(Jerod Santek, Diane Zinna, Kim Patton, Andy Davis, Jessica Flynn, Taylor Craig) What resources are available to nonprofit literary organizations to help them improve their work and services? Representatives from leading national organizations dedicated to helping nonprofits of all sizes do good work better will discuss strategies in board development, fundraising, assessment and evaluation and more. The panel includes experts from BoardSource, The Foundation Center, National Arts Strategies, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Published Date: August 16, 2017

Transcription

(Music)

Voice:
Welcome to the AWP Podcast Series. This event was recorded at the 2017 AWP Conference in Washington, DC. The recording features Jerod Santek, Diane Zinna, Kim Patton, Andy Davis, Jessica Flynn, and Taylor Craig. You will now hear Jerod Santek provide introductions.

Santek:
Good morning, everyone! How are you doing? I’m Jerod Santek. I am the representative of Writers’ Conferences & Centers on the board of AWP and with me is Diane Zinna, Membership Director at AWP. We are happy to be here with this panel: Doing Good Better. We work very closely with nonprofit literary organizations around the country, and so we were thrilled to see this panel on the schedule and when the original facilitator had a conflict and couldn’t make it, we were very happy to be able to step in and help moderate this panel. Given the fact that we are in DC, where so many organizations that help nonprofits do their work well are located, we have this unique opportunity to share the expertise of what they have to offer with anyone who is involved in nonprofit organizations, whether it’s a writing center, an independent press or publisher, or any variety of nonprofit organizations. Today we are very happy to have with us Kim Patton, Director of Foundation Center Northeast, Taylor Craig, from National Arts Strategies, Jessica Flynn, from the National Endowment for the Arts, and Andy Davis from BoardSource. So they are each going to tell you a little bit about the work that they do in helping nonprofits, and then Diane has some questions for each of them, and then we will open it up to your questions. So, with that, we would like to get started and, uh, I didn’t warn the panelists about what order we were going in, because I had no idea what order we were going in, so, if we could just start working from my right to left, and you can stay seated [inaudible off to the side] …

Craig:
[To Jerod Santek] Oh, okay.

Can you all hear me? Alright. So, hello, as Jerod said, my name is Taylor, and I’m with National Art Strategies. So, at the most basic and simplest level, NAS is a facilitator and a connector, which I know is very broad, but we work with the entirety of the Arts and Culture Ecosystem, from grassroots projects to large and long-standing institutions. We do this by providing educational programs that encourage people to explore possibilities, lead change, I think that’s the biggest factor, and create a community of practice and support, so really finding other people they can work with long term.  And we do this in three ways, which is through in person programs via our website, which has case studies or tools you can download and also digital learning in one-on-one and group forms, and then also through massively open online courses, so we currently have three that are open, available for free and on demand on platforms like Coursera and edX. I think that for me the most important thing that we do is really about the people and the people that we bring together in the room, so we are, um, take a lot of care in really ensuring that we have an artistic discipline, diversity in geography, diversity in our groups, and that’s really important to us. We believe that, you know, having that, like, heterogeneous type of views in the room really challenges perspectives and broadens views. So, to be really short, what we aim to do is, um… you know, facilitate conver… I think first bring the right people together in the room, and then facilitate conversations that push boundaries, and then encourage people to effect the change that they really want to see. So, I thought instead of just listing all the things that we do in the different courses that are on Coursera and things like that, I could talk a little bit about some ways that literary organizations or people working in a literary sphere are involved currently in two of the programs I work the closest with. So, the first is the Chief Executive Program, something we’ve been running since 2011, and it’s for people who are executive directors, artistic directors or CEOs of arts organizations around the world, and, um, it’s a group of fifty leaders, and they learn first from each other for over a year and a half, that’s the most important, that they’re learning from each other, and then second, alongside a tailored curriculum from business schools across the US. So this year we work with Harvard Business School and also Ross...uh, Michigan’s Ross School of Business, and I’m really proud to say that we have folks in the program this year from organizations like the National Book Foundation, Seattle Arts and Lectures, the Loft Literary Center, and you know, alumni from the program include people like, who, um, Youth Speaks and Coffee House Press and also libraries around the nation...um, Palo Alto and Chattanooga, and I think what’s really amazing is business people in the literary sphere bringing their experience and sharing that with people who are running museums, or symphonies, or community art spaces, or film organizations. So, it’s about that cross-disciplinary learning and sharing. 

