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The Fundraising Masterminds Podcast
74. Top 4 New Year's Resolutions for Your Nonprofit in 2025
00:25:01
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- [00:00]
A
You're listening to the number one podcast for nonprofit leaders getting your nonprofit fully funded. This is the Fundraising Masterminds podcast. One of the worst things you can do is say, I'm kind of picturing a building, maybe two of some recovery homes, but how much space do you need? I have no idea. How much is it going to cost to build the buildings? I have no idea. You know, they just have this like, vague. That's not what we mean by creating a five year vision. If someone gave you a check for 100,000 doll as today.
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B
Yeah.
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A
How would you spend it today?
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B
Yeah.
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A
And you have to know exactly what you're going to do with it.
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B
Yeah. People don't take give me a hundred thousand. Well, what are you going to use it for? Well, trust me, when you give me the check, I'll figure out a way. No, no, it just doesn't work that way.
- [00:50]
A
Well, hey there. Welcome back to another episode at the Fundraising Masterminds podcast. We are super excited, as always, that you are here with us. And today is no exception. If you're tuning in today, it is New Year's Eve. January 1, January 1 25. And last night, you know, I had a great time playing board games with my family. We stay. We usually play a game called Power Grid. And we usually, you know, it's like a blitz night, you know. What do you guys do on New Year's Eve?
- [01:23]
B
Well, we usually, we do stay up, watch the ball drop. We're, you know, Dick Clark, you know, people, and then just. My daughter and I relate. My wife is done for the night already. My daughter and I usually just walk outside and watch fireworks in our neighborhood.
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A
Well, it's. Can you believe it's 2025 already?
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B
Ah, man, I gotta start writing my checks with 2025.
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A
I know.
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B
I'll go six, six weeks right in 2024 on it.
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A
I, I remember growing up in the 80s, we were supposed to have flying cars by now.
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B
Yeah. Yeah.
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A
Well, what happened to that?
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B
We have driverless cars. How about that? You know, I mean, at least we have some of that, which is a little scary watching those things go around the.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Around the corner.
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A
Um, yeah, I just remember, wasn't Back to the Future like, wasn't the future like 2020 or something?
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B
Yeah, it's like, okay, yeah, I grew up with the Jetsons, which was, was, you know, we had robot maids and things. So that was, that was even different.
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A
We're getting, we're getting close to some of that stuff. It's kind of scary as well.
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B
Yeah. Elon Musk is taking us to the next level.
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A
Well, anyways, in today's episode, we wanted to get into some resolutions.
- [02:26]
B
Everybody creates resolutions this time of the year, so we thought we were going to come up with some development ones.
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A
The episode for today is the top four New Year's resolutions for your nonprofit in 2025.
- [02:37]
B
I love it.
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A
We're going to kind of run through these real quick. I don't know if we're going to spend a whole lot of time on this. So number one, we want to resolve to shift our focus away from the scarcity mindset and towards abundance. Right. This is the year. Okay. Let's start fresh.
- [02:52]
B
Yes.
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A
Okay. Maybe you've been struggling with the scarcity thing or maybe your non profit is like barely surviving. We want to get you to three thriving in.
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B
No more stinking thinking.
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A
No more stinking thinking. So let's resolve to do this. Okay. Now, one of the great books, I don't know if we have it here in the studio. Do we have the. The book, Micah's guy, Larry's book? Yeah. One of the great books here is Intentional Living and Giving. If you want to. If you want a good book to read at the beginning of the year, this will really get you thinking.
- [03:25]
B
I've been a big fan of scarcity versus abundance mentality for a long time. Larry was the person who really set my thinking in the right direction.
- [03:37]
A
Yeah. So if you want to learn from the master of the master, check out Larry Onan, Intentional Living and Giving. We'll put a link in the description for this. You know, we're not getting any benefit or kickback from this. We're just going to send you directly to. Because this is such an important concept. Right?
- [03:52]
B
Yeah. To really just the right mindset. Right. Thinking.
- [03:57]
A
Right. And so I would resolve to get the right mindset for your nonprofit. That's gonna help you tremendously. Number two.
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B
Yes.
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A
We wanna resolve to creating a three to five year dream vision for your nonprofit.
