How to Boost Philanthropy Through Servant-Leadership with Evan Wildstein

We know that nonprofits do amazing work. Every single day, they deliver life-changing programs, research, and more to impact communities, regions, and the world. Philanthropy supercharges nonprofits to go forward — but it’s often about more than money. It’s about trust. It’s about storytelling. It’s about big relationships. It’s about doing the right thing. It’s about meaningful conversations. 

The concept of servant-leadership inspires all this and more - and that is the focus of a new book on philanthropy, The Nonprofiteer’s Field Guide: 30 Practical Ways to Boost Philanthropy Through Servant-leadership. My guest today is the author of this book and long-time nonprofit professional, Evan Wildstein.

In this episode, Evan and I discuss: 

• What a “nonprofiteer” is and who falls in this category
• The concept of “servant-leadership” and why nonprofits should embrace it
• How servant-leadership is different from other forms of leadership, and how nonprofits can incorporate it in their own fundraising work 
• Trends in the sector and how to adapt

About Evan Wildstein

Evan Wildstein is nonprofiteer with over twenty years of experience in fundraising, strategy, and operations. In addition to his work in social impact, Wildstein has coached organizations on board development and talent growth, commissioned operas, and produced learning initiatives. He writes regularly for several nonprofit publications and is the author of the recently published book, The Nonprofiteer’s Field Guide: 30 Practical Ways to Boost Philanthropy Through Servant-leadership. 

Connect with Evan on LinkedIn
EvanWildstein.com 

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Transcript

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This show is sponsored by Bloomerang, a solution that helps nonprofits like Shower up, which is a nonprofit providing mobile showers and personal care for those experiencing homelessness to efficiently manage their volunteers and donors in one place. And thanks to Bloomerang, Shower up increased their volunteer signups by 60% and first time donors by making it easy to give right on their site. Showerup's executive director, Paul Schmidt said Bloomering is an ideal marriage of volunteer and donor management. The deeper we get into it, the more we love it. And if you want to see how showerup easily manages their volunteers and donors with Bloomerang, just go to jcsocialmarketing.com bloomerang. That's jcsocialmarketing.com. B-L-O-O-M-E-R-A-N-G or visit the link in the show notes to learn more. All right, let's get to the show. Hello and welcome to Nonprofit Nation. I'm your host, Julia Campbell, and I'm going to sit down with nonprofit industry experts, fundraisers, marketers, and everyone in between to get real and discuss what it takes to build that movement that you've been dreaming of. I created the nonprofit nation podcast to share practical wisdom and strategies to help you confidently find your voice, definitively grow your audience, and effectively build your movement. If you're a nonprofit newbie or an experienced professional who's looking to get more visibility, reach more people, and create even more impact, then you're in the right place. Let's get started. Close. Hi everyone. So excited to be back today with a brand new episode. And today's topic is how to boost philanthropy through servant leadership. So we know that nonprofits do amazing work. We're in the trenches. We're doing the work, delivering all of these great programs, research, impact. And while philanthropy is supposed to supercharge nonprofits to go forward, it's often about more than money, trust, storytelling, relationships, affinity, meaningful conversations. This is the concept of servant leadership, and my guest today is Evan Wildstein, and he's the author of the Nonprofiteers Field Guide, 30 practical ways to boost philanthropy through servant leadership. Evan is a nonprofiteer himself with over 20 years of experience in fundraising strategy and operations, and in addition to his work in social impact, he's coached organizations on board development and talent growth, commissioned operas, and produced learning initiatives, and he writes regularly for several nonprofit publications. And he just recently published this book that we're going to talk about today. So, Evan, welcome. So glad to have you here. I was just about to say welcome to you, but you're the host. I'm here. Welcome, Julia. Welcome, Evan. Young baby at home. Everything is upside down. Thank you. Yes. Oh, I know. Very young baby. Coffee, though. Coffee. That's the only advice that I have. I'm a terrible. I have two kids, but I'm terrible with the advice, especially about the sleep regression, because I just know how tough that is. But it's okay. You'll get a good sleep eventually. I'm still waiting for that day, but it'll happen. So I usually start the podcast asking my guests how they got into nonprofit work and why they chose it. So you're asking that question of me then, because I'm a guest. Let's go with that. It's the most ununque story, I think. Sort of on accident. I needed a job that's sort of like the quick fast forward version, but I was in undergrad in the early, very early two thousand s, and at the time was pretty sure I was going to want to try and make it as a rock musician because that's what I was doing. And my parents pulled me aside one night and said, we love you. We know you're great, you're super talented. But just in case. Just