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Foreign.
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Welcome to the Arcady Group Thinkers Podcast. I'm your host, Justin McCord. With me is Ronnie Richard. Ronnie, special treat today for me because of your excitement and the cold open question that we're going to get to with our guest. And also just for those that are listening, you're going to miss the joy of seeing Ronnie reference starter jacket. And I saw a little nostalgia come across your face when you talked about that starter jacket on Christmas Day of 1991. So tell us a little bit about our guest without giving away too much context there.
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I won't, I won't give away too much, but I'll just say that that starter jacket was clean. Like it was. It was. I'm using my kids lingo now.
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B
Well, yeah, what are we. We're going to. Are we going to do the rest of this intro in Gen Z?
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A
Okay. So our guest today, Clint o'. Brien. He's the president and COO of Engaging Networks. And Clint has just a tremendous history with three decades spent in the nonprofit sector. And we walk through some of that and his career prior to that as a journalist. He spent time at PBS. He spent time at Care 2. So you talk about someone who's built up a lot of just knowledge and experience in the space and in the conversation. We start talking a little bit about some of the uncertainty today in the nonprofit sector. And then a little bit later, we get into culture and there's this connection between the two that's really fascinating to me.
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B
Yeah, I've known Clint now for over a decade. Met him while he was at Care 2, uh, and, you know, have always had a tremendous amount of respect for his humility as a leader. And so to be able to hear him share some of that story on this episode is. Is special for me and so excited for, for our listening audience to be able to, to share it out. So before we get to the episode, just do us a favor, be sure to leave us a review. We always love folks giving us a review at the. On the platform in which you listen to this. And so if you would do that for us, that would be awesome. Hey, by the way, I had the. I had a Florida State starter jacket and it's. I still have possession of it, so, you know, we need to don them at some point. Yeah. You know. All right, so without any further ado, here is Clint o' Brien on the Arcadia Group Thinkers podcast.
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A
Okay, Clint, I want to paint a quick picture for our listeners here. It's Christmas Day 1991. I know I was opening my Christmas present of a Miami Hurricane starter jacket that year. Very excited about the team being undefeated. You're in Moscow as Mikhail Gorbachev resigns as the head of the Soviet Union. And we see the fall of the Soviet Union. Little bit different circumstances, but tell us about what that was like being a Moscow correspondent at that time.
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C
Wow, that's an unusual place to start our conversation. What can I say? It was a thrilling time. I had lucked out into insanely good timing to be a correspondent in Moscow. I arrived in June of that year, and it was two months later that the coup happened where Gorbachev was being held prisoner by the junta, whatever you want to call those coup plotters. But yeah, and then, yeah, it was just a thrilling time because you realized, oh, my goodness, history is being made here. This is going to be the end of the Soviet Union. And it was all driven by this guy Yeltsin and a few others, but Yeltsin was right there, kind of forcing Gorbachev to do what he did in December, essentially writing the Soviet Union out of existence and going back to Russia and the republics. But, yeah, I mean, those years were tremendously exciting times for my wife and me. We were over there for a total of three years. One year working for the U.S. government, for the U.S. information Agency, touring around. But then those two years where I was a reporter, first at Apartment, and then I kind of added Newsweek. So I was. I felt like I had the best job in Moscow because I split my time between AP and Newsweek, which are very different organizations with practicing different styles of journalism. But together it was just an awesome experience. So, yeah, we were there till 93, came back when my wife was pregnant with our first child and decided, you know, we've spent a lot of time in the Soviet Union. Now it's time to come home and enjoy Western medicine for first child's growth.
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B
Until Ronnie shared that he had dug this up, Clint, I had no idea. And so I was. I was just as enamored and learning about this kind of chapter of, of your story and, and we'll get to the fundraising part. Like, we'll get there in a second. But like now, when you reflect on those years, what are some of the lessons or takeaways? What are some of the things that you. That you still think about and use or that have informed who you are today? That came from that three year period, which is incredibly fascinating. Well, wow.
