 Let's get this show on the road. I mean, we are so excited. Once again, you've joined us for Ask and Answer. It's our Friday episode sponsored by our wonderful partners at Fundraising Academy. Cause selling education is what they do. They have a really robust, I think super intuitive, natural and fabulous process for working with donors. So check them out. And we have had such an amazing partnership with them, along with our other partners that continue to support us. You might have noticed some new sponsors here. We added your time controller. Thanks for coming back with us. We're really excited to have them. Again, if you don't know me or you might have forgotten who I am, I am Julia Patrick, CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy. And today, Jack Alotto, CFRE is joining us with Fundraising Academy to be in the hot seat. Okay, my friend. Okay. You ready? Yes. Dionne from St. Louis, Missouri writes, our board wants to be present at any ask over $10,000, not the whole board, but a representative. They think this would help close a donation and demonstrate that we have a strong board leadership. Do you have an opinion about this? Yeah. We've been asked this type of question before. Yeah. You know, the thing is, I think that when you look at the basic, one of the basic tenants of cause selling is that who is present in the room during the ask is the person who has the connection with the prospective donor or the current donor. And the only reason why I would have a board member there, honestly, Julia, is if they are the person who has the connection with the prospect or they know the prospect or they have some influence over the prospect. Otherwise, I really don't see the necessity of having board members at all these asks. The other thing is, you know, what are they trying to accomplish by having a board member there? They want to show credibility. They want to show maybe that they have the support of the leadership of the organization. I think there are other ways that are better to do that than to have a board member present at every single ask. It seems cumbersome for the fundraiser to make sure that happens. It's just another person's schedule and calendar you have to coordinate. So I'm gonna push back a little bit because I have been that board member who's been on those asks. And to your point, I did not know the people. I was not part of the relationship. And maybe this is my ego speaking, but I always felt like, and I'm talking big asks, right? 500,000 above. You're right. I always felt like I was a voice of leadership, of support, of reassurance that this investment or commitment was prudent. So you said something really interesting to me. I think there are other ways of doing it. What would be some of those other ways? Well, I think that the transparency that an organization has certainly is important to make donors and prospects feel comfortable. So you might list your board members, definitely you should list your board members on your website, that kind of thing. But I've been involved like you in large asks. Now, it doesn't seem like this question is only large ask. It seems like pretty much every ask. So like I remember during a capital campaign, we asked a donor for a million dollars. So we put together a solicitation team. Okay. Which included a board member. But that board member had a relationship with that prospect. Okay. So I think there are exceptions, as you say, like a $500,000 ask. You probably might wanna bring a board member, especially if they're connected in some way to that potential donor. Let me ask you this before we go forward then. Would this be a strategy of laying this out and saying who is gonna be the board member that helps create a relationship? Or is that too? No, I think what you're describing is something that's really important as part of the ask and the cause selling cycle. And that is putting together a solicitation plan. When we talk about a solicitation plan, we're not talking about our big development plan. We're talking about a solicitation of one person. Who's on the team? Who's gonna say what? Who's gonna make the ask? All of those things. So I love with big asks or big cultivation events with donors to put together a team. And a board member's membership on that team could be critical to getting to yes. Okay. You know, Jack, I think that's, I don't know if we've had enough people talk about this, you know, the team concept and the amazing Terry Axelrod and years ago with raising more money and then Ben Avon. I remember one of the very first workshops I attended with her and we're talking probably 20 years ago. You know, she did this thing called the football field and she kind of had like a one sheet with a football goal at the end or uprights. And then she would say, you know, what's your path? How do you march down the field? And I kind of, I like what you're saying here because it doesn't just make it like, oh, we go to lunch and we ask for a million dollars. Right. Whoa. Yeah. And you know, I mean, when you put that team together, Julia, and when you get your talking points, who's gonna say what, then do a rehearsal. Okay. Rehearse the day before, address rehearsal. Who's gonna say what, plan it