 I thank you again for joining us for this TechSoup Executive Director. We call it ED Chat. Again, as you're coming in, type in where you're from, let us know where you're from, what you do. Feel free to share your website. My name is Aretha Simons. I'm the webinar producer here at TechSoup. And I'll be your host today. I'm so excited. I always love senior faces. So you all thank you for joining early. Our goal here for ED Chat is to bring executive directors together to share their knowledge and make connections and just talk about how technologies used to advance their mission, excuse me. Look, if this is your first time here at ED Chat, type of one in the chat room, we'd like to know. This is your first time here at TechSoup. Welcome. Some of you know TechSoup offers, you know, great products and services or laptops. If we were much more than that, we have some wonderful courses, free webinar, which you are on today. We have some wonderful blogs. Our writers for our blogs are amazing community forums. So even after ED Chat, you can go on our community forums page and start a thread for EDs. We have lots of great articles. Plus, we have our apps for good. I'm going to post a link later to talk about our apps for good. If you have a food pantry or you work at a food thing, we're going to do a webinar on Monday for our apps for good for food insecurity. So as you are coming in, just a little bit of housekeeping, everybody is on mute. I would love if you would say on mute for, you know, the quality of the recording. When we get to the point where we start asking questions, go to the action section. You'll see the reaction button. You can use that to raise your hand and we'll ask you to unmute your, I was going to say your phone, but the technology, your Zoom device. When you do, let us know your name, the name of your organization. And if you can keep it to one to two minutes, that would be great with your comments so that we can give time for everybody to reply and respond. And otherwise, feel free to chat with each other in the chat room. So today, I wanted to make sure that we do something different. I want you to take some screenshot and share, share with us on Instagram, just on there, all the social media platforms. Again, make sure you're muted as you're coming in. I would love if you would become a featured ED nonprofit because I know you wear multiple hats. I know there are some who are grant writers, there are some who do so many other things. So we would love for you to become a featured nonprofit. And of course, we would love to hear some of your topics, some of the topics that you would like to discuss during the chat, because this is all about you. So do me a favor, type in the chat room, some of the topics that you would like to hear. And we've been hearing more development grant writing. So just share with us some of the topics you would like to hear or chat about during ED chat. Fundraising is a big one. And there is a fundraising webinar that's going to be happening on Monday as well. So we'll I'll put that link in the chat a little later as we go on board recruitment, grant writing and fundraising, a big one. We'll continue to do that over and over again, because I know that's an area that all nonprofits want to hear about. Idea for use of ARPA funds, you have to let me know what that abbreviation stand for, career development. But today, this is one of the most requested ones from our survey, strategic planning and outreach. And I have the privilege of introducing our featured speaker, who's right here in your community, Melissa Roberts. She is the director of Melissa Waves. Everybody can see you. She is the director at Bristol Promise. Melissa joined Bristol Promise in 2019 as the adverse childhood experience and trauma informed care coordinator. She has over 20 years of nonprofit experience in a wide variety of roles, from volunteer to executive director to board member and a consultant. That one where's a lot of hats. Community service is in her DNA. She's also a member of her local Rotary Club, the regional diversity, equity and inclusion alliance, Virginia organizing and campaign for trauma informed policy and practices. This is just to name a few. But take a screenshot of this so you can have her information. I'll also put it in the chat room. But I wanted to welcome Melissa. Melissa, I'm going to turn it over to you. The stage is yours. Thank you, Arita. I appreciate it. Hello, everybody. It is great to be here today. As I said, for some of you who might not have been there, I have a nasty case of conjunctivitis. So I apologize ahead of time for my appearance. I am going to go ahead and share my screen, but I wanted to thank Arita for this opportunity to be here. Can you all see this? Okay. Fantastic. Great. So I have had a lot of different experiences in nonprofits. I started as a candy striper. If any of you remember that back when I was young, even before then a Girl Scout and have really had a passion for nonprofit work. We do the most good with the least amount of funds, it seems like. And so I really am passionate about that. And so I wanted to talk to you all today about strategic planning and outreach. But I wanted to ask you a couple of questions first. So if you all will take just a moment and answer in the chat box, I'm going to ask you two questions. The first one, and I want you to overthink this, I want you to just the first thing that pops into your head, the emotion, it elicits. But what is it that pops up for you when someone says strategic planning? Don't overthink this, you know, a phrase, an emotion, a word. And I cannot see the chat, Aretha. So if you can help me out here. Yeah, so I'll call up somebody critical vision, priority, prioritizing. Somebody says, Oh no, some, oh, yes, forecasting, goal setting, legacy, moving forward direction, more work, more work. Someone says a lot of work. Yeah, action steps, future planning, long term. So I'll stop right there. These are great. Yeah. And you all really sound like, you know, a lot of you already have that idea of what strategic planning is. And several of you have that idea that it's overwhelming