 Welcome to the nonprofit show. We are so glad you're here. This is a dedicated week. It's a special unique week that we get to spend. This is actually our third annual nonprofit power week with the team of the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption. So we are thrilled to have with us kicking off this week on a Monday or as I like to call it a Monday because Friday gets all the fun and we really need to start Monday off with fun as well. Julianne Nichols and Julianne serves as the vice president marketing communications at Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption. And she's brought to us a topic that we don't talk about often enough and it's about changing minds in particular with researching and changing attitudes. Stay with us. Julianne's gonna introduce herself in just one moment but if we haven't met you yet we always like to remind you that we are here Julia Patrick and myself, Jared Ransom serving alongside as co-host here for the nonprofit show. 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So again, as we kick off this monye, we are thrilled for it to be a nonprofit Power Week. Again, Julianne Nichols is joining us as vice president marketing as well as communications. Have the Dave Thomas Foundation for adoption. Welcome to you, Julianne. Thank you so much. It's great to be with both of you today and just wanna say thank you so much for giving us the opportunity to share a bit about the foundation's mission and a number of different topics with you this week. It's important to us year round and extra special in November because it is National Adoption Month. And that's a time that we shine a light on families growing through adoption and the urgent need for foster care adoption in particular. And so as you know, and we've shared with your listeners in the past, we're a national nonprofit public charity that is committed to dramatically increasing the number of adoptions of children waiting in foster care in crossing states in Canada. And so as you mentioned, I'm the vice president of marketing communications and I lead a team of marketing and communications and graphic design professionals. And we wear a number of hats in terms of supporting departments within the organization that lead a number of our strategic priority areas and really work to raise public awareness of our mission and then the cause of foster care adoption in a number of ways. And research has been a key part of that, a part of our strategic priorities from the very beginning of when Dave Thomas who was the founder of Wendy's restaurants and who was adopted, created this important foundation to be a national voice for the cause and support families growing this way through a number of initiatives. And again, research has been a key part of that. And so I'm happy to share a couple of examples today. Well, it's an interesting thing because I think a lot of times Julianne and Jared and I see this every single day on the nonprofit show that a lot of us come to the world of service in the nonprofit sector with a passion and a sensibility that we don't often back up with research. It's just a passion that we're like, everybody should feel this way, everybody should know about this, everybody should get involved. But I'm really interested to find out how you look at this and using this research model to move forward. Talk to us about that. Sure. So again, I'm gonna give you a couple of different examples and the first one really is about the evidence base of your work. So again, the roots of who we are as an organization is about advocacy and raising public awareness and that there are research components that I'll talk about that are part of that, but our president and CEO, Rita Sornan in the early 2000s also wanted to create a program that was more direct service. And so we developed a program called Wendy's Wonderful Kids and it worked to support the funding of adoption professionals who would serve the longest waiting children in foster care and using what we refer to as a child focus recruitment model that focuses on finding the right family for every child. And we felt good about the results that we were seeing but we wanted to make sure. And so we engaged a research partner to do a rigorous national five-year evaluation of that program. Wow. Yeah, and among the findings we learned that children who were referred to that program are up to three times more likely to be adopted. So that was critical research that we began sharing through reports on our website, highlights to the media, evidence to inform the training that we provided to adoption professionals and working with partners in the field and really to develop a business plan that would scale that program to make sure that there would be enough adoption professionals to serve the number of children waiting. And so that's an example of kind of that outcome base that is really important for nonprofits who are either funding or leading a cause that advances their mission. Another example I'll share that's a bit more audience-specific. So Dave Thomas also was a huge advocate in reaching out to business leaders to say, you're providing benefits to families who are having a child biologically but what about parents who are considering becoming a foster or adoptive parent? Why wouldn't you provide the same benefits? And so we started conducting a research survey encouraging employers to share what type of paid leave and financial benefits were they offering to employers. And so for the last actually last week we released the 17th annual survey of what we call the best adoption-friendly workplaces and it reveals kind of what are those best practices so that we can encourage other employers to do the same and inform their policies and developing like an employer toolkit of resources that helps them to inform their practices. A third example I'll share and this really gets to the public research question that you asked in terms of attitudes is called our adoption and foster care attitude survey. And so this research when I'm about to share parts of it are not ours but we know from other research resources that every year more than 20,000 youth age out of foster care without a family. And we know that the research shows that those youth that they don't have the support of a permanent family are more likely to experience homelessness and unemployment and just other negative outcomes. And it's just something that it's a cause that not everybody knows about. It's the sort of quiet crisis. And so the data points of these surveys allow us to have conversations with the media to be able