The Nonprofit Exchange: Leadership Tools & Strategies

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Engaging Your Board in Funds Sourcing Sep 17, 2017

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Giselle Jones-Jones shares her wisdom on engaging board members in fund sourcing. Here's the Transcript Russell Dennis: Welcome to the Nonprofit Exchange brought to you by SynerVision Leadership Foundation. I am your host, Russell Dennis. Thank you for joining us. Our guest today is Dr. A Giselle Jones. She is the founder of The Write Source, technical writing and consultation services. She is a writing advocate for community leaders, pastors, administrators, and the like, all sorts of nonprofit entities. She is here to share her expertise with us today. Thank you, Giselle. Welcome. Glad to have you here. Giselle Jones-Jones: I am glad to be here. Russell: All right. So Giselle, tell us a little bit more about the woman underneath the cloak. Giselle: I see myself standing like Wonder Woman with my cape flying in the wind. Russell: Tell us about your superpowers here. Giselle: I’ll tell ya, I am empowered by the people whom I have had the privilege to write for and to work for. They are really the wind beneath my wings. I can’t claim any of the success on my own. It’s because I have been in the right place and been equipped to be the right person for these people. I like the way you emphasize The Write Source before because that is exactly what I do. The w-r-i-t-e. I do the writing. We’ll talk a little bit more about that in just a little bit. But the woman underneath the cloak, the woman wearing the mask, the woman who is in the background. Again, my name is Giselle Jones-Jones. I am a Jones twice. I married a Jones. I have ben writing now, filling the majority of my professional life, and how I demonstrate that in my day job, so to speak, is as a teacher. I am a professor of English, of literature, public speaking, so that is my day job, and that is what gives me my passion. My students give me my passion. I do that and have been doing it since 1990. That tells my age, Lord have mercy. But I have been doing that for many years, and I learned my greatest lesson. I once heard that the teacher is twice taught. Again, I look at everything really as a privilege, and I take everything that I do as building blocks to do the next thing. Teaching, that gives me what I need to do what I do in my evening job, in my weekend job, in the-extra-time-that-I-have job, which is working for the nonprofit, which is working for the charity or the ministry or the professionals who have a desire in their hearts to do something to make a change in their community. Where I come in is exactly how I see my students. My students on the first day of English 101: Composition, “I hate to write. I don’t want to do it.” I have to struggle with them throughout the semester. On the other end of it, they are happy for the journey. But it’s the same thing with the charities, with nonprofits. There is this fear, there is this force that is in the air, and they absolutely fear the writing process. Preparing that proposal just causes dread and so they have a desire to do something in the community. They want to do something great, but they often stop in their tracks. When they face that in order to write a grant, it needs to read well, etc, they come looking for the grant writer, that person, and that has been me for organizations again who I have been privileged to work with as a freelance writer. I created The Write Source to cover me as the freelance grant writer, and that is how I have operated over the course of these 20+ years that I have been The Write Source. Meeting Hugh on August 26—that was just a little over two weeks ago—founder and president of SynerVision, opened my eyes to the possibilities that I was working out this summer and building of the infrastructure of my company to duplicate myself a few more times so that I can reach more people and help more people. Again, this opportunity today is a blessing. The past two weeks dealing with Hugh, I have been on a rollercoaster ride already. It’s been fantastic because it’s putting me in a place of impact to help people more, for me to do more and to build upon what I’m doing even more. That is a little bit of who I am. I’m a mother of three. I have two in college, both of my two girls, and I have a boy who is 12. I’m a wife of a wonderful man who is a musician like Hugh and a director. Again, I am privileged to be his wife. Here I am, before you now. I have shared a little bit about my passion, what makes me get up, what is my mission for life, walking in my purpose, walking in my destiny, all of that. Russell: I’m glad to have you here just looking at your bio. You are a tenured professor at just about every university in the state of Carolina. Giselle: Oh, stop. Russell: Your client list reads like a who’s who. It’s phenomenal. More hands makes the work lighter. Giselle: That’s right. Russell: I’ve been a part of this SynerVision team and signed on as the first WayFinder. We have been building momentum and now things are starting to take off. It’s really great to have expertise to leverage because you can do more. A lot of nonprofits feel like they’re alone. How much does that play into the struggle that people have with writing grants? I know that a lot of times, at my first nonprofit job, my first day on the job, the travel planner came and dropped a package on my desk from the Department of Education and said, “I’ve seen your writing sample. You’ll do okay. I’m right next door if you need some help.” I had never written a grant. Talk a little bit about that intimidation that most people have and what makes it seem like such a difficult process for most folks to achieve. Giselle: You said it. I mean there is nothing more dreaded than being given the RFP coming from a federal grant that requires 20-25 pages of information, demographic studies, all those things you have to do, plus giving a face and a personality to the organization. That is a lot. The fact that you were a gifted writer helps, but think about those who lack the skills to write. They feel alone. They feel like they’re on an island by themselves, and again, those grants go often unwritten. That’s money that that organization did not get because people stop in their tracks. It’s for that very reason it is dumped on one person’s desk, and that one person feels it is his/her job to do it by him/herself. That is wrong. The team approach is absolutely the best way to go about this. I think that the idea that you offer grant-writing workshops and support the grant writer, that is promoting it the wrong way. It has to come from the point of view that a team effort, with the grant writer sitting at the helm delegating responsibilities—Yes, that can be that person’s role, but that person needs the help of experts across the board everywhere from just even designing the document itself. You need someone who goes and gathers the information. All of these pieces go walking past the background in accounting who can put together that top-notch budget that is tight and that is ready to go. All of those elements for one person to handle, who is a gifted writer but may not have the expertise in those other areas, can get overwhelming. Again, having those people on board, having those people who are trained and equipped and ready to contribute to the team, is the best way to approach grant-writing or proposal-writing, period. That body of people, really from the standpoint of all funds development, all funds, all resources, from not proposal-writing because you can’t put all your eggs in one basket either, that team will follow the organization and work with that organization, with donors, with sponsors, with all of that because the same documentation is needed, the same writing is needed. That team of people who are equipped and ready to help the nonprofit, the charity, the ministry, they follow them from beginning to end and let them know they’re not alone. That is overcoming that particular person who is given that file on the desk, that RFP. No, if that does happen, that person sitting at that desk should pick up the phone and call that team and call a meeting and let’s go over this. Let’s look at this and delegate. Let’s