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New Job? Start Off Strong

                Melissa Bank Stepno

A month ago today we welcomed Melissa Bank Stepno to the HBG team, and (no surprise, if you know her), Melissa hit the ground running. Melissa is the new Vice President of Data Insight Consulting as well as the Managing Director of DAFinitive®, our online donor advised fund research tool. Four weeks in and already she’s brought new insight of her own and (good) change to things that needed a fresh look from a new perspective . This week we welcome Melissa to The Intelligent Edge to share her fresh perspective on starting a new job.   Welcome, Melissa! ~Helen

Congratulations!  You have accepted your offer letter and you are starting a new job.  Day One is here!

How are you feeling?  Excited? Nervous? Confident? Overwhelmed?  All of these are normal emotions.

You are also not alone.

In fact, according to a PwC study released in June 2023, 25% of workers expect to change jobs within the next year.  This may come as no surprise to those of us who have heard the phrase “Great Resignation” explode into our lexicon over the past couple of years or to those of us who follow the news stories of so many industries reducing their workforce and forcing additional folks into the job market.

Of course, a job change typically requires a job search.  The good news is that the job market in our industry is hot right now!  As of the writing of this article, Apra has over 200 job postings listed on its career center and AFP’s career center has yet an additional 200 listed on its site.  This, of course, doesn’t count the myriad of other channels used to identify open positions such as LinkedIn job postings, listservs, and word of mouth through your professional network.

There are a plethora of resources available for job seekers but less seems to be said about how to be successful as you approach your first day.  That’s where this post comes in.

Exactly one month prior to the date of this post being published, I started my latest career adventure.  I am thrilled to now be part of the HBG family!  And, I thought that for this blog post I would share my thoughts on how to make your next career transition a success:

0. Ground Zero – if you are in the middle of a job transition, or planning for one in the future, the biggest piece of advice that I can offer is to take a break. Wrapping up your current position on a Friday and starting your next job the following Monday is not ideal.  Give yourself time and space to clear your head, rest and reflect.  Whether you can spare just a longer weekend, a full week or a few months, you’ll assure that you arrive for Day One renewed and refreshed.

1. The Best Laid Plans – Your new employer might have a standard training and onboarding plan ready for you when you arrive. If so, that’s great!  It is likely well thought out, vetted and (hopefully) tested by others who onboarded before you.  But it still might not be 100% complete.  It’s also possible that your employer does not have a plan ready for you.  In either case I highly recommend creating, or adapting, a plan specific for your role and your past experience.  Keep in mind too that your needs might be slightly differently than the last person who was hired.

An ideal plan is more than just tactical orientation.  It should focus on specific goals and milestones.  Ask, and confirm, what is expected of you over your first week? 30 days?  90 days? Your manager should be able to articulate how they will assess your success over time.

Working with both your manager and a peer to create your plan is important too.  Even with good intentions, your manager might miss something that a peer knows is important for your role and responsibilities.  Many organizations even have a formal Buddy program where you will officially be paired with someone who is your peer – someone who you can ask those really important but seemingly stupid questions that you don’t want to ask your manager.  Sometimes, these informal learning opportunities can be even more helpful than your formal training plan!

2. Patience is a Virtue – Once you are ready to dive into your training and onboarding plan, give yourself time to get situated and organized. It takes longer than you might remember to set up your new laptop, establish all of your necessary logins and credentials, finalize HR “paperwork” and the like.  Also be sure to ask for a full list of tools and documents that you will need access to accomplish your responsibilities.

Your first few days may not be filled with glamorous work.  In fact, you may feel unproductive and disorganized at times.  That’s okay!  Taking care of all of these items now will assure smooth sailing for the long term.

3. Be Confident and Be Kind to Yourself – Once again, congratulations – you are starting a new job! Maybe Imposter Syndrome is kicking in and you are thinking: “can I do this?” Yes! You Can.  You were hired for a reason and likely beat out other candidates.  Your new manager has confidence in your abilities so you should have confidence in yourself too.  For some added inspiration on this topic, see my colleague Michelle Hart’s post from a couple months ago here: https://www.helenbrowngroup.com/is-it-imposter-syndrome-or-lack-of-confidence-i-cant-even-choose-right-now/

Even if you have a few slip-ups early on – and you are likely to – remember that everyone will make mistakes.  It is how you bounce back and learn from those mistakes that matters most!

