From Transactional to Transformational: Rethinking Funder–Nonprofit Relationships

Stephen Minix

Stephen Minix is a dynamic speaker, thought facilitator, and connector who helps audiences reimagine what true collaboration looks like in the impact space. A former educator and basketball coach in Watts, he brings the energy of the gym and the heart of the classroom to every stage and convening. As Vice President of Community at UpMetrics, Stephen partners with funders and nonprofits to turn data into meaning, dismantle harmful power dynamics, and amplify stories that matter. Known for creating spaces where people show up authentically, he convenes conversations that move beyond performance into presence. Stephen also serves on the boards of A Reason To Survive, Positive Coaching Alliance San Diego, and MENTOR California, where he is Board Chair. Living in San Diego with his wife, three daughters, and dog Malibu, Stephen embodies perpetual positivity and a belief that impact grows strongest in community.

More about Stephen Minix and UpMetrics at https://upmetrics.com

The Interview Summary

The Interview Transcript

Hugh Ballou
Welcome. Here we are again. It’s Tuesday and it’s the Nonprofit Exchange. This is where we bring your conversations with leaders who are transforming the nonprofit sector. We bring it to you. You don’t have to go do it. It’s right here. Today’s topic is especially important for every nonprofit leader, board member, and Funder. The title that my guest has chosen today is From Transactional to Transformational, Rethinking Funder Nonprofit Relationships. I got to tell you, I’m real happy about this topic because it’s a big one. Our guest today is Stephen Minix from Upmetrics. is part of a movement that is helping nonprofits and funders move beyond compliance-based reporting toward deeper data-informed partnerships that drive real impact. Upmetrix works with nonprofits, grantmakers, and impact investors to define impact strategy, collect and analyze meaningful data, and tell compelling stories that inspire funding and change. Stephen, welcome to the show. Let’s talk about this transactional stuff. How would you describe the typical relationship between funders and nonprofits?

Stephen Minix
Thanks for having me, Hugh. I appreciate it. I’m glad to be here. Transaction is what it is, right? Someone gives somebody something and expects something back oftentimes. You pay for something at a store, they give you the product, things like that. Transaction can be very basic, but I think if you put it in a bucket, tie it to to funders and non-profits per se, it’s mostly compliance-driven, right? Non-profits are reporting to a funder some data to validate why the funder gave them some money or some resource. The funder is looking for data to come back and say perfectly, how did it work? Were you successful in the form of an annual report or some kind of oftentimes just mid-year reporting, end-of-year reporting? Did you do what you say you were going to do, you know, instead of what are we learning right and I’m old high school PE teacher and so for me and a basketball coach and a baseball coach for me learning is a part of the journey learning isn’t a direct J curve to success. Learning has pivots, curves. What are we seeing? Why? You have to be okay and available. And I think in the historical context of relationship as it pertains to funders and nonprofits, it’s largely gated in transaction and data reports. And that’s it. And what we’re really trying to do is try to combat that with the idea that You need relationships and information to be able to do something transformational. You need to access to the right people and you need access to the right information. And with that, then you can build towards potentially transformational partnerships, impact, et cetera, et cetera. But getting off the transaction and living in the partnership is kind of where we should be going.

Hugh Ballou
So we teach SynerVision. By the way, SynerVision is the contraction of Synergy and Vision, where we build synergy with our teams because we’re very clear on a powerful vision. And obviously, that’s you, too. You have this clear vision. So we teach underneath leadership, underneath communications, and certainly underneath funding is relationships. So due to the contrast, you talked about transformational versus transactional. Highlight that for a minute, please.

