in their life. How does that work? Like do you sit and talk and kind of a focus group, or how are, how are the students able to show that they can speak up? Yeah, okay, so we really have two programs. We have our school based program, which is our signature program. That’s what we’re known for, and that is basically has a couple components. The first part is that it starts with the students. And so we go into a school and we ask, any student can be a leader in speaking up? And we ask, What do you want to talk to the adults in your life about that’s hard to talk about, but meanwhile, they’re talking to their peers about these tough topics as they’re narrowing it down. And then we say, well, what specifically and what do you think the adults want to talk about? And so they go through that process, and then we train the school adults. And we say school adults, because literally any adult in the building who wants to be trained or willing to train, because we say that we all have a role to play in helping young people thrive, and who that young person is going to connect with really depends on so many things. And then the centerpiece of our program is that we have a nighttime event where we bring together youth, school adults and parenting adults, and we have small breakout conversations where you’re mixed together about 2022 people, but you’re not with anyone in your family. And that’s kind of our secret sauce, because you can gain insight listening to young people and vice versa in a way that doesn’t activate your fear,

4:03
and then you can use what you’ve learned to communicate within your own family. So that’s basically we call that our breakout sessions. Yeah, that sounds I mean. When you said, what are things in your life that you need to speak to an adult about? I started thinking of all these things I should probably speak to an adult about. So that’s probably very helpful. Are you calling

4:23
me old? Yeah, I’m calling myself

4:26
what’s happening, but that’s great for the parents to be involved in, like you said the school adults. That’s really unique. What a important

4:35
addition to that circle. That’s amazing, yeah, and it’s neat, because my mom really came up with it from gut and instinct. And when I took over from her in 2015 I said that my job has been to kind of put the science underneath the art of what she created, and the essence of the model has really stayed the same over 25 years. And sometimes I say it works almost in spite of itself, like we don’t have to do it perfectly.

5:00
We just kind of have the essential ingredients. And no matter what 22 people you put in a room, they leave having the impacts that we hope for, where they feel less alone, they’re more willing to ask for help, and they know which adults they could go to to get it. So yeah, what an important

5:17
environment you’re building, not only in the schools are in the programs after school, but a consistent conversation is so important, and you’re addressing that, which is really great. Yeah. And then we complemented that, and I guess in 2013 we added what we call our continue the conversation series, and that is a community based program. It’s designed to help the adults so that second part of it, so the students have a chance in the school based program, and the school adults to kind of gain skills and but the parenting adults don’t have that same opportunity. And so we created the continue the conversation to really focus on these same topics, small group conversations facilitated by a mental health expert or whatever the topic may be, and then they can find support, share strategies, ask any questions that they want to build their own confidence and skills as they help their kids navigate. So great. One thing you just mentioned is that speak up has been around for over 25 years, which is quite the milestone and very exciting that you’re in this milestone year. What are some things that you’re doing to commemorate all of the years of speak up. And what are some things you’re excited about celebrating? Yeah, so we, we’ve had a couple major milestones along the way. So when my mom started speak up in in the year 2000 she thought it would be a one time event, huh? And she brought together. It sounds like such a non profit thing. Yeah, exactly. You think you’re doing one thing, and then you have a lifelong, forever commitment. She brought together youth, educators and parents from a number of different schools, and did this event in the first year she did at St Joe’s University, she had 600 people. The next year she had 900 the next year she had 1000 and was logistically challenging to do that, so they shifted to it being in the schools in the year 2003 and then 2009 we shifted to middle schools,

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and that was recognizing that young people, younger and younger, are struggling and the chances to speak up. And now kind of we moved during 2019

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to instead of us going into the school and delivering the program 100% for them, we now partner more deeply. We call it deeper school engagement, supported delivery, where we train, coach and support the schools in delivering the program. Now we’re at our 25th year, and congratulations, thank you. To celebrate, we just launched a new website, and we have a new podcast series so that we can share what we’ve heard and learned from our unique vantage point. And we’re going to be celebrating our goal is to really express gratitude to our donors and partners that have been with us over all these years, to deepen their relationship with us and to invite them to stay on the journey, hopefully for the next 25

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and to celebrate and to capture and share what we’ve heard and learned over 25 years, because a lot of that information is in our notes and in our heads, and yet it’s really a lot of insight, because we’ve had the privilege of listening to over 35,000 youth and families, oh, my goodness. And so valuable like to get that real life conversation, that real life experience. I’m sure many, many people will benefit from learning about that. Yeah, and then we’re going to do a series of events to do that. So we’re going to do a legacy donor dinner, a cocktail party, where we invite some existing families who are using speak up and have them bring a friend, introduce somebody else to speak up to the program, and then we’ll do a

