Episode Transcription

David Pisarek: Welcome to the Non-profit Digital Success Podcast. I’m your host, David, and in this episode, we’re going to be talking with Mickey Desai. Mickey is the inventor and chief nerd of the Nonprofit Snapshot, as well as the host of the Nonprofit Snapcast Podcast. I was a guest over there not too long ago. And Mickey, thank you so much for joining us on the episode here today.

Mickey Desai: Hello, David. Thank you. Yes, I’ve been looking forward to this all week. Happy to be your guest. Thanks for having me.

David Pisarek: Yeah, no problem. From our conversation we were having, you’re an avid collector and purveyor of vintage toys.

Mickey Desai: I can’t say that. I’m not as avid as other people, but my wife and I are definitely geeks. We saw this thing in Atlanta called Toylanta, so we went to go check it out. I have never bought an action figure before in my life, but it was cool to see what other people collect. I did end up walking out of this show with a Hasbro make of an X-Wing Fighter, which I’ve always wanted to have an X-Wing Fighter in my collection. I say collection as if it’s huge and involved. It’s like three things, but now there’s an X-Wing Fighter on my shelf, and I’m very happy about that.

David Pisarek: Amazing. Let’s talk about, I guess, what everybody’s here to listen about. Tell us a bit about your background and how you became involved in the non-profit sector.

Mickey Desai: Yeah, my involvement in the non-profit sector was intentional. My exit from it was not (laughs). But I had been, at one point, heavily entrenched in the non-profit sector. I worked with a local technology non-profit as a Director of Business Development. I worked for my local habitat affiliate for a while as their Director of Development, and then I became the Executive Director of another small profit here in Atlanta.

And those experiences, plural, culminated in something that became the non-profit snapshot, my first consultancy, which I did not intend to create as such, but it has turned into that. So to make the long story longer, I walked away from these experiences with a headful of frustration about how the last two experiences in particular went at executive directorship and then my time at Habitat was both educational and frustrating all at the same time.

I took those frustrations, and I thought that I would try to publish a white paper based on what I had experienced. And instead of publishing a paper, I ended up creating this report card that I thought I could use to grade non-profits on certain basic things related to non-profit leadership and non-profit management.

I went to Georgia State, I got some of their textbooks on non-profit management, and I fleshed out my report card, and that became the first iteration in the non-profit snapshot. It is basically a micro-assessment that a consultant can use to help a non-profit gauge their management of efficacy. So that is a large mouthful.

I’m going to make it a little bit larger by saying now I’ve turned the snapshot into an app, and I just need to pull the trigger on doing my alpha test to see if I can use the online app to help consultants across the country use the tool and hopefully shorten their discovery phase as they do work with their client and non-profits.

It’s designed to shine a light on a non-profit’s management practices to get the five-mile view. It’s not meant to be granular. If any granular work comes out of the Snapcast assessment, it’s up to the consultant who’s doing the thing. And I could give a couple of examples of what that looks like. So I did an early test of the hand-driven non-profit snapshot with an entity down here, a mental health entity here in Atlanta, that thought they needed a marketing consultant.

They didn’t realize they needed a lawyer first. And so the snapshot illuminated that for them. They cleaned up some of their policies before they started on a marketing campaign, which helped them steer away from risk and away from liability related to patient identifying information and confidentiality, which for a mental health organization is huge. I had another organization that didn’t have a disaster recovery plan. They didn’t ever think that it should be part of their ops.

So that turned into a whole other conversation with them to help them do some pretty basic things to get prepared, so to speak. How do you continue operations if the office burns down? How do you continue operations if your leadership suddenly gets hit by a bus or something? Those things have to be in your plan as grim as they are. So it’s stuff like that.

There are tons of things related to fundraising and strategic planning that can come out from the snapshot that turns into more work if you choose to do that with the non-profit. That is probably more than you wanted to know about the snapshot. I need to go ahead and pull the trigger. I’ve got a handful of folks who want to alpha-test the thing and make sure it’s working the way it’s supposed to work. I’ve just been sitting on my hands. I just need to do it.

David Pisarek: And your time is going to be a little bit more sparse in the immediate future, right? You’re moving, so that’s going to take up a bit of time as well.

