 Well, hey there and welcome back to the nonprofit show. You know, I like to say back because I'm making a broad assumption that you've been here before. We are thrilled to have with us Joanne Pasternak joining us as president and chief impact officer with Oliver Rose. She's here to talk to us about the power of pro sports in nonprofits. And this is going to be a very interesting intersection. She's also talking to us within this whole, you know, umbrella conversation about how athletes can influence philanthropy. So she's got some great nuggets of wisdom to share with us. But before we jump into conversation with you, Joanne, we want to remind our viewers and our listeners around the globe who we are. So hello to you, Julia Patrick. Julia C. Patrick is the CEO of the American nonprofit Academy and I'm Jarrett Ransom, nonprofit nerd and CEO of the Raven Group. We are also honored to have the ongoing support and I'm going to say sponsorship too from these amazing partners. So thank you to Bloomerang, American nonprofit Academy, nonprofit thought leader, fundraising Academy at National University, 180 management group, your part-time controller, staffing boutique, JMT consulting, nonprofit nerd and nonprofit tech talk. So thank you for these companies. I like to say their mission is your mission because they're here to be on your roster and to help you do more good in and around your community. And if you missed any of our previous episodes, also over a thousand episodes now available to you, you can download that app by scanning QR code and you can also still find us on your broadcast and your podcast channels. Whoo, that's a mouthful Joanne but now we are welcoming you onto the show. Again, for everyone watching and listening today, we have with us Joanne Pasternak, president and CEO of Oliver Rose, welcome to the nonprofit show. Well, thank you for having me, appreciate it. Yeah, well, why don't we start off? Tell us a little bit about yourself but also Oliver Rose, what is this? What do you do? Like how do you play in the nonprofit space? Well, that's a great question and I feel like it changes all the time but I'm gonna go backwards a bit and just share how I ended up where I am right now. So at a very, very young age, I was in a very serious car accident and I was five years old and I was told all these things that I couldn't do. Well, I had to be homeschooled for kindergarten. My mom was a librarian, so of course I had the best tutor as possible but by the time I got to kindergarten, I was reading, I was doing math and I was used to answering the questions. When I knew the answer, I would answer the questions. What I found out was that wasn't very popular in the classroom. If you're the kid who's always raising her hand, especially if you're a little girl with orange curly hair and freckles, you're less likely to be received in a positive way. But I was restricted from doing a lot of sports but I eventually found my way to figure skating and figure skating was a sport that I could do even with some restrictions on my activity level. And it was there that I saw that I was being rewarded for trying really hard things for stepping onto the ice more often than other people for falling and getting back up. And that's really where the journey for me started with sports as a way to activate our natural leadership tendencies. And as we're in Women's History Month right now, I always like to lean into the fact that as a little girl, I found my voice through sport and it helped me to elevate as a leader. So we'll fast forward many, many years. I ended up working in volunteering with Special Olympics from the time I was 14, went to law school, looking at roles where I could advocate for individuals with marginalized voices and found myself first at Special Olympics, working with their operations around the world for their global games, then worked in city government for a bit. And it was there that I saw the power of sports to connect kids and cops from disparate communities to do things that were productive in our community and eventually landed at the San Francisco 49ers where I served as the head of philanthropy for nine seasons and then the Golden State Warriors in a similar capacity for some back-to-back championship years before deciding that it was time for me to go out on my own and create an organization that could amplify the voices of athletes, causes and corporations around social impact. So that's me. I love it. I love this story and I love the trajectory of your life and leadership in sports and how that's navigated your education and your commitment to this. It's a fascinating story. And part of this is so interesting to me because I hear all the time, Jared, I'm sure you hear this as well that nonprofits are like, if we could just get that one athlete that would get behind us, all things would be solved and money would be falling from trees. And it's just, I think we're such a sports crazed nation that we assume that that will solve a lot of our funding problems. And so let's back up a little bit and have you share with us athletes as influencers and that value and how that might work or might it not work too, right? Yeah. Well, again, my mother was a librarian. So we played a lot of word games growing up. But I'm not sure if