 everyone to another episode of the non-profit show. We are really excited today to have one of my favorite people on the planet, Jeff Goldner, with the CEO of STEM Sports. We're gonna be talking about something that we've never really delved into, and that is keys to licensing curriculum. This is really one of those topics that I think has a lot of interest for so many people, it's quite mysterious. And Jeff Goldner is gonna get into it with us and help to give us some ideas so that we can figure out if this might be something for us to think about with our non-profits. If we haven't met, I'm Julia Patrick, CEO of the American Non-profit Academy. Jared Ransom, the non-profit nerd. My co-host is not with us today. That stinkers on vacation. She must know, she knew I was scheduled today. I understand. Okay, Jared. She, I think, is in the South with her family. So we will see her shortly. We wanna make sure that we thank all of our presenting sponsors without them. We would not be here. We are marching towards our 600th episode. Hard to believe, hard to say. We wanna thank Blumerang, American Non-profit Academy, your part-time controller, the non-profit nerd, fundraising academy, staffing boutique, and non-profit thought leader. If you wanna get back to any of our episodes that we started now moving well past two and a half years ago, you can find us on Roku. YouTube, Vimeo, Amazon Fire TV, and now on podcast. Kevin Pace, our interpretive executive producer, is now putting all of these episodes on podcast format. So queue us up and you can take us with you when you are on the road. Okay, Jeff Goldner, yay team. I'm super excited to talk with you. You are the man that knows so much about sports and I would say philanthropy in a really interesting twist. Talk to us about how you know about sports from the lens of the professional sector. Yeah, you bet. I mean, it really kind of goes back to a really cognitive experience, you know, and I realized that when I was going to Phoenix Suns games as a youth, I was really absorbing, taking in, certainly what happened on the basketball court, but I was definitely aware of my surroundings and simple things like picking out where the public address announcer was announcing from and who was around him. I was fascinated and always knew at halftime someone was gonna walk out and take a half court shot to one of you at Regal or some other car. And so I was very aware of those things, but it really didn't click for me until literally my last semester in college at University of Arizona when I kind of said, Jeff, you're about to graduate and still haven't figured out what you wanna do. So I really had a deep, you know, conversation in my brain and I realized, whoa, I love sports. I'm not like this, you know, crazy jersey wearing fanatic, but I, you know, I really went back to those times when I was going to Veterans Memorial Coliseum in the Madhouse on McDowell and realized, well, wait a minute, I can work in that. I'm not worthy of being on the field, if you will, or the court, but there's lots of work positions, you know, around that. So I, it just turned out that it was the Colorado Rockies first ever spring training in Tucson while I was down there. So I showed up, knocked on the door and said, how can I help? And they took me in instantly. Phone was ringing off, people were lines outside of the box office, they built a batting cage one morning. It was just kind of all hands on deck. And I loved it, really enjoyed it. And then I actually wanted to move to Denver, coincidentally, and I went up there, post-college, I missed the first season, they're very, very first season, but they did hire me for basically the first working day of 94. I'll be hitting a box office window in three-fifths snow on the ground. And I thought, you're in here. But I thrived and I worked my way up out of the box office and in the front office. And I stayed there for about almost three years, two and a half years with the club. Decided to come back to Phoenix where I'm from, born, raised with my eye on the prize. And that was with Iron Max. And so didn't take too long, but maybe about seven months or so before they hired me in a part-time method, if you will, and it grew into the full-time positions when they hired all the full-time positions to start the 98 season, which truly was called the Marketing Coordinator Game Operations. So that's what I did for the next eight years, eight seasons. Wow. You know, it's such an interesting thing because MLB and the NBA and the NFL and now NHL, of course, they've all really figured out that there's some magic in collaboration with nonprofits in the entertainment side, in the funding side, selling tickets, selling packages. I mean, it's really an interesting aspect of professional sports that we touch on every now and again, but you've been in the hot seat. It's been really fun to watch your career and see how you could navigate through your love of passion for this on the operational side. Now, with STEM Sports, talk to us a little bit about how your for-profit company works and what that looks like with the concept of sports. Yeah, I mean, just to go back a little bit to it, I left the dime backs and I started a marketing agency which still exists today called Agency G. And we get hired for marketing communications work for small businesses, usually tied to sports. And then I still get hired to do events. And so in 2017, STEM Sports came as a client to the agency. And kind of what you said, one of the first things that I identified when I was aware of STEM Sports was, holy cow, any team would just clamor to have a curriculum that really, does a really authentic youth marketing job, if you will. And it answers those community fair initiatives that all teams are looking for, really co-activation. And all the while, and call it what