Nonprofit Growth Summit 2024 | Instrumentl

Rachel: Hi, folks. Welcome. I see our attendee count and jumping up. We're so glad to have you this morning, this afternoon, maybe even this evening, depending on where you're streaming in from. We'll give everybody a few moments to come on into the room and join us.

But in the meantime, I would love to hear a little more about who you are. If you can introduce yourself in the chat box, share your name, your role, and organization or the location that you're streaming in from today. We'd love to learn a little more about you all. Thanks so much for being here.

Hey, Tim, from Las Vegas. Hi, Lauren. Y'all are fast. Thanks for saying hello. Hey, Griffin. Great to see you. Karen, love it. Hi, Rachel. Great name. Hey, Tom. Hey, Rich. Melissa, it's great to see you again. I love seeing some familiar faces. Hi, folks. Hey, Daniel. Wow. There's so many folks here in the room sharing. Thank you. Oh, it's so great to see you all. I see another person from Los Angeles. Shout out to that. Streaming in from the same place. If you're just joining us, welcome. We're so glad to have you.

You can share a little more about yourself in the chat box. Put your name, your role, and the organization you are streaming in from today.

Hi, everyone. Hi, Carla. Hi, Danielle. Great to see some familiar and new faces in the room. Oh, awesome, Danielle. That sounds so cool. Hi, Sarah. Hello, everybody. Welcome. Thanks for being so prompt. We'll get started in just a few moments.

In the meantime, introduce yourself in the chat box. We've got a lot of folks saying hello, where they're streaming in from. Amazing organizations from all across the country, the South Carolina Aquarium and Charleston. That's so cool, Amarie. Hi, Jose. Hey, Stephanie.

Awesome. We've got folks coming in from Palm Springs, New Orleans, Berkeley, California, Portland, Oregon. Very cool. Maybe some of you even already know each other. I wonder if there's some folks in the room who might be in similar regions, maybe in similar sectors. Hey, Geovani. Good to see you. Hi, Paula. Welcome.

For folks that are just joining us, once again, we're so glad to have you. We're going to get started in about 30 seconds. But in the meantime, give us a hello in the chat box, say who you are, your role, your organization, or maybe the location that you're streaming in from today. And we'll get started in just a few moments.

Good morning, Maxine. Hi, Aaron. Hey, Angela. I've seen you on LinkedIn. Thanks for joining us. Hi, Diamond. Great to see you. Hey, Emily. That's so great.

All right. Because we've got a jam-packed agenda today and I have so much I want to share with you all, I'm so, so excited and thrilled that you are taking the time to be with us today. I do want to get us started. Respect our time. We are busy non-profiteers and I know we've got a lot on our plates. So, I'm going to get us rolling and start with our own introductions. Many of you probably already know me if you've been to an Instrumentl event before. But my name is Rachel, and I'm one of the events and community managers at Instrumentl. I have a decade plus of experience in the nonprofit sector, specifically in museums, which I've got some cool little museum related emojis here. And I'm based in Los Angeles, California.

I'm also really excited to introduce my colleague, Nia. I'll pass it off so that she can introduce herself.

Nia: Hi, I'm Nia, and I'm one of the newest team members here at Instrumentl. And like Rachel, I come from the nonprofit world, specifically the environment sector, having worked in rainforest conservation. And before that, sustainable agriculture research. And we are both so excited to spend the next three hours with so many nonprofit professionals from all sectors all around the country, even around the world. I saw some international folks joining. So, welcome, and thank you for being here.

Rachel: Thanks, Nia. We are so excited to get started today. And so, to build a little bit of hype, get us stoked about what we're about to experience, I would love to hear, what are you most excited for? If you can share in the chat, number one, two, three, or four, maybe you're most excited about discovering new tools or strategies, networking and making connections, hearing from other nonprofits, which I am thrilled to introduce all those folks who are joining us today from there, or something else. And if it's something else, we'd love to hear it.

Three of the folks who are sharing in the chat will win a coffee on us. My colleagues who are helping us out in the chat box will be reaching out to folks who win. We love to hear what you're most excited for today. Oh, wow. We've got so many great comments in the chat. I'm seeing a lot of ones. Couple twos, couple threes. All of them, we love to hear that too. Oh, yeah. I am so excited about these as well. Great to hear it, Eric.

Oh, these are such great comments. I love to hear everyone's enthusiasm and excitement. We have a lot to share with you, and I'm hoping you'll stick it out to the end. As a reminder today, this is a CFRE certified course. So if you stick it out for the duration of the program today, you'll earn three points towards your CFRE certification or recertification if you're already certified.

We also have this amazing workbook of 30 plus resources and offers from our incredible sponsors and partners. So, that will be something that you'll get if you stick it out to the end with us. And lastly, you'll get a cool little summit certificate.

Just an extra way to show that you've been spending your time growing professionally, another way to highlight the time that you're spending with us today. As a reminder too, you can win a ton of cool stuff. We're raffling stuff all throughout the program today. We have a couple of really great prizes, including some donations to your chosen nonprofit, an office goodies bundle to jazz up your workstation, that could be your at home workstation or your at work workstation, and some surprise, extra prizes that you'll see as we go throughout the program today.

The way you can enter to win is to share your learning. You'll win those prizes. So, you can tag Instrumentl on a LinkedIn post. You can include our #Nonprofitgrowth24, and our team will automatically enter you into our raffle. We'll be doing them all throughout the program. So I would love to see your learnings, love to see what you're getting out of today's sessions. We're so thrilled that so many of you have shared about this event with your peers. I'm already seeing some folks who are in the room who took the time to share a little bit about their enthusiasm, their excitement about this program. So, we're going to be actually starting with a raffle. We're gonna raffle off someone who's already shared.

And if you're planning on joining us for these next three hours, we want to continue to see all these amazing learnings and reflections that you're having. You know, studies that show that the people that document and share key takeaways from educational experiences, they're going to be significantly more likely to retain that info. So I encourage you to reflect, jot down what you're learning today. It'll just help you really make sure you're kind of synthesizing all that, all that info for today. So, I'm really excited to raffle off our first raffle, and that's going to go out to Delila Valdez Levin.

So Delila is going to win our first raffle prize for today, and that's going to be our $100 donation to a nonprofit. So congrats, Delila. You already won. We're going to keep the excitement going. You all are invited to participate and engage in this and connect to your learnings so that other folks can see what you're getting out of today's program. So, let's talk about where we're headed. I really can't wait.

We've been putting together what we think is a fantastic program with each session packed with nuggets of knowledge you're going to take away. You've got three hours with breaks of learning. You're going to get the recording. You're going to get a ton of resources. Please, honor your personal needs, bring that snack, bring that water. But don't miss the chance to win. I will be raffling stuff off with Nia throughout the program today. As we go through, don't forget to add questions to our Q&A box. That's a feature that you have in your webinar settings, and let's take a quick moment to cover where we're going on our journey.

We're starting off the morning or afternoon, depending on where you're streaming in from, with our keynote chat, Vision to Strategy: Building Your Roadmap for Mission-Driven Success. We'll hear from Instrumentl CEO and co-founder, Gauri Manglik, and Monica Coleman, Director of Foundation Relations at Eureka College, on how to effectively align time, resources, and efforts with your mission.

This engaging discussion will reveal real world insights on the art of strategic planning. I can't wait to get into that. Next up, we've brought together a panel of experts from across the sector with leaders from Givzey, SureImpact, Storyraise, MemoryFox, and Instrumentl. You'll hear about what they've learned from working with over 2500 nonprofit organizations each week, and how maximizing your impact means working smarter, not harder. Our Hands-On Workshop will help us apply practical tools that foster teamwork improve communication and ensure we're building those high performing nonprofit teams with insights from some of our leaders at the boys and girls club and Salvation Army.

And lastly, we'll wrap up with our closing. We'll reflect and marinate on all the good that we've taken away from today. Share how you can access all those resources I mentioned, and, of course, do some final raffle prizes. For folks that want to connect and share some of what is resonating with you after the event ends, we're hosting a special networking session based on our grant chats. I see a few folks in the room who are grant chats participants. This is a guided discussion in a Zoom meeting format with small groups of five to six nonprofit professionals from a similar sector area of focus. I'll share a little more about what to come there.

But for now, let's get started. Are you feeling pumped up? I'd love to see in the chat box some emojis, some excitement, some enthusiasm for folks. Are you feeling ready to go? We've got a ton to share with you. And I want to jump right on in. Love the Emojis people choose. These are great. So excited for everybody. So, let's focus on our wins. I want to hear from you all. I'm gonna launch a quick poll. Oh, these are such great emojis coming in. What is one way your organization is totally crushing it right now? Maybe you're securing new funders or new donors. Maybe you're improving those internal operations and teamwork. You're launching or sustaining impactful projects, or maybe it's something else. And we'd love to hear it in the chat box. I'll give folks a second to think about where their organization is crushing it and I'll share out in some of those responses in just a second. Oh, I'm seeing some great responses here. Thank you everybody for participating.

We've got 50% of folks participating in our poll. Oh, now, we're up to 60. This is great. Oh, I see some folks adding some ideas in the chat. Donna says, "New partnerships." Oh, Christa said, "We're using Instrumentl data and AI to do data analysis on funder giving patterns." That is amazing. Yeah. Cindy said, "More than one." I'm sure it's hard to pick just one. I'll give folks about 10 more seconds to respond to our poll and then I will share out on those results. Joanie, I love to hear that. We are crushing our plans for annual gala. That is so awesome.

Oh, Carolyn, this is great. Love to hear that Tammy. We love to hear your successes. So I'm going to go ahead and end this poll and share out so folks can see where other organizations are crushing it right now. It looks like our folks that are improving internal operations and teamwork feel like they're really doing a great job with that. I love to hear that. We're going to celebrate that today. We've got another chunk of folks who said they are launching or sustaining those impactful projects. Awesome to hear. And then a whole bunch of folks, 20% securing new funding in our donors. That's so great.

Continue to add those wins in the chat box as I move us along to our next section here. But first, I just want to highlight, your hard work matters. We know you're out there working so hard every day to elevate the impact that your nonprofit organizations are doing, whether you're in leadership advancement, marketing program, staff. I know we've got folks from across the board here today.

So, let's lift each other up. Let's support all these wins and let's think about areas where we can grow. There may be some moments where we're going to kind of critically analyze how we're feeling about where our organizations are going today. I want us to use this time to truly reflect, be critical, and think about how we can support one another in this room.

We've got almost 500 people here who are saying they've got these wins. Let's support each other as we go through our program today. So our theme this morning, this afternoon is going to be, what does it mean to be a high-performing nonprofit? And we've worked together to kind of find these indicators of high-performing nonprofits. We're going to reveal them as we go throughout the program. And each session is going to highlight in even further detail what that indicator looks like. And some of those kind of key ways that you might apply, the lessons learned, tangibly to your organization. So the first one we're going to talk about is focused on our strategy. That's why we've got this great keynote coming up.

One of the indicators of a high-performing nonprofit is that they align time, resources, and goals with their mission. So, that is where strategic planning comes into play. We're going to talk about how you can set your nonprofit up for success that way.

But in the chat, I'm kind of curious to hear from folks. On a scale from 1 to 10, 1 being maybe not so great, 10 being totally awesome. How do you feel about your nonprofits 2025 strategy? On a scale from 1 to 10, where are you at on planning for the next year imminently approaching? Oh, I love to hear. We've got some high ones up there. That's great. Got some folks that maybe are thinking, "We could use a little bit more strategy development here." I love to see that, Hannah. Zero, but here to learn. That's awesome. Okay. Great.

And I'm curious, you know, this is maybe just a rhetorical question for you all. Think about why you put that number in the chat. What is it that indicates to you that you're at a five or that you're at eight or you're at a three. And we're going to use this workshop, these sessions today to help us get a little bit closer to the higher end of that scale as we prep for the upcoming calendar year. We know that defining strategy can be a little bit of a bumpy road. And that's why I'm so excited to intro our keynote for today.

So, I'm going to invite our keynote panelist to come on screen. And I'm going to do a quick intro for them as I get into our program today. Hey, you folks. Right. Let's add you to my spotlight so everyone can see you. We've got Gauri. She's our CEO and cofounder of Instrumentl. Gauri has dedicated her career to building intuitive and delightful user experiences. She has led Instrumentl to serve over 4,000 nonprofits making it a favorite tool among grant seekers for bringing together grant prospecting, tracking, and management all in one place. Alongside Gauri today, we have Monica Coleman.

Monica serves as the director of foundation relations at Eureka College in Eureka, Illinois. Monica has over 18 years of grant writing experience focused in management solicitation, development, and stewardship. She took the leap into higher education in 2021 at her alma mater after exclusively working in nonprofits like the Red Cross since 2005. In her first eight months, she helped secure over $2.9 million in new grant funding to the college and another 4.7 million in her second year.

If we're lucky, we'll maybe hear some of the ways that Monica has done such an incredible job over these past two years. But I'm gonna go ahead and pass it off to Gauri to kick off our keynote today.

Gauri: Awesome. Thanks, Rachel.

And hey, Monica. Thanks so much for being here. I'm so glad we can open this event with our conversation, this very important conversation.

We know that nonprofits run on passion and a ton of hard work. Sometimes things like our daily cup of coffee, which I don't know if you can see with that background, plays a big role too. Before we get rolling, I would love to hear from everybody in the chat. What is your nonprofit fuel? What's the thing that one thing that powers you through your toughest days? Let's see what folks say. We got some coffee aficionados. Like myself, got passion, prayer, fresh veggies. Love that.

The people that we work with, my co-workers, the mission. Yeah, each other and coffee of the coffee vibe. So much. Awesome. So much nonprofit fuel. Monica, I'm curious what you would say is your nonprofit fuel.

Monica: Well, it's funny because I have my coffee right here. But I also am a huge fan of good music while I work.

Gauri: Yeah. Amazing. Yeah. Just get yourself in the zone. Nice. Yeah. Cool.

So, Monica, we heard your amazing intro and background. You had almost two decades in grants and fundraising roles, various nonprofits, including orgs like American Red Cross, current role at your alma mater, Eureka College. I would love for you to share with folks how you have built a grants or fundraising culture in your role and what strategies did you use to keep the organization rowing in that direction, moving while you're at the same time creating new systems. Like, I like to say you're sort of building the plane as you're flying it.

Monica: Well, that's certainly true. Thanks for having me. I'm honored to be honest with you all. I really appreciate the opportunity to share my experience. I like the introduction that said I have worked in nonprofit for a long time before I came to higher ed. So it's similar, but different, you know. When I was starting to do grants exclusively at Red Cross, for example, there wasn't really a central grants person when I started doing it. So a lot of the lessons I learned from back then translated when I started at Eureka College because there wasn't, I guess, a me before me. So definitely building a plane as we fly it. Or since we're talking about roadmaps, I was like it's kind of like I'm on a road trip and I kind of know the destination, but I don't know how to get there quite. But I'm like plotting it as I go. I think the thing that -- the thing that I had to strategize a lot -- and I joke -- I kind of joke about it. I felt like a lot of it -- and I knew this going in was going to be a little bit of treasure hunting.