out. And not to stiffen it or to script everything because you can't. Donors are gonna ask questions that you can't anticipate. Foundation visits gonna ask questions you can't anticipate. But I think that generally, you know, when we did that million dollar ask in a capital campaign, I did not do the ask. I just talked about the capital campaign. The CEO talked about why we needed this. And then the board member who had a relationship with that donor asked for the million dollars. I have to say to you before we go on, I always loved these meetings. I loved them. I found them, I don't know if it's like my competitive nature or what, or because, you know, in the groups when I, you, first of all, you have to believe in it. Yeah. You have to believe in those groups where I was like committed and but believed in it. It was magical. I mean, just magical. Some of the best days of my life asking for that commitment. I just really powerful. Okay. Well, I gotta get off that. Okay. All right. Now you're right. Absolutely. I agree with you. I know what people watching your show to call me up and say, Hey, Julia, we got to ask for a million dollars. Can you help me out? That's right. Oh, Lord. Okay. Chantal from Denver, Colorado. That's chilly there now. What is the average term limit for a nonprofit board of director? I'm in charge of reviewing our bylaws and it's not specified. I think we need to put it in, but I need some guidance. However, I met a loss as to what the right number should be. Yeah. I mean, I think term limits are a great best practice for a board. You have to have term limits. I think every board member has to know that there's going to be some end to their tenure. And I think the reason why we put term limits on and it looks to me that like 10 years, past 10 years, a board member becomes less and less effective. What happens when you have a term limit? It incentivizes board members to bring their best ideas, to make larger gifts, et cetera, because they know their tenure is coming up. Now, some people, I get this. They say, we have the founder of our organization, a great donor on our board. We don't want a term limit her off. You know what some organizations do? They invite them to be part of an advisory board so that they still can stay connected to the organization and contribute and be part of the thinking about what's happening in the organization. You know, what happens when you lose a long-term board member? You lose some institutional memory and that could be bad. But then of course you also want new blood, as they say. One of the things that I like about this question, why it's such a great question, is that it points up a whole bunch of things which I know we don't have time to talk about as it relates to boards. For example, one of the things that I advocate quite a bit is getting each board member to sign a board engagement form. Oh, yeah. And there's tons of them out there on the internet to look at. And I think that's part of it. This question is about bylaws. You could put term limits in bylaws but you could also put some engagement things in your bylaws like you must attend the meetings. You must be part of the committee. You must make an annual gift, all those kinds of things. But I love that board agreement form as a way to really codify what your expectations are around board membership. Yeah, Jack, I think that's brilliant. And I think you're right. I love that you use the word codify. Codify what the board expectations are. Because I think a lot of times, I would say people want to start out doing great work but they disengage because a lot of times they don't really know what they're supposed to be doing or it hasn't, what they think they're supposed to be doing is not what the organization wants them to do. I mean, a lot of zigging and zagging. And so, yeah, absolutely. I think that that is something that we talk about a lot. And I think that those organizations that practice that are ultimately stronger. Okay, let's start with another question here, Jack. This comes to us from Judy from Texas for a group exercise. Call it a low cost personal development training. I thought it might be a good idea to have lunch and learn with another nonprofit development team. I think we could share ideas of how we fundraise. We are in human services and I was thinking about a local animal shelter. Interesting, completely different sector. I love the idea. I think she's right on the money. And I'll tell you why. One of the things that's so important for us in the fundraising profession and we call this in cause selling, we call this one of our big tips is networking. Networking in your local nonprofit community. That's why people joined AFP. That's why they joined DER or any of the various associations of nonprofits so that we can network. Here's the value of networking. The value, it enables us to look at trends. I could ask Julia at lunch. Julia, what's happening with the fundraising trends in our community? Are you seeing more gifts? Are you seeing less gifts? Are you seeing more major gifts? Julia, are you seeing less major gifts? What about foundations? What is happening with you and your animal shelter as it relates to foundations? And the other