it is, it may not cost the team a dime because it's something they can actually sell to a partner. So it's a piece of inventory now that some teams are looking for because it has those youth marketing, community and public affairs attachments, if you will. So that was my big attractor. However, what we truly are as an education company, we're a STEM education company through and through. And really our nonprofit partners, the way we visualize or actually activate is what schools all across the country. And yes, are they sending us funds? Yeah, and sometimes those are funds through granting and through federal and other state or even county methods to help them put curriculum into their classrooms. But we're glad to work with them and we're very closely with not only those schools, but there's a lot of entities nonprofit that are helping them find curriculum, finding really good engagement for students because education is challenging. Let's just put it that way. And it's short of saying it's broken, it needs fixes. And so we feel we're not gonna change the world. We also feel very confident that we're offering something super unique that we're getting evaluations and say, yeah, the engagement kids are learning through a different method and hands-on. And so that's kind of how we kind of, I guess, net result or how we work with a nonprofit world is through schools and through a lot of boys and girls clubs also a lot of after-school programming as well. So talk to us a little bit about this concept of licensing curriculum versus creating your own. I think a lot of times in the nonprofit sector, we play, as my mother always says, with scared money. We work with a mentality of fear and lack of resources. And yet we don't really understand how we're spinning our wheels and actually, underperforming when we don't think about maybe purchasing or pulling in partners. So I'm wondering if you could kind of address this a little bit for us of why should we look at this? Well, if you're a nonprofit and that's really who you are and what you're delivering, this curriculum or obviously my optics are obviously in K through A. So we're delivering really good learning methodology. Then yeah, we're going to want to seek partners and actually we get sought more than maybe the other way around, but we're being a little more proactive. And so one of the, I guess, one of the real life examples is we are working with an entity called Skyhawks Sports Academy as a great example. And they are for profit, but they do have a foundational arm which we're actually getting more hands-on with and more connected with. But basically, yeah, they're paying us a licensing and a royalty fee where about 30 different states have either corporate run locations or franchisees that are either mom or pop or sometimes even a charter school type scenario might buy into a franchise so that they can teach children the fundamentals of sport. Now, then we come in, we've been in an arrangement with Skyhawks now for four years and we're probably going to be renewing with them fairly soon to continue the expansion of allowing them to use our curriculum and added on, they're really basically marketing to parents to say, hey, if Johnny or Jenny has made overtures that they want to play soccer this summer, as an example, by the way, they can also learn STEM soccer as a great add-on. And PS, learning exclusive relationship with Skyhawks so we can't work with their competition. So it works out very well. They have a very unique offering, it's us that no one else can really get by the Skyhawks. Wow, so you've really delivered, you are delivering to them a good to go, ready out of the box kind of program that it's tested and they know any of their employees can do it. I mean, like how deep is that relationship? Do you have to bring people into your organization do training and so that they get up to speed or what does that relationship look like? So you can actually get the content delivered. Yeah, that's a great question. So if we just pull back and just kind of put the Skyhawks piece aside, one of our methodologies and where we're having a lot of success is we, when I inherited the company, when I went up acquiring the client and I acquired STEM sports, they had very good curriculum on it said like what enough to purchase it. When COVID hit, we rewrote everything. And the reason why we rewrote into a volume two was we really wanted to eliminate any need of training or professional development for any teacher. So we figured if we can, and we actually did it for Skyhawks too because we've entered into this agreement and Skyhawks has what we call coaches ideally. But that coach could be an 18 year old that just graduated high school all the way up to a, maybe a retired teacher, right? That does have the educational experience in anybody in between. It can even be consider a volunteer coach granted they're probably being paid. They basically don't come from an education background necessarily. So our curriculum is very close to being easily implementable without that training. But when we rewrote it, we made that ease even greater. So fast forward to answer your question. Yeah, the coaches in Skyhawks don't need PD. They don't need training, which by the way is really key for I think post COVID when it comes to the education side and teachers because teachers are, we hear all about it, worn out, not paid well enough, often spending them money out for their classmates. Well, we not only make this really easy curriculum to adapt and use, no training, but we also build kits. And our kits go in, go with our curriculum. So it winds up that turnkey experience so that it lands in a classroom. We basically say open box, add students, or add kids when it's maybe in a Skyhawks program. I love that. Now, let's go into that next kind of level of