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Sean Littman on GiveSuite for Nonprofits | Nonprofit411 Podcast · Nonprofit411 Podcast

• 0:00
  Hello and welcome to nonprofit 4 1 1, where we dive into the resources and strategies that help nonprofits not just survive, but truly thrive.
• 0:09
  I'm Sarah Barton, your host and fundraising advocate.
• 0:12
  Each episode we bring you inspiring conversations with experts in fundraising, sustainability, and best nonprofit practices to equip you with the tools and confidence you need to make a real impact.
• 0:26
  Today's episode of Nonprofit 4 1 1 is sponsored by Gift Suite, and I'm really excited to share with you about them.
• 0:33
  I work with a lot of small nonprofit teams, and I often see incredible people doing really meaningful work using five or six different systems that don't talk to each other.
• 0:44
  They may have donor forums on one platform, an email platform, spreadsheets, ract donations.
• 0:51
  They often don't have tech support to call when something breaks, and it's really hard.
• 0:57
  That's why I'm so excited about Give Suite.
• 0:59
  I use a similar version to run my own work, and their nonprofit version really pulls everything together.
• 1:07
  Fundraising, marketing, supporter, communications, automations, giving pages all in one place.
• 1:16
  If your team is ready to invest in something that actually makes your job easier, take a look.
• 1:21
  I'm an affiliate because I believe in what this platform can do, and I've seen how much of a difference it can make for small teams who just need systems that work.
• 1:30
  You'll find the link in the show notes, and now let's get into today's conversation.
• 1:34
  Hello and welcome to this week's episode of Nonprofit 4 1 1.
• 1:37
  I'm so excited that you've joined us and I am excited to welcome our guest, Sean Littman, who is the CEO of Give Suite.
• 1:45
  Welcome.
• 1:46
  Thank you so much, Sarah, for having me.
• 1:47
  It's always a lot of fun to be on the other side of the microphone for a change, and I'm excited to really sit down and hang out with you.
• 1:53
  We've, so far, we've already had a lot of good conversations, so I'm assuming this one's gonna go great as well.
• 1:58
  Yes.
• 1:59
  And I'm so excited that we get to share it with our listeners.
• 2:01
  So I'm gonna start with my favorite question.
• 2:03
  What is your favorite hobby? Oh, man.
• 2:07
  That, that's a, that's a doozy.
• 2:09
  I like to do a lot of things.
• 2:10
  I think honestly, my favorite hobby is just hanging out with my kids and my wife.
• 2:14
  You know, I like to play guitar if, and, and play, play music, but I think my main hobby is just spend time with my family.
• 2:21
  Oh, awesome.
• 2:21
  That's one of the things that, you know, that time gets, so it gets captured and we don't do it enough, like intentional time with each other, right? Yeah, no, a hundred percent.
• 2:33
  How old are your kiddos? So I have a 12-year-old, an 11-year-old, a 9-year-old, a 4-year-old, and a 1-year-old.
• 2:41
  Wow.
• 2:41
  Spans the gamut, so, awesome.
• 2:44
  Yeah.
• 2:44
  Enjoy them.
• 2:45
  And I'm be 30.
• 2:46
  Yeah.
• 2:46
  When I'm about to be 35 next month.
• 2:48
  Dear God.
• 2:48
  I'm old.
• 2:51
  Well, my oldest children.
• 2:53
  I have twins and they turned 21 this year.
• 2:55
  So I feel very old.
• 2:57
  Like they're entering adulthood, they turn 21 and they graduate from college.
• 3:01
  And people say like, it goes so fast and blah, blah, blah.
• 3:04
  And you're like, yeah, but it really does go fast.
• 3:07
  I think like as it, as they nears them not being in my presence at, at all, you know, during the week, then it, I feel like it goes faster and faster.
• 3:17
  Yeah, no doubt.
• 3:18
  That's crazy.
• 3:20
  Yeah.
• 3:21
  So we've kind of chit chatted.
• 3:24
  Go ahead and introduce yourself and tell our listeners a little bit about yourself and what you do.
• 3:28
  Well, all righty then.
• 3:29
  Well, my name is Sean Littman.
• 3:30
  I'm the founder and CEO of give suite.com,
• 3:32
  and we found, we built Give Suite out of necessity because as I, my backstory is I run a digital agency for nonprofits.
• 3:40
  I've been doing this for a very long time and working with lots of different nonprofits on their marketing end.
