Latest / We Are For Good Podcast - The Podcast for Nonprofits / 451. Real Talk: Why Nonprofits Must Dream Bigger (Replay) - Dan Pallotta

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451. Real Talk: Why Nonprofits Must Dream Bigger (Replay) - Dan Pallotta · We Are For Good Podcast - The Podcast for Nonprofits

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Welcome back to the Summer of Evolution.
• 0:03
  Speaker 1: We're in Innovation Week and we could not go throughout this week without relifting an incredible conversation we had with the infamous Dan Pilata.
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: If you don't know, dan, he had an incredible TED Talk that I can still remember watching for the first time.
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: That went viral about a decade ago, called the Way we Think About Charity is Dead Wrong.
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: Tune into this episode, friends, because we are talking about nonprofit disruption marketing.
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: I would love this quote that I remember Dan left us with, and it was if you're not being laughed at, you're not dreaming big enough.
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: We are right on the heels of Dan dropping this incredible documentary film he's been working on.
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: That's a follow-up to his TED Talk called Uncharitable in September 2023.
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: We hope you check that out, but listen in here.
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: This is going to give you some incredible nuggets for how to infuse innovation into your organization.
• 1:00
  Speaker 2: Hey, I'm John.
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: And I'm Becky.
• 1:02
  Speaker 2: And this is the we Are For Good podcast.
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: Nonprofits are faced with more challenges to accomplish their missions and the growing pressure to do more, raise more and be more for the causes that improve our world.
• 1:14
  Speaker 2: We're here to learn with you from some of the best in the industry, bringing the most innovative ideas, inspirational stories, all to create an impact uprising.
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: So welcome to the good community.
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: We're nonprofit professionals, philanthropists, world changers and rabid fans who are striving to bring a little more goodness into the world.
• 1:33
  Speaker 2: So let's get started.
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: Welcome Welcome.
• 1:36
  Speaker 2: Becky, what a big day.
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: The day is here.
• 1:39
  Speaker 2: We've been counting down the days.
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: When we start.
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: I mean, this would almost be the impetus of why you would start a podcast is to just simply have a platform to talk to our guests today, and I have been thinking about how I would even begin to intro our friend Dan- Pallotta.
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: I plan nothing because I wanted it to come from the heart, but I kind of want to take everybody back about seven, eight years ago.
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: I am on a we've talked about this several times.
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: I'm on a TED Talk binge and where I would just watch everything that was on and I was just so intrigued by the concept of TED and just the way that it could curate these innovators in the world in such a short spance of time.
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: And I watched this TED Talk and I'm sure Dan hears this every time he goes to talk to anybody but it was so revolutionary in my life.
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: And Dan gives this TED Talk that went viral and I mean viral still continues to get millions and millions of hits around the world and he is basically talking about the way we think about charity is dead wrong and I felt the world tilt on its axis a little bit after I watched it.
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: I have sent it to probably 50 people in my lifetime, including every boss that I've ever had.
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: And today we are talking to the disruptor of all disruptors, the man who I felt like.
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: For the first time in my nonprofit career, I saw somebody that represented my thoughts and my ideas and I'm just geeked out.
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: So, Dan, welcome to the we Are For Good podcast.
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: We're a little bit excited that you're here.
• 3:18
  Speaker 3: Thank you for having me, becky and John, and thanks for that big, big buildup.
• 3:22
  Speaker 3: I hope I can live up to it, but I'm happy to be here with you.
• 3:25
  Speaker 3: I'm looking forward to the conversation and, you know, thanks for creating a place for ideas like this.
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: These are the conversations that we need to be lifting up, and I really just want to kick it to Dan and just say tell a little bit about your story and how you even got into the nonprofit sector and why you started speaking up for things that truly matter.
• 3:47
  Speaker 3: Well, I guess it probably started for me, you know I'm probably started when I was a kid.
• 3:51
  Speaker 3: I was born.
• 3:51
  Speaker 3: I was born the first day of John Kennedy's presidency, and so I, you know, my formative years were.
• 3:57
  Speaker 3: I was surrounded by images of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King and John Kennedy, and you know these were young people talking about love and justice.
• 4:09
  Speaker 3: In the same sentence, it was also the era of the Vietnam War.
• 4:13
  Speaker 3: So, you know, when I was six or seven or eight years old, my parents were watching Walter Cronkite every night, talk about the, you know, the body counts, and it was, it was unending and it gave me a sense of that the human condition was futility, that we were unable to transcend our circumstances.
• 4:30
  Speaker 3: It was also the era of Apollo, right.
• 4:33
  Speaker 3: So I was eight years old when the alarm, strong, walked on the moon.
• 4:36
  Speaker 3: Like so many other eight years old, my eyes were just glued to the television set during that whole mission, watching the docking sequences, the undocking sequences, the landing, everything else.
• 4:47
  Speaker 3: And so that was a that was a powerful stew of things that made me want to make a difference in the world, rebel against futility.
• 4:58
  Speaker 3: But I also wanted to do something as big as going to the moon.
• 5:01
  Speaker 3: And then, I guess it was in college when I was studying world hunger for the first time and learning about the massive mortality, I chaired our hunger action committee.
• 5:10
  Speaker 3: We were doing these little fundraisers that seemed very, not big to me, and so I wanted to do something big and organize the bike ride across America.
• 5:19
  Speaker 3: I got 38 of my classmates to bicycle 4,200 miles across the continental United States with me during the very hot summer of 1983.
• 5:30
  Speaker 3: And that's where the metaphor of the journey became powerful for me.
• 5:34
  Speaker 3: You know the very difficult journey, the arduous journey that took us nine and a half weeks, peddling our bikes, 4,200 miles, 69 days, the intersection of that and coming to the aid of the disenfranchised and then the abandoned in the world.
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: Dan Pilotta is such a good dude and I love the humble brag of just.
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: We just biked 4,200 miles.
• 5:59
  Speaker 1: And I just got all of these people to do it and really it underscores our belief that community is everything and if you can get people to believe very much in the mission of something, they will work and they will hustle to see it through to the end, and then you have a rabid fan there who you can pour into your mission even further.
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: I love that you saw this so early.
