Recruiting and Building a Strong and Effective Nonprofit Board

On October 22nd, Keith Curtis joined us for a webinar entitled “Recruiting and Building a Strong and Effective Nonprofit Board.” Keith Curtis’ extensive work with nonprofits over the past 30 years has provided the opportunity to interact with a wide variety of nonprofit boards of different sizes and levels of experience. This webinar brought that experience to the table. In case you missed it, you can watch a replay here:

Full Transcript:

Keith: Can’t think of a better time.

Steven: Okay, great. Let’s do it. Well, good afternoon for those of you who are on the East Coast, and good morning if you’re on the West Coast. Thanks for being here for today’s webinar, “Recruiting And Building A Strong And Effective Board”. My name is Steven Shattuck, and I’m the VP of marketing here at Bloomerang, and I’ll be moderating today’s discussion. And today, I’m joined by two experts in fundraising. The first is Keith Curtis. Hey there, Keith.

Keith: How are you? Thanks for having me.

Steven: Good, yeah, great to have you. Very exciting for you to be here. And for those of you who don’t know Keith, he’s a 30 year veteran who has worked with some of the largest YMCAs in the country. He’s worked with a multi billion dollar healthcare system, as well as RX cultural and educational organizations and even makes time for some of the smaller nonprofits, such as free clinics, animal shelters and hospitals.

He is currently president of the Curtis Group, where his team has developed strategies to raise hundreds of millions of dollars for more than 150 clients, and he’s also a sought-after advisor and speaker, giving up to 40 presentations a year, not including this one, which we’re very happy to have him here. He’s going to share some of his knowledge on recruiting and building effective boards. So great to have you here, Keith.

Keith: Glad to be here. Thank you, Steven.

Steven: And also joining us, as always, is my colleague, Jay Love. He is the co-founder and CEO over here at Bloomerang. Hey there, Jay.

Jay: Hey, hello there and for all of you out there, if you’ve not had a chance to hear or see Keith speak before, you’re really in for a treat this afternoon. I’m looking forward to just joining in here and there, watching it all unfold. Looking forward to it.

Steven: Absolutely. Yeah, and I’m also excited, this is a topic that a lot of folks have been requesting for our webinars and it’s one that Jay and I have wanted to cover for a while now. So, very excited to be talking about boards here with Keith. So what’s going to happen today is Keith is going to get started. He has a really great presentation. I’ve had a chance to peek at some of his slides a little earlier today.

And once he’s done, he’s going to hand it over to Jay, who is going to talk about board membership, from sort of the other side of the vision that Keith is going to talk about. And then, after they’re both done, what we’ll do is we, as we always do, will jump right into a Q&A session.

And we’d like that to be interactive, so if you hear anything during the presentation that maybe you want explained or elaborated on further, please do not hesitate to send questions or comments over the chat window, right there on your webinar screen, and I’ll see those. Keith and Jay will also see those and we’ll try to answer just as many questions as possible before the 2:00 P.M. hour. So with that, I’m not going to take up any more time. I’m going to hand it off to Keith, who is going to get us started. So, Keith, take it away.

Keith: Thank you, Steven, and I want to thank everybody who is with us. Good morning or good afternoon to Jay and all the folks at Bloomerang for inviting us and having us today. Also, want to thank one of my colleagues, Aaron Phillips, who’s our consultant and our marketing director with our firm, who’s been a big help in pulling all of this together. So, if you have questions afterwards, visit our site and Aaron and I can talk to you about those.

But as Steven mentioned, we are consultants and we work with nonprofits and we are consultants and a couple of slides. So I’m just going to run through these real quick for you because since he’s already introduced. But our role is really helping to promote philanthropy, just like you have. We’ve done it for a lot of groups. Steven mentioned that I’ve been doing this for over 30 years and our firm has been around. Next year, we celebrate our 25th anniversary and we’re also involved with the group and Jay’s been a part of that over the years, in an organization called Giving Institute.

We have a sister organization called Giving You Faith Foundation, which every year talks about who gives in this country, how much they’re giving, who they’re giving to, why they’re giving. I serve as the Vice chair of that foundation and we’re going to talk about that a little bit today because it’s all about giving. And as Steven mentioned, what we find in almost every presentation we do, whether it’s a making the ask, cultivating the donor, anything out there, people are always talking about their boards and how do we engage them in fundraising.

So we thought it would be important for you just to understand a little bit about what’s happening in the philanthropic world as we talk today. Also, as Steven mentioned, we do a lot of presentations during the year. We do a lot of different services for clients. These are just some of the national conference firms that we have presented at. And in some cases, again, all of these folks are asking us about what’s going on with boards.

So what are we going to cover today? We’re going to talk a little bit about the workings of individual giving and what roles the board members and the volunteers play in this. We’re going to talk about how to create an effective board and really engage your board.

One of the things that I’m really excited about is sometimes when we’re doing presentations like this, we just have maybe executive directors and development directors. And in this case we’ve got not just those two groups, but we also do have volunteers and board members posting in. So, I’m really looking forward to it, at the end of the presentation, if you all have some questions, who are board members of volunteers, make sure that you get those out for us.