So, I had to find out like what grants existed already. Right? And, like, who was involved with those. And then also, you know, did the college have, like, certain funders they were going to approach or certain, like, strategies they were trying to fund, and kind of starting from there and building it up. It's -- I'm still working on it. So it'll be three years next month, actually, that I've been here.

I'm still working on building that culture up. But as the introductions, I have had good luck so far with some of the funding we've had going on. It's kind of -- I'm fundraising, at the same time, I'm trying to build the processes because there needs to be processes in place. Because as we all know from nonprofit, higher ed because my school's small. So it's like it reminds me of a nonprofit a lot. Sometimes when somebody is at an organization a long time, they keep that knowledge in their head. And there's not -- it's not really written down anywhere or the processes have changed, you know, technology's changed. So, it's kind of like I have to devote a little bit of time to building the process at the same time that I'm trying to fundraise, if that makes sense, so.

Gauri: Yeah, 100%. Treasure hunting, that's such a good phrase.

Monica: And I just realized now I meant it in the -- it's getting the treasure to fund the programs, but also looking for the actual documents and --

Gauri: Yeah.

Monica: Things that you need.

Gauri: Awesome. And like what -- can you share more about what that what that looks like? What is it? Just like to paint a picture for folks. When you're treasure hunting, are you, like -- where are you looking? How are you organizing that? Just give folks a little bit of a peak of what that process looks like.

Monica: Sure. So I mean it started with my own internal team. So, I'm part of our development or advancement team on campus. And so, it started out like what do we have records of, right? And then also working with, like, the president or the provost or other faculty that might have had grants and meeting with those folks to find out, like, what's already been done. And then knowing, like, what the overall strategic plan is for the college, I was like, "Okay. So we need to prospect for certain things," right, that's more higher up on the priority less to, like, kind of -- it was a lot of, like, it's better now because I've been in it three years.

But in the beginning, it was kind of like, "I think I'm going to apply for, like, these grants from these types of funders." Some federal, some private, some state. And just kind of go from there and see how it kind of falls. I know we're going to talk about this a little bit later. But I also had to learn a lot about because it's different, right? I've changed industry. So, it's like I had to learn a lot of, like, lingo from -- to the new place I'm working. And also the people that -- other people that would be involved on campus. Like, the office of student life and career services, and admissions, and things like that, so that I had a rough idea of, like, how things worked and who would -- who would I be tapping on to help with the grant because I'm not a subject matter expert about all these things, right?

But I can definitely help write down, like, I'm a list maker. I like lists. I like to make steps. So it's like, who do I need to talk to, how are they going to be able to help get to where we need. Because usually, if you tell someone, "Hey, I want to help you get funding for your program," they're very excited to help you.

Gauri: Yeah. Totally. The word that came to mind as you were talking about this was "initiative," right? Like, you're in this new organization. You're trying to figure out where all the nuggets of wisdom are, where the insights are from people's heads figure out what the process is, what is the strategy, what is the approach we want to take. That requires a lot of initiative on your part and folks in this role to, like, really figure that out, figure that out and drive that process forward.

So on that note, you know, when we talk about big picture concepts, like, strategy can feel sort of abstract, not really sure where, you know, where to begin. I'm curious for the rest of the group here in the chat box. When you think about addressing, you know, getting a more clear picture of your strategy rolling at your organization, what's, like, one hard truth you've had to address? What's one thing you've had to face? Let us know in the chat box what your -- what you would say for -- is true for you. Not enough people to get it done. Looking only one year ahead versus more years ahead.

Time management. I see a lot of capacity wearing so many hats. Siloed information. Not experience with grants. Putting together a solid team. Aligning folks. The chat is moving quickly. Lots of really interesting nuggets here. Amazing. Thanks for sharing, folks.

For you, Monica, what would you say is, you know, the tough, but like most valuable starting points that helped you be really intentional about your strategic planning?

Monica: Sure. I'm looking at the chat as they comment. I'm like, "Oh, my gosh. This is just like hitting a dartboard." Like, all of these things. Some of those I don't think you can avoid because although I'm, like, helping my team, there's just one grant person here, and it's me. So, I don't have a ton of time either. I had to come up with a stra -- I'm working strategies of how to time manage myself and, you know, the capacity limits, and things.

When I first started, I kind of had to see where we were. And a good example is, I knew that, you know, aside from getting new funding and helping write grants, it's like, "Was there CRM or database that they keep track of all these things? What is it? Is there a prospecting database, you know, coming from another organization that had both of those? I kind of had to see that. So being that I think about everything in steps, I knew that I had to do kind of multiple things at once, multitask on writing the grants, prospecting the grants, and, like, building the data.

All of those I kind of are concurrently working on at the same time. And some of which I'm further heading because it's just me. And I -- we'll talk about this more in a second. But one of the things, like I had mentioned before, like, having those internal relationships to certain people in the organization, sometimes people don't want to help you right away, especially if they don't really know what that means or -- let's be real. If you mention fundraising your grants, people's eyes glaze over. And they don't really know how they want you to help them.

So it's kind of -- some of it was building just a relationship and being candid with people and just not wanting anything from them at first. Just, you know, kind of just being friendly with them because at some point, you know, you might have to come back to them and -- it's important to think about all the, like, your capacity to do certain things. Like, it's three years in and I'm still like, "Man, I haven't got all my data yet in our CRM." But I have to be like, "It's just me. It's okay. My supervisor is very understanding." We do have a plan for it. But, you know, how to be more realistic with what you can and can't do. It's really important to have, like, know how things need to be integrated. I always find it's important to see the things that we're needing to fund.

So back when I was a nonprofit, if I'm writing a grant about something, like a certain program, I kind of want to see it, at least briefly or, like, talk to somebody who actually does the program because it's makes more sense to do so. And it's kind of the same thing with, like, leadership and knowing the leadership know what program and, like, know there's a little bit more specifics about it. So, when they're out and talking with others externally, they can be a little bit more knowledgeable about it.

Going back to the capacity thing though, I feel like I still do this now. Sometimes I kind of have to play the bad guy when people get excited about applying to new grants and having to be like, "Well, maybe we could do that in a year or two." But now, we don't have the capacity to do. We might have the capacity to write the grant, but we don't have the capacity to run the program if you want it.

But I think the biggest thing is, is even though I like making steps in making a plan, there has to be this background knowledge that in that plan, you kind of have to be flexible because things might change. So the data entry thing, for example, that was my first project I wanted to do in that summer, my first summer, and I did not get that done. And then it didn't happen last year either.

But guess what, I did get a little bit farther in it this year. So it's kind of like knowing that some things take a little bit more time to get set up. Or maybe you put in a little bit of effort in the beginning. But it pays off later, such as like I started an internship program with grants, specifically. Because even though it was so much work up front, it's helpful now because then I have somebody to help me prospect, and edit, and do things like that, so.

Gauri: Awesome. That's a great tip, figuring out how to actually be, like, scrappy and get gets some additional internal capacity. I love what you mentioned about having more, like, interface with the programs and understanding the impact more. You mentioned, like, talking to folks. Is there anything else that has been helpful for you to get that deeper level of insight?

Monica: I like to go see things myself. I'm a visual person. So I need to, like, I guess, experience it or see it myself to kind of get a better idea or write more emotionally about the thing because a lot of funders like to have that little story or, you know, not just the facts and the statistics. They want those. But you need to kind of be, like, have that human touch to it, right? So, you know, whether it's going to see a program how it runs or, like, going to a campus event. It's not part of my job description, but I'll go to it because I want to see, like, how the students are reacting, and do they like it and talking to the students, actually.

A lot of them are -- I help write grants for a lot of the programming they do. So, they're grateful for the things in place. So it's nice to get, like, that firsthand experience. And sometimes the students will let you use like quotes and things. So, that's always good.

Gauri: Amazing. I love that. I saw a couple folks mention in the chat like silos. And I love that this is like a way to like break down the silo. I like to say that grant folks can often be like the quarterback of a lot of different, you know, processes and teams and needing to bring that all together. And the more integrated that feels, the more context everybody has across the board, I think the more successful folks will be of that. Yeah.

You mentioned plans being flexible and needing to change, of course. Many of our organizations are smaller, you're learning things, you know. You're trying to incorporate those learnings. Things happen externally. You had to handle disasters literally in your work in the Red Cross. I'm sure many of us had to operate outside of, like, business as usual. Tell us about a time when your team -- you or your team, like, needed to pivot the plan, you needed to be flexible. How did you do that while also maintaining, like, focus on what was mission critical?

Monica: Sure. I like sharing this from my past role at Red Cross because every -- a lot of people know what Red Cross is, right? Like, it's not just a National Organization is a global organization. And one of their main functions is disaster assistance and helping in disasters. And I wasn't on the disaster team, but I was in fundraising, right? I did grants. And that was still my core thing is I had to do the grants, turn them in, make sure the reports are done. Red Cross did a lot of preparedness. And not just, like, teaching others about preparedness, but internally we did a lot of preparedness where if it was kind of set up at the beginning of the fiscal year that if a disaster happens, whether locally or a really big one, that we kind of have a pivot to fundraise more for like a big hurricane or wildfires, or something. That each person on the team kind of had their own -- like a specific role to the disaster. Like, what would you be doing if a disaster happen?

But you still had to do, like -- the very core piece is I had to make sure the grants got submitted and the reports got done. But on top of that, like, what could I push off on some of the other duties as assigned? And, you know, everybody on the leadership team was well aware of, like, we're pivoting. So we actually used the terms "blue sky" and "gray sky." So blue sky was when everything was going well, you do your job, everybody does their jobs, and you fundraise whether that's, you know, donor development or stewardship or grants like I did. But then gray sky was when a disaster was coming or happened and we kind of pivoted.

On my specific piece, I was -- I kind of helped with two different things. I was -- I helped with external communications where I, like, helped with, like, emails, newsletters, getting, like, templates written out so that the fundraisers could send them out easily and quickly and not have to, like, rewrite it every time. And then I also helped with just answering phones and taking notes and getting things down like documented so that the person that could decide, you know, could this disaster use whatever this in kind donation or what have you. So it's kind of like we knew when to pivot and when -- because, you know, the disaster happened and it's kind of like a switch got turned.

Now, I know that in Red Cross' case, they're a big organization. It's been running a long, long time. It's kind of like clockwork. It's pretty smooth like it runs. But it's harder to get that set up when that's not really, like, that's a specific disasters. But I've had to kind of translate that to here because I know a nonprofit too and other things you have your main things you want to do or want to reach out to. But then last minute, things happen, you're reacting instead of being proactive. And it's kind of a balance you have to somehow get to.

I think our team specifically here have been working really hard on that in the past year. We've been trying to prepare and make processes for things so that when things have to pivot because of a crisis, or something comes up that we have to be in charge of, we can kind of pivot a little bit better because we already have a process in place and know who's going to do what, whether that's keeping the main function working or pivoting to the thing that needs addressed right away. We're still working on it.

But it's kind of helpful to know what, like, my main priorities I have to get done this week, for example. If something comes up, I can fit it in. But, you know, knowing which things you can move and not move, I guess.

Gauri: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Extreme prioritization is key. I love this mode of, like, blue sky, gray sky. I'm curious, like, when that transition happens, like, what did that look like? Was it like an email was sent out and it's like, "Hey, like, we're in, like, we're in this new mode now. Did you have like a meeting that was, like, all these people were sort of, like, trying to figure out now how to work together in this new mode? Like, how did you actually make that transition? Was it, like, really explicit?

Monica: Yes. I was at the Red Cross for a number of years. So I'm sure -- I was trying to remember, like, because to me it just felt like we just knew. But I think it's because, like, for example hurricane, you kind of know it's coming for a little bit. So, it's kind of like we were ready. Like, a day or two before.

But where I am from, there's lots of tornadoes. So sometimes you don't know there's going to be a tornado until it happens. It's pretty much knowing that a disaster happens, an email did get sent out. And it's like the first day -- the first business day when we needed to react. It was the first thing in the morning. Literally, the very first thing. We would jump on a quick call to be like, "All right. Everything's pivoting to gray sky. We need to get this in the sun. Is there anything we need to, you know, get tucked away or sent to someone, or a volunteer to get help for the blue sky things just to make sure like things were taken care of.

So it's wild when I think back to that because I feel like I actually used to watch the weather way more than I do now. But it's kind of like we all just knew that that's the mode we went in and we just went and did it.

Gauri: Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. I think, like, how people actually collaborate in those moments where they need to shift is so important. So, it sounds like you, you know, had a specific process where you, like, came together, you, like, were explicit about what was shifting and how people needed to pitch in differently, which makes a lot of sense.

And one thing that comes up a lot in nonprofit work, regardless of the role, is relationships. I want to shift gears a bit to that. That can be with the constituents we serve, the funders we work hard to cultivate and build long-term relationships with, it can, of course, be as we're talking about the Dynamics with our internal team. It ends up being, you know, can often be like very personal. I'm curious for you, Monica, how have relationships and relationship building, how's that impacted your overall strategic approach?

Monica: Well, I knew with my role -- and actually, this was one of the interview questions I got when I interviewed for this job asked me what would my first few steps be within my first week. And one of them that I said, I said, "I want to take a people tour, and which actually did happen after I started because I was very insistent. I wanted to know internally what people -- like, who am I going to be working with? But not just that, just who -- who's this new place I'm working in? Who am I going to be working with?

Now, in fundraising, obviously, and grants, like, you're working with a lot of external partnerships. And those are super important in relationship building and -- but I think internal collaborations is so key. It's so key to build those intra and inter departmental relationships because a lot of times you need help from others to get things that you need.

I don't know how many times, especially in my previous role, I had worked with a, like, accountant for, like, years at that point. And there were a couple times, last minute grant application needed a budget. Generally, that would take longer than a couple days. And she would help me out just because she -- her and I had built up a relationship over there. So, she would help me out. Or a couple weeks ago, actually when I had to call somebody and say, "Hey, I need more information about this program because there's a grant that's due." Easy application. I just -- I'm not a subject matter expert about this specific thing. So can you give me, like, where to go to get that information. And in my case, it's been very helpful, especially if you build that relationship in the beginning. So, they know who you are and know what you're doing.

But I think that translates too, like, like, making good relationship with who's on your board, making sure you get good board members on. You want people that are going to be invested. There's a really good article, actually, I think that I read on Instrumentl about the shiny object syndrome of the board. And I love that article because I -- the board gets very excited also about grants. And so, it's easier to talk to them more candidly when I have a relationship with a lot of them. I'm being like, "Hey, this is -- great ideas." But these are the, like, strategic direction I gotta -- we got to focus our work on this first. And then we can maybe do the others later. So, that's the thing is a lot of times I feel like when I talk about grant writing or fundraising, when people's eyes glaze over, it's not I don't think what people think it is.