Stephen Minix
Yeah, well, I mean, transactional, you end up living in the kind of performative data. Right? How many did you serve? What did you serve them with? And I don’t know if that’s necessarily something that people really get out of bed for. It’s like, oh, we gave out six more meals. Or do you care about young people being fed and having access to quality food? And so when you only live in a report or a binary spreadsheet that has objective data only, you’re not tying into that emotional side of it that a lot of people in impact, service work, et cetera, really are aligning to. Not to say that you don’t need objective data to make sure math’s out, but you got to have both the head and the heart, the objective and the subjective, right, of information. And so when you think about transactional relationships, I can turn in an annual report to you at the end of the year, it says I’m pretty and smart and wonderful and I cured all the problems, and then that does what? Is that fair? Is that accurate? Probably not. It’s a static report that sits on someone’s desk, doesn’t get leveraged. It doesn’t get looked at again besides you turned it in, check the box. When you start to think about transformational, well, that means you’re in the canoe with me. right? You care, you’re my, me as a nonprofit lead going and taking my experience and my social enterprise and my team that’s designed to do a specific thing. Maybe it’s workforce development for young people in Los Angeles, right? We’re designed to do that. We have the lived experience. We have the expertise. We have the plan. We’ve pitched you as the funder, our plan. This is what we’re trying to do. And then hopefully you buy into it and see the value of this plan rooted in data rooted in sound logic curriculum, whichever way it needs to be explained. And then you see that not as let’s cut a check and fund it and stay out of the way. But actually what happens if we learned with that nonprofit along the way, and you look at quarterly engagements as more like an opportunity to see what’s really working or other ways that I, as a funder can help amplify your work or provide a smooth pavement in front of you. It’s not just checks taken in and service done, right? You need to actually be able to build in time for folks to talk about what it is they’re learning with their work. to inform the funder so the funder can be better situated to understand that work and how their resources largely capital, but also influence talent ties testimony treasure all these things that go into the five T’s of philanthropy, I only gave you four, but the point being. That is their secret sauce. Well, the nonprofit has their secret sauce of that sweat equity and live experience. How do you put them together? Well, you got to create pace for them to talk about it, not just report on it. And that’s part of the work that we drive it up is try to create collaborative space for those folks to be in mixed company together, not in just report. Right. And that’s just a it’s a very, very high level version of it. But when that starts to happen, you start to know you have a teammate. And when you have teammates, you invest in the project and the partnership more than if you have a person doing something for you that’s going to bring you information back. And that’s kind of what I see a lot of.

Hugh Ballou
I love it. To our audience, there’s a lot of data you just got. And don’t fret if you didn’t get it all down, go to the non-profit exchange and look for this episode from transactional to transformational. It’s rethinking the relationship between non-profit funder. You’ll find the transcript for all these great things. So Steven, I’m a non-private leader. We all have hangups. You know, we just, uh, we we’re running a, uh, for, for, Not a for-profit, but a for-purpose business, really. And there’s some business rubrics. However, there’s a lot of nuances that are very different. And you talked about data a little bit. So, you know, there’s three authors that talk about data. Edward de Bono, Thinking Skills, Data is Important for Decisions. Thomas Sowell talks about having accurate data. We tend to work on our assumptions, not our data. And then this is a tribute to Einstein, but I don’t know who did it. You know, not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted. So what do we measure and why is it important to a funder?

Stephen Minix
Yeah, I think that’s the real conundrum folks trying to solve, right? I used to have a coach that would talk about Or I heard a data person talk about, if it’s not measured, it doesn’t matter. And I said, well, have you ever measured a handshake? Folks were like, whoa, wait a second. I’m like, yeah, there’s some data in that. There’s that wet fish handshake that some people give you that you’re like, that’s kind of weird. That’s not really. Maybe that person isn’t about what they say they’re about. Or you get that really firm handshake where maybe they’re trying to teach you something. There’s soft data in that handshake that’s omnipresent in that quick relationship, right? And so, but I’m not measuring it. I’m not writing it down and looking at it over time to see if that wet fish handshake merges into a firm handshake with eye contact. That’s not so. So I do try to peel back that layer where folks and say, we don’t need to measure everything, but there is data in everything. Right. And so some of it you got to be aware of. And so the big thing for me is The people that should be designing what data should be looked at relative to the social enterprise, to your nonprofit, are the nonprofit leaders themselves of that organization and the stakeholders that they serve, not the funder. Because the funder doesn’t live in that work. The funder cares about that work. That might be part of their funding strategy, is to fund workforce development. programs in Los Angeles, to stay with the example I gave earlier. But they’re not designed to do that. They’re designed to fund it. So the person closest to the pain should be closest to the progress. And what does success look like? And by working with nonprofits to help them define impact framework strategy that says, who do you serve? What do you serve them with? What’s the quality of that service? Is anybody better off? And how does that relate to the greater community? What that does is help that nonprofit organize their focus, their work, their theories of change, et cetera, into logic over time. They can see it. They can what data they’re looking at qualitatively and quantitatively. So then when they go talk to a funder about why they should invest in this partnership. It’s rooted in sound data that says this is what we care about to do. This is how we look at whether we’re effective at it. This is what we use with the information. This is how we make sure it is relative to the community that we’re lucky enough to serve. right, not what we think or what we assume or what we hope. And then when you tie that to data strategy over time, and now you’re looking at the information coming in, you’re able to course correct or amplify areas of success or pull back and peel back that layer of the onion more and say, there’s something here I want to examine because we have the data to look at it. right, versus, I think we should do this, maybe we should do that. And that, to me, is a core at flipping this dynamic into from transaction to transformation is really get buttoned up on your own operations of nonprofit leader, so that you can speak with base in your voice about exactly what you’re doing, why you’re doing it. And when you do change, you can speak to that too, because you are the expert of that work in concert with your team that you’ve organized to do that work at your social enterprise.

