228: Mastering Millennials & Your Board Calendar – Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio

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What is that music? This is tony martignetti non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent and i am your aptly named host. Yes, we have new music, new music this week that was cheap red wine and it’s going to be our music going forward. It’s by scott stein and if you’d liketo meet scott, you can go to the facebook page. We have a little q and a with scott stein. I’m very glad that you’re part of the show. Welcome scott. New music and a new year luciana tova for those who are celebrating fifty seven, seventy four oh, i hope that you were with me last week. I would suffer idiopathic ridiculous apathy if it came to my attention that you have ms trim tab marketing. James eaton is president and creative director of the tronvig group. He explained how something small and seemingly insignificant, like the trim tab that’s it helps to steer a ship can make a big difference in your marketing and more social. Now what amy sample ward, our social media contributor and ceo of non-profit technology network and ten, had thoughts about how to manage the internal changes. When you make social media a part of your office culture this week, the overhead myth letter signers written to the donors of america, the three co signers of the letter are the ceos of the better business bureau wise giving alliance guide star and charity navigator our tailor jacob harold and ken berger, who explain what what led up to the letter, why it was necessary and why they feel many charities should spend mohr on overhead. Plus your questions and good overhead, bad overhead. Jean takagi are legal contributor helps you understand what may be sensible and appropriate non-profit graham expenses and what you should avoid. How do you protect your board officers and employees, but not go overboard on overhead gina’s principle of the non-profit and exempt organizations law group neo-sage san francisco i’m very pleased to welcome the three ceos who are the co signers of the overhead myth letter. Art taylor is president and ceo of the better business bureau wise giving alliance they’re at give dot or ge and he’s with us from arlington, virginia. Jacob taylor is president and ceo of guidestar there at guidestar dot or ge jacob’s calling from washington, d c and ken berger is with me in the studio. He’s, president and ceo of charity navigator at charitynavigator dot orb, gentlemen, welcome hi, good afternoon, glad to be here. It’s. A pleasure. Glad to have all three of you. I do want to ask you in the beginning, tio, try to be concise with your answers, because way, have lots of info to cover and just about twenty five minutes together. So tree, please try to keep that in mind. Really my first question. Art galleries for you. How did you get to be the first signer on the letter? How did you guys decide the sequence of the signatures? That’s, what struck me? Well, actually, i’m not sure about how that came about. I think we probably just threw a golf tee around. And whoever got the point got the name of their first. Okay, i don’t think there’s any significant. So about the order of the names. I think we used different orders for different events that we appear at and different communications that we send out. So, there’s. Nothing to be read into my name being first on. Okay. That’s. Very cordial of you to say. The only pattern i could see was alphabetical by first name art jacob and then ken that’s all that’s all i was able to discern, um, let’s, let’s, stick with you there. All right, you guys are the three. You represent the three leading sources of information about charities. Um, let’s start with you first and then jacob, and then can tell us what’s special about your organization, the wise giving alliance how’s it has it has a little different than the others. Please aren’t well, we’re one of the organizations that will actually make a judgment about how we feel about charity’s accountability and where, as i said, we’re primarily focused on whether a charity is accountable to the public, and we have a set of twenty standards that we use to measure the extent to which we believe charities are accountable. The’s standards were developed with the assistance of the non profit sector. It took us a little more than two years to devise the standards back in two thousand one when we last revised. Hm. And so we really feel that they represent the interests of donors, as well as the aspirations and hopes of charities that want to be accountable to their donors. All right. Thank you, jacob. How about how about guide star? Sure. You know, the big contrast i would make with my two colleagues organizations here gets right to something that art said, which is that guide star itself is not an analyst or raider or provider of judgment. What we are is a platform for data from all across the sector. So we have data on every single non-profit in the country for many, many sources, and we want to share others analysis, because we do think that the sort of analysis done by better business bureau wise giving alliance charity navigator can be very informative and important for the field. And we see it as our role to bring together the many different voices and and present them in a systematic way. And jacob, how many hits are you getting on the web site each month? Let’s, let’s. Just establish how relevant thes sites are for donorsearch schnoll sure. So last month we had about one point. Two million unique visitors. Excellent. Okay, unique visitors. Excellent art. I should have asked you how many? How many hits are you getting or if you can say unique visitors each month? Yeah, i don’t know if it’s unique visitors, but we get about one. We get about five and a half million report hits every year. So five and a half million times. Someone will come to our website to see a charity report can. How about charity navigator? What makes it different and and how? How popular. Well, you know, i just want to say first that i think, you know, between the three organizations were about fifteen million dollars in budget trying to oversee a one point five trillion dollars sector. So there’s, this much need for their, you know, all of us. And there’s a lot of us, i think similarities even more than the differences. But we also i do make a judgment, and we have a, you know, five level star rating system scale from zero to four stars. And we have about thirty metrics that we used to make those judgments. We also engage the sector in that. And also we have all one point six million non-profits on our website with information about them, even if they’re not currently rated. Let’s, let’s. Move to the letter itself. The overhead beth letter from believe june is when, when it was formally announced. Jacob the letter cites the misconception that overhead is a poor measure of a charity’s performance. How did that misconception arise? You know, when there’s a vacuum, something has to fill it, and i think there’s a desire on the part of donors as well as journalists, academics, researchers and non-profits themselves tio try to have a way to make judgments about the non-profits sector, which is very diverse and where there certainly are variances been in quality. Uh, and i think people saw the overhead ratio of something that had some meaning i’m sure my colleagues will talk about how it is not meaningless. It’s just what i would call a filter that helps us still filter out a few bad cases, but not a proxy for for equality and, you know, it fiddled it filled that vacuum, and my hope is that over the next few years, as we systematically gather a number of other types of information across the field, that we can offer an alternative that is much more meaningful and useful and helpful for the field on broader that that alternative being much broader than looking right just that overhead, anybody else want to add? To what you feel led up to this serious misconception about our ways, you know, we at the wise giving alliance, we’ve always i believed that you should look at a broad spectrum of things when you’re assessing a charity’s accountability, and while we have financial ratio metrics, address fund-raising and administrative costs, those are just two of twenty different areas that we look into. And, boy, we must ask charities almost three hundred questions before we can actually no of all twenty of those standards, okay? We’re actually met, so we’ve always group believe that there should be a broader look at what a charity does in order to really know if they’re accountable. And so when this opportunity came up for us to come together and share with the public that belief, we were all for it. So that’s sort of how we come into the table can how about you? How’d we get to this misconception? Well, i think it’s been over a lot of years, and i think that there’s been an ongoing debate over the question of what accountability measures should be those that we use the urban institute has done studies, of course, dan piela has gotten a lot of traction, and i think, you know, the views are wide ranging from we should have absolutely no accountability for overhead. There should be it’s meaningless. And i think all three of us were concerned that we be not throw out the baby with the bathwater that there’s a sort of a balanced place. We need to get to. We’re going take a pause for a couple seconds and course will continue with the three ceos of three co signers of the overhead myth letter and live listener love. When we come back, stay in there, talking alternative radio twenty four hours a day. Do you need a business plan that can guide your company’s growth? Seven and seven will help bring the changes you need. Wear small business consultants and we pay attention to the details. You may miss our coaching and consultant services a guaranteed to lead toe. Right, groat. For your business, call us at nine. One seven eight three, three, four, eight, six zero foreign, no obligation free consultation. Check out our website of ww dot covenant seven dot com are you fed up with talking points? Rhetoric everywhere you turn left or right? Spin ideology no reality, in fact, its ideology over in tow. No more it’s time. Join me. Larry shot a neo-sage tuesday nights nine to eleven easter for the ivory tower radio in the ivory tower will discuss what’s important to you society, politics, business and family. It’s provocative talk for the realist and the skeptic who want to go what’s really going on? What does it mean? What can be done about it? So gain special access to the ivory tower. Listen to me. Very sharp. Your neo-sage tuesday nights nine to eleven new york time go to ivory tower radio dot com for details. That’s. Ivory tower, radio dot com e every time i was a great place to visit for both entertainment and education. Listening. Tuesday nights nine to eleven. It will make you smarter. Hey, all you crazy listeners looking to boost your business? Why not advertise on talking alternative with very reasonable rates? Interested simply email at info at talking alternative dot com dahna duitz i love our new music, scott stein, live, listener lover get live listeners all over the country, in fact, and, of course, all over the world. Asia checking in, but we’re going to start domestic san francisco, atlanta, bloomington, indiana what if that’s the centre at indiana university. Leesburg, virginia. North kingstown, rhode island, south portland, maine. Walnut creek, california in san diego, california lots of californians live listener love there’s lots more coming, lots more live listeners glad you’re very glad that you’re with us and i never want to forget podcast pleasantries for the nine thousand or so that listen in the podcast love you too. Um, let’s see ken berger, you’re sitting here in front of me. It’s true i am. You are the only shill willing to come to the studio. How do you feel about this? That the rating organizations bear some responsibility for the evolution of this this overhead misconception? Well, i think you know, when i when i learned about the origins of charity navigator, part of the challenge for us was that the only standardized information that was available to us way back when was thiss financial information on the nine. Ninety. That’s, really all that there was that we could look at it. We always tried to communicate to our users that finance and overhead is just part of what you should look at. That’s always been part of our message, and i think part of our problem part of our responsibility is, we never really got that message out loud and clear enough. And that was where charity navigator one point o had to start. Yeah, it was all that was available. Yes, yes, but, you know, and so we’ve been trying to do bang the drum louder and louder over time, to let people know there are other things that are critical that have to be considered in the most important of all, being the results of the work. Okay, you other guys, anybody wantto weigh in on your organization’s responsibility leading up to this? No, i take it, you know. I’ll just say that i think, you know, we what we didn’t do ratings, we certainly presented the ratio on our site, and, um, i don’t apologize for that, but i think there was always room, as can said for further context provided to users and two donors about how that could be a meaningful peace, but not a full, full story. And then i would also argue that the blame where the credit or the responsibility, however we want to characterize it, goes far beyond any organization that did a rating but all the way to non-profits them cells, which, you know, reinforce this myth by literally, quite literally, billions of times a year, you know, prominently displaying their own ratios on their sites and at times they do that with complimentary data about programmatic results, which i think is very powerful. But when they do that alone, when they they on ly share that information, they really reinforce the myth in a problematic way, and so i would encourage all non-profits to ensure that if they are sharing, they’re they’re financial ratios, that they only do that in the context of their programmatic work and the results they’re achieving their communities, and they might have been doing that in response to donors who were, you know, picking up on it and picking up on the misconception i mean, there’s been a lot of talk about it and that that may have been, albeit sort of, you know, inappropriately waited response, but it may have been a response to the public, so the demand for those for those numbers, i think that’s absolutely right and it’s essentially create a vicious cycle where i think no one wanted it tio kind of spin out of control, and it hasn’t. So now where we’re pulling it back, trying to put things inappropriate contact trying teo affirm this multidemensional approach that we’ve all been talking about write your letter is is addressed to the donors of america, not to the charities of america. Dahna um yeah, go ahead, there’s some something more okay, there’s something i would like to say. You know, i think one of the things that really strikes us is that when a message goes out there, as some people are promoting that what? You should look at his results and results alone and forget about all this overhead. In this other financial business and what not in these other ratios? I think that it’s really ridiculous, and i think it’s really unfair to donors, i think that in a sense donors have made a very rational choice in looking at proxies to some degree, because the reality, as we know from years of research, is that is that the vast majority of non-profits do not publicly report on their results, and in fact, if you take it a step further, the vast majority of charities don’t have any data on their results to report upon. And so it’s not fair. I think two entire, you know to say, well, donors, you know, you should be looking at this when in fact there’s nowhere for most of them to go for most cause areas. For most types of charities, you don’t have robust information. So in addition to the advice that jacob gave about the overhead being paired with the results, i think there’s a fundamental message that charity’s more and more have got to step up to the plate and really take on this matter off results if you want people to look at things other than overhead. You have a really obligation to give them the most meaningful. The most important information which we agree all is about your results. Yeah, the conventional wisdom for for a lot of years has been that our results are unmeasurable were too complex for the work that we do is too abstruse, teo quantify results and that’s still happening. And in fact, we spicy and increasing drumbeat. There are more and more of these kind of particles we see coming out saying, well, we’re too complex. It’s two unique were too it’s, too expensive, there’s any number of a litany of excuses, quite frankly, and we’re not saying that you have to be perfect and it has to be robust. We just want to see charities begin to get on this road and do the best you can just started. Don’t say that. It’s. Impossible. We know that it’s, not there’s. Plenty of resource is out there to help our tailor. The point i would. Oh, please go ahead. There. There are the reasons people give to charities are very complex. And quite a bit of it goes to the extent to which people trust the organization the extent to which they trust people are trying to achieve the organization’s mission and trust can be measured. You are sensed by people, sometimes more so than it can be measured. You know, when we feel that the people in an organization are giving it an honest effort, that they’re working hard to achieve the goals of the organization. We tend to trust that organization, mohr and their different ways of looking at that it’s not always extent to which, you know, we see these results printed so, you know, that has to be factored in, and sometimes trust goes to the extent to which people feel comfortable with how they’re spending their money. And while we don’t like that, it’s still part of the complex mix of what drives people to give to chairs art the letter goes so far as to say that many charities should spend mohr on overhead. What what was behind including that? Well, you know, you can certainly look at some organizations who like to tout the fact that they spend, you know, very small sums of money on overhead and and want to point out that that makes them somehow better than organizations that maybe spending mohr that’s. Dangerous, because if an organization really needs to spend more money on overhead and and that amount is reasonable, they should move in that direction, rather than in a direction that would keep them from being an effective organization by not spending that money. So, i think, that’s, the point that we’re trying to make here. If an organization needs to spend more money on overhead, and they’re still within reasonable boundaries for what would be comfortable for for them and for their board members, they should look in that direction. They should. They should do that, including overhead for long term growth. Minute. This constant struggle between the immediate need and and the the desire to have build scale and capacity for the longer term. That’s, that’s very, very challenging. Yes, that’s. You know, that’s, what boards and executives of non-profits are charged to do? We have to balance the challenges of explaining to a doubting public that he spent expenditures are worthwhile and that they will lead to results. Uh, that’s the role of the board and that’s the responsibility, i think, of the executive running that organization to make sure that the people understand the directions that they’re headed in art taylor is president, ceo of the better business bureau wise giving alliance jacob harold, president, ceo of guide star, and ken berger, president, ceo of charity navigator. And we’re talking about there overhead myth letter that the three of them signed i want to take a moment, send a little more live listener love, hillside, new jersey, yonkers, new york, new york, new york, baltimore, maryland and bloom dale, ohio live listener love out to all of you let’s, go to some some questions we did a lot of pulling for listener questions, and i want to thank all three of your organizations. Thank you and your staffs for retweeting my tweets, looking for questions and really, i wantto do one think all three of you and your and the staff, they were working with me. Really very, very, very helpful. Thank you for that. Um ah, question came from amanda. Pee on da on twitter, she’s at living united who decides and how do you decide what is program and what he’s overhead? These areas can be pretty overlapped and sort of pretty vague boundaries. Who want to take that? That question from amanda p about program versus overhead. How do we decide? I think part of that can be in discussion with your your auditors to help ferret out. Make sure that you’re using the best practices in the policies that air in place to make that determination. We do know that, you know, i bought it. Work is as much an art as a science and there’s some ambiguity there. But there are some experts that have worked with a lot of organizations that you can, i think, rely upon, you know? And the other thing is to remember that were typically looking at larger organizations, those of us at least those of us that are doing these ratings. So those kind of organizations that need to do a gnawed it and to have that kind of expertise they can work with that professional to help make certain that they’re allocating those costs appropriately, that our overhead and that are not overhead and let’s also remember that when we’re talking about overhead, there are two subsets of that in particular, one is fund-raising and the other is administrative, and there was some important differences between those things, and as we’ve been talking about the importance of overhead, a lot of what we’ve been talking about is especially in the area of the administrative, the infrastructure jacob can mentions the fund-raising overhead is there a another? This is another question i got from a couple of listeners about the cost of raising a dollar that phrase, the cost of a dollar raising the dollar, any any guidance around that? What can we what can we offer charities? Well, so you know, i would say this distinction is is an essential one, um, and that when we talk about investing in yourself and investing in training or strategy or internal systems, that really falls into this category of administrative overhead and that’s something that in general, i’m very sympathetic when an organization says we need to invest in ourselves on we need to be able to think in the long run and that ultimately the way that we’re going to maximize effectiveness is by being a strong and effective healthy organization with fund-raising you know, i think that when you look at the cases of fraud, which i believe are rare but it’s still important for us to address, they more often fraud and or gross mismanagement, um, they more often fall into the category of fund-raising fraud or front fund-raising mismanagement, i’m not going to offer any sort of a, uh, redline a particular number where it’s, fine, if you’re below and it’s bad, if you’re above because the non-profit sector is simply to divers for that, i will say that, you know, the vast majority of a dollar raised is going teo fund-raising costs, especially when those air outsourced to professional fundraisers, you know, that’s something that to me is not a red flag at least a pink flag is worth exploring, but i also recognize that, you know, philanthropic capital is the fuel of the non-profit sector, and it does cost money to raise money, and we have to defend non-profits ability to invest in their own fund-raising while recognizing that there are those cases where it goes too far, aren’t we have find it interesting? Yeah, that in our evaluations, about forty five percent of the organizations we evaluate failed to meet one arm or of our twenty standards, but only about twelve percent failed to meet because of some financial ratio issue, whether that be fund-raising or administrative. So, you know, we like to help donors appreciate that if you’re just focusing on these overhead numbers, you might be giving to organizations that you wouldn’t give, too, if you knew more about him. So there’s also the flipside of overhead, which is over relying on them, can can lead you to support organizations that you might not want to if you do so, we think that our financial ratios are probably at the right place, given that so few fails to meet those financial ratio stands. Okay, that puts it in perspective. Thank you. All right, let’s, stay with you. We have a question from the council of non-profits in washington d c on twitter. They are build np capacity. Should we still use overhead? Is it so charged a word? Now that we should be using something else instead, well, you know, the word overhead is a generalization, as we’ve just discussed, what we’re really talking about here is where their charity spending a reasonable amount on administration and program and fund-raising and those are the three categories that we use should we continue to use that those three descriptions? Absolutely, because organizations do need to know how much their spending on these particular categories for purposes of comparing their effectiveness in these particular areas, effectiveness isn’t simply program effectiveness, it’s also, you know, making sure your administration is effective and making sure your fund-raising operation is effective, and i don’t think you can do that without keeping score financially to go along with what you’re doing. From programmatic jacob question from jean takagi who’s, our legal contributor and on twitter he’s at g tak wonders, why did it take so long for the overhead myth letter? Um, you know, a fair question, and i’ll i’ll say that, you know, part of