in case you're not part of the zero point 17% of people who make it in an arts and culture career, maybe finish school and do something. So I kind of rejigged. I went and talked with my advisor. I rejigged some of the coursework that I was taking, and I sort of cobbled together this nonprofit management degree, sort of like really interested in things. The bands that I was performing with are doing a lot of those rock for the blank fundraisers. And so I was starting to build this, unbeknownst to me at the time, this little skill set, this little nonprofiter skill set. And when I talked with the advisor, they said, what are you interested in? What are you good at? And you're like 20 years old. What is anyone good at at 20? And so I finished with that, applied to a few jobs, and was very lucky enough to get hired at the Juilliard school. I'm from up around the New York City area, and that was 2004, I think, and I just sort of haven't looked back. I've done all the stuff you mentioned, and I've just kind of done all these weird, wacky, upside down things that I think by the time I retire, it'll all kind of make sense, and maybe that'll be one of the books. It'Ll write in the future. So is that where you commissioned operas? No. Odly enough. So I went from Juilliard to this organization that was still around today, but they're meant to support opera companies in the US and Canada. So sort of like the north american service organization for opera. And I was their head of education programs. And then I got very close with the late, great Sandy Bernhardt. Not that Sandy Bernhardt for people listening, but my boss, Sandy Bernhardt, who brought me to Houston to commission operas for this brand new, really wacky, well funded series from the Mellon foundation, was the seed funder for that called east plus West. And we told these stories about the asian american experience in Houston, which is very cool because we don't have a tremendously large asian american population, but we've got just such interesting. Houston is this 10,000 square mile greater metro region, and there's all these little pockets of interesting people. And so we commissioned stories and told them through opera throughout the city. It was the wildest job, and I think very fondly back on that. That is really cool. And so that's how you sort of got into storytelling as a way to communicate the importance of the arts. That's right. I love that. So you published a book. We talked about it. I said the title. I'll read it again. The Nonprofiteers fundraising field guide, which I love. A good field guide, like I love a good framework, I love a good blueprint, and I love a field guide. And it's very practical. It says it in the title, but it's 30 practical ways to boost philanthropy through servant leadership. So I want to unpack some of these terms for people that are not necessarily maybe familiar with them. So what is a nonprofite? Ask Chat GPT and see what it gives you back. I can right now. I have it pulled up. I should have thought to do that. No, I'm literally, as you're talking, I'm going to do that. Hold on 1 second. It's the cheeky term that I use. It's really anyone who's interested in boosting the quality of the nonprofit experience. I tend to use it to reference people who work in nonprofits, full time, part time salaries paid by nonprofit organizations. This is not meant to say that our coaching friends and our consulting friends and those who are peripherally boosting the quality of the sector are not nonprofiteers. But one of the things that I've been thinking a lot about lately is the overall health of the sector. And I want people to stay happy, well compensated, have opportunities for growth in ways that keep them in the sector so that they don't leave and go down the street and make coffee for people. That is an admirable career choice if one was to choose to do it. But I want the nonprofit space to be a place that people want to come to and stay in as employees. So that's nonprofiteers to me. Well, Chat GPT says the same thing. I will not read the whole thing, but Chat GPT said a nonprofiteer is a term that is sometimes used informally to refer to individuals who work in or are associated with nonprofit organizations. It's a casual and sometimes affectionate term used to describe individuals who dedicate their time, skills, or resources to furthering the mission and goals of nonprofit organizations. And then it goes on to tell me what a nonprofit is. So clearly, chat JPT has not listened to a word that I've said, but it's okay. I think that's a great definition. I love it's an affectionate term. I think that's a really great way of putting it, because it does sound affectionate. I forgot that at the top of the back of the book cover I had written nonprofiteer noun, a person who loves being a champion for social impact organizations and their people. And I can thank one of your namesakes, Jess Campbell, for helping me distill that definition a bit better long before the book came out, because I was struggling with that. Jess Campbell, fantastic wordsmith. Absolutely love her. Huge fan. So no, that's amazing. So now we know what is a nonprofit here. So is that who the book is designed for? After I wrote the book, this is the challenge, I think, and the sort of short sightedness of being a, a new parent and b someone who works in nonprofits. The sort of narrative version, and you're actually one of the stories in the book, if you recall, of experiences of nonprofit people, either current or former, that