From $275k to $51M: How to Become a High Growth Nonprofit - Matt Scott

7:01PM Apr 19, 2023

Speakers:

Julie Confer

Becky Endicott

Jonathan McCoy

Matt Scott

Keywords:

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Support for this show is brought to you by our friends at Bloomerang. Bloomerang offers donor management and online fundraising software that helps small to medium nonprofits like First Tee of greater Akron, and nonprofit empowering kids and teens through the game of golf.

After just one year with Bloomerang, they doubled their unique donors improve donor stewardship and raise more funds to listen to the full interview of First Tee of greater Akron visit bloomerang.com/we are for good, or click the link in our show notes. Hey, I'm John. And I'm Becky. And this is the We Are For Good podcast.

Nonprofits are faced with more challenges to accomplish their missions and the growing pressure to do more, raise more and be more for the causes that improve our world.

We're here to learn with you from some of the best in the industry, bringing the most innovative ideas, inspirational stories, all to create an Impact Uprising.

So welcome to the good community. We're nonprofit professionals, philanthropist, world changers and rabid fans who are striving to bring a little more goodness into the world.

So let's get started. Yo, Becky, what's happening?

Let me ask you a question. Have you ever wanted to double your revenue? Raise your hand I have doesn't that sound dreamy? We're going to talk about how to do that today. And we have brought an incredible expert onto the podcast today. Because it's not just enough to double your revenue. You got to bring the impact that comes with it. And friends we've talked so much about, it's more than the money. It's more than impact just being the dollars. It's about how do you grow your movement? How do you grow your storytelling bank? How do you enrich the experience? And man Are we excited to have Matt Scott on the podcast today he is the CEO and co founder of CauseMic even though I'll tell you it looks like cause mic, but it is CauseMic and he is this incredible experience fundraiser speaker. And now he's the author of this great book called The high growth nonprofit. And we're gonna talk about that today. But we're really centering this conversation on how do you become a high growth nonprofit. And so even though Matt is the CEO and co founder now of this incredible Portland based consultancy, he was one of us. He was in the trenches, just like we were as a fundraising leader. And one of those we're going to talk about it Team Rubicon. You've heard it on this podcast before. He was part of that team that took Team Rubicon from $275,000 raised a year to $51 million in seven years. I mean, insert the explosion. Yeah, so that's an incredible story. We cannot wait to dive into it. But he's just also a builder and a doer with this vision for scaling his company. But doing it while he's balancing profitability with employee profit sharing and respect. You know, those values jive with our community here. So we're going to be diving into all the ways that they show up in marketing fundraising technology, and how they really start to focus in on the revenue to really take you to the next level. We're gonna be diving into this new book called The high growth nonprofit. But first, we got to get to know Portland based Matt Scott, how the heck are you? It says you're an early riser. How early are you up to date, Matt?

Today, I slept in I was up at about 515. But I was out late last night was amazing.

Well, you know, we really like to get to know our guests on a deeper level. So take us back. Like we want to go back behind CauseMic maybe back behind Team Rubicon, like, tell us about you tell us how you came into this work and why you're saying in it.