8:48
young alum for the first time, do something to engage speak up alum. We’re at that point now where some of the first people who did speak up are parents themselves, with kids in the ages, where they could start going to speak up. We’ve already had that experience where people who have been alum of speak up are school adults who are facilitators. So that’s been cool. That’s great. And then we’re going to do a main event where we’re going to bring everybody together, use the educators and parents again, and it’ll be informal, conversational. And so that is beginning to take shape. Wow, that sounds like you have a lot, yeah, of work cut out for you, but so much again to share from all the experience of the last 25 years. Yeah, are there any kind of mantras or taglines that you all use a lot of time and speak up? There are. One is, if you can be honest about the reality of your life, no matter what that is, you’re going to find support, you’re going to find solutions, and you’re going to help somebody else along the way. Another that I really like is

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every problem grows in secrecy and isolation, and that’s not around having to tell everybody everything, but just knowing that you have to find your people. And we also talk about how it’s just such.

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Incredible generation of young people. Even right now in the world, when things feel overwhelming and uncertain, I never leave a speak up where I don’t feel even better than when I went in, even though we’re talking about hard things, because it’s an incredible, incredible generation of young people. And at the end, we do this one word when you’re leaving, and it’s often relieved, hopeful, inspired, impressed. And my favorite that I get to hear a lot is blown away by the young people. So that’s wonderful. Well, it’s clear that you’re having a great impact on the community, and that speak up is really affecting young people’s lives. I’d also love to talk to you a little bit about your fundraising journey. Sure, I know, like you said, your mom thought she was throwing one of it, and then a nonprofit was born. How about you? Obviously, you’re following in your mom’s footsteps, but as you learned fundraising and trying to figure out your fundraising journey, how did that go? Was it hard? Do you love it? What does that look like for you? Yeah, I would say that I’m a reluctant fundraiser. That’s a good way to put it. I actually was on the other side. I worked for the Pew Foundation for many years. So I was a funder in the Health and Human Services and Community Development space. And then after that, I was a consultant to foundations and to some individuals with their philanthropic investments. So I’ve always been on the like that side, the giving, not the asking, yeah,

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and so I’m reluctant, and I have, I think I had shared with you, my joke is that you can pay me to shut up about speak up. I just like to talk about speak up. I’m passionate about it, and my strategy is usually that I hope that when I share compelling stories and our compelling impacts, that that will inspire people to want to give. And one of the things that I need to get better about is getting comfortable doing more face to face asking, so I’m comfortable, you know, writing the appeal letter, sharing different tools of things that you know are useful to families when I do that, but I do need to build my skills and my comfort in the area of fundraising well. But also something interesting is that, you know, the heart of the giver pretty well from working on that side of things.

12:03
I’m kind of putting you on the spot here. But would you have any advice for someone who maybe wants to know what motivates a giver, or why would they give, or anything like that, that you could share from your insight from being on that side? Yeah, I think that. Well, first of all, I think you’ve focused right on the important part, which is that to try to make it about the donor, to really get a sense of you’re in partnership, and when you can understand what their interests are, what they’re passionate about, and have it align with what you are doing and your mission. That certainly goes,

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you know, it goes a long way. Oh, I think it’s often helpful to think in terms of what’s the direct impact that your dollars having, but if it can also help to advance the field at the same time, that is, you know, kind of double doubles the impact? Yeah, and that’s a great point like, but the donor needs to be connected to what they’re giving to, and as a fundraiser, if we’re able to offer them that connection, like, Hey, I know you’re passionate about this. Why don’t you join us? It’s a little disarming to say the ask. I don’t know. I think sometimes I was so nervous about an ask, but really, I’m just giving them the opportunity to be part of something that’s already happening, you know, yeah, so it shouldn’t. I shouldn’t have felt as much pressure as I did, because the thing was already happening, just inviting them in to join us, which I think is

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easier than we make it seem, and that’s an expression we actually use a lot across the board, join us. Oh yeah. Now this idea that we’re part of a movement that, and I mentioned earlier, that we all have a role to play in helping young people thrive. One thing I think that’s different about speak up is I will often say that every dollar that you invest and every hour that you spend actually has the potential to accrue direct benefit to that donor or volunteer, which is unusual. That’s not always the case, but most people have young people in their life, whether they’re their own children or they’re an aunt, they’re an uncle through their church group or their coaching, or, you know, we, or we’re employers, so we have a chance to benefit directly, in a way, from what we’re learning and

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fruit. Yeah, the labor, yeah, for sure, it’s very interesting to hear how you’re you were on both sides. And so now, like you said, as a reluctant fundraiser, you’re getting to

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kind of sow some new crops for how you’re raising money and things like that. Something that you hit on was that it’s important to know why the donor wants to give, and it’s important to know about the donor I know for your 25th anniversary, you all are doing a lot of work, especially in DonorPerfect, to identify your donors and classify your donors. Can you tell me a little bit about that Sure? You know, I think one thing that is a strength of ours is that we started with friends and family, and we have been able they’ve many people started giving.