look at who needs to do what so we can pull this together. Russell: Our first question came from Jolyn. She asked, “Do you know of any grant funding for a holistic healer or complementary healing services for PTSD?” Giselle: Oh my goodness. I would think that there will be federal funding, and I do have a list of those from the Center of Disease Control, federal dollars that go toward those military who have suffered. There is funding, yes, there is. As a matter of fact, I am going to keep searching for that, and I will make that available. I think there is a chat forum on here, and I will type those in as I find them. Yes, there are federal dollars that are available for that, yes. Russell: We will get those in there to you. Giselle: Yes. Russell: There we are. We’ve got a phone number for Karen. There is information we can follow up with in the chat. I have put the web address in the Facebook chat and the Zoom chat forums: http://www.thewritesource.org. That is where you can reach Dr. Jones. As always, our lines are open for more questions. Jolyn already has a 501(c)3 set up, and she knows about practitioners. There are some people that I want to put Jolyn in touch with who are doing different types of things, nontraditional and complementary healing. I will put her in touch with some other people online. My next question is that you have been working. I know you met Hugh a couple of weeks ago, and you have been talking about setting up what you call an office of funds development and collaboration. This is something that other nonprofits can do for themselves. Tell us a little bit about setting that type of thing up. Giselle: Especially because Hugh approaches what he does through SynerVision with the team approach, team is very important. So having a funds development office is really the next step in line for what he needs to do. It takes the pressure off of him so that he can continue to be creative, so that he can continue to do his workshops, his symposiums, but to have this particular office to continue to fund what he does as he helps organizations and boards fund what they do, the team approach handling how they go about procuring and sustaining their funds, this particular office would be the liaison between the workshops and the symposiums that are held to local implementation. This office would provide guidance after they have received the trainings. this particular office will follow them. And it’s got two branches, two arms. It will continue to fund the endeavors of SynerVision because its vision is large. Its vision is still evolving. That one side is important. But then those whom SynerVision develops and trains, they will continue support. This office will be here to stay ahead of the game with resources, with staying trained and relevant and current about what is being offered to charities and nonprofits across the board because again people have various needs and they are trying to impact change in their local communities in various ways. This office will be equipped to be the support for both sides, for SynerVision and for those whom they serve and develop and train. It is still a work in progress. Again, this is a two-week relationship that is blossoming, so we’re putting some meat on the bones per se, so that is where we are at this point. It is exciting. Hugh and I are talking every day. He says, “Giselle, what do you think about this? I am going to put these ideas together. Let’s put a proposal together to begin to make this happen because it needs to happen.” That is where we are as far as that is concerned. This particular office is critically important. It seems like a natural next step for SynerVision to have this particular office available. Russell: And it is. The work here that SynerVision is doing is designed to help nonprofits increase their capacity to serve others. Training and development is very important. It’s something that will attract people to you to serve on your board and for volunteers. Having a process, we’re all about helping put processes together that will empower you to work more efficiently, that will tell you to go off and find others to collaborate with. Fundraising is like a lot of other things. My whole role is to help nonprofits build high-performance organizations. There are four steps to that, and the first is having a solid foundation where you look at all of the things that you have. You look at all of your assets. You look at what you want to try to do and what you want to try to achieve. As you bring people in, you find out what drives them, what makes the work important to them. Once you understand why you’re doing what you’re doing, you can start putting a solid foundation. Talk a little bit about the importance of an overall strategy. I’ve seen a lot of organizations go out and take a scattershot approach where they are applying for grants, they are looking at pockets of funding and saying to themselves, “Oh my God, that’s a lot of money. Maybe we can go after this.” But they don’t stop to look at whether that particular funding source is the right one. Giselle: That’s exactly right. Again, the process is very important. I believe the gift that I have is making sure the voice of the organization tells the story. It is what draws the potential donor to them, which gives value both ways, which shows why the organization is so important and why they are so important to do the work they want to do in their community, and why it won’t be done any other way. It’s important then to connect with the potential donor that has the same value that in giving their money and making a contribution, they will be a part of that value. That I think is important, but what I do and have done is to go and pull the voice out of the organization. Who are you? It’s activating voice. I came up with my own class that I’ll be teaching that is called Voice Activated. It is. It’s just that. Who are you? What is it that you want to do? Whose lives are you trying to impact? First, you have to know your purpose. Everybody wants grants. I get phone calls every day, “I need a grant. I need you to write a grant.” Okay. Why? Let’s back up. Let’s take a couple of steps back because you can’t go find the grant first and then write the grant to it. You have to have a purpose first. You have to know who you are first. You need to have in mind the person or the thing that is being impacted. You create a story around that. Those are the steps. You begin with you have to know who you are, and then we can look at- You have an idea, you know what it is you want to do in the community, you go from idea to how it is going to impact the community. You then look at, if given the money, if you get the funds, who is going to implement it. What is that going to look like? How are you going to sustain yourself if you don’t get that grant funding? What happens after that? Do you have a sustainability plan in place? from idea all the way to sustainability with implementation in there as well, those are the necessary steps it takes, but where we spend the most time is that first base. We have to know who we are, why you’re doing it, and thinking long-term or short-term and then long-term. Coming up with that kind of strategy, sitting with the organization, hashing that out will help. We can’t do anything else until we know who we are. That is exactly how I teach my classes. That is how I teach those first steps in composition. You have to know who you are. Once you can find that out, I can tap into that voice and help to create your story, to create the emotional attachment. All those things that go along with pulling people into knowing why that particular idea or why that particular act of service is so important. Russell: That’s it. That is the second step of how to develop a h…

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Cheryl Snapp Conner On How Great Content Attracts Funding Sep 10, 2017

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Cheryl Snapp Conner, public relations specialist, Forbes contributor. author, and founder of Content University

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The Art of Significance with Dan Clark Aug 31, 2017

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Dan Clark, internationally renowned speaker, shares his secrets for success.