it is just the coordination and that you know, the power here it that our three organizations that have some differences have different approaches, sometimes differences of opinion. Came together because we did share a belief that we have the field could move beyond are our focus on on overhead, it just takes a while sometimes to coordinate that across organisations that even as we are friendly there there elements what we do that are in competition with a city with one at the same time, though guidestar, charity navigator and others did sign a similar agreement back in two thousand nine. So we did do this before. I think part of the differences that, you know, you have the damp a lotta phenomenon, and i also think that and jacob and guide star was very instrumental in this, trying to have a way that tangibly the non-profits could actually sign on and be involved and engaged in the process which pulled people in in a way that weren’t wasn’t in that original effort in two thousand nine. Yep. That’s right. Gentlemen, we have to leave it. Okay. Very, very quick. Back-up. Go ahead, jacob. Oh, just that. And the one thing that has that there’s now hope that their new alternatives emerging and that we can begin to fill the vacuum with something else i want to. Thank all three of you, alright, can burger just said, amen. Thank you, taylor president, ceo wise giving alliance. Jacob harold, president, ceo guidestar. Ken berger, president, ceo of charity navigator you confined art on twitter at wise giving. Jacob is at jacob, harold and ken is at ken’s commentary. Gentlemen, thank you very much for being guest. Thank you so much. Thank you, thank you. Been a real pleasure. We take a break, go away for a couple seconds when we come back, tony’s take, too. I want to express some gratitude, and then gene takagi on good overhead, bad overhead. More live listener, love. Stay with us. You’re listening to the talking alternative network, waiting to get in. Duitz nothing buy-in good. Are you suffering from aches and pains? Has traditional medicine let you down? Are you tired of taking toxic medications, then come to the double diamond wellness center and learn how our natural methods can help you to hell? Call us now at to one to seven to one eight, one eight three that’s to one to seven to one eight one eight three or find us on the web at www dot double diamond wellness dot com. We look forward to serving you. Hi, i’m ostomel role, and i’m sloan wainwright, where the host of the new thursday morning show the music power hour. Eleven a m. We’re gonna have fun. Shine the light on all aspects of music and its limitless healing possibilities. We’re gonna invite artists to share their songs and play live will be listening and talking about great music from yesterday to today, so you’re invited to share in our musical conversation. Your ears will be delighted with the sound of music and our voices. Join austin and sloan live thursdays at eleven a. M on talking alternative dot com. You’re listening to the talking alternative network. Buy-in hi, i’m bill mcginley, president, ceo of the association for healthcare philanthropy. And you’re listening to tony martignetti non-profit radio. Big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. Oppcoll got more live listener love, rocklin, california, brooklyn, new york, clinton, maryland, dallas, texas live listener loved to you let’s, go abroad. We’ve got seoul, korea, seoul so so loyal. Such always someone at least one of a couple of today from seoul. Thank you very much for listening on your haserot and chongqing, china usually have more from china, but only one today. Chung ching, china ni hao, time for tony’s. Take two and i want to use this time to just thank you very much for listening. I am grateful for your support of the show. I’m in your ear right now and i thank you for that. Radio is a very personal, maybe even intimate medium, i believe. And i thank you personally for listening and supporting the show. Thank you very much. And that is tony’s. Take two. Just my gratitude for friday, the sixth of august sixth of september. Who writes this copy? Who writes this copy to sixth of august, the thirty sixth show of the year. Jean takagi he’s, the principal of neo the non-profit and exempt organizations law group in san francisco he edits the popular non-profit law blogged dot com and as i said earlier, i’ll give him another shot out on twitter. He’s at g tak welcome back, jean tony, how are you? I’m terrific. What was what was your take on that conversation? You know, i thought it was really interesting. Tony, i really appreciate the fact that the three of the signers of the overhead myth better came onto this show and we’re willing to discuss discuss that issue. I think it’s a really important one to recognize. Excellent. And i was grateful as well it was. And that was the first time i ask can off mike that’s the first time that the three even have been together in a live for him like this. The only other time was answering a newspaper. Reporters questions and, you know, newspaper is a secondary medium to radio, of course. So very glad to be the first time that they were all three together. Live s o. You have some thoughts on good overhead, bad overhead. I got some questions, gene, that really worded differently, but fell into the category of this. How do we decide what is appropriate? Yeah, i think. That’s a great question. Tony and it’s. Difficult. To answer because it’s so specific tio the organizations in the circumstances that may be applicable to that organization so it’s hard to make generalities. Which is the whole reason why it’s hard tto rate charities based on their overhead. But i think we can, you know, lissome general principles of what might be good overhead and what might be problematic. Okay, you have some from categories, then that that we should start with the good, i believe, sure. So i think education is a really good category educating particularly your board of directors so they can understand their responsibilities and how they can best contribute to the organization. I think boards are largely an untapped resource for many charities and investing in educating and engaging them. Figuring out how to best engage report, i think, is really valuable then educating your executive director or ceo. I think that’s so important as well, often times ditigal dd is charged with implementing a plan, and that person may not have the experience or the educational background to do all the things that are required to implement that plan. Perhaps no translating their vision into organizational priorities are setting realistic budget providing. A useful employee feedback, you know, defining and delegating properly assessing organizational needs on dh communicating those two all the stakeholders of the organization, the eighties are charged with doing so much and so many different areas, and they may have tremendous skill and leadership, but they may lack certain certain skills or experience in certain areas, and i think boards have got to make sure that they put into their budget equipping that executive director with the information or consultants or other materials that she or he needs to get the job done. Thiss ah lot of what you’re talking about falls in the category, i think of professional development for the board, for the executive officer on that would also trickle down to the staff as well. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, i call it education rather than professional development, because professional development sometimes seems like a benefit that you’re giving out to your to your employees. And i think these air just crucial investments, both in making sure that you’re properly equipping your organs, you know, perhaps you’re your most important organizational asset, which people, um and also in terms of just, you know, making sure that you’re going to retain the best people if you’re not educating them, retention is going to be a big challenge, all right? What’s another category of what you deem acceptable and an appropriate overhead expense stop purposes by saying i am a lawyer, chun hee’s. I’m bringing that perspective into this and and others will have other perspective to offer. All right, jeez, what’s coming boy, go ahead regularly at the morris with for me as a lawyer, making sure that you’ve got the right policies in place is really important. I think sound policies can improve on organization’s operations, can help prevent really costly mistakes and keep in organizationally a new organization legally compliant, which can be valuable in so many ways. So that would the expense aside from time to time to create policy and then have it approved by the board, might involve consultants in areas that the organization’s lacking expertise? Yeah, absolutely so anywhere from an auditor, regardless of whether you’re require an audit or not under under laws, maybe an audit or financial review, khun raise cem cem, sufficient information or materials for the board or the executive to consider an internal control policy. Financial management policies getting other consultants involved or lawyers to deal with conflict of interest, document retention, whistleblower issues figuring out what type of gifts are ok to take and which ones are not ok to take. Most organizations don’t have gift acceptance policies and that’s something that they should look into, and i think you’re going to raise maybe an issue of expense reimbursement later on and that’s another good policy to have to make sure that everybody’s on the same page well, okay, around that you and you and i have talked about a lot of these policies in the past, in detail, so around that expense reimbursement there was there’s, an interesting case, a to college, a college president who spent one hundred forty thousand dollars on a trip to china, and it is justifying it. Could i don’t remember the name of the college. I don’t do you? Yeah. It’s, westfield state university and their president was abin da bao. Okay, he’s he’s. So that expense, among other things, it’s. Not just that expense, but among other things. But that one caught my eye because it’s on its face, it would seem so outrageous. But there’s things. We don’t know, like how many people were there and, uh what? What the outcomes were i mean, that could be a justifiable expense, that kind of money for a trip it was to china. I’m pretty sure yeah, absolutely. So i don’t know enough about it to really comment on it any more than to say that, yes, on its face, it can look like it’s going to be difficult to justify expense, but that’s, as it was characterized by the media on dh i don’t know that we have all the information or if the media has sametz displayed, you know, the information that would raise sort of public outcry where otherwise it might be kind of boring to know what justifications there were for such an expenditure. Perhaps there were good reasons teo increase the amount of revenues that coming from from china, or support or toe otherwise in attract students from from there, if that was indeed one of the goals, i think there’s more that needs to be learned about this before criticizing it, and the board or the executive committee of that board had requested and risk steve thirty page audit, i believe, and i think they’re going to need to go through that pretty court carefully. It just raises the point that it’s really without all the facts, as you’re saying, it’s really impossible to know whether one hundred forty thousand dollars for a trip to china or fifteen percent spent on program in a year or are more vice versa in a year is appropriate. You just if you just can’t draw these lines the way one of the ceos i think it was jacob, harold said, you know, and we were talking about i was talking to those guys you just can’t know and be so precise with dollar amounts and percentages, yeah, in some ways are in many ways i would say that st tony, i guess there are the exceptions and aren’t there are always exceptions, but if a charity that’s focused on poverty relief is paying for, you know, first class entertainment, first class flights to paris toe entertain their staff members for retention purposes. I upleaf that’s bad overhead, but, you know, outside of the really obvious examples, it is sometimes difficult t criticize a charity, but i don’t think we can downplay whether donor-centric tae shins are reasonable or not, if you’re transparent organization and that information is coming out through the media through the charity rating sites through your nine ninety, you’re going to want to make sure that that you’re aware of certain expenses that might catch people’s eyes and turned them the wrong way because of public relations and the goodwill that the charity has is, you know, other other than the people of this that that are supporting the charity, another one of the charity’s most important resources that that goodwill so you don’t want to harm that you want to avoid the perception of a bad expenditure. Yeah, especially if it looks like a blatant rip red flag out there. What’s another category you you have for us in the in the good overhead section. A few risks that you have the right insurance investing in the, er, right technology, kind of another area, i think, in terms of raising the effectiveness and efficiency oven organizations performance even currently, and not just building skills for the future. I think you gotta look at things like technology are using data technology, that’s going to be more expensive, upkeep and that’s creating inefficiencies. In the productivity of your staff for that hinders prevents reasonable expansion will knew technology allows for more effective and efficient ways of advancing the mission, communicating with the donors and supporters, finding new donors, you know, mobilizing advocacy efforts, measuring and analyzing impact. And i think measurement tools is another thing there’s a demand now from from lots of sources about well, if it’s not overhead it’s about, are you creating positive impact? And if that’s the big question out there now what? How our charity is measuring that i think are may have mentioned that a lot of charities, they’re not showing that in their nine nineties, we can’t really determine howto review charities based dahna on impact and part of that is because it’s so hard to measure, but what investments are you making there then? I think the last thing i wanted to mention with building engagement and collaboration collaboration is it was such an important part of being more effective and efficient and taking great ideas to scale where, where it makes sense and that all costs money, and if you’re going to label that is overhead and then i think you have to make sure that you’re putting your money in the right place. One of those questions that i read from a listener was, you know, he’s overhead, a jaded term now. But, you know, maybe i’m probably doesn’t really matter what the term is, but investment is something that i think that sounds more positive than overhead, and it seems to fall into. I think it sort of captures a lot of what you’re talking about in terms of engagement. You know, in investing in people and maybe joint ventures and things like that, we have to go away for a couple seconds. Jean, of course, will stay with us, and we keep talking about good overhead, bad overhead. Got a little more live listener, love, stay with us. You’re listening to the talking alternative network. Oppcoll are you stuck in your business or career trying to take your business to the next level, and it keeps hitting a wall? This is sam liebowitz, the conscious consultant. I will help you get to the root cause of your abundance issues and help move you forward in your life. Call me now and let’s. Create the future you dream of. Two, one, two, seven, two, one, eight, one, eight, three, that’s to one to seven to one, eight one eight three. The conscious consultant helping conscious people. Be better business people. Have you ever considered consulting a road map when you feel you need help getting to your destination when the normal path seems blocked? A little help can come in handy when choosing an alternate route. Your natal chart is a map of your potentials. It addresses relationships, finance, business, health and, above all, creativity. Current planetary cycles can either support or challenge your objectives. I’m montgomery taylor. If you would like to explore the help of a private astrological reading, please contact me at monte at monty taylor dot. Com let’s monte m o nt y at monty taylor dot com. Talking alternative radio twenty four hours a day. No. Got more live listener love, vietnam live listener love out to you, warrington uk and mara pole, ukraine live listener left each of you. I’m sorry, we don’t have vietnamese or ukrainian covered in the studio here. We do have japanese, though. Konnichi wa to you, yokosuka! That was terrible. Let me try that again. Yokosuka and osaka i could eat you are gene let’s, let’s move, teo bad overhead some something’s in the fall into that category you think probably are hard to justify. Yeah, there are certain transactions that i think or expenses that they’re going to be more difficult to justify than others think again there they’re going to be exceptions to some of these, but generally speaking, if you’ve got transactions that appeared to benefit insiders like boardmember zehr officers mohr than the charity’s intended beneficiaries, those are going to be difficult to justify, and you’re going to want to think carefully about whether you should make those expenses and then whether they’re really of reasonable advantage to the organization if that was to come out in the open. So those are one type extravagant expenses way before we before we moved to benefit another if that one hundred forty thousand dollars china trip is really resulting in very trivial benefits and never with the expectation of muchmore benefits to accrue to the organization but was really about sort of making sure that a president or ceo was traveling on a very enjoyable trip. That’s compensation, that’s that’s not that’s, not an organizational expense that that it’s going to be easy toe to justify in and of itself, and finally appears, you know, having significant expenses on furthering some other cause other than your mission other than your state admissions, then that may be a problematic expenses well, and that may be a violation of your duty. Teo ensure that the charitable, recent sources are used for that particular mission. So if you’re an organization with a mission to improve the lives of children with leukemia, you shouldn’t spend significant amounts of the charity’s money tto help disaster victims in the local community, even if that’s a wonderful cause because that’s not your mission, you mentioned the insider transactions, and one of the policies that were supposed to have when we were talking about good overhead was was conflict of interest policies, but that is not. Supposed to deal with the the insider transactions? Yeah, in part it does, but we can. We can have work transactions that are going to pass the legal requirements of conflict of trance. Interest transactions are not necessarily bad if a director or boardmember is offering an organization rent and one of you know his or her office spaces and that’s slightly below fair market value or nor more than fair market value, that might actually be the best deal for the organization to take. And that deal might be fine. But on the other hand, if you had other choices that were equally viable and it looks like you’re benefiting one ofyou, directors air, doing him or her a favor by renting out when it their offices and that can be problematic, and then you want to you want to factor that into the decision for that particular transaction. You have some thoughts about fund-raising expenses and how they may or may not be good or bad, excessive or or appropriate. Yeah. And there again, it’s it’s really about the care and the diligence at the board and the executive are exercising in determining what is an appropriate amount. To spend on fund-raising expenses and what is to be gained out of it sometimes you know fund-raising expenses are going to be expensive, and if you’re building a new campaign and intending to raise a lot of money, you may have to invest a lot in that to get the right people there. Tio use the right strategies for marketing, but again, you’ve got a sort of manage both what your needs are and what your donors and the public’s expectations are. Well, yeah, it’s a tricky area that’s very hard, though, because the public’s expectations air being set by thie overhead myth misconception, for instance, and what and what they do see some charities publicizing the way i think it was jacob harold, you know, said hey didn’t use the fund-raising expense example, he used the overhead ratio example, but those don’t expectations are very hard to two teo to manage well, impossible to manage their very hard to know sometimes, yeah, i think one of the questions that that has been raised on twitter around the show as well with what you know are the signatory to the overhead midst letter going to do about changing don’t expectations, and i think they’ve got limited power to do it. I mean, it’s, great to shut some sunlight on this issue, but, you know, your donors are your donors on dh you’ve got no, you know, here’s, another overhead expense that you should be spending on is educating your donors about why you’re spending the way you are on if you can tell them exactly what you’re doing and be open with it, hopefully that’s going to justify it for your particular backs of circumstances, but you can’t just simply, you know, expect donors to understand it very, very high overhead ratio initially, uh, let you know, let them figure out for themselves that it’s going to actually result in better impact and lower overhead ratios in the future. You know, companies deal with this, you know, expectations. I said it’s, impossible to manage, not manage, but i don’t know, maybe i’m splitting hairs here, but persuade mean over time, and it does take time, and it does take money. People’s perceptions do change. I mean, look, a tte political candidates who are disgraced and then, you know, win win congressional offices or running for mayor or something on dh, you know, and have a good chance of succeeding. Look at, you know, your own your governor in california, for instance, people perceptions about people can change perceptions about companies can change. Weii just have about a minute left. I mean, it can be done, but it’s a very long and i think expensive process. Yeah, i absolutely agree. And i think it is important for platforms like like this and be open the overhead mid letter and and your show, uh, tony, for people to understand, you know, overhead averages about twenty five percent across all industries in the for-profit world and thirty four percent across service industries, at least according to one major study and a lot of non-profits are scared at anything that approaches over twenty percent and, you know, maybe that’s not right. And sometimes you need the initial overhead expense to build infrastructure uh, before you move on to more efficient systems, and that means your overhead, rachel is going to be bigger as well. So educating more and more people about this through through the media, through other platforms, but also on the organizational level really, really important. Durney martignetti non-profit radio we’re trying to be the change that we want to see in the world jean takagi is principal of neo in san francisco non-profit and exempt organizations law group. You’ll find his blawg at non-profit law block dot com, and you’ll find him on twitter at g tak jean, thank you very much, as always. Thanks, tony, my pleasure. Next week, scott koegler returns he’s, our tech contributor and the editor of non-profit technology news. We’re going to talk about internal versus external social media and communications tools and platforms very much want to thank my three ceo guess the three tenors, i don’t know there were the they were like the three tenors. I don’t know which one would be pavarotti, who were the other three placido domingo and i put it in janice ah, former opera singer on the spot she can’t name the third just she can’t name the third she will as soon as we sign off, i know i’m i’m sorry, janice, if you like this show, then you’ll like my podcast, which i do for the chronicle of philanthropy. It is fund-raising fundamentals it’s monthly and it’s ten minutes each podcast and it’s on the chronicle of philanthropy website and itunes have some more lingering live listener love that io, doylestown, pennsylvania. Bethpage, new york. Port. Charlotte, florida. And tokyo, japan live listener love to all of you. Our creative producer is claire meyerhoff. Gemma’s taylor is today’s line producer. The show’s social media is by deborah askanase of community organizer two point oh, and the remote producer of tony martignetti non-profit radio is john federico of the new rules i’m loving this new music. What do you think you could tell me on the facebook page? What you think of the new music? I hope you’ll be with us next friday, one to two p, m eastern. Talking alternative broadcasting at talking alternative dot com. Duitz e-giving didn’t think the shooting. Good ending. You’re listening to the talking alternate network, waiting to get you thinking. Cubine are you a female entrepreneur? Ready to break through? Join us at sixty body sassy sol, where women are empowered to ask one received what they truly want in love, life and business. Tune in thursday, said noon eastern time to learn tips and juicy secrets from inspiring women and men who, there to define their success, get inspired, stay motivated and defying your version of giant success with sexy body sake. 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154: Get The Best Out Of Your Board & Back To Board Basics II – Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio

