← Nonprofit Leadership Podcast
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This is Dr. Rob Harder with the Nonprofit Leadership podcast, Making youg World Better. What does it take to be an effective nonprofit leader today? What are the biggest challenges? What are the biggest obstacles? How should nonprofits fundraise in an economy that is constantly changing? All these reasons combined led me to start this show. And it's my hope that through this series, people can learn not only what it takes to be an effective nonprofit organization, but to hear from effective leaders who are. Who are successfully making a positive impact in their communities. We hope you enjoy the show as together we hear how they are making their world better. Hey everyone, this is Rob Harder, and you're listening to the Nonprofit Leadership Podcast. So glad you're here today. All right, so today's discussion. Let me just tell you upfront, you're gonna feel a bit uncomfortable with this conversation today because I felt uncomfortable a little bit in a good way. My guest today is going to raise some questions and challenge our assumptions when it comes to how we view nonprofit organizations or the social impact sector as a whole. He has been challenging our thinking for many years through TED Talks, through books, through speaking all over the world on these topics. And today he shares a lot of those same questions, that same challenging invitation to re examine. How should we lead nonprofit organizations? How should we invest in social impact organizations? How should we actually be willing to take a risk to accomplish great things? So my guest today is Dan Pallotta, and many of you probably recognize that name. As I mentioned, he's an author of many books, most recently a documentary he created called Uncharitable. He's also been known as probably one of the most influential speakers from the TED Talks that we all are aware of. His 2013 TED talk had over 5 million viewers and again, is considered one of the most influential TED talks of all time. But a couple of things that, as I was listening to him talk, I thought, I've experienced this firsthand. My whole career essentially has been in the social impact sphere. And this question he will ask you and all of us as we go through this conversation is, number one, the overhead issue. You know, are we willing, as nonprofit organizations, as donors, are we willing to pay people a good wage in order to attract the best people to start trying to solve the biggest issues, whether that be food insecurity or housing affordability, whatever it is. Number two, are nonprofit organizations willing to take risks and really be bold to say, make declarations, as he said, to accomplish something that needs to be accomplished in your community or in your state or in your country that no One else has solved, perhaps, that you want to solve it and you put a date behind it. Are you willing to do that even knowing that you may not accomplish that goal, you may fail? We do not allow our non profit leaders and organizations to fail. And so that's an issue. He says because of that, we don't innovate very well in the social impact sector. We don't take risks, which means we don't have really bold, audacious plans to really accomplish much. And he argues that donors actually want to get behind something that's really inspiring and that really changes the dial on a particular issue. So it's just one of these conversations that it's going to stick with you for a while. It is going to make you uncomfortable. So be ready for that. But I think he raises some really good questions that we need to face in the social impact sector. And then finally, I'll leave with this. I thought I loved how he reframed what fundraising is all about. One of the things I think that he really has shaped when it comes to the social impact sector is how we view fundraising. And his whole point is fundraising is not just a transactional agreement between people. He believes that fundraising is all about helping people explore, explore their heroism. And he'll explain a little bit more in my interview what he means by that. So it's a fascinating conversation. So good to have you here. Tuning in today. Now on to my interview with Dan. This podcast is sponsored by DonorBox Donor Box, helping you help others with the best donation forms in the business. Welcome to the Nonprofit Leadership Podcast with Rob Harder. I'm Alex Budak.
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I live in the San Francisco Bay Area. I'm a listener just like you. We're all on a leadership journey looking for ways to learn and grow.
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Each week I look forward to hearing.
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Rob's latest discussion with his guests.
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A
I invite you to join us and subscribe. Thanks for listening. Now here's Rob. Hey. Well, welcome everybody to the Nonprofit Leadership Podcast. Have a special guest today. Dan Pallotta is in the stock studio. Dan, thanks for being here today.
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B
Yeah, thanks for having me, Rob.
- [04:51]
A
Well, we've got a lot to talk about and I love starting out my podcast interviews, really allowing my listeners to get to know who I'm interviewing. So I'd love to start with your journey because you have quite the journey when it comes to particularly the social impact sector and a lot of the changes you've brought about, the innovation that you brought about. And so I want to dive into that. So. But yeah, tell us A little bit about your journey. And specifically I do want to get into, you know, when we're recording, this is actually World's AIDS Day. So I'd love for you to talk about those two events that really, I'd say, as I understand the way you've mentioned this on your website, really kind of put you on the map in terms of how you did fundraising, specifically the breast cancer three day walks and the AIDS rides. So maybe we can talk about that, because I think that really created some innovation for other nonprofit organizations to change the way they do fundraising. So, anyway, but. But yeah, tell us a bit about yourself and your journey.
