[00:00:05.150] – Intro
Welcome to The Nonprofit Hero Factory, a weekly live video broadcast and podcast where we’ll be helping nonprofit leaders and innovators create more heroes for their cause and a better world for all of us. Da-Ding.

[00:00:21.790] – Boris
Hi, everybody. Welcome back to The Nonprofit Hero Factory. I’m excited to present a topic today that we haven’t talked about on the show before but is really critical. We’re in the heart of the giving season right now. As you’re watching or listening to this episode, I’m sure your campaigns are in full swing, and you may or may not be really paying attention to one very important aspect of your fundraising at this time specifically, although I hope it’s part of your bigger picture, which is legacy fundraising. And it’s never really easy necessarily to talk about legacy fundraising, especially when it comes to talking to donors about their legacy gifts and well, when a legacy gift might kick in.

[00:01:00.140] – Boris
But we have someone with us today who is not just a professional when it comes to helping organizations develop their legacy programs but also helps them figure out how to talk about legacy programs so that it’s not as awkward and makes it easier to then connect with audiences and get them to… well, take the actions you need them to take so you could create a better world for all of us.

[00:01:22.980] – Boris
Her name is Ligia Peña. Ligia is a CFRE and President of Globetrotting Fundraiser, where she specializes in helping nonprofits with their fundraising and legacy strategy. She’s also a PhD candidate at the University of Kent, researching national legacy marketing campaigns as a tool to change society’s behavior towards gifts in wills. As an AFP master trainer, she’s trained countless fundraisers around the globe. She’s a sought-after and seasoned international presenter who enjoys sharing her knowledge and empowering nonprofit professionals to think about legacies differently by daring to be creative and innovative. Her superpower, Ligia, describes as teaching nonprofits how to structurally build or reboot their legacy program while making talking about death fun.

[00:02:07.760] – Boris
With that, let’s welcome Ligia onto the show to tell us more of her story. Hi, Ligia.

[00:02:13.240] – Ligia Pena
Hi. Thank you for having me.

[00:02:15.510] – Boris
Thanks so much for joining me today. So for those that don’t know, which is probably everybody listening, Ligia and I are in an ongoing consultant’s support network, if you will, for nonprofit consultants. And it’s been great getting to know you Ligia over the last I don’t know few months now that I’ve been involved and frankly to learn from you. So I’m really excited to have you on the show to share a lot of your wisdom that you’ve accumulated over the years with all of us.

[00:02:41.760] – Ligia Pena
Oh, likewise. Thank you so much. I’m very excited to talk about legacy. It’s something that I can talk about for hours and hours and hours. So we’ll try to cram as much as possible in this podcast.

[00:02:54.100] – Boris
Yeah. I wish I could make the podcast as long as it really needs to be to deliver all the information that any of my guests want to share, which is awesome and incredibly valuable. But there’s this thing called life that people want to get on with sometimes. I don’t get it personally.

[00:03:11.750] – Ligia Pena
I know. Phew!

[00:03:14.050] – Boris
Let’s dive in Ligia with your story. So I read your bio. You’re clearly an impressive individual, but what got you here? Why are you doing the work that you’re doing now?

[00:03:26.290] – Ligia Pena
I’m doing this particular work because my work as a fundraiser for the first 15 years was as a small shop generalist. And after 15 years of doing pretty much the same thing over and over again in different charities, obviously adapting and learning and expanding. It became very clear that what I really felt like—the areas of fundraising where I felt that I was working in my zone of genius was in the relationship fundraising element, not the transactional fundraising area of fundraising. And to me, doing planned giving, as we tend to call it here in North America or legacy or gifts in wills is really the epitome to me of relationship fundraising.

[00:04:14.740] – Ligia Pena
And so I started doing planned giving many years ago and then ended up getting this fantastic job working for an international NGO as their global legacy person. And there was no turning back from that point forward. And so now I’m consulting.

[00:04:33.550] – Boris
Yes, you are. And lucky clients that do get to work with you. But for those that haven’t and don’t really know as much as you do, for example, on the subject. Let’s talk a little bit about what’s going on in the nonprofit space and specifically, of course, in the planned giving or the legacy giving world. I’m sure things have gotten a little more intense or shaken up during the pandemic as every other aspect has. Talk to me, what’s going on out there? What are you seeing?

[00:05:04.090] – Ligia Pena
It’s really interesting because, you know necessity… What’s that expression? Necessity is the mother of…

[00:05:12.310] – Boris
Necessity is the mother of invention.

[00:05:13.670] – Ligia Pena
Exactly. And despite all of the elements of the pandemic that have been absolutely horrendous and sad and upsetting and stressful, et cetera, that everyone experienced globally. When it comes… when I look at the impact of a pandemic on legacies specifically, and this is something that I’ve observed not only in North America but across the world, is that it pushed fundraisers and charities to adopt new ways of engaging with donors and new ways to talk about the topic of legacies.

[00:05:52.550] – Ligia Pena
Because what happened? If we go to… if we go back in time to March through June, July of 2020, what happened is charities that would on average receive two or three notifications per month of a legacy, suddenly were getting 20, 50 notifications per month. They were getting 20 or 30 inquiries on how to leave a gift in their will per week. So this is… and lawyers and notaries around the world and online will writing services saw in the upwards of 300% increase in business. And so that just really pushed the sector to look at legacies through a different lens. And that is something that’s super exciting to me as a legacy nerd.

[00:06:52.250] – Boris
So on the one hand, of course, it’s tragic and there’s a lot of tragedy happening.

[00:06:58.310] – Ligia Pena
Of course.

[00:06:58.310] – Boris
And on the other hand, it’s a critical time for organizations to be looking at their legacy programs, to be optimizing them to figure out better communications, better tracking, better everything in order to really not just benefit from it but honestly—and I’m sure this is how most people including yourself think about it is give people the opportunity to make a lasting impact, whatever may happen during a tragedy like the pandemic that has befallen the entire world at this point.

[00:07:32.630] – Ligia Pena
Oh, absolutely. And I want our listeners to know I’m not making light of the pandemic at all. But here’s what happens is that by looking at the numbers and I’m just projecting here because I don’t think anyone has done the research yet. It’s definitely something I’m interested in probably doing a bit of a small research project on is looking at the charities in 2020 and 2021 that have been able to weather the storm, the pandemic storm, or have managed to continue operating with minimal impact. I wonder how many of those are those who had a legacy program that was functioning, was generating income versus those that did not, my suspicion—and again, I’m just projecting. And my assumption is this, but it hasn’t been proven yet—

[00:08:33.820] – Ligia Pena
My assumption is those that were focusing… who had fundraising programs that were all about small transactions or transactional fundraising. Short-term funding probably paid the price a lot more than those that had their nest egg being legacies. Because when you look at it, if you were to take the concept of fundraise… a diversified fundraising program and you transform that into an example of what it is that—how you invest for your own future. Well, basically, a legacy program and gifts in wills are the equivalent of your 401 (k) in the US, right? Or whatever pension plan you have. It’s that money that in the future is going to come in and when you need it, you can tap into it.