Mickey Desai: Exactly.

David Pisarek: But the data science, you can’t argue with numbers that come out of a report card because it’s based on your actual information. It’s just a different way of thinking about it or displaying it or collecting it and having it all in one spot to get this review, this overview, this deeper insight into what’s.

Mickey Desai: Going on. That’s right. It’s designed to be very quick and easy to administer. People have asked me if I would let a non-profit self-drive the evaluation, and I think that’s a huge mistake. I think you lose objectivity and accountability if you do that. I prefer to leave the tool in the hands of consultants so that they can drive that agenda with them.

But really, it requires input from three people. It’s not rocket science. It’s just a complete micro-assessment that takes a look at the, as I said, the five-mile view of everything that I think it makes for good management for non-profits. I shouldn’t say it’s just my thoughts are, it has been vetted several times over, and I did match it up against the latest academic research coming out of the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies here at Georgia State. I think it’s pretty thorough, but the whole thing, when I do a snapshot, conceivably, I could get the thing done in a day, but it depends on the interview schedule. So if I need three people’s input and they can only see me every other day, then of course, snapshot takes longer to administer, but gives a report card that would say, “Okay, here”, let’s just pick something, a Humane Society.

The Humane Society gets a B+, and here’s why. We divided up in the snapshot amongst 10 different subject matter areas, everything from board governance to staff leadership to legal and ethical accountability, organizational planning, fundraising, and marketing. 10 different areas like that.

So it has happened that I’ve had organizations get an A+ in terms of what the board does from a governance perspective, but a C- from what the staff does from a staff perspective and vice versa.

Sometimes the staff is really stellar and the board simply doesn’t know what their obligations are. I end up doing a lot of consulting work after some of those things are done, helping non-profits understand what board relationships are supposed to be like, what’s their job, and how we strategically align as an entire group to move the mission forward in some meaningful way. And the snapshot has totally facilitated my work in that regard.

David Pisarek: I think it’s important that non-profits and leadership and non-profits take a moment maybe every couple of years. I don’t think this is necessarily something you need to do on an annual basis, but maybe every three years you plan this in and you take a look and you go, “Okay, here’s where we’re at”. And then you’ve done it the first time. Three years from now you do it again. You have a baseline that you can compare how you’ve improved or how you haven’t, the metrics that you’ve moved the needle on in your organization and how you’ve fixed some of these fundamental things that needed attention.

Mickey Desai: Yeah, absolutely. That’s the goal. People have asked me if I’m going to publish the scores that are currently not in the plan. My goal here as an individual, used to be to help the non-profits really just take a look at their management practices and work on them themselves. It wasn’t my intention to help them with it. I just wanted to be able to deliver the assessment and then walk away and then it was someone else’s job to help with the strategy sessions or whatever.

But now that I’m actually helping my non-profits, my goal is twofold.

My goal is to help other consultants use the tool the same way and to help non-profits break out of their ruts, break out of the prisons that they fall into as a result of various myths. I think we can no longer afford to see boards that simply show up to sign on the minutes and then go home. Those days are long gone. So how then do we help those boards become full of engaged and passionate people who really move the mission forward and make some really good strategic decisions for their representative non-profits? That’s the trick to me.

In fact, that’s the trick of leadership in general, I think, but that’s a subject for another day.

David Pisarek: Well, I’d like to touch on that a little bit here. How has the non-profit snapshot helped non-profits and their leaders overcome challenges to help them achieve their goals?

Mickey Desai: In fact, I just did a strategic planning session for a local community theatre. And starting from the top, that board had some misconceptions about what the board was supposed to do. And when I work with boards in general, I tell them that there’s a nice concise set of phrases they can use to describe the work of a board member. There’s a nice way, and then there’s the Mickey way.

So the nice and cute way is, “If you’re going to join a board, bring your time, bring your treasures, bring your talents”. And that’s completely accurate.

If you’re a board member, you should be doing all of these things. Bring your time to the organization, bring your treasures and become a significant donor to the organization, and then bring your talents. So if you have the ability to do events, then you should definitely be pouring your talents into that for the organization. If your talents are in accounting and tax liability and stuff like that, then you should definitely be using those skills to benefit the organization, things like that.

