Changing the Culture at Goodwill Industries-Suncoast

Goodwill Industries-Suncoast is headlong into a new journey – one that many in the fundraising industry call “building a culture of philanthropy”. It started when Jim Williams, Vice President for Fund Development attended a national Goodwill conference. That’s where Goodwill employees from around the country go for education and to share best practices. Jim heard about a practical idea to raise more money – and he is using it to change the culture too.

It’s quite simple really. Rounding-up. When you shop at a Goodwill Industries-Suncoast thrift store, the cashier will ask you if you want to round-up your purchase as a gift. If you say “yes”, the cashier thanks you for your gift. If you say “no thank you” the cashier thanks you for supporting Goodwill by shopping at the thrift store. The small change from rounding-up has already raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for Goodwill. No joke.

But how does that change the culture? When Jim explained it to me he told me that first he had to convince the Vice President of Retail, who was reluctant. Maybe customers would be uncomfortable being asked. Maybe the stores would be uncomfortable asking. Jim described how customers were already giving by buying and would be thanked no matter what – diffusing any awkwardness. He also agreed to do training at each store. The VP was willing to test it out in one store first. It was a smash hit – both in dollars and morale!

Now Jim and Melody Marrs, Goodwill Fund Development Manager, are launching the round-up initiative at all of the Goodwill Industries-Suncoast stores. They show up in the early hours of the morning to train staff about all of the programs operating under the Goodwill mission. Get a question right and win a small prize. Store members all receive a special Goodwill t-shirt and distribute Goodwill static-cling decals. And when a customer rounds-up on a purchase, the receipt prints out the gift amount.

The response?

• Store employees are excited about the lives enriched through Goodwill – including the part they play.
• Store employees are sharing the Goodwill mission and confident answering questions from customers.
• Customers are asking how they can purchase a t-shirt.
• Non-store Goodwill employees are asking about shirts and want to sport the decal on their cars.
• The stores have been competing to see which one will have the highest gift income on launch day!

Like many organizations that have strong earned-revenue, Goodwill has to get creative to foster a strong culture of philanthropy and connect its earned-revenue services with its fundraising programs. The round-up initiative is a simple but powerful way to bring Goodwill Industries-Suncoast’s retail operations into closer collaboration with its philanthropic operations.

Thank you AFP Suncoast member Jim Williams for sharing your inspiring story!

Connect with Goodwill:  Facebook and Twitter
About the Author, Jen Filla

Jen Filla is a roving reporter on the AFP Suncoast Communications Committee. She is also president of Aspire Research Group LLC where she works with organizations worried about finding their next big donor, concerned about what size gift to ask for, or frustrated that they aren’t meeting their major gift goals.

Fully Engaged

Nora Gunn, CFRE

Diana Nyad has made history this week as the first person to swim the 110-mile Florida Strait. This was Nyad’s fifth attempt, and it took her 53 hours to complete. Nyad, 64, said that her record-setting swim was about being “fully engaged” in life – a lesson in passion and persistence we all can take to heart. Here in the AFP Suncoast Chapter, we have several opportunities for our members and the community-at-large to become fully engaged in philanthropy.

Our keynote speaker on September 17 will be fundraising veteran and long-standing AFP member, Holly Duncan. She will be sharing a career’s worth of advice and anecdotes on her professional development experience. It’s a not-to-be missed program.

On September 20, nominations are due for our 28^th Annual National Philanthropy Day celebration. This is a great way for your charity to honor donors and volunteers whose gifts of time, expertise and resources contribute significantly to the quality of life in our communities. The National Philanthropy Day committee, chaired by Bryn Warner, has been working hard to ensure this will be the best celebration to date. Please consider submitting one or more nominations on behalf of your organization.

This month, the Resource Development committee led by Judy Anderson will launch a philanthropic guide that highlights some of the most visible and valuable marketing opportunities for partners to support of the development profession.  Partners interested in sponsoring chapter activities should contact us as soon as possible as spots are filling up fast.

We will soon be electing a new slate of officers that will lead our organization in the years to come. I encourage you to speak with a member of our nominating committee if you have interest in serving in a leadership capacity or on a committee of the Board.

Diana Nyad’s goal took a team of experts that helped her make the swim from Cuba to Key West, giving her nourishment, protecting her from jellyfish and monitoring her health. For our volunteer-run Chapter to succeed and accomplish its goal of promoting ethical and effective fundraising, it takes the work of many members and professionals behind-the-scenes and along the way. Thank you to our members and leaders who are fully engaged with our mission, and welcome to those that would like to be.

