 Okay, we're back, we're live. This is TinkTuck, I'm Jay Phydell. We're doing community matters with the BBB. That's the Better Business Bureau here in Hawaii, part of a national Better Business Bureau organization. And its manager is Rosane Freitas, she joins us. And it's, I guess it's reporter. It's Kelsey Gardipe, and she joins us. And we're going to talk about a number of things that have crossed the desk of BBB in recent weeks. And we want to stay in touch with them because they are in touch with the business community in this time of crisis, if you hadn't noticed. So let's talk first about this report that was done, Kelsey, about sexual harassment in nonprofits and how that affects contributions by those who would sponsor and contribute and support nonprofits. Can you talk about it? Absolutely, so the give.org donor trust report on special harassment and charitable sector was released a couple of weeks ago. And we surveyed over 2100 Americans as well as 1,000 Canadians to understand the connection between donors and charities when there is an instance of sexual harassment and how that incident will impact donor behaviors. Will they choose to continue supporting that organization? And we learned that donors who had learned about sexual harassment at charities, and these statistics here on the screen are of charities or donors in the U.S. We found that 22% of donors that had learned of sexual harassment would no longer continue to support that organization, or 17.1% would decrease their donation. And of those, if you could go to the next slide, of those 47.8 would choose to support a different organization in that same cause area. About 13.3% of U.S. donors said that they would replace that donation to a new cause altogether. And 38.9% alarmingly said that they would not replace their donation, whether it be to that same organization, a different organization in the same cause, or any other charity altogether. So it's not only the organization that could potentially be impacted, it's that whole cause and really the whole sector as a whole that could be impacted. And then charities, we asked donors what they expected charities to do as a result of allegations of sexual harassment coming out. So if we could go to the next slide, ultimately U.S. donors expect that charities would have an internal investigation. Almost 54% of donors indicated that was their preference, that they would have a policy to enforce and how they would handle sexual harassment allegations. 40.2% of donors thought that that was a good course of action. And then the third most popular with 48% of U.S. donors was hire a third party to handle an investigation. But the good news that we've found after this is all hope isn't lost. After appropriate corrective matters were taken or actions were taken, on the next slide I've got that 38.1% of U.S. donors have indicated that they would likely resume their normal level of donation to that organization, which tells BBB that sexual harassment is something that absolutely has an impact on donor behaviors. This is just a survey of what their intentions are. So we have two other factors to consider which is that we don't always hear about sexual harassment allegations at certain charities, particularly smaller charities. We do hear about it on larger scale organizations, particularly national organizations. So it may not come to light, so it may not impact donors or impact local charities as much. Donors also may choose to act differently. This is how they expressed that they would react. It doesn't mean that they'll always react exactly this way, but it does show that there is a connection between learning of sexual harassment in the charitable sector and how donors will perceive that behavior. You know, Roseanne, this is outside the normal operating area, outside the ordinary wheelhouse, so to speak, of the BBB. Why did the BBB do this particular survey and why did they do it now? Well, I think sexual harassment is always gonna be a hot topic. And they're also, well, you don't necessarily see that in our wheelhouse of sexual harassment. It is something that impacts businesses and charities. So it is something that we would suggest and talk and educate businesses about. I mean, this is not going away. People are not putting up with it anymore and businesses need to be aware. They need to have a plan in place, not to just prevent it, but to also have that plan address. What happens if it does, what we do as an organization to restore trust because it always comes back to that trust for us at BBB. And that is why the charity report came out because a lot of people don't look at charitable organizations and think sexual harassment, but it's there. And so we want them to up their game and up their standards and really have the trust, probably more than any industry. We have to expect trust within the charities. Okay, so suppose a given organization, a nonprofit, because this focus is on nonprofit, has a really bad report in the newspaper, scandalous, and they come to you. They say, what do we do now? Will you advise them? What will you do for them to help them restore their image? So I'm gonna kick that one to Chelsea because I mean, Kelsey, excuse me, because Kelsey, I know, sorry, Kelsey, it's one of those days. And the reason I'm gonna kick it to Kelsey because Kelsey actually does the interactions with all of the charities and because we are specifically talking about them, she actually would have a plan. So go ahead, Kelsey. What do you do for me? I mean, honestly, the situation hasn't come up for me personally, but if there were to be an issue and there was a case out against a charity that our local Better Business Bureau office would report on, then I would get in touch with that organization, particularly if they're a