One of the things when we’re doing these presentations, and if we were all together in a room, I would be asking you all about your board. And one of the things that we find from folks, whether we’re doing presentations or if we’re doing a campaign planning or a feasibility study, is that we hear from people some of these questions here.

This is their board, their board will do anything but ask for dollars. Or their board thinks its [inaudible] to raise dollars. And then often times what we find, as we’re talking to people was what’s happening is that many of these board members haven’t really been recruited with clear expectations. And so sometimes we can’t really expect that a board member is going to do that fundraising if we haven’t told them in advance that’s what they’re wanted to do.

We have a client that a gentleman said, when we were interviewing him for a [inaudible] study, “You know, when they came and asked me to serve on the board, I told them that I didn’t want to help them raise money. I had already done that.” They said, “Well, that’s okay. We just need your name.” And he said, “And also I feel like I’ve given you enough money, so I’m not going to give you any more money.” And they said, “That’s okay. We just need your name because you’ve been a great supporter.”

And what ultimately ended up happening is, about six months later, they decided to go into a capital campaign and they went to this person and they asked him to chair the campaign. And when he said no, they got upset at him. And the fact was that they didn’t recruit him clearly with what those clear expectations were. He told them what he would and would not do and they decided that they were still going to go ahead and take him on and were convinced that they would change his mind.

So you have to make sure that you have those clear expectations, and we’re going to talk about that. Your board really has two roles. It’s the governance piece, which is frankly the easier piece for most boards, where there is [inaudible], there’s policymakers.

But what we’re really talking about today is the support piece. Because it’s hard to be a [inaudible] finances if you don’t have dollars coming in. And so you have to make sure that your board understands that support role when they are helping to donate or they’re helping to raise dollars where they’re a participant in the life of the organization. So that’s what we’ll be talking about today.

But as we go through today what I want you to think about is, again, if we were in a room, we would get that feedback from you of how are you engaging your board and how do you recruit new board members? And do you actually meet with board members annually, individually, to talk to them about what their role is? And these are things you need to be doing. So think about those, how you do it now and how you can improve upon those things as you go through this afternoon or this morning, depending on where you’re located.

This is a chart from Giving USA that I want to make sure that we touch on. We’ll not spend a lot of time on this, but here are a couple of things that I want to remind people. This is giving from last year. Americans continued being incredibly philanthropic, so people are giving away a lot of money: over $316 billion last year, with the third straight year of increases.

But the other key thing that I really want you to look at here is that individual giving. And if you look at that, you see that 72% of the money in this country comes directly from individuals. But the other piece is foundations in the quest. Half of the foundation money in this country comes from private family foundations, which are individuals or couples who have set up a structure for their giving or from the quest, which is an individual who has made a gift at their death.

So if you look at this, about $9 out of every $10 in this country comes from individuals. And the reason that that is important for you to know is that your board needs to realize that they get to be connectors because of that. What’s also important to realize is that of that individual giving, about half of that comes from high net worth individuals, those people that you really get to because your board members of volunteers know them.

And the thing is that once those people give, they have a tendency to give every year, as long as you’re continuing to build relationships with them. This is important to know because it ranges to this piece that is all about leadership. We always used to say people give to people and over time we realized that people don’t just give to anybody. If you know me and I called you up, you wouldn’t see me. But actually what happens is people, they give to great causes. They invest in great causes, but they give appointments to the right people.

So part of what we try to do is get your board members and you volunteers to realize it’s really not about the asking. It’s really about telling the stories and opening doors. Because these donors, if they don’t know you, aren’t going to open their door to an executive director they don’t know, but they will open a door to somebody they do know. And you have to think about that in your own giving. It’s so relationship-based.

As we go out and we interview people, people tell us over and over again that what they’re doing is they’re looking for causes to invest in but, because there over a million nonprofits out there, the only way that they can find some of those investments and really validate them is that somebody they know is talking to them about it.

So as we looked at this, what we realized is that board leadership and volunteer leadership, that is it. And as I’ve mentioned at the beginning, as Jay mentioned, we hear over and over from people, “How do we engage our board more? How do we get them to participate more?” So what we want to do is, again, keep in mind, some of your board members may never ask for gifts but they can participate.

So when we do a lot of our presentations, in every one of them we ask people, “How would you all like to ask for a gift?” And probably if I could just get a show of hands today, maybe I’d have a few hands go up. Because people don’t like to ask for gifts. But if we ask people, “Are you comfortable telling the story about the organization and are you willing to tell that story,” what we find is a lot more hands go up. So if you can start to talk to your board about, “It’s not just about the ask, it’s about knowing the story.”

And in order to make sure you doing that right, you’ve got to have an effective board. So here are some of the traits, as we’ve looked over the years, of effective board members. The first is that they really understand your story and your message. And don’t assume that they do. I was doing a session not long ago with a board and we do.

During these sessions, we let board members tell their story about why they’re involved and why they are excited about your organization. And it was really interesting; this one board member just starts talking about this particular program that he’s so excited about it. And the executive director’s is at the other end of the room, just looking quizzically, “What is this person talking about?” It was a program in the organization that was not done for two years.