I wrote a version of this for my master's thesis, and it was very academic. And now that I think about it, I've relied a lot on undergrad and grad advisors to help me see things. But my grad advisor, who's this gentleman? Larry Spears, that's the name. People listening, if they're curious about the state of servant leadership in the US, he's probably one of the smartest people on this subject living today. But he encouraged me to think bigger about it. So updated the version of the book that's available today. It's a bit more narrative oriented. I interviewed you and other people to tell stories. Some of the work I did after the book came out, I worked with our friend Mallory Erickson to think about, because I work in house, having a book was more like the story I wanted to tell, but it wasn't really meant to be a workshop or like, people could get like, I want people to read it and just take the things away from it. So it's really meant for fundraisers, executive directors, chief executive officers, board leaders, and board members, anyone, really, who's within the orbit of a nonprofit that purports to participate in the philanthropic process. And I think you and I, and people like us, would argue that that is a responsibility across the board. Your communications people are de facto fundraisers in how and what they share with folks. In fact, you and I worked together on a project earlier this year for the organization where I'm the chief development officer. And so it's meant to be a very short, quick, it's under 90 pages. You pick it up. There's 30 practical suggestions in there. And that's sort of ten traits of servant leadership. And each of them have three suggestions that I've made, and these are things that I've tried in my own career and that I've absorbed from other people. So that's what it's meant to be. I love that. And how do you define servant leadership? That's the 300 page book version. Right. And my feeling on it is there's a reason why, as a practical philosophy, it never really took off as much as I think it should. There have been people who have taken the core tenets of servant leadership. We know all of them, Simon Sinek, Brene Brown, and all the really brilliant current modern thought leaders who have found a better way, in my view, to package and sell the ideals of servant leadership. They've put new spins on it. I have no qualms with that. But it is, I think, the wrong definition of servant leadership, which is sometimes the place where I start in these conversations, is people think about this service to a fault, martyrdom, caretaking philosophy, where you do everything and anything you can to improve the lot of everyone else. And in fact, that's partly when we think about servant leadership as a verb, as an action. One of the things that we, those of us who purport to consider ourselves servant leaders, or want to be servant leaders, is we want to improve those around us. But some of the things that come from that is something very common in the nonprofit space, where we give too much psychological safety, be darned, and burnout and exhaustion and all those things come. One of the big traits that I've thought about a lot in servant leadership is healing. And what Bob Greenleaf, who is the guy who coined the phrase servant leadership in 1970. It's another great essay. People should read the servant as leader. Okay. It's wonderfully esoteric in the show notes. It's worth it. I think you can buy it, but you can also find version of. It's one of those things where you get to the end of it and you're like, wow, my life is transformed. But I'm not exactly sure why. And he spoke of healing in the way that we do want to work on improving everything around us. But that has to really begin with healing inwardly first. That's not a step. I feel a lot of our peers in the nonprofit space get to. We're moving too quick. We are doing more than we have the support to do. We don't have the budget funds to bring in additional help, or we don't quite know how to make those resources available. So we just do do. And the last people we think about are ourselves. And that, I believe, is not servant leadership. That's service to a fault. And that doesn't. When you think of the tide that raises everything, that when in practice is done, is when servant leadership is at its best. In what ways is servant leadership different from other forms of leadership? I feel like I'm just an academic rattling off books, but there's a great 450 page book by Peter Northhouse called leadership theory and practice. It's sort of the grad school compendium that we read. And he gets into probably 1315 of the top most spoken about, written about traits of leadership. The one going back the farthest is what we call the great man or the great woman theory, which is kind of what you think of, like all those 1980s Wall street movies. That's the great man and the great woman. Like, real confident bravado. They've got the corner office, like Gordon Gecko, Gordon Gecko, Gordon Gecko. In definition, the great man. You've got authentic leadership. You've got transformational leadership, you've got transactional leadership. All of them really center on a person, a person at the apex of an organization, of a team of some sort of dyad servant leadership in the way that transformational leadership and some of the other theories thinks more about the 360 view. It encompasses how one can use their skills and their strengths and their interests and their commitment to growing other people in improving