• 6:20
  Speaker 3: Yeah, it's got to be.
• 6:21
  Speaker 3: You know you got to give them a dream.
• 6:23
  Speaker 3: That's the thing, and I think too many nonprofit organizations and even, you know, political leaders, want to make it as easy as possible for people, and that's not what their spirits want.
• 6:35
  Speaker 3: You know.
• 6:35
  Speaker 3: They want to live into a dream, and so when you tell someone that who's lost their friends to AIDS, you can stick a red ribbon on your jacket or you can work your ass off for a year and ride your bike 600 miles from San Francisco to Los Angeles and raise $2,000 and scare the hell out of yourself in the process of asking all those people for that money.
• 6:57
  Speaker 3: They'll pick the latter.
• 6:59
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I love that you bring up dreaming.
• 7:02
  Speaker 2: It's real, san Dippetus.
• 7:04
  Speaker 2: We were, you know, interviewing another guest this morning and she talked about just the limitations that nonprofits feel with so much restricted funding coming into the play.
• 7:14
  Speaker 2: And she was the recipient of this huge gift from Mackenzie Scott that was unrestricted and she said it allowed us to run, it allowed us to dream, it allowed us to activate.
• 7:25
  Speaker 2: And I feel like that's what you have been really championing for a long time, saying nonprofits can have these answers and have these big dreams, but they can't get held back by these, by looking at the wrong metrics of if we're successful or not, and it's keeping things so small.
• 7:39
  Speaker 2: You know, I love that you've been kind of preaching that or similar to that.
• 7:43
  Speaker 2: If I haven't botched it for decade, you know yeah, and the Ted talk.
• 7:48
  Speaker 3: I used the metaphor of a rulebook, that the you know the two rule books.
• 7:54
  Speaker 3: The for-profit sector gets to play by one that has a lot of freedoms in the nonprofit sector has to play by one that has a lot of restrictions.
• 8:02
  Speaker 3: And since then I've been using the metaphor of a prison that the nonprofit sector is in prison and the for-profit sector roams free.
• 8:10
  Speaker 3: And even when we dream, we dream in miniature.
• 8:18
  Speaker 3: You know, we don't dream on the scale that Elon Musk is dreaming and that Mark Zuckerberg is dreaming, that Jeff Bezos is dreaming.
• 8:28
  Speaker 3: And these are people who are lack any ounce of self consciousness about the scale of their dreams.
• 8:36
  Speaker 3: Right, come right out and say it colonize Mars, you know, bring humanity to another planet.
• 8:41
  Speaker 3: But you try and get a person in a nonprofit to say it's their dream to end hunger in the city of Boston in the next 10 years.
• 8:52
  Speaker 3: You try, I've tried.
• 8:55
  Speaker 3: You know they just can't bring themselves to do it.
• 8:58
  Speaker 3: They just can't bring themselves to think that big.
• 9:01
  Speaker 3: It's.
• 9:01
  Speaker 3: It's hubris to think that big.
• 9:04
  Speaker 3: You know, it's ego to think that big.
• 9:06
  Speaker 3: I, you know my dream, my dream is if we could hire another major gift fundraiser like really man, really like you don't have to do it, just say it.
• 9:16
  Speaker 3: Just say it.
• 9:17
  Speaker 3: Come on what's in your heart.
• 9:19
  Speaker 3: Just say it, like if you couldn't fail, what is it?
• 9:22
  Speaker 3: Can't do it.
• 9:24
  Speaker 2: Do you think it's because people are just so preconditioned?
• 9:26
  Speaker 2: Because the next answer is going to be I mean, here's all the limitations.
• 9:30
  Speaker 2: I mean you don't have the budget to do that.
• 9:32
  Speaker 2: It's going to cost too much.
• 9:33
  Speaker 2: To do that, it's too power.
• 9:36
  Speaker 3: Yeah, well, we work in the, in the no sector.
• 9:38
  Speaker 3: Right, it's the.
• 9:38
  Speaker 3: It's the no profit sector, the non profit sector, it's the no sector, and so the word profit actually comes from the Latin for progress.
• 9:48
  Speaker 3: So it's that literally like the no progress sector, and there's, I think there's, you know, I think there's a.
• 9:55
  Speaker 3: I'm gay, I'm very familiar with what oppression sickness is, and I think there's a serious oppression sickness in the non-profit sector that we're so used to.
• 10:07
  Speaker 3: You know, what Mackenzie's doing is great, but still recognize that we're grateful for what a dreamer is doing for us.
• 10:16
  Speaker 3: Right, we subjugate ourselves to the dreamer, even in that, even in that scenario.
• 10:22
  Speaker 3: What Joan Croc did for the Salvation Army O's and she's a saint Well, you know what about us?
• 10:28
  Speaker 3: Why can't, why can't we create entities as big as Apple for solving the world's problems?
• 10:34
  Speaker 3: They're only individuals at Apple, that's all they are.
• 10:38
  Speaker 3: But they managed to put a smartphone in the hands of pretty much every human being on the earth and a Mac on, you know, 10% of everybody's desk.
• 10:46
  Speaker 3: They're just human beings with capital.
• 10:48
  Speaker 3: Government is just human beings with capital.
• 10:51
  Speaker 3: We're human beings too.
• 10:53
  Speaker 3: Why aren't we capable of achieving things on that, on that kind of a scale?
• 10:57
  Speaker 3: You know people are aghast when you say that, oh no, government has to do it.
• 11:01
  Speaker 3: Well, government can do it, great, but they haven't demonstrated the ability so far.
• 11:05
  Speaker 3: I'd like to see people of ingenuity stimulating public concern on a mass level, selling the idea of a better world on mass level the way we sell caffeine and, you know, watches and everything else and get ourselves out of this prison because we didn't do anything wrong.
• 11:26
  Speaker 3: You know we don't deserve to be in prison.
• 11:29
  Speaker 3: No, human being, it's a horrible thing and it's ironic.
• 11:32
  Speaker 3: Like, well, like the poor person that you're trying to help, you know the entrepreneur that you're trying to help, the poor entrepreneur starting a business.
• 11:41
  Speaker 3: You want to see that business grow right, you want to see them maybe get wealthy, but no, not yourself, not your organization.