or there's lots of fear surrounding it or lots of work. We know that it is lots of work. But what I'm hoping to do today in the short time that I have is to kind of start changing our mindset from one of fear and overwhelming and oh my goodness, to one of excitement. And it sounds like some of you already kind of have that look. And strategic planning, like you all said, it really is at its most accepted definition, the setting of the course or the goals for your organization in line with your mission and vision, excuse me, and then creating steps to reach those goals. And that can expand, that can be your entire organization or that can be your social media. It can be in lots of different ways, as big or as little as you choose to set it. Traditionally, what we've looked at with overarching strategic planning is we plan about three, five, maybe even 10 years out because we can see those trends that are coming down the pike for our different sector. And now post COVID, those trends are changing so quickly. We're seeing things that we've not seen before. And so the recommended look forward is 12 to 24 months. So they're recommending that you don't do strategic planning beyond two years, at least not any hard strategic planning. And the interesting part about this is this is also about how long you need to plan your marketing, your outreach. So it's really kind of coming together in one thing. So I'm going to ask you another question. How do you, your organization, your, your group, how do you all define outreach? So this one, a little bit more thinking, but not a whole lot. But how do you define outreach? What does that look like to you? And you can post your answers in the chat box again, if you would. Relationship building, collaboration, grassroots community, communication with the community. I love the grassroots. Yeah, that's a great one. So I'm going to public in any way that's needed. Great story. Community, I think that's collaboration as well. Giving information to your community, letting people know about us. Research. Yes, yes, yes. Absolutely. Outreach is literally reaching out to any population. You need to look at that both internally and externally. You know, you want to spread that message. And so when you do all of that work, doing that strategic planning, looking at those smart goals, which is a whole different thing. But if you haven't heard smart goals, I encourage you to look that up, you know, being specific and measurable. You want to share that. So the one thing and I have to say, Brandy Peters, my co-worker gave me this term and I use it all the time. Don't be a minus or right. We all know these people. We all have these people in our lives. This is mine. You can't have this. And really what that does is it keeps people as a whole community is grassroots movement. It keeps it from moving forward. So once you've done all of this work on strategic planning, whether it's a large organizational strategic plan, or if it's your media strategic plan, you need to share that, right? Again, you want to take those highlights and share it with your volunteers, your board, your community partners, staff, stakeholders, but you also want to share that with the media because that's how you're also going to reach people. And I want to try and kind of codify what it is that nonprofits and world changers like you all are trying to do. So many of you might have already seen the six conditions of systems change. And this is where you're kind of looking at those strategic planning goals and where you want to go with that. And you can see on that top layer, you have your structural change, your explicit changes, right? These are kind of the easiest to do. It's the policies and the practices and those resource flows. That next level is more semi explicit relationships and connections and power dynamics. And those two levels will flow back and forth. So it's not like you need to do the first level and then the second level, you may change a policy which then changes relationships in your community, or you may change some power dynamics that change how practices are done. But ultimately, what we're all trying to get to is that transformative change, that mental models. So these are the deeply held beliefs that people have, you know, and I'm down here in Appalachia, northeast Tennessee, Southwest Virginia, we have lots of deeply held beliefs around here. And so some of those are good. Some of those come from our parents, from our grandparents, our families. But some of them might not be the most helpful or the most useful moving forward. So these are are kind of how we change those systems, which is ultimately what we're trying to get to. And as many of you know, already, when you're looking at your goals, you want to identify who, what, when, where, why, and how, right? Who is your audience? What is your goal? Or what are your goals? When do you hope to achieve that measurement? Where is your footprint? So what area are you trying to achieve these goals? Why is it important? And one of the things that is a really hard question for us as nonprofits to answer is who cares, right? It's a really hard question because we care, obviously, but why do we care and why should our community care? And then how will you achieve those goals? Or how will it change or improve the audience? Again, going back to those mental models? So let's go back to outreach discussion and focus on the two areas that often cause the most stress for nonprofit professionals. That is media and social media because somehow, if you put this on social media, if you send it out to your newspapers and your radio stations and, you know, all of your media, it makes it real. It makes it really real and you can't go back on it, but you should be proud of the work that you're doing. So if you don't already have social media and you can see there are a ton out there and lots of people don't use social media. Lots of us are really, really busy and social media takes up a lot of time. I encourage you all to start with Facebook. It is the easiest to use. It's been around the longest. Initially, you know, young people adopted it because young