The Future of Digital Fundraising and How to Get Ahead of the Curve

Interview with Sarah Olivieri

Sarah Olivieri is a nonprofit strategist with a passion for helping organizations thrive in the digital age. The founder of PivotGround, Sarah helps human-service nonprofits increase capacity, deliver better programming, attract more funding, and make the world a better place. She is the creator of the Impact Method™ – a business framework for nonprofits designed to help nonprofits thrive in the digital age. She has over 15 years of nonprofit leadership. Sarah co-founded the Open Center for Autism and was the executive director of the Helping Children of War Foundation. She is also a published author whom co-wrote Lesson Planning a la Carte: Integrated Planning for Students with Special Needs.

For more about Sarah’s work, go to https://pivotground.com

 

Read the Interview

Hugh Ballou: Hey folks, it’s Hugh Ballou on another edition of The Nonprofit Exchange. We’re pushing six years with great interviews with really good people. Everybody has a piece of the puzzle. People have been working in this sector from different disciplines, and I learn something every week. I have been doing this for 32 years, helping leaders put their strategy together, put one foot in front of the other, to get their success pathway defined and implemented.

Sarah Olivieri is our guest today. Love that name. Sarah’s topic is a fascinating topic. I want to make sure I get it right. It’s called “The Future of Digital Fundraising and How to Get Ahead of the Curve.” Sarah, welcome to The Nonprofit Exchange. Please tell people a little bit about you and why do you have passion for this topic?

Sarah Olivieri: Sure. I used to be a nonprofit executive director. Probably it’s my mom’s fault. She took over the small independent school that I had gone to when it was in need of help just as I was transitioning out. I got asked to organize a nonprofit conference for a school who worked with kids on the spectrum. I loved organizing their conference. They quickly asked me to become their program director. In that process, I discovered that their financials were messed up. My mom, who had picked up a lot of things on the fly, said, “You can learn bookkeeping. It’s no big deal.” I took home the books and learned QuickBooks over the weekend. Before I knew it, I was leading both people and money. In a nonprofit world, that puts you right into top leadership positions really fast. I had the pleasure of being a program director, a deputy director, an executive director. I founded a nonprofit that was a school, and I was once the first but not founding executive director of a foundation, which was interesting to see things from the other side. That was my background.

Until the economy crashed. I started leaning on a side skill I had picked up in this nonprofit work, which was building websites and doing digital marketing. I enjoyed that. I made that my business. As I got really serious about building a marketing agency, I started focusing on picking a niche, and I focused on nonprofits, of course. As soon as I did that, I realized there was still so much work that needed to be done in how nonprofits operate because they weren’t able to take advantage of really great digital marketing because they weren’t able to move fast enough. They weren’t able to make decisions fast enough. They weren’t able to grow in the way they would need to if they really had great marketing added to their repertoire of what they were doing. That’s what led me to what I’m doing now and what led me to create The Impact Method, which I can talk a little bit about and how I came to develop that.

But that is why I’m here. It’s really been a love of nonprofits, and I always wanted to help the nonprofits I worked in and scale what they were doing so they could do more without necessarily working harder. Now I get to do that with many nonprofits.

Hugh: I got a lot of questions. Let’s start with one. Your website and your company is called PivotGround. Give us some background on that.

Sarah: Sure. When it came time to name it, I didn’t want to name it after myself. I really wanted to create a name that represented the space I was creating. I felt like I wanted PivotGround to be a place where nonprofits could come, really understand where they are, and identify where am I going from here, where am I going to turn to and pivot to? I came up with the word Pivot first. Somebody said to me, “Sarah, look to the sky,” thinking about nature, and the word “ground” came to me. People have always felt that working with me feels very grounding. I am known for taking things that are very dynamic and complex and making them simple enough to manage.

Hugh: Pivot is a fascinating word. It came out of my mouth this very morning. I was with a brilliant family who does a family nonprofit project. They are funding water projects with origami. It’s brilliant. She said, “I wish we could scale this more because we are folding as much as we can.” I went by the house, and there were four ladies folding. I said, “It’s time to pivot. You’re the founder. It’s time to pivot into being the leader so you can have other people do this marvelous work.” It’s hard for people to change their mindset.

Talk a little bit about digital age and digital marketing and digital fundraising. Why is Pivot Ground important for that paradigm? Define what you are talking about with digital marketing and how it relates to fundraising so we have a basis of understanding before we talk about it.

