 In episode 47 of Mission: Impact, Carol and her guest, Julia Campbell discuss:
Named as a top thought leader and one to follow by Forbes and BizTech Magazine, Julia Campbell is a nonprofit digital consultant on a mission to make the digital world a better place. Host of the Nonprofit Nation podcast, she’s written two books for nonprofits on social media and storytelling, and her online courses, webinars, and talks have helped hundreds of nonprofits make the shift to digital thinking and raise more money online. You can learn more about Julia at www.jcsocialmarketing.com/blog Important Links and Resources:
Carol Hamilton: My guest today on Mission Impact is Julia Campbell. Julie and I talk about ethical storytelling – what it is and why it is so important for nonprofits to consider as they share stories of their impact, the misconceptions people have about social media and its place in your organization’s marketing mix, and why leveraging your owned marketing assets is key. Mission Impact is the podcast for progressive nonprofit leaders who want to build a better world without becoming a martyr to the cause. I am Carol Hamilton, your podcast host and nonprofit strategic planning consultant. Welcome, Julie. Welcome to the podcast. Julia Campbell: Thanks so much for having me, Carol. Carol: So I'd like to start each conversation with, what drew you to the work you do? What motivates you and what would you say is your why? Julia: I have always been very attracted to social justice work and social justice issues. And when I was in high school, I was involved. I couldn't even vote, but I was involved in the Clinton gore campaign. I started a recycling program at my high school. There was no recycling program. I just have always been very involved in activism and changing the world for the better. It sounds simplistic and cliche, but I really always have been. And then in college I volunteered at several different places in Boston. I went to school in Boston. And decided to enter the Peace Corps. So I was in the U.S. Peace Corps, for two and a half years after I left, , after I graduated from college. And that was where I really worked, started working with international NGOs and other organizations, and also started fundraising and truly understanding what it takes to make a difference in a culture because I feel like, I feel like with the Peace Corps, especially. I'm just speaking for myself, but I also feel like this is a, this is almost a, how people perceive us is we do have this white savior complex where we go into these countries and we think we're gonna change everything and make everything better. And what I really learned was that you have to. Immerse yourself in a culture and listen and hear the stories and truly understand what's going on. And you can't just say I'm gonna come in here and build a well and raise a ton of money for a well, and then leave. And that really opened my eyes because a lot of the NGOs were doing that. So when I got home, I thought I'm going to work. For nonprofits, but really help them understand how they do fundraising, how they do marketing and, and if it is maybe harmful to the communities that they're trying to serve. So I've worked in domestic violence. I've worked in international relations. I've worked in early childhood rape ISIS centers. I've pretty much run the gamut from large organizations. I worked at Boston university where. I graduated. And then I've worked in really small organizations with tiny budgets. And I think the work that the nonprofit sector does is so incredibly vital, no one else is gonna do it. Okay. The government can't do it or won't do it. The private sector won't do it. So we're filling this really important gap and solving these problems. And I just feel really strongly that people need to be advocating for the sector. And I'm just, I'm just such a strong advocate for it. Carol: I realized when I was looking at your bio that, that you were a returned Peace Corps volunteer, and I think you're probably at least the third guest that had that, that experience, that background, Julia: We always end up a nonprofit don't we? Carol: AmeriCorps, I really appreciate, the perspective that you got there helped you come around to how stories are used, and how they can be used for harm. There were a lot of common practices, , and I'm not a fundraising person, but, just observing, being in the sector in fundraising that now people are questioning and saying, that's really not exploited ethically. It's very exploitative, and so I'm curious about how you're helping organizations shift that and tell their story, but not take advantage of the people that they're actually trying to help. Julia: There's an entire. tidal wave in the sector right now. I think because younger people are starting to take the reins and younger generations do not put up with things that we have put up with in terms of exploitation or unethical storytelling, unethical practices, and they will call you out. what we learned in terms of practices and fundraising, when we all, I didn't study fundraising, but I read a ton of books. I took a lot of courses. I went to a lot of conferences. Mostly predominantly taught by white people. What I learned was you have to pull these heartstrings, you have to tell these sob stories. You have to start from a place of, of deficit. And it's called deficit thought basically. So then I started to study. I didn't feel very good about it. And I started to talk to other people. That we're doing fundraising work and saying, no, there are stories of hope and inspiration, and there are, they don't need to be tied in a bow. You don't need to say, oh, everything's, , grand and Mary Poppins ask. And it's just, it's not the reality, but still, if you think of the Sarah Locklin, the arms of the angels where she's singing and there's all these abused animals around her. And it's the shots of these dogs and cats. And it's always played on cable TV and they, the, as BCA pulled that ad because they did raise money from it initially. But if you're constantly doing that storytelling, it. It's not only unethical, but it's very fatiguing and people get numb to it and people, they wanna turn it off. They grab the remote. There are whole stories of people saying, oh, that ad came on and I had to like, actually leave the room and I couldn't deal with it anymore. The other thing is the. Giving the person that is sharing their story agency and making sure that they understand that this is not necessarily their defining moment. This is just something that happened to them. The terminology now has really shifted. And I think it's interesting where we don't say. And I'm still working on this and I'm not perfect as well. We don't say homeless person, we say a person experiencing homelessness. We don't say domestic violence survivor, we say person experiencing domestic violence or person living with a disability or person living with misuse and substance abuse. The terminology has changed. We don't make the experience that someone is having be the focal point of their whole life and it doesn't define them. And then there are, there are all sorts of interesting studies and all sorts of people talking about ethical storytelling using terms like at risk vault, vulnerable. I think you can still use marginalized populations. It's changing all the time. I think it's interesting. And to me, I don't think it's about canceling people or telling people they're wrong. If they use a certain term, it just opens up a conversation for something that I think is really interesting. And I think the sector does need to do a lot of introspection into how we might have, we shared all of these videos of kids in Africa with bellies descended and flies around their face. And if you look at the work of charity water in particular, one of my, one of my favorite charities, you can love them or hate them. Their whole perspective was we wanna make giving joyous. We wanna make people happy. We don't wanna guilt people into giving. We wanna make people excited and proud to be a part of what we're doing, and that's gonna help retain donors. And that's gonna help people continue to give, because if they're constantly guilted into giving, it's not good, so we wanna make people feel great about giving and feel proud about being part of the cause. Carol: One of the areas in addition to storytelling, or I guess it's not really in addition, it's a way to deliver a story. You work a lot with helping nonprofits with their social media and social media presence. And I feel like it's an area that can really trip people up. What would you say are some of the key things that people need to consider in pursuing a social media strategy? Julia: They need to consider how much time it truly takes to be successful. We need to get out of this mindset that it's free. So Carol, I could come to your house and give you a puppy for free. I mean, I don't know if you want a puppy, Carol: I got one of those free puppies and he cost me like $150, the first visit to the vet. Julia: Exactly. And then walking every day and feeding them. It's like, technically, maybe having a kid is not free because of the medical bills, but you could technically have a child in the middle of the woods for free, but then of course, there's so much upkeep there's upkeep, there's taking care of what you've created. So I always give the analogy of the puppy because. Yes, it sounds great on the surface. It's free, but your time is not free. Your effort, your energy, your bandwidth, none of that is free. And then also of course, as we know now to really get more visibility, you do have to play the ad game. Whether or not you think it's ethical to pay Facebook. I'm constantly going back and forth on that, but there's also lots of other platforms, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, TikTok. There's so many other platforms that we can explore. So what I do, and I'll just summarize it really quickly, I teach nonprofits the four pillars of social media and management because, you can't say I'm just gonna get on TikTok without doing all four of these things. And so something else is gonna have to come off your plate. So the first pillar is Listening, going there, being on let's just take TikTok. For example, being on TikTok, listening, watching, lurking around following people, seeing what. See, like taking webinars, reading blog posts really figuring out, okay, what's going on on this platform? What would my audience wanna see on this platform? That takes time. The second pillar is Content Creation. You have to create the content and you have to create it specifically for the platform. What you put on LinkedIn is not the same as what you're gonna put on YouTube, it's not the same as what you're gonna put on Instagram. So you need to have that content creation strategy specifically for the platform. And then the third pillar is Community Management. This is following people, looking at who's following you, going in, responding to comments, responding to your DMs, interacting in conversations, going into chats, being present because social media is a two-way street. You can't just use it as a billboard or a newspaper ad. Then the fourth pillar is Measurement and Analysis. Really taking time. This doesn't take three hours a week to do measurement analysis. If you're on one platform, you can quickly just do a scan and say, are we growing? Are we not growing? What posts were popular, which were not popular? What happened this week? Just do a scan of it. And then the key with pillar four is the reporting out, because what we don't wanna do is do our work in a vacuum. And we wanna report to the board. We wanna report to the staff. We wanna report to executive directors because we wanna show them this is actually work. A lot of them still think it's tweeting about what you had for lunch. I have never once tweeted about what I had for lunch ever. I probably have put a picture of a cappuccino or something on Instagram, but I've never done that. And that's the whole misconception that this is not an actual job. This doesn't require actual skill, but it really does. So every time you think about it, should I be on this platform? Should I adopt another platform? Are you doing those four pillars? Are you accomplishing those on the ones you're already on? And then if you're not, you get, you get those ducks in a row before you jump on another platform. Carol: When I was thinking about, just for my consulting practice, how I use social media and that the second, the first thing that you said of how much time do you have to. To give to it. I was like, okay, to be reasonable, I'm gonna pick one. I do LinkedIn, that's it. Julia: And LinkedIn is great for B2B. Like that's the best place to go for B2B. Carol: I just felt like the other places it's like probably not where people are hanging out. Julia: , but, and also actually it's a really good point. I just had. A podcast interview with my friend, Angela Pitter, who's a LinkedIn expert. And what she said was, you have to think about what people are doing on the platforms. Like you said, they're not really on Facebook looking for people to connect with professionally. They're hanging out with their friends, they're watching cat videos. They're doing fun things with friends and family. They're looking at the AB pictures. They're not necessarily using it the way people use LinkedIn. So I think that's smart. I think that's a very smart, strategic move. Carol: The only thing I practically go on Facebook for anymore is to see what picture I posted or what I posted eight years ago. Julia: I like the memories to look at, I like memories. I always wish that I could get off Facebook. I can't escape it, but I have Facebook groups that I run. So I can't. Right. Exactly. I can't officially leave. Exactly, exactly. But I do, I do spend a lot less time on it lately. Carol: And I think that for a long time I was just posting, right. Then I heard the phrase, the posting and ghosting, and that's a sense and ghosting. Then more recently just, I started doing the other things that you're talking about by actually getting in their comments ending on people's engaging and, it was more satisfying actually to, feel like you're, getting to know people that way. And actually, I think we connected originally cuz you had posted something about getting on podcasts and I was like, oh I've got one and we yeah. Talked to each other. Julia: That's what I love. It's like an actual LinkedIn memory Michelle received. Right. Really? Yeah. I posted that. I said I'm really interested in being on more podcasts this year. I have my own podcast. I'm just putting it out there. I had so many introductions. The LinkedIn community is so generous and so welcoming and just so happy to make connections with other people. I found it to be a much warmer community than Facebook. Carol: Which is ironic, right? Julia: It's ironic, but all of the CEOs, they make their own decisions about what they allow on the platform and what they don't and what they make go viral and what they don't. And I think Facebook, especially the more provocative, the more angry you are, the more negative you are. That's what is going viral and getting eyeballs. And that's why that's what we're seeing. Carol: One of the misconceptions that you talked about was that it's, well, it's just free. It's something that somebody can do on the side. What are some other misconceptions that people have about social media and their marketing strategies? Julia: I think there's, there's so many, one that I would say is that it can substitute for other things that are working. Social media is really the icing on the cake. It's really one of those things that people have definitely built their business on. But how I feel about it is I feel like you should be using it and leveraging it to bring people into other owned platforms. So your email list, maybe subscribing to your blog. Making a donation on your platform. You need to be consistently bringing people over to your owned platforms because social media is rented land. They can and will and do pull the rug out from under us very frequently. Do you remember when Facebook pages started? I will never Forget this cuz I was working at a nonprofit and my executive director called me and said we have to get a Facebook page. And I was on it, , because I had, I still had my college account, so I could still like get on it. I wasn't in college at the time, but I had an EDU address and I said, I don't know, like, is this a marketing place? Is, is all college kids, like just talking about stuff, but. She said, no, it's gonna be free and it's gonna be, it's gonna replace websites and it's gonna be a free way that we can talk to all of our fans and followers. People still think that. And to me, I think if we look at the data, you really can only reach a tiny percentage of your fans and followers. You use social media, not to say that if you have built a community, you should leave, but we need to be consistently bringing people over to our email list and our own. Properties where we can then build a deeper relationship with them. And also you can bring an assumption you've earned and its permission based on your email list. You can bring that email list anywhere you can change providers. If you don't like this one provider, you can communicate with these people. You can use that as huge leverage. And if you, about the way. We use email. It's a much more intimate experience than social media, because a lot of us are spending less time scrolling on social media, but we still all spend the majority of our day in our inbox. A lot of us. So to me, I do teach social media marketing, and I think it's a fantastic way to reach new audiences and younger audiences and to do fun things and experiment and build ambassadors and, and really, advertise events, things like that. But I don't want people to put all their eggs in that basket. We have to have a multi-channel digital marketing strategy that also includes our website search engine optimization is essential. People are searching. People will never stop using Google. Maybe they will. One day Google became so popular and huge. We want people to be able to find us where they are. So the other misconception that is really popular is that you have to be on all the platforms and you have to just cut and paste what you do across all the platform forms. What I've seen now, the trend is people are two platforms. Maybe now I need to start doing that because I need to really start focusing on two platforms. I feel like I spread myself so thin and I think a lot of us do, but the trend now, if you go to influencers websites, or if you go to brands that are just starting out, they're not gonna, they're not gonna see the 27 little logos on the bottom. You're gonna see Instagram probably, and maybe Twitter. and that might be it, or maybe YouTube. It depends if you're video based or visual based, or if you're text based, like LinkedIn is fantastic for B2B and consultants, but I do see the streamlining as being a big trend and the going all into one or two platforms as opposed to being everywhere at once. And I actually think that's a gift to nonprofits because we can't be expected to manage, unless you're a full-time social media person, which very few nonprofits have you cannot be expected to do those four pillars that I talked about on seven different platforms every week. It's just not feasible. Carol: You used a phrase, “your owned properties, social media is rented.” Can you say a little bit more about that? I don't know if people exactly get what you're saying there. Julia: Say you have an event in person or virtual, someone signs up for this event, permission based. you ask them to come. They come. Whether it's on Zoom, whether it's in-person, they give you their contact information. You now own that contact information and you have it. And if someone goes to your website, signs up for your email newsletter on your little form that I hope you have on your website, if someone subscribes to your blog, if you have that old school, like I have on my blog, WordPress. People can subscribe to your blog. Those are owned. You own those, and you can take those wherever you go. Sure. people will unsubscribe and move and email addresses will bounce. And that's not what I'm saying, but you do not own. You can't upload your Facebook fans. And this is a big problem. You can't get the contact information from people that donate to you on Facebook. So what I would do is just take these tools for what they are. Raise money on Facebook, raise money on Instagram. Don't worry about the contact information, but don't put all your eggs in that basket. You own your CRM, your database, you could switch a database and still bring all those contacts with you. Your direct mail list. You own that. So. To me. I want us to build our donor files, our supporter files using these tools. These amplifying tools are what I call them, but we can't just say, okay, we're not gonna have a website or an email list anymore because we have Facebook. Remember the day that Facebook went down the whole day? I was actually running a fundraising, paying for a client and we had. Multiple posts that were gonna go out. We were gonna do a Facebook live. We had Instagram posts and we had to completely cancel all of it because both platforms were down for the entire day. And we had no control over that. So we had to rely on email and we still did a lot. We did things like a YouTube live, but what I learned was that we really cannot rely on this. Like, this is just a good to have, a nice to have, but we can't put all of our effort and all of our eggs in this basket, because what if it went down, like, I'm just thinking of Giving Tuesday. If Facebook went down so many nonprofits would've lost thousands of dollars. So it's good to have, you need to have it, but focus on the other elements of your marketing program that you can, you have more control over? Carol: I remember when Facebook first started having the fundraisers, I