 Welcome. We are glad you're here. It's another day, another money for the nonprofit show. As we start this week, we are thrilled to have back with us. He's joined us before, but Gong Wang is with us today. He is CEO of Civic Champs and back with us to talk to us about volunteer management and technology. So if you joined us in the green room chatter, you heard a little bit of like AI conversation, a little bit about gaming conversation, a little bit about everything, but it still streamlines into this technology. So Gong excited to have you back. I think we had you on four or five, maybe even six months ago. So for those of you that are interested, you can go back and see a previous episode where we had you on and shared some really great information with us. For those of you that might be joining us for the very first time, we would like to introduce ourselves. Julia Patrick is here. Julia is the CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy. And I'm Jarrett Ransom, your nonprofit nerd and CEO of the Raven Group. We are so extremely honored because day in and day out, these amazing companies that you can see on the screen have supported us and supported the sector for four years now. Really excited to have their support for the nonprofit show. So thank you to our friends over at Bloomerang fundraising Academy at National University, nonprofit thought leader, your part-time controller, staffing boutique, nonprofit nerd, nonprofit tech talk, and American Nonprofit Academy. So thank you to all of these companies. Again, they allow us these opportunities, the ones that really all over the board, anything that relates to nonprofits, that's what we say is our genre, right? Like we'll talk about anything as long as it relates to nonprofit. And the secret is pretty much everything relates to nonprofits. But if you missed any of our episodes, we've produced now nearly 900. We'll reach that milestone in October. 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As I noted earlier to our host here that it's not very phonetic. It's like Gun Ho, if that's easier to remember. I'm the CEO and co-founder here at Civic Champs. So we're a software company. We provide volunteer management software for nonprofits and their champions. And our goal really is to make the most intuitive and impactful version of that software. Amazing. You know, volunteerism is such an underappreciated, under-researched, underfunded aspect, I think of nonprofit management. I mean, so shockingly so. And it's really wonderful to think that you're invested in this and seeing changes and then helping us on the technological side. So really cool. How old is your company? We are now actually four years old, a little over four now, man. Awesome. Getting over our toddler years. Those nasty toddler years, those nasty. So let's start off and I'm really interested to hear what you have to say about this or what are the different types of volunteers? I think we just use the word volunteer and we think it's all the same, but not so much, right? Yeah, I think it's really interesting, going back to what you just said, Julia, which is all nonprofits, when we first get started are volunteer led, right? And at some point they professionalize and certain roles become not volunteers and we don't, oftentimes we don't invite those volunteers back into helping in those areas anymore, whether that's fundraising, whether that's programming, et cetera, but everyone starts as just volunteer led. And so the different types of volunteers, I think if you think about the whole organization, really you can have volunteers across the entire spectrum of your mission, right? And most organizations don't really leverage volunteers in that way. And so I think about it, right? There's a couple of big buckets, right? And so there are your board members, of course, that's an easy one. Then I would say there's your, let's call it your almost staff or skilled volunteers. These are the folks that maybe they're actually functionally as the volunteer manager. Some people have volunteers who do fundraising for them, et cetera, right? And then when you come to, typically our customers, let's call it, we see a couple of buckets, right? So you have your, let's call it the low threshold, high volume volunteers. These are your Habitat for Humanity builders. These are your animal shelter volunteers. These are your food pantry folks, right? That you can come one, come all. It's really easy to be engaged and in supportive. And then you have your more longer term volunteers. A lot of times what this might look like are mentors. That's a very popular one. You have docents at museums. Folks that might require some training usually. It's, or also maybe background checks and things, the process is a little longer. So you need them to be a little bit longer term. Otherwise the investment isn't quite worth it. And then last but not least, I would say you have your skilled volunteers that might be episodic, right? So these are folks that help you with marketing for a short duration. They might be more interested in skill building as well. Career trajectory, they're using this opportunity both to help but also to learn, right? So that's at a high level, sort of what's called the four or so buckets. You know, I love that you use the word episodic because I think that's really powerful about how you can pull or you need to pull in volunteers and volunteer talent, you know, according to the season or to the need of the organization. And so it's fascinating to kind of step back and look at this. I don't know what you think, Jared, but it seems to me that a lot of times organizations will look at something and they'll be like, okay, how do I keep these volunteers busy? You know, and it's tragic to think that they're kind of helping fulfill a relationship maybe with a big funder that's also a larger corporation and they wanna have some sort of, you know, staff engagement, but it doesn't seem like we're fulfilling