Posted on August 9, 2013 by Nonprofit Radio

Tony’s guests this week:

Allison Chernow is director of external affairs at Bronx Museum

Terry Billie is director of corporate and foundation relations at Goodwill Industries of NY & NJ

Holly Bellows is chief development officer for Helen Keller National Center

Gene Takagi, principal of the Nonprofit & Exempt Organizations Law Group

Read and watch more on Tony’s blog: http://tonymartignetti.com

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Hello and welcome to tony martignetti non-profit radio, where we’re talking about big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. I’m your aptly named host. Oh, i hope you were with me last week. You would cause me to go into cardiogenic shock if i learned that you had missed fermentation sandorkraut cats is a fermenter. We talked about the history, benefits and methods of fermenting foods and volunteermatch making scott koegler, our technology contributor and the editor of non-profit technology news, shared ideas about tech that matches willing volunteers with seeking charities this week, all aboard. First, get the best out of your board our panel shares wisdom on identifying, recruiting, training, engaging and transitioning board members. I talked to allison char now, terry, billy and holly bellows at fund-raising day in june and back to board basics, do you, jane takagi are legal contributor returns to contribute to continue our discussion on soundboard practices? This time, we’ll talk about term limits, how often you’re bored should meet having automatic removal provisions and very young trustees that’s young in age, not in how they’re acting, and jean is principal of the non-profit exempt organizations law group between the guests on tony’s take to my beth cantor interview is on video, and i feel i let you down last week, and i’m going to explain that right now. We have the interview from fund-raising day this past june, where we’re talking about getting the best out of your board, and here is that welcome to tony martignetti non-profit radio coverage of fund-raising day two thousand thirteen where at the marriott marquis hotel in times square, midtown new york city and we’re talking now about board relations. My guests are it’s needed most closest closest to meet holly bellows, chief development officer of helen keller’s services for the blind. Next to her is terry billy, director of corporate and foundation relations for goodwill industries of new york and new jersey. And we also have allison for now director of external affairs for the bronx museum of the arts ladies welcome. Thank you. Thank you. It’s. A pleasure to have you. Your seminar topic is bored. Relations getting the best out of your trustees. No, let’s start far away. Allison, can we start with recruitment? What? What? What’s? Some advice around identifying and recruiting the right boardmember well for museum. We have a lot of opportunities for cultivation of perspective, trustees. We looked to people who come to many of our events. We sort of noticed repeat attendees way start plucking them out. We invite them to special private events. We find that people are very attracted to sort of exclusive private events, not generally open to the public. So we invite them to dinners or preview openings of exhibitions and that’s how we generate interests, and we see if they respond to that we just keep cultivating more and generally that’s, that’s way, tio sort of notice and pounce on perspective prospects. We also use other trustees to help us, and they bring along people whom they think would be a fit for the museum to two events as well. Okay, i mean, i sort of go down the line on different topics. Teri, you have anything you’d like to add about identifying the right people? Well, we’re different kind of agency were a social service ages. We don’t really have events or exhibitions or things like that that people would come to so instead we have to really go the traditional route, which is working with our trustees to see if they have friends or colleagues or others that might come be interested in working with our organization or we go toe on organizations such as bored source to do recruitment. Two or two funders, corporations, foundations that might be interested in supporting us in a different way through ford relations. Okay, so you’re relying more on your board because you don’t have those cultivation events. By the way, terry, i want to welcome you back to the show. Thank you. Chatted with you this time last year. How about you, holly? Like they have that goodwill industries is doing well differently. Well, we’re also human service organization. We serve the blind, and those were deaf blind. And so we have the same process as terry. We look for people who are already within the organization. People that know people that want to be committed for the long along home. Okay? And i apologize. I confused you with i’m sorry, terry. I’m here with goodwill industries and holly. Of course, you’re with falik falik color this’s blind. Thank you very much. Coach me on each individual word. Now i have it. Holly’s with helen keller services for the blind. Thank you, but no, thank you. Thank you for saving me. Okay, after we’ve way haven’t identified the right people way have to start. Teo, make conversation a lot more serious. Terry, how do we how do we go about that? Well, we work with a development committee. In fact, i had my development kitty meet committee meeting last night, which we met with five of our board members. And we talked about the different things that were doing to raise money. And we talked about developed direct mail cultivation events and funding alerts for possible corporate foundation connections, finding out what they’d like to do, how they like to help. And so that’s that’s, how we work with our board, we have a lot of other board members that in war policy driven, so they’re not so much into fund-raising so we have to use them as ambassadors they’re not so comfortable in. They get scared about fund-raising and what the expectations will be have to have to come out in the recruitment process. Right? Right. Would you say holly? This is critical. We need to be up front. How do you how do you do that? Helen keller. Well, right now i weigh had a board meeting on monday morning and a golf tournament afterwards. And so i i spoke with the board that i will be interviewing them over the next couple of months. Existing existing board, the existing board. Okay, and on that will be part of the question is, we also had a former board members come to the golf tournament to reinforce the other ties to the organization, and i will be interviewing them, too. And so is part of that process reaching out to not only what they’re interested interests are going forward, but, you know, looking for prospects and, you know, foundations as well as their personal connections for future board development. Imagine it’s it’s it’s important not to be trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Different board members have different interests. Aptitudes abilities, right? They can all come to the board for different reasons. Maybe they had someone in their family that is blind or deaf blind. Or maybe it just seems like a really cool thing to do. They learned about helen keller in third grade here in new york state. And they want teo you. Know, be a part of it. So various everyone has various reasons why they want to be on the board, and we want to exploit those personalities and and credentials, right? That’s, right? Some people they may not be able to get give from their personal wealth or their corporate wealth, but they are connected to lots of people who may be able to give to us or a foundation. I interviewed someone earlier today who uses is actually sort of ah, trainer on linked in hey uses, linked in board, connect on trains, organizations to use linked in board, connect to any of you use that for identifying potential board members. Anybody? Yes, that’s one of the things that we are planning to grow our board in the coming fiscal year fiscal starts in july, so we will be using board, connect as one of the tools and dish in tow board source to reach out and look for a new board members. So you haven’t used board connect yet? No. Yeah. Okay. Okay. I do plan to use it, though, so you’re so holy. You’re aware. Also aboard. Connect. I’m aware of it, but i haven’t used it. I’m creating a separate committee. A cz i told you before the interview. I’m hyre helmsley. We have a grant from the helmsley found charitable foundation and one of their charges tow us is to create a aboard for one of our programs so that we can attract funders and people who are interested in serving the deaf blind. And so i’m going to be using it soon to look for people across the country that might want to become members of this committee. Alison to make this aa two way street. How does the organization identify what it has to offer board members in return for their for their service? Right? Well, when we interview a prospect way really try and find out what? What is it that draws them to the museum? What is their interest? And for us, we have, ah, large education component. We have the whole art collection component, so they’re different reasons why a trustee would join the board of the museum. So we try and suss out what that will be. And i find a commonality is that they want to learn more. They often want to learn more about art. So for those who do, we put them on the acquisitions committee, and that way they can meet artists, and they can learn all that are they come to gallery tours. We sort of feel what? What is it that attracts them? So for others, it’s education, and they want to be part of the whole education programs. So they join the education committee for the board waken segment, their interests, and sometimes they don’t even overlap with board members. But we can sort of put them where they’re most enthusiastic. Okay, talking alternative radio twenty four hours a day. Do you need a business plan that can guide your company’s growth? Seven and seven will help bring the changes you need. Wear small business consultants and we pay attention to the details. You may miss our culture and consultant services are guaranteed to lead toe. Right, groat. For your business, call us at nine. One seven eight three, three, four, eight, six zero foreign, no obligation. Free consultation checkout on the website of ww dot covenant seven dot com are you fed up with talking points? Rhetoric everywhere you turn left or right? Spin ideology no reality, in fact, its ideology over in tow. No more it’s time for action. Join me. Larry shot a neo-sage tuesday nights nine to eleven easter for isaac tower radio in the ivory tower will discuss what’s important to you society, politics, business and family. It’s provocative talk for the realist and the skeptic who wants a go what’s really going on? What does it mean? What can be done about it? So gain special access to the ivory tower. Listen to me. Very sharp. Your neo-sage tuesday nights nine to eleven new york time go to ivory tower radio dot com for details. That’s. Ivory tower radio, dot com e every time i was a great place to visit for both entertainment and education. Listening. Tuesday nights nine to eleven. It will make you smarter. Hey, all you crazy listeners looking to boost your business? Why not advertise on talking alternative with very reasonable rates? Interested simply email at info at talking alternative dot com and just while we’re still on this recruitment process, terry, how i said, terri and i looked at allison mary-jo terry, how do you explain the organization’s expectations? Is it in writing, or is it just a conversation? Thie expectations around all all the functions of a boardmember it’s through conversations way actually, in the past, our board has not really been a fund-raising board, and so we’re in the process of kind of transforming and educating our board as to their financial responsibility, even though that’s something that most people understand that that is one of the reasons why you become aboard is to support the organization, unfortunately, we have boardmember is that have not made a gif right? And so we need to have the conversation with them and to say that we need one hundred percent support, it doesn’t mean that you need to give us one hundred thousand dollars. You can give us five thousand dollars, you could give us three thousand dollars, you need to give us something so that’s one of our challenges with our organization, with a board that we are working through, even though we’re jumping way ahead in the boardmember life. Cycle that could be an indicator that it’s time for a boardmember step down exactly. In fact, we just started a new campaign to attract the millennials, the young twenties and thirty somethings to start, eh? Maybe a young, not so much a board, but a council we’re going to call the good the good counsel, and they’re going to be younger people that we want to get involved and engaged and so that they could eventually turn into board members. So we’re starting with the youth, starting with they’re all about cause marketing and the finding ways to make a difference by their volunteering, so we’re going to be working with them to do that, and then eventually, you know, have them start their own, like little special events and cultivation and awareness and marketing, and then eventually waken see floats to the top and hopefully get him on board. Okay, back-up another step, let’s say we’ve recruited the boardmember we need to keep that person active, engaged who wants to talk about keeping a boardmember active and engaged way have we’re fortunate that we have a vehicle for doing that, we can invite them to openings and too many events, but it’s really also about having them see the inner workings, lights, lights just dimmed here. Nothing wrong for those of you watching the video on youtube, there’s nothing wrong with your vision. The overhead lights all just went out here. Marriott marquis. But we’re continuing. We have our own lights powered battery so doesn’t doesn’t interrupt back on. Okay, no, don’t adjust your sets. Everything is fine. Okay? I’m sorry. Go ahead. So for example, that the trustees who are interested in education way let them come and see the classrooms that come to the museum to see the work in progress and to see the work that we do so it’s very important that they come in and see all the grassroots work that’s that’s happening. And the other thing is that we just try to make them feel special. I mean, we try to write letters that are personalized for them that nobody else could get, so that they would feel that, you know, they in fact do make a difference there. So, you know the gratitude combined with hands on and really seeing what what’s going on works to really keep them interested. Invested? In it good, great, it isn’t. One of the things that i have begun doing is whenever we get a grant or a large donation, even a small donation, but we are an organization that’s been around for one hundred twenty years or more, and so we have lots of get small gifts that we get and half for a long time, but i ask different board members to call the foundation or call the person and just a thank you they don’t ask for anything, but to in that way, they’re learning more about that organization, and they’re feeling connected and that’s been a real positive response that i’m getting. So as i said, we’ve been around for a long time, we have many donorsearch couldn’t call everyone they are picking up more and more that they can do. So. Holly, how about training training the new boardmember what does that look like for for helen keller way haven’t i haven’t started training yet since i’ve been since october, but what that will look like is for is creating a talking points and some role playing for those that haven’t gone out and ask for money, paring them with someone who has done it and feels comfortable with it, having conversations about their experience on other boards. It’s, interesting custom, many of our boardmember serve on other boards on, sometimes they’ve gone out and made asking some have not so it’s going to be a combination of things here teach person’s comfort level. At the very least, i tell boardmember sze in in the past that invite the person to join you, make your donation in first and then in fight uh, your prospect to join them if you just can’t really say, can you give x amount of dollars so that’s a nice, non threatening way to get started and asking for money. Allison, how about training the new boardmember bronx museum of the arts? What does that look like? Well, we have a retreat on annually and in terms of role playing, there was a facilitator who came and your role played about making an ask and talking about the priorities for the museum, so it was really a time it was a very concentrated long day dahna meeting the other board members really learning about the mission and learning how to move it forward howto ask. And how to do that. Nut’s involves metoo holly, it sounded almost like you have ah, maybe a mentor mentee relationship for board members is that? Is that is that overstating? No, it didn’t help that a senior boardmember mike, you that’s correct, my position is newly created position, and part of that is to help our board became come more of a fund-raising board many of our programs our government funded, so there wasn’t a need in the past to be a fund-raising board and many organizations like helen keller, are transitioning from having helly government funded programs to where they’re going to have to go out for private gifts, and they’ll get bored members more senior boardmember help with that, terry. Anyway, you want to add about training the new boardmember right that’s, exactly the same situation that good will in addition to having individual individuals support, we have also had in the past a lot of government funding, so asking board members to help with raising money is a somewhat new angle for them. So what we’ve been doing is bringing on a different new board members, for example, way just havin a new boardmember from j p morgan chase, who has been on other boards and has done fund-raising so he is kind of going to be a example or role model to the other board members to show show them how easy and painless it is, but we do have to identify tasks board members who just can’t do fund-raising or maybe maybe won’t? Well, maybe won’t takes little training, but they’re just they’re timid. They’re terrified of it. Terry, what do we identify other things that that boardmember could do around fund-raising right, right. Other than asking right it’s it’s getting them to come to different events or different cultivation events, too, talk, be an ambassador, so they’re not asking for money. They’re building awareness, they’re talking to their friends about what they do about what goodwill does and sharing the passion about what the organization’s all about and really building awareness, not so much asking for money. If they’re afraid of asking for money, they could be a representative and record. For those who are afraid, teo, ask or it’s just uncomfortable for them. We often say what we need you to do is identify potential trustees, advocate cultivate b passionate and then we come in that’s our job and the and the executive director’s stopped to come in and do the ask, so it takes the awkwardness and the onus away from them, and they feel that they can just freely invite a guest without the worry of having to do the actual ask, okay, how about may be hosting an event? They could perhaps open their home? Holly other tasks that again trying to identify things that people who will solicit can still be involved in around fund-raising well, i have someone on our board who is an attorney, and that person uses their personal skills to review documents that are very important to fund-raising such as st charitable registrations for things like that that are very important documents that keep my department moving and keep us legal and transparent, but that’s not at, you know, going out, asking for money, but it is very important to the movement of the organization. So, yes, there are other task that besides fund-raising the other part of my practice, besides plan e-giving is the charity registration i wrote. I wrote a new book on how to do-it-yourself you and i do the registrations for charities i don’t want to do. Them so very well acquainted with that enormous morass called charity registration. Terry, we’re gonna have something. Yeah, just the same thing is asking people to host a breakfast, maybe at the club, maybe at a restaurant they go to or at there. If they have a nice house or an apartment to host something again to invite their friends or people that we want to get more engaged, all they need to do is be the be the host they don’t need to ask. Okay? And we do that also especially we play in the bronx nostalgia. So we have people hosting private problem bronze talk to sow bronx artists from storytellers. We really emphasize the bronx and have these very small, intimate events at people’s homes, and those people who host often become interested because they posted they become vested. And then the whole positive spiral happens where they want to get more involved. It’s great. How about the i don’t know the recalcitrant boardmember who just either can’t do it? I won’t do it. Or that you could. But it’s just not too. Is that person need to be transitioned off the board? How do we how? Do we finesse that situation or they’re recalcitrant? Maybe about or maybe there their attendance is very poor. Maybe they are. Maybe they’re great fundraisers, but their attendance is back. You start to see these signs, how do we want to take the first shot that way? Especially the previous job i had at a small museum. It’s, very hard because in a small shop you get to develop relationships with your trustees and you realized, especially in the economic downturn in the past years, that life happens that trustees have goes divorces, they go through bad business times, and that may account for they’re not coming there, not being able to give. And i think in a small place where you built intimacy it’s really important to have some flexibility to give them, for example, if you know there’s a personal situation to give them a year or so, it is sorted out and have a little bit of leeway. On the other hand, you know, once you do that and it continues, i think then that’s, when the board president needs to talk to the boardmember find out what’s going on and have a really frank discussion about whether it’s working for both people often they’re relieved to be let off the hook. Okay, mary-jo you’re tense, that’s totally familiar with me. I mean, we in my past organisations and in this one you have sometimes people that you just know that they’re heading out because they haven’t shown up wave a big gold wheel or a rappel wheel in the four in the booth next to us. That’s what you’re hearing it’s not we’re not giving any other way, but with next to us is giving away t shirts, caps, mugs or ipad mini being in the drawing for a night. So that’s that’s what you’re hearing going so, you know, we just recently had one of our board members say that she needed to step down because life changes and different areas of interest abila different, different levels of interest in what we’re doing, we’re already priorities changed, and she said she would continue to support the organization, but she needed, you know, she just couldn’t make it to meetings, and we knew that because she hadn’t been to meetings in like, a whole year that starts to hurt ford morale generally, i mean other board. Members who are making the time fine, making time making effort start to get resentful everything right? Holly? Yes. Okay, anything you want to add more about thie transitioning off boardmember i just sort of playing what you’re doing in terms of building up a younger constituency in my past job and now in the bronx museum, trying to build a board a parallel board. It’s called the leadership council, which conserve as a farm team for future board members and also as a retirement place for trustees. Who can’t you know, the financial onus is too great as trusting, but there’s a lesser amount expected as from a leadership council member. So it’s nice to have a transition. You’re keeping them in the fold, keeping them interested. But they don’t have all the responsibilities and duties of a trusting. Do we each have term limits for boardmember ship? No, none of you have term limits. Really that’s interesting. And that’s, you know, that’s. A very double edged thing. Because in my former job we had founder syndrome. You know trustees who had been there a long time. Really? Basically. So i ran the board de facto it’s very tough. And it really made me understand why term limits would be good. On the other hand, when you have donors who give these were our biggest donors, it’s very tough to give up financial support that they provide so that’s one motivating reasons to have this other board where they could go as well. Anybody thinking about adding board limits, we would like normal social. Yeah, we would like to add term limits, that’s something that we need to have a discussion with the board president and make some changes so that we’re hoping that we can implement that, then they’re coming here, ok, way happening had that discussion on at this point way have long serving board members who and she said, contribute and are active, and i don’t want to say goodbye to them because they’re valuable to the organization and we love them. So ish, as she said it, zo double in. Okay, we have about a minute left or so anybody want one talk about anything that i didn’t ask you about, that you’re it’s on your mind because you’re doing your seven or in a couple of hours about the board relationship hyre final final final thoughts? No, nobody. Okay, well, we’ll leave it there. All right, thank you. Oh, my god. Thank you. Thank you all very much. Thank you. Say that. Remind listeners and viewers that holly bellows is chief development officer of helen keller services for the blind. And terry billy is director of corporate and foundation relations for goodwill industries of new york and new jersey. On up, of course. Alison looking for your name here? Alison? Sure. Now sorry. Director of external affairs in the bronx. Regime of the arts, ladies. Thank you very much. Thank you for sharing your experiences. Thank you for being with me. Tony martignetti non-profit radio coverage of fund-raising day two thousand thirteen i love that roulette wheel in the in the background they were giving away the big prize was an ipad mini so i heard that in a bunch of interviews always nice to have a little little pleasant background music for an interview. And my thanks, of course. Also to the organizer’s at fund-raising day i’ve got some live listener love moscow in the russian federation and in china, taiwan, guangzhou, wuhan and beijing. Ni hao i’ve been to beijing and of into wuhan, also, and seoul in south korea, on yo haserot in japan, hiroshima, metallica and tokyo. Lovett konnichi wa there’s. Plenty of domestic live listeners will get to them in a couple of minutes. Right now, we go to a break when we come back, tony’s, take two, and then gene takagi, continuing our are all aboard day