But the Mickey way of saying the same thing, which I’d like to deliver because in my mind it carries a little more punch, is “If you’re going to be on a board, be a doer, a donor, and a door opener”.

It says almost the same thing in a slightly different way. I like the idea that a door opener is in there because a lot of board members don’t. A lot of board members show up at the table. And even if they’re helping with other things on the board agenda, they don’t really tell their friends what they’re up to. And they should be. They should be combing through their Rolodexes to find opportunities to say to their friends, “Hey, I’m on this board and I’d like you to join me on this board”, or, “I’m on this board. It’s a great experience. We serve this cause. Would you please become a donor?”

That thing should be happening regularly with every single board member, even just among friends. You don’t have to become a multilevel marketing salesperson. There’s no pyramid scheme there. But by all means, your friends at a minimum should be aware of what you’re doing and that you’re hoping they’ll become donors in that cause, which that’s just the baseline level right there. But I hope I answered your question.

David Pisarek: Yeah, I think it’s important for people that are involved in a non-profit, whether you’re volunteering or on the board, that there should be a goal of 100% donation. Every member of the board should be a donor. Taking into account everybody has their own disposable income. Not everybody can afford to give thousands of dollars.

Maybe they can give $100 or $50, but I think it should be a reasonable expectation that every member of the board has donated to the organization. And not just once, it should be a monthly recurring or an annual recurring payment that is made. It makes you, one, feel good. Two, there’s like a tax receipt, whatever. That’s the other side of it. But showing that you actually care about the organization, talking to your friends, being an advocate. That’s what this is about. That’s what Mickey is talking about here.

Mickey Desai: That’s exactly.

David Pisarek: Going out and yelling from the rooftops, “I am on the board for this organization. I care about this because they help feed children” or “They help raise money for cancer research” or whatever it happens to be, you need to be the one screaming it from the rooftop.

Mickey Desai: It’s true. And you should see it when I’m standing in front of a room full of board members and I say to them, “Hey, your ORG should be your primary philanthropic concern this year”. So if you’re serving on two boards at once, you’re doing both of them a disservice. But the real change in attitude comes when I say to them, “Look, when I say this org has to be your primary philanthropic concern for the year, what I mean is that you, as the board member, if you can write that check without thinking about it, it’s not big enough”.

And that you should see the attitude shift that happens with that one statement. Every time that happens, I think to myself, “Oh, maybe they get the message”. And the other half of the time I think, “Oh, maybe they’re going to throw me out of the room now”. But it’s the truth. If you’re a board member and you’re really, really making that your passionate concern for that term, if you’re writing the check without thinking about it, it’s not big enough.

David Pisarek: Yeah, I think it’s important to have 100% participation, for sure, at the board level. If you could get volunteers to do that as well. I mean, that just speaks volumes about the organization, what you’re doing, the cause you’re fighting, and all that. That’s absolutely huge.

Mickey Desai: You become ineligible for certain grants if you don’t have 100% board participation. Even if your board members can’t—I’m crossing wires here—thinking about the board giving minimums. You have to be on a board, and a lot of boards say you have to give a minimum number of dollars per year. I don’t like those for a number of different reasons, but those values are all culturally defined. I’ve been in two organizations that said we can’t apply for X grant unless we have board participation from 100% of the board. And so if that means you can only give $50, then give it. But if that means you can give something more significant, then please do that. There’s a nuance there that I know I’m forgetting, so I’ll shut up now.

David Pisarek: No worries. You know, you’ve been doing this for a while.

Mickey Desai: Yeah.

David Pisarek: What do you think some of the biggest challenges facing non-profits are today? And how do you think that they could be… What’s the low-hanging fruit that could be addressed with those?

Mickey Desai: Yeah, I think the low-hanging fruit would be simple board education, just broad-based education on what boards can do and what boards are allowed to do, and how to energize the board to be very proactive and not reactionary in the approach to their mission. I think that a simple thing to do for non-profits is to come in and just do board education 101, which would be very easy.

The other thing is to look at fundraising practices on the whole, not just board-level fundraising, but the entire staff agenda for fundraising.