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Nonprofit Board Empowerment with Dr. Thyonne Gordon (Archive Replay) Aug 27, 2017

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Hugh Ballou Interviews Dr Gordon on Board Best Practices

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The 7 Essential Skills for Nonprofit Leadership Success (Archive Replay) Aug 27, 2017

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Mark S A Smith leads the Executive Strategy Skills Summit. A 36-year veteran of the business world, running his own company for 26 years, he works with companies large and small to achieve their sales and marketing goals.
For over twenty years Mark has served as a strategic advisor to corporate leaders and executives all over the world who must develop the best way to bring in the right strategies for successful growth and sustainability. What makes him different is he brings a holistic view of the business instead of solely focusing on one aspect and ignoring the impact of decisions on the rest of the organization.
Mark designs and implements leadership, sales, marketing, customer acquisition and client conversion systems that find and recruit willing buyers for products and services ranging from common every-day to high-end unique and disruptive.
He is often invited to speak at entrepreneurial and corporate events because Mark delivers unique, valuable, and pragmatic ideas to grow and succeed. With a deep understanding of international business, he worked in Europe for three years and has delivered events in 54 countries.
Mark is the author of 13 popular books and sales guides and has authored more than 400 magazine articles. He is a genuine Guerrilla Marketing guru, co-authoring three books with Jay Conrad Levinson, and is a certified Guerrilla Marketing Coach.
A renaissance man with many talents, Mark is passionate about leadership, team building, teamwork, sales, and marketing.

Develop your executive skill stack:
1) Presence
2) Discipline
3) Foresight
4) Business Acumen
5) Communication skills
6) Persuasion skills
7) Decision making skills
Go check out ExecutiveStrategySummit.com/synervision for the next event and then send me an email at mark.smith@Bijaco.com and let’s schedule 30 minutes to talk about your operation. If you choose to be part of the Executive Summit, 10% of your fee is donated to the Synervision foundation.

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The Nonprofit Exchange: Humility is Key! (Archive Replay) Aug 22, 2017

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The Nonprofit Exchange: Thinking about Community (Archive Replay) Aug 13, 2017

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Read the Transcript

Todd Greer: Good afternoon, and welcome to the Nonprofit Exchange Leadership Tools and Strategies. As always, I am your host, Todd Greer, Executive Director of SynerVision Leadership Foundation. Today, I come to you with a slightly different hat. Today, the hat I am wearing is the role of Managing Editor of Nonprofit Performance Magazine. Today, for the Nonprofit Exchange, I want to share with you a little bit about our upcoming issue for the magazine. Our September issue is just a few weeks away, and we are getting ready to go to the designer and to press. I wanted to share with you a little bit of insight.

Before we do that, let’s remind you about a couple things. If you ever want to join the community and be a part of these discussions, thinking about what it looks like to serve in the social benefit sector, what does it look like to be able to engage and grow your nonprofit, we invite you to come and join us. You can find us at synervisionleadership.org, and you can feel free to join the community at /register. It’s a great opportunity for you to think about other people in your sector who are asking the same types of questions as you, to be able to draw closer to ask tough questions, to share your practices that have worked for you, and to think about new and innovative solutions to problems that are facing your community.

We also want to remind you about our magazine, which is what we are going to be talking about today. The June issue of our magazine was focused on giving for impact. I think it’s a really important thing for people to jump in to think about high-quality information and content that we share with you every quarter. You can find that through our website at synervisionleadership.org. All you have to do is look for the Magazine button, and you will be able to access it right there.

Also, if you have missed any old episodes of the Nonprofit Exchange, the easiest way to find those is either by going to the iTunes Store and searching for the Nonprofit Exchange, or by simply going to hangouts.synervisionleadership.org. Those are all there. They are accessible for you, and they are free and easy. Whether you are downloading or watching, you can have access to some great thought leaders from across the country as they share with you on really important topics affecting the nonprofit landscape.

Today, as we said, we want to think of our community. It’s a subject that is really deep and important for the SynerVision Leadership Foundation. We have had a lot of blog posts about community. We have had a lot of conversations with nonprofit leaders from academics and practitioners across the globe who are talking about community. For us this time, it’s a little bit special.

Our September issue is focusing on embracing your community. This is where it really started for us. For us, we came across a co-authored report by Commongood Careers and Level Playing Field Institute. That was called “The Voice of Nonprofit Talent.” It was really focused on the perceptions of diversity in the workplace. It was a study that was published a couple of years ago, but when we saw it in early 2015, it started to prompt some questions for us, as we thought about what is community and how do we think about it.

We have talked a lot about community-building, asking questions about what it means for us as we think about communities to be built. What does it mean for us to think about communities as they remain intact and grow? A lot of times, we throw out conversation points like we do community management or we do community building. Those are pieces of the lexicon that are just buzzwords that we use now. We wanted to think about what is community. What does it look like?

Peter Block, in his book aptly titled Community, he began his entire treatise with the following words. He said, “The need to create structure of belonging grows out of the isolated nature of our lives, our institutions, and our community.” As we think about community in this upcoming issue of the magazine, we want to think of this sense of membership as a way that we find identity, support, and mutual goals and drivers, but it’s also a way that we find the wholeness of community. As we sit and think about our own personal experience, they are but one in the midst of a larger community.

We have tried to ask some deep questions as we have thought about what community looks like and how we embrace our whole community. We are really excited about the end product that is going to be coming to you soon. We have contributions from Penny Zenker. She is an expert who has joined us on the show here.

Leah Eustace, Kathleen Latosch. They are nonprofit consultants talking about diversity.

