 and good morning or good afternoon. Welcome to the non-profit show. Wherever you might be joining us, we're glad you're here. Today, Julie and I have a guest with us. We're so excited to have Hardy Smith. He's an author and he's here to talk to us about how you can stop the non-profit board blame game. So stay with us. We're gonna dive deep into this conversation. It's a big conversation I know often non-profit leaders and staff have. So Julia Patrick, good morning to you, CEO of the American Non-profit Academy. I'm Jarrett Ransom, you're a non-profit nerd, CEO of the Raven Group. And we are honored to have the continued support, investment and trust from our loyal presenting sponsors. So thank you, thank you, thank you to Bloomerang American Non-profit Academy, fundraising academy at National University, be generous, you're part-time controller, staffing boutique, non-profit thought leader, as well as the non-profit nerd. I encourage you to check these companies out. They're here for one reason and that's you and your mission. So they're definitely here to help you wrap up the year, start the new year. So do check these companies out and they help us to create what now is our 700th episode. Ba-ba-ba-ba, those are my fireworks. I know. Hardie, these are the excitement. Today is episode 700. Technically it was yesterday but we were off for the holiday. So thank you to all of you for being here. You can find all of our episodes on Roku, YouTube, Amazon Fire TV as well as Vimeo plus podcast. So go ahead and queue us up wherever you stream your podcast. So Hardie, thank you for that excitement. I know before you even came on the show you wanted to confirm when the 700th was. So I wish that we could like have, you know, confetti fall down from the sky where you are, the ceiling. Yeah, it's real to have you. And again, for those of you watching as well as listening, Hardie Smith is our guest today. Hardie is the CEO of Hardie Smith Consulting and an author that we're gonna learn more about. So welcome to you, Hardie. Thank you so very much. And I do want to confirm that I am not the NBA legend who will be on your show later this week. That I am not that guy. So I like watching hoops, but NBA was not in my career path. Anyway, it'll be a lot of fun. But what's even more fun is that we have Hardie Smith on today talking about something that honest to goodness is at the central core of almost every discussion that comes up. And that's about boards. And I love the book cover artwork. I was telling you this before we got started, Hardie. And I've been a part of this blame game on both sides. And so talk to us about how and why you started this book. Well, thank you so very much first of all for an opportunity to be on your show. I'm just, you know, I've got a 30 year career in the high performance world NASCAR racing. So competition is what I just love competition. So knowing that I'm that 700, that's like I got that. So thank you so very much. You know, it was a very interesting situation. I've been speaking, training, working with nonprofits across the country for a long period of time. And I, is it just total circumstance? I was conducting a training session with about a hundred nonprofit CEO level, C-suite level leaders. And I just asked, Julie, I just put the question out there. What's your, what's your number one problem? And I'm just gonna tell you, you would think it was scripted, but it wasn't. And they just, the room just yelled back at me. The board members, why don't those board members do what they're supposed to do? And Julia and Jared, the force of that answer. I mean, it was, it caused me to kind of stick, take a step back in the room. And then the room went totally silent. So the first response was my first ah-ha, there's something here. Then the second ah-ha was when the room went totally silent. And all of those nonprofit leaders realized they just affirmed something that they probably knew but didn't realize everyone else had the same problem. So two big, two big ah-has, I said, I've got to get into this, you know, because obviously, you know, if you're in the nonprofit sector, the subject, you know, they're two big main subjects. Either you don't have enough money or the board members aren't doing what they're supposed to do, right? And then maybe they're three main subjects. It's number one and number two combined. And so I said, I'm gonna get into this because obviously there's a lot written. There are a lot of training sessions. There are a lot of speakers like me that are out there and they're talking about, well, your boards aren't doing what they're supposed to do. And here's how you want to fix it. And so all of this advice is out there but it isn't working, right? Not getting the result that organizations need. So I said, I'm gonna find the answer. So what I did was a very, I'm on total confession here a moment, totally crude. I'm not an academic. I'm not a professional researcher. I didn't use a very sophisticated survey methodology. And I confessed to that in the book because I don't wanna misrepresent myself. But I reached across the country to not nonprofit leaders, professional staff, I reached out to board members. And I just in an email, very crude, just ask them an open-ended question. Well, board members seem to be constantly blamed for not doing what they're supposed to do. Can you tell me why that is? And so the answers all came back and open-ended answers. And obviously the words weren't the same because it wasn't like a multiple choice, pick a number, that kind of a thing. And then when I started laying out the responses from all over the country, all of a sudden I got papers all over the kitchen floor, the dining room floor, everywhere I've got papers. And I said, they're all saying the same thing. This is 100% locked in the same thing. So what they did, they identified the reasons from a board member perspective. And that's why the book is different. It's from the board