 Anyway, welcome to Nonprofit Tech Club Austin, and we appreciate your taking the time. I know we have some Facebook live viewers right now, and you're very welcome. We will have a recording of this program on YouTube, on the TechSoup page eventually, and also if Sean has any slides, we'll post those on SideShare, but we are glad to have you, and you can look at this 24-7 in another day or so at your leisure, if not live. We are a part of a network of tech clubs across the nation in the world. N10, Nonprofit Technology Network, was our first sponsor here in Austin, and that took us certainly nationwide, and then TechSoupConnect joined us, and that made us have a global reach, which we really like that. Get in some really interesting conversations with our friends all over the world. Programs are free to all. We are managed entirely by a group of volunteers, and Sean Hale, our guest speaker today, is one of those, like Kevin. They do all their work for us, free of charge, and we also are very inclusive, and we like to invite people of all backgrounds and skill levels to our meetings, and we went online last year with COVID, starting in, I guess it was April, and we've just kept going because we've had more viewers and participants, and it's just really super easy, so we will see as COVID progresses here, we will probably keep doing Zoom meetings online through the end of this year, and then we'll review next year and see what we can do, and of course you would guess our mission is to help individuals and non-profits seeking tech tools and techniques to make their work easier and more effective. We have had a great year so far. We're in our second half now, so please come back and join us for future programs we'd love to have you. I guess I mentioned so ready, we're all volunteer. We are soon, this fall, going to morph into not just us, we're not going to be just us, we're going to be the Texas chapter of TechSoup Connect, and that will allow us to draw in people from all over the state, and most everything will remain the same, but our programs are probably going to get even more interesting, and so stay tuned for that. We'll still have our group page on Facebook and our event listing and all that. We wanted to showcase here our wonderful volunteers, again who do their work free of charge for us, and so if you have questions at any time or you just like to, you know, hook up with them, LinkedIn is a great place to do that. Locally here in Austin we have Capital Factory as a partner, and we're very grateful for that. When we were meeting in person we had space dedicated to our programs at Capital Factory, and we love that, and they stayed with us through COVID, and so we are in touch with them every week just about, and they post our events on their event page. Capital Factory is expanded into Houston and Dallas by the way, and I think maybe they have their site in San Antonio, I don't know, but it's a startup hub, and a tech hub, and really a friendly, great co-working and educational space, and also to ramp up your startup. It can help you do that if it's a social good startup or a for-profit one, and here are some links for you, and so connect there if you would like, and we do have this slide deck with all these links on our Facebook group page in case you would like that, so I am now going to stop sharing and I'm going to let Sean Hale, who is a former COO, I guess it is, of Mission Capital, which is a long-time, highly valued local non-profit support partner here in Austin. He has some really good knowledge from that experience, and also, he developed a new platform, he's gone freelance, but he's also a developer, which is a consultant directory, and you'll love to hear about that, so I'm going to let him self-introduce further, and I really, really appreciate Sean speaking today. Thanks so much. Carolyn, thank you. I'm going to, speaking of technology, you guys, speak up if my slides aren't starting to show up. They are. They look good. Okay, all right, so folks, please do feel free to interrupt me if there's an important question that really has to do with what I'm talking about. We'll also try and do Q&A at the end, but this seems like a small friendly group, so we can also take some questions while we're doing this. Of course, first of all, thank you, Carolyn, for organizing this group and making it all possible. Carolyn, for those of you who don't know her, she is the glue that holds the non-profit tech club together, and Eli van der Giesen up in Vancouver was also key to this. He had to jump off the call before we officially got started, and of course, thank you everybody who's in attendance for wanting to serve your non-profits and your missions better. So I'm Sean Hale. I've been doing non-profit nuts and bolts, back offices, what have you for more than 20 years now. By day, I'm a consultant now. I help non-profits strengthen their administrative functions. So finance, HR, IT, operations, those sorts of things for small and medium-sized non-profits. And I'm also a co-founder of Philanthrop Force, which is a tool that helps non-profits to find their next consultant online. We have hundreds of consultants listed, and this is a service that is free to non-profits. So at Philanthrop Force, I get to talk to a lot of non-profit and foundation leaders, and very often they'll tell us about how they want to have more options than they can get just by word of mouth, but when they're not talking to us about that, they're asking us how they can vet the candidate pool so they can get the right match. And that's a lot of what we're going to be talking about today is getting those candidates there and making sure that you do get the right ones, to get the right one finally hired to help your non-profit out. And folks, don't worry about taking notes today. In addition to the