Al Winseman, who has joined the show. He is a senior consultant at Gallup, talking about the uniqueness and importance of unique talents in your own organization.

We have the Second Chance Organization, based out of San Diego County. It’s a group that works with formerly incarcerated, formerly homeless, and formerly drug-addicted individuals and helps them on a journey from that place of hurt to sustainability.

We are seeing input from the Tamerack Institute, as they think about what is community.

We are talking to The Mission Continues, an organization working with veterans as they come back stateside about giving them a sense of focus as they think about volunteering in their own communities.

We have input from Angela Spranger. She is a professor of management and leadership in the Newport News area. She is looking at the sense of diversity and conflict from the role of an HR practitioner.

We are excited to be able to share with you insight from Stephen Lewis, the executive director of the Forum for Theological Inspiration.

We are totally blown away by the opportunity to be able to think about storytelling from Miriam in the Close Up Baltimore group. They are experiencing the challenges of what happens when community is struggling in Baltimore last year. We are excited about that.

We have some great insight from C Forbes Sargent III on board development and community.

You will see some names you are familiar with. You will see my name. You will see Hugh Ballou, our president and founder at SynerVision.

But for us, it’s really digging into some important questions. We want to think about what it really means to be in community. We want to think about the uniqueness in community. Sometimes, one of the first things we think about when we talk about community is the importance of diversity and inclusion. You will see the questions that surround that. You will see some prompts. Our hope is that as you think about your own community, as you think about your own organization, you will be asking those kinds of questions that make you step to the next level.

Community is so important, and diversity and inclusion are so important. It’s not just from that idea of us thinking about a forced implementation. We want to think about proactive perspectives for diversity. How is it that we can embrace the whole community and think about opportunities unless we bring together the unique skills, abilities, and perspectives of the people that make up our community? Or what about for you as a nonprofit leader? When was the last time you had somebody that was part of your population that you were serving at the boardroom table to think about program development? We think it is extremely important, and it is vital to our growth and sustainability as nonprofit organizations, to make sure that the people we are serving are part of the development of service, not just the end user of this service. We want to think about what it looks like for us as we think about coming together. Are we truly embracing our community, or do we just have a specific niche that we have covered?

We understand very truly that organizations cannot be a one-size-fits-all. They are not able to do everything for everyone, and I would not entice you or encourage you to do that in your nonprofit. But the question is: Are you missing out on a really important part of your community? Are you failing to give service, even in the specific type that you provide, to a specific aspect of your community? Have you thought lately about language barriers, the struggles of individuals who have English as a second language, what they are dealing with as you seek to provide them with programs, services, and resources in your community? Have you looked at what it would be for somebody who doesn’t have the experience of your community as its origination point? How about somebody in an urban community who comes from a rural background, or somebody from a suburban background in an urban setting? What does it look like? Are you bringing those voices to the table?

Even for you, as you think about your board, are you including on your board not only people who can give money to the organization, but also people who bring a unique perspective? Are you bringing young and old? Are you bringing racial diversity? Are you bringing diversity of perspective in job functionality? What types of things are you bringing to the table as you develop your organization?

Throughout the issue, we are going to be focusing on the importance of unique strengths and abilities of diversity and inclusion because our common theme that we are working off is a quote from Doug Floyd. Doug said, “You don’t get harmony when everybody sings the same notes.” That is really important in the nonprofit sector, too. We know it’s very easy for us to get a very specific type of person, somebody who comes in. A lot of times, what we have found is that women are overrepresented with nonprofits as compared to men, which is surprising because we don’t see that in a lot of other institutions, yet in nonprofits we do. How are we encouraging men to be a part of it, and not just in the boardroom? How are we encouraging them to be involved in various aspects of our nonprofit? We oftentimes see people later in their career who are more involved in nonprofits. But what are we doing to engage our millennial? We oftentimes see people of a higher socioeconomic status that are involved in the nonprofit sector. How are we making sure that we are embracing and encouraging the development of people that come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds?

These are all really important questions for us, and they are important questions that we are going to be tackling throughout the September 2015 issue. We want you to think about how you can ask these important questions in your organization so that you can grow the impact of your nonprofit. We are very excited. We want you to join in with us. It’s a very important time for us as a nonprofit sector to make sure we are leading the foray into diversity and inclusion. We cannot be at the tail end. We have to be leading the surcharge, the focus. Make sure you are there leading that charge. We encourage you to ask deep and important questions as you function in your organization.

Really excited to always join you for the Nonprofit Exchange. These are simple tidbits, tips, strategies, questions, but they are not easy. I encourage you to join in as you ask these questions in your organization. Thanks again for joining us, and we will see you next week.

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The Drucker Challenge: Managing Oneself in the Digital Age (Archive Replay) Aug 06, 2017