I know that fundraising tends to be the chief concern for non-profits over and over and over again. Let’s take a good look at that and start from the ground up, which I’m sure you would attest is very technology-dependent these days and has everything to do with how you present yourself not just on your website, but in social media. Let’s do some basic education along those lines and get non-profits connected with resources to make sure that they have all that stuff covered. That’s relatively easy to do and non-profits somehow just don’t make time for it.

David Pisarek: One of the things I’d like to, I guess, stress there is: take a look at your fundraising practices. In my personal life as well as with my agency, we donate to non-profits and charities.

Quite often I’ll just get a random letter in the mail asking for money. No, no. If you’re listening to this and that’s what your organization does, you got to stop that. You need to steward the donors throughout the year.

Talk about how the money is creating impact, where the money is going, how it’s being spent, what problem it’s fixing and all of that. Don’t just send a blanket letter asking for money or an email just asking for money. You need to bring people along on the journey. “Why do I care about this organization?” Because I’ve been involved at some point with it or I’ve used their services or I know somebody who’s been afflicted with X, Y and Z and that’s why I’ve donated. But if you want me to keep donating, if you want me to keep giving up money that I’ve worked really hard for, and all the donors have worked really hard for, you’ve got to bring them the value impact.

Mickey Desai: That’s exactly right. That was one of the lessons that came out of my time working in the sector as an employee. I worked for one organization that was looking at financial failure. And this was in 2008, the economy collapsed a lot of corporate giving had evaporated.

And so the organization sat there and said, “Mickey, we need to snail mail everybody who’s ever been a donor for us and ask them again”. I’m like, “You are certainly able to do that at this point, but I’m going to tell you you’re going to spend more money doing it than you will make on it”. And I was right, sadly, about that.

But that’s the thing. Non-profits don’t understand what that relationship’s endeavour means. And especially now in a digital age, when so much that relationship can be done via electrons and not via a phone call, I think that works to their benefit. But you got to teach people how to do it.

David Pisarek: Just one little point, low-hanging fruit.

Get a CRM in place, something client or customer relationship management tool. Non-profits are using those to track donors and messaging between the organization and the donor and have conversations, you can take a look.

A lot of them that are integrated with donor platforms, allowing you to see when the person donated. So if you know that this person donates every year in September, start hitting them up with messaging in April and May and stay top of mind and explain the cause and the need. And then when it comes time for asking, little pro tip here, a number of these donation platforms allow you to send a link to a donor that’s unique for that donor. And on the back end, you can dynamically have the amounts filled in.

So usually it’ll say like $10, $$25, 50, $100, $500. But if you know, if the system is smart and it knows that David donated $100 last year, it could be set up to automatically increase that by 10% or 15%. When I click through to the link, it’ll have $10, $25, $120, and $110 instead of $100. “Yeah, I think I donated about that”. Then there should obviously be another box there where I can type in $100 if that’s all I want to do or whatever. But a lot of these platforms have that and that’s something really easy that you can implement. A percentage of the fee and a small monthly fee, some of them are just free. There are a lot of them out there.

Mickey Desai: But compared to the return on that investment, if you’re using the CRM properly, it will facilitate so much for you. As you said, you can maximize the donation that comes back to you. You can maximize your time stewarding your donors themselves and creating solid relationships with them. If you don’t have that CRM, get one. If you don’t know how to use it, please get trained on it. That all those things pay back in dividends.

David Pisarek: 100%. If you can’t afford training, go to YouTube and search. There are tons of videos on anything you can imagine. Somebody has probably made a video about it before.

Mickey Desai: So many things. Yes, it’s true.

David Pisarek: And a lot of the vendors make training videos and put them on YouTube. Youtube is the number two search engine. So a lot of people, a lot of businesses are creating videos, publishing them there because people are going there and searching.

Sorry to take the conversation sideways a bit, but just back to your point about the board, it’s great they come together once a month. They have their board meeting, they have their annual general meeting, all that type of stuff. But I think the board needs to be involved in between and have an impact. They have the knowledge.