recording of this being available, all this content, we're in the process of publishing it as a three-article series. The first article has already been published. The next two will be available soon and I'd be happy if you email me. I'd be happy to give you advanced copies of those articles so that you don't even have to wait. And I do have just a really quick legal disclaimer, and what it kind of boils down to is, please don't sue us. This is all good general information, but at the end of the day, a professional is key to identifying and managing exceptions to that general information. For example, for many non-profits, bringing a margarita machine in on Fridays, that could be really great for staff morale. But it could backfire at other non-profits. For example, mothers against drunk driving. That's where a consultant can help you make sure that you're adapting the advice appropriately to your non-profit. So why would you want to move beyond word of mouth? Because word of mouth, it is what most non-profits use right now to find the specialists and consultants that help them out. Well, if nothing else, and we'll talk about a number of reasons during this presentation, if for no other reason, consider doing it because of money. Because if you're going to spend $5,000, $10,000, $20,000, $50,000 or more, you really deserve a great match, right? Not just a match. And why wouldn't you just go with the friend's reference? You might be wondering, because a lot of non-profits do that, right? They reach out to the person that worked and friend says, oh yeah, I like Terry. Well, that person, very well, we have been a great match for your friend and their organization. But that doesn't mean they're the best match for your non-profit. Your non-profit is unique. It has its own unique history, mission, people involved with it, culture. And so all those things are important to take into account when you are looking for your next consultant. Now, I'm going to be talking about some work that might be more than you're used to doing when you're looking for a consultant. And why would you want to do extra work? There are lots of reasons. Number one reason is that we human beings, and I think everybody on the call is a human being, we're kind of, we fall prey to a lot of biases, right? And these biases, they lead us to make poor choices sometimes. For example, we will tend to favor the person who gives us warm fuzzies. That's what we do by nature. And you know, that's a perfectly good criteria if you're looking for friends or a romantic partner. But it's usually not a good criteria if you're looking for the best match for the job, right? And so we're going to be talking about good processes to help us acknowledge and reduce that bias so that we can really make sure that the person that we end up hiring is an outstanding match for our organization. So, step one, we want to define the project, right? By answering questions like who, what, when, where, why, how, that helps us improve the odds of getting the right consultant. And it helps get all of our people in our organization pulling in the same direction because different people might have different ideas, even though, you know, we all agree that we need a strategic planner. Everybody might have a different idea about what that really means. And folks, please note that for larger projects, consider hiring a consultant to do a small kind of figuring out the details project with you, because a good consultant can help you make sure that you really understand the problem or the opportunity that your organization has, because oftentimes it's different from what you might think at the beginning. They can help you really surface those, those important details that can change what you're looking for in the consultant who's going to take on the big project. So, what kind of details might you want in addition to who, what, when, where, why, and how? Well, you can start with smart goals, right? S, for specific. What do we want to accomplish? And why is this goal important? M, for measurable. How much and how will we measure success? Is it a finished website? Is it a 50 page plan? Is it mission clarity? A, is for achievable, right? Is this project realistic? Have we accounted for things like financial constraints and other things like that? R, relevant, right? Are the goals of this project that we want to do, are those consistent with our mission values and strategic plan? Because sometimes it might be a really awesome idea. It might even be aligned with the mission, but it's not aligned with our strategic plan that really helps us make sure we stay on course for the next three to five years. And T, time bound, when will we finish this project? Right? It's good to know that up front and get everybody on the same page. Your, your staff and your internal stakeholders and your consultant that you're going to be looking for. You all want to be on the same page about, yeah, we need this wrapped up by December 31st. Of course, you're going to want to start to do a preliminary definition of activities that can change over the course of the engagement and endearing project design. But you want to start spelling out, you know, if you really have in mind that you're going to have a gigantic gala at the big hotel downtown or whatever, go ahead and put that in there. Budget, right? You have an idea of what this is going to cost, or maybe you already know that you have this grant that's going to cover $25,000 or whatever. Name that, because that's going to help define whether or not you can add bells and whistles and all sorts of other important conversations. Financing, what stage is the financing in, right? Has it been secured? Has it been partially raised? Has none of it been raised? Those are going to be important factors for you to understand internally and for