this. And let's say you are a nonprofit that is dealing with, let's say animals, for example. And you want to license or navigate your program into the hands of other organizations. I hear this all the time from nonprofit leaders. They'll say, man, Julia, we've been successful and part of that success is that we get all these other organizations wanting to come to us and learn how did we do it? And they want us to share the secret sauce. How do we protect our curriculum? How do we do it so that we're being thoughtful about this and at the same time, helping to possibly build our intellectual property? Yeah, IP is challenging, right? You can, I mean, heck, I've got the registration mark next to my logo. Well, what does that really mean at the end of the day? How do we monitor that? And the same goes with our curriculum. It's all copyrighted, it's ours. But no one really owns the science behind a sport. So we're on stable ground, but it's not necessarily as strong as before. But so how do you protect it? So, I mean, one of the ways we're protecting ourselves at the moment is we're not providing our products digitally. We just don't, and we will eventually, but we're very much a analog business. Why? STEM is a hands-on method of learning. So what we're trying to do, not making fun of a podcast, we are trying to reduce the amount of screen time that children actually experience while they go through our curriculum. There are times, no doubt, we say refer to this video and welcome to maybe spend some time on a YouTube video to learn something relative to the actual lesson or module that they're in. For the most part, our students are on the playground. They're on the field or court of play learning. They're away from the classroom. Yeah, they can bring a tablet or a laptop or a phone. You know, if we were digital, they could utilize that technology. But when we go there, we'll go there. We'll still offer an analog version. In fact, we've never lost an opportunity because someone said, oh, well, it's not digital. I can't use your curriculum. It's not the case. So the answer to the question is carefulness when you're in digital. Yeah, can someone grab our printed manual to some hundred pages and retype it and repossess it for sure. But we've done everything we can, I guess, to protect ourselves from that. So definitely encourage getting an IP, copyright attorney. So every time we produce a new curriculum, like we've got tennis, probably we're gonna publish here pretty soon. Well, as soon as we publish, we're sending him the file. He's going to file it for IP protection. And then we actually are doing some international work. And so we're slowly exploring that, but we're having our attorney and our copyright attorneys lead us that path before we engage with anybody overseas. So there are some legal ways that you wanna go through digital. Yeah, it's scary when we know it can go everywhere. When we do go digital, we're gonna go through a licensing methodology, typically in the education field, that means that if we're gonna sell a digital opportunity to a school, well, they're going to buy based on their tablet count. And they're gonna have a use of that curricula for maybe a year, a school year, or maybe they buy a two or three year. And so it'll hopefully stay within the confines. But again, there's ways around that, those are the methodologies we're utilizing at the moment. I love it because it seems to me like this whole subscription model, the educational system is really on the forefront of this. I mean, in so many ways, when we think about charter schools and homeschooling, and there's just so many ways to get this out. And we're seeing this at the university level even. It's a way, used to be professors selling their books, selling their curriculum through their own books. And you had to buy the textbook that the professor wrote, right? It's somewhat reminiscent of that. I can see where we've kind of moved through this. Let me ask you another thing, because this is, again, you're sitting across the table from us with the for profit lens. And I know you personally, so I know you've done a lot of philanthropic work and you've had a lot of philanthropic leadership throughout your life, your family. So I know you understand this, but how do we look at valuing and marketing curriculum, or if we use the word programming, how do we even begin to figure out what this value might be? Yeah, it's a challenging question. It's, in our case, we're finding, I mean, like I kind of mentioned before, schools are kind of our nonprofit partner, but we're also exploring even deeper. It's really important to us. I mean, individually, our staff, I'm kind of like, our staff, we all are connected in some way or shape to a nonprofit. Some cases it might be through the church, or it might be through these other things. And so one of the things we take a lot of inquiries from the nonprofit world in ways we can work with them. So just recently, one of my staff just happened to mention, big brothers, big sisters. And I said, you know, I think there's a way we can work with them, because we have another product that takes our school-based curricula, that actually cuts it up and makes it a month long, I'm sorry, monthly subscriptions where a child receives a lesson with the actual gear at home. And next, they'll get a basketball and they'll get a baseball and a softball. All of these things will come to them over the course of the year. So, you know, we bridged that gap and said, hey, big brothers, big sisters, is this something? And sure enough, we were right on because they just had their national meetings and education was a huge platform. So now we're actually giving a big and a little something to do together with these lessons. So we're really proud of that. We're talking in Special Olympics, Arizona. We've