Um, so that’s just a little bit about that program, and then to go in a totally different direction, I thought I would talk about… than CEOS… I thought I would talk about another program we run called Creative Community Fellows, which for a lack of a better term and purposes of brevity serves cultural entrepreneurs. So these are people who are starting, piloting, or scaling a venture, so to speak. They’re not typically involved...or attached to an organization as an employee, or they’re starting their own organization, so they’re sort of in that fiscal sponsorship phase, or putting in the papers for 501(c)(3).  And people working in literary sphere there are, for example, Sarah Gonzales, who’s a spoken word artist in Tucson, Arizona, and she founded the Tucson Youth Poetry Slam that uses poetry as a tool for advocacy against anti-immigrant racist policies in Arizona. And then another really cool example is Steph Kent, who is a self-proclaimed bibliophile, I’ll say, living in New York City, and um, her… she started this project called Call Me Ishmael, and it began as a phone number that people could call and leave messages about their favorite books, or a book they read and what that meant to them, and that’s really what she wanted at first, like, to collect stories of that. But I think it, er, I don’t think, it did grow into so much more than that, and she now has a website callmeishmael.com, you should check it out, and weekly she releases videos of these recordings that people have left, but you know the stories are much more than just people saying I like this book because why, as you all know, when you read a piece of literature it can speak to your bones, really, so a lot of these are really deep and personal stories that are now shared, for example, there’s one of you know, like a lifelong reader talks about how The Little Prince helped them get through the death of a friend, or there’s one of a young girl that talks about how Cornelia and the… Somerset Sisters, like, transported her out of middle school and made her feel confident, so it’s really moving, and on top of this, Steph has partnered with bookstores, libraries, museums, some of you might work with her, I have no idea, and places around the US where she installs this thing called the Call Me Ishmael Phone. It’s an old rotary style phone, it comes prerecorded with recordings and the place that gets it can curate that, so it can be on a theme or there are bookstores that maybe put their staff picks recorded on there, or libraries that have community-curated stories put on there, and then the public, when they come in can interact with this, and, kind of, listen to the stories. Um, so it’s quite amazing, and I know, like, these people are clearly awesome, and you’re wondering a little bit about, so, like, what do we do at NAS, you know, because these are people who are running these organizations, are starting these incredible ventures, and what we really do is we support them so that they can continue to do this work in the field, and that’s by giving them tools that might help them rethink, like, why they’re doing a certain thing a certain way, or how to partner with a certain person, or how to raise money, or how to start a board, so and then also I think most importantly is just creating a community of practice for them with people who are working in the arts space in similar and different forms that they have  people that they can reach out to for years. So, I’ll stop there, but, uh… that’s a little bit about what we do.

Patton:
Hi, everybody. My name is Kim Patton, and I’m here from the Foundation Center. I’m glad Taylor looked at me when she said, help me find money, because that’s what we help people do, find money. Um, we have four regional offices, maybe five, I always loose count, but in DC, New York, San Francisco, Atlanta, and Cleveland. I head up the DC and New York office. Most of the...we have a resource center, where people can come and do training and they can also use our database, which is what most people come to us to use. It’s call Foundation Directory Online. Does anybody know about it? Okay, cool. So, it’s the largest most comprehensive database in the world. It has more than three million grants in there so you can look at organizations like yours to see who’s funding them. I like to do it that way, personally. Right, there’s heads nodding.  And, also, you can do sources based on the issue area, the population you’re serving and addressing, your geographic region. It could be national. It could be international. It could be regional. It could be local. So, you can put all that in our database and do a customized search on where you can find funders, private funders, who are interested in what it is you are doing, and we make it very simple and easy. We give you their website, their contact information, their application guidelines, their deadlines, everything you want to know in a one-stop-shop kind of thing. Our website, we have two: foundationcenter.org and also, grantspace.org—it’s the word grant and the word space together with no space in the middle. So, grantspace.org—that’s my favorite, though, I like grantspace.org a little better than foundationcenter.org because it’s easy to see where our trainings are, where our skill development section is—so, um, if you go there and try to do...use our database online, you can’t, because it is a subscription based service to use online. If you want to use it anytime, anywhere, you have to have a subscription, but don’t let that discourage you because you can come to any of the regional offices that I mentioned, or we have what’s called Funding Information Network partners, which are basically libraries all over the United States. We have over 450 of them, and you can go into those libraries and use the database for free. That’s what I like! And you can save all the information, email it to yourself. So you don’t have to have a subscription at all if you go to one of those locations. So, I know the next question is, where are those locations? So, just go to grantspace.org, that’s why I love it, and right on the home page there’ll be a little box, pretty big box, that says “FIND US” and you literally just type in your zip code, because I know you’re here from all over the country, and it’ll show you where there’s one close to you, so, I bet you there’s one in your back yard that you just didn’t even know existed. So, all you have to do is go in there, to the library or whatever, and just say, “We’re looking for,” you don’t even have to remember the name of it, just say, “We’re looking for that thing where you find grants.” Because I know a lot of you’ll be like, “Well, what was it called again?” They’ll know exactly what you’re talking about and they’ll send you over so you can use the database that way. So, that’s mostly what we do. We also have a lot of webinars, online courses that are self-paced, recorded courses, most of which are free, so I definitely encourage you to go on there, where you can look at how to write proposals, because once you get the people you want to approach, which is so easy using our database, you gotta know how to approach them. So, we have lots of stuff on proposal writing, developing a fundraising plan, corporate sponsorship—how to do that—so really, really good stuff on there and it’s all free, which is my favorite part of it. Thanks!