Hugh Ballou
So I’m new at working with nonprofits. I’ve only been doing it 35 years. But in that time, people struggle with this meaningful data. And I think, in my humble assessment, the most common problem with any leaders, multinational corporations or community charities, is overfunctioning. We think we have to do it all. So you’re obviously an expert at this. So I want to encourage people to get out of doing it all. Find somebody who knows this stuff because it’ll make you money. We struggle with the money part. So why is it hard for us to come up with these meaningful measurements? Because I think money listens for it. It looks for impact. It has ears. It listens for impact.

Stephen Minix
Sure, I think, look, both nonprofits, they’re not lacking passion, they lack capacity and clarity, right? And it’s not because their skills aren’t there, it’s because they have 15 things to do in a day and they have time to do seven of them. And so what you’re speaking about of trying to find partners to help you with this, the phrase I use is don’t play hero ball. It’s like playing basketball, a team basketball game by yourself. One person versus five. You might have some success, but you’re not gonna have nearly as much success if you had four more people on that team with you in concert working together. And so like a lot of the data stuff, there’s no shared definition of success. Right? We don’t have a clear vision on what success is for what we’re doing. The data is all over the place. Marketing has it. The volunteer program coordinator has some of it. The parent coordinator. It’s all over the place. It’s siloed. And reporting feels like work. And most nonprofits know that funders aren’t taking that reporting and learning from it. So it’s this performative exercise. then you’re not putting into it the effort to get what you want out of it because you know it’s not being resonant. It’s like when you send out a newsletter and no one clicks on it and reads it. You’re like, well, do I want to write the next newsletter? Yeah, you should write the next newsletter. Your problem isn’t the newsletter. Your problem is getting people to read it. It’s a different problem. But if you can start to bifurcate your problems or your opportunities and say like, well, data is my issue. It’s not my inability to understand data. It’s a mess. My pantry is a mess. I got data everywhere. I don’t know what to make of it. So you need some organization. Great. Well, let’s start with what are you trying to do? Then we get back into this logical framework of who do you serve? What do you serve them with? How do you know what success looks like? And then you can back into your data strategy. So it’s not about teaching you something that you can’t do. When I came to this company as one of the first hires 10 years ago, I left education. We didn’t have P&L sheets in education. You’re not talking profit and loss. But when I got into this company, you start to look at P&Ls. I’m a sharp tack. I got a few college degrees. I can read and write a little bit. I like my academic aptitude. That said, if I’m not aware of the issue or the language or what we’re focused on, then I can also be very put back and like on my back foot and not ready to participate. That’s just like a nonprofit leader going into some data exercises because they don’t have all of the information the way they want. And I’m speaking in generalities, not in alls. So so those listening, please know that if you’re the one that has it all organized, I’m not talking to you. But most of us struggle to make sure the organization is commiserate with what the effort is that we want to put out there when it comes to things like data. Now, what they’ll over index on is the event or the out in front of partners and being with people because that’s what they aim to this work. But if you can streamline some of the sausage making of the data collection, data reporting, advanced analytics, doing some of these things that maybe were thought to be way for these fancy places, but actually weaponizing for you, give you practical tools, give you a support system and help you do it over time. Well, now more people are like, well, I can, I might be into that. I didn’t know I was a data person. Well, everybody’s a data person in some way, just a matter of if you’ve been asked to articulate it or not, right? Because we got it. We got to use information to move people. And that’s kind of what we’re trying to help people do.

Hugh Ballou
You’ve used the words transformational, transactional, and partnerships. So let’s pull those together. So with corporate partnerships, sponsorships, they want to measure data, because they want to measure eyeballs. Grant funders want to measure data, because they’ve given you money for specific outcomes. So what’s the transformational piece of corporate partnerships? Let’s take that, Chan. How does that look like, and why is that important?