everything. And it's sort of this. If you've heard Richard Branson talk about the client experience, he talks a lot about if you improve the quality of the experience for your employees, your internal people, that will spill out. Those people will stay, especially in fundraising, if you can treat people the way that they ought to be treated. The tenures will grow longer than twelve to 18 months, and we'll be able to build the major gift trajectory. Major funders won't have to learn a new name every 16 months, which they know how it goes, but also, there's so much more that we can do with it. And servant leadership, one of the challenges is just in the title. I think one of the things that I researched and wrote in the book know nobody really wants to consider themselves a servant. That's not really a very appealing title for things. But when you join those two words together, servant leadership, Pat Flottico is a great thought leader in the space that talked about that hyphen and how the servant, absent the hyphen and the word leadership is just someone who gives, gives, gives. A leader, absent that servant mentality, is someone who thinks maybe a bit too inwardly and not about the quality of the experience for everyone else. So when I write servant leadership, there's always that dash hyphen between the two because they're connected, like twins that cannot exist absent one another. Wow. I never even thought about it that way. So you talked about healing and how servant leadership is a lot about mindset. What are some other core behaviors? The big one that gets a lot of airplay is the practice of listening. And I do speak about these behaviors in servant leadership as practices. Behaviors. I think when we think of them as traits or attributes, they're a little bit. I sit back in the chair when. I think about that traits and attributes. Sounds like you were born with it and not didn't learn it, like you can't develop it. And that perhaps one of the questions we were going to get to, one of the things that people ask me is, who's this book for? And I rewind 2025 years, and I think about the earliest version of Evan, who got into the nonprofit space, and how many of these things I did very poorly, and how many of these things I'm still trying to improve. I'm not the world's best listener, even though listening is one of the big things. Bob Greenleaf probably wrote, spoke, and pontificated about listening more than he did anything else, and it's really important. I think you and I would look around the field at chief executives and fundraisers, chief development officers and others, and think the ones who can transform the work that they do make the best relationships with donors, probably the ones who follow that 80 2075 25 rule, where they're allowing space, which I'm not doing right now, in allowing space for a conversation. And that's active, that's generative. Not really speaking to hear the sound of your own voice, but prompting with really great questions with the one hole of your mouth and then listening back and with the two holes of your ears, allowing those conversations to move. So listening is the big one. Working with Mallory, what I was able to do is reframe these ten. And would it be helpful to just sort of rattle the ten off? Sure. And also, for those of you that do not know Mallory Erickson, I will put her information in the show notes. She's a fantastic thought leader in the fundraising space, and she talks a lot about mindset and reframing how we think about our work. Definitely. But yes, definitely give us the ten or quickly, briefly, however you want to do it. I'll go through the list quickly. Maybe if any of these stand out to you just in their title or in some of the stuff that I sent you over, we can sit on some of those. But yeah, I'll go through quickly in the way that I've been thinking about them now after my work with Mallory. So we start with conceptualization, which feels very 30,000ft when you think about it. We go to awareness, then listening, empathy, healing, persuasion, commitment to the growth of others. Foresight. Fundraisers will love this one. Stewardship and then building community. Don't those all sound like the nonprofit space, though? Except for maybe awareness and persuasion? Foresight, maybe not. But I would like to talk about foresight. We'd like it to be there. We'd love it to be there. I think, unfortunately for a lot of us, it's just like what you said, doing, not having a lot of time to reflect and to really predict the future. Yes, that's all true. And also empathy. It's just because the doing, the doing, the doing. I would love to have more time. So what is your advice? I guess, and it's probably in the book, but for my listeners, what is your advice on developing these ten behaviors? Where would we start? That's what I've been thinking a lot about in the ethos of this book, where taking something that is a bit difficult to understand and that is often in the literature and the TED talks and everything else kept at the level of a plane, very 20, 30,000ft in the air. If you were to read this book and you're like 28 of these 30 things are junk, I disagree with them. Whatever I've not heard anyone come back and say that. But some of these things are very, very practical. In the listening section, I talk about leaning into some technologies that you can find better ways to welcome commentary from donors and other partners. People will forgive me, we'll put all this in the show notes. But the we are for good folks, John McCoy and