Flynn:
This is great, I’m taking notes. My name is Jessica Flynn. I’m a literature specialist at the National Endowment for the Arts. It’s nice to see all of you here at the… or sort of fresh at the start of AWP. I’m pregnant and I have to say, my feet already hurt thinking about the next few days, but I’m looking forward to it as always. So how many of you, out of curiosity, have applied to the NEA on behalf of an organization? Oh, good. A lot of you. Okay. Um, there’s a mix. So, the NEA, we’re the federal agency that works to give all people across America a change to participate and experience the arts, and we were established by congress in 1965, so we just had our fifty-year anniversary. What you may not know is that we are the only funder to provide art support to every state, US territory, District of Columbia, and what we’re really aiming to do, is to elevate and sustain creativity across the country, and we do this through things like our grant making, which you know about, through partnerships and research and other initiatives. I will say, because we’re a federal agency, I think some people approach us with some trepidation sometimes because when you think of the federal government you think of official people in suits and impenetrable office buildings, but we are at the NEA because we’re excited about the work you’re doing and we know how important it is, and, you know, on the literature team we’re writers, and we get the work you’re doing and we’re here for you.

So, just to give you a sort of overview of the agency itself, and the agency’s side and sort of the context, in 2016 the NEA budge was 147.9 million dollars, which represented just about .004% of the federal budget. And forty percent of the agencies grant making budget goes directly to the states. So that means that the state arts agencies and state arts councils are distributing those funds, and then the other sixty percent of our grant making budget goes to the organizations and individuals who are applying to the NEA. So, that would be where you would come in, and we support a really wide range of artistic disciplines at the NEA. Everything from dance, design, folk arts, opera, theater, and there’s so many more, literature of course. So, in terms of what we do in the literature side of things, we really work to support the whole literary ecosystem, and we do this through a number of programs and initiatives. You may know about our creative writing fellowships to individuals. We also offer translation fellowships to individuals to bring world literature into English and to American audiences. We have two, uh, two program initiatives. One is called Poetry Out Loud, which is a national poetry recitation competition, which is for high school students, and we have a program called the Big Read, which supports community reading programs, that are centered around one book from our Big Read Library.

And then I think where I’m going to spend the most time talking to you, um, what I’m going to spend the most time talking to you about, is our artworks grant opportunity, because that’s the grant opportunity that’s for organizations. So, in literature we support two general types of projects. The first is literary publishing projects. So, those are things like the publication, distribution of books and journals and magazines—paying those writers, who are the authors and contributors, promoting the books and the journals, also maybe if you’re a publisher maybe you want to digitize your back list or you’re doing some other electronic endeavor. That could all be supported under our literary publishing deadline. And then our other sort of main category for support is called Audience and Professional Development, and those are projects like residencies and reading series and festivals, services to writers, conferences and workshops that promote professional and artistic development, technical support for literary organizations. So, that’s all in our audience development area. And organizations can only apply once per year, so you have to pick one or the other when you are applying. Typically, our literary publishing deadline is in February and our audience development deadline is in July, so a few other things to mention...in order for an organization to apply it has to be a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and it has to have at least three years of programming under its belt, so you have to have a track record that you can show our panel. Our grants range from ten to a hundred thousand in this art works opportunity. I would say typically in literature they range, like the average, is probably about ten to thirty, in terms of what folks get. Our review process...so when you submit an application for review it goes to a panel that changes every year and it’s made up of a group of experts from across the country, and they assess your application in two general ways. So they look at the artistic excellence of the application and the artistic merit. Artistic excellence is really the panels looking at the literary content that you’re proposing and the quality of that, and then artistic merit is kind of everything else in the application, so it’s how well posed is the organization to carry out the project. You know, who are you serving and what will the impact be—all of that kinda stuff. So, I think I will stop there for now, I talked a lot.