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C
It's not something I think about that often. It feels like a former life before I entered the nonprofit sector. But I have to say that being over there at a time of great hope and optimism, when you thought that the Soviet Union or the aftermath of the Soviet Union was just going to get more and more Western and pro democratic, and then having that all fall to pieces because Yeltsin name the wrong successor, he put a thug in charge, you know, and everything slid back. It was like time went backwards and now they're essentially a dictatorship or, you know, quasi dictatorship, oligarchy. It just, it really makes you cherish what we thought we had here in the United States, which was a very democratic, very open society. You know, I think after we, my wife and I returned from our overseas adventure, we thought, oh, now we'll get back to normalcy, where things just get more and more progressive, more and more free and democratic. And obviously we were wrong. I mean, it can slide back and it is sliding back right now. So, yeah, it's kind of a perspective that a lot of Americans talk about after they've lived abroad. Maybe you guys have lived abroad too, and you know what I'm talking about. But it makes you no longer take for granted all the freedoms we have here.
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B
And I think that that's, you know, because we work in the nonprofit space, I think that we feel some of what's lingering in the air right now differently than other individuals do. You know, I know I was with a group of nonprofit leaders in the last two weeks and the last five years have been bizarre. The last five years have been very bizarre as a non profit leader in terms of the impact on the pandemic and then all of a sudden the rise of need and social changes that have occur and all of those things. It was very much a reactive space. I would say there is a new level of uncertainty unlocked that I see now from many leaders. That is, it's interesting to observe considering the season of uncertainty that we have been in for five years. And so how jumping now to engaging networks that serves clients both in the US and abroad, how would you characterize what your clients are feeling and experiencing in this season of uncertainty?
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C
Well, no doubt they are less willing to commit to switching to new software platforms. So I would think that engaging networks and some of our peers who provide technology tools to nonprofits are going to see less switching platforms where people are just going to say, you know, now is not the time for us to switch. On the other hand, that cuts in our favor in terms of client retention, which has always been our North Star. That's our number one measure of success at our company, which is unusual in our peer group, because we're the only, we're kind of the last independent company left that hasn't taken on, you know, outside investors or Wall street to sort of drive them to do things that maximize or prioritize growth, profit and revenue over client retention. We've had the luxury, the independence to just be answerable only to our clients and make client retention our number one focus. But so yeah, I would say these are good. Good. Uncertainty is good for client retention, not so good for attracting new clients. Yeah, but who can blame the nonprofits, particularly certain sectors that have been hit hard. So I'm sure you're hearing, you're hearing the kind of things we're hearing. There's tremendous consternation about what happens next. That said, I think it reinforces to, to our clients the need to diversify their sources of revenue. So if they were overly dependent on grant funding or foundation funding or government funding, now's the time to think about how do I build up my small dollar donor programs or my mid level donor programs and how do I absolutely support from the public. So in that sense, it's a message that we've been preaching forever. I bet you have too grow your individual giving programs. So that's a little bit of a silver lining is I think that it's focusing nonprofits more than ever before on the need to get good at fundraising.
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B
Yeah, it's not to be dismissive of the weight, but it's also, you know, Ronnie, we talk a whole lot about like, you know, about the water that moves versus water that's stagnant and how you always want to be water that moves because that's where you create momentum and you have power and you have fluidity and like all of force, like all of those good that can show vitality versus stagnant water that can attract disease and bugs and nastiness. Right. And so again, not to dismiss the weight, but to think about the opportunity for diversification is so important right now and to be proactive versus, well, and.
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C
Also I would say to maximize the value of your existing tech stack. If you're paying for all these tools, you probably should be using them.
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B
Yes.
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C
And you know, I'm still astounded at to find some clients, despite our best efforts, who aren't availing themselves of all the possibilities in their tool set, whether that's being able to do split testing before you commit to a broadcast email campaign or using built in features like, you know, what we call the tip jar or the feet cover feature that invites your dirt Cover the prostitute. Like, these all seem like no brainer best practices. And yet some clients will say, we're too busy to do that. And it's like, well, no, you should be taking the time.
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Yeah.
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C
Because there's such an obvious payoff to doing it. It's like one of the no brainer investments you make with your time. But you know, people, it's human nature.
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B
It is.
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And this is a, you know, you kind of both talked about it. There's, there's opportunity out there with a lot of new things, whether it's, it's new platforms, new tools, new strategies. I mean, you know, we talk all the time about the rise of AI and the impact it's having. Right now we've got text messaging taking off in the non profit space for fundraising donor advice funds. We just had our first daft day in October of last year. Like each one of these is a new avenue of opportunity. Like, it's uncertain, we don't know where they're going. But there are opportunities there that nonprofits should and could be jumping at.
