 Hello and welcome. We are glad you're here and if you've joined us today and you see this purple background ask an answer that means it's a Friday. I like to call it Friday, but I also like to call Monday Monday and all the other days should be celebrated as well but thrilled to have asked an answer as a dedicated episode each and every Friday. Thank you to Fundraising Academy at National University for your partnership because it's a lot of fun to have a representative a trainer from your company from Fundraising Academy to join us for these questions. Today we have Hannah Berger CFRE joining us. She is a trainer at Fundraising Academy and also president of the philanthropy coach. Welcome to you, Hannah. Thank you, Jared. Pleasure to be here. Yeah, thanks for joining us. If you would take just a moment to share with us a little bit about yourself and how you serve this great community within the nonprofit space. Sure. So, as you said, I am the president and founder of the philanthropy coach. It is a boutique nonprofit management and fundraising consulting firm based out of Los Angeles, California, but we work all over the state of California and occasionally beyond. I've been in the nonprofit sector my entire career. So more than 20 years, not sure how that happened. I like woke up and suddenly I was the oldest person in the room instead of the youngest. But here we are. And I've had a variety of roles. I consider myself a fundraising generalist. I'm very proud of the fact that my consulting comes from a place of lived experience. And so I work with community based organizations tends to be mid sized nonprofits. That's sort of three to $20 million operating budget to help them scale their fundraising and scale their impact. Thank you for sharing that and that's what I love about the fundraising Academy trainers is everyone brings their, you know, lived experiences, their stories, you know, really from from day to day and it's so inspiring to hear. I'm so glad to be alongside with you. I'm Jared ransom known as the nonprofit nerd. If you joined us in the green room chatter you heard honest story where I was passing out my nerve glasses at the cultivate conference that just took place in June. And if you missed it, or you attended and you still want to come next year, please join us next year. I'm already looking forward to it. It's going to be a really great opportunity. I want to extend my immense gratitude to our amazing presenting sponsors these companies pour into the nonprofit show so that they can pour into you into your community so thank you so very much. That goes out to Bloomerang American nonprofit Academy, your part time controller nonprofit thought leader fundraising Academy at National University again we're Han is joining us from. Also, thank you to staffing boutique nonprofit nerd, as well as nonprofit tech talk. If you haven't checked out these companies do yourself a favor and check them out today. This weekend Monday. They are great companies providing amazing resources I want to say immense resources there's tons of resources that this collective group provide into our sector and so, so glad to have them here as well. We have produced nearly 900 episodes we started March of 2020 we thought this was going to be a two week endeavor. Here we are four years into the journey and marching towards 900, which will happen in October. If you missed any of these episodes you can find us on all of these platforms if you're watching for those of you listening. You can download the app. There's a qr you can scan or you can just search us on all the app platforms the nonprofit show can also stream us on broadcast and podcast platform so wherever you choose to consume your entertainment the nonprofit show is there for you. Alright, so we're going to move right into the questions Hannah and you have done this before my friend and so I'm so grateful to have you here I believe we have four questions for today's episode. And for those of you that have joined us live I encourage you if you have a live question or you want to throw us a curveball. We have a Q&A at the bottom. Hannah and I will do our best to fit that into today's episode and also do our best to answer it so if you have a burning desire, or you have a current situation that you would like us to address right here right now, that's what we're here for. Jamie and my local community Phoenix Arizona wants to ask you about your designation. So can you please talk about your CFRE designation and how this has impacted your professional fundraising career. So, it's funny, I feel like the CFRE conversation is everywhere right now. I was actually just asked yesterday by my local AFP chapter to give some sort of testimonial about what it's done for my career and a couple months ago I shared with you Jared that I was on a live with Hannah Palmer to talk about the CFRE designation so I came about it a little bit differently from a lot of folks that I know I just got my designation last year. After 20 plus years and being friends with Jack Alotto who if you don't know Jack he's also a fundraising academy trainer he's incredible and he's a trainer for CFRE. I feel like his name and CFRE are synonymous right. Absolutely. Jack CFRE. And so we've been friends for Ron he was like this is just ridiculous that you don't have it. And I feel like CFRE has done a great job. And maybe the sector in general has become much more sort of professionalized in a way that employers are starting to see a lot of job descriptions with CFRE preferred. Right. Or you interview with clients in my case and they're asking oh are you a CFRE right so it's become a lot better known than it was say a decade ago. So for me CFRE was just taking up a lot of brain space and when something keeps