Sarah Olivieri will dive into a strategic framework designed to break down your big audacious goals into clear, easy-to-understand components.
Full Transcript:
Steven: All right, Sarah, I got 1:00 Eastern. Is it okay if I go ahead and get this party started officially?
Sarah: Let’s do it. Yeah.
Steven: Nice. Welcome, everybody. Good afternoon, good morning if you’re on the West Coast, I should say. And if you’re watching this recording, hope you’re having a good day no matter when and where you are.
We are here to talk about strategic planning, specifically why you should ditch the way you’ve been doing strategic planning. Oh, yeah, we’ve got some new ideas for you.
I’m so glad you’re all here. I’m Steven. I’m over here at Bloomerang. And I’ll be moderating today’s discussion as always.
And just a couple of housekeeping items for you. Just want to let you all know that we are recording this webinar, and we will be sending out the recording and the slides later on this afternoon.
So if you have to leave early, or maybe you get interrupted, or you’re working from home and a toddler barges in, which may happen to me here in a minute, don’t worry, we will get all that good stuff to you later on this afternoon. So just be on the lookout for an email from me with all those goodies.
But most importantly, we love for these sessions to be interactive, so use that chat box, use the question box, you can use either of those, we would love to hear from you. Yeah, we would love to hear from you.
We’re going to save some time at the end for Q&A. So don’t be shy, send in those questions and comments throughout the hour because we’re going to try to get to as many of those before the 2:00 Eastern hour.
You can even send us a tweet, I’ll keep an eye on those. But we’d love to hear from you. Introduce yourself in the chat now, if you haven’t already. Because it’s always good to kind of know who we’re talking to.
And if this is your first Bloomerang webinar, just want to say an extra special welcome to you folks.
We do these webinars just about every Thursday throughout the year. We love doing them. One of my favorite things we do here at Bloomerang.
But if you’re wondering what the heck is Bloomerang, you’ve never heard of us beyond those webinars? We are a provider of donor management software. That’s who Bloomerang is.
So if you’re interested in that, check out our website. There’s all kinds of videos and resources you can get a hold of to kind of get to know us and maybe even make contact if that’s something you are interested in or in need of in terms of software.
But don’t do that right now. We split an hour because you all are in for a real treat over the next hour. So I’m really pleased to welcome back a friend of the program, someone who’s done Bloomerang webinars for us in the past, and is always a great presenter and highly rated. Joining us from the beautiful Hudson Valley in New York, Sarah Olivieri is here.
Sarah, how’s it going? You doing okay?
Sarah: Oh, I am great. I’m super excited for this webinar today. And I’m especially excited to share it with the Bloomerang audience who I know are my peoples.
Steven: Yeah, we got some good peeps here. It’s awesome that we got a full room because you always bring great trainings, you did a great session for us last year on budgeting. We’re here to talk about strategic planning today.
But if you all haven’t heard of Sarah, check her out. She’s a former ED, she’s a former fundraiser. She’s got over 17 years of experience doing what she is going to be talking about here.
And she’s got a really cool, specific framework that she has created called the Impact Method. I think she’s going to talk a little bit about that. That helps nonprofits kind of simplify all of their operations and kind of bring their teams together.
And like I said, she’s all over the place doing webinars, doing podcasts, speaking at events, and has co-founded nonprofits. I mean, what else can we say there. It’s something I always look for in my guest, is that boots on the ground, nonprofit experience.
And like I said, you all are really in for a treat over the next hour or so. So I’m going to pipe down. I’ve already taken up too much time away from Sarah. So, Sarah, I’m going to stop sharing my screen, and I’ll let you bring up your beautiful slides here.
Sarah: Awesome.
Steven: I think the floor will be yours.
Sarah: Well, thank you, everybody for having me.
I really want to encourage you to keep that chat going. We’ll have Q&A time at the end. But you’re also welcome to just pop a question into the chat anytime. I’ve done enough of these at this point, I can actually kind of watch the chat and present.
Steven’s welcome to interrupt me as well. I want to make sure you get your questions answered along the way. Because the topic of strategic planning is the topic of how to run your organization well. So, you know, it’s a big topic to cover in an hour, so I want to make sure that you get the most out of the parts you’re most interested in because I can’t go super deep on everything here.
So I want to dive in and actually start with a question for all of you. I’d love to know, what is your role at your organization right now, and what comes to mind when you think about strategic planning? It can be the good, the bad, the ugly, you know, or you’re like, “Yes, we need it. It’s hard.”
Long-term goals I’m seeing. Fantastic. Yeah.
What do you think of when you think about strategic planning? Vision for the future. DEI Strategic Visor’s thinking about roadmap. Yeah. I love my strategic plan as a sneak preview to be like my GPS, my turn by turn directions.
Vision. Lots of people about vision. Empowering people. Five-year plan, where you want to be. There is so much.
And basically I want to tell you, like, I’m a strategist at heart, I love strategy. But I have seen traditional strategic planning just really failing nonprofits again and again. So what do I mean by strategic planning failing?
We’re going to go a little more in depth about strategic plans specifically, but I’m wondering anybody seen . . . Give me a yes if you’ve seen this TED talk by Dan Pallotta on “The Way We Think About Charity is Dead Wrong?” We’ve got some yep, some noes. It’s a really good one. It’s only 18 minutes if you want to pull it up later.
But the basic message is what we’ve been taught to think about giving and about charity, actually, the historical roots of most of our nonprofit sector themselves, the way it was developed and designed is really undermining a lot of the work that we’re trying to do and the incredible results that most of our organizations are focused on getting every day.
So in general, what is it that we’re told to think? And I’m going to go specifically, some issues around strategic planning as well.
But we’ve got all these messages like, “It’s bad to spend money.” Or, “We’re not supposed to have a lot of money.” Or, “It’s supposed to feel hard.” Which really messes us up because when we don’t have a lot of money, and it starts feeling really hard. We just say, “Well.” We don’t start asking for help, we don’t start looking for other ways because we say, “Well, that’s the way it’s supposed to feel. I guess I’m on the right track.”
And I hope today I convinced you no, no, no. If it feels hard, really hard, if you’re frustrated, if you’re overwhelmed, if you don’t have money, something is wrong. That is a warning signal. But a lot of folks aren’t getting that signal because of the culture of our industry.
We’re told that we’re not as good at business as for-profit businesses. Now, I have a whole nother talk I can give you on the nonprofit business model, but let me just tell you, nonprofits as businesses are more complex than for-profits. So it’s actually, you have to be better at business to run a nonprofit well than you do to run a for-profit. So that couldn’t be farther from the truth.