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On June 8, 2015 the following interview was recorded: Peter Drucker, the father of Modern Management, long ago pioneered the idea of the knowledge worker. With the advent of the knowledge worker came the concept of managing oneself. Drucker stated “more and more people in the workforce…will have to manage themselves. They will have to place themselves where they can make the great contributions; they will have to learn to develop themselves” (Drucker, Management Challenges for the 21st Century, p. 163). Frances Hesselbein, CEO of The Hesselbein Leadership Institute, co-author of Drucker’s Five Most Important Questions, and dear friend of the late-Peter Drucker. Joan Snyder Kuhl, founder of Why Millennials Matter, an international speaker, and co-author of Drucker’s Five Most Important Questions. Paul Sohn, has a heart for equipping, connecting and transforming the next generation of leaders through his work as a Leadership Coach and Purpose Weaver. The Drucker Challenge will take place in Vienna, Austria on November 5th and 6th and asks the question, “what will it take to manage oneself in the digital age?” Tune in as we discuss this important challenge of “Managing Oneself in the Digital Age”, discuss the Drucker Challenge competition, and connect young professionals here in the United States to the international forum! Interview Transcript The Drucker Challenge, Managing Oneself in the Digital Age Todd Greer: Hello, and welcome to a very special episode of The Nonprofit Exchange: Leadership Tools and Strategies. So thrilled to be able to welcome in the amazing, wonderful panelists for our roundtable on The Drucker Challenge. Today, we are joined by Frances Hesselbein, Joan Kuhl, and Paul Sohn. So thrilled to have you here. We are talking about some extremely important things, one being the primary legacy of Peter Drucker. I want to welcome you in and let you know who is with us today on the program. Our first guest with us today is Frances Hesselbein. She is an amazing woman. She is the president and CEO of the Frances Hesselbein Leadership Institute. She is its founding president. Prior to founding the institute, she served as the CEO for the Girl Scouts USA. Between 1965 and 1976, she rose from troop leader to CEO, holding the position of CEO for 14 years. During her time, she grew the organization into a monster of a wonderful organization, bringing girls in from all parts of our society. Whether you are talking rural, urban, or suburban, Frances led the effort to bring girls in, to give them programming, to help them grow their efficacy and understanding of what it takes to be successful. In 1998, she was honored by President Bill Clinton with the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her work with Girl Scouts USA. Today, she is the editor-in-chief of Leader to Leader Journal, she is the author of a zillion different books, including a half dozen seen behind my shoulders. She is a lead author on the recently released Peter Drucker’s Five Most Important Questions. Frances, we are so absolutely thrilled to have you in with us. Frances Hesselbein: Well, I am so thrilled to be with you. Todd: Frances, right next to you is Joan Kuhl. Joan is the founder of Why Millennials Matter. She is an international speaker. She is a multi-time successful book author. She has dabbled in both business and health care, but she has found her niche in mentoring and developing millennials across the country and truly across the globe. She has been mentoring millennials for a decade now, which is a beautiful message because she is only 17 herself. She has an MBA. She is a certified instructor. She does so much to lead and let organizations understand what it looks like to work with millennials. Her advice has been in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Leader to Leader. Cosmopolitan Magazine has chosen her to be part of their inaugural Millennial Board of Advisors. She has been featured at amazing places like 92Y; just last week, she was speaking there. She has written The First Globals: Understanding, Managing, and Unleashing Millennial Generation with John Zobbie. She is a keynote and panelist all over the country. Joan, thrilled to have you in with us. Joan Kuhl: Thank you, Todd. I am so excited to be with all of you. Todd: Last but certainly not least, we have our young man on the panel, Paul Sohn. Paul is a leadership consultant, blogger, and author. He has worked with Fortune 100 companies and is now working with Giant Worldwide as a consultant. He has been ranked as one of the world’s top 50 leadership bloggers to follow. Paul is listed as one of the top 33 under 33 Christian millennials by Christianity Today. He is pursuing a graduate degree at Pepperdine University, the world’s premier organizational development master’s program. Paul, wow, we are thrilled to have you on the program as well. Paul Sohn: It’s an honor, Todd. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. Todd: Look, folks, I am just thrilled to be here with three amazing panelists, three amazing guests. We want to dig into some really important topics. I want to start with a really important question. I am going to ask you this, Frances. Frances, who is Peter Drucker? Frances: Peter Drucker is and was the founder of modern management and has had the greatest impact upon leaders in all three sectors, with hundreds of books and films and videos all bringing the Drucker philosophy alive to leaders at every level across the organization. He is skilled at the language of leadership with maxims such as “Think first, speak last.” Another one I love is, “Ask, don’t tell.” That could be translated into any language and moves easily around the world. When Peter Drucker says that your mission should fit on a T-shirt, he began a not-so-quiet revolution that would continue to celebrate and share in today. Todd: It’s an amazing thing. We look at the lasting legacy of Peter Drucker. Frances, you obviously had the wonderful experience of not just a partnership and working alongside him, but a friendship. What do we think of as Drucker’s legacy? What do we still see today? Frances: When Peter Drucker instilled the language of leadership and when he moves his three questions across all three sectors, what is our mission, who is our customer, what does the customer value, and once we have published this, celebrated it, put it on posters, he said, “No, no, there are five questions.” What is our mission? Who is the customer? What does a customer value? Then what about results? What is our plan? He said, “If you don’t end up with a plan, a good time was had by all, and that is all.” Todd: Absolutely. It’s a beautiful thing. It’s interesting because we have Paul who is a millennial; I am a cusper; Joan, I think you’re right in that cusper level, but just barely on the X side if I’m right; but each of us have been profoundly implicated by the legacy of Peter Drucker. It’s one of those things that you start to think about what has been passed down to us over the years. A quick snippet. I am currently reading Innovation and Entrepreneurship by Peter Drucker. It’s a book that came out in 1984. I was three years old. Yet the things that Peter Drucker talks about in that book are the same key areas that are being talked about all across the world in all three sectors. Frances, you hit the nail on the head. Frances: Yes, and we continue; even after Peter passed, we changed the name. We began as the Peter Drucker Leadership Institute, but to us, it is still the Peter Drucker Institute. Our job is to move Peter across the country and around the world. Todd: Speaking of moving around the world, we’ve got something really important that we want to be talking about, which is the Drucker Forum. Joan, talk to us a little bit about what this Drucker forum is and the corresponding global Drucker Challenge. Joan: It is so exciting. The Frances Hesselbein Leadership Institute is a