with back to board basics, do keep listening. They didn’t didn’t dick, dick tooting, getting dink, dink, dink, dink, you’re listening to the talking alternate network e-giving. Dahna good. Are you suffering from aches and pains? Has traditional medicine let you down? Are you tired of taking toxic medications, then come to the double diamond wellness center and learn how our natural methods can help you to hell? Call us now at to one to seven to one eight, one eight three that’s to one to seven to one eight one eight three or find us on the web at www dot double diamond wellness dot com way. Look forward to serving you. Hi, i’m ostomel role, and i’m sloan wainwright, where the host of the new thursday morning show the music power hour. Eleven a m. We’re gonna have fun. Shine the light on all aspects of music and its limitless healing possibilities. We’re gonna invite artists to share their songs and play live will be listening and talking about great music from yesterday to today, so you’re invited to share in our musical conversation. Your ears will be delighted with the sound of music and our voices. Join austin and sloan live thursdays at eleven a. M on talking alternative dot com. You’re listening to the talking alternative network. Schnoll if you have big ideas but an average budget, tune into tony martignetti non-profit radio for ideas you can use. I do. I’m dr. Robert penna, author of the non-profit outcomes toolbox. And i’m dr tony martignetti and it is time for dr tony martignetti is take two. I just appointed myself phd since last week. They’re pretty easy to come by, so i figured, why go through the that the trouble? I’ll just name myself one my interview with beth cantor, which was on this show a couple of weeks ago. The video is now on my blogged you may recall, she is the author of the network to non-profit and measuring the network to non-profit we talked about riel online engagement and had a measure your success in your online efforts. That video is on my blogged at tony martignetti dot com, and i think i let you down. Last week i tried a new segment called out of the blue, and my intention was to bring things bring in people who have you are supporting non-profits but are doing work that’s not directly related to non-profits on dh sandora cats was the fermenter who are brought in, and he was terrific. He was delightful, but a zay was listening to him, and then i replayed it during the week, you know, i was kind of struck with why what? Is it why we listening? What does this have to do with non-profits it’s just not close enough to non-profits he supports non-profits um, but we didn’t talk much about that and that’s not really. Why you listen, is tto find out why people support non-profits i mean, at least not from one person’s perspective. S o we’re not goingto i’m not going to continue that out of the blue i what my intention was was to try to recognize that people who work in non-profits have lots of interests that have nothing to do with non-profits i read all the profiles of new twitter followers, and a lot of people comment on food that their food either to cook, ah, a lot of people coming on their kids, wine is a pretty popular one, different sports, so, you know, so that got me thinking people are multidemensional and maybe we should bring in some other dimensions besides non-profits and i thought a fermenter was a great place to start, but you have plenty of other podcasts, tens or hundreds of thousands of other podcast that you can go to to satisfy all those multidemensional interests that you have and i don’t think it’s right for me to try toe satisfy all those we have our niche here non-profits and picking the brains of experts to help people in non-profits that’s my mission here on this podcast, there’s plenty of other outlets for youto satisfy all those other interests that you have, so i think i let you down. We’re not going to continue out of the blue. We’re going tow. Focus more on on the core and that is tony’s take two for friday the today’s the ninth of august, the thirty second show of the year. I’m very happy to bring back jane takagi he’s, the principal of neo the non-profit and exempt organizations law group in san francisco he edits the very popular non-profit law blogged dot com and on twitter he is at gi tak gt a k welcome back, jean takagi. Hi, tony it’s. Great to be back. Thank you. I can tell you’re smiling i couldjust always telling you i could tell when you’re smiling. It’s ah it’s. Wonderful to have your energy even from san francisco. I feel it great. I’m conveying that over the phone. You absolutely are. Yes, we started this. Conversation back to board basics two weeks ago, july twenty six so you can go back and listen to that if you missed it, jean and i are going to pick up where we left off, and that was with term limits. Question of whether there should even be term limits. What’s your what’s what’s the advice around that gene. Well, first piece advice tony’s to check with your state laws because individual state laws may vary. My understanding is that under in most states, that there are no term limits, meaning that a boardmember could get reelected onto the board over and over and over again, without any restriction of the law, unless the organization’s by-laws say otherwise. So then it depends upon the individual board thinking about, well, what are the good things about keeping board members on potentially forever? Versace? What is the good thing about limiting how long any boardmember serves so we can get new people onto the board? Increased our diversity on pursue other things and other perspective. So that’s kind of the starting point, but i’m wondering, tony. What? What do you feel about board term limits if you’re serving on the board? I’m i’m pretty pro term limits. Um, in fact, i was just on a phone call this morning with someone who works at the gnu heimans center she’s an instructor there, and i mentioned that you and i are going to talk about this very subject and she said has to be bored limits has to be, yeah, i like them, i think that they they boardmember could be extended if it’s a two year term or three term, you can always extend in addition on additional term tua boardmember but after four or six or maybe even eight years, nine years, i think boardmember tze get a little stale and i’d like a fresh perspective and i think there’s other things that boardmember khun do we don’t kill them just because they leave the board, they don’t die there’s other things there’s other ways they can help that’s such a great point, tiny, and i agree with you a hundred percent, i’m there are exceptions, but i’m very much generally in the pro term limit kapin with without term limits, i think you can encourage very insular boards that get stale as you said, they could become rubber stamp. Boards just going with the flow, you may not be able to attract additional skills and perspectives of the same people are staying on the board, and you’re not bringing new people in boardmember khun get very entitled about their positions and start toe slack off a little bit, and it becomes very difficult to remove long term board members politically speaking into from a sense of relationships and when you have term limits, it really encourages bringing in those new perspectives and thoughts and skills. But the best thing you know is to make sure that when you bring in new people that you’re really engaging them and not just bringing them as tokens so that that becomes very important too. But i like your ideas of, you know, just reelecting, you know, the board members who are performing really well don’t re elect the board members that are performing poorly or unable to attend the majority of the meeting and see exactly how many terms you feel would be sufficient before you could bring in new people. The previous segment was all about keeping boardmember sze engaged from the beginning getting, you know, identifying what their passions are. So these these two segments are discussion, and the the pre recorded panel discussion are fitting together very well. Now i asked each of those three panelists if any of them had board term limits on in in their non-profits and none of them did, and one of them express the concern that their board members are major donors and they don’t want to, you know, the way she said it, they don’t want to say goodbye to them, but i do think there a said there are other things that board members khun do maybe there’s, an advisory board or something that’s, not a fiduciary capacity, legal, legal, legal duty capacity, but still meaningful and not frivolous. Yeah, i think is individuals tonny it’s natural that we like to get our egos stroked a little in there for a major donor to a non-profit to be asked to leave the board can be, uh, a difficult thing for both parties, but i agree again one hundred percent with you let’s find other rules for them. And advice report doesn’t seem to sound prestigious, but maybe emeritus board oh, it’s latin oh, that’s latin brings immediate prestige. Yeah, obviously. Okay. You know, we can we can play around with the titles of the committees and even the titles of the individual board members or former board members if we really value their contribution, we continued to engage them but have been take a term off the board and maybe if we’re not if the board is struggling to recruit and can’t find somebody, teo, take the place of the departing boardmember after term off, maybe that person can come back on again. So that may depend upon each organization but that’s, the that’s, the putin model of boardmember ship you depart and then you come on. All right, all right, well, if we’re going to implement terms, then we should talk about how long those terms should be. What, um, is there is probably not state law guidance on that kind of that. That kind of detail is there. There actually is. So there is among state laws. So some state laws, like in california, we say if you have voting members, the maximum length of a term is four years. If you don’t have voting members who elect the board, the maximum term length is six years and that’s that’s just for one one term, but doesn’t wait. I’m confused by that doesn’t every boardmember have a vote aren’t all board’s voting boards? Well, so in terms of voting members like in the auto club or a homeowner’s association where members who are not board members elect the board members? Oh, i see ok, yeah, so a lot of operations a lot, but many organizations have voting membership structures, which are much, much more administrative, burdensome and difficult to maintain, so i typically don’t recommend that for smaller public charity type organizations, but for other organizations that do have voting members, they’re subject to different, or they may be subject to different term length rules under state laws. So be careful of that there’s also a special on california that i think maybe in other states as well. That says ifyou’re by-laws and articles don’t define what a term length is it’s automatically set that one year, so many organizations get tripped up on that. They didn’t contemplate that in their by-laws and they let boardmember stay on until the board members feel like, you know they want to resign, and you’ve got to make sure that the elections are going on on a regular basis, just sort of on the side, the by-laws air are so important because our don’t state laws have lots of defaults for by-laws being silent on different issues, absolutely. Tony, you’re one hundred percent right? So if if you’re by-laws don’t contemplate something than the default will be, whatever the state could end up with a lot of things you didn’t even know you had, right? And now imagine if you’ve got a board that didn’t do proper elections and you’ve got one boardmember who voted the opposite way from everybody else and then says, well, it doesn’t matter that it was ten against one, this sport isn’t properly compose. I challenge the validity of that action that that one thing can trip up the whole board until they solve that issue. Okay, okay, so we just have, like, a minute and a half or so before a break different term, you know, i guess obviously the shorter the term, the fresher the board is going to be, but you’re going to lose, you know, institutional knowledge. Yeah. And so what is the expectation when you recruit a boardmember if you recruit a new boardmember and you say the term length is one year, they make oh, yeah, easy commitment, but they made me feel very good about serving that one year before they really got you know the organization and develop a director for that organization and then leave after one year feeling fulfilled. Meanwhile, the organization may not be very satisfied with just the one year term. Human three year are probably more common, but some lawyers actually liked the one year term because it allows boards to get rid of or shed. Directors are really not performing very well ever failing to attend meetings, failing to live up to their produce, very duties where it otherwise might be a little bit complicated. Relationship wise toe formally remove. All right, so you can get you could get rid of the trouble quickly on. You could just continue to reappoint them. And i guess if you had one year terms, you probably want they’re to be many possible successive terms allowed. Yeah. You might set your term limits that something like four or five in that case? Yeah. Okay. All right. We’re going to go away for a couple minutes, of course. Jean stays with me and hope that everybody else does, too. And we’ll get some live listener loving as soon as we come back. You’re listening to the talking alternative network. Oppcoll oppcoll are you stuck in your business or career trying to take your business to the next level, and it keeps hitting a wall? This is sam liebowitz, the conscious consultant. I will help you get to the root cause of your abundance issues and help move you forward in your life. Call me now and let’s. Create the future you dream of. Two, one, two, seven, two, one, eight, one, eight, three, that’s to one to seven to one, eight one eight three. The conscious consultant helping hunters. People be better business people. Oppcoll have you ever considered consulting a road map when you feel you need help getting to your destination when the normal path seems blocked? A little help can come in handy when choosing an alternate route. Your natal chart is a map of your potentials. It addresses relationships, finance, business, health and, above all, creativity. Current planetary cycles can either support or challenge your objectives. I’m montgomery taylor. If you would like to explore the help of a private astrological reading, please contact me at monte at monty taylor dot. Com let’s monte m o nt y at monty taylor dot com. Talking alternative radio twenty four hours a day. Gotta live listener love all over the country mesa, arizona golden, colorado in daytona beach, florida live listener loved to you, newport, north carolina and brooklyn, new york live listener love podcast pleasantries gotta send those out, especially to germany, where there’s a big subset of podcast listeners and if you are a podcast listener and you want some podcast pleasantry sent directly to you, let me know who you are, you know there’s ah there’s, facebook, there’s, twitter, there’s a contact page on my block. Let me know where you’re listening from, and i will send you those podcast pleasantries. Always great for the for the live listeners as well. Jean, what if we had a hybrid? What if we what if we make the first term one year? I kind of like this one term one year term, and i’ve really thought about it until you mentioned and we started talking about this topic. What if you had a first term is one year and then successive terms are two years or maybe three years? Could you do that? Yeah, absolutely. Tony there’s there’s actually a lot of room in the by-laws if you decide if the board decides it wants to spend some time to create the right structures. You could do something like, like, one year for your first term. And if everybody gets along in this thing well, to do the second term of two or three years and that might be sort of communicated to prospective board members with the understanding that the first years kind of that test period. Although everybody has their fiduciary duties to live up to. But they hope that they’ll be continued service after after that term. All right, so it also doing my classes, tony? So we could have different classes of attorneys or different classes of directors? Sorry. Lawyers? Yes, yes, everybody. The whole world is attorneys. Everybody knows that the world revolves around the all of them. And then they’re just two or three people out there who are not lawyers. Yeah. Further embarrassed, not you. You’re welcome. So, yes, we could have different classes of directors out there in some classes of directors. Could have a two year term. Some might have a three year term. Some might be prone to term limits of two term limit. Some might be subjected to classes, but how? You gonna decide how you decide who’s in which class, when i have tears and and the senior the three year member is going to look down on the lonely one year members? How you going to make those distinctions? Yeah, really top i mean, this is these air possibilities that you, khun contemplate the sea if they would fit within your organization, but yeah, creating different respect levels for remembers, but absolutely be wrong. So i understand your caution there about forming classes and maybe classes is not the right word now, but still different to you, even tears. Or, you know, however you however you euthanize it. It’s still g. She got a three year term and i only get a one year term. Why is that? We often do that originally with brand new organizations to get staggered board. So if you have a two year term and you start the initial board members everybody in two years, everybody turns off at the same time. But by staggering it, having some served three years in some serve two years and sometimes that’s done just by lottery. Believe it or not, ok, that won’t can get half the board being elected each year, i guess if it’s random, then then i could see you’d overcome at least the personality or ego concerns. All right, but what? So what are your recommendations around term limits? What is gene takagi like? I generally like to the three year term limits, although i’m not opposed to what you just suggested about having a one year initial terms and then two or three year terms after i do think that it’s important to get that commitment from directors, that it’s not just going to be this one year where we’re expecting you to serve for one year and then you can jump off and serve on another board, i’d like to see a longer term commitment and deeper bond created between the organization and its director. Okay, now, when you’re talking to non-profit clients do do they ask you, what should we do on then? Do you deflect that back to them, or how does that how do you finish that? Yeah, it’s a good question, tony, you know, i can’t get to paternal about it and just tell people what the best practices, so we have to make sure that it fits what their individual facts and circumstances are not if they’re three, you know, founders of the organization that want to be on the board and are going to champion other people, the recruitment of other people, perhaps those three founders, they’re goingto have longer terms uh then then the subsequent boardmember is that get brought on, but it really depends because we don’t want to create that class hyre key system that you suggested before, so we’ll have to take a look at stuff like that. Very careful, okay, it xero only is individual and look, look at gene is not a paternalistic attorney, one of the few you said it, so i’m sure he’s not, um, let’s, let’s look att since we’re talking about being on a board and being removed from aboard, should there be automatic removal if you’re not not performing up to snuff? Well, removal for not performing up to snuff is going to require a board decision and that’s going to be governed by state laws well, and even if state law permit sports to remove poor performing directors, practically speaking it’s, so hard to do, especially if that boardmember is also a donorsearch otherwise, support organization in other ways what we like to see is an automatic removal provisions, but only for failing to attend board meetings. So for example, if there was, you know, the board meeting’s every two months, if you fail to attend three successive board meetings without an excuse that had been approved by the board, even either before or after the fact you are automatically removed without further board action, so the board doesn’t actually have to vote to remove you. You’ve just automatically been removed, and they called me allow that. Okay, of course, then you’d want to go a little further and define does attendance mean live attendance in in person? Or can it be attendance by phone? I think it’s the state laws permit by phone than and the by-laws permitted as well, and most state laws, i would say, would permit it by phone, then you’re fine. I would count that as attendance, but if you just failed to show up at all and then it’s something else and it may be whether you’re sick or you’re you’re on sabbatical or have a valid excuse that the board is willing to say where we’re going toe not apply this removal rules because of this exception, but then the board approves to save a person they don’t approve. They don’t vote to remove a person, which is much, much harder. Yes. Ok, i see. All right, just about a minute or so before we go. What about having young people on boards if it’s appropriate to your mission? But in certain states, including new york, they have provisions for having young people onboard. Youth onboarding i think in new york you have to be above sixteen years old, and only organizations that served used or deal with issues like education or juvenile delinquency are allowed to have such boardmember okay, other states there expressly not allowed, you must be eighteen in order to do it, but most states i think forty states are silent on the issue now, it’s great to engage in engagement is the key word again. You to participate with boards and maybe having them entitled toe participate in board meetings is a great idea latto have them on the board and giving them fiduciary duties can be a little bit more problematic if you’re going to do that and there may. Be some rare exceptions where i think that that’s okay, you want to make sure that they’re not tokens and that their contributions are valid and their vote is equal to anybody, anybody? Else’s, vote on that board, you’ve got to be very careful now you can probably be held liable for breaching their fiduciary duties, although that’s not very clear, and if it was really agreed, just perhaps they could, and they can’t sign contracts on behalf of the organization because they probably wouldn’t be enforceable. So be careful about having that emily chan, my former colleague wrote a great block post called youth boardmember khun miners serve on a non-profit board that that i recommend for any organization considering having having young people on their board. Jean, we have to stop there. Is that? Is that blood post at on your block? It non-profit latto block dot com it is, and it was also captured in a non-profit quarterly article as well. Okay, thank you very much, gene. Great, thanks. Durney pleasure you confined gene at that non-profit law blogged or at g tack on twitter next week a fund-raising day interview we’ll start and then maria semple is here she’s, our prospect research contributor and the prospect finder the overhead myth show his book i got the three ceos who signed the overhead myth letter are going to be with me on september sixth. That’s, the ceo of better business bureau wise giving alliance guidestar and charity navigator, and ken berger from charity navigator has been on the show before. I would love to have your questions for these three ceo’s these three signers of the overhead myth letter you know you can ask questions on twitter, through facebook or contact page on my blogged love to have your questions for these ceos, please insert sponsor message over nine thousand leaders, fundraisers and board members of small and midsize charities. Listen each week you can reach me on the block or on twitter or facebook if you want to talk about sponsoring the show, our creative producer was clear meyerhoff sam liebowitz is the line producer. The show’s social media is by deborah askanase of community organizer two point oh, and the remote producer of tony martignetti non-profit radio is john federico of the new rules. Oh, i hope you will be with me next week, friday. One to two eastern at talking alternative broadcasting at talking alternative dot com miree i didn’t think that shooting a good ending. You’re listening to the talking alternative network. Get in. E-giving cubine are you a female entrepreneur? Ready to break through? Join us at sexy body sassy sol, where women are empowered to ask one received what they truly want in love, life and business. Tune in thursday said. Known eastern time to learn timpson. Juicy secrets from inspiring women and men who, there to define their success, get inspired, stay motivated and defying your version of giant success with sexy body sake. Soul. Every thursday ad, men in new york times on talking alternative dot com. Are you suffering from aches and pains? Has traditional medicine let you down? Are you tired of taking toxic medications, then come to the double diamond wellness center and learn how our natural methods can help you, too? He’ll call us now at to one to seven to one eight, one eight, three that’s two one two, seven to one eight, one eight, three or find us on the web at www dot double diamond wellness dot com. We look forward to serving you. You’re listening to talking alt-right network at www. Dot talking alternative dot com, now broadcasting twenty four hours a day. This is tony martignetti aptly named host of tony martignetti non-profit radio. Big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent technology fund-raising compliance, social media, small and medium non-profits have needs in all these areas. My guests are expert in all these areas and mohr. Tony martignetti non-profit radio friday’s one to two eastern on talking alternative broadcasting are you concerned about the future of your business for career? Would you like it all to just be better? Well, the way to do that is to better communication. And the best way to do that is training from the team at improving communications. This is larry sharp, host of the ivory tower radio program and director at improving communications. Does your office need better leadership? Customer service sales or maybe better writing are speaking skills? Could they be better at dealing with confrontation conflicts, touchy subjects all are covered here at improving communications. If you’re in the new york city area, stop by one of our public classes or get your human resource is in touch with us. The website is improving communications, dot com that’s improving communications, dot com improve your professional environment. Be more effective, be happier. And make more money. Improving communications. That’s. The answer. Talking. Hyre