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B
You know, I grew up in the 60s. I was born on the first day of John Kennedy's presidency. So that's formative. You know, being seven, nine years old, when John Kennedy is. Is speaking to the world and Robert Kennedy speaking to the world, and Martin Luther King is inspiring everybody, and Vietnam is happening, which is really depressing and demoralizing and frustrating. You know, it feels like adults have resigned themselves to the futility of the human condition. And then Apollo is happening at the same time. So it's this. This crazy dissonance of hopelessness and. And the greatest hope the human race has ever experienced, the greatest achievements. So that was a wild period to be forming your ideas about the world. And I think it was the cinematic Camelot presidency. I wanted that. I wanted to be president. I wanted to live in the White House. And later I realized I was gay in the early 80s and felt like, oh, that can't possibly happen. But also, Apollo just had a massive impact on me. Not like, oh, I want to be an astronaut, but, okay, that was impossible, what we just did. So why aren't we applying the principles that we use to do that impossible thing, to do other impossible things? You know, I remember as a kid going to church and the priest, you know, would have the prayers of the faithful for all of the poor. We pray to the Lord. And I was like, well, why are we at. Why are we putting this on God? Like, why? We didn't say that we get to the moon someday, we pray to the Lord, we did it. So that really informed everything about me. So it wasn't necessarily like fundraising that I was interested in. But later on, I went to college. I chaired the Harvard Hunger Action Committee. We had John Denver come and speak about his work on the presidential commission. He and Warner Earhart had just started this thing called the Hunger Project, which was Apollo like, in its aspiration, you know, started in 1981. Or something. And the goal was the eradication of starvation by the year 2000. Well, nobody had ever spoken in those terms before. You never heard the word eradication. It was always a guilt trip. We have to help these poor people. Eat all your green beans. There are people starving in Africa. Nobody ever articulated we could end this. We could be the generation that ends this. And that. That just sent a shiver up my spine. And I wanted to do something big. So organized the bike ride across America. 39 of us rode our bikes across America, and that's what led to the AIDS rides and the breast cancer. Three days. Seeing the power of a journey like that because we rode our bikes for 69 days, like 80 miles a day. It was grueling and it was difficult and you wanted to quit all the time. And when you were done, the sense of achievement and sisterhood and brotherhood with the people that you had done it with was very, very powerful. And then I, you know, years later, I got friends dying of aids. And all you can do is go do the AIDS walk. You know, walk for 5km, get a balloon at the end or something, and go have Tex Mex with your friends, you know? Well, that's completely. That's not like Apollo at all. That's incongruent with the stakes here. So, yeah, so the first event we created was California AIDS Ride. Didn't know if we could do it. Goal was to have 500 people ride their bikes from San Francisco to LA. Nobody had ever done anything like that before. With a minimum pledge requirement of $2,000, netted a million bucks, and thought there is an appetite for people to explore their own heroism. It's dormant in there and nobody ever asks them to bring it. So it's always sort of been strange to me that people thought you came up with a new fundraising technique. Fundraising was a byproduct of coming up with a new heroism technique. You know, that's what it was all about. I mean, yeah, we needed to raise money and we wanted to raise a lot of money, but the real core of it was get people to do something that scares them. And so that's why we didn't look for athletes, you know, in the AIDS rise. We weren't like advertising in Bicycling magazine. We were advertising in the LA Weekly and the LA Times and the New York Times. And so we had these motley crews of people, you know, all shapes and sizes, breathing capacities of all types, rear ends of all dimensions. Ragtag outfit like. Like the revolutionary, the Continental Army. And not color coordinated Lycra. Now, over the years, you know, half of the riders being gay, they decided it was very important to have color coordinated Lycra. But they still weren't athletes. And that's what made it beautiful. You know, see some 70 year old woman terrified of riding her bike down the coast of California, but her son's HIV positive. She promised she's going to ride. There's nothing that's going to stop her. And it's funny, when I talk about these things, you know, we're busy and we hear through a filter. So when I say the AIDS rides and the breast cancer, three days, even though I describe them, people think, oh, a 5k walk, a 5k ride. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. These things lasted a week. You had to sleep in a tent every night with a stranger for six nights. You had to raise $2,000 to do it. You had to ride your bike 90 miles a day on the Alaska AIDS vaccine ride. You had to ride your bike across Alaska in the snow. You know, you had to ride the Montana AIDS vaccine ride. You had to ride over the Continental divide, up and over the Rocky Mountains for seven days. So these weren't, you know, little fashion events that you did in the morning. These were intense, grueling. So I really give credit to John Kennedy and Neil Armstrong and the men and women of Apollo who made that thing happen, and Warner Earhart and everybody who created the Hunger Project for inspiring me to want to inspire others to do something that seems impossible to them. And I'm still inspired by that today. Why aren't we doing impossible things? Everybody, everybody in the left seems to hate Elon Musk. I love the guy because he's just trying to do impossible things. You know, he's, he's trying, that's. He's just, you know, doesn't sleep, practically doesn't own a house, doesn't have a yacht. It's just, you know, 90 hours a week trying to make impossible things happen for humanity. And to me, that's the adult definition of fun. You know, the adult definition of fun. For me, it's not going out and partying on a Saturday night. It's not going to a great dinner party. It's getting together with a band of sisters and brothers and trying to do something that is more than likely going to fail.