Nora Gunn, CFRE
2013 AFP Suncoast President
Vice President, St. Joseph’s Hospital Foundation & St. Joseph’s Children’s Hospital Foundation
Phone: 813 872 0979

How Good Ideas Spread

Nora Gunn, CFRE

I recently read an article by Atul Gawande called “Slow Ideas.” Among his many accomplishments, Gawande is a professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School and has been named one of the hundred most influential thinkers by Time. He asks a question that many in the field of philanthropy have wondered, “How do good ideas spread?”

The basis of his medical research suggests that we yearn for frictionless, technological solutions, but that people talking to people is still the way to make change happen. The concept struck me as something that is so easily relatable to what we do in the Development profession. How we engage a donor with our not-for-profit, how a donor becomes passionate about our mission, how we inspire them to make a gift.

Gawande uses a series of historical medical advances and current third-world problems to illustrate a pattern of important, but stalled, ideas and movements. While his research work currently focuses on systems innovations in surgery globally, he emphasizes a very important point: we are in the first part of the twenty-first century, and we are still trying to figure out how to get ideas from the first part of the twentieth century to take root. Just like each of us in our not-for-profits, these change agents have been tackling problems that are big, but somewhat invisible to the greater majority of society. Drawing attention to our cause can be challenging in a distracted and fragmented world. 

In the era of social media, we’ve become enamored with ideas that spread contagiously. We connect with donors via email blasts; we post our latest giving opportunities on Facebook; we create YouTube videos about our programs. Gawande contends that technology is not enough to motivate action.

Mass media can introduce a new idea to people. But, change is a social process. To truly adopt a new idea (in our case, support to a cause) people follow the lead of other people they know and trust when they make decisions. To create new giving behaviors, we have to understand people’s existing norms, objections and motivations. We have to talk to them. The mere value of an opportunity is not enough. Human interaction is the key force in overcoming resistance and speeding change.

In Gawande’s research, he evaluated many common change approaches like group instruction, penalties and incentives. In our work, group instruction could be akin to public service announcements for our charity, penalties likened to more tax burden without philanthropy, and incentives equated to the donor benefits provided by our organization as recognition. What is interesting, and somewhat inherent, is that research has found the most successful approach to be when people are given mentors. In fundraising, we give our donors this kind of attention through our board members and leadership volunteers, and by when we sit down face-to-face and build relationships. It comes down to some basic elements of donor engagement: through personal outreach, they will come to know you; if they know you, they might trust you; and, if they trust you, that’s when they are motivated to change.

Want to read Atul Gawande’s full article? Click here.

Nora Gunn, CFRE
2013 AFP Suncoast President
Vice President, St. Joseph’s Hospital Foundation & St. Joseph’s Children’s Hospital Foundation
Phone: 813 872 0979

Founding Philanthropists

Nora Gunn, CFRE

Amongst the fireworks, parades and barbeques, Independence Day is a time to reflect on the many gifts we, as Americans, have been given through sacrifice and how deep the roots of philanthropy extend into the founding of our nation. It is through the efforts of a group of volunteers who dedicated themselves to democracy and building a strong community from which America grew to become the greatest country in the world.

America’s Founding Fathers, including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin, led fascinating, often controversial lives and exhibited philanthropic influence can still be seen today.

The author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, said of philanthropy, “it is the duty of every man to devote a certain portion of his income for charitable purposes; and that it is his further duty to see it so applied and to do the most good for which it is capable.” He donated his expansive personal collection to restore the nation’s oldest federal cultural institution, the Library of Congress.

Benjamin Franklin, in addition to being a brilliant inventor, organized the United States’ first lending library and volunteer fire department, built universities and hospitals, and was one of the first Planned Giving donors, leaving a $2,000 bequest to the cities of Boston and Philadelphia.  

George Washington was one of the most notable philanthropists of his generation. He was generous toward the poor, supported orphans, and gave the largest gift to higher education in American record at that time.

Due in part to the leadership of our Founding Fathers, philanthropy has evolved over the years to a powerful and integral force in American society. The charitable virtues of these revolutionaries championed social responsibility, influenced knowledge, and addressed human crises. As we stand saluting hand-over-heart during the national anthem this holiday, we have one more thing to honor – the contributions of the philanthropists that have come before us who have shaped history. Happy Fourth of July!