your consultant as you are looking to find the right person. Tea, I know we already discussed tea when we were going to find it, so activities, budget, financing, timeline, major dates and milestones like maybe you need to have the strategic planning line up with the annual board retreat or whatever. To find that up front, that could be important, especially if one of your top consultants always takes the first week in July to go do something with their family. You want to define your organization roles, right? Who in the organization has decision-making power with this project? Who has an advisory role, but not decision-making power? Who's going to be the point of contact for the consultant? Because the last thing you want for you or the consultant is for them to have 20 points of contact. I'll just make a mess. And I see some things going into the chat, folks. I can't look at the chat, so Carolyn, please do stop me if there's something there that is a good reason for us to pause. You also want to look at the consultant's role and define that up front, right? Are you looking for an advisor, somebody to do research, somebody to do analysis, to diagnose, to propose solutions, to implement those solutions? There are lots of different things that a consultant can do for you, and it's important to define that up front. And the above list, it's not comprehensive, and you're not even going to always use all the different things that I just named. For example, often get hired to provide ongoing financial advisory to nonprofits, among other services, and a traditional timeline doesn't come into play much. It does a little bit, but not so much. All these project details that you're going to be building out, these are things that you want to share freely internally to make sure everybody on your team is pulling in the same direction, and you want to share this with your applicants so they can help self-select and really understand what you're looking for and help you figure out jointly whether or not it's a good match. You're also going to want to define criteria for your consultants, right? And you want to do this before you begin publicizing or doing a search. We'll talk a little bit more about that in just a second. Here are some of the potential criteria you might want to consider. Things like skills and credentials, right? Do they need to have an MBA or a fundraising certificate? Are you looking for a certain amount of experience in the field or a certain number of years of consulting? Is emotional intelligence an important criteria for this project? How about personal lived experience? Is it important, for example, that the consultant have meaningful lived experience among the population that you serve? How about affinity for your mission? Is that an important criteria? Do you want that person to at least be able to speak to and understand what your mission is? A lot of times, you can tell a lot just by their cover letter and whether or not they understand what you do or how much they might care about it. Location, is that important to you? Can they work for you from another state away or across the country or from Timbuktu, for that matter? Or is it critical that they be local? Being open to a large talent pool from around the country, around the world, will get you a lot more opportunities for great matches, but sometimes it is critical that that person live in your community. Can the work be done remote, onsite, both? Is it important that they play well with others? Is it important that this consultant be forthright with you? Do you need somebody who can maybe speak some hard truths? Or is that not an important criteria? Or maybe you really need somebody who's going to sugar coat it? I don't know. That's up to you. I do want to make a special note here, though, folks, about unicorns. Unicorns, they are magical creatures. They have magical powers. They perform miracles. And in my experience in nonprofits, I'm not saying it's the case for anybody on the call right now, but in my experience in nonprofits, I've seen over and over again how sometimes we expect to get a unicorn out of these processes. And if you have a magical treasure chest, you should totally go for that unicorn. But otherwise, maybe to have different expectations because that unicorn, that person who's going to check all the boxes, who's going to do all the hard work for you, who's perfect in every way, it really does take a magical treasure chest to be able to attract and retain that person. If you don't have that magical treasure chest, there are some things you can do. And that really becomes to prioritizing your criteria, right? What among all your criteria are required, right? That you absolutely must have, like maybe you really do need somebody who has at least three years of experience doing capital campaigns. But it might be preferred for them to have 10 or 20 years. Those are different levels of experience there, right? You want to prioritize those criteria now before you meet any of the candidates. Going through this process, making sure you and your team are on the same page, this is going to help you to acknowledge, manage, and minimize bias. And it's also going to help you to manage expectations within your organization. So how are we going to evaluate people? Well, you can build an evaluation matrix. And because really, you can and you should expect to get multiple applicants. And why do we want to use an evaluation matrix? Why do we want to minimize bias? Well, again, human beings like me, and I expect every other human on this call, we all have a certain level of bias. Sometimes we know about it. Sometimes it's unconscious. And whether it's, you know, we want to pick the person who we want to have coffee with, or the person we might have bias because, oh, yeah, this person went to the same university