15:00
And Bob’s memory, but we’ve been able to maintain those donors as we broadened our base and we are so we know our donors well, but a lot of that is in our head, as I was talking about earlier. We have staff that have been here a long time, so starting that process of systematizing, that getting to know different things about them that may not be things we already know. So, for example, understanding who’s in their family,

15:28
understanding what are their areas of interest. So that we can begin to, for example, if our donor is a grandparent, we can invite them to our grandparent coffees, if they have a particular interest and have a family member that might be struggling with mental health, then we can do personalized outreach around the mental health trainings that we offer. So it’s a chance to engage them in our programming. I feel like if you have a chance to experience speak up in one way or another, you will be compelled to give that is a great point thinking through why they would love speak up, before you think through why they would give to speak up, that’s an important kind of

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turning point, I guess I would say, because then, you know that connection, and like you said, you know, maybe, maybe you start documenting What schools they went to, or if they’re an alumni and things like that, it’s easier to communicate with them that way. Yeah, and school affiliation is one of the things that we wanted to add into our donor profile, and because we can say come to speak up at this particular school, to get a chance to see it, or if they have children or grandchildren in that school, letting them know to have their their young people get engaged on the student leadership team, right? How do you think things like having that information stored? How do you think that will affect the long term connection with speak up. Do you think that gives them a longer lifeline with you all? I think so. And I think it also one of the things we’re looking to do during our 25th anniversary that relates to getting that data and keeping that data, is being able to start a young alum program. So we are, you know, when we work with young people, they give us their high school emails, and then they end up in what is a household in our records and DonorPerfect. And so we didn’t think ahead of time about, Hey, how are we going to build connection for the long haul? So we’re going to do an event in the fall to begin to capture that information and then be able to put that into DonorPerfect. But then to think strategically about, how do we use DonorPerfect to capture that more proactively? Now, whether it’s cell phones, they don’t change as much as kids move up through and graduate and move on, so that may be a more enduring point of contact. So being able to look at different ways to keep those connections going, that’s a great idea to use an event to collect information. I think sometimes events seem so spastic and busy and there’s so much going on, but to take a moment to get people to write down their email or to fill out a form or scan a QR code or something to capture their information is kind of a doing two things at once, which would be long term beneficial, yeah. And I think that, you know, we talk about how there’s a lot of low hanging fruit for us in terms of being able to improve our fundraising. That’s one of our goals during this 25th anniversary. So we have a pretty, pretty simple and one size fits all approach to date whereby we do two hard mail appeals and we do an end of the year email campaign. We dipped our toe in the water with a Giving Day this year during Giving Tuesday, but that’s really it. And then we do very little non ask touch points. We do very little recognition, in part because we don’t have the confidence in our data. We don’t have the protocols in place to sort of ensure that we’re keeping our data current and clean. And so as we were thinking about our 25th anniversary, we put together the series of events, and the DonorPerfect team was really amazing. They said, Let us help you think through your strategy, what you’re trying to accomplish, and what are the best tools that we can use to help you do that.

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And that’s been incredible. So we’ve started that process, and we had shared that we had developed Debbie donor, which was like this profile of all the information that we wanted on our donors. And worked with the DonorPerfect team to say, Okay, if this is what you want, how do we get that? What do we already have, and in what tables and what fields we mapped it and are looking at, okay, where are there gaps? Is this something that would be best served by pulling reports out of DonorPerfect, or do you want to create different inputs? So we’re working with a DonorPerfect team on that, and all that information is incredibly valuable, especially so obviously, people talk about keeping information about giving, but you’re also talking about keeping information about communication and affiliations and things like that. How.