Sarah: Sure. I think the most important thing is that we are living in this digital world. What I mean by that is a world that is highly influenced by the powers of the Internet. What the Internet has allowed us to do or forced us to do, depending on how you look at it, is move much faster. The whole context of the world changes faster. Information is flowing faster than it used to. Ideas can take hold faster. Prototypes can be made faster. That really changes the way we need to operate. We need to be able to pivot. We need to be agile, if we are going to update the way we’re doing things in order to continue to have the result that we want. I think it’s important to imagine we need to be able to change the way we operate fast so that we can keep the outcome we’re trying to achieve consistent. We don’t want to become all chaotic. We don’t want to change our missions every 60 days or every three months, but we do in this day and age need to be able to change how we’re getting there and tweak that and sometimes do a sudden about-face change of the direction of how we’re doing it, not necessarily where we’re going. Just like your family who is doing origami, they don’t need to change their water-based mission; they just need to change how they’re getting there, find a new way to do that.

Hugh: They are selling origami, tens of thousands of them, to fund projects where people have no water. They are doing a successful job of it, but they have to scale it. We are in an Internet age that is fast. The word “fast” can be interpreted in many ways. Most of them will be wrong. Sometimes we try to do things too fast. We have the ability to connect with more people in a more succinct way. We don’t have to wait to get a piece of mail a week later or the cost of overnight FedEx. We can communicate with people instantly. It doesn’t mean we have to do everything fast, but we have the ability to connect in a rapid manner. Yes, we have the same outcome in mind, but the methodology, the pathway. Talk a little more about that and how we can embrace this instant communication. There are many people who ignore it, and some who respond to it.

Sarah: First, I’ll say you have a good point about speed. We want to be fast and in control. We do not want to be rushing or out of control in any way because that is beyond. That is too fast. That is ineffective.

Let me lay the history of communication out in 30 seconds. The first big scaled communication was the invention of the printing press. We’re going way back, pre-Internet. The printing press comes around, and now we are able to mass copy and distribute someone’s ideas, one person’s ideas goes into a book, and the book gets mass printed and distributed. That is the first major evolution of scaled communication. That is one-to-many communication. One person’s idea goes out in many copies of the book.

Then we had the first version of the Internet. It gave everybody, if they wanted, a printing press in their house. One-to-many communication. That is when we got the ability to send to a large email list. That was the first version of the Internet.

Maybe not everybody is aware of it, but we all have in our laps now the second version of the Internet that came out around 2006. It’s from that second version that the Internet became much more interactive and responsive. Chat tools, where people write back, or you are getting live data, and computers can start making decisions based on that data. That is when people started creating multiple versions of websites. It displays one way on a mobile device and another way on a desktop computer. Or you may have noticed years ago, Amazon didn’t show me the same things as it showed you. A Facebook wall didn’t show me the same things as it showed you. That is the second version of the Internet. It’s different in that instead of scaling the one-to-many communication, it has started to scale the one-to-one communication, that back-and-forth. We are squarely in that era now. That scaled one-to-one communication. But we are on the verge of a future era, which we can talk to. Does that make sense about the one to many versus the one-to-one scaling of communication?

Hugh: Yes, absolutely. That makes sense.

Sarah: We are now scaling even farther with artificial intelligence and the way that chatbots are going. We are beginning to scale what I call the none-to-many communication, which means the computers are actually beginning to communicate on our behalf. That is a new era that if you really want to be ahead of the curve, you need to be thinking about how you are going to scale your none-to-many communication.

Hugh: Wow. That hadn’t dawned on me. All that AI stuff is shifting this sector. At first glance, this all seems very overwhelming. Lots of options and tools and things to do. Already, I work with some people who have an idea. I want to start a nonprofit. Who do you know that can be on the board and help fund it? People think they don’t know anybody. Then you start doing the planning. You think of people. You look at all the steps you need to do to get this thing off the ground. People say, “I’m overwhelmed. There is a lot to do.” I say, “Okay. Let’s sequence it.” We do one thing at a time that builds to the next one. You talk about all this social media. That is one component. This digital communication is another component. There are so many facets to that in addition to how you find people, do meetings, raise money. Talk about how people can look at this and break it down into what’s manageable and not be overwhelmed by it.

Sarah: I actually love that you asked that question. I made a very small marketing course recently that deals with how you increase your marketing capacity. There are a bazillion and one tactics out there that will overwhelm you, and you will go nowhere. Or you will think none of them work for you. I have a few levels that you should think about where you are at in your own evolution for marketing.