• 11:49
  Speaker 3: There's just, there's this internal inconsistency to it.
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: I mean, I'm going to call this the pilata pulpit, because I just am sitting here listening to you preach and I just am cheering in my head.
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: I'm like, yes, you're saying this is exactly what we need.
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: We need a revolution.
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: We call it an impact uprising in our organization and it's about shifting the lens and everything in the way that we talk and the way that we engage and the way that we infuse and the way that we empower.
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: And I love just this unapologetic approach to this is how we can really solve human suffering, because you're right, anybody that's sitting in Apple is a human being, just like we are.
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: But I would even submit to you that people that are in the nonprofit sector have the level of compassion and the level of sacrifice that could even elevate creativity, ingenuity, to another level, because we don't want to see failure.
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: We know what failure looks like.
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: We've seen it in the eyes of the people that we're trying to serve and the people that we're trying to help solve these crises around them.
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: And I love that you brought up Elon Musk, because we have a very dear friend who says that if Elon Musk says that he can colonize Mars in a decade, why can we not in the water crisis in the world in the exact same time?
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: Why do we have to move outside our own planet when we still have major issues of basic human rights and basic human like response.
• 13:20
  Speaker 2: Yeah, to end suffering.
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: So I love all of this.
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: I also want to give a shout out to just what you do with marketing and advertising, because I think that the way that you leverage the power of words and platform is a beautiful thing.
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: Dan's group has a great ad campaign that's going on called I am overhead, which I am just geeking out on, and the thing that you say is we've got to humanize overhead, because overhead is people.
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: When we talk about overhead and we talk about not investing in overhead, we're saying that we're not going to invest in people, and it's the people who are passionate about these issues and it's the people who are going to solve the problem.
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: So I would love to get your just take on the overhead crisis and how our listeners and all of us can lean into combating it.
• 14:10
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I want to just go back to something you said earlier that like, maybe in the non-profits sector we can even do more than Apple because of sacrificing, because we're unwilling to see failure.
• 14:22
  Speaker 3: I actually think we have a high tolerance for seeing failure.
• 14:25
  Speaker 3: I think we've seen failure for a long time and we've gotten quite accustomed to it and I think we actually need to break out of that willingness to live with the failure to end poverty and the failure to end hunger and failure to cure cancer.
• 14:40
  Speaker 3: And I think also that we have to rewire what kind of sacrifice we value.
• 14:47
  Speaker 3: We value financial sacrifice, like the person who's willing to sacrifice themselves financially.
• 14:54
  Speaker 3: I remember a mentor of mine once saying I don't have respect for someone who's old, I have respect for people and I don't have respect for people who sacrifice money necessarily.
• 15:18
  Speaker 3: It doesn't necessarily make a difference.
• 15:20
  Speaker 3: I have respect for people who are willing to sacrifice their reputation.
• 15:24
  Speaker 3: People who are willing to sacrifice their reputation put their ass on the line for some audacious dream that they don't know whether or not they can achieve and they're not sure how they're going to achieve it, but they're fully committed to it and they're willing to have the world laugh at them while they're attempted.
• 15:43
  Speaker 3: To me, the willingness to sacrifice your reputation eats, the willingness to sacrifice money for lunch in the domain of making a difference, and I think we also have to recognize in the nonprofit sector, there's a certain arrogance to thinking that we're the people who really make a difference in the world.
• 16:07
  Speaker 3: Oh, really.
• 16:08
  Speaker 3: So you don't think the people at Apple who developed the ability to do an electrocardiogram in 30 seconds on your wrist?
• 16:15
  Speaker 3: You don't think that makes any difference?
• 16:16
  Speaker 3: Huh?
• 16:17
  Speaker 3: You don't think the iPhone makes a difference in the lives of the blind.
• 16:20
  Speaker 3: You don't think the iPad is making a difference in education?
• 16:22
  Speaker 3: You don't think Zoom makes a difference, which is allowing us to spread this message about making a difference around the world wherever we want to spread it right?
• 16:30
  Speaker 3: So get over this notion that you're the only one that makes a difference.
• 16:35
  Speaker 3: Get over your sackcloth and ashes, get over your sacrificial mentality.
• 16:40
  Speaker 3: Get in the business of producing results and ask yourself what is the result you actually want to produce?
• 16:48
  Speaker 3: Like, say it and not.
• 16:51
  Speaker 3: Well, if we could, you know if we could meet our budget this year?
• 16:55
  Speaker 3: That's not your dream.
• 16:56
  Speaker 3: That's not your dream.
• 16:58
  Speaker 3: Go deeper.
• 16:58
  Speaker 3: Well, I'd like to have you know.
• 17:00
  Speaker 3: I'd like to have money to do the new marketing campaign.
• 17:04
  Speaker 3: Really, that's what you want on your grave.
• 17:06
  Speaker 3: Get the new marketing campaign, get deeper.
• 17:09
  Speaker 3: You want to solve problems?
• 17:12
  Speaker 3: Name them.
• 17:12
  Speaker 3: I want to cure cancer in the next 10 years.
• 17:14
  Speaker 3: Say it, say it.
• 17:16
  Speaker 3: You know what is it that you want to achieve?
• 17:18
  Speaker 3: Because if you don't say what you want to achieve, like at the deepest level of your heart, you are lost.
• 17:24
  Speaker 3: You are lost and you will be at the mercy of some kind of a fog of confusion and a sense of lack of purpose about your work, no matter what kind of 501C3 status it has attached to it.
• 17:37
  Speaker 2: Just some self-reflection of just man.
• 17:39
  Speaker 2: We're just selling ourselves short, we're selling our missions short.
• 17:43
  Speaker 2: We're selling these problems that could be eradicated.
• 17:47
  Speaker 2: And you know, becky, I do have a dear friend that his mission is to eradicate, to go out of business because we solve the crisis.
• 17:53
  Speaker 2: But that's a very rare organization to see.
• 17:56
  Speaker 2: You know, we have to look far to find that.
• 17:59
  Speaker 2: What do you think is holding people back, dan?