coming up for me I'm kind of person who like I want to address this right. So I sat for the exam. After 20 years I had more than enough education and experience to qualify. And I would say that it has been helpful in that it is another sort of third party validation that clients see and they're like oh she knows her stuff. Right. I've heard from other fundraisers that have approached the CFRE and gotten their designation earlier in their career that it's an incredible door opener. Right. It's an environment where they may not have been welcomed in because of their experience their age. You know the geography they come from when they're breaking into a new market having that CFRE designation is a door opener. You know it just lets them kind of get a seat at the table. Yeah. Great answer. And I like to share too. I don't have my CFRE it's not because I don't support it or that I haven't even myself considered it. Right. And so it still knocks on my door. Of course every time I talk to Jack right and so really looking at it so I highly encourage those of you that are interested in achieving earning this designation. Please do check it out and then talk to many peers right like talk to peers as Hanna said in in different areas. Talk to similar peers as yourself really learn from so many different people because I'm going to say and this might be a little disruption but like there's something for for you and it might be the designation it might not be the designation there might be another designation that fits you better right like really looking into that but I am definitely an advocate for those that are interested I fully support that and I too Hanna I've seen a lot of development professional positions with a CFRE preferred so I'm seeing that more and more and more. Yeah one one other hot tip around that. So the exam is pricey right you end up spending right now I think it's a thousand dollars. So if you're early in your career like I really want to get the certified fundraising executive designation. Look into scholarships with your local AFP Association of Fundraising Professionals chapter a lot of them offer it and or if you are working for someone else you're not independent business owners. Like Jared and I work it into your your benefits package with your employer ask for it to be part of your professional development so that you're not coming out of pocket. Absolutely I love that and there are some scholarships for a lot of people out there and so definitely consider that and see see if you might you know qualify so hopefully there's a lot of resources. Thank you for addressing that and I hope Jamie you you got the answer. If you want to call me later give me you know give me an email or call and I'm happy to talk more. Okay we're moving over to St. Louis and Tom has a question for us. We are considering purchasing a wealth screening digital tool. Can you please speak to how this investment is a good one. Some of our development staff think that we can get this information with general internet searches and cross referencing our own database with local media outlets. This is an interesting question yeah how to take it away. And I'm interested to hear what your response will be Jared so I typically tell the organizations I work with that you don't need to make the investment in wealth screening software until you are preparing for a major expansion a major campaign, or you've reached a level of sophistication and your fundraising that you have more than one development person for sure. So you've got you know a lot of prospect research going on you've got some very focused and structured sort of moves management happening so younger organizations. I love wealth screening tools. I think they're such an awesome sort of cheat code. They are pricey right so for those that aren't familiar the wealth screening tools that exist what they do is they take information from a lot of public sources and put it all into one place and sort of put it all into a neat little package for you to review with a score applied to it and it's usually something around they call like propensity to give so it's. There's a person you're looking up have and they'll pull that from real estate records and from you know if they're with a publicly traded company and their stock options that they hold. If they own a boat or a plane that kind of information is in there. So all of those things you can't find on Google. If you have their address you can certainly look it up on the lower redfin to find out how much the house might be worth but in places like Southern California where I live. That's not always a strong indication of wealth right at least not liquid assets that they might be interested in contributing. And you know additionally when I first started out of my career I thought that what kind of car somebody drove could also be an indication of wealth also very not true in Los Angeles. So here we have a lot of $30,000 millionaires right like yeah that's what we refer to. Exactly. So are the tools great. Yes. Does everyone need them. No they don't take the place of getting to know your donors, right, having conversations because you're also not going to see the entire picture on these tools. There's a huge transition of wealth happening with the boomer generation, you know, handing off their assets to their, their offspring and other family members. And you're not going to see that full story. Right. Things that go into trusts, you can't see. So, there's a much bigger picture there that you're only going to get to if you're actually sitting down and talking to your donors, getting to know the full picture of what their lives look like and understanding what they're interested in and what kind of impact they want to have. Ditto to that my