Yeah, great question. And first, thank you so much for helping me start start my work day off. This is like, I'm just stoked to have this as my first meeting of the day. So I guess going going back a little bit like I always knew I was going to be an entrepreneur. Except when I was a kid, you know, I was obsessed with like making money. I thought I was going to be super rich. I just like knew it. So I had all these like weird side hustles. I've come a long way I've developed in terms of the focus, but it was kind of an interesting experience because I applied to a number of colleges. And actually the one I ended up graduating from was the only one I wasn't accepted to, which my therapist also says says a lot about me. But you know, one of the things that drew me in was I went to Loyola Marymount University and I remember the president of the school talking about how, when you're when you come to school, that's your time to be selfish. That's your time to like, focus on yourself and absorb as much as you can. And now, you've you've had this opportunity, it's like your responsibility to go out and be be be people for others and to use this education for good and I thought that's, that's interesting. And that was before I ended up going there. And so, while I was at Loyola Marymount I had the opportunity to work in the Center for Service and action. And I was the only business major in NCSA, I was kind of surrounded and flanked by like, all these colleagues, better people, in terms of, you know, like social workers and, and, and liberal arts majors and like creative thinkers. But it was a really cool experience for me, because I got to see like the intersection between business and doing good. And I helped create this English learning program in East LA for undocumented immigrants. And I kind of fell in love with that intersection. And you know how life goes it like tasty one thing leads to another. And a few years later, a friend of mine who I worked for at the Center for Service and action, Joanne Dennis, she was the first staff member at Team Rubicon first full time staff member, she she reached out and was like, Hey, we're building this organization, I think you make a good, good contributor. Do you want to come help us build it? And then I got into, into like, the nonprofit space more and more. And yeah, I'd say the rest is history. But because I'm still trying to write a story, but that was sort of Act One, if you will. Yeah. Love it.

I mean, yeah, we'd love here in the winding journey that we're all kind of part of, but I want you to talk take us to the Team Rubicon part of the story, because I think, you know, Becky and I are similar that we had some real formative experiences that made us want to go outside of the walls and just start a bigger conversation. And I feel like that's very much what you experienced, too. But take us back to the ground floor of Team Rubicon, and then what you saw, and then we're going to break down all the frameworks, and the mindsets that came out of that.

Team Rubicon was aside from like, you know, finding my partner in life, I would say, Team Rubicon was like the most influential thing that's ever happened to me. I'm just so lucky to have been young, naive enough to think that, you know, I think Jake, Jake, the founder of Team Rubicon, you say, you know, we were bold enough to think that we could change the world and smart enough to maybe have a chance. And

Team Rubicon is done now. It's like it happened. It's incredibly crazy.

Yeah. And I was never the smartest person in the room. But I was I was usually first in last out, but it was like this opportunity to to take bold, calculated risks, you know, like we had this mandate to go out there and be the best disaster relief organization in the world. And I think back on it, and I was able to experiment, try new things. Take risks, always had the support of Jake. But yeah, I think that was a major contributor in terms of my experience, and is like, I just got to play the role of somebody who had a lot more experience and, and therefore was able to learn and grow, test things out. And it was the perfect environment for a builder and a doer, you know, like Becky said, on the intro there, I'm very much that as opposed to a maintainer. So that was the origin for me in the in the impact that Team Rubicon had on on my trajectory, and then ultimately, like the creation of CauseMic and what we do now.

So I just love the organization so much. And I want to go into this concept of becoming a high growth nonprofit. And we really want everybody to begin to kind of shift their mindsets as we start to this. And in start there, Matt, like, we want to talk about that mindset. What do we need to get right in our heads as we start moving toward this focus on becoming high growth, high revenue within our missions?