It's a lot of relationships. It's all about the relationships and building those with the people internally and externally to just, you know, make that impact, whatever that may be with your mission.

Gauri: Yeah. Awesome.

I think this idea of, like, a people tour is really resonating with folks and, like, been, like, figuring out how to really build those relationships. Is there anything that you think you do, you know, really well in those conversations or when you have, you know, when you're on that people and you're getting to know folks and trying to have their eyes not glaze over? Is there anything in particular you can share about just tips for how to make that people tour as effective as possible?

Monica: It's hard. It's like being in -- I don't know if people can tell over this video call, but I'm an extrovert. I actually like meeting people and making connections. I think I just introduce myself and say what I'm doing and, you know, ask them more about them. I ask a lot of questions what they do and where -- maybe where they're from before and make -- sometimes I can make a connection that way. Because at first when I -- make, I guess, creating a relationship between some, it's not what I want out of them, it's just getting to know them as a person. And then I can come back to that later if I ever need a meeting and you can build upon that.

It's just, I guess, it's just being a friendly person and just being interested in what they have to say and do. And a lot of people have really cool stories, and you can build upon that to get the impact made and the work done.

Gauri: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Really understanding, like, what their goals are, where they're coming from, what their perspective is, what that context is to help figure out how you can both, like, work together effectively.

I love that. Cool. All right. Well, thank you, Monica. I've got one last question for you. So many great nuggets have been shared. And this is on -- you know, you're a one person grant team. And so, there's a lot of expectations on you, a lot of expectations folks put on themselves on their teams, on the organization. And we're doing such meaningful valuable work. But inevitably, we may not always stay on track with our strategy, things might not always go according to plan, but we need to, like, stay motivated and stay, you know, focused on our mission. I'm curious for you, like, what are your small but mighty wins? Like, how do you make sure, like, you go easy on yourself sometimes? How do you, like, recognize those small wins and celebrate?

Monica: Yeah. It's easy to get lost in the weeds. You know, when -- I'm just going to say this because I think it's slightly funny. There was one point in my career very early career that I I said out loud, "I would never want to do grants full time." I said that. And that's obviously didn't come true because that's what I do now. But it's because I didn't understand really what it was, I guess. And I feel like sometimes I get and I've been doing this almost 19 years at this point. And I'm like, "I don't understand why I" -- and I'm sure others have. I think they call it impostor syndrome where you think, "Do I really know what I'm doing?"

And then reminding myself that, especially in the first few weeks when I was here that people don't know what you do specifically and they don't really -- they might not understand how it actually works and having a central person to get that done. When I came here, I was super lucky in the beginning. I think the first, like, seven grants we won. The first seven grants I submitted won. And everybody was like, "Wow, you're like 100% success rate." And I was like, "Guys, this is not normal."

Most of the time, it's like I think the statistic is between 10 and 30% success rate, right? This is just -- these key ones that somebody pointed out to me that were already kind of build upon a relationship and already kind of going and I just helped move it along, so my percentage has gone down, of course, since then. But I think just knowing how to balance expectations with people and then for my own and then for my own personal self is just knowing how to balance. They say -- call it work-life balance. Like, how to balance your time.

I'm only one person. I can only do so much, right? But as long as I am meeting the goals, like our team sets goals for ourselves, and we have input into that. So it's like as long as we're meeting the goals and kind of on the right track, I think that's important. And I feel like one of the ways -- I feel like winning life, right, is it's kind of knowing also when you need a reset time. Like, I always joke that -- I always take my birthday off, for example.

And every year for, like, over a decade, it's always like kind of feels, like, the worst time. There's always, like, grant reports to. But I always take it off. I don't care because I have to have that reset time to keep going and keep doing a good job, you know. Just because I don't want to burn out or disappoint anyone. So, knowing that I need to make time for myself too to make sure that I can reset.

Gauri: Amazing. Yeah.

I always find that when I take some time off and come back was such a different brain, different refreshed brain. Cool. Thank you so much, Monica. This was amazing.

Monica: You're welcome. You're welcome. Thanks for having me. It's been great. I'm a big fan of Instrumentl. So, I'm excited to be here today.

Gauri: Amazing. Thank you.

Rachel: Thank you both so much. This was just such a treat. We loved hearing all these insights.

I'm going to actually share a couple that really stood out to me though. There were probably many more that I could have kind of taken away from this session. Some of the key takeaways that I heard from Monica in this conversation with Gauri, strategy starts a little bit with honesty, honesty about where you're at. You should make sure that you have an understanding of your strengths and some areas for growth. And that may take some tough conversations. That may take some dedicated time and decisions made with leadership. But that honesty will really set you up in a strategic direction that will hopefully get you to a high performance state.

The second being, plan for flexibility and pivot with purpose. I kind of like this little nugget because I feel like Monica's "gray sky," "blue sky" functioning really did highlight this idea of we have a plan in place when things aren't going exactly to plan, right? And that could be so hard. But I love that idea of having that ready to go.

And then lastly, that strong relationships can really drive progress. Again, this takes time this takes effort. But building those initial relationships, connecting with people for the sake of connecting and then, you know, saying, "Hey, I'd really love your help with an impact statement for this grant report that I have due next week. And now you have an in with someone who's going to give you a really great nugget that you can use on that killer grant application.

So thank you, Monica. Those were such wonderful insights, and I'm excited to kind of take us into our next indicators of success. I'm going to pass this over to Nia so she can take us on to the next section.

Nia: Thank you, Rachel.

And actually, I want to highlight Barbara in the chat just said, "Monica, great talk and thanks for sharing the good, bad, and ugly." And isn't that the truth? I feel like regardless of what sector of nonprofit work we're in, there is just a base level experience that we all share, the good and the bad, with nonprofits. So, I think that was a really good comment that stood out to me.

And one of the trends that I'm picking up on so far is that being high impact really depends on being high performing. And so, this might seem obvious, but how can we expect our organization to meet and exceed goals if we're not operating at our full potential? And so, recognizing those gaps is a crucial first step.

Monica talked about stepping into a new role and then immediately seeing those gaps and having to split time between getting the work done. So keeping that impact going, but also building a system of high performance to grow that impact. And you're all doing such important work. We want to have the highest impact possible. So, let's get to that state of high performance.

And I want to get the ball rolling with a quick reflection. I would love to hear from all of you what your number one takeaway from the previous session was. So, what was a nugget of wisdom that really stood out to you? I know the chat was super active. A lot of you are relating to what Monica had to say. But if you had to think back and think about one thing that really stood out to you, and I'll give folks a moment to think about it and add some thoughts in the chat.

And if you want to get really fancy, you can share your answer on LinkedIn. So, post something you learned from the last session on LinkedIn. Be sure to tag us and add the hashtag #NonprofitGrowth24. And we'll actually pull some live raffle winners at the end of this upcoming session. So in real time, it's all happening here. Now is your chance.

I'll give you a second to make that post, share in the chat. Yeah, being able to pivot. That's a super important one. It's not a waste of time to network. Don't burn out.

People tour, yeah. Relationship building before the ask. Personal interactions. Yeah. So many good nuggets of wisdom. I mean, wow. This is -- I love to see each of you being able to relate to Monica's experience in one way or another even if we're all working in different organizations. Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing those thoughts. And feel free to keep sharing as we jump back into the question. That's at the heart of today's summit, which is what does being a high-performing nonprofit actually look like?

And I'm going to share a couple more indicators here. So, Monica and Gauri just explored how aligning time, resources, and goals with your mission can help your nonprofit steer with a stronger strategy. And so, time for the big reveal for the next one. High-performing nonprofits are nurturing existing stakeholders and engaging new ones with their storytelling. So more and more, we're seeing nonprofits stand out and get people excited and passionate about their work, and then be able to tap into new or more resources through their communication strategy. So this could be leveraging emerging social media platforms.

I know the chat was already buzzing about TikTok. So something like that. Or it could be getting really strategic with good old emails. And then the next indicator is that high-performing nonprofits are letting good data and not feeling driven decision-making. So, so much of what we do as nonprofit professionals is about our cause. And often, that impact can feel really hard to quantify. I don't want to speak for everyone. But this was surely the case for me and many of my nonprofit peers. Data and numbers don't necessarily come instinctively, and my focus was always on the qualitative. So the work we're doing, the mission, what it means for those impacted. But it took me a while to figure out how to attach good data indicators to those angles of our work because you can. And data is so crucial to enabling our own success for -- everything from guiding strategy to securing long-term funding to do more of the work that we're so passionate about. And then the final indicator for now is that high performing nonprofits are retaining donors and funders and leveraging multi-year giving.

So at Instrumentl, we actually publish regular insights reports about the world of grants and funding. So, we catch a lot of trends as they emerge. And we know that in 2024, only 24% of private funders are giving to new grantees. That's less than a quarter. It is a tough world out there. So retaining existing donors and funders has never been more crucial. And we actually have a panel of experts here to talk about all three of these points. So I'm going to leave it to them to dive deeper into this with you.

And with that, I want to introduce our speakers for this session. We're being joined by our friends from some incredible companies here: SureImpact, memoryfox, givzey, Storyraise, and Instrumentl, of course. These folks work with over 2,000 nonprofits weekly, exploring specifically those three indicators that I just mentioned. And I am so excited they're here to share their insights and tips for getting to that next level.

I'm actually going to turn it over to the speakers to introduce themselves and then we'll Dive Right in. So let's have Priya kick it off for us.

Priya: Hi. Good morning, everyone. My name is Priya. I'm tuning in here today from Chicago, Illinois. I am the head of customer success at Instrumentl where I'm humbled to work with over 4,000 nonprofits and help support grant seekers with finding, managing, and winning more grants every day.

Nia: Sheri, do you want to continue?

Sheri: Yeah. Absolutely. Hello, everyone. I'm excited to be here. Thank you, Instrumentl, for this amazing opportunity to learn and grow. I'm Sheri Chaney Jones, founder and CEO of SureImpact. We are an online platform that lightens your load by making impact measurements easy and accessible by basically leveraging your case management functions and analyzing all of the data for you.

Chris: So, I'm Chris Miano. I'm the founder and CEO of MemoryFox, which is a technology tool that helps nonprofits collect, organize, design, and share impact stories that are collected directly from their community. So one tangible way we help nonprofits be successful is through our commitment to ethical storytelling through features that we build into our tool like rigorous consent management, as well as through educational resources like our 2023 ethical storytelling report. So I'm excited to share these with you, and really happy to be here.

Emily: Hi, everyone. I'm Emily Groccia. I am the VP of customer success at givzey. Givzey is an end-to-end gift agreement platform that enables nonprofits to scale multi-year giving to every level of giving and bring all forms of gift documentation onto one platform.

Josh: Hi, everyone, and thank you Instrumentl. And hi, Sheri and hi, Chris. I'm Josh Kligman, co-founder and CEO of Storyraise. Storyraise is a solution for nonprofits to create engaging digital reports for donors. So think annual reports, impact reports, and donor reports. Thanks for having us.

Nia: Awesome. Thank you so much for introducing yourselves. And I'm so excited we could get all five of you in one room at the same time. It is not easy to coordinate schedules nowadays. I'm sure all of you nonprofit folks know that as well, getting six people in the room at the same time is a feat. So, I'm really excited you're all here.

And I want to note that we will have time for questions at the end. So please use the Q&A box to leave any questions you have. I'll come back to them at the end. Chat is great, but it does get a little busy. So if you use the Q&A box, we'll be sure that we can actually see your question and come back to it.

And with that, I want to dive right into our discussion. So the first indicator that I talked about was that high-performing nonprofits are nurturing existing stakeholders and engaging new ones with their storytelling. And I actually want to take a step back before we dive into best practices. I want to understand what do engage stakeholders at a high-performing nonprofit look like. And I'll have Emily start us off.

Emily: Sure. So, Nia, you indicated just a second ago in that second indicator that storytelling was an important indicator for high-performing nonprofits. And that's because high-performing nonprofits understand that stakeholders need to be involved with the entire organization and its mission and not just one person at the organization.

So I think, first of all, as fundraisers, we build relationships with donors. But more importantly, it's our job, you know, if we're really thinking about the long-term future of the organizations that we're with. It's our job to build a relationship with the organization and the donor. So, that really -- that relationship lasts longer than the donor's -- than the, excuse me, the fundraiser's relationship with the organization, right, and their career at the organization. That's really future proofing, you know, as the title of this whole day, that relationship between the donor and the organization.

And I think the other thing that's important, you know, beyond just that at a little bit of a deeper level is that stakeholders have to have a multi-channel engagement journey with these organizations. So, it can't just be a donor. It can't just be a volunteer. There needs to be multiple points of engagement, really, to get that donor or that stakeholder involved at every level.

For donors, maybe that's even multiple areas of support. If you work for a little bit of a larger nonprofit, getting the donor supporting multiple areas and multiple mission and impacts that your organization is a part of is important. If they're volunteers, they need to see right the work that your organization is doing through their own eyes, attend events, be advocates for your organization, social media connectors within their own network.

To me, those are those four buckets: the donors, the volunteers, the event attendees, the advocates. And really, high- performing organizations understand that stakeholders need all of it. They can't just fit, you know, one person per bucket.

Nia: Okay. Thank you, Emily.

So, pivoting back to storytelling. Are there differences in the storytelling tactics used to engage new audiences versus cater to those existing supporters, so existing donors or stakeholders?

Josh.

Josh: Yeah. And I just want to comment on Emily's first point because I really agree with that, about this long-term game. And that just makes me think of engagement. And it's really no different than how you engage with brands that you like. So if you love Starbucks and you're going there all the time and you're making a purchase and then you go home and you see certain promos from your Starbucks app pop up on your phone and you're getting different emails from them. I mean those are all really targeted and very specific thoughtful emails to someone with your profile. They're kind of segmenting you into one of their audience groups. And, you know, it's no different in the nonprofit world.

It's just a different marketing channel, or channels you're going through, like this multi-dimensional approach that Emily mentioned. So, I think that's a great point. Nia, to your question, I think, yeah, there's times when you want to send the same message to everybody. And then there's times when you need to separate it out. So everyone might want to hear the same impact stories in an annual report or impact report just for example. And that covers both new and existing audiences.

It's broad information. But the existing supporters are worth stewarding and supporting in a different way because that's far more costly and timely to go out there and find new supporters all over again. Far more costly. So, think about the different messages that you can craft just for them. I like to think of personalized, you know, donor reports built just for those audiences as an example. So, this is an example of audience segmentation. And that's crucial to take the time to at least think about that strategy of segmenting out those audiences.

I'll give one more example, which is outside of the nonprofit world. I think it's kind of like throwing a party. Saying this out loud. Maybe it's not a great example. But, like, you send out this invitation to everybody, right? But then behind the scenes, Chris, I'm going to pick you out. I'm going to call you and say, "Hey, stay late because we're going to have a lot of fun." But I'm not saying that to everybody. So, I'm sending different people different messages.

The point is, it's customized to certain people. And that's something to think about with new and existing donors.