Davis:
Awesome. I left my notes in my bag down there and she brought paper and she’s taking notes because there’s so many interesting and fascinating people up here, so just go with the...if you don’t...yeah...thank you very much. My name is Andy Davis. I am the Director of Education at BoardSource. I guess we can start off by asking how many of you serve on a nonprofit board of directors? Wow! That’s impressive! And how many of you are chief executives? Yeah, so I’ll start just by telling you a tiny bit, a tiny story about my self because I like to make it about myself sometimes. I grew up in a small town in eastern North Carolina, and my father was the executive director of the homeless shelter in the town that I lived in. And I always thought growing up that that was a big deal. It is a big deal! But I, you know, in my nine or ten or eleven year old head he was the boss of a homeless shelter. Doesn’t get more important than that. I thought, and I’ll never forget my very first time hearing the words board of directors or “a board” and I’m willing to bet most people don’t, that was not a formative moment in their life, but we’d go to my grandmother’s house every Sunday for lunch after church. Like a lot of southern families, she didn’t live far from us and we would go there, literally every single Sunday, and she was kind of an older-fashioned lady. It was very important to her that we were there every single Sunday, and one Sunday we couldn’t because my father had a board meeting he had to attend, and I remember her saying to him, “What does a board do anyway?” and he said in a very, uh, in a way that I could understand it as a preteen and my grandmother could understand it in her seventies, he explained what a board was, essentially saying, “Well, they’re the only boss I have and I’m gonna have to miss fried chicken this week.” And, after that, he and I had more conversations about what a board did. He worked in that job for about seven years before he got burned out. We moved, actually, he went to seminary in Kentucky, um, felt like his calling was to have a congregation. After he graduated from seminary, he ended up going right back to the exact same organization in North Carolina...felt like he had a calling to come back there, didn’t really understand it. One night, this is a small town in North Carolina, one night the shelter had a woman and her daughter come in. It was not a safe place for children, and only a few beds in a separate room for females in the shelter, and they had to turn the mother and daughter away. And two days later the mother and daughter were found drowned in the river that came through our town and he figured out his calling was to open a women and children’s shelter and that’s what he did. Long story short, six or seven years later, burned out again, and by this time I’m in college or maybe even grad school by this time, and we’re having a conversation about what happened that he got burned out. And really then started to talk about boards and boards of directors, and how a board is the only real partner a chief executive has, and he always felt like he was doing all of the heavy lifting for himself. Everywhere he went: the fundraising aspects, the management aspects, which as you know are normally chief executives, everything he did he felt like he was alone, and he didn’t have a partner, and that caused the burnout. And so, that really struck a chord with me, because I understood, for myself anyway, that I wouldn’t be great on a kind of a micro-level scale dealing with these same issues every day. I wanted to work on a macro-level scale and boards seemed to be an interesting way to do that or at least something that I was interested in. In grad school they sent me to this, this uh, this training, a train-the-trainer from an organization called BoardSource and I just thought immediately when I was there, I was like, “These people get it. They understand what a board of directors and a chief executive, how that partnership can create lasting and impactful change not just for an organization but for an entire community,” and, so, when I graduated I applied for one job. It was called a Junior Curriculum Developer, Junior Staff Associate or something with a terrible title, and I applied for it because that was the only place I wanted to work, and here we are nine years later and I’m still with BoardSource and I’m proud to say we’re the largest publisher of nonprofit governance materials in the world. We’re the only national organization that focuses solely on nonprofit governance and the relationship between the chief executive and the board of directors and what we do is we have three basic arms. We have a membership arms, a membership arm that provides materials, white papers, topic papers to our members. We also have our publishing arm, and we have our consulting and training arm.  And our education arm provides over thirty webinars free per year to our members. We also have in person trainings all over the country. We host our annual leadership forum. This year it’s in Seattle, would love for you all to come, but what we do on a very, very basic level, when I explain it to my relatives at home who have no clue what I’m talking about when I say I live in Washington, DC, and I work on governance, they want to talk about Trump.  That’s not the kind of, you know, the kind of governance I’m working on, so really the way I explain it is we teach people how to serve on boards of directors, and we do that every which way you can imagine, from the smallest start up organization with a thousand dollar budget to, we are working right now on a five year project with all of the Smithsonian boards, so check us out, BoardSource.org, and if you have any questions, we’re always here to help work with you, and help your board of directors become more impactful, and also to try to help you build a better board.

Voice:
Nice.

Zinna:
Thank you to this incredible panel. I’m so glad all of you are here and all of you, too. Again, I’m Diane Zinna and I’m the Membership Director for AWP and one of my happy duties is to direct the Writers Conference and Centers groups. So we have WC&C members in the room? Yes. Thank you. This is the group that manages conferences, centers, festivals, retreats, and residencies, and provides benefits to them and helps connect them to one another. So, this panel today is really important to those of you who do this kind of work, and I’ll talk a little bit more about some opportunities, how you can get involved in it at the end, but what we did when we found out about this panel was solicit some questions from our member organizations, and I thought I’d pose some of those to the panel today, and then we’ll open it up to questions from you all, okay? But one question I got from our group was, “What is the most innovative action you have seen a nonprofit take in the past year?”

