 Kevin Pace said this morning, you know, we're trying to do things to keep people alive, and then we have to come back into the office and then switch in the hubs and go into, you know, that continuity or behavior. And that's why it's exciting to have Sasha Lewis on today, because when you talk about management and when you talk about data, there's a huge continuity concept that you can't be freewheeling. You cannot ignore. Absolutely. And I am excited for today, Sasha, because you're going to be sharing with us so many amazing things. Sasha Lewis, CFRE principal at Moves Management Consulting, she's talking to us today about nonprofit summer to do task and already in our chitty chat chat and even before that, we've just had some really robust conversations about what your nonprofit summer to do task should include or you might want to consider including. So that's what our episode is on today. Thrilled to have you back, Sasha. Also thrilled to have you as one of our presenting sponsors. So we're going to be her logo Moves Management right there on the slide deck in front of you. We are so extremely grateful to each and every one of our presenting sponsors. They continue to invest in the episodes and in the show overall, but really in each and every one of your communities. They are here. They exist. The whole mission in their company is to help you do more good. So please do check them out, give them a like some love, give them some good follow energy and check them out online because I guarantee you they've got amazing expertise to share with you and your team. Thanks to Julia Patrick, CEO of the American nonprofit Academy for having this wonderful idea and creating these episodes. I am so honored that I get to play alongside you every day. I'm Jarrett ransom, also known as the nonprofit nerd CEO of the raven group. And it's really just been a pleasure to go through these episodes I think we're on like 313, perhaps, but we are really getting up there in age, and I've just loved, loved every conversation. So here we are back to you Sasha. Welcome back and thank you for spending your time and your talents with us this morning. I'm excited to be here and really appreciate the opportunity to have the discussion today on some things that we can do over the summer to really help our organization. You know, stay fresh day on the cutting edge or at least start to get to the cutting edge of things that we need to be thinking about when it comes to data and I, I do tend to focus on the database but the things that I'm talking about today do connect with the but are definitely things that come in a collaboration with our marketing departments or development teams and everybody together to really make sure that we are using these few moments we do get in the summer when people are on vacation or out of the office where we could take a few more minutes to take care of some things that often get put on the background. So again looking forward to having that discussion today. So I appreciate this because I think I fall into the trap that okay summers here. I can relax and I think it's really detrimental because then I over commit mentally sometimes. And then I'm like okay we're going to get this organized and we're going to get this straightened out we're going to get this all ready to go because I know in the fall that's not the time we can make change you know we got to just like work the plan and so I appreciate you kind of reframing us and I love that you are a CFRE so that you're not just looking at that data piece, although that's the overall call, I guess, Clarion call, but I've got to ask you got several to go through standard communications checkup. Wow. This is the one that I started with that maybe I don't know if these were in order but this was the one that to me is one of the most important things that gets overlooked in our organizations and these are our thank you letters, the time monthly gift output, the emails that are associated with our online receipts, it's the things that tend to burn and turn transactionally with our organization. And we send these out but we stop, in my opinion thinking and realizing how many mission moments we have. And so take our donor thank you letters, if you have only updated your thank you letter one time a year usually it's kind of in the fall of 2020 and maybe not even every year every two or three years. That means your donors have received the exact same message from you over and over again, I actually encountered an organization that had not changed that letter for 14 years. And so when you first thing we did with my new letter, but it's those reminders that this is an opportunity to talk with your donors to tell them the amazing things that they're helping accomplish and your thank you letters, whether it's the printed receipts or whatever those communication points are that is a missed opportunity to share a current mission moment to share a testimonial. And I would also encourage in a lengthy way to say don't make them so long. Start shortening them a little bit. The essay long thank you letters I see regularly are more than a donor is ever going to read. They don't need to and frankly I don't think want to hear about every little thing you did they want to know the big things they want to know the big things. So take a look at them. I encourage you to slim them down if you've got a one or two page letter. Get to them, you know, a focus point with the letter, you know, text stuff that you have to, but take a moment to audit whatever pieces of communication you're sending out on a regular basis. Make it fresh make it vibrant and use this time to really tell them the exciting