[00:09:24.380] – Ligia Pena
Well, a lot of charities still don’t understand that concept. That that’s what a planned giving program is. So they keep saying, well, my paycheck is in two weeks, therefore, that’s what I live on. It’s not sustainable. You lose your job from one day to the next, and now you’re unemployed, and that’s what a lot of people saw during the pandemic.

[00:09:44.450] – Ligia Pena
Anyway, I don’t want to over extend the metaphor, but that’s basically—charities need to look at planned giving programs through that lens and start doing that. Because let’s look at back in 2009 when the… in 2008 and 9 when the economy tanked. The organizations that weathered the storm as well during that are those that probably had a planned giving program and a major gift program.

[00:10:11.270] – Boris
No, I think that’s really fascinating. I would love to see that study if you would be able to put it together. I think it will definitely bring to light a lot of things. From what I have seen—and I haven’t talked to a lot of organizations about their legacy programs, but I have talked about their individual giving programs over the last year and a half. It’s the ones that were able to pivot or that were already in a position where they were most capable of helping the biggest number of people in communities that were impacted by the pandemic.

[00:10:45.510] – Boris
A lot of them were actually able to grow. Foundations poured more money into it. But I think… And again, really interested if you are able to do this study to see the results, if you could break them out by the category of services that the organization provides, the ones that were not directly or maybe even secondarily providing relief to people during the pandemic and didn’t have a great legacy program, or how did a legacy program impact them? I think that’s going to be where the biggest gap is probably going to be. Again, just like I’m guessing here, but that’s my take on the state of things right now.

[00:11:27.590] – Ligia Pena
That’s definitely an interesting hypothesis that should be layered into that. Absolutely. That’d be really interesting. So we’ll talk after.

[00:11:36.770] – Boris
You and I can gather our data and studies as much as we want. But let’s get back to some of the things that I think our listeners and viewers would really love to learn from you, which is: with these trends that are going on right now with everything happening, what is it that we need to do and can do in order to optimize and really measure our results in terms of legacy giving programs? And I know you talk a lot about data and about dashboards. I’d love to get your insights on that. What are the KPIs that we should really be tracking? What should we be looking for as we’re coming out of the pandemic? What should we be thinking about?

[00:12:23.030] – Ligia Pena
So, and what I’m about to share—it really applies whether we would have gone through a pandemic or not—I think to me is a fundamental thing that needs to change. Like when we started the call is, what are some of the challenges that we see? Well, I think a big issue that I see and everyone reports on legacies differently, but the most traditional way that organizations have been reporting on legacies is income. Well, income is just a really tiny snapshot of how many estates have been settled during the year. But it says absolutely nothing about the effort that your legacy fundraiser is doing today. It basically is reporting on something that you have absolutely no control of.

[00:13:13.690] – Ligia Pena
So how can you be developed as a fundraising director, as a CEO, how can you make strategic fundraising decisions about your legacy program when what you’re using as your benchmark to make those decisions is something you have absolutely zero control of? So go back to the drawing board and define your key performance indicators based on elements that you can control, that you can actually make business decisions to ensure that you continually push and advance your legacy program as well as your legacy professional, because your KPIs need to be evaluating both the program and the professional.

[00:13:59.780] – Ligia Pena
So some of the things that in the dashboard that I introduced to the organizations that I work with looks at some broad-based KPIs and then some specific KPIs. And the specific KPIs are based on the pipeline model that they decide to integrate. So it’s a pipeline of who you inquire… who you acquire from within your database or outside of your database to engage in the legacy conversation. What are the different stages of that journey? And then up until the point where you convert them into a legacy pledger.

[00:14:39.960] – Ligia Pena
So those are the specific KPIs that you should be looking at. How many new inquiries have you received? How many of those inquirers have turned into considerers? How many of those considerers have turned into intenders? And how many of those intenders converted into a pledge? Right. So those are things you can control strategically, through your marketing, through your engagement, through your conversations, through different ways. So those are the specific ones.

[00:15:09.160] – Ligia Pena
Next is then looking at more managerial type of KPIs is how many communications are being sent out? How many engagement… How much comms is being sent out to donors? How many individual one-on-one conversations your fundraiser is having with donors? And so this is done—and there’s additional—there’s like way more KPIs. But if you’re starting from scratch or if you’re currently reporting on things that you can’t control and you want to start integrating this element, start with those things. Look at your pipeline and identify KPIs that challenge you, to grow that pipeline. I know I keep harboring on the pipeline element, but that’s because it’s the most important piece of your fundraising program to ensure that you do get that money.

[00:16:08.430] – Ligia Pena
So it’s not the number of people who have raised their hand, although that’s obviously important, but it’s the number of people that you bring into the funnel, and how many you move ahead. And what happens oftentimes is that organizations are really good at the acquisition element, but then do a terrible job at converting and bringing them to the end of that funnel. And so that’s the key to the success of your legacy program is the conversion element.

[00:16:38.830] – Boris
So I really appreciate you being as specific as you just were. And I understand that you can’t be completely specific because every organization is going to be slightly different. And the way that they’re going to set up their pipeline or funnel—either metaphor—is going to be a little bit different, but it is critical to figure out what the most important KPIs are for each organization. And it sounds like—and correct me if I’m wrong here, you’ve basically broken them down into inputs, outputs, and outcomes. Where the inputs are, okay, here’s what we’ve done: here’s how many calls we’ve made, how many emails we’ve sent, how many follow ups we’ve had, how many conversations in-person meetings we may have have, right? Then the outputs are, okay, here’s how many people responded, here’s how many people were interested and that ladder that you spoke about… three different stages of interested or inquiring, you said?

[00:17:34.690] – Ligia Pena
Inquirers, considerers, intenders and pledgers.

[00:17:37.870] – Boris
Oh, so four levels?

[00:17:39.118] – Ligia Pena
Yeah.

[00:17:40.270] – Boris
Right. And so pledger is ultimately the outcome that you want when somebody has pledged?

[00:17:45.260] – Ligia Pena
Correct. The person that said, “You’re in my will, we’re good.” Yeah.

[00:17:50.350] – Boris
When they do that, do they declare a specific amount?

[00:17:53.950] – Ligia Pena
Sometimes they do, and sometimes they don’t. So what you do want to be doing is having that additional conversation with the donor when they confirm that they have included your charity in their will, they say, “Well, we would love to have the opportunity to honor your gift and to thank you and to recognize you. Would you be willing to share with us the terms or the amounts or is it a specific gift? Is it a residual gift? What is it that you want?” And then that enables you also to have that conversation of, “did you have an intention of having your bequest be dedicated—not dedicated but reserved for like a particular project? Do you want it designated?”

[00:18:39.026] – Boris
Earmarked?

[00:18:39.530] – Ligia Pena
Yeah. “Designated to a specific project or program that we’re running?” And so that enables you then to engage in that conversation and et cetera.

[00:18:51.950] – Boris
Right. We map these out, all these KPIs onto some sort of a dashboard, and then we could essentially look and see what results we’re producing long before we get the eventual bequest, the eventual donation?