4. Rely on the Generosity of Others – we are lucky to work in a collaborative industry. While some of us might be competitive, we also have a strong sense of community.  Take advantage of this!  Many of your peers, both internally at your new organization and externally within the community at large, will want to see you be successful and help you along your journey.  Many might even be paying it forward because someone helped them when they started their current job.  Ask questions.  Lots of them!  Listen to guidance and advice.    I can’t tell you how thankful I am to my new HBG family for helping me over the past 30 days!  And, I’ll fully admit that I’ve already cashed in some favors from my own professional network.

Fast forward…

Let’s pretend it’s a few weeks or months since you started your new career adventure.  You are feeling settled.  You are in a rhythm.  You are thinking: “I’ve got this!”  Remember to pay it forward too.  At the end of the day, this is what this blog post is about.  Yes, I’m still learning and yes, I will still make mistakes.  But, hopefully I have learned a few things that might help some of you too!

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Fundraising data privacy goes before the Supreme Court next month

Photo of a square boulder leaning on another on Stanage Edge.

Stanage Edge boulder. Photo by Julie Kahn

Maybe you already knew about this but it was a total surprise to me this week: Right now at this very moment there’s a case in front of the US Supreme Court that directly impacts the amount of information – private information about our major donors – that nonprofits may have to share in order to be able to raise money in the state of California.

The Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP), four of its chapters, and more than 120 nonprofits have filed an amicus brief in the case to prevent this from happening, and there are at least 35 other amicus briefs filed on behalf of 275 more nonprofits country-wide.

If that weren’t enough action, 22 state attorneys general, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and the U.S. Solicitor General have also filed briefs in support of the petitioners.

So yeah, this is kind of a big deal. Here’s what’s at stake:

The background

As you probably know, nonprofits have to file an audited income tax form called a Form 990 each year with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) which outlines (among other things) that nonprofit’s mission, its board members, and its income and expenses. This form becomes part of the public record about the nonprofit so that the government (and any potential supporters) are provided transparency into the nonprofit’s finances.

What you may not know is that one part of the form is the “Schedule B,” on which the nonprofit is required to share the names and addresses of all of its donors who have given more than $5,000 or 2% of that nonprofit’s income over the year. This information is usually redacted from the public record when it’s shared with searchable sources like the Foundation Directory Online or ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer, which is why it’s generally not seen.

The hitch

Nonprofits are required to register in every state where they raise money. In 2013, the California Attorney General’s office ruled that every nonprofit from that moment forward would have to share their Schedule B (in confidence) as part of their registration process.

There are at least three problems with this:

1) By sharing confidential information about supporters with their contact information, nonprofits could potentially subject their donors to political reprisal based on the change of political opinion and/or incumbent attorney general. Before the middle of the last decade we might not have thought too much about this, but since then nonprofits and causes previously thought of as relatively apolitical suddenly became so.

2) Data gets hacked. Even if it’s kept in confidence, there’s no guarantee that information stored electronically by the California AG’s office won’t be accessed illegally by bad actors and published (or used for other nefarious purposes).

3) Accidents happen. The state of California has already disclosed more than 1800 donor names accidentally from Schedule Bs that it published on its website. Once it’s out, you can’t put that toothpaste back in the tube.

California has no logical reason to need this information, particularly for nonprofits outside of its legal jurisdiction. And as AFP president and CEO Mike Geiger has said, there’s a real fear that major supporters won’t want their home addresses and gift amounts shared electronically, so they could stop giving. (Or, alternatively, it could push them toward making gifts through donor advised funds).

These cases, called Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Becerra and Thomas More Law Center v. Becerra, have made their way to the U.S. Supreme Court and very soon we’ll see what the Supremes have to say about nonprofits, politics, and donor privacy because it’s going to be argued a month from now – April 26th.

Stay tuned and watch this space (Scotus blog) and the AFP website for more information.