things you accomplish this last year, because I can guarantee that if the organization is still functioning you accomplish some amazing things over this last year. I love that comment. Sure, were you going to say something. Yeah, I was. I love this conversation and ironically I just had an executive coaching session this morning before I got on live here for the show. And the individual I was coaching, literally said well it's summer, you know the board's gone is a lot of travel, everything kind of stands still in that arena and I said, No, it actually doesn't. I love you to consider and one of the things honestly Sasha had no idea this was a topic. This key point really was going back to audit some of these elements of what's being sent. How are you engaging with your board members. How are you telling the machine moment stories. So this is perfect and you know one of the things I do when I work with my clients is I do audit their thank you letters and their donor receipts. But I love that you said the receipts because I am guilty sometimes those get forgotten. Yeah, well I must say, I'll give a little shout out if you're on Twitter and the only thing that I really follow on Twitter is the whitey donor. And the whiny donor cannot familiar is this donor that truly will kind of last nonprofits for the stuff that they send. And recently, the whiny donor have talked about receiving like a thank you letter or something and it was dear friend and it was not even format and it was basically a shell of a template and what I realized when I saw that was that means they had just implemented a new CRM CRM system nobody understood how to go in and configure the USC and they probably don't have the staff to do so. So I've started to follow what they're saying and going I wonder what's happening on the operational side of things. And if you're not watching that Twitter feed I encourage you to do so as a nonprofit professional because it really makes you think well what am I skipping and that's also why I wanted to bring this up is we need to do better because we don't know who's blasting us, you know out in the footer sphere and we need to be elevating our quality because our donors deserve better and our basic standard communication is one of the main ways we can show our donors we care enough about them to make sure that we're updating our thank you letters and our regular communications. I know we're going to have to get our executive producer who handles the Twitter feed for us to check out the whiny donor. You know this makes me think as you say Sasha, you know, we don't want to be blasted on the the Twitter, Twitter sphere and here I was thinking like the Walmart Hall of Shame was the worst thing that could happen but there's so much more out there with you know what not to do, and, and we've had Steven Shaddock right with Boomerang talk about that his test and what he's done to really audit the sector across the nation across the sectors to see exactly how they recognize a gift from a first time donor. Yeah, it's riveting. Okay, if I may it's there it's individuals like Steve Boomerang and some of these other software providers that are making this even more important because of the fact that there is more we can do now with engagement analytics and things like that so it really is adding to the tools that you've invested in for your organization and helping to make them better with even some of these fundamental things thank you. Yes, absolutely. Super cool. Okay, now you have another summer vacation to do point. And this is biographical health check. I don't even know what that is. So this is really taking a moment to do a look at your donor records. So if you're an organization that is sending out direct miles and your point mailing list and you have to spend an exorbitant amount of time deducing or billing and you know fixing the name because it's not printing the title and it looks really weird. That's what I'm talking about. It's those things that you are wasting your time over and over again by manually fixing them in the Excel file versus pausing and actually taking the time to go fix them in the donor database. So do a query and if you're an organization that's still heavily used as Mr. and Mrs. as a part of your address the salutation format and you're missing titles, go in and fill them in work together as a team to accomplish a co-cord of them or small section of them excuse me a day. If your organization deals a lot with online giving there's some really great new platforms like classy that create integration opportunities and duplicate records. If you don't get ahead of those duplicate records you're eventually going to have a database that is so clunky and dirty everybody's going to be frustrated. So pause and take a moment to empower team members to help facilitate this biographical wellness check of your database. If your donor records are healthy and you don't have the proper solicit codes which translates to how do they want to be communicated with us and you're not building those into the mailing list that you're then extracting and pulling out. So we're continuing to reinforce that mindset to the donor that we are they are not important that we can't communicate with them. For those that know me you hear me talk about the Amazon experience our donors deserve that they need to know that if they like a green shirt we're going to take them with every green shirt they could possibly ever see again and our donors deserve that kind of care from us as organizations and it's this help check and making sure that their records are clean and accurate so that when we are communicating with them we're showing them that