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A
Well, there's so much in there, and I want to follow up on something you said I think is a really powerful theme. And I know that this is something you've continued to do today, but you Go back to that. Those first couple of things that you really started, it wasn't so much about fundraising. You said you wanted to have given opportunity for people to explore their heroism. And I think there's really a lot in there. Tell me more about that. Like, did that come from your own reflection in your own life? And then how has that played out? As you've seen this, you know, with fundraising Now, I mean, 5Ks and bike races and running races, that's just common now for all nonprofits. So we don't even appreciate that you were really one of the first to do these things. But talk about this exploring of heroism, I think that's really interesting, and I think there's a lot to it.
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Yeah. What excites me are things like, how did they build the Sydney Opera House? How did they make that happen? Nobody had ever engineered shells like that, and they didn't know how they were going to do it. They poured the foundation without knowing how they were going to do it. How did they get those 18 kids, the Taiwanese soccer kids, out of that underwater cave? It was impossible. They were going to die there. You know what they did? They anesthetized the kids because they felt like if they took them through these tunnels with scuba tanks, the kids were going to freak out and everyone was going to die. So they anesthetized them. It forces you to think, incredibly. My parents took me when I was 15 years old. I mean, this sounds hokey and corporate and all that stuff, but when my parents took us to 15 at the age of 15 to Disneyland, like, holy. How did somebody make this place? There had never been anything like it. You just had little amusement parks in your hometown with the stupid little rides and a Ferris wheel that was likely to kill you. And somebody thought, I'm going to build a place with these enchanted, you know, audio animatronic robot lands, and I'm going to charge people for $49 a day, and they're going to fly from all over the world to go to it. I mean, no, they're not, but yes, they did. And, you know, it's one of the problems in the nonprofit sector and throughout the world, but particularly in the nonprofit sector, is, well, show me the data. Show me the data, and then maybe we'll do your idea. Well, when you're attempting something impossible, there is no data. Nobody has ever done it before. If we. If Disneyland was nonprofit, it would never have been built, because there was the only way you get the data to do the thing. And then you see how many People showed up. How many people come in the spring? How many people come in the fall? How many people come for Christmas? How many people come when you raise the price? How many people come when you lower the price? How many people come from the Midwest? How many people come. You can't learn any of that unless you do it. And so like with the AIDS rides and the breast cancer, three days, we never focus grouped that stuff. If we had focus grouped it, we would never have done it. But because I'll tell you what, you put there's like one in a thousand people that are going to do the AIDS ride, but that's enough in a population of hundreds of millions of people to do something incredible. But if you take 30 people and put them in a focus group, the likelihood that you found the one person who's going to do it is remote. So you're going to be in a focus group where everybody's going to say, yeah, yeah, I would never do that. No, I would never do that. No, no, I would never. If you shorten it, maybe I would do it. If you take away the pledge minimum. So you'd walk out of the focus group going, yeah, this is a bad idea. But there's something about when you actually do it that shocks people. When you take out a full page ad in the Los Angeles Times and you say there is a group of people that are going to make a pilgrimage from San Francisco to Los Angeles on their bikes over the course of 600 miles in seven days, want to come. That's, that's completely different than saying, would you do this if it was two days? Would you do it if it was a half day? Well, what about if we made it? Really? That, that doesn't inspire anybody, you know, so that's what I mean by giving people an opportunity to explore their, their heroism. Nobody wants to die with their music still in them. You know, nobody wants to be buried thinking that they had 90% of them left still, 90% of their potential left still to expl, explore. And we keep trying to make people, make things easy for people. Well, people don't want to be asked to do the least they can possibly do. They get aggravated by that. When you keep over and over and over again, you know, death by a thousand cuts, asking them for five bucks. People want to be asked to do the things they, the most they can possibly do. You know, John Kennedy said, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. Well, people have been asking themselves, but nobody ever tells them Nobody ever tells them what you can do for your country. You know, what you can do for your country is sit down and shut up and let me lead. Well, that's not. No, you know, we want you to lead as well. Everybody's got to be a leader. That's a massive problem