[00:19:06.290] – Ligia Pena
Absolutely. Because if you’re reporting this, whether you do it on a quarterly basis or at a six-month mark, et cetera, then you can see trends of what’s happening. So, for instance, if I put my fundraising director hat on and my legacy officer brings me this, and I see that quarter after quarter, I don’t see any movement in the conversion from stages to stages. Then that would be the time—that would be a red flag for me to have a conversation, okay, what’s happening here? Why aren’t any of these donors being converted? Why isn’t this flowing?

[00:19:43.250] – Ligia Pena
Because, of course, when you go into legacy fundraising, you’re in it for the long term. This is not an ask and it comes in. Okay? So we know that. But your pipeline has to keep moving. So if I keep seeing that my legacy fundraiser keeps adding a lot of inquiries, but none of those inquiries are moving into considerers or intenders, then I need to have a serious conversation with them. Is it because we’re not investing enough? Is it because they’re overworked or are they just not the right person to be managing the program?

[00:20:15.780] – Ligia Pena
So you want to look at it from a business perspective. Is your program progressing? Because the last thing you want is to have a situation where 20 years from now, you suddenly have very few legacies coming in. Why? Because none of those donors were engaged with. None of those donors were converted.

[00:20:36.780] – Ligia Pena
I can tell you one organization I know for sure in a country they did that. They had a legacy officer for many, many years, and all she did was just maintain the relationship with donors who had already confirmed their gift. But she was not doing any acquisition or any conversion. They ended up being promoted to a team leader position. They hired a new legacy fundraiser. I was brought in to go sit down onboard her and look at their program. And then we realized that for the last ten years, there was no acquisition, no conversion done. And now they were facing a significant funding shortfall because they always depended on that legacy income, and the well had pretty much dried up.

[00:21:25.130] – Boris
Wow.

[00:21:25.130] – Ligia Pena
And it’s not something that you can replace in five minutes. It takes years.

[00:21:31.070] – Boris
So it’s critical to have this information available and accessible, perhaps reporting to the board, perhaps at least reporting to the executive director or CEO, whatever you have at the top of your organization. How do we do this? How do we put it together? When I think of a dashboard, I’m a marketing and data geek. So I think of a dashboard as something with charts and inputs and outputs already kind of meshed together. And there are tools that I know of for marketing purposes. But for a lot of people that might feel technical or too technical to get set up, what do we actually need to do? What are some of the tools that we could use to make this as simple as possible?

[00:22:14.730] – Ligia Pena
I can’t take credit for the dashboard that I have because it was someone else that had created it from scratch. I just modified it and adapted it to the needs. Excel. I have it on an Excel spreadsheet. Honestly, I went as low tech as possible because I never want to assume that someone else knows how to use these other tools. And there’s a lot of things like there’s a lot of tools out there, Tableau software and all of these other pay services that you can use, and they’re great. They’re fancy, but most people don’t know how to use it. I can’t be bothered to learn it. And the Excel spreadsheet most people do, and most people know how to input formulas.

[00:22:56.570] – Ligia Pena
So on my resource page on my website, I have a template of a dashboard that people can download and then turn into an Excel spreadsheet. And that’s it. That’s all you need to do, really. Keep it as simple as possible. And what I often tell my bootcamp participants or my clients is, you don’t need to report on all of the elements that are in the dashboard that I created. Just pick the first three or four or five however you think is more relevant to your organization, do those really well. And then as you get more and more sophisticated, add new KPIs, add new elements. Don’t think that you need to do absolutely everything. Just do what you can actually control for now, and you can actually report on and then improve from that point forward.

[00:23:47.310] – Boris
So I love what you said about keeping it as simple as possible. The best tool is the one that you know how to use and can use in the moment, that it’s available to you in the moment. If you have the time and bandwidth to develop something custom, to develop something larger or use one of these bigger platforms. And Tableau is probably the biggest one and probably too complex for 99% of people out there. But that certainly shows the range something from as simple as an Excel sheet to a package like Tableau that will do so many advanced things that data scientists can use, but the rest of us don’t really need to. And I know that there’s a data package from Google. I forget what the—Google Data Studio, I think it’s called.

[00:24:30.620] – Ligia Pena
Yeah, it is great.

[00:24:31.750] – Boris
Yeah, and fairly easy to use and then can be easily—you could package reports, basically export reports out of that on any sort of a regular basis and then share them with the team whomever that might be.

[00:24:45.240] – Ligia Pena
That’s actually what we used to use at Greenpeace.

[00:24:48.210] – Boris
There you go. So once you have this report going, and by the way, I love that you offer this. I’ve seen the tool that you offer. I think it’s super simple, straightforward. It doesn’t feel like some fancy dashboard. It feels like, oh, I just need to plug in some numbers over here and track my progress over time. And you offer a lot of great resources on your website. We’re going to link to as many of them as we can. You’ve got most of them on your resources page right there for people. So we’ll be sure to include that in the show notes.

[00:25:18.300] – Boris
One other resource, speaking of which, that you have on there, which I personally love is that you have examples of legacy pages that work on your website. Can you talk to me a little bit about that?

[00:25:32.970] – Ligia Pena
Yeah. That’s a work-in-progress, because I often get asked by organizations for examples of good legacy pages or in-memory pages. And truth be told, there’s a lot of really terrible ones. So whenever I come across something that I find fits within what the research tells us of how to talk to donors about legacies, I just put it in there. So honestly, I should go and add like, what are the things that I like about every page and what other fundraisers should be on the lookout for because it has to be educational. Right?

[00:26:14.310] – Ligia Pena
So that’s why… so those are pages that have been sent to me or that when I was doing research, I came across and went, oh, my goodness. But I find when it comes—because this is about a lot of storytelling as well. One organization that honestly is perhaps one of the organizations does storytelling the best is RNLI in the UK. It is absolutely insane how well they tell the story. It’s the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, RNLI. And their web page is fantastic, and their YouTube channel is fantastic for like heartfelt storytelling.

[00:27:00.680] – Boris
I’m excited to check them out. And you got exactly to the heart of why I was thrilled with the pages that you have on your side. I didn’t get to all of them, but the few that I looked at honestly, what makes them great is the storytelling. And I talk about donation page storytelling. I’ve never actually really looked at legacy pages specifically, but it’s the same kind of concept of you need to tell the story. You need to make sure that it connects to your audience. And I saw that the visuals were good, that the videos were right there and easy to see, that the impact was on the page. It had a great complete story on there with ways that people could jump in and get involved.

[00:27:41.260] – Boris
So I’m happy to go through if you’d like to break it down for you and say exactly why it’s working. And even maybe in some ways, that some of them might improve similar to what I do for donation pages for a lot of my clients and occasionally just for fun for people. But, yeah, it’s really the story that works. And you’re talking about… what potentially without your organization, without a nonprofit is the end of someone’s story when it comes to working with a certain cause or cause that they believe in, and you’re offering them—once again, giving them a call to action and offering them the superpower, the ability to have a legacy impact on a cause that they really care about. And it’s critical.

[00:28:27.720] – Ligia Pena
Exactly. And going back to the introduction that you did at the beginning of the podcast where you said that I make death—talking about death fun. A lot of it is that—and to your point about the website is that—in legacies, it’s not that you talk about death and we make it fun. It’s that it’s fun to talk about life and leaving a gift in a will is to talk with the donor about the lives that they live, the values that were important. Because through their gift in their will, they can reach symbolic immortality and academic research.