The first one I call figuring out what you can do. It’s flexing the muscle. Pick any tactic. Pick posting on social media or writing a blog post or sending an email out to your list. It doesn’t really matter what. Just try something with your team, without hiring anybody. Even if it’s just you, figure out what you can do with some consistency, that brings you joy. What works for me? What works for my team? What are we capable of? That is the first thing you need to answer before you really worry about what works well for your audience. You need to know what you’re capable of. If you’re small and just starting out, you may only be capable of managing a single Facebook group. Or you may be capable of going live and doing a live recording like this. You might find you’re able to do that.

Once you have a sense of how much you can actually have on your plate right now and what kinds of activities you’re capable of and good at doing and what kinds of activities are not for you. For example, from all my marketing experience, I can’t consistently write a blog. Writing hurts me. I’m good at it, but it hurts. I resist. It’s not my path. It doesn’t matter how good blogging is in the world. It won’t work for me because I won’t do it. That’s just me. That’s how my brain operates. But I have other ways that do work for me, and I know what those are, so I can leverage those.

Once you know what you’re capable of doing, then you can do what I call figuring out what works for your audience. You want to know who you’re trying to reach and see if you can use one of the things that you’re capable of doing or tweak that a bit to reach the people you’re trying to reach. Maybe you found you can totally do Facebook, but your audience is really on LinkedIn. You can move your efforts over there. Maybe you don’t have such a social media crowd. Maybe your crowd is coming to physical meetings in person with you. It doesn’t have to be all digital. Or maybe email is your main thing. If you can’t do much, email should just be your main thing. If you need a cheat right now, email is still the most effective two-way communication tool by far. I highly encourage everybody if you’re feeling overwhelmed to start with mastering how to communicate effectively by email. Although I say email, but in-person and telephone conversations are always going to be above that as far as relevancy. Nothing beats an in-person conversation, and I don’t think anything ever will. Definitely hear that email marketing is great, but meeting in person is always better. You can’t scale a one-to-one in-person meeting.

Hugh: Absolutely. You’re limited by the amount of time. Go ahead.

Sarah: You’ve gone from what works for me to what works for the people I am trying to talk to. Once you figure out some things that consistently work for the people you are trying to talk to, then you want to scale those activities. Scaling might mean you start putting advertising dollars behind it, or you hire an agency or professional assistant to help you execute whatever it is that you know is working. But until you are really through that experimental phase, you’re not going to be putting a huge monetary investment. If you get stuck or do have some resources and you want to make that experimental phase go faster, you could hire a marketing agency. Specifically tell them you need to test and figure out a marketing strategy that is going to consistently work for you. Whether that’s fundraising—fundraising in marketing is just about finding people who are interested in what you’re offering and engaging them to the point where they will take action with you. If that means finding donors and engaging with them until they are ready to make a donation, and then another donation, that is marketing for fundraising. You might be doing marketing to fill your programs. You might also be doing marketing to increase your staff. People think about your reputation before they apply with you. All three areas need marketing, and you may have overlap between those three marketing efforts.

Hugh: What you have with the face-to-face meeting is relationship. This digital age, and you said email is the most effective interactive communication. How do you build relationship through that? We tend to say, “Hey, we need money,” and send out an email. How do you build relationship that will net in someone saying they want to respond to this?

Sarah: You want to keep everything in context for the medium. Email is a medium. Facebook is a medium. There are a few mediums within Facebook. Let’s take email as an example. You may have heard the days of the newsletter format are gone. That was Internet 1.0. Internet 2.0 is about meaningful content. People’s inboxes are flooded. You want to make your emails seem as close to a personal email. You are more likely to open an email that was personally from me for you than you are to open a newsletter that you send out. Whatever steps you can do to make your email, which is a mass email, seem like a personal one-to-one email, the better it is going to work.

There are a few levels at which you can do this. It could be as simple as stripping the formatting out and making it look like a plain email. Have your email tool start with “Hi” and the person’s first name. That’s a great step.

There are some more complicated steps you can do by only sending certain emails to people who you already know they are interested in that topic. The secret trick to doing that, to finding out what topics people are interested in, is you embed a link in the email rather than giving them the full story. Let’s say you have three news things about your nonprofit. You give a little summary, and that link to read more. Then you track, and your email tool will do this for you, who clicked the story about the homeless puppy, who clicked the story about the homeless veteran, and who clicked the story about the gala. You send everybody who clicked the story about the gala more information about the gala, everybody who clicked the information about the puppy more puppy-oriented information, and everybody who clicked about the homeless veteran more information about your homeless veteran programs. Does that mean you have to write 3x as many emails? Yes, it does. So work your way up. Only do what you can handle.