with our political system, this Christ complex, you know, who's the savior? She ain't coming. He ain't coming. I don't care who you like. I don't care whether you like Donald Trump or Kamala Harris. That ain't it. Yeah, there are great leaders and they're great managers, but. But society's only going to work if we're all leaders. I'm watching Ken Burns American Revolution right now, and it's fascinating. Like, the degree to which the colonists vacillated between being with Great Britain or being with the Patriots blew me away. I never knew, like, if the British occupied their town, we're with the British. If the Patriots took over and won and occupied their town, we're with the Patriots. You had George Washington and others, you know, sticking with it, doing this. Another impossible thing, the American Revolution. I mean, the British had hundreds of ships. The colonists had none. They had no warships whatsoever. Ragtag militiamen, you know, and the British had this trained army that had fought all over the world. Okay, so we got the United States out of George Washington and others. Leadership. What kind of a country could we have if everybody exercised leaders? Leadership, if everybody took responsibility for their communities and did impossible things in their communities rather than sitting around waiting for the great white or the great black hope to show up, you know?
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A
Yeah. I love that. I can tell you're very passionate about this topic. Gee. So in general, nonprofits and social impact, let alone, you know, the political sphere, do you think we just don't ask enough of people? In other words, we're so afraid of getting rejected or getting turned down or making people feel guilty or whatever, we don't even ask them to do bigger things. So you've seen that sounds like is a problem, particularly in the nonprofit sector.
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Yeah. And we think of. Thinks of things in terms of mechanics and transactions, you know, fundraising. Who. What are the best practices? Who's doing from this kind of fundraising? Who's doing that kind of fundraising instead of spirit? We don't think in terms of spirit. What is the spirit of the thing? Is the spirit of the thing inspiring? Is it impossible? Is it exciting? You know, people ask me all the time, how can I get my board members more engaged? How can I get my Donors more engaged. And I have a simple answer, which is, stop boring them to death. Stop boring them to death with tiny little ideas that aren't going to make a difference, that don't excite them. And people say, well, what's the latest thing, you know, venture philanthropy, catalytic philanthropy, trust based philanthropy, reimagining philanthropy. We're too much in our heads. Get out of our heads and get into your gut. Get into your heart. Not even your heart. Get into your gut. Does it scare you all right now you're on the right path. It doesn't scare you? Then it's shit, you know, it's too small. It's too small. And so what I tell nonprofits is get out of your head. Stop talking about reimagining philanthropy. You could reimagine philanthropy and still have homeless people at the rate we have it now and still have breast cancer. The question you want to be asking is not how do we reimagine philanthropy? It's what problem do I want to solve and by when? Now that's a scary question that, because that brings in accountability and this is impossible and all this stuff. What problem do I want to solve and by when? And if you don't know, why do you exist? If you don't know, if you haven't explored that, why does your organization exist? Just to keep your head above water, you know, like, get out of the room and let somebody in who actually wants to solve the problem. John Ford, the famous director, he said about taking pictures, like, if the horizon's low, it's interesting. If the horizon's high, it's interesting. If the horizon's in the middle, it's. And. And we're just stuck in the middle all the time. And it, you know, it's just not exciting to anybody. Like, let's show me the sky. Show me the moon. Show me how we get to the moon without a computer any more powerful than a calculator. You know, do some of that. I mean, there are one or two nonprofits doing that, you know, Billy Shore and no Kid Hungry. There are one or two nonprofits that I know of that are doing that. And look, there aren't a lot of for profits that are doing it. I mean, General Motors wasn't doing it. Ford, they all said, oh, electric cars. Electric cars. Well, why are you excited about that? Because Elon Musk came along and did the impossible thing and showed that one individual could start a new car company that people would buy. So I'm not giving you much time.
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A
To talk right well, and I. You already mentioned a couple, but. Yeah. So who are. If you just maybe one other example that mentioned Billy Shore. So another example of someone who's doing this. Well, particularly in the social impact sphere that you feel like is willing to just risk it all and think big, challenge their supporters and donors to think big with them. Any examples you want to share. And we're going to get to your movie, by the way, in a bit. Just a sec. Because I know there's a lot in there, too, but. Yeah. Anybody off the top of your head that you feel like, okay, they're getting it right.