Nora Gunn, CFRE
President, 2013 AFP Suncoast Chapter
Vice President, St. Joseph’s Hospital Foundation & St. Joseph’s Children’s Hospital Foundation
Phone: 813 872 0979

“Have To” vs. “Get To”

Nora Gunn, CFRE

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about perspective and particularly about how optimism is a truly powerful gift, and a positive attitude is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Not easy for a realist.

Bert Jacobs, who spoke at the AFP International Conference on Fundraising last month, taught me an important lesson about promoting the disposition to see opportunity. After years of peddling tee shirts on the streets of Boston, he and his business partner and brother John founded the Life is Good company, building it into a $100-million lifestyle brand based on the idea of giving back.

His philosophy is that in order to be able to turn the fun things you do in your life into your work and have a constructive impact on the world, you must remember two powerful words…GET TO.

We say things like, “I have to go to this meeting.” “I have to take the kids to practice.” “I have to finish this project.” “I have to go to go to the gym.” We act as if we don’t have a choice, but we do. We choose how we view our life and work. Often, it’s those facing the greatest adversities that understand and embrace this the most. It’s not about what we have to do. It’s about what we get to do.

As fundraisers, we get to go to work and work on something that we really care about – something that we can be proud of and that makes a difference. As members of AFP, we get to have access to top-notch education resources, we get to network with our colleagues at monthly membership luncheons, we get to make a contribution back to our profession through the Every Member Campaign and we get to celebrate generosity at National Philanthropy Day and through the Lloyd Horton Lifetime Achievement Award.  

If you don’t love what you’re doing, flip the coin and find a way to infuse positivity into it. Oh, and a sense of humor never hurts.

 

Nora Gunn, CFRE
President, 2013 AFP Suncoast Chapter
Vice President, St. Joseph’s Hospital Foundation & St. Joseph’s Children’s Hospital Foundation
Phone: 813 872 0979

Doctors of Inspiration

Nora Gunn, CFRE

On two separate occasions in the last week while visiting with a donor and showing them the impact of their recent gift, the donor has found themselves in need of the services of our organization. No matter if we fundraise for a homeless shelter, a crisis center or a cultural center, all of us have, or will have, many occasions when a donor becomes a client or needs help. As a fundraiser for a hospital, I’m not talking about assistance with an office appointment or finding a specialist. I mean that right then and there, on the spot, these people needed a doctor STAT.

I don’t know what that says about my powers of persuasion, but at least I’m not putting them to sleep.  After the ambulance was called, the ICU bed readied, and the crises was over, I was left with this great appreciation and humbling reminder of just how critical charities are to our community. Who would our neighbors turn to if the not-for-profits we represent did not exist? What if the resources donors provide our organizations dried up?

The ways we connect, build a case for support and inspire people to experience the joy of giving is important. Equally important is the Association of Fundraising Professionals that provides the research, advocacy, education and ethical platform necessary to do our jobs better. It means so much to the clients, patients and patrons our institutions serve. Our fine colleagues at academic institutions might beg to differ with me, but I think fundraisers deserve an honorary degree…Doctors of Inspiration.

Nora Gunn, CFRE
2013 AFP Suncoast President
Director of Development, St. Joseph’s Hospital Foundation
Phone: 813 872 0979

Our own Jen Filla has just published her first book!

By Bill Faucett.

Titled Prospect Research for Fundraisers: The Essential Handbook, and co-written with Helen Brown, it is part of the comprehensive and highly-regarded Wiley/AFP Fund Development book series. The book is filled with examples, case studies, interviews, and stories. In fact, AFP Suncoast Chapter members, Debbie Sokolov and Jim Williams are among those quoted. Other AFP Floridians in the book are Sue Seiter, Carol Butera, Suzanne Nixon and Laura Breeze.

Written especially for front-line fundraisers, Prospect Research for Fundraisers presents a practical understanding of prospect research, prospect management, and fundraising analytics, demonstrating how research can be used to raise more money. This unique book is structured around the fundraising cycle and illustrates myriad current and ever-changing prospect research tools and techniques available to boost an organization’s fundraising effectiveness.