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B
Yeah. If you haven't already created a three to five year plan, do it now. There is no reason to delay. If you really wanna have a good year where you have abundance and become fully going to need a strategic plan. You're going to need a plan that you can base all your efforts on. It's going to be your plumb line. When you are going face to face with major donors, it helps you with proposals. If you're going to do the perfect vision dinner, it's going to help you create your accelerators and your individual Giving strategies. If you're going to do direct mail, mid level, all those things, you've got to have those strategic initiatives that are so important and no good. 5, 3 to 5 year plan does not include smart goals. You need to have smart goals once more. Smart stands for specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely. All those things are so important, especially the specific and measurable.
- [05:23]
A
Yep. It's so important to know where you're going. You know, we all just got back from Christmas, New Year's. Imagine if my goal was to visit my family at, at Christmas, but I didn't exactly know how to get there. You know, I didn't know the address, so I just thought, well, my family is up north, so I'm just gonna grab a compass and just hope that I get there. Yeah, you're probably not gonna get there unless you have a very specific address. Absolutely punched into the gps, right? Where you know exactly where they, where you need to go, you know exactly how to get there. So a lot of people get bogged down in the details of this, right? They, they get bogged down in the weeds of how am I going to achieve this? And that's not really the point. The goal of the five year dream plan is just to think about what is God calling me to do? What has God, why has God enabled me to start this ministry and what is God putting on my heart to do? There's two parts to this, right? So part number one is praying and just spending time with the Lord and asking him to give you a vision for what five years down the road.
- [06:33]
B
Could look like seeking his direction.
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A
You know, for me, I remember doing this with my organization, reaching the heart of Zambia. And we really kind of concluded that in the next five years we'd really like to see a fully funded private school get started where kids could come off the streets and get the education they need from a biblical perspective to get their lives turned around. So that's the three to five year vision.
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B
Jason, you shared with me the other day some very specifics. Why don't you share that with our listeners? I don't, I don't think it's wrong. I think it will help people.
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A
So then, you know, drilling down into that is, well, how is that actually, like what are specific, measurable, obtainable, realistic, timely things that we can do to actually achieve that goal, Right? And that, that goes down into, well, we need to teach seven grades. We, we have about three to 400 kids that we're ministering to, right? These are kids that are vulnerable. They They've lost parents due to a. Are, you know, living on the streets, or they're living with an uncle, or they're living in an abusive situation. So they, they really have no direction.
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B
Right.
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A
So we're trying to give them direction. Right. And so we've created seven classrooms or seven grades. I'm sorry. And ideally, we'd like to have a specific classroom for each grade. You know, we don't want to be having everyone in the same room or rotating them all around.
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B
So in each classroom is going to cost how much?
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A
Right. So in Zambia, you know, the, to build the. The building standards are significantly different than in America. Right. So it, it only costs about $25,000 to build a classroom.
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B
Okay.
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A
And so you multiply that 25,000 times seven.
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B
Right.
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A
We've got ourselves a specific goal. Right. And, and you can even break it down, you know, price per classroom. Or you could combine like this year we're going to do three classrooms. Next year we're going to do, you know, so that's. That. That would be one specific measurable goal. We know how long it takes to build a classroom. We know how much it costs, and we know the time frame. We can do it in the. Another one.
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B
You're going to need teachers, right?
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A
Yeah. Another one is we need teachers for every class. Now, in, in Zambia, it doesn't, you know, the cost of living is significantly less. So we've averaged that. You know, we can hire a teacher for about $10,000 a year, which in our standards is insane.
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B
But for them.
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A
But that's pretty good. Most people living in the area that we're ministering to, they're living off of a doll.
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B
Yeah.
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A
That's like so standard.
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B
So $800 a month is. That's a pretty good salary.
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A
Yeah. Getting, you know, paying them what we'd be paying them would be a lot.
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B
Yeah.
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A
For them. And, and you know, we're, we're trying to balance this. We don't want to pay them too much, you know, because then it creates different problems. But we want to pay them well compared to where they're at. So 10,000 a year per teacher will get us to $70,000. So that's a very specific, specific, measurable goal.
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B
Y.
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A
Right. And then the third thing that I would say is specific and measurable is that we want to create a security wall around the property.
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B
Right.
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A
And believe it or not, we've gotten quotes for this because I thought it would be. We could have done this a couple years ago, but because it's Concrete. And because it needs to be high and it needs to go around, the.
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B
Whole property needs to actually be secure.
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A
It's, it's about 80 to $90,000, believe it or not.