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B
Yeah. Social Current, which is a big network of nonprofits, they've chosen three pilot cities to do a let's solve all the problems in this city on a deadline project right now, which is really, really inspiring. And you know, Billy Shore, let's end child hunger in America by the year 2030. And they're making enormous progress on it. So, I mean, those are the two examples that I know of where someone is attempting something ridiculous.
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A
Yeah. Right. Okay, so here's the question then, because you've been. You've. Do. You've got this passion in you. You've seen, I'm sure a lot of people attempt really great things. How do you temper that big vision? Let's go for it. There's a lot of risk involved with when, say, you don't hit your goals, you don't accomplish what you set out to do. How do you manage the disappointment, perhaps manage the expectations when it comes to donors or even a board where you've had the, you know, their permission, if you will, and their investment in you as an organization to get these things done, and you don't get it done. How do you manage that? And how do you manage their expectation?
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B
Yeah, well, that happened with Apollo. I mean, they made their goal, but along the way, rockets were exploding and astronauts were dying in fires and, you know, all kinds of stuff like that. And they just kept on. But here's what people are afraid to say. I'll do this thing by then, number one, because it's scary. But number two, because people have virtue and they have ethics and they don't want to dishonor their word. And they think that if I say I'm going to end on suicide in Boston in the next 10 years and I don't do it, I dishonored my word. No, you didn't. If you say you're going to end suicide and you don't do it, you didn't dishonor your Word. You dishonor your word. You honor your word by saying, we didn't do it, but here's what we learned, and we're setting a new goal. We are now committed to doing it five years from now. That's honoring your word. Dishonoring your word is when you give your word, you don't keep it, and you act like you never gave it. You ignore the fact that you don't say anything about the fact that you didn't keep your word. That's dishonoring your word. That's ignoring your word. But when you're conscious of the fact that, yeah, we made this promise, we didn't keep it, we're going to make a new promise, or you could say we're giving up. I mean, even that's honoring your word. And I think it's what people hate about politics. There's so much hypocrisy and lying. And when people have made a political promise and we've all seen them on interviews and then they don't keep it, oh, God, they've hired all these consultants to say, just bridge away from the question when it's asked. Talk about something that's dishonoring your word and that's demoralizing to the whole culture when people do that.
- [25:43]
A
That's helpful. It's a helpful distinction of how you play that out and how you describe that. That makes sense to me. Okay, so another thing that to me fits right in this kind of having these big, audacious goals. You're part of this thing called the Audacious Project. So for my listeners who may not be familiar with that project, what is it and what has been the impact so far with this project?
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B
Well, I support it entirely, but I'm not part of it anymore. I don't work on it anymore. But Chris Anderson, who runs TED, had this idea in, I think it was 2015, and he and Richard Branson had this idea, and it was, look, there are all of these billionaires coming to ted and we should do something to harness their philanthropic power. And so Richard Branson and Chris Anderson and I got together at Chris's place one night and started to talk about it. You know, I think I was invited because I'm imaginative. Chris has unbelievable convening power, and Richard Branson is Richard Branson. So, you know, I had a little bit to offer compared to those to titans. But the original idea was, let's bring people together on Richard Branson's island and have a discussion about what philanthropic thing they would like to support. And leave it wide open. Part of the contribution that I made partially was to say, I think we should curate projects. We should pick five or six and do a deep dive on them and present business plans on these six projects. Then Chris came up with the idea of doing like TED Talk videos on each of them and then have the billionaires come to the island, show the videos, have them go into breakout groups and decide which they want to fund. And on that first one, I think it raised something like 170, $180 million in three days with like 10 billionaires, mostly for One Acre Fund, Andrew Yoon's group. And now as Chris has grown it, I think, I don't know, I think they're one to two billion dollars has. Has been raised for. For Audacious projects. You know, and that's the thing, like the billionaires weren't necessarily moved by whether you an established organization. I mean, some of that funding went to very new organizations. What they were moved by was the audacity of the idea and the commitment to make it happen. That's why it's called the Audacious Project. You know, TED said is ideas worth spreading. And Audacious was ideas worth funding. And that's the thing about ted, ideas worth spreading. I mean, that's how you get a TED Talk. Do you have an idea? Do you have something new to present to the world? Not are you a great speaker? Not are you motivating? But is there an idea? And the same with the Audacious Project. Is there an idea here worth funding? Something that has not been tried before that's novel and important?