credit or have been evaluated by us and would offer guidance on whether they should implement a policy, make sure that their board has become involved. Clearly, we see that donors expect that there be an internal investigation as well as a third-party investigation and that they have a policy in place. And so offer resources to that organization to help them implement a policy if one isn't already in place. And if there were other organizations to come to us, seeing that there isn't an impact on the other charities, if they had any requests for guidance, I'd suggest a policy, since a policy would be a legal document, I wouldn't necessarily have a template, but I would guide them towards other resources so that they could put the practices into place to get to respond. If this appeared in the Star Advertiser on a given nonprofit one day, it was scandalous, would you make a note in your files? Would you treat that as a complaint of bad business? And if somebody came to you and said, I've been thinking of dealing with actually making a contribution to ABC company, should I do that? What do you know about this nonprofit? Because I know people come to and ask you that, we'll disclose the fact that there had been a public report of sexual harassment against this company. There's been a government action against the organization and that's something that we would be able to report on. It was something that I found in my Google alerts and it's something I'd make internal remarks on and reach out to the company or the charity over. But until it's something that the charity wants to make a statement about, or until it's a government action, it's not something that we would report on, particularly if it's just allegations. We don't report on gossip. So it's something we'd have definitely internal remarks on and we would do our own investigation as necessary. If that's something that seems appropriate for us, but if they're accredited, then that could absolutely impact their accreditation. Oh yeah, okay. You look like you wanted to add something to that. I thought what Kelsey, she hit it there. It's something that internally, because I read the news every day here in Hawaii. So anything I see whether it's on a business or on a charity, I must definitely am putting that into the system and porting that to the appropriate departments. Because there are departments that need to look, is this an issue? Is this something we need to deal with? But the legal action, yes, that is something that also comes across, but we're aware of what's going on and we will have a business or a charity reviewed if we feel something is in the news media that's a credible source that they could look into. Obviously gossip, no, we can't because that's just, we have to have an investigation. We have to have backing to anything that we put out. So what do we learn from this report? I suppose it's completely public. I'm sure it is completely public. You went to the trouble of doing it. And I'm a, I can't say a business owner. I'm a non-profit person. And I want to maximize support from my support group. My donators and contributors, what does it teach me? What does it teach me about what's going on in the community? What does it teach me about what goes through the mind of a contributor? Was it teach me about how maybe I should change my management style to avoid the risk of this? What does it teach me? Yeah, great. So the report itself is completely available on give.org. It's, you can see much more detail covered. The report does go into different donor behaviors based on gender and it also age range. And then so you see male versus female whether they would be more likely to donate in certain situations. We did also ask certain questions about certain scenarios. So if the workplace culture of a particular charity tolerated harassment, what then would the donor behaviors be after that? Or if leadership or staff looked away or if it was against a child or against an adult. So there are a lot more detailed than what I have shared already that are available in the report. And it's rather interesting to see, but ultimately the message to charities is that these allegations can absolutely impact whether donations will continue coming in. And in a time of COVID, in a time where we know that donor trust is so important and it's not already there, anything that could impact, particularly that could decrease donor trust is something that a charity needs to be prepared for. So the best thing that a charity can do is have practices in place and policies ready to go so that they can handle sexual harassment allegations swiftly and that they're not creating a workplace or volunteer space or relationships with their donors that would encourage or allow sexual harassment because donors, if they learn of it, will make decisions to support elsewhere or discontinue support altogether. Yeah, that's troubling. You mentioned there was a certain slice of the pie there where they would just turn off. They would blame every charity on the block. Yes, absolutely. It wouldn't give to anybody anymore anything, a pox on your house kind of thing. You mentioned the 38% would resume, but we did find in this study and these numbers could change based on actual actions, but roughly 8.7% of those surveys said that they would just discontinue support altogether and it didn't matter what the charity did to rectify the situation. They just stopped donating. So, I guess this is taken in the context of COVID and COVID is different. I've gotten to divide our time continuum from before COVID, that's BC, and then after COVID, that's AC, all right? So are you guys gonna do another one here? Are you gonna do another one like this, I mean about sexual harassment or maybe something else that could turn off donors? What