Yeah, I think it all starts with a growth mindset and illustrate that point, I'll just share a story from one of our clients Mercy Corps, their global humanitarian organization operating in over 100 competing countries, some of the most difficult places in the world, there are half a billion dollar charity, when they approach CauseMic it was during a time of tremendous uncertainty, we're in the middle of a presidential election cycle, where on one hand, we had a candidate who was talking about reducing foreign aid America First as a foreign policy. And on the other hand, we had somebody who was talking about doubling down on on foreign investment, as a way to move America's kind of values forward. So there was a lot of uncertainty because 90% of Mercy Corps funding comes from restricted government grants. So they wanted to grow, you know, unrestricted net new revenue, when we uncovered with them is something that I see a lot from nonprofits, when we asked, how much are you trying to grow? The answer was 5%. Net unrestricted revenue each year for the next three years. Yep. The problem with that is that you actually don't need to do anything differently. You can just do what you're doing right now a little bit better. Or maybe even the same, and you'll you'll experience 5% growth. But when you force yourself into a resource constrained environment, that's where like innovation, creativity, and I think like most importantly, ruthless prioritisation, because it's more about what you don't do than what you do. So, you know, we pose this question to our clients, and we pose it to Mercy Corps, like, what if you had no choice, but to double your revenue with half the resources over the next three years? How would you do that? How would you go about doubling your revenue with half the resources in the next few years, resources like, money, people, whatever. And that really, really forces you to focus on on identifying the bold, calculated risks that I was talking about, about Team Rubicon that are worth taking. And I think if if you just go back to your team, and you ask them that question, You'll be really surprised at what they come up with. At first, they're gonna look at you like, You're crazy. Indeed, yeah, I think you'll be really surprised. You gotta, you gotta No, no, really, like, let's think about this. So it starts with that growth mindset. And a Team Rubicon, we always had that mindset in mind, you know, we were trying to build the best disaster relief organization in the world. And to do that we knew we needed resources. And we hadn't, we had very little so it was easy to operate in a resource constrained environment. But as we got bigger and bigger, and we had more and more money, and more more people, we always kept that that mindset in mind, and I think it helped us

grow. And I mean, that points back to the lead in that Becky sent me to go from an organization raising 275,000 to 51 million, I mean, is truly incredible. I mean, it's even hard to even imagine the transformation that had to take place in the open handedness to how we're going to get this done. So you've listed some mindsets, I want to give you the platform to share more, but the ruthless prioritization sticks out to me the growth mindset. What do you think also is holding back I mean, to hear scarcity, you know, of most nonprofits that we think we can only grow 5%? Is there something else that you think could unlock for this next level of growth for people?

Yeah, particularly right now, right? We're dealing with this time where there's a lot of economic uncertainty. And I know, you know, my experience working with fundraisers, and when I was a fundraiser, this goes to the mindset of thing, it's still but they're always setting their targets kind of low. And then they exceed them like that's, like certain standard operating procedure amongst fundraisers. But the problem is, like when you're running kind of scared when you think that the economy is going to, you know, influence your your giving, it's important to be informed, don't get me wrong, like you need to understand what's going on, and how you're going to pivot. But another tactic that works really well, is is kind of the second piece like, once you have this mindset, then you have to create, like, basically a punch list of stuff that you're going to do, right? Like, what are all the things that could be done? So let's say one of your bold, crazy ideas is, we're going to take an audience led approach, we're going to reach each each constituent on the right channel with the right message at the right time. Okay, well, there's a lot to unpack there, right? You got to like, figure out what is your core messaging? What are like the key stories, where's your value proposition, you got to segment your donor audience, you got to actually put in place, maybe you don't have the technology to send email and paid ads and build landing pages and things like that. And then you also have to think about like, Okay, how now that we have all these cool tools? Like how do we, how do we create content, that much content with the same number of people, so there's a lot there, but what you got to do is you got to list out all the things that need to happen. And then you have to prioritize them based on the highest impact at the lowest cost, you're not gonna be able to do all those things all at once. You got to kind of figure out what are all of the things that need to be done, and you have to prioritize them based on impact and effort and then assign those out to the various folks and tie those things back to your strategy for growing like, you know, I talked about that how, like audience led approach. Okay, that how does that tie back to that one core strategy that you have? Does that does that help John or does that make sense?

Yeah, I think so. I think, you know, we wanted to get into the head of, you know, how did, how did you make those prioritizations to realize that kind of potential just so to kind of give a map for somebody listening to the story and being like, How could that be us? And I think we're ridiculous idealists around here to be like, we do think it's possible. We definitely believe the funding is out there, as you kind of lean more into your values. So I think, I think, absolutely, you're kind of leading us in that direction. But if you have more of like the storyline of how that came to be, take us there. Yeah. Yeah, so