think they were linking it, like it's your birthday, have a fundraiser. And so I did one and, I didn't realize at that point that the nonprofit that I did the fundraiser for wouldn't actually get any information about who donated. This is not helping them - it's helping them in the very short term. Julia: I kinda have a different perspective on that, so I don't mean to interrupt you but, the way I feel about Facebook fundraisers is yes, it's not a way to build your donor file long term. You're not gonna get major donors and plan givers and like to build this funnel, but. I'm sure that a lot of your friends and family had not heard of the nonprofit. So they were exposed to a brand new organization and they gave because of you, , they didn't necessarily give because they supported the organization they gave because of your birthday. And then honestly, I've given for birthday fundraisers. And then I have on my own, looked up the nonprofit later and got on their mailing list and maybe got more information. So I really see birthday fundraisers as marketing. It's like a marketing piece. Interesting. Because think of your friends on Facebook, they all saw that, and then their friends saw that, like, if I donate to my friend Melissa's birthday fundraiser, I post about it and then my friends and family see it. So the way I think about it is it's much more marketing based than fundraising based. And yeah, you're never gonna build your whole fundraising program on Facebook. And what's, what's also interesting though. about Facebook. They developed that because you remember the ALS ice bucket challenge. I can't remember what year that was. There was no donate button on Facebook. So what Mark Zuckerberg saw, because I do believe that he is like, actually a diabolical. Like, I don't know if he's evil, but I he's, he's like a genius and I'm not sure if it's in a good way, but what he saw was. Oh, everyone's donating, but they're going off of Facebook. So I wanna keep everybody on Facebook. I don't want people going to als.org and making a donation and then maybe not coming back to Facebook. So he created the donate button, really? Not out of the goodness of his heart. I mean, they know we, they say. But it was to keep us on the platform. So they wanna be in all encompassing, all, one ring to rule them all thing. And that's always been the way that they've been thinking about things. So when we think about the donate button, there are no fees involved. Fantastic. The reason we don't get the donor information is because it was never created for us. It was created so that we would stay on the platform. And so that, I mean, it's a bad user experience. It's. If you get my data and then you start spamming me or you start soliciting me again, that's bad for me. And I would blame Facebook. So if we look at it from a business perspective, it makes total sense not to give the data because it would be a bad move for them. This is also how we just have to look at social media. We can't have color glasses because we have to understand these are multi-billion dollar businesses and the answer to them. They're shareholders. So that was a little bring of their own, but I don't think people know how the donate button came about. I think they thought it was interesting. Oh, they wanna do something good for nonprofits? No, they just wanna keep you on the platform. It's really true. It's totally true. Yeah. I'm reading that amazing book. , I can't remember who it's by. It's all about Facebook. It came out a couple of years ago and it's really eye-opening and pretty, incredibly amazing. So I teach it, I love it. I think it has power and potential, but I always take things with a grain of salt when it comes to these platforms. ‘Cuz I just think, okay, shareholders, shareholders, they're businesses. They're businesses. They're not nonprofits like we are. Yeah. Carol: And I really appreciate the perspective of its amplification. It’s nice to have the extra, but it's not the core pieces. So one thing that's interesting when I'm, when I'm doing strategic planning with organizations, I feel like almost every group, one of the themes that comes out of all the conversations that I have with people is we're the best kept secret in blah, blah, blah Julia: Are we though? Carol: Now that I've heard it from so many different groups, I'm just curious, like how. I don't know, like, yes. How do you get over that? Is it important? Is it important for every group to be a household name? Julia: It's not possible. I don't think it's possible. That's true. I think of the organizations where I live, some of the really small organizations, like I live in a town of 4,000 people and if it's a food bank, it's a village technically. And if it's the library here, it's not going to appeal like 4,000. It's kind, probably the limit. Maybe people that have lived here and moved, but you're not gonna get 300,000 Facebook fans. It's just not going to happen because you are serving such a small community and it's such a targeted niche thing. So we have to really tamp down our extra, I think, unless we are. Dealing with a cause that's in the news all the time, unless we are a national organization, unless we're an international organization. So we have to understand that. Not only can we not reach everybody, probably the majority of people are not going to support what we do. And that's so hard to stomach for a lot of organizations that have. This passion, the curse of knowledge, they know that what they do is important. They know that it's life changing. They know that they're making a huge difference in a lot of different populations, but there are people that don't agree with food banks. There are people that don't agree with homeless shelters. There are people that don't agree with arts programs. I mean, there are people that just, they don't care, they don't, and that we can't change that. So to me, I just want people to focus on who you have now and love on them and love on them and appreciate them, encourage them to spread the word like you. Did Carol have a fundraiser, tell your friends and family. They are your best marketers. They are your absolute best ambassadors. And then try to find more like-minded people, but don't get hung up on being the best kept secret because how many people can get on the front page of the New York times, not many. Even the front page of your local newspaper, it's pretty rare. So I really encourage people and marketers, especially fundraisers to love on the people that are there, because what happens is we get so focused on. Acquiring new people and new names and new donors. And then we neglect the people we have. And I just actually, who did I just have on my podcast? Julie Edwards, she's a fundraiser consultant. She was talking, she was saying that donor retention. It's something like 20% or at least in the last couple of years. So we don't focus nearly enough on keeping the people we have. We're constantly focused on the next thing, the next thing. And I really think we should do more to retain and engage the people that have raised their hand and said, Hey, I really like you, rather than just say, okay, we're 10 more. The like, Carol: Cause you hear people like, oh, we're just preaching to the choir. Julia: And the choir's amazing. If you get the choir singing together in harmony, get more people to get them to join the choir. Like you need the choir. If you don't have the choir, what do you, well, I mean, I'm not a real church goer, but I would say if you don't have a choir, you don't have a church. Like if you don't have people. Attending the church and their job is really to get more people to come and to, to make it an exciting, fun thing to do to invite people to say, we're having this great party over here. Do you wanna come? Oh, you don't wanna come right now? You can't come. It's not a good time. That's fine. The door's always open or, Hey, you wanna come? Here's some more information on how you can come to this party. And I think the whole notion of. Like beating people over the head with information and forcing them. And like we would, bring it full circle, manipulating people, guilting people. That's just not a sustainable way. It's like, you need to inspire people, get them excited, and then they're gonna spread the gospel for staying on this metaphor. Carol: Yeah, absolutely. And, yeah, overwhelming people with information. If I had a magic wand to change the nonprofit sector, I would somehow sum all the policy people and I would sit them down with the marketing people and, um, have the marketing people. help them simplify their message. So on all those advocacy emails that I get, I'm now saying this so that if a few people hear me, I want a, the highlight summary, like that has like a sentence behind it. Mm-hmm and then the second version is I want all the details. Then you can give me the version that the policy people will usually give. Yes, but I want to. Julia: This is called TLDR for “too long, didn't read.” Have you ever seen that? Oh my God. Well, so sometimes people write emails and it's TL:DR. Yep. I've seen that where it's like, this is the too long didn't read version and it's two sentences. And then it's the whole rest of the email. If you wanna read it, go ahead. Carol: I was talking to somebody who was interested in taking action on an item. Yeah. an issue. And she went to their website and she got so overwhelmed by the amount of information that was there. She just was paralyzed and didn't do anything. So it had exactly the opposite effect of what they wanted. Yes. Um, yeah, Julia: This gives me a good idea for a blog post. All right. Excellent. Yeah, and we don't need more information. We need people to synthesize information for us. Yeah. And tell us why it's important. So you and I, we can Google everything all day. Every day. We do not need more information or data or statistics. We do need someone to tell us what it means and why it's important. And I totally agree with you, too many emails are just listing the data, but not giving me any context. Carol: Yeah. And not giving me the simple “okay. And here's the next thing to do and I'm gonna help you do it.” So one of the things you talk about is future-proofing your organization. Can you say a little bit more about what you mean by that and how somebody might go about future-proofing? Julia: I talk a lot about specifically future-proofing your marketing strategy, but I do think the. Principles would apply to me, my main idea behind this is to build a community that is excited and inspired by what you do. And that will follow you anywhere because tools and trends come and go. There's a clubhouse. There's this idea that something's gonna come up. TikTok and Snapchat the tools are not what's important. And I think when people hear me talk about future-proofing and trends, they get excited and they're like, “oh, she's gonna talk about the five tools that you need.” But actually the tools are really the least important thing. It's if you understand your audience and truly understand what they want. And just like we just said, if you can really distill your message down. Into the why and not focus so much on the how also if you're adaptable. So we have to be more proactive. That's a huge thing that I teach and that I advocate for rather than simply reacting. To change or putting our head in the sand and saying we can't fundraise because of XYZ, or we can't do this. We can't do that. We can't do this. Trying to be as proactive as possible around the things that you can control or the things that you do have in your wheelhouse. So, we can't control things like the war in Ukraine, we can't control things. Like I remember George Floyd's murder and, and the black lives matter protests and clients of mine had fundraising campaigns. They had marketing campaigns going on. You just have to say something like, trust your gut and say, okay. We're gonna be quiet now, but then not be quiet forever. Don't think because the world is constantly changing. I mean, the only constant is really change. Don't think because the world is so in upheaval that you can't, you can't connect with people. And then another thing that I teach is just to communicate more than you think you need to, you are not annoying people. If you are sending out relevant interest in communications that people want to hear. So, yeah, you're annoying me. If you send me five emails that are written the exact same way, just ask me for money. But if you're communicating with me weekly or twice a month, about the impact of my donation, about the problem, about the solution that you're providing, about things that you're doing, what should I know, what do I need to know? If you are becoming a thought leader and a go-to resource, then the tools don't matter. And, and. The method of communication doesn't really matter. So I think the only way to future-proof yourself is to become a real go-to resource and thought leader in your industry, even if it's tiny and small and not quote unquote sexy. Although I don't believe there are no sexy causes. I hear that all the time. I call this sexy well, sexy is in the eye of the beholder. As we know, like what I think is sexy, you might not think it is sexy. So I think that it's in the eye of the beholder, but really being able to understand your audience is what's important to them and what motivates them. And then just constantly be proactive in giving that to your audience. That's really the only way we're gonna get through. The next, I don't know, 5, 10, 15, 20 years of total upheaval and change. Carol: Yeah. And that goes back to what you were saying before, really pay attention to the people who are already there. Who've already raised their hand. Who've already said they're interested. , yeah. Keep educating them. And, but it doesn't need to be a dissertation every time to give them the tools to spread the word, right. Like helping them be an ambassador. Yeah, I've been an ambassador and they don't, they're not necessarily, that's maybe somewhere where somehow it might actually be helpful, right? Like how do you, how would, what are some steps that you might be able to take to let other people know about the organization, et cetera. Julia: Right. If you can't. I see Global Citizen as a fantastic example. I get their emails and honestly, there's great articles and information, but it's always like here's a step I can take this month, tweet this out, sign this petition, put this on Facebook, it's usually very simple activities like that. They do fundraising campaigns, but it's very rare. It's mostly here's something small you can do to spread the word about this and to help us, reach more eyeballs and more people that are interested and does it make you feel good? I mean, they're targeting a very, very young audience actually. They target a lot of college students and like Gen Z who might not have the ability to make a donation. I'm thinking of my daughter, she's twelve. She doesn't have a bank account. So she's on TikTok, but she still elevates the voices of people due to her sharing commenting, that's a huge deal to that generation. So you're building it up for them to care about these causes. It's a long term game here, and then when they become my age and then they can actually make donations. Hopefully they will have remembered that experience that they had. So I just see it as playing, playing a really long term game. There's so many different generations that we have to interact with now. I mean, I think there's like seven distinct generations right now. So we can't. We can't ignore the people with the money, right? The boomers, but we can't ignore the people that are coming up and that are really active in digital natives and are excited to spread the word and talk about it. So we just need to have different approaches. I think for, for both ends. Carol: Yeah, absolutely. So at the end of each conversation, I like to ask a somewhat random icebreaker question. Yes. And so I pulled one out of my handy icebreaker question box. Yes. So if you could have any fictional character as your friend, who would you pick and why? Julia: Wow. That is such an amazing, amazing, amazing question. Okay. I don't wanna think too long about this because I have so many books that I love. Mm-hmm , oh, I just had it in my brain and I lost it. Well, Right now I'm reading. Well, first of all, I should probably say cat is from hunger games, cuz I'm obsessed with hunger games, but I'm not sure she'd be such a good friend. So I dunno if she'd be like a really fun person to hang out with. But I'm reading station 11 right now. I don't know if you've read that. Mm-hmm so good and it's a TV show on HBOMax. So I would have Kirsten, the main character. I believe I would love to hang out with her. I think she'd be fun. Carol: Yes. Yes. She is a really, really interesting character Julia: Yeah. It's cool. Just such an interesting experience and she's just very Shakespeare and I think it'd be cool. Carol: Yeah. And what was so interesting that, that book, and then the series was one of many. After some huge apocalypse story, but what I really appreciated about that one versus so many others, is that, sure there was some fighting between different groups of people, but that wasn't really the focus. Julia: It's not like walking dead where it's just a bunch of oh yeah. People fight all the time. Carol: And so many of the others, , after the apocalypse are always people fighting. And this one, I really felt like it was much more centered. People taking care of each other and I was that's what's actually gonna happen. Like yeah, sure. Julia: People are gonna fight and be terrified. It's not gonna be Mad Max. Carol: People are gonna take care of each other. Julia: Oh, can I add one more- Jo of Little Women, obviously. Oh yeah, you gotta hang out with Anne of Green Gables. Okay. Now I've got a million of them. Carol: We'll have a tea party with all of them. Julia: Have a dinner party. That would be amazing. There you go. That's a great, great question. Carol: Yeah. Yeah. So, what's coming up for you. What are you excited about, , in your work these days? Julia: Yay. I'm traveling a lot more for work and speaking. I am running my nonprofit social media summit again this year, November second and third. The registration page is not up yet, but we're really excited about that. I'm working with, , neon one CRM on. The third year of our summit, we did it in person in 2019, virtually last year. And we're doing a virtual this year again. , and my podcast, nonprofit nation, I absolutely love it. Some fantastic episodes and great guests coming up. So I just, I'm really, I'm feeling very positive for 20 me, 22. I really am. I think. I think it, I mean , I felt very positive about 20, 20 and 2021, but this year is our year. This is the year that it's gonna be. It's gonna be good, but I'm just feeling very, very positive and optimistic. Carol: Awesome. Awesome. All right. Well, thank you so much. It was great. Thanks Carol. Great having you on the podcast and really appreciated the conversation. Julia: Thank you so much anytime. Carol: I appreciated Julia’s point about the marketing assets that you own vs your presence on social media. Whatever following you cultivate on social media – you only have access to them to the extent the algorithm puts your stuff in front of them. I was talking to someone recently who said they post on LinkedIn to broadcast what they are up to. But that isn’t really the case – because the LinkedIn algorithm decides whether it puts your post in someone’s feed or not. When you send an email to your list, you know you are sending it directly to the person. They may not open it and read it – but at least you know you have sent it to them. So your subscriber list, your donor list – these are all important marketing and fundraising assets of your organization. I also appreciated her different take on Facebook fundraisers – that they actually serve a marketing purpose by making more people aware of an organization they may not have heard of before. So even though the organization is not getting the donor information from the fundraiser – you are still getting them a little money in the short term and some visibility. Her advice to ‘love on the people that are there’ reminded me of Stu Swineford’s comment about the value of the choir. Both are saying – care for the people who already support you. Give them tools and resources to be able to spread the word. Don’t assume they know how to be a good ambassador for your organization – make sure you give them the resources and time to practice sharing your good news. Thank you for listening to this episode. I really appreciate the time you spend with me and my guests. You can find out how to connect with Julie, the full transcript of our conversation, as well as any links and resources mentioned during the show in the show notes at missionimpactpodcast.com/shownotes. I want to thank Isabelle Strauss-Riggs for her support in editing and production as well as April Koester of 100 Ninjas for her production support. We want to hear from you! Take a minute to give us feedback or ask a question at missionimpactpodcast.com/feedback. Until next time!  In episode 45 of Mission: Impact, Carol and her guest, Stu Swineford discuss:
If you know me, you’ll know I’m never one to shy away from an opportunity to grow and take on new challenges. For example, I started my marketing career as a copywriter and ad man. But one day, when my graphic designer colleague didn’t show up for work, I evolved (very quickly) into a designer. After all, I was the only other person in the building who knew how to turn on the Mac. Since then, I’ve performed virtually every role in the digital marketing production lifecycle – from strategy and concepting, to design and development, to QA/QC and everything in between. Along the way, I realized that I get the greatest joy from helping others achieve their goals. In a way, you could say I’m making the world a better place, one frustrated professional at a time. These days, I’m in love with purposeful, conversion-focused digital marketing strategy and execution. That, and doing ridiculous things outdoors – usually where oxygen is limited. When I’m not helping entrepreneurs and executive-level professionals, I can be found traipsing around the woods near the cabin in which I have lived with my wife and menagerie of pets since 1993. There I watch movies, read, and polish the details of my latest (possibly ill-advised) master plan for world domination. If you’re interested in pulling me out of the woods for a coffee and talking shop (or hearing how I managed to actually run 100 miles in one go), please send an email my way (stuart@relishstudio.com), give me a call (303.825.4441), check out the podcast (relishthis.org), or grab a copy of my book, Mission Uncomfortable. Important Links and Resources:
Carol Hamilton: My guest today on Mission Impact is Stu Swineford of Relish Studios. Welcome to Mission Impact, the podcast for progressive nonprofit leaders who want to build a better world without becoming a martyr to the cause. I am Carol Hamilton, your podcast host and nonprofit strategic planning consultant. Stu and I talk about the nonprofit marketing ecosystem and how complex it can be, why it is important to really be able to articulate what makes your organization different, and why many nonprofits struggle with the attract phase of the marketing cycle Before we jump into the conversation I want to let you know about a new thing that I am doing. I am hosting the Nonprofit Leadership Roundtable every couple months. During the Roundtable, you get to talk with your peers, share an opportunity or challenge you are having at work and get some peer coaching on the topic. The Roundtable is free and I host it on Zoom. The next one will be Thursday April 28, 2022. You can register on the Eventbrite site. We will post a link from the mission impact website. It would be great to see you there. All right. Welcome Stu. Welcome to the podcast. Stu Swineford: Thank you so much for having me on Carol. I'm really excited to talk with you today. Carol: So I like to start out with a question around what, what drew you to the work that you do? What, what motivates you and what would you describe as your why? Stu: That's a great question. I think that it comes down to my initial motivation, [it] was opportunity. I was working as a sales guy at a bike catalog company back in the early nineties. And had been working there for a couple of years. And one day the owner came to me and said, Hey, do you want to go to lunch? And I thought, well, this is a weird way to fire somebody. But we went on a bike ride for lunch and during that ride invited me to help them with copywriting. So at the time I was just being, I was just a sales guy, but they needed some help writing copy for the county business. This tells you how old I am. We're talking about actual physical catalogs back in the day. So I raised my hand and said, yeah, that sounds great. I think that sounds like fun. So I became a copywriter in about six weeks. After that the graphic artists decided that she no longer wanted to work there and just stopped showing up. So we had a catalog that needed to be completed and gotten out the door in about three or four weeks after that. And I thought to myself, well, I know how to turn the Mac on. So maybe this is something I can do. So I raised my hand and said, how about I take this on and see about. Being a graphic designer and all of a sudden at about the age of 23 or so, I found myself as the director of marketing for one of the top three catalog companies in the states at the time. So it was really an opportunity that drove me initially to marketing. From there, I really was able to, Work for during the.com boom, and worked for a number of agencies and eventually found myself in a position where I decided that I knew enough to be dangerous, to run my own business. And so started relish studio back in 2018. I'm one of the co-founders of, and, and partners at relish studio. And we were able to refine what we do to bring a little bit of a different take to it where we recognized that. We had the most fun. And we did our best work when we were working for companies who had something more in mind than just making money. It wasn't just buying the owners next yacht or, or Porsche or something like that. There was a mission behind what these companies were doing. And so we really pivoted what we do to try to work with purpose driven businesses, nonprofits, people in that, in that zone who. Who really do have a little bit of a giving back mentality. So that's what we try to do here at relish studio. So I think that's our, why being able to serve authentically one of my declarations is I exist to serve and and so I really have embraced that and, and, and that's what gets me up. Carol: That's awesome. Yeah, I, I can, I can relate to that story because I feel like when I first moved into the nonprofit sector, I had a little bit of a background of doing some Well, they were actually advertorials and it was also in a, in a physical magazine that got sent to people who, who did a radio talk shows back in the day, then moved into the nonprofit sector because I wanted to really support causes that I believed in, but it was also a little bit of the case of, oh, well, she can write, so she should do marketing. Like, or, and she's organized so she can manage production. it was very much falling into it and, and, not moving out of the, out of the circles fast enough when it's like, well, okay, you, and and I've since moved away from that, but I feel like for a lot of people in the non-profit sector they may not come to their role with a huge amount of background or, they may have some basic skills. Don't have a degree in marketing or business or, and they're having to learn as they go. So where would you say is a place to start for folks who, they, they somehow end up with that title. But aren't really, don't necessarily have a real huge background in, in the field for a, for a small organization. Stu: That's a really fantastic question. It's like marketing a marketing title through necessity and opportunity there. Right. I think that. So we have a blog post that actually has gotten quite a bit of traction over the years that just talks about the marketing ecosystem and how complex it can be and understanding that there are a thousand things that you can do in any given day. The best plan of action is to pick one and do it really well. And then you can move on into other options, understanding also where your audience is going to play. I think that there are a lot of people who feel forced into social media. They may not be comfortable with it, or, they're, they're trying to do all of the things in social media instead of just figuring out which one will have the most impact and going there. So we always try to start with values, vision, mission making sure that there's a good understanding, a good solid understanding of, of what makes your organization different. And then really rolling into the audience, who are the people who are going to support your organization. And where do they go to get information where they go to engage and, and start there? So for example, in the nonprofit world, the boomer generation is still one of the most powerful. Donor pools out there. But there are a lot of new social media platforms out there that are exciting and fun and people want to play in. But, for example, putting all of your eggs into the TikTok basket with. Your organization and the donor pool is really in the, more aligned with the Facebook basket or even direct mail or email basket is something that you want to consider. So just make sure that you are hitting things hitting the people where they should. There are programs out there to help with coaching. In fact, relish studio has a coaching program as well, where we help budding marketers learn more about marketing and, and become more adept at being able to fill. Role within their organizations. So I'd say that going out and trying to seek out those types of service opportunities or learning opportunities would be another, another place to, to start as you're dipping your toe in the marketing. Carol: Yeah. And you make some great points there. I mean, one of the things that, as I was thinking about our conversation today, I was thinking about was, with marketing today, there are just so many different options, different directions that people can go in different channels. And so starting about thinking, who are you trying to reach? Who you're trying to educate or inform about what you're doing, what your organization is doing and then where they hang out and go there. And instead of, “oh, well I'm comfortable writing, so I'm going to do a blog,” but no one's going to come to it or, from your own comfort level of like, “oh, I have fun on Instagram and I'm going to go there.” [Try] thinking about it from the other person's point of view: where are your donors – or potential donors – and how can you reach them where they're at? Stu: One of the things that we've done, we have a blog but one of the things we recognized is, it's really challenging to get people to come to your site for a “regular blog” type of scenario. So we looked at a couple of ideas and in one of those was why don't we go where the audience is. And so I spent a lot of time on LinkedIn basically putting material there. It can be, it can be reused on the blog. So it's not like you can't use that material on your site as well. And we've actually seen a strong growth in both organic and redirected traffic from LinkedIn to our site. So, I think that what I really recognized was I was able to reach a larger audience. If I went to where they were actually hanging out, rather than asking them to come, come join me wherever. Carol: Yeah, exactly. And I think the other thing that you talked about right, there was just the ability to use one thing, but re put it in different places, repurpose it. And, and I think that that's a great opportunity for organizations, especially when there's, they're stretched so thin. They don't need to be in that constant turn of, we’ve got to create something new all the time, what's the take, the one thing, and how can you use it in five different ways? So if somebody were to try to do some more repurposing of what they're already producing, what are some ways that you would talk them through thinking about. Stu: Well, a podcast is a great example. You can start with an audio or a video explanation or discussion or conversation. And from that, you can get a variety of different materials. So I have a podcast called Relish. It's about nonprofit marketing. And I have conversations with nonprofit leaders and experts in the field who bring a lot to the table in terms of opportunities to just have discussions around, around marketing and how people can do a better job. So there's one asset there, which is the podcast itself. That podcast theoretically can be broken into sound bites. If there are nice little quotes in there, those can be leveraged on social media. You can put a sound byte out that is a teaser to the show that drives people back to the podcast. The transcript of the podcast becomes an opportunity to create written content that can be used in a variety of different ways, both on social media and on a blog et cetera. In fact, what are the, one of the ideas around starting the show was that I would get a book out of it, out of it. I'd have, let's say 52 conversations. And from that we had a book, essentially. I have not yet written that book, but it's certainly there and the opportunity there to take what started as an audio recording and. pretty quickly enables you to repurpose that material. in a variety of different ways to, to get the most out of that one piece of media. I am also always on the lookout during my show for blog opportunities and ideas. And so we leverage it that way as well as send out an email about the show, send out an email with that, with those blog post opportunities. So, we're repurposing what started as one conversation into a whole variety of different materials. We also publish the audio to YouTube as a video. I know there are a lot of podcasts out there that record video for their shows as well. So, there's just a lot, a lot of ways to to take one piece of media and make it really like. Carol: Yeah. I mean, I started including transcripts of the interviews. My initial motivation was just around accessibility in terms of the deaf community who obviously can't listen to a podcast. But I realized there was someone who was listening who said “No, I love the fact that you do transcripts because I don't generally listen to podcasts, but I love reading the conversation.” So it makes it accessible to folks whether they have a challenge in the way or not. So yeah, then all those things that you're talking about, how can you springboard from that one piece? What do you see as the biggest challenges facing nonprofits when it comes to marketing and getting the word out about the work that they do? Stu: Well it really depends on the non-profit the maturity level of, of, of each nonprofit, I would say. I think that non-profits tend to have a real challenge in the attract phase. So if you consider our idea that there are essentially four major phases of a stakeholders life cycle: attract, bond, connect, and then inspire. Within those, you can break it out into a little more granularly where people need to know about you. So they need to find out who you are. They need to then develop a sense of liking you where they're like, okay. Yeah, this is a person I'm interested in continuing to follow trusting you. So providing proof that you're doing a good job or. social proof that demonstrates that that is what you're doing. And then we move into the connect phase so that those are part of the bond of the attraction phase. We move into the connect phase where they're really being able to try and buy. So, small offers, small opportunities to have a value exchange. Usually that's an email. It starts with time for value. And then you escalate that to perhaps an email address for value. And then eventually that becomes a financial transaction where you're actually getting a donation. And then or, or a purchase, if you're a nonprofit actually has a product that they can sell. And then we move into the inspire phase, which is essentially once you have established that financial, transactional relationship moving into the inspire phase is really getting those people to shout your praises, to spread the message to reach a wider audience, as well as repeat. So you're taking a one-time donor and turning them into a second time donor, turning them into a monthly donor. Maybe getting their business involved and having. Those relationships grow into something that's bigger than what it first started, which might be a simple $20 donation. And so, so really I think some of the big challenges lie in that attract phase. What are the things that we can do as a nonprofit to get the word out and encourage people to come learn more? What are those offers? What are those things that are going to get people to. To say, oh, I want to learn more about this. And that tends to be I think one of the, one of the biggest areas of challenge is, is just starting to, how do I, how do I get in front of the right people to get them to come to my site or to learn more about. Carol: So, what are some things that you've seen organizations be successful in, in terms of that attract phase or that, just building some awareness around the work that the organization is doing. Stu: I think that organizations, one of the things that we see organizations of almost every type struggle with is how to position themselves as the guidance story. All of us want to be the hero in our own stories. And most organizations fall into that trap where, when they talk about themselves with. When they're attempting to talk to their audiences, they tend to talk more about themselves than their audiences and fail to really see opportunities to reframe that narrative where the audience becomes the hero of that story. And it's a challenge in the non-profit space because people are out doing really good work. They are out there, changing lives and. Perhaps saving lives. And so it's, it's pretty easy to fall into that trap of, we do this type of language. I think reframing that narrative and doing the best that you can to put it into that perspective of where your donors are, where the people in that audience are framed as the hero of that story. So trying to figure out what their motivations would be to donate to your organization, what is inspiring them to fill that role and then framing your narrative around that is one, one way to just start that process certainly as I said a few minutes ago, making sure that you're, you're in the right place to be starting. Those conversations are important as well. I would recommend that every organization out there do a survey of their constituents or their stakeholders and just find out where, where they go to get information, what social channels are they on? Where do they go, how do they even like gathering information? So, I like to read, but I don't want to watch a video. And that'll really inform not only. Where to go, but what media type to to leverage in that place in order to, to get in front of the right people and, and and create materials with that, they'll be interested in engaging with, Carol: Can you give me an example of turning that around that reframe that you're saying of being the guide versus the hero in the story? Stu: Yeah. So an example in the nonprofit space might be, let's say you are a, let's say you're an organization that builds trails and advocates for trail use in in a certain area. One of the ways that you might re-frame that conversation. So instead of saying, Hey, we help save the trails and keep them clean. And ready for all of the access that people might want. You might want to reframe that in the perspective of, if we know that you are passionate about trails and want to keep them safe. So by donating today, you help w you help keep this area's trails open and accessible for all. Carol: Yeah. So it's turning it around again. I mean, just like you were saying at the beginning where it's, go, go where the folks are, right. Rather than where you want to hang out and then put them in the center of the story instead of, instead of yourself. Yeah, just really appreciate that you talked about maturity levels of organizations, kind of. I'm curious what you see. Well, obviously there, there are organizations that are early on small as they get bigger. What are some different things that you see as opportunities as, as organizations grow to maybe, I don't know whether it's necessarily to expand their marketing, but maybe do it differently as they. Stu: Yeah. So I think as organizations grow and this can be any organization you have, have built up an audience, you have built up a base of clients or donors or stakeholders that have raised their hand that are ready to continue to engage. With your organization, if you just ask them. And so the lowest hanging fruit tends to fall into that inspire phase where it's way easier to get a donor to donate again than it is to take someone through that entire journey of attracting, bond and connect and get them to donate for the first time. We, as people love shiny new things, it's just, for whatever reason our brains are geared toward how exciting it is to land something new. So it's a little boring to go back to Stephanie or Jim or, or, or, or Gail and say, Hey, would you be willing to do it? Would you be willing to donate again? Could we turn you into potentially a monthly donor? That just isn't as exciting in our brains, but it's an easier opportunity. So two things there first is. Yeah, it's way easier to get someone to donate again than it is to get them to donate the first time. And the second thing is those people also have demonstrated their interest in your organization and their desire to help your organization. And so even though. Even if they aren't able to donate again right now, they will probably be willing to share your mission with their networks. So that repeat and refer area is something that we see as more available to a mature organization, because you've just simply been around for longer. And you have those connections built up versus a startup, nonprofit who right now doesn't really have a whole lot of opportunity to re-engage donors if they, if they're just starting to get them. Carol: Yeah. And what comes to mind is the phrase, “oh, you're just preaching to the choir.” Well, you need the choir yeah. Those folks that continue to, to show up maybe at your events, maybe, participating in programs, donating all of those different things. And so making sure that you're treating the choir well is, is, is important Stu: Well to extend that metaphor, the choir sings really, really well. Carol: Right. And how can you help them see broader, broader audiences? Stu: Exactly, exactly. And a lot of times that's just giving them something to say, that social post and sharing it, writing an email that they can share with their, with their team, just, getting them one step down the road, saying, Hey. Feel free to modify this, however you'd like, but here's, here's some ways that you can spread this message a little bit, a little bit more effectively, and we wanted to help you help make that easier. That's certainly among the recommendations that we would have for that referral type of athlete. Carol: Yeah, that, that point of making it easy for folks. I was with a group the other day, and a woman was talking about, she wanted to take action in this particular arena. And, she went on to a website. It was, this was around, advocating for voting rights. And she was motivated. She went. But there was just so much information on the website. It was so complicated. It just overwhelmed her and she ended up in paralysis. She didn't take any