that promise as well as we could. And so I'm fascinated to see if you're seeing that. Yeah, I see that often where it's like, oh my gosh, we have this big corporate group that wants to come and volunteer their time. We can't say no, because what if this leads to a big potential funding opportunity, but we need to have something to give them to spend their time, which tells me it's never really gonna be a true meaningful opportunity, right? Like how can we really leverage their time into this way? And you know, I have to mention the GivingUSA report, right? Like it shows that the financial donations are down, but that the giving of time is up. And so this is the time when we really have to consider how do we engage the individuals as well as the large corporations? Yeah. You know, Gung, what do you think about that? Is there a way for technology to understand that and connect us back up? Because it seems to me that that is a, just understanding your main buckets is a huge concept and then leveraging that with a system. What does that look like? Or what can it look like? And maybe more importantly, what should it look like? I think, you know, when it comes to corporate volunteers, you know, one thought that just came to mind, and I forget where I heard this from, it's not exactly my original thought, but for all volunteers and donors, right, for that matter, it's oftentimes about creating those moments that matter, right, moments that they remember that's emotional. And, you know, what Jared was saying is if you're scrambling to create something that feels inauthentic, that's probably not the moment that you're gonna be, you know, sort of the experience that you really wanna lead folks with, right? And so thinking through, you know, how you can make things impactful. And I think there's actually small things you can do, maybe not necessarily technology related, right? And so I, for example, you know, if you're at a, you know, a food pantry, right? Instead of just having everyone come and serve food, maybe have them bring in a one item, right? And then ask them to bring an item that means something to them and have everyone share that story before, you know, this session that can be, you know, a way to drive, even making something that a little bit mundane or, you know, not mundane, but like, you know, typical into something that could be emotionally impactful, right? On the technology side of it, I would say, I think about the basics, you know, what are the things we wanna do with our volunteers? Sorry, we're recruiting them, we're engaging them, and then we're trying to retain them, right? And so on the recruitment side, technology can streamline and make all that much more seamless, easy. It feels nicer and, you know, anything that feels nice, right? Like it's like shopping. When you go shopping, you wanna click a button, like Amazon made this, like, this is the easiest thing, right? Like you just click a button, you're like, ship it to me tomorrow. And you're like, okay, yeah, now I'm done. And I spent so much more money because of that, but you wanna make that experience similar when it comes to recruiting on engagement, right? We have so many tools that allow us to stay engaged, right? Whether that's chat, whether that is, you know, other forms of communication, social media, where you have updates. Well, there's really no reason, right? Nonprofits couldn't use some of those tools to stay engaged with folks, especially as they're not necessarily engaged every day, right? To make, and, you know, because life happens, and so maybe I'm a regular volunteer, but I become a parent and now I can't, but I still wanna be, it'd be awesome if I could be part of that community. And so I think technology can play a really nice role there. And then on retention, we're all used to on the, again, on the consumer side to be asked for our opinions all the time, right? You buy something that's like, did you like it? Would you give us the five stars? You know, you use software. It's like, you know, will you recommend us? You download in the app, right? I don't know how many nonprofits have that same feedback loop, right? And so, and this is something that we do at SpeakChamp. So we allow at the end of a volunteering session to say, hey, Julie, did you, did you have fun? Leave a little reflection, optional, right? But you can say, you know, happy, unhappy, and both are important. You wanna find your champions and then you wanna intervene on the folks that may not have had a great experience. So what do you do with that information? So for example, let's say you have, I love that feedback because I can't ever think, I never can remember a time when any of my volunteer work was queried. I'm thinking back. But what do you do with that information? Let's say somebody's like, yeah, I didn't feel valued to Jared's point. Or it didn't feel like an authentic task. Yeah, we would do it. So what do you do with that? I think at a minimum, I would reach out and say, hey, thank you so much for this feedback. We're gonna take that into consideration. And next time, or do you have some ideas about what would have been more engaging, right? Because just like people unhappy with products, if someone's unhappy with your experience, they're gonna share that with other people. More people, probably more than if they actually enjoyed it. Right, exactly, exactly. Now, having an outlet actually decreases the amount of that sharing because they feel like they got it off their chest a little. So at a minimum, that's already helpful. But if you reach back out, right, now you can actually turn things around and say, hey, I've never had any nonprofit or any organization come back out and ask me for my opinion, right? And so that can be actually pretty powerful. Wow. All right, Gunn, Julia warned you, we're very curious by nature. And when you were talking about volunteers really feeling part of the community, it made me think about perhaps a volunteer portal. We