either of you ever played Mad Libs but that was very popular on our car rides. You fill in parts of speech, you know, noun, verb, adverb, proper noun and then you'd flip it over. Your brother or sister would read it out loud and of course hysterically laughing because nothing made sense because it was out of context. I think that nonprofits often look at athletes as proper nouns. It's just fill in the blank, put a random athlete name into the event or into the fundraising capacity and the money will flow in. The problem is that without the context, you're reaching out to somebody who may or may not have a connection to your cause and so they may or may not be able to speak with passion around it. Now what we do at Oliver Rose is we match people with athletes who are aligned with their cause. So it might not be LeBron James but it's gonna be somebody who really believes strongly in what you're doing which means that they're going to do more to support the cause. They're going to personalize the situation or the fundraising event and people can see right through when there is a lack of connection. So what we love to do is we love to ask a lot of questions, get that context and then instead of putting a random athlete into a random spot, we'll say to them, these are three athletes we recommend but we think would be really terrific with your event and here's why. And it works so much better because we all have things that we can talk about and things we don't care about. Sure. Right. I just want to make reference. This is now two days in a row, Julia, that Mad Libs has come up. I got that too. I was the only person who ever talked about Mad Libs. That's when I started to chuckle because I was like, oh my God, Jarrett Ransom just brought that up yesterday. I did. I did. Go ahead, Jarrett. I'm sorry. I have another question, Joanne, because I'm really curious. Julie and I talk about the pandemic's plural over the last four years. How has that changed and navigated how athletes are stepping up to use their platform and their influencer value? So one, how has that changed? And then secondly, kind of a two-part question is, are you seeing that athletes are saying, this was my cause and now I want to speak up for this? Like I'm really curious how that navigates through. Great question. No, it's a great question, Jarrett. So the nonprofit side of my business, which is called Athletes Voices, launched in May 2020. And it launched because we knew that athletes, just like all of us, were sitting at home trying to figure out what they could do to remain engaged, involved, intellectually stimulated. And it was a time period where anybody I reached out to was saying, yes, what can I do? How can I be involved? We started to do webinars and we were doing them on a monthly basis on a variety of topics focused on athletes elevating a variety of causes, partnering them up with corporate partners and then also academics. So we did this in partnership with Harvard University at first and then branched out to include about a dozen other universities, athletes from the Paralympic Movement to the NFL. And what we found was that we were opening the door for individuals who hadn't had a cause that they were publicly aligned with to be able to start to speak. Of course, in the middle of all of this, perhaps even more impactful than the pandemic on the individual athletes I work with, was the Black Lives Matter movement and the power of connectivity through social media and other resources to fundraise. And so we started to see more and more athletes leaning in and saying, what can I do? How can I share my thoughts? Now, coming from the 49ers where I was working when Colin Kaepernick and Eric Reed and Eli Harold took a knee and watching the response within the community. We had people who were vehemently opposed to what they were doing and people who were as enthusiastic as they could be. Colin's Jersey was the number one selling Jersey that year, but it was also like no joke on a weekly basis we were receiving dozens of jerseys in envelopes that have been defaced in some way. So we have these two extremes. So as we went into the pandemic, here's your chance to curate the message and to put it out there in a way that feels most authentic to you. So I would say, Jared, an answer to your second question. So first question, yes, athletes definitely got more involved during that time. Second question, did they change the causes that they were aligned with? I would say that they felt more comfortable about being vocal about the things they cared most about even if it felt politically charged. So one of the webinars we did was in October of 2020, just a couple of weeks before the presidential election and it was on the influence of athletes regarding getting out the vote. And it was an amazing conversation. I mean, really amazing. Moderated by a professor from Harvard who had looked at demographics and patterns in voting. Now that sounds very esoteric when you think about like athlete coming out and being like, yeah, go kids. But our athletes were engaging in a community to help to bring certain issues to light. And we were able to leverage that to create momentum leading into the election. So big, big stuff. So I've got to ask this. It is big stuff and it's important. And I've