Nia: And, Chris, since you got called out right there, I'd love to hear if you have anything to add to that.

Chris: Well, I mean, I like to kind of reframe it a little bit. And I'd like to think of our top of our fundraising funnel as, like, community member versus non-community members, like a social media follower. Like, that's a community member. They can like and share your posts. They can tell others about you. Are they, like, technically a supporter? Maybe not. Like, that's the critical inflection point. And we don't -- we definitely don't want other community members, right? Like, even though they're at the very top of our funnel, even though they're not traditionally supporters.

So if we're drawing people into our community and that's the focus, you know, we want to at the top of the funnel draw people in by consistently telling stories about our community members, like volunteers, donors, clients, employees, everybody. Like, what we're trying to do right is we're trying to put up a big welcome sign to draw people into our funnel and into our community. And you want people to click like, or follow, or subscribe.

And they're only so many channels that you can really achieve that. So, you need that welcome sign content that works great on social media, that makes people feel excited about joining an actual community. And so, once they're in your funnel, it's about building expectations about being consistently moved by the mission. That's where it's about consistent impact stories and delivering those.

So, a newsletter every month, impact story Fridays, donor appreciation month, multi-channel, live -- and even at your live events and programs. This, of course, it draws in new community members. But the center of gravity is your existing supporters. You're giving them an ROI by sort of educating and entertaining them to retain and grow them and make them feel like they're part of something.

And the other sort of part to this is, once they're community members and in your funnel, collect their story. Getting someone to share their story is one of the most powerful ways to move someone through your funnel to become actual supporters to convert them from community member at the top of your funnel into actually a donor or a volunteer or even an employee.

Josh: Yeah. You tell a story that says, "Oh, our nonprofit put a new playground in the community." That's great. But it's a little bland compared to now our recipients of the money that you gave, you know, like little Johnny and Susie, are going to go after school every day and they're using that playground because of you, right? It's a much more tangible, personable like a way of telling stories.

Chris: But even showing like your volunteers and telling their story too and telling everybody's story, like I said, that welcome sign of like, "Hey, everybody is a part of this." You know, not just the clients. Not just, you know, whoever. That's the way we like to think about it. It's like telling a lot of stories that are really just big welcome signs.

Nia: So, Chris and Josh, while we're on that topic, so you outlined several different strategies, that welcome sign and then converting them into actual supporters. So say we have a storytelling strategy that we're employing right now. Surely, it's not one size fits all. So maybe, what we're works for Josh isn't going to work for Chris. So, what are those indicators of successful storytelling? How do we know if something is really landing and resonating with our audience? Or if it's maybe time to pivot to a different storytelling strategy.

Chris: Yeah. I mean, that's literally what we think about every single day at MemoryFox, is like our goal is to be your storytelling strategy, is like be the thing that facilitates that. And so, one of the things we've observed is that great storytelling begets more great storytelling. And so, great storytelling organizations generates storytelling momentum. And they create this sort of virtuous cycle of community members who consistently, you know, delight in their organization's impact stories. But also on the other side of it is community members who, by extension of that, consistently delight in contributing storytelling content. So they're contributing pictures and videos from events or they're contributing stories of their own. It's two-sided.

And to really have that great organization, you really need both of that. And so, there's a lot of analytics that go into ROI that I think Josh is going to touch on. But before that ROI can even happen, you need those powerful community generated stories. So for me, a simple North Star is to ask ourselves like, "How likely is someone to contribute storytelling content? Like, how much are we getting?" And so, that's an indicator of so much that's, like unsaid. So do people trust that we'll ethically leverage their story? Or are we going to be exploitative about it? Do we have the right mechanisms in place to make it easy to share stories? Are we asking all the time? Do community members feel connected to the mission enough to take the time to share content? And so, that last one is, like, literally one of the greatest indicators of connection to your community. Will a donor submit a story, a volunteer, a client, an employee even?

So, like, elevating people's community stories, like, I think of it as a good in and of itself. Like, that's what we do as part of our mission. And so, but you can work yourself into a little bit of a pickle if your board or executive director is sort of unimpressed with the analytic results. And so, building community takes time. I think we mentioned this before. Time. It takes consistency probably above all else, and the payoff is massive.

But if you're always sort of chasing these, like, engagement analytics that are very weekly or monthly, like, your executive director is like, "We've been doing this for two months. Like, when's the payoff?" Well, it takes a while to build like a really good flywheel to be successful moving forward with storytelling.

Josh: Yeah. It's definitely cumulative. And then, you know, if your board is, you know, looking for you to present metrics, I think that's an important thing to consider too. Maybe there's that goal, like Chris was saying, you're chasing or maybe you're just showing an increase that you've had since your last campaign or earlier that year or the previous year. And you know what Chris kind of laid out is like this nice, solid strategy that kind of, you know, has step by step instructions to it, right?

And then once you have these stories in place, you can then track the metrics from it. So, I was talking earlier about engagement. So I'm thinking about how that ties to donor retention. And, you know, there's different indicators with the stories that can occur. It's very different when you're talking about tracking through social media versus tracking something that's tied to a case for giving where you have a solicitation going on, like end of year or capital campaign than email. So, they all have different metrics that you want to think of.

But you can separate out those, you know, within the metrics, those analytics. So for example, if you are thinking about end of year because that's coming up so soon and you're going to have donation forms, right? You might want to have different donation forms for those different marketing channels for different types of stories that you're telling so that you can see if your efforts are driving that ultimate goal that you want.

If it's just about awareness in other types times of the year or you're just saying thank you, there's different ways that you can track engagement there. I mean, social media does a nice job of packaging it up. So, that's easy.

That story ray since we focus on digital reports, it's really about how many times people are clicking throughout different reports. So you're saying, "Thank you. It was a great year. We couldn't have done it without you. Here's our impact stories. Are they clicking around?" And then you take a look at that and compare that to what you did last time and then what you did next time. That's how you can tell of your strategy for all these stories that you collected is sound, if people like the stories.

And, of course, people will give you, you know, feedback, you know, right into your inbox and say, "Hey, we love this," and then, you know, the donations get tied to it. So you almost have to figure out that kind of plan for how you want to say, "All right. We were successful at the end of the year because of these reasons in the beginning," and then track it all the way through.

Nia: Awesome. And that actually transitions us perfectly into speaking about data because you're talking about that impact and, like, what is impact, what are we measuring? And so, I want to pivot to our second indicator, which was high-performing nonprofits. Let data and not feeling drive decision making. And that is in storytelling as well as just general strategy. So I talked a little about how -- being data driven was one of those things that didn't come naturally to me at my nonprofit. And we really had to make an effort to learn how to do that.

So, Sheri, I'm wondering if you can speak about how, like, what tools or practices make data driven decision-making more accessible to organizations with smaller budgets or organizations that maybe haven't really implemented a system of good data at their org yet.

Sheri: Thank you, Nina. You are speaking my love language. I absolutely love to talk about how to make data collection impact measurement easy for nonprofits. Because to your point, it isn't everyone's love language like it is mine. And so, some things to recognize is that in this day and age, data are required.

Donors, funders, they want to be engines of its impact. So, they're looking to invest in your nonprofits so that they can achieve the social change that they're passionate about. They don't have time to do the work. But your nonprofit is the experts in that work. And so, they want to invest their resources into the nonprofits that can demonstrate. They're achieving the social change. And so, you need to be able to demonstrate to them with numbers and data how you're doing that. And some of the best practices to make sure that you have this information at your fingertips so you never lose out on a grand opportunity or a pitch if you're meeting with a donor is to fit data collection and impact measurement strategies in your organization.

Our research has shown that the only barrier to having a data-driven impact measurement culture is the commitment and willingness of the leader. It's not an organization's budget. It's not their size. It's basically the leader saying, This is important. We need to do this." And so, you build your organization's workflows around data collection. So, you know, in technology today allows this to be much easier than it ever has been before.

But the best practices are to, you know, have the impact measurement tracking happen while you're doing your work. And, you know, looking for systems to automate as much as possible in terms of giving you those analytics and insights at your fingertips.

Nia: For sure. I think that point about leadership having to be bought into that culture of data is so important.

Priya, I'm wondering if you can speak to best practices for fostering data-driven culture amongst both leadership and then also staff, the people who are, you know, running those programs and doing all that work.

Priya: Sure. So, I would start always with KPIs. Most of us have KPIs for our missions. And so, I think it's really important to start there so that you're focusing on the data that's actually going to serve your core objectives. From there, similar to what Sheri said, you know, investing in the right tools and technology, and making sure that those tools are accessible to everyone so that staff also can actually access that data and leverage it in their day to day. It's not okay to just have tools. We also need to pair that with training and support. People need to feel really clear on how to use those things, have the right data literacy, and actually engage with that data in a way that it supports their role.

There's lots of free trainings and things you can get online. But I personally think learning by doing and just practicing and really just pushing yourself to incorporate data into your work is, like, the best way to really move towards that culture. So, you know, maybe just focus on something that doesn't feel measurable and just push yourself to try and measure it.

You'll get better the more you do that in terms of finding better ways to measure your goals that don't always feel clear. Another aspect of training that I think is really important is helping under people understand good data hygiene. There's nothing like bad data to help you draw the wrong conclusions to disincentivize people from wanting to use data. So starting really small, helping people just understand why do we collect the data that we collect and how can you make sure that we're collecting the right things can be a great way to then help them take the next step to say, "What insights can I draw from this data now that I know, like, why it's so useful to our organization.

And one other thing I'd add for training as well is building out a data dictionary. This can be terms that are specific to your organization. Maybe you have custom attributes that you track in your CRM. Maybe you have some financial metrics, you know, help everybody see what the operational definition of that looks like so that they all know, like, what do we really mean when we say a long-term funder? Like, what do we consider to be that in our organization and how do we calculate these things so everybody feels clear and can really speak the same language and also really helps when new people join to really understand how you're thinking about those different things in your business?

One other thing I'd add in order to really go from starting off with data to ingraining it into your culture is it can feel very sequestered to have one project that's focused on data. It can feel like it's really just not actually and, like, integrated into your business and an afterthought. So keep the scope of the actions really, really small, but try to spread them across many areas of your business. So, maybe you're just focusing on data collection. Maybe you're just focusing on making goals measurable or maybe it's just having a plan on how you'll measure and report on impact before starting a project.

But try to do that across multiple programs rather than having just one project that you want to focus on data so that it really permeates across your organization. So, just to give an example. Let's say you do have a program. You're trying to empower a thousand people. What does it actually mean to empower a thousand people? Create a plan to say how you're going to measure what empowerment is. So, are you going to deploy a survey? And they have a certain number of people have to answer that survey in a particular way to be considered empowered. Are you going to collect specific data and have them hit a certain benchmark?

You can then encode that into your data dictionary. Make sure everybody feels clear on that. Make sure you're collecting the right information based on how you've defined that and then really rally your entire program or on making sure you're actually working towards that plan of, you know, what does it mean to empower a thousand people so we know we'll achieve the impact that we want by the time we finish this program.

Nia: I love that. And I know the chat is blowing up because they love data dictionary. And I will say that for me was a big thing because when we started doing that at my organization, we very quickly realized that.

Even within my program, we were not on the same page about what certain things meant. We think we're all working towards the same goal, but we're all tracking it differently and we're approaching it differently. So even if you already have indicators that are established within your organization, it's always a good exercise to just sit down with people and say, "Are we actually on the same page about this? And if not, let's get to that point." So, Sheri, I want to come back to you really quick. So, let's say we've employed all of these strategies and we're collecting all this data or data.

Sorry to alienate someone if we pronounce it differently. But let's say we've got all these metrics. How do we know what it's telling us? And what I really want to understand is, what are the signals that nonprofits should look for in their metrics that indicate that a shift in strategy is necessary? Whether that's, you know, scaling because it's all going well or pivoting to something new, because the data is telling us this isn't working out.

Sheri: Yeah. That's an excellent question. And I agree with everything that Priya said about how to create a data-driven culture within your organization. And I think starting with that data dictionary, or I like to call it your theory of change in logic model and making sure you have measurable goals that are attached directly to that logic model is the starting point to include data in your strategy and in your, you know, decision- making for programmatic changes and shifts.

And that is making sure you have three types of data. You need to be able to tell the story and use data to understand who are you serving, making sure that you're serving the right population. Sometimes we find that nonprofits aren't as effective as they think they are because they're not even working with the right population. For example, if you're working with women who are hard to reach and you're working for infant vitality, for example, it's important that you know what ZIP codes those women are coming from, what are their needs so you can make sure you're targeting in your outreach is working as best as possible.

The second type of data that you need is how well are you doing it? Sometimes you might find that your outcomes aren't what you want because of issues of cultural responsiveness. A lot of the research that we've done for nonprofits look at the fact that although the program is effective, the families that they're trying to serve don't believe that it is for them. So we need to make sure the relationship between how well we're doing something is connected to our outcomes because that might be where we need to pivot. It's not our program is bad. It's, "Oh, we need to change our hours or we need to change our messaging."

And then the third thing is, how are people better off? And this is the key gold in terms of making sure that you are achieving your mission. So, you don't have to have tons of metrics about how people are better off. But really think about why do you do what you do and how would you measure that? How would you know that you are 100% successful and making sure you have measurable goals related to that success and you're tracking it and, you know, all the time?

You know that number. Any given time you can log in and you know what your success rate is. And then you can use those three types of data to understand where do you need to scale. Maybe you're having great success in one ZIP code or with one population, but not another. So now, you change your strategy to make sure that you're meeting the needs of all the people that you have. So, it's creating the right framework and collecting the right data. And then, you can make some really powerful strategy decisions.

Nia: Awesome. Thank you so much.

And just in the interest of time, I'm going to skip on over to our third indicator. I know there's a whole lot more we could say about data. But I want to have enough time to talk about retaining donors because the third indicator that I had mentioned was that high performing nonprofits are retaining donors and leveraging multi-year giving.

I mentioned that less than a quarter of private funders are open to giving to new grantees. And that's just that's such a small chunk. So, Emily, I'd love to hear from you. How do you transition onetime or annual donors into multi-year donors?

Emily: Sure. So Sheri, you know, said data was her love language. I'll get on my soap box for this one for sure. Multi-year giving is our love language at Givzey, absolutely. And a lot of our customers come to us without a multi-year giving strategy in place. But knowing that for whatever reason, their particular initiatives they have upcoming, a campaign. It's a strategy they need to employ, specifically as you mentioned around donor retention.

So, we encourage our customers to scale multi-year giving to all levels of giving. Not just use it as a payment vehicle for major gifts, which is, you know, the typical pledge, right? It's just really a way for a major gift owner to spread those payments out. But instead, really use it as a strategy for pipeline and for retention.

This a good one to pair with the storytelling Chris emphasized earlier, you know, when Chris was talking. That's super important component to pipeline building, right? Is storytelling and engagement. And so, is annual giving, making a gift for multiple years in a row for a number of years. And you really need both because, typically, a major gift donor is making a major gift after multiple years of giving, not as their first-time gift.