[00:29:07.160] – Ligia Pena
Actually, one of my research supervisors wrote her PhD thesis on the importance of symbolic immortality in legacy marketing, and that’s what we do. And I think once we understand that, it’s incredibly powerful to know. And I think it’ll take that fear away from fundraisers to say, “Oh, my gosh, I don’t feel comfortable talking about death.” Well, no, you need to understand that this is not about death. It’s about that symbolic immortality that a donor will have through that gift in their will. And in order to do that, you need to talk about the life that they lived.

[00:29:45.490] – Ligia Pena
And that’s why another resource that I really believe that fundraisers should read is this book by Dr. Russell James out of Texas Tech University. Let me see if I can hold it up. Inside the Mind of the Bequest Donor, which is also hyperlinked. A PDF version of the book is also hyperlinked on my research page. I think it’s a must read for every fundraiser that is interested or is currently working in the area of legacies. It’s incredibly important because it talks about the neurological aspect of—the parts of the brain that are activated when donors talk about gifts in wills, or read legacy marketing.

[00:30:27.610] – Boris
Ligia, you must have been reading my mind because the next thing I wanted to ask you was, what are some tools and resources aside from all the ones on your site that we are going to absolutely link to, that you recommend to people. So that book Inside the Mind of the Bequest Donor we’ll definitely link to that. And it’s great that it’s available on your site as well for download. Is there anything else that you recommend people check out in terms of the state of the industry, if that’s an appropriate term for legacy giving?

[00:30:57.610] – Ligia Pena
So, The Giving Institute also published in 2019, I think it was. Yes, I think it was in 2019 or 2020, sorry. Fall of ’19. Leaving a Legacy: A New Look at Planned Giving Donors. So I think that’s a must for fundraisers working in the US and it’s only $69. So click download, boom, you’ve got it. So that’s another great place. Reading anything that comes up. So I’m going to declare my bias here because I am doing my PhD I’m very much about read the academic research coming out. So things that Jen Shang and Adrian Sargeant are writing about donor motivation, donor psychology. Incredibly important. They publish a lot of stuff. You can find them on their website.

[00:31:49.040] – Ligia Pena
Claire Rowley, another academic friend and thesis supervisor. Dr. Russell James, that I mentioned as well. These are academics that are straddling academia and being practitioners. And so it’s important as fundraisers, and it’s incumbent on us to read the research because that’s where we know if we apply what—the researchers have actually done the test for us. All we need to do is apply it in our daily practice.

[00:32:22.570] – Boris
And I love research and figuring out how to apply it, especially when it comes to human behavior, behavioral economics, behavioral psychology, behavioral sciences in general, how we can really help people make the best choices for themselves and for the world around them when it comes to working with nonprofit organizations or NGOs, whatever they might be in your part of the world.

[00:32:45.730] – Boris
Ligia, thank you so much for being on the show today and sharing all of this. This has been a wonderful conversation. I’ve learned a lot, and hopefully the audience at home has too. Do you have any call to action for those of us that—for all of our listeners and viewers that have made it this far and are fascinated by the work that you’re doing?

[00:33:06.010] – Ligia Pena
Keep reading, ask questions. Don’t be afraid to doubt yourself and then seek advice from myself or from others in the sector that work in this realm and keep pushing. Keep the pushing the envelopes. Learn about what’s going on in other markets and then apply that learning to your own.

[00:33:27.190] – Boris
Definitely. Well, thank you again so much.

[00:33:30.410] – Ligia Pena
Thank you.

[00:33:31.690] – Boris
And thank you everybody who joined us today for this episode of The Nonprofit Hero Factory with Ligia Peña. If you enjoyed this episode and learned something that you might be able to apply to your organization, any idea that has sparked in your mind that can help you create more heroes for your cause, then this was a good day for me and for Ligia. Thank you for joining us. Please share, like, and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite platform so that more nonprofit professionals like yourself can discover experts like Ligia and create a better world for all of us.

[00:34:04.450] – Boris
Bye bye, everybody.

[00:34:05.550] – Outro
Thank you all for watching and listening to The Nonprofit Hero Factory. We hope this episode has given you some ideas and strategies for creating more heroes for your cause and a better world for all of us. Please be sure to subscribe to this show on YouTube, Facebook, iTunes, Spotify or your favorite podcast platform and let us know what you think by leaving a review.

[00:00:19.490] – Intro Video
Welcome to the Nonprofit Hero Factory, a weekly live video broadcast, and podcast. Where we’ll be helping nonprofit leaders and innovators create more heroes for their cause and a better word for all of us. Da-Ding!

[00:00:21.480] – Boris
Hi, everybody, welcome back to an episode of the Nonprofit Hero Factory, I’m excited about today’s guest. He is an advisor on all matters philanthropy on both sides to philanthropists and nonprofits. He’s going to give us some inside looks and some things to consider based on recent events and recent news and historic roles of nonprofits and philanthropists. His name is Doug White. Doug is a longtime leader and scholar in the nation’s philanthropic community. He’s an author and an adviser to nonprofit organizations and philanthropists.

[00:00:52.950] – Boris
As I said, he serves as the co-chair of the Walter Cronkite Committee at FoolProof. And as a board member, the vice president of the Secular Coalition of America. He is the former director of Columbia University’s Master of Science in Fundraising Management Program, where he also taught board governance, ethics and fundraising. Doug has published five books. His most recent “Wounded Charity” analyzes the allegations of mismanagement made in January 2016 against the Wounded Warrior Project. I know a lot of us heard about that and were affected by it in one way or another.

[00:01:24.990] – Boris
When I asked Doug what his superpower is, he says, “I try to help people better understand the role nonprofits play in our society and the impact they have on individual lives. I examined the personal stories of charities as well as the broader policy implications of philanthropy.” So with that, I would love to welcome Doug to the show. And hi, Doug, thank you so much for joining us today.

[00:01:48.480] – Doug White
It’s my pleasure, Boris.

[00:01:49.560] – Boris
If you don’t mind. Obviously, I just read your bio and it is impressive, but tell us your story.

[00:01:56.760] – Doug White
I began in the philanthropic world in the late 1970s when someone asked me to come to dinner. They asked me to then go out and talk to some people about raising some money. And I said, sure. It was for my high school. And I went out and talked to these people and they all said yes when I asked them for money. And I was so surprised because they weren’t getting anything back. And I thought this is easier than selling refrigerators or cars or anything like that, even though there’s nothing really tangible there to give to these people for what they’re what they’re paying.

[00:02:31.020] – Doug White
I thought what is going on there? And they said, well, I really had this great experience and I want to give back. All of these things that we now take for granted when we talk about fundraising. But for me, that was brand new. And it was it was so eye-opening. I knew that was my life’s mission at that point.

[00:02:48.470] – Boris
That’s pretty awesome, and I’d love to actually talk to you more about what it is that you think got them to quickly and easily—basically, it sounds like it wasn’t very difficult to convince them to—give. Clearly, that led you into this career of working with philanthropists as well as nonprofits. Why did you decide to go into philanthropy advising?