got to ask the question, you being the conduit for so much engagement, how does the sponsorship view factor in? Like, do you have sponsors? And I've got to believe they exist that have fear of their partner athletes speaking out. Absolutely. And how do you navigate that? Cause that's a pretty dicey thing. Well, you know, it's interesting. It's more of a challenge when you're at the team or the league level where you have league-wide or team-wide sponsors. When we look backwards to that season when the guys were taking a knee and making a statement, we did have sponsors at the 49ers who had all but signed a contract for a sponsorship deal who said, we don't want to be associated with something controversial. So they withdrew. The individual athletes, it's very different. Certainly we saw some ramifications of their positioning around political issues or around social justice and equity issues. But I've also found that certain sponsors came to the table who had never considered being involved or working with athletes because they shared some solidarity around a cause. I'll give you a very specific example, Ben and Jerry's. Ben and Jerry's created a vegan ice cream flavor called World Peace with Colin Kaepernick. And it was vegan because he's vegan. And it was a cause marketing campaign where proceeds were going to benefit a foundation that was important to him, the Know Your Rights camps. And so it was a beautiful partnership. But I don't think that Ben and Jerry's would have naturally been inclined to reach out to a vegan professional football player to partnership. But for this moment in time where they said, this is a cause that's important to us and you're a face of it. And so let's do this together. Yeah. And Ben and Jerry's, they use their platform as well. Like they definitely use their platform. This is so fascinating. Can you help us to better understand athletes, philanthropic point of view, because we talk about there being 1.8 million nonprofits registered in the U.S. And Joanne, do you happen to know how many professional athletes there are? Because like, I can't remember. Probably the same number. I mean, that's what I was thinking. And they all have like, nonprofits have different missions, athletes have different points of view. Like what does that look like? Help us understand. Well, again, it's not one size fits all, right? So we have 1.8 million charities. We have 1.8 million athletes. It doesn't mean that it's a one-to-one ratio for charities to athletes because of course, certain athletes seem to gravitate towards certain causes. But it's about matchmaking. It's about finding the right fit. Now, being presumptuous about what you believe an athlete will be excited about because of something related to their background or their demographics or the sport they play is a very narrow-minded approach. If instead you come to somebody like me and you say, I want to do work in raising awareness for safe gun ownership. That's a project I worked on last year with the Brady Campaign and the National Ad Council. And they were looking at it not as gun prohibition, but they wanted to know if there were athletes out there who were gun owners and who were practicing safe ownership in order to be able to message that forward to a very specific subpopulation that wants to have guns but believes in gun control and in safe gun ownership. So that's a hot issue. Also a very scary issue for a lot of people to step into from a political standpoint. But if you come to the person who knows the right people, then you're gonna get the athletes who can speak to that in a way that's really authentic as opposed to, let's have these guys do it. And we wanted diversity in that campaign. So we ended up with seven athletes and they were everything from a Paralympic athlete to a bi-athlete, a woman who was winning a medal while the Parkland shooting was happening. And she stepped up and said, if it would help for me to put my gun away right now and quit my sport, I would, but it won't, we need better gun control laws. So you think about like, what is an NFL Super Bowl champion doing on the same PSA as a niche sport bi-athlete? And a gentleman who was a football player until he was shot in the back and became a world-class tennis, wheelchair tennis champion, they all worked together. So that's part of what we do. It's let's bring together the right mix of people for the cause. And then we say to people, do your research. Like when we were speaking for all of us, when we were in college, if you wanted to research something, you had to like go to the library or Dun and Brad Street or something, right? And, you know, look at a book. Today, if it's not the case, you can discover more than anybody wants to know about people. And so if you're coming to me and you're saying, I'd like to talk to you, can you help me get Steph Curry to do this event? Like, why? What is it about this event that would make you think that he would be the perfect fit? And if the answer is, well, he's high profile, that's not good enough. I need you to say, because it's a working around food insecurity and Eat Learn Play works on food insecurity. And we'd love to be able to partner with him because it's an initiative that's important to him. Like that makes more sense. Yeah, I so appreciate