So you’ve got to make sure not only do people tell the story, but they’re telling the right story. You’ve got to also make sure that you are educating them on development. Even if they are not making the ask, they understand the process of doing that. That they are not just looking at the staff and saying, “Hey, here are three or four names that you should go call on them,” but they are identifying these people, cultivating them and helping to recruit these folks either as donors or maybe as new board members. And that they understand that they’ve got to be involved in this planning process and that it’s just not the staff’s role to do it.

This is a chart that ASP has put together, not long ago, talking about the board’s different roles. When you talk about being, really, that supporter of an organization, you’ve got askers and ambassadors, advocates. The advocates are good; they’re getting the story out there, they’re telling people why the organization is important.

But you’ve really got to have more ambassadors. You’ve got to have people who can assist with cultivation and stewardship, in identifying the donors. And, really, if you’re going to be a successful organization, you’ve got to have the askers successful in fundraising. So it’s more important. really, to have those askers and ambassadors, who are willing to do more for the organization.

So when we talk about creating effective boards, a lot of times, people will come up to us and say, “You know, we’ve got a board and right now our board’s not willing to do anything. They talk about making calls, they tell us we need to raise money, but they’re not doing it.” And part of that is because we are starting the process a little late.

What we’re doing is we’re really trying to get people to understand the role of the board when they are already on the board, when we should be doing this much earlier in the process. It’s sort of like hiring somebody. You don’t decide, “Oh, I’m not really going to tell them what’s expected of them and maybe they’re not capable, but we’re going to hire them anyway and then they’re going to be able to do their job.”

So what we want you to do is start creating an effective board during the recruitment process. I had a major philanthropist tell me once that, “The most important committee that you have on a board is your board recruitment committee, you’re nominating committee.

Because they are the ones that will make sure that all of your committees function.” So we want people to have a year-round recruitment committee. We want people to make sure that they are developing the poll process. We want people to make sure that when you are asking them to serve, that you go through their roles and responsibilities and if getting a gift is part of it, then you are telling them that upfront, essentially making those expectations clear.

You also, then, need to orient people. We had found ones that they weren’t big enough to have their meetings on-site and there were some board members that had been on the board for a year and had never actually toured that site and had not met the staff. So it’s important that you are doing this formal orientation process and figure out maybe using board members who can help mentor your new recruits and talk to them every now and then and see if they have questions.

And then, as that person comes onto your board, making sure you educate them, train them and don’t do what the typical nonprofit does. The typical nonprofit agenda in this country hasn’t changed in the last 50 years. And what happens is development is usually at the bottom and you spend about three minutes on it.

What we encourage people to do is really spend time during the board meeting, sharing successes, talking about calls, talking about challenges, getting people to tell their story. And then, finally, what we want you to do is engage those board members. Include them in cultivating and stewarding people, getting them to talk about the names that they know and meeting them once a year and letting them outline two or three key things that they would like to focus on as an organization.

So once you’ve recruited these people properly and you’ve oriented them, how do you engage them in the fundraising piece? Part of what we’ve got to do is make sure that people are really talking to people that they know. They are much more comfortable with that and sometimes we go ahead and we say, “You know, who are people that you know that are connected to our organization?” And we forget about those current donors.

So what we want you to do is let your new board members or your current board members, looks through your donor list and say, “Hey, I know these people. I could call them; I could thank them for their gift. I could say, ‘Hey, when was the last time you were out here? Come out, see what we’re doing. And I’d like to spend some time, just letting you know what we were able to do with your last gift, how that had an impact for us.'”

But remember that when the talking about engaging your board in fundraising, it is not all about the ask. There are many ways that your board members can participate. They can invite somebody to your special event, your gala, your anniversary event. They can make personal visits, as I have talked about, to go and talk to someone about how their gift has had an impact. Share stories of the kids you’ve helped with, the animals you’ve worked with, the art collection, the exhibit you were able to bring in. Bring them by for a tour and, again, make thank you calls.

We have a number of our boards, they pull out their mobile phones at the beginning of a board meeting and they all make four or five calls to people. Just thanking them for their gift, the gift they made last month or in the past quarter. And the thing is, it’s a very easy thing for board members to do because, most of the time, what’s happening is they are reaching somebody’s voicemail and they can leave that nice message there.

Of course, one of the things that you really want your board members to do is help you make the ask. The volunteers, whenever they meet with somebody in person, they have a plan and what we want folks to do is keep in mind that when we’re making this ask, they need to think about it and talking about how they are involved with the organization, why this organization is important to them. Explain what their gift can accomplish and really talk about it from a standpoint of opportunities that are there and how their gift can make those opportunities possible.

Studies tell us what upsets them about an organization is the only time they hear from an organization is when that organization wants money. So it’s good to let them know what their gift has accomplished.

And whatever you do, be positive on the call, don’t make excuses for why people should or should not give. I know the economy has been tough the last five years. I know that you’ve got two kids in private school. I know your business is going through a difficult time, or your daughter is getting married in a couple of months. Be positive and really don’t make excuses for folks.