There’s a reason that they’re in the seat that they’re in on the board, whatever seat that is. As you said, bring your knowledge, help, train, and give some insight. Talk about “My experience in corporate America was blah, blah, blah, blah, blah”. How can we use that for the non-profit? What learnings have I picked up? What connections do I have? Who can I pair up or connect with? And a lot of times, if you’re on a board of a non-profit or a charity, know people that are on boards of other non-profits or charities.

It’s okay to partner with another organization.

It’s totally fine to do that and to have a relationship with another organization, even if you’re both fighting for the same cause.

Mickey Desai: Absolutely.

David Pisarek: Which makes your mission more powerful.

Mickey Desai: Yeah, absolutely. It bothers me greatly that more non-profits aren’t partnering, pooling their resources that way. I need to help non-profits cross that bridge as well. I get it.

I understand that a lot of non-profits don’t understand where the boundaries lie, especially from a financial perspective, when you build those partnerships.

But they’re not insurmountable challenges. In fact, they’re very navigable challenges. I would like to spend more time helping non-profits build those partnerships.

David Pisarek: So how important is it for transparency and accountability in the non-profit sector? What steps can organizations take to ensure that they’re meeting those standards?

Mickey Desai: Yeah, it’s critically important. It’s tantamount to having blood within the organization. If you have a surviving, thriving non-profit that’s doing good work, you should have transparent finances all the time. In fact, some non-profits say on their websites, “Click here to see our most recent 990”, which is the IRS form that the IRS uses to track the movement of money through the non-profit sector, even if a non-profit doesn’t have to pay taxes. But all that stuff should be ready for the asking at a minimum.

It’s not just the finances that should be transparent. The non-profit should be completely transparent with the work that you do and how you do it.

You should be sharing that story day and night, combined with some financial data, perhaps, and say to your constituents, your population, “Hey, we refurbished this entire park, and it only took us $500 in materials”, and “We leveraged $10,000 of labour using corporate employees to do this thing”. That stuff should be documented thoroughly and should be sung about frequently from the rooftops. That is to say, a lot of people are like, “Well, doesn’t that get covered in our annual report?” Maybe. Yeah, sure, it should.

But not every organization should be doing an annual report either. I think that annual reports can take a ton of time and effort away from mission-driven activities. So if you have the bandwidth to do an annual report, it might be useful. But it’s up to each organization to determine if it’s worthy to spend the time and effort doing the annual report away from mission-driven activities. I hope that makes sense.

David Pisarek: Yeah, the minimum for an annual report is the finances. We need to be transparent and have that available. Totally get that. Making a beautiful 40-page brochure document magazine-style thing about all the work that you’ve done, that’s what Mickey is talking about.

Mickey Desai: That’s right.

David Pisarek: You need to have a one-pager with PricewaterhouseCoopers or whoever has reviewed your budget and you’re spending and blah, blah, blah. Yes, you need something like that. But it’s the time and effort for putting this beautiful magazine-type style thing together. And that’s what he’s talking about, that you don’t need to spend the time and effort and hire designers, graphic designers, copywriters to go and then do interviews and put this all together.

And then it goes through the board’s approval and everybody’s time for editing and auditing and reviewing. It’s a lot of time and effort. Personally, as a digital agency owner, I don’t think anybody should be doing a printed annual report. If you do want to spend the time doing that, it should all be online and digital, or if you want a PDF that somebody can download. But spending the time and money on a printed version that is going to sit on somebody’s coffee table, maybe, I don’t know, it’s a lot of time.

And then the postage cost for mailing it, it’s huge. It’s huge for sure. Yeah, I think transparency and accountability in the non-profit world, we need it.

Mickey Desai: Absolutely. And there are some questions we ask in the snapshot related to that too. It’s all about legal and ethical accountability. There are things that some people should be able to do just by picking up the phone, calling the organization that says, “Hey, can I see your year-to-date progress along your budget?” I personally wouldn’t have a problem sharing that data.

I understand how some people might raise an eyebrow at that, but really, it’s your budget. Your board has to approve it. Not much of what the external public can say can affect that. So share it. Share it at will.

And who knows? You may come back with someone saying, “Oh, you have line items to this thing for $10,000. I can help you get it for five”. That’s not a bad way to look at the reasons why to share that information.