action, even though she was motivated enough to go to their website and try to read, but they, they didn't, keep it simple, they wanted to give the person all the information. And so, unfortunately it probably had the opposite impact that they actually wanted because she didn't end up making the phone calls that they were hoping that she would do or anyone who would show up on the website. Right. And was motivated to take action. Stu: Yeah. We tend to fall into the trap of wanting to tell people all the things. And if we can focus on one thing at a time, this is why I've, I've gotten a little bit away from newsletters and have started focusing email outreach on a single idea and a single action. So instead of giving people a choose your own adventure, monthly newsletter, where, there are nine things that they could possibly do. Get interested in and maybe go exploring hitting people more frequently with more focused intentional single, single ideas. Emails have proven to be a lot more than that. Carol: Yeah, I've seen that for myself. When I first started out, I did a newsletter where I went once a month where I shared both. I did a twice-monthly blog. And so I shared links to each of them. And after a year looked at my stats and every single month, the one at the top was the one that got opened more. I was like, well, and, and the one, one further down, just and so yeah, I went to one thing, one email, one thing and people are just so bombarded with information that yeah, I think that, that desire to tell you everything that. We've got a lot to share. We want it, we want to do that. But what, what's that one thing that you really want people to take away or take action on? Stu: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. We've found that creating synergy between your email message and where you're sending people as well is super effective. And so making sure. the tendency is to be just like, okay, well we'll send them to the homepage. Well, once I get to the homepage, there's dozens of things on most sites that people can do from there. So even creating a single landing page, that is the action that we want you to take from that particular email is a really valuable exercise. Carol: So what do you see as the opportunities for organizations as they're trying to connect with people, attract them, may do that bonding help them get to know each other, create that relationship. Really. It's not just about that transaction and then moving them to inspire what are some of the opportunities that you're seeing? Stay the course and don't get distracted with the shiny new things, or are there some new things that are coming along that people should be paying attention to? Stu: Well, that's a one fun thing about marketing is there's always something new, something that's either falling out of favor because it's no longer really working or coming into favor because it's it's something that people are trying, I would say nonprofits have a tendency to lag in terms of what they are. They just don't have the bandwidth to stay on top of the latest trends. However, like I mentioned earlier, most of the donations are still coming from the boomers. At this point that'll, fairly quickly move into Gen X-ers. And it just tends to be the people with more. Less time left on the earth, as well as more income opportunities or more, more disposable income opportunities. Tend to give a little more, it's just, we tend to do that as we age. So I would say nonprofits should probably be a little less focused on the newest. Information a delivery mechanism or, or marketing channel and stay focused more on some of the things that are a little bit more tried and true. For example, email continues to be a very viable way to engage with some of the older populations. That's been something they're comfortable with. Email, if someone's on your email list, they tend to have raised their hand at some point. So they tend to be a little more engaged with you than just, something that happens to flow into their feed. I would say consistency is something that most businesses including nonprofits can benefit from is just creating content. Map a a roadmap for what the next six months look like develop themes around that, that a roadmap. So, maybe April is going to be, when you talk about this particular program, maybe when you promote some event or sweepstakes opportunity that you have et cetera, and then develop the content that's of help support that. And then just be, get really good at executing on, on that content. just be consistent about it when shiny things, I call it the shiny squirrel syndrome. When those things come up, put them, put them in a sandbox and be willing to explore those as future opportunities, but don't let those try to not let those get in the way of the plan. Carol: Yeah, I appreciate the notion of, you don't, you don't need to be on top of all the trends and picking a couple of things, doing it well, doing it consistently. Those all can have multiplier effects. So yeah, I, I think that may be a sigh of relief for most people in the nonprofit sector where it's like, we're, we're, we're trying to do so many different things. And, and I mean, I think probably that those principles would work in a lot of different areas within an organization, oftentimes where I'm working with them around strategy. It's it's, it's also trying to figure out what are the. Couple big things that you're going to be focused on, not 95 different things that you could be doing within a particular space. So yeah it aligned. Stu: You mentioned relationships earlier, and frankly, I see marketing as just relationship building, whether you're selling, trying to sell a widget or let's say a bottle of soda or trying to get someone to come on board as a major corporate donor, it's all about building relationships and getting good at having those conversations consistently. And making sure that those are authentic. And I would say if there's, if there's ever one thing to do for an executive director or a donation manager or, someone out there it's pick up the phone or get people on calls and ask them questions and develop relationships with them. even, even buying soda, for example, Coke and Pepsi and all those guys are out there trying to develop a relationship with a customer. And it may be a fairly easy relationship to develop, a dollar or whatever, however much a soda costs these days is not a heavy lift to get somebody to try something. But at the end of the day, you’re billing awareness. So not getting people to know who you are, getting people to like you, to trust you, to try to buy, to repeat your refer. that's that, that's that cycle that, that we want to get people into. And yeah, it's just about having authentic conversations is, is really, if there was one thing that every non. Leader or their team could do it, contact X amount of people and have good solid conversations with them every week. And just put a number to that and, and make sure you're hitting that. Carol: Yeah. And I think just keeping the relationship and the conversation front of line. So even when you're, you're creating something that may not be in a conversation format and back and forth too. Remember that whatever you're sharing is only one half of the conversation. So what's, what's the other half that you went back to? So that back and forth I think is really Stu: Yeah. And developing opportunities to just provide value, whatever that is. So we talked about content a little while ago. You don't always have to be, you don't always have to come up with the big story out of thin air to be a good blog post, if there's something that aligns with your mission that, in another organization, is doing, or that's interesting. I had a conversation last night about food scarcity, scarcity at a, at a meetup that I had appeared with some somebody and, there's information there that I could then share. I didn't come up with it. Found out about it. But that's like being the Maven, being the person willing to share that information. if you can just reach out to somebody and be like, Hey, I saw this article, it reminded me of you. Here's why you think it's important or why. I thought you might be interested. Let me know what you think and send that to an individual or send that to your list, in an authentic capacity that that's good. Carol: Yeah. I actually love the parts of newsletters where it's, what we're reading right now or what we're listening to. And, and, some of my most read things have been my little, like, short reviews of books, et cetera, because people are always on the lookout for recommendations from people, as you said that from people that they trust and, and they know, have a similar perspective. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So at the end of each podcast, I ask a somewhat random icebreaker question. I have a box of icebreaker questions I pull them out of. And so I've got a couple here for you. I'll just ask you one. What I usually do is pick out three and then see where the conversation goes and see what I'm pulled to, pull to, to then ask. So what's the best advice that you've ever received? Stu: Wow. The best advice. I have been fortunate throughout my life to be able to engage with experts in a variety of different fields: business, personal life. No even athletics. I just somehow managed to be able to spend time with world champions and, and people of that nature. So I've received a lot of amazing advice over the years. I think that probably the best advice I have that I could share is to be yourself. And if you can come to every conversation and every interaction as you are authentic and be interested and, and all of those things, but essentially coming from that from who you are you're going to feel more fulfilled and you're going to develop better, stronger relationships. It's that authenticity piece that I think is super important. Carol: Yeah. And I think, yeah, absolutely. And I think that that goes for organizations as well. Right. Be themselves. Yeah, I think we're, we're social creatures and our antennae are pretty good for when people are faking it. Right. And they're not, they're phony or whatnot. And so, yeah, I think that that's, that's great. That's great advice. And we're always stepping into that. I think as we, as we continue to evolve, hopefully. Yeah, I hope Stu: so. It feels to me like I've been around in the business world since, I mean, I guess I graduated college back in the early nineties. And so I entered the business world pretty, pretty soon thereafter, and for a while, there was a real trend to never show weakness and never, never be. demonstrate that things might not be going well. We're asked for help and, and I, I'm very encouraged and maybe it's just the people that I hang with, but I'm very encouraged to see at least among that group, people being more and more vulnerable and more and more willing to share both the good things and the bad things that are going on. I think that social media has created a situation where a lot of us argue. Given the opportunity to, to see how people may be struggling because they just put out the good stuff out there and just really understand that it's okay to be vulnerable. And when you can be yourself and show up in an authentic way good things happen. Carol: Yeah. And with that, I think I appreciate it. I've heard it from Brene Brown of also being aware of who's earned the right to your story. Who's earned the right to, what levels of vulnerability. Are you, are you telling a story from a wound or a scar? So I think that that's also important when you, those, those big, big blanket statements don't, obviously it never works in every situation, but the more that you can, be willing to yeah. I recognize, and share when, when you're struggling and that. But you need help. Right. And asking for help, I think, is certainly something that I've had to step into and learn more about as I grow older. So yeah. Appreciate that. So what are you excited about? What's emerging in your work? Stu: I think that is one of the things that I have been working on for quite some time. And it's really coming to fruition and I'm incredibly excited about it. It's something I spoke about a little while ago, which is this coaching opportunity. I love helping people. I love helping people be their best selves. And so being able to create a coaching program that puts me in a, in a. In a position to be able to help people in that capacity has been really fulfilling and I'm super excited to continue to expand that program. So, it's something that we have, I have several, several coaching clients at this point and And so it's really fun to be able to meet with them on a, on a regular basis and watch their progress and see how much they can come alive in, in the marketing space and be able to contribute to the growth and success and ability for their organizations to to expand that. Carol: Yeah. So it goes back to that. You don't have to do it young. You don't have to go it alone. You can, you can get help. Stu: Yeah, for sure. There are lots of resources available out there and I'm certainly available. And, and, if somebody would like to discuss some of the challenges they're facing or, or what coaching might look like, I'd be happy to chat with them about. Carol: Well, thank you so much. Thank you for being on the podcast. It's been a super pleasure. I'm excited to be able to have this chat with you and look forward to talking with you soon. Stu: Alright. Thank you so much. Thanks Carol. Carol: I appreciated Stu’s point about thinking about all of your communications from the point of view of those you are trying to reach. So if your average donor is a Baby Boomer, spending a lot of time on TikTok probably doesn’t make a lot of sense. Where do they hang out and how can you go to them? And then when you are telling your story – making yourself the guide not the hero of the story – putting the people that benefit from your work at the center instead of yourself. That can be a little tricky because you don’t want to be in the business of not respecting your clients privacy or using their challenges for inspiration porn. At the same time – how can you get yourself out of the way of the story you are trying to tell. I also appreciated Stu’s emphasis on keeping it simple. Asking people to do one thing – just one thing. When I am talking to people as part of the strategic planning processes that I support, I ask them if they had a magic wand and could change the organization in any way, what would their wishes be. So if I were to give myself the magic wand, it would be to have every policy person who writes policy updates and asks their constituents to take an action – write an email, call their representative to simplify their messages. And if they really want to share all the details – they would have two options – Click here for the highlight summary – that would have at most a sentence or two explaining – why they wanted me to contact my representative to vote for or against the bill and then provide a mechanism for me to do that. SIMPLE. Then they could include a second option – if you want all the details – click here – But right now – most of the advocacy communications I receive only have the second version. Maybe the policy people think it is the simple version – but to a layperson like me it is not. So yes – keep it simple and to the point! With that I should get to the point… Thank you for listening to this episode. I really appreciate the time you spend with me and my guests. You can find out how to connect with Stu, his bio, the full transcript of our conversation, as well as any links and resources mentioned during the show in the show notes at missionimpactpodcast.com/shownotes. I want to thank Isabelle Strauss-Riggs for her support in editing and production as well as April Koester of 100 Ninjas for her production support. Please take a minute to rate and review Mission Impact on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. I also hope of course that you subscribe so that you will get future episodes. Reviewing the podcast helps other people find the podcast. We appreciate it!  Brief discussion of attempted murder from 26:27 until 26:38
In episode 43 of Mission: Impact, Carol and her guest, Travis Johnson discuss:
Travis Johnson is the host of the Nonprofit Architect Podcast. Travis shares his perspective as the former Vice President of Books by Vets; a board member at the S.H.I.N.E. foundation; he’s donated over $30,000; volunteered over 1,500 hours; raised more than $500,000; helped start 6 nonprofits; event coordinator; and published author. Travis is currently serving as an active-duty officer in the United States Navy, married with two children, and on move #50. His humble beginnings include 36 moves before graduating high school at 17, 6 states, 5 foster homes, and surviving 2 murder attempts. Although this was very rough, there was always a person, group, or church willing to help him and his family. Now that he’s in a position to give back, he’s made it his mission to “Help the Helpers”. Important Links and Resources:
Carol Hamilton: My guest today on Mission Impact is Travis Johnson. Travis and I talk about why Travis thinks every nonprofit should have a podcast, the benefits of podcasting, and how podcasting can help your overall social media strategy. Welcome to Mission Impact, the podcast for progressive nonprofit leaders who want to build a better world without becoming a martyr to the cause. I am Carol Hamilton, your podcast host and nonprofit strategic planning consultant. Welcome Travis. Welcome to the podcast. Travis Johnson: Hey, thanks for having me, Carol. Carol: So I'd like to start each conversation with a question around what motivates folks. So, what drew you to the work that you're doing now? What would you say motivates you and what would you describe as your why? Travis: I have a why, and I just had this conversation right before we got on about a mutual friend of mine and this other guy, he's like, why are you doing all this stuff? And he replied because I'm allergic to being poor is like, why I'm doing so many things. That's not my why, but I thought it was a hilarious way to put that in context. But we're talking about the show that I had with the nonprofit architect podcast when I was growing. We had a lot of help and we needed a lot of help. I went through 36 moves, 12 schools, six states, five foster homes, and survived two murder attempts all before graduating high school at 17. And that means that we needed a lot of help, whether it was from individuals, churches, social services, or nonprofit organizations. You have a lot of credit to all the people that helped our family grow up there, the reason that we stayed sheltered close at the fed, and now that I'm in a place where I'm not in that scarcity of that survival mode, I'm able to give back. And I found out a way to be part of the community and being part of the nonprofit community, served on a couple of boards, donated a bunch of hours, and a bunch of money helped start a few nonprofits. And then I got stationed overseas in the kingdom of Bahrain. And I was like, how am I supposed to keep doing all this fun nonprofit work? And someone's like, well, you really have that podcast voice. You could probably connect and talk about some of this stuff. And I was like, Ooh, that would be cool. And, look through all the different podcasts that are out there. And there were some great conversations, but when I really didn't find that the top tier show was, was it really a show, like how do you set up a board? How do you raise money? How do you hold events? All these different things that apply to the nonprofit world. So I set out to create the premiere, how to podcasts for nonprofits. And we came up with the nonprofit architect podcast, helping build stronger nonprofits. And I view it as my mission to help health. Carol: Well, I love that, that catchphrase. I was just looking at your website and saw that it helps the helpers, because I've used that phrase myself, that when I'm working with organizations, I like to work with people who are helping other people. And so I'm like many, many lines back in the chain of the helpers. But going back to that Fred Rogers, look, look for the helpers that, that really, When I'm wondering, what, what am I doing here all day? And I, that really helps me come back to center and think, it's, it's contributing to that, that entire ecosystem of folks who are doing all sorts of things to contribute to a better world. taking care of people day to day, all of that, all of the above. So I love that motivation. It certainly rings true for me. Travis: Oh, absolutely. There's so many people out there doing, just going to work, helping their neighbors, helping the environment, helping animals. And if I, I can't help all of them, but if I can help them do what they're doing better, put a little bit more money in their pocket, help them understand their organization a little bit better, get a bit more focused. So they're able to deliver those services more efficiently, more effectively, and with less stress. All in. Carol: Absolutely. Absolutely. So one of the things that in addition to the podcast that you host yourself focusing on, how do you really think that nonprofits themselves should have their own podcasts? Can you, can you tell me a little bit more about that and why, why you think that? Travis: And we can fill up a couple of hours talking about it if you want it to. First off I fell in love with podcasting while I was deployed. It is just such an easy medium to deal with. It's easy to get started. It's free to get started. If you've got a smartphone, you've got all the equipment you need to get started. And even I have production services and all that stuff, but even if you don't use me, like just getting started and falling in love with the process, that's, that's the way to go. Everyone that I talk to, everyone that I interview, everyone that I'm a guest on their show. I get to learn something. And