Becky Endicott. One of the things that they do through their program is they use this platform called Speakpipe, where people can leave sort of like pre recorded voicemail messages, and that gets to them. That can be commentary. I think if organizations open up their ability to listen to folks, this could be a simple, which is a big boom that I've seen people do over the past few years. If you're sending emails to a larger list, don't just have the email come from, like, no reply@organization.org. I've been so pleased. And I think also Google hates that. Google does not like it. What I have seen, consultants are really doing this well. You'll get an email. I'm signed up for you. For all of our friends who are in this space, and the emails from Julia at blah, blah, blah, I could reply right to that note. So I think when we think about how we listen to folks actively, that is very practicable, that's very action oriented. We can do some of these small technological changes, and you'd be surprised. The organization that I'm working with now, for a long time, we looked at, like, people would reply to the info at email. And then my question when I first started was like, who's checking info at? And lots of confusion. So it changed that to philanthropy. At the very minimum, philanthropy@everytexton.org. Because that's the organization I work for, and that's kind of a catch all way. But now the emails come from me or they come from our CEO or something like that. I think you might have been the one to give us that advice earlier this year. If I didn't, I would have. Or if you didn't get it from me, I definitely would have told you that, because it's like you said, and it's empathy for the person on the other end, and they see that and they feel like there's a real human. But all of these things in the book in particular, they're little snippets of things to try. And one of the ones that I heard from there was someone who bought the book and gave it to their roommate. Their roommate is like a salesperson. They're not in a nonprofit space, but one of the suggestions in the listening section, you'll hear this and you'll kind of tilt your head. Thinking like, this is so obvious, but that so important pause that comes when you're making a big request to someone you're sending. Julia, thank you so much for being with us on this journey. We appreciate all your years of support. We are curious if you might consider upping your gift this year to $5,000. Julia, I know that's a lot of money. I know you normally only give 500, but. And you've jumped in and you've helped the donor make a smaller decision than they would have otherwise made. So one of the things I suggest in the book is record yourself asking the big question. And then watch your watch and let 5 seconds go by and see how maybe uncomfortable that might feel as you're doing it. But then when you watch that back, you're going to say, that was really quick. It takes the human brain, it takes the sound waves a moment to hit the earlobes resonate all in that ear. Goodness. Get to the brain. Ponder what someone is asking of you. A five, even 1020 2nd silence. I've been in those silences and they are so skin crawlingly uncomfortable. But how many downgrades on a funding request might have happened because you didn't give the donor? And maybe a couple or someone who's going through something really challenging, a moment to sit with it. And what's the worst that they're going to say no, or let's think about that and let's get back to you. Then you can be empathetic and say, totally understand what's the best way for us to follow up with you. And there's all these little practices that I think people, if they read this, they could take five or ten of these and say, it's year end. I have to make 30 phone calls today. I'm going to try a few of these things. It's a really good time of year now that I'm thinking about it, to put some of these into practice, I. Had Julie Ordonias on the podcast. I don't know if you are familiar with her work. She talks. She's in the book fundraising. Oh, right. Oh my gosh, she's amazing. This is what she talks about in the podcast, about asking for major gifts. The number one thing that we get wrong is trying to fill the silence and feeling awkward, making apologies when we really should just ask. Put it on the table, put it out there, let the person think about it, and let them give those five to 10 seconds for them to answer. I think that is just such great advice for anything. Anytime you're asking anyone for anything, really, just really give them a chance to process what you're asking for and to listen. To listen to them and then hear. Maybe they have objections, but you won't know if you're constantly trying to fill that silence. You know who I think does this? You're making me laugh. Who I think does this better than anyone right now, because come 2020, all of the takeaway food places we go, coffee shops and others, they've all got the thing. You swipe your credit card, and they go, just going to ask you a question or two. The tip, do you want to leave 1015 20%? They're not going. If you didn't feel the service is great, you don't have to leave a tip. I think baristas and the takeaway food people own that. They're like, here's your $4 coffee. Do you want to leave a$3 tip? They'll just put that little swipe device in front of you, and then you sit with it. No one's pressuring you. So I think there's something we can learn from our friends at the corner coffee shop. Yeah, I agree with that. I think that's