So yes, absolutely keep things on the up and up and share that information frequently.

David Pisarek: There are also legal requirements that you need to pay attention to as well. In certain areas, the executive’s contracts need to be published. So their salaries, all of that needs to be public. Their spending needs to be public, all of that. So be mindful of what your legal requirements are in the state or the province or the territory or the country or wherever it is that you are.

Mickey Desai: A lot of times there are some grants that will ask for that same information. So you’re sharing it with the grant-making organization, which technically is public because they have a certain amount of transparency that they must abide by as well. So it’s the non-profit sector. Don’t keep secrets. Share what you do and share it with everybody.

David Pisarek: Okay, so if we look forward into the future a little bit, the next maybe 5-10 years, how do you see the non-profit sector evolving? And what role do you see the non-profit snapshot playing in that evolution?

Mickey Desai: Oh, my goodness. That’s a very big question. 5 to 10 years in the future for non-profits, I think I would like to see how the playing field changes as the infrastructure within the country changes between the US and Canada.

If we’re saying goodbye to internal combustion engines, what does that do to urban planning? What does that do to the availability of electricity? How then will someone who can only afford a four-cylinder economy box from 10 years ago, how does their life change? What services are those people going to need? Can the non-profit sector provide those services? Those are the things that are on my mind because the for-profit world is already making those changes.

I want to see how those changes trickle down, as they say, and affect those of us who can’t be on the cutting edge of that technology. Speaking of technology, we’re in it now, and some people are like, “Okay, are we as far down into technology as we can get?” I think the answer is “No”. I don’t know what technological innovations I could predict for the next 10 years, but you can be sure that there’s going to be some exciting stuff happening for non-profits that may further transcend.

With AI, especially AI coming around, I think it’s going to change the way we fundraise, and I think it’s going to change the way nonprofit stories get told. There are some people who are worried that it’s going to remove the need for writers to create copy for things like blogs, fundraising appeals, and stuff like that.

I think there’s always going to be a need for oversight of AI-generated content. If you’re blindly publishing something that an AI generates, you’re making huge mistakes. So don’t do that. Always go through a proofread.

Always make sure that whatever content an AI generates for you meets the brand standards of your organization.

You know that matches the look and feel of your website, and uniformity of voice throughout your communications. Those kinds of things matter. I don’t know that I’m directly answering your question because I don’t have a solid prediction on what’s going to happen next, but those things are certainly on my mind as I look at that horizon.

David Pisarek: Yeah, it’s interesting. You’re talking about AI and that side of it. We leverage AI here. We’ve been playing with it for the last couple of years, and it’s been fun. It’s been some really interesting stuff. Now you’ve got some free platforms that are available and whatnot. I think it’s okay to use those platforms. I think it’s totally fine within limits, right? So maybe use it for some brainstorming.

I’ve actually seen job postings for prompt specialists, which is really interesting. So a prompt is what you put into these AI systems. People are hiring individuals that understand how to put the right content and context into a prompt to get out of the AI something that is really helpful and useful and beneficial in a shorter amount of time. Because you can go and you can keep prompting and prompting and prompting and prompting, but if you can just get it done really close the first time, that’s what they’re hiring people for, which is really cool.

Mickey Desai: That’s really interesting. That is interesting.

David Pisarek: Yeah. And non-profits are starting to slowly get into the VR world as well. And having Oculus Rift headsets and being in that environment and setting up spaces there, I think that’s really cool. I feel the non-profit and charity sector is probably about 8-10 years behind corporations’ evolution into technology. So where businesses were going 5, 8, 7, 8, 10 years ago, that’s where non-profits are starting to catch up. I don’t think that needs to be the case. There’s new tech.

If you can get a consultant in and go, “Hey, this is really cool. This is happening. How can we leverage this? Is there something that we can do?”. If you get an expert in, you can be ahead of the trend and maybe be one of the trend-setting organizations.

Mickey Desai: Absolutely. It’s exciting. It’s one of those things you’re looking at in a world full of change, and a lot of people in the non-profit sector don’t like change. I don’t know if that’s a fair statement to say. Please reel me in on that. It’s a stereotyping thing that may not be cool, but change is where innovation comes from.

