 Welcome everybody to another episode of the nonprofit show. I'm delighted you are here because today is a special treat. We get to join one of the great minds of my community, Sam Alpert, who I've known for, you said 20 years, which I think was being kind. I think it's more, but. I don't know, maybe 22. I remember going down to Mexico together when I was in the marketing world and doing a trip down there. So it's been a great relationship between us. It's been really fun and it's been just a joy to see you grow and mature. I think of you as a teenager when I met you. You're a married man with a family and it's like, wow, what happened? But yeah. I don't know. I don't know. I still see myself as a teenager. Hey, you and me both, you and me both. Well, we're going to talk about something really interesting today. And that's the fundraiser's mindset. We talk about mindset a lot, you know, in the nonprofit space. A lot of times we talk about it because working in this space can be perilous and can really, you know, cause havoc with our own self-care. And so I think this is a really good thing to be talking about so we can kind of look at maybe some skills, new skills and kind of reorient ourselves to what it takes to be a fundraiser and what it takes to be a successful fundraiser. So Sam Alpert, president of Bear Fruit is going to join us today as we kind of navigate this super interesting discussion. I'm Julia Patrick, CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy. Jarrett Ransom, the nonprofit nerd, will be back with us tomorrow. We have amazing sponsors that allow us to be here every day. They include Blumerang, American Nonprofit Academy. Your part-time controller, nonprofit thought leader, fundraising academy at National University, staffing boutique, nonprofit nerd, and nonprofit tech talk. Check these folks out. They support our mission and they support your mission. And we also come to you from so many different platforms that we've been building out, including our new Sexy app that I just love. Thank you to the team at American Nonprofit Academy that created it for us. But you can find us on streaming platforms and podcasts. We'll go with you when and where you need us. We have nearly 900 episodes that will help you to do better with your nonprofit. Okay, Sam Alpert, I really can't believe that you are here with me having this discussion because it just seems like yesterday I met you but it's been several decades and I've been able to see you flourish. You come to us with a really interesting combination. We were talking about this in the green room chatter. You are a brilliant, brilliant mind when it comes to marketing and promotion. But then you have served in the nonprofit sector and you seem to marry those. Talk about what Bear Fruit does. Yeah, Bear Fruit is a new company of mine and the focus for me is on fundraising and marketing strategy, grant writing and donor research for nonprofits, charities and social impact organizations. And the focus of course is helping them raise more funds so they can make a greater impact on the communities they serve. Amazing. It's exciting for me and the community piece is just in me. It's in my DNA. I grew up in it. I've been working in the community since I was a kid and so to me Bear Fruit is sort of a culmination and combination of everything I've done over the past 22, 25 years of my life. That's amazing. You know, are you surprised as you've taken this journey? And I know you have a philanthropic art. You come from a family and you have an Arizona legacy of philanthropy. Do you feel that we are talking about these things separately and not coming together with this as much as we should? Or what's the ecosystem of fundraising and marketing? Where does it stand today? I mean, it's got to be together, doesn't it? Yeah. You've got to be able to communicate your message clearly to the right audiences and oftentimes, no, not oftentimes always, you need funding. You know, no money, no mission, the cliche in this industry, it's true, but you've got to be able to communicate the need well and effectively across multiple channels. And you have to demonstrate your impact on the communities you serve, which of course gets a funder to take notice and hopefully invest in what you're doing now and in the future. Let's me go together. It does go together. And I love this conversation that we're gonna have because I also feel, and I've noticed this and I'm sure you must have seen this too, but even within our own organizations, we kind of have a prejudice about what everybody does and that bias oftentimes looks like this. Oh, those people in development, they just go to parties and they just go out to lunch and they just socialize and ask for money, right? And there's not this like true understanding of what goes on and what it takes the mindset to be engaged in fundraising. So I wanna really start there with you and you advise us that mindset is everything in life and fundraising, what do you mean by that? I'm gonna make the case that the mindset is the most important in general in your life and in the fundraising community. It's a challenging job, there's minimal resources, we work long hours, there's a perception of charities and nonprofits and the amount of money that comes in and what people are paid in nonprofits and what amount should you go to programming. And so you've gotta have the right mindset to keep doing the work. And whatever that means to you, to me it's a mindset of the optimism that you're trying to solve very complex issues that have not been solved yet and will not be solved anytime soon. We're talking about poverty or homelessness or any number of causes, they're really challenging to look at and need a combination of organizations solving it. So you've gotta have that mindset to say, okay, this can be done. We can find the resources to fuel the impact on the communities we serve. There's a resilience component to it. And what I've thought about recently, maybe because of the pandemic too, you've gotta understand your own values and your own purpose in life. And you have to align that to the organization or organizations that you're representing because you've gotta believe in what they're doing. And if you believe, then that helps you stick around a longer period of time because it takes time to raise good money. You know, in all the guests that we've had on, I mean, done nearly 900 shows. I do a lot of public speaking. I work with a lot of groups. I've never really heard somebody articulate that as beautifully as you just did because I think sometimes we expect our teams, you know, we're like, come on, buck up. You should believe in this, you know, settle up right away. You know, we don't come back and say, look, we know this is hard. What can we do to help facilitate a stronger mindset and help us navigate this? It seems to me, Sam, and before we go further, it seems to me like we expect to burn up people and just burn them out and move them on and bring somebody else new. Yeah, and I don't know the current stat on this, but, you know, for a while, the turnover on the development side, what, 18 months? 