Remember, there are a million-plus nonprofits in this company and people are going to be asking for money. And people need to hear it from you volunteers that help validate why your organization should be one of their top priorities. So as we wrap up and I get ready to turn it over to Jay, this has been a quick 20 minutes, I’m going through some of the things you can do, engaging the board.

But remember that it all really starts with this board recruitment process and making sure that your board members and volunteers are clear with what you want them to do. And if they tell you they can’t do it, it’s okay to say, “You know, this is what we need. Maybe there’s another way that you could help us for serving on a committee.” And make sure that there is a constant training and education of your board and that you will involve them, not just in the ask but in that cultivation and stewardship.

There’s money out there. People are going to give. I doubt anybody on this call woke up this morning and said, “I have got to give some money away.” There’s money out there. People have to be asked and if nobody’s asked, they are not going to give. So if the board can tell that positive story and invite somebody to participate, they typically will. Jay, I’m going to turn it over to you now.

Jay: Thank you. Thank you, Keith. Getting ready for this meeting, one of the tools that we work with within the Bloomerang database is connecting up with prospect research databases. And I locked myself up in there for a particular reason because one of the things we show to Keith is it shows all of the boards that people sit on and how many direct relationships they have with current and past former board members. And it shows how many more terms that each of those have had.

So I looked there. I wasn’t quite sure in my 30 years in this sector. I have now served on 29 different board terms, spanning 14 different boards. Some of them are two terms, some of them are three terms before that. But what I thought was fascinating, Keith, was bringing this all to focus is I had a direct relationship with people that I sit in board meetings with currently or in previous years, to over 1,830 people that I’ve sat in boards with and I thought. “That is so significant because I know I’m not uncommon. I mean, I’m still in my 50s. Can you imagine people that are in their 60s, 70s and 80s?”

How many direct relationships have they had, Keith? As you all know, it can exceed that very easily. So I want to talk a little bit about the missing piece in the puzzle because the effective use of a donor database allows board fundraising to be a natural progression of the relationship. And what I’m talking about there is the fact that we want to be able to find and know about engagement. And Keith touched on this already.

It’s not so much trying to introduce people that don’t already know the organization. How many of your current supporters do your board members have a relationship with in some way shape or form? And I like to use the comparison to a linchpin. A linchpin is literally the person that holds the various elements of a structure together, and that’s what our board is all about. Governance is one thing, but holding the structure together makes a big difference and how we go about bringing in the best practices for this.

I know Keith probably knows one or both of these individuals very well. We worked very closely as we created the software in figuring out what was important for people to use with two very national experts on the writing is Dr. Adrian Sargent, our Chief scientist, whose sort of the father of donor engagement and donor retention. And on the left is Mr. Tom Mayhern, who is our donor communications head coach. So much of what we’re referring to here revolves around communication.

So I’m going to spend a little bit more talking a little bit about Tom’s influence and how it ties into what Keith has been talking about here. Because this engagement, we measure by this engagement meter that you see right here, and people can move from cold, cool, to warm, to hot, to on fire and you’ll see examples of those as a show a couple of other screenshots.

But, the engagement meter is sort of neat and it’s the thermometer of your database. It’s the thermometer for each of the individuals that you have in the database and it’s updated based upon all these different factors, and I’ll show you some of these factors. We used Adrian and Tom’s formulas and algorithms on what is important.

For instance, how many points or how much juice should you get for upgrading your gift from one year to the other? How much do you get for being a board member? How much do you get for being a volunteer or attending an event? So, those are all items that work behind the scenes to update that every single day, and it doesn’t require any setup but the users.

I have worked with larger database systems where there was some sort of a point value system and I’ve literally watched people spend 12 months, 18 months, 24 months trying to figure out this point system in order to move forward and I thought, “Wow, how much time did they lose in 18 months, when they could’ve been contacting and working with people?”

So we wanted to be, as Keith talked about, a springboard for major giving and legacy giving from this. So here’s a good example of an organization, an individual that’s in a warm category and you’re someone that’s on fire. So you can see it literally moves up or down based upon the factors that you see listed here.

And those factors are a combination of communication, transactions and just relationship-building that takes place in general. We take a look at whether they are a cash donor or a sustaining donor, where they are doing a recurring gift or a multi year pledge. The number of years of consecutive giving, whether or not they’re upgrading or downgrading, whether or not they lapse.

We also take a look at these two items here, on whether or not they volunteer or attend events, as I was referring to. And, most of the time, that comes over from the linkages with the websites. So people can sign up for an event or sign up to volunteer via your website or some other device. That automatically comes into your database and updates it. And then we focus in on some communication areas.

Since Bloomerang has the complete email engine, we can see whether or not someone opens your emails, whether or not they click on links, whether or not they forward it to people, whether or not they unsubscribe, whether or not we have their communication preferences on file. Those all come into play. Are we making small little movements in that communication area? Are we connecting with them? Do we have inbound interactions? We all know how much different it is when someone calls us or emails us or, as Keith was alluding to, people stopping by for a tour.