if I'm the host, I get to ask all the cool questions that I want answered when you're in the nonprofit space, there's all these other organizations doing something similar to what you're doing, right. They're helping the same group of people. Maybe they're helping the same type of animals and maybe you're doing it differently. But what it does is. You're promoting the stuff that you're doing in your area, right in your local area. And there's people that are going to be listening and they're going to be like, this is really cool. I want to know how I can contribute. And it might be giving your organization money directly, or it might be connecting with an organization in their area that they didn't know is there. And they can now help out. The same thing that you want to help, maybe not your organization. It helps you build this huge, massive contact list. Every interview that you do, they're also sharing. So you guys are both getting the chance to leverage each other's network, all the audience that you've built, all the audience that they've built, you get to, You lend some of your credibility and some of your audience to them as an organization, and then all the people, because they're going to share the episode, all the people in their sphere of influence, they're going to hear about you. And it's such a fantastic way to grow your audience, to connect, to do better things on the personal. you go to a school, you go to college, you learn life experiences. Maybe you get into reading and maybe you listen to podcasts. Like you're listening to right now and they're going to teach you something. But when you start interviewing people, it's like having your own private masterclass with the experts. I got the opportunity to interview Asha Curran from Giving Tuesday, and learned a ton. Interviewed Alan Stein Jr. From raising your game. He's done leadership work with the late great Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, Steph Curry, Kevin Durant, and he gets to speak about leadership on the show. I got to interview Bob Burg, author of the Go-Giver series. It was just a fantastic man. I love his five principles for stratospheric success. And I got to interview Steve Sims. This is someone that does world-class events for millionaires and billionaires. He hosts, Sir Elton John's. Carpet Oscar party every year. And I asked him, I was like, what's the difference between the way for-profit businesses do events and the way that nonprofit businesses, like I got to ask him personally, instead of having to spend like $30,000 for his coaching, I get to bring them on my show. He gets to leverage my platform and I get to ask him for whatever the heck I wanted to. But if you're in the nonprofit space, And you're trying to get something accomplished, especially if it requires legislation, you can interview every single politician, every city council member, the mayor, the Senator, the Congressman state, and the federal level, the governor, you get to get them on your show on a record, talking about the thing that you both care about. Best part about it is when this comes up in Congress or for a vote or they're getting the committees ready. They're going to say this stuff, who do we know that's an expert, and they're gonna remember being on your show and you're going to get brought into the conversation to have that direct ability to affect the change that you want to see in the world with the people that can make it happen. It's such a fantastic way to leverage and do everything you want to do as a nonprofit, but that's not even the biggest part of this Carol. It's the big difference between a website people go to all the time, day after day, week after week, month after month and a website. Yeah. People only go through one time. The biggest difference between the two is new content. When you look at news, sports, social media, whatever it is, there's new stuff every day. And when you look at the vast majority of non-profit websites, it looks like a digital pain, but this is who we are. This is what we do. Here's our founding story. And that's great. And there's a sure, some donation plugin there so people can give you money, but they've got no reason to come back to your website. Unless you've created new content and reasons for, for doing that. So by adding a podcast or a blog or a blog or a YouTube channel to your page and creating that new content, all of a sudden people are coming to your page for other reasons. And realizing that the thing they care about is the thing that you care about and they can provide money directly to the cause of the thing that they care about. Because they found you through some other method and what a fantastic way to get people into your circle and to create real value for them, the person that large, the potential donor, the potential volunteer is by coming directly to you because of something that you've created. Carol: Yeah, that's awesome. I wanted to follow up on a couple of different things you've talked about there. First is I just totally resonate with the idea that the podcast actually is a learning mechanism because I, when I started mine or even actually way before I started it, because, well, I won't admit how long it took me to get started. But when I first had the idea, I was sitting at a conference and listening to. A number of experts, consultants. Who've been in the field for a long time and were thinking about their legacy. And I thought, oh, wouldn't, I want to follow up with these people having kind of one-on-one informational interviews. And I thought, well, Wouldn't it be cool if I just shared that, if I just had the conversation recorded and then shared it with other people and, and that was the springboard for the, the podcasts that my podcast of yeah, exactly. That I could say, talk to interesting people. I'd be doing that anyway. The difference is I hit record and I work with some of them, do a little bit of editing and add some music and stuff, but beyond that, it's pretty simple. Right. It's what you would do in a virtual coffee anyway. And yet it can be valuable to a whole other group of people. So I love, yeah, so, it could be Just that, that, that instance of learning and continued growth. I think too often folks in organizations think about any content that they're creating a blog post, possibly a pocket. As, just as a way to get their message out, but all of those other benefits of the multiplying networks that you're talking about, the potential for relationship building. Having, as you said, your own private masterclass with really prominent people, all is beneficial. And, and for me, when I was doing my worst case scenario, What if no one listens to this podcast, I still could list all of those things as benefits. And luckily there are plenty of people listening. So thank you to all of them, all the folks who are listening. But I could list all of those benefits from the get-go even if, if my worst fear were to have. Travis: You have nobody listened. Nobody showed up, the really cool part about it is, a lot of organizations have a problem with things like, what am I gonna post on social media? Like, what am I going to, I don't even know what to put out there today. If you do something like an interview show, thank you Carol, for being my guest yesterday. And I'm your guest today. Thank you so much. If Carol asked me 10 questions and I provided 10 answers. That's all the content you need to have a morning in an afternoon post each and every week. Right? So if you interview me, it’s January 6th. I don't know when this is going to be published. Let's just say it's next week. Carol asked me 10 questions, using a program that's free called headliner. And you can take a few minute clips out of there. Her question and my answer. And if you have 10 questions and answers, you have a morning, Monday morning and Monday afternoon, Tuesday morning and Tuesday afternoon or Wednesday morning or Wednesday afternoon for the whole week, from just a single conversation, you don't have to figure out what you're going to post. You just have to repurpose what you've created and all of a sudden that workload goes away. If you have a company doing the backend stuff for you, they create them all for you. And they can even schedule them out. So you don't have to even do anything. You just record the episode, you give it to the team and they do all the work. Carol: I think that's another thing that people forget is the number of ways that you can repurpose. One thing that you've created. So you've talked about a lot of the benefits that organizations can see from doing a podcast from, the learning aspect of connecting with other people, networking with other potential partners highlighting all the interesting things. Obviously you can just interview people within, inside your organization and help highlight their expertise. Multiplying networks, having, having people they'll share you share you got to borrow people's audiences are stepping into their audiences and building relationships in that repurposing. What are some of the things that you see gets in the way of folks getting started? Because it might, it might seem intimidating to do a pilot. Travis: It can be. And I'm sure when you started your show, I mean, you feel like there's a thousand things you got to figure out before you surgery. You're like, oh, what am I going to record this thing? When do I have the time? And who's going to do the production, can I do the production? Can I do all these things? What equipment do I need? What do I host it on? Can I change it? What am I going to name it? Like it can be. It can be a lot to be successful in this stuff. The main thing you need to do is say what your show is about and tell people how often you're going to do it. And if you keep the program on target about what it's going to be about, and you publish, when you say you're going to publish that builds credibility and authority and reliability. So I said, I'm going to do a weekly show, and I've done a weekly show each and every week I publish. And people come flocking in. They know that it might be providing the steps they need to be successful. So I've said what I'm going to do. And then I do it, which is great. If you look out there, there's all sorts of different production, quality levels. There's people on their phone on anchor, just chatting for a few minutes and then they call it good. A guy named Russell Brunson. Who's the co-founder of click funnels. Did this as a marketing podcast. He got in his car every morning, recorded on his phone on the way to work at 10. And it got to the parking lot and he hit publish and just let it go. He did this for like 400 episodes. He's gotten millions upon millions upon millions of downloads. No intro music, no outro music, no production quality whatsoever. He had quality conversations with himself and publishing. And allowed him to have this huge platform with millions of downloads. You don't have to get all crazy with it. You can write, you're going to get the Joe Rogan setup and he's got people setting up the sound and he's got the crazy microphone and he's got headphones and mixers and all these things. And they do it in a sound booth and a sound room, and then they take it and they put all this production value into it, make the sound, sound great, and all these things. And you can do that, but you don't have to do that. I didn't start with this fancy microphone. I started with the equipment that I have and started having good conversations and came from it from a curious point of view. And that's all that was needed. To start going to start showing up to have the audience grow and to provide value. It doesn't have to be crazy. People are like, well, we already do so much in the nonprofit. When are we going to have the time? Hey, I get it. But if you have someone dedicated to doing the interview, One day a month in the morning, lunchtime afternoon, evening, they sit down and record all the episodes for the month. They don't have to be crazy. not doing a Joe Rogan three hour long marathon. There's nothing wrong with his show, but some people just don't have the time and I don't blame them. Right. But you can say I'm going to do 10, 15, 20 minute episodes. And if you're going to do an interview, you set them all up on the same day. You do them back to back to back and. Yeah, two hours worth of work, record six interviews, and you've got six weeks worth of material. If you have a team that's doing the production, you give it over to them, they publish it, they edit it and they do all those things. So as long as you have the time to record, which is a two hour block, Sometime during the month, you've got your time set aside. So it's really easy to do. It can be free to start. If you use your cell phone, an anchor, you can buy the equivalent when you decide, you know what? We really like this thing because we want to improve the sound quality. People understand that you might not be the best interviewer when you start. I don't think I was the best interviewer when I started Carol. Were you the best interviewer? Carol: No. I mean, I think that's been one of the, talk about learning from others, but you just, you also get better at this. Right. You get, you get more comfortable. It's not as anxiety producing as it might've been at the beginning. So yeah, you definitely get better and, and right. If there are lots of different options, you can do like the person that you mentioned, you're just doing a solo show short. Some thoughts on your own. You don't have to be interviewing other people. You can mix it up. Right. So, occasionally I'll do a solo episode. I mostly do interviews, but occasionally I'll, I'll throw one of those in a couple, couple of episodes ago. I did a best-of which was an interesting one because I found that it actually took more work than doing a simple interview, but it was a lot of fun too. Travis: Oh, it's there. There's no, there's no rules, right? So you can have these as long or as short as you want them. There's there's people that do flash briefing. On Google or Alexa or Siri or whatever you have that are between two and 10 minutes. It doesn't have to be crazy long. It doesn't have to be all consuming. I posted a solo show on the fifth. That is like three quick tips, three reasons. I think every podcast needs their own website. And it's really quick. I go through the three tips, a program or something that's going to add value to the podcaster. There's three and a half minutes. What would he do? People are like, well, I just don't like the camera, I guess what? I didn't like the camera when I started. I like it now because with the right filters, I look, I mean, I'll look good. Like let's not pretend here. I'm joking. Of course. I don't know. I'm not that high on myself, but you can turn the camera off and just record audio. You can do this in your slippers and housecoat. Nobody cares. I've got a show on the veteran podcast. As a gal who talks about mule, military sexual trauma, and she's still active duty military. So all of her stuff, she's never shown her face. She's getting the word out there, talking about the thing that's important to her, but she's doing it anonymously. Like we don't know who it is. And she's able to do that because of the technology that we have. She interviews her camera and stays off the whole time and she gets the. Content that she needs to put out on episode and she's able to speak her mind and do her things and remain anonymous. You don't have to do video. You can do just audio only and put out great content. And why wouldn't you, but you can do it a couple of ways. You can do it solo. You can do an interview show like Carol's doing, let's be honest. It's probably the best. Like Carol doesn't have to do any work. She just asks a couple of questions. Is that guy in the hot seat or of the guest that does all the work, right? Carol's like, oh, tell me about this. And I talk for 20 minutes and he's like, this is great. Like, I don't have to do any work. You can do a co-hosted show. There's one like diapers and deployments. It's a co-hosted show. Two people, one was active duty, one was a military spouse. Talk about who had it worse. And then they bring on guests for part of the episode. There's people that do panel discussions, where the host is the guy and they asking, five, six people what they think about a certain topic. There's all sorts of different ways to do this. And the best part about. As you can change it. If you don't like the name of your podcast, you can change it in a couple of months. You don't like your podcast, or you can change in a couple of months, get in a fight with your co-host. You can do a solo show. You don't like doing it. Let alone starting the interview show. You can change it however you want to do it. But the whole thing. Is to just start. Most people that do start, they get about 10 episodes in and they're like, I don't have a million downloads yet. A fun fact, no one did. Right. Unless you're doing like… NFTs right now, I saw a guy's show. This was increasing by hundreds of thousands every day. Because of the new hot NFT space, but most people, 99.9999997% are not going to have that return. You have to come through, you have to do it on a regular basis, whether that's daily, weekly, monthly by way. Even if you did one a month, you would still have 12 pieces of content that you created. I recommend a weekly. Because think about Netflix when they binge like people get in, they want to listen to something. And if you produce one piece of content, it takes you 30 days to get your next piece. They're already on to some other show they've already forgotten about you. I definitely recommend at least one a week, but there's so many different ways to do this, but if you wait to make all the decisions or slog through all the possibilities, you'll never start. And if you do start, you want to commit to making 25 episodes. There's something like 2.5 million podcasts that are published right now. But 2.1 million of them haven't produced more than 10 episodes. So the people that are going to come on and be dedicated to the thing like Carol and myself, We're already in the top 20%, just because we have more than 10 episodes. I don't know where you're at in the standings and it doesn't really matter, but like I'm in the top 5% of podcasts in the world and I do a nonprofit show. Our audience just really isn't that big, but because then I'm showing up every week we can bring in week out bringing and providing value, valuable guests. You will be able to hear my show with Carol soon, probably in a few months, I've had a lot stacked up, but. If you do this and you stick with it and you stick to whatever your mission is, like, it's gonna pay off. And it's just so much fun thinking. Am I right Carol? Carol: Yeah, it totally is. I have been having great fun. It's a great way to connect with people and, and yeah, I think that's really important to just have people. Go into it, thinking this is for the long haul. This isn't a short, this is not an easy short return thing. It's a quick thing that builds over time. And I've heard of, I've seen a lot of podcast spaces where they're like, just, just ignore the downloads. Don't even pay any attention to them. Just keep doing your thing, keep showing up. And then as you say, like try not to overcomplicate it. And that could be challenging in the nonprofit sector because it's not usually just one person making a decision. It's many people being involved. But. You know that you can just get started with as, as simple as set up as possible. Not, getting all involved with complicated equipment at the beginning are all good places, just that, what's, what's the what's good enough. Get it out there. Travis: Oh, all this stuff builds over time. Especially if you’ve got a board. Money's tight, completely understood. Go with the free option to start with your phone, whatever earphones you have that have a mic on them and download the Anchor app. There's a couple. I'm not affiliated with Anchor. There's a couple of free apps that have a podcast hosting app that you can do it for free and get. Start creating content for your page and give people a reason to come back to your website over and over and over again. Don't just rely on outbound traffic, outbound, social media, direct mail. Don't just rely on those things. Give them a reason to come find you. Wouldn't you rather have volunteers showing up in your email and donors contacting you than having you have to contact all of them. Find a reason to create content. So they come to you. Carol: So I'd love to finish every episode with a game where I play, where I ask one random icebreaker question that I pulled somewhat randomly out of a box. So I've got three sitting here. What would you say is something that surprises people when they first hear it about. Travis: I mean, if, if it comes up in conversation, the murder attempts are usually pretty high in the list. Like, what did you do that people tried to kill you? It usually comes out. If I'm on video, I've got all this great stuff behind me. People are like, Ooh, what's that? Like, it was this thing. Like, you've got a Rubik's cube over there. Can you sell all of that? I had a guest stop, like in the middle of our thing, make me grab the cube and mix it. I can solve it. Any three by three of your weeks, Q in under a minute. So they're like, I have someone like, I want to see this Kenny be like, I've never seen it done in real life before, I've got my wings up here. I've got my sign that lights up. I've got the kingdom of Bahrain. I've got some awards from the Navy. Like this is from a war hammer from the veteran podcasts awards. All sorts of different things. People like you're so young, you've been in the military. How long have you just turned 40? They're like, holy cow, like I have no idea. Like how long have you been podcasting for this long? Like, have you had any success? I was like, well, four months after starting, I was number four in the U S and they're like, what? Like, I don't know. I