member perspective. They identified why once good board members turn off and become disengaged. And then they outlined, and then so what the book does is share their thoughts, it shares the solutions and more importantly, the how-tos on to fix this. So I don't have a fire extinguisher that I can, but I was listening to you. I was binge listening to the non-watching, the non-profit show during my Christmas Eve rapping. And then I'm listening to the Blumerang report and Ann's comments. And then when you said, oh my God, my hair's on fire, I just started screaming and laughing and it was hilarious. But I don't have a fixed extinguisher. Let's talk about that book. So that'll help you. It's really an interesting thing because you are right. We talk about this a lot. We talk about this a lot on the non-profit show individually in the orbits that we run in. But let's start with board recruitment and retention. And yeah, I mean, if you are working with a deck that's not so great and the hands that you've been dealt, how do you even move forward? It's kind of got to start from that very moment. You bring somebody onto the board. Can you talk to us about that a little bit? Absolutely. And the blame game comes. Let me answer that question with this lead in. The blame game comes from the realization. That's the big reveal that while board, a professional non-profit professionals are blaming board members for not doing what they're supposed to do, the board members are blaming the non-profit staff. So it is a blame game. And who wins in that blame game? And that's why that creative two fingers of blame are pointing to each other on the cover. So number one, if you've got board members who aren't doing what they're supposed to do, you've probably have the wrong board members to start out with. So take a look at your processes and procedures. I advocate, recruit board members with purpose and process. So how familiar does this sound? You know, the annual meeting is in January because it's in every year in January. And November is the last board meeting of the year. And you have two board seats that are open that haven't been filled yet because you haven't been recruiting board members with intentionality. And the big push is, oh, well, does anybody know anybody that we can fill these two seats with because elections in January? Oh, well, I know somebody, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes, okay, well, you got two people you're gonna grab. There is no advanced conversation. There is no background checks. I mean, go figure, you'd go do a background check on a potential candidate for your board, duh. And then, you know, what are the standards that you're wanting your board members to achieve and perform to? So there is no intentionality. Whatsoever, by too many of the 1.8 million nonprofits in this country. And so what you get is what you always get. You get board members who will not meet your expectations. I call those slot fillers. That is so important. I see it all too often. We're right in that mixture of, you know, the final board meeting of the year looking into, you know, the voting season for the next year. And Hardy, I have seen that around the board tables that I have the privilege of sitting from a client perspective. And so I see this all too often. I like to talk to you about that succession planning because it's not just about your executive director or your CEO, it's around the board table as well or the board Zoom table, right? Where we're all meeting virtually. So what are some of these best practices when it comes to that recruitment and retention? Because a big key element of being on the board is fundraising. Well, I'll save the fundraising. So don't let me forget that. But number one is what do you need? So what are the skills? What are the experience levels? And who you might need in 2023 could be totally different than 1993 or 2003 or 2013. So, you know, what the organization needs in the way of skills, talent, experience evolves on a constant basis. And then it's the who. Who has what you need? And so going, walking back to the beginning to the green room conversation and the beginning of the show, college football, I'm just a sports junkie. And you know, you play the games and then that's part of the season and the big part of the season is recruiting. Well, I coach youth boys youth basketball back a few years back. And we played against some real, we weren't one of the really good teams but we played a whole lot of really good teams even future NBA players at the time. So sixth, seventh and eighth grade boys were being scouted by, listen to this, my college scouts because they were being projected in the sixth grade that they would be in a major talent category in just a few short years. So if you're gonna do that with sixth grade boys playing basketball wouldn't your nonprofit board and you know, how important is your cause? So why not put that same intentionality into board members who are potential board members that might not even be a part of your organization might not be members of your association even. So who out there could be a potential board member and go out there and put them on that prospect list and build a pool of candidates that you can work with. And then in the recruiting phase you have got to have intentionality and you have got to have the one-on-one conversation. So if I'm interested, you know, gosh we've got to get Jared on our board. She is a five-star recruit if there ever was one. And Jared, we're so interested in having you on our board. And by the way, here's the expectation we have of you. And then stop and listen. Is Jared saying yes or is Jared saying, well really I'm too busy, I can't do that. But we're mindful that that clock is ticking on filling that seat. And even though Jared is telling us she can't fulfill the obligation we keep pushing her to say yes. And then now we've got a board member on our board who gave us every reason, told