0:05  
All right. Sorry about that. Folks, we are back in business here. I'm going to make it that everybody can chat with us. I'm going to turn on the whole transcript situation. Okay?

Okay, we should be good to go. Let's make sure that we have folks in here. Awesome. Okay. All right. We're excited about today's presentation today, because we had a little bit of a zoom hiccup. Now that we're back in business, let's give folks a little bit of time to get acclimated into the room. But we are good to go for today's presentation. We're going to be diving into employee retention challenges for fundraisers. We're excited to have the Evolve giving group join us today, I'm going to go over a few housekeeping items. Before we formally begin. First and foremost, this is being recorded. And so we will put the full presentation as well as the slides and transcript on the neon one website. This will be recorded, put on the website, the transcript will be provided, we always get that question. So I like to reiterate that. You also may notice that we are doing the Zoom live captions as well. So for whatever reason, you need to mute things. Because there's stuff happening around you, when you just kind of want to pay attention to the words, you can do that as well. So we've turned that on. Finally, we are going to make this interactive. So the Evolve team has some interactivity here, but let's get that tried out now. So first, I'd love to ensure that we can see what you might be typing. So there's two ways besides the poll that will be launched, that you can participate today. First is there's a chat. So let's test that out. So if you can type into the chat, who you are and where geographically we are hearing from you, that would be great. We can see that. Lisa and Jamie can see this. I can see this. And Lisa's already testing it out for us. Thank you, Lisa. We got Laura. We got California, we got Georgia, we got Florida, we got Colorado, we got New Orleans, Sunny Arizona, okay, and don't rub it in. I'm in upstate New York today, personally. So love it. Love it. Love it. Thank you, Chris. from Arizona, we got multiple folks. So very, very, very cool. The other thing that we're going to be paying attention to is the q&a. And so that's primarily going to be fair, Lisa and Jamie. And that is to make sure that they can see your question and prioritize your question. As you can see the chat can get rowdy. So if you want to make sure that they actually can see your question, we can answer it live, we could type out some things. But the q&a is going to be great to make sure that's the big hand raisers situation. So without further ado, I am going to hand it over to the Evolve team. Lisa, as we talked about, I'm going to make you the host. So you now have full control. And I'm very excited to have you folks here and the floor is yours.

3:53  
Thanks so much, Tim. We're so excited to be here and to be with all of you today. I'm going to pop into the chat, also a workbook. Some of you may have seen this in advance. But if not, it can be helpful to just sort of download and track some of your notes. As you're going. We're really big on giving suggestions that you can put into practice right away. So we wanted you to have a place to jot down your notes as we go through today's session. So oops, I had one too many times. So we're Elise. I'm Jamie from evolve giving group we evolve as a consulting firm that partners with nonprofits to create sustainability really in three areas through fundraising, hiring transformational leaders and training volunteers. And so Jamie and I have both had the pleasure of working in house for a number of years at various nonprofits before joining the consulting team and collectively we've worked with more than 65 organizations since we've been in consulting so a lot. We have a lot of information to share with you today. And just a quick note about evolve. We are a women Oh Wouldn't it and lead firm, we are very mission driven and rooted in our values. And we're really excited to be here with you today to talk about what we think is one of the biggest challenges facing our sector. And that's employee retention. So, as Tim mentioned, feel free as we go along to put questions or comments in the chat or in the q&a, we may answer some of them in the chat as we go. And we're gonna leave ample time at the end for the q&a. So let's go ahead and jump into the content. And, Jamie, I'm going to initiate our polls real quick. Perfect. Okay. So you should now all see a poll in front of you with two different questions, the first being about the role that you serve in at your organization, and the second being about how turnover has affected your organization recently. So you want to go ahead and fill those out? That would be great. Jamie, are you also able to see the answers popping up?

6:10  
I don't see the answers. Okay. Either questions.

6:14  
Okay. So it looks like we'll give it one more minute. It looks like we have about 60% of the group who has already participated. I'm seeing a bunch of executive directors, development professionals, some managers. And it looks like we have a bunch of organizations who have lost a few people, about three or four organizations who haven't had any turnover in the past year. So congrats to you and a group that's lost about half their team, as well. So I will just share these results out so that everyone can can see them. Are you seeing these on your screen? That group is seeing me as now. Okay, so this is awesome. And this really helps Jamie and I think about how to spend the time today as well. So Jamie, I'm gonna turn it over to you, and why don't you help us to set the stage?