I did, or they went to the rival university. Maybe I don't like that rival university. Sometimes we also have much more serious unconscious bias. And research has shown that we human beings, we often judge people unfairly because of things like physical appearance, age, gender, national origin. So this evaluation matrix, it's kind of like a scorecard. And I'm going to show you an example of one here in just a second. It's going to help you make sure that you're comparing apples to apples, right? You're using the same criteria for every single person and criteria that you came up with in advance. And this is a great way to keep that bias down. You're going to create it now because after you've seen the applicants come in, bias can start to creep in, right? You might have already seen, oh, my gosh, this person went to that other university or whatever it is. And ID, in an ideal world, you're going to build your evaluation matrix, your criteria for your consultant and your interview questions kind of all together. They kind of come as a package because they're going to all influence each other. So what does an evaluation matrix look like? For those of us who haven't seen it before, I have one here on the screen for you and email me. I'd be happy to share this Excel spreadsheet with you. And the basic idea is it's just a quick scorecard. So on the left hand side, you have the names of the different candidates. Then you have a bunch of columns here with required skills, right? These are things that the person must have. So either they have them, so they get to keep on going in the process, or they don't have them in which case, they're out. They are off the island, right? You also have preferred skills and experience, right? These are things that for all those people who have to check all the boxes on the required skills, these are the things that are going to help you see who really stands out in the crowd, the people who have a lot of your preferred skills and experience. Folks, another key factor in this whole process is making sure that you have buy-in from your stakeholders. Program participants are one of your stakeholders, right? The people that you serve and the people who might be participating in this project that you are bringing a consultant in for, right? The people that this project is going to impact. You want to involve them with a real voice in the project design because that's going to make the design better and it's going to make their participation a whole lot better if they know that their thoughts and ideas were taken into account. The other set of stakeholders that you really want to keep an eye on into taking into account are your key decision makers, right? That might be your board, the executive director, key staff, key funders because the last thing you want to do is spend lots of your time and lots of the consultant's time in this whole process of finding the right person just to have a situation where at the last minute, a critical decision maker denies support, right? You want them on board from day one, but I'm not saying you necessarily need 100% buy-in or 100% consensus, but you absolutely do need critical mass for project success. We get a lot of questions about requests for proposal, RFPs. Should you do one? Shouldn't you do one? The answer is maybe. And for bigger projects, especially where there's a lot more detail, more formality, budgets of like 50,000 and above, absolutely you're going to want to go a little bit more of the RFP route, but I have some important considerations free to keep in mind. Requiring a full RFP can really create a serious barrier to entry. Many of the most qualified, most experienced consultants will not participate in an open RFP process. Why not? Well, it's a big time investment for them to fill out the whole proposal. They're going to be competing against dozens of other proposals, so they know upfront that I might have a low chance of payoff after I put all this work into my proposal. If they know that you as a nonprofit are allowing dozens and dozens of proposals, that also signals to the consultant that you haven't done your homework to find good potential matches up front. You're just kind of shotgunning it out there everywhere. Most of the most experienced consultants, they really value a discovery process where they get in, they have conversations with you before ever putting in a proposal. It's hard for them to understand your nonprofit and it's unique challenges and opportunities if they haven't had a chance to really engage with you upfront. And one of the biggest things that's going to keep people from following up with your RFP is that they've seen that the winner is frequently the lowest bidder rather than the best match. And a lot of these folks, especially the most experienced, the most qualified, they're not necessarily going to be the lowest bidder. So instead of an RFP, if you had been considering one, how would you consider a targeted approach where you identify four or five, six consultants who look like a strong match? You reach out to them personally and share their project details. And even though I have a picture of a pretty VIP invitation on the screen, an email would be fine. And in that email, you're going to ask them if they would like to be one of a handful of hand-picked candidates to be considered for the opportunity. Doing an approach along these lines, it's going to get you greater appreciation from these folks. It's going to start building a positive relationship with them from day one. And that's going to be a critical part of your whole project success. It's going to be better for your reputation, both as a professional and for your organization. It's going to get you more participation from those highly experienced candidates. And so that's going to get you better matches. And