I know everyone on this call could give me a story of a major donor who gave their first-time gift as a major gift. But statistically, there are more that do take multiple years of engagement and giving before they get there. So, what we do is encourage folks to really usher that donor into a multi-year commitment. Pair it with storytelling and do that first by identifying the opportunities. Who can you engage in a multi-year gift? Are those your libuns and sibuns certainly that helps with retention? Do you have giving societies that really lend themselves naturally to a multi-year gift? Boards, I cannot talk enough about boards and multi-year giving. But really, they should be modeling what you're going to be asking of your donors. And it starts there. And it's not just -- if you're a larger organization, it's -- I'm not just talking about your high-level top board of trustees.

I'm talking about any organized group of individuals, volunteers, committees, all of that throughout the whole organization. And then once you've identified those, it's developing your "why." Your "why" can't be because we really need your gift for the next three years, because their question back to you is going to be, "Well, I give out every year, anyway," right? Because they think they do a lot of the time. Sometimes they miss a year here or there, but they intend to give every year. So, you need to bring a why beyond just -- we want to make sure that your gift doesn't lapse, right? A lot of times, we're talking about creating like a 5 to 10 point mini micro campaign, my colleague likes to call it, of what are things your organization wants to do over the next three years. Not big things. Not giant capital projects.

This is not a comprehensive campaign here. These are just little things that your organization plans to do in ways that they want to make an impact, that they need your continued support to do, not just a single one-time gift. Sometimes there's initiatives that lend themselves to those multi-year gift opportunities in higher at an independent schools. It's particularly easy, you know, supporting students across their four years at the institution, that kind of thing. But those examples live, really, in all areas of nonprofits.

And then finally, tailoring your ask to the donor. So again, not every donor comes into to the ask at the same point. If this is a donor that has never given, or maybe has given once or long lapse kind of thing, it's -- will you make your gift today and pledge to give again at this time next year? It's just sort of that light intro to multi-year giving. For a donor that says no, say, "Well, we know you don't usually give in September, you usually give in April, will you just pledge to make your gift in April?" And get that commitment now instead of wait till April to solicit it.

So again, just sort of getting them into the idea of committing to a gift at a later date and then, you know, developing that a little bit along the way to eventually be a multi-year gift. And, obviously, you're longtime supporters. Those are your prime candidates for, "Will you give for the next three to five years? And here's the initiatives why we need that support.

Nia: Yeah. I like that. I like you mentioning the "why." The "why" has to be really compelling, right? And it also has to prove to the funder that you're worth giving money to over and over again.

So, I want to actually lead into my next question. Priya, I'm wondering what are key indicators that funders look for when they decide to commit to a nonprofit over several years? So, how can you best demonstrate that, you know, the why is strong for you?

Priya: Yeah. So a clear multi-year strategic plan that outlines milestones, scalability, and growth over time to show that, you know, your organization is ready for sustained investment is going to be really, really big. If you can pair that with a clear risk management strategy, that also shows that, like, you've already done the work to anticipate where things could go wrong in a longer-term project and how you actually plan to get ahead of that, that's going to be really, really helpful as well. And everywhere you can, like, leaning on that data to really weave that into your story to really illustrate your impact that's really going to highlight for them, you know, what you've already achieved and how you can, you know, do something longer term in the future as well.

I also, you know, highly recommend, you know, showing your track record of how you are really able to consistently deliver results. You know, what systems do you have in place? You know, what resources does your organization have that shows that it's going to be able to do that? And if you've had any programs or projects where you've been able to knock it out of the park, you know, really illustrate the impact that you've been able to make there and how you did that so that they can see that you have the right resources in order to continue to do that.

Lastly, I'd also say, if you have other funding sources, really highlight and showcase that. It's going to show that there are other stakeholders buying into your organization's mission and your why. It'll show you you have financial stability, and that there's people rallying behind your vision and, you know, get them excited to also want to be in that group and do the same.

Nia: Yeah. For sure. The buy in from others is such a big part of it. I know we're coming up close on time. So, I'm just going to transition to our final question here. And I would love -- I mean all of you gave a lot of really good insight, a lot of really good strategies here.

And I would love if we could just distill it down to one nugget of wisdom from each of you. So, what's the first thing you would suggest that people at this summit do in this room after this webinar to set their nonprofit up for success in 2025 Just like one thing to take away from it.

And, Josh, let's go -- let's start with you.

Josh: I would say test something new, right? Test a new way to engage your donors. And I talked earlier about segmentation. So, it doesn't need to be across the whole board with everybody.

It could just be with a small group of donors you're largest or smallest. But, you know, take something you're learning from today, and test away.

Nia: Love that. I think we often fall into a pattern of just business as usual. And testing is so important. I love that one.

Chris, let's go to you.

Chris: Yeah. I mean I'm a little biased, but start building a culture of storytelling. Like, really think about what that means. You know, try to make every communication you have like sort of a two-way conversation. So, you know, in your newsletter, ask for stories, ask for replies.

In your emails, ask for comments. In your social posts, ask, you know, volunteers to answer surveys after events. And, you know, you could consider a pro platform like MemoryFox. You can do it yourself, right? You can do these things yourself. And, you know, it takes a little time, like I said, to build that virtuous circle.

But once it starts and you have your beautiful, like, qualitative stories and your beautiful quantitative data, like, as Sheri and I joke, it's like peanut butter and jelly. And, like, you have those things working in concert with each other, you got a delicious sandwich. So, that would be my recommendation, the real culture of storytelling.

Nia: Yeah. And you got to start somewhere, right? You're not going to get to that peanut butter jelly if you don't just start from scratch sometimes.

Emily, let's hear your nugget.

Emily: Also biased like Chris. But for me, so I'm a transitioner. I worked in nonprofit for 10 years and I've worked in tech for the last four and a half or so. And obviously, my nugget for you all is to think about retention build multi-year giving into your engagement strategies at every level. But just start doing it. Don't spend the next year planning it. In nonprofit, we love to sit around a table and plan, and plan, and plan, and strategize, and strategize. But, you know, now that I'm on the other side of things and working in startup tech, we do the opposite. We just start, right? We just start and we learn from it and we build on it and we get better at it.

And it's not perfect right away and we don't have all the i's dotted and the t's crossed. But we start and we're able to make an impact so much faster. And that's so important in nonprofits. More important than it is in tech to make a faster impact. And so, that's what I'd encourage you to do is take, you know, any of these nuggets, certainly mine for multiyear giving is what I'd like. But take any of them and just start doing it.

Nia: A hundred percent. I think for me, that's so top of mind because I was in nonprofits up until just a couple months ago. And for me, that's been the biggest transition is, if I spent months at my nonprofit planning out the perfect project in this sector, it's like you have a day and just start and you'll adapt as you go. And that would have helped me so much at my nonprofit to just get things going. So, I love that one.

That one's really important. Sheri, let's go to you.

Sheri: Yes. So just like Chris mentioned, the peanut butter and jelly. As you create a culture of storytelling, at the same time commit to a culture of impact measurement tracking. And so, what I would recommend people do this afternoon, if they've not already done it or don't have impact measures in place in their nonprofit is to do a very simple exercise, which I call the "five whys" exercise. And basically, you're going to ask yourself -- you're going to answer this question five different times. You're going to ask yourself, why do we do what we do? And answer that five times.

Then, why do our donors want to invest in us? And then the third one that you're going to ask five times is, why do our participants and stakeholders work with our nonprofit organization? And so, the answer to those questions, this is the key secret. Those are your outcomes. That's what you should be measuring and managing to.

So once you understand that and have that clarity, you can start to build the data collection systems that will give you the insights you need to tell your impact story.

Nia: Yeah. Sometimes it just takes a little bit of self-reflecting to recognize, you know, where your gaps are, where you can immediately scale the why.

Exactly, Todd love it in the chat. I love it too. Priya, let's go to you.

Priya: Awesome. Building on what Sheri said, once you know what your outcomes are after doing the five whys exercise, I would push yourself to take one goal or outcome that doesn't feel measurable and force yourself to find a way to quantify it.

Similar to what Emily said, just getting started is going to, you know, help you learn as you go. So, you're going to get better and better at figuring out how to measure the impact of your outcomes by just pushing to do so, and then you'll have that delicious peanut butter and jelly sandwich that Chris talked about in order to really illustrate, you know, the work that your organization's doing as you continue to build that muscle.

Nia: Awesome. Thank you all so much.

I know I promised a Q&A, and I will get to it. We are running a little short on time. So, this might be a little condensed Q&A. But let's just pull from some of our questions here. And the first one that came in, Chris, I would guess this one's going to you. But if anybody else wants to hop in after, feel free. But someone asked, "What are some key ways to keep storytelling ethical, especially when dealing with more sensitive topics?"

And we had a follow-up addition to that about somebody whose nonprofit works with children. So when you're limited with how much you can share in the stories, you know, visually or otherwise, how do you tell a good story but keep it ethical?

Chris: Yeah. I mean, I think there's a lot of foundations. I could talk about this all day. But there's some foundation setting that happens before you're going to start getting stories, right? Because storytelling is about a relationship and nobody owes you their story, even if they impact are impacted by your mission. So you have to build that trust and demonstrate stewardship. So my marketing director, Carly, put together this amazing ethical storytelling report and some of the key points.

So number one, give your community the microphone and start building that relationship. Let them tell the stories, then they'll see each other tell the stories. And maybe that person that you didn't think was going to tell their story or didn't feel comfortable now feels comfortable because they see others doing it.

You want to encourage them to share when and where they are comfortable as well. So gone are the days of dragging somebody in putting makeup on them and making them tell this broad story, right? Like, we want stories all the time. Be upfront about how you intend to use the story, right? If it's for a grant proposal versus social media, obviously, someone's going to want to know that and that's going to dictate the type of story.

Strength-based messaging, is obviously important, especially with, like, people who are in difficult situations and capture stories all year round. So you're not like, "Hey, we need a story for the gala next week." And now, someone feels pressured and all those things. And I think even those people that you didn't think were going to tell stories, they may tell those stories. And you can keep them anonymous a lot of cool ways. But, you know, that's how I would do it is really build that culture. Yeah.

Josh: I'm happy to take the other piece about the youth development. I worked for a youth development organization for over 10 years in marketing. And just thinking about being COPPA compliant is a big one, thinking about, you know, how your audience in social media isn't and shouldn't be, you know, kids under, you know, certain ages. You know, generally, 13, but you're probably thinking, you know, older anyway. Think about marketing to their parents instead of the kids.

But I saw something in the chat a little while ago about, you know, lack of photography. So, that's always a problem too. I mean, it's always better to use the photography that you have. But when there's restrictions, you know, don't necessarily shy away from good stock photography when you can find it. There's AI that allows you to generate different images also. But you don't have to use photos in those cases.

You can use other types of images that you create and just, like, colors and textures from a presentation or a brand perspective and just use the few pictures of the kids that you're allowed to. But make sure that you have that permission from the parents with, like, multiple checkpoints and they're signing something saying that you can use images in marketing. List out what those marketing channels are and then also for media because you never know when media is going to use it. You'll be liable at the end of the day if it ends up in, you know, in a news story and you didn't have permission to use it in media. So, I mean, it's best to consult an attorney for all those. But those are some starting points.

Consent is definitely the foundation of ethical storytelling. Absolutely. I'm glad you mentioned that because that's really what it all comes down to at the end of the day. And we have a related question here.

And maybe, Sheri, this one goes to you. But besides those smiles and the stories how do we measure impact if we're working with people?

Nia: Yeah. And I think that's where I sound like a broken record because I always go back to the five whys exercise. But as the nonprofit, when you do that, the you answer those questions, why does your organization do what it does? That then leads you to -- or why your participants want to participate in your organization.

Now you have like a concept or a, you know, the change in live that your nonprofit is designed to achieve. And so, you take that concept or construct and you turn it into, you know, if there's not already an assessment tool to measure that, you create a survey that you're standardizing and asking people at the end of your intervention, you know, to what extent is this true for you is a great way to do it. And that way you kind of get -- you get that standardized feedback back at you that you are indeed achieving the goals that you've set out to achieve.

That's just one example of how to systematize, getting the impact measurement data back.

Nia: Okay. And we have one that I think, Emily, maybe this one goes to you because you talk a lot about boards and stakeholders.

And this question is maybe straightforward, but I'd love to hear if there's some nuances here. But how important are annual reports to stakeholders, donors, board members? And are there other materials like that that are maybe overlooked but just as important?

Emily: Yeah. I think critical. Priya mentioned this a little bit too is right? You really need to build your case for support, and that involves from an annual reporting standpoint, really some credibility behind what you're doing and your responsibility with your donor's funds that they've given you. What you have planned, not just -- I think, you know, annual report is backwards looking, which is fine. That's important for sure.

But you also need, to Priya's point, a forward-looking strategy and a forward-looking piece that's really clear about what your goals and objectives are over the coming -- next coming years so that they do commit their support for multiple years in a row.

But in terms of how important an annual report is, it's pretty important. Yeah.

Josh: So we work with all our customers are creating annual reports and impact reports. And it's important and it's usually there because of the reasons Emily mentioned, plus, it's board mandated. The good ones from the great ones are really separated by, like, the impact stories that that Chris was talking about and how engaging it is. So think about multimedia that you can have in there. Think of whether it looks good on a cell phone or whether or whether -- whether it's hard to navigate through. But, you know, there are -- like, Nia, you were asking if there's other types of reports there too. I mean, all these different groups we were talking about, a board, Chris, I think you mentioned volunteers before, all these different groups could have different impact reports that could just take the stories that just -- they're interested in and go back to them. So I think any report is a start.

It's checking an important box. But throughout the year, just leverage that and just make smaller kind of spin-off reports if there's time, and it depends on the size of your organization. But there's different stories you could tell because it's not just once a year that those stakeholders want to hear from you on those updates. They want to see how the funds are being used or how the program is developing over time.

So, you know, they'll hear through email, newsletter, social media. But reports are an important one too, so you can go a little more in depth.

Chris: Well, community is about relationships, right? And relationships are about co-exchange, right, of some sort of relationship, right? And so, if they're expecting that like, "Hey, every month we share a video from our, you know, programs, or something like that.

Every year, we have our annual report. And it's like these things, they become expectations and they become a relationship. And that's how you really solidify community and really make it rigorous.

Nia: Awesome. Well, I think this is a perfect place to stop because we are a little over time. I want to thank all of you for being here. Like I said in the beginning, it is not easy to get so many folks in the room at the same time and to have such -- a valuable enriching conversation hitting on all these different points.

I think this was an incredible amount of detail and strategy packed into just a little under 45 minutes maybe? I don't know if I'm right on that timing. But, I mean, the chat has been loving it. There's people who are finding so much wisdom and new strategies to test out from what you've all said. So, thank you so much for being here. We really appreciate it.

And with that, we're going to continue on with our program. Thank you so much to all of our speakers.

Chris: Thank you all for what you do.