7:07  
Absolutely. So what we are seeing in the field today, and we're very curious, and some of your responses actually just now, sort of, you know, lend themselves to this question as well. And that what we're seeing is that a fundraiser and a nonprofit on average is staying no longer than 18 months in their possession. So really quite a quick turnaround in a lot, a lot of nonprofits, over 4 million Americans have actually voluntarily left their jobs for six months in a row. So starting in February 2022. And 45% of folks who work for nonprofits are expected to be looking for new job opportunities within the next three years. So about half of our workforce, about 50% of the workforce might be basically turning over within the next three years. And statistics also show that about 42% of nonprofit organizations are really struggling when it comes to filling their open positions on their team. So what does all of this mean? And how will it impact you and your organizations? And what can you do to set yourselves up for hopefully combating some of these issues and trends. So of the employees who are so who are leaving their organizations voluntarily, what we are seeing is that over half of them are indicating after they leave that they actually feel there's something their employer their former employer could have done to keep them in their job. Right. So that's a lot of power that we think about having as nonprofit professionals, to actually take an action step to prevent someone from leaving before they're actually gone. And this is pretty staggering. When you look at the financial cost of replacing someone on your team, you as the nonprofit can actually spend up to one and a half times to two times the amount that you would spend on someone's annual salary, just in the cost of replacing that person. And the other piece that's really interesting to consider is that on the flip side, employees and organizations that feel they have a lot of upward mobility, the ability to be promoted to move up to continue their growth in their roles. They actually stay in their jobs almost two times longer than those who don't feel they have a place to go within their organization.

9:36  
So let's talk about why this matters, right? We know that it takes time to build relationships and to bring in dollars and I wanted to share a quick story here. A couple years ago, I had the privilege of sitting on a search committee for a CEO position for a massive organization about a $90 million a year organization and their past CEO had been there for 40 plus years and they were bringing on a new CEO and one of the questions we asked during the interview process was about how much people like about a donor that someone had progressed along their career, right, and how they had built that relationship and how much more that donor was giving at the time, at this time versus when the professional first started working with them. And I will just say that it really brought out the importance of longevity at the organization and how much impact and growth can really happen when when we have staff and fundraisers who stay with our organization. So imagine how much more you could raise if someone stayed for three years, or five years or seven years. And this really goes back to the fact that it takes time to build relationships with, with donors and to bring in that trust. And yeah, another really important thing is consistency is important to stakeholders. So once we build this trust, once we have these long standing relationships, we have confidence, we have consistency, we can really take those relationships and build off of them and know what's important to a donor on and build from there. Reach toppling teams, causes reshuffling teams and having to constantly train people in new roles and what they're working on. And what they're doing causes burnout, right. So we all know that we've all seen that. And there's culture and reputation implications as well, we want to be a place where people can stay and where they can grow versus just a place that's a stab along their path. Just a place that and we all know that these nonprofits exists where someone goes to for a year or two, and then they move on.

11:41  
So what can we do about this, so there's really four different categories that we're going to cover today that we're going to dive into about what we can do. The first is about elevating and resourcing our current team. The second is about offering positive culture and creative benefits. The third is really thinking about non conventional staffing model. And the fourth is about monetary benefits. And we know that many nonprofits have budget constraints. And so monetary benefits and raises and salaries, if you could do that, you probably wouldn't be doing that. And that's why we're really going to spend the bulk of our time today thinking about these other creative ways beyond salary increases, that help us to keep our teams. So Jamie, I'm going to turn it back to you to help us dive into the first category here. Great, so elevating and resourcing your team, what does this mean? So there's a number of different things that this can mean, and different approaches that you can take to help your team feel elevated and resourced day to day and their work. So the first is to offer professional development. Now, we all probably have a concept of what professional development means. But we might all have a different idea. And what we're seeing is that professional development is taking all kinds of new forms in today's nonprofit world. And so that could be everything from an in house opportunity for people to build their skills. So maybe you bring someone in a specialist to, you know, do an Excel course, or talk about major gift fundraising or do something in house. And as part of their work day, you could offer a mentor or a coach. And again, that could be someone either already on your team or somebody outside in the field, who really shares additional resources that they might not be getting simply by working on your team and looking at greater trends in the field and things like that. It could be webinars, conferences, being part of cohorts, whether it be the Association of Fundraising Professionals or other types of groups that help your professionals to feel that they are continuing to grow, and their skills and their knowledge constantly during their work. So encouraging internal upward movement that goes back to this statistic that we looked at before, which was really staggering about how folks are so much more likely to stay in their organization for a longer period of time, if they feel like there's an opportunity for a promotion or some kind of upward movement where they feel like they're growing. Right. So what can this look like? It can be anything from encouraging employees to apply for open positions, even if it means that they might have to switch departments on your team? Is that something that they might be interested in that they have the skills to do that they could build the skills to do? And thinking about, you know, really rich, really what it means to retain someone, as opposed to losing them all together, right. So if they have an interest in an open position, and maybe it's a little bit of a stretch for them, maybe they need some extra training or coaching to get there, but they're a great team member and you want to keep them and they're not going to be satisfied in their current role for five more years, thinking about really taking that leap, and still saving a lot of time and money by keeping that person on your team. And also all of the institutional knowledge that they bring, right? So every time that you train a new person, you're kind of losing you're starting over again, whereas the people already on your team have that knowledge and then all sprint goal setting and formalized feedback. So what can that look like? So it can be really keeping your finger on the pulse of your team's career goals, and helping them to lay out a plan to accomplish those goals. And being an open door so that they can come and say to you, hey, you know, I'm really interested in becoming a director of development, I'm really interested in becoming an executive director someday, I'd like your help and getting there. And so supporting them in their professional growth in that way. And also, again, thinking about internal opportunities, so they don't have to take time out of their workday or take time off to go to a conference always, if it's something that you could provide to them really in house. So and there are a lot of opportunities like that. So again, frequent check ins, don't sit back and wait for people to come to you on your team and say they're dissatisfied, they feel like their workload is not manageable. They feel like they are ready to leave because they're overwhelmed or they're not growing. So maybe it's an employee satisfaction survey that you put out confidentially. And you ask people for their honest feedback about how are they feeling? Are they getting what they need? How do they feel about their compensation, their professional development, their growth, and really taking that feedback seriously, and then responding to it. And I know that we also have a resource to share, Lisa, on which was a blog article that we recently wrote about keeping your mid level professionals at your nonprofit. And so I don't know if we can, we can share that. Yeah, I just put that into the in the chat already. So that might be a nice article to peruse. Also, when you have a moment on the topic of mid level professionals, and how to retain them in your organization.