The nonprofits I’ve been on the board of, when people stop in on their own to go for a tour for that, I’ve hoped that the organization would get someone indirectly to the executive director or to the development or the VP of development, so we can see because this is someone who’s gone out of their way to show a genuine interest in us.

Much like somebody who contacts us and says, “Hey, my address has changed and I want to stay on your mailing list. Keep me informed on what’s going on.” Those are people, those inbound interactions. You’ll love this because Adrian tells us to count those double. Soft credits, any sort of stewardship, so they are bringing in a matching gift company or a family foundation or they are bringing people to sit at their table at a gala. Any type of stewardship, we give a lot of additional juice to.

And then one of the things we’re going to be doing in the near future is bringing the entire social media aspect in, whether or not they like you once Facebook, whether or not they follow you on Twitter or LinkedIn or whether they’re saying anything about you. Those all come together to move this meter up or down or to make a difference for them.

So it really allows you to make that come to life. We also show this in a timeline. Yes, go ahead Keith.

Keith: Can I just jump in real quick here?

Jay: Sure.

Keith: What’s interesting is when you talk about this engagement piece, and I’ll just spend a second on this, oftentimes we also find members of boards are saying, “Where do we find these people and where do we find board members?” And they always want to go off, looking somewhere else, whereas you just ran through the volunteer engagement, the people that are coming to your event, there is your pool, right there. It’s important to really look at these engagement factors and help people who are participating. So, sorry about that, wanted to just really jump in.

Jay: Oh, please do, Keith, because we want to tie it all together through your entire best practices for the board. One of the other areas that we do is we pull this together in a timeline. Does someone know what a Facebook timeline is? You can see over on the left- hand side there all of the touch points. And then on the right- hand side, you can see the highlights of what moved and needled the most in any one particular year for that.

So you can imagine, in addition to showing someone on your board a list of donors, if they know somebody, could you imagine popping this up on their phone, Keith? Before they make phone calls, so you can see how many times that they’ve communicated with other people at your organization and what’s been happening in a summary fashion?

It would make those communications much, much easier because we really pull all this together and, once again, use the formulas and algorithms to decide what weightings come into play and makes it very easy to use, for a smart phone or tablet, in order to be able to keep track of every single touch point that we’ve had with that donor. In the case of board members, obviously, they would be one of the ones there.

Now the next thing I want to talk about is focusing a little bit on some of the communication best practices from our communications coach, Tom Mayhern. And I love one of his quotes here, “Successful direct mail appeals are quite simple and, at heart, they are love letters to donors, prospects, woven through with clear cries for help.”

And what I wanted to talk about, just briefly, is that first touch point with somebody. And what I’m referring to here is engagement, in my book, begins with the thank you. And I’ve told this story many times. Keith, you may have heard me speak in the Giving Institute, when I was a speaker there a couple of times.

But one of the experiments I ran for many years, with one of my technology companies that was involved with the nonprofit marketplace, is for every new employee, I gave them a $100 bill and I said, “Your job is to make 20 gifts to various nonprofits of $5 each and watch how they begin to engage with you and to see who creates a relationship with you and who does not.” And I gave them to rules and this is a little exercise or experiment out there that every one of the listeners can do too.

Those 20 gifts, I told them they had to divide them so that have four of them went to local nonprofits and half of them went to national nonprofits. And the other rule that I instituted was half of them were online donations and half of them they had to send in, via the mail and watch what would happen.

And what was interesting, Keith, over a ten-year period, at least one third of those $5 gifts were never acknowledged and some of the ones, when they were acknowledged, you could just tell it was a very straightforward form letter to do that. But what I thought was the most insightful is that people would report back to me at the end of the six months and tell me who had built a relationship with them. And some of my employees and former employees are still supporting those organizations in a much bigger way today, based upon that.

Keith: You know, as you look at it from an anecdotal piece of doing that, doing all the research, Jay, it just backs all of that up. People want to be thanked and if they are not, they remember it and they move on. And major donors do the same thing. It’s not just the $5 donor.

Jay: And the fact of being called an old fogey that just tells stories, let me tell you a story when I talk about this little grid, here on the on the chart. One of the things that I’ve done over the years is help so many people put out database software, and there was a particular organization that I helped install the software that was in Chicago. They will remain nameless.

I had an opportunity to be back in Chicago for a non-profit conference, approximately eight years later. And when I’ve visited that nonprofit, Keith, one of the things I ask about is you better take a look at your thank you letter. And lo and behold, eight years later, they were still using the same single thank you letter to thank every type of gift, whether it was from a board member, and existing donor, a new donor, a high- level donor, a low-level donor. They had not changed the words or the phrases in that thank you letter for eight solid years.

Keith: Wow.

Jay: And so often is the case, the reason being that we often leave that acknowledgement process in the hands of an administrative person who really doesn’t, in some cases, know a lot about fundraising and how to do segmentation and how to take care of this.

So let me give you a little clue here and a little way of going about that. If you could just divide your thank you letters into four quadrants, the line going across the middle here, we’re going to make that line. Anything above that is people that have made a gift, above your average gift amount and here are the folks that are below your average gift amount. So, if you can go in your database and you can say, “The average gift in my organization is $172.57. Anything above 172.57 is in the top half, anything that’s low is below. And then this line here is whether or not they are a new donor or a repeat donor.