now, let's talk a little bit about the search, right? And in an ideal world, we are casting a big net. Just in Texas, we estimate that there are 1,000 independent consultants serving nonprofits. And you want to cast a big net and have all those people potentially at the table, right? And you don't want to have just casting that that's going to have four or five consultants. You want to have as many as possible. Around the country, there are tens of thousands of great talented people serving nonprofits. And you want to get the best people to the table, you cast that big net. And this has always been a best practice. So step one in this is by looking at nonprofit consultant directories. And there are some regional ones. And so if you are outside of Texas, you might actually have a state nonprofit association. Check with them. They might have one or be able to point you to one. And there are a few national ones as well. Philanthrophorus, of course, in full disclosure, I'm a co-founder of Philanthrophorus, director of nonprofit consultants. And there are a couple of other national ones that you may want to take a look at CGT Connects, which is based up in the Chicago area. And nonprofit.ist, which is based in the Raleigh, North Carolina area. Where else are you going to search? Because you want to ideally bring as many people to the table as possible. There are professional groups out there where you can look. There are informal ones. You might find them on Facebook or LinkedIn. Some of those are organized by specialty, others by region. There are also formal professional groups out there like the Association of Fundraising Professionals or the Grant Professionals Association. And so if you're looking for a grant professional, by all means reach out to them as well. And then you have your personal networks, right? Yours and your staffs, your boards, your stakeholders. And so the more people are sharing this opportunity on their social media, LinkedIn, Facebook, all that, the more potential applicants you're going to get into your pool. And so now great. You've gotten a whole bunch of great applications in the door. How in the world are you going to narrow the field, right? Because you don't want to have a phone interview with 30 people as awesome as they all are. So here's a pro tip before we get fully into narrowing the field. And that is having a blind application process can help reduce bias. What do I mean by that? That means that at this point in the process before, if you're the person who's kind of running the search, you don't look at the applications as they come in. In fact, they go to somebody else in your organization and that person's only job in this process, their only job, is to take all the applications, print them out, and use a big marker to hide the name of the applicant, where they live, and any other critical information that might bias the selection process, like the university they attended, or things like that. So that when those applications get to your desk, you're not distracted by, oh my gosh, they went to Texas A&M or whatever university is that might not be friends with the university you went to. Things like that. So you have these 20, 10, 15, however many applicants that have come in the door. That matrix we showed you earlier, that's going to help you to screen those resumes, right? And you're going to see who has all the required criteria. If somebody doesn't, they're out, right? Because those are required criteria. And then for all those folks who check all the boxes for required criteria, you go on to your preferred criteria, right? And you advance the strongest two, three, four people, maybe five, to the interview phase. So let's talk about the interview. And to continue getting the best match, to continue to minimize that bias, to continue comparing apples to apples, you're going to use a similar matrix, right? Except that this is going to be based around your interview questions. But similarly, you build it out in a matrix, right? And if you're going to be interviewing by panel, you want to have the same panel in every interview because the last thing you want to do is interview four candidates. But Terry on your team only shows up to two of the interviews. Well, Terry's not in a very good position to really compare apples to apples because they've only seen two of the four apples, right? So to avoid that situation, you want to get time blocked out on everybody's calendars weeks in advance before you even start publicizing the opening, right? Right now, it's the beginning of August. If you're wanting to interview people in the middle of September, go ahead and block out time on people's calendars for September 15th to 30th, right? So that you have those times available. And remember, use the same matrix and the same set of questions for each interview. And folks, I know some of us, we can't do this in an ideal world of hopefully you have somebody in your personal network, an HR professional who can help you design interview questions so that you can avoid those questions that are illegal or irrelevant or unhelpful. And these are the same ones that you don't want to use in an employment situation. Things like, when were you born? Because that can lead to age discrimination or have you ever been arrested? Because arrest is not a conviction and it's usually unrelated to the job. Questions like, are you a U.S. citizen? Because that can lead to discrimination based on national origin. Do you have a disability? You do not want to run afoul of the Americans with Disabilities Act? Or people's family staffs? There are all sorts of questions like this that you do not want to have. Do you have a pro tip here for you, though, folks? Speak frankly about your organization's weaknesses and challenges because the consultant is going to figure it out