such a good point. So there's so much I want to talk about in terms of the book, but I want to get to bigger trends and something that I am particularly concerned about, a trend that I'm seeing, which is the sort of decrease in trust in the sector and in philanthropy in general. So did you read the generosity crisis? The book, the generosity crisis? That's Nathan and Brian's book, right? Yes. Yeah. Really great. I was skeptical about it because, a. I'm skeptical when I'm not anymore, but I'm skeptical when there's this, when something comes out and people attribute the word radical to it. The radical, radical generosity. Yes. I probably need to do an entire podcast on the book, and I'm going to have Nathan on the podcast. I have a lot of thoughts about the book, but I do think. And Edelman does the trust barometer. Every year, the law firm, they do a really famous trust barometer. And what they found is that Americans trust businesses and corporations more than they trust nonprofits. And I thought that was pretty horrifying. And they found that 50% of Americans do not trust nonprofits to do the right thing, which I also thought was like a knife to my heart. So how can this concept, like the concepts in the book. And how can we as nonprofiteers increase trust in what we do and really elevate the work that we do? What is interesting for me, or at least it was, is when I would look through everything in servant leadership lore that focused on this notion of stewardship because that's one of the ten traits. There are probably a million traits in servant leadership. I tend to focus on this list of ten that my mentor pal Larry Spears helped codify down. But stewardship, we think of it in a certain way, but when you really distill down the nature of stewardship, that is a word that is really steeped in trust and building it, continuing to grow it. I'm not of this mindset that trust takes forever to build and only one experience to destroy. I think if that's the case, you've not actually built real trust. You've built a semi patient understanding that is held on by a shoestring. Real trust is like what I saw in our organization last year where we had a board who got it. A couple of challenging things happened financially and we had a board that didn't jump down our throats when some things came to bear. We have a chief executive and staff and other people that have cultivated and grown the trust with that group that they said, all right, we're going to roll up our sleeves, put our heads down and help you figure out where to make expense cuts that don't cut into the bone. We're going to figure out how to do this. We don't often think of those kind of like volunteers or boards or those other partners in that, but that notion of stewardship and servant leadership is grounded and founded in trust. And with the changing demographic of donors that we've been hearing about, reading about and know, save for Mackenzie Scott and her friends, we know the number of donors that are giving is going down. I think the definition, this is one of the stories that I tell sort of tongue in cheek, the definition of what people think is charitable. Maybe it never was what we think. About, but absolutely has changed. It's updating. And the story I tell is one of the big gifts that we get for the holiday season. We have all three of the major abrahamic religions in our family. So there's Christmas, Hanukah, and there's nothing really equivalent in Islam. But one of the gifts that we all get is socks every year. And since Bombas came out, bombas are the socks that we get. They're not the cheapest socks, but my family loves socks. They're great. I'm wearing them. Now, my family love bombas socks because for them, the purchase of a bomba sock is charitable. They know that they get something, and then something good happens. A sock or a pair of socks gets given or gifted to Tom's. There's a soul. Nathan and Brian, in their book, talk about this. Companies who are, they pay better, better PTO policies. They have better training programs. They're better, better. They're doing all the versions of the things that I think we gripe about in the nonprofit space. Also, some of them have robust CSR programs that are investing and turning some of this stuff around. It's often one of the quickest places that companies cut their budgets when things aren't going well. They cut down on ESG and CSR, which, in my view, is a mistake. But this definition of how. Wait, what's ESG? I know CSR is corporate social responsibility. Environmental, sustainable something or other. I think ESG is kind of like the umbrella, and CSR is kind of under. Don't ask me corporate questions, Julia. What do I. Acronyms flying around. I'm a nonprofit guy. The other day, I was talking about how the nonprofit sector in the US is the third largest employment sector. Nobody ever asks me what the first two are, and someone did yesterday, and I was like, I got to get back to you. I should have the government and the public sector, I'm sure. Maybe small business. I have no idea. I mean, small business drives everything. But I wonder how nonprofits would fit in there, because some nonprofits are small business. I don't know if they. Anyway, that could be another episode. Yes. I'd be interested to hear about the. Long arc toward trust. Some of this gets discussed like, I just watched the uncharitable movie, and we've all heard the stories of these nonprofits where we talk about overhead. I just got a letter in the mail from a donor who made their largest