I'll share my experience. Like when I was at Team Rubicon, before Hurricane Sandy, we had a few 100 individual donors. Hurricane Sandy happened and we deployed to the Rockaways and sent dozens of military veterans to respond to this disaster. And we had this huge influx of of donors and If I literally was sitting at my kitchen table, can writing every single donor, a thank you note and calling each and every donor myself. Oh, and I realized

donation back in the house. Yes,

I know. Just like the grind. And there are still people who received those thank you cards that are still support squad monthly donors for Team Rubicon today, right? I know it for a fact they reached out to me cheer. And as I'm talking to people who gave five bucks, they were blown away that we had called them. And so then they became these like evangelists, right. And so literally like, a few weeks later, I'm going to Dreamforce a conference in San Francisco. And at this time, like not that many nonprofits were using Salesforce, and I was reading an article about chewy.com, and how they took 30% market share on on online e pet retailer 40%. And I was like, well, that's interesting. And they did it by scaling, personalization. You know, they were sending like, literally paintings of people's pets. Wow, that's cool. How do we leverage this best in class tech for the nonprofit? Right? So we implemented Salesforce and, you know, and sort of one thing led to another, we implemented it poorly. We reimplemented it. And then we went through two other digital transformations while I was at Team Rubicon. But to answer that question of the story behind it, it's like, you're in the moment you you take stock, you look for opportunities, you test them, you evaluate, like, if you get real time feedback from people that like there's something magical about this, then you pull back and you evaluate, is this something that we need to double down in? Or is this something that is a flash in the pan? And so I think that that's a little bit of the story behind like, how you fall into these methodologies is like you realize that what's working but then you identify, ooh, this, maybe this isn't scalable? Or maybe it is and how do I work through that?

I love that. And I want to make sure a couple of those themes get lifted here, because I think we're really intent on the way to disrupt the eroding generosity crisis is really through that radical connection. And I love that you have personalized at scale. I think that's a key, I think investing in your tech stack and humanizing it. I think that I mean, that's one of our 2023 trends this year is make making the digital experience human. And I also think just finding ways to digitally connect all the time is going to drive that engagement through the roof at a crazy level. And when someone who is giving $5 feel seen and appreciated and understands from another human being where that $5 went there, their need to want to replicate that is going to be exponential. And so love this idea. I think there's so many takeaways from it. And I don't think any of it would work unless you were really hyper focusing on that. What is that strategic plan? What is what is the right systems that we can build for high growth, and I want to move to that, and I want you to take a step back, because we've all been part of strategic planning processes. We all bear the scars and the wounds from building those strategic plans, and then watching them get put on a shelf and collect dust, like, talk about what do you feel like is broken right now currently in the nonprofit sector in terms of strategic planning process? And what can leaders do about that today?

Great question. This comes up a lot, particularly early on in our engagements with folks. Because you see, like, most consultants, I've learned charge by, you know, by the hour. So like, the more hours that they have, the more they can build. But the problem is that like most most people take an approach of like, it takes like three to six months on average to develop a strategic plan. And that's because most organizations depend on unstructured meetings, to try and come up with to make priorities. And there's so many things wrong with that, like I was with a client just a couple of weeks ago. And there was like the CEO, the head of marketing the head of fundraising, the CFO and probably a half a dozen executors from both departments. So now 15 people, we met for an hour just to make a single decision. And I was trying to like I wanted to watch it. Get out of hand. So I let the space go because this was like we were there for half a day. So I was like, Okay, let's spend an hour watching this. What ended up happening was three of the people did 70% of the talking. I'll let your listeners Guess who those three people were.

I see them. Yeah. So much power.