16:45  
And then positive culture and creative benefits. So again, soliciting employee feedback, letting them know that their feedback is valued is valuable, creating a collaborative and open team where people feel that they can come and express their opinions, right. And they have somewhere that they can go and have an inclusive culture where people feel that everyone is part of the team, no matter where they are on the totem pole on your own in your organization. Are they new? Have they been there forever? Are they you know, more junior? Are they more senior making everyone feel that they're included on your team? Something else to look at as wellness offerings, right, and we're seeing a lot of really creative, interesting things now. So whether it be, you know, within the scope of what your HR benefits, you know, in your employee handbook will allow, but thinking about maybe offering a yoga class during your lunch hour, you know, maybe it's, you know, bringing in a smoothie bar, and you know, letting people enjoy a healthy snack and feeling like they're getting a little a little bit of a break during their work day. Or maybe again, if you're outsourcing or you're looking at external opportunities, you know, giving folks a stipend or the time off work to go to a meditation retreat, or to go on a hike in the middle of the day, or there's endless numbers of things that could fall into sort of the overall wellness category. And looking at how to offer those creatively, they don't always cost a lot of money, either. And this idea of unlimited paid time off, I don't know how many of you have you know, offered this in your organization's are have toyed with this concept. But it's something that we're seeing much more in the field now, rather than having a set amount of vacation days, sick days, personal days, that really there's a trusting policy where employees take whatever amount of paid time off that they need. And the understanding is that they're going to get their work done when they get it done. So something to consider, again, within the boundaries of what your HR policies might allow for

18:46  
one thing about unlimited PTO, because the question that I often get, and I know that you can speak to is people that aren't? Aren't my employees going to abuse it? Or what do I do about the employee who then takes off one week a month and isn't actually able to get their job done? And so can you speak a little bit to what we're seeing actually of how unlimited PTO is playing out?

19:09  
Absolutely. Yes, thank you. So what we're seeing is actually that trust goes a very long way, right. And so, people actually, by and large, do not abuse this policy. If anything, statistically we're seeing that people end up out of the office, sometimes less as a result of this policy, because they really feel honored to be trusted with the policy and they don't want to abuse it. And so again, it just we're also seeing statistically that it really fosters this feeling of you know, work is my home. And so I want to give my all to my work and when I need to be off, I'll do it, but also, if I need to catch up on my emails late at night, right, because that trust is there. You can get the work done around the clock whenever you need to. And if you're off on a random Tuesday, and you can catch up on a Sunday, that's great. So really in the field, we're seeing that it's about If it and not a detriment to offer the unlimited paid time off. Awesome, and similarly, looking at really flexible, and really understanding family leave policies, right. So whatever type of family leave that might be, whether it's a parental leave, whether it's someone out, care, you know, caring for a loved one who is sick. And that's a time that obviously, you know, many employees, when they're looking at a job will ask what is your family leave policy because either they are thinking about expanding their family, or they're concerned because, you know, they're they, there they are their loved ones have, you know, reason to believe that they might need some care, you know, in the future. And so having those really generous as much as you can, again, with your financial constraints, generous policies built in is always recommended. And then the flexible return to work options is the other end of that, right. So if someone goes on a parental leave, and they're out for 12 weeks, and they want to come back to work, but they haven't figured out their childcare exactly yet, or they're still kind of getting back into the groove, being able to offer them a hybrid schedule, so they can stay home and care for their child some days and come into the office some days, being able to come back part time, possibly, if you can make that work on your team starting back at 20 hours, and then scaling back up to 40. Right. So opportunities, again, to help people feel that they can take the time they need and that they want to come back in a way that works for them. And again, that speaks to the flexible work environment and schedule. So we're seeing, of course, out of the pandemic era, we are seeing more and more hybrid work. I'm sure you all are experiencing this. So thinking a lot about what can that look like beyond the pandemic, and how flexible how hybrid, how remote, can you offer your employees to work right just on a regular basis, because we're really seeing that the large majority of the field is wanting some kind of flexibility, and that people are leaving their jobs for other more flexible opportunities. If organizations are not able to offer that food related perks, I think I mentioned smoothie bar. But anything related to food is always a benefit. So whether it's a free lunch, you know, once a week, you cater lunch, and you all sit together and have a nice lunch. Or whether you can provide an unlimited snack bar and coffee bar at your office just on a regular basis, whatever that looks like people love food and they love not having to worry in the morning about what food they're going to eat during the day.