We’ve been told again and again that we can’t take any risks, right? If we try and experiment, and it doesn’t work, then we’re not going to get funding, or our donors won’t like us anymore, and they’ll go away. That also couldn’t be farther from the truth.
We have to take risks and experiment in order to innovate because we’re solving some of the world’s most complex unsolved problems. And you can’t do that without innovating, without experimenting, and without taking risks.
We’re told that our volunteer boards should do the fundraising as though it’s this separate thing that’s not really connected to the rest of the nonprofit. I see that a lot. Specifically in strategic planning, we’re told that our boards should be leading the process. I’m going to go into why that isn’t helpful either in just a moment.
Some people are really focused on grants that they’re not ready for, and they’re just kind of on this grant starvation cycle like, “We’re just hoping that that next one is going to save us.” Anybody been in that? Said that to themselves? Like, “If I just get this next grant, we’ll be saved.”
I see a yes. If you have a question too, please, feel free to just pop it right in the chat.
That we shouldn’t get paid, that we shouldn’t pay our staff market wages. I just saw a great news article this morning, I think it was, about a nonprofit that just decided to set the minimum salary at its organization at $70,000. I thought that was an incredibly bold and powerful move.
And this last one I already talked about, it’s supposed to feel hard.
So there are a few things I want to tell you specifically about strategic planning, and where we’ve been with strategic planning, and why that’s not working. I don’t have a slide for this because I don’t want to harp on, you know, there’s plenty of people who still do it this way, and you may have done it this way, and that’s fine.
I’m not really concerned about what we did in the past, I just hope that we can move forward in a new direction.
So a few things that I’ve seen with strategic planning are that we take a really long time to make the plan. We take months.
I once talked to an organization, they just spent the last three years creating their three-year strategic plan. And this is not fast enough, right? By the time we’re done planning, our plans are often obsolete, which leads to the second challenge, which is that once we make our plan and we start to execute it, you’re going to find things that are wrong with that plan, I promise.
But our strategic planning process doesn’t have a way to make adjustments quickly as we learn lessons from implementing our plans.
And the third thing. There are lots of things I could go into, but I’ll go into two more. One is that we tend to do all this research in the traditional strategic planning model. And a lot of the research is market research, is, you know, evaluating our constituents and our stakeholders. And that’s really the work of good marketing, right?
And nonprofits in the past, we often just talk about communications. But communications is only one piece of great marketing. The other piece is great research. So it’s kind of like a Band-Aid fix every few years on the strategic planning process to make up for a marketing process that we really should be incorporating into our daily set of activities.
And finally, and this is probably the biggest shift. So I just want to, you know, prepare you if you’re about to have an oh my God moment, is your board should not be making strategic decisions except around hiring and firing the executive director. Want me, say that again. You have your oh my god moment, and then I’ll explain why.
Your board should not be making strategic decisions. Your board should not be setting the strategic direction, which is another way of saying making strategic decisions.
Do I have any believers with me already before I even explain? Give me a yes, or an oh my God if you’re like, “Oh, okay.” I got some followers. Good. I need to know that.
Because that is scary. Because it’s scary for me to say, because there is a whole world of articles you can Google right now that say, “The board’s responsible for making strategic decisions.”
So the short answer, and again, I could do a whole webinar just on this. The short reason is this. Good governance includes decision-making plus oversight, right? You can’t provide good oversight for your own decisions.
So good governance is not just the job of the board, the nonprofit needs to have good governance, the board’s job should be to provide the oversight, which means they’re not going to make any decisions except that one of hiring and firing the executive director.
And the leadership team, the staff, and having a process for making decisions is as part of the team, the staff team. They’re going to make the decisions.
I have a quick question on, so what does the board do? They provide oversight. That means double-checking. And it’s a lot of work to be reviewing what’s going on and just saying, “Yes, this makes sense. Oh, no, I have some questions.” Or like, “Hey.” And then if really something’s going off the rails, they could pull the emergency brake.
But what I see more often than not is boards just pulling that emergency brake, telling their organizations to stop or slow down when it is unnecessary.
The other reason why boards actually don’t need to be involved in even coming up with the strategic goals is because you have to be in the day-to-day work of running the organization.
So this isn’t true for all volunteer board run nonprofits, but nonprofits who have paid staff. For nonprofits who have paid staff, then this is the case. So your paid staff is doing the day-to-day work. And that is the fuel or the food that gives you the ideas about what goals make sense for your organization, and what goals you might even come up with.
Your board members don’t have that. So even if they know all about nonprofits, they’re not going to have the food that they need to generate creative, inspiring, and innovating ideas for their strategic plan.
So I’m going to move on. Hopefully, we’ve gotten through that moment. I’m so glad some of you are with me in this bold statement. And I hope that for some of you it’s something that you desperately needed to hear. So with all of this way of traditional planning and all the other things that we’re being told about running our nonprofits, we’re basically . . .
And I got some disagreers, that’s okay too.
We basically are carrying around this giant boulder while climbing Mount Everest, right? The big mountain is achieving our mission. And we need to be on that mountain. We need to be traveling that path. But we don’t need to be carrying this boulder with us, because climbing that mountain is already one of the most challenging jobs that we may ever face. So what I want to encourage you today is to let go of this rock.
So what is this old system doing to us? Well, I see too many nonprofits who are either slow, stuck, or rudderless. And I’d love . . . If you’re feeling brave and you want to share where you are now, most people are in a combination of these.
But if you’re primarily in this slow column, you’re experiencing slow progress. There’s never enough time in your day, you’ve got siloed departments, if you’re big enough to have departments. You might be experiencing mission creep, meaning like you’re kind of doing things off mission.
You might have some issues. I’m not going to say exactly what they are. But with your staff or your board, there’s maybe some tension, it’s making things harder. And you have limited funding, right? It’s a stretch.
For some organizations, you might be stuck. It’s actually a combination of being slow and rudderless, is when you get stuck.
I got some stucks here.
Yeah, you can’t go on any farther like this. I get too many calls from executive directors in tears.
I’ll never forget the story of a now consultant, but executive director when we talked about like, “Well, what did you do for support or for help when you did this job?” And she said, “I kept a crying pillow in my office so that I could close the door and cry into the pillow, and my staff wouldn’t hear me.” That’s what stuck feels like.