So you have new people above, repeat above, new below, repeat below and if you can set up so that there are four different letters and more importantly, on these top two, this should also include a telephone call here, maybe a handwritten note. Anything that allows you to make that much more special.

Keith, I loved your story about the board members, at the beginning of the board meeting who pick up the phone to do that. I’m on the board of a well-known nonprofit in Indianapolis. One of the things that’s waiting for me in every board meeting are five little notes with the name of the organization and the name of five new donors. And as a board member, I write a handwritten note thanking them for making their very first gift to our organization and telling them what that money was going to be used for.

Keith: That’s a great.

Jay: That makes an amazing difference. So if you can, come in and come up with these four different segments and map out a little bit of a communications strategy for each one, particularly for this left- hand side, for the new donors, for this one and this one here. Map out a 90-day plan. So I’m going to try it out with my free- form mouse here. My hope would be, based upon the best practices, that you have some sort of a touch point with them at least two or three times in that first 90 days, so that they know that they are welcome and they know that they have a chance to be part of your family.

Now, I want to take it one step further by showing you something that we also developed with Tom that will apply to these letters. We have a little something up here called the Mayhern audit and, Keith, you’ll get a kick out of this. Any letter that you are about to send out of the system, whether it is an appeal letter or a thank you letter, you can touch this button and it will come back and it will run to little tests for you in five seconds or less.

I’m not going to talk about the test at the bottom of the first. What we’ll do is scan the letter and tell you what grade level it is written for, using the flash Kincaid Reading test. It says here that this letter was written at a sixth grade reading level, which passes our test because any appeal letter and thank you letter is best written if it’s written between the sixth grade level, because people scan these letters. They are not reading a book; they are scanning your letter.

And then the top one, which is even more important, is the You test. And this is where it looks at all the pronouns in the letter and it determines if you’ve used pronouns focused on the donor or the prospect more times than you have pronouns focused on yourself or your organization. So in other words, you’ve used “you” words, in this case, 11 times and me words five times. So you have a 2:1 ratio to pass the test. If it did not pass the test, we mark it sort of a reddish pink here and. in this case, it flunked both the You test and the flash Kincaid Reading test. And, Keith, a ripple went through our customer base the first time all of the users of our software checked their letters to see how they came out on this?

Keith: What were the results?

Jay: It was really, sort of a mixed bag. There was a lot of celebration when their thank you letters and appeal letters passed the test, but there were a lot of people saying that they had to go back and make a little bit of adjustments, particularly those letters that had been approved by a committee.

Very seldom do the committees ever allow them to pass the test because they usually end up adding too much verbiage and taking things out and they talk more about the organization and it really causes that to not be the case that happens. So it allows you to bring that there. One of the things that I would like to also talk about is just five little principles that can drastically improve first-year retention and help you with your acknowledgements.

Number one is the 48-hour rule. If you can respond back within 48 hours of a given gift coming in, that is the ideal time for that because people are used to in this world, for instant gratification. Be different from the rest. That’s where the handwritten note or the phone call or the slightly more personalized letter can make a difference. The handwritten rules of communication: anything that’s handwritten, people will sometimes keep those for years, particularly if it’s something personal in nature.

Another key factor there is state exactly what the money will fund and then, if you can, as a secondary part of this, call or see the person, in some way shape or form after the fact, particularly those that are brand-new donors or people that are above the average gift amount. You will truly differentiate yourself from the rest of the pack there with that.

So with that in mind, I’m going to leave you with those five thoughts. Steven, are there some questions that you want to throw at Keith and I? I understand we’ve got about 15 minutes left and here.

Steven: Yeah, we’ve got some time for questions and there are a lot of good ones coming through, especially after Keith finished. So, we’re just going to jump right back into them, not waste any more time.

So, this first question comes from Catherine and she was wondering, what you should do if a board chairperson doesn’t understand the need to recruit new members who are going to be involved in all the things that Keith mentioned. You know, asking for donations and all these things. What can you do to sort of start at the top there with the chairperson of the board?

Keith: Well, I think part of the reason is you need to make sure that you’ve got active committees, and I know that’s easier said than done. But oftentimes, what we find is usually when you have a chairperson like that, they are sort of running the organization on their own and they are not really engaging these committees.

And oftentimes what we find is other people don’t necessarily feel that way. So I think, one, if you can make sure that you’re getting a nominating committee together and really starting to look a little bit and discussing, what are the expectations that we should be having as a board, and really beginning to present those back.

Now, a lot of times what we find is that these board chairmen are saying, “Oh, no, we can’t ask people to do this. We can’t ask them to do that.” But when you end up doing that with a committee, you are starting to form some of those alliances with these other board members who are really starting to back up the process and the importance of doing it. I think you also need to start to look at board members and showing them some of the statistics of giving.

For instance, where money is coming from and why that is so important, for board members to help open doors. And again, I think part of it is maybe not think of it as the board member has to do the ask, but what we’re trying to do is open doors and tell their stories, essentially, being an ambassador for the organization. Get them to be ambassadors before we get them to be askers.