Hugh: That means you have a contact list and are working the list. You validated your list, and you are staying in touch with your list. How much is too much?

Sarah: I don’t think nonprofits have reached too much. There are a few versions of too much. I am receiving your emails. There might be too many emails, but there is not enough on Facebook. You can double-message. You can send the same information out on email and on Facebook. I might be interested reading about it on Facebook, but not on email. If people start not opening your emails, it’s probably too much. At that point, you have to decide, is it me, or is it them? Were they not the right fit after all? Am I glad they’re off my email list, and I’m not paying to market to them because they weren’t for me. Or is it too much? Usually though it’s not too much; it’s too boring, too uninteresting. You need to change what you are saying. If you are saying, “Oh, I did this, and I did that,” that’s great. But I’m a normal self-interested person. I want to hear about me when you send me an email. That’s okay. It’s totally natural and normal for humans to be self-interested. It’s harder and unnatural to send a message that’s not about you, but about the “you” you are sending the email to.

Hugh: That’s a key point. We all want to go on and on about us and what we’re doing. There is validation for donors of impact. We can tell people about the work that’s been accomplished. How do you bridge from we need to stay in touch with people, let them know we have been good stewards of their money, or we are going to be good stewards if they give us money? Here is the difference we are making in people’s lives. How do you take that message and translate it to- I’m sure it’s different for every organization. I use a service like MailChimp or Constant Contact. You can see who clicks on it and who doesn’t click on it, and who clicks on the links inside those emails. You know exactly who is opening your emails and who is not. The open rate is not all that good across the board, I don’t think.

Sarah: Yeah. And I think I like the work that NextAfter does. I think they’re really pushing the nonprofit industry to have open rates and success rates closer to what the for-profit industry does. When it comes to what is interesting for your donors, yes, you could say this is what we did with your money. That’s one thing.

I’m a really strong believer that the primary drive that donors have is they want an emotional experience. It’s like the same reason why we might take ourselves on a shopping spree, why we might eat certain foods, and why drugs are attractive to many people. We’re looking for an emotional high. For all of you who feel nervous or bad about asking people for money, I want you to think about how you are offering them probably the healthiest alternative to get that emotional high that you could possibly give somebody an opportunity for. Way better than eating food that is terrible for you or getting drunk. You have the chance for people to get an emotional high and make the world a better place while doing no harm to themselves. You have gold to give to people. It’s something people want and are seeking for every day. Think about how you can give them that emotional high in your emails. Take them on the journey with you. They’re contributing because they want to be part of your journey helping people. This is what we’ve accomplished. This is what we’re trying for. This is the hard problem that we’re facing that you could be helping us solve. All those kinds of messages. There is nothing wrong. You can be vulnerable. You can be strong, as long as you’re talking about how we’re able to do it together, and the world that you, the person who’s reading, is playing in that. You will be sending great messages.

Hugh: That’s really stimulating thinking for me. You can find out about Sarah’s work at PivotGround.com. The very first page, the home page, says, “Nonprofit strategic planning that works. Make impact with tools and processes that move your organization forward without the overwhelm caused by traditional strategic planning.” Speak to that for a minute. That’s fascinating.

Sarah: Sure. I really set out to find a way to help nonprofits really thrive. What I mean by thrive means you have to change the way you operate so that you can scale your impact and not be burned out. Scaling impact means doing more without significantly increasing your resources, as opposed to growing your impact, which means you’re making a bigger impact, but the work of it just increased proportionally with the impact you’re making. You just grow a bigger beast, and that leads to burnout. Burnout is inefficient.

The Impact Method is three core concepts that you need all three parts going together to create a synergy that really makes it work. Part of that is the way you do strategic planning is completely different from traditional strategic planning. In the Impact Method, you are able to develop your core strategic plan—we call it an impact strategy—in as few as three hours, as long as 30 days. By the time 30 days is up, you should be up and running.

You are going to revise that strategic plan every 60 days. You will no longer have a big planning cycle. You will no longer stop the world and do a big strategic plan. Maybe you do it; maybe you don’t. the secret to succeeding in the digital world is come up with an idea, and actually test it right away, and see if it works. That’s your most valuable data. We don’t have time to do a big data study and make a big plan and execute the plan over years because it will be obsolete before we start it. We no longer have a shortage of data. We can get more data than we can handle in the blink of an eye. Log into your Google Analytics account, and you will be overwhelmed immediately with all the data that you could possibly need. We need to do strategic planning frequently and regularly and be chipping away and modifying it and modifying it.