we care enough about them to make sure that how we see them is is correct. And it doesn't it does take time but it's just an intention of time 20 30 minutes a day can make an incredible impact on the data help of your biographical records be a donor database. You know I appreciate you saying this because I, I'm not a lot of lists. Right. And one of the things that when when things happen that are incorrect or like I get three annual reports mail to me, things of that nature. I'm never worried about myself that they don't feel that I'm worthy. But I think that the organization's not well run. I put a whole lot of baggage onto the backs of an organization when they don't do things right because then I think it's filtering down and they're not serving the community well or their constituency their clients you know. And so it's such an important piece of of the donor experience and I just feel Sasha until we met you. We weren't really talking about it. You know, we were absolutely sorry it's. It's such an important piece it's the part that's driving the conversations and we talk about what's changing things it's donor engagement and donor engagement is absolutely built on your foundation of your CRM system your donor database. And if that is not correct, you're not going to engage your donors you're going to have miss messages things aren't going to go to the right areas you're not going to, you know in the biographical health check check your emails. If your donor has multiple emails on the record and once for their spouse get that over on their spouses records you actually can start engaging them as individuals instead of assuming that they have the same interests. You know you're really expanding your opportunity to understand your donors by again stop by by taking the time to make sure your system is set up correctly it's the most important thing you could do right now moving forward to prepare your organization to be ready for the truly digital engagement world. And I cannot tell you with the name like Jared, even after I have talked to someone on the phone right, even I have zoomed with someone through the virtual space, and I still receive a Mr. That really does not sit well with me. Well, you bring up a point that I have shared before and I will share again and it's still somewhat controversial, but I do consider it no longer appropriate to title or gender your records in your database if you're not asking for that information. I don't consider it to be correct anymore now there are organizations where the donor basis tend to be a little bit more older and more mature and so they do still appreciate that structure. And for that exact reason Jared I have a friend they named their daughter James never would have assumed that but you know what right do we have to assume right of those things and we frankly don't have a title that represents they them and individuals that identify as non binary so how do we honor their identity when we don't have one in our in our formal system anyway. So I encourage you to be mindful of that and if you are an organization that it would make sense to convert away from the Mr. That's true. Do that this summer. It takes time to make sure they're correct. You don't want to make mistakes but do that because Jared I would assume you'd much rather be dear Jared than do Mr. Jared. And I'm so glad that you mentioned the non binary because when we talk so much about Mr and Mrs are miss and we're you know we're correcting that in the system. I was curious how we do identify, you know with the with the gender or the non gender of they. So for you to mention that and to say this is a great summer check up, maybe make the decision moving forward, you know, as we really look into our Jedi space just you know, and look to see like, is this still necessary that we include that formal salutation. We might want to scrap it all together and I would, I would much rather and in fact I tell my son school this when I receive you know all the letters, please refer to me as Jared that that's what I want. Absolutely. And I think it reflects as an organization being aware of the modern times and the way that the war transitioning and the world's shifting. You know we don't necessarily have this formal structure where we're all Mr and Mrs. And so it has changed and so be adaptable to that I would encourage you. And I would encourage you to look into your summer projects things to work on. You know, it's, it's important for years, I know I never changed my name when I got married. So for 30 years, plus 40 years of the life together I've had a different last name than my husband and my child. And so an hour child and so it there's nothing that torques him out more than getting addressed is Mr Patrick. One thing that I would love to throw into the online gift form that I don't know if it's come up with start asking individuals the pronouns like preferred pronouns, and then build those into their thank you letters into their knowledge as merge fields. You know, again, it's a simple thing to do it's a merge field and then you, and this takes time so this is why it's a great summer project and you have your team working on it, and you start to again identify and work with individuals and communicate with them. However, they want to and recognize something you know very basic was just how you know they prefer their pronouns to be across the board so rather than you know gender maybe what our new question is is what's your preferred program. Yeah, wow. Okay. Now, this kind of dev tails into the next summer vacation task reports queries and those templates and we've been talking a lot about that but I would imagine that