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A
That's fascinating. Well, okay, so let's go right into an idea you have where it's really reshaping the social impact sector and it's really, through your movie, uncharitable. In fact, I remember I was at a conference a couple of years ago in. Or was it, I think it was in Dallas, all these nonprofit leaders was a nonprofit focused and, you know, conference. And they showed the film and it was just brand new, so very pat. I mean, a very interesting movie. First of all, you could tell the passion just comes through of who you are through that movie. So let's talk a little bit more about why did you create the film and then what are you hoping people to really take away from this film?
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B
When I wrote the book on charitable in 2009, I had been going to Ted, I saw Al Gore give his slideshow and then do An Inconvenient Truth. And I thought the way we think about Charity is the same as the way Al Gore is saying people think about climate. There's this big mythology about it that needs to be busted. And the most powerful way to do that is not a book, but it's a documentary. So for a long time, I wanted to do a documentary. And I, you know, I just got caught up giving the TED Talk and speaking all over the world, and it ended up being, you know, whatever. It was 15 years later, 14 years later, that we started raising the money for it. And throughout my career since I wrote Uncharitable when I did the age rise and the breast cancer, three days, we were so successful so quickly. I had a front row seat to. The way we think about charity is really screwed up. We deprive these organizations of talent by limiting salaries. We don't let them advertise, we don't let them take any risks. We don't have a capital stock market for them. They got to make everything happen in 12 months. It's a recipe for not changing anything. It is the opposite of what it should be. It's as backwards as it could possibly be. So I spent my life since then not only spreading that word, but asking myself, what are the tools I can create for people that will help them spread that word? I would give speeches everywhere and see the audiences really moved and really inspired and really enlightened. And then I noticed they couldn't repeat it. Why? Well, because, look, I just gave you 45 minutes of dense content. The likelihood that you're going to be able to go and repeat that to your board chair is zero. So what kind of tools can I create that can do that for people? So the book Uncharitable was a tool. The book Charity Case was another tool. The everyday Philanthropist was another tool. The Bold Training was another tool. You know, three and a half hours of video content to train your board and staff. But the movie was the ultimate thing. It was like, look, people love movies. People will go to see a movie. It's 90 minutes long. You can show it to board members. You can use it for onboarding for new staff. You can show it to all your donors. It changes minds like that. So that was the idea, and still is, to use the movie to change the way the culture thinks about charity.
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A
We'll be right back. Are you looking for an easy and effective way to boost your nonprofit's donations? Well, look no further than DonorBox, the online fundraising platform that streamlines your fundraising efforts, maximizes donations, and simplifies giving for your supporters. With Donorbox, you can Create beautiful donation forms, accept digital wallet payments, track donations, and send auto receipts. And the best part, there are no setup or monthly fees and no long term contracts required. So what are you waiting for? Visit donorbox.org today to get started. That is www.donorbox.org. What's been the response so far? And I want to particularly look at that whole area of staffing and not giving people the opportunity to take risk. I think those are two of the things I took from it. Number one, not paying enough to get good people to your organization to solve these huge issues. And then, yeah, you've said it kind of throughout. The theme here of today is not supporting people and taking risks. With these massive problems, whether it be food insecurity or housing affordability or whatever it is, there needs to be an ability to take risks without worrying about losing your funding or your board saying, hey, sorry, you tried, it didn't work. You're out, you know. So, Tim, what has been the response, first of all, to the film? And then, yeah, maybe talk more about some of those key issues that came out of the film.
- [33:13]
B
Yeah, people love, love the movie. You know, people in the sector love it because finally they have a tool that can do the talking for them. And donors love it. They'll line up like they're at confession saying, I'm so sorry. I never knew any of this. So, you know, I feel so stupid. And I say, you shouldn't feel stupid. This is what we taught you. You know, the nonprofit sector itself taught you this because it was so afraid to tell you anything other than what you wanted to hear, which was, we keep our overhead low. You know, the reason you thought this way is for decades, nonprofits had on their websites, we only spend 1% on fundraising. Well, you know what that means? That means we don't spend any money trying to find any other donors. We just want to keep relying on you. Right? Totally. Yeah. And it talks about all those issues that I brought up in uncharitable. You know, we need the best talent that the world has to solve the world's greatest problems. And you kind of have to pay people to get the best talent. We need to advertise and put more investment into fundraising because that's an investment in strengthening civil society. That's a competition with compassion. Okay? L' Oreal is spending a billion dollars a year to build market demand for cosmetics. Apple is spending however much they're spending to build market demand for iPhones. We're spending nothing to build market demand for philanthropy to solve the great Problems of the world. We gotta do that. We gotta take risks. And, you know, look, here's what people are looking for. And people say, well, I'll take a risk so long as I know it's going to work out. Exactly. That's the kind of risk people want. That's the opposite of what risk is. So I don't have any magic answer for how to take a risk and not have it fail. The very nature of risk is it could fail. You know, and every great achievement in human history has been because people were being willing to risk failure. Meanwhile, we've got people dying of starvation and unable to work because of illiteracy and all kinds of other things, and we're playing it safe.