friend absolutely I've worked with a lot of small shops midsize shops and very few that have access to wealth screening we might have played with it 3045 day trials right to see what kind of information it can provide. I always like to search myself to see is this accurate right like what is the data that's being pulled. How is it changing from one platform to the other. I would echo right like really if you are at a place where you can truly implement wealth screening. Again, many of these organizations. It's a one person two person shop and I think adding a wealth screening tool platform is another level of responsibility. And when we look at capacity, you might not have the capacity to truly utilize that platform for its full intention right like there's so much information you can pull from it but do you have time to do that. I also want to you know call out there's prospect researchers out there and you might want to consider bringing in a prospect researcher for a project base as opposed to adding a tool that may be your unfamiliar with driving, you know, and and to have this prospect researcher drive the data and provide that to you so I'm not opposed to wealth screenings but I certainly want all of you as we just came off of celebrating nonprofit professionals day, you know, to make sure that you can use the tools that you have. And we had a great conversation this week with Tim Locky of the human stack and just some really good information around how are we stacking technology to also benefit our human stack right of people and the capacity so I loved your answer and I would just say, you know, echoes and, and absolutely, you know, I, I echo everything that you're saying there so yeah, it's, it's interesting and I always find the software to be fascinating. I always like to run some records and see what is this pulling you know, yeah, have you pulled yourself and and if so like was it was it accurate or were you like, that's strange. Yeah, but what have you seen for yourself have you pulled that for yourself, Hannah. Oh, of course. Yeah. Um, the interesting. Yeah, it comes back as strange. I mean, it's usually to get overestimates my liquid assets a little bit. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well good insight here. Oh, there's a lot of O's here I see overwhelmed in Ohio. Okay, here we are. How valuable do you think it is to send out our leadership to speak at community groups such as Rotary and Kiwanis organizations. Our team is stretched as it is, and I'm not sure how we can manage booking our staff at small events that might not achieve any impact. So this one hits home, Hannah, and I hear you overwhelmed in Ohio Cincinnati and Hannah I would love for you to address this and what you're advising with those that you work with. I want to have a conversation with this person and identify the overwhelm right like that's immediately where my. Yeah, my coach brain goes. But I will answer the question first. So here's the thing about getting in front of service clubs, congregations, any kind of group that is his own community within your community. I know it's what I hear from clients is like they only give grants of like $2,000 is it really worth our time to like make space to go to this luncheon that's really going to take three hours, blah, blah, blah, blah. The answer is yes. And here's why. When you're in front of a group of people who have opted into joining an organization that is inherently philanthropic. Right. So I called up service organizations I would include fraternities and sororities in that I would include congregations like I said churches, temples, mosques. You know, any sort of group that has philanthropy at its core, you're not just going in there for that single grant opportunity, you're opening up the eyes of everybody in the room to your organization's mission and work. Right. So it's actually a shortcut to dozens of potential new donors. Right. So I'm a big fan of making space for this. A couple of consultants on my team are longtime Rotarians. My dad is a longtime Rotarian. I was a long time member of the Kiwanis Club of downtown San Diego when I lived there. And they're really fruitful relationships come from those, those sub communities, right. What do you think, Jared? You know, it's funny. I started in my career. Gosh, a long time ago. I say 20 plus and definitely my development director was pushing me out to go to these organizations right like go network go mingle go meet the community leaders and whenever we had an opportunity to present on the organization. She really nudged me to do that. Right. And so I think the same thought early in my career, I will say I was gung ho for put me in any room, send me to any free meal and I was absolutely there right early in my career. Later in my career, I probably see it similarly as overwhelmed in Ohio where it was like, how can I fit this in my schedule? There is so many juggled, you know, deadlines and tasks. And I found it more of a nuisance, but I love what you said, Hannah, and I cannot echo that sentiment more and more. It is a fast track to a very civically engaged community that then allows you to have tenfold opportunities to meet other leaders, other champions. These could be volunteers. They could be potential board members. They could be, you know, potential community partners, right? Like leaders of other organizations that you could apply for grants together and what that might look like to even elevate further your community. So I say absolutely that this is an opportunity you want to take advantage of. I also hear you with the capacity and the overwhelm kind of what we were just talking about with the wealth screening, right? What can you do? And the often these meetings happen on a regular basis. If