18 months? If you want it to go from place to place, you just burn out completely and you change careers. That can't work because I meet you today. I've got to cultivate that relationship. It could take me three years for you to consider investing at the right level, whatever that means. So it takes time and you've got to, of course, pour into yourself. So the whole work-life balance, I mean, that's cliche, but I believe in that. So whatever that means for you, if that means you've got to have your exercise on a daily basis and that gets your energy out so that you can come into work feeling good, you've got to have maybe your family life set or taking care of your kids. So whatever that means to the individual, we have to pay attention to that because if we don't pour into ourselves, it's going to be really hard on the workplace to keep going after the relationships and trying to seek the funding because it never ends. Right, nope, it never ends. I love that you really highlight that and start with that with this conversation today. Another piece of this that you advise us is the long-term mindset. Now you just brought that statistic up which I absolutely can't stand it. It comes from AFP, 18 months is the average tenure time of a development officer in America. It's horrible because you are right. We need more time. Yeah, I mean, and I think I think it's a combination of things of why we have that statistic. It could be expectations from the team within the nonprofit. I want you to raise another billion dollars this year or in 12 months or four expectations or maybe it's your own expectations and that's what makes it hard. So the expectations have to be aligned in general and it's to me a long-term view of things. I mean, I was lucky enough to work for a great organization, junior achievement for 10 years. My first full-time development role, why did I stay 10 years? I believed in the cause and I wanted to help the kids. That was my obligation was to help the kids. Now my job was to do fundraising but I really wanted to help the kids and so that kept me there and so that's back to the core values but it's also the long-term view of things. You're constantly planting seeds. You're planting never ends and they bear fruit over time. Hence the name of my company and that was really sort of the concept and the theme is that you've got to be planting seeds and you've got to be persistent which I know we'll talk about to make sure those seeds bear fruit the right way. I love it. So let's talk about that because persistence is sometimes, we get a bad rap in that when the nonprofit sector because it seems a little too maybe hardcore or too salesy when we're talking about fundraising and I think we try to step around that. I know one of our great partners, Fundraising Academy at National University, they use that phrase cause selling to try and help us to get over that hump of what occurs when we sell or we make a transaction, if you will or we build a donor investment relationship but part of this is persistence. And you mentioned that planting the seed what does that look like and how do we do that when we have such a failure of tenure in our sector? So I think the sales techniques translate into the nonprofit space to me the difference is the finesse around it. It's a finesse game and it's a relationship game of course. That's pretty obvious but you've got to have the right follow up and the persistence knowing that it's just going to take a long time. There's nothing quick in this business at all and you've got to follow up the right way and it's very nuanced. I have to understand the relationships at a deeper level personally and professionally to be able to follow up the right way be persistent with someone the right way. This is all a people game and I can't do it in a way that is too aggressive that turns someone off. I mean, this isn't to use a bad analogy this isn't used car sales where you just don't have it. Yeah, people think they think of sales they think of used car like it turns people off. The bottom line is it's an alignment game too. What is a person or an organization or an entity you want to do in the community want to do philanthropically what do you do as an organization from a mission standpoint, align the two and align the two could take time. I mean, if you just look at grants in general you could find an opportunity, submit a grant that could take six, seven, eight months for it to fulfill for the investment to come or no investment to come and you got to follow up the right way there and that's just one example. So to me, the persistence is so key on a day to day basis but you've got to do it with finesse. Yeah, I love that. It also seems to me that this tags into leadership because they're going to be dark days when there are the wolves at the door and you've got your finance accounting department saying, oh my God, we can't make payroll or we can't, we got to cut programming and then it's just it can easily become such a negative thing. Before we go further, do you have some tips or some ideas for us so how we can support persistence without making it seem like we're just going up against yet again another brick wall? Yeah, I mean, to me it goes back to the relationships again and you've got to be able to build those strong relationships. I mean, you and I may be an example. We don't work day to day. We don't see each other maybe for months but