- [35:12]
A
That's so interesting. So risk is something that it's kind of across the board, we struggle with, but certainly nonprofit sector. Have you seen changes where you're seeing, again, examples of, whether it be nonprofits or nonprofit leaders, specifically because this podcast focuses on nonprofit leaders. Are people starting to do that and really model that now for the rest of us? And they're getting supporters, investors, board members behind them to take these risks. Is there any examples you could give?
- [35:40]
B
Well, they're doing things to dissolve the focus on overhead. You know, The Ford Foundation, MacArthur, and the Open Society all doubled their overhead ratios. Charity Navigator and Better Business Bureau issued a joint press release saying, don't ask about overhead, ask about impact. But the risk thing, you know, social current and no Kid Hungry and the Audacious Project, you know, those are the only places I know of that are big, where it's actually happening.
- [36:10]
A
So you feel like, really still, when it comes to the social impact sector, innovation is still not being pushed, as this is a big part of what you do. It's still kind of play it safe a little bit. Make sure you accomplish what you set out to do. Don't take as many risks, because you want to make sure you report back to donors. Hey, here's what we did this last year with the money you invested. So innovations, because of that, you still think is lagging behind in the nonprofit sector.
- [36:34]
B
It's not play it safe a little bit. It's play it safe as big as you possibly can. And when I tell people, think big, think big, think big. The nonprofit sector so suffers from this oppression sickness that when I say think big, they interpret that as, let me think catastrophically, a little bit less. There's no real big thinking going on. And even the word innovation, these are barriers that we place between us and really taking a risk, you could innovate and hunger would still exist. The only way you're going to end hunger is to declare you want to end hunger and by when. And so all these other things, innovation, even asking for more overhead. In the absence of a great daring dream, you don't have any moral authority to ask for more overhead. In fact, if you educate all your donors in your ecosystem, you show them the movie, you show them the TED Talk, you have them read the Everyday Philanthropist, every donor, every board member, every staff member so that your whole family is on the same page, all your donors. And then you tell them, together, we're going to do this impossible thing, and it could fail. If it does fail, you told them, and they're all on board with you. Instead, you want to say, what could we do that's a little risky without telling our donors that we're doing anything risky. Nothing. I mean, if you're not willing to be transparent with, they'll come along with you on the ride if you tell them, if you excite them. But if you want to keep sending them flowery little cards all the time with cute little pictures that you got from Getty Images of how great the cause is, then, yeah, you're trapped in that predictability. Like, what can we do that's predictable? Well, ending hunger is unpredictable. Curing breast cancer is unpredictable. So get out of the domain of the predictable and enter the domain of, we don't know what the fuck's going to happen. You know? Right.
- [38:33]
A
Okay, so board members that are listening to this, what advice would you give them today to help support this kind of innovation you're pushing for?