sooner or later. And what happens if you are not upfront with a consultant about this? Well, it's going to damage trust. It might turn out that they are not the right match after all. That they were a good match for the organization they thought you were, but not the organization you actually are now that these skeletons are coming out of the closet, right? And so you can end up with a situation where they might be with you halfway through the gig, but then once they see that, oh my gosh, there's a big fire here and they should have told me about this two months ago, they might lose their enthusiasm or they might not even have the skill to be fighting that fire, right? Or they might walk away from the gig because you broke trust with them and they might suspect more surprises to come. Tell them about if you have any fires, most nonprofits have one or two fires at least, and if there's any fire that's relevant, it's not going to come as a surprise to the consultants. They've seen it all before, an experienced consultant has seen all this stuff before, so just go ahead and tell them. If you're still not convinced, I'd encourage you to think about those times that you or a friend went into a new employment situation and after you've been there a few weeks or months, or maybe even on day one, right? You started finding skeletons in the closet like big scary skeletons. How did you feel? And what happens to your warm fuzzies about the organization, about the people who brought you into the organization? So now you have your final candidate, right? You have your, and they are awesome, they're almost a unicorn even. They're so awesome and you have a couple of good backup people just in case. What are you going to do? Well, you want to check their references and again, build a little matrix so you can be sure to be asking the same questions to each person that you are reaching out to for a reference, right? In an ideal world, these references will be from similar organizations or organizations that they've done similar projects with. That's not going to happen in all cases. Most consultants, they might only work with three, four clients in any given year and so they might not have a perfect exact match, but certainly ask for that if it's available. And then background checks. You want to run those in certain circumstances and only in circumstances. For example, it's necessary if they're going to be touching HIPAA protected data, or if they're going to be getting deep into like accessing your bank accounts or other financial data, or if they're going to be interacting with vulnerable populations. But if it's not something like that, don't run a background check, right? If you do want to run one, remember, just like in an employment situation, that context is important, right? Something might come up on somebody's criminal background check. A 20 year old DWI for somebody that you're looking to to help you out with a bookkeeping, probably not relevant to the job, right? You should let that one go. A DWI two months ago from somebody who's going to be helping out with driver safety instruction, that's really, really relevant. And so it's important to keep those things in mind and not just like a blanket, any kind of criminal record rules people out. So you got your person, they references all checked out. We're good. So we're at the contract phase. It is time to sign that contract. And this is a big milestone for the project. Congratulations. And do remember, even though you can celebrate here a little bit, there's still more work to do, right? You still have to do the project. And a key piece of that is how you as a nonprofit are going to interact with that consultant. You can win lots of brownie points and continue to build up those warm pleasies by things like a timely, thorough communication, continuing to be honest about things, including around those things that are weaknesses or embarrassing, establishing a welcoming presence for this consultant so they know that they are valued and welcome in your space and treating them with dignity and respect. And of course, folks, please, please, please remember to send a brief thank you note to all of your applicants. Why would you do that? Well, because it's the courteous thing to do. It helps your reputation as a professional and as an organization. Those consultants are a lot more likely to speak well of you in the community if you have closed the loop and taken two minutes to send them a quick thank you note. And they're all more likely to apply for future opportunities just because they weren't the right match for this one doesn't mean they're not the right match for your next opportunity a few years from now. One last note here. You might work for an organization or you personally might value justice, equity, diversity and inclusion. Or maybe you're intrigued by all the studies that show that diverse teams get better results. Or maybe you feel strongly like we do at Flanthorforce that everybody deserves a seat at the table. If that's the case, I want to let you know that we are publishing a three article series and the third article is going to be by Cheryl and Peyton who is a expert in this particular area and she will, this article is going to help you intentionally with justice, equity, diversity and inclusion practices into your next consultant search. So if that's something that's important to you, email me. I'll be happy to send you that article so you can get on it. You don't even have to wait for us to publish it. And folks, that is that. I'm Sean Hale. My email address you can reach me at shale at flanthorforce.org. And I believe we have, we have some time for Q&A, right, Caroline? Yes. Cohen says, I get that folks aren't willing to participate in RFPs. Can you speak to using instruments like MSA or SOW? I don't know what those