There are lots of ways for you to become engaged in the topic and in Jen’s book.  Be sure to visit the companion website www.Research4Fundraisers.com or purchase your copy online from Amazon or Barnes and Noble.  And if you are attending one of the following conferences, stop by and say hello to Jen:

• AFP International Conference on Fundraising, San Diego CA, April 8-9, 2013
• Ohio Prospect Research Network Conference, Columbus OH, May 2-3, 2013
• Planet Philanthropy, Sarasota FL, June 10-11, 2013

She’ll be speaking, selling books, autographing them, and making the AFP Suncoast Chapter proud!

Successful Major Gift Strategies with Michael Baker

Michael J. Baker CFRE

Michael J. Baker CFRE of M3 Development talked to the AFP Suncoast Chapter in March 2013 about Successful Major Gift Strategies. He advocated a 5% strategy – if your job is running the office as development director, dedicate at least 5% of your time to raising major gifts.

Michael covered much in his presentation, a copy of which has been added to the chapter website. Click here to download.

Some of the highlights include the following:

• Don’t wait, just ask.
• Get others to ask for the gift! Peer solicitors are an important resource.
• The wealthiest 3% of the U.S. population gave 50% of all dollars nationwide.
• 32% of donors give because of the tax benefit according to the  2012 Bank of America Study of High Net Worth Philanthropy.
• Women control 60% of U.S. wealth.
• If your organization does not have a strategic plan, your fund development efforts will not have a road map and will struggle with the case for support.
• Look inside your existing donor pool first.

About the Author, Jen Filla

Jen Filla is a roving reporter on the AFP Suncoast Communications Committee. She is also president of Aspire Research Group LLC where she works with organizations worried about finding their next big donor, concerned about what size gift to ask for, or frustrated that they aren’t meeting their major gift goals.

Ten Stars and Lots of Friends

Nora Gunn, CFRE

Your AFP Suncoast Chapter was recently recognized for two notable achievements: the 2012 Friends of Diversity Award and the Ten Star Chapter Award. But, what do these designations really mean? 

The Ten Star Award is presented to Chapters that are positioned for future organizational growth and success. Observing National Philanthropy Day, promoting Ethics education and CFRE certification and providing networking opportunities are some of the ways we have increased professionalism within fundraising and public awareness of philanthropy. We appreciate Secretary Beth Fontes for ensuring we meet criteria throughout the year.

The Friends of Diversity Award means we have a designated plan and budget for diversity that has been sanctioned by our International Association. With it, we perform specific activities designed to increase diversity within fundraising  like offering programs on Women in Philanthropy; we educate our members on the importance of philanthropy in all cultures, like sharing diversity essays; We help unite fundraisers with diverse backgrounds with our collegiate and mentoring programs. Special thanks to Vic Teschel, Diversity Chair, for leading our efforts.

When you see these logos of achievement, you can be assured that we are driven to foster the best possible fundraising environment and that we are committed to a respectful and welcoming organization that is open to all. Your AFP Suncoast Chapter will be recognized at AFP’s International Conference on Fundraising in April. We hope to see you there and celebrate with you!

Nora Gunn, CFRE
2013 AFP Suncoast President
Director of Development, St. Joseph’s Hospital Foundation
Phone: 813 872 0979

Welcome AFP Suncoast Chapter Administrator, Chandra Tracy

Your AFP Suncoast Chapter is pleased to announce the selection of Chandra Tracy as Chapter Administrator.

Chandra Tracy

Chandra’s scope of services will include day-to-day operations, membership services, bookkeeping and accounting, compliance, and meeting management.

The selection of new management services is a result of Eleanor Hubbard’s announcement in December of her retirement as part-time administrator after nearly two decades. Eleanor’s steadfast support has played a valuable role in the growth of our Chapter. We would again like to take this opportunity to express our immense appreciation to Eleanor for her many years of service.

Please join us is welcoming Chandra and bidding a fond farewell to Eleanor at our February meeting.

Chandra brings a decade of association management experience having managed the Major League Baseball Alumni Association, and serves both the Suncoast Estate Planning Council and the Tiger Bay Club. She also comes with knowledge of not-for-profits having been a development associate early in her career.

Thank you to the Administrator Task Force (Bill Faucett, Marion Yongue, Bryn Warner, Deborah Wagner, Jane Arnett) for developing the criteria for our search and for their thorough assessment of the candidates. As we continue to add value for our members, the hours and duties of the administrator have been expanded.