thing, which is really important, excuse me, is to avoid conflicts. And I say, Julia, when is your gala? Gala, and you'd say, yeah, our gala is December 7th. And I say, oh, we were gonna have a house party on December 7th. I need to move that date. But I'm gonna give you a real life example. I was involved in a capital campaign, that same capital campaign I talked about earlier. And we wrote a $10 million grant to a foundation. And I got a call from the program director at the foundation and he said, I'm gonna come and do a site visit. Do you know what I immediately did? I called up all of the other nonprofits who had had a site visit from that foundation. And I said to them, what did he ask you? So smart. What kind of questions? And one of the questions, this is a true story. I'm not making this up. One of my colleagues said, he's gonna ask you, Jack, what percentage of your board has made a gift to your capital campaign? And his second question to you is gonna be, what percentage of your staff has made a gift to your capital campaign? Comes for the site visit. It was myself, the CEO, and we're sitting there. He turned to me and he said, tell me what percentage of your board has made a gift to your capital campaign? And the second, and I said 100% because I knew that that was gonna be important. What percentage of your staff has made a gift? And those were the only two questions Julia, he asked me. Then he turned to the CEO and he said, why do you need a new building? What's gonna happen in this new building? How's this gonna advance your mission? That's why we talk to our colleagues. That's why we network for those important things. Okay, the show's over. It's not gonna get any better than this. It's a true story. I love it. I love, I love it. And you are really smart and vulnerable. Let your ego get out of the way to call a nonprofit competitor, so to speak. That's cool. That's, that is maybe the lesson of the month. That was, that's really awesome. You know, and the truth of the matter is we got a $5 million grant. We had asked for 10 million, but we got five. And I just thought, you know, this is awesome. And when I called around to my, you know, my cohort, my colleagues and told them, yeah, we got the five, they were like stunned. And I said, well, you deserve part of the credit guys because you helped me understand what questions I was gonna get. So, yeah. I know this is like getting out the crystal ball and polishing off, but if you weren't prepared for that, do you think that your five million would go down or maybe go to zero? Do you have a sense of it? Well, I think if I said to him, you know, only 70% of our board has made a gift to the capital campaign. He probably just said, well, what are you asking me for a gift for? It can't even get your board members who are the investors of this organization to make a gift. Or, and I didn't have 100% from the staff, but we had a high percentage from staff. You know, if I said, well, only 10% of the staff has made a gift, he could have said, you can't even get your staff to contribute to something that's gonna benefit their work going forward. So I think it's really important to network with your colleagues, talk to them about foundations. And you could do this with major donors. I'm gonna ask Julia Patrick for half a million dollars. I'm gonna call the animal shelter because I know she's a big supporter. Hey, what works with Julia? What questions should I be asking her? What questions do you think she's gonna ask me about our animal welfare organization or whatever it is? And, you know, if they're not willing to share, I've always been willing to share. I think this is one of the most beautiful things about being a fundraiser is that we can, let's collaborate guys. We're really not in competition, we're collaborators. Right, ultimately it builds a stronger ecosystem. And I believe that big donors follow other big donors. So, you know, that foundation that made that $5 million gift might make it easier or quicker path for another foundation to invest. I mean, I just think that we follow success. It's kind of part of the human condition. It shows credibility. It says this foundation has made an investment in this new building for this nonprofit to this amount of money. There, we know that foundation. They have, this gives credibility to your organization. It's also true if I lend a half a million dollar gift from a donor, an individual donor or a corporation, it gives credibility. So we should share those things. Let's help all boats rise, right? Exactly, exactly. Okay, this is fun. Oh my gosh. Shidi Chat Chat, we were talking about Boise. How funny, we have a question from Boise. Ah, I'm not Boise, Idaho. Oh my God, that's crazy. Okay, name withheld, would you know, Jack, my favorite questions of all time. Our CEO has announced that he has plans to retire in retiring in 2022. He's not been very specific. Our leadership team is a bit surprised, but we feel that he did not give enough info. For example, the date and the process on how a new CEO will be found. How do we get this topic in discussion so we will not all be freaked out? Yeah, it's very interesting. Yeah, it's a great question. But here's where the responsibility