folks are really good about adopting things early. And then the older generation started adopting it. The young folks went, nope, we're out of here. And they moved on to other social media platforms. But now they're starting to come back because that's where everybody is. So, you know, when you do that, and there are lots of opportunities and lots of programs that can help you kind of manage your Facebook, your social media, but when you post, it needs to be intentional, right? You need to have this planned out. And this is part of that strategic planning. You need to plan that out for 612 months of what you're going to do and what is it you're trying to do with those posts? It's great to educate people. It's great to, you know, put something cute up there. We all love kittens and puppies. But what are you really trying to do with that? It is an extension of conversations that you have with people. So for us, for Bristol's promise and for me particularly, we focus on adverse childhood experiences and building resilience in our community. If you haven't heard about that, it's a population health of public health that the CDC considered a public health risk. So we're trying to target men ages 25 to 40. You know, we are traditionally very female heavy. And so we're trying to change that. We want to educate people on ACEs on what they are and how they impact our community. When in the next month, the next quarter, the next six months where, you know, we are in Bristol, Tennessee and Virginia is where we're housed, but we serve both a much larger 26 County region. Why? Because there are lifelong negative health outcomes. If somebody has six or more adverse childhood experiences in their history, they're likely to die 20 years earlier than someone with no ACEs. And then how will it change the audience? How are we trying to change them? We want them to start talking about this. And I am going to add one more thing to the who, what, why, when and how, who, what, why, when and how I want to add a call to action and somebody said something about grassroots, right? So you are probably already familiar with a call to action. We don't ever want to give our audience information, education, that light bulb moment and leave them hanging, right? We want them to move forward. We want them to do something that helps move them forward, our community forward, our cause forward. It can be something as easy as visit our website, right? Visit bristlespromise.org. It can be something a little more challenging. Attend our trauma responsive care meeting at the next one and post the date. But you always want to give them some way to get involved or some way to move forward. It's great to scroll through. But if you actually get them to move forward, you need to have that call to action. And I do want to add one more thought about all of this, strategic planning, marketing all of that. You need to measure your work. How do we know what we're doing if we're not looking at the data that's coming out of it? How do we know if we need to change what we're doing or if we need to continue doing what we're doing? And there are two different kinds of data. There's qualitative and there's quantitative and qualitative. I can say nonprofits are great at we are storytellers in our hearts. We love to tug at heartstrings. But when we're looking at reaching outside of our already engaged population, we need to have that quantitative data to how many people were reached? You know, what was the engagement like? How long did they engage with the the whatever you're doing? And so I encourage you all to measure again, there are lots of really great programs out there that can help measure these analytics and then you can look at them and say, Okay, over time over last month, here's what we've done. And then share that with your internal stakeholders so that we start changing our culture internally so that we can change the culture externally. So I appreciate your all the time. I hope I didn't go over, but I'm happy to answer any questions you have. We are on all of these social medias that you can see. You're welcome to visit our website. And my email address is there as well. But what questions might you all have for me at this point? Please use the raise your hand button. And for those of you who asked, this is being recorded. If you registered for this webinar, then you will get the email within 48 hours and also the PowerPoint. So if you would use the raise your hand reaction, then I'll call on you. I'll see your your question. Awesome. I know that was a lot of information. I saw everybody frantically writing down, writing down your notes. So I know when you listen to the recording over, then you'll, you'll probably get more ideas. Well, I do have a question. I don't see anybody raising their hand. I do have a question. The when you talked about the data, so a lot of people ask about fundraising, you know, we need grants, we need grants in your, your data is so important. So make sure that you're getting those numbers. If somebody comes to volunteer, make sure you write down every volunteers information because of one hour of volunteer is worth, I think it's $28. So I'm not sure what, what the data is any seven and change the last time I looked at it, right? Yeah, make sure you do that. So I see Diana, she has her hand written. I hope I pronounce your name right. Unmute yourself, please. Thank you. Yes, I'm with parents, the addicted loved ones. And the quantity that our mission is somewhat obvious from our name. We have support groups across the country that provide education and support for parents who have adult addicted kids. And we are anonymous. So we, we just recently instituted an attendance app for our volunteers, facilitators, but of course they're volunteers. And we're not getting the figures we would like necessarily. There obviously is a great deal of interest in terms of what kind of diversity we serve. We, we really can't collect that kind of information. So we've been as creative as we can with quantitative things. But I was just wondering if, if you Melissa or if anybody else had ideas, you know, tracking volunteer