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152: The Event Leadership Puzzle & Back To Board Basics – Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio

Posted on July 26, 2013 by Nonprofit Radio

Tony’s guests this week:

Sheila Kelly, vice president of development at The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research

Pamela Mohr, executive director of FACES at NYU Langone Medical Center

Wendy Kleinman, president of WK Planning

Gene Takagi, principal of the Nonprofit & Exempt Organizations Law Group

Read and watch more on Tony’s blog: http://tonymartignetti.com

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Hello and welcome to tony martignetti non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent it’s july twenty sixth i’m your aptly named host. Oh, i hope that you were with me last week. I would suffer atrial fib relation if it came to my ken that you had missed maria cuomo cole on relationships miss cole, a philanthropist and board chair of help yusa, shared the professional value of all her relationships, including her mom and how they’ve helped her and help yusa succeed. We talked at the june meeting of executive women in non-profits part of new york society of association executives and tumbler tactics, amy sample ward, our social media contributor, co author of social change, anytime, everywhere and ceo of and ten, explained the value of tumbler, how to decide whether you should be in it and how to get started this week, the event leadership puzzle from the association of fund-raising professionals, new york city fund-raising day in june, our panel solved this puzzle for honorees, chairs, hosts and event committees, from goal setting and recruitment to motivation. And thanks, i was with sheila kelly, vice president of development at the michael j fox foundation pamela more executive director of faces at noon you langone medical center and wendy kleinman, president of wk planning also back to board basics jean takagi are legal contributors back this month. We’re talking about who belongs on your board and for how long should you ceo beyond the board? Is it okay if your ceo chairs? What about term limits? Jean is principal of the non-profit and exempt organizations law group between the guests on tony’s take two my block this week is women’s touching relationship stories my pleasure now to bring the event leadership puzzle to you from fund-raising day new york city last month here’s that interview welcome to tony martignetti non-profit radio coverage of fund-raising day two thousand thirteen, we’re at the marriott marquis hotel in times square in new york city, and our subject now is event leadership with me r sheila kelly, vice president of development for the michael j fox foundation for parkinson’s research on in the middle is pam moore, executive director of faces at noon you langone medical center, and wendy kleinman, president of wk planning limited ladies welcome it’s a pleasure, wendy let’s, start down the other end. There what what’s the trouble with that non-profits have of the challenges that they have around event leadership. Well, i think there are a lot of non-profits today, everybody is vying for the same dollars and everybody’s buying for the same audience everybody would like to have the same leaders at the helm, many of whom have been over asked, and i think it’s also it’s identifying, you know, the right match when you invite somebody to take on the leadership role it’s important that you identify what the organization’s needs are and you try to find the right person teo approach that matches and believes in your mission and who feels that they can help you raise the funds you need. Okay, pam, these thes leadership positions can take a lot of different titles, right? A lot of a lot of possibilities. What a quaint listeners with what, what the scope is that we’re talking about. It could be anything from being an honoree to an event where you’re expected to bring in a certain amount of revenue, either giving it or getting it. It could be whether you’re chairing an event, it could be whether you’re sitting on a benefit committee vice chairing an event there are so many different titles, so many different forms of event leadership, but the most important common theme is that everybody needs to know what their expectations are in advance, so they understand what their role is in your event. Okay, making expectations very clear and i guess also gold setting, i guess. Sheila, for the event itself. Yeah, it’s, it’s, tremendously important to be very clear from the outset what your goals are for the event, both from a revenue perspective and also just what you’re trying to achieve for the for the organization and making sure that the people that have a leadership role with that event no, what what they need to do to help achieve that goal on dh, that i think when you find the right people and they know that they are part of something that, you know, there’s there’s a distinct goal for they’re going to be more willing to sort of step up to the plate and take on what you’re asking them to d’oh okay, now we just have about twenty minutes together. So why don’t we start at least our focus and maybe we’ll end there. We’ll see with the committee. Get your volunteer committees. What? What? What kind of what committees are we looking to recruit? First, i think it’s very event specific. It depends on the kind of event that you’re hosting. So if you’re hosting a golf event, for example, your committee could be helping you plan the event. They could be helping you with all the details. But if it’s your gala and, you know, we have a large gala, really? We look to our committee’s simply for fund-raising and for forgetting new people to come to the event and to help us expand our network. So i think it’s it’s about being sort of clear about with the specific events what you’re looking for, people to d’oh. Okay. And how do you start the recruitment process? A tte michael j fox foundation for us for bone event volunteered for event volunteers. Now we really do look within our network. We have so many amazing supporters who care about our work. I think that that’s key. You want to make sure that the people who are are involved have a direct connection to to your mission and to what you’re what you’re trying to achieve and so looking within first before going outside makes a lot of sense because there are people right there who are going be willing and able to get involved, and so that’s that’s typically where we start and also people self select, you know you will have people within your network who will who will raise their hand and say, please let me know how i could be of help and it’s if that person is, is the right fit. You know you should take them up on that for sure, pam, what wanted your quaint listeners what’s the work of faces at the gnu lango in medical center? So faces stands for finding a cure for epilepsy and seizures. We are an organization within and why you and go on medical center that raises funds for research, education programs, advocacy for patients with epilepsy and their families. Okay, and where do you start your recruitment process for event volunteers? So i’ve lived two very separate lives, one working for a major health care non-profit and the other one now it faces, which has only been eight months what’s so amazing to me. About my job now is that i’m dealing with a grateful patient fund-raising so i work directly for dr orrin devinsky, who is the director of the comprehensive epilepsy centre at n yu, and we work directly with the people that we impact every day. So where i’m looking for events, volunteers or donors or chairs or honorees, they’re all people that have been impacted some way by the comprehensive epilepsy centre and a recipient of some service that we’ve provided so it’s building relationships with the existing folks that have been involved and seeing who they know that they want to get involved and then being introduced to new people. One of the things that were actually looking to do with our board is to create a board event. We really want to get the word out. People don’t know enough about epilepsy, seizures and how common it is, and one of the ways that we want to do that is not just our gala, because not everybody wants to come to a gallon, so we’re working with our board to develop an event where they invite some of the individuals that they network with so they can hear. About what’s been going on in the world of epilepsy right here. When did you have advice for smaller and maybe midsize shops that that may not have the internal constituency? Teo look to first for event volunteer leadership. Well, every organization has somebody who is in charge, and that person is out in the world all the time. So what we do is we try to encourage every mind, whether it’s, the board or it’s, a executive director or the director of development, or even if it’s a small committee made maybe two or three people that they should always remain cognisant of of a good candidate is just in their travels through life, you know, in the workplace or in their social life. Oh, you know, we mentioned earlier in the panel, you know, everyone goes to cocktail parties and many people have jobs full time jobs in addition to the non-profit work they volunteer for so on, and then, you know, you talk about what you do, and if somebody expresses an interest in wanting to learn more that’s someone who could be a potential candidate to get involved in your organization. So that’s one way of looking at the outside to bring people in, they don’t have the infrastructure to pull from, like, a donor of strong donor-centric urging those conversations and basically that’s essentially good branding to yes, people should all your people well outside fund-raising should always be talking well about the organization and and know what it’s needs are, i think, and those needs might be event leadership volunteering. Exactly. And i think it’s it’s learning how to talk about what the organization was also in a very friendly, approachable manner on dh to make it interesting because people want to know who you are, what you like to do and where you spend your time what’s our next step, then wendy, you’re the consultant on the panel what’s the next step, after we’ve identified some people who are potential leaders of the event, how do we start to approach? What should we be talking about with them? Well, i think you can you can meet on a one to one basis. Maybe initially, teo, explain all the different areas where the organization might need some health. It could be joining the committee. There might be a greater interest in the board, which has a bigger picture approach, or the gala committee, which might be specifically for one event. Uh, and everybody has their different strikes. Some people are better at selling table. Some people are better at bringing an auction items. Some people are better at selling journal. Latto. So i think, it’s it’s, having that discussion and trying to find someone’s comfort zone and really assess their capabilities, where their strengths are, ok? And i think it’s a mutual decision sometimes, and that makes a lot of sense for all volunteer positions. Really? Yeah, from the board. Teo teo. Someone who’s, doing something, not his time consuming but way, want to be engaging people where their interests are. Okay. Talking alternative radio twenty four hours a day. Do you need a business plan that can guide your company’s growth? Seven and seven will help bring the changes you need. Wear small business consultants and we pay attention to the details. You may miss our coaching and consultant services a guaranteed to lead toe. Right, groat. For your business, call us at nine. One seven eight three, three, four, eight, six zero foreign, no obligation free consultation. Check out our website of ww dot covenant seven dot com oppcoll are you fed up with talking points? Rhetoric everywhere you turn left or right? Spin ideology no reality, in fact, its ideology over in tow. No more it’s, time for the truth. Join me, larry shot a neo-sage tuesday nights nine to eleven easter for the ivory tower radio in the ivory tower will discuss what’s important to you society, politics, business it’s, provocative talk for the realist and the skeptic who want to know what’s. Really going on? What does it mean? What can be done about it? So gain special access to the ivory tower. Listen to me. Very sharp. Your neo-sage tuesday nights nine to eleven new york time go to ivory tower radio dot com for details. That’s. Ivory tower radio dot com e every time i was a great place to visit for both entertainment and education. Listening. Tuesday nights nine to eleven. It will make you smarter. Hey, all you crazy listeners looking to boost your business? Why not advertise on talking alternative with very reasonable rates? Interested simply email at info at talking alternative dot com durney yeah. Sheila. Pam, do you want to share how you approach people for for these kinds of positions? Anybody wanna with your first up? You know, for us, really? It’s it’s, the relationship building in stewardship is is sort of the most important piece, right? And i think to wendy’s point people have different strength. And so when you find someone within your network, or or someone who’s new to you realising what they want to be involved in, there might be someone who is very interested in events. There might be someone who’s just interested in helping to to find new donors. There’s, you know, there’s lots of different ways that you can engage with people in it. What we what we refer to it, the fox foundation is giving someone a seat at the table, you know, having them feel that they are, they might. They have separate work outside of what, what they do with the foundation. But they are an extension of what we do and making sure that they feel that they’re armed with the right tools in the right messaging so that they can speak to the work of the foundation as well. I think that’s hugely important you want you want all the people who are associated with your foundation and with your mission out there talking about the things that are important and it’s the job of of the internal people to make sure that they have all the right information, that they’re on the support that they need? Absolutely what do we do now? So we’ve recruited suppose there are some committee members who aren’t quite pulling their weight, sam, i imagine that gets frustrating to those who are how do we how do we deal with that situation? I’ve dealt with that situation many times, so i think the first thing that actually needs to happen is and we had talked about this earlier is roles and expectations. I think that when you’re working with an event committee, the most important thing that you can do from the beginning is give them the rolls and expectations, so they understand exactly what’s expected of them this way. There’s really no question about what they’re supposed to be doing and what the result is supposed to be. These committee members need to be treated as leaders because most of them are probably leaders in their industry, they need to understand that the event that they’re working on, you know, the funds raised for this event are directly impacting the mission of the organization, and they have tto take ownership, and they have to own the actual event and understand that what we’ve, you know, and we’ve talked about this earlier during our session, what tends to happen is that if you do have individuals that aren’t pulling their weight on the committee, but you have people that are many times those people will almost self select away from the committee because they understand and recognize that they’re not doing what needs to be done in order to get to make it happen. Ok, in order to reach that goal, all right? That’s helpful? What if they don’t start self elected? Sometimes it could be it could be a problem, obviously, i you know, i’m a shoot from the hip kind of person if there’s somebody who’s not pulling their weight and they’re bringing the rest the committee down, it would probably be an individual conversation with that volunteer and letting them know that, you know, this is really what we expect for. The level of what this event is, perhaps this isn’t the right police for that particular volunteer, maybe there’s another part of the organization a lower level event, some sort of program we understand that they’re completely passionate about the mission and the cause, and they want to continue to remain involved. But maybe this particular event isn’t the right match for them and let’s identify what might work and as long as you know you can find that place for them, they’ll be happy. They don’t want to be a part of something where they feel like they can’t give what the other people are giving that’s also kind of, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s not a comfortable place to be. I would think. Sheila, what about having the committee organize themselves in terms of who’s going to be a leader? Who’s going to take on? What do you prefer to see? The committees decide that among themselves or you appoint people once they’ve agreed to be part of a committee, appoint them to certain certain positions we typically help with a structure. This is it’s really more apparent in some of our smaller events that are led through? Our community fund-raising armed with team fox way. Find that people really do want teo want to know what what we need of them. And as we were talking about in the panel, people that do this for a living, we would probably we were all on a committee. We would self select ourselves, right? And we would be able to divide ourselves up. But that’s not everyone’s, core strength. And so i think guidance in this area is key. And if you if you have a group of individuals that are passionate and they want to help and they want to get involved, helping them with the structure is very important in terms of the overall success of the event. Okay? Anybody want to add tio having the committee cam or wendy having the committee decide among themselves and versus lending structure? I think that there are some individuals, you know, much like sheila had said there are some individuals that might know, you know, if we were on an event committee, we would probably know what we would be good at. Whether i would be really great it’s sponsorships and shell. It would be really great. A ticket. Sales or whatever that looks like and every so often you obviously want to honor the request of a committee member that says, i really want to work on this, you know, and what i usually do with the committee when i am dividing them subcommittees, i give them a interest for him and they’re going to fill it out, and they’re going to indicate what theywant, obviously, i don’t want to put somebody in a role where they’re selling something if their strength might be planning, but most of my committees that i have formed, we’ll have some sort of fund-raising, you know, commitment to it, but that level might very depending on each individual person, so i don’t necessarily let them make their, you know, they can select what they want, but in terms of the overall leadership structure and setting that up and dividing them up and letting them know and, you know, i’ve handled that as a development professional, okay? I’m sorry, wendy, was there something you want to add to that? Well, as consultants, we’re we’re a little bit more objective, and sometimes we can observe a committee in a different way because we’re not. Dealing with them every day like hammond, sheldon might be in the sense that their internal so, you know, we’re asked for opinion about almost everything when it comes to putting an event together, so that includes sometimes helping to identify who we feel or who we would recommend to be the chairs, for example, who shows the strength. Dahna and because sometimes the committee members themselves were just too close to one another that they can’t single each other out, so we’re standing a little bit apart, we could say, well, we think that she would be a great chair and then and that person would be a great co chair, and this person probably shouldn’t leave the auction the auction chair, for example, because they’ve been so influential ins and busy obtaining auction item, so sometimes the strength or more apparent to us and they are even to them, to the committee members themselves, so we just helped them identify that guy. What else can we say about these events leadership committees? I haven’t i haven’t asked you about more more advice around. Go ahead, i think one of the things that also came up in our most in the most recent panel that we just had is the importance of treating the committee as as a leadership group on treating them like a professional group of individuals who are there to help move the mission of the organization forward giving them, you know, in addition to setting the expectations that i mentioned before making sure that they have all the tools that they need in order to be the best that they can be, whether that’s making sure they have a budget, making sure they have a timeline, they need to understand what this event needs to gross. We need to understand the expenses behind the event, what it needs to net at the end of the day as well. They need to have those clear Job expectations 1 of the best examples that i had given is making sure that, you know, if let’s say you have a committee and they’re actually submitting a list and there soliciting individuals, making sure at the end of each week there’s a spreadsheet that’s organized by solicitor, so every single person on that committee understands what money’s come in, who is responsible for bringing it in how much and where they need to be to do this on a weekly basis. I’ll do it on a weekly basis during events season. Absolutely. So i think, it’s, just the same way that you would handle it like a business. You want to handle your event committee the same way they want to understand, they need to understand that you’re taking this seriously. This is serious. Without this money, the mission of your organization is not going to move forward, and i think if you treat it that way, they will treat it that way and it’s a mutually respectful and professional relationship. More more you want, i couldn’t agree more. I mean, transparency is imperative when you’re dealing with planning of events, and when you’re working with the committee, they need to know exactly what expense structure looks like what the revenue expectations are so that they can feel a part of it, you know, events event fund-raising is expensive. It’s it’s, one of the more expensive ways to raise a dollar and anyone that does it for living knows that. And so there’s always that balance of making sure that you’re keeping your costs down, that you’re doing that. You’re maximizing your investments, and again, many of these committees air filled with people who run their own businesses who have great perspective in this area and and using them to there, you know, to the best of their abilities is actually makes your event even better. It sounds like this kind of work for ah volunteer could be great cultivation to be, be enhanced, enhance the they’re their own giving, or maybe expand their volunteer rolls in the future. I mean, if there’s that kind of transparency and they see that it is run like a business, as you say, sounds great cultivation from or more activity, whatever, whatever, yeah, whatever form that takes, we’ve seen people move at at the fox foundation from someone who just gets involved at the team fox level who running, running a marathon and fund-raising from their peers to then joining, you know, our leadership council, which is sort of a junior board of directors, and you know that that level of engagement just continues, but it’s about making sure that you’re cultivating that relationship from the beginning in the right way, especially for people who want to who want to have a greater involvement with your foundation and i think it’s giving him that experience too, you know, it’s making sure that they’re having a positive experience. One of the best feelings that i have is when i’ve transitioned a committee that might not have been functioning as well in the fund-raising side and giving them these tools and providing, you know, changing the structure of a committee so that it functions the way we’ve been talking about and then having them get so excited about it. And then when they come to the event and they see this, you know, seamless, amazing galla golf cocktail party, whatever it looks like, they want to get more involved, and then they want to recruit other people to get more involved so it in turn by doing it this way, it might be a little bit more work on errand, but in the end, it’s going to increase our revenue and it’s also going to expand our relationships within the whole community. We have to leave it there, ladies. Thank you very much. Thanks for having us. Thank you. Pleasure. All three. Thank you. Sheila kelly ceded closest to me. Is vice president for? Development. Michael j, fox foundation for parkinson’s research pam mohr is executive director of faces finding a cure for epilepsy and seizures at the gnu langone medical center. And when d kleiman is president of wk planning limited again. Thanks very much, ladies. Thank you. Thank you for being with me. Tony martignetti non-profit radio coverage of fund-raising day two thousand thirteen. Thanks so much. And my thanks. Also to the organizers of fund-raising day twenty thirteen, sponsored by the association of fund-raising professionals. New york’s, greater new york city chapter. Gotta live listener love lots of new yorkers. Massapequa, new york, new york and brooklyn, new york. Welcome, live listener. Loved to you also new bern, north carolina. Gonna be there very soon, very soon. And washington, dc all up and down the east coast. Where’s there’s, nobody east of ah, nobody west of philadelphia and, well, we got santa. See joe argentina, that francesco or alejandra? And also ottawa, canada. Welcome live listener love to all of you will hit asia shortly. Right now we take a break for a couple minutes when we come back. Tony’s take two and then gene takagi with back to board basics. Hang in there. You didn’t think that shooting getting dink, dink, dink, dink. You’re listening to the talking, alternate network, waiting to get in. E-giving good. Are you suffering from aches and pains? Has traditional medicine let you down? Are you tired of taking toxic medications, then come to the double diamond wellness center and learn how our natural methods can help you, too? He’ll call us now at to one to seven to one eight, one eight, three that’s two one two, seven to one eight, one eight, three or find us on the web at www dot double diamond wellness dot com way. Look forward to serving you. Hi, i’m lost him a role, and i’m sloan wainwright, where the host of the new thursday morning show the music power hour. Eleven a m. We’re gonna have fun. Shine the light on all aspects of music and its limitless healing possibilities. We’re gonna invite artists to share their songs and play live will be listening and talking about great music from yesterday to today, so you’re invited to share in our musical conversation. Your ears will be delighted with the sound of music and our voices. Join austin and sloan live thursdays at eleven a. M on talking alternative dot com. You’re listening to the talking alternative network. Schnoll hi, i’m kate piela, executive director of dance, new amsterdam. And you’re listening to tony martignetti non-profit radio. Big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. Hi there, welcome back, i want to also send along with the live listener love podcast pleasantries, especially to germany, gooden dog have lots of german listeners to the podcast, from a site called podcast that d so good in dog to all end and podcast pleasantries toe all the german listeners. Time for tony’s take to my block this week is women’s touching relationship stories? Remember last week you heard my interview with maria cuomo coal, which was pre recorded at a meeting of executive women in non-profits after that, we opened the discussion of relationships