lies. It lies with the board. The board manages the CEO of the organization. If this CEO has announced that she's leaving the organization and she hasn't specified the date, the chairman of the board or the leadership committee, the executive committee of the board should sit down with her and say, okay, you've announced your resignation. Give us some details, you know, what's gonna happen. But I think it also points. So the board has that responsibility. It also points to the need for succession planning. Yes. What's one of the most popular shows right now in HBO? Isn't it's called Succession? Where all these children are trying to figure out who's gonna take over when daddy leaves the company? I don't really watch the show, but I think that's what I'm about. The name of the show is Succession. They don't have a succession plan. So now they're all fighting with one another, right? So you wanna avoid that. A succession plan is really important. Even when I've been leading organizations, I would say to the staff, you know, I'm probably not gonna stay here for the rest of my life. But maybe I'll leave in three years and let's start talking about what that would look like. Yeah. You know, it's interesting because I think about this in terms of the HR professionals that we've had on and then the number that we keep hearing is six to 12 months on a CEO search. And with the great resignation, that number's going up. Yeah. CEO, C-suite level personnel, they have more options. They can shop it. They can be a little bit more judicious on who and where and what part of the country they're gonna be in and what their workloads even gonna be. And that's such a good point, Julia, because if you leave, if you get two weeks notice, there's a scramble, especially for a leadership position like that one. But if you say, I'm gonna leave in six months, they could be thoughtful about their search. They could be thoughtful about the type of person they're looking for. And you know, the job market is so tight right now, it's not fair to your organization to give them a two week notice. You really need to give them a little bit more lead time, not only at the C-suite level, but pretty much across the board in director positions. Yeah. You know, it's interesting. We have a guest coming on in two weeks, Jeffrey Wilcox, he's been on before and he runs the CEO interim academy where they teach professionals that have been in the business, how to manage interim positions and leadership. And it is fascinating to see how in the beginning that concept was like so novel. We spent so much time just explaining the concept. Now people are getting that this interim thing is real because of all this change and stuff. In my career, I've had two, maybe three interim director development positions. And you know, it's, I mean, you have to hit the ground running, I'm sure he'll talk about this. And you have to do your homework real fast, move fast, make a lot of mistakes, especially one was during the middle of a capital campaign. So it was tough. So they're very important things to do. Wow. Yeah, that's a tough one. Okay, our last question for the morning. And I think this is something that you know a lot about. This comes to us from Lee and Bellevue Washington. Lee writes, I think it's a she. I want to pursue a CFRE in 2022. This is a personal goal. Should I ask my employer to help pay for this? I will benefit our organization at the same time, my professional path. Gotta say, this makes me nervous. But I keep hearing about other orgs doing it. Now you do CFRE, I don't know what the word is like, test prep or training or talk to us about that first. So I run study groups around CFRE prep and I get this question quite a bit. And some organizations, here's the thing, some people don't want their organization to know that they're even preparing for the test. Okay. In case they haven't passed it yet. So that's one thing. So they don't really ask for, I served on a panel two days ago with two other CFREs for the AFP chapter in San Jose and neither of them had told their employers that they, and I didn't either when I took it that I was taking the test and I paid for it myself. I like to say this, give your employer a rationale why they should pay. And I'll tell you what, if I did it now, I would ask my employer to pay for it. Because here's the thing that the CFRE does when they pay for it. It says to them, and you're telling them, I believe in my professionalism as a fundraiser and I intend to pursue this certification. They should support that. But from their perspective, here's what a benefits. When you provide your staff people with professional development, whether it's the CFRE or anything, you retain them. They're gonna wanna work for you and stay there. And you know, as an HR professional or former HR professional, it costs a lot of money to hire a new person than it does to train a person you have. So I urge employers to look at it from their perspective or the CEO or whatever from their perspective is that if I train these staff, they're gonna be better at fundraising. They're gonna wanna stay here because they're gonna feel like I have a stake in their professional development, which every employer should