to educate our supporters about challenges. So we have been commissioning this study every five years with an external agency partner since 2001 to again just gauge does the public know this information? What can we do to change hearts and minds? And so like two examples I'll give you from the 2022 survey was that 75% of the public survey to that representative sample size believe that the public we should be doing more to a support foster care adoption. And 68% say that if their employer provided adoption benefits they would consider adopting. So those research points kind of tie into our adoption friendly workplace study and survey that I mentioned to you. But again to make that point to employers of why those benefits are so important. Let me ask you a quick question. Can our viewers and listeners go to your website and find this? Because this is the sort of thing that 1.8 million registered nonprofits in America need to be looking at having this benefit as well for their teams. Can they find that to see what that looks like? They sure can. So on our website we have a research section that highlights a kind of a number of the different reports that we have done over time in those annual ones. And the best adoption friendly workplace. There's a program tab that you can see on our website that highlights the toolkit that I mentioned and some of those key statistics. And then the adoption and foster care attitude survey findings are you can find there as well. And a number of our national child welfare organizations across the country go to those and look to that data every year or every five years depending on which survey we're talking about to be able to make the case for the area in which they are supporting the cause. And so they're often citing us as a source. Appreciate having that research because it seems like a simple add on benefit for employers. It seems perhaps Julianne and maybe this is what the research concludes. It's simply a lack of education, right? The lack of inclusivity of adding that foster care benefit package onto an already existing family package that might come from a birth family. That's right. And this research isn't ours but from another HR group. Not that many individuals even take advantage of the benefit. So I think sometimes there can be this feeling particularly with smaller organizations of like, gosh, how much can I offer? And so that's where the survey data is really important and we not only have the reveal of the hundred best who are really giving that top line benefits but also benchmark reports that show what organizations are doing of different size. So small, medium, large, different industries so that you can compare yourself against your peers and figure out what is going to be, make the most sense for your organization but also be able to support your employees and attract them, retain them and really make them feel valued and that there's no one way to grow your family and that your employer is supporting them that. Yeah, I love it. Let's move into the attitudes, right? Like how do the attitudes, people's attitudes, employers' attitudes, everything really shift and shape your nonprofit mission. What does that look like, Julianne? And what are you seeing? So I can give you examples from a number of different ways. So the adoption and foster care attitude survey that I mentioned as an example reveal that, you know, 30% of the public feels that a teen will be fine on their own. You know, they don't need the support of a permanent family. They're almost 18, like they're fine. And only 3% would consider adopting a teen as their first choice. So that significantly impacts our mission because, in particular, our Wendy's Wonderful Kids program is serving children over the age of nine, sibling groups and children with special needs. And so if the public is thinking, well, that's not really needed, but we know there's 20,000 youth aging out of foster care every year, then we have a challenge. And we need to work to educate the public and sharing the findings of those surveys, those surveys, which we do in a variety of ways. And also educate our supporters about why, you know, their commitment to our cause matters so much to really, you know, move that needle. Another example of research that I'll share, you know, even relates to the child welfare professionals who we collaborate with. So we know that, you know, often the youth that they serve have experienced significant trauma. You know, sometimes it's just, you know, it's not an easy job to find that right family. And so we wanted to know is to be able to conduct some research with them to say, what struggles are you finding in your work? Are there any perceived barriers that you're facing? Are there best practices that are a compliment to what, you know, our program is doing? What type of messages resonate with you? What type of professional learning would you find valuable? And so, you know, it's looking at, you know, we engage, you know, the public, we engage child welfare professionals, we engage business professionals, you know, all the different angles. There's so many different roles that play into the advancement of our mission and this critical work. So research is just critical in that way to really advance our work. You know, this is a critical question, but how often are you, do you get research back that's like, holy moly, we didn't know that or we didn't think that? I mean, how often is this coming back at you and really re-informing your choices as an organization and not just data and metrics that helps you support what it is you're doing? Yeah, I mean, I think there can be surprises for sure. I mean, in the example of the survey of child welfare professionals that we did, you know, if you ask the question, you know, do you believe that every child deserves a safe and permanent home? The number's pretty high, but if you ask the question, do you believe every child waiting in foster care is adoptable? It's not as high as we'd like to see it. And so that's a surprise. And it's not because they don't believe that it's needed, it's the how and how hard it is. And so then that helps us to say, okay, what can we do to elevate the profession and help them feel valued? What type of stories and resources can support their work and help them make the case in their jobs? What type of educational resources can we put out there? So absolutely, there can be surprises and changes in the data over time. And the adoption and foster care attitude survey that I mentioned we do every five years to see how has that trend changed? And many times there have