And I’ll just open it up to anyone who wants to answer that.

Davis:
So, I saw these questions when I was reading the material when you sent out an email saying these might be questions we talk about, and this one was really difficult for me, and I think it’s...um...it says a lot about the sector, especially where I work where we talk about fundraising or governance, that I think as we see a lot of innovative things but we’re not putting those into practice across the sector, but when I really started thinking about it and I hate to toot our own horn at BoardSource, we’ve...we put out...I don’t want to call it a research paper because it’s not that rigorous, but we put out our own framework a few weeks ago about measuring fundraising effectiveness. I think that one thing our country and folks who donate to nonprofits have gotten way to caught up in is overhead, and the cost of overhead for a nonprofit, and we automatically think, “Well, if it’s not between twelve and fifteen percent then this organization’s not doing good work,” and I think that our nonprofit chief executives and board members have gotten stuck into a place where they’re constantly trying to explain away where costs go. And we forget about, especially, you know I’m a firm believer that us 501(c)(3)’s, we’re beholden to the public trust, and by that we have to do the best amount of good we can with the dollars or the tax statuses that we’re given by the federal government and part of that is making sure we’re investing in the right people, we’re investing in the right strategies, and we’re putting money where we can to get a return on that investment. So, twelve to fifteen percent is an outdated number that I think is not relevant to organizations.  For some it could be a perfect number, for others it’s not.  So, BoardSource has put out a tool recently called measuring fundraising effectiveness, and it basically just helps board members talk about how they fundraise, where the cost of fundraising dollars go, and why that cost is important for the turnaround of the organization. So, let’s say you spend a thousand dollars on a direct mail campaign, but you only receive eight hundred dollars in, but we’re not talking about the amount of information that you’ve gotten back, the type of donors that you’ve cultivated to be long term donors for your organization. So, I think our tool measuring fundraising effectiveness, in just the way we’re helping board members explain where nonprofit dollars go, is pretty innovative and helpful.

Zinna:
Thank you.

Craig:
Um, okay, so innovative is sort of a tricky word, but I um, I first want to say that I think that a lot of organizations in the past year have taken a lot of really radical stances that I would… that I applaud and would call innovative, including people putting “Black Lives Matter” as the back of their twitter background. I mean, that’s amazing and like what the MoMA just did which took down it’s exhibit and put up, you know, all artists from the seven countries that are on this travel ban. You know, that’s amazing, and I personally haven’t seen actions like that in a long time. But on a, on a more like “what can we do as organizations?” I think, well, we can do that, but um, a more tactical thing is an organization called Fractured Atlas, I don’t know if you guys are familiar with them, but they are a nonprofit, but they’re a tech company and they support artists through, like, fiscal sponsorship, crowdfunding, finding space, and that sort of thing. So, sort of like the support for artists getting an organization off the ground or doing a project. But, they’re pretty radical in, forward thinking, in a lot of their internal policies, so you know, they have unlimited vacation. Seventy-five percent of their staff works from home two days a week, and things like that, if you think about, like, HR policies, but one thing they did really cool in the fall of last year was publish a website called How We Work. I don’t know the exact address but if you google How We Work and Fractured Atlas you’ll probably find it. And it’s basically all of the information that you would receive if you were a new employee at Fractured Atlas, so, like, all of those policies are there and why they do them, like, including like, summer...er, winter bonuses and R&D policies and things like that, and I find that fascinating and their just totally open with the transparent fact because they believe, you know, we work in this sector and we want other people to ‘do good better, ‘ and this is how we do it, so what can you learn from it. So, I would check it out.

Patton:
I would say that a lot of nonprofits are doing some really interesting things with the political climate, whether you’re for it or against it, it’s an opportunity to take a stand, and a lot of people are using that platform to really create some interesting ways to raise money through crowdfunding, special events, things like that that revolve around specific political issue. I know that, you know, from big organizations to small organizations, they’re doing that. I think that the ACLU and Greenpeace and organizations like that have raised a phenomenal amount of money—like probably record numbers of dollars, just based on stuff that’s goin’ on in the news and the political climate. So, I think people more than ever now want to get involved and be involved and a lot of social media sites are encouraging involvement and a lot of times that does involve nonprofit organizations that are doin’ great things in the community, so I think a lot of people are doing innovative things with that kinda stuff.