If you’re wearing way too many hats, you’ve got not enough money to even do what you’re trying to do now. And oftentimes, if you’ve been stuck for a while you start to see staff members leave, or you start to see board members leave, or possibly both.
And my rudderless folks, sometimes it doesn’t feel . . . It can feel more frustrating than overwhelming, right? You’ve got false starts. So you start a plan, it doesn’t go through, you’re really inconsistent in how quickly you move, your plans are disconnected.
I once worked with an organization where the board created one strategic plan, and the staff created a separate strategic plan. I wasn’t really sure how that was supposed to work.
If you’re not sure where to focus, like, what’s the important program, which strategic relationships should you be building? And if your strategy is kind of like this destination of, like, distant goals but not really a roadmap.
I once talked to an organization, they said, “Well, we just finished our strategic plan, we have it. Now we just have to raise $800,000, so we can start doing our plan.”
Well, if your plan doesn’t meet you from where you are today, and lay out the path to where you want to be tomorrow or 10 years from now, it’s not a really good plan, in my opinion, it’s just a goal, right?
And the difference between a goal and a strategy is a strategy is your goals plus the tactics you’re going to use to try to achieve those goals.
We misuse this word strategy a lot. We say, “I’m going to try to act strategically.” What we mean is, I’m going to try to act tactically, I’m going to try to make good tactical decisions, but it’s not a . . . We’re not acting strategically unless we’re saying, “Okay, we’re going to plan out our goals and plan out the steps we’re going to take to achieve those goals.”
I see we have a lot of stuck folks here today, at least the ones in the chat because they’re the ones who are like, “No more. Please make it stop.”
Well, this is what having it stop looks like. This is my vision for the future for all of you and for the nonprofit industry itself. I think nonprofits should generally be in a state of thriving, because thriving organizations are organizations that can innovate. And we’re not going to achieve our missions if we can’t be thriving and innovating better than any type of business out there.
Google should be looking to you to learn how to do business better, not the other way around.
So thriving means that you have really high impact, you’re making a huge difference but with relative ease. It shouldn’t feel that hard. That feeling of having it be hard means you’ve got inefficiencies and things that are ineffective. That’s what makes it feel hard, and actually makes making an impact harder. It makes it worse not better.
You need to have a clear sense of accomplishment. You need to know when you’re achieving success. You need to have that momentum.
A lot of people in the for-profit space who have been successful have learned this lesson that getting momentum is the key, right? That means things to start, take on their own energy, they go faster, it’s like not only did you let go of that rock, but you’re now riding that rock as it rolls up the hill. That’s what momentum feels like. You know exactly what to do and stay focused.
Has anybody had a strategic plan done for them? Or maybe you did it yourself. And every day, you could just sit down, and it would tell you that, that strategic plan would just say, “Oh, this is exactly what you need to do today, Sarah, right? Here are the three things you need to do today.” Did anybody get that from their strategy? Like the exact?
Yes, and it’s a huge blessing.
Man, does it make a difference when the overwhelm of these huge goals is gone because you know these are the three things I need to do today, and they are the best possible things I could be focusing on. No.
So today, I’m going to teach you a bit about how to actually do that. I want you to have tons of support, right? We’re not just solving the world’s most complex problems, we’re solving some of the most important problems that on the whole, the large human community of this world would like to see these problems solved too. There is no reason why you shouldn’t have tons of support.
And for anybody who’s saying, “Oh, there isn’t enough for us out there.” I recently did a little research, it was for another presentation, but I’ll share it with you here. I believe it was in the United States there are at least 16 millionaires for every 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Sixteen millionaires for every 501(c)(3) nonprofit in the U.S.
I don’t know the numbers for Canada, sorry, my Canadians here.
That means there is enough. And I want you to have not just enough to do what you want to do now, but to grow, to get to the next level. And I want you to also be prepared for the unexpected, so when things like pandemics happen, you aren’t scrambling.
My clients who were using the Impact Method before the pandemic hit were ready very quickly. In fact, one of them was ready for the shutdown in January, right? The shutdown happened in March, they were ready in January. Three months before everybody else. Because they were planning ahead.
And others who were even just learning the Impact Method while the pandemic was starting, they weren’t churning or wheeling, and they have done incredibly well this year. We have all seen incredible growth.
So how do we do this? That’s me.
My water opportunity.
If you want to connect with me on LinkedIn, you can.
As Steven so kindly shared, you know, I’ve been an executive director, I’ve been the director of a foundation briefly. I did all the things that many of you have done, wearing too many hats.
I was the secret toilet fixer once. I didn’t want anybody to know that I knew how to fix the toilet, because I didn’t want it to become my job. And yet, there was no one else to do it. So I would wait when everyone left just before I locked up, and I would fix the toilet every day. So I know what it is like.
So as I get into it . . .
Oh man, time has gone by fast today.
I’m going to tell you two really quick stories to set the framework here. Because when I set out to create the Impact Method, I knew that if it was hard to learn, or hard to do, none of my overwhelmed stuck nonprofits would do it. So we had to make it easy to learn, easy to implement, or it wouldn’t help change the industry.
So there’s a couple things I know about change.
Oh yes, nine millionaires per Canadian charity. Lots for you too. Fantastic. You’re welcome to come pilfer some of ours if you need as well.
When I was a kid, I’d sit in the back of the car, and it looked a lot like this. My dad would drive, my mom would sit in the front, I’d sit in the back. Classic nuclear family dynamic. And every single time my dad would have some sort of explosive, upset outburst for almost no rhyme or reason. It was different thing every time.
And as I grew up, I noticed that if we changed up our seats, if my mom drove, or if I sat in the front, chances of an explosive upset went way down. And when I was old enough to drive, I would drive, my dad would sit in the back, even if my mom wasn’t with us. He’d pretend he was being chauffeured around by his daughter, it brought him great delight. And we didn’t have an upsetting moment not one single time.
And what was happening here was when we were in that traditional family dynamic seat, he was bringing all of his childhood trauma around his own father into the car with us, and that’s what was causing the upsets.
Now, therapy is one way to approach that, but another way, when you’re just dealing with the car, is all we had to do is change our seats. And that baggage, that rock that we looked at earlier, didn’t come in the car with us.
So if you want to thrive, you have to change your approach. But changing your approach doesn’t mean we have to go through all that therapy, it just means we need to change up how we’re looking at ourselves, how we’re thinking about ourselves, how we’re seeing our own organizations.