• 18:02
  Speaker 2: And I also want to hear what are some of the naysayers saying to you, because it's not lost on me that you were one to stand up and put your reputation on the line, to stand up and be the counter-argument to you know all this tradition and expectation of cost to raise a dollar and all these things.
• 18:20
  Speaker 2: Sorry to throw two questions at you.
• 18:23
  Speaker 3: Yeah Well, the first thing, you know it's part of the human condition to lower your horizons, I think, because people are afraid that they'll be laughed at.
• 18:33
  Speaker 3: I've always said if you're not being laughed at, you are not dreaming big enough.
• 18:40
  Speaker 3: Like seriously, if people aren't ridiculing you in a way that's painful for you, you're not thinking big enough.
• 18:49
  Speaker 3: Mario Andretti, the famous race car driver, used to say if you don't feel out of control, you're not going fast enough, and I think that's true.
• 18:57
  Speaker 3: And if you look at the ridicule that's been laid on Elon Musk I mean by the legacy auto manufacturers and by the space experts, by his heroes, by heroes of his in the space program laughing at him, you know it's just like painful, painful stuff.
• 19:16
  Speaker 3: You imagine Walt Disney at the age of 15 walking around with this drawing of a mouse and telling people I think it's got a lot of potential, right?
• 19:24
  Speaker 3: I mean seriously, like try to erase hindsight from your brain.
• 19:29
  Speaker 3: And you're looking at a 15 year old kid with a drawing of a mouse.
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: I'm laughing right, I mean.
• 19:37
  Speaker 3: I remember Bruce Springsteen used to tell this story to his concerts about how he and his dad never got along and he had long hair and they'd always fight and his father didn't know why he was playing the guitar and his father was waiting up for him one night when he came home sitting in the kitchen and his father said to Springsteen what do you think you're doing with yourself?
• 19:53
  Speaker 3: And Springsteen said the worst part about it was I could never explain it to him.
• 19:58
  Speaker 3: It's in that moment where who you are is really tested.
• 20:03
  Speaker 3: How do you tell your father I'm gonna be Bruce Springsteen Right, when that means nothing prior to Bruce Springsteen being invented?
• 20:15
  Speaker 3: And so I think it's part of the human condition.
• 20:21
  Speaker 3: I also think we have some of our values are mixed up in it, like we don't wanna make a promise and then not deliver on the promise cause we feel that we're dishonoring our word.
• 20:33
  Speaker 3: But I don't think it's dishonoring your word if you make a promise and you don't keep it.
• 20:38
  Speaker 3: I think it's dishonoring your word if you make a promise and don't keep it and then act as if you never made the promise in the first place.
• 20:46
  Speaker 3: That's dishonoring your word.
• 20:48
  Speaker 3: But to actually make the effort and fail and explain to people why you failed and then perhaps make a new promise.
• 20:55
  Speaker 3: I thought we were gonna end hunger by 2025, we didn't do it, but here's what we learned and here's the progress we made.
• 21:02
  Speaker 3: As a result of that audacity, we're making a new promise.
• 21:04
  Speaker 3: We're gonna end it by 2030.
• 21:06
  Speaker 3: I applaud you.
• 21:10
  Speaker 2: We're taking a quick pause to get real with you, friends.
• 21:13
  Speaker 1: Because, let's face it, it's a new world.
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: Donor expectations are higher than ever and donors wanna know what their personal impact will be, which means we need to start by building a truly resonant message.
• 21:24
  Speaker 2: And if you follow, we Are For Good.
• 21:26
  Speaker 2: You know we're advocates for nonprofits need to disrupt and adapt in order to grow, and our friends at Foster Avenue agree.
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: You might know Foster Avenue by their former name, Snavely Associates, but here's the thing they're evolving alongside the sector too.
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: As a philanthropic communications consulting and creative agency, they see how campaign communications are facing a revolution these days and, luckily for us, they're sharing their insights.
• 21:49
  Speaker 2: The Foster Avenue team is sharing a 10 point checklist for creating campaign communications that meet the moment, and we wanna get this checklist into your hands so you can start refining your messaging right away.
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: Grab it today at fosteravcom backslash good.
• 22:05
  Speaker 2: So, whether your campaign launch is three years away or six months away, foster Avenue can help you accelerate to the next phase.
• 22:12
  Speaker 1: We wanna see your campaign have all kinds of success, so hope you will check out Foster Avenue.
• 22:17
  Speaker 2: That's fosteravcom slash good.
• 22:57
  Speaker 1: You are so right and it is about a global mind shift as a mindset shift and we have a lot of people that are new, young professionals in the nonprofit space and I just believe Gen Xers, gen Zers and Millennials you are the ones that we think can turn the tide on the way nonprofit is viewed and the way that we operate and the way that we engage.
• 23:28
  Speaker 1: And I'm here to tell you that your disrupter is right here.
• 23:32
  Speaker 1: Your creative rebel is sitting here on this podcast right now, and I wanna give you an example of why it's important to stand up and be the one that everybody thinks is crazy, the one who's being laughed at.
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: Dan stood up and had this 18 minute TED talk and then three minutes or three minutes it could have been three minutes after it launched, three months after the TED talk went live, guidestar charity navigator and the Better Business Bureau, wise Giving Alliance, did a complete about face.
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: It was like the coup of the season, in my opinion, as the three leading resources for nonprofit data and announcing that they were denouncing the overhead ratio as a valid indicator of nonprofit performance.
• 24:18
  Speaker 1: When you speak up, when you are brave enough to say the thing that is on the hearts of so many.
• 24:25
  Speaker 1: When you have capacity to dream, incredible movements begin to ripple, ripple, ripple and I have to tell you I love this notion of picturing little Dan, like watching the shuttle launch and you literally, if you get on the YouTube, you can see in the background.
• 24:41
  Speaker 1: Dan literally has a shuttle in the background of his office, which is amazing.
• 24:45
  Speaker 1: That are five, right, okay there you go.
• 24:48
  Speaker 1: New one.
• 24:48
  Speaker 1: So I just think that if you have someone like Dan, who has this heart for justice, you have a pinch it for creativity and you can speak up and be okay with being the one that's being laughed at.
• 25:04
  Speaker 1: They will not be laughing in 10 years, because a movement can come behind you.