don't know what it is about me or my life or what happens, but like, I've dodged death like six or eight times that I can remember that I can directly remember what happened and then not dying, obviously. I've been to all 50 states. I've been to 12 countries. I've got friends all over the world, especially I started meeting a lot of people doing the podcast and game, but if you're listening to this and you want to reach out to me, please do. But like, People in your area, meet him online, meet him for coffee, go meet people who will be so surprised to see all the amazing things that are right in your neck of the woods that you just never know. Because he never asked the question. Carol: Exactly. Exactly. So, what are you excited about? What's coming up for you next? Travis: Oh, let me tell you, let me tell you Carol. I know I told you yesterday cause you're on my show, but like we have created. The ultimate and complete podcast guide, which is available on the website or whatever, but we've taken that thing and we've created a course and you're like, no, there's a bunch of podcasters with courses right now. We are the only course it's being revoked. Even professional podcasters get tongue tied every now and again. We're the only professional podcast group that has created a course that's going to be available at the college level that is being reviewed right now at Forbes business school. At the University of Arizona, you're gonna be able to take my college course and get college. For podcasting here, hopefully within the next like four or five weeks, it will be available online as the only professional podcast, or to have an actual course where you get college credit, which is just really, really, really amazing. anyone that's in business communications, journalism, marketing, entrepreneurship, the possibilities are endless, and you have the ability to get college credit from a podcast course. Come on. Who wouldn't take that? And why wouldn't you? That's exciting. And my official Navy retirement is March 1st, so I'm less than two months from retiring after a career of over 21 years. Carol: Congratulations. And I think yeah, I am also stacked up with interviews, so this probably will be coming out just about that time. You'll be officially retired when this is published. So thank you. Thank you so much. It was great having this conversation and I hope. This inspires a couple of new non-profit related organizations to get into the podcast and game and, and share their wisdom, share their, their networks and get connected with people. So thank you so much. Travis: Hey, thanks, Carol. And anyone listening hop on over to nonprofit architect.org. There's a tab in there. That's got all my stuff, but we also have the non-profit podcast network. We've got 15 shows: my show and Carol’s show, and a bunch of other shows that talk through all the things that go on in the nonprofit world and nonprofit game. Maybe you like my show, maybe you don't, but you're going to find something that you do like that does resonate with you at nonprofitarchitect.org. Thank you so much again, and thank you, Carol, for having me on. Thank you. Carol: Thank you. I am taking away several things from our conversation. The first is the versatility of the podcasting medium and the hidden benefits – I have certainly experienced what Travis talked about in terms of giving me a way to access many people, their expertise and perspective. I learn so much from each guest and each conversation. And he also makes a good point – that you don’t have to make it complicated to start. You can start with a smartphone. You also learn as you go and get better at interviewing, at spotting an interesting quote to pull out. One thing to remember with this particular marketing channel – it is a slow burn and takes a while to build an audience. It’s a long game, not a quick win. Thank you for listening to this episode. I really appreciate the time you spend with me and my guests. You can find out how to connect with Travis, their background and bio, the full transcript of our conversation, as well as any links and resources mentioned during the show in the show notes at missionimpactpodcast.com/shownotes. I want to thank Isabelle Strauss-Riggs for her support in editing and production as well as April Koester of 100 Ninjas for her production support. We want to hear from you! Take a minute to give us feedback or ask a question at missionimpactpodcast.com/feedback. Until next time!  In Episode 42 of Mission: Impact, Carol and her guest, Marla Bobowick discuss:
Guest Bio: Marla Bobowick is an independent consultant based in Washington, DC, has served as a Senior Governance Consultant for BoardSource since 2008, and is also a Standards for Excellence® licensed consultant. She has more than 30 years of nonprofit experience and a history of creative problem solving. Specializing in nonprofit management and leadership, she has extensive experience with board governance, strategy, and publishing. She has worked with nonprofit organizations of all types and sizes, including regional healthcare and social service providers, educational institutions (independent schools and colleges and universities), family and other private foundations, and local and national offices of federated organizations and professional associations. Previously, Marla was Vice President of Products at BoardSource, where she oversaw publications, online products, and research. During her tenure at BoardSource, she was an active consultant and trainer, developed educational curriculum, managed regional capacity building projects, oversaw the global program, and coordinated the annual conference. While at BoardSource, Marla managed Leading with Intent: A National Index of Nonprofit Board Practices. She was also a member of the working group for The Source: Twelve Principles of Governance That Power Exceptional Boards (BoardSource © 2005). She managed “Governance Futures: New Perspectives on Nonprofit Governance,” a multiyear research project that culminated in publication of Governance as Leadership: Reframing the Work of Nonprofit Boards (John Wiley & Sons © 2005). She is co-author of Assessing Board Performance: A Practical Guide for College, University, System, and Foundation Boards (Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges © 2018). Previously, Marla was an acquisitions editor at John Wiley & Sons, where she developed Wiley’s Nonprofit Law, Finance, and Management Series and the Association of Fundraising Professionals Fund Development Series. Marla holds a bachelor’s degree in English from Amherst College, a master’s degree in business administration and a certificate in nonprofit management from Case Western Reserve University. She is a past board chair of Maryland Nonprofits and a past board member Calvary Women’s Services. Important Links and Resources:
Transcript: Carol Hamilton: My guest today on Mission Impact is Marla Bobowick. Marla and I talk about the misconceptions that people have about nonprofit boards and governance, why shared leadership and governance is important to strive for, and why boards needs to shift their focus from hindsight to foresight Mission Impact is the podcast for progressive nonprofit leaders who want to build a better world without becoming a martyr to the cause. I’m Carol Hamilton, your podcast host and nonprofit strategic planning consultant. On this podcast we explore how to make your organization more effective and innovative. We dig into how to build organizational cultures where your work in the world is aligned with how you work together as staff, board members and volunteers. All for this is for the purpose of creating greater mission impact. Welcome Marla, welcome to the podcast. Marla Bobowick: Thanks for inviting me. This'll be fun. Carol: So I like to start by asking folks what drew you to the work that you do? What, what motivates you and what would you describe as your, why? Marla: I fell in love with the nonprofit sector by accident. I love being involved with people who are absolutely passionate about what they do and believe in it and get to live and act and work their values and passions. And I wanted to be surrounded by people like that. And my passion is the nonprofit sector and making it work better, which is a little wonky, but that's what I do. Yeah. The most people, when they think of the nonprofit sector, I think they, they think of that direct, direct service or, or, working on the front lines, but there's so many layers and I've often felt that I was a couple layers removed from, from those frontline folks, but it's all important work. Carol: Your work focuses on nonprofit board governance, which is obviously very key. What would you say is the most common misconception about nonprofit boards? Marla: Of course, I always think there's more than one answer to questions like this, which is, I think it's two extremes. It's either the board thinks they have all the power or they think they have none of the power and same from the CEO executive director point of view. And so. Undoing that misconception because I really believe in a notion of shared leadership and a governance partnership is forcing people to challenge a lot of their implicit or explicit assumptions. Carol: And where do you think those two extremes come from? Marla: I think it's sometimes the language that, that we in the sector that state laws say that the board is responsible for the mission. Well, they can't do that by themselves. They do it with the community that they serve. They do it with professional staff who are on the front lines. So there's language that says the board is responsible for it. Sometimes unfortunately it's more egregious, I pay for it. Therefore I get to decide what our priorities are. And I think executives over underestimate they either manipulate or overestimate how much power they have because they control information. And so board members sometimes feel excluded or executives don't want to give them too much information because they'll get in the weeds. And that creates a tension that is counterproductive. Carol: Yeah. And I've definitely always wondered about that aspect and, and been in organizations where I've seen those dynamics playing out where it seems like in the, the, the way that conventionally nonprofit governance. Is taught and the models that people are using currently, there is a lot of power in, in that executive director role of, especially around controlling information and what information is shared, what information isn't shared that, can, can lead to some not great outcomes. So I'm curious about what your perspective is on that. Marla: So I feel like I walk into a lot of boardrooms and there's this hope. Assumption that there's a nice, neat line in the middle of the sand. That's a bright line that says on one side is what the CEO and the staff do. And on the other side is what the board does. And when I walk in and say, the reality is it's a fuzzy line. It moves sometimes depending on the circumstances of the organization, either as it grows and changes over time or on the size and shape and nature of the organization. And the goal is to know where the line should be and agree on it for your organization at the moment in time. No, when you cross over and know when it's time to go back to your respective sides and that underlying that is the. Every decision you can make the case that should really be borders should really be, may be management and to say, What's the sequence of the discussions and conversations and decision making, as opposed to thinking it's all one or all the other, and realizing that almost everything really has to be done in partnership or together in some way. And it's the process about how do you do that? That is the way through the mass to see where the line is and what to do on terms of what's management and what's board work, Carol: Can you give an example of what you mean by that? Marla: So strategic planning is a pretty classic one, which is, again, it depends, the board has a role in it. I think of the board as bookends. They should be involved in the front end, the back end, but board members and the board in particular, can't do strategic planning by themselves. They need information from the CEO. They need information from the field. They need information from the frontline staff, from constituents and stakeholders. And it's gotta be an inclusive process. And often the executive and the staff are the ones that filter and synthesize and frame that information for the board on a regular basis. And together talk about what's the priority, what's the shift, what are our goals and what matters most? And some of those things about what matters most are going to be based on client needs. Others are going to be based on organization. so the client needs in terms of which programs, where should we grow, where should we shrink? How do we rethink what we do? Some of them are going to be on Operational issues about size staffing technology. Inevitably, every strategic plan has to improve operational excellence or systems. And that's really the purview of the staff and the CEO. But when you get to fundamental questions about sort of, are we really a hunger organization thinking of a food bank or are we really a poverty or anti-poverty organization? Those are philosophical conversations that have to be had by everybody. Carol: Yeah, I definitely see when I'm doing strategic planning, I want to see it as a partnership between board and staff, because each is bringing different information, different perspectives and to really have buy-in for what those final strategic goals are going to be. Staff need to be involved in those conversations. So what would you say is the key to having healthy governance? Marla: You need magic. So I'm a big fan of alliteration as a recovering book editor, but I think there's a combination of, I used to say, it's just, you need good. You need clarity, real clarity, and sharpness of focus on what you're doing. You need great communication and information sharing. I always say this is a little of the Goldilocks approach, the right amount, not too much information, not too little and at the right time. And I started to add to that list. You need real curiosity to break out of old habits and maybe COVID has brought this to the fore, but I also think it is just part and parcel of words in particular need to be with. Ask good questions and then work together to find the answers and executives who have a lot of the answers, and sometimes think it's their job to give answers all the time. Need to be curious about what's behind board members, questions, interests, responses, as opposed to being defensive. And the last one I would add as context, which is what does the organization need now? And in the future, knowing where you've come from. And the, I did this somewhere else. And you hear that a lot from board members, and you'll hear that a lot from executive directors to say what fits the culture, what aligns with the organization's culture and purpose and mission. So that it makes sense for this organization now and going forward. And I always say the end going forward, because board work is often hindsight and I wish there was more foresight with it. Carol: Can you say a little bit more about what you mean? Marla: So board meetings often happen and you get lots of information and reports. That is all about what happened in the past. What happened last month, last quarter, last year, and not a lot about the, what you see coming up in the next 3, 6, 12, 18, 24 months. And so how do you use it? And that's, that's the reality of information sharing because there's nothing, there's no data on what's going to happen next, but how do you use the past to inform conversations about wow, we saw. But they need an X during the last six months. How do we pivot to make more of that available? What are we going to stop doing so that we can put more staff onto this program? And so I think it's that using the past to inform the present, as opposed to saying pat yourself on the back and say, Hey, we just did a great job on this, or, oh my God, we're having a panic. Because if something didn't work, we should beat ourselves up and slash the budget to say, let's really think about what. Coming ahead and short-term, and long-term. Carol: Yeah, I think that's so important. Especially around the communications piece. Cause that could be so tricky of a kind, you want people to be informed. It's challenging to get people to read things ahead of time. So you end up with a lot of reports, but as you're saying, that's all looking backwards and so, how can. Boards, carve out the time to have some strategic conversations, get, sometimes I'll talk to folks about, what's a, what's a question that you can have a half an hour conversation about that isn't necessarily about making decisions today. But opening up so that you're thinking about possibilities for the future is right. None of us can predict the future, but by just having that discipline of trying to look ahead and notice name and notice trends, et cetera can, can help. And I think having some a couple of questions to frame that up really helps people have those conversations because otherwise it's like, okay, well, are we being strategic? We're supposed to be strategic. How are we doing? Marla: One of the challenges is that people are so prone to asking, yes, no questions as opposed to open-ended questions. And there is a time when you need a yes, no. And up, down, vote on something. I think you learn more from the boards when you can ask them open-ended questions, which is what worked, what would work better? What would you do differently? What did we learn from this? Where there is no, yes, no answer. And you can then pull out the nuggets of information that can inform things. And so as opposed to saying, will you approve this or do you agree with this decision learning to ask open-ended questions creates more discussion. And I think the more board members are given a chance to have productive and constructive conversation and discourse in the boardroom and not be talked at or to. Is healthier. So one of the mantras, I think I can brag about board source on this podcast is that when we were aboard board source, our rule is staff. When we presented to the board you had five minutes of the hour-long agenda item. They had them on our board and came prepared, but they had the materials in advance. You framed the questions for discussion, and we gave the highlights and then it was a board discussion. And they would ask big questions and they would offer different points of view, but it wasn't. I gave the report for 20 minutes or half an hour that they already had read. And then ask them, do you agree with that? Carol: Yeah, that's so important. And it's really like those almost as if the report is laying the groundwork or setting the stage for having that conversation rather than yeah. Being talked out and then going, oh, whoops. We ran out of time for any conversation about this. Yeah. So, what are some other things that you see get in the way of kind of, of good governance? You talked about those extremes of like either the board that you may have all the power and none of the power. What are some other things that get in the way of boards that are just being talked at by staff? Marla: It’s people. Boards would be great if there was nobody on them, nobody staffing them. Right? Carol: None of us, we have any work. If there weren't any people in home, Marla: We get in our own way as execs and board members in terms of not listening in terms of having preconceived ideas in terms of. Presenting a defense or offense for something as opposed to a conversation. And so I think it's, and I think board members, on the one hand, there's this push for efficiency. We want to be efficient. So we're going to run through a bunch of conversations or meetings. Or we're going to try and cover so many things that then there's no time for conversations. So I feel like board members and execs put up their own barriers, they bring a lot of baggage or and preconceived ideas into their board work and their work together. That, to say, taking time out to pause And find a way to say what's how we should be as a board and spending time on board purpose and culture can overcome a lot of the usual frustrations that go around boards, but it takes time. And often people don't feel like they have time for what board, something many board members do. We'll say it is navel gazing. And many execs would say it's not going to make a difference. But taking time out to say, well, is this a good use of our time? What's the most important thing we talked about? What could we do differently at the next thing? I just came from a board meeting this weekend where we finally have turned around the board. We've restructured it. We've got new board members on and somebody complained about one of the agenda items. Like, all we do is talk about fundraising. So I said, what do you want to talk about next? And I think that was the first time that the board had ever been asked what's of interest to you. And I think that's a healthy conversation and let the board own some of it. Carol: Yeah, I think so often when I talk to folks, the whole question of slowing down and taking a pause and stepping back and thinking about, well, why are we doing things the way we're doing them? Or, is this really serving us? Always comes up and then there is the pressure of, we just gotta get through this. We've got so many things on our agenda. Yeah, I, I, to me, when. When I was on board. And, and in charge of putting together the agenda, I was always fighting. Well, it was us fighting might be a strong word, but there was a struggle often between us having all these different things to talk about and then being saying, well, We're really not going to talk about any of them. If we just try to rush through it all we'll just end up having to come back to it anyway. So could we have fewer things on the agenda so that we could really dig