you calling out. Like, if you're just going to them for X, Y and Z, that is narrow-minded. And we hear this all the time. Well, I want to ask so-and-so athlete because he also went to my alma mater. So he'll give to us. And I'm like, no, he, she, whoever, they will not give to us because stand in line. There is a long queue of people also just saying, hey, remember me? No, like that's fine. And you brought up something really interesting. So 1.8 million charities. I used to joke of people. I'd be like, I think I know all 1.8 million charities because they've all asked me for something, right? And so there's this perception that somewhere in the back of my house here, I have a big closet that must be the biggest, must be like Narnia. Like it's the biggest closet ever. Because when you open the door, it just has signed memorabilia and tickets to games. And we're like, no, all of that is, it's a commodity. We have a limited number. So we do think about how and when we want to get those out. The other piece, I think this is really, really important, especially for your nonprofits that are looking to hold raffles or auctions or to have an appearance. One of the questions I get asked all the time is, instead of doing an item, can we do an experiential type of auction? What that means is, Joanne, can you help us to not only secure the person, but also follow up with them and then request that they follow through on this on a specific date, where we're probably coordinating with an auction winner who has a scheduling conflicts. It's really difficult. So it's not that we don't want to do it. It's help us to make it easier. What is it that you'd like? And let's think that through, but also asking athletes, not for their financial contributions to an event, but being creative about what they might be able to do that will be aligned with who they are, what they stand for. So an example, this has been a very popular auction item recently is, you can do a 10 minute Zoom call with an athlete. It's great, easy. It doesn't have to go anywhere. You don't have to go anywhere. You can do it for a kid. We've done some shout outs, like a happy birthday message from an athlete. We did a few during the pandemic. It was watch Monday night football on Zoom with, with the athlete. A former athlete, and then they're there like, they're at your tailgate party. And so those types of things where you're, you're asking them to do something that isn't going to encumber them, but it's allowing them to lean in and have a lot of fun with it. I love this conversation. And I think it's, it's so generative because it's, it also all these things that you're saying lead to a more sustainable, not just a one-off kind of concept. And I, I really want you to kind of finish up. We don't have much time left, but to talk about this triad, if you will, not just thinking about the athletes, but thinking about maybe their corporate sponsors. And of course they're philanthropic interests, which by the way change as it does for all of us over the course of our life and what happens and how we're impacted by something might shift what, you know, what we want to support. So as you said, it's not a one-size-fits-all. Talk to us about that, that relationship with the folks that the athletes bring along with them. Other athletes of course, but their sponsors, you know, things of that nature that I think we don't always consider. Well, I, we try to avoid exclusivity within contracts for sponsorships when it relates to philanthropic investment. So for example, you might have a sneaker partner and that sneaker partner has to have the first right of refusal if you're going to do something that involves branding, sneakers, giveaways. But that being said, it's also helpful to research who they partner with. If you are a corporate entity and you're looking to activate the athletes on your roster around a cause, again, doing your research and making sure that it's aligned with who they are. The other thing, and I'm going to do this from the reverse standpoint, one of the athletes I work with, great guy, Tori Smith, based out of Baltimore, Maryland, went to University of Maryland and has returned to the community to live there. And he was doing a massive remodel of community center. He reached out proactively to some of his sponsors and said, under him, or will you partner with me on filling out this football field? Best buy, will you help us build the technology center? You know, and on and on. So we went to them and said, hey, I'm working on this project and it'd be really great if you could join me. And what that did was it took the pressure off of the partnering nonprofit that was supporting the curriculum and the kids and put it on to Tori to then go to his sponsors and say, join me in this. So nonprofits don't be shy about asking an athlete who has expressed extreme interest in what you're doing to reach out to their sponsorship portfolio to see if they'd be interested in leaning in because that augments what you're doing. And it's also, it's a natural fit. And the athletes, most of the athletes that I work with, they love to go back to the people who are asking them to do appearances all the time, their sponsors, and say, hey, this is important to me. Yeah, it comes, yeah. I also suggest to