huge fan and supporter of the Global Drucker Challenge, and the International Drucker Forum is actually one of the leading management congresses in Europe. It brings together extraordinary dynamic leaders of every sector, talking about Peter’s philosophies. This is now going into the sixth year. This international forum takes place in Peter’s birthplace, Vienna, Austria, in November of each year, and the dates are November 5-6. It’s also live-streaming. Those of us who can’t be there in person can experience it online, as Frances and I did this past year. It’s an extraordinary forum of really innovative thinking. To our point, but also thinking about how Peter’s wisdom is timeless. What we are excited to share today is this huge opportunity for millennials to grow as a community of followers of Drucker, but also compete for an opportunity to be at this forum in Austria. There is a cash prize as well. What is based on, this Global Peter Drucker Challenge, it shares the same mission that we have that Frances spoke to, which is really to expose new emerging leaders’ work and have them make it relevant to themselves, what they are seeing, what their experiences are, what their goals are. It’s an essay competition, and there are two categories. There is one for students and one for young professionals. This year, the topic is Managing Oneself in the Digital Age: The Human Side of Technology. Basically what you need to do is submit an essay, 1,500-3,000 words, outlining your perspective and your experiences on this topic. If you go to both the institute's website, Why Millennials Matter, or druckerchallenge.org, where you can find all the information, it’s suggested that you download a copy of a chapter that Peter wrote about managing oneself. I know we will talk about that further, but that is a great starting point for all of you who want to enter the competition. Read Drucker’s Managing Oneself, and start to think about how you’d apply that to that topic. Todd: Joan, I think somebody is calling in for a second because they were really intrigued by participating. They got right on the phone. Let me stop right for a second and let you know that if you are on the SynerVision webpage, you can chat and ask some questions there. That will be an opportunity, whether we can answer them live on air or answer them after the fact, for you to engage with Frances, Joan, Paul, or myself going forward. Joan: Great. I wanted to say that the deadline is July 15. We are very excited and anxious to spread the word about the challenge and get online today to answer any questions and talk a little bit about it. I think that one thing that we are going to find extraordinary is as Frances and I have been traveling and talking to college students, how much our recent book The Five Questions has been relevant and valuable and interesting to today’s students and professionals. We can’t wait to hear the type of thinking that will evolve out of this contest. Todd: I want to point out to anybody who is sitting watching from work or their home office or wherever they may be as they take this in archive form. The new edition of Peter Drucker’s Five Most Important Questions has taken and distilled down these five great questions that Frances referred to earlier and broken them into really important pieces. We know some of the lasting legacy leaders like Marshall Goldsmith and Jim Collins and others of this nature, you see the legacy of Peter Drucker living in them. We have also seen in this edition millennials be engaged to deep dive into these important questions. I think that is something really important. Kudos to the two of you, Frances and Joan, for taking that next step to think about how we make these concepts accessible to each generation as they go forward. I know Paul and I have both really enjoyed the book and thinking about those questions. The questions are simple, but they certainly are not easy. I think you have done a wonderful job in making that accessible for us. I want to take that next step because Joan, you talked about the question that serves as the Drucker Challenge question, which is: What does it look like to manage oneself in the 21st century? I want to dig first into that concept of managing oneself. Frances, if you would, talk a little bit about what it means to manage oneself. Frances: Managing oneself is a millennial concept. It is the millennial’s language that we have just grabbed. My generation, perhaps yours, too, does not think so much as managing oneself as unleashing or liberating oneself. Self-management is a contemporary term. Most managers are comfortable with it. They can trust the work within the concepts. Others prefer language that uses the concept of leadership rather than management. We understand what it really means to manage oneself. Todd: I think that is a really interesting thing. Obviously, you bring up that shift and how we think about it. Joan, would you touch on how the concept really has shifted into the 21st century? The challenge even talks about a digital age. What does that look like? Joan: What I love about our youngest generation in the workplace today, millennials, is they are hungry for and craving leadership resources. They aspire to be people who make a difference. Their definition of success is through personal fulfillment. They want that greater role. You think about the role of technology in all of this. What we talk to students and young professionals a lot about is how important it is to be conscientious of your personal brand. Your brand lives in three places. It’s in person, how you present yourself and how you connect personally. It’s on paper, still the traditional ways of resumes and portfolios. Third, it’s online. Thinking about how you share your own thought leadership. When we talk to students today, we tell them that everybody has something to contribute and to share. To Frances’s point about how millennials, this is the millennial language of managing oneself, Peter himself in the essay Managing Oneself talks about how you can look at your own strengths, how you can ask for feedback and why that is a really good thing to get others’ perspectives, and how you can continue to shine by evolving those skills into greatness versus feeling overwhelmed by your weaknesses. He talks about how to figure out where you belong, what your contribution is. That deeper sense of who am I, what is my role in this world, is completely a complement to what we know students and young professionals are craving today. I think really using social media, technology, like we are doing today, to spread those messages around the world to their peers, to new audiences is what makes this time really exciting. Todd: I think that is such an important thing. We have seen a shift in this millennial generation. We have this massive boom. They are technology-savvy, not just technology-savvy, but it’s intuitive to them. We have grown up with this. Paul, what do you see? You are a millennial here. We have kind of kept you quiet for a little while. Kudos to you because they say millennials can’t keep quiet. Only teasing. What do you see? Paul: As Joan said, millennials are wrestling with the issue of managing yourself in this digital age. Honestly, I think we are living in a very noisy world. Our generation are plugged in 24/7. We are constantly bombarded with messages and images of what our friends are doing on social media. There is one interesting study that I found that seven out of ten millennials are experiencing FOMO, which is Fear of Missing Out. This is an anxiety that you see when you have friends on Facebook or Instagram that seem like they are having the time of their life. You think to yourself, What am I doing here? I want to be there. I want to be doing all this. Instead of leading your lives based on who you are, you are basing your lives on the expectations of the pressures of this world. One question I think that could be helpful to millennials to ask ourselves…