It’s that process of creating a plan that the plan itself has two of the three components. One is we need to have a system for consistently improving. That is where in the Impact Method, we have these regular meetings at two-week intervals and at 60-day intervals where we check on our strategic plan and we check on our action plan.

The second thing we need that the plan is involved with is a clear road map with what I am doing today, and how does that lead to my big goal, my mission? We have our mission at the center, our big goals, and it’s linked to our work plan for the next 60 days. Every work plan is broken down into the next two weeks. I always know today, I am working on this two-week plan, and I know that it connects to my biggest goals. Everything I am doing is the most important thing I can think of to do right now, and I’m not getting distracted by things that are not directly connected to my big goal. Those are the two things. I said there were three.

The third thing that you really need to thrive and to get this synergy going is a way of operating, a way of being organized as an organization that is efficient and happens to also be more enjoyable. I call it creating a trellis for your humans to organize around. So many nonprofits think that their biggest problem is lack of money, but I want to tell you that I haven’t met the nonprofit yet whose biggest problem is actually lack of money. It’s almost always how you have chosen to organize the people involved with your nonprofit. You haven’t been able to organize them in a highly efficient way. That is usually the biggest problem. Once you get that tended to, you have the capacity to do the fundraising that you really need.

Hugh: Spoken very well. You put that in a concise statement. A lot of people work without strategies. I have it all in my head. All we do is confuse all the volunteers because it’s in our head, not theirs. There is an interactive process of putting that track down. It’s like a musical score. I am a conductor. You have the musical score, and everybody has got their part. When you give the down beat, people know what to play.

Part of your strategy is the right tools. How do you find and utilize the right tools? The strategy tells you where you want to go and how to get there. Then there is the micro of which tool does what. I know we’re limited on time here, but highlight how we choose the right tools.

Sarah: That is a good question. I know a lot of nonprofits struggle with that. *Audio issue* Tools are becoming obsolete or breaking really fast. The trick is a couple of things. One is if you focus your whole team on the outcome they are each trying to achieve and give them the freedom to choose the tool or change the tool as needed to achieve the outcome, that will help you feel a little more nimble. Balancing that out, I have to say try to use as few tools as possible. It is very easy in this digital world to have a big suit, a mess of too many tools. One thing I think a lot of nonprofits are aware of is if you owned a campus of buildings, you would have a property manager of some sort. You would have that job of buildings and grounds. You probably own a campus of Internet property and tools. You probably didn’t put anybody in charge of managing them. In this world of the digital age, if you are using a campus worth of tools and digital properties, that needs to be managed. It is not just going to manage itself. You do need someone who is accountable for making sure that your digital resources are optimized and working as best as they can for everybody in your organization.

Hugh: What are some of your favorite tools?

Sarah: It really depends partly on personalities. I’ll tell you my personal test for a tool if I’m going to use it. First, pick the need, and then pick the tool that meets the needs. Don’t let the tool lead the show. Don’t pick a tool and try to do everything it can do. Figure out what you want done, and search for a tool that does the job for you. Then I download the trial or whatever it is. Without following any tutorials, I give myself 30-45 minutes to see if I can get going with the tool. If I can start to get going with the tool and feel like I can use it, I will consider it further. If I go down that path and am feeling overwhelmed or like I made more of a mess, this is not the tool for me. It doesn’t work the way my brain works. That is my test.

I’ll tell you some of my favorite tools because everybody does like tools. Google Drive. Google over Microsoft when it comes to the online office suite every time. I recommend it because it has a much greater emphasis on collaboration. I really don’t see the point of having our Word documents or spreadsheets in the cloud if it doesn’t enhance our ability to collaborate on them. I really like Google Suite for that. You can certainly have both as a nonprofit. I’ll just tell you what I’ve heard about the Microsoft suite is it’s almost the same experience, except it’s in the cloud, and Google is quite different.