Steven: Great. There’s another question here from Cassie. She was wondering, what’s an optimum size for a board? Is there a size that’s too large? Should you try to keep it under 20, try to keep it under ten? What’s been your experiences with the sizes of a board?

Keith: Do you want me to take that one, Steven?

Jay: Sure, yeah. Go ahead, Keith, and I’ll have a comment on that too.

Keith: You know, actually, personally, we’ve always advised our clients that the members ought to be somewhere between about 14 and 18. But there was actually a study done about a year or so ago, through Giving USA and a couple of other folks, ASP did, looking at some boards and boards that were successful in fundraising.

And the board is somewhere in between. If you have less than ten, you are not going to be successful with fundraising because you don’t have enough people. What was also interesting was the organization that said think, “The more, the merrier,” what they also found if you had over 30, you weren’t successful. So the big number in there, where most organizations saw the most success with fundraising, the percentage that met their goal, they had somewhere in between 11 and 20.

Now, the next was group that had between 21 and 30. I think ifyou are a national or a statewide organization, maybe you look somewhere in that 21 and 30 range. But I think otherwise, if you are a local nonprofit, somewhere probably, again, within about that 14 to 20 range would work for you.

Jay: And I will certainly second that. The ones that I’ve found to be most successful and have met annual fund goals and capital campaign goals have been in that 15 and 20 range. And more importantly, taking the next step, the committee size that has worked the best regarding that were three people because if you get more than three on a committee, that’s taking some sort of action, except the recruitment committee.

People sometimes think they can share the responsibility with somebody else. But when it’s just three people, that committee tends to get a lot done and everybody takes an equal amount of the work to be accomplished for that. I’ve been involved where there were committee sizes of five, six, seven and they didn’t seem to get as much done as the committee size that had just three people on them. Except, like I said, the exception being the recruitment committee; a lot of times we had for five people involved with that group.

Keith: And you know, Jay, just to add on to that, I like your point about committee size. If you end up having too many and you have, let’s say, 15 board members and you have six or seven people on each committee, all of a sudden your board members, they are just serving on way too many committees. As you said, “Oh, I can miss that one because somebody else will pick it up.”

And it’s really not just even in the committee side. It’s sort of on the board side. Part of the reason is, we feel like, if you are up on that 20 plus range, then people start to say, “Oh, you know if I missed that meeting, it’s really not a big deal because somebody else will pick it up,” and you’re not engaging and building emotional connections with people. Because if they miss one meeting and you meet every two months, you are not going to see them again for four months.

Jay: If your board chair is talking in terms of, do we have a [inaudible] today? You may have a [inaudible], but you also have a problem.

Keith: Right.

Steven: Great. A question just popped in from the chat from Elizabeth and there was something, I was actually wondering since Keith finished up his presentation. And she loves all the strategies for recruiting new board members, but she’s wondering what advice you might have for trying to implement these things for current board members, who maybe aren’t as engaged and maybe are resisting some of these things? How can you engage those folks? Is it appropriate to maybe relieve them of their board membership? What can you do for folks who are already part of a board that’s not really working?

Jay: Keith, can I jump in with that one first?

Keith: Sure, go ahead.

Jay: One of the things that have always tried to bring within the board that I’ve had the privilege of serving on is I insist that they have some sort of a board orientation process. And that orientation can be the hour before the board meeting; it can be a three day orientation. I’ve seen them be as long as half a day.

And one of the things, if they’ve not done a board orientation process before, I highly suggest that the first time they run it for new members, that all of the existing members who have never been to a board orientation get to go through it too. And if people are resistant to that, then you’ve really got a clue that maybe as they finish up their current term, that should be their last term.

Keith: I think, Jay, that’s a great point. We’ve actually done that with some groups, where we were doing capacity building work for it. It was funded by a local community foundation and we found that a number of the current board members had never been through an orientation. It really added a level where it needed to be and when they went through that, it really opened up their eyes.

I think the other thing is we are very big advocates on having term limits and term limits that are real. Because people, frankly, get tired and so what I mean by real is it does mean that you serve a two-year term and it can go on for 20 years. That you serve, as a two year term, three two-year terms or whatever it is, but at some point, you’ve got to get off that board. Doesn’t mean you can’t come back at some point, but that’s the way to get people engaged and to move people off who aren’t doing as well.

And I think the other is, as part of that orientation, is really starting to use some of your board meetings where you can let people just talk, tell stories, do some education sessions. Let a board member who made a successful ask or got a big gift talk about that and what happened, and they are going to be charged up about it. It’s a way to help educate those board members. Having said that, it will not happen overnight. You are going to have to do a lot of small things to make that work and spend some time doing it.

Jay: This was a smaller nonprofit. I’m sure you can pull this off on a bigger one. We had a board of about 14, 15 people involved with it and when I took over as chair of it, at the first screening I said, “We are going to disband, we’re not going to do the normal quarterly reports and etc.”