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It’s not rocket science – ethics, due diligence, and risk

The MIT Media Lab/Epstein scandal is a kick in the gut for those of us in prospect development and for the hundreds of frontline fundraisers that I’ve worked with (and thousands that I haven’t) who do their jobs ethically.

It angers me that my profession is being tarred by the brush of bad actors working in the shadowy fringes:

  • Coaches taking money to get rich kids into reputable universities.
  • Program directors taking money knowingly from a guy who sex trafficked girls (because why else would you insist the gift be an anonymous workaround when the university’s central fundraising office told you that the individual was off limits?).
  • Bad-apple fundraisers, nonprofit leaders, and administrators that turn a blind eye. Or are actively complicit.

It angers me to my core. We already have enough working against philanthropy these days, with dwindling numbers of donors; deficit funding that creates starvation cycles; low pay; a desperate need to retain good fundraisers; a stock market that is unstable; political systems in flux; and pundits who have never worked a day in the industry social-media blasting their opinions about the evils of our sector and scaring off actual decent people that could fund our work. We don’t need people within our institutions working against us, too.

It’s not rocket science. It’s basic ethics.

Fundraising ethics are not a nebulous mystery

There is a boatload of guidance out there on how to behave ethically in fundraising. The Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP) has a published code of ethics. As does Apra, the professional association for those of us in prospect development. CASE, too. AASP. AHP. I can’t think of a fundraising-related professional association that doesn’t have at least one (and sometimes two) codes of conduct/bills of rights.

Here at The Helen Brown Group, each employee on their first day has to sign an agreement that they will follow the Apra ethics guidelines. It’s not just lip service, either: I also have a discussion with each new colleague about our company values and expectations for their ethical conduct. My guess is that there are quite a few nonprofit managers that do the same. (Does yours? Do you?)

But besides ethical guidelines, there’s also what I call the “gut check.” If you have to lie, obfuscate, convince someone, or conceal a donor/relationship, you already know in your heart that whatever dodo you’re trying to launch isn’t going to fly. You know what that gut check feels like:

I am an institutional fundraiser. It is the duty of everyone involved in development to make sure that the highest levels of integrity are maintained. I can think of two times in my career that I have felt that the money I was taking was inappropriate, though nothing on the scale of Epstein. One gift was a quid-pro-quo for an internship for the donor’s child, and the other was a gift with questionable tax consequences. I deferred to bosses both times, and I regret it.”

-Commenter user_4429094 on Boston Globe article “Former MIT Media Lab Fund-Raiser says he was following university rules on Epstein donations” (9/10/2019)

I do get it – the pressure of a supervisor, a donor, a powerful leader “strongly encouraging” you to do something you know is counter to your professional ethics is extraordinarily hard to say no to. In the moment it feels nearly impossible. I am fortunate that saying no (which I have done) never put my job on the line, but I know that it can. The question to ask yourself in the moment is, would you want everyone to link your personal reputation with this action? Do you want your name and that donor’s to be forever intertwined? Is it worth that?

We have ethics resources. We need to make sure they’re deployed, understood, and followed by everyone who touches money. Not just people in the fundraising office, because as we’ve seen, the actions of a few bad (or uninformed) actors on the fringes can take the shine off the domes of previously solid institutions and respected development offices in a New Yorker minute.

Risk and gift acceptance

And it’s not just following ethical guidelines internally, right? It’s knowing what potential risks lie out there, too. Knowing which prospective donors could bring reputational risk to your door and avoiding them (or being prepared to defend your relationship with them).

It doesn’t matter (to me) if your leadership decides to accept gifts from Koch or Soros (or neither), tobacco and guns (or neither), big pharma (or no pharma). What about a prospective donor who has done jail time – under what circumstances is your organization prepared to affirm that have they paid their debt to society? What about someone whose source of wealth is a little too hard to nail down, or is tied up in businesses that lend themselves to graft? What will you do then?

If you can defend a company or industry or donor’s alignment with your mission to your stakeholders and the court of public opinion, then you’re good to go. But you need to write it down.

It’s critical to have transparent, published gift acceptance guidelines to help every one of your stakeholders – internal and external – remain clear on whose money you will accept and whose you will not. What projects you will take it for, and what you will not. A gift acceptance policy is a reflection of your ethics and values, and it serves as one important guardrail for your philanthropic work.