• 25:09
  Speaker 1: You have little people in Oklahoma who say, dan, you saw us, you were the creative rebel who was brave enough to step out there and say this, and now we're looking at a different arc that's kind of hitting our sector, and so my question to you, dan, is there are people listening in here who are going to say yes, I 100% believe in this ideology.
• 25:32
  Speaker 1: I believe that I wanna be a part of change and about shifting this narrative.
• 25:36
  Speaker 1: How could someone lean into what you're doing?
• 25:40
  Speaker 1: We're gonna talk about the charity defense council in just a second, but how could they lean into that?
• 25:45
  Speaker 1: How could they lean into this notion of we've gotta start disrupting, because I do think it starts within community and wherever they are in the world?
• 25:53
  Speaker 3: Well, first of all you've got to analyze your own assumptions and be careful of thinking that, because you're 22 years old and you're having a new thought, excuse me, you're 22 years old and you're having a thought for the first time that it's a new thought it could be that it's a very old thought.
• 26:16
  Speaker 3: I speak to a lot of college students who are very traditional.
• 26:22
  Speaker 3: They have very, very traditional thinking about charity because they grew up on it and they've been infected by the same media as the rest of us.
• 26:30
  Speaker 3: So their idea of being young and innovative and progressive is charities shouldn't pay people very much money.
• 26:39
  Speaker 3: Well, that's a very old idea.
• 26:41
  Speaker 3: That's a very counterproductive idea.
• 26:43
  Speaker 3: That's not a very young, new idea.
• 26:46
  Speaker 3: They have the idea that charities should be very frugal and not spend very much money on anything other than giving it to the people who need it.
• 26:53
  Speaker 3: That's a very old idea.
• 26:55
  Speaker 3: That's a very counterproductive idea.
• 26:57
  Speaker 3: So you got to check your own ideas.
• 26:59
  Speaker 3: I would encourage you to watch my Ted Talk or read one of my books or somebody else's book.
• 27:04
  Speaker 3: And then you've got to come out about your dreams.
• 27:10
  Speaker 3: If you're working for a nonprofit organization, you got to come out to donors.
• 27:14
  Speaker 3: You got to say I'm not here to have them carve.
• 27:17
  Speaker 3: I kept the overhead low on my grave.
• 27:20
  Speaker 3: I'm here to solve this specific problem.
• 27:22
  Speaker 3: In order to solve this specific problem, I need these resources, and one of the things I learned over the course of the last 15 years and speaking about this, is that people want to educate their donors, but they don't know how.
• 27:36
  Speaker 3: They don't know what to say, and they haven't said it as often as I've said it, so they're, you know, understandably not as articulate about it.
• 27:43
  Speaker 3: So in the last couple of years, I've created tools specifically for changing donors minds, like a new little book I have called the Everyday Philanthropist that literally takes an hour to read.
• 27:55
  Speaker 3: It reads in an hour, like you could spend an hour scrolling around on Facebook or you could, like change your whole perspective and charity in an hour fits in your pocket.
• 28:03
  Speaker 3: It's got that thread, you know it's got big type and big graphs and it's really easy to understand.
• 28:09
  Speaker 2: It's for anybody and rounded corners.
• 28:11
  Speaker 3: And then I created these online trainings, called the bull training, for nonprofit staff and boards and donors.
• 28:17
  Speaker 3: So I've created lots of tools that people can find on my website for actually evangelizing and you don't have to do it yourself, you can let these tools do it.
• 28:26
  Speaker 3: So, but coming out about your real dreams, that's the bravest thing you can do.
• 28:33
  Speaker 3: You know, probably like coming out, coming out about my sexual orientation is probably the bravest thing that I did.
• 28:44
  Speaker 3: Or do you know people think that you come out once when you're gay, like, oh, you're 19, you come out.
• 28:50
  Speaker 3: Uh-uh, nope, I mean, you know, I'm much older now and I can be in a cab and the cab driver can start up a conversation about family and I say I have triplets and he says, oh my god, how's your wife feel about that?
• 29:02
  Speaker 3: Ok, and now I get to decide whether I want to have a transformative conversation with a cab driver in a city that I don't know and what's going to happen to me, and I don't know what his prejudices are or believe.
• 29:14
  Speaker 3: So you know you got to come out every day.
• 29:16
  Speaker 3: We've been way too timid in the nonprofit sector, you know well.
• 29:21
  Speaker 3: Let's tell donors what they need to hear Donor trust, donor trust.
• 29:24
  Speaker 3: I'm all for donor trust.
• 29:26
  Speaker 3: Yes, we want donors to trust us, but on the basis of what?
• 29:30
  Speaker 3: On the basis that we just told them we have low overhead and we know that low overhead means we ain't going to be able to make much of a difference.
• 29:37
  Speaker 3: Well, that's not a very nice thing to have your donors trust in, or trust in your dreams, trust in the resources that you need for those dreams.
• 29:46
  Speaker 3: That's the thing you want your donor to have trust in.
• 29:50
  Speaker 2: And I have a strong sense that that is why our boards aren't leaned in, why our teams are not engaged, why your staff is not performing, because they're not hooked into that big dream, that they feel connected to this big idea that they could perpetuate or be a part of.
• 30:06
  Speaker 2: It just changes the way you act and take action and just the urgency of it.
• 30:10
  Speaker 3: If you're plugged into something that's much more impactful meaningful People say to me how do I get my donors more engaged?
• 30:17
  Speaker 3: How do I get my board more engaged?
• 30:20
  Speaker 3: Stop boring them to death.
• 30:23
  Speaker 3: I mean, jesus, come up with a dream that's so exciting that they cannot say no to it.
• 30:30
  Speaker 3: You watch, I have the model of the Saturn V rocket behind me, the ship that got us to the moon, that brought Apollo 11 and 12 and 14 and 15 and 16 and 17 to the moon.
• 30:42
  Speaker 3: And you watch documentaries on the Apollo program and you look at those people who you know the flight directors and the people who did the math and the people who built, fabricated the spacesuits.
• 30:55
  Speaker 3: They look back on that time and in the interviews they're just tears in their eyes.