we have a relationship because we've spent time building that relationship for you saying over 20 years. So a long period of time you've got to understand that the relationships never go anywhere. You have them for life and you don't want to burn bridges and sometimes given the world that we live in as human beings, sometimes it happens where the communication is not good and people hear it a different way and the relationships fall apart but it's about the relationships and the understanding of the people. I would say maybe more on a personal level. I know you have a daughter, I know your husband, I know what you like and what you don't like and so that helps me be persistent to the right way and come at you at the right time. For, I'm gonna say maybe more selfish reasons like I'm representing an organization or organizations and I need something from you but my view is more reciprocal. How do we help each other? And so I think that's a big part of the persistence as well. You know, I think that one of the things that we forget when we're talking about fundraising and we're talking about, I love you use the word alignment in that I think we need to be mindful and reminding ourselves that we are a conduit to joy in philanthropy. That when we enable people to connect with this donor investment and change lives and have impact, that's really a powerful gift. And I think that's a really cool thing and maybe that's like a Pollyanna approach but I do believe that, that we can be those shepherds to living a better, more fulfilling life with the resources that some of us have been able to acquire no matter the size, small or large. I totally agree with that in my own philosophy. It's an obligation for us. It's an obligation to give back if you have any sort of resources. I'd say you need to be wealthy but if you know what you have compared to all the people in the world that don't have much of anything, to me it's an obligation for us to give back. Now that doesn't have to be monetary all the time. It could be your time, it could be your expertise, it could be your mentorship, it could be your money, it could be a combination of those, just showing up. It is definitely an obligation to me for me personally to give back knowing that my life has been easy when I look around what's happening in the world or happening in the community. I know that my life is good so I wanna help others. Right, right. And I think it's a powerful piece of the pie and I think that probably again to that mindset speaking on how that can lead you through those tougher times because not everybody you meet is gonna be like, oh my gosh, I love you. Yes. You know. I don't think that happens. It's more of not right now or no, this isn't a fit. It's more of that than yes, let's do it. Let's make the investment. I wanna partner with your organization, help whomever it may be. And so you've gotta be, you've gotta know that it's a lot of no's all the time and that's okay. That's okay. You're still representing a cause or causes that you believe in that you care about. And if that's deep, it makes it easier to hear the no's. Yeah. Yeah, I agree with you. I love that you said that. It makes it easier to hear the no's. And I think too in sales, there's something about me that I can hear. It's no right now. Yeah. And maybe it's a yes down the road or around the corner or with another resource. So I think that's again, that goes to a mindset thing. Let's talk a little bit about vision and execute mindset. Because that gets down into looking at our process in a little bit different manner. What does that look like to you? Yeah. You obviously have to know where you're going. You know, I talked to someone the other day that wanted to go from $300,000 in revenue to $2 million in revenue. Okay, so that's the monetary goal that's however many years out. The execution to me is more important. Yes, you have to know where you're going, but it's the process piece. It's the detail oriented pieces. It's having complimentary skill sets around you. You've got data or marketing or the fundraising in the ask. You've got the technology piece of things. There's a combination of things. And you have to know that the processes to me is more important than necessarily the vision piece. I'm not saying no vision at all. But if you process down the right way and you work well as a team, if you have a team, then the good results will come. You know, the whole perfect practice cliche. I totally believe in that. And if constant refinement all the time, it's never static. You're always adapting. You're always refining, especially, I mean, given the last three, four years, just the environment overall, you have to adapt really quickly. You know, I think you have to not be afraid of that change. I think that's a big thing, is flexible thinking, as my sister always says, and really, you know, embracing, this is a time for a new thought. Or let's try something new and not being afraid to fail. And yeah. I think change is probably the hardest. And for me, it was hard. I mean, it was hard just given my 10 years at Junior Achievement. It was hard for me to make a change because I poured my heart and soul into the organization. And a lot of us do in this space because the passion is there and the altruism is there. And you just want to help all the time. And that can be very exhausting. But you've got to be able to change on a dime quickly. I mean, the idea of doing a plan and the plan is for the next year, I don't believe in that. It's almost every couple of months you're refining. Refining maybe on a weekly basis, depending on what you hear from donors or within your organization or the clients you serve. It's constant. When you talk about that, do you see that this is just born of COVID? Or would you have said the same thing before 2020? Yeah, I think I'd say it more now. Yeah. I'm thinking about that question. Yeah, because it was such an unusual time for everyone. No one expected this. The world turned upside down and you've got the political stuff and you've got the racism. It's everything at one point in time. So I probably would say that more now. I mean, that's something that I've learned in the past couple of years, how to be even more adaptable. Right. Because we've all been forced to be more