ever gift to us. It was lovely, but in the note, and I won't read it verbatim, they really meant well, but they said something like, we are slimming down the number of organizations we give to because we get too much crap from too many organizations. And I'm paraphrasing here, but it was like, we appreciate that you keep it slim and straightforward. And so they're like, don't write us more than once a year. There are some people that just in December, they take out their checkbook, they write their five checks. They don't want the newsletters. They don't want 60 emails. Yes, but I would not scare the fundraisers out there who should be communicating more. But listen to your donor when they say that. Absolutely, you're getting to the right point. So if you've got, and this is in the book, I talk a little bit about healing as this notion of when there is some sort of fracture. It's not just like Julia reaches out to me and said, we told you not to mail us anymore. And you keep mailing us. My response can't just be, okay, we'll fix it. You have to admit that you screwed something up. Yes, you did ask to be pulled off the mailing list. And I've had to do this for programs that I've taken over. There's always that transitional challenge where that note didn't make it into the CRM, if there even is the CRM. No one's putting that note in an excel spreadsheet. But you have to admit that something happened. You have to apologize for that. Julia, thanks for letting me know you had sent that note to my predecessor. I am so sorry. I never saw know. Please accept our apology. And beyond admitting and apologizing, you need to clarify what's going to be different. What we've done, Julia, is we've gone into our CRM and made a note to make sure that this won't happen again in the future. You have our word. Sorry. Thanks so much for being with us. So that listening, if someone makes a statement, extrapolate that over. If you've got a portfolio of 300 donors and 30 of them have that sort of experience, and you don't work on the reparative nature of that relationship, you're going to have 10% of your donors that feel trust has just slimmed way down because you've not listened to them, you've not generatively heard. Stop sending me print mail. We had a donor respond to our year end appeal in the RTS return to sender. Stop sending me that Twitter thing. Stop sending me this crap that came back and no one. Organizations will have stacks of returned mail that they never grab. Someone never sits and updates those in the database. They don't do an NCOa, which for listeners is like the thing you run through the post office to figure out if people have moved and you can update that information. You're going to erode trust by doing that. And I think that's kind of a micro level trust breaker. But on the big know, one of the things that I think we need to do a little bit better is this whole conversation about overhead and all that stuff. People want us to keep it light and slim. But wages need to go up, and we need the support to do this work, and we kind of do some of this to ourselves. We need to have a better internal conversation how to improve upon this stuff and communicate that clearly with folks. Oh, everything I saw around giving Tuesday, all the headlines that were not from a nonprofit publication were how to trust a charity, how to know who to give to, how to know if your money is going to programs. And also, it's because the narrative out there, also, there was that Netflix documentary around the call center that was calling for fake charities. I watched it, everybody watched it. And I thought, oh, great, now everyone's going to think that fundraisers are all fraudulent. And I'm trying to remember what it was called, but people are going to be listening to this and screaming out whatever the name it was called. But it was a Netflix documentary about this fraudulent call center that is one little tiny piece of a huge puzzle, and that is what's getting all the press. And it just makes me upset and sad and really angry because nonprofits are doing such fantastic work. I think we need to do a better job, like you said, advocating and educating people about what overhead is and what programs are and how they're definitely mixed, and you can't really separate them. And listening to our donors when they tell us how they want to be communicated with, when they want to be communicated with, and what kind of communications they want to hear from us. And I really think that actually ties back into servant leadership, because if you're taking the lead on this, if you're standing up and saying as a development director, things need to change. We need to change things in this way. That is what being a leader is, at least in my view. Do you have great, amazing. You can interview yourself for the rest of this time. I'm going to interview you. Got it. I have a lot of thoughts on uncharitable, and I have a lot of thoughts on the generosity crisis, and that is for future episodes, I would suggest. Though I had my hesitations about reading Nathan O'Brien's book, and I've become friendly with them. We did. Oh, I think it's really worth a read, for sure. It makes you think. I find that there's nothing wrong with some cognitive dissonance when something's going to flip it upside down. I forget how I got the link, but I watched uncharitable because it wasn't coming to Houston. So I found a way to watch it online, and it reinvigorated in me. Something this time of year, we can get really bogged and slogged in just