does it look like down the playing field for more similar kinds of surveys where a nonprofit can figure out, you know, what hurts it and how it can recover from this kind of damage to its contributor base? What's the plan? So this is the third year that we've done the donor trust survey. So we're chart donor behaviors, attitudes and donor trust over time. Last year, our special topic was disaster relief to really understand whether donors understand what charities say that they'll do with donor or with disaster relief donations. So generally how we do it is we do a survey of donors late at the end of the year and then midway through the year we survey charities on the same topic. So we see both angles of the story. I do believe that there will be a report later this year surveying charities on whether they have policies in place regarding sexual harassment. But yes, we do plan to continue having annual surveys on topics that are important for charities and donors to understand, to really give charities something to act on and donors more understanding of what happens when they support a charity. Yeah. Yeah, because it isn't that easy managing an unprofit and maintaining the kind of image you wanna have in the minds of your contributors. But let's move on. We're in COVID now and one of the really awful things about COVID is that it brings some of the rats out of the woodwork. It's really, you know, it's an interesting comment on the human condition that a crisis brings rats out of the woodwork and they do scams perhaps at a greater intensity than they have been ordinarily. So I'd like to talk about that. I'd like to talk about, for example, hacking and reports you've had of hacking and other online, you know, illegal or immoral things that have happened to the business community. Can you talk about it, Rosanne? Yeah, so I think the big one we know was the Twitter hack where they hacked into all the Twitter accounts of all of the top names out there and put out about cryptocurrency. So Twitter addressed it right away, shut down and didn't allow anything else to go through on those accounts and acknowledged that they hadn't been hacked. And actually what was probably the interesting part is their hacking went through employees. And usually that is going to be one of the problems you have. Anytime you have security set in place, it's also super important to make sure the employees understand the importance of it and why they need to not allow this information into the company system. So we're starting to see that with the hacking. We are in a time of fear between health and between the economic situation. And that makes it a perfect storm for those scammers out there, con artists, fraudsters, whatever we wanna call them. They're just really bad actors and they're gonna try to take advantage. They don't care that everybody else is in turmoil. They just wanna take the money and run. We've seen it, especially in international crime with unemployment fraud out of Washington and then they added another layer to that and funneling the money through romance victim scams so that it made it harder to trace for the federal government to follow the money. So we're seeing a lot more of that since COVID-19. Our numbers are up, our numbers for scams, for fraudulent activity, we're seeing it. It just really for us highlights the importance that the consumer really has to be educated and they have to do their homework to find a trustworthy business. And we can't believe everything we see just because something pops up on your phone and it says, hey, this is a great deal. It's like here that you shouldn't do that. So as consumers, we also have to do some educating which is a lot what we're doing here with your show today. This morning in one of my various newspapers about the University of California had a medical facility working on COVID vaccine, the laboratory. And they got attacked by ransomware. Somebody somehow got into their system. Maybe he was by way of an employee who clicked on the wrong email. I think that's what usually happens. And wow, often running. And this is, we're all in dire straits over this. It's an emergency. Finding a vaccine is an emergency. And these guys wanted $1.5 million to unlock what they had locked in the ransomware software. And the university said, we can't put our hands on that much money so quickly. We're only a laboratory. So give us a break. And they negotiated. And finally, it was something like 1.1 or something like that. And they gave them 1.1 in cryptocurrency. So it was completely anonymous and nobody can trace it. And they paid and then luckily the ransomware people released the data. But I have to say that it's bad enough. It's really criminal enough all the time. But to do that to somebody who's working on a vaccine that will save millions of lives is criminal to the nth degree. And as I was saying to you before the show, Rosanne, put me on the jury. Put me on the jury. You know, the problem though, is that these things happen and I think ransomware is a good example of that. And it comes in on somebody who doesn't know the difference. It comes in no matter what kind of security systems you have in place, because it's writing on as a trojan horse on email and it looks innocent enough. And before you know it, it's viral over your network. And there you go. At the end of the day, query is anybody actually investigating these crimes? Is anybody actually prosecuting them? Is anybody actually sending them to jail where they belong? I would do my part if I was on the jury. I assure you that now. But query, are we really doing anything to stop this? We can report it. We can warn people. I'm gonna ask you about that. But the first question is, have we done anything to deter these guys, these rats who come out of the