Another quick story on the power of changing your approach. Anybody know what these are? I know we’re a little short on time, so I’m going to tell you. These are classic America’s Cup sailboats. I’m a sailor, so you have to forgive the sailing references.
And the way the America’s Cup race works is it’s an international competition, happens every few years, and the winning team gets to set the rules for the next race. And every race for decades and decades, the American team won, and they kept the rules relatively the same, especially rules regarding how the boats could be designed.
Then one year in the early ’80s, the Australian team won, and they changed the rules. In fact, they threw out a lot of the rules around boat design. And now we have boats that look like this.
Yay, Aussies. Yes, right? The Aussies and the New Zealanders are always competing in a really tough fashion for the America’s Cup.
This is the . . . I believe it’s the current America’s Cup sailboat. This boat has been hyper-optimized for speed. It literally flies out of the water. And it can sail up to four times as fast as the wind powering it. It’s just an incredible boat.
I’m not showing video today, but if you look up a video of one of these, they are zipping around like a motorboat. You see the motorboats who are filming them zipping along trying to keep up.
Yeah. If it flies, is it still a sailboat? Yes, if part of it is still in the water.
So you can see down here one wing is up. And one wing, they’re called foils, is down in the water, and it’s steering using the water.
You should fundraise really, it’s fantastic.
And by the way, these teams have to do a lot of fundraising because this is a multimillion-dollar boat. They have to train year round for years. They have to feed . . . They have like a whole team of people plus a whole team of people who build the boat, maintain the boat, and make the sails.
This is one of the most expensive things to fundraise for, and they don’t struggle too badly, right? Because lots of people just want to see an amazing boat do amazing things.
And let me tell you, as much as I love sailing, your mission is probably more important than an America’s Cup sailboat team’s mission. And if they’re not having trouble fundraising, you don’t need to be having trouble either.
So my point in telling you this story is the wind didn’t change, it’s all about the approach.
So some of you might be saying, “I’m too busy to change.” But one, I’ll tell you, if you don’t change, you’re carrying around this rock. And two, I want to tell you this, the first step in changing your approach is just to change the way you look at what you are already doing.
And today I’m going to give you a new lens for that, but I need to ask you quickly, are you ready to let go of the rock yet? Put “let go” in the chat if you are ready to let go of this rock, because nothing I’m going to tell you next will help you if you’re carrying the rock.
Yay.
If you’re not ready to let go, you can go right now because none of this is really going to help you, maybe a teeny weensy bit, but it’s not really going to work that great if you don’t . . .
Oh, I love it, drop the rock. That’s what I should say next time, drop the rock.
So we’re ready. The Impact Method is a three-part framework. It is not a replacement for just strategic planning. It is a three-part framework for scaling your impact. It is essentially a strategic framework. So we’re replacing strategic planning in the traditional sense with a strategic framework.
The first part is having an actionable strategy. Now, this may sound like strategic planning, but I’m going to show you the ways in which it’s different. And in the Impact Method we call our actionable strategy. We actually, it has two parts, an impact strategy and a continuous action plan. And they are connected.
So we actually draw our strategic plans, our impact strategies, as mind maps. They are not documents, there is no fancy graphic design, they are mind maps. And they are built around with a mission at the center. Your mission is your North Star goal. It is your ultimate goal. But it is a goal in your strategy.
From there, we stem off all of the goals that are related. And we have a very specific process for how we set goals. In fact, there are two types of goals, which I’m going to teach you next. And we set those goals in a very specific order.
Once we have our goals set around what we know we can do or what we’d like to be able to do as an organization, then we start building out the projects that need to be done for each of those goals. And we break down those projects into things that can be completed in two weeks.
What is the specific process for setting goals and designing projects that makes your strategy actionable, and it actually makes your strategy better?
I think it’s always helpful, at some point, to have an outside consultant or just anybody who can have an outside fresh pair of eyes to give you some ideas and insights.
However, this process for setting goals will force you to set better goals and design better projects even if you don’t have anybody from the outside. And I think that’s in, critical for every leadership team to be able to do this for themselves.
Because sometimes, and if you’re really going to be agile, you’ll need to be able to do this for yourself at a drop of a hat if something dramatic happens.
So when COVID hit, the first thing I did was go and redo my actionable strategy. Took about an hour and a half, and I redid it accounting for the pandemic. And then I was ready to go again. For a larger organization, it might take half a day.
Here’s the thing about setting goals and the process. We’ve heard all this stuff about smart goals.
And I got to tell you, I struggled with goal setting for a long time, and I struggled even more when I thought about goal setting for nonprofits, because a lot of our goals aren’t tangible. At the end of the day, you know, improving somebody’s well-being is not tangible, right? It’s not specific, it’s not actionable, it’s certainly not time bound, it’s really hard to get around.
So I dove deep into understanding goal research, and I finally learned that their goals actually come in pairs. And if you set them in pairs, you will create clearer, better goals. And they’ll force you to really think about what you’re trying to do.
So what are those pairs? We have outcomes, those are results, and we have execution goals. Execution goals, by the way, they are things that you can do as an organization, as a team, that you have direct control over.
The academics, if you want to research this, call them process goals. But I prefer to call them execution goals because it sounds like something you can execute on. So the execution is the action, the outcome is the reaction.
And when we’re planning, we want to plan for the reaction, the ultimate outcome, but that we don’t have control over, and then figure out what action-related goals we can set for ourselves. So let me give you some examples here.
And if you want to put in an example in the chat and tell me whether you think it’s an outcome or an execution goal, this is your chance to get free coaching from me right now. You put it in, and I’ll let you know if you’re right or not and why, because there are some tricky ones here.
So my first example is the goal is to lose weight. I’m sure people have had that goal themselves at one point or another, many people have. And we can kind of enhance it with a number saying the definition of done is I’m 10 pounds lighter.
Unfortunately, we can’t just presto chango, wish ourselves to be 10 pounds lighter. It’s not really in our control. If we could, that would be amazing.
But what is in our control is a goal like change my diet, right? I do have the power to do that. And I could have a definition of done for that as well. I might have two execution goals related to this one outcome, it might be change my diet and exercise daily.
Oh, I’ve got a good example in the chat now. The example is increase donor stewardship. So is this an outcome goal or an execution goal? Somebody else want to guess?
Sherry doesn’t have . . . Sorry, it was Chrissy. Correct. It is an outcome goal. You can’t force stewards, your donors to engage as better stewards. But there’s a lot of things you could do to try to have that result.