And I think that whether you’re a for-profit leader or a non-profit leader, embrace the change, ride that wave out and innovate, innovate, innovate.

That’s the thing that separates success from failure and being able to turn on a dime when necessary. We learned that the hard way at the start of COVID, those organizations that could pivot are surviving, and those that could not are no longer here. So somewhere in there is the continuing answer to that question.

Oh, and the last thing I think about, and this is more than… I don’t know if we have time for this, but environmental change continues to worry me in terms of the work that we’re going to have cut out for us within the non-profit sector. The environmental non-profit sector has a huge agenda in front of them to protect the planet and try to get policy moving in a direction that doesn’t kill us all.

And so that’s something I very much keep an eye on with the 5-10-year picture as well. So again, I’m not sure that answers your question, David. I’m sorry.

David Pisarek: No, it’s totally fine. It’s all about the conversation that we’re having and to help the listeners try to think about things in maybe a little bit of a different way or a different slant to help them go, “Oh, shoot. Yeah, we need to be doing this. We help refurbish parks” like you were talking about. “What if we expand it and we helped with forestry? How can we connect with a ministry organization that protects forests and parklands? What can we do there? How can we draw attention to this?” I think it’s important.

Absolutely. We want to create a better world, but we need to be thinking about creating a better world for the future, for the long run, not just for today. What’s the saying? You can give a man a fish or you can teach him to fish or something like that?

Mickey Desai: Exactly.

David Pisarek: If we can create more sustainable X, Y and Z for the future, we can also help people right now that are struggling with that X, Y and Z.

Mickey Desai: Absolutely.

David Pisarek: That’s that impact statement. That’s the connection that’s going to help you drive more donors and stewardship.

Mickey Desai: One of the things we talk about with the work I do with the Snapshot is forecasting. Does your board actually have a forecasting committee? And if not, maybe you should take a look at what’s happening to the people that you serve. What does local policy have to do with some of those efforts? If you don’t have a forecast, and technically that’s the whole board’s job, to have people focused on specifically forecasting is not a bad thing to have.

David Pisarek: Yeah. So somebody who’s looking to start a non-profit or a charity, or somebody who’s maybe considering a career in the non-profit sector, what advice would you give them?

Mickey Desai: Oh, man. So- Where to start? If someone wants to start a nonprofit, my first non-snarky response, even though it sounds snarky, my first response is, Please don’t do it. And there’s a blog post that I wrote quite some time ago that’s simply called “On Starting a Nonprofit”.

And a lot of people who have the most noblest intent ever simply just don’t know what’s around them on their local landscape to serve a particular cause. I can give you a couple of examples. I met a woman who met with me and she’s like, “Mickey, I want to start a non-profit. I want to promote personal healing and therapy to help underserved women who are coming out of abusive situations to get their GEDs”.

I thought, “Wow, okay, she’s been through this journey. She confessed. She’s been through this journey. She’s had these eye-opening experiences. She wants to share that with the world and help other people get the same help that she struggled to get”. My first remark to her was, “Do you realize that in a 10-mile radius from where we’re sitting, there are four organizations that do almost exactly that?” And she looked at me funny just because she had never thought about it.

And I said, “I would guarantee that any one of those organizations would be happy to have you as a board member, a powerful, engaged, empathic, evangelical board member, passionate about the cause already. They would probably welcome you with open arms if you were to join them instead of creating another entity that does the same work”. So to some degree, there is competition for funds, and some people say, “No, there’s always an abundance of funds”. I don’t know.

There’s research to both ends. But I still say, stop reinventing the wheel, help the organizations that are out there get more traction instead. And so that’s the first thing.

And to people who are interested in working for the non-profit sector, please, we need tons of folks who are able and willing to do the good works that keep us moving forward in powerful, progressive directions.

The downside, I think, is still true that non-profit employees don’t make as much as their corporate counterparts. That’s something that I hope would change because the work is worth doing and the work is worth paying for. But just keep your eyes open before you get into the sector. Don’t be afraid to talk to the people who preceded you.