know about board portals and how those exist to provide continuous information and education. Are there volunteer portals like in a capacity to continue to engage and foster, steward these relationships with volunteers? Is that something that technology has brought to the space? Do you see flavors of it? I don't know if anyone has done it super well, including ourselves to be very transparent, right? But you have Facebook groups, right? And in many ways, it functions the same. We're introducing chat, group chats, right, as a way to do that. We were doing this with just our mentorship organizations today, but we'd like to roll it out across. And I think that could be a really interesting way to have an internal communication channel within core groups or events, et cetera. And then I would, yeah. Would that be something like Slack or Monday, like a project management tool where volunteers have a login and they have access to staff and whatnot? I've seen Facebook and I've seen that work well. I've also seen it work not so well. But then are you seeing where other organizations are utilizing something like Slack? I've not seen the nonprofits themselves use something like Slack with their volunteers. I think what'll happen, whether that's with us or with another software provider, but having it embedded within your mobile app could be really interesting because now it's like, okay, well, I have to use this anyway for my check-ins, for my scheduling. And here's my, the best analogy I can think of is for all the parents out there that have kids that do any sports of any kind, you're probably asked to download an app. P-Snap, yep. And there's only two functions, so three maybe, right? One is a chat function, a communication channel. A second is some sort of scheduling, you can see what's coming up. And a third is impact reporting almost, which is like, oh, your kids swam and this is their time. Or like, oh, this is the baseball game and they went up to bat and they struck out or whatever it is. So there's like, you can see imagine for volunteers, it could be very similar. Oh, wow. And you bring snacks because that always seems like, who brings snacks is like the big topic of any organization. Right, that's right. And what kind of snacks? What kind of snacks? They must be organic these days, by the way, Julia. But yeah, I know, I can't even. Well, you know, it's an interesting thing because I'm fascinated why we don't have this discussion more. It seems to me, that's how far away we are from understanding how to manage our volunteers. Yeah. I mean, see that? Or how do you feel about that? We treat volunteers very differently than we treat donors. Yeah. As a sector. That's probably why. Which is insane to me because we just learned that volunteers give 10 times more than donors that aren't also volunteers, right? So like, when they're a donor and a volunteer, they give 10 times more. When they're just a donor, and I don't mean just to me that they're also a donor, you know, is they're giving statistically is less. So why do we treat them differently? That's, well, I mean, you know, money speaks, right? In its own, I feel like part of it is donors provide a very tangible, immediate value, right? And it's very flexible. Like you could buy whatever you want. It solves issues that the organization might have. I think for volunteers, that value, you know, depends on the organization, right? Certain organizations understand that they couldn't function without their volunteers. But even in that instance, they're thinking about them as almost a resource, right? As they, as staff, right? Just unpaid staff. And I think there's something to be said about, you know, thinking about that as, you know, what is the ROI? Like maybe actually placing more business-type concepts and say, you know, when I have, because not all volunteers, you know, to be fair, not all volunteering and all volunteers are actually adding value, right? And maybe you shouldn't have those programs anymore and really focus on the things that they're gonna be driving a lot of mission and value and experiencing, you know, those emotional moments, if you will. And you can do a better job of recruiting, engaging and retaining those, you know, your ideal volunteer. What does that profile look like? Wow. Okay. As we move into our final third of the conversation, we have to bring up AI, artificial intelligence. So as we just, you know, are off the heels of technology and we're building into this, can you talk to us about artificial intelligence and the impacts that this may or may not have into our volunteer management platforms and experience? If my sense is like many of the technology trends, it'll take a little while to trickle down to volunteer management is my first thought. But that said, immediately there's some great, you know, chat GBT is the most, you know, popular AI tool. I actually think it's a great tool for volunteer managers because oftentimes we're just stuck trying to think of like, well, I need a volunteer handbook. Actually, if you just ask chat GBT to write one for you, it'll do a half decent job. And it's not that it'll finish it, but- It starts it. It starts it. And not looking at a blank screen is much better than having the blank, you know, paper on screen. Yeah, yeah. It's really an interesting thing. You know, I feel as though we're gonna have to educate our volunteers on using these portals and making it more just pro forma. You know, this is how, this is what you do because most volunteers don't just volunteer for one organization. You know, they do, it's an ethos and it's a way that they live their lives and their families, right, do this. So it seems to me that as we navigate this technology and it becomes more of this is what you do and this is how you do it, we'll be able to kind of weave some of these things together more efficiently. And this leads me to my last question and that would be, do you see a separation in demographics? Meaning