Nonprofit Mastermind Podcast

This week, I’m talking with Jessoica Sloan, ED of RaisedByUs. 

RaisedByUs has a big hairy audacious goal - one that resonates deeply with me in its power and simplicity: To make the world a better, kinder and more just place.  They are literally aiming to raise as many charitable dollars as possible for global causes by mobilizing the power of individual philanthropy. 

What’s super cool about their model is that they leverage the workplace - and workplace giving - to narrow the gap between wanting to give back and actually doing it.  Questions like: How can start ups and emerging companies define the kind of social good footprint they want to have, and then actually build volunteer and giving policies that get them there? What’s the relationship between corporate culture and employee giving? How can you shape one to influence the other? How can companies of all sizes build employee-giving programs that offer authentic and meaningful opportunities for their employees to have an impact on issues they care about?  

Ultimately, giving feels good. People like giving. How can we leverage the power of the workplace to help make it easier for people to give to the issues and causes and organizations they care about? 

That’s what RaiseByUs tackles. How to leverage our natural instinct to give, and mobilize dollars for good. 

In this conversation, Jessica and I talk about the mechanics of partnering with businesses and corporations to do social good, how employee giving can be an important key to helping nonprofits unlock small-dollar donors, and what it really means to be philanthropic. 

It’s a great conversation - I hope you enjoy! 

Want to work together?

Apply for the Next Level Nonprofit Mastermind, a high-touch coaching and training accelerator for established organizations with $1M+ budgets that are ready to design for impact sustained at scale.  

Budget under $1M? Join Elevate and get proven step-by-step playbooks + coaching support to build each of the core elements of your nonprofit's operating system - strategic clarity, a fundraising engine, a high-performance team, and an active and engaged board!   

Connect with me!

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I’m very excited about this episode because this is something that I’ve been thinking and talking a lot about recently. So often when we hear the term “thought leadership” and our mind goes fuzzy. The term is wonky and opaque and no one really ever says what it means or how to do it. 

But here’s the thing:  having a strong thought leadership strategy is a critical aspect of growing and sustaining your budget and impact. So I’m doing a 2-parter about thought leadership. 

Today I’m going to dive into the framework - understanding why it’s important to integrate thought leadership into your strategic work, and talking about exactly how having a robust thought leadership plan can move your work forward in concrete ways. 

Next week’s episode we'll get into the structure and components of an effective thought leadership plan. 

Want to work together?

Apply for the Next Level Nonprofit Mastermind, a high-touch coaching and training accelerator for established organizations with $1M+ budgets that are ready to design for impact sustained at scale.  

Budget under $1M? Join Elevate and get proven step-by-step playbooks + coaching support to build each of the core elements of your nonprofit's operating system - strategic clarity, a fundraising engine, a high-performance team, and an active and engaged board!   

Connect with me!

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In today’s conversation, I’m talking with the co-leaders of an organization that I’ve had the pleasure of knowing for a number of years:  Ragz Bruland and Michael Aryee of Flex Dance Program. 

Ragz and Michael founded Flex Dance as a response to the problem of mass incarceration. They wanted to tap into the expansiveness and movement of dance as a way to help young people especially see beyond a system that can sometimes feel stuck. 

Their organization - through programs and community partnerships - provides young people not just with safe and engaging ways to spend their time - they are also creating a powerful and inclusive community that embraces young people and gives them a cultural home rooted in self-expression and joy. 

 In this conversation, we talk about their own personal relationship to dance - and to flex dance in particular - and about how that deep personal connection helped them see dance as a vehicle for wider impact and broader social change. 

It’s a beautiful and powerful origin story, and a beautiful and powerful vision for change.

Want to work together?

Apply for the Next Level Nonprofit Mastermind, a high-touch coaching and training accelerator for established organizations with $1M+ budgets that are ready to design for impact sustained at scale.  

Budget under $1M? Join Elevate and get proven step-by-step playbooks + coaching support to build each of the core elements of your nonprofit's operating system - strategic clarity, a fundraising engine, a high-performance team, and an active and engaged board!   

Connect with me!

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Let’s face it - numbers can be scary. As nonprofit leaders, how often do you hear how important it is to “know your numbers”? But most of you didn’t get into the nonprofit leadership game with a background in accounting. So instead, you make sure you have a bookkeeper, make sure your books get closed and you track your spending, and MAYBE you get monthly financial reports to review. But you’re secretly faking it until you make it -- you don’t really know what it means to build a strong financial infrastructure - who to hire, what to talk to them about, and how to use your finances as a strategic decision-making tool.