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C
Absolutely. Those are some really important ones you just mentioned. We created an integration with the Daft Pay tool way back in late 2023 because what a fantastic shift where people are now committing when they create the daft fund, that these funds will go to charity. They are now legally required to give that money to charity. So we want to make sure our nonprofit clients get their fair share, their unfair share of those dollars that have to go to charity. So if you can eliminate friction, make it easy for daft giving, why wouldn't you do that? So it's a daft Daft Pay is the tool. The company behind it is Chariot. And they've done the work that we could never do to sort of create direct connections to Fidelity and TIA and all those, you know, deaf account holders. I really love that you brought up text messaging, which is the fundraising channel of the future. I mean, some people are already using it effectively, but a lot haven't even begun playing with it yet. And that's a mistake. I have four kids and they don't do email or very little email. They are, they live on text, they're constantly on sms. So if any of our clients or other charities want to get the donations from my kids, they're going to have to learn to meet them where they are. Which ain't email, it's texting. So, yeah, and I forget the third one that you mentioned, but these are all super important trends. Oh, AI, AI, of course, you can't go to a conference in our sector anymore without AI being a huge track. Yeah, I mean that's one where we see tremendous potential due to the ability of AI and machine learning to do pattern recognition that humans can't do and to thereby get way more value out of your existing house file while also helping you understand lookalike audiences to go out and increase your house file. But in that case, we're actually very excited, more excited about predictive AI than these so called large language models, which is generative AI, which is also super cool. We've all played with ChatGPT and found some efficiencies we can gain. But the bigger lever we think is actually the predictive AI. We're trying to help our clients right now through an effort that our CEO founder Graham Covington started six years ago called Accessible Intelligence to help clients recognize who among their current house file supporters are ideally receptive to a message of say if they're a non donor becoming a donor making that first donation, or if they're a one time donor upgrading to becoming a recurring donor. And you know, our technology pioneered by Accessible Intelligence, which is kind of our R and D wing, is to not only tell you who those supporters are on your house file, but also what is the ideal marketing stream, which is, you know, I say marketing stream, that's email +SMS that you can use creating journeys to specifically target those clusters of supporters or donors within your house file. But also looking at things like how can you, and this is a real use case that, that we, that some of our clients are availing themselves of. Now how do you identify current recurring donors who are so valuable to your organization, you've worked so hard to bring them on file, upgrade them, turn them into recurring. How can you detect the ones who are about to dump you, about to lapse? Because if you know that you can intervene and try to save those people before it's too late. So these are use cases that are already bringing huge value to some nonprofits that are using these tools. And more and more the idea is to mainstream these tools. So like we've, we've, we've now got a four point framework which we started last fall where we gradually introduce AI features into existing features. So the first one was a tool called Segments that we brought out last fall. That's a new way, an alternative to our current profiles technology or our query builder to segment your list. And it's using Venn diagrams and it's very user friendly and visual. The second piece is just a major reporting upgrade that Includes our first ever custom report builder and then a total upgrade of our marketing automation suite and then finally a feature that we're calling smart pages. And all of these are basically AI powered under the hood and providing actionable insights to clients. So over time, the goal is client raises more money, but also it simplifies their life, simplifies the work for their team so they can kind of move on to higher order activities because the AI is doing so much of the work for them. That's the goal.
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B
Those are like the harnessing that democratization of AI is so important right now. And like the, the sharing of the specific use cases and the adoption and readiness and adoption of our clients is going to be so important today, like next week. Right. Clint, you said something earlier. Just the thinking about how you had the opportunity to spend time working both with AP and Newsweek. And I'm going to add in a third media entity. And that's your time at pbs. And that's a pretty important troika as it relates to, you know, media in, in the US and even more broadly. And your time at PBS is where you move from the, a little bit of the content creation as the journalist into the business side. And it seems like that becomes a little bit of the launching point into where you are now around technology. And obviously as a business leader, reflect a little bit about your time at PBS and what you learned there about fundraising and what you learned there about, about leading a business.