because of the pandemic. So many of our templates need to be changed I mean we're doing things differently. What are your thoughts on this. And that's exactly part of it is we have all of these that happen year over year the templates of reports and some systems are great about archiving them some of them it creates this very lengthy long list. That gets really hard to filter through and to be trying for a long time I personally never value the time to go back and kind of look at these and say, you know are the ones that we're not using we just need to clean them out I've always kind of been like leave them because you never know who's going to get them. Well now when I see reports that are 20 to 30 years old and nobody's executed them in that long, I feel much better about saying we can let those go, and we can clean them up so that we make it easier for our teammates to understand. What are the current reports what are the current templates how are we currently pulling data, so that I can be consistent in the way that I am generating my output. Because more often than not when we're starting to generate reports in these templates, we shift them when a new team member comes in because they didn't understand how the last team member did team member pulled them. And when that happens we actually have the potential of changing the metrics in a sense. And so this is an opportunity to get rid of that potential confusion. There's old data points there's old reports there's things you know from staff members that are a decade long gone. If they don't have current value add any passing downtime, I finally have embraced the notion that it is what the time to go on and clean up because 20 years later, nobody knows what that means. If they no longer spark joy it's time to release them. It's time to let it go. What I do and I wonder if you would like give me give me the blessing of this or say well you know it's not really necessary. When I do create a report query a template I put the year in which I created it so that if it's you know let's say. I don't know 2021 donor thank you, then I know that that's the that's this year that this current one, but then I also have it you know that template then for the next person to make a 2022. But hopefully then that also ignites back to your first topic point is change your letters change the language update it so what would you say should I keep the year in these titles or should I not. This is a good. Good output depending on how you structure your reports. So one of the things that I see often is people creating the same, what we talk call it query and razors edge for example where it is, you know, basically your 21 dollar report, and the structure is exactly the same and what I think people is all too often these queries are intended to group people. So I will say yes you can keep doing that because it absolutely helps with organization be consistent in your structure, but I encourage you to. Can you craft that query or report in such a way that it is template. The year is irrelevant because it's nearly updated, and we're using the same functionality year over year so there's no risk of the parameters changing. That's the ultimate output structure we want because we never have the question recreate we nearly go in and update the date for years. Perfect. Interesting. I love that. And I think that that kind of dovetails into when we first met you more than a year ago. You said we need to make data sexy again. The concept of really understanding what it is we should be looking at is the starting point and you said something else that makes me think of this is that you you made this comment. Again, right when we first met you that you see too many people throwing out their systems because they're like, it just doesn't work. It just just garbage it's ridiculous, but the reality is, maybe they haven't set it up correctly. And I'm assuming this is what you're talking about is you need to understand what is going to be a value so that you can focus on those pieces right. Absolutely. I do see that a lot this desire to shift and jump to the next thing of the next system that's promising bells and whistles, but it still goes down to what's your foundation if your foundation of your system is not solid you're just going to put bad data into the new process and most likely make it worse, because the inherited problems that you already had. If you don't have someone knowledgeable in that position assisting with that you know conversion for example, you wind up with data that belongs in such weird places because we are just trying to map it versus understand how does the organization use it, and let's make sure we map its usability, not just where we think it makes sense and so that also leads into this conversation about security checks. One of the things that I am becoming even more concerned about and more, let's just say it's stressed out about is the overwhelming amount of organizations that have volunteers with complete absolute supervisor rights to their database. I know that we want to trust you may have one or two volunteers that that makes sense, but your database has a lot, a lot of private donor data yes some of it is public records and I know reports 990s depending, but we have credit card information stored we have in some organizations a health information information about family members and data security is important I'm not a cybersecurity specialist I understand its value that I'm not in that area. But I know enough to know that we are not protecting this as an organization that we are so free willy-nilly about it. It's stressful when I look at organizations and when I think