• 31:00
  Speaker 3: They're just like grown people, weeping because of the beauty of exploring the full potential of your humanity.
• 31:10
  Speaker 3: And you don't do that.
• 31:13
  Speaker 3: You're trying to figure out how to scheme a donor to give you more money for overhead, and it's without purpose.
• 31:19
  Speaker 3: You know you're not up to something big in the world.
• 31:21
  Speaker 3: Good luck.
• 31:23
  Speaker 1: Here's what I'm hearing is when we're positioning and we have this conversation so many times about the new way to partner with a donor, the old ways I hope they go to bed and I hope they never come back in COVID and the ways that we would traditionally engage with them.
• 31:39
  Speaker 1: But if you asked a donor, would you come alongside me to explore the full potential of your humanity versus would you consider buying a table at my gala?
• 31:50
  Speaker 1: I know which one's going to inspire somebody.
• 31:54
  Speaker 3: Exactly, exactly, yep.
• 31:56
  Speaker 3: And they want to Look.
• 31:57
  Speaker 3: People got money.
• 32:00
  Speaker 3: I'll tell you.
• 32:01
  Speaker 3: I mean, I know a lot of people have a lot of money.
• 32:03
  Speaker 3: They don't know where to put it.
• 32:05
  Speaker 3: They don't know where to put it that it's actually going to make a difference.
• 32:09
  Speaker 3: They're, by and large, dissatisfied where they have to put it, so a lot of them end up just sticking it on the name of a big $50 million law school building, because at least they can see well, there's a building there and it's got my name on it.
• 32:22
  Speaker 3: Because we're not very good at packaging dreams in health and human services and we got to get much better at packaging dreams in health and human services, the way Harvard is good at packaging new science center.
• 32:37
  Speaker 3: Because higher education is eating the lunch of health and human services.
• 32:41
  Speaker 3: Because they're dreaming much bigger than we are.
• 32:45
  Speaker 1: And to think that this could all start with just doing exactly with what you did.
• 32:49
  Speaker 1: If we could just step out on that stage just a little bit maybe the stage is just across the seat from your donor in their office or on Zoom and just literally launch the scale of our dreams in those words.
• 33:02
  Speaker 1: If that could inspire someone to not only give but to lean in.
• 33:07
  Speaker 1: I have to think and I'm an idealist so I probably would think this that so much good can come from that, because when you're leaned into the dream, you understand that it's going to take everybody pouring into it.
• 33:19
  Speaker 1: We've got to be inclusive in those spaces.
• 33:22
  Speaker 1: Our number one core value of our company is everyone matters.
• 33:25
  Speaker 1: We've got to make a seat at the table.
• 33:27
  Speaker 1: We talk about the boards.
• 33:28
  Speaker 1: We don't want to bore them no, we don't but we also want our boards to be representative of the populations we're serving.
• 33:34
  Speaker 1: If somebody's not at that table and we're sitting there, we need to scooch over and give them a space.
• 33:41
  Speaker 1: I'd also think that other things would come from it Greater potential for risk capital.
• 33:45
  Speaker 1: If they see that you have these creative ideas that are actually building traction in a very untraditional way, then they're going to give you more leg room, more of a runway to keep trying more things.
• 33:58
  Speaker 1: We talk about throwing spaghetti at the wall.
• 34:00
  Speaker 1: We've got to just try stuff in this sector and I am just geeking out over everything that you're saying, and I know we have a million questions that we're not getting to because we're just talking to Dan, which is amazing.
• 34:11
  Speaker 1: So sorry, john, go ahead.
• 34:13
  Speaker 2: Well, I mean Dan's had a lot of dreams, but one of them I would love to dive into is this you started the Charity Defense Council and I know your in-game was not to create a council.
• 34:23
  Speaker 2: Your in-game was to change the way the media and the public views things like overhead in a nonprofit space.
• 34:30
  Speaker 2: So that's a huge, audacious dream, and maybe it's even bigger than that.
• 34:33
  Speaker 2: But would you give us the background of that organization and how are you all activating on that now?
• 34:39
  Speaker 3: Yeah, well, it was basically after I wrote down Charitable, which was a book about the problem.
• 34:43
  Speaker 3: I wanted to write a book about what's the solution.
• 34:45
  Speaker 3: Well, if the problem is the general public has all the wrong ideas about charity, then you got to change the way the general public thinks about charity.
• 34:54
  Speaker 3: Now leaders and thought leaders in the sector, they've started to come around to the idea that inside the sector we think about it all wrong, so it's very insular.
• 35:07
  Speaker 3: So we issue press releases to one another hey, we're thinking about this all wrong, but we never go outside the walls of the castle to the general public and that's where it's all happening.
• 35:17
  Speaker 3: So I've always felt like you know the hell with the internal stuff, let's go out to the people.
• 35:24
  Speaker 3: You know the people that are driving down the street right now.
• 35:27
  Speaker 3: And when you look at that like the answer is change the way the public thinks and you look at the sector, you see it is devoid of any of the tools that you use for movement building.
• 35:39
  Speaker 3: It doesn't have an ad agency, it doesn't have a legal defense fund, it doesn't have a legislative agenda, it doesn't have an anti-deformation force, it doesn't have a database of all of the people who work in the sector.
• 35:55
  Speaker 3: There's no database of the 10 million people employed in the nonprofit sector.
• 35:59
  Speaker 3: We've never taken out a full page ad in the New York Times or taken out an ad on the Super Bowl to tell the general public what we do we have.
• 36:07
  Speaker 3: You know, every community has a legal defense fund.
• 36:10
  Speaker 3: We don't have anything like that.
• 36:12
  Speaker 3: So the Charity Defense Council is about well, let's put some of those things in place.
• 36:19
  Speaker 3: And you know I kind of go where the love is.
• 36:23
  Speaker 3: And you know the Charity Defense Council is alive and you know it's been really hard to get structural funding for it because people want to fund poor children.
• 36:34
  Speaker 3: Well, you're always going to have poor children if you don't solve these structural issues here.
• 36:39
  Speaker 3: So right now in fact I was just on the Zoom before I hopped on this with Stephen Gyllenhaal, who is directing a new documentary that I have coming out on my book on charitable.