have. And they wanna pursue a professional credential and it doesn't have to be the CFRE, it could be attending the fundraising academy or a certificate program at some university or other place. So I think that every employer should have a professional development budget. And here's the other thing from the employee perspective. I would allow employees to say, here is my professional development plan. I wanna learn more about plan giving. And I wanna attend a program, a seminar, a webinar on plan gifts. I wanna learn more about cause selling. So I wanna join a cohort. I wanna start whatever it is, CFRE, whatever it is and put somebody in the budget. I was fortunate in my career to work for some large organizations, hospitals, libraries. They always had a professional development component. And guess what I did? I went to everything. I attended every single thing that they would pay for. Yeah. I would say you turned out pretty damn good. I don't know. I lost a lot of hair in the process. Trying to crowd. Hey, I just wanna make a clarification. I have not been an HR professional. I've hired, no, I've hired and fired a lot of people as a business owner. And it's certainly in publishing over 30 years and even now with the American nonprofit academy. So I don't wanna misrepresent anything. But I have one more question along this line. Do you ever see employers that maybe say will pay for a percentage or will reimburse you after the fact or will give you time off to study or are there some flexible things or what does that look like versus cause CFRE is kind of pricey, right? Yeah. I mean, the certification, just to certify that take the exam is like 800 bucks. And then the other thing is if you buy some of the materials you can spend hundreds of dollars on the materials. And then you re-certify every three years, which is another couple of hundred dollars or more. I can't remember the exact amounts. But I think all of those things, I have met people studying for the CFRE who say to me, oh, my boss said, take as much time as you need. Gave me the week off during prior to taking the exam. Okay. You know, any number of things or a percentage. My funny thing is when I got the CFRE back before fire was invented, I went into my employer and I said, hey, guess what? I passed the CFRE today and they said, what's that? Right. So I mean, educate them, talk to them about your professional development whether it's CFRE or any other thing that you wanna become an expert in. It's really important. You know, I love that. And I like that advice because I think it's, you know, I like what you said that it helps us to become more professional. And if I had a gripe about our sector, that's one of the big ones. It's just because you're doing something benevolent or something for good. That doesn't mean you can step aside professionalism. Yeah. And when you get any kind of a certificate, including one that we would give you at the fundraising academy, it's a testament to your employers and your donors. Yeah, yeah. That you are interested at being the best you can as a professional fundraiser. Yeah. Well, even at the American Nonprofit Academy, you do that. You know, we have certificates and we have, yeah. And I agree with you. I really, really do. Well, hey, Jack, you've been amazing. We always love having you on. Here's Jack's information. Now, in your test prep, can that be done virtually or remotely? Yes, it's done virtually. Here's the interesting thing. We just completed our study group. We're gonna have another study group starting in January. Okay. And I am very fortunate to tell you all that I can now, people who attend can get continuing education credits from CFRE. I'm one of a handful of individuals in the world who are able to do that. Nice. Yeah. It's nice. Nice. Congratulations. Well, here's Jack's information. Reach out to him if you want more information because I really do believe this is the right way to go for so many folks. And he can talk to you more about it. Again, fundraisingacademy.org, one of our fabulous partners that allows us to have these conversations. Again, I'm Julia Patrick, Jared Branson, the nonprofit nerd herself will be back with me on Monday. And again, we wanna thank all of our presenting sponsors without you. We would not be here having these discussions. Wow, Jack, this has been a great way to end the week. Yes. Thank you for having me and thank you to everybody and also reach out to me to learn more about the cost-selling academy we have at National University, Fundraising Academy at National University. It's an amazing program. And I have said this to you privately. I've said this publicly to so many of your team. My success and trajectory in this sector would have been remarkably different if I had learned this 30 years ago. Yep. It would have changed. I would have been able to raise more money for my community. Yeah, nice. You know, and I really truly believe it. It's a pretty profound thing to say. Having said that, we wanna remind everyone to have a great weekend, get some rest. We're in this busy time of the year and we'd like to end every episode with our mantra. Stay well, so you can do well. See you back here on Monday, everyone. Thanks, Jack.