us she could not and would not do all that stuff but we insisted on getting her. And then you want to know about the fundraising. Yeah, I do want to know about the fundraising. And I love the analogy of like the sixth, seventh grade athletes, you know filling the roster in years to come because I do think that that's a big miss for us. And I automatically when you were saying this Hardy I thought about, you know like the business journals around the nation. I mean, they produce 40 under 40 lists. They produce, you know, the top entrepreneur list. Like they produce these lists which really could be our potential recruits. Absolutely. And you know, we all know the old saying about continuing to do what you've always done and hoping to get a different result. Insanity. I'm just gonna tell you, my good friend, the fellow speaker Stephen Shapiro wrote one of his books is one of my favorites. Our best practice is stupid. Well, I kind of tweaked on that with his permission and I wrote an article. It's one of my favorites. Our non-profit best practice is stupid. Stupid. So in the recruiting activities, what we do as a sector doesn't work. You've got to do something differently. We do. Yeah, we do. So talk to us about the fundraising because I know we've got another key topic to talk about before our time runs up but talk to us about fundraising best practices, Hardy, for our board. Well, this is one of my favorites and I'm gonna give a shout out to Ann from Blue Morang, extremely compelling research. I can't wait to get into all of that. But I'm gonna take for purposes of conversation, just be being the contrarian challenger that I tend to be. Maybe it's that NASCAR thing, why does it all work? If you remember the conversation, Julia, Ann said when she talked about the high percentage of nonprofits whose board members don't participate in fundraising. If you remember what she said, I wrote this down, how do we set those expectations for them? That's the problem. That nuance is the problem. I agree. Here's my philosophy. If you want your board members to raise money, that's great. But understand and nonprofits don't, it's selective memory here now. I'm challenging you. The number one purpose of a board member or a board is not fundraising. Hang on, it's governance. And governance is not fundraising. So I'm gonna suggest to you, and here's the problem. If when I was recruiting Jared just a while ago, our five-star board member recruit, right? Our prospect. You know, one of the things I did not mention in those expectations was the level of fundraising. The fact that there is fundraising involved. The fact that there's a personal ask that's going to be requested. And you know why we don't have that conversation in the beginning? You know, what we do is we wait till the altar. We get our board candidate to the altar. We wait for the I do. Then we're gonna come back and have the conversation on expectations. So in a relationship, how often does that work out? You're gonna fix them after you get them. You're too afraid you're gonna lose them if you don't. So here's the situation. So now all of a sudden we've got Jared on the board and it's her first meeting. Oh, Jared, by the way, we do expect all of our board members to be involved in fundraising. And we do expect you to make a substantial personal gift. Well, you know what that is? In my opinion, that's bait and switch. Oh yeah. And in the world of advertising, if I'm selling you a car or selling you a home or if I'm selling you a new appliance for your kitchen, that's false advertising and it's illegal and I can go to jail. So the point is we as a nonprofit sector we set ourselves up for failure. Now let's go a little bit deeper with this fundraising thing and how can we do better with it and get the engagement that we want? I'm gonna suggest to you as hard as I can push it. Julia and Jared, if you're listeners today want board members to be fundraisers, you've gotta get fundraisers. Not everybody is a fundraiser. Not everybody on the planet or those faces around the boardroom are interested or willing or want to ask someone else for money. Now I know there are a lot of ways to be involved in fundraising, I know that. But in the context of a direct solicitation, not many people ever, ever wanna ask someone else for money. And think about this. How often, we're expecting our board members to raise money in the recruitment process. Oh, we were talking to Jared, well, what about Julia? Now Julia could be a prize for our board because she's on five other boards right now and she served on 20 boards in her past and you know what they say about if you want something done, who do you get? Ask a person who's busy. A busy person, right? So what about that? Let's dispel that myth really quickly. How many of Julia's friends, customers, other sponsors are willing to be hit up every time Julia decides to go work for another worthwhile cause. I'm suggesting go get someone who's not as involved as Julia is. Someone that hasn't been tapped into yet. Right, and their networks. Well, that's really, yeah, no, that's really important. And I'm curious, so I'm looking at the time here, Hardy and I know we wanna get you to talk about the effectiveness now of the communication because we've talked about the expectations, we've talked about not doing the bait and switch so we're standing in the altar, we're saying I do and then, oh yeah, don't forget, we expect a personal gift. So how do you communicate this with those board members effectively? Well, the number one issue that in the research that I've done to answer the question, why don't board members do what they're supposed to do? The number one issue is poor communications. And it's not about another, more emails, more reports, it's about communicating effectively. So think about, if everyone right now, all of your listeners, if you would just simply visualize, close your eyes, visualize all those faces around your boardroom, each