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B
Per wall?
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A
No, just for the whole thing.
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B
For all, all seven walls.
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A
Yeah. Well, it's, there's property and all the buildings are inside the property. So just to put a wall around the whole property, a couple acres, you know, and, but it's a, it's a big job and, but it's expensive, you know, and so that's another one of our major goals is, you know, we want to build out, but then we also want to secure the premise. Right now we secure it with labor. You know, like we have security guards and that works. But ideally, you know, building a security wall would be even better for the kids.
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B
But that, that goal, once again, you're not going to try and eat the elephant all at once. You've probably got that broken out. How many classrooms you want to build the first year, second year, third year, fifth year.
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A
Right. So this is a, this is like a three to five year dream.
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B
Right, Right.
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A
We, we, you know, if God could move mountains, he could do all this in a year.
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B
Yeah. He could do it this month.
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A
Right. So I know that it's possible, but at the same time I want to be realistic.
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B
Yeah.
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A
And I want to think, well, okay, based on my past giving records, based on all this stuff, you know, we, we average about a hundred thousand dollars of giving a year.
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B
Yeah.
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A
So, you know, we could probably do a couple classrooms and hire a couple teachers and then save towards the wall. Right, right. And you know, if we could, you know, eat an elephant one bite at a time, in three to five years, we could have it all done. Yeah. And we could get the wall built. But you know, I want to be mindful that, you know, someone could write a check for a hundred thousand today and you know, then that just accelerates our vision.
- [11:31]
B
Yeah. What I love about it is that if you want, you could go into a business, man or woman, and, and have the total plan and say, hey, you know, if you could do this today, we could take care of all this with one check today.
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A
Right.
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B
But if all you're able to do is help purchase one classroom or one teacher or one teacher in classroom.
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A
Yeah.
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B
You know, I love it because you can buy the whole thing or just buy components.
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A
Right.
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B
So that's scalable.
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A
Right. And so that's what we mean by having a vision. And then, you know, the, one of the worst things you can do is say, you know, well, we want to help women, you know, with human trafficking. And, you know, I have this vague idea of like some property somewhere. I'm kind of picturing a building, maybe two of some recovery homes, but I don't exactly know. Like, if you drilled in, if you ask some questions, like, well, how much, how much space do you need? I have no idea. How much, how much is it going to cost to build the buildings? I have no idea. You know, they just have this like, vague, you know, that's not what we mean.
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B
No.
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A
By creating a five year vision, you.
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B
Get a token check, a token gift from that. But you won't get any gift. Real.
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A
You got to do your research. You gotta, you gotta know exactly what you want to do. Like if someone gave you a check for $100,000 today.
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B
Yeah.
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A
How would you spend it today?
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B
Yeah.
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A
And you have to know exactly what you're going to do with it.
- [12:57]
B
Yeah. People don't take, well, give me a hundred thousand. Well, what are you going to use it for? Well, trust me, I'll, I'll. When you give me the check, I, I'll figure out a way. No, no, it just doesn't work that way.
- [13:07]
A
Yeah. So make that one of your New Year's resolutions. Resolve to pretend that you have the money already in your bank account and that you have to figure out how to spend it.
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B
Yeah.
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A
And. And get quotes.
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B
Yep.
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A
Figure it out, you know, what would you actually do? And then, you know, and now you have yourself a dream vision. And some people may be thinking, well, gee, that's going to take some time. Well, yeah, it's going to take some time.
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B
Yeah.
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A
Do it now before, you know, you get too busy with work and too far into the year.
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B
Yep.
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A
So, number three, let's resolve to immerse your board in development training.
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B
Oh, man, Jason, wouldn't that be a dream? I can't tell you how important that is. I come in and help so many different ministries. They'll say, jim, give me your opinion on, you know, on our organization, how we can improve it and how can we better our board.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Time and time again, I find that board members are recruited, they're brought on, and they know nothing about their responsibility in development. We know that a board member has a fiduciary responsibility. They are responsible for being good stewards of resources. But we think that is spending money wisely. And it is, it does include spending money wisely, but it also includes them owning, raising money. And so board members can't say, ah, gee, Jim, thanks for. I love my responsibilities as being a board member, but I'm washing my hands of raising. That's your responsibility, Executive director. Nope, that's a cop out. Their responsibility is to, it's, it's there to help to set the direction in development and to play a key role. They need to be owners in development.