to the group and lots of women shared very touching stories of people who have been important in their lives and help their careers. And i included just a couple of minutes of the group discussion in last week’s clip, but the whole discussion was about twenty minutes and it’s really very uplifting on dh very tender, and that video of the video of that interview is on my blogged at tony martignetti dot com and it’s, also on youtube, if you prefer to go there directly the channel israel tony martignetti cem very tender and touching stories from executive women running non-profits now and the audio is much better than it was in the clip that i played for you last week. And that is tony’s take two for friday twenty sixth of july thirtieth show of the year and show number one hundred fifty two. Jean takagi is with me. He’s, principal of neo the non-profit and exempt organizations law group in san francisco. He edits the popular non-profit law blogged dot com and he is at gi tak on twitter. Hello, jean takagi. Welcome back. I’m tony, thank you for having me, it’s. Always a pleasure. Thank you for joining us from the west coast. We’re talking about cem cem board basics this month on dh specifically, who should be on the board. And maybe for how long? Let’s. Start with the well, let’s start before we get into individual people. Do you see trouble or or challenges a lot of times around who belongs properly on a board? Well, i think a lot of organizations right now, tony, are struggling with recruitment, trying teo attain diversity. Getting a different skill sets on the board. Different representations of populations. Um, at the same time, it seems that the boards are very underutilized asset of many organizations in terms of the valley that they’re adding, or at least in terms of how the ceo or the executive director perceives the value add of the board of directors. And i think i’m going back to some of the board basics. Is a good place to start and explore some of these issues about not only what that board could be doing. But what, what aboard should be doing. You since you mentioned the ceo and their role with respect to the board, we polled listeners before the show and asked if your ceo is a boardmember and forty percent said yes, sixty percent said no. Should a ceo be a boardmember great question, so i think they’re different stages of evolution of organizations where whether the ceo belongs on the border not may change, and i’m going to sort of give you kind of the lawyers disclaimer about that i’m dunaj unconscionable thoughts on this, but there’s always going to be some exceptions tease general rules, and my general thought is tony, is that once an organization is matured, having the ceo or executive director on the board of directors can be troubling because of the potential conflicts of interests that are involved. And the big one is that the board is responsible for overseeing, evaluating the performance of and determining the salary and compensation of the ceo at the same time. If the ceo is on the board that is overseeing himself or herself, you can see the inherent conflict that’s involved. What couldn’t they? Couldn’t they recuse themselves from any discussions off of those issues? Yeah. Absolutely, and i think that’s commonly how organizations treated so if they’ve got their ceo on the board, whenever it comes around, too evaluating performance or determining compensation, the ceo recuses themselves from the board and the rest of the board makes that decision. However, that seems teo sort of discount the possibility that decisions on programs and finance and budget don’t also affect the ceo personally and the ceo very may very well have a personal interest in all of those aspects of an organization that are very important for boards latto oversee and make decisions on, and if the c e o by virtue of being on the board, i can control the board discussion and analysis of these issues, then it really creates a problem and allows the board to sort of get away from from mid duties of acting as the check and balance to the ceo. So is it not sufficient than let’s? Say we have a boardmember i’m sorry, we have a ceo who’s a boardmember um if they can contribute, but they don’t vote sounds like i mean, they still could they still control the discussion, but then they don’t have final decision. Making authority because they’re not a voting member of the board. It’s a great question the night, you know, i see lawyers actually struggling with this idea in many states and in california, we actually recently made a change or a proposal to a change in in the statutes about what is a director, and i think for most lawyers, the idea they want to get across to their clients to their non-profit clients is that there really is no such thing as a non voting boardmember and the reason for that is because boardmember have fiduciary duties, and they’re ultimately responsible for the management of their organizations. So while they khun delegate duties, toe officers and executives and ceo, they ultimately hold responsibility for what happens with the organization, and you can’t really ultimately hold responsibility is a boardmember if you can’t vote on the issues ah, yeah, so there really is no such thing as a non voting boardmember nonvoting director. What you may have, though, is a ceo or executive directors that is invited to attend in and participate in all of the board meeting’s except when the board meeting go into executive session and determining when the board should go into executive session without having the executive director there so that they can actually tied it by themselves on independent of the director, determine what is necessary to direct the organization and the future toe oversee the organization, how it’s doing in the present and in the past and do a little of what i’m going to quote somebody else’s term that they coined the lucy markets is a governance expert out of the uk, and she calls a stargazing about planning for the future and trying to determine how teo look into the future and make sure that the organization is ready to be able to respond to future challenges and take advantage of future opportunities a great role of the board that they probably don’t do enough for most boards don’t do enough of this when the ceo is they’re trying to ground everybody to the present, sometimes that future stargazing aspect is lost. So those are some of the reasons why maybe the ceo just recusing themselves at certain times isn’t isn’t the best idea. Well, that kind of cells short, visionary ceos, i mean, every ceo is not going to be wedded. To what’s happening this quarter in or this year and i think a ceo could be visionary and be looking fifteen, twenty years ahead doing that stargazing also, yeah, absolutely. I think we would hope that that when when, as a nonprofit organization boardmember myself, we would hope that when we hyre are ceos that we are looking for somebody that that has that inherent ability to be able to stargaze and be a visionary and a champion of that vision. On the other hand, i think we know, especially for smaller organizations, tony, and you’re probably well aware of this as well. Ceos are so burdened by the work of the day to day management of the organization that sometimes they just don’t have the opportunities, even if they have the skills t able to engage in that type of stargazing and board members may be in better position to bring their valley. So that added value that we talked about that board may not be giving enough of to an organization that’s, a really strong air in which they could do it and having the ceo lead, that would be great if that’s possible and then having the board, you know, sort of be the counterbalance and check, uh, to the ceo. Perfect, but if if the board is just relying on the c e o to champion all of the vision and determine what the vision is of the organization, he may not have the healthiest organization around let’s, go back to something you said a few minutes ago, jean the that you can’t really have a nonvoting boardmember because that that abila gates, the fiduciary responsibility of a boardmember was that i’m sorry was that was that california law or that’s a california proposal? What? Well, that’s california law and i think, while it may not be stated explicitly in other statutes, are depending upon what state your urine, i think that’s the general idea of most, if not all, of the states, that we’re not really supposed to have somebody who is a boardmember with the fiduciary duties of a boardmember, but otherwise unable to to vote on any of the issues do corporations for-profit corporations struggle with this? Also mean, my sense is that it’s routine for a president ceo to be a board member of a corporate board? Do you do you know? Do they struggle with this the same way? Non-profits are they absolutely do? Tony, this is a major topic of controversy and has actually been hitting twitter a lot in the for-profit circles as well among the governance experts and it’s close to a fifty fifty split about whether ceos they’re going to serve on the board of directors neither mainly mainly for larger public organizations. Oftentimes again, yeah, that the board is supposed to be the check and balance to the ceo and to bring the ceo onto the board might start to facilitate this rubber stamp board that just sort of agrees with a ceo and sort of puts all of their trust and relies on the ceo’s opinion just too far rather than acting is the check and balance, but it goes both ways because, you know, we haven’t really talked about the benefits of having the ceo on the board, and there there are some benefits, especially in the early stages of an organization. Do you have a visionary ceo? The only way that that ceo and possibly that’s, the founder of the organization to recruit the best members onto the board? Maybe if the ceo is on the board himself or herself because they’re the draw. They may be the draw to the organization, and without that person’s leadership, that organization may not be able to evolve to the next stage where, you know, i’m talking about where hopefully a cz the organization mature a little bit that you can get to a phase where their partners, the ceo on one side and the board of directors led by chair of the board on the other side, rather than blending the two together. But that may take a little bit of time to get to that stage, especially for small organizations, really depending upon the champion of the organization and its mission being the founders ceo and the boardmember all, at the same time, another advantage to having the ceo on the board sounds like would be that the other board members would be not so likely to get intruding into management day today. Issues. Yeah, but that’s that’s actually a good point. So sometimes, while directors ultimately have the authority tio and the obligation to ultimately manage the the organization that’s collectively, as the board of directors individually, board members have no inherent powers. At all. So that’s that’s something to really think about individually, director’s really don’t have powers unless they’ve been delegated to them as possibly officers of the organizations are agents for some specific tasks, but it’s a boardmember just by virtue of being a boardmember shouldn’t start directing employees of the organization and telling them what to dio even the executive director or ceo because it’s the board collectively that that overseas that that and not individual directors so i’m good, really good point let’s move to having a ceo chair, the board? What what’s concerns there. So all of the concerns of having the ceo being on the board of directors as a director are amplified when the ceo is also the chair of the board, and interesting enough, this was a recent article in the non-profit quarterly where and author just took the opposite position not now, fairly advocating it in all cases, but sort of making us aware that, well, sometimes a compensated ceo cancer because the chair of the board and it may be perfectly appropriate because what they want to do is completely aligned with what the board wants to do, which is advanced the organization’s mission is effectively and efficiently as possible, and if again the board doesn’t have a champion to do that other than this is the ceo, the ceo is almost resigned, teo being a member of the board and leading it forward so that part of the argument that that that author made but they’re the cons are again is that you can really encourage a rubber stamp board, you can lose the checks and balances that you’ve tried to design for the board, and ceos can, even without knowing that they’re doing so, make decisions that are based not necessarily in the organization’s best interests, but in the ceo, you know, ceos best interests as well, and not in terms of sometimes in terms of making more compensation for themselves or protecting their own job status, but sometimes it can be for more innocent reasons. Just the ceo thinks a certain way about a particular project and wants to protect that project ahead of others, perhaps, or looks to the present more than to the future of the organization and again in wanting to protect everybody, all the employees from from facing layoffs or anything like that doesn’t want to make that difficult decisions that might improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the organization in future, and really holds to the status quo, because there’s so many personal interests that are involved as well that the ceo maybe, like, here she is safeguarding too. So that’s where the board you know, it’s kind of this objective party from the outside looking in, khun really provide this different perspective for an organization. If you have the ceo of the chair of the board, designing the agenda of the board, being responsible for the education of the board and orientation of the board and preparation of all the board members before every board meeting, everything can get planted in a certain way to sort of direct everybody else to just approve. But the ceo is recommending and that that’s the danger of having a ceo is the chair, the listener pole. If if your ceo is a boardmember does he or she chaired the board, only thirteen percent said yes, and the other eighty seven percent said no that they don’t have that. We have just about a minute before we go away for a couple of minutes um, you’ve seen cases where the there’s, a volunteer chair of the board, and they’re identified as ceo of the organization. Yeah, and and that’s that’s kind of an interesting fact pattern that that oftentimes takes place even if the by-laws don’t say anything. So if you’ve got an executive director hired but your state law says that either the president or the chair, the board is the ceo, unless the by-laws state otherwise, even though you haven’t executive director, the chair of your board, maybe the ceo just by default of the law because you’re by-laws don’t say anything else, and that may not be a great place for a volunteer chair of the board tow want to be in should anything ever go to court and that person be held responsible as the ceo of the organization for understanding and knowing what the organization is doing on a day to day basis? And aside from the legal aspect of it, i think that would diminish the authority of the paid executive director. Absolutely. Here you’re absolutely right, and i wantto point to something that was on the april twenty sixth, two thousand thirteen show the guest was eugene fram, and he and i talked a lot about the title ceo versus executive director and how that and how executive director tends to diminish the authority of what, what he recommends. B b the ceo. We have to go away for a couple of minutes. When we come back. Jean, i’ll keep talking about board a six. Hang in there, stay with us. Dafs you’re listening to the talking alternative network. Schnoll are you stuck in your business or career trying to take your business to the next level, and it keeps hitting a wall? This is sam liebowitz, the conscious consultant. I will help you get to the root cause of your abundance issues and help move you forward in your life. Call me now and let’s. Create the future you dream of. Two, one, two, seven, two, one, eight, one, eight, three, that’s to one to seven to one, eight one eight three. The conscious consultant helping conscious people. Be better business people. Have you ever considered consulting a road map when you feel you need help getting to your destination when the normal path seems blocked? A little help can come in handy when choosing an alternate route. Your natal chart is a map of your potentials. It addresses relationships, finance, business, health and, above all, creativity. Current planetary cycles can either support or challenge your objectives. I’m montgomery taylor. If you would like to explore the help of a private astrological reading, please contact me at monte at monty taylor dot. Com let’s monte m o nt y at monty taylor dot com. Talking alternative radio twenty four hours a day. God, that’s. More live listener love. Ah! Houston, texas. Yakima, washington. Rocklin, california. Outside sacramento. San francisco, california. And a masked us avenger listener. Tokyo, japan durney chua and we know that it’s francisco imbriano zara is francisco welcome. Lots of masked listeners in japan. Also bunch of mass listeners in japan, seoul, korea and goose on korea on your haserot and chung ching, guangzhou and shanghai, china. Ni hao, so happy to have all the live listeners. Love i love sending live listener love it’s, more like my live listener love, then love going out to you because i love doing it. Jean let’s see that’s ah, let’s continue with the possibility of having other paid employees or even contractors on the board. Seems to me this is getting messier the further we go, yeah, it can get messy hair as we go along and, you know, here in california, we actually have ah, state law that says for non-profit what we call public benefit corporations. So those air, the charitable organizations that are not not religious and focus, um, on lee up to forty nine percent of the board may be compensated or related to someone compensated and that’s, whether as an employee or an independent contractor, so a majority of the board essentially must be interested or not compensated or related to anybody confident no, jean, that still seems too high to me. Forty nine percent, i think, should be, like, ten percent. You know, most states actually don’t have that law at all in the vast majority of states don’t have that. So i agree with you that it would be great to have a small minority of the board compensated so the board can be can be the real checking balance in terms of making decisions that are not beneficial primarily for the employees directors, but primarily for the mission of the organization in most states don’t have those laws. And i think part of that is to accommodate some smaller boards where they may only be three or four board members to start out with. And you do have the founder, who’s compensated on the board and, you know, so e-giving ten percent, which would be very tough. Well, all right, well, then, say one out of force, you know, based on the size of the board. But but it seems risky tohave employees or even do you see this case where it’s it’s other employees or even vendors to the organization on the board? Yeah, way, absolutely, tio i don’t know, i don’t know, maybe i’m it just sounds crazy to me to have especially vendors on the well, no, actually, they’re equally bad to me vendors and and other paid employees aside from the ceo, i just don’t think they should be on the board at all. Yeah, you know, i for the most part again, generally, i would say i would agree with you, you really lose out on all the checks and balances that we talked about, even maur if you’ve got not only the ceo on the board but other employees or contractors as well, and then what about the situation, tony, if the ceo is not on the board but one of the vendors is on the board now, that creates, like this unusual situation where the ceo is really responsible for making sure that bender’s is performing under whatever contract that they have. But the vendors sits on the board that oversees the ceo and can affect the performance or even the retention of the ceo and that that’s kind of crazy, isn’t it? Yes, that’s, i can’t. I can’t see a case where a vendor or contractor to an organisation belongs on the board. I don’t care, even if they’re volunteering their time and the value of their services, or whatever, they, whether they’re volunteering or being paid, they just don’t belong and an employee’s equally bad. You know, some employees are on the board, but not other employees. I mean, what does that do to the peer-to-peer relationships, working relationships in the office? Yeah, they can’t create problems, but let me take the other side for just a moment. That lawyers love to do this right, then so let’s take the other side and say, well, what about a vendor who has been a great vendor paid vendor to the organization that’s been giving discounted rates to the organization all along knows the organization really well on dh if you continue to use that vendor, you just get far better value than you would by using any of her his competitors out there. And now you feel like the vendors so aligned with the mission of the organization, you actually value the perspective that this person could bring to the board and no one invite them onto the board. But you don’t necessarily want to take away this advantageous business kind of action that you have with this vendor, and you may be paying double if you go out and bring them on the board, but not continue to use their services. That may be a case where i say that’s, ok, you’ve to be very careful about this, but that may be okay to bring that vendor onto the onto the organization and in, you know, in a slightly different matter. What if you’ve got a board member? Who’s not a vendor right now, but he says, hey, i can leave my, you know, that’s, an extra business space, and we’re looking to expand i can offer you a lease that, you know, just half the price that you’ll find anywhere else, and you go ahead and have the all the independent board members of that that statement to make sure that what actually is much lower than when what fair market value would be for that space, and that may be another case where it’s okay, the boardmember eventually becomes the landlord of the organization, but that may be okay as well, but you do need the check and balance of independent board members to prove those type of transaction. So you’re not just relying on somebody saying that, yeah, we’re way cheaper than everybody else, you’re actually verifying that with the independent boardmember okay, well, i’m not willing to go that far with you. I think the the vendors perspective can be brought in by the by the ceo so that i think the perspective could be represented. And, you know, if the person loves the organization so much the way you’re describing it, i don’t think they would double the price just because, you know, way didn’t put them on the board. All right, i don’t need to do neither do i, tony, but, you know, it’s interesting board source, i believe, are no urban institute did a study of non-profits that have they’re they’re contractors on the board, and forty five percent said it would be difficult to terminate that relationship that contracting relationship and but only seventeen percent, haywood said it would be very difficult terminate that contract relationship and still keep that member on the board. So it’s an interesting thing, i think generally i agree with you, we don’t like the idea of having them on the board because of the conflicts of interest, but i can understand situations sometimes went when it might be appropriate. You’re more understanding than i am. Jean wait, we have to leave it there to be continued let’s do aboard basics again because we didn’t get to term limits. And then there’s also the question of, you know how often should the board meet? And i’ll bet you have some other topics. So let’s do board six again next time. Okay, that sounds good. I look forward to it. Excellent, i do to thank you, jean takagi, yet it’s the non-profit law blogged dot com and on twitter he’s at g tak thank you again, jean next week, a new feature out of the blue we’re going to bring people in that have offed be jobs and a connection to non-profits of course we’re going to start this with sand or cats he’s a fermenter, and actually he called himself sandorkraut and we’re going to talk about the history, benefits and methods of fermenting foods and he’s got a simple sauerkraut recipe and in a future out of the blue, we’re going to go from sandorkraut to santa claus, we’re going to bring in santa claus and mrs claus, they’re going to be in the studio in october, kicking off their busy season next week. Also, scott koegler returns he’s, our technology contributor and the editor of non-profit technology news he’s also in ina file, so that means fermentation is bad for scott koegler you want to follow me on twitter, i’m at tony martignetti our creative producer is claire meyerhoff. Sam liebowitz is our line producer, the remote producer of tony martignetti non-profit radio is john federico of the new rules, and we’re saying goodbye to regina walton of organic social media. We’ve had a terrific three year run with regina she’s, been with me from the beginning of the show, and you’re listening because regina promoted the show and you saw her good work, and that brought you to us. Thank you very much for gina it’s. Been a pleasure. I hope you’ll be with me next week. Friday, one to two p, m eastern, a tucking alternative broadcasting at talking alternative dot com. E-giving intending to be a good ending? You’re listening to the talking alternate network. Get in. Cubine are you a female entrepreneur? Ready to break through? Join us at sixty body sassy soul, where women are empowered to ask one received what they truly want in love, life and business. Tune in thursday, said noon eastern time to learn tips and juicy secrets from inspiring women and men who, there to define their success, get inspired, stay motivated and to find your version of giant success with sexy body sake. Sold every thursday ad. Men in new york times on talking alternative dot com. Are you suffering from aches and pains? Has traditional medicine let you down? Are you tired of taking toxic medications, then come to the double diamond wellness center and learn how our natural methods can help you to hell? Call us now at to one to seven to one eight, one eight three that’s to one to seven to one eight one eight three or find us on the web at www dot double diamond wellness dot com way. Look forward to serving you. You’re listening to talking alternative network at www dot talking alternative dot com, now broadcasting twenty four hours a day. This is tony martignetti aptly named host of tony martignetti non-profit radio. Big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent technology fund-raising compliance, social media, small and medium non-profits have needs in all these areas. My guests are expert in all these areas and mohr. Tony martignetti non-profit radio fridays one to two eastern on talking alternative broadcasting are you concerned about the future of your business for career? Would you like it all to just be better? Well, the way to do that is to better communication. And the best way to do that is training from the team at improving communications. This is larry sharp, host of the ivory tower radio program and director at improving communications. Does your office need better leadership? Customer service sales or maybe better writing are speaking skills? Could they be better at dealing with confrontation conflicts, touchy subjects all are covered here at improving communications. If you’re in the new york city area, stop by one of our public classes or get your human resource is in touch with us. The website is improving communications, dot com that’s improving communications, dot com improve your professional environment. Be more effective, be happier. And make more money. Improving communications. That’s. The answer. Talking. Hyre