[00:03:12.570] – Doug White
Because over the years, it’s become clear that many donors want to make sure their money goes to the causes they want to see furthered. And a lot of times they don’t really know what those causes are. And so it takes a process that’s become rather institutionalized in the last couple of decades. But still at the beginning of all of this, it wasn’t. But it takes a process to actually talk to a would-be or a philanthropist about his or her values. What do you want to see changed in the world? How do you want to see your money used?

[00:03:48.570] – Doug White
We’ve gotten to the point on, let’s say, Maslow’s hierarchy to the point where they’re comfortable with their own world. They have what they need and their needs are taken care of. So now they’re saying, how can I look out to the rest of the world and do something about that? Well, a lot of people really don’t know what they want to do. They really don’t.

[00:04:09.000] – Doug White
But when they do know what they want to do, they still have another hurdle to find out what organization is going to best further that mission. So it’s a matter of going through a questionnaire in my case, and I think it’s probably the way most of philanthropy advisors do this, that really examines values. And it also has to do with family issues like what you want your children to be when they grow up in terms of what their value system is, what kind of world you want to leave behind, what kind of legacy do you want to leave?

[00:04:41.760] – Doug White
When I was on the board of what was then the National Committee on Planned Giving, I started this group called “Leave a Legacy”. And I think that’s still going. But it’s a local group. It’s a group that has local efforts around the country where people are encouraged to leave a legacy at a nonprofit through their bequests or some trust or something like that. And that has grown.

[00:05:12.570] – Doug White
That idea has grown and that vernacular has grown, to leave a legacy. But what does that mean? What do I want to do? How do I want to affect the world after I’m gone? People have a difficult enough time to think about dying to begin with, let alone how the world’s going to look like after they after they leave. But that’s the kind of conversation you have to have with people. And they are willing to have that because they’re asking you what can I do to make the world a better place?

[00:05:40.710] – Boris
So I want to touch on several of those things. And I think we’re going to come back to a few of them because they’re definitely on my list of things to chat with you about today. But one of the reasons why this is so important right now, and I feel like—predominantly my audience is nonprofit communications, marketing and fundraisers, and their goal is, of course, to help their organization grow to, as I like to say, activate more heroes for their cause.

[00:06:05.310] – Boris
It seems that over the last at least a few years, there has been a trend in giving where there’s been fewer and fewer smaller donors and more and more philanthropists on a larger scale that are actually more than making up for the losses in the smaller and smaller donations. So overall, giving is increasing while with possibly the exception of Covid last year, which I think did drive a lot more people to open up and and empathize and donate to local organizations or national ones. But aside from that, there’s been that decline and giving has grown regardless of that. So what do you think that trend is about? What’s what’s happening?

[00:06:53.270] – Doug White
I call that—I have a phrase for it—is the de-democratization of fundraising. When I began in the early 1980s with this fundraising gig, I was concentrating on the people who gave low amounts of money. You asked earlier about how I was able to get these people to give money to this school. And I can answer you by saying they basically ask themselves, I was just the conduit. I was just able to release some of their memories and some of their good feelings about the place and how that school helped them become who they were.

[00:07:36.210] – Doug White
I know that’s a bit of a cliché right now, and it’s not entirely true, but it’s true enough. And a school, college, whatever, oftentimes makes an impact on you. And so I was very involved with… those are thousand dollar gifts and that at the time was a big deal. But I was involved with those people who are giving low amounts of money. Today a thousand dollars is almost meaningless to some of these organizations. But over the decades we’ve become enamored with the large donors.

[00:08:10.010] – Doug White
And why not? If someone’s got a potential to give you a million dollars, you’re going to pay attention to that person. You’re going to you’re going to cultivate him over years, maybe, or over years. And why not? Because that’s going to result in more money than cultivating a person who’s got the capacity to give a thousand dollars or five hundred dollars or something even less, if it makes economic sense to take the time to do that. And it makes sense for the organization’s growth to do that.

[00:08:37.700] – Doug White
But, I have also noticed that we are doing that at the expense of paying attention to our smaller donors, and I fear that the pool that we create of smaller donors will not be enough to then turn into larger donors as time passes. And maybe the future of philanthropy is that your big donor will just come in and show up and say, I care about your cause. And so I’m going to I’m going to give you this money, but especially with organizations like, say, heritage organizations like schools…

[00:09:15.020] – Doug White
They grow into big donors. Seniors in college, or are asked to give to their class fund as seniors in college. That wasn’t true when I was in college. And so the idea there is to create a level of paying back, an understanding of how the school works and also to have a participation level. Right now, I’m in my fiftieth reunion for my high school, the school I went to, Exeter, just so you’ll know. And we’re very concerned about having a participation level at a very high level.

[00:09:49.910] – Doug White
And that’s crucial because it keeps people lubricated, if you will. Their philanthropic senses lubricated and keeps Exeter on the front page. And there are so many other competitors for that—the local food bank, their daughters’ schools, the local hospital where they had surgery. And they’re all legitimate competitors. And so what we say in our situation is don’t forget them. But do keep in mind the school that got this all started for you. And even if you can’t give a lot or don’t want to give a lot, then your participation is crucial.

[00:10:25.430] – Doug White
So that keeps that pyramid in the proper level. Still, though, what used to be an 80-20 rule is closer to 95-5 rule. And we are we are paying so much attention to that five percent.

[00:10:39.800] – Doug White
And you are correct, Covid really brought out a lot of the smaller donors. It’s because that’s where the heart strings were. After 9/11, Red Cross brought a lot of smaller donors out. And so a tragedy or an intense situation will get our heartstrings going. And that’s good, but that’s temporary. And so charities have to figure out how to continue that.

[00:11:04.310] – Doug White
And I think there’s a lot of argument to be made to, even though it makes sense to go to the large donor and cultivate that person or the prospect. It also makes a lot of sense to cultivate the smaller donors as well, because otherwise we’re going to get into a situation where it’s seen that philanthropy is only for the rich. In fact, when I make my own phone calls for this reunion, people will say, you’ve got too much of an endowment, you don’t need my money. Besides, you’ve got X, Y or Z famous name giving you this money you don’t need me. What is my one hundred dollars going to do?

[00:11:40.070] – Doug White
And I have to go through the process and say, look, even though there’s a big budget, every dollar is accounted for and the school does do that and it does that very well. And that’s one recommendation for charitable organizations, is to make sure that they are there running their business properly. I say business not in air quotes, but I do say a little cautiously because I don’t want to get people confused between what a for-profit business is and a nonprofit business is. But the way I look at it is that both start with the same premise that you’ve got to stay alive, you have to pay people, you have to have an office, I think even today. You have to have computers. You have to have operational activity taking place.

[00:12:20.720] – Doug White
The difference is that the purpose of a for profit is to make a profit for shareholders. A nonprofit doesn’t have shareholders. It can often make a profit. That’s another issue. But it isn’t meant to go out of business or it’s not meant to go poor or be poor just because it doesn’t sell widgets. In fact, I think what it sells is much grander than widgets or any other widget that we can we can identify.