woodwork from anywhere in the world? Can we, have we done anything to stop them? Well, we have in the past, not us personally at the Better Business Bureau, but the data we collect, we also share with the Federal Trade Commission. And then there are obviously FBI, Homeland Security, Secret Service, all of that investigates. And they follow the money and they do catch them. There are times they catch them and they arrest them and they go to jail. Unfortunately, it doesn't deter anybody from doing it and they continue to do it and they're doing it from all over the world. It's so many different places that they are attacking these different companies. So yes, as law enforcement is following it, but they can only do so much, we have a role that we can play as consumers. And probably the one, and I just mentioned it before was the money meals that we're starting to see. They are the romance scam victims. So what they're doing is they're being approached by the scammers in the skies of a romance. And they work months on this. They make, you know, the connection, they build the relationship, they build this trust. And then eventually they ask this person to funnel money for them. Basically, oh, I'm gonna be sending you money from this one account, but I can't for some reason get it out of the country. So I need you to put it through your bank account and send it on. Anytime somebody asks you to transfer money from them for them, it should be a real big red flag, especially someone you've never met in person. You've only developed this relationship online. So as consumers, we too have to play a role and say, hold it, this doesn't sound right. And that's where we can help prevent what's happening out there. Law enforcement is behind it. You have to report it. That is the only way they know what's going on. So it does seem somewhat frustrating at times because we keep hearing about it. So, you know, we just have to keep working to try to stop it. Well, would you confer with your clientele Kelsey when you try to counsel with them and help them? This is a big loss, a big risk. And frankly, if I'm a contributor to a nonprofit and I see my nonprofit was hacked or my nonprofit had to give up a million dollars because of ransomware, I'm not so excited about giving them more money because I figure they were somehow negligent and I give them the money and it winds up in the hands of rats. So, you know, their image, the nonprofit's image is tarnished by having to, they have to report this sort of thing and it's tarnished by the experience and the report. What do you tell them? What is your advice to them about how to avoid this kind of hack? That's a really interesting question, Jay. I mean, going along with what Roseanne has said, a lot of what Better Business Bureau can do is to help advise both consumers and business owners the safe practices to take. You know, you really do need to be vigilant when you're online, it used to be when I used to do presentations to high school students to teach them to avoid being victims of scam. It used to be as easy as saying, well, look for the lock symbol next to the HTTPS, that'll tell you the website's secure. That in itself used to be a great indicator of whether it was a trustworthy website or not. That's no longer the case because scammers have gotten more creative and they're picking up on the things that people like Better Business Bureau, you know, have educated the public. So now the scammers are getting more creative and the scams are getting harder to identify if you're not paying attention. So the same things that we'd be telling businesses or consumers are the same things that I'd be telling charities. I don't personally believe, and this is my, you know, obviously my personal opinion, if a charity were to be hacked, I don't know that it would necessarily tarnish donor trust. That is though why we recommend that charities have privacy policies in place so that we know what measures they're taking to protect donor or client information that they've received via their website or via other forms and email applications. So falling back on privacy practices, that's something that we would really look to strengthen. But I don't personally think that it would tarnish their public responsibility or the public, just because any business, big business, little business, all of them can be victim. And I think the assumption is that charities don't always have as much by way of technology or the top program. So I think if anything, it'd be a little bit more understood that a charity could possibly be hacked. But again, you just need to be vigilant. Well, there was about a year ago, Merisk M-A-E-R-S-K, which is a multinational global shipping company. You've seen their containers everywhere in the world. They were hacked with a ransomware hack and they decided they were going to rebuild their system. And they put all the people from all over the world, traveled, they stopped all operations, brought them into London, I think, and they sat around a table and figured out how they're gonna take little pieces of data from this source and that source and rebuild their system. Now, Merisk had plenty of money to do that. And they had the talent within their organization that could figure it out. The average company, as you say Kelsey, you're not gonna have that or not even close. They don't have the money to even have a robust system in the first place. But the point that I raised is that Merisk is a global company. You'd think they would have systems. You'd think they could avoid this kind of hacking. And so big companies are equally exposed and it's worthwhile for the rat to attack them because the solution, at least in the case of ransomware is to have a backup, isn't it true? So you're saying, I mean, what kind of backup would