abbreviations mean. I want to say SOW is like a statement of work. MSA. Master's service agreement. So, and Cohen, feel free to jump on the audio if you like, but that the general spirit of it, whatever the, whatever you're asking that consultant to do to apply, the more work that they have to put into it and the more that they get a sense that there are, the general point is yeah, the more work they have to do to apply and especially if they get the sense that there are going to be dozens of other candidates, the less likely they are to do it. Of course, the other variable in that is the size of the project, right? If this is a six-figure project, well, there are going to be a whole lot more inclined to play the odds and to fill out a long thing. But what we've seen happen over and over again is you have these smaller projects that have like just really onerous kind of expectations of the people filling them out and then the nonprofit is disappointed because they don't get very many good applicants and they're not, and so that's the last thing we want to do. And so that's why we have kind of like here's the alternative to the RFP kind of process, if that makes sense. The traditional RFP process. It does, Sean, thank you. I think that the VIP invite is a great idea, but the once you've established maybe right before or right after the contract, I just was wondering about either doing a statement of work, which basically says here's what we've agreed and you sign it and we sign it and, you know, or it's a series of projects and you put it under a master service agreement. So that's what I was asking about. It's kind of the flip side of, you know, once the engagement has begun in whatever form that there's something that is a little bit more tangible and I'm thinking of it, it would be beneficial for the for the consultant as well as for the nonprofit. So I think I didn't mean it instead of an RFP. Okay, that makes a whole lot more sense now. I'm working on a project or two right now that has those. And so, yes, absolutely. For me, that kind of all falls under the umbrella of the contract, right? And so you and the consultant absolutely want to be on the same page about what's going to be delivered, all those other different things and the kind of size of the project and or, you know, like third parties might dictate kind of how detailed you want to get into that, but absolutely. That's great. Thank you so much, Sean. You're welcome. You know, I was going to put in a good word for the thank you letter. I just furnace and getting an assistant once had had several great applicants and I sent a course pick one, they took the job. But I sent thank you notes to each person telling them how much I appreciated their applying and how great they were and a little personal, you know, based on our conversation, a little personal thing. I got thank you notes back for my thank you note. It was the best feeling because I hate saying no, I just hate it. And I can't say enough good things about thanking everybody who tipped at the time to apply because I actually have seen some consultants in my field of nonprofit fundraising run down groups. They got mad at them and they weren't nice to them to the consultant and they have friends in high places, you know, they've worked with a lot of people too. And that is very bad, you know, but it happens if they're if the nonprofits read and then the last thing I just wanted to mention this, I got enticed to work on a capital campaign that was kind of a repair job, but I didn't learn till I got there that they had actually won a million dollar grant that had never reported on that grant. And the donor took the grant back. Think about it. It was like, I've never experienced anything so horrible, but here's the good news. I knew the donors, a foundation, and I called them up and I talked to them, and I did get some back, but not the full million, but still I got something. So there you go. That's wonderful, Carol. Thank you for those stories. Yeah, we don't want to necessarily encourage that behavior, right, by our fellow consultants, but or justify it, but it happens. And it's a reality of the situation. Susanna asked about places to get a background check. Yeah, there's a place that I use because I also I run background checks for people when they subcontract from me. If you want to email me afterwards, I can I'm happy to show the names, but there are literally dozens, if not hundreds of organizations out there that do background checks. A lot of nonprofits will already have one. They should have them set up if they're a nonprofit of a meaningful size at all for running on their own staff who are in critical positions. But yeah, email me. I'm happy to show the group, the name of the group that I work with that I work with. And I'm happy with them. They think it's like 10 bucks for a basic one. And it's very user friendly. Six months ago when I researched them, they were very good. I did want to just mention, Sean, we've had 11 shares of the live stream to different pages on Facebook. So whenever we do Facebook live, it's really great because people love just tuning in to check it out. And the recording, of course, will be on YouTube eventually of all this in our discussion. Eli will edit it a little bit. But, but be sure to give your slides with that great contact information to email Eli because he'll post them on SlideShare. And then they, I actually was doing this both for myself on the event page, but they've been just automatically adding them to our event listing, which becomes real shareable. And you've got it all right on my page. Excellent, excellent. I love the technology and I love that we have Eli in our corner. Yes, he's great. He's really great. So and everybody sign up for TechSoup to be it's free, please, please, please sign up. And then