into at least one of them? Marla: Well, I think that's a silver lining for boards during the time of COVID, which is, many were meeting more often, less often, but they were all meeting differently than they used to. And I think it is forced. One of the most important conversations, which is what does the board need to talk about and why, and what do we not need to have as a board meeting on a board meeting agenda. So to hear a lot of reports that there's not a lot of conversation about is a waste of everyone's time. And yet it has value. I understand when you're in a board meeting, like people aren't thinking about the organization as board members on a day-to-day basis, and they want to know what's new and different, but finding a different way to convey that or a more engaging and interactive way to talk about what's happening at the organization so that when you are together with the board, with the average of whatever 15 people. You are using everyone's time to the highest value, which is what's. How can we add value to the organization and help the executive and help advance our mission? No. Be not a board, his book club. Let's just talk about what you did last month and how great it was, but you're not actually contributing anything of, of intellectual or strategic value. Carol: So, what are some of the innovations that you've seen come out this past 18 months? Marla: I have been surprised and shocked and pleased at being able to do some board assessment, evaluate self evaluation, work online with doing the typical online survey and then presenting the results, and creating it as a separate meeting. Whereas if we were always meeting in person, it was an all day retreat. There was a lot of drama and anxiety around, oh my God, what are we going to do per day? Is it worth it, but to kick off a conversation in an hour and a half or two at a zoom meeting and talk about it and then parlay it into full board discussion. So it's almost like deconstructing what were retreats? Definitely missed the in-person social networking that happens when board members are together. No one get this wrong, I'm all for meeting again in person. But I think the innovation of saying we can call an extra meeting for an hour and a half and use it as a listening to her, use it for a discussion that doesn't require action. Use it to dig into one topic. So I think that's the notion of focus. Out of it. I think there's just a lot. I think people have realized how much information you need and what's the best way to present it. Because I hear all the complaints and I haven't heard them lately. That board meetings are just a bunch of presentations. So when you work on zoom. You have to think about how much presentation, how many Hollywood squares can I see, how many, how much is too much PowerPoint. All of that is a test to be rethought. The strain honestly, though, is that it takes a lot more work to organize a meeting like that on zoom than to do it in person. It can take a lot. It can, it doesn't have to, but even as a consultant who does this all the time to plan and design interactive meetings, it takes more of a. Carol: Yeah. I mean, it's been interesting to me where you talked about deconstructing the retreat. I've definitely seen the advantage of breaking up. I do a lot of strategic planning and break up those processes into a series of two hour or three hour meetings where you're really just doing one piece of it. You're starting out with that. Okay. So, I've, I've done all those conversations. I've done that assessment. I've got survey data, all of that. Let me share that with you. Let's make sure. But that's it that we're going to do today. We're not going to try to get to the very end in one day and have that marathon that people have had before. So I've really appreciated that, that focus that that can be brought. Marla: I've done something similar with orientation and I did this before. COVID with an organization that is very small and. It's a national organization and people just can't afford to come together very often. And so a couple of years ago, we started a three-part session of orientation. One session about the state of the organization. One session about the work of the board in one session. Planning for the next year, board action planning that then feeds into organizational planning and budgeting. And we've been doing it in these three-part sessions now, I think for three or four years. And it really is like there, it compounds it, it gives people time to think about it. They tag it on to an existing board meeting, so they're not creating more stuff. It's worked really wonderfully and I've watched the board come along. And the conversation, even if the session, the content doesn't change much, the quality of the conversation has improved. And in the beginning they didn't talk a lot. And now there's much more back and forth. It's much less hearing me talk, but to have board member to board member conversation. So I think things like breaking things down have been, has been. Carol: Yeah. And I'm even thinking, in terms of all those presentations what, what, might've all been written reports before, you could just record a brief, the, the staff or the, whatever the report is and have those go out beforehand. So you watch them while they're doing the dishes or listen to them while they're taking a walk, it doesn't have to all be written materials. So there's lots of different ways that you can deliver whatever information people need to have to have the conversation. Marla: I'm trying to think of other innovations I've seen. And I think it just has to do with better reports. I've seen a, like little they're, more logistical and operational about better way board members are getting in the execs, I guess, are getting better at organizing board packets and materials and online handbooks and resources. And I think this is the nature of the pandemic, but I think it's a healthy thing. And I've seen other execs do this often when they're new, which is communication between board meetings. Assuming you're not meeting monthly, which I rarely recommend. But that, they're like, here's an update from the staff on what's happening on the ground because board members, especially during COVID and especially if you're doing frontline work, want to know what it’s like in the office or the quote office. What are you seeing? And so they don't have to be long emails, but a, like, here's three exciting things that happened this month. And yes, it takes some time from the exec to do that, but to be strategic about it and balance it between operational and strategic issues and need, and mission has, I think, helped some board members feel better connected. I've also seen some really savvy execs have coffee hour sort of, much more intentionally one-on-one with board members or an open house, like just call and ask questions, schedule time on a, like once a month basis for just whats. So people can ask questions because I think with all the uncertainty around, going back to work or direct service needs or increases or decreases in funding. It's just a way to ask questions without feeling like it's the formality of a full meal. Yeah, I love that. Carol: There are lots of different ways to do that communication, that isn't all in the box of a board meeting, but what are the different ways that you can poke people in and not have it be onerous either on the board members part or on the staff part, but to keep those lines of communication open. So on each episode I'd like to play. A game where I ask one random icebreaker question. My question for you is what book have you read recently that you would recommend and why? Marla: One of the things they did during the pandemic was a virtual book club with people I've been in book clubs with over the course of my life, and none of us are in the same city. So it's been a blast. My favorite book was Deacon King Kong by James McBride. I can see you smiling. Not everybody can do that on the podcast. So it is a historical novel, if you will. We'll about, I believe it was the sixties in New York city and it had the, the Italian mafia on the Irish cops and the black drug dealers. And The Bronx or Harlem or Brooklyn, I can't even remember, but it had the best characters. Carol: Character names for sure. Marla: Absolutely the best names. And so it was incredibly relevant to the world today and issues of social justice and community. And yeah, just a blast to read. He's a wonderful writer. And we had some fun conversations about it, we were joking about that. So if you haven't read the book, the burning question in our head was what was the cheese that was left in the basement by that was left for the community in the basement of the boiler room. Carol: I do remember it now. I do remember it. Yeah, there was just so it set in, in a, in a housing project. I can't remember what borough of New York and just all the intersections of community and. These characters. Oh my goodness. Yeah. So Donald has great characters, but the story moves too. So yeah. I love that. Marla: I want it to be a movie. Carol: Yes. I think it would make a great movie. So what are you excited about? What's coming up next for you. What's emerging in the work that you're doing? Marla: It was amazing in the middle of the pandemic. I worked on a think tank research project about the principles of trusteeship which I did with the association of governing boards of universities and colleges. It's always a mouthful to say that and it really focused on what are the principles of would that make a great board member? Not a great board because the board is made up of a bunch of people. And as I said earlier, one of the obstacles to governance is people. And so it was really fun and amazing to tap into the wisdom of a bunch of college and universities per professor presidents and foundation executives to say what they had seen and to do this in the middle of the pandemic. When you thought colleges didn't even know if they were going to be open that semester. Folks, hundreds of volunteers from AGB we're on focus groups. And so really walking away with this sort of, how do you speak to the individual? I think it has made me realize how important it is to say, it's not just what a good board should do, but it's like, what can you personally do and do better as a board member and. I feel like that's a mantra that comes out in conversation, but not as explicitly as this project brought it into focus. And so really helping people see what you are doing to help or get in the way of yourself or others. Be part of a great board. Carol: Is there a report or some summary of findings for that? Marla: It’s coming. There is a big purple book that we did that has nine principles. They fall into three big buckets. I was a PI. Now it's a mandola because that sounds far more sophisticated than a pie. It was at Thanksgiving when we came up with a pie that has an inner circle of three pieces, which is understood by the government. Think strategically and lead by example or lead with integrity. And so that is what you as an individual should do. And then each piece of that pie has components built within it that get at your role as a. As a fiduciary of the organization. So you've got to uphold that they get a, what role you play on the board as a member of a team. Like not everyone is the captain or the center or the goalie. I'm a soccer fan. And then there is the, what do you do outside of the board and board work? That you do as a volunteer. So when you have special expertise or you show up on campus for an event or whatever it is that you're doing, that is not board work, but you do because you love the organization or you're passionate, or because you're a board member, but you have something to add that is not a governance function. And I think so. Yes, it came out as a book that you can buy from AGB. There is an article that I wrote for trusteeship magazine that I believe is free to anyone on the AGB website, agb.org. And the title is what board members are you? So it's again, it's speaking to you. And then there's a whole bunch of stuff that AGB is rolling out, but it really was this process of self-reflection and trying to make it and put it in the language that is accessible and not jargon. And that isn't shaming people or giving them commandments, thou shall do this, but that's say, we know this is hard and we know it varies from organization to organization, but there are some fundamentals that we think everybody should be capable of doing, or you shouldn't be on the board. Carol: Awesome. All right. Well, we'll look for that so that we can put a link in the show notes, so, awesome. Thank you so much. It was great having you in love to have this conversation. Marla: Likewise, thanks for including me and keeping up the good governance work. All right. Thanks. Carol: I appreciated Marla’s perspective on how the work of governance is not always crystal clear about whether an issue or decision is in the realm of strategy or management. Those are two categories that are somewhat arbitrary and there is a gray area between them. Clear communication and trust between the board and the executive director and senior leadership can go a long way to make it safe for each group to ask the questions it has, get the information it needs and feel supportive of each other instead of so wary about whether they are stepping on each other toes or getting in each other’s lanes. The models may make it look super distinctive but folks need to realize that sometimes it is not. I also appreciated the point that boards needs to spend more time looking forward than backward. Too often so much of board meetings is taken up with reports – updates on work done by committees, staff, task forces, etc. Instead of using the time that everyone is together to have a discussion about a key issue – whether it is one facing the organization today or one that folks see coming down the pike. As much as you can get reports to people in another format than shared verbally in a meeting – whether it is a written update, a short video or audio message – there are lots of options to consider. Thank you for listening to this episode. I really appreciate the time you spend with me and my guests. You can find out how to connect with Marla, the full transcript of our conversation, as well as any links and resources mentioned during the show in the show notes at missionimpactpodcast.com/shownotes. I want to thank Isabelle Strauss-Riggs for her support in editing and production as well as April Koester of 100 Ninjas for her production support. If you enjoyed it, please share it with a colleague or friend. We appreciate you helping us get the word out. Until next time.  This episode is part of the Culture Fit project that Carol recorded with her son-in-law Peter Cruz. In this episode, Carol, her cohost Peter Cruz, and their guest Damary Bonilla discuss:
Guest bio: Dr. Damary M. Bonilla-Rodriguez is a national leading authority on leadership development, especially as it pertains to diversity and inclusion. She delivers keynote addresses and presentations drawing upon her experience from roles in the non-profit, private, and government sectors, as well as her doctoral research. Her research about Latina leadership in the United States has served as the foundation for events, conference sessions, publications, and content development - to address the urgency of leadership development for a fast-growing population and create a pipeline of diverse leaders. Dr. Bonilla-Rodriguez holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Spanish and Social Work from the College of New Rochelle where she received the College President’s Medal, graduated with Departmental Honors, and was awarded the Sigma Delta Pi Spanish Award. She also holds a Master of Science degree in Organizational Communications and a Specialized Certification in Corporate Communications, both from the College of New Rochelle. Personal endeavors of overcoming statistics and accessing higher education, led her to earn a Doctorate in Education focusing on Executive Leadership from St. John Fisher College. To change the political and leadership landscape for Latinos, Dr. Bonilla-Rodriguez ran for State Representative in the 189th District of Pennsylvania in the 2016 election cycle where she became the 1st Hispanic to make a State ballot in Pike and Monroe Counties. In November 2019, she became the 1st Hispanic elected as School Board Director in the East Stroudsburg Area School District where she Chairs the Education and Negotiation committees. Passionate about supporting professional organizations, she is a Board Member of the Brodhead Watershed Association where she Chairs the Membership committee, Colonial IU 20 where she serves as Vice President, Prospanica NY where she serves as Vice President of Professional Development, Latina VIDA, Latinas on the Plaza and an Advisory Board member for several organizations including: The Board of Hispanic Caucus Chairs, Monroe County Children and Youth where she leads the Education committee, SciGirls, and the Alliance for Positive Youth Development. In addition, she was appointed by Governor Tom Wolf to represent the Poconos Region on statewide commissions on Redistricting Reform and Latino affairs (GACLA) where she Chairs the Education committee. Dr. Bonilla-Rodriguez was recognized as a 2014 Coors Light Lideres finalist and the recipient of numerous awards including a proclamation from the NYS Assembly, the Proud to Be Latina Soy Poderosa award, and the SISGI Beyond Good Ideas Excellence in Nonprofit Leadership award. Her published written accomplishments include the books Ethics, Gender, and Leadership in the Workplace and Today’s Inspired Latina (Volume II), as well as contributing to the Huffington Post and being featured by several media outlets including NBC Latino, Chief Writing Wolf, and the Empowered Latinas series. While, she is proud of her many accomplishments, she highlights her greatest as being the mother of eleven-year-old twin boys, Caleb and Joshua. She resides in Pennsylvania with her boys and husband Robert. Her favorite quote is: “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants” (Newton). Important Links and Resources: Transcript: Carol Hamilton: My guest today on Mission Impact is Dr. Damary Bonilla-Rodriguez. This is one more in the Culture Fit series I did with Peter Cruz. Damary, Peter and I talk about the interconnections between having to code switch and imposter syndrome, the pressure of being “the only,” and her hopes for the upcoming generations. Welcome to Mission Impact, the podcast for progressive nonprofit leaders who want to build a better world without becoming a martyr to the cause. I am Carol Hamilton, your podcast host and nonprofit strategic planning consultant. Peter Cruz: This week we have Damary. Hey Damary. How are you? Damary Bonilla-Rodriguez: Hey, Peter. I'm good. How are you? Peter: I’m doing well. For our listeners, could you just share with us some tidbits about your professional background and who you are? Damary: Sure. So my background is I am a Hispanic woman born and raised in Spanish Harlem, New York. I've lived in the Poconos for the past 14 years. I'm the director of the leaders of color New York program, which is focused on building a bench of black and brown leaders in New York. I serve on Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf's commission on Latino affairs representing the Poconos region as well as served on his redistricting reform commission. And I say that my most important job is being the mother of 11 year old twin boys. Peter: That's incredible. As an expecting parent myself, that seems challenging. Damary: Congratulations. It is challenging. Peter: But in regards to your professional side of it when you were working with. Leaders of color who are trying to enter or establish their positions in, in, in mostly white dominated spaces. Just to jump us off, like what pressures do you see that exist to either code switch or similar, remove aspects of themselves just to like, I guess be taken seriously. Damary: Your, so a topic related to leadership that is emerging for women and for leaders of color more now than, since it had been coined in the 1970s as the imposter syndrome. And this week, I've talked about it several times because women and leaders of color struggled to. I have the opportunity sometimes to achieve a formal title and position in society to climb the ladder of success, to penetrate the political sector. And once they do get there to really be able to maintain the status, if you will, because there are expectations that. You should speak a certain way or behave a certain way. Sometimes even dress a certain way. Right? For the women, we talk about things like, is it okay to wear hoops in the workplace and be still considered professional? For those of us that are bilingual, is it okay to use a little bit of Spanish or Spanglish? I was raised in New York City and we speak Spanglish. That's another language. And so just being able to understand where. And if you have to shut off some aspects of yourself, which then does not allow you to be your authentic self is a challenge in itself. Right. And then when you do get a seat at the table, how are you able to gain and maintain the respect of your colleagues, particularly individuals that may not be as qualified as you, but based on privilege, are at the table and absolutely feel like they belong. So the conversation around the imposter syndrome is you, you internalize those concepts and those notions that are just throughout society and or not, when you're able to leave those aside and push through what. Like you don't belong at this table or there's no room for you, then you're able to really show up as your authentic self and challenge the status quo. But that's a day-to-day struggle. Carol: So often I feel like I mean sometimes, and certainly more nowadays they're, they're direct messages that are very clear and explicit about you don't belong, but I feel like a lot of times