I love a tool called Cloze.com. It’s a relationship management CRM. It’s really about enhancing your ability to build relationships one on one. We didn’t touch on this before, but I often talk about it. With our scaled one-to-one communication, there are a number of tools that do what I call augmented automation. It’s not fully automated, but they give you a little boost, a little time-saver. Google’s Gmail does this now. It fills out what it thinks you want to reply. Like “Congratulations,” you can just click a button instead of typing it. Cloze has some automations or augmentations that are similar. I confirm all my meetings with people, and it prefills in a template email with the unique meeting time for them. With a click of a button, I can generate an email that says, “Hey Hugh, I am looking forward to our meeting at 2pm tomorrow ET. See you then.” Instead of having to write that each time, I go click, click, click, click, and my meetings are all confirmed for the next day. It also reminds me to follow up with people, or I can set reminders, which is really helpful to have things be pushed to the surface that you need to follow up with. You can schedule emails, and you can tell it only to remind you if someone doesn’t reply to an email you just sent. Things like that are really helpful time-savers. Any tool that does that that is fast to set up is helpful.

I love Zoom, which we’re on right now. I think video calls are really getting pretty close to one-on-one in-person communication. A lot more nonprofits could be taking advantage of video calls with clients, with donors. You could be scaling classes and programs using this medium. It’s highly effective for education, especially if you do what we’re doing, actual face-to-face conversations. If you’re just playing a slideshow, even though it’s live, it might as well be pre-recorded. It’s not that much more engaging. With Zoom, you can get a group of 10, 15, 75 people in a virtual room together, talking, seeing each other’s faces. That is meaningful. That is communication at a much more meaningful level than just a presentation with a slideshow.

Hugh: This has been a wealth of information. You talked a little bit about this, but with the artificial intelligence thing, until that gets safe, because it’s kind of scary right now, how do we stay ahead of the curve so to speak with technology of digital communications and specifically building relationships so people want to fund us?

Sarah: I would say number one is keep top of mind how can I scale my one-to-one communications? Ask yourself that. How can I scale my one-to-one communications? They are so much more effective than one-to-many. There are a million tools to do this. If you go through your current tools and what you’re doing now, and figure out how you can scale it so you can have more one-on-one interactions or something that gets you almost to one-on-one or simulates a one-on-one. Because those are so meaningful.

I’ll tell you the reason why it’s more important now than ever that you do that is because the baby boomers are passing away, and we are having the largest transfer of wealth in human history. What’s partly unique about the baby boomers, especially in this country, is most of their wealth is tied up in illiquid assets, property, things that won’t have value to you as a nonprofit until they pass away. Many of them may not look like major donors right now. You want to be scaling your one-on-one communications with people who maybe are just volunteers or give you $20 a month. They may look like consistent low-level supporters, but if you engage them and find out they may have significant wealth they would like to pass on to you when they pass away, you won’t know who they are if you don’t scale your ability and attempt to have some sort of one-on-one communication with everybody on your list. Gone are the days where you’re only looking to have that one-on-one communication with your highest-level donors on your list. Aim for everybody. See if you can have a meaningful connection with everybody.

Hugh: That is extremely good advice. The website to find Sarah is PivotGround.com. There is a Login. Do people have a private community here?

Sarah: I have some online courses. The Login is for those people who have enrolled in one of our courses. Otherwise, you can schedule a free consultation with me. It’s about 45 minutes long. We’ll dive into something that’s going on for you now. You will leave with one to three clear next steps. So many people think it’s going to be a sales pitch, and they are so surprised when I say, “I have no deck for you. This is a real free consultation.” If one of those next steps makes sense for you to implement the Impact Method, we can have that conversation. But I love having those one-on-one conversations. I love to help people who call. I encourage anybody, whether you are an executive director or a board member. I love it when executive directors and board chairs get on a call together. We are able to do a lot in 45 minutes. I encourage anybody who is considering it to get on a call with me for free.

Hugh: If you go to PivotGround.com and click on “Free Resources,” there is an abundance of resources there.

*Sponsor message from EZCard*

Sarah, what do you want to leave people with today?

Sarah: I like to tell nonprofit leaders to be brave. There are too many people out there running nonprofits trying to solve the world’s most complex problems and feeling overwhelmed and stuck and not sure how they can really get there or how they can go on. I want you to hear me when I say there is a better way, and in fact, carrying on being overwhelmed is extremely inefficient and ineffective. You need to do this better way because I believe your mission is extremely important. I don’t want you to carry on that way. But it might mean that you really have to pivot. You really have to change the way you’ve been doing things. That will require a bit of bravery. I want you all to be brave and try something different.

Hugh: Great interview. Thank you for being our guest today. Thank you for giving us such great wisdom, Sarah. You obviously know your content very well.

Sarah: Thank you, Hugh. It’s really a pleasure.