22:32  
Kid and pet friendly workplaces I'm sure there's many of us who would much appreciate this. And who wish that we had that for you know the majority of our of our careers. But if it's possible based on the nature of your work in your workplace, to have it be a place where if someone's kid, you know if school is closed, and it's a work day, and someone needs to bring their kid and you know, here or there, that that's a welcome. You know, that's a welcome cultural piece to have someone's kid kind of in the office and feeling like they're not going to have to go home for the entire day, if they need to go pick up their kid things like that. And same with pets. You know, I think dogs in the office make everyone happy. So when it's possible, it's very nice, that can also save employees a lot of money if they would need to use a doggy daycare or, you know, they would normally need to leave at 3pm to go pick up a child but that child can sit quietly in the office and do homework for two more hours. Like these are things that really go a very long way for employee satisfaction. And the concept of a sabbatical is something that we're not really used to hearing in the nonprofit world, or we're used to hearing it maybe for very high level executives. But this idea that everyone needs a break, and what could it look like for especially maybe for employees who have been there for several years to look at, you know, just giving a six week or 12 week, you know, whatever would make sense for your organization, sabbatical where that individual can go and either take time for themselves, maybe do some research on a topic that's relevant to work, maybe do some writing some traveling that's going to help them just become a more whole person that's going to be a better employee at the end of the day. And so what could those policies look like and maybe incentivizing folks who have been there for several years to then qualify for that type of a sabbatical benefit. So a lot a lot of positive cultural and creative benefits to be considered. And you can jot down in your workbook, that least a link to and then that was shared, some ideas that you might have for how to create a more positive culture in your office and on your team. And it would be wonderful for you to come away from today with at least one idea that you might be able to implement in this way.

24:41  
And I just want to say two other things. In relation to what you said Jamie, on the sabbatical front. We if we're trying to retain employees, if we know that it costs us one and a half to two times someone's annual salary to replace that person, giving four weeks off to somebody to go take a sabbatical or giving to weeks after somebody after two years, right, those two weeks still cost you a whole lot less than it does to go out and do a search and have to replace someone, and to the person who's getting that time off, that feels really like a huge reward in a really positive way. And so you might want to think about, is it every two years is every three years is every five years that someone gets up a little bit of time? And how does that help us to keep employees even longer than we might be? And I've been seeing a lot of articles in the past, you know, few months and a couple, even in the past couple of days that are we really talking about culture, as sort of the end all be all these days, some of us can go find other places to work and maybe make more money, but it's not always about the money, if you're going to be somewhere where you then have to be at your desk from eight to six every day or nine to five, whatever sort of the working hours might be or there's a lot of nights, there's a lot of weekends, there's a lot of rigidity. For some people, that's just not worth it. Even if that comes with $10,000 more, right, they'd rather take the lesser salary to be able to pick up their kids from school or to know that they can work from home twice a week, and they can get other things done at the same time. Or they even just don't have to deal with the hour long commute each way, depending on where they live and where they're commuting to and where they're working from. So I really would encourage you again, to think creatively and holistically about this and not to discount culture. But to really think about how do we elevate culture? And what does that look like? And so I'm gonna take us on to the third category that we had talked about, which is this idea of non conventional staffing models. And I want to tell sort of tongue in cheek, the story here, but so often in the nonprofit world, we have new youths, and we're trying to get how we're going to get those needs met. And we sort of like lump them all together into one position, right? So maybe it's that we need someone who can manage our database, and who can do major gifts, and who can tune our pianos. Right? Well, the truth of the matter is, those three skill sets are wildly different, and they're probably not going to be found in the same person. So just because those are the three needs that we have in this moment in time on our team doesn't mean that it's the best idea for us to lump them together into one position, it doesn't mean that we want our DOD going to tune pianos, right, or we want our major gift officer sitting and entering everything into the database. And of course, sometimes there's no way around this, depending on what the roles are, everybody needs to help enter their own notes into the database, and everyone needs to be a team player and roll up their sleeves and help get things done. But when we can think creatively and strategically about this, we can actually get a really long way in a different sort of way. So here's a couple things to think about. Not everyone has to be a full time employee, what would it looked like for you to have a hybrid workforce and I don't mean hybrid from location perspective, but I mean, hybrid in terms of having full time employees and part time employees, where if all we need is someone 15 hours a week to manage our database, then let's hire someone 15 hours a week to manage our database. Or if we are not a massive organization yet, and maybe we only have 100, or maybe we only have 50 major donors, we really want to cultivate, might it be better for us to find a major gift officer who really has that expertise. And yeah, maybe we can't afford that person's full salary. But we can hire that person on X number of hours a week, and we're getting that extra expertise from that person. And we're not sort of maxed out by this full time salary that maybe we couldn't afford, right. So there's sort of creative and different ways to think about that, whether that's through employees, whether that's through part time personnel, whether that's through independent contractors. So you can oftentimes think about also hiring 1099 Steer team, right, independent contractors who are maybe working for you X number of hours a week on a very specific sort of task or role. The other thing is to really think about specialized vendors. So it's not going to be the it's not always going to be that someone on your development team is good at graphics, or that someone on your communications team is good at graphics. That's sort of its own specialized skills that graphic design or website design or for that matter to So rather than saying okay communications person or okay marketing person on our team, you also have to now figure out how to design our brochures and how to do these graphics and how to update our website. What might it mean to have a graphic design vendor that you go to who you can either do on a project basis or maybe you have on a you know, on a small monthly retainer that you can go to when you need that person when you need that sort of skill set. So I really want us to think creatively about how we structure our teams and what those staffing models can look like. So that we can really get the most out of the people that we have. And so that we can have the expertise that we need. Because we also know that when we're asking somebody who's really skilled in one area to take on all of these additional pieces that they might not want to do, that might not be a good use of their skills, that leads to an overwhelming, you know, a plate that feels overwhelming and maybe not as satisfying. And then that can lead to somebody leaving the organization as well.