Flynn:
Yeah, I think literary organizations are, they’re always innovating, really out of necessity because the literary landscape is always changing so quickly, and like an example of that is in publishing. So, it’s hard to come up with one example but I think, like, finding a novel way to connect with an audience, or maybe finding a fresh way to promote a book can be just as innovative sometimes as doing something as overtly innovative as developing a new technology or platform, or something like that. We also see, I think we’re also seeing a lot of innovative partnerships happening in the literary field. An example of that is the Poetry Coalition, which is a, you know, a lot of poetry organizations coming together around the common goals they share for promoting poetry, and realizing there’s power in numbers, and there’s a lot to be shared there. So, I think that’s terrific, and I will also say that at the NEA, in terms of what we support, we’re always interested in innovations like that technology, but we’re also interested in supporting the really excellent existing work, core work, that literary orgs are doing, so the publications that you’re putting out or promoting, so we appreciate all of that whole spectrum.

Zinna:
Alright, and on the flip side, a very popular question was, “What is the most common mistake you see nonprofits, particularly new nonprofits, making?”

Flynn:
I can start. So, I think some of the key things I would say as a funder, if you’re applying for a grant, first of all, call us before you apply because especially if you haven’t applied before, I can help you, I can help talk through your project and make sure it fits within a, you know, what we support, and it’ll be competitive in our pool.  It’s a big outlay of work when you approach an NEA grant, so you know, we want to make sure it’s a good use of your time, and also just introduce yourself, because we want to know what you’re up to, and it’s good to stay in touch and let us know what you are working on either way. So, first of all, so call, don’t not call, and at the end of our application process, what some folks may not know or they may not take advantage of, is the fact that we offer panel feedback, so whether or not you are funded, you can call and request feedback, and I can go over it with you, and it’s just, I think sometimes very helpful to hear what a panel of experts thought about your proposal and it might include, you know, it may highlight strengths and weaknesses that you knew were there, it might highlight something that you didn’t know. It’s just an opportunity, and we really see it as a service to the field that we can give you that feedback, so don’t make the mistake of not taking advantage of that.

Patton:
I think what I see is people not diversifying their funding streams a lot. You know, we have the NEA up here, which is public support. I represent private foundations, you know, but you can’t live on grants alone. You just can’t do it, especially nowadays, its just much more competitive than it used to be, and the biggest source of nonprofits in the US by far are individuals, period. I mean they make up like eighty percent of the dollars, come from individuals. So, I think that it’s a mistake not to really look at individuals to support your work, and, you know, I don’t even mean rich people. A lot of people think that’s what I mean, but I don’t, because rich people, besides having way more money than we have, they have foundations, so typically we’re not even talking about rich people, we talking about just the basic individual person that you can connect to—their values, their beliefs, things that they care about, and it’s easier to approach them, because you don’t have deadlines, and you don’t have proposals, and you don’t have requests for proposals and all that stuff, so really thinking about individuals, and that’s why I am a big fan of crowdfunding, because of that, or having an online donation button on your website, because people tend to give very spontaneously, based on, you know, what they’re connecting to at the moment, and, you know, if you make it easy for them to do that, I think, you know, that’s a good approach.

Zinna:
Thank you.

Craig:
So, what stands out to me in this question is the new nonprofit part, because, like I mentioned in the fellows program, we work a lot with people who are in that start-up phase, um, and for any of you who are founders, or anything, you can probably relate to this, but I think one of the biggest mistakes—I don’t want to harp on that—that I see made is people not accounting for their time and what it’s worth, and I recognize thought that a lot of this is passion projects and you can’t...you...you’re working another job, a full time job, while you’re creating this thing and you can’t always afford to pay yourself, or, you truly can’t afford to pay yourself a livable wage right away, or at least usually. So, but I think it’s important to know what time you are putting into it, and what that is worth, and then when you can start to incrementally add that in, and where to ask for it, and make it clear to people when you’re partnering, or when you’re asking for money, what that’s gonna take for you to do.