kind of processing and getting things moving along. But it reminds me that we nonprofiteers need to do a better job conceptualizing what we do. And one of my favorite stories about this is one of the organizations I used to work with when I started. I was looking at some of their grant proposals and looking through the budget that had been submitted to foundations, and you look like, say they're asking for$150,000. You look at the sort of inward expense line salaries and all that stuff. Zero. Quite literally every single expense expectation was tethered to the program. And so I sat with the grants person, I sat with the executive director, and I said, what story? I know maybe we're conditioned a little bit to keep overhead low, but if we're telling funders repeatedly, and you look at the 1.5 million nonprofits or whatever it is in the US, if we all continue telling the story that to do a program takes zero in the salary line, people are going to stop listening when we ask. And so we may have had the conditioning. We are uniquely skilled and in the right position to change that narrative. Public funds is a different story. They have their gift to submit 30 forms in triplicate, and they'll limit you to, like, 12.5% overhead. And that's a very slow argument. We're never going to win. But for foundations, who, if they hear from, they're supposed to be grantees, they're supposed to be partners. And some of them were founded after the mid 1960s, like tax change, and they're trying to do the bare minimum. And Bob Greenleaf had said one of the most difficult, profoundly difficult ways to lead, maybe the giving away of money. And he worked a lot in the 1970s with trustees of foundations where back then it was very. Who knew? Who was at a foundation? They didn't have program officers. They didn't have websites, still. Oh, no. They lived in the shadows. They lived in the shadows. Maybe a check showed up, someone with that big, giant, six foot cardboard thing, which organizations are still doing. There is maybe some benefit to that, but times are changing. I do believe donor advised funds are going to be the next, maybe victims is the wrong word, but the next group of philanthropic resources that will be regulated in a way that the foundations were back in the 1960s. So we have a long way to go to being part of the change with encouraging trust. And if we can have that conversation more, like with my family, bomba socks are great. I love getting them, and I love that someone else somewhere gets a pair. But think about the local food bank. Still needs our support. Local food bank. And also, not to be selfish, but I work at a policy advocacy organization. Give to the folks who think about the long term, the systemic change, systemic change, the only way structurally that things will get better. And it's going to take multiple legislative sessions and encourage people to be with those organizations and invest in them. That's not the direction we were going in this conversation. But no, I love it. One quick thing, and I know we have to wrap up thinking about systemic change and supporting organizations. I support invisible people, which is an organization that just is trying to change the narrative around homelessness and people experiencing homelessness. They do not provide direct services to people experiencing homelessness. They don't have a shelter. They do advocacy and storytelling, and they're just trying to shift the mindset. And I think that is so powerful. And I absolutely think we need to do more to support public policy and advocacy and the people that are like boots on the ground, talking to legislators, talking to change makers, and trying to make the change happen. So for me, I think that's an incredibly important piece of the whole philanthropic puzzle. But I want to hear, where can people get the book, Evan? Where can people get the book? Where can they dive deeper? Where can they find you online and connect with you? The best place to go for the book is simply the nonprofiteers.com, because that will get you to Amazon if you choose. That will get you to bookshop.org if you choose to support that way. I think what they do is great. So thenprofiteers.org, and then there's links on there to know. You could find me through that on LinkedIn. You can email me directly. I try to make it simple with a very green and yellow website. Perfect. Wonderful. Well, good luck with the sleep deprivation. It should be getting better. And really, good luck with the book. Thank you so much. This has really been fantastic. And thank you so much for featuring me in the book. It was really wonderful. I love that one. Like now in a published book that I love. That was my pleasure. So people can go read that, and in the show notes, we can tell people what page it's on so they can go right to it. Thanks so much again, Evan. Thank you. Well, hey there. I wanted to say thank you for tuning into my show and for listening all the way to the end. If you really enjoyed today's conversation, make sure to subscribe to the show in your favorite podcast app, and you'll get new episodes downloaded as soon as they come out. I would love if you left me a rating or a review, because this tells other people that my podcast is worth listening to, and then me and my guests can reach even more earbuds and create even more impact. So that's pretty much it. I'll be back soon with a brand new episode, but until then, you can find me on instagram at Julia Campbell, 77. Keep changing the world, you know, nonprofit unicorn.