Nia: And let's talk a little bit about some key takeaway. So, I'm sure you all have more. I know I wasn't following the chat too closely during this. I'll go back and read everything. But I saw there was a lot of comments coming in about takeaways that you guys are all having from this one's session. So, here are some that for me felt really important.

The first one being fostering a data driven culture. And there's a lot of ways to do that. You know, Sheri and Priya specifically talked a lot about strategy there. The next one is demonstrating long-term value. So, that's so important to retaining those donors that are going to come back and give year after year.

So especially in seeking funding, I think that long-term value is such an important thing to demonstrate. And then testing your storytelling strategies to find what really resonates with your audience and how you can turn those supporters into active stakeholders. And you know what? I would add a fourth here, which is just testing anything. This was -- I think it was Josh who talked about just test things. And I think that's really important in nonprofits is, yeah, let's keep doing business as usual. Let's scale what works. But let's also figure out how we can innovate and get creative and try out a thing or two. So some of you are probably already doing these things. If not, it's a great time to start.

I hope you got some actionable strategies here. But I also want to say that we know you're already out there doing some really important work. And we see you and we appreciate you, and we really want to support you. So, I have a quick poll here. I would love to know which of the areas we just explored. You're most excited to tackle at your organization. So, which area are you most excited to level up in? Is it grant prospecting and management? Is it donor retention and solicitation?

Communications and storytelling. Impact measurement and recording so that culture of data. Go ahead and fill out that poll. I'm going to give everybody a second here to fill that out. And if you have some comments about any of it, feel free to throw it in the chat. I would love to see what you guys are excited to tackle at your organizations. Let's give everyone just just a second or two longer. All of these above, but specifically one and four grants prospecting and impact measurement.

Yeah. I find those two often go hand in hand. I mean, what doesn't go hand in hand at a nonprofit? But Communications and storytelling, but also data collection. Yeah, those two also go hand in hand. Yeah, data underpins so much. It's really true. Yeah. Once you start thinking of data in that way, you really recognize that it is really part of everything that you do at your nonprofit.

One and two grants and donors. Yep. We do a ton of great things, but measure little. Yeah. Absolutely. So, let's go ahead and end the poll here. If you haven't had a chance to fill that out, just go ahead couple seconds. Okay. There we go.

Okay. Wow. That's really interesting to see. We have almost a perfectly even split across the board. That really rarely happens. That makes me feel really excited that I hope this last session with all of our experts really gave all of you some really good strategies to walk away with and take back to your teams. But, of course, none of these are changes that happen overnight. So, we're excited to support you on your nonprofits journey.

Our experts from the session are all about helping nonprofits become more impactful. And all of us here from that panel are committed to that mission. So, you can definitely expect to hear from them. And then on top of that, everyone here today can get exclusive access to our nonprofit growth summit resource pack. So this is only for attendees of this summit. It is packed to the brim. I mean, packed with freebies, eBooks, downloadable templates, special offers, discounts. You name it. And these are exclusive offers from over 30 partners just for attendees of this summit.

And I'll tell you more about how to access that at the end of the summit. And on that note, let's take five minutes for you. So step away, grab a snack. Re up on coffee. Or, now is the perfect time to share something on LinkedIn. We're going to raffle off four really exciting prizes right after the break. So, get those posts up. You have five minutes. You can do it all in those five minutes.

I know we're all nonprofit folks. We know how to stretch out five minutes. So, go ahead and do that, and I will see you all back here in a few minutes.

Rachel: Wow, folks. I have just been soaking it all in. I had, like, I think the biggest smile on my face during the entire panel. Thankfully, I was off camera. So, I didn't look like the scoopy person in the corner smiling. But, gosh. I mean, yeah. I wish I had been at -- in this panel when I was working in my previous roles in the nonprofit world.

And I'm so excited to see some really great engagement in the chat. As a reminder again, Nia just mentioned this. We are raffling off some of our biggest prizes coming up. So we would love to see you share your learnings on LinkedIn.

Already seen some amazing folks sharing. We've got Regina, Cindy. David's shared Kiana. Jessica, we love to see it. And please do continue to share.

As I mentioned, there are studies that show that if you document your key learnings, you will retain that information even more. We want to give you stuff to walk back to your leadership up your boss today and say, "Hey, I learned something really important that I think we should try today or tomorrow or next week," right?

I love some of those key learnings that we just got from the panel about just trying some new stuff out. So, got about three minutes left. I want to make sure everyone gets a chance to refuel themselves, use the bathroom, get a drink of water, take a little stretch break because we've been sitting at our desks for a little while today. And we're going to get started with our hands on workshop next in about two and a half minutes.

So glad to hear that, Danielle. Yeah. And if folks want to share, I would love to have folks drop their LinkedIn profile in the chat. You can connect with others who are here. They are learning with you.

They have maybe some of the same challenges or maybe some lessons learned that you could benefit from at your own organizations. Go ahead and share those in the chat box, and you all can make some of those professional contacts while you're in the room today.

Awesome. So glad to hear. Oh, hey, Allison. Hey, Allan. Just seeing some of these chat box hellos. That's so great to hear. About two minutes remaining. Would love to see some of those key learnings. I'm curious too from folks, you know, what was really standing out to you about the panel? Those folks are working with nonprofits day in and day out, which is why we gathered them here with you today. They get to hear all the ups and downs of all of our work on a daily basis. And I just felt like they had so many good different avenues of strategy. Any number one takeaways?

Yeah. Regina is saying, "Every person added to the conversation." It was great having such a strong group of speakers. I agree wholeheartedly. Each time someone spoke, I was like, "I need to jot this down right away." Love that. Queen just shared their LinkedIn profile. That's awesome.

Devin says, "Learning how to create a strategy that has intent and purpose." Yeah. You know, it's tough out there. Strategy is a great buzzword. And it sounds lovely when you have the intention of building a really lovely strategy. But you actually have to build it with purpose, and that takes some time. Doing things like these summits where you're learning and growing and getting resources are going to be the ways that you're going to take your nonprofit to the next level. Oh, Bianca's got a good question in the chat. We'll save that for our Q&A. If you don't mind copying and pasting that into the Q&A box so we don't lose track of it, that would be so helpful. And I'll make sure to try and touch on that when we get into our hands-on workshop coming up.

Couple of other key learnings. Renee says, "Building a culture of storytelling and making it a two-way communication." I love it. Samantha, "The panel was highly informed and gave amazing ideas." Love that too. Yes, Albert, you'll get the recording. And with our timer ending, I am going to go ahead and do a little raffle moment because, why not?

We should be excited to win some raffle prizes. And we've got some folks that have shared some great learnings. I love seeing that. Just also empowering our nonprofit colleagues who couldn't be here to learn. So I've got folks that are ready to go. I'm going to raffle off a couple of things. Two folks are winning $100 donation to a nonprofit of their choice. So, it could be their nonprofit or maybe their consultant working with nonprofits.

They get to choose who they would like to give that $100 donation to. And that's going to go to Cindy Lynn. Thank you, Cindy, for being such a strong supporter of our programs. And Regina Funk. So Regina and Cindy will reach out to you both who won a $100 donation to a nonprofit of your choice. You're so welcome.

And then we've got two other folks who are winning some of our other prizes here. Thank you for sharing those great learnings. We've got two office goodies, supplies that are going to be sent out. And those are going over to David Debrai and Serita Stanley. David and Serita, I hope you are here in the room. We are so glad that you shared those learnings and spent some time with us today. Congratulations on winning our raffle.

Awesome. Oh, great. Hey, David. Yep, we love a raffle moment. It's a lot of fun. So if you want to get in on it, we've got only a little bit of time left.

We've got about a little less -- I'm sorry, a little over an hour of programming to go. So, you're not too late. You can participate in these raffles by posting on LinkedIn, tag Instrumentl and include nonprofit growth 24.

So as a reminder, we're going through these indicators of high-performing nonprofits today. We've talked about the ways that we're aligning time, resources, and goals with our mission. We've talked about those important nurturing techniques with impact driven storytelling. We've talked about decision- making with data, retaining donors and leveraging multi-year giving.

And our final session here is going to dive into probably one of the most valuable things that we can start today. And that's building and properly equipping our dream teams. I'm really excited to bring on the screen. Two of our nonprofit champions, Sharon and Brittany. And I'm going to add them to my spotlights here. Hey, Brittany. And we've got Sharon coming on as well.

Let's see. I'll make sure she is added to my spotlight. Perfect. Hello, Sharon. Awesome. So I'm going to start with a quick intro and bio of each of our speakers so you can learn a little bit more about who these folks are today. Sharon Cohen, MPA, is the director of Resource Development with the Boys and Girls Clubs of Palm Beach County, Florida. Over the past 20 years, Sharon has been responsible for raising over 50 million in funds. Prior to working with the Boys and Girls Clubs, she was director of early childhood education programming with the Children's Services Council of Broward County, Florida, and executive director of the Pace Center for Girls in Palm Beach County. Ms. Cohen has a Master's in Public Administration from Florida Atlantic University and a Bachelor's in English Literature from Brandise University.

Hey, Sharon. Great to have you.

Sharon: Hey, everybody.

Rachel: Brittany Ballo-Ritenbaugh is the Salvation Army's regional resource development director for the Northwest South Carolina and Western North Carolina Regions. She has a passion for nonprofit fundraising and connecting with donors. Brittany has a decade of experience working in nonprofits with 200 donors in her major giving portfolio and 2.5 million in fiscal year team grants.

Hey, Brittany.

Brittany: Hello. Nice to be here.

Rachel: So one cool thing about this section of our program today is that you all get to kind of go back into your student mindset. You get to join me back in school today. And you all are going to have a workbook to keep track of some of the key learnings that are happening while our nonprofitiers share their case studies. I'll have one of my colleagues help drop the link to that in the chat. There'll be two options for you.

One, you can make a copy of a Google doc. it'll create your own copy in your Google Drive, or you can download a PDF and edit it there. I'll prompt you on some of the pieces that we're going to be kind of highlighting as we go through these case studies today.

But I love folks to get a chance to open up that workbook. We'll drop that link in just a moment here, and make sure you can access that. So, you're going to go ahead and open up that workbook here. You can create your own Google Doc version with that copy link, or you can download the PDF version. I'll give folks just a couple seconds to get that open on their screen.

This is something I'd love for you to reference back to. It's a place for you to document some of these learnings we've talked about today. And it includes a handy assessment tool. No problem, Karen. That you will be able to use to identify kind of where your nonprofit is at when we talk about high performance. So, I'll drop that link again.

And with that, we'll go ahead and get started. Sharon, I'm going to invite you to kind of come up first. And in our workbooks, I've got a section here on the second page for all of our attendees to follow along. Sharon's going to talk a little bit about kind of the before state, what things we're looking like at their organization before they had some of these indicators of success, before they were moving towards a culture of growth at their organization.

So as you listen to Sharon, you can jot down some of those challenges. And then we'll go into a little bit of an after-state reflection, how did the organization address these challenges? So with that, I'm going to jump over to Sharon and I'm going to have you start by telling us a little bit about that before state. How did it look like when you were struggling a little bit? And --

Sharon: Sure.

Rachel: Yeah, what that status looked like for you.

Sharon: The before state. The before state for me actually coincided, I think, for them. They've been there for 53 years. But the before state for me came, it was April Fool's Day 2020 when I was hired, when I started there. And that was also the beginning of the pandemic. And they had not had a grants team in place there.

Then at that point, there were already a large organization. Boys and Girls Clubs of Palm Beach County out of over 5,000 clubs in the US is in the top 10 size-wise. Palm Beach County in Florida is geographically the largest county east of the Mississippi. We have 20 sites. We're going to 21 soon, and it's not nearly enough.

And I know when folks hear Palm Beach County, you think of many things, palm trees and Mar-a-Lago and great wealth. And wherever there is great wealth, there is also unbelievable poverty. And so, that's part of what we deal with. And so, our 20 sites are not nearly enough. So when I was hired, they were already at a $14 million budget. Much of that coming from Department of Education 21st Century Community Learning Grants. And that was foundational for them. And they were also looking to transition into doing more of that.

We did not know as of that April that what was hitting was the pandemic. So, that hits. They were looking to hire a couple of new grant writers and a director and a grant writer, and then there was a VP of resource development. And then everything changed. And so, we became this resource development team not knowing each other. And that's a challenge in the best of times.

And we also did not have any administrative support. We did not have a good data collection system, or software. System at that point was not a good one. It was developed for marketing and had been kind of, I think, restructured to work in grants. But it wasn't meant to be used for grants. And we just were struggling with also because of COVID, there were now our regular grants that were all still due.

And now, a lot of additional COVID money, which was, "That's great." But as with many other industries, at that time, medical, everything else, people were working like crazy. And it didn't stop. We were working 12, 14, 16 hour days, nights, weekends, vacations. We became a machine. So, we were doing something between 150, 175 grants that year.

And this went on solidly -- excuse me, for maybe two and a half, three years. To the point now we are at 2024, we went from about 16, 15, 16 million. We're now 24 million. Some of that was the COVID relief funding. But we've become -- we just -- we burst. And that was this machine, which is great. But that can't be maintained with two people, with the director and a grant writer and a VP who was often being pulled to work on other things in the organization because that was what the nature of this was.

The group is an amazing agency and they did whatever was needed. When we couldn't serve children in the clubs, we went virtual. We became one of the major food providers in the county when people could not go. There were no supermarkets open. We became food providers and were there to have hot meals that people could pick up on a daily basis and things they had never done before.

But for our grants team, this was crazy. And we were also the ones responsible for writing reports. not just the grant writing, but then the progress reports, annual reports, everything for that, which is not always what happens in an organization. It doesn't work that way. Usually, the grant writers are not necessarily the ones who then follow up writing the reports, unless you are the program director yourself. So, it was just overwhelming. So, those were the challenges. And whether you're very large or you're smaller, they're the same challenges that you would face. So --

Rachel: That makes sense.

Sharon: Right. Yeah. I know those are the challenges. What do -- you want me to --

Rachel: Yeah. And I'm curious just kind of one more note on the challenge there. You had told me that, you know, not having necessarily designated staff for prospecting.

Sharon: Absolutely.

Rachel: Yeah. You know, I'm curious if you could share a little bit about what that was like at your organization because I imagine many folks in the chat and watching right now are in similar situations.

Sharon: You know, even with craziness, your CEO, she's fabulous, and she has -- she worked harder than all of us. She never gave up. But there's always the thought that you still need to be looking for more opportunities, you always have to be looking for more funding. But when you're juggling all the rest of that, it's near impossible to keep looking. And we -- even with sources that we knew we could, at least, go to on a regular basis, certain newsletters, certain sites that we were paying for, we didn't even have the time.

When you don't have someone who's designated to do it, it becomes impossible just to do that. You must -- you have to have human bodies to do this. You have to have staff. But you also have to have the tools --

Rachel: Yeah.

Sharon: That work for you, that make it that much easier and attainable.