Another one from Sarah, increase volunteer engagement. For my crew here, outcome or execution? I’m seeing a couple outcomes in. The outcomes are correct, right? We can’t just force people to do things. And so usually if we want somebody else to do something, it’s an outcome.
So some examples of how we might get a donor to engage or a volunteer to engage, you know, it’s famous, giving free food is a great way to get people to show up.
We can thank them, we can call them, we can invite them to a party, we can ask them their opinion. That’s one of the best ways to get anybody to engage is to ask them about them. Almost nobody can resist a question asking them about themselves.
Fantastic. You guys are getting it.
Another goal description here for an outcome, increase the number of active donors supporting my nonprofit. An example of the corresponding execution goal would be to hire a copywriter to write new messaging. So once you have . . .
Yes, definition of done is another way to say measurables. You know, I think the words we use affect the way we think. And if you ask somebody, “Well, what’s the measurable for that?” Maybe if they’re using measurables and KPIs, they’ll say it. But if you ask anybody what’s the definition of done? They will know. Plus the definition of done is a specific type of measurable.
It’s the type that tells you when to stop. When you can say, “Yes, I achieved that goal.” Right?
We certainly could lose too much weight, right? We don’t want to be underweight. We don’t want to be killing ourselves.
So it’s important that we have a clear idea of what done looks like. Especially when we’re dealing with gray areas, which we often are in nonprofits.
So once you have an execution goal, then, you can create a project, right? So even hire a copywriter sounds like maybe it’s a project, and maybe it’s a simple goal to achieve, but you might have multiple projects involved with achieving that goal, right?
So you might have to research copywriters, interview copywriters, hire a copywriter, onboard a copywriter, and those are each projects in themselves.
Have a question of, “Should some outcome goals never have an end?” So that is a good question. Especially when you are thinking of increasing the donor base. I think for some goals like that, that aren’t likely to have a natural end, it’s still hard to say it’s working if we don’t create some fake endings, or benchmarks, if you will.
So I would say, you know . . . I would have like Phase 1, or a Phase 2, or a Phase 3, or just say instead of saying increase donor base, I would say increase donor base by 50% or by 200%, or the number of people you want to increase it by.
And then say, “Okay, we achieve that outcome using these tactics. We’re successful. These other ones aren’t, let’s move the mark. Now let’s increase by another 50%.” So I would have a little measurable in kind of one of those never ending things, because you’ll feel better checking off goals that you’ve achieved.
Great question. I love that.
Okay. Where goals and projects, where do they live for your programs? So you should have goals for your programs in your strategy as well, not just fundraising goals.
I’m a strong believer that you need both impact-related outcome goals, so we want to serve X number more people or to have X number of programs that are running this well.
And we want capacity-related outcome goals, we want to have this much more money, we want to have this many more team members. And you have to always keep your impact growing, scaling activities in balance with your capacity, because, you know, it’s no fun.
I just told somebody earlier today like, “Yes, you need a plan, but if you don’t have any capacity to execute the plan, then you shouldn’t spend a lot of time making the plan.” You know, your plan should be a plan of increasing your capacity.
People are asking about programs. We’ll get into there. If you want to go deeper on how to set goals and a few ways of double-checking them, I have created a goal setting cheat sheet more than I can go into today.
But you can grab it from pivotground.com/bloomerang. How in the world will you remember that? Pivotground.com/bloomerang. And you can grab this worksheet. I think I have a link again at the end. I’ll put it in the chat at the end.
So actionable strategy. With it, you get an easy to update plan, right?
Thank you so much, Steven, for putting that link in the chat. And, Allison.
So it’s really, really important, have you heard of that strategic plan sitting on a shelf? I used to collect them. I’d get every nonprofit to give me their strategic plan. And usually, maybe I had a printout of the PDF, maybe it was a beautifully bound thing. There was always graphic design involved. Those are not easy to update.
I’m going to teach you in just a minute how often we update the strategic plan in the Impact Method.
If you want to guess now, I’ll maybe give a prize to whoever guesses correctly. Only if you’re not doing the Impact Method. Oh, good guess, Angelica. We’ve got some good guesses. Allison, keep an eye, see if anybody gets it correct.
You have to be able to set better goals. The part of what makes this really difference is the process itself pushes you to really understand what you’re setting and why.
You need to make sure it actually forces you to make a better plan. When you set better goals and you’re pushed to break up your plans in this way, you will have a better plan. So it’s not just about the end result of the strategy, but the process that makes it better. It’s prioritized.
And it should allow you to run those experiments, know that you’re running those experiments, and keep room to do that. And as I said, with it, you will be addressing scaling both your capacity and your impact.
Oh, I see we have at least one winner.
Without an actionable strategy you have a lot of what traditional strategic planning has done or people with no strategy have done. So you might be taking action that isn’t really achieving results.
Translation is you might be doing a lot of work you don’t need to be doing. And the fastest way I know to reduce overwhelm and burnout is to just stop doing all the things that you don’t actually need to be doing.
But you don’t really know which of those things you can stop until you have a clear plan. You’ll have an overloaded plate. You will not feel sure about what to do next.
Without it, you’ll have those false starts. And you’re probably going to have a frustrated team. Because having an actionable, clear, written strategy is one of the keys to having a team that’s all on board and all rowing in the same direction.
The second piece is having a process of improvement. The process of improvement is what keeps the strategy moving forward. It’s built on a basic cycle of you review where you’ve been and what you know now, you plan, you make that plan, and then you take action for a period of time.
So in the Impact Method, we run a strategic cycle where we are updating that strategic plan called the Impact Strategy and developing a new work plan, the continuous action plan, every two months. Every two months.
I know we had a couple people.
So more frequently than two months isn’t necessary unless something happens, you know, like Mount Vesuvius erupts in your village. Definitely, you can always throw an extra planning cycle in. But typically we don’t need to be doing more than two months. But three months is a little too long for that human brain to imagine. You can really imagine eight weeks well in your human brain.
Yay, Leslie is our winner. Fantastic. Leslie, make sure you reach out to me, please, sarah@pivotground.com. And I will figure out what your prize is by the time you’ve emailed me. And if anybody else got it right, you’re welcome to email me as well.
But just having a cycle of continually improving our strategy is not enough. We’re going to add in a second cycle of improvement for just our work plan. So our continuous action plan. And we’re going to have a meeting where we review and update our plan every two weeks.