hours because we have over 300 volunteer facilitators. So, you know, we can do that. But it's difficult to find a creative way to do that. And most of our grantors have, have understand that. But I still would like to have a lot more solid base with that type of data. Yeah, and that is a hard one, especially when you're trying to do it anonymously. You know, we have a program that we provide that does work for sustainability. So we work with frontline workers, some of them who have substance use disorders. So that's kind of some overlap there. And we, we give that anonymous data to our business partners because the business community needs to know what's going on. But we never, ever want that to be identifiable. So you can do things like how many hours are you spending doing these support groups? You know, how many attendees do you have? And the grantors do understand that sometimes you can't get that, that demographic information. So you're not going to know if they're male or female or what their ethnicity is or any of that. But, but there are unique ways to do that. But I think you just have to think outside the box of what are you trying to accomplish? And how do you, how do you accomplish that? What is your smart goal? What is that measurable measurability of it? Yeah, that's a great point. And I see some other hands raised, but Peter Davis asked, why can't you keep all the numbers with no names, just numbers? And I'm going to let Diana answer that. But I know I sat on the grant review board for sexual trauma victims. And so no names, only numbers. And the funders who fund those types of grants, they understand that you cannot release names. So Diana, did you want to add anything to that? Well, like I say, unfortunately, or or, you know, the situation is, is we have volunteer facilitators. And we're trying to gather that data, but getting them to take that extra step and that extra time, we already have high demands on them. They, they have to take training. They're responsible for these, these meetings weekly. And so part of that is just motivation on our behalf to, you know, we try to emphasize the importance of this in terms of our getting funding. But that does mean the only other thing I've thought about is, is maybe having somebody else at their meeting, if they have occasionally they have co facilitators track that information. But it's difficult. And then, you know, when it comes to ethnicity, you have to guess, you know, sometimes it's more obvious than others. But I understanding, you know, I can understand how we might be able to do those things. But I was just wondering if anybody had other kind of creative type of data we could collect that would still be meaningful. Okay, we'll see what some of the other EDS in the community have to say, I'm going to go to Carmel, you have your hand raised and then to Jeremy. Thank you. Hi, everyone, I'm Jeremy Jeremy, first, Carmel, and then you. Thank you so much. Can everyone Yeah, if you, if you meet your I'm going to meet you, Jeremy, and then I'll meet you in just a moment. Okay. Go ahead, Carmel. Okay, thanks. So I hear and I get the importance of the social media. And this is the first time I've heard like six to 12 months out. I would love to hear like how do you plan social media six months out like I have a hard time planning it a month out. So what what tools and I'd love to get a volunteer to do that. And I'm not sure even how to do that yet. So I'd love to hear some feedback around that. Thank you. Yeah, and it can be a bit daunting, because again, right, when we take it outside of our walls, it's really real. But you can plan that out. And like I said, there are lots of programs that you it looks like a calendar view. And so again, you do that strategic thinking of what are you trying to accomplish? What is your goal? What are your goals for the six months, the year, and in line with a strategic plan for your organization even. And then you can load that in that calendar view, and it'll automatically post so you don't have to be right there. And, you know, I've used HootSuite before there, there are other programs that you can use that will help you kind of load that up so you can load it for the full year and then just post additional things as they come up because there's always something that comes up in between best laid plans of mice and men, right? And so you can add in between. But you know, there are lots of lots of different programs varying price ranges. Some of them are free that you can load all of those in. What are some of the free ones if you don't mind me asking for a startup? So HootSuite I know works well. And Jeremy, I see that you asked what are products other than HootSuite that work well. That's the one that I am most familiar with. Canva just has Stacy. Thank you for that. Canva, if you're a nonprofit organization, you can apply for a pro account and it helps you post as well. I have not used that though. So there are some people here putting great stuff in the chat. Thank you. I appreciate it. Yeah, Lumley. And you can now schedule on Facebook as well. Thank you all for sharing the chat. See, this is what we do share with each other. So Jeremy, we would love to hear from you. We can unmute yourself. Thank you so much. Yeah, sorry about the confusion. So I guess my question since we are in TechSoup is a tech question. Regarding the numbers, you're talking about making sure you know how many numbers you have. We use a CRM program. We use Salsa, but we're looking at alternative products. And so if you have some suggestions or people in the chat have some suggestions that work well, you know, not only just for a tracking donor, but also for making sure that we can send out emails and messaging and then keeping track of those reports as well. Well, awesome. I'm saying that I wrote that down. Salsa, I haven't heard of that. There's so many CRMs and we do have some CRM platforms here at TechSoup. I'll put them in the chat room as well. Thank you for sharing that. So I see a lots of conversation in the chat room. JT said, I think the main helpful tool for social media posting is a communication plan and determine