Rachel: That absolutely makes sense. And that's a great lead into kind of where do you feel like your organization is right now? You've become extremely successful, I think I would say, with your budget increases. And if you could maybe talk a little bit about what that looks like now. And I know you shared some specific strategies.

So, if you can think of some of those tangible examples that folks could learn from in the chat here.

Sharon: Right. Now, I will say, you know, as we are bigger, sometimes you can just walk into the CEO's office and say, "We're done." When it was just the two of us writing grants and we couldn't write, we couldn't do any more writing the grants and the reports.

We said this was an extraordinary time, and the pandemic is hopefully something we will all never have to live through again. We got you here, but we can't maintain this. More people have to be brought on. We need administrative support and we need more writers. And she heard us. And they found the money to do that.

We sat with them and they were able to do that. That is sometimes what can happen in a larger organization. And I know that that's not always the case in smaller organizations. I've been in the smaller organizations. All the way through.

So, that can be a difficult conversation. But she also knew if she wanted to keep what had already been achieved, they had to do that because we couldn't do it. We truly could not even maintain what had been done if they didn't bring on the staff. So we now have administrative support. We have a grants coordinator who is using Instrumentl. And no, I'm not a paid shill here for them. We research when we knew we needed a better software program for our deliverables because that's the one thing I didn't say in the first part.

We live and die by deadlines. Our deliverables lists, we should have t-shirts made that say, "We live and die by deadlines," because it's everything we do. And it has to be so accurate and up to-date and usable. And Instrumentl has really helped us with that. It's been a much better software program for that for us. So our grant's coordinator and I, actually the director, work with that. All the staff can go in and use it. But we really are in there regularly doing it. And it's been great. It's a great tool for that. Thank you.

And so that's been enormously helpful, to help us structure better and not have to worry that we're missing deadlines That's the worst. And then to be able -- I'm looking here. I want to make sure that I get what we talked about. Then for prospecting, that you do want. If you can, you don't have to just have one person assigned, but if you have areas that anyone on your team can specialize in, then that's something. Whatever tools you are using, if it is Instrumentl or other tools out there, have them focus on those areas so that they can at least look for those things.

The other thing I would suggest strongly, because we all know this, I think it was mentioned earlier when they were saying that only a quarter is available for funding out in the world. I'm sorry. I see my hands going. I talk too much with my hands. Much of what's -- when you go in and look for funding, that's available. A lot of the funders will say, "We don't accept unsolicited applications." However, there are these things called connections. If someone on your board or someone in your organization knows someone at that foundation or funding body, that's everything because that's how you get the invitation to at least send them a letter of interest or to have a phone call with them, and then they might invite you to apply.

So, don't -- do not send an unsolicited application because it will go in the circular file. But user your board. Use them willingly, ask them if they -- you must get the list of the directors of the foundations. If you can do a little digging, find out, you know, where they work. You have to be a detective sometimes. Their spouses, where they went to school, went to college, where they live, all of these things. And locally on your local -- if you have a bigger board. But then if you have advisory boards for smaller committees, everybody counts. Right in your town, everyone counts. Glad hand everybody and ask them.

You never know who you know and it doesn't hurt to just be nice to everybody. It helps. And you can ask them if they know anyone for a local foundation, because now we're talking about bigger national and state foundations. But if they're talking about a local foundation, your local friends. You don't know who knows who. And that is how you get invited. You wouldn't believe that that is how it's done.

Just like politics. You read the stories in the paper and then you're stunned to see. It's this one's friend who got this one's friend the job. Well, that's how sometimes the grants are gotten to.

Rachel: Yeah.

Sharon: And it can be that simple.

And sometimes the grants are just a letter. It's not always a big form or a new portal. It is just a letter. But you have to get invited.

Rachel: Yeah.

Sharon: That's it.

Rachel: No, Sharon, that's so valuable.

And I think in our increasingly connected world, we have so many tools that can help us learn about our connections. Folks are adding each other on LinkedIn. I'm sure you're surprised if you've added someone on LinkedIn. Like, "Oh, I happen to know that person as well."

Sharon: "I just met them." Right.

Rachel: Right. Yeah.

And then what are the chances? We have a lot of information available about funders. And we are passed to the days of having to manually, you know, pick up a giant packet of a funder report and we can look online. We can use tools like Instrumental or go through those form 990s from the IRS and we can do -

Sharon: Right.

Rachel: Detective work, right?

So, yeah, I think that's a great highlight to just remind folks again and again of the value there. Thank you so much, Sharon. And I just want to

Sharon: My pleasure.

Rachel: Highlight -- yeah, you've talked about some really great things. I think one thing I want to highlight for folks, you talked about this kind of tipping point. And, you know, you were in an extreme situation when you were kind of in that COVID world and working under different parameters. But that some folks may have a tipping point with their organization too.

And this kind of goes into some of our early conversations about being honest about our strategic direction. What do we actually need in order to truly achieve our mission? So we're going to nail down that point there. There's some other great tips. If folks want to share some learnings that they heard from Sharon in the chat what you've added to your workbooks, I would love to hear it.

With that I'm going to transition over and we're going to go into our next case study. I'm going to bring Brittany on. And thank you again so much, Sharon, for your reflection. So helpful.

Hey, Brittany.

Brittany: Hello. Nice to be here.

Rachel: So great to have you.

As a reminder to folks, I have a note space as well in your workbook to drop down some of the similar things that might come up as Brittany is sharing her case study. What are two to three challenges that Brittany may have faced in her role at the Salvation Army? And then we'll do a kind of after-state reflection as well, how did she address those challenges. If folks want to add any thoughts that they came up from Sharon's presentation, happy to continue to see those come through.

But in the meantime, Brittany, I'd love to hear a little bit about your before state and what did it look like when you maybe weren't performing in an optimal state at the Salvation Army.

Brittany: Absolutely.

So, I am part of the Salvation Army of North and South Carolina. So each Salvation Army, I'm not sure anyone's aware of, has their own little section of the country. So ours is North and South Carolina exclusively. So, we have a team of five regional resource development directors that cover the fundraising for those two states. And as I said, my area is the Western Carolinas. So I'm in the mountains a lot of times, which is beautiful. But it is a struggle to get funding sometimes in those areas because they can be small, they can be exclusive and not really open to fundraising.

So our funding is primarily individual donors. But we do get a significant amount of revenue about 10% from grants. And so, I handle 10 different areas of the states. And some of the budgets for those areas were very small and some are much larger. The board meeting I just went to this morning, their budget is only 250,000 for the county.

So, there are small budgets. There are large budgets. But before the use of Instrumentl -- and I also will say, I don't work for y'all, but I am also a huge fan, just like Sharon. Before the use of Instrumentl, there was just halfhazard research for grants. Since we're covering two states, we could get national grants. But then we also had a lot of foundations and local grants that we were just not even aware of.

We didn't know where they were. We're just randomly searching on the internet for grants. We really couldn't find a whole lot unless we had connections and through word of mouth. And there was no tracking and past performance. So, we weren't able to know who did what in the past, what grants maybe we had in the past.

With each Salvation Army area, our officers that are in that area, they actually switch out so officers can be in one area for a year, or they can be there for three years. But if someone new comes in, they don't necessarily know about the area yet. So they had to rely heavily on the board to tell them any information and then any new employees in my role. When we came in, we also didn't have that past information. We didn't know what was going on. We had no past grant information, and it was just a bit of a mess. It was difficult to know what had been applied for previously and to know what we could apply for in the future. So, that was a big struggle.

And then, we got Instrumentl and it completely changed everything for us. We are able to track all the grants in there. And even with the past grants, we can see what has been accomplished, who's applied, how much we've received. And it's very helpful for us to be able to go in and see those past grants and also for future grants. We can now search for grants. It's been very helpful because usually our areas are by county, so we can just search the county name, include foundation. We can get lots of information in there for the local grants.

And then for the national grants, a lot of times it just tells us. It says, "Hey this is something that based on our information that we entered is something that's going to be something you could look at, something you might be interested in." So, it's been a huge help to us after getting Instrumentl to have that information.

Rachel: I'm so glad to hear that. And I think your point about historical knowledge, this is something that, regardless even of what role you're in at a nonprofit, if you're in advancement or -- I was often, you know, running programs boots on the ground that all that knowledge lives in one person's brain, and they are the expert. And they've stuck it out for two decades and then they're like, "All right. I'm gone," and all of that goes with them. That can really set your organization back, especially if you're on a great track for that, you know, next growth or you've built those funder relationships if that all goes with that person. That can really kind of be detrimental to that ramp up, that growth that you're working on.

Brittany: Mm-hmm. Definitely. For sure. And we do have good news in our CRM system. So, that's helpful. But there's also just a different aspect of having the grant tracking system.

Rachel: Yeah.

Brittany: Just being able to see contact information in there, being able to see amounts and how much was asked for and how -- versus how much we received. Maybe it's significantly different if it wasn't something that really matched up with the Salvation Army's mission. So, it's been extremely helpful.

I will say, one of the good tips for outreach to donors, not just individual donors, but also these funding donors has been as several people had said about the relationships. It's about building those relationships and having that essential contact information, background information.

If a board member doesn't necessarily know anyone on that funding platform than keeping in touch in other ways. Just building a relationship, having coffee, going to lunch. We like to do personal touch points like birthday cards, Thanksgiving cards, anniversary, meeting cards. Not necessarily wedding anniversary, but our anniversary with that funder saying, "Hey, we've been in touch for five years. It's been a great relationship. How can we go forward with another grant?” And just keeping your organization on their mind. So when you do apply for that grant, they're saying, "Oh, yeah, we remember them.

We know them. They're great." And they're more likely to give you that funding if they can remember you and have that good rapport with you.

Rachel: All right. Just adding to the chat because I love that anniversary card idea. I hadn't heard of that before. And, like, making sure that you as the relationship builder, if you're that person in your organization or your CEO, or your board members, like, also are aware of, "Hey, this is the date that we first met that funder. Can you reach out and send something to them and" -- yeah. Making sure you have that on your calendar.

Brittany: Yeah. Yeah. Yes. It's been a huge help.

Rachel: Oh, I'm so glad to hear that. And then kind of one last thing that you shared that was a strategy in getting you to that -- from that before state to that after state, was investing in your team a little bit and investing in tools.

And you talked about using Instrumentl, but I think this applies to literally any investment that you're doing time wise, money, resource wise. Can you talk a little bit about that as kind of a strategy for your growth?

Brittany: Yeah. Absolutely.

If you are fundraising, you can invest in these tools. It -- there's I don't even know how to describe it. There's no better tool than getting this information in your hands. The grants in the system are so varied and so thorough that it is easy to advocate for these type of tools. Not necessarily just Instrumentl but any type of tool where you're building these relationships with funders and finding new grants. I would say a major tool for advocating for them is to research the tool you're trying to find or trying to use before you go to leadership and show them everything this tool does, everything that you can accomplish with the tool. And then showing them, "Hey, it may cost XYZ. But through this cost, we are going to get so much more funding." And it's going to be so beneficial not even just for funding, not even just for funding, maybe you don't necessarily get the funding. But you learn about potential funders.

And through that, you might find another funder. Maybe you were declined to grant, but they're like, "Oh, hey, you might actually be good for this other funding source that we're aware of." And a lot of people are on multiple boards. So if they say, "Hey, this organization, this funder that I'm on the board of isn't something that will work for your organization. But I have another one.” That's something that can make a huge difference.

And so, advocating for those tools is something that gets you in. The mindset of those people get you connected to those people. And it has been a great help to us. Being able to add our own grants also in the system has been something huge for us because there are some grants that aren't necessarily in the system. But it is something we need in there. And especially if you leave a role or if you get a new officer, like we do regularly, then they can see those past grants and they can see, "Oh, this is something we've never even heard of. We didn't even know this existed." It's not even in any tool systems. It's something so obscure. But this person entered it. And then the team, which is nice, if it's not a specific county grant, can also see that information. And they can say, "Oh, okay. I could also apply for this for our area." So, it's been very helpful for the team to be able to collaborate and to be able to see, "Oh, this person is applying for a grant from maybe a bank." And that bank could also fund our area.

So, we're not competing for money necessarily. But both trying to get a grant for our specific area.

Rachel: I love that. Lifting each other up using the resources that you have access to. And, yeah, kind of elevating what you found so that others can take advantage of that as well.

Brittany: Yes.

Rachel: Brittany, that was so insightful. Is there anything more you want to share before I kind of bring this back? I'm going to invite some folks to ask some live Q&A. But anything you want to close us with?

Brittany: I think I'll also add, even having that declined grant information in the system is good because then as a team, you can discuss, "Oh, why didn't we get this grant? What can we improve on?" But metrics aren't necessarily something that we want to work for. And especially if it's something national, you can say, "Oh, they didn't approve it for so and so county."

Don't even bother applying for your county because it's the same programs. I mean, that saves so much time.

Rachel: Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a key part about that feedback loop that we get with grants, right? We can literally see what was successful and what wasn't. And it can build that culture of feedback, that culture of asking for evaluation on things and seeing what worked and what didn't. That's such a great point.

Well, thank you so much for your insights there, Brittany. There's so much that I think folks can learn from in their organizations, be them small or large. I do have some questions in the Q&A. So I'm going to spend a few moments going through those. And, Sharon and Brittany, feel free to jump in if there's one that feels particularly relevant to your organization.

And actually, you know what, I might pitch this first to Sharon. This is a question from Kiana. She asked, "Can you all define relationship? When it is appropriate to make the ask?" They said, "In my head it feels like we need to be on a long-term basis, have known each other for maybe over a year, is it too involved, is -- before directly asking for funding? So kind of, yeah, what is the definition of a relationship?

Sharon: Hmm. I guess it's with whom? I -- if you're talking about a foundation that's in the business of doing this, and you've met them, and they actually are allowing applications, I guess, you get a feel for when if there's a timeline for doing that. You want to get a feel for that. But if you're talking about donors, that's quite different And I would say, use your gut. But I'm not always sure that's -- and it should never just be incumbent upon you, Kiana. That's -- I would never leave that to one person to make that only on yourself.

I don't know Kiana's position there, unless she is the CEO. But even with that, there would be a CEO and a chairperson and other folks who might be involved in discussing that with. You should never feel like you have to make that decision yourself and how big the ask is.

My goodness, if it's not that big of an ask, should feel comfortable kind of asking pretty quickly. But if you're working, and I think they discussed this in the other panel as well, that there's -- sometimes it starts off smaller. And that can grow. And often, it may be other board members who may be making the ask with you or on their own, and then that grows over time.

But don't feel that pressure that you have to know that inherently and be the one to always be guiding that, discuss that with others to get a feel for that person.

Rachel: That's great.

Sharon: But with foundations and the like. There's usually timelines. And you're going to know when you have to make the ask. Like I said, we live on deadlines, so.

Rachel: I love that. No. And I think that's also a great reminder for us to not bear --always bear all the burdens. That's maybe a nonprofit tier trend as well.