[00:12:47.990] – Boris
So absolutely, nonprofits do need to function as businesses, as any other business, and they do compete with businesses for the attention and money of people who might support it or might go and spend their money somewhere else in their time doing something else. So there’s a lot of that at play. It’s interesting what you call the de-democratization of philanthropy. I was very excited just seemingly a few years ago when the crowdfunding space first took off, because I saw that as the democratization of philanthropy, where anyone could become a donor to any organization, where any organization can also reach out and capture the interests and hopefully hearts of just about anybody that they could have some sort of affinity with.

[00:13:37.970] – Boris
It was an exciting time. Today, I’m not sure how prevalent that is in people’s mindsets in the organizations themselves. Is it worthwhile for them to run a campaign versus just make a few phone calls, wine and dine somebody if you will, bring them to the gala and get that big check? But it does say something for their future. It also, I think… and you and I agree on this. Possibly shifts their focus and attention away from a more groundswell public want for their services to what an individual or a few individuals might be looking for… the changes that they want to see in the world.

[00:14:23.980] – Boris
Can you talk a little bit about this outsized influence that some of the deeper-pocketed philanthropists might have on the charitable sector today?

[00:14:33.820] – Doug White
It seems to be more and more prevalent. Let me give you a little bit of history on that particular segment of philanthropy. I did a book on this. It was the lawsuit against Princeton University. In 1961, a woman, an heiress of the A&P fortune. And for most of your audience, that is going to be like coming out of Mars. They used to be the largest grocery chain in the United States for many, many decades. Well, the trust dissolved after the death of a grandchild.

[00:15:04.030] – Doug White
And so she inherited directly about a hundred million dollars and she gave about thirty five billion dollars of that to Princeton University, a huge gift, the largest gift to that university at that time. The second largest gift event of any university at that time. To establish the graduate program or to endow the graduate program at the Woodrow Wilson School the International Relations School. Time passes. We understand that the family is not happy with the way the money is spent.

[00:15:36.340] – Doug White
And so in 2002, this was 40 years after the gift was made. The son sues Princeton. Now, by this time that 35 dollars million has grown to about 900 million dollars. The family set up a separate foundation. Princeton was the only beneficiary of that foundation, which is fine. And as a result, Princeton included that endowment in its endowment totals, which is also fine. They were the only beneficiary. So it made sense.

[00:16:04.780] – Doug White
But the son said, you’re not using the money the way my father wanted to. And they said, yes, we are. And so he had sat on the board, there were there was a foundation, a separate organization. Four members were from Princeton, three were from the family. And he contended that a lot of the decisions were being made in their absence and money was being spent without their permission and knowledge, and that a lot of the money was going to the wrong place.

[00:16:30.320] – Doug White
It was going within Princeton. Nobody was walking home with a Cadillac or anything of that nature. But it was just that the donor’s intentions weren’t being served. Princeton came back, said, look, we’re we’ve got a great school here and it’s good. It’s a lot to do with your dad. So let’s not get that wrong. Princeton’s graduate school here is among the best in the world, if not the best in the world. The donor kept saying that’s not the question. The question is, are you using my dad’s money the way you said you would use it?

[00:16:59.960] – Doug White
It was a terrible ordeal. And going back to your question, the donors, that was the first donor that I know of that I know of—and there were others, I’m sure—that ran into trouble with regard to how their money was going to be used. But did they have a right to say this is the way it should be used? Well, if Princeton agrees to it, my answer is yes, they do have that right. Now, fast forward to 2021. And you’ve got a very similar situation taking place right now at the University of Chicago.

[00:17:36.290] – Doug White
So what I’m getting at, Boris, is that there is an environment right now where large donors are expecting that their wishes are going to be granted. And the key thing for me is that the university or the charity agrees to this. And my thinking is not being an attorney and not looking at this through the legal lens, but from an ethical lens. If you’re saying you’re going to do it then by golly, you’ve got to do it.

[00:18:04.580] – Boris
So that’s a specific case with a very large donation. How do we extrapolate that on a national level, it seems like and people are often accusing or I don’t know if the accusing is the right word, but upset with an outsized influence that deeper pocketed individuals or large corporations have on our political system, it seems like there is something similar that might be going on in the philanthropic system. The other side of things, if you will, where the government isn’t directly involved.

[00:18:43.920] – Boris
Is that a cause for concern when a small percentage, as you said, fewer than 20 percent at this point, of the donors are maybe even if they’re not dictating, if they’re not saying here’s a 60-page contract, but they’re saying I’m going to support an organization that’s promising to do this. And then, sure, they might want metrics and performance indicators throughout. But is that, do you think, an issue for us and for most nonprofits out there?

[00:19:21.140] – Doug White
George Washington, in his farewell address, warned of organizations that today would call charities, warned against the influence of charities. And what he meant by that was individuals who may have different designs on the way American society should be from the designs that Congress, the people speaking through their representatives, would say our society should be. And since that day in the 1790s, when he sent that farewell address to Congress, it was actually published in a newspaper. But since that day, we’ve always had that tension.

[00:20:05.180] – Doug White
What role is… what role does charity play in our society? And when we ask that question, we then, in today’s vernacular, also have to ask, what role does the donor play in that whole process? Nobody elected Bill Gates to anything, and yet he’s had massive influence over much of our public life. Now, most people think that his influence has been very, very positive. And I’m going to grant those people that. But it still is not necessarily an expression of the people’s will in the United States.

[00:20:39.350] – Doug White
So I think we always have to take that into account. And any organization that, this is where the tension is, any organization that wants money has to balance getting that money with how strictly they want to adhere to that particular wish by the donor. But I think it’s fair to say at this point that donors do have much more influence over a charity’s mission than they used to and they’re expecting to.

[00:21:11.730] – Doug White
I’m not a psychologist, but I will say that my impression is that the richer you are, the more arrogant you get. In… oh, gosh, I forget the year. But some years ago, Mark Zuckerberg began an initiative in Newark for the Newark Public School Systems, in Newark, New Jersey. One hundred million dollars, and it was going to be matched by other philanthropists and one of the billionaires that I spoke with was part of that group, and he criticized himself as well as Mark Zuckerberg and the entire effort because they knew better. They they could take their private helicopter from a Manhattan heliport, go over and plop themselves down in Newark and say, “here, here’s the money and this is how it’s going to be spent and you’re all going to be the better for it.”

[00:21:58.280] – Doug White
No one talked to the people on the ground in Newark to say, how can this money be spent? No one among the advisors of this came from the Newark public school system or even the Newark schools or the community. So I think there’s a lot of lesson in that. You know, we don’t know better, but who does? The public charities are owned by the public, not any shareholders. So who does? Well, the board of directors is supposed to. There is no real I guess what I’m getting at, there’s no real ultimate arbiter that we can know is going to be right or know everything.

[00:22:41.500] – Doug White
It’s a messy system. Does the donor not know things? Probably not. He or she does know things and could help the organization well. But how much deference should we give to that one person? Is a question that’s probably going to plague us forever. What I think is the best answer and it’s not clean and it’s not perfect, but the best answer is to have a good board of directors who care about the mission, who are intensely engaged in the organization, and who have backgrounds that represent what the mission, the organization’s mission, is all about, deferring to those people as a group. They still might get it wrong, but it’s more than just one person.