Stephen Minix
Yeah, you got to understand what your partner wants, right? There’s a there’s some like, what is the objective of the corporate partner? So when we talk about partnership, if there’s if their goal is to grow the eyeballs on something they’re doing, it’s not just to grow eyeballs, right? It’s to grow eyeballs, probably to get into relationship, whether that’s get new clients, get new buyers, get new people that believe in the brand, whatever the case may be. But that’s what the corporate partner wants. But what do you want? What do you want? And if you can’t articulate what you want, you’re doomed to mission drift and just chase whatever’s out there because it’s guised in money or a grant or funding. But oftentimes that mission drift happens because you don’t truly know what it is that you want. So if what you’re looking for is funding, great. Then how do you talk to your corporate partner about funding that’s available from them that fits in who you are, what you do and what you what you’re purporting to do moving forward? because that kind of calibration allows us to immediately look like two Lego pieces. If we don’t do that, what ends up happening is, ooh, I think this partner will give us some funding, but we just got to do, this is a real example, vision screening and get all of our kids to wear glasses at this event. I’ve been a part of a group that tried to do that to get an additional $50,000 in funding from a local healthcare provider. The problem is the administration of that kind of got in the way of all of what they were trying to do, which was help more young people play sports, get access to sports. Could you have done it a different way? Sure. But the messaging and the connection up front wasn’t there. So it kind of felt like a Frankenstein experience. So whenever you’re working with a corporate partner, they have 70,000 foot, 100,000 foot views on what they’re trying to do. they’re oftentimes not in the community on the ground. You as a nonprofit are. You have that lived experience here, they have that corporate experience, now the challenge is the leadership to align. Clarity, data, what are you trying to do, goes back to that impact framework I was talking about. How do you then help use that information to get that relationship started up top, so that when you do whatever partnership you want, you know it’s rooted in sound foundational partnership. And you’re not worried about the transaction changing or the mission changing because you have something to start with. So I think that’s one way. But also, like, getting off of, like, the idea of outputs and starting to get to outcomes. What are we trying to see long-term? And as a nonprofit or as a funder, we shouldn’t be looking at how many backpacks we gave out. We should be looking at, are young people ready to go to school? Right? Getting off of these like feel good vanity metrics of I gave out 700 corporate backpacks last Thursday. Thanks. Did the community need those? Did they? Because some of this stuff is kind of in tech, we talk about eating your own dog food, right? You got to eat your own dog food. Well, if a funder is asking a nonprofit to understand who they serve, why they serve and what’s the effectiveness of that, well, then they should also be kind of pulling the thumb and looking at themselves and saying, what am I funding? And why am I funding it? And is it tied to our logic models and what we care about? And is this getting us closer to what we said our goals were? Because that exercise isn’t good for them, and not good for for me, it’s good for both, because that’s where you get to partnership.

Hugh Ballou
A couple more quick questions. I want to go show people your website. So your expertise is in the metrics, the data. So it’s not just a compliance piece. It’s a learning piece. Would you talk about that, please?

Stephen Minix
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if learning is your goal, then it’s going to be messy along the way. But like, I’ll give a perfect example. I have three daughters. I have a 13-year-old, 11-year-old, and a six-year-old. The six-year-old, I’m not waiting until June when school is out to determine if she can read. We’re not. The teachers are helping her. We’re helping her. We read to each other at night. We check in along the way. We go to progress meetings with the teachers and these things along the way. I’m not waiting for the end of the year for an annual report. I’m doing checking along the way. So I’m using data along the way in concert with my wife to help my kid. Well, think about that for teams. Teams need to use data internally a lot of different ways, right? Is it for strategy? Is it for reports for validating? The point is, if we just collect data as an exercise in amassing more information, and we throw it in this big cabinet we have back here called a server, and it just sits there. Well, it doesn’t, it’s not doing anything except extracting from people. Because when you take data from surveys, and all these other things, and you ask people how they feel, and then you don’t do anything with it, eventually people lose the belief in responding to those inputs, those requests. And so you have to show people that if learning is my goal, that I’m taking in information, and here’s what I’m learning. So a lot of times in nonprofit and funder, the data goes one way, it goes to the funder only, and then it never comes back. Funders can do a better job of saying, look at what we’ve learned from our partners. And this is how it’s now informing our strategies moving forward. That hat in hand approach, humble leadership goes a long way in telling those partners like, what you’re bringing to the table is awesome, and it’s valuable, and it’s important, and we’re learning from it, and this is what we’re learning. Very rarely do foundations do that in a way that feels partnership. They’ll likely do that in a state of the affairs presentation or video that’s polished and buttoned up and doesn’t have community partners there, and it’s really controlled. But that’s not partnership either, right? If we really say we’re learning, then I have to be able to come to you, Hugh, and say, here’s what I was trying to do. Here’s the time I spent doing it. Here’s where I’m at now. Here’s what I think of that. What about you? And then we talk. And those spaces need to be created. And that’s kind of what we’re trying to do with a lot of our collaborative cohort, our capacity building cohort space is that, is pulling people together and saying, well, what are we seeing? What are you seeing? Ooh, what do we want to see? And then trying to go, I’m trying to make it simple as possible because it is. But also for the sake of this conversation, I want to keep it very high level.