Just like an organization checks up on your references, you should definitely check up on an organization’s references and talk to people about the jobs that they do. What keeps them moving, what keeps them going every day? And in the nonprofit sector, how do they contend with burnout? That’s a big thing. But in the nonprofit sector, the research says there’s a dearth of non-profit leadership in the world. And I think that’s right. We need more good minds to help drive the sector. I don’t know how much more plainly I can say that, but how’s that for an answer, David?

David Pisarek: I think that’s great. One of the points that I just want to emphasize that you’re talking about is passion.

If you’re passionate about something, like in my case, I worked in non-profits for 16 years. I was passionate about digital marketing. And that’s the role that I took in those organizations that I worked in. You don’t have to necessarily be a fundraiser to be involved in the non-profit.

You can work in IT services. They need computers, they have networks, they have WiFi, they have cell phones, they have these, that whatever devices, they have systems that you can do this even if you don’t want to be in front of people asking for money. You can help in other ways. It’s not just about being a fundraiser.

Mickey Desai: Yep, absolutely. There are many things to do. I’ve told boards that everybody on the board needs to be a fundraiser. And they look at me funny when I say that. I say that not every single one of you needs to make the ask, but every single one of you needs to move when the ball is hiked, to borrow a metaphor.

When the ball starts moving, everybody on the board should be in motion. And if all you’re doing is helping facilitate phone calls, that’s fine. If what you’re doing is helping throw an event for the organization with the silent auction attached to it, that’s fine. But everybody has a job to do with regard to fundraising.

And now I know we’re off-topic because we’re talking about boards and not just staff members. But same within the organization, you have strengths, you have talents. The non-profit sector needs you.

David Pisarek: For sure. Absolutely. Mickey, these have been some amazing insights around helping move non-profits and charities and boards forward and getting more traction with their mission. I hope that people listening have been able to get some really great advice from you. I know I’ve picked up a few really great points from you.

I challenge everybody that is listening to this to take one insight that Mickey was talking about and talk to somebody else in your organization within a week of listening to this episode or watching it. We push this out on YouTube.

If you don’t know, we’ve got a YouTube channel, go subscribe! But yeah, take one thing, talk to somebody about it. Even if you don’t do anything about it, even if they don’t do anything about it, it’ll help get the ball rolling. It’ll help people think about things maybe in a little bit of a different way to help eventually at some point down the road. So, Mickey, if anybody wants to get in touch with you, what do they need to do?

Mickey Desai: Two ways to get me: nonprofitsnapshot.org website will certainly find me. The nonprofitsnapcast.org website will certainly find me. People are welcome to search for me on LinkedIn. Just look for Mickey Desai, a “Mickey” like the mouse, the last name is Desai. I happily connect with folks on LinkedIn. And if there’s anything I can do to help your non-profit move forward in a meaningful way, just ask. I’m happy to try to help you.

David Pisarek: And you’ve got a little bit of an interesting offer we were talking about just before we hit record here. Do you want to talk about that?

Mickey Desai: Yeah, absolutely. The work that I normally do with non-profits is to say to them if I’m helping you do something like a crisis communications plan or a strategic planning session or something, that my standard offer to all nonprofits is if I get to work with you and if your entire board is at the table, then I will knock 25% off the entire price for that engagement.

I would certainly extend that offer to anyone who’s listening here. I think, though, that also if they mentioned Wow Digital, I would do any work we could do online for 50% additionally off. If we’re just going to talk about 10 hours of executive coaching, normally I charge like a thousand dollars for that. I think we’ll do it for 500 if we get to do it online. Let’s say 50% off services and a further 25% off if the entire board is properly engaged in the process. That’s what I would do for your listeners, David.

David Pisarek: That is an amazing offer, Mickey. Anybody that’s listening to this, get in touch with him. Take advantage of this offer. He knows his stuff. He’s been around a while. He’s developed his scorecard. You are going to be set with his process 100%.

Thanks again for joining in, Mickey. It’s been great having you on the Non-profit Digital Success Podcast. To everybody listening, if you want any of the links that Mickey just mentioned, head over to our podcast page at nonprofitdigitalsuccess.com. Click on this episode for all the details. And until next time, keep on being successful.

Mickey Desai: Thank you, David. It’s been fun.