Davis:
Yeah. I think for me, I think it’s about a different kind of, she was talking about diversifying funding streams—for when I think about the biggest mistake that especially new nonprofits make, it’s about diversity on their board of directors, in terms of, especially on a brand new board, in terms of moving outside the sphere of the founder of the chief executive who sets up that board with friends or family, people that they know, and for one reason or another, they think that they’re gonna be a good fit on this board and really what they end up being is rubber stamping, rubber stamps for the executive director, and there becomes no diversity of thought or opinion in the board room, and it’s often that they react with blinders, and aren’t able to see pitfalls or, you know, tricky situations that may be coming around the bend, because they get so excited or passionate about a founder, a founder’s vision for the organization, so things just become whatever the founder wants them to do, and they move forward. Founders are wonderful, great people, with great visions, but you always have to have that person on the board that’s willing to push back and say, “Let’s take a second here and think about this.” And we recommend that for boards that have been around a hundred and fifty years. If you see yourself becoming complacent and too many people, if there’s not a robust discussion, conversation, even arguments in your boardroom, then you’re doing it wrong. I’ll often tell boards, maybe even before a board meeting, pull a board member aside and say, “Hey, you’re gonna be the devil’s advocate today, and we’re not gonna tell anybody else, but every time, you know, we talk about something, or a point comes up, if we’re talking about strategy or having a generative conversation, I want you to take kind of the opposite approach and it just breathes new life into a board discussion.” And for older boards it’s also about diversity. It becomes an old boys’ club. We’re getting ready to put out our research. We call it, the leading with intent. We do research about—through about five thousand board chairs and chief executives, and we’ve seen, just traditional forms of diversity—race, gender diversity in the United States—on boards of directors have stayed the same since we started doing this survey for the first time, in 1993, so, over twenty-four years we’ve seen relatively the same amount of African-Americans who sit on boards, it’s around 13%, and White people on boards still make up about 85%, so, those numbers just aren’t changing, and when we talk to people about it, and I want to do more rigorous research, it becomes a conversation of inclusivity. We’re striving for more diverse boards, but when we get diversity on our boards, they’re not part of the conversations, the real conversations, that are going on outside the boardroom. My boss is gonna publish a paper she keeps talking about called, “The Boardroom, the Bathroom, and the Barroom,” and the different conversations that happen in each one of those places. You always have a certain conversation that happens around the boardroom, but when you take a break and go to the bathroom, you know especially as a consultant, as an outsider you hear people start saying, “well, so-and-so didn’t bring up this,” or, “so-and-so forgot to say whatever,” and then in the barroom, that’s when the gloves really come off, and then that’s where the decisions are made. So, building in inclusivity into board conversations when we talk about board building, and at the beginning making sure that a founder or chief executive has a check on their power, I think are two big mistakes that nonprofits make in areas we can improve.

Zinna:
Thank you.

Davis:
Mm-hm.

Zinna:
AWP had a board meeting yesterday (chuckles). I was thinking through all these things as you’re saying [laughter]…I’ve got one more question that I’d like to pose, and then I thought I’d open it up to all of you. Are there questions already out there? Can I see a show of hands? Yeah, I’ve got a few more in my back pocket if we need to fill the hour, but I’m gonna open it up after this last question. I love this question. It came to Jerod from a colleague, and his colleague said to him, “Every whisper of thanks comes with a roar to do more,” indicating her feeling that neither she nor her organizations can ever do enough. Right? What advice do you have for preventing nonprofit burnout and retaining joy in the workplace? 

Patton:
I’ll take it. I would say that number one, you just can’t be all things to everybody. I mean you just have to say, “Here’s what we do, here’s what we do well, and we’re gonna stick to that, and we’re not gonna take on too much.” You know, Foundation Center’s been around for fifty years, and people ask us to do a lot of things from around the world, and we are very particular about sticking really close to our mission, and what we do well, and not trying to do too much. The other thing I really want to talk about is networking, like, seriously, like getting out of the office. Just, I know everybody feels like, “I have so much to do that I can’t even take lunch,” most days, but I think that’s a mistake. I think you should take your lunch. I think you should come to events like this. I think you should...because a lot of ideas happen, not just what’s goin’ on up here, but all the conversations that go along outside of what you’re doing in these sessions I think are very important, and I’ve seen that happen a lot, like in my trainings and stuff. We, at first thought webinars were just gonna take off and really just put our in-person classes to shame, and to be honest the reverse of it has been true.  Honestly. The webinars are doin’ okay, but people actually like to come out to the training because one, you get the Q&A’s fabulous, plus you get to talk afterwards, but a lot of networking, a lot of collaboration happens after the class. You know, that’s when you really meet people. So, I say get out of your office, you know, make time to do the other things that will bring the joy and fulfillment back to what you do. Personally, like I still teach a lot of classes, she’ll tell you, I do. And a lot of people say, “You’re teaching a class? You’re a regional director and you’re teaching a free class?” And that’s the joy of my day, a lot of times, it’s that. I get into things like this where I get to get out of my office and not do all the administrative stuff.  I started off as a training coordinator and now I’m regional director, but the training part was what I liked the most, so I just want to say that no matter how far I get away from that, I still like to keep my foot in that arena, because that’s where I get the most fulfillment and the most joy. So, try to, you know, with your mission, try to stay really connected to the people you serve and the people you’re calling some peers.

Zinna:
And the things that give you joy, because, I took her class at the Foundation Center. It was a proposal writing boot camp, three days, and you could just tell that she loved to be doing that, and you had a million other things that you could be doing, but it was an incredible course and I put together a killer proposal, right? But yeah, and then, afterwards, the networking aspect of it, I stayed in touch with so many people who were in that room and other organizations and help me put my mission into a new perspective.

Patton:
Yeah?

Zinna:
Yeah.

Patton:
Very good.