Hugh Ballou
So let’s tell people where they can find your website. What’s your link?

Stephen Minix
There it’s www.upmetrics.com. U-P-M-E-T-R-I-C-S dot com.

Hugh Ballou
And what will people find when they get there?

Stephen Minix
Yeah, you’ll see some stuff. You’ll see some cool things. So we are a software as a service technology. We have our consultative team, our capacity building team. But what you’re seeing up here, one thing I want you to go to is who we serve. If you don’t mind going to that second toggle, yes. And go over to nonprofits, the bottom left. Yep, go down there. And what I want folks to see here is we’re trying to do specifically at UP is make sure that whether you’re a nonprofit, whether you’re an impact investor, whether you’re a foundation, there’s a route for you here at UP because we’re not working with one to fix the other. We think this is an ecosystem issue. So if you go up a little bit, you can see easily reach out to the team and get a demo, all that stuff. But the part that I actually really want you to see is if you go into, you can get a look at the type of nonprofits we work with, how we work with people. You’ll start to see some videos. You should see some video to talk about how we really spend time with folks. There’s a lot of toolkits, things in here. We don’t want to keep this information. But Hugh, if you don’t do me a favor, go up real quick. I want you to specifically go to the community section. If you go to about, yep, right there, resources, our community. And so what I lead at Upmetrics, I’m the vice president of community. And this is what you want you to see is we think if folks are connecting, they start to collaborate and they can be inspired to move. But we create the space, right? We want people to actually understand that you don’t you can’t hope people just magically bump into each other and work together. You got to create that space. And so if you go down just a little bit more, or it’s okay, you took it out, no problem. But one of the things you’ll see in those videos is you’ll see examples of this in action. So when I talk about funders and nonprofits in the same room, when I talk about impact frameworks, when I talk about deconstructing who you are and what you’re trying to do, you’ll see some examples of that work product in there in video with real partners. One of the groups that you’ll see featured is a group of about 30 nonprofits in Detroit based on an investment with the Balmer Group, a partnership with the Balmer Group, where we are working with those 30 nonprofits over three years. That’s an intense, deep engagement, but what you see in those videos is a representation of that. And so what I want people to take away from that is you can’t The space to collaborate also has to be funded, right? You can’t just hope nonprofits just stumble into opportunities. Conferences cost money. Networking costs money. Everything kind of costs. And so if we start to understand that when nonprofits want to grow their work and grow who they’re doing this work with and grow their relationships, why not create that space? That’s part of the fun that we do it up. is do that. And you’ll see on that website a lot of different videos that you can click on and really see it. Way more about show than tell.

Hugh Ballou
There’s a lot there. And there’s a lot more we can talk about. I think we should do part two of this interview and talk about capacity building and why both funders and nonprofits should be aware of that. So we have used our 25 minutes really well. There’s a lot of good stuff. I would encourage people to go to this website because there’s so much to learn here. And Stephen is hitting at the heart of where we are stuck. That’s we. I’m a non-profit leader. We are stuck. And even if you don’t think you’re stuck, there’s probably a lot more opportunity than you realize. Stephen, what’s a parting wish that you want to give people or tip our challenge you want to leave people with today?

Stephen Minix
I’ll always leave my personal one, which is perpetual positivity pays off. You gotta believe it’s so. But even more so than that, you gotta create some spaces where folks can actually learn together in time. Because impact does not come from perfect plans. It comes from honest learning. And if you’re honestly learning together, and you’re creating thoughtful relationships, the realities in front of you are truly endless.

Hugh Ballou
That’s worth the whole interview right there. Stephen Minix, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom as our guest today on the Nonprofit Exchange.

Stephen Minix
Good to be here. Thanks for having me.