Enter Germeen. She’s taken her expertise and passion for accounting and merged it with her passion for social impact organizations and the result is both an incredible company - Virtual Accounting Group (which you’ll hear about) - and a great conversation today. 

Germeen talks with us about how to know when to move beyond the bookkeeper, how (and who) to think about hiring, the often unrecognized relationship between fundraising and financial infrastructure - she breaks it all down! 

So grab a notebook and pen and settle in with your beverage of choice and enjoy! 

Want to work together?

Apply for the Next Level Nonprofit Mastermind, a high-touch coaching and training accelerator for established organizations with $1M+ budgets that are ready to design for impact sustained at scale.  

Budget under $1M? Join Elevate and get proven step-by-step playbooks + coaching support to build each of the core elements of your nonprofit's operating system - strategic clarity, a fundraising engine, a high-performance team, and an active and engaged board!   

Connect with me!

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This week’s conversation is with LaFrae Sci, a friend, colleague, and superstar in my Impact Accelerator! LaFrae is an accomplished musician, imaginationist, and Executive Director at Willie Mae Rock Camp, where she created the innovative and transformational Willie Mae Future Sounds STEAM-based curriculum.

I’ve been excited to talk with LaFrae on the podcast for a number of reasons. First, I think that her story of stepping into the ED role at Willie Mae at a time of flux and stewarding the organization's growth through a pandemic is instructive and inspirational for other leaders. As I reference in our conversation, the org has grown in budget and impact in the under 2 years that she’s been at the helm, and I’ve wanted to shine a light on her journey and experience as part of a broader dialog opening up and creating transparency about what leadership looks like in practice. 

The second reason I’ve been excited to talk to LaFrae is more personal. She and I vibe out via email and on some of our coaching calls, about the role that having intentional abundance and gratitude practices have played in our lives. She leads from a place of abundance and gratitude, and I’ve wanted for a long time to invite her to share what that means in practice, and how those practices have helped her stay grounded and avoid overwhelm during the craziness of these past years.

Finally, I just love shedding light on incredible leaders as part of this podcast, and LaFrae is an incredible leader.  

This is a great conversation, I hope you enjoy! 

Want to work together?

Apply for the Next Level Nonprofit Mastermind, a high-touch coaching and training accelerator for established organizations with $1M+ budgets that are ready to design for impact sustained at scale.  

Budget under $1M? Join Elevate and get proven step-by-step playbooks + coaching support to build each of the core elements of your nonprofit's operating system - strategic clarity, a fundraising engine, a high-performance team, and an active and engaged board!   

Connect with me!

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I talk in my workshops and trainings, and in my Accelerator program, about how important it is to be intentional about building your organization's internal capacity if you want to grow in a way that is sustainable.  By this I mean having the right people in the right roles within your ecosystem. 

But what does that look like in practice?  

In this short mini-training I talk about two principles to use when hiring in order to fuel and support your growth:  hiring to give you more time for high-leverage activities and hiring for ownership rather than execution. 

Want to work together?

Apply for the Next Level Nonprofit Mastermind, a high-touch coaching and training accelerator for established organizations with $1M+ budgets that are ready to design for impact sustained at scale.  

Budget under $1M? Join Elevate and get proven step-by-step playbooks + coaching support to build each of the core elements of your nonprofit's operating system - strategic clarity, a fundraising engine, a high-performance team, and an active and engaged board!   

Connect with me!

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This week’s episode is very very special to me. It is a tribute to my sister, Darcy Richie, who passed away at the age of 40 in April of this year. 

Darcy Richie was the Chief Program and Impact Officer at Generation Citizen.  Last Spring, I invited her to join me to talk about two of her many superpowers: the how and why of communication and team-building. 

I called Darcy the communication whisperer.  She was one of those people who can be in any situation, with any group of people, and find her way to the heart of what they are trying to communicate. She had a unique way of making people feel truly seen and heard - which is really what communication is all about. Most critically for her work, she was able to help others do that for one another. 

Darcy spent her career building and sustaining high-impact teams, starting when she was the founding principal of a charter school at the age of 25. She built and managed national teams, and remote teams; Small intimate teams and sprawling layered teams…  At the root of it, she was simply excellent at communicating, and at helping build the capacity of those around her to do so effectively as well.