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C
I'm really glad you went there. The truth is that I never had any intention of entering the nonprofit sector. I stumbled into it and I'm so glad I did. And now I've stayed nearly 30 years in that sector. For me, the transition actually going back to Moscow. When we left Moscow in 1993 with my daughter, my wife was pregnant. With our daughter, it was to enter business school. And I had decided that after seven years as a journalist, I was ready to move to something different. And business school became that transitional, empowering, stepping stone for me. And initially coming out of business school, it was not pbs. It was a big book publisher, Bantam, Doubleday, Dell, which is now Random House. It's owned by the big German media conglomerate of Bertelsmann. But what happened was I quickly figured out I was in the wrong place at that particular publishing company. I was kind of in the finance vertical. And I decided I didn't want to spend the rest of my life buried in spreadsheets. So I took a job with an Internet startup in the Washington D.C. area and left the New York area to come down to D.C. only it was a startup that didn't, they didn't get their funding. And so three months into that experience, I was COO of a 10 person company. The CEO called me in and apologized. He said, take all the time you need, but I don't think we're going to get funded. So I think you should look for something else. And a week later I was working for pbs. The Public Broadcasting Service totally stumbled into it. They needed a person with business ability to sort of figure out how to monetize this fire hose of traffic. They were getting to their website, pbs.org and pbskids.org, which was really tricky because that had to be a very safe space for kids. So you couldn't really do any sort of aggressive monetization. And it's a nonprofit. Part of how their whole funding model was. You have to be purer than Caesar's wife is the old saying, you know, you can't have really calls to action in your sponsorships. They had to be very soft underwriting, you know. Anyway, long story short, I stayed seven years at PBS because I loved it. And, and I got to be inside one big nonprofit. And that is very common in our team in engaging networks is all of us, nearly all of us used to work at some nonprofit or another. I bet that's true of you guys.
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B
Yeah, it's super interesting like that. I guess two parts. The number of people that stumble into the sector vastly dwarfs those that sought out. Right. But there's something about purpose that whenever it grabs us, we want to keep it right. That the compassion and the purpose side of this world. And then second, the number of folks that have been inside the nonprofit that understand the mechanics. So important.
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C
I felt like I must have been a poor student in business school to end up in the nonprofit sector. That's not how you maximize your lifetime earnings. And yet I loved it. I loved the fact that at PBS for those seven years, you know, they had, they had to try harder and everybody was wearing multiple hats because it's not a wash in funding, you know, the way for profit businesses are. And initially it was also just so much, so much fun. We were growing. The Internet was a new thing. This was in the 1998-2005 time frame that I was there. And then there was a big reorgan. I kind of got moved into or thrust into leadership of the distance learning arm of pbs, which was called PBS Adult Learning Service. And it was providing curriculum that was initially delivered by satellite, but later over the Internet to colleges, especially community colleges around the country. And it was branded pbs. And it was a big job for me. It was my first sort of big responsibility with a P and L of $12 million and about 33 people that now reported up to me. And it was a great opportunity, but it was a turnaround situation because they had just fired the top three people and they kind of threw me in there and said, okay, o', Brien, you clean this up. And we did turn it around because it was a profit making arm of, of the organization. The problem was they took our profit away every year and just funneled it into general coffers because most of what PBS does loses money. And so here was a rare instance where there was an arm that was making money. They needed us to subsidize all the money losing stuff. So as, as fun as it was to turn that around and what we were doing was exciting and the whole conversion to online curriculum was really exciting. It was ultimately kind of frustrating because had that been a for profit business, you would have invested more into it instead of taking the profit away. And we badly needed to update our product, which was the curriculum product. We needed a lot more promotion and we couldn't pay for it if they kept taking a profit away. So I've told friends it felt to me as a lifelong tennis player like playing tennis against the backboard and which can really, you know, you can get to be a good tennis player that way, but you're never going to beat the backboard. It'll all. So anyway, it taught me something about the inherent structure of nonprofits and some of the challenges and how some of the decisions get made that drive an MBA like me a little nuts. Because, you know, we're told when something is working, do more of it and when it's not working, don't do it anymore. Nonprofits have a different set of physics that they have to live by and I respect it. But it was, you know, it was very illuminating. And my next job, which was still in the nonprofit sector, was not by accident. It was in a for profit company, which I bet you guys have heard of, called Care 2. And I spent 11 years at Care 2. Wonderful years. So yeah, sorry, that's not True. I spent seven years at PBS, then nine years at Care2, and now I've been at 11 years at Engaging Network. So that's a method.