Davis:
I mean, I think I agree with everything that was just said. My biggest thing about avoiding burnout, and I think about this a lot, is that most organizations don’t spend enough time celebrating their wins. Celebrating is just as important a part that, to me anyway, than just about any other step in the process, and when you don’t give yourself the time or the opportunity to pat yourself on the back and say, “Hey, we did a pretty darn good job here,” you forget about those wins, and no matter what good your see yourself or your organization doing in your community, if you don’t give yourself that opportunity to reflect back on the hard work that your put into it, it’s gonna burn you out before the next time. We have an organizational culture team at our organization that I serve on, and we try to just come up with innovative ways to celebrate wins, but also just to have fun together as an organization. And I know that you know that everybody works in different size organizations. We only have about twenty-nine/thirty folks in our office, but last Thursday of every month we have what we call ThABiO: Thursday Afternoon Beer in Office, and we, you know, we take time just to have a drink or two, or several more, or not, but to you know, eat some good food, and just, you know, for lack of a better word, fellowship together. Last month, I brought in a bunch of board games and we just all sat around and played Scattergories and Jenga for the af... you know, for an hour, and sometimes, you know everybody can leave at five o’clock, but we’re there ‘til six-thirty or seven o’clock at night sometimes, just trying to enjoy being around each other. You know, we’re still a diverse group of individuals, and we probably wouldn’t all choose to hang out together on Friday or Saturday night, but when you give us an opportunity to share successes with one another, it goes a long way to Monday morning not being so painful and not wanting to get out of bed because you get to not only go see your colleagues, who do great work, but you get to see your friends.

Flynn:
I love that advice, ‘celebrating wins.’ That’s great. Yeah, I think in the literature field we’re all...we’re part of it because we love poetry, or nonfiction, or fantasy or whatever, and it’s just sometimes you have to come back to that and you have to think about the people you’re serving and I think that that can help a lot. So, yeah, and I also think many, you know, our colleagues are off to, we have such similar interests with our colleagues, just to take advantage of that happy hour. And it’s just, also if you feel overwhelmed by something and you can’t do enough, it like, read a few pages, like sometimes we’ll read a few pages from, like, a fellowship application or poetry application, and it’s like, it’s uh, that’s always a transporting thing, so...

Zinna:
Yeah.

Craig:
So, I’m second or fourth, you know, everything that has been said about celebration, especially taking a lunch break. I’m a firm believer that no one is going to die if you leave your desk. I mean, they’re really not. If you sit behind a desk, you should just honor that time. You get paid for it, and it’s good for your mind. I also think similarly, like that’s with vacation too. Like, take some vacation days, and respect the time, don’t check your email. Also, respect your colleague’s time when they go. Don’t just send them fifty emails because you know they’re gone for a week. Like, who wants to come back to that? But, one thing that’s really cool about where I work at NAS, I also love getting out of the bed and going to work in the morning, because I love the people that I work with, and I think that’s part of the culture we’ve created, which is similar, we do take time to celebrate our wins, which is outside the office, and um...we, like, all went and got manicures one day...there’s a lot of women, you know, and things like that. But, one thing that really works, we’re also really small, so we’re only eight full-time people and we all work in, like, a big blob of desks together, so, like I see someone right across from me, like our CEO sits right in the middle, too. And for us it’s really amazing not only for like cross collaboration of talking about projects and hearing things, and that transparency, but, also, I think it really brings about joy and fun and staff bonding. You know, like, then we have conversations, like yesterday we all laughed about the video of Winona Ryder’s faces at the SAG awards or something. Like, you know, and everyone took a moment to like, stop and enjoy that. And... or talk about the food that they’re eating, or something like that. So, for us though to really, that’s created, that type of environment has created a really magical space, um, for us as a team, um... so yeah, thought I’d share that.

Davis:
Also, just a thought. When I interview people and I, believe me, I get it... I want the best folks that we possibly can have around our organization, but I know that my boss is probably gonna, and I’ve already seen their resume, and my boss is gonna ask the important questions around job roles and responsibilities, but a lot of times I think about culture fit, and, when I interview folks, “How are you going to be able to work with, you know, this team, or in this environment. Is this something that makes sense to you?” because if you’re not happy here, and that’s our goal to make you happy, because when you’re happy you’re gonna be a more pleasant person around your colleagues, your work product’s gonna be better, and folks around you are gonna be happy to work with you. So, I think often times we look for the person with the best resume, and we forget to ask those questions to figure out what kind of a fit they’re going to be in our culture.

Santek:
Taylor, I really love what you said, and it reminded me of something that I heard in my other organization. “There’s no such thing as a literary emergency.”

Thank you to all of our panelists, they’ve given up their time on a work day and thanks to all of you.

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Voice:
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