what type of information you want to post. That is so, so true. So, so true. Exactly. And I do want to I do want to share one other thing that I found helpful. It's how to create an outreach work plan. And it is 10 pages and it walks you through really easily. And I'll send that to Aretha and have her send that link out when she sends this out. Because I think for those of you who haven't done this before, it might be really useful. It's from Enroll America. But you can can use that. It's got checklists and it's really, really helpful to walk you through if you haven't done this before. Great. Thank you, Melissa. I would love to hear. Melissa, you said something really good. Don't be a minus or I'd love that. That was funny, but so, so true, because even as nonprofits, we want to hold our grant ideas. We want to not tell other people about this grant that's available, you know, because we want to make sure we get it. But what are some of the things that you all do in your strategic planning? What are some of the because I know I don't know if you all do certain. Matter of fact, let me know in the chat room if you do strategic planning, put a number one in the chat room. If you do it at least once a year, put a one in the chat room, let me know. Good, Kathleen. Great. Lots of people. This is great. I love it. So those of you who do strategic planning, share with us some of the things, some of the discussions that you have when you sit down to talk about your strategic planning, use a raise your hand button. I would love to hear you share with other Edie's. So Jeremy, your hand was still raised. So even though you didn't lower it, I'm going to call on you. You want to share with us? What are the questions? One of the what are some of the things that we discussed? Yeah, when you do your strategic planning, because I know hopefully you do a swap analysis, you you sit down and find out what your strengths are, what your weaknesses are, what opportunities and the threat. And then from there, what things do you do? Like usually in strategic planning, you set goals. So what are some of the things that you all do when you do your strategic planning? I mean, I think one of the things to start with that we found helpful with strategic planning is to have a facilitator, to have a professional facilitator, if you can afford it, or if you're not profiting, get somebody to do it for free, because I do think that that helps to focus a lot of the ideas, you know, and we have such a limited time also with nonprofits with board meetings and, you know, making, you know, making sure that we the engine has a gas in the tank, so to speak. So to have somebody facilitate these discussions and make sure we're putting ideas on paper and focusing these ideas, I think are incredibly helpful. That is a good one. Does anybody in the group do any strategic planning meetings? What people if you do put your information in chat room? This is the place that this is the group that you want to connect with. Deborah. Right. So we are actually a community development nonprofit. And so we have two drug related grants, we have a drug free communities. And then we have one with the Department of Justice, the OJJDP. And so for us, it's really important to bring in diversity and diversity is not just like one thing or one area diversity is every area. When you represent a whole community, you really need to make sure that you have every voice involved and that you're hearing all the points of view and that you're hearing from every neighborhood and you're hearing from every sector. Like our drug free communities has 12 different sectors from business and healthcare to education and parents and kids. And it goes on from there. But diversity is really a big concern for us because many times some of the people we most need to hear from are either working multiple jobs or they have kids or they don't they just don't know how to make time for this or know that they're even invited or involved. And so that's one of our big things is how do we really get everybody involved so that because one of our things that we say is not not about us without us. And so we don't want to have one small group of people whatever that demographic is, even if they're super caring people, we don't want to have one small group of people making decisions for the larger community. So we're always looking to find out how we can bring the whole community and a diverse group of people together to be making those strategic decisions to move forward. Wow, that was powerful. What was your quote because that that's that that's a tweet moment not about us. Yeah, I didn't come up with it that came from CADCUB but it was not about us not about us without us. And so if we're working on a certain neighborhood or we're working on a certain group of kids that we want to target for we don't want to make decisions for them without getting their voice and getting them involved so that they're part of that. And and also what people help to build is what they support. If you just give them a program where you give them, you know, we think, oh, it's so helpful, we're just going to give you all these resources if they weren't part of that development part, party, they're not going to necessarily feel like it's part of them. And so diversity is we I think we generally think of diversity in, you know, specific ways, but diversity is really everything. It's really bringing people from all walks of life together because we are all one community. Yeah, that was good. That was good. OK, I want to ask you a question, Debra. But before I do, everybody needs to type that in the chat room, not about us, but for us. And don't be a minus over. Those are two things that we need to remember. That's good. So you, Deborah, you have working with the organization you're working with, you have to apply for government grants. Am I right? Yeah, federal, yeah, large federal grants. Correct. So that's I mean, you're talking about local level and federal level. So I'm sure everybody in here wants those big dollars with all those zeros around it, but they don't know that the work that it takes to go into