And then we also want to make sure that we are taking some respite every year. And in the Impact Method, we have four weeks of respite built in to each year. Respite doesn’t have to be total time off, but it’s time when you’re not aggressively pushing on goals, and you’re kind of really just giving your brain a chance to take it easy and churn over new ideas.
And this is critical if you’re going to have the creative, innovative ideas to put into your plan to make the world a better place in the first place.
So with a process of improvement, you’re going to regularly evaluate your progress. You’re not going to fall off track, you’re not going to get squirrely, you’re not going to have a plan on a shelf. It is as hard and as easy as putting the meetings on your calendar and showing up for them.
And in the Impact Method, we have fixed agendas for each meeting. You don’t even have to create the agenda. And we have a specific process for doing each meeting. So it sounds like a lot of work, a lot of meetings especially with smaller teams. But let me tell you, most of these meetings will replace all other meetings you’re doing.
So if you’re already doing meetings, you can replace those with the Impact Method meetings. If you’re not meeting at all, this will have you meeting, if you’re a smaller organization, you will be meeting weekly. And you have to be meeting as a group if you’re going to be solving problems and working together. It is not efficient to just not be meeting at all.
But this meetings are highly structured, so they are time bound, they are productive, they really capture issues before they go too far.
What happens when issues go too far? Often, they turn into problems. Those issues turn to problems. They come up and they whack you in the face, and you’re like [vocalization] now you’re in reaction mode, right?
What we want, if you catch issues early, if you go hunting out issues. And yes, you have to value vulnerability to be good at hunting out issues. But if you find them early, you can turn almost any issue into an opportunity for your organization. That’s how you start becoming proactive.
And instead of having reactive negative thing after reactive negative thing, you can have opportunity, after opportunity, after opportunity.
And you’re going to have rest periods, right? Rest period really helps with burnout. What we want to avoid, which you won’t have if you have a great process of improvement, you will leave behind those unfocused, unproductive meetings where you feel like you’re getting in the weeds.
You’re going to leave behind reactive mode where you’re always putting out fires. And you might be overrelying on your board or your board might be micromanaging, that’s going to just go away. And you’re going to eliminate WADILT syndrome, which is, “We’ve always done it like that.”
The third piece of the framework is your MO, and it consists of your mission. We heard some of these when people think of strategic planning. This isn’t really the plan, this is your boat. What is your mission? What is the vision of your organization in the future 5 years from now, 10 years from now? What do you look like?
That’s a tool for getting everybody on the same page and starting to get creative about your strategy. It’s who’s on your team. It’s the resources you have to use money, equipment, facilities. It’s the processes that you use to make everything run more smoothly. And it’s your brand. It’s who you are as an organization, what is your heart? What is your character?
Quick question is, how would you suggest encouraging all staff to attend your weekly meeting? Oh, so the thing is you can always start small and grow it. Once the meetings work and people see results, everybody will want to come. They will want to be part of that.
If somebody really doesn’t come, they might be a bad fit team member. I see that happening a lot. So as kind of like . . .
Yes, offer lunch, right?
There’s lots of ways to coach people to get there the first time. And if it’s great . . . So in the Impact Method, we rate our meetings, usually on a scale of one to four, one’s the worst, four is the best. Usually the first meeting is around a three, and the second or third meeting, we’re at a four.
People are thrilled to have an effective meeting format that doesn’t waste their time and really helps move the whole organization forward.
So to sum it up, your MO is, what is your boat? And the team included, right? Do you have one of these? But I’m guessing most of you are not riding around in one of these yet. You might be riding one of these babies. You know, if you’re stuck, you’re probably in one of these. And it’s not glamorous to get unstuck. But it’s possible, right?
We make good moves, little moves backward, little moves forward, and each move gets bigger and bigger. And before you know it, you are unstuck. With a great MO, when you’re on one of those amazing boats, you have an amazing dream team. Your fundraising activities start working.
A lot of people think, “Oh, I need a better donor strategy or something.” You really need a great MO before your fundraising is going to work for you. You have people turn up to help you who didn’t even ask.
I have a client who, donors just started coming out of the woodwork first, and more recently in her very effective grants program. She told me a win from the week was she got two unsolicited grants.
Who would like that, when the foundations just start sending you money? You don’t apply, they just send you the check. Congratulations, you’ve got more money. That’s what starts to happen when you have an amazing MO.
This is where you gain the momentum. And this is how you have a team that can turn on a dime. See, if you’re still at the stage, getting people to come to a regular meeting, you need to have that in place because when something serious changes, something big, you need everybody to know that meetings are valuable.
It shouldn’t be hard. You don’t want it to be hard, right? It’s not helpful if it’s hard to get people to come to a meeting.
COVID hits, your team needs to already know that meetings work, and how to hold them in order to address the big issue that just fell in everybody’s lap.
So if you have a great MO, you can turn on a dime. If you don’t have a great MO, you’ve got out of balance power dynamics, right?
That person is a great example you’ve given me, so forgive me for keep going into it, right?
Someone not coming to a meeting, that can be a power dynamic thing. Sometimes one person’s holding on to too much power. Other times, it’s like everybody’s decision by committee and there’s too little power, nobody’s stepping up.
You’re struggling with your team, you have money problems, you can’t make marketing work, you’re slow to implement change, and you have issues with your board or staff. They all come from your MO not being strong.
So each one of these three things will move the needle a bit, especially if you drop the rock. But when you do . . .
Yeah, so it depends on the type of meeting, right? So you want your meetings to be . . . There’s actually a third type of meeting in the Impact Method, so you need a strategic meeting every two months.
And I don’t have time to teach you how to do everything in the Impact Method, but we have specific agendas that we follow that are designed to keep it focused. We need a planning meeting for your action plan every two weeks.
And then I left out one in the slides, but I’ll tell you since you asked. An issue-solving meeting just for any issues or roadblocks that come up weekly or biweekly, depending on how big your team is, and how many issues you have to get through. Each meeting has a standing structured agenda.
So when we use all three pieces together, we start to get this incredible synergistic effect. Essentially what’s going on here, whoops, that your traditional strategic planning can’t even begin to do for you, is your MO, you strengthen your MO and it gives you speed.
Your actionable strategy gives you really clear direction, oh, and a roadmap. Not just the goal but directions. Turn by turn directions. I want my phone telling me, “Get in the right-hand lane now. Turn right in 300 feet. Merge left.” That’s what I mean by a truly actionable strategy.
And of course, your process of improvement, aptly named, helps you improve. And when you do all these three things together, they start working on each other, right? More speed means more improvement. More direction also. So each one leads to the other. And you get scaled impact.