I'm replaying this episode as a tribute to her and her work. 

Want to work together?

Apply for the Next Level Nonprofit Mastermind, a high-touch coaching and training accelerator for established organizations with $1M+ budgets that are ready to design for impact sustained at scale.  

Budget under $1M? Join Elevate and get proven step-by-step playbooks + coaching support to build each of the core elements of your nonprofit's operating system - strategic clarity, a fundraising engine, a high-performance team, and an active and engaged board!   

Connect with me!

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This week, I get to introduce and celebrate South Asian SOAR, an organization working to build a national movement to end gender-based violence in the South Asian diaspora. 

South Asian SOAR, led by Amrita Doshi, is helping to create a bridge between the urgent, incredibly necessary direct service, and systems-level change. SOAR’s mission and work are rooted in the idea that these types of work - downstream and upstream - must happen in parallel and must inform and build off of one another if we are to co-create a world without gender-based violence.

In this conversation, we talk about Amrita’s experience as a founder, the intersection of the personal and political, and what it feels and looks like to co-create a movement from the ground up. 

Want to work together?

Apply for the Next Level Nonprofit Mastermind, a high-touch coaching and training accelerator for established organizations with $1M+ budgets that are ready to design for impact sustained at scale.  

Budget under $1M? Join Elevate and get proven step-by-step playbooks + coaching support to build each of the core elements of your nonprofit's operating system - strategic clarity, a fundraising engine, a high-performance team, and an active and engaged board!   

Connect with me!

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This week, I’m thrilled to shine a light on an organization that is truly walking the walk when it comes to living its values. The New Harmony Project - led by Lori Wolter Hudson and David Hudson cares for and nurtures writers to give them the space, time, energy, and inspiration to create works that change our world by interrogating the complexities of hope. 

There’s a lot there -- what it means to care for and nurture writers, the role of hope in helping to forge a more just and equitable world, and what it looks like in practice to translate a bold and beautiful mission into organizational practices that can actually be used to guide the institution. 

In this conversation, David and Lori share how their recent strategic planning process has helped them answer these critical questions, and how it has helped them actually translate their mission and operationalize their values.  It’s a great look into how powerful a good strategic planning process can be, and into how intertwined personal inspiration, strategy, organizational values, and day-to-day operations truly are when leading an organization. 

Want to work together?

Apply for the Next Level Nonprofit Mastermind, a high-touch coaching and training accelerator for established organizations with $1M+ budgets that are ready to design for impact sustained at scale.  

Budget under $1M? Join Elevate and get proven step-by-step playbooks + coaching support to build each of the core elements of your nonprofit's operating system - strategic clarity, a fundraising engine, a high-performance team, and an active and engaged board!   

Connect with me!

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I have so many conversations with organizational leaders about how social media strategy - especially when it comes to fundraising - can feel opaque - at best. At worst, it can feel like a time suck or even a waste of time - a misuse of limited capacity. 

The truth is, not getting smart and savvy about your digital footprint means that you’re leaving money on the table. And when we’re talking about fueling our social impact, we don’t want to leave money on the table. 

More importantly, it’s critical to find high-leverage ways of bringing new people into your orbit and activating them as supporters and ambassadors for your cause. 

So that is what I’m thrilled to talk with today’s guest about. Christina Edwards is the founder of Splendid Consulting, and she spends her days helping social impact leaders use your digital assets - your website, social media platforms - to add fuel to your fundraising. There is a hard way to fundraise - constantly searching and scratching for each new donor, and then there is the type of fundraising flywheel that you want to set up in which you’re using the assets you have to do some of the heavy lifting for you. You can chase or you can attract. 

That’s what Christina and I talk about - how to think strategically about using digital assets to attract people to your cause and get them excited. We talk strategy, we talk tactics - this episode is super juicy and concrete. 

So grab a notebook and a pen - I hope you enjoy! 

Want to work together?

Apply for the Next Level Nonprofit Mastermind, a high-touch coaching and training accelerator for established organizations with $1M+ budgets that are ready to design for impact sustained at scale.  

Budget under $1M? Join Elevate and get proven step-by-step playbooks + coaching support to build each of the core elements of your nonprofit's operating system - strategic clarity, a fundraising engine, a high-performance team, and an active and engaged board!   

Connect with me!

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• YouTube