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B
I thought you were going to say it wasn't wonderful years. And that's, and that's actually where, where you and I met was during your time at Care2. Whenever I first came into the space. Yeah, yeah.
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C
And. And by then, like you guys, I had made a conscious decision to stay in the nonprofit sector. I moved from a. From being within a nonprofit to. To a vendor that serves nonprofits. But by then, I was hooked. Right. And I. As you know, this is a great gig because you are able to make a good living if you're doing it well, if you're with a good company. But you get this psychic reward of, you know, vicariously experiencing what our clients experience, which is that they're directly helping people or helping the climate or helping animals. Like, this is super exciting stuff. And you just. I didn't get that back at the book publisher. I mean, it was a very nice product. Books are positive and life affirming, but it's not like cigarettes or something. But you don't get the psychic reward that you get within the nonprofit sector when you have wonderful clients like the Nature Conservancy or Human Rights Campaign or Embassy International. That's a wonderful reason to stay and recommit to the nonprofit sector.
- [26:57]
A
So true. So true. Clint, I want to zoom in a little bit on you move into the nonprofit space in your career, and you stayed on the track of that. But you mentioned getting thrust into a leadership role while at pbs. So at the same time, you're moving into nonprofits, now you're moving into leadership. Can you tell us a little bit about from PBS and Care2 and now in engaging networks, who, as you're growing in your leadership, who are some of the people who have influenced you or that you've learned from to build these lessons that you've taken into the leadership for yourself.
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C
Wow. If we had an hour, I could do a proper. I could do justice to answering that. But, yeah, suffice to say, I've been blessed to have some wonderful leaders along the way who not only took a chance on me, but mentored me. Fantastic leader who's still active in the nonprofit sector, who was very influential, who hired me into PBS is a woman named Cindy Johansson, who is now head of Edutopia, otherwise known as the George Lucas Education Fund or foundation. George Lucas Education foundation, founded by George Lucas, based at Skywalker Ranch in Northern California. Cindy is one of my favorite people in the world and was just a really inspirational, charismatic leader who taught me tons of stuff, particularly the people side of leading people. And then later, when I went to Care2, I was blessed to have a wonderful boss. All those years, he was our chief operating officer, Marlon Miller. Sadly, Marlon Just passed away on February 1. He will be sorely missed by a lot of us who were touched by him. And he was just a prince of a human being. And now I have a terrific boss. Our really inspirational founder, Graham Covington, who had been my friend for many years when I was a CARE too. And the funny thing there is I don't think it occurred to Graham to hire me, even though we were good friends, and I know it didn't occur to me to want to go work for him, but we have this. This other mutual friend who I bet you guys know, but I'm not going to out them, who took it upon herself to play matchmaker and took him out to lunch and said, you should hire Clint because he kind of needed help at the time and, you know, and was ready. And she took me out to lunch and she said, you should go work for Grant. And it was the funniest thing because it took a while, but I think it dawned on both of us she was absolutely right. It was a really good fit. And now I get to learn so much from Graham, who's kind of a visionary, particularly in product development, kind of looking around the corner. And AI was one example where he was really. I said six years. I think it was really seven years ago. He got religion and said, oh, AI is going to be huge. It's going to change everything. And so he started this sort of skunk works called Accessible Intelligence to get going early, figuring out how do we apply this to nonprofit fundraising? And now fast forward seven years. We're mainstreaming it into the engaging networks platform. So Graham's really good at looking ahead, looking around the corner at what nonprofits are going to need next. But along the way, I'd also say I was very blessed by one of my predecessors. My immediate past predecessor at Care2 was an unusually wonderful person named Andy Stocking. And he, if you've ever seen that play or the movie Cyrano, Cyrano de Bergerac, if you remember how Cyrano writes the words for the character Christian, you know, these poetic words to make the girl fall in love with Chris. So Andy Stocking was my Cyrano, where he was, like, coaching me constantly during my first couple of years, really, because he stayed on in a sort of advisory role even after I became the new vice president for sales and marketing at Care2. But he was coaching me in the background the whole time. I'm tempted to say, you know, was like a ventriloquist and I was his dummy. But I think I had a little.