Scaled impact. What’s the difference between scaling your impact and growing your impact? Growing your impact, when you grow as an organization, you have more impact, but the amount of work to achieve that impact remains proportionately the same.
So if you’re overwhelmed serving 1,000 people, you’re going to be, you know, 10 times as overwhelmed serving 10,000 people.
When you scale your impact, when you scale your nonprofit, you are changing the difference. So you can achieve even more results for the same amount of work. So the difference between serving 1,000 people and 10,000 people might be only twice as much work instead of 10 times as much work. That’s the difference between growing and scaling.
So coming in just at time, key takeaways, right?
Drop the rock, our old rules are holding us back. And I got to tell you, of the things that Dan talks about in his talk, of the things that we talked about today, unlike those sailboats, almost none of them are actually against the law. Right? These are just so-called best practices or customs.
The only thing stopping you from doing them, the only thing stopping you from dropping the rock is your own brain. You just have to be brave enough to let go. That’s all you have to do. There’s no loopholes or laws we need to change, you just have to decide to do it a different way. You have to decide to take that new approach. And if you do, it is possible to thrive.
And we have three key pieces of the Impact Method. We first did actionable strategy, a process of improvement, and your MO. And you need to be cyclically working on all those. The process of improvement will tie it all together to give you speed, direction, and improvement which will give you momentum towards scaled impact.
I’ll take a few more questions. But some questions I have for you while you put any . . . oh, and I see we have some in the Q&A.
What would it mean to you if you had all the money you needed not just to survive but grow? What would it mean to you if you had an amazing team who lightened your load and drove the mission forward with you? Or even without you, if you’re an executive director?
What would it mean to you if you had a clear strategy and knew exactly what to focus on today and all the things to say no to in order to achieve your biggest, hardest goals?
This is me and my son. It’s actually from the other year. And my real dad. And this is us on the sailboat. We’re actually teaching my son how to sail. I’m being goofy. My dad and son are looking very serious because he’s looking at the sails learning how to do it.
We not only learned to change the seats in the car, we got on the boat, and we always have an amazing time. In fact, we race to this day together. And it’s fantastic. I see a lot of less stress. You could do everything. Less crisis mode. Amazing to think of all those possibilities. Yeah.
So are you going to stay stuck, slow, or rudderless? Or are you going to pivot and thrive? Because the choice is yours.
So I’m going to pull up some questions here. We’re almost at a time. But let’s see, what do we have here? “Regarding your board should not be making strategic decisions. Your board should not be setting the strategic decision. What if you don’t have paid staff or a volunteer ED?”
Great question. I think I may have brought this up. So if your board is the staff, but they’re unpaid, right? Then that’s fine. You do need to make decisions because you are the leadership staff. But you don’t want to stay there long. Basically, as long as your board is being the staff, you don’t have good oversight. And so you don’t have great governance.
Also, as long as your board is the staff, you’re kind of going to reach a cap about how high you can scale too. And if you’ve reached that cap and you want to go further, you have to transition to what I call, and with no judgment, a professionally run organization. Meaning that you have paid staff, and now you have this separation between board and staff, and you have the ability to provide oversight and separate it from decision-making. I hope that helps.
Nancy asks, “If the board is not responsible for making strategic decisions, who is the owner of the strategic plan?”
So it’s a really good question. So often, you know, it’s one role to create the strategy, right? Somebody has to make sure that the goals are the right goals. That’s a great outcome for somebody’s job description to own. Whether or not the plan is being executed on, whether or not those plans are happening is another great role that could be owned in a job description, but not necessarily by the same person.
So, you know, again, as soon as you start breaking things down, you get used to breaking things down. So one person can own, do we have the right goals? And another person can own, are we executing the plan, are we following a process to achieve that plan?
You know, there’s two parts to owning the plan. You know, do we have the best one and are we following it? And often kind of, you know . . . In the Impact Method, we go way deeper on changing up the way we think about roles and what they are.
But kind of the short answer in the traditional paradigm is often the executive director is in a good position to make the final call on whether or not we have the right goals.
And somebody else more like an operations person is a better person to say, “Are we following our plan and do we have the right speed for our plan, right?” So the executive director might say, if they’re a visionary type, “We need to build this building.”
And another person, more of an operations type, will say, “Great, but not now because we’re not ready to build a building.” Right? Or, “We don’t have any money.” Or, “Not only have we never done a capital campaign, but we don’t even have a fundraising department.” So it’s like the where and the when, it’s really great if we can separate those two. Nancy, I hope that helps.
Ronald ask, oh, “Does the board have to approve the start plan?”
This is in the chat. I love this follow-up.
So if you want to stay slow, wait for the board to approve the start plan. But let me ask you this, who’s more qualified to know if the plan is really good and ready to be started? The team, the staff, or the board? Who’s more qualified to know that? I’m guessing it’s not the board. How are they supposed to know?
So let’s not give them a decision that the staff is better qualified to make. So, no, I don’t believe boards should be approving plans unless there is a history of bad plans, and there is good reason to put on that emergency brake and slow down.
So Ronald asks, “If boards should not be making decisions, how do members of the executive team convince their board to shift this model?”
That is hard if your board members are primarily there because they are looking for power and influence, which unfortunately, happens. So if you have that, it may take some serious time to put in place slow moves to have some board turnover.
If you, though, have a board who’s ready to hear some training about, you know, what does it really mean to provide great oversight, and what are they really reliable for, and who is the best person to make the decision logically? It shouldn’t be too hard to bring them to the conclusion that it makes sense to let go.
Another approach is just if you . . . Most of my clients, their boards are like, “I don’t know, maybe.” But they don’t have any better ideas. The executive director and the team start doing the process, the boards are so thrilled with the results that they’re like, “Awesome, now we have full transparency with what’s going on. The plan is even better than we could have made ourselves. We’re confident in it.
And we didn’t have to do all that extra work that we weren’t sure we had time to do anyway and were scared of doing.” So usually they are thrilled. And as soon as they see the success happening, that they get to say they’re a part of and feel confident that those were the best decisions, they are more than happy to let go.
Patty asks . . . Okay, we have couple of more.
Steven, are we okay to go just a little more on these final questions?
Steven: Yeah. Why don’t we do a couple more, and I can send you the ones we don’t get to if you want to follow up later. Okay?
Sarah: Patty asks, “If the staff makes a strategic plan, how do you get that so-called board buy in?”