[00:23:23.460] – Doug White
And of course, people will say, what if the billionaire’s on the board and just rides roughshod over everyone? Well, that’s a board governance problem. That person shouldn’t run roughshod over everyone. But that does happen. That’s real life. I mean, I do a lot of work in board governance and my goodness, that happens a lot.

[00:23:41.000] – Boris
So, it sounds like you’re saying there’s… That the reality is that they do have an outsized influence and there’s no easy solution to that, nor is it necessarily a problem or something that that needs to be solved. I think that, personally, the solution is to have a broader base of donors and a more, I guess stricter board and adherence to mission so that billionaires or whomever it is can’t ride roughshod, as you just called it, can’t override.

[00:24:26.750] – Boris
Of course, they could also just start their own foundations like Bill Gates did and like so many billionaires do in order to try to influence the change they want to see in the world. I’m a little conflicted on this personally, because on the one hand, I do believe that the greatest good needs to be responsive to the greatest number of people. But I’m also not a direction-by-committee kind of person. I think that often dilutes intentions and often gets nothing done.

[00:25:00.830] – Boris
And in the U.S. system specifically—and you and I talked about this a little earlier—we have this democratic system, this capitalist system where as much as it is complicated and far from perfect today, there is some of this idea of anyone can pull themselves up and rise up. Of course, that’s not true for everyone in this country, unfortunately, at this time. But there are nonprofits working on that, too.

[00:25:31.540] – Doug White
Yes

[00:25:33.620] – Boris
So there is definitely a need for private sector funding for charitable causes. And I don’t think that the government is the answer either. Like, we don’t want to I don’t think anybody in the US, except for perhaps actually some billionaires want their taxes raised. Most people do not. So the government doesn’t have the the resources or the bandwidth to tackle some of these larger problems and also isn’t as responsive to smaller things on the ground, certainly not on a federal level. So there’s this need for organizations, charitable organizations to step in and do some of the work.

[00:26:13.840] – Boris
And… without paying taxes, we can direct our own called a discretionary income—call it tithing, call it whatever you’d like—funds to the problems that we think are most important for government or for society to be able to tackle. I think back to the Soviet Union and, you know, in the Soviet Union, there were no charities. And in fact, a lot of immigrants from the Soviet Union to this day do not think that anybody needs to donate to charity because that’s the role of government.

[00:26:48.510] – Boris
At the same time, if you turn it and ask them, they’ll admit that the government in the Soviet Union, which claimed they would provide everything for everyone, really provided nothing for anyone except for the very wealthy elite that secretly stole a lot of funds from the people. So in the US, we need this kind of balance to our capitalist system in a private way. Can nonprofits fulfill that need and how do they approach this need for, at the moment anyway, these these white knights or these whales to come in and fund a lot of their major programing, knowing that it may not be responsive to their entire community?

[00:27:40.190] – Doug White
I’m seeing two questions in there, so let me break those out. Actually, several, actually, but I see two major things running there. What role in the capitalist system that we currently have nonprofits play? And also the role that the white knights play within that? So let me begin with the bigger the first part that you bring up. Congress, in its wisdom, understood exactly what you’re saying over a hundred years ago when they created the deduction for charitable gifts.

[00:28:10.400] – Doug White
So not only are our tax dollars not going to go to these things that we would otherwise want them to go to, we’re getting a tax benefit from this. So if we itemize, we will get a tax benefit.

[00:28:27.500] – Doug White
Now, just as a quick aside, you mentioned earlier we talked about the de-democratization of giving. And one of the factors, I think, in the last couple of years has been the increase in the standard deduction, which means that fewer people are itemizing, which means fewer people are able to take advantage of their charitable giving.

[00:28:46.130] – Doug White
That doubled, I think for married couples, it’s about twenty five thousand dollars now. So that’s huge. So that that that’s taken away a lot of the lower dollar donors from the charitable giving rolls. OK, if that’s an incentive. And there have been discussions as to how incentivizing charitable deduction is. I don’t believe that it’s as much of an incentive as some people do, but it’s there, especially for the larger donors.

[00:29:13.610] – Doug White
But the role of charities in society… It’s an interesting story we have here in the United States. You were talking about the Soviet Union, Europe also in the seventeen hundreds anyway, had a lot of money and they supported a lot of what we now think of as nonprofits, the churches, the art museums, the schools. And in the United States, we were very poor. We had no government money. Our government was bankrupt.

[00:29:43.880] – Doug White
In the 1820s, Alexis de Tocqueville came here from France to look at American society, and he was struck by the number of what he called Associations. And how people in communities would help do these things that in France was done by the government. So we started out very poor. And I think that’s what gave us birth, gave birth to our philanthropic system, which is very, very strong. By the way, this last year, we gave about 470 billion dollars to charitable organizations, a five percent increase over the prior year.

[00:30:12.650] – Doug White
So the role of of nonprofits… excuse me, yes… the role of nonprofits has always been somewhat defined by the fact that we didn’t have any money to put toward these purposes. And as the country has grown, it’s grown richer. There’s still a mindset that the government can’t do everything. I think even if we had all the money to do it the way we wanted to do it or that we could do it, we still wouldn’t take on the old European system where we were just pay for all of these things. Because there’s a sense here that and I believe it’s a very strong one and a very positive one, that as Americans, we’re more individual.

[00:30:48.050] – Doug White
Now that’s had its problems. Nothing’s perfect all the way through. But that individualism has created this nonprofit sector that’s very, very strong. Now, some of the larger problems that the government has to fix or that needs fixing in society, only the government can fix. Nonprofits aren’t going to build roads, they’re not going to create a military. For the most part, they’re not going to take us to the moon. Not going to do a lot of the large, big things that the government does.

[00:31:15.020] – Doug White
But there are a lot of organizations that are doing other things that are big. Cancer research, for example, that’s a nonprofit-government collaboration. The government’s got an interest in this and the nonprofit world has an interest in doing this. And I hope together there can be enough work and research done for that to someday be past tense disease. So I think that going forward, we’re never going to get out of having nonprofit play an extremely important role, nor will we get out of the situation where the government doesn’t want to spend some of these dollars for these purposes.

[00:31:56.260] – Doug White
And I think that’s healthy. I think that’s healthy. And and the government encourages that through the deduction. That’s the only way it can say, yes, we want to encourage you to make these gifts. And I think private philanthropy is a strong, strong, good moral force in society. And I think I know because I’ve been to Saudi Arabia to talk about this, I’ve been to China to talk about this, been to India to talk about this… The idea of how we have grown to be such a philanthropically oriented society is pretty special here in the United States.

[00:32:28.480] – Doug White
And I want to be very clear that that’s different from saying that we are more philanthropic than other people. I believe that’s a human tendency, not one defined by national borders. It’s just that we have a system where that can be better expressed or more efficiently expressed. Now to your second part there, where the large, I think you’re calling them “whales”, these large donors, what role are they going to continue to play in this society as we go forward?

[00:32:57.370] – Doug White
Because if we continue the way we are. We might see a very, very elite nonprofit sector and like we are seeing in the United States right now at large, we’re seeing these higher endowed charities become even better and better off and these lower and doubt charities, if they’re endowed at all, struggling more and more. And that takes away from, I think, the essence of what a charitable organization should do.