it's, it's much, it's more subtle, and oftentimes for the four people who are in the dominant culture who are white, who are white men, unfortunately, men that may not even realize that they're taking up as much space as they are taking up, or, assuming competence on the part of other colleagues that look like them or themselves in this. Damary: Absolutely. The implicit bias in the professional setting is probably the greatest influencer of the environment of whether or not somebody feels like they fit in based on their gender, their sexual orientation, their their age, their race or ethnicity. And you're right. Sometimes people don't even realize because they have biases where everybody looks like them and talks like them. And here comes this individual that doesn't fit what they are used to. And sometimes they just don't know how to react. And I've heard comments from older white males at the same tables, as I am saying, things like you speak out of turn or your tone will not be tolerable. Sometimes I am seen as - and this goes for women leaders and then also people of color sometimes, and often, mostly women of color who are leaders, where you hear things like you're aggressive, or, you are abrasive or, you're, I've been called unprofessional. You're unprofessional because you speak up and you speak. But for me, it's conviction and leadership. You asked me about working with leaders of color and as a leader for leaders of color, I feel like it's my responsibility and I have to speak up and speak out. Otherwise what's the point of being at any given table? Carol: You say you've been labeled aggressive and, studies have shown that, that same behavior, whatever people were perceiving of, how you were showing. That same behavior on the part of, of a white man would be labeled as assertive or leader, so the exact same way of being the way of showing up, it's just perceived and so different a way, depending on what your social identity. Damary: Right. And that brings me back to the conversation about code switching, that we were starting to have around leaders of color, particularly when you're trying to fit in, you see yourself in a position to either compromise your identity in terms of not speaking about certain aspects of your life. We see that I'm not when it comes to the LGBTQ plus population, but then also in terms of shifting, if you're in certain places and spaces, You might try to adapt the way you speak, use words that you think will be more acceptable in that space versus when you are with family and friends and individuals that you feel comfortable with. Myself being in academia. Oftentimes I use layman's terms because that's how I best communicate with everyone at every level. But when I'm in the academic spaces, individuals are using big words. I know the big word. I know the meaning of the big words, but I choose not to use them because I'm a communicator and it's more important for me to be able to connect with all individuals at any level, whether they have access to formal education or not. So code switching and fitting in is really about making choices around how much of yourself are you willing to compromise in any given space or, or moment? Peter: Yeah, and the thing that I wanted to just touch on briefly was just that. This is a thing that is universal regardless, because there are a number of people who are shifting careers or moving to different cities where, maybe if I move to a more progressive city, this probably won't be an issue. Or like, trying to escape it because it's, but the thing is that it's unavoidable in, in your experience, moving from a bigger city to the Poconos, being there for an extended period of time, like. What is that labor-intensive and trying to, I guess, use this for an Eichler, was it, I mean, cause that's the assumption. Damary: It is labor-intensive Peter. It wasn't, it is. And, and it will be because these are the systemic issues that we talk about. So you're right. Regardless of where you are. There are geographic perceptions. So have you moved from the north to the south? There are certain expectations that individuals in the south have that somebody from the north may not be able to, to live up to. Right. So regardless of where you go, you have to realize that there are cultures within communities. There are people who have lived in certain areas for many years. So some of the issues that I have had to grapple within our community and I've been here 14 years are. Everything from speaking with an accent, which people don't realize, right. It's my New Yorker’s accent. And so I've been asked about, you know the way that I speak, where my from et cetera being labeled a transplant and, and not fully being. The white individuals who have been here for generations, who to me have a lot of wisdom to share in terms of the economy of the community in terms of the educational system and other systems that I want to be part of. And I want to help, and I've traveled the country. So I have a wealth of knowledge and expertise that now is starting to support our community. As I'm leading the diversity, equity and inclusion. For our school district. And so on, in December of 2019, I was sworn in as the first Hispanic elected to the east Stroudsburg area school district school board. And as the first, thank you as the first and as the only, you often have to educate people along the way about what it's like to be you about, what are the issues that are unique to people like you, in this case, students, educators, community partners, through. I also represent us on the board of the colonial intermediate unit 20, which is 13 school districts from Delaware valley out to north Hampton county and focusing on special education. And there I'm also the only Hispanic as well as the youngest and several others first and only. And there is pressure that comes with that. But for me, there is also a reward that I have the opportunity to help create a space that is more inclusive for individuals who are different. They don't have to be like me, but they just have to be different than who's been at that table before me. Peter: And for people who are numbers like a first and only because I think that's like what's happening now. Right? Many organizations, many companies are having. First ever diversity equity, inclusion person, most commonly it's a woman of color because of the glass. What is it? The glass cliff taking over it. For those people who are trying to establish that type of environment, what are some key things that you have, like tried to implement that were unsuccessful or things that were successful right off the bat, that they should either try to replicate and make their own. But things that helped you get off the ground and establishing Damary: that because of the individual, whether you're the person that is pushing for change or the person on the other side of the change certainly has. A personal lens on the diversity equity and inclusion conversation and thinking about what is my perception of diversity, how do I promote a more inclusive environment? How do I move the needle forward in my organization? My community and society broadly becoming more equitable and, and being able to serve everyone who wants to be served by this institution or deserved by, to be served by the institution. If we're thinking. School district or a nonprofit organization or a company with a target audience in terms of the organization, it's really about evaluating the policies and practices that are in place. Are those conducive to being an inclusive environment, are those conducive to moving the organization, the institution. Equitable practices or not. And then there's a level of buy-in that has to be gained from every individual at the organization at any given time. You're not going to get that buy-in all at once, but you do have to work with individuals in the respective. So that it becomes institutionalized. And then if you're the person that's pushing for the change or driving the change, you have to be patient, you have to be mindful and you have to be sensitive to meeting people where they are. And knowing that just because you want people to buy into DEI does not mean they will. And just because you want an organization. To take on this effort doesn't mean they will, or they can, they may not have the capacity, the expertise, right? The individuals on the team to be able to do this work comprehensively at least. Peter: Yeah. I would just speak on, on my own experience that this also it's prevalent in. Corporations or organizations that are actually not white dominant as far as the people involved, because racism is so systematic that we, and white supremacy culture is just prevalent everywhere that we're just perpetuating it without really recognizing it. I remember being in a diversity equity inclusion meeting, and having someone say, well, we are all brown and black people, so where we don't have the same types of struggles, but that's furthest from the truth. Damary: Absolutely. So you touched on a couple of things. One there's, there is racism and prejudice amongst like individuals, right? So within the Hispanic community, there are over 20 countries represented under that umbrella of Hispanic, Latino Latinex. Right. And there is racism and sometimes division. Even those countries, Dominicans and Puerto Ricans or Ecuadorians and, and, and the mannequins, et cetera. So we can not assume that just because it is a black or brown institution, these things are not happening, but also in terms of the tenants of white supremacy culture, when we think about perfectionism and that pressure, right, talking back to the imposter syndrome that we touched on a little bit ago, that pressure to be good at things, or to have to work harder, to be at certain tables because. I don't see a way in or nobody that looks like you has been there, or nobody in your family has achieved a level of higher education. I mean, I'm one of less than 4% of Latinas in the United States with a doctorate. I was raised by my grandparents who went to the first and third grade. They didn't speak, read, or write English fluently and what they did know, they self taught. Where would I have ended up if I didn't have the opportunity for mentorship for nonprofit organizations given. The space to know that these opportunities existed. And then at the college level, having advisors that supported me and Latinas that looked like me, where I learned that a doctorate was a possibility that wasn't anything I had ever thought about before, but I was open to the possibilities when I got to college, I was the first in my family to graduate college. So then my responsibility is to pass that along to others in my family and my community and society. Peter: Yeah. I mean, it's because so much of what you're saying and just like I had experienced, I'm also Puerto Rican first in my family. I think when I graduated, I read this study that said like about. Three to 4% of Hispanics just like to go to college. And then of that three to 4%, about 8% complete. And it was just like very, very, it's just an immense pressure and burden to be the representative of everyone. So the simulation just has to come naturally because. shifted and navigated through these spaces. Do you feel like you could answer this? How can we, as you want, but do you feel that that is more existing in education or in politics? Damary: Oh, this is a whole nother session, I think in both. So in, in education, in terms of access to education and being in this. The student, you do experience the need to assimilate frequently, because if you look around, you're often by yourself, right? And as you stated in terms of what the data shows, but the higher you climb in terms of formal education, higher education, the more likely you are to be the only one. So to finish the journey. So you, you find yourself having to adapt and shift along the way you find yourself having to identify with individuals that may not speak the same language or eat the same foods, but that you can still learn from and have some peer to peer mentorship with, to just make it through the journey and then using the opportunity to help others. In terms of politics, though, we talked about geography a little bit. So if you're in a place like New York city, you're going to find more. People of color in positions of elected leadership, right? However, if you're in places like the post. You're not going to see that. And though we did have an influx of people of color and particularly Hispanic people who moved to the Poconos in the last 20 years, they still have not fully penetrated those spaces. I ran for state representative in 2016 and became the first Hispanic to make a state ballot in Monroe and Pike county. That was just five years ago. That's the reality of what the data shows. Right. And then when I did get on the ballot and I was knocking on doors, I heard things like, you speak with an accent. You're not a NoCal. You should be home with your children because my five-year-old twins were on the campaign trail, handing out flyers and they really loved it. They love people. They love the energy. They say that they're going to run for office. So. That is where we're able to shift the dynamics. When we help our children see the possibilities that we didn't see, right? Because we didn't have the role models because we didn't have the opportunities or the experiences. Then we shift the dynamics because their generation, for my kids, they expect to go to college. They expect to run for public office. They expect to be elected to public office. That's a very different mentality than those of us that have had to really fight. And the fight for social justice is every. It's everything from the boardroom and the school district to, the, the boardroom in any of the organizations that I serve across the country. But even here locally, I was the first Hispanic to be elected to the board of the Broadhead watershed association and Hispanics care about the environment. However, There's a difference between individuals that come from the city who don't really understand, how do I help maintain the waters? How do I help contribute to protecting our environment? Right? So there's a level of education and support and connection that our organization knows is very important. And we've had informational events and have been deliberate about inviting diverse individuals to join. So when you talk about politics, sometimes issues like the environment may not be front and center when people of color do get to the table, because if you've grown up in an urban community versus the suburbs versus another geographic area, The priorities are different to that. I would say it's across the board. Peter: Yeah. I mean, yeah, like we've been talking about it's all universal everywhere. I have one question that ties into it, but in regards to politics as the world kind of, becomes more progressive in a way. Right. I think the starting off point and the foundation is different based on geography, but The near future when your children maybe run for office or my child runs for office, who knows when in some near distant future, we hope you foresee it? Cause you were just interacting with the two people trying to tell you that you're not from here X, Y, and Z that the need in politics per se. Cause I think it lives out in the public. To Western than need to assimilate. Damary: I hope so. And for the record, please plant the seed for your child, that they can and should run for office. I hope so. I'm the type of person who is very comfortable standing out, so I don't feel the need to assimilate personally. Just because I'm also patient enough with others to teach them what it's like to be me. And sometimes it does take more push than others, depending on the individual, depending on how receptive they are, depending on how much they actually want to learn about me. But I hope that we are making strides so that our children are able to show up as they're often. So because we use the word authentic leadership often, and, we want people to be authentic. We want people to bring their full selves. And yet when people attempt to do that, we center them. We don't want people to be their full selves. It just sounds like the right thing to say, especially when it comes to the diversity conversation. And, and so, right now the social unrest and the issues that we're seeing and, and in the media and that we're seeing play out in our communities, It's putting a sense of pressure and urgency for institutions and organizations to move some of those that you talked about, that yourself they're creating the diversity officer positions. I mean, across the board every day we see lots of posts. Some of those, even if not intended that way, are just to check off the box. That's what they're doing. Right. Because if the organization does not have an environment conducive as these individuals and we're forcing individuals to assimilate, then you're really just checking off the box. So I'm hoping, but I'm also an optimist. I still believe in a government for the people and by the people because who better to tell us what are the issues that they need to prioritize than the people going through those issues, who better to inform the social justice movements that we are promoting right now than the people who have lived marginalized for generations. Public incidents have happened over the past year or so. And global prices for these issues to emerge to the place where they are right now. So I'm hopeful, but I can't say for sure. Peter: And that's usually, that seems to be the last question I asked, like, what are you optimistic about and what are you hopeful for? So I'm glad you addressed that stuff. Carol, do you have anything else? Carol: I just want to say, I appreciate your persistence, you keep showing up, you keep being the one and only, which is that's a huge amount of emotional labor that you're taking on. Damary: Thank you. Yes, it is. It's exhausting. I've been saying that a lot more lately. And so I'll, I'll share this with you in terms of, in terms of optimism, what I'm optimistic about is people being inspired by injustice to the point that they will step up to the. And take on leadership roles. And I've been talking a lot over the past year about how crises bring about leaders. And so you're either going to sit back and complain and just be bogged down by the crisis, or you're going to step up to the plate and ask what can I do and contribute. And that can mean getting engaged in your child's PTO, or that can mean running for office, or that can be. Anything in between, but it means that if you really feel compelled to see difference, you're going to be part of the difference. So what I'm optimistic about is that more people will be inspired by social injustice, by prejudices that they experienced or that they see others experience. And that, that will bring about more allyship in terms of diversity of racial and ethnic communities. Right. Because we can't sit around and just talk about white privilege and white supremacy, if we don't talk about all the privilege. I was born and raised in the projects in New York City. I'm a homeowner. My kids do not have the same experience that I had. And so understanding that I have privilege in a heterosexual family versus not understanding that my kids have privilege because of the socioeconomic status of their parents versus their parents growing up is important as well. So there’s just a lot of DEI dynamics that that we can talk about. So hopefully we'll continue the dialogue. Peter: Yeah. Maybe we'll have you on when we talk about intersections. Damary: Yeah, I'm leading a committee at work on intersectionality and coalition building. Carol: All right. So perfect. Peter: So that will be part two of our conversation. Thank you so much to Damary. Thank you for doing that. You don't want to take too much more of your time. Damary: Oh, great. Thank you. And it's an opportunity to reflect, but yes, Carol, sometimes I'm exhausted. I woke up this morning thinking like maybe I need to throw in the towel on this, on the school board piece. And then I got a message on Instagram that one of my quotes was printed on a greeting card in this new company for. But for highlighting women of color and it, and, and it was exactly about how we remember your blessing, no matter what life circumstances you're facing. And I'm like, okay, I get it. I remember what I said. Carol: It's terrible. When your own words come back to you. Right? My favorite is when your kids say it back to you. Damary: That one's great. Especially when they're sassy about it. That's what awaits you, Peter, what mommy, you said? I know I said it. I know what I said. Carol: Thank you so much. It was great talking with you. Damary: Great talking with you both. We could've gone on for a while, so anytime I can hang out with you, let me know. Carol: Thank you for listening to this episode. I really appreciate the time you spend with me and my guests. You can learn more about Damary and her background, as well as how to connect with her in the show notes at missionimpactpodcast.com/shownotes. We also post the full transcript of our conversation, as well as any links and resources mentioned during the show in the show notes. I want to thank Isabelle Strauss-Riggs for her support in editing and production as well as April Koester of 100 Ninjas for her production support. Please take a minute to rate and review Mission Impact on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. It helps other people find the podcast. We appreciate it! |
carol HamiltonMy passion is helping nonprofit organizations and associations have a greater mission impact. Archives
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Grace Social Sector Consulting, LLC, owns the copyright in and to all content in, including transcripts and audio of the Mission: Impact podcast and all content on this website, with all rights reserved, including right of publicity.
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