you can get all these great discounts. So I recently had a group I was working with that was paying full price for QuickBooks. And I said, have you been on TechSoup? For one-tenth the cost of QuickBooks, which is not cheap. It's a great platform. But I said, why are you doing that? We need that money in our budget. We don't need to be paying QuickBooks because they're giving it at a huge discount. So it's those kinds of wonderful things to check into. And Zoom and the Adobe Creative Suite and some cloud services, Dell, really great stuff. So yeah, yeah, does anybody else have questions or maybe you have a war story you'd like to tell if there are? Susanna has to have one, I'm sure. Are you still there, Susanna? She does a lot of work in grant writing. I don't have a war story, but I do. I want to get your feedback. I don't know what that shiny, sorry, I've got the blinds open and the sun is all weird right now. I'd like to get your feedback. Sean, thank you for a great presentation. I'd like to get your feedback on whether it should fall. I know the answer, I think, but whether it should fall to the organization doing the consultant search or the consultants to create the contract once they are hired. I have been in a situation many times where, as a consultant, I create a contract and I wonder if that is par for the course or maybe we should try and advocate it sort of to be more together. What do you think? I personally, I do it because it helps keep the process moving along. Most non-profit staff that I know, they tend to be overworked. And if they haven't, granted, if they've already gone to the trouble of writing something up and there's a good thorough description, a lot of times there's not a whole lot of anything. A lot of times it's like we need some help with our accounting as a mess. That's all they have written up. Then I will do a conversation. I'll figure it out. I'll write it up. I think this is what you said and we go from there, but just to keep the process moving. But for the larger organizations, the ones that have time, if they've built something more thorough, go with that or some of the bigger, more sophisticated ones are going to have a contract and things like that ready. But I wouldn't expect that from the most smaller medium-sized non-profits. A lot of times we'll work for boards. We're a board member who's volunteering to fundraise and they just want backup on that. And I find I usually always write it myself and I say, look, you can change any of this you want. I'm very flexible. But I go ahead and say, well, I'm going to do this, this, this, this, and this. And then I put in there 30 days notice. You can cancel, whatever it is. Don't worry. You have to move on to a new project. I'm okay with that. And so I try and put them at ease. But I find they're like, contract. We don't even know. But it is really good to write it out because then they can tick it off as you go along and you get done with all the tasks that you've discussed. And I often will add things in there. Today, of course, it's in my line, which is fundraising, of course, with a tech twist in my case. But I always say I'll create a cloud drive in their cloud of choice Google Drive. And I'll leave all my documentation, all my research, all my written charts, which I track everything, copies of grant proposals and correspondence. And I put it up there. And then after a certain length of time, you know, I'll get off of it and they'll just have it. But they can then use those documents to make new proposals and, you know, to review what went on. And I've had people say that they've used my research charts, like five for five years, at least. Because I'll find a bunch of stuff that doesn't. I'll always put in there. Well, these guys are not good for this project, but you might look at them in a couple years for this other one you're thinking about. And so they just have that forever. And they're usually really grateful. I like these cloud platforms, because I can work from home. I can work in Dropbox or Google Drive or whatever. And then they can access it. And they're all over the place all the time. So it's good. But yeah, so I put in those tech things. And it's, it's just great to write it out, but they never seem to want to write the contract themselves. I don't know why that is. So I've gotten real used to that. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you both. Those are great tips. And maybe that would be a nice presentation for the future is how consultants can create contracts. Because I always feel like I might be leaving something out, you know, when I do create them. I'm not a legal expert. So but, but yeah, no, thank you. Those are great tips. Thank you, Susanna. Cassandra, you had some questions at the beginning before we officially started. Did you, did we answer them all? Are there any that you'd like to address right now? Or maybe you got up to get another cup of coffee. No, I'm here. I just know that if I mute and mute the video that I have less problems with the bandwidth. Yeah. Yeah. And I can stay on. So, but yes, I've been here for the whole meeting. I'm very interesting. I appreciate everything that you share. I think that I'm good for right now. Yeah. Okay. Yes. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Well, okay. Is that everything Sean? Do we need to let you go and have a life at home with your kiddos? Yeah, they might want to see me tonight. I might. I think so. No, but it's been, it's been fun. Good. It's been good seeing folks that I've known before and who I've met today. So thank everybody for, for joining us. And please do feel, you know, if a question comes to you at 3 a.m., like please send me an email. Don't call, but please do send me an email and I'll be happy to follow up with you. Thanks. Have a good week, everybody. All right.