talked to everyone from Boy Scouts. We've spoken with just lobbyist entities like this could be a really good methodology. Boys and girls clubs are big activators of our curriculum, right? So I guess, you know, as we make those, as we continue to make those endeavors and partnerships and collaborations which obviously are very, you know, mutually equal, that's where the value proposition, I think raises itself and gets some of that awareness. In fact, we had someone that was at Boy Scouts that left and went to a for-profit after school program. We were one of her first calls. And again, she saw, you know, it's really at the end of the day, it's the impact piece and what they're making and making a difference with their kids. And granted, she's wearing a different hat, but we were thinking we were going to be doing something as deep as Boy Scouts would earn a patch, you know, the STEM sports after they went through our curriculum. So that model and that sort of thing was there. At the end of the day, we're a STEM education company and our results are driven to drive students to a queer path that is STEM-scale enabled. And so, yeah, we're K through A, but we actually might, you know, make a kid click, if you will. We've been told, Jeff, you're probably going to develop the next general manager in basketball in the MBA. Or maybe we're going to have a kid that realizes they want to be an engineer and they might build a stadium down the road. Things like that are all in our framework and if we're not perpetuating jobs as a STEM education company, then we're really just an education company, not a STEM education company. How interesting, you know, it's, I think with, especially in our country, how we can just become so enamored by the sports hero, we forget about the sports business. I mean, think about when you were going to school, there was no sports management. There was no nonprofit management, really, to study. As these programs are now, I mean, they're super, super evolved. And so I can see where this kind of has a piece. And I would imagine there've got to be nonprofits that have programming, that have curricula, that if they could think outside the box a little bit, they could use your story kind of to understand that there are opportunities for this. Yeah, you know what I mean? Yeah, you make me think, I mean, I would go back probably, you know, boys and girls clubs make the most sense, right? They have the facilities for what we're doing. So for us, I mean, I guess how maybe you're a nonprofit listening and you're thinking, I got curriculum, how do I apply it? So whatever, you know, whoever you're trying to reach, yeah, you find these partnerships that can really help you use a baseball term, tee it up, or golf term, so that you're just perpetuating what you have through a partnership that's really gonna benefit from it in the long run. So, you know, we're thrilled with any of those types of opportunities and we treat everybody equally. Obviously, if it's really kind of, I guess it's really interesting not this is perpetuating this thought behind, we really are serving the nonprofit world. It's the best way to look at it because at the end of the day, that's sort of how school, you know, obviously thrives and then those partnerships, boys and girls clubs are certainly some wise YMCA's that have engaged and used us in our partnership with Skyhawks, granted, yep, for-profit with their foundational arm is starting to perpetuate more partnerships for them as well that we all get to play with. So it's been a lot of fun. Wow, well, you know, this is one of my favorite questions that I get to ask and we don't have a lot of time left, but I'm really interested in how do you know or how should we know when we're getting it right and when it's working? Because I can see we're in the concept and the framework of licensing. These things go to other parts of the country. You can't just drive down the street, pop in and after school program and say, yep, that's working. How do you know? How do you even register this? You know, in our case, I guess it's probably similar tactics that nonprofit would take on and we're trying to figure that out constantly. Our main user is a teacher. Okay, so let's just call that what it is. So he or she is very busy. I think that probably at the prospects of all of a sudden, maybe administration says, oh, by the way, that giant box that's in the room, you start using it. It's called STEM Sports. You've got a STEM basketball kit there. So then what happens? I think this is the way I translate what the question would be. How do you know if it's working? So we have some methodology digital that we're constantly asking these teachers to do. One is assess the students, assess them before they even start a lesson. Where are they at? So do they understand things like forces and gravity? Which by the way, the common person calls that triveling. We just call force and gravity and basketball. What's their concept and what's their reality with those science concepts? And then take the assessment after you've gone through the entire lesson. Let's see what improvement have we shown? Now we can say, I can tell you we're at about a 30% improvement mark for pre-assessment to a post. That's that great improvement. Almost like a call it failing this to a C or even a D to an A, right? So we're proud of that, that part is happening. The second piece is a survey. Just flat out, hey, teachers, how's it going? And we're very upfront with them. If it's not going well, we wanna know what we do to improve. How can we adjust? Humbly, we're getting great scores. We're going through a process right now where we're really trying to get even more survey results from those that are using it. And in our world, sometimes we're shipping to a warehouse. So our purchasing department contact, we