athletes a lot that they ask for a roundup if they're getting an appearance fee for something or they're doing an autograph signing to say, okay, so you're giving $5,000 for this appearance, but could you round up or could you match that, double it and do $5,000 to this charity of choice for me? Awesome. Which one? You know, we have a comment that came in and I really want to take a moment to stop and read this because it's a really cool comment. And it comes from anonymous attendee. So I don't know who it comes or what part of the country, but they write, no question, just a comment. I love the honesty of this conversation and the emphasis on authenticity, wonderful information and a wonderful reminder that athletes are people first and they care about all the same stuff as the rest of us. Thank you. Yes, and by the way, they like to be thanked too. It's so funny. It's like, don't give them the bottle of wine or whatever, but the items that the athletes I work with treasure and hold onto are the handwritten notes from kids, the pictures that were taken that are then printed and put into some sort of frame. I mean, it sounds ridiculous, but in the Niners locker room, back in the day, we used to see the guys would hang these little thank you notes from kids up in their lockers. And it was a reminder to them like, this is why on my day off, I'm gonna go do something. So that's important. Feel free to reach out to them with messages from your beneficiaries, from your stakeholders. Just did an event last week in collaboration with Special Olympics where the invitation to the professional athletes came from the Special Olympics athlete via video. And it was, hey, I'd love for you to join us at this upcoming event. You're my favorite, fill in the blank. And honestly, how do you say no to that? But it was beautiful. And to that point, they are humans. They like to thank, they like to be appreciated and they like to be known for what they're doing versus just being seen as somebody who's going to push something out on social media and gain visibility, right? Yeah. And that really develops the relationship and takes it beyond the transaction. And I love that you called that out too, because really having these thank you notes or something from the benefactor, as you were saying, like so many of nonprofits, we think, oh, well, that might not be good enough, but it speaks to the mission. And that is at our core of who we are while we're doing this. So I really appreciate that reminder. It seems so basic, Joanne, but I think it's often overlooked. And again, I just, I appreciate you bringing that out and all that you shared today. It's been fascinating for everyone who's joined us. You've just heard from Joanne Pasternak. She is doing some amazing things. President and CEO at Oliver Rose. Check out oliverrosellc.com. And who knows? She might be able to help you connect with another nonprofit or athlete in this great community and see where there is that perfect match. So Joanne, thank you. Thank you so much, appreciate it. It's been great. I think that this has just been a fascinating conversation and I can't wait to see how your business grows and the different things going on in the sector because it's really, really important. Again, I'm Julia Patrick, CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy, been joined today by the nonprofit nerd herself, Jared R. Ransom, CEO of the Raven Group. Again, we have amazing partners and sponsors and they include Blumerang, American Nonprofit Academy, nonprofit thought leaders, Staffing Boutique, your part-time controller, 180 Management Group, Fundraising Academy at National University, JMT Consulting, Nonprofit Nerd, and Nonprofit Tech Talk. These are the folks that join us day in and day out. You know, Jared, it was fascinating as Joanne was talking about her talent, pool, her athletes, and then talking about the link to the sponsors and how they generate activity and engagement. You know, we have that too here on the nonprofit show. It's really an interesting thing, you know, and when you do look at something with that kind of more comprehensive look, it's healthier for everyone, right? It lifts up all the parties involved and so that really just struck me as I was reading our sponsors' names and Joanne, I have loved this conversation. We're sports nuts in my family and so this is like, it just brings joy to my heart to even see your memorabilia behind you when you're off. Well, and just to shout out, remember like the women in sport need us as their fans, need our audiences to come forward. That's how they will get sponsorship support and that's how we can empower them to go out into the community and do more philanthropic work as well. So here's to the women in sports, men, non-binary and all of our athletes who participate in the Paralympics as well. It's not just the big names, it's all of us who can go out there and support them. It is. That's brilliant. Thank you, thank you. Thank you, yeah, that means a lot to me. It truly does. Hey everybody, as we end every episode of the nonprofit show, we leave with this message and today it really means something to me and it goes like this, to stay well, so you can do well. We'll see you back here tomorrow everyone. Joanne, Jared, thank you so much ladies.