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A
We often talk about the life acrostic. Right. Labor.
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B
Yes.
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A
Influence, finances and expertise. You want to have your board members.
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B
Have a good balance.
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A
Have a good balance of all four of those things. Right. So often the mindset of a board is, well, this is why we hired an executive director.
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B
Right. Executive director, A development person even.
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A
Right. And so our job as a board is to have a board meeting and to hear from the executive director all the wonderful things that they're doing. And then we're going to just make a couple of suggestions and they're going to do everything we suggest and, and.
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B
We'Ll take care of spending the money. You take care of the raising money.
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A
Right.
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B
And that's not true.
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A
Yeah. And that's the wrong, that's the totally wrong mindset of a board. So if your board is functioning like, then resolve to immerse your board in proper development training because this is one of the most important things that can really turn your organization around. And we've talked a lot about Larry Onan's book.
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B
Right.
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A
Getting your board to read that book could be very eye opening.
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B
Right.
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A
Do you have any other resources that you could mention?
- [15:56]
B
Well, there are, I mean there's a handful books that I really like and really recommend. Now we're going to put this. So don't worry about pulling out a pen and paper. We'll put this in the description, possibly even offer it in a PDF. But one book that I really like a lot, just generally from Development, Understanding and Principles, Development 101 by John Frank. It's a tremendous book on understanding the basics of development. Second one is Donors Are People Too by Tim or Timothy Smith. All these books can be found in Amazon. Great book. Megagifts by Gerald Panis. Gerald Panis is probably considered the guru of major donor relations and he is, he's, he's a prolific author, but this is one of his best major mega gifts. If you want a book on real practical principles, there's a book, It's Not Just about the Money by Richard Pero, Richard Perry and Jeff Scheffels. Terrific book on practical principles. Of course, you just mentioned it a minute ago. Intentional Living and Giving by Larry Onan. This series will Be coming up fairly soon on that. So keep an eye open.
- [17:13]
A
Those are five good books that kick off your new year. And, you know, again, just find one of those and buy. Buy a copy for every board member and say, hey, I'd really love you guys to drill into this. Let's talk about it at the next board meeting. Yeah, I think when you go into a board meeting and you say, you guys are doing it all wrong, I've been listening to Jim and Jason, and they said, we need to be doing this, and you guys just are not right.
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B
You need to step up.
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A
You need to step up. Yeah. That's just gonna create animacy. And, you know, you wanna. You wanna. You wanna encourage them through education. Right? So, hey, I just read this book, or, hey, I just listened to this podcast. What do you think? And. And ask them to listen to it and let's talk about it.
- [17:56]
B
You may even read a chapter each. Each board meeting. In other words, they read it, you come in, you discuss it for 15, 20 minutes. What are the highlights? And then move on to the rest of the board meeting.
- [18:05]
A
Right. So some good podcast episodes we've done, and these are actually really popular. Episode 15 of the fundraising masterminds. It's called Roles and Responsibilities of a Board.
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B
Yeah.
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A
So we go into a lot of depth on, you know, what are the roles and responsibilities and these kind of.
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B
Things you can share with your board.
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A
Yeah.
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B
You know, and then you maybe even discuss those at the board.
- [18:25]
A
Literally just send them a YouTube link of, you know, us discussing the roles and responsibilities of a board and say, what do you think of this, guys? Let's discuss it. Next board meeting, then. Episode 45. 9 Ways your Nonprofit board members should be involved in fundraising. That was a really big episode, and we've got a lot of good feedback.
- [18:45]
B
From one of our most popular.
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A
If I remember a lot of people coming back saying, wow, I had no idea my board should be doing this.
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B
Yeah.
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A
And they're not doing this. And we should be doing this.
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B
Or they're doing one or two of the nine.
- [18:57]
A
Yeah. So when we're saying, you know, resolve to immerse your board in development training, we're not. We don't have a course on board members or anything. There's yet. Not yet. We might. We might create one. But there's. We've done two podcast episodes about it to get the ball rolling, and we've suggested five books you could read, and that will more than get you started on your journey to getting best practices in your board. Number four. Resolve to focus your efforts on your critical few. Absolutely. So we always talk about, focus on the 20% who give 80% of the dollars.
- [19:33]
B
Right.
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A
And it's so important.