that. So yeah, share with us some of your yeah, some of your trials and successes with that. So I will just tell you and we have the most wonderful grant officer at the Department of Justice. But I would my advice to nonprofits would be really know what is going to be required of you, because I think it's really nice to get that grant that's five hundred thousand dollars and then it's going to pay your staff for three years that you don't have to go out and fundraise. But to give you an idea, I've been in the middle of a Department of Justice audit that was supposed to be four days and we're going on a month because you give information and they come back for more information. And like I said, I kind of not joke, but not joke with my grant officer that when either of us is not in our role that we can be Facebook friends because she's in Washington DC. I'm in the other Washington Washington state. But so I mean, we really have somebody who's wonderful to work with. It's still really intense. The scrutiny is really intense. The tracking is really intense. And so I would just I'm not saying don't do it or don't go for those grants. Absolutely. Consider if it's right for your organization. Just know that it's that it's not easy money, just like fundraising is not easy money. It's it's not easy money. And on the other hand, it just really forces you to be very transparent and we are regular tech soup customers because you guys have been very, very good to us with hardware and software and we've we've needed it. So I want to say thank you to TechSoup. But it's the money is out there and it's it's there to be used for your communities and and do feel free to apply for it. Just just make sure you read the fine print and know what is going to be required of you because it can it can be time intensive. Very good. Thank you so much for sharing that. Well, Melissa, our featured speaker today, she has to leave to go to another meeting. I want to make sure there are no questions for her before she leaves. She provided a lot of information. Again, you'll be able to get the recording within 48 hours with the PowerPoint. Any questions for Melissa before she leaves? And I do want to say that Deborah Kadka is amazing. They are the premier of coming together. But I encourage you to look at FSG and Aspen Institute on their collective impact model. That's the model that we use. And that's kind of why that don't be a minus or is so central to what we're doing because you have got you cannot do this in a silo. You have got to reach out to your community partners. You've got to create community partners because we can move further together than we can separately. That's good. That's good. Well, everybody. Flat for Melissa. Thank you so much or do your your yes. Thank you so much, Melissa. Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. I'm going to go to the chat room because there are lots of conversation when in chat room. Robert wrote the biggest challenge we're having is data mining, fact finding to verify the new services that we think are needed or truly needed in the pandemic. He said 16 months we were not able to focus on groups and surveys. So Robert, would you mind sharing with us more about that? If you would unmute yourself. Sure. Thank you for the time. Yeah, so again, we we're an organization that's been around for over 50 years and have done some really good work with the developmental disabled in a lot of areas. However, much of our services part of the challenges are in Gateway Center of Monterey Monterey County, but everybody focuses on the center part and not the Gateway or the county part. Right. So a lot of our services have been concentrated in one location and we believe that these services are needed. Educational services and independent living services are needed in other parts of the county that there is a really gap in services in some of those counties. Obviously, we need to become more culturally sensitive because there are different types of communities and cultures in these underserved areas. But we believe that there are services there, but we have not been able to go out and meet with folks. We've not. There hasn't been any community gatherings or organizational meetings or any of those sort of things. No sort of report out on statistics. So at this point, we're sort of having to sort of put on hold any of our strategic planning sort of real work until we can do that fact finding to verify that what we think is real. That that that's intense. And that's why, you know, gathering that quantitative data emailed phone numbers because with the pandemic shut a lot of people down. You had no way of meeting them face to face. So maybe having an email, you know, email them to connect with them being on Zoom, which is important now. I want to share with you. I put in the chat room on DocuSign. It's going to be doing a webinar next week. So that may I would love for you to come to that webinar because as Robert was saying, you know, he had no way of getting that data and maybe having no way to get that data through DocuSign, having them sign electronically or, as I said, meeting with them face to face. Good information. So lots of information in chat room, lots of resources that people are sharing. I'm going to also share the chat room with you all as those of you signed up. Again, I want to remind you this is going to be available within 48 hours. I would love for you to be a featured speaker. So email me at a simon at TechSoup.org. I'm going to put it in the chat room and not just to be a speaker, just to be a speaker, but we want to focus on some of the topics that were requested in the chat room. If you specialize in fundraising, grant writing, strategic planning, you know, all the things that you need as a nonprofit. If you do that in the community, definitely share. Patty says in our community, we can post for volunteer board seats, OK, open, et cetera, with United Way. United Way is a great resource. How many of you use United Way? United Way is just more than a place that you can get information. I see people raising their hand. You can post information, share information. This is