- [31:06]
B
More the Cyrano the Cyrano route is a little more romantic.
- [31:11]
C
Right. And he was so generous that way. And so I'm, I've always tried to do that for people that I've hired is at least initially like, give them a license to kill total access and a chance to get coached by me quietly in the background as much as they need it. It's the single most high leverage way for me to invest my time is to help a new leader within our company kind of get up to speed. And I hope that I've done that. I hope I've paid it forward in the way that Andy Stocking did it for me years ago.
- [31:44]
B
One of the things Clint, just affirm you there. One of the things that I have observed from your team members that have been in chapters at Engaging Networks and even before that Care too, is that there's a, it's easy to reference culture and, and to, you know, to talk about the importance that culture plays. You know, there, there are different aspects of culture. There's the, the words on the wall, there's the way that it plays out and, and how people interact with each other. And then, then I think that there's the, the thumbprint of, of leadership as it relates to culture. And so you have, whether or not you realize it, you have created some culturally penetrable, you know, forces in, in your time, both at Care2 and Engaging Networks. And some of the folks that have come out of those places like that might fall under the Clint coaching tree. You know, I can't speak to whether or not you were quietly mentoring them in the background, but I do think you've, you've culturally influenced the way that they work with others so well.
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C
Thank you for saying that. I certainly hope that's true. I'm very aware of mistakes I've made over the years, but you'd always hope that the good things outweigh the mistakes. I think culture is the single most important asset any company has. As important as technology is, as important as branding is, and strategy is super important without culture. I mean, I think I agree with the, the management consultant. I think it was Peter Drucker who said culture eats strategy for breakfast. I totally believe that. It took me a long time to understand that. I remember back in business school, we were forced to take the Myers Briggs assessment, and it was all about the softer skills and your interactions and communication preferences. And I thought, this is complete hogwash. I feel like fortune teller reading my Palmer. Like, it just seems silly. Ten years later. When I was at pbs, I was required to take the Myers Briggs again. And this time, I approached it with an entirely new respect and curiosity. Because in the intervening 10 years, what I learned is, oh, no, no. This soft stuff, how you interact with people, it's the biggest lever. You've got the team, it's who you hire and then how you support them, how you challenge them, how you leverage them. That is where it allows a small company like ours, Engaging Networks, to compete against a $4 billion Wall street market cap company in our space. You guys know which one I'm talking about. And we respect them and sometimes we even cooperate with them, but they are still a big competitor. And we, you know, by contrast, Engaging Networks as a fully independent company never took a penny of outside investment, not even angel investment. So think about how is it we've managed to take 100 clients off of one of their best known products in the 11 years that I've been Engaging Networks. And despite the fact that they're a huge company with I think, $800 million a year in revenue, we're a spec compared to them. But why? And I think it's the people. I think it's the product and the people, but the product is created by the people. So ultimately it's still the people. And I think it speaks well for Graham that he's attracted great people. And then hopefully I've helped too, attract more great people. And then you want to hold on to them. So you have to create an environment that they like so that they'll stay enthusiastic and stick around. We hate churn. Like, when you lose people, all that institutional knowledge goes out the door with them. And also you have to find a new person. That takes time. You have to break in the new person. They have a learning curve. So it's much better if you can hire the people that you want to have on board and keep them. And they just get more and more valuable to the company. Their contributions get better and better. You guys know all this, but, yeah, I just.
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B
So important.
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C
I'm violently agreeing with you, like the importance of culture. Yeah.
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A
There's a reason we're sitting here just nodding our heads while you're saying this. And I want to go. I want to tie it back, too, because we were talking about uncertainty earlier and the uncertainty in the space, and I, I think that you can make a case that culture can be that north star around uncertainty, that you can build around culture and people and really go from there. So wise words. Clint, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your story with us. And our listeners.
- [36:27]
C
My pleasure. Thank you again for having me. It's a real honor. Group Thinkers is a production of RKD Group. For more information, including how you can partner with RKD to accelerate growth for your fundraising and nonprofit marketing needs, visit rkdgroup.com.