[00:33:28.700] – Doug White
And that’s the other thing about this. Charities are public commodities. We’re using public dollars to fund these organizations. So I think there’s an argument on both sides there. But if we allow this mega-donation mania that we have right now going into these larger and larger organizations, I’m afraid the system just may fall apart with such a division between the rich organizations and the small ones. This is where if I may, this is where Mackenzie Scott comes in. Mackenzie Scott, the former wife of Jeff Bezos, is known this past year for having given hundreds of—billions of dollars to underfunded, mostly black, historically black colleges around the United States.

[00:34:19.550] – Doug White
And recently she gave another several hundred million dollars. And what she has done, she’s hired these people to go out and talk to these organizations to find out where the need is. And they’re not overfunded, they’re not over endowed. They need this money. And the money she can give them is a real help to them. I would like to see more of that kind of philanthropy. Rather than saying, OK, I’m going to get more money to Harvard. And I’m not picking on Harvard. They’re a great organization. They really, really are. But it’s just that they have the largest endowment in the United States. But Harvard doesn’t need another building with someone’s name on it right now.

[00:35:01.430] – Doug White
So and as you’ll notice, McKenzie Scott isn’t putting her name on any of these buildings. In fact, she’s keeping that list of those organizations secret. She’s not keeping the organizations from talking about it. And some of them are. That’s how we’re getting the news about who’s getting what.

[00:35:19.690] – Boris
So there’s clearly so much more that we could discuss about this and endless things to learn on both sides of the conversation around this. What are some resources that organizations that nonprofits that might be listening to this should maybe go and check out? Obviously, I think your books are going to be a great resource for both history and some practical knowledge and advice. Are there any other that you would recommend?

[00:35:47.680] – Doug White
I would. And thank you for asking. A lot of the literature and nonprofit and fundraising activity has to do with how great it is or how to do fundraising and how great it is that donors can help charities. And I think we need that and we need more of it. But two books that have caught my eye in the last year, one is called “The Givers” by David Callahan, and he examines who these people are, these givers, these donors and what motivates them. It’s a great book. It’s not at all negative, but it’s not. It’s not it’s not all positive either.

[00:36:25.180] – Doug White
And the other book is “Winners Take All”, by—and I’ve got to look at the name here… he’s very famous, but I still have trouble with— “you’re the hottest who’s very well-spoken, very knowledgeable person.” And his is a critique. It’s an outright critique of how philanthropy and philanthropists really perpetuate the inequalities in American life. And I recommend those books not because of the way they are negative, but because they’re really positive, both of them, because I feel the same way.

[00:37:01.360] – Doug White
I feel like I so cherish the nonprofit world and the role nonprofits play in the United States and the role philanthropists play. I so cherish it. I want to see them all do well. I don’t want to see bad actors come in. I don’t want to see the bad charities take over. Some years ago there was an article in the Tampa Bay Times entitled The 50 Worst Charities in the United States. And there was a scathing review of how some charities really do misbehave.

[00:37:32.290] – Doug White
I want those people gone. I want them out of our sector. It’s too pure and we need good people. And I know we’re not angels. We will never have only angels in the nonprofit sector, even though sometimes we like to think of ourselves that way. But we are and we are human. But we really have to be more and I wrote a whole book about this on the ethical decision making at nonprofits. We have to be better than the rest.

[00:37:57.580] – Doug White
I just I feel our aspirations have to be higher. We don’t have a political environment in which to succeed. We don’t have a for-profit environment in which to succeed. The way we succeed is by really, truly making the world a better place, which I feel is a lot stronger a pull than either of the other two motivators.

[00:38:19.130] – Boris
Awesome. We’re going to link to both of those books and to your works in our show notes, if nonprofits are looking to delve further into this or to start their path down this road, where should they begin? Do you have any calls to action for them to get going?

[00:38:37.430] – Doug White
Well, as a nonprofit, I think I’ve seen the areas of… there are three areas basically that I think need a particular attention: Board governance. And there’s a whole bunch of work within that whole process here. But as I mentioned before, you don’t want one person steamrolling the others. Board governance is a process. It’s a skill. It’s a discipline. And people need to learn how to be board members because they are the ultimate people at an organization. We don’t hear as much about them as we do the CEOs, but they are extremely important. And so the process of board governance is critical.

[00:39:14.540] – Doug White
Ethical decision making at charities. I think we have a unique space to make these decisions. As I said before, we don’t have for-profit concerns that we don’t have political concerns. We’re kind of in a pure space to make ethical decision making as high level as possible. So I think we need to pay more attention to that so we keep our bad actors away.

[00:39:35.510] – Doug White
And finally, I think the question of impact, if I’m a nonprofit, I want to make sure that I can show why I exist. One of the things that I ask a nonprofit when we do our retreats, the first thing I asked them, in fact, is how would society be different if you didn’t exist, if you closed your doors tonight, what would happen? Who would care? And board members have to actually think about that because it’s not intuitive. What would happen if we didn’t exist.

[00:40:06.680] – Doug White
And the answer is, well, we’re trying to cure this disease. That’s what they want to do. What would happen if they did not exist? When you… when I think of it that way and I put this in another book, about 30 percent of our organizations could go away and nobody would notice. So we tout the fact that there are a million. And when I say a million, the 501C3 sector of section of the C3 sector, for profit and public charity, excuse me, nonprofit public charities and foundations, probably a third of those three hundred thousand. And I know that’s maybe controversial, but I would say that that could happen and society wouldn’t be any worse off.

[00:40:53.180] – Doug White
So, if we’re going to get money and if, excuse me, if we’re going to ask for money, I think we have the obligation to tell people how we’re going to use it and the kind of impact the organization is going to have. So those three areas, let me just repeat governance, ethical decision making and impact. If I’m a nonprofit, those are the three things I need to really pay attention to.

[00:41:12.050] – Boris
Awesome. And if people want to follow up with you, what’s the best way to get in touch?

[00:41:16.730] – Doug White
I think LinkedIn I’ve got a public page there. And when it says contacts at LinkedIn, you can click that, and I actually have my own addresses in there, my phone number and my email address. It’s not just the LinkedIn address. So I think LinkedIn would be the best place to go. And I also do pay attention to that and tweak it every once in a while to make sure it’s up to speed up to date, up to speed with what I want.

[00:41:41.780] – Doug White
And so you’ll see what my own value system is in there. And I put that in the introduction of it. And so if anybody wants to further a conversation or have a conversation, feel free to touch base.

[00:41:53.960] – Boris
Awesome. Thank you so much, Doug. Thank you for all your time today, your insights. Thank you, everybody, for joining us for this episode of the Nonprofit Hero Factory. If you like what you see or what you hear, please do subscribe, rate and share our show with anyone that you know that might also benefit from the wisdom that people like Doug are imparting. Thank you again. And we’ll see you soon for another episode of the Nonprofit Hero Factory. Bye bye.

[00:42:40.850] – Outro Video
Thank you all for watching and listening to the Nonprofit Hero Factory, we hope this episode has given you some ideas and strategies for creating more heroes for your cause and a better world for all of us. Please be sure to subscribe to this show on YouTube, Facebook, iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform and let us know what you think, by leaving a review.