great. Thank you so much for for putting that out there. Melissa says, Adana, we recruit board members from the community members for each part of our organization. Each board member is the committee committee committee chair, excuse me, and when their term is up, we start with new committee members. So for committee chairs, because a lot of people talk about board, they want board development. How many of you know you need new board members, but you don't want to give them that power, you know, minus or brain mentality. But I understand you do have things to protect, because they're making them committee members. How many of you have a committee board member? Would you unmute yourself and share with us? Unraising committee, grant writing committee, grant writing team, would you would you want to share with us there, but I see you nodding your head. Would you unmute yourself and share with us what kind of committees that you have? Yeah, so we have a safety committee, a sustainability committee. We have we have we started with action teams and then each action person representing an action team forms a committee. And some of those members on the committee are with a compliance committee. We we have community members and board members who are on those committees. And that's really important in moving things forward, because if it's just the executive director who's telling people, oh, I need this, oh, I want this, so let's do this. You really don't get much interaction. You don't get much feedback. People ignore emails because it's always coming from the same person. But when they're on a committee and they want people to listen to them, they respond to other committee members because it's just kind of a give and take. And so, you know, it works really well. And if you I don't want to take too much time, but I also wanted to speak a little bit about about getting new board members and the importance of having different types of board members. And so if you want me to come back to that, I can come back to that. Like I said, I don't want to take too much. No, feel free to share. No one else is raising their hands or the floor is yours. OK, so I will tell you, we were kind of in a we were in a difficult situation during the pandemic, where of course, everybody was busy and everybody was doing their own thing and life was turned upside down pretty much for everyone. But one of the challenges was that, you know, when people volunteer, it is free. Like they have a family that they prioritize, they have their job, they prioritize. And if somebody is, you know, functioning either emotionally or physically, just at a lower level, because they're feeling overwhelmed, they start cutting out the things that they think they can afford to cut out in their life. And so then we we needed to have people who were, you know, in the community, making a difference and who were influencers. But then we also had to have people who were willing to say, I can work, I can volunteer, I can make calls, I can just do a variety of things. And so we had to really in a strategic planning session go back and say, OK, so we've got the sheriff, we've got the prosecutor, we've got a couple judges, we've got, you know, we've got some of the high profile people, county commissioners and people who really bring in the attention of like municipalities and because we're a county, so we have different cities that are involved. But what we didn't have is we didn't have people who are willing to say, you know what, I want to do fundraising. I want to get out there in the community. I want to volunteer when you are doing events for kids, whether they're in Zoom or whether they're socially distanced outside. We did end up getting a special approval from the State of Washington Department of Health that we could operate with some youth serving organizations. So we were able to still meet during the pandemic, but under very specific circumstances that were approved by the Department of Health. And so we had to have people that would be that would show up to volunteer. And so we started actually not we had the people who were already the influencers who could get us the meetings we needed and the power we needed and we brought in the mayor and some of those things. But then just as important, we had to bring in people who were willing to say, I will dedicate five hours a week to whatever the organization needed. And I think it's really important to make all of your board members, no matter what they bring, feel equal because they are equal. I mean, it's truly like a human body. You don't want to lose your arm if you don't have to. Some people have lost their but I mean, you don't want to lose your heart. You don't want to lose your liver. You don't want to lose everything is different and everyone is different. But all are equal parts of a fully functioning healthy person. Yeah, thank you for sharing that. So there's a lot of conversation in the chat room, Claudia. I appreciate you putting this here. She says I need to complete 15 hours of nonprofit coaching for my certification. Anyone needing coaching, please contact me at mine, my business coaching at gmail.com. You can see our email right there. So somebody said, Claudia, bring it on. So I love it. So a lot of people are needing some coaching. This is great. Deborah, you brought up a lot of good points. Some of those things we'll probably talk about in our next ED chat. I wanted to just open up the floor to see if anybody have any comments, any questions before we close out. I put the survey link in there. So please take a moment to fill out the survey. Use the raise your hand button if you would like to make any comments. Deborah had to step away, but she did an amazing job. Again, you'll you'll get the recording within 48 hours. Any comments or questions? Oh, Melissa, I see your hand raised. Go ahead and unmute yourself. Hi, I'm the one that actually brought up the committees in the first place. We're brand new. Well, I'm a brand new director. I took over two months before covid started. I'm actually a math professor and took over a food pantry as, you know, as a nonprofit thinking I