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148: Intuitive Brainstorming & The Pallotta Pall? II – Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio

Posted on June 28, 2013 by Nonprofit Radio

Tony’s guests this week:

Karen Garvey, author, speaker, intuitive and coach

Gene Takagi, principal of the Nonprofit & Exempt Organizations Law Group

Read and watch more on Tony’s blog: http://tonymartignetti.com

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Hello and welcome to tony martignetti non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent i’m your aptly named host. Isn’t it comforting to hear all that you know, you’re in the right place. It’s friday, june twenty eighth twenty thirteen so pleased to be back in the studio even though it was your last week, too. I just love being here so muchmore than pre recording oh, i hope you’re with me. Last week it was get out and positively communicate. Sharon abbott is the author of mixing it up the entrepreneurs new testament we talked about networking your non-profit recruiting and hiring motivated people and positive communications. Sharon read my face to tell what kind of communicator i am and sec secrets. Maria simple is the author of panning for gold. Finding your best donorsearch prospects now and our monthly prospect research contributor she struck research gold in sec corporate filings. I hope you’re with me last week, i’d endure a cubine it’s ulcer if i heard that you had missed last week’s show this week intuitive brainstorming karen garvey, author speaker, intuitive and coach describes the why and how of intuitive brainstorming it’s not your mother’s brain storming and the ppa latto paul part do have you seen dan pallotti’s? Viral video from ted it’s called the way we think about charity is dead wrong. Our legal contributor jean takagi. Principle of the non-profit and exempt organizations law group continues our discussion from may tenth on how we got here and what would need to change. And should it change to achieve dan, pull out his vision of a more free market charity sector. Also the overhead myth letter between the guests on tony’s take two. It is my block this week, which is are you having fun? I’m talking about mermaid parade type fund. My pleasure. Now to welcome karen garvey. On september eleventh, two thousand one, she received simultaneous information about what was happening. That was her first experience. Learning something not through earthly means. Over time, she discovered how to intentionally tune into this connection through this conduit to universal knowledge, she provides insights for coaching seminars, media and books. You’ll find karen at the answer’s unlimited dot com. Karen garvey, welcome. Well, thank you for having me, tony it’s. A pleasure. Thanks for joining me in the studio. Um, september eleventh. What? What was happening for you then? I have an mba, and i was working as an independent business consultant at that time. So i was working out of my home and what i would typically do wood was go out for iran a few mornings a week before i began the day. And when i returned from my run about five to nine that morning i was standing in my driveway, punching the key code in to get the garage door to go up. And as i was standing there, i received information about what was happening, a visual, a sense of it, almost like a download of knowledge about what was happening. And since i live about an hour from manhattan, it was impossible for me to have any physical clues about what was going on. I put it out of my mind. I thought it was just a awful thing to have appear in my brain, if you will. But within under a minute, i had the phone ringing, somebody telling me to put the television on. When i put the tv on, it was at the moment where the broadcasters were making suppositions about what had happened to the first tower, and they were saying that a small plane and gotten off its course. But i was able to immediately connect that what i had experienced in the driveway was that i understood and comprehended what was going on even without my knowledge or being there. So i guess the big moment for me was that, you know, coming from a more intellectual background and only really caring about things that were academic and scientifically proven. It was my first experience knowing that our conscious energy is not connected to our body. While you were punching in the key code, you knew that this was happening in new york city. Yes. And you knew that it was more than just a small plane off course over jimmy. Yes. I knew it was the beginning. I knew it was intended. I knew it was planned. You know, i knew that it was oven attack nature s so yes, i got that information with sort of like a visual as well. Do you know where edward snowden is going to go for asylum? And you tell us what country he’s headed to? Wow, if i could do that. I probably wouldn’t be sitting on the air with you telling me you wouldn’t think that this is a place to reveal this is no, nobody listens to this show. Only nine thousand. But this is the place to reveal where but okay, but what do you mean you’re your bio says universal knowledge. What does that mean? What? What have come, teo, understand? And, you know, after nine eleven, it took me a while to find any language for what had happened. And then it took a lot more occurrences of receiving simultaneous information of things that were happening before i could comprehend the experience. S o i’m pretty much self taught learning how to remove my conscious thoughts from what i’ve learned from my learned experiences. You call it getting out of your body or getting out of your way whatever you wanna call it. But i learned that i can connect with non physical sources for information, and any information i get from that source is far more comforting. Liberating. It resonates with me more far more than the things that i have learned on earth from people s o what i find is it’s, is it? Some kind of a miracle or gift? I don’t really think so. I think we’re all very intuitive. It was just a confluence of events that day, you know, the magnificence of the amount of conscious energy that was being shared that day, plus the fact that i had just been for iran, so my mind was quiet and also my family and i had some personal connections to that date, so it was also intimate, so and i don’t know if that confluence hadn’t happened if i would’ve opened up on that day, but all it did was help me to find this extension of life that taps into universal knowledge, and i think that we all do it in one way or another. We just might not have a description for it or know howto how to capture that knowledge. Yeah, i mean, i certainly feel intuitions strongly, i think when i’m leaving my apartment that maybe that i’ve forgotten something. Yes, and sometimes unwisely, i dismissed him ends, and i don’t even think, oh, no, i’m not i’m not forgetting anything. I just dismissed them, and then i get on the subway. I realized i forgot to bring my my apple elected an apple each time on the subway and got my subway apple or, you know, i did forget my workout clothes or something, but there then there are times when i will pay attention to it, and i’ll stop and i’ll think, what am i missing? Yes and something. Ah lot of times not not every time, though, but a lot of times something does occur to me, and i could go back and get it before i leave my apartment. I mean, that’s, that’s, intuition. But but how do we how do we connect to that? The sort of on demand, which is what you’re what you’re describing, i mean, and you’re working coaching and workshops, you know that i can’t i’m not saying i can conjure it up. Yes, yeah, and maybe conscious, not ivory. I don’t mean that in the demeaning i understand. Exactly understand? Well, you know the what it is, it’s kind of like finding the place that your brain goes, if you will it’s almost as though i could feel shift in my brain when i’m open to that conduit. So it’s practice, practice practice i like to think about it, like, did you ever see those images? Those aren’t images that it looks like just a bunch of small dots or pixels. And when you step back and you look at it and use you, bend your eyes, it turns into a three day when you’re seeking it and seeking it and seeking it it’s flat and two day. But the day you see the three day you can practice to keep finding it and it becomes easier it’s the same way with this connection. When i practiced, i can see the three day without effort anymore because it’s so practiced, i practiced the muscle in there for me now nufer let’s translate this to something that small and midsize non-profits i think, can benefit trump. Why? I invited you to talk about intuitive brainstorming. What? What is this? Generally? Okay, what it is it’s it’s. First of all, it’s about suspending doubt that we are creatures that are finite and that we’re separate. First, you have to understand that we are connected and that there is this universe with infinite wisdom that’s trying to guide us in the direction of our focus. So what we do when i go into organizations as we begin by setting a goal, and that goal will be to overcome whatever challenge or limit the organization is experiencing. The moment whether it’s, you know, staffing issues or trying to find new creative ways to raise revenue or a new marketing idea. But whatever it is, we set a goal, and we have what it would be typical brainstorming rules. Ah, that we apply for the process. And those rules include that we’ll get to those. Okay. More, general. Yeah. Yeah, no problem. And so we just set the course of working toward our goal. In a way where there’s no interruption. We have an hour to think about it, and we start to put our energy and our focus toward that direction. And however many people department heads, or if it’s a very small organization, everyone whoever’s in that room is somehow connected to the end goal and feels as though it’s possible to get to that end goal. Can we apply this where we have maybe difficult relationship with some some fellow employees? Or maybe, ah, relationship with board members or other volunteers? Can it work with personal relationships? Also it definitely can and that’s. One of the wonderful things about it. Is that just the process of knowing that there’s no judgment or criticism or bad ideas during that one hour, it allows people to open up the possibility that they might not have thought of otherwise. It gets, you know, it gets the thinking part of you out of the way. So the more creative ideas, things that come more from intuition and from love and from heart and soul, can come forth, and those usually are the better solutions. In the end, we’re gonna take a break, and when we come back, we’ll start. I just want to probe a little more the way the universe is guiding us, but then we’ll get into some details about intuitive brainstorming. So after the break, karen garvey, of course, stays with me, and i hope that you do, too. Talking alternative radio twenty four hours a day. Do you need a business plan that can guide your company’s growth? Seven and seven will help bring the changes you need. Wear small business consultants and we pay attention to the details. You may miss our coaching and consultant services are guaranteed to lead toe right growth for your business, call us at nine. One seven eight three, three, four, eight, six. Zero foreign, no obligation. Free consultation. Check out our website of ww dot covenant seven dot com. Are you fed up with talking points? Rhetoric everywhere you turn left or right? Spin ideology no reality. In fact, its ideology over in tow. No more it’s time for action. Join me, larry. Shock a neo-sage tuesday nights nine to eleven easter for the isaac tower radio in the ivory tower will discuss what’s important to you society, politics, business and family. It’s provocative talk for the realist and the skeptic who want to know what’s. Really going on? What does it mean? What can be done about it? So gain special access to the ivory tower. Listen to me, larry sharp. Your neo-sage. Tuesday nights nine to eleven new york time go to ivory tower radio dot com. For details. That’s, ivory tower radio dot com everytime was a great place to visit for both entertainment and education. Listening. Tuesday nights nine to eleven. It will make you smarter. Hey, all you crazy listeners looking to boost your business? Why not advertise on talking alternative with very reasonable rates? Interested simply email at info at talking alternative dot com welcome back to big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. Time to send some live listener love let’s start abroad today. Beijing chung ching and shanghai, china welcome live listener love ni hao seoul, south korea always lovely always always glad to see south korea checking in on your haserot and in japan, tokyo is only one person in tokyo or multiple. Sometimes there are multiple multiple people in tokyo. We don’t know exactly where you are, but do you know each other? I’m are you all in a coffee shop together for for our listeners in japan. Konnichi wa ann arbor, michigan. Newport, north carolina. Malvin p a thank you for checking in live listener love to each of you and there’s more coming talking with karen garvey, author speaker, intuitive coach we’re talking about intuitive brain storming let’s say a little more wood. Well, actually not not. Let us let you can. I don’t understand it about how the universe is is guiding us. I the way i see things now is that we we either live awake or asleep when we’re asleep. We really think that this is a solo flight. Maybe you can have. Tea members or friends or people that support you, but you think pretty much that this is your journey, your legs, your brain, and you got to do it on your own. But as soon as you start to awaken, as soon as you start to understand that there’s, this infinite power that we are connected to that is eternal that’s with us before we’re born and will be with us during this journey and also be with us after we you know, after we pass on, then you start to be able to find ways that you witness this interaction, what i usually do with clients, even an intuitive brainstorming as i start to ask them to become aware of it if you’re not aware of it by asking a question of the universe every day and expect that you’ll get an answer, because this will train you to start to witness the signs in the way that the universe is connecting with you or communicating with you. So, you know, in the beginning, keep it light hearted and playful because you don’t want to have your first question be life or death. It’s, it’s a little bit harder. To discover the answer that way, if you’re very very invested in the outcome, or if you haven’t expected desire of how it will turn out. But if you start with something playful, you’ll start to see that the answer can pop up in an e mail or by someone’s conversation online. Behind you in the store, it can come through maybe not new york city so much, but where i live, it comes on vanity plates on license plates. Quite often, it can come on a sign on a building or a passage in a book, but you allow yourself to be able to accept the answer so that you’re you’re strengthening your ability to understand how we are connected and how we are guided, you know, and often times you’ll see two or three responses to the same question. So it’s about practicing it’s about seeing something differently. Also another way to strengthen this is to take stock of how you are intuitive and there’s a lot of ways, we are intuitive that many people aren’t taking taking ownership of like what you were saying earlier about that gut feeling, i left something in the apartment, but there are other things, too, like thinking about somebody that you haven’t seen in a while, and then they contact you. Ah, another thing would be just to have a sense of turning in a different direction and finding that when you made that turn opposite of what your logic would say, that there was a good reason to do it or not taking that turn and finding out that you should have listened to that feeling. Another thing is, we we oftentimes can get messages or visits from past loved ones in our dreams, and they feel very different than dreams. They don’t feel like they’re imaginative play. It feels like you’re visiting with this soul and that’s, another avenue toward understanding intuition. I have, ah, very dear friend who says there are no coincidences. Do you agree with that? I just phrase it differently. I just say that a coincidence is a purposeful intersecting of events. So, yes, there are coincidences and they have purpose, but you define them as having purpose, yes. Interesting. So, yeah, i mean, i i had something like that just this past week. I was thinking about someone contacting them, and then i got an email from them that’s it, uh but you okay? So you’re suggesting starting with a question a day now, i was thinking something like, you know, where should i have lunch today? But you don’t want to. You don’t want to be that trivial in the beginning. It’s kind of nice to make it that trivial because it’s easier to find the signs when you’re not that emotionally encumbered by the answer so you can find things that are just lighthearted. So if you’re thinking, you know, if you’re thinking of going to the smoothie place versus going to the chinese place, it’s not that difficult to find a sign, you know, you might walk out of here and trip over a pineapple, and that might indicate you should go to the smoothie place. Well, but chinese, they have sweet’n sour point way. You’re gonna wait for your second land. Okay? Right now. All right. So starting with something simple like that is okay. It’s actually easier. Much easier. Preferred. Okay, so, let’s. Go back to the intuitive brainstorming. You will lose to some of the rules. And i didn’t want to get too specific at that point. But what what are, uh, what does? Well, the second step back. How do we get started? Who? Who should we invite into our brainstorming process? You said you mentioned doing an hour session. Yeah. Who should we invite to this? It really depends on what the goal is. So any player that has some kind of responsibility or some kind of task that’s oriented toward getting to that goal should participate. So that everybody’s, aware and everyone’s energy thought energy and feelings and beliefs are all vested into the process on dh it’s about setting forth. I like one hour. Because for the average person, it takes us about twenty minutes to set ourselves aside and get out of the thinking part. We we really do critique everything and oftentimes criticize everything. So the judgment part of us, when we start to get into a more playful, imagine imaginative and creative arena, it will start. Teo, allow us to dismiss judgment and being free of judgment is a very, very important application here, so that’s part of the reason for blame being playful. I usually encourage the teammates too. I kind of have a little bit of a contest that the more outrageous the suggestion, the better, because here’s, the way i look at that, if you are going teo, aim for one particular star that’s between us on the moon and you’re only aiming for that star, you know, we might not make it, but if you aim for the moon there’s a better likelihood to get to that particular star. So if you go for the really outrageous answers, it’s going to help you to seek beyond what your typical boundary would be, and to get past those limits that would normally come upon you it’s also important that there’s no interruptions for that hour because interruptions change our focus. Like just as i was saying, how going for a run helped me to get out of myself being uninterrupted and to be playful and to have a very positive atmosphere in this circumstance helps you to stay imaginative and creative. It helps to keep you more right brain rather than left brain. You have all the time in the world to be left brain after the intuitive brainstorming session, but right now, it’s about getting creative and get an imaginative and being playful and being free and believing an infinite possibility. How often should we do these sessions? It’s it’s multiple times, right? Yeah, in the beginning, i suggest that people do it once a week because you’re exercising muscles that you’re not that familiar with. I have the same purpose in goal, and if the goal is a very long term goal, i say about a month of once a week and then you could go down to once every two weeks. If you’re finding you really have momentum even once a month after that to maintain that energy moving forward. Okay, should there be a leader of the group or is everybody equal? I usually have someone that’s, a facilitator, not necessarily a leader, but that is very familiar with the structure, you know, tries to encourage playfulness, tries to encourage people to be without limits, nonjudgmental noncritical on someone and ensuring that everybody else is especially non judgmental. Yes, everything is allowed. Yes, more. As you’re saying, the more playful, the better. All right, so we’ve done we do several of these sessions say over a month, what do are we starting to make a decision about how we’re going to proceed or we looking more for signs at that moment? Where are we now after for these let’s say, well, we’ll have a recorder, so every idea will be recorded during the session, so we’ll have a place that we can go back to initially, you know, want to take any speedy action. It’s not about developing your plan in that moment. It is about now going out, having all players seek and say, you know what? We’re in this together with this universe, there are some good ideas there might not be. The ideas that were thinking are the best in this moment, but give us evidence, give us signs, put a stepping stone down in front of us won that we feel is viable, and we feel that we can move in that direction. So in the next week you come back any share stories or even during the week, if you’re bumping into people, you can share stories because sharing stories gives validation, and it helps everybody to suspend doubt and to encourage not needing to think that this is off an off limits topic, so the more encouragement you get, the more people will see signs where they are starting to appear everywhere, from dreams to vanity license plates. Exactly. So we’re sort of opening our mind two on our consciousness too signs that i don’t know what would they have been there otherwise we just wouldn’t have recognised them. How do we hear is that? You know, for may i still really prefer the scientific ideas behind what it is that i dont here’s how i began to understand signs, because for me, it’s like really, you know, if i’m listening to tony show today and all of sudden he says the thing that answers my question, what did ugo did the universe take over tony’s brain? Enforce that sentence out of his mouth that doesn’t. That doesn’t make sense to me, but here’s how it really does work that there’s no such thing as time, so your answers are in the universe. But what the objective of this guidance is is to get you to pay attention to where the signs are so often times you have to understand that conscious. Energy is vibrations thought energy is waves, wave energy intersects with other intersects with other wave energy of other conscious thoughts treyz closely in jargon jail. Now we have a jogging jail here you haven’t you haven’t transcended basically and that’s not what i mean transcended. You haven’t transgressed okay having transgressed, but you’re, you’re almost your close transcendent. The idea is simply that, like we can’t see radio waves, but we can hear the music. The same is true with thought energy, and if your thought energy is intersecting with someone else’s thought energy or with a non physical source of energy, you’re not aware of it. It still feels like your thoughts so you can actually be prompted to think toe look at assign toe look to the left to listen to the lyric of a song and that’s the that’s. The way that it works is that you, it’s basically, like, think about an invisible couple of fingers being put on your cheek asking you to turn to the left or turn to the right or look up or listen well, i whenever i had a break up when i was younger, i always thought, you know but everybody thinks it’s the song lyrics are talking to me about how how melancholy i’m feeling but i think that’s ah, well, maybe it’s coincidence with purpose. Yes. Ok. Could be helping you through the process, is there? Ah, a minimum number of people that that this really works well with me is like, is three enough for there really? Isn’t even two people can really very powerful on dh, not self censoring. Really? Yeah. No. Yeah. Even two people is very effective. As a matter of fact, there are often times just teams that do this and you don’t even have to have the same objective. If you’re working with just one other team member, you can give a half hour to one person’s purpose and one half hour to the other person’s per purpose. If you have a very small organization, it still is effective. Having at least two players, though, helps your own personal bias is to be removed through the vision or the eyes of somebody else. Okay, i like the idea that this could be ongoing. So we could just schedule this hour a week, and maybe i have several devoted to the same. Topic and then switch topics but always have this sort of playful our you have organizations that have have done that devoted time to this over the long term. Yes, i have organizations that this is just a part of their business process. Now for two, three, four years it’s just been an ongoing part. Everyone gets used to that. This is when it’s scheduled this is when we meet, and they do look at it as the fun hour of the week share a client story, one of one of those longer term organizations can you ok, here’s a good example for fora non-profit often times, the biggest challenge is thie ongoing process of fund-raising especially if the fund-raising methods are finite and you need to raise revenue on an annual basis, and you’re starting from scratch, scratch fiscally every year. So one example of something that came out of the brainstorming for one come company one organization was that it’s, an organization that helps young people between the ages of fourteen and eighteen who have started to have issues with the law or with drugs or other different problems, and it gives them a place to maybe find different traits or characteristics within them while being guided by a support staff that can help them. And the challenge definitely is in fund-raising, you know, they have their gala, they have their golf outing. But what was generated from this process was the idea that thie donor-centric a child and have real communication with one of the people that he has is in contact with. So it’s monthly communication, maybe even photographs, a man indication of what kinds of really cool things is being done with their money and their donation. So what that does is it takes it from ah, one year donation of such and such amount of font and then it’s out of their mind, and it becomes a subscription. So every month their credit card is processed, and they have this relationship with the person which encourages them to stay with the subscription. And that came out of intuitive brainstorming works outstanding. Um, share what? What it is that you love about the work that you do with clients, whether individuals or or organizations or companies there’s a lot of things that i love about it. But one is certainly that one is definitely that. Thie benefits that you see in your business, and