you can't make all of them this month, what can you make this month? What can you push into next month and create a calendar that seems manageable? That's what I would recommend. What about advice? Yeah. And then also really sorry to look at your team, look at their personal schedules, right? Like I'm still doing school drop offs, but you know, I don't pick up until later. So depending on the schedules of your team, figure out who can do those early mornings? Who can do those evenings? Who's best for the lunch? And in regardless, I want to echo this regardless of whether you have kids or not to really figure out this for your schedule, right? What works best for every person and their commitment? So absolutely. Yeah. And remember, your team should extend to your board of directors. Yes. Yes. So if you've got a small development team, the best thing you can do is work with your board to train them up. So they're comfortable talking about why they're passionate about your organization and then you booked them for those meetings. Bingo. Let them report back. Yes. Yes. I'm so glad you mentioned that. Add to your team. It's not just your leadership team. It's your board and other advocates. Okay. I feel like we have to go fast because our time's running up, but name with help in Boise. I signed up to speak at a national conference. My title and association to a nonprofit was included in my proposal. I am leaving my nonprofit and wondering if I will not be welcomed to speak to my peers. I'm in a bit of a quandary. What do you say to this, Hannah? Just have an open, direct conversation. Yeah. If your expertise and the creativity in your proposal shine through enough for you to be selected to speak in front of an audience of your peers, there's no reason why your, you know, decision to change your role or your career should affect that. I just served on the Education Advisory Committee for AFP's International Conference in 24. And I don't think that's an unusual circumstance that people switch jobs between the nine months, you know, between submitting a proposal and actually the conference happening. So, yeah, I agree. I wanted to speak to this a little bit, not from a presentation standpoint, but I was receiving an award and I was listed as, you know, working for another organization that I had since left. And I am so glad that my intuition or something, you know, asked me to check in with the host and the MC of how they are going to announce me because they were going to announce me at this previous organization. And that I checked. And so I am right there with you, Hannah, have a very direct conversation, transparent. I don't think it's unfamiliar and they want to represent you in a true manner. And I think just having that conversation to let them know and update, you know, maybe your email has changed, maybe you're tight, you know, again, your title and all of that, it seems to have changed as well. So, I'm all for direct conversation. Just, yeah, I have that communication with them. I think they would appreciate it. So, oh, good insight here. I love these questions that we get. I don't see anyone taking us up on the live, you know, kind of burning desire questions if there's anything that came up today but I do want to just, you know, repeat that as we hold every Friday or Friday. So I just want to ask an answer. You are more than welcome to ask us a question during the show. If we have time, we will absolutely answer it right here in the moment. If we don't have time, I'm going to tell you a secret. I copy those and save them for another date. So I still want to answer them because if they're coming in live, we certainly want to address that. So thank you, Hannah, for sharing your amazing insight and your experience with us. You bring so much value to these conversations. So I'm really glad to have you today. Oh, thank you. I really appreciate that. Yeah, absolutely. So again, for those of you that have joined us today, we have had the amazing honor of Hannah Berger CFRE joining us. She is a fundraising Academy trainer at National University. We finally met in person at the Cultivate Conference that just took place in June. And I hear that the the workings are already taking place for this, this upcoming conference and that's going to be a lot of fun. Hannah is also the president of the philanthropy coach and you heard her. She works with a lot of organizations around the state of California and sometimes beyond. I heard that sometimes beyond. So hey, thank you to our partner fundraising Academy, please do check them out. I want to shine light on their portal. Their portal is amazing. There's so much again free content and information there for you. So if you're looking for personal professional development, please check out this portal fundraising dash Academy.org will take you right to it. And again, you know, it's always a pleasure to have you Hannah and a representative from fundraising Academy. I also want to say thank you to our amazing sponsors that partner with us day in and day out to have these conversations. So thank you to our friends over at Bloomerang American nonprofit Academy fundraising Academy at National University, nonprofit thought leader, your part time staffing boutique nonprofit nerd as well as nonprofit tech talk day in and day out right like we have done this since March of 2020 we're not going anywhere. So we hope you're enjoying these conversations you can find us on all of the streaming broadcasts, broadcasts, even your apps. So, Hannah, thank you, my friend. Happy Friday, and I hope that you have a wonderful weekend. As we end every episode, we invite me to say all y'all because that's my origin from the cell, all y'all to have a stay well, so you can do well and have a safe weekend.