can do both jobs and then both exploded at the same time. So this whole business of committees is all new, but it's kind of interesting because I know nothing about being an executive director. So every member of our of our board is also a committee chair. If you're not willing to be a committee chair, you really have no place on the board. We have a very active board. So our for example are the one who's our secretary. She's also our volunteer coordinator. So she has a committee of people who are not on the board. They are people in our organization and we're fully volunteered by the way. Like I work full time for free. So we we just have each person in charge of it. And then when our secretary of the board, for example, when she's ready to leave her position, then we're going to look to her committee first. And what it's doing is it's priming those members so that we're not just going, OK, all of a sudden we need a board member and we're in trouble. We know no one. We have 10 people on her committee who work on our volunteers that are already primed. It also the other great thing is we have people who were on our board who really weren't board members. And so we could turn around and say to them then, hey, listen, we want you to be involved, but we don't know that this is is the right fit for you. Would you rather be on a committee because it's too much pressure and it allows them to still be involved without having that bad conversation like see you later, you're not doing your job. That's good. That's good. Thank you for sharing that. I hear that a lot. How many of you are brand new executive directors like under a year? Put a one in the chat room and Rebecca, I see your hand raised. You can unmute yourself. The people. Go ahead, Rebecca. Hi. Hi, I'm Rebecca Lawrence in Minneapolis and my nonprofit is a year and a half old, but our organization is eight years old. And so we're doing our first like official strategic planning this September. And I'm in the process of looking for a facilitator to guide us and educating myself and my board about what that process looks like and helping them realize it's not just like you plan it the week before and you have some snacks. This is like a big long project that's going to we're going to have to involve others. And so I learned that as I'm teaching it to them. So I'm wondering if anybody who's gone through it has any tips for what to ask and what to look for in a facilitator and like any other tips of like what are key things for us to involve in then the process. Great question. Is Jeremy still here or anybody wanted to answer that for her? Anybody have any tips? That's a great question. Lots of new nonprofits here. Again, a lot of people quality may be a resource for you. Providing donors for Africa. You're going to feel free to unmute yourself. OK, thank you. My name is Chidi and I'm back here from Nigeria. I just wanted to respond to the last question. What I would recommend is you want to find a facilitator who has track record. So someone who has not just some talks to talk but someone who has actually done some work and has recorded a certain amount or a certain level of result or impact while working with any of nonprofits that they have consulted with over a specific period of time, because quite a lot of factors would affect your strategic plan. For example, what are your core goals for the next, let's say, I mean, two years is pretty ideal. I think it's quite reasonable and not too farfetched. What are your core goals for the next two years? What are the what are the things you're looking to achieve in terms of staff or in terms of strategic partnerships or local partnerships, even in terms of transition in our board memberships. So it even the mission and mission statement is have you achieved it already or have you exceeded what you have set out to achieve? For example, I have an organization that had set out to do something in three years and got it done in pretty much under a year by a year and and six months. So what that showed probably on the estimated amount of you they were about to bring into the sector at that time. So they were forced to go back to the to the drawing board and restrategize for the next two years. So you want to you just want to make sure you find a facilitator who has track record and can show how he's or her contribution has actually, you know, added value to whatever organization they have worked with. I think that that's one thing you may want to consider in your search for a facilitator. Well, thank you and congratulations on finishing your goal set for three years and you completed under under in a year. That's fantastic. So I'm going to put the link for our survey in the chat room. Also, my email again, I'm hearing lots of professionals on here that has a lot of information to share. I would love for you to become a feature speaker. I want to type it here in the chat room and make sure you read out to me and let me know the topic that you would like to discuss and any other comments, questions that you would like to ask before we leave. I see a lot of connection going on here in the chat room. I love it. This is what Edie Chat is all about. Thank you all so much for coming in. I'm right. One takeaway that you received today, one takeaway. I know there was there was a couple of them minus or that was another one. And what was the other one? Not about us. See, I've already messed the quote up. You probably don't remember. Without nothing about us without us. That's it. That's it. I love it. I love it. And that's probably going to be our motto from here on out at Edie Chat. I love it. This is great. Thank you all for communicating with each other. Nothing about us without us. Edie Chat, that's our new slogan. I love it. Thank you all for coming to join us here at Edie Chat today. Feel free. I see you waving Patty. Hi, did you have a question or you were just saying bye? OK, I love it. I love it. Thank you. Feel free to email me, complete the survey. Thank you all so much for your time. You all are busy taking care of everybody else. Please make sure you take care of yourself and have a great day. Bye bye.