you say, what kind of advice could you give about creating a backup that would survive a ransomware attack? So really what people need is a backup system that's not attached to what they have online so that if they went into the one system, they're not able to attack the other system. So they need a separate one in the cloud to back it up. But at the same time, they also need something separate physically, like some, especially small businesses that have their servers or their backup in their offices. I think with the storm that we just had this weekend really highlighted, had it hit those businesses, they would have lost that data as well. So it's very important with all of the pertinent information from client information, vendor information, tax returns, all of the accounting, you need a backup in the cloud or a backup virtually that's not in your office. Yeah, I certainly agree. Now one thing that we should cover before we close here is this whole thing about cryptocurrency. Now you can call me a fuddy duddy, but when they started talking about this anonymous kind of payment thing, then trading in anonymous payments. Now there are people I know, nice people, nice people who love this stuff and actually make money with cryptocurrency, but I can't see the need for that kind of thing in the market. I think anonymous money and secret money is very troubling and here they're using it for the worst possible reasons. That's how they got away with it in the University of California with this cryptocurrency thing. How do you feel about that? Is this a positive addition to business or is this something that we should look to outlaw? I think it's something that's gonna have to have a lot more research behind it and because it's still new and it's really risky and speculative, you've gotta be really careful anytime you work with cryptocurrency. And the one thing you need to remember it's not backed by any government entity. And I think we're so used to FDIC, everything they've federally insured and all of that but cryptocurrency doesn't have any of that. So once that code has left you, you're done. The money is gone. And people like it because there is no regulation but the flip of that is the regulation also helps protect you, the consumer and the business. So I think it's one of those that will, we wouldn't recommend it right now but it is possible in time as they figure it out and get through all of that that it becomes less risky but it's still a risky and speculative right now. I think American culture is individualism and privacy. And a privacy is good but the problem is with cryptocurrency and just my view, I haven't studied it much but the problem with cryptocurrency is it allows people to keep their transactions secret such as our president who would like to keep all his transactions secret, even though he's president and it may be things that his tax returns or accounting papers we would like to know because it will tell us about him and his background and his way of operating. And I think there's a, although you don't like the government knowing your business because they could use it against you there's a weighing in balancing here about having secret transactions versus transactions that are what do you call it, classic transactions that are identifiable. That's an ethical question, of course. So we're about out of time, Kelsey. All of this being the case, here we are six months into COVID and the BBB is on the job. What would you advise the business community to be careful of these days? What would you advise them when they're having lots of trouble to stay aware, stay awake, avoid being scammed? What would you advise them? I'm just keeping in communication with who you're doing business with whether that's your general clientele or new ones and follow your gut feeling if something feels off then further investigate. Yeah, totally. They're opportunistic, these people and we have to watch for them. Okay, Rosanne, you get the final word. What would be your advice and your message from the BBB to the business community? And the consumer community. And the consumer, for both, the same message. Ours is to always act with integrity whether you're the business or you're the consumer. It's really about trusting that marketplace between the two of them. So when you're looking for a trustworthy business you need to look to the BBB and look at the record of these businesses. There are a lot of great businesses out there and we really need to support them. Yeah, let me just chime in on that to say that what people say that we have to reimagine ourselves. We have to reimagine everything. We're recreating, we're in a transformative time now. And at the end of the tunnel here, hopefully it's soon, we will have a different world. We are having a different world right now. And you guys are involved in that, and good for you that you are. But bottom line is one of the things that sometimes we focus too much on is the law per se. We should be looking for decency, for ethical conduct, for moral behavior. And that's what the transformative revelation is for me anyway. And I'm sure that you guys are in the same place. Comment, Rosanne, yeah? Yeah, I do. We need to exceed standards. We don't wanna make minimum standards. None of us want somebody who just minimally qualifies. So all businesses really need to exceed standards. And the one thing that won't change in this transformation time is the trust. Trust between business and consumer. Yeah. Okay, well thank you guys for building trust for helping us understand what builds trust in our donors and our business partners and our consumers. Thank you for being kind of the gateway to good business practices. Thank you, Rosanne. Thank you, Kelsey. Hope to talk to you again soon. Thank you, Jay. Thank you.