- [38:41]
B
If you don't a CEO who is willing to think in this way, you need to find one. And to the CEO, if you don't have a board that gets excited when you talk this way, you need a new board or you need to go start something on your own. You know, as much as I hate to say that, because there are so many nonprofits, you know, if you look at how ridiculous would it have been if Steve Jobs looked at Microsoft and was frustrated with it and all of the steps it made you go through just to send a picture to someone, the stupidest thing he could have said was, let me go work for Microsoft and see if I can change the culture. You know, in that case, he had to say, I need. You know, what was it Michelangelo is credited with having said? Criticize by creating. So in some cases, if you don't have a board that's willing to go with you, you got to Create it on your own. You know, if General Motors isn't willing to make electric cars, you. You might have to start something on your own. And you think about the impossible of that. The chicken possibility. The chicken and the egg. If I'm going to sell electric cars, I got to have charging stations all over the United States or nobody's going to buy my electric car because they won't be able to charge it. But in order for me to have charging stations all over the United States, I need to sell a lot of electric cars. So what I get, that's the problem. You know, Buckminster Fuller said, a problem well stated is a problem well on its way to being solved. And the problem there was solved, but with capital. Okay, I'm going to need to raise a humongous bunch of capital before I sell a single car to set up electric charging stations everywhere. And nonprofits don't use capital in that way. You know, they hate capitalism. They hate capitalism. They hate capitalism. Guess what? That's the only way you're going to solve problems. And unless you start to use the tools of capitalism like everybody else is, everybody else is going to eat you for lunch. And there are some in the nonprofit sector that are using them. I mean, the University of Southern California, you know, they doubled their endowment in five years by doubling their major gift staff. You know what they started with? I mean, when I ask people, they'll say, what do they start? They went from 10 to 20. They went from 8 to 16. They went from 2 to 4. No, they went from 250 to over 500 major gift officers. There isn't a hunger or literacy or racism charity that has three major gift officers, you know, and that's why even higher education, this nonprofit is eating the lunch of the health and human services sector because it thinks big. It creates big, beautiful projects, you know, big brick and mortar projects that you can put your name on, and then hires armies of people who are paid 2, 3, 400 grand a year to go out and sell it. And meanwhile, you know, we're being all, all humble when it comes to the most important issue on the planet, which is hunger, starvation, and poverty.
- [41:38]
A
Wow. I mean, that's a real challenge to all of us. Okay, so one last question, perhaps would be, because we could talk about this all day, I think, but okay, there's a lot more corpor, obviously, providing social impact arms, creating foundations now doing more work that we normally would call nonprofit work, mission driven work. Is that part of the solution? Because you think about these large companies like Microsoft And Google, they all have their social impact arm. In fact, I've had them on my show. Is that pushing the larger nonprofit sector in the right direction or is that co opting what we should be doing in the nonprofit sector by just doing it through corporations?
- [42:13]
B
Well, that's a long question. That's a tough question and complicated. But here's what I would say. First of all, with respect to corporate social responsibility programs, I would much rather you make products and services that don't suck than put together a foundation that gives $2,500 to, you know, a hundred different charities. Meanwhile, the poor working class people out there buying Christmas toys for their kids and the toy breaks, you know, the minute they get it or their, their wi fi doesn't work and they don't can't get on customer service with Verizon. You know what? Shutter your damn corporate social responsibility program and start taking responsibility for your core service and your core business. Now you want to support non profits? The best way, the best way to do that is with capital. You know, that's what, that's what we did with the breast cancer three days is we went to corporations and got them to give us capital to underwrite the negative cash flow so that we could SC things really, really, really big. I mean, that's what corporations should be doing. Corporations are going to solve a lot of problems they have throughout history. But as I said at TED, there's going to be that 7 or 8% of problems that are not marketable, that are not vulnerable to money, measures that only philanthropy can solve, and they're big problems. So we have to start to market philanthropy. And in order to do that, we need to capitalize the marketing of philanthropy and we need to fuel it all with big, daring ideas.
- [43:42]
A
Well, it's been a fascinating conversation. Again, I can tell the passion is fully alive and coming through the mic. So thank you for sharing that passion with all of us. For those who are listening and maybe have not watched the movie yet and, or want to know a little bit more about you, where would you send them? How can they connect with both you and the movie?
- [43:57]
B
Yeah. Go to danpilada.com and you can find out all about it. The movie's available on Apple, Amazon, you know, every conceivable platform. If you want to go directly to that, just go to uncharitablemovie.com and all the buttons are right there. You can press whatever you want to find out where to watch it. Nice.
- [44:15]
A
Okay. Well, Dan, thanks again for pushing all of us to think beyond what's safe because I think that is one of the drawbacks for all of us. I think we all fall into that trap of I need you what's safe to keep my job or to keep raising money for my nonprofit organization. So thanks for pushing us out of that. That and really exploring the heroism of all of us. I think that's still a phrase that sticks with me. So really appreciate you sharing your ideas today.
- [44:39]
B
Thanks for having me. Rob. Thanks for the work that you do and for the podcast on this Giving Tuesday. Take care.
- [44:46]
A
Hey friends. Well, I wanted you to know that this podcast can be found on itunes, Spotify, Amazon, Google podcasts and wherever you listen to other podcasts. I also want to encourage you to like subscribe, subscribe and share this podcast with others. This will actually help us get this great content out to more nonprofit leaders just like you. You can also join the nonprofit leadership podcast community, find other resources and interviews of past guests, all on my website, nonprofit leadershippodcast.org well, thanks again for listening and until next time, keep making your world better. This podcast is sponsored by Donorbox Donor Box, helping you help others with the best donation forms in the business.