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Will that affect how you communicate with your donors, or how they hear about speak up now that you have this information? Well, I think it’s it gets harder as the world gets more complex. So for example, we may have a donor who commits like, I’m going to give x over five years, one year they might give personally, the next year they might want to give through a donor advised fund. And that’s there’s rules around that. There’s also complications in keeping track, as you where you store donor advised funds and other things. So when I talked earlier about our confidence, an example would be a donation might come in and it may look like a first time donation because it’s coming through one of these other vehicles, and it would be so offensive to say, Oh, welcome as a new speak up donor. Meanwhile, they’ve been giving to you for a long time, so you realize the importance or people’s family circumstances change. They may have given as a couple, and then have a divorce, and then how do you handle that in the future? So there’s complexity in the data. I think best practices in fundraising change what DonorPerfect has to offer and their tools and apps. It’s constantly evolving and changing, so keeping track of that, and we’re evolving in terms of our needs and capacity. So that’s lots of moving parts, and it’s been great to have the partnership. We’ve used the webinars. We’ve also used the one on one training,

21:19
and so that’s been useful, and we’ve done we’re doing one of your data audits now, and the team is helping us with that. Even things in terms of we’ve kept all of our data over all of the years, and we used to keep our program participation data in DonorPerfect. So it’s not even just donors. And I know in our call recently, you were like, I would just keep donor or potential donor, not supposed to tell people. I said,

21:43
sorry about that. Scratch that. Pull that one out. But it’s true. There is so much information, and I think something like DonorPerfect is a great database, but making sure that you’re using it the right way into its fullest capacity, especially when it comes to again, knowing the donor and finding out these very particular things about the donor and how to communicate with them and what are they interested in, those are all additional valuable points beyond their giving. Those are ways to continue to strengthen and build relationships with those donors. Do you think that there’s a plan in place for relationship building when it comes to using this data. Yeah, I think we’ll definitely be able to do a better job of that, and also it won’t fall as much on solely me, right? We don’t really have a full team, or anyone who’s 100% dedicated to fundraising right now, so as the executive director primarily responsible for, at the end of the day, making sure that we have the revenue to fulfill our mission. We have a director of finance who handles like the money and the budgeting and the reporting. She’s been here 17 years, so she’s a great repository of information about all of our donors, but much of it is in her head as well. And then we have a strategic project manager who serves, in a way like a development coordinator entering and acknowledging and so the more that we can keep our systems up to date, it becomes that the relationships move from between individuals to actually our donors being attached to our organization and our mission, and the ability for those relationships to endure beyond any one person who might be in the seat as we begin to build out a development department and over time, for sure. And it’s really cool. Like you said, a lot of people are affected by what’s happening with speak up in their personal lives. They know someone who’s gone through it, or it’s, it’s, I’m sure many of your donors just have this personal connection to what you all are doing, and that’s a really easy way to be involved, which is great, yeah, and we talk about shaking your family tree, because all these issues run in many of our families, and so normalizing that, but also being we bridge to support many donors, and sometimes we’ll bridge a family to support. They’ll call and it’ll basically say, I don’t know where else to turn. So we will help connect them with additional support that they might need, and then they become future donors, which is nice, great point. Well, and I just have one more question for you. So I know you’re part of this EITC program that DonorPerfect takes part in. Can you tell me a little bit about where those EITC funds go? Sure. So those are dedicated directly to the student leaders. Oh, cool. Last year we had 660

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student leaders that we train. Those are the ones we ask, What do you want to talk to the adults about? And they are setting the stage for the conversations. They’re the MCS the night of the event. They do the norms, they do icebreaker, and they help to co facilitate the conversations. And so your support goes to helping them build those social and emotional skills. In addition to that, one of the things the EITC support happens to support as well is that those student leaders are simultaneously gaining Applied Business skills, they’re learning communication skills, they’re learning marketing skills, they’re developing the marketing plan for their event and their outreach strategies, and they’re doing public speaking, yeah, and so that.

25:00
Yeah, the TA Department of Community Development is interested in that part of it as well. So great. Well, speak up is doing so much, and I know that the community is very grateful, and it’s the impact is evident. So thank you so much for taking time to share with us a little bit about what you all are doing, and we’re excited to see all that happens for your 25th year. It’s gonna be great. Thank you, and thanks for your support. This is a true story. I did say to Kate and Kim the other day, whoever does DonorPerfect HR is really good at their job, because the team members that we’ve met really everyone has been both very humble, very helpful, and has worked with us to understand what our needs are, no judgment of us in the simplicity or how unclean our data might be, or the hacks that we might do to work around, just very supportive, not trying to fit us into a particular box, and even looking with us right now for our corporate sponsorship program in terms of what’s the best tool to use for that we have different ways to know, different events, management approaches, etc, as we’re looking forward to the 25th anniversary. So we’re super grateful for the partnership. It is a definitely a true partnership. That’s you to say thank you so much. It’s genuine. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you for listening to nonprofit expert presented by DonorPerfect for more information and a special offer, visit donorperfect.com/podcast