- [19:35]
B
Yeah. You're going to get the biggest return on your investment from your critical few. If you just resolve to spend more time this year building relationships, getting to know those people, their heart, their passion, where they are at with things, you're going to make a major difference in your efforts. So focus in on that critical few and doing it right now.
- [20:02]
A
Well, the best part about that is we do actually have a new program called Major Donor Mastery. And Major Donor Mastery, we launched it last year. It specifically is talking about how do you develop relationships with major donors with major partners. So more like you've got the critical few, which might be some mid level people mixed with some major people. But how do you develop those mid level people into major donors? How do we take them to the next level? So in Major Donor Mastery, it's actually, it's not quite as intensive as the Perfect Vision Dinner. The Perfect Vision Dinner. We're like walking you through the process for 20 weeks and we're holding your hand and we're, we're doing all this stuff. Major Donor Mastery is just a normal video course.
- [20:50]
B
It's more self paced.
- [20:51]
A
It's a. Self paced, you can buy it anytime, you can take it anytime. But we go into a lot of detail.
- [20:58]
B
How to find a major donor, how to court a major donor, how to ask for a major donor gift, what to do once you get the gift, how to respond if the person says no, if the person says maybe if the person says later, all those things. And then how to create reports and to follow up, to get the second and third and mortgage.
- [21:16]
A
And there's, there's everything. The, the course is not geared towards large organizations or small. There's something for everybody. So whether you're just getting started, whether you've been around for 10 years, or whether you are a huge national organization, you know, there's something in this program for everybody. And again, coming from 40 years of experience with development. Jim, let me ask you this question.
- [21:38]
B
Sure.
- [21:39]
A
What's the largest major donor check that you were responsible for in your development efforts?
- [21:45]
B
Well, I've had a number of checks that I've where someone strokes out a check for a million dollars. And it's pretty neat to see the one. And then because there's a lot of ones that I've seen from 1 to 1,000 to 100,000, when someone writes the word million on there that's really, really a special check that you get.
- [22:09]
A
Wow. And I mean, I know there's a lot of people listening that could only dream about, you know, even getting a million dollars through 10 years of work, you know, but. But you've seen million dollar checks been written after.
- [22:22]
B
And in fact, yeah, I saw, I actually saw one come through. Wasn't responsible for it. But. And that's a, That's a nice gift.
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A
Wow.
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B
To get.
- [22:30]
A
So it's really important that you learn from the person. You know, Jim's not just, you know, making courses and having podcasts just to talk about what you should be doing, but he's not actually doing it. He's. He's the guy doing it. He's been doing it for 40 years. And you can learn a lot through Major Donor Mastery. So that would be. Our fourth resolution is resolve to, you know, take a course like Major Donor Mastery. It's a very practical thing you can do. We'll put a QR code on the screen, you can scan that or look it up in the description, but that'll take you to our Major Donor mastery course. And that is something very practical, very actionable that you can, you can click, you can scan, you can go to your board and say, hey, I think we need to do this. I always say, you know, I think if you implemented even just 10% of what you learn in this course, it will pay for itself. Because the beauty of this course is we're teaching you how to get major, major gifts.
- [23:27]
B
Yeah.
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A
Right.
- [23:29]
B
One, one person, your first appointment, you could pay for it.
- [23:32]
A
Yeah.
- [23:32]
B
Multiple times over.
- [23:33]
A
Right. So it's definitely worth the investment. And those are four resolutions that you can make in 2025.
- [23:42]
B
Let's recap.
- [23:43]
A
Really ratchet it up real quickly. So resolution number one, resolve to shift away from the scarcity mindset to the abundance mindset. Resolution number two, resolve to create a three to five year dream vision that has actionable, smart goals. Resolution number three, resolve to immerse your board in development, training, and resolution number four, resolve to focus on your critical few by taking the major Donor Mastery course. Perfect steps for starting off 2025. Wow.
- [24:17]
B
I can't wait for January 2nd.
- [24:19]
A
Yeah.
- [24:20]
B
To kick off and start to get these resolutions myself.
- [24:24]
A
Well, there you have it. If you found this to be super helpful, and if you're listening to our podcast but you're not subscribed, go ahead and just click that subscribe button. Let us know in the comments if there's any resolutions that you would be doing that we maybe didn't mention. We'd love to hear from you on that. And as always, thank you for listening, and we'll see you next time.
- [24:44]
B
Take care.