Yeah, it's like okay, so the executors are just like shit, I'm in another unstructured. They don't call it an unstructured meeting, but you know, they're like, What the heck you know? And so, basically, like, what you have to do is you have to bring about structure to the process. So you You got to get alignment, and people have to feel consulted, but they have to feel like their voice matters. So the way that that we do it strategic plan is, is we favor action over documentation. First of all just have a bias for action over a bias for documentation. We have one client who showed us a 53 page strategic planning document that took 26 months to build, oh my God, and it was for a 36 month period, and at month 26, it was available. And I was joking around with them, because I was like, Oh, wow, like, I'm gonna be honest with you, Doc, like, we work with your team every single week. And I've never read the strategic plan. And she's like, I don't think anyone on our team has. And I was like, Yeah, this is like, this is harsh, you know. So first go into it with a bias for action or a bias for documentation. Then, instead of like, bringing people together over months to work out like, okay, what are your OKRs? are what are we trying to achieve? What are our strategic objectives, then usually, you want you to find those on an executive team, then you go back to your individual teams, and you walk through all that. And then you come back together, and then you create this document. And now three months to six months have gone by, and what action has been taken. So back to Team Rubicon, you know, every six months, we would develop a new strategic plan. And I think that there's some a few things that are broken like most nonprofits develop a strategic plan for three to five years. I think a strategic plan should be developed for every single year, it should be captured on a single page or one page strategic plan. It defines, like, what are those big, audacious goals? How are you going to do it? It's essentially what in the military, they call Commander's Intent. It's just a filter for your executors, your operational as your people up and down throughout the organization, that they can run all of their potential ideas, their tasks, their to dues, their troubles, through this filter and say, Who is this going to help us achieve? Our mission? Is this does this tie into those three areas of like three key strategies that we want? Because you know, you, most organizations pick too many strategies? It's like, we got five to 10. How, okay, that's a lot. So every six months, we would develop a strategic plan, and we will look back, and we would literally laugh at where we thought we were going to be, like, sometimes, you know, originally, we had this regional model where we like, Okay, we need 10 regions throughout the country, and, and they're going to be volunteer led, and these are the roles that they're going to have and, and we turned out that didn't work. And ultimately, what what they now have is two divisions. But it took time, it took ideation, but we always favorite action to documentation. And we would just get back together every six months. And we would look back into a retro and say, what's working? What's not what's missing? What's confusing? How do we drive this forward?

I mean, Matt, I love this lens. And I felt love using the even the word filter of just like all of our decisions, all of our actions are going through this real clarity. If it's 56 pages, how do you even begin to think about doing that? So I love an answer to your to your last reply to Becky, it's like basically everything that people are doing is broken. So let's get back to the core of this, you know, so

and I want to even drop in here, like we did an episode with Veronica luff Amina, you can go back to it. It's episode 226, she did an entire episode on how to put together a one page strategic plan. And so I totally agree with this, Matt, and think this is the future like if we can Micro Focus on what we have and where we're going and just focus on that activation. I think it went up in not only the mindset, but it went up and the way we interact, the way that we engage the way that we really focus on what we're going after at a high level. So I think it's brilliant.

And it's leading us I know, just naturally in this conversation and just like us as people to to like want to get activated to not just sit around and not just type another Google Doc, that's our bias is like let's start another plan. But it's like getting activated. I want you to talk a little bit about this concept that magic happens at 10,000 or 10k. That's this place where ideas really turn into action. Can you tell us more about this unpack that is kind of how this relates.