I’m aware that many nonprofits in the United Kingdom have in recent years formed gift acceptance review groups. The group meets on a regular basis, and it is required that each solicitation at a certain level go before the group to be discussed and approved (or rejected). Yes, it probably slows the process down slightly, but you can’t beat the transparency and accountability.

What else saves your bacon?

Besides a solid gift acceptance policy and a review panel, due diligence prospect research is one of the few shields that an organization and its leadership have against institutional and personal reputation damage. Due diligence research checks for past civil or criminal charges; whether the person or company is politically exposed; whether they or their family serve on a company or nonprofit board whose mission is antithetical to your nonprofit’s; if they are, in fact, as wealthy or well connected or even who they say they are.

But a due diligence report isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on if its recommendations aren’t followed – or if non-professional fundraisers act outside of that safety net.

Because that’s exactly what due diligence prospect research is: a safety net. You may think it’s expensive to have it, but it’s lots more expensive not to.

If you don’t have one yet, create a gift acceptance plan now and take advantage of due diligence

Whose responsibility is it at your organization to make sure that everyone in the institution that cultivates and solicits donors is aware of and is following the nonprofit’s ethical guidelines for fundraising? Do you have an institutional gift acceptance policy and is everyone aware of it? Does your nonprofit demonstrate transparency for all internal and external stakeholders?

Now is a pretty good time to get on that.

 

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How to recruit for that hard-to-fill position

poppy wheat1 NKHow do you recruit new employees? That’s always a tough question in the prospect research field.

Partly because there is no college degree in prospect research. High school kids don’t think “Hey! I’m going to be a prospect researcher when I grow up!” Not because it’s not desirable, but because they just don’t know prospect research as a career choice exists. [Read more…]

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Coming out

Prospect research pride flag

I’m going to let you in on a secret. Across the US, Canada, the United Kingdom, Europe, Australia, and a growing number of other places around the globe, there are more than 5,000 of us.

People who, at one time or other in our professional lives have faced bias and, at times, even open revulsion from the public or the very people we serve. Most of the time we face well-intentioned misunderstanding without even knowing it.

[Read more…]

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Big Data, Big Brother and Prospect Research

Red flag

I can’t stop talking about Big Data when I speak at conferences. I’m excited about the applications Big Data have for fundraising, and I’m not the only one – other prospect researchers, consultants and front-line fundraisers are talking about how Big Data analytics can transform prospect identification and donor engagement (amongst many other things).

For those of you who are new to the term, here’s what Big Data is: super large data sources, much bigger than the information in your Raiser’s Edge or DonorPerfect database. It’s huge data aggregators like the Securities and Exchange Commission or the US Census Bureau. Like Guidestar and Wikipedia. There are even clearinghouses that offer free, direct access to big data sources including websites like freebase, LittleSis and even Amazon (because, seriously – what can’t you get on Amazon these days? It’s not just for books anymore!).

With the recent revelations about the US government’s Big Brother-like access to information through the NSA Prism program, do you worry that the actions of us data nerds in nonprofits could make donors nervous that we’re doing something we shouldn’t be? That question lead me to an article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review by Peter Manzo called “Can Charity Make Big Brother Benevolent?”

Manzo talks about ways that nonprofits/NGOs are using Big Data to effectively deliver essential services to their end users. He shares his vision of opportunities for transforming society that could be possible: for example, based on its use of Big Data, a food pantry or social service agency could proactively offer their services to a needy family in the community who didn’t realize they were eligible for support.

Which could be a wonderful thing.

Or it could signal a step closer to Dystopia. How much individually-identifiable information do we want out there about each of us? For example, in a recent Forbes article, writer Kashmir Hill described the fallout when Target knew that a teen was pregnant before she told her family. The teen’s father was livid (with Target) when she started receiving what he thought were inappropriate coupons. Soon he discovered that Target knew more about his daughter than he did. Target’s data-mining predictors are clearly sophisticated and surprisingly accurate, but as the company’s statistician commented, “…even if you’re following the law, you can do things where people get queasy.”