Sharon: We do that. We do.

Rachel: Yeah.

We're scrappy. We try and wear so many hats and answer all the questions. But sometimes that's hard to do. So making sure you have team members. Or if you're a really small organization, other state holders who you can make sure to kind of bounce these things off of is so valuable.

Brittany, I'm gonna pitch this one to you. Arnold said, "Individual giving has been declining. How has this affected the Salvation Army? And what are you all doing about it?

Brittany: Yes, it definitely has been. Definitely has been declining. Just going off again what everyone else has been saying multiple times. It's all about those relationships. We are also focusing on the plan giving relationship side, which is not part of my role. We have a separate plan giving team. So, they are doing a lot of work as well. But I work with them to make those visits, to make those interactions. So, we'll both be there maybe for a lunch or a coffee and they can kind of build on the plan giving portion of it. So, we're trying to definitely focus on the plan giving side. But I mean, we're not relying on that.

Sharon: We actually have a question here.

Brittany: Sorry?

Sharon: We have a question here. What is plan giving? Someone just asked.

Brittany: Okay.

Sharon: that. So maybe --

Brittany: Yeah.

Well, plan giving is planning to give after your death. So, you can put us in the will. You can put us in other types of estate planning, that type of thing. So, it is planning to donate usually large amounts after your death. So, we're focusing on that a lot. But, of course, you can't rely on that. Hopefully, people aren't dying. You don't want your donors to die. You want them to be very healthy and doing well.

But we are focusing on that as well. But even just the individual giving, focusing on those relationships making sure people know that they're appreciated know that they -- their donation is making a difference. Their donation is doing something. Just keeping them informed as, "Hey this is what your money did. This is what we're doing with your money. This is the needs that we have."

A lot of times, people don't give because they're not asked. So just letting them know, "Hey, we're doing so and so project. What do you think about maybe participating in that?" And if they can't donate monetarily, they can always volunteer with us as well. And that makes a huge difference. A lot of times after they volunteer, they give money as well because they've been so impacted. So just keeping them on their mind. That cultivation strategy can go beyond, yeah, beyond funds, beyond direct giving, and can lead to things like connections, like Sharon was talking about as well. May not be for directly even from that person becoming a donor, but maybe someone they're at a dinner party with and say, "Hey, I've been volunteering with this great organization."

Sharon: Yes.

Rachel: All to say. Yeah. Thank you, Brittany. That's a great response there.

Sharon, Amanda had a question. What recommendations do you have for smaller organizations with limited resources and maybe limited staff who are at that tipping point with grants? So say, you know, you're kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place and you're in this kind of small scale organization. What advice would you give Amanda here?

Sharon: Always, first, need to take care of the staff you have. So you want to look at your mission statement and make sure you're meeting your mission statement, and then prioritize what you're doing. Because if you have good folks and you lose them, you're done. So, you have to take a look at the workload and make sure it's doable.

You know, you don't want to overload people to the point that either they're going to quit or they're going to shut down and not be able to do the work. Either way, that's just not what you want. So, you want to get a good sense.

They talked about strategy earlier and there's always, you know, your long, long-term strategy. And then your short-term every day. This is how we're living strategy and we need to live a little better if we want our staff to live a little better. I always just thought it was my job.

Yes, I want to make sure my clients, the clients that we take care of or taken care of. But my clients were the staff. I knew I had to take care of the staff in order for them to take care of the clients that were our mission. And so, that would be what I'd say, you have to -- get your ducks in order. I don't know. There's so many cliches. But that's how you do it. And sometimes that's hard because it may mean cutting, it may be difficult to not attain certain goals right then and there. That may be the longer-term goal.

But if it's to keep the health of your organization right then, that's what you need to do. For smaller organizations, that's what happens. Otherwise, you go by the wayside of something like 75 or 80% of nonprofits which fold, I believe that's -- there's a number out there. And I -- I'm not quoting. I don't know the place to quote it. But and it's even worse for Social Service nonprofits.

But nonprofits in general, it's a huge number that don't make it past two or three years, I believe. They just -- they have the best intentions in the world and they're wonderful people. And they can't make it because of these very issues. So if you're hanging on with good people and you can make it with what you've got, stay there for now.

That would be my advice.

Rachel: That's really great advice, Sharon.

Taking care of each other. And that's something I think that's kind of a theme of today is like we're joining together to lift each other up, to support each other because we don't necessarily always have the great resources in the nonprofit sector. Traditionally very underserved with tech, with resources, with trainings, all these things, right? So making sure we're taking care of ourselves, taking care of our teams.

I think it's incredibly valuable takeaway from today. We are just about at time. So, I'm actually going to wrap us up with this. I know there were some lingering questions. So, we'll save those. And for folks that had open questions in the Q&A, I'll make sure to kind of review them. And if there's anything we can share out after the summit, I'll make sure to get those to all of our attendees.

But Brittany and Sharon, thank you so much for your insights. And your time today was great to be with you all.

Brittany: Thank you.

Rachel: Thank you both.

Sharon: Thank you. This was a pleasure. Thank you.

Rachel: I want to invite folks. We have this handy assessment tool. And this is going to be on one of the pages of your workbook. So, if you go into that workbook again, I'll drop a link into the chat to -- for anyone who needs access to that again.

But this will be a useful checklist for you to take a peek and assess your nonprofit's current status. And I've written out these indicators of need based on some of the lessons learned from those case studies. You can check off it.

If you feel like it applies to your organization, write yourself some notes to see, "Hey, you know, this is why I'm checking this off." And maybe some ideas about what you might do to address those needs. And then there's also a reflection question at the bottom of this page. Based on what you've checked above, describe how these factors are impacting maybe your grant-seeking efforts or overall organizational health.

So, again, this is a day for you. You've just spent two and a half hours with us, which I can't believe we're almost here at the end of the summit. And we want to make sure that you're taking away some really great kind of nuggets of wisdom. We use that term a lot. These gold pieces that you can kind of go back to your leadership with and say, "Hey, this is something that I really want to try. That could maybe take our nonprofit to a higher performance state. So, invite folks to do that.

Thank you. Thank you for everyone in the chat who's sharing thanks. We're so grateful to our nonprofit partners who are willing to jump in today and participate. We are at our closing here. But before we get there, just want to kind of highlight some of those key takeaways from this discussion. We want to make sure that we are identifying and addressing gaps that we have on our teams. So use that indicator checklist to assess your nonprofit.

Give yourself some notes and think about the ways you might invest in your team. Be that with time resources, tools, additional people, what you can do, and in yourself too. Making sure you take those vacation days, take your birthday off, like Monica shared.

You also want to make sure you're building those sustainable and scalable grant practices. There are a lot of resources on the blog that talk about getting your organization grant ready. For some of those smaller organizations that Sharon was kind of giving advice to in particular, I encourage you to take a look at those. There's some really great assessment tools there as well. And that'll give you a sense of if you are truly building sustainable practices within your organization.

And then lastly, invest in the tools and invest in teamwork. We want to make sure that we're advocating for ourselves. It's really tough to do because we're often working with such small budgets We know there's not a lot to go around, but you are worth it. You are doing so much hard work and we see that every day. So we want to make sure that our leadership is aware of that, tell them what you can do with the tools that you need. And they may be able to say, "Hey, actually, we've got some funds that we were going to go towards something else. But seems like this would be really valuable in achieving our mission."

Whatever it might be, encourage you to advocate for yourselves out there. I'd love to hear one thing in the chat box that surprised you today. Maybe there was, you know, a little takeaway or just something that you hadn't heard before. A lot of us are nonprofit experts. So, I'm always curious what kind of caught you off guard and surprised you today? We will have one more raffle moment. So, I want to make sure that you get a chance to enter that raffle to win.

We would love to see what surprised you today. I'll give folks a moment to think. Yeah. Kimberly Clark says, "That 24%, that statistic is based on a recent Instrumentl insight report where we found that about 24% of private foundations were given to new grantees." We've got a lot of great insights in those reports. I highly encourage you to look at those. Mark says, "So many tools, so little money." Yep. Oh, that's great, Shannon. Since they started using Instrumentl, successfully applied and received more than one million in grants in just nine months.

Wow! That is so cool to hear. Give yourself a huge pat on the back for that. That's incredible. Angela said, "I realized how much I didn't know." You know, that's also a good thing to do too. Just check ourselves and be like, "Wow, I wasn't aware that my organization maybe was missing these key parts. Yeah. Paula says, "I think it's interesting how we're all juggling the same questions and challenges despite budget size."

This is something I love about programs like this because it can feel very siloed in our work. It can feel like we are the only ones that can't seem to figure out how to get those new funders in the door, how to get those programs off the ground. But the truth is even those high performance nonprofits struggle with some of these things too. So making time to go to events like this and learn. So, so valuable. Yeah. I'm seeing so many great key learnings here. If you want to get fancy and copy, this what -- literally, what you just put in the chat, post it on LinkedIn, add that hashtag, we'll do some of those last raffles. We really appreciate you sharing your learnings.

Again, it just reaffirms what you're taking away from today. And actually, I think I have the big raffle that I'm going to do right now. I'm just looking at my notes. Yeah. Okay. We're going to raffle off our biggest prize. So we have two $250 donations that we would like to give to two folks who have joined us today. Those are going to go out to Jessica Shore and Patricia Moore. I like that these names rhyme. Congratulations, Jessica and Patricia. You both have won a $250 donation to a nonprofit of your choice. We are so, so happy that you joined us. And thank you again for sharing some of those learnings Congrats, folks.

Oh, Bonnie. I'm so glad to hear. Yeah. We're not struggling alone. We're in this together.

All right. We are rapidly approaching the last segment of our portion. Thank you for sticking it out for us. We have some great things to give out to folks who have made it through this three-hour program with us. I want to remind us that we talked about these different indicators of high-performing nonprofits today. So, these are some things to remind yourself of. Screenshot these slides. Remember them as you're going into your strategic planning for 2025, or if you're designing a new program, thinking about a new way to approach a funder.

These are going to be some of the ways that you can kind of make tangible change in your strategic direction. The first being that high performing nonprofits align time, resources, and goals with their mission. They're also nurturing those stakeholders with impact driven storytelling, driving decisions with data, not feelings. They're all Al retaining donors and leveraging that multi-year giving.

And then from our last discussion here, they're building and properly equipping those dream teams that are really kind of taking that next step here. So we're so, so glad that you joined us. If you want to take a moment to reflect, I love to do this when I'm in my professional development mode. I've got a last page on your workbook. There's a couple things. This is just for you. Because I want you to walk away from this room, show your boss and say, "Hey, I've got some really good ideas about what we could do next. The first question I want to invite you to do or to answer here, what's one thing you're going to do today to level up your organization?

And in the workbook, I've even suggested a model where you can say today, next week, next month. Think about what key things. You can get started right now. The panel talked about this again too. Like, just starting to try some something new and going for it, not kind of doing our traditional nonprofit dance where we wait for, you know, a committee meeting or something that might give us that indicator that we can move forward on a new idea. What's one thing you're going to do today? Oh, I see Mark says, "Make some phone calls." David saying, "Donor retention." Cindy says, "Reviewing my fourth quarter plan. Hone and focus." Love that.

We've got quarter four coming right up rapidly as September closes out. So, it's a great time to be thinking about these things before we get into the busyness of the end of year giving, the holidays. All those things where people start to take a step back from kind of their day-to-day work. Paula says, "Just start." Queen, "Mapping out my planning." Josh says, "Hand this assessment to each of my clients." Love that. Danielle, "Maintain new industry connections." Amanda saying, "Revisit strategy." Teresa says, "Try new things." Love that, Teresa. And great to see you here. Ah, these are all so great. Tanisha says, "Thank my team for all of their hard work." I love that so much.

You can even think too in your workbook about what's one thing you'll do to prepare your organization for 2025? So maybe you've got that kind of narrowed in goal. What's one thing I'm going to do today? Next week, next month. What's the one thing you you'll do to prepare your organization for the next year? Again, it's coming up fast.

So, let's think critically about the way we can take our organization skyhigh to a whole other level. Patricia says, "Working on forward-thinking strategies." I love that. Wilma said, "Notes out to all previous donors." Oh, these are great. Karen says, "Take this back to the board and share the mindset to build towards the mission." Yes. Love to hear it. Mark says, "Mind more data." These are so good.

Okay. I can continue to share. These are great. We've covered so many ways today that you can take your nonprofit to high performance, right? And we want to get to that high impact state because we're doing such amazing work. I see this with everybody literally in the chat box. You each are doing such valuable work towards our communities. I know and I see that day and day out.

So, let's take what we're doing and make it really worth our while, make our nonprofits higher performance for higher impact. I want to keep growing together. We're building on this momentum. I'm seeing this in the chat box. You all are connecting with each other. You're resonating with similar things. So, let's connect with new peers that you just met in this room.

I know we're in a webinar format. It's kind of weird to meet people. But what I'm inviting you to do, Nia, just dropped a link in the chat. You can go to Instrumentl's latest LinkedIn post. We literally just created one about the summit. Write a comment about one thing you enjoyed or copy paste what you literally just put in the chat and say, "Hey, this is one thing I'm going to try today out of the summit." And then connect with three other folks who have shared their reflections. This will be an easy way for you to look back and see some of those friends that you saw in the chat that you were like, "Hey, they seem to be at a similar organization to me. I'd love to reach out to them and talk about their strategies for donor cultivation, etc., etc. Right? So, go to this link. You can click that in the chat box. Write a quick comment, say one thing that you enjoyed, one thing you want to take away, any other reflection, and connect with some other nonprofit folks.

Oh, Ryan says, "I would love to connect with folks." He's a great LinkedIn person to be connected with because he's always sharing really insightful tidbits from Instrumentls database. So I highly encourage you to connect with Ryan. Ryan, you're about to get a million requests coming through your LinkedIn.

Awesome. And as I promised, you all are getting some access to some really cool resources. So all you need to do in order to get those is share your feedback. I just want to hear from you all what you thought of today's program. There'll be a place for you to add comments on the speakers that you heard from. The overall content of the webinar. You want to make sure these are valuable to our nonprofit audience. So, please, please share your feedback. We literally read every response. So, I love to see those.

And this will be the way that you can get access to that resource pack of over 30 offers from our incredible partners, our sponsors from today, and other kind of resources that we've sourced for you all. You'll also be able to get some proof of attendance with a summit certificate and get those CFRE points for those who are CFRE certified. So Nia's dropped that link in the chat. Please share your feedback. Would love to hear it.

And with that, we have completed our summit. I can't believe for all the folks who sat with us today, thank you. I am filled with gratitude. Literally, my face hurts from smiling so much. There was so many good tidbits. And I just really loved being with you all today, the energy, even in a webinar format is just palpable and I'm so grateful to be a part of this community. Truly. Yeah. Makes me even a little emotional talking about it because you all are so incredible and I love supporting the work that you're doing. So, thank you.

Filled with gratitude for you all.

Nonprofit Growth Summit 2024 | Instrumentl

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