30:34  
At least I would just add one other piece to that, which is just that, if you're asking someone to do your website, and they don't know how to do websites, not only is it overwhelming, but your website isn't going to be as as, as correct and as you know much what you want, as if you get someone who actually specializes in that. So you, you ultimately could get a better product and your employees are happier at the same time.

30:54  
Exactly. Thank you for that to me. So I'm gonna move us on to the fourth category that we discussed, which is about monetary benefits. And, again, we want to think about this from a really different perspective, we know that if you could bump up everyone's salaries by however many 1000s of dollars, you would do that, right? If you could do that for your own dollar. If you could do that for your team, we know that you would do that. So that's not really where we're going to spend our time today, where we're gonna spend our time is thinking about some different potential monetary options that might exist that might fit better into your budget, or might be more of an option to you. And so one of these is around a bonus for hitting certain benchmarks. And these can be monetary benchmarks, they can be goal benchmarks for the organization. So maybe it's our goal that we're going to bring in X number of new prospects this year, or we're going to grow our list by y or we're going to expand our program by z. And if we hit that bowl, then everybody on the team gets a, you know, gets a bonus or gets gets a bonus for hitting that or everyone who's involved in that sort of activity gets a bonus for hitting that. And these don't have to be large bonuses, right, they can be $100, they can be something that's a little bit larger than that, right, it can sort of also tie into what the activity was, and how that activity advances the mission and the work of your organization. But people like to feel appreciated for the work that they're doing. They like to feel recognized for working hard and for achieving what they're achieving. And, and being able to give someone a small bonus toward that it's a good way to show that appreciation and also helps the person have the extra cash to be able to do something they maybe want to do. Another thing to think about as tiered salary increases. So in some ways the teaching system does this well in public schools, and in some ways it does, and but it's an easy example. So I'm going to share it. So for those of you who have friends who are teachers, or family members who are teachers, you probably know there's like this ladder model in teaching. And for every year that you're a teacher, you move up sort of a rung, and so you get a salary increase that is specified for you. Now, some people like this, again, some people don't I'm not going into that part of it today. That's the point of the conversation. But the idea is that you know what to expect, you know that there is going to be an increase for you, you know what that looks like, you know what needs to be achieved to get there. And it's just not ambiguous in the same way, right, Your path is a little bit set out for you. Or it's banded by ROM. So we might know that all of our coordinators are within this band, all of our managers are within this band, all of our next level, or vice presidents maybe are within another band, and it creates equity. And it also helps people to know, okay, if I want to get to X amount, I need to do X, Y and Z to jump from this rung to this rung. The other thing to think about is retention bonuses, and this a little bit is similar to the sabbatical piece of it. And a little bit ties into some of the stats we talked about earlier as well of the cost of replacing employees, the cost of retaining employees. So what would it look like if we know that if we know that on average, people leave every 18 months. And if we know that it costs us one and a half to two times their annual salary to replace them? Technically, every 18 months, if we don't have to replace them, we gain an extra one and a half to two times their salary. Right? That's less money that we now don't have to go spend in order to replace that person. So we don't have to give all of that to them not by any stretch of the imagination, but what might it mean or look like to give someone an extra couple $1,000.20 505,000 Whatever that might be or make sense for your organization to say thanks for sticking around, right? We want to incentivize you for saying we want to celebrate you for believing in this mission for believing in the work that we're doing. And for wanting to carry on network, we want to celebrate you for having built relationships with donors and having helped those donors move along in that pipeline. And you'd have to think about what are the right sort of marks for your organization? Is that three years? Is that five years is that two years? You know, How frequently does that happen.