adaptable in general. So, yeah, I think it's more of that. And if I'm looking back before 2020, I probably wish I would have been more adaptable. Yeah. I know. And I always think, and I don't know what you used to say about this, but it seems to me that the nonprofit sector is like so inflexible. And we are the last ones to adopt new things to make changes. I mean, we work from such a point, a reference point of scarcity and fear. And so, gosh. Why does it have to be that way though? It's got to be an abundance mindset in general and the problems we're trying to solve are so important. Yeah. Impact every aspect of all of our lives in general. So I agree with you on that. We've got to change the sort of the perception of the nonprofit industry and how non-non-profit people see it. Like it's so incredibly valuable what we all do and amazing and fulfilling. It's a great space to be in. It really is. You know, 1.8 million nonprofits are registered in the US. If you think about the millions of people that go to work every Monday to a nonprofit, you know, that's serving in some capacity. It is a remarkable workforce. It is a remarkable input into, you know, our social structure and how we get things done. So it is really impactful. And so to have this discussion with you today has been really lovely and to kind of reframe about mindset, looking at how we can all be fundraisers. I'm concerned when I see an organization and it's like development is in that building. You know, and they're not, you know, the sense of the, oh, that's their job. But it really is all of our job. And so I love that you could share with us today some of this insight that you've developed over the years. You know, before we let you go, talk to us a little bit more in depth about bear fruits. I think we've got a good picture today about your direction and your sentiment, but where does bear fruit engage? Like what are the sorts of things? Cause you talked about grants in the green area. Yeah, I think it could be a couple of ways. I mean, it depends on the organization and the teams within an organization. So our services could fill a gap. You know, we don't have a grant writer on staff or we don't have someone to think through the fundraising schedule. Okay, we can help there. Or we already have a team and we want to augment what we're doing, we want to raise more money. I mean, we always want to raise more money. So there's always a need there in general. And I think it depends on the skill set within an organization. Maybe the writing is not a skill set that an organization has. So they're going to outsource it, which is a common practice in our industry. And there are a lot of grant firms or solopreneurs that are doing an amazing job. And there are a lot of opportunities out there to seek more funding. I mean, to me, the mindset is that it's never enough. Kenny got to be careful with that mindset because it can exhaust you, but it's never about funding. And there's more to be had and we're worthy of receiving that funding. So I think it can go both ways. And what I and our company want to bring is that hunger, you know, and that passion to go after it, to be aggressive, but in the right way, not aggressive in a negative way, but just always looking for opportunities to get investment in the mission so that organizations can serve the communities they want to serve. I love that. And I love that approach. And I think that that's been one of the things that's been a silver lining to the pandemic is, and then the shift in labor is the nonprofit sectors. It seems like we're more open to bringing in outside experts and not just making do with the small team that we have, but being more open to bringing in experts that help us guide us, maybe march with us for a period of time or maybe just for a short period of time, you know, a long or short term. And so, yeah, I think it's a good thing for this concept to really be out there and to be a part of a resource for any size nonprofit. Sam Alpert, president of Bare Fruit, barefruit.co. I've known this man for 20, I say more than 20 years. So I can, I mean, I'm in my 20s, so I must have met you like at preschool or something. Sounds about right. But no, this has been a great joy to see you grow your profession and your career. I can certainly vouch for Sam Alpert. I've seen his beautiful work and his committed work throughout our community and in many forms and fashions. So check out barefruit.co, excuse me, if you're looking for somebody to help you, maybe refine a piece of that puzzle that seems to be daunting. I think sometimes getting that outside voice is just magical and it can really kind of help you figure out where you need to invest in what you need to work on. Sam, this has been amazing. I need to make sure we get you back as you roll along and have you share with us even more of your insights, thank you. Thanks Julie, congrats to you on all of your success over the years, appreciate it. It's been a lot of fun because I know people like you. Hey, again, I'm Julia Patrick, CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy. Jarrett Ransom, the nonprofit nerd and CEO of the Raven Group will be back with us tomorrow. Again, we have partners that march along this journey with us and I wanna make sure that we really express our gratitude to them. They include wonderful organizations such as Blue Morang Fundraising Academy at National University, Nonprofit Thought Leader, American Nonprofit Academy, your part-time controller, Nonprofit Tech Talk, Nonprofit Nerd and Staffing Boutique. These are the folks that join us day in and day out so that we can have really cool conversations with folks like Sam Alpert. So again, check them out because they are part of our ecosystem and they can be part of your ecosystem as well. Hey Sam, today is the start of a day. You are gonna go out there with my friend I'm sure and do some great things and I can't wait to hear more about bear fruit and all the things that you help to achieve in the nonprofit sector. So thank you very much. Thanks for having me on, I appreciate it. It's been a lot of fun. Hey everybody, every day we end our episode with this message and it goes like this, to remember to stay well so you can do well. We'll see you back here tomorrow everyone.