• 36:52
  Speaker 3: It'll be out in June and it's going to be a very powerful tool.
• 36:55
  Speaker 3: It's going to be more powerful than TED Talk, and Darren Walker is in it.
• 36:59
  Speaker 3: He was the head of the Ford Foundation.
• 37:01
  Speaker 3: Billy Shore, who created no Kid Hungry.
• 37:04
  Speaker 3: Chris Anderson, who runs TED, edward Norton, the actor who started Crowdrise Katie Hood, who's the former CEO of the Michael J Fox Foundation.
• 37:13
  Speaker 3: It's a really powerful documentary film with real world examples of how this dysfunctional thinking screws things up.
• 37:22
  Speaker 3: Can't wait.
• 37:24
  Speaker 1: Oh my gosh.
• 37:24
  Speaker 1: We all want to figure out how to lean in to this topic more, and we've got to be a part of big change.
• 37:30
  Speaker 1: If we're going to solve these big dreams, we've got to be able to be mobilized and to lean into it.
• 37:35
  Speaker 1: So I want to ask you about a moment of philanthropy.
• 37:40
  Speaker 1: You've had so many incredible opportunities to work with nonprofits in your lifetime.
• 37:46
  Speaker 1: What is a moment of philanthropy?
• 37:48
  Speaker 1: A story that deeply moved you that you might share with our community today?
• 37:54
  Speaker 3: Well, you know we had 182,000 people ride or walk in one of the AIDS rides or breast cancer three days, or out of the darkness, suicide prevention walks, and so I mean more stories than I could ever tell you of heroic people who were terrified of riding their bikes across Alaska or across Texas or across Montana.
• 38:16
  Speaker 3: You know, my dad rode across the Continental Divide with me when he was 65 years old in the Montana AIDS vaccine ride.
• 38:23
  Speaker 3: My mom's, a breast cancer survivor, walked three days and 60 miles with me and my sisters in the breast cancer three day.
• 38:30
  Speaker 3: It's just those kinds of stories of average people in ragtag outfits of all kinds of breathing dimensions and rear ends of all widths, who you know didn't look like Lance Armstrong and committed themselves to these brave endeavors.
• 38:47
  Speaker 3: Each of those is an act of philanthropy.
• 38:49
  Speaker 3: Philanthropy comes from the Latin philosanthropos for love of humanity, and so you don't need to be a billionaire to be a philanthropist.
• 38:59
  Speaker 3: You do something sacrificial in the name of others.
• 39:02
  Speaker 3: You know you sacrifice your body, your reputation.
• 39:06
  Speaker 3: That's philanthropy.
• 39:08
  Speaker 3: I wrote a blog once for Harvard Business Review.
• 39:11
  Speaker 3: I used to write regularly for them and Steve Jobs was being attacked while he was alive as he didn't give enough money away to charity and I wrote a piece called Steve Jobs World's Greatest Philanthropist, because of what he contributed to humanity.
• 39:26
  Speaker 3: You know, because of his love of humanity, his desire to democratize desktop publishing and movies and photographs and music.
• 39:33
  Speaker 3: So yeah, my stories.
• 39:38
  Speaker 3: I've seen people give away tens of millions of dollars in a moment.
• 39:44
  Speaker 3: I've seen billionaires do it, but my stories are the ones of the average people.
• 39:51
  Speaker 3: You know carpenters and nurses, and the average people who took it upon themselves, on top of everything else that was going on in their lives, to do something philanthropically heroic for AIDS or breast cancer or suicide prevention.
• 40:08
  Speaker 1: I mean, I just sit here and think about this conversation of dreams and what you've been able to ignite through that walk.
• 40:14
  Speaker 1: I love that your mom is a breast cancer survivor.
• 40:18
  Speaker 1: That must just have been so rewarding for you to be able to pour more than $300 million into research for that.
• 40:24
  Speaker 1: It feels like a very nice love letter to your mother.
• 40:27
  Speaker 1: But I'm really curious about your kids and I would just think having a dad that everybody deserves to have, a dad who loves them, but having a dad who literally says I want to give you incredible space to dream your biggest dream, what is that like?
• 40:46
  Speaker 1: And I'm wondering how you're infusing these ideals into the way that you are parenting and raising these three extraordinary humans.
• 40:55
  Speaker 3: Well, you'd have to ask them.
• 40:56
  Speaker 3: But you know they're human beings, so they have human DNA.
• 41:00
  Speaker 3: So for one thing, like yeah, I'm this champion of charity and making a difference in the world and my son, ryder, is really into Minecraft.
• 41:10
  Speaker 1: My daughter is too.
• 41:11
  Speaker 3: He's really into Minecraft and he's really into Fortnite and he's really into Call of Duty.
• 41:17
  Speaker 3: And my daughter, sage, is a wonderful, wonderful drummer and is learning to play the guitar and is learning to play the piano.
• 41:25
  Speaker 3: And Annalisa is a wonderful writer and goes to CrossFit every day and is doing the CrossFit challenge with all of these adults and I encourage them to dream their biggest dreams and they're haunted by the human condition, by the narrative that says I'm not good enough, I'm not strong enough, I couldn't do that.
• 41:46
  Speaker 3: So we all battle that, no matter who your father is, Maybe even if your father is someone who's achieved a big dream, maybe those demons are even louder.
• 41:58
  Speaker 3: I try to make them aware of the voice in their heads and that that's not them, that that's something other than them, that who they are is the listener right.
• 42:10
  Speaker 3: Who they are is the context for their lives.
• 42:12
  Speaker 3: Whether it's getting through, well, just have to see.
• 42:17
  Speaker 3: I have enough trouble trying to get it through to my own head.
• 42:22
  Speaker 1: We hear that I mean Dan has triplets, John has two sets of twins.
• 42:26
  Speaker 1: I just feel like I'm not contributing much to this conversation with my singles.
• 42:33
  Speaker 2: So, dan, we ask all of our guests and man, I'm prepping for this one what's your one good thing?
• 42:39
  Speaker 2: Summing up all the advice you could impart on our listeners, what's something that you could say?
• 42:44
  Speaker 2: You could do this today.