35:23  
But it's an interesting thing to think about. I know some organizations that do it on the anniversary of when the employee started. So if you started September 1, then the next September 1, you get your retention, bonus, whatever that may be. And I know some organizations who have retention bonuses that go up based on every year that you stay. So the first year you get $1,000, the second year, you get $2,000, that third year, you get $3,000. And you basically get $1,000 for every year that you stay at the organization. So if you're at the organization for 10 years, on your 10th anniversary, you get a $10,000 bonus, which is a really nice bonus, and might incentivize somebody to stay if they're on the fence one way or another. So these are just some different sort of creative ways to think about the the monetary aspect of that. So we're going to in a moment, we're gonna head into the q&a. And while we're doing that, we want to hear from you. So do me a favor, go ahead and open the chat that we I know you've been in a little bit earlier, and share with us, is there a retention mechanism that sort of sticks out to you? Is there something that maybe you're excited to try after today's session? Or is there a category that you feel like this is a category that my organization maybe isn't doing enough of and a place that we want to sort of spend some more time thinking about and talking about?

36:56  
So I'm gonna go into the chat and see what sticks out to you. What are you What are you

37:07  
trying trusted and flexible PTO? Erica, thanks for sharing. I think that's a great one thing goes a really long way. Haley retention bonuses and offering free food. Awesome. Yes. I'll share one thing about the food that I think is it sort of creative and fun at Evolve. When we have a new team members start, we send them like a $20 gift card. Because we're a fully remote team. We send them a $20 gift card so that they can buy lunch on their first day and we do a welcome lunch. And so they come to welcome lunch with whatever meal they ordered for themselves. It's just sort of a nice fun different way to think someone to welcome them into the team to feed them because everyone likes food. Anything else sticking out for anyone? All right, well, I will let you keep typing. And I will keep an eye on the chat. And workplace culture. Flexible PTO. I love that. Eleanor. Thanks for sharing. And I'll move us into the q&a. Let me open the q&a.

38:20  
Oh, because I love that. That's great. Chris says celebrating birthdays with kudos and a special gift. I love that. That's great as an office, yay for dogs.

38:33  
And if there's other things that you're doing in your workplace, like I love this share that that Krista shared, because I think this is a spot where we can really all learn from each other. So if there's something that you're doing in your office that you're proud of, please type that into the chat too. We'd love to hear about that. And for everybody to be able to learn from each other. This Kudo board. I'm going to check that out. Well, yeah. Thank you, Chris. That's awesome. So we had a question about the some of the stats on and we're happy to share the articles of where those stats came from. I

39:08  
know that Jamie answered that. But in went into the chat right now. That was one of the sources that we looked at recently about the 18 month period.

39:17  
Yeah. Great, thank you for sharing that. Jamie. Are Are there other questions that are coming up for people? Genuine question, how do you use some of these ideas like pet kid friendly workspaces? With others needs examples? I'm allergic to dogs. I work best in silence. Yeah, so I it's a really, really good question and we have to be sensitive to it. To me the allergy piece is the most important piece because of bringing dogs into the environment is going to make it and we have someone in environment who has an anaphylactic allergy to dogs like that. definitely not something that we want to do. So I think if to the extent that we can survey our employees about some of the benefits that we're thinking about trying, that goes a really long way. And it also helps people to it helps you to solicit feedback and helps people to understand that you want their feedback. So one thing you might consider is taking three of the benefits that you would be okay with implementing all of them, right and send you a quick survey to your team. And it can be even through Google Forms, and just asking them to rank or to prioritize, which of these pieces might be most exciting to them? Or which ones would they want? And is there anything on here that stands out to them as as maybe being problematic for them? And when you ask that sort of question, you'll find out that someone's allergic to dogs or something else. And then you can make your policy based on that maybe only hypoallergenic dogs are allowed in, maybe that person is alerted if a dog is going to be in that day. So they don't come in that day, right. So again, there's with the allergy piece of it, there's differing levels of allergies that we sort of need to understand with the I work best in silence he is totally get that. And in a lot of work. If your cubicle only workplace, that's tricky, because there's not really a place to go for silence. But in a lot of places, there's a conference room you can go into there's a an office where you can go close the door. So you can still work in silence, or there's enough things that you can get done that I we find it's not actually as disruptive in practice, as, as people anticipated might be in theory. Helpful. What was the amount of retention bonuses