been celebrations with that, that more families are opening their hearts to adoption. And so we celebrate that and we share that, but there is still more than 51% who believe that children are placed in foster care because they've done something wrong. And that just couldn't be further from the truth. And that doesn't mean that they may not have behavioral issues at certain points, that's to be expected from the trauma that they've experienced. But that just demonstrates how much they need that support and guidance and resources to overcome that trauma and then their whole world changes around when they have that support. And so we attempt to share that through research findings but also through storytelling. And so there's a combination of those things that are used together to kind of again educate about the urgency of need and the problem, share that story of how a life was changed but then remind people what the research shows about the number of children who are still waiting and what we can do about it. You know, I really commend the organization for all of the research and you've talked already a little bit about the process but I'm curious, Julianne, if you can talk to us about the process in particular of the cost and the time, what is that looking like? Yeah, so that is a complex question to answer because research really comes in all different forms. So if your goal is to gather feedback from your supporters, for example, about why they signed up for your emails or what inspired them to support their mission, there are free or low cost tools that you can use from Google Forms to SurveyMonkey to gather that informal feedback. Other inexpensive forms of research might be if you are testing two different types of an ad to see, you know, did a message or a visual resonate differently or perform differently? Did you send an email in the morning versus the afternoon? Did that impact things? And so those are important types of research that inform your tactical implementation that are kind of lower cost and that you can kind of do in-house. But if you're using the research to make a public claim or inform policy decisions, engaging an external research partner is critical and that has an expense. But it's so important because they can help you make sure that the questions you're asking are truly going to accomplish your business goals or inform your business goals and prevent any unintended bias in the questions. So I might think like this is exactly how I want to say it and a research partner might say, well, you, if saying it this way is going to lead the answer, like maybe it's going to give you what you want to hear but it's not going to help enough. So again, finding a critical partner who has experience with a level of rigor of what you're trying to accomplish is huge. And then the cost is again, widely varies depending on how granular you're going to be and how customized you want to be. So we have certain surveys where we might have a set of questions that we ask every year and we fold them into a pre-existing survey of the public. Something like that could be in the $15,000 range and maybe take a couple of weeks of analysis. But if you're doing a survey where it involves focus groups and you want to know about findings from different roles in different states and more qualitative data, that could take three to six months. And sometimes what we've done is conduct a quantitative survey and get the analysis from our research partner and talk through that and say, okay, we want to probe deeper in these particular areas and so we want to conduct Zoom interviews with a representative sample of individuals who are going to help us get that. And that could be $50,000, $250,000. It could be multi-year. So it's hard to answer the question because it really depends but I guess what I would say is that that's where having that external partner, if it is something that is going to make a major policy or programmatic decision, that would be really important. And sometimes you're not the one to conduct it. You know, we also can in some cases grant fund organizations who are conducting research, like they'll reach out to us and say, hey, we want to know about this. And we're like, we want to know about that too. So this is an alignment with our strategic priorities and you're going to lead that with an external partner and we're going to work with you to think about the implications of what it reveals and think about the ways that we can also promote that around our shared goals. Well, I appreciate your insight on it could be as simple as testing two different advertisements, all the way to bringing in a third party person or company that's really going to facilitate that. And there's really no right or wrong, I think when it comes to research. I think any and all research is very helpful. But what do we do with it afterwards, right? So we've conducted this research, we've perhaps invested thousands of dollars and perhaps multi years. How do we take that research to change the attitudes? And the one that I'm stuck on, Julianne, is really the one that's like, our assumption is that children are in foster care because they've done something wrong, right? Like how do we change the mind and that attitude? And there's so many assumptions, I think, when it comes to a lot of different social challenges, how have you used this research to change those attitudes? That's a great question. And I would say this is one that is a multi-channel, multi-partner, over time, never ends, that particular question you asked. But I think it's true of research in general when it's something you're talking about attitudes and behavioral change. It's not something you can kind of do overnight. And you have to ask key questions sometimes about who's the right messenger to share what you're wanting to articulate, right? So we develop integrated marketing and communications plans, collaborating with our development team, collaborating with our program team, our business development team, all the people who are out in the field who are engaging with different audiences who have some influence and support of the youth and families who we serve. What we have really found is that a storytelling approach is among the most powerful tools in your toolbox. And so we very carefully welcome youth and families who have adopted through foster care, employers who have become adoption-friendly workplaces, employees who have taken advantage of those to share how it's changed their life. And we launch public service announcements that we run every year through TV, radio, billboards, blogs. And