don't know who our end user is. So it's challenging. So what I would just, I guess the answer to the question is understand who your end user is to get that evaluation to see how is it really working? And also, we do work with a lot of nonprofits. We actually sign agreements with them and say, listen, we're gonna give you our curriculum for free. Here's all we ask, sign a pilot agreement just so we have a thinner stand that's in a really formal working partnership. But you know what, there's only like a one line like what we receive feedback. It's all we want. We just want to know how it's going. We're about to work with the only Arizona State accredited special needs school. We don't know the answer. Does our curriculum work there? They think it does. We'll be shipping out a kit to them this week and they're gonna start the process of working our curriculum with kids that are, or I should just say students that are learning at our K through eight level, mostly through through eight level to see how it's going. So we're really excited about that to see how that's gonna work. You know, I really appreciate that you said the feedback and the measurement because this is one of the things that we're seeing across the board and duh, we should be seeing this but we're seeing funders say, look, we need metrics. We need data. It's no longer a benevolent act for us just to spend money. Now you're gonna have to report back. And so this is something that for the nonprofit sector has been somewhat of a shake up in the last decade. It should not be, but it has been. And so where you're going with this is really a trend that we see going across our sector. And really quickly in education, that's, you know, there's all these funds, but more than ever, there are major federal grant funding that's coming post-COVID to help restore schools their best possible. So guess what they're asking, you know, their funding, there's a lot of good funds out there, but you know better, we can't just keep continuing to expect it if we don't have results to share. So we're doing that. And we've got Isaac School District as a great example in our neighborhood shadow of our office that had a huge year using our curriculum and we have to provide them results so that they can show that back with their funding source, which was the fence and the county. County actually receives the funding, but they still have to answer to, you know, higher columns, so it's been. Yeah, you know, I really appreciate you bringing that up because we're seeing that absolutely, the amount of funds from the built back better COVID. I mean, just even general, you know, funders and family foundations and corporate foundations that really leaned into funding new and different things because of COVID has really flushed a lot of cash into the marketplace. And in some cases, not understanding how you have to respond to those, you know, those reports or, you know, re-engaging with those funders. It's a huge mistake for nonprofits that can't understand that. Yeah, you got to survey, you know, your work, you got to really understand, you know, get that feedback and be able to give it in a consumable way too, it's very important. Yes, thank you for saying that. Absolutely, a consumable way. Well, again, Jeff Goldner, one of my favorites, if you were with us on the Green Room Chatter, this man and I share a very unique thing that we are both in Cooperstown, the MLB Hall of Fame, the museum, for something kooky that we did with one of my publications back in the day. And so when I go to my great reward in the sky or down below that I was in Cooperstown, that's like one of my top five, I got to say. We're creeping up on 21 years coming this later on this summer. Is that right? Wild. Wow, okay, well, now I'm feeling old, my friend. Well, here's Jeff Goldner's information, president and CEO of StemSports, stemsports.com. Their website's really interesting because they pull together these links between how children can learn using the experience of sport, what that translates to in the greater community. We're not talking about, you know, these super kids that are gonna go on to be professional athletes. We're talking about regular average kids that can become excellent in a different way because of their connection to sport. It's a fascinating drill down. For somebody like me who loves sports but has no sports capacity, Jeff, I really saw some things in my life that, you know, it really resonated with me. So this is a super fascinating thing. You have been really generous and being candid and sharing your knowledge with us. I know a lot of times in the for-profit sector, we are fearful of sharing our inside processes and things that we do to be successful. So my friend, thank you for doing that with us today. My pleasure. I always, I feel like I win with transparency, so I will continue to do so. Oh my God, quote of the day. I always win with transparency. Okay, yeah, I'm loving that. That's a good one, that's a good one. Well again, I'm Julia Patrick, CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy. My interpret co-host, Jared Ransoms, on some well-deserved vacay this week. So we'll see her back shortly. We wanna thank all of our presenting sponsors who are with us day in and day out as we march towards our 600 episode. I keep saying that because even I can't believe it. Our thanks and gratitude go out to Blumerang American Nonprofit Academy, your part-time controller, the non-profit nerd, fundraising academy at National University, staffing boutique, and the non-profit thought leader. Jeff Goldner, you are a treasure. Thank you, sir. Thank you, Julia, I really appreciate that. Thanks so much. It was a lot of fun. As we end every episode, we'd like to remind everybody and ourselves, I think. Stay well so you can do well. Have a great day.