I imagine most listeners to this bucket maybe they're on a commercial flight right now. But, you know, I was thinking about this because I was like flying, you know, and it's like I fly a lot for work. And at 10,000 feet so much happens, right? That's when the cabin is pressured, pressurized, like you're allowed to put down your tray and people begin to start moving around like the flight attendants and they're they're getting ready for beverage service. So please sit your butt down. They told you not to get up. But there's all this stuff that happens at 10,000 feet and so somebody is out there looking over the horizon a 30,000 foot and then you got your executors, your ground crew, these different people at a nonprofit. These are folks like these your gift officers soliciting Yes, these are like your, you know, copywriters, right? And those emails, you know, your project manager is building out dependencies and task, right? These are all of your executors at 1000 foot. And what you need at 10,000 feet Why think it's magic is there's some people who know how to to bridge the gap between, you know, a vision and where we're headed and the executors, but they're really special, and they're hard to find. I've got one at CauseMic, Bobby She's, I mean, holy crap, I couldn't do anything without. Hi, Bobby. Yeah, Hey, Bobby, I hope you're listening. And, but we have all these systems that you can actually depend on systems. And those systems are covered throughout the book, I'll use one as an example. So when I was at another nonprofit, I worked in accounting in finance, and there were five people working. And it took 15 days to close the books. And there were four people all with like Master's in accounting and financial analysis, I was the idiot in this group of five for sure. The only one without an advanced degree. And admittedly, I was like I was I saw that my vacation was kept being denied. And I was like, what, what is this trend here? And it just so happens that was always during close a month? And so selfishly, I was like, how do we move from 15 days to 14 days in terms of time, because it's very predictable. Like we have to reconcile our books, we have to make, you know, figure out what accounts payable accounts receivable and that sort of thing. But then when I'm fast forward, when I'm at Team Rubicon, and I realized, like, this is like the business as usual, these are your ba use? What are all the things that just have to happen no matter what. So I literally gathered my development operations team around like just a whiteboard, and we just listed out everything that had to happen. So like, merging contact records, sending out donor acknowledgement, letters, doing prospect research, just all this stuff, right, that got put on a board. And then we identified who's the primary person responsible for this Bau, who's the secondary person responsible for this Bau. And if there was not a second person listed, then you've identified a single point of failure. And you need to close the gap on single points of failure because people quit. People need to go on vacation, sometimes they're at capacity. They win the lottery, I don't know, whatever. So you've got to figure out is this something that I need to hire outside contract support for? Is this something that we need to cross train on? Is this something that we need to hire for? And everybody approaches like too much do not enough time to do it with I need to add more people? But first, you need to figure out where do you need to add people? And is that even necessary? Can you eliminate BTUs? So just gathering around that whiteboard and listing out everything that we had to do? allowed me to figure out how much of a person's time of the 2080 hours per year is allocated towards business as usual? And what are they actually doing? What are they spending that time on, because then when we talked about that project backlog earlier, what's really cool is once your ba user at a stable point, so you've got your donor acknowledgement letters out for the week, the day, whatever. Now, you don't have to talk about what should they be spending their time on. Those four people with master's in financial analysis can just look at the project backlog and say, boom, I know what I gotta do. I gotta jump into Priority One projects. And so the magic there is that 10,000 foot is like, here, we have this big bold strategy that we captured on a single page, we're going to double our revenue with half the resources. Okay, cool. Here's how we're going to do it. Got it. Now, you're kind of rolling, the executors are rolling, they know what they're responsible for, and they know where to jump in. And I think that's the magic of 10,000. Foot is like, always knowing where your time is being budgeted, and your team's time and how to how to focus it.

Just such good tips there. And honestly, Matt, it's it's really about rethinking the way that we, and the way that we work. And in my mind, I've got such a heart for the accounting team. You know, when you even say that in that example, because there's no reason that that anyone should have their vacation denied every single end of month, you know, if we can figure out a system that can be more efficient, that would allow people to take breaks, and I think just this dumping out of the junk drawer and putting it on the table and saying, Okay, what have we got here to do? And how do we get some order to this and let's all be honest, when the junk drawer gets cleaned once every 10 years, it feels so good, all of us. And so I really like this entire conversation. It's all nestled here in your book, and I love that you're extrapolating these things. The one thing that I just keep thinking is we need we We need to go in a different way. But how can we still cultivate cultures where our missions greatest asset, which is its people can still thrive in one of these fast, high growth environments where we're looking at our work differently. And we're chasing with such intentionality, these hyperfocus goals. Talk to us about how those cultures can be healthy for the organization and its people.