older volunteers who might have more time and volunteer a certain way versus younger volunteers, students, things of that nature. You kind of have a change in the way that behavior manifests itself with technology. Yes, this is probably the question we always get on when we're doing demos or things like that, right? Which is, oh, we, you know, we, so many of my volunteers are older volunteers. And it's interesting because everyone thinks that's unique to them for some reason when in reality everyone's consistent volunteers are all older volunteers. And so we, you know, and I do note that, right? Which is like, oh, well, you know, all of the organizations we work with actually have older volunteers. And so I think there's two things. One, you're right, not, you know, there is a level of comfort with a certain technology that, you know, your college students will always have that compared to your older volunteers. But that said, you know, making things accessible is really important. So, you know, things like a kiosk are pretty straightforward, right? And then everyone can, you know, find your name, go tap it and tap the sign in button, right? And, or if you think about tools that you give administrators, right? And so for example, we have this mobile admin feature on our app. So it's only for admins and you can see who's supposed to show up. You can check everyone in on your phone. You can sign up new volunteers. And that way if someone came and they said, hey, you know, I don't wanna download your app. I don't wanna, you know, I don't wanna do all these things. You say, hey, no worries. I can do it for you, right? And so I think that's, those are a couple of ways you can make things, technology still accessible and helpful. Yeah. Yeah, I love that accommodation for individuals that are either, you know, not going to adopt the technology. And I have to say, Gong, I'm a little guilty of that myself, especially the increase of technology when it comes to conferences, right? It's like there's more and more and more apps that need to be downloaded. I feel like, you know, my phone is a little unorganized. And so I can only imagine, you know, a volunteer coming in and then that's one more thing to do. So if we can remove that obstacle or perceived obstacle, right? Make that accommodation for them. Again, that to me is customer service. And that's what we want them to take away into their community, into their dinner parties to say, this organization is amazing. And they go above and beyond to make sure that, you know, everything is handled. So I appreciate that, that accommodation. Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, in many ways, you wanna, as a technology company, it's our job to actually help you entice them to use, right? And with the, yeah. Yeah, very, very interesting. This is fascinating. You know, again, as we look at the giving USA data and I know when that came out a month, two months ago, it was very bleak, right? Like people were all, people, all of us were all over the internet just saying like, woe is me, this is, you know, a downturn in our philanthropy trajectory, but really an uptick, a huge uptick in a volunteer engagement and what that looks like. So, Gung, we are so appreciative to you and Civic Champs for coming on yet again. For those of you that joined us earlier, you heard that Gung was on probably six months ago, maybe five months ago, again, talking about volunteers, engagement and what that looks like. So please check out civicchamps.com. Gung started this business, I think you said four years ago and then of course the pandemic happened and a lot of volunteer opportunities kind of shut down. So really hearing and learning from you has been just so inspiring. I love your ability to just speak very frank about it. I really appreciate that. Well, thank you. I try, you know, we try to be authentic if we can't. Right, yeah. You know, I think too, it's so odd that we even have to have this conversation and talk about volunteerism in a way that we pretty much should all know and it should be part of our vernacular and our management process, but clearly it is not. I mean, it's such a fascinating thing. And to Jared's point, just if you back up to giving USA who's waving that flag saying, look, this asset is in growing. So, but we're not as a sector thinking about that. It seems like we're just looking at that donor and not realizing that this is an amazing cultivation piece. This isn't a strengthening beyond maybe what we would ever get with our donors. And so really, really important. Check out civicchamps.com, super interesting company. You're based in the Midwest? Yeah, we have offices in Indianapolis and Pittsburgh. Awesome, okay, cool. Well, again, I'm Julia Patrick, CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy, been joined today by the non-profit nerd herself, Jared R. Ransom, CEO of the Raven Group. She's the non-profit nerd. I like to say she's my non-profit nerd, but she can be yours too. I share, you know, sometimes. Thank you. Hey, we have amazing presenting sponsors. And I always, I like to point this out every once in a while and I should do a better job of it. But you know, these partners of ours exercise no editorial control. So we can bring on who we want and we do. We talk about what we want, what our viewers and listeners are asking about. And so that's really a powerful partnership to get this buy-in from these amazing companies. And they include Bloomerang, American Non-profit Academy, Your Part-Time Controller, Non-profit Thought Leader, Fundraising Academy at National University, Staffing Boutique, Non-profit Nerd, and Non-profit Tech Talk. These are the folks that join us day in and day out. And they really do make a difference in our communities to such an incredible extent. Hey, everybody, we like to sign off every episode with this mantra and it goes like this. Stay well, so you can do well. Thank you so much, you too. We'll see you back here tomorrow.