41:42  
offered 1000 per year, kind of as an arbitrary example, but I just had, I just had noted in the chat that we've seen significantly higher numbers, right. So like a significant percentage of salary. So if a normal bonus, let's say or a cost of living might be closer to 3% a year, you know, looking at something like that, or looking at, you know, for a high level executive, depending on your salary scales, you know, potentially significantly more. So, just about what works for your budget, and what would work for your team.

42:14  
We're also seeing signing bonuses at the moment. I know some of you said that you've had a lot of turnover in your team. I imagine if that's the case, you might be hiring new team members we are seeing signing bonuses at the moment, too, which is not typically something that happens in the nonprofit space. But given given the world that we're living in right now, everything is on the table. Yeah, I'll just give you know,

42:38  
there's a an interesting question here, too. I just wanted to give a quick example of a nonprofit that I just worked with and hiring a new director of development, and their hire package ended up offering a combination of a bunch of the things that we've discussed. So there was a tiered increase at the six month mark, I think it ended up it was a higher level position. So I think it was like 5000 extra dollars at the six month mark. And then there was the opportunity to earn based on benchmarks, another like 5000 at the 12 month mark, but that was around a combination, it was development position. So it was a combination of monetary benchmarks like how much do you actually raise? And it was also like some non monetary benchmarks. Do you complete the strategic plan? Have you met with 50 new donors, and so this person came in feeling like well, I could potentially be $10,000 Higher. And again, I know this, these numbers aren't always realistic for all nonprofits. But it was a high level position. And there was also a signing bonus. And there was also a relocation allotment because that person was moving across the Bay Area, which is local, but it's an hour away, and it costs money. And so those are all pieces that went into a one offer letter. So just to give you a sense of you know, we are seeing it a lot.

43:50  
And oh, go ahead. I'm sorry,

43:52  
sorry. Yeah, I know, I'm popping in because we're in the q&a portion. I actually had asked, and I'm going to put this into the chat, folks, if you're not part of this. We actually have a connected fundraising community. And there's a few things. There's an email newsletter and some tips. But we have a Slack channel, Slack group that people are part of and I had actually asked in anticipation of this session to our community. What's your onboarding, like, as a new employee? What are the things that people get at your organization when they join, because that's important to set the tone for when you're bringing on people because you could see high turnover because they're like, this is not what I signed up for too. So when you're thinking about the investments that you have to make the prioritization and your budget, don't undercut the importance of that orientation and onboarding as part of this process as well. I want to share what one of the members of the community wrote because they're like, I started a new job in May. We're almost totally remote before I started the operations directorate, HR arranged a full orientation meeting to go over policies get the computer where they got swag. Don't undercut swag as part of the cultural benefits that you add to. And they got like a meeting with the leadership team, they set some lunch meetings. And a lot of times, it's providing these different resources in kind of a one simple area that people can do. So even small nonprofits, think about where your intranet that houses this type of stuff in a secure way, ends up living, too. So this opens up a whole host of questions. So we wanted to share that from the community. At the very least, though.

45:43  
I love that, Tim, thank you for sharing, and I have to get myself into that community, you'll have to send me the link and hopefully others on this call will will join as well. They can, yeah, we

45:52  
try to continue these conversations. You know, even in the webinars through there, I want to, I want to ramp it up, I want to have more stuff. But it's a fun, it's a fun thing. So I'm gonna pop that into the ol chat here. So yeah, let's keep it going. Folks,

46:11  
just want to thank you actually are giving an example of how you do your tiered increases at your organization. That's really interesting for the group. Thank you.

46:20  
And there was another question in the q&a that for our nonprofit funding for certain incentives are really difficult to find. And do you have suggestions for raising the funding to do some of these things? So this is a great question. And we hear this all the time, especially from small organizations, that that it's hard to find the budget to be able to do this, I would say when you really sit down and look at it, a lot of these things don't cost a lot of money, you can do them actually for pretty cheap, like seeking feedback from people free, right? It's a little bit of somebody's time to put together a survey and to send it out updating people on what you're doing with that feedback is also you know, free thinking about wellness offerings. So here's a creative way to do it is there somebody in your office who teaches a workout class on the side and would be willing to teach a workout class that at lunch, one of the places that I used to work, they started a wellness program, and there was a couple of different instructors who worked at the organization full time. And then outside of that they would teach different types of classes. And so they had the instructors sign up and on Tuesdays or Thursdays during lunch, we could go down to the gym in the building. And take whatever class was was being offered. And it was different all the time. And so there was these four things, they were actually all women who taught these other classes. So one day was yoga one day was Zumba. Well, I don't remember what the other two days were. But it was just an again, a cheap, really easy way to bring something in to get people up and moving to get that blood flow going in the flexible work environment we've seen right doesn't really cost us hopefully at this point, most of your employees have a work from home setup, because they probably needed to have that during the pandemic. In terms of thinking about monetary benefits, that's the hardest one to find the money for or if you think about lunch, and some of those kinds of things, right? Those do add up. But I would think about how can you add them in a little bit over time in small ways into your budget. So maybe for your team, you even have a line item for miscellaneous type of things or for team building or for you know, something in one of those realms and you decide, okay, I'm going to order pizza one, the last Friday of the month, I'm going to order pizza for my team for lunch. It's not very expensive, but it goes a very long way. So