Yeah, great question. I think I'm very biased because I worked at Team Rubicon and and culture was our secret weapon for sure. We used to say, you know, that, that, that people who were, you know, we would just basically do a culture test, I guess, is what I'm saying is like, we would filter through every new hire every person and say, one, would we go to Haiti with this person? Like, would we have put them on the original team? Do we want to grab a beer with this person? Or whatever, you know, you'd have to be an athlete, you don't have to drink? But like, do you want to hang out with this person? And how do they line up to the cultural principles? So most organizations, I know, I've worked with them, where the cultural principles are just like a poster on a wall, in the break room. And it's so listen or not repeated. For those listeners who would like us, StrengthsFinder, who have hired a Strengths Finder coach, if the one time you talk about Strengths Finder, is when you've got that coach, and you're no longer like revisiting it and calling out the top five strengths and saying, Wow, you're doing man, your empathy is coming through right now. And I could really use that, or that some individualization right there. That's what you have to do is like, you have to actually repeat, repeat and use those cultural principles as a filter. So a Team Rubicon, one of them was my favorite one was our mother's a donor, which meant treat every dollar as if your mother had donated it. And that didn't mean hold back, don't invest, don't make investments. We were actually, like I said, Before, we were empowered to make bold, calculated risk, we were mandated to do it. But we were, you know, we were smart about it, we were like, would we invest our this dollar like our mother gave it and a team at CauseMic to you know, the culture is like, it's incredible. It's just, it's every, it's so much about our success has come down to our culture. And it's not just our cultural principles. But it's how we treat each other. It's how we show up for each other. It's the fact that you know, I believe I belong to a business group. And in this business group, most of them are always talking about taxes, and, you know, hiding things from their team, and the team doesn't understand me, they don't understand what I'm going through that sort of thing. That's very common for an entrepreneur to feel that way. You're isolated, you're alone. They think I'm crazy because I'm, I share everything with the team. Here's the numbers, here's how, here's what I'm here's what I'm thinking. And the reason I do that is because because I know that that with contexts people will understand why we're making the decisions that we're making, and they will help us to solve these really tough problems. And that is really critical for developing a culture is thinking about okay, what are your core what's uniquely you? How do you go about this? What is uniquely you? Okay, write those things down. You as an organization as a team, then you can finesse them, you can make them fun, like at CauseMic we have Success is not final their sleeves up where the future belongs to the curious, right. But it's, it's sort of like the, the essence or the ethos of of what we're trying to capture, then you have to be deliberate. You have to repeat those things over and over and over. And you have to call out actions when you see them. And that will really help reinforce the culture. I'll share just one one story real quick, you know, Franny, Franny, who was still works for CauseMic one of our one of our first employees. And I remember when we were just in our garage, and we had had to, we had to let a new hire go. And and they and ultimately, I was sharing all this context around why. And I said to Frannie look for any there's going to be a moment where, where myself, Bob, we're not going to be in the room. We need you to tell the story to tell the why to to reinforce our culture to share. Well, the reason behind decisions because people will question decisions, and it's because they don't have context. And so I need you to like think about that and to be a steward of our culture to own that and she she is like a catalyst for our culture today. And I think it's important for leaders to define their cultural principles run every decision by repeat it frequently, but also empower their team to do the exact same thing. Yeah,

agreed. And Senator The humanity and you do that. So well. I mean, you light up talking about your team. And I think that comes through in the way that your team is going to rally around this too. So, I mean, you know, we'd like to create space, Shawn and all these conversations, just celebrate the power of philanthropy. And I know you've gotten to be witnessed a huge moments, but just take us back to something that stuck with you like a sucker punch, philanthropy of goodness. And tell us that story.