Yes, indeed. Both the Association of Professional Researchers for Advancement (APRA) and the Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP) have ethical codes that we in the profession are obliged to abide by. But are they good enough? Do they cover this new era of technological possibilities? And even when we follow the law, will what we do make our donors queasy?

Technology and our ability to manipulate data are advancing so quickly that we have to be confident that our own eagerness and experimentation with what is possible are aligned with our professional compass of what is ethical. Because if not, we’re going to hear about it in the most public of ways and, much worse, it will damage donor trust for a generation.

Is ethics a keystone in the conversations you hear about Big Data and fundraising analytics at the water cooler or at conferences? As enthusiastic as I am about Big Data, I know that we we’ll be nowhere with it if ethics is left out of it.

 

 

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They’re going to leave (unless you keep them)

This year’s AFP/Urban Institute Fundraising Effectiveness Project reported that for every 100 new donors that supported a small-to-medium sized nonprofit in the United States last year, 107 donors left. Even more starkly, “every $100 gained in 2011 was offset by $100 in losses through gift attrition.”

Every year small-to-medium nonprofits are working harder just to break even.

Overall the study found that the largest gains come from new donors and the largest losses came from lapsed new donors.

Lapsed new donors.

These are the friends that should be easiest to keep. You’re still in the honeymoon phase. They’re excited about your organization enough to make a first gift. Sure, some of them will have given because of a road race or a golf tournament or in memory of someone. But most of those new donors should spell opportunity, not the promise of future loss. And as we’ve been told a hundred times, it costs less to retain a donor than it does to acquire one.

For larger nonprofits (organizations raising $500,000 and more) the figures are very different. For the most part, the more money an organization raises per year, the less likely they are to have donors leave them. Their losses due to attrition are cut by half.

So what’s the difference between small organizations and large ones? How are the larger ones able to keep their new donors?

A stronger fundraising infrastructure makes a big difference; overhead isn’t a bad thing when it is used effectively. The report strongly recommends building internal capacity overall and then annually providing extra budget support to the areas showing the greatest opportunities and success. Most of the larger organizations use prospect research to identify the new and renewing donors that have the highest potential to be upgraded. If yours doesn’t do that already, now is a good time to start.

What can you do now?

We’re swiftly coming up to year-end and your organization will, with luck, have an influx of brand new donors that you don’t want to lose next year.

This January, use prospect research – do an electronic screening of those new year-end donors. Apply data analytics to find the hidden gems in your database. Research the ones with the most potential to find their interests and philanthropic capacity. If you don’t have internal capacity, hire a professional. Prospect research may be an overhead expense, but it’s more expensive to keep treading water year after year.

Resolve to keep more of your new donors next year. You can start now.

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Meaty Take-aways

Next Wednesday, November 30th I’m going to be speaking at a conference sponsored by the Massachusetts chapter of the Association of Fundraising Professionals.

I mention this because it got me to thinking about what I like and don’t like about conferences. I like really meaty sessions at conferences, and I get disappointed when speakers are entirely theoretical or philosophical. I do like the theory and I do like understanding the context, but then I want you to show me how. Or at least give me a roadmap, inundate me with URLs, show me some first steps so I can figure out the rest.

It drives me crazy when the subtext of a session is if you want the real details, you’re going to have to buy my book / hire me to consult for you / buy my product.

Ugh. People come to a session to learn something, and to have practical take-aways that they can use when they get back to the office. Or at least that’s true for me.

So that’s what my seminars are – heavy on the take-aways. Sure, I’ve got a couple of the requisite cartoons and polls to get people chuckling, talking, and sharing. A lot of people in my sessions have cool tools and sites to share that I end up checking out when I get back to my office. Prospect research is like that: new tools are popping up every day, and we do love to share them! I think that’s what conference sessions should be about, too.

My session, Using the Web to Manage Information Overload is going to highlight handy web-based resources that will help fundraisers save time and get to the information they need more quickly. Prospect researchers are welcome too – come bring your best tools to manage information overload and be prepared to share and to take away.

Selected meaty take-aways if you can’t make it to the session:

A terrific research metasite from Northwestern’s prospect research department
Another one from Supporting Advancement
Prospect research Tweeters to follow

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