48:54  
sometimes it's about finding that the sorry, Lisa, I didn't mean to interrupt you. I was just going to add one other quick thought which is And Gartner Oculus, which is just that sometimes your board can help you find ways to honor your staff and they can fit the bill. Right. So if you have like a Staff Appreciation Week, and you have a couple people on your board who are cheering your Staff Appreciation Week, they might give out you know, Amazon gift cards to your staff, right similar with like holiday gifts for your staff. They might bring lunch in right every day for a week different plays that we get right and like a board member could sponsor every day for a week. And board members were often like throw a little bit of money, and that making the staff feel good because they work with them every day and they're their partners and they don't want to lose their good staff either. So asking your board can go a long way. Sometimes board members work for companies that can donate you know, items or gift cards that are worth a lot of a lot of value and don't cost anything out of your budget. Yep.

49:53  
I also think it's important to hammer home the importance to your board to basically embrace an abundance mindset versus a scarcity mindset meaning just because we invest in staff doesn't mean we're taking away from other things overhead is not taking away from growth. If anything, it unlocks growth when we prioritize that, so getting leadership to say, it's not about scrimping, it's about investment into the people that make our mission come alive. That getting leadership bought into that on your board, and your executive director team is pretty good first step.

50:34  
Yeah. And even asking, right, there's a saying in fundraising, if you ask for advice, you get money. And if you ask for money, you give advice. So what would it mean to just sit down with a couple of your board members who are business people and say, we're trying to really think creatively and strategically about our employee retention, and you have a successful business in the community? And I'm so curious, can you share some of what you do to retain your employees, and then just listen and hear what they say, because a they're so excited to give you their advice? Be maybe they're gonna have ideas for you, maybe they're gonna, as Jamie said, step up and offer to help in a different way, or offer to send in lunch or offered to purchase sweatshirts for the whole team, or who knows what they would you know, what they would offer, how they would get involved? So I think that's a really a really great question. Tim, I'm conscious of the fact that we're five minutes, the hour people might need to start getting ready for the next call and whatnot. So I think that might be a good stopping place for us. What do you think?

51:32  
Yeah, I think that, you know, we have definite time for for, you know, at least another question or insight, I want to also give a shout out to Christina, for joining the community already during the webinars. So there you go. And yeah, it's just kind of a fun way to continue the conversation. So yeah, folks, any any other questions, this is a good time to ask them any other insights, too. And one, final shout out, I know, we're going to continue to work with the Evolve team on great content like this. But if you haven't signed up for generosity exchange, I also am going to encourage folks to check that out. Don't want to throw too many calls to action at Yeah, but it's a great, great event that we're going to be throwing that's going to have a lot of different sessions like this, as well. So I'll throw that into the old chat. It's a free conference. We're holding that in October. So. Yeah. Any other questions, folks? Well, there we go. Okay. See, and time, talent and treasure are are important. So we're gonna give you a little bit of time back in your day. It's only a few minutes. But there you go. Lisa, Jamie, I want to thank you so much for joining us today. This was excellent. There's a lot that I wanted to even take back to my team to I think that's important. And, and we make a better sector through focusing on conversations like this. So thank you so much for your time, and attention to this topic.

53:25  
Thank you so much for your thoughtful questions. And for having us today. We really enjoyed the conversation.

53:29  
Thank you. Awesome. All right, folks. Let's have a great rest of the week. It's a short week for many of us. And and that means that it's just time to just get to the grind and put our noses down there. So we're going to have a great rest of the year though. I know it folks. So well. Let's get be there and support each other for that. Thanks. Awesome. All right. Thank you have a great day, folks. We'll get the recording and the workbook and all these great resources. It'll be hitting your Inbox by tomorrow. And we tend to actually even get the recording and stuff up on the website a little bit earlier than that probably in the day. So thanks again. Thanks again vaulting. Oh, I'm going to take back the control slug and properly in the webinar. Actually, Lisa will just set this part out. Okay, now I can end the webinar. All right. Thank you

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