through even just our get processing. You know we have these accesses to PayPal and all the things that we just give to any staff member and I'm sitting there pausing and going and if you're not familiar if you have access to organizations PayPal. You have access to the bank account, and you know we're just giving that away and so it's I encourage you as an organization to really do an assessment of where our logins, what things are being used, can we create a evergreen user email that goes for all of these logins so that we stop changing every time a staff member turns over. Let's be honest turnover is what 12 months now 18 months at this point in most cases I mean it's fast. And so if we have to spend months trying to get back to the same logins, because we don't have consistency. It just cost these organizations. And so I encourage you as an organization to evaluate what logins are going out, who has access to what and these are your the nevity accounts, you know, your donor transactions wherever you go to get that information however your merchant service accounts work, your donor database, these are not just think that they're going to be okay you need to put data security practices around them, create security groups if that makes sense in that system or that program, and make sure your donor data is protected credit card information I don't fully understand how they steal it but it is stealable you know you can steal that pretty easy. And when anybody come on again and just start running your donors credit cards because you really don't have good security, you know structures around it. You've got too many people are now list but it could happen and it's not worth the risk. Well and I'm thinking like you know, the whole concept of what we're talking about is doing some things during vacation time, because let's face it, our coffers are generally generally a little low right now, but in 60 days 90 days, that's the pinnacle of our cash flow. And that's when we are more vulnerable, you know, so get it done now. Jared, did we have a question that came in. Yes, it's comment, great insights, time to get to work this summer Sasha rocks she totally rocks and love to know that she's staying on with us as a presenting sponsor. So these are the kind of conversations that I think are so important and hopefully will keep us from being blasted on the Twitter, Twitter spear as you call them. And so really looking at what that looks like with you has really been a true joy. I was taking some notes of some of these things as you know I do all the time Julia it's like I have a three ring binder just built with notes here so I've got my pen and hand taking some notes, because every time Sasha is on she totally rocks, and it ignites something in my in my brain of like, Oh yeah, I need to do that. I love it, I love it. Well here's Sasha's information. You know one of the cool things about Sasha is that she is also CFRE so she can understand the components of data movement and all this but yet she's tagged in and educated in the worldly ways of the nonprofit sector. So this is why I think it's a valuable thing, especially for us for Jared and I Sasha I mean because we do talk about this in fact in a pre meeting I had with our executive producer. He actually even brought up your name this morning and said well like Sasha says that's because we were talking about our own internal database stuff so this is the magic discussion. We should be having now I mean this is a, a summer issue and so we're delighted again here's Sasha's information. Go ahead and reach out to her and see how maybe she can give you some clarity and what you're doing. I'm Julia Patrick CEO of the American nonprofit Academy, I've been joined by the nonprofit nurture here at ransom CEO of the Raven group. Again we want to thank all of our presenting sponsors without you we would not be here I see that every day, but it really is true. Yeah, it really is true. And we are really excited about what things are coming forward with us. Jared, I think you have booked out the rest of the month and you're into August. Okay. This is my summer. That's right. There went your summer. Yes, it's a we're just so appreciative everyone's brought such great voices and and views to to the episodes. I love to share Julia that you're like at some point we'll run out of content but really as the sector continues to evolve, we're in COVID rebound. One of the things Sasha you shared with us was, you know that time that you would use when you would commute. Now I want you to focus that time really on your database. And that's changing right this co vet COVID rebound timeframe is changing so the content is ever evolving just like our sector. It's true. Hey, we want to remind everybody that we've launched a new program called fundraising events TV. It's just about the fundraising event side of our sector so we like to say from ballrooms to barns from golf to gala as we got you covered. My co host on that is Jason champion, who we've had on before he's just a fabulous talent and I on the nonprofit show I have been known to call him Jason ransom but I want to report back to you I haven't made that mistake yet. Now you will because you just said it. Really, it's true. Oh, yo, yo, but anyway, so please join us for that. Another great episode. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Sasha Lewis. You've given me some tasks to do in my own business summer vacation. Not going anywhere except to my computer. I'm thinking Sasha it's been phenomenal. Thank you everyone. Hey everybody as we end today's episode. We want to remind you to stay well, so you can do well. We'll see you back here tomorrow.