And I had one of the administrative people pass out everybody a sheet of paper and I said, “I want you to write down on that sheet of paper, what you think the average gift from all of our donors is to this organization. Make that your first number and then I want you to write as the second number: what do you think the average amount of years that someone is a donor to our organization.” And I collected all those and out of 14 or 15 people, only two people were even close to the two actual numbers.

It became the most strategic hour that we’ve ever had as a board, as we talked about what those numbers really were and why.

Keith: Yeah. And part of that, Jay, is also because sometimes boards don’t talk about fundraising at their meetings. And once they do, it gets the mood in and so, that’s a great idea.

Jay: Yeah, because most people just don’t have an idea, and of course, Steven knows what I’m getting at. Those two numbers, when you combine them, equaled the lifetime value of a donor.

Steven: Absolutely. Well, here is a question from Dreamy that is along the same lines. And, Jay, you’ve served on a lot of boards and still do, and Keith, obviously, you’ve worked with a lot of boards too. So what can you do about a board that maybe is a little too involved and is maybe micromanaging the actual programs and events and some of the activities, that the nonprofit is doing? What can you do about that situation?

Keith: That is one of the most difficult challenges with the board. And board members need to realize that it’s the staff who need to run the programs, and they oversee the organization. One of the things that we find a lot of times is that the board members who are micromanaging, it oftentimes means is that the board is meeting too often. For instance, unless you’ve got some emergency crisis that’s been going on or you’ve got some major building project, most boards don’t need to meet every month.

Jay: Amen, brother. I cannot say that hardly enough. That is far too often for any board.

Keith: But what happens is, by the time you are done with one meeting, gosh, you are getting ready for the next one and you don’t even have time for committees in between. And so I think the way you’ve got to take micromanaging away is starting to look at your organization more strategically. How often do we meet?

You’ve got to have active committees. Don’t let your board be a committee in whole and, frankly, you’ve got to have a board chair that’s going to look at people and just say, “That’s not our role.” And that’s the tough part. So I wish there was a real easy answer for that, but I’m not sure there is.

Jay: Well, one of the things I think too, Keith, can keep that from being the case is if your typical board meeting is not 90% comprised of giving reports from those types of areas that are about the day-to-day running of the nonprofit, instead of more on a strategic level. I’ve been at board meetings where they’re giving operational reports and that’s just begging the board to get involved, ask questions, do this and do that.

You are waiving the bait right in front of the folks there, as the old saying goes, and you are just asking for that to be the case. So one of the things that I always try to do is make sure that the operational reports, we summarize them and maybe show something at a very high strategic level, once a quarter. But don’t get into any of the weeds anymore about those.

Steven: Great, great advice. Well, we are approaching the 2:00 P.M. hour and we’re just about out of time for questions. I know we didn’t get to all of them, but I do want to be respectful of everyone’s time, especially as we approach the 2:00 P.M. hour here. So, just in the final minute or two we have left, Keith why don’t you tell folks how people can learn more about you? Hopefully, folks can ask you some questions that we didn’t get time to answer.

Keith: Yeah. Thank you, Steven. One of the key things you see is the slide up now that lists everything, from our website to our Facebook, to our Twitter. We do a lot, where, whether it’s information that we’re doing, based on a webinar like this, we’ll probably do a posting on it. We do a lot with Giving USA. We do a blog a few times a month. So you could go to our site and get a lot of good information, either through our Facebook, Twitter or just going to our blog.

And if you do have other questions, because we didn’t get everything today, we’d be happy to answer those. And I just wrap up and I would turn it back over to Jay and Steven. I just really want to thank you guys for the opportunity to do this today. It was a lot of fun. Thanks.

Steven: Yeah, it was a really great presentation. Jay, you are also active on social media. I’m sure people can get a hold of you if they had any additional questions about us or Bloomerang.

Jay: Very much so. Just check our website. It’s bloomerang.com and the slide’s up at what we’re talking about. You’ll find out a little bit more about the database and CRM. But more importantly, as you look at our blog there, you’ll find we have guest blog posts, much like Keith with 30 and 40 years of experience in the sector that really has some excellent advice. So it’s well worth coming back to, almost on a daily basis.

Steven: Absolutely, and if you enjoyed this webinar, we do these webinars weekly. Next week, we’ve got a really fun presentation planned; we’ve got Nathan [inaudible] who is a dynamite fundraising consultant. He and I are going to be talking about social media and some ways that you can employ some good social media strategies to help your fundraising. So be sure to visit our webinar page.

Jay: So are you both going to have your Halloween costume on?

Steven: Yeah, we might have to turn on the video sharing here, so folks can see that. Yeah, check that out. Definitely register for that, if social media is something that interests you, [inaudible] fundraising. So, we’re just about out of time. I want to say a final thanks to Keith for joining us and to Aaron, helping put all of this together. It was really a joy to have you guys speak about boards and share all your knowledge. So thanks again.

Keith: Thank you.

Steven: Thanks, everyone and thanks to everyone who took an hour out of the day to listen to us. To those of you who maybe had to cut out early or missed the beginning, we will be sending out the slides and a recording later this afternoon. So look for an email from me in just a few hours. So with that, I’ll say have a great rest of your afternoon and a great rest of your week. Bye now.