Yeah. Love this question. I think because you're such big fans of Team Rubicon. I'll use an experience of that from that. Because my job a Team Rubicon involved fundraising. So often, when a disaster happened, I was actually back with the team trying to raise as much money in as much awareness as possible. But we always tried to go out staff members on on one off every year, at least one was disaster response operation. And I was in Wimberley, Texas, and after hurricane and I remember this, that this woman, Maria, who, you know, she was in a rent to own situation in our home. And it was filled with mud, very common with flooding. And her landlord was like, well, you kind of own this house. So this is your responsibility. But she was only a few months away from being from owning the house outright. And she was uninsured. And you could just see it in her face, there was she had a small child, no electricity. And literally, on the other side of the street, there were there was a community of folks who lived in in like a suburban track home. These people had resources, there were contractor trucks already over there mucking out houses cutting out drywall. And that's really important, because it reduces the risk of mold spreading. And it was a really interesting experience, because I sat there with Maria for a few hours and got to talk with her and and Yeti had donated these awesome coolers. So we had like dropped those off of super hot and we were kind of like praying food. And ultimately, we mocked out our house and removed all that mud. But it was actually the story in the time spending with her and realizing just how vulnerable so much of our population is and how on the edge so many people are and how here's a situation where this hard working person who is so close to having like this American dream was, you know, suddenly so far away from being from being stable. And so that experience for me of like actually doing, doing the work having the conversation, it grounded, so much of like, the office work that happens if that makes sense when when disaster struck, and I was working 20 hours day alongside all these other gray shirts, as we call ourselves, just sending out emails and making appeals. And it was just like, oh, yeah, that's why we do that work, because there are millions of Maria's across the country who are affected by disaster every year. So for me, that was probably one of the more personal stories to share around philanthropy, it couldn't have been made possible without the generous support of all those, you know, the corporate partners and the individual donors and the volunteers and etc. So it was a really moving experience for me.

Great story. I mean, anytime we can have someone come on to the show and talk about collective humanity rising up, you know, in the best of times, and the worst of times to help get to keep someone on center. And to not send them back. I those was just the stories that light me up and show Matt, please promise us you're not working 20 hours any longer. We need to give you breaks.

Just those are just spreads during.

You know, we end all of our discussions with a one good thing and this could be a piece of advice, a life hack. What's something you want to leave with? We Are For Good community today, Matt.

I mean, I think ruthless prioritization is something that you if you could focus on just one thing, just think about what's going to have the highest impact at the lowest cost to drive my, my impact forward in our organizations impact forward. And if you do that every day, every month, every year, every decade, you're going to be totally shocked by how fast you you build up momentum for your cause.

Oh my gosh, I love that. But can I add on a one good thing because I love this one good thing. But Matt's so humble. The principles you shared today, you've rolled up into this book. And before we started recording today, Matt was just sharing his heart behind releasing this book is because obviously they will they're an agency. They're not completely just infinitely scalable in their time. But she wanted to get these resources, these mindsets these ideas He is into the hands of every nonprofit across the country. And so this book you've written is available free on your website really, literally free. He's so much such an epic one good thing like, go get this book. So we wanted to give you space to just talk about it for a second and how people can grab it. And just kind of roll it up.

Oh, thank you. Yeah, you can get the book at CauseMic.com/book. As you pointed out earlier, that ca us e m IC. So it's like more like CauseMic.com For those listening. And yeah, just just fill out the form, we'll send you a copy of the book. That's, that's, that's how you can get it. Yeah.

That how can people can connect with you? Where do you hang out online, I know people will want to be wanting to dig deeper into this conversation

within the social, I will say that I frequently am on LinkedIn, I try to share things on LinkedIn. So that's, that is like the primary place, you can find CauseMic on LinkedIn as well as me. But we also have like this amazing blog where we share all these insights. And you actually get to hear from so many other people on the team that are way smarter than me in their various areas, particularly. So we do try to share really practical tactical tips. And then we publish a few studies every year, those are free to there on the site. So yeah, I would say LinkedIn and CauseMic.com you can get you can get connected with us. And yeah, I'd love I really would love to have a conversation with you be wonderful.

I mean, just feel so grateful for this time. And just appreciate all that you're pouring into the sector, my friend. Thanks for being here.

Yeah, thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.

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