when he’s starting to see more abundance and more possibility and more wonderful things coming your way with less effort than you used to put in. All of that starts to kind of overflow into your personal life too. So the principles are the same. Whether you’re having these successes in business or you’re having them in your personal life, the principles are the same. You’re exercising muscles that affect every area of your life, so i love to see the personal growth that develops from the business growth and vice versa. So that’s really satisfying the other thing is that it’s fun to see that people start to believe that life can be easier to get out of that mode of life is hard, this is difficult. This is not fun. I can’t get this done and to start to see that when you link into this support that’s there for you and it’s free and that you can use it, that challenges start to fade and have the same extent or the same energetic difficulties that you used to have. So just to see that byproduct of it as well, as really satisfying, we have a lot more time. You won’t share one more thing that you love about the work. Okay, one more thing. Well, i’ll take it to a personal level if you don’t mind. I was one of those people that was, you know, falling into snags constantly relationship wise or people wise or or even my relationship with money. And in the ten years that i’ve been really focusing on this, i have probably fewer challenges than anybody i’ve ever met, and i also feel that i’m probably one of the happiest people i’ve ever met, which i’m going to tell you. A decade ago, i didn’t know it was even possible. I feel like i’m in a joint venture with the universe and yes, you are all right, karen garvey. You will find her at the answer’s unlimited dotcom. Thank you so much for being against karen. Thank you, it’s been a real pleasure. We’ll take a break when we come back a little more live listener love tony’s take two and then gene takagi is with us to talk about the poll latto paul part do stay with us e-giving didn’t think dick tooting, getting dink, dink, dink. You’re listening to the talking alternate network. Get in. E-giving good. Are you suffering from aches and pains? Has traditional medicine let you down? Are you tired of taking toxic medications, then come to the double diamond wellness center and learn how our natural method i can help you to hell? Call us now at to one to seven to one eight, one eight three that’s to one to seven to one eight, one eight, three or find us on the web at www dot double diamond wellness dot com. We look forward to serving you. Hi, i’m ostomel role, and i’m sloan wainwright, where the host of the new thursday morning show the music power hour. Eleven a m. We’re gonna have fun. Shine the light on all aspects of music and its limitless healing possibilities. We’re gonna invite artists to share their songs and play live will be listening and talking about great music from yesterday to today, so you’re invited to share in our musical conversation. Your ears will be delighted with the sound of music and our voices. Join austin and sloan live thursdays at eleven a. M on talking alternative dot com. You’re listening to the talking alternative network. Dahna i’m leslie goldman with the us fund for unicef, and i’m casey rotter with us fun for unison. You’re listening to tony martignetti non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. Metoo now more live listener love teo washington, d c, san francisco and jamaican new york. Where comes to coast? Jamaica have courses in queens. Very diverse neighborhood. So could be anybody listening in jamaica, new york. What comes to coast today and there’s? More live listener love coming from coming from abroad. My tony’s take two. This week is about my blog’s, which was are you having fun? Because last weekend i was a judge at the thirty first annual coney island mermaid parade and it was it was great fun. There were mermaids. There were mermaid ls. There were octopuses, burlesque dancers, ice skaters, ice skaters in in june, on on a float that had, i guess, in that ice on it they were skating. There was even a pabst blue ribbon float, pbr float. And that just got me thinking about summer fun. So my block this week is are you having fun? Because it is summer and my suggestion that you make time for fun, you have to make the time because you won’t just find it. But i think it’s very well worth doing. There are pictures from the mermaid parade on my blog’s at tony. Martignetti dot com, including a bunch of mermaids and that is tony’s take two for friday twenty eighth of june twenty sixth show of the year and my one hundred forty eighth show. The one hundred fiftieth is going to be on july twelfth. There’s nothing special planned for the hundred fiftieth show. It’ll be it’ll be a laid back sesquicentennial. My pleasure, as it always is. When he’s here to welcome jean takagi he’s, the principal of neo the non-profit and exempt organizations law group in san francisco, he edits the very popular non-profit law blawg dot com. And you can follow him on twitter at gt a k g attack. Gee, tak, welcome back. Hey, tony, how are you? I’m great that’s a little rhyme i made. I just i just thought that right now. Is that what i’m what an improviser. Welcome back. Okay, um, we are continuing our conversation from back in may may tenth, to be exact when we were talking about dan piela tas viral video. The way we think about charities is dead wrong. And we talked about compensation and advertising and marketing and risk taking, and we want to continue their two. Other things that you blogged about it on the first of those is time constraints that non-profits don’t have the luxury of time. What? What air dan’s concerns there. I think tony, you know, because the public and thunders appear to have really little patients for non-profits that failed, teo immediately make an impact that they can report back there’s. Just this lack of patient capital. It’s, maybe a buzz term that people use in this industry, that’s willing to wait it out and allow non-profits to develop the right infrastructure and systems, and perhaps the right, uh, foundations to go to scale before being able to deliver the type of results that the public and that institutional thunders they’re looking for, and then makes a very good point there. I have a clip of him talking about this, relating it, to analogizing it to the corporate side. So amazon went for six years without returning any profit to investors, and people had patients. They knew that there was a long term objective down the line of building market. Dahna. But if a nonprofit organization ever had a dream of building magnificent scale that required for six years, no money was going to go to the needy was all, then be invested in building the scale. We would expect the crucifixion. That’s damp latto is there? Is there something we can do about this game? And he he has a very good example that if if if charity went six years without spending money on mission, there would be there would be a lot of trouble that there would be, and there would be legal problems a cz well, there there is a principle it’s rarely used, and because there are no sort of really english or plain english words for this high risk jargon j hope that it’s called the commensurate test for pizza basically all right, commencement fancy words and just basically means that a charity has to spend its resource is in line with its mission, and that includes the amount of financial resources it has and what amount is going to program versus administrative and fund-raising so if you were to spend and and i’m not actually a man of that example that that dan produced with amazon, i’ll explain that in a second. But if you were to spend six years building infrastructure and admit zsystems to go to magnificent scale without spending a penny on program that’s going to be a violation of the commensurate test almost surely on dh there may be others from some other problems with that as well. The reason, tony, i don’t like it. Maybe you could tell me how you feel is well, when amazon was building up for six years, it was still selling books and producing revenues and inspiring confidence in its investors if a non-profit were to do nothing but build infrastructure for six years and not do any programming it’s not been inspire confidence in its investors. And it’s not really the legal problem it’s the ability to track capitol problem if it’s not showing any demonstrate, you know, demonstration of its ability. Tio achieved this massive scale of the project can’t show benchmarks along the way. And the public and institutional investors, they’re just not going to believe in this, i say all right, so there was there was mission related work going on in amazon for those six years that’s so the analogy isn’t really great. That’s my feeling okay, mission related work being sales. They just maybe weren’t profitable, but they were doing some mission related work. Okay, now, lobbying can be effective, but in making chain making social change but that’s largely, and we’ve talked about this before prohibited. Well, actually, i correctly there okay tony so non-profit public charities and engage in quite a significant amount of lobbying without passing the threshold. But locking and advocacy were generally it takes time to do. And so, in that sense, an investment in time requires some patients there and again, patients capital, it’s, it’s, an investment in time, and supporters of those lobbying advocacy efforts are going to have to wait it out to see what may happen, and sometimes a change in the laws we’ve seen with the supreme court decisions recently. Sometimes changes in the law are much, much more powerful than just direct services. Let’s move to another of dan’s concerns. The final one, which is that non-profits don’t attract profit. Tio don’t don’t make profit to attract risk. Yeah, great, great point so for-profit can attract equity owners, and they can use that to make investments in, you know, big projects that might become sustainable and be able to deliver charitable goods to communities and made on a consistent basis and non-profits can attract that equity capital because, of course, non-profits don’t have owners now i actually don’t have a problem with that. And, tony, maybe you could tell me what you think. I don’t think we want tohave charitable non-profits with shareholders who put pressures on getting a financial return for their investments think non-profits are difficult enough to run in having shareholders there is just gonna complicate things even more. Well, we’re we’re moving. I don’t want to say we’re moving to that, but there are these, um, other ways of self-funding funding social change, like, like the social impact bonds. And i think you and i have talked about those before and just these things that fall under pr ize programme related investments that are sort of that way. I mean, there’s sort of a midline yeah, i think the midline that you’re speaking up that’s, where we’re trying to go, so we don’t really want non-profits with shareholders so i don’t think we want non-profits tohave equity investments in them, but what we do want our ways for investors to be able to invest in social good, so there are a few ways to do that one is, well, already social investors could make loans to non-profit on and, you know, if they want to get a financial return, you know, in line with the fair and, you know, market rate, return for their loan, um, i’m sure charities would love that if they could go a little bit more with the risk than a bank might pick, then charities have access two new capital, but that depends upon inspiring confidence in those social investors. Private foundations can make program related investments, as you mentioned, and those who take the form of usually loans or guarantees that will be for the benefit of non-profits to run their program and the private foundations aren’t expecting sort of a big production of income or appreciation. They’ve got any equity investments in return, but they could do that already got social impact bonds that you talked about such a cool idea where we don’t really know if they’re going to work because it’s such a a new idea, but the government issues the bonds and pays on ly if the social goals are met, and so the investors and the bonds are taking a risk that the social the non-profits that air contract it with the money that the bonds produce are going to be able to to keep their goals. And new york has got a great experiment going on with goldman sachs and recidivism that’s going to be a great example for for us to see whether this is going to really produce impact or not. I think the last part is maybe those hybrid organizations, those air, not non-profits, but they’re kind of in this cool space somewhere in between traditional for-profit organizations and non-profits and these air like the benefit corporation, flexible purpose corporations, social purpose corporation, low profit, limited liability companies that kind of occupying this space in the spectrum between social good and financial returns for shareholders and i think that’s going to be an exciting space. Did you watch maria simple and i talked about finding foundations that will do these program related investments, and that show was on march. Eighth of this year what’s that goldman sachs and recidivism example that you mentioned jean i’m not aware of that. Well, basically goldman sachs is is the bond is the investor in the bond so they bought the bond and they’re going to profit on ly if the non-profit center involved are able to reduce the receipt of ism so the government will pay out based on the savings that they get from reducing prisoner wei have recidivism on so you know it’s it’s kind of a win win situation if it all works, if there is actually impact. So if the government makes the right that on the service provider on the non-profits and they do a good job of reducing recidivism, then the government will save money overall used some of that savings to pay the bondholders which in this case is goldman sachs and so, you know, theoretically a great model sticking the right partners that’s going to be the tough, the tough thing and then finding the right buyers, goldman sachs came out and, you know, took a shot of the investor here. But will the public buy it? Same problem with the hybrid organizations. We talked about, we see a lot of private individuals twisted in doing social good, who are investing in this. But we haven’t seen big institutional investors come in in a big way yet, and i think that’s follow-up do you know how much goldman sachs invested in the in the bonds? I don’t think i could be quoted for that, but i think it was somewhere with around seven million dollars, okay, all right, that’s, right, let’s say. We’ll take our break, and when we come back, we’re going to talk about the overhead myth. That letter that just came out very recently, and also an oregon law that’s related to this and putting a cap on. Well, sort of putting a cap on the amount that can go to non program related activities. So stay with us. You’re listening to the talking alternative network. Buy-in are you stuck in your business or career trying to take your business to the next level, and it keeps hitting a wall? This is sam liebowitz, the conscious consultant. I will help you get to the root cause of your abundance issues and help move you forward in your life. Call me now and let’s. Create the future you dream of. Two, one, two, seven, two, one, eight, one, eight, three, that’s to one to seven to one, eight one eight three. The conscious consultant helping conscious people. Be better business people. Buy-in have you ever considered consulting a road map when you feel you need help getting to your destination when the normal path seems blocked? A little help can come in handy when choosing an alternate route. Your natal chart is a map of your potentials. It addresses relationships, finance, business, health and, above all, creativity. Current planetary cycles can either support or challenge your objectives. I’m montgomery taylor. If you would like to explore the help of a private astrological reading, please contact me at monte at monty taylor dot. Com let’s monte m o nt y at monty taylor dot com. Talking alternative radio twenty four hours a day. Zoho dahna hyre more live listener love to columbus, ohio, new york, new york. Welcome, fujisawa, japan, can it? You are beijing, china. Many people in beijing. Are you together? Do you know each other? Beijing welcome. Ni hao. Jean let’s. Talk about the the overhead myth letter. Um, this was signed by the leaders of the better business bureau wise giving alliance, um, guide star and charity navigator and ken berger from charity navigator, ceo of ceo. There has been has been a guest. This letter is is just come out very recently ordered. I just learned about it very recently. Now it came out very recently, just a few days ago. Ok, they didn’t put a date on it. That’s the first thing i learned in grade school, you supposed to put a date on your letter and then you do the inside address and then the greeting, but they don’t have they have neither an inside address nor a date, but okay, it came out very recently on dh. Why is this creating a lot of buzz in non-profits? But it’s creating a lot of buzz? Because i think these charity, some of them are charities, ratings organizations, some of them just provide information about charities to the public. But there’s been a widespread feeling among charities that thie over admit that they’re talking about was actually perpetuated by some of these organizations in terms of rating charities, by virtue of what they’re programmatic expenses were versus their administrative and fund-raising expenses, very much the argument that pelota was talking about as well. And the feeling was that the ratings agencies were e-giving low scores to anybody that had this high overhead ratio. I know so it’s ah it’s, a little it’s, little crusty of ah, of ken berger to be signing this, to quote the letter which is against signed by all three the percent of charity expenses that go to administrative and fund-raising costs commonly referred to as overhead is a poor measure of a charity’s performance and that’s very early in the letter. And then they go on to encourage donors it’s addressed to the donors of america. They encourage, um, donors to think about on dh consider lots of other factors besides overhead myth overhead overhead. Um, yeah, it seems a little hypocritical. Yeah, and i think they go back. I think the first sentence is probably not reflective what they actually believe that overhead is a poor measure of the charity performance. I think what they’re trying to say. And i think the rest of the letter describes it is that overhead alone is a port measures charity performance because they go, they go on and say in the letter, but overhead offers insight and can be a valid data point for rooting out fraud and poor financial management. But in most cases, and i think the message to donors is this and i don’t want to detract from that messages that focusing on overhead alone does more damage than good. And i absolutely we believe in that as well. Yes, for sure. And i am trying to get the three signers of the letter as guests together. I already reached out tio the better business bureau wise giving alliance and charity navigator. I don’t have a connection to guide star, but i’m trying. I would like to have a show with the three of them to let me see if i could make that connection for you. Honey. Really? You know somebody it ah, guidestar. I do. Oh, okay. Thank you. Well, this is good. Look at this intuitive brainstorming. It works. It works. I put the message out and i got an answer right back. This is incredible, it’s. Just that in advance to pardon me. You must have known that in advance. No, i no. I mean, what do you mean, what? I must have known what they’re what your intuition told you to go in this direction. Well, the my first guest, we were talking about intuitive brainstorming. Instead of you start to put something out. Then you’ll get signs back. And i was going to start looking at vanity license plates, but but i don’t have to thank you, jean. That would be a credit that’s. Incredible. This is the works system works. Um, okay. Now, over up in oregon and i learned is not oregon. I was admonished by by tim sample who’s amy sample ward’s father. He called in from oregon once. There’s no. E on oregon. So it’s not there’s. No e on oregon. So it’s, not oregon. So those of you were pronouncing it wrong. Please be admonished. Over and up in oregon. They have ah, new law. That sort of puts a cap on how? Much charities khun spend on non program it’s kind of going against the flow of the theme that we’ve been. We’ve been focused on you, we’re going right? Is this back and forth? I know. So yes, there’s a house bill called two thousand sixty i believe it was signed into the law and is going to go into effect in a few months and basically it allows the attorney general to disqualify a charity from being able to receive deductible contributions and that’s just for state income tax purposes because federal income taxes are outside of oregon’s jurisdiction, so deductible contributions from the state income tax perspective if they don’t meet a thirty percent threshold, thirty percent programmatic expenses versus sort of administrative and fund-raising if they’re not real reaching that threshold, uh, for three years over a three year period, and they may not be able to receive deductible contributions from the state resident, and they have tio disclose that publicly, yeah, absolutely so they disclose it, or they can face a penalty of up to twenty five thousand dollars, and once they disclosed that the attorney general can come in and say, well, anybody donating to this? Charity will not be eligible to receive a deductible contribution for a state income tax purposes. Um, and i didn’t know it was over three years, the three year period. Okay, so three, if you’re if you’re spending less than thirty percent of your revenue on program for three consecutive years than in the third year, that’s when you have to disclose it, uh, when your fourth year in the force you closing the previous three years, okay? And if you fail on the previous three years going for the attorney general, but it could disqualify you. So after those three years, you would report it. Ok, does it have to be three consecutive years, or can you do less than thirty? More than thirty, less than thirty? More than thirty, less than thirty that’s? Three? But it was over five years. I think it’s three consecutive years and they don’t look at each year in isolation. They take a look at a rolling three year calendar. Oh, i see. Okay, um, what’s, your what’s, your opinion of this law that i think is draconian? Yeah, i i think it’s going to resonate with some of the public because you know, this week we also saw another story big story from cnn talked about the city worth charities in the united states and these air, all out liars, but also tremendously high overhead, racial and hardly any programmatic spending with, you know, cumulatively, like billions of dollars involved or hundreds of millions. So they just picked out the most egregious cases and, you know, outrages the public and the public puts pressure on the legislature to create laws to prevent those things from happening. And then we get laws like the one in oregon? Yeah, i don’t care for those, you know, fifty worse than you know, the irs does something similar too well, no, that know the irs different? No, i’m sorry they generalize about charity scams, but they don’t specifically name charities. I don’t like these headline grabbing things. It it tarnishes the entire sector it does for the vast majority of attorneys that are doing very good work. It’s it’s hard to sit there and get a hit from a donor confidence because of those real outlier. So you think they’ll be a public backlash in oregon? Well, i think the charitable sector is going toe push. Back a little bit on this, but i think actually this may be a trend, and we may see more states create these laws. Well, actually, the non-profit association of oregon endorsed the law. Yeah, they felt like this was kind of a benchmark minimum, although i think they said in a statement, i think there’s a comment field on the overhead mid fight where somebody, a representative of that association, made a statement that there shouldn’t be a single number threshold that indicate a good performing charity. This is a poor performing one, but they felt like thirty percent over three years was kind of the bottom line number that any charity should be able to meet. And i’m not sure that that that’s really something that you can back-up yeah, yeah, we have to leave it there. Gene, thank you very much. Great, thank you so much, durney i enjoyed it, jean takagi, you’ll find him at non-profit law blogged dot com and at g tack on twitter next week, beth cantor, author of the network non-profit and measuring the network to non-profit we talked it fund-raising day last month about engagement and outcomes, and i’ll have that. Interview unless i can get the three authors from the overhead myth to come, i don’t know if we could get them as quickly as next week, but they’ll take precedence over that beth cantor interview. We’ll run that another time if i could get the three of them, but i’ll try to get through them some time. Also next week, scott koegler, our tech contributor and the editor of non-profit technology news returns. We’re going to talk about apse for your tablet. Check us out on the social networks youtube, facebook, twitter you know the litany. The links are on my block at tony martignetti dot com insert sponsor message over nine thousand leaders, fundraisers and board members of small and midsize charities. Listen each week contact me on my block to talk about sponsoring the show. Sam loves that music so much he played it a little prematurely. Our creative producer was claire meyerhoff sam liebowitz. The one playing the music is our line producer and the show’s social media is by regina walton of organic social media. The remote producer of tony martignetti non-profit radio is john federico of the new rules. I hope that you will tune in next week at talking alternative dot com friday one two to eastern durney dahna e-giving thing duitz good ending. You’re listening to the talking alternative network waiting to get in. Dahna cubine are you a female entrepreneur ready to break through? 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You’re listening to talking alternative network at www dot talking alternative dot com, now broadcasting twenty four hours a day. This is tony martignetti athlete named host of tony martignetti non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent technology fund-raising compliance, social media, small and medium non-profits have needs in all these areas. My guests are expert in all these areas and mohr. Tony martignetti non-profit radio fridays one to two eastern on talking alternative broadcasting are you concerned about the future of your business for career? Would you like it all to just be better? Well, the way to do that is to better communication. And the best way to do that is training from the team at improving communications. This is larry sharp, host of the ivory tower radio program and director at improving communications. Does your office need better leadership? Customer service sales or maybe better writing are speaking skills? 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