• 42:45
  Speaker 2: What's one good thing?
• 42:47
  Speaker 3: There's a line in a James Taylor song which I love and I sing it in May.
• 42:53
  Speaker 3: It's called Jolly Springtime.
• 42:55
  Speaker 3: And there's the line where he says everybody say got to live in today, Don't nobody know how.
• 43:01
  Speaker 3: And I think it's realized that life is happening right now.
• 43:07
  Speaker 3: It isn't happening when this podcast is over and you get to apply the ideas.
• 43:12
  Speaker 3: It isn't happening when you go get your dream impact job.
• 43:15
  Speaker 3: It isn't happening when we convince the world not to think about it.
• 43:19
  Speaker 3: It's happening right now.
• 43:20
  Speaker 3: That's all you got.
• 43:21
  Speaker 3: That's all you got is right now.
• 43:23
  Speaker 3: It's all you ever had.
• 43:24
  Speaker 3: It's all you're ever going to have, is right now.
• 43:26
  Speaker 3: So if you're not here right now, if you're not living right now, if you're not happy right now, if it's always off in the distance, that's the greatest mistake you can make.
• 43:39
  Speaker 3: And I think as a culture we're really bad at being, and it's almost that we're getting worse, that we're getting better and better at doing.
• 43:52
  Speaker 3: And for all of the importance of it and the value of it, you look at whatever side of the political spectrum you're on, you look at the obsession with political discussion right now it's all off in the future.
• 44:07
  Speaker 3: It's all doing.
• 44:08
  Speaker 3: It's all doing.
• 44:09
  Speaker 3: It's all hating on other people.
• 44:10
  Speaker 3: It's all this projection, this cinematic projection in our mind.
• 44:15
  Speaker 3: And who was it, Seneca, that said?
• 44:18
  Speaker 3: All of human kinds problems come from people's inability to sit quietly alone in a room, and I believe that you know Like you get, you start jonesing out if you just have to be right.
• 44:35
  Speaker 3: It's just not natural to us to just be, just sit here and do nothing and feel the wood on your hands and the temperature on your face and the pressure of the chair on your legs.
• 44:47
  Speaker 3: Just sit here and be shut up.
• 44:50
  Speaker 3: See, now you got nothing to contribute.
• 44:53
  Speaker 3: Just be.
• 44:54
  Speaker 3: I think that'd be my one good thing.
• 44:57
  Speaker 1: I think that was such a beautiful manifesto.
• 44:59
  Speaker 1: We didn't talk about the fact that Dan inspired John and I to write our first organizational manifesto.
• 45:05
  Speaker 2: It had to be 10 years ago then.
• 45:07
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it was 10 years ago in our healthcare organization and we wrote one and we've even written one for here.
• 45:14
  Speaker 1: It was the flag, yeah, and I just think the manifesto concept is so great.
• 45:20
  Speaker 1: But I love what you're saying, because I think it's an incredible way to just tie up this amazing conversation.
• 45:27
  Speaker 1: We've had a conversation about equalizing and about and not even coming down.
• 45:31
  Speaker 1: I don't mean to come down as equalized.
• 45:33
  Speaker 1: I mean for us to rise up and I think that this notion of do something, and not even just rewrite this narrative for nonprofit, I would say look inside yourself.
• 45:45
  Speaker 1: What is the narrative?
• 45:46
  Speaker 1: What is your brand?
• 45:47
  Speaker 1: What do people say about you as a human being?
• 45:50
  Speaker 1: How are you living your truth?
• 45:52
  Speaker 1: And step up and be the person that you wanna be and step out, be a champion for the cause that you are so passionate about.
• 46:00
  Speaker 1: Maybe your mother is a breast cancer survivor, maybe you have somebody who's fighting through something right now.
• 46:07
  Speaker 1: Be their champion.
• 46:09
  Speaker 1: You can do that in the space that you are.
• 46:11
  Speaker 1: You can do it with your voice, you can do it with your resources, you can do it with your volunteerism and I'm telling you, we all know in our living proof that charities need us, that nonprofits need us, that social good needs us, that entrepreneurs need us, and so thank you, dan, for being the great equalizer for seeing every single human and being the scrappy same little boy that was watching the coverage of NASA with on wonder, and the fact that you have followed your wanderlust to innovate.
• 46:42
  Speaker 1: This sector is one of the greatest legacies, I think, that anybody could give.
• 46:46
  Speaker 3: Well, thank you.
• 46:47
  Speaker 3: Thank you both very much for having me.
• 46:50
  Speaker 3: It's been a pleasure to have the conversation and I salute what it is that you're up to in the world.
• 46:56
  Speaker 1: Thank you and our thanks to our dear friend Matthew Zachary, my New York brother from another mother, for making this connection and encouraging us to be rebels.
• 47:06
  Speaker 1: We felt like we found a fellow disruptor there, so it's good to be around like-minded friends.
• 47:11
  Speaker 2: Dan, what's the best way people can connect with you online and follow all your good work?
• 47:16
  Speaker 3: Yeah, go to danpalatacom and you can get in touch with me there.
• 47:19
  Speaker 3: And you can buy a kit, you can buy a book, you can buy a bold training, you can buy a humankind be both t-shirt you can.
• 47:26
  Speaker 3: You know, danpalatacom is the best way to be in touch.
• 47:30
  Speaker 2: So this has been amazing, yep.
• 47:31
  Speaker 2: Thank you for coming, dan.
• 47:32
  Speaker 1: We're so glad to know you and amplify your great work.
• 47:37
  Speaker 2: Thanks so much for being here.
• 47:38
  Speaker 2: We hope you're loving the summer of evolution series and to learn more you can head over to weareforgoodcom.
• 47:44
  Speaker 2: Slash evolution all the playlists, resources and other ways to help you get inspired and activated this summer.
• 47:50
  Speaker 2: We'd also love for you to join the conversation, share what you're learning on social media or join us at our free community at weareforgoodcommunitycom.
• 47:58
  Speaker 2: Bonus points for snapping a picture and showing us where you're listening from.
• 48:02
  Speaker 2: Can't wait for the next conversation.
• 48:04
  Speaker 2: See you soon, friends.