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How to Be Sure That Your Nonprofit Brand is Recognized Jul 30, 2017

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The Nonprofit Chat live was a panel of experts on getting recognized. They represent various type of expert skills and backgrounds. The common trait is that all of them are competent at getting connected and recognized for your brand. The panelists were Bill Gilmer, WordSprint, Ashley Bernardi, Nardi Media, Shannon Gronich, Media Magic Intensives, and Doug Brown, NewsWire.net.

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Strategy - Driving to Abundance with Ed Bogle, Master Strategist Jul 23, 2017

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Ed Bogle is a Strategic Planning Consultant that serves as a mentor, coach and consultant to entrepreneurs and non-profit executives. In the case of non-profits, Ed specializes in developing and implementing innovative solutions in defining their strategic value to those they serve and building a "brand" that moves beyond scarcity to a level of abundance.Â His firm ideationEDGE works with their clients to understand their "value" creation and "revenue" production. He has worked with and served as a coach and mentor to several non-profits and two of Inc Magazine's Entrepreneur of the Year regional winners. He developed a deep passion for non-profits through a frustration from serving on boards and seeing great visionary work die due to funding shortages and donor fatigue. Understanding revenues and creating abundance comes from carefully crafted strategies driven from a long-term vision and a constancy of purpose. Some questions to ponder: What is strategy and why is it important to the charity I lead? Does a written strategic plan limit my creativity?Â Why and how should me board be involved in the planning? How does anyone predict the future with any success? Here's the Transcript Nonprofit Chat – Ed Bogle – 7/18/17 Hugh Ballou: Welcome. It’s another session of the Nonprofit Chat live. We’re going to talk about some important stuff tonight. Russell Dennis has been my co-host on this series. Russell, how are you doing tonight? Russell Dennis: It’s another fine night here in the mountain west. Beautiful skies and life is good. Hugh: You are always good. We are in the old mountains. I am in southwest Virginia, and it’s a lovely evening. We have a mutual friend on here tonight. Besides that, we know he is a very skilled professional. We know he works with business leaders on all levels. He has a special niche of helping entrepreneurs get clarity on what their vision is, on what their market is, and how we get there. We call that strategy. He has done some amazing projects with some specific nonprofits, and there have been some that have really done well. Ed understands the nonprofit space. He understands what the challenges are, and how to come around and address those challenges. Ed, welcome to the Nonprofit Chat tonight. Ed: Thanks, Hugh. I am privileged to be here. I have a great passion for the nonprofit world. We need them to do their jobs and live their vision and mission so we can make it a better world. I will do what I can to help. Hugh: Somebody once taught me that the work of nonprofits is more important now than ever before in history, and there are fewer resources. We have to do really well at describing the impact we are going to have in people’s lives. I think it was a guy named Ed Bogle who told that to me. Ed: I had a good idea about some of that stuff now, didn’t I? Well, you know, so many nonprofits, and even our churches, come from a position of scarcity so often. That clarity of vision and that clarity of the persona, the branding, you talked a couple sessions ago about the branding world, it is what gets people excited to your brand. It has a business flavor to it. When we do that, we find some pretty magnanimous results. We really like to carry into the nonprofit a lot of the business sector stuff and hopefully do it better. Hugh: Our friend David Corbin talked about brand slaughter. We illuminated a few things in that session, as you might expect. Everybody has a uniqueness to share about this. As I understand strategy, it is the framework that is going to help us engage our stakeholders. Otherwise, people are hunting for what to do. It’s the clarity of the sequence. It’s the railroad tracks to get you from where you are to where you want to be. Before we get into the strategy world, let’s talk about the Bogle world. It’s not the wine Bogle world; it’s the Ed Bogle world. Ed: I drink a lot of that. Nah, I’m kidding. Hugh: But your people bring it over and you have a whole closetful. Ed: At one time, we had 45 bottles of Bogle wine in our house. Hugh: I know what to ask for next time I’m there. Let’s talk about Ed Bogle. Who is Ed Bogle, and what is your background in strategy, and why is that important to you? We’ll talk about you first, and then we’ll talk about it for others. Ed: Basically, my undergraduate was in marketing, and my graduate degree was in strategy. But I was trained as an investment banker and commercial lender until that bank brought in a new president and said, “We want you to be the marketing and strategy guy because you have the educational background for it. You just finished our year-long management and development program, so you can do that.” I took that on, and the long and short of that story is that we grew the bank from $250 million to $1.6 billion in less than four years without an acquisition. It was all organic growth because he gave me carte blanche to focus on what was changing in the marketplace and how we related to our customers. That early on lesson was all about getting not only outside of the box, but it was innovating. We did some innovating stuff. Some of you may have heard of a little piece of equipment called an ATM. We put the first remote automated teller system in the country out. We put 12 units out all at once and promoted the living daylights out of it. That was 1975. The importance of that lesson is to look for the innovation, to look for the change. We so far exceeded our own expectations of what that would do. After I left the banking industry, I went to work for a little firm called Ernst and Young, then one of the big eight. I was part of a team of seven that built their strategy process over about a year long. Then I was leading a team of three to adopt that to the entrepreneurial services world. It was in my days at Ernst and Young that I had my first brushes with the nonprofit world. I saw a lot of people running around with a lot of tasks and people holding out their hats begging for the same donors every year. That is where I learned a term called donor fatigue, which all of us are familiar with. We wear them out. While I was at Ernst and Young, we created a process called focus strategic framework. Our plans end up on one page, and we have used it in the nonprofit sector as well as the church sector. It’s all about change. One of the great lessons of strategy that I learned through that course of effort is one of the only constants is change. If you agree that the world is going to change, and you agree it is pretty unpredictable. Back when I used to speak and lecture, I asked, “How many people believe the conditions under which your business exist today will be the same three years from now?” I have never had anybody raise their hands. I would suspect that would be true in the nonprofit world. The way you conduct your business won’t be the same three years from now. You get that clarity of vision, that clarity of purpose, that engagement culture that really goes with this. People ride for the brand. That is the critical part of the integration of the framework process. We have a new vision, mission, brand strategy. We have set objectives and all of that, and we know that is going to change, so we like to get people on a horizon of 5-7 years out, then concentrate what we are going to do the next 12-18 months. Then build such a culture internally that people are engaged in change. They have their antennae out. It’s not solely the responsibility of the leadership of any organization; it’s a responsibility of everybody. I don’t know if the brand guys talk to this, but if I can get anybody in my organization riding