You know, I think, like I just, said boards buy in when they see the results happening. But the end of the day, you don’t . . . Actually, as long as your board isn’t putting on the brakes, right? That’s a different situation. But your board, whether or not they buy in, won’t probably affect your ability to achieve that plan, because it’s usually the staff doing the work.
So if you make a plan, remember what this is, in this new model, we’re redoing the plan every two months. We’re refining it, right? So it’s not like something’s now set in stone for 5 years or 10 years, right?
Usually, I encourage the transition process, I say, “Boards, hold on a moment, let your team come to you with something and start showing you it’s working before you get too worried about it.”
Staff goes in, they make their first version of the plan, their second version of the plan, they start seeing huge results really quickly, and the boards are like, “Yay, results, we love it.” We’ve got buy in, right? So sometimes the proof of the pudding is in the tasting, make the pudding, let your board taste it, and you’ll get your buy in.
Anonymous asks, where . . . Oh, I think we answered that.
Programs. I just don’t think we have time to go into the nitty-gritty of programs other than to say that one, growing and scaling your programs should be in your strategy.
And two, there’s a critical function that a lot of organizations are missing. Like in their org chart, where one, there’s a set of people who need to be responsible for ensuring that programs are carried out according to their design.
And there’s another person who really needs, or another role that needs to be accountable for whether or not you have the right programs, or your programs are performing up to the standards that you would like them to be performing. So do we have the right programs, and are our programs running according to plan? So it’s part of your MO, and it’s part of your strategy.
Ray Anne says, “This is very helpful. If we wanted to work with you more on the Impact Method with our organization, what price point are we looking at? We’re a small nonprofit.”
Probably as a smaller nonprofit, I have a group program called Thrive. The first step would be to just apply to see if you’re qualified, and we’ll go over pricing and everything you’d want to know.
So if you go to pivotground.com/application, you can apply. It’s not a long application, but we want to get a sense of if you’re a good fit for that program, because small comes in many sizes with nonprofits. So we’ll make sure we give you a good answer for that.
Toby says, “How do you break down the projects in execution? You mentioned projects can be done in two weeks.”
I would love to elaborate. So you have your execution goal, and then you plan out the project.
So one of the transition things that happens in the Impact Method is teams learn to design projects and break them down into two-week pieces. And that process of thinking through what really needs to be done and how can we kind of lump that into a smaller chunk makes a huge difference.
So I was actually talking to a client earlier today, who’s actually transitioning to use Bloomerang. And we were actually going through this process of what does the group of projects look like to move from their old tech stack, the tools they were using, into their more streamlined tech stack, which primarily includes Bloomerang and a smaller set of other tools?
And so you might be tempted to say, “Oh, the project is, you know, switch to Bloomerang?” Well, that’s a big project, right? So one project might be set up Bloomerang with our current information, another project might be, you know, we move our emails from one platform to our new platform, reconnect tools, right?
So there’s actually sub-projects within there. And that process of learning as a group to really break things down is so revealing and so empowering for teams.
It’s also powerful to realize part of the reason why you feel overwhelmed is you’re doing an incredible amount of work. And when all this stuff starts to get written down in a not very time-consuming way, you recognize how much is on your plate. It’s easy for boards to see how much is on your plate. And it’s really exciting how you can start controlling what the demands are on your time.
Last question, “Is the board allowed to know the full amount of the donated money?”
Sounds like you’re having a very specific question with your board. I think I am a fan of full-financial transparency. I’m even a fan, it’s not for everybody, of open bookkeeping management, where the staff knows where all the expenses are going to.
However, board members, I think . . . You know, they should understand the finances of the organization, what makes which things work. Do they need to know who is donating which amounts? Probably not necessarily, right?
One, they’re not making decisions. Maybe there’s a good reason for them to know, but they should certainly . . . It’s for anybody who is thinking about whether or not your organization is run well, they need to know how much money does it cost? How much money are you bringing in? How much money does it cost to bring in that money? And which of your expenses are revenue generating expenses?
Which of your expenses are impact generating expenses? Which are both? And which are none? Very few should be none, but you might have stuff like insurance, right? It’s not impact generating, it’s not revenue generating, but it is required.
So, Dominic, sounds like if you have a specific situation you want to run by me, you’re welcome to email me sarah@pivotground.com, with an H. Sarah with an H. And I think we’re done.
Steven: Dang, you got to all of them. That was awesome, Sarah.
Sarah: Woo hoo.
Steven: Nice job. Great pres., great Q&A. Thanks so much for doing this. It was awesome to learn from you again after your last Bloomerang webinar. So thanks for doing this. This was fun.
Sarah: Yeah, my pleasure. You know, as I said in the beginning, the topic of running your whole organization and how to optimize it is a big topic. If there’s something you want to know more on or if you want to learn how to implement all the pieces, you want them all done for you, you know, get in touch, fill out an app application. Because it is all laid out.
If you’re like, “I don’t want to reinvent the wheel,” I’d be happy to help you. Or if you just want to know more about a piece, I’m happy for that as well.
Steven: Yeah, do reach out to Sarah. She’s got an awesome online community herself. Grab that cheat sheet. I’ll include that in the email with the recording and the slides just in case you didn’t grab that link in the chat.
And thanks all of you for hanging out for an hour or so. It was good to have a full room. I know it’s a busy time of year. We’re taking next week off for the Thanksgiving holiday here in the States. I hope you don’t mind me taking a week off.
But we’re back in two weeks with my pals Harvey and Andy. They’re going to talk about donor surveys, asking donors questions. It’s going to be a really fun session there. An important topic that I don’t think gets enough attention. But Harvey and Andy are great. Might get a little ruckus with those two, from past experience with them. But it’ll definitely be fun and engaging.
So hopefully, you can join us. You’ll get an invite to that if you are here, don’t worry.
But we got a lot of other sessions listed on our webinar page as well that you can mosey on over to and check out even on into next year already. I can hardly believe it.
So we’ll call it a day there. Like I said, look for an email from me with all of the resources from today. And hopefully, we’ll see you again in a couple weeks. So have a good holiday week next week if you are celebrating.
I know Hanukkah is coming up too, so hopefully if you are celebrating, you have a really great next couple of weeks. And we’ll see you again in December.
So have a good rest of your Thursday. Have a safe weekend. Stay healthy, stay warm, and we’ll talk to you again soon. Bye now.
Sarah: Bye, everyone.
Steven: See you.
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