very often, again, to that particular point that you were making, it's the voice of a 17-year-old girl sharing that she was weeks away from aging out without a permanent family, that she had given up hope that this was ever going to be a possibility for her and how adoption changed her life and how without that could have ended up on the streets and not had the support reasons. And that's reality. That again, we know from others external research of what happens. And so where we can share that story through the public service announcement, through their voice, through ads, through social sharing and kind of identifying influencers in the field who have larger networks than ours to be able to say, hey, can you believe that this is what people think? And we want you to hear this story and we want you to help tell people about it. And then that translates through earned media and reaching out to reporters to educate them and it translates into the distribution of adoption guides that we create and other resources to really help people think about it and even sharing maybe a parent who did adopt that team and say, I never thought about it before or I didn't know that this child was in foster care. I didn't even know that was a possibility that I could adopt them, but I can and I can be that support person for that child and I can encourage another person to do the same. So we definitely use multiple channels and making sure that we're sharing best practices that we've learned over the years and through that research to continue advocating for the advancement of our mission and why investing in our national awareness campaigns and the advancement of our programs is just so, so critical for an issue that just is not talked about enough and it's just, it's different than a cause that is sort of and I'm not saying that not all causes are important but when it's like a disaster relief and it's in the news and it's right now and you can totally relate to it or something that every family has experienced, it's just a different thing. And in this case, it may be something that every family has experienced in some way or knows someone who's adopted but maybe not talked about as much. And again, so those are why we take that multi-channel long game approach to moving the needle for our mission. Yeah, well, that's, I mean, it's needed, right? To be repetitive, to be consistent, to share that education. I just commend honestly you, the entire team, Julian, of the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption. We are so grateful to have, I think we have four different representatives joining us this week and a special non-profit Power Week, our third annual and the reason for that is really to bring education to the sector, to their communities across the globe about the benefits of adoption and foster care. So Julian Nichols has joined us today, Vice President of Marketing as well as Communications of the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption. Really thrilled to have you here. For everyone that's interested in learning more or looking up that research that Julian mentioned, go to DaveThomasFoundation.org, fantastic website that provides so much information but take a look there. You can hear, you can see, you can read these stories, that storytelling that Julian was sharing with us today. I know I always spend extra time on your website as well as at Wendy's because it just, you know, it's just a great fit. So thank you Julian for all that you do and to share this wonderful topic. You've been phenomenal to kick off this non-profit Power Week. Just so grateful to have this dedicated week with you and your colleagues. Well, thank you so much. This is another example of an important voice to shine a light on our mission and there are various ways to get involved. We hope it's in attracting people to become adoptive parents, but again, if you go to our website, lots of ways to help. So thank you so much for the opportunity. You know, this week is going to be really interesting because there's so much going on. We're going to be talking about experiencing trauma and then staying in the environment, working for the nonprofit sector when maybe you have a backstory that's just really tough. We're going to also be talking about the realities of founder syndrome and I can't wait to do that with Rita. Again, testing your marketing plan is going to be kind of an adjunct to this and how we actually look at the different ways we can understand how our work is navigating us towards our mission vision and values. Again, today we talked about researching and changing attitudes and then on Friday, we're going to wrap it up with an ask and answer with Rita Soren and the CEO and President of the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption. Again, I'm Julia Patrick. I've been joined today by the nonprofit nerd herself, Jared R. Ransom, CEO of the Raven Group. Again, nonprofit Power Week is a special thing. We only do it a couple of times a year and we have the ongoing support of Fundraising Academy at National University, Blue Morang, Your Part-Time Controller, American Nonprofit Academy, Tech Talk, Nonprofit Nerd, and Staffing Boutique. These are the folks that joined us day in and day out. Wow, you know, Julianne, you really kicked us off in a meaningful way for the whole week and I suspect, Jared, that we're going to be weaving back some of her comments as we move forward every day, don't you think? Absolutely. Yeah, we typically do and I always learn so very much from these conversations. Last year, Julianne, I was serving as a professional interim CEO for an organization. I was so grateful to help bring some of the foster care and adoption benefits to the policies that had previously never been part of that before. And again, I wouldn't have known about it if it weren't for the show. So thank you. Well, together we're stronger. So thank you so much for that connection and I'm grateful to hear that those resources were helpful. You know, it's amazing and again, this is only day one of a full week so join us back every day. And if you can't join us live, you can certainly connect with us on our archives and we hope that you do because I think this is really a powerful nonprofit power week. So as we end every episode, we like to leave with this mantra. And again, it means a lot of things, it means something different every day when we say it. But especially it resonates, I think this month as we celebrate the Dave Thomas Foundation for adoption. And it goes like this, to stay well so you can do well. We'll see you back here tomorrow.