for the brand—they defend the brand, understand the brand, have clarity on vision, mission, purpose of the organization—their role in fulfilling the brand, and I am not talking about their job description. If I get that, then I will have the ability to change and integrate and build a culture that will be successful. Then if I study the marketplace, it starts and stops with a customer or somebody that you are engaging in your organization. It starts with your constituents, your stakeholders. How are we creating value for them, and how do we create that value over time? If I pick on the churches for just a second, why is it that all the big churches out there now seem to be these rock ’n’ roll churches? The non-traditional churches are having trouble getting people in their pews, yet the churches like- There is one here that has 26 locations around the country called Life Church. They have four locations in Tulsa. That place is packed. They have six services on Sunday, and all six of them are packed. Where is that coming from? It’s all about understanding your target market and how you serve them. I’ll quit there; otherwise, it will start to feel like I am teaching class. Hugh: That is part of what it is. Russ, does that pique some interest for you? Russell: It all makes perfect sense. These are some of the things that I have been trying to convey to people in creating a framework when I work with nonprofits. It’s getting to that mission and understanding who you are at your core. Knowing people at your very core is important. Those churches with the music, what they are going to find is they have a younger audience. You’re going out there and really talking to markets. It almost seems like dirty language to some in the nonprofit world, but what we have are customers; we just have different segments. Donors are one segment. The people who get your services are the other. If you don’t understand what they need, the people that you put programs together to serve, nobody will access your services. I have had talks with people who say, “I don’t get it. Nobody is coming.” We went through and talked about what some of those needs for those clients were. There is definitely a need, but they decided they are going to operate out of a location that was not accessible to the people they wanted to serve. Hugh: The church world is not very different than some of the other worlds. I was on a chamber webinar today with one of the chambers in Florida. Engagement, and especially engagement with millennials, but they said the other organizations in the neighborhood, the rotaries and other service clubs, have had sidebar with the chamber saying that they are having trouble growing their membership. They are having trouble engaging people. It was a whole session about board empowerment today. I suggested with a lack of strategy, people don’t know where to be engaged or what to do. They aren’t really clear what the endgame is. Furthermore, if they weren’t part of the initial planning process, or at last a revision or upgrading, and doing tactics for the long-term objectives, they really aren’t engaged at all. There is a trend for boards not to be effective. Let’s go back to the centrality of strategy. As you know, I approach the world with the left and right brain. As a musician, we have a very specific framework. In music, it’s the sheet music itself, the musical score. All the players have their parts. The analogy I make is that it’s their strategy, and everybody on the team has their own piece of the action plan. They know when to play, how loud to play, how fast to play, and we direct the process rather than try to do it all. There is the heavy lifting on the front to put that together. Respond to some of that long dialogue about strategy. I am an Ed Bogle strategy fan. You strategize your life as well as everyone else. Ed: My wife also told me that that didn’t work very well in strategizing your life and the raising of your children. With the latter, I would totally agree. It’s impossible to strategize raising children, so give it up if you are trying it. I tried it, and it didn’t work. In response to what you were talking about, Hugh, the whole thing is you want everybody in your organization to be bought into the mission and vision of what you are doing. Therefore, they need to be a part of it. That doesn’t mean they need to sit through long planning meetings, but they need to be a part of the development of that strategy. In particular, one of the things we do oftentimes is we have people in the organization that have different roles or employees, in the case of some of them, that they write their description of their role. Not their job description, not their daily task, but what is their role in completing or living to that vision and mission of that organization? It’s stunning what we come up with. If we attach them to this one-page framework, or any framework you use, what happens is they now have ownership. Russell mentioned common sense earlier, and the old adage is that it’s not so common. What in particular that gives organizations sustainability, stickability, is the engagement of cultures. I want people internally riding for the brand. That means they are bought into that constant collaboration and innovation. They don’t have silos of jobs. They are wrapped around what is our value, our brand promise is to our constituents. What is our brand position? How do they attach to that? What is their role in doing that? We use a few tools to do that. Hugh, I know you have a few things you do with organizations to bring them to that level. Gosh, if they’ve got this framework down and they understand it. If you give them vision, if you have a one-page framework that links from mission to vision, values, purposes, grand strategy all the way out to long-term objectives, competencies, capabilities, long-term objectives, short-term objectives, strategies, and action plan, it’s a big one page. At the end of the day, I have had clients blow up wall-size versions of this framework, and we would do training sessions where they would work with their division, their people, for themselves individually as to how I am attached to that framework, that strategy. Then they would all autograph it. There is one client I started working with nearly 30 years ago that still does that stuff. They are running out of places for people to sign. It’s amazing the difference it makes when you bring that level of consciousness up for their connection to the organization, vision and mission, as opposed to a set of tasks, a job task. It’s critically important. I don’t care if you’re a charity, church, or for-profit. In today’s world, if the only constant is change, how do you change? You have to have the people going with you. In fact, if you really look deeply at innovation in organizations, it usually comes from the lowest level, who are the people closest to our constituents or customers. Am I making any sense? Hugh: You are. Addressing the needs of the world. When you teach, usually when I am with you, you are teaching me. You don’t know it, but I am listening. The describing the impact, especially for charities. If we are going to attract people who want to be engaged with us, as you know, in SynerVision, we are encouraging people to use other words than “volunteer.” We want servant leaders, we want community leaders, and in churches, we want members of ministry. There is another term that indicates they are active and are doing something meaningful. Volunteer means it’s laidback and I will do what I have to do until I go home. We are about changing paradigms, and we get stuck in the activity mode rather than the results mode. Part of what I value about your teaching is we define the end result, we look at what we are going toward, so then we get people looking in the same direction. I heard you say a couple things here, and then I want to come back and ask you about the significance. One is about the one page. One was I’ve met your children and I think you did a fine job. They are fine human beings. Ed: My wife did. Hugh: That’s usually the case. Ed: Credit where credit is due, please. Hugh: We overcame our shortages. What is the significance of being able to have it on one page? Ed: There are a coup…

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