individual face that's kinda, you're thinking about right now, represents an individual distinctly different preference for how they want to be communicated with. How you communicate the message, the message is the same but how it's communicated. So what communication platforms? And there's multiple platforms. So is it email? Is it a report? Is it just a brief summary? When I work for NASCAR, I work for Bill France, Jr., the CEO, chairman of NASCAR. I'm gonna tell you, whenever I walked in, he would say, Hardy, I don't need a full weather forecast. Is it raining? Yes or no? And then if he wanted to ask more questions, he certainly would and did. But the point is, some of your board members may want a phone call. Some of your board members may want a personal visit. So you've got to analyze that and oh, how in the world can you know you ask maybe? And when would you do the asking? Is in that recruiting phase, orientation phase, the onboarding phase. So you've got to be able to communicate effectively. And again, I'm gonna repeat what I said earlier. When you're communicating this whole thing about fundraising, stop and listen because the number one most important element in communication we all know is listening. So listen for what your board member is going to tell you. Yeah. You can't assume that's the biggest mistake. Yeah, that is a big mistake. I'm curious and Julie is a big fan of this. How did board portals play a role in the communication? Did you hear that feedback from any of your solicitations? Board, well, it's kind of interesting. At the time of the research, board portals weren't a thing. So not really, well, probably, but it's like anything else. You can't just tell your board, well, we have a portal and then, okay, how the heck do you use it? And so you've got to, and they may not want to, from a staff standpoint, it might be the world's greatest idea and I see some potential portal sources right there on the screen behind you. But it's gotta make sense for the board. The people that you're trying to communicate with. Right. And that can change. Absolutely. And this is a fascinating thing, Hardy. It's been amazing to have you on because I love one of the things that you started off with and that's the journey of somebody, sixth, seventh, eighth grade and how they move forward. The type of board member, the type of leader, the type of influencer you are at one point, shifts and changes, it gets better, it might get worse, but this is a journey and so as it is a journey for our board members and our nonprofits, that is the journey of success. If you can understand that and follow it. It's really been cool to have you on and to hear what you have had to say so much more that can come from Hardy Smith, given the amount of information that he has and the research that he's done. Check out hardysmith.com and you really need to check out this book. I think it's just such a great way of helping you to understand maybe why you're getting frustrated. Now I talk to a lot of CEOs and I talk to a lot of board chairs who are unhappy but they can't really define why it's not working and I think there are a lot of gems in this book that will help you to understand why things aren't working and in some ways they're very simple. Hardy, remind us where we can get a copy. Amazon, just go to Amazon. Perfect. It's right there, Amazon bestseller. It's right there, easy to find. Thank you so very much. Well, stop the nonprofit board blame game by Hardy Smith, how to break the cycle of frustrating relationships and benefit from fully engaged boards. An amazing opportunity to learn how we can be more efficient and how we can be better and I think we can all agree this is something that we need to understand and fully move forward. Again, I'm Julia Patrick. I've been joined by the nonprofit nerd herself. Spoiler alert, we talk about this concept a lot. We do. We really do and privately. It's not just on the show. I mean, wouldn't you say Jarrett, this always weaves its way back into our conversation? Well, it does and I think it's important that it continues to as well because as Hardy said, there's one main role for the board and that's governance, right? And so the board really is that fiduciary agent and advocate for the mission. So yeah, I mean, another spoiler alert, I think it'll continue through next year as well. Oh my God, we're giving it away. We're getting all the cash back. Well, it's really true and it's something that I agree with you, Jarrett. We're gonna only continue just to be speaking about it more and more. Hey again, we wanna thank all of our presenting sponsors who are so generous and have been with us now for most of these folks for 700 episodes. Blumerang, American nonprofit academy, fundraising academy at National University, be generous, your part-time controller, nonprofit nerd, nonprofit thought leader, and staffing boutique. I wanna give a shout out to staffing boutique. They were our very first sponsor. They called us up and said, hey, we wanna be a sponsor. And I was like, oh yeah, no problem. Never having an idea that this would be something that we would move forward on. So that would be on for two weeks, right? Let's be honest. We didn't know we had a need for sponsorship. So yes, thank you to staffing boutique and Blumerang that followed shortly after. So it's been an amazing journey, 700 today. March will mark our fourth year and that will be here before we know it. Before we know it. You know, it's been a pleasure and an honor, Jarrett, ransom the nonprofit nerd to work with you every day and learn something new every day. I'm encouraged about our communities doing amazing things and it only gets better from here. So tomorrow will be another day. It'll be a very exciting, another day as it is with the nonprofit show. And as we like to wrap up today's episode and remind everybody our mantra again, stay well so you can do well. Hey, Hardy, thanks so much. We've really enjoyed this.