• 3:46
  You get to use a lot of the tools that are out there that the organizations are subservient to.
• 3:50
  And pretty much every tool, every organization we worked with either hated their CRM and hated their, their marketing tools, or didn't know how to use their CRM and didn't know how to use their marketing tools, which kind of hindered on us.
• 4:01
  And you know, when you're paying us a boatload of money to do our job, we wanna do it effectively and efficiently.
• 4:06
  So I said, let's figure out a solution.
• 4:08
  This is my, this is what usually happens a lot with me.
• 4:10
  I tend to, I tend to solve problems and build things.
• 4:14
  After realizing, well, this is stupid, let's fix it.
• 4:17
  And so we were like, well, let's see here.
• 4:20
  Everybody's pretty much doing the same thing.
• 4:22
  Everyone's focusing on donor management and fundra fundraising, but nobody's focusing on the marketing piece.
• 4:28
  And the marketing piece is the biggest component with all this, because it's the next after fundraising campaign ends.
• 4:34
  What happens next? Nothing.
• 4:36
  You just sit there and try to figure out what you know, wait till the next campaign, but the marketing piece and synchronizing and harmonizing everything together with the donor management and the fundraising is the key to growing your organization and scaling it.
• 4:49
  So we're like, we need to create a system that does donor management, fundraising, marketing, everything all in one box that's actually cost effective to nonprofits.
• 4:58
  That's not going to make them go crazy with all the tech jargon.
• 5:02
  So $5,000 domain later.
• 5:04
  Give sweet.com
• 5:05
  was born.
• 5:06
  That's awesome.
• 5:08
  So yeah, I agree.
• 5:10
  Like there a lot of times it's really difficult for nonprofits to adopt a large variety of softwares because they don't have the capacity to be a master of any.
• 5:22
  Right.
• 5:22
  Right.
• 5:22
  So they're a master of none and.
• 5:25
  The marketing piece is a piece that many nonprofit organizations believe that they don't have the capacity to be able to invest in, and so.
• 5:36
  Giv Suite provides them an opportunity to be able to invest in marketing and the donor management platform all at once.
• 5:45
  Yeah.
• 5:45
  And I absolutely love it.
• 5:47
  Yeah, no, for sure.
• 5:48
  Because it, it, the mar marketing with nonprofits is like this big, giant scary word and everyone's, everyone's like afraid of it.
• 5:56
  And it's just like, but why you guy? You know, you how you have to be, you have to put yourself out there.
• 6:02
  You have to market your people.
• 6:03
  You have to.
• 6:04
  Take, take what you're doing, prioritize it, show it off to the world, and bring more people in.
• 6:08
  Otherwise no one's gonna know about you.
• 6:10
  And when you're, you're scared of doing this because you think that you're, you're siloed into this, I'm a nonprofit.
• 6:16
  I can't make money.
• 6:17
  I'm a nonprofit.
• 6:18
  I can't afford this, that, and the other.
• 6:20
  You need to, you're running a business.
• 6:21
  You're just because you're nonprofit doesn't mean you're not allowed to make money.
• 6:27
  You're just a business with tax deduction, tax deductible receipts.
• 6:31
  And so having the right tools to be able to do that in order to grow, it's like a business, like if you don't have the right tools to grow your business, your business is gonna flop.
• 6:38
  Yeah.
• 6:39
  If you don't have the right tools to grow your nonprofit, your, your organization's gonna flop.
• 6:42
  So.
• 6:44
  Yeah.
• 6:45
  Yeah.
• 6:46
  So, what actually generally happens is a lot of nonprofits are started as passion projects, and then the passion project, you know, gets outta hand and then they're like, we need to move this thing into the next level, and they move into a nonprofit.
• 6:58
  Actually, I have a great book here.
• 6:59
  I had a guest on the podcast.
• 7:01
  Passion isn't enough.
• 7:02
  And it was written by David Road, it was recently released.
• 7:05
  It's an, it's a great book.
• 7:07
  I recommend it to all nonprofits because it's kind of like nice, hey, this is the business side of it.
• 7:13
  And so what happens is a lot of nonprofits are like learning that on the go and kind of piecemealing it together.
• 7:20
  And so, you know, I, I, I don't fault them for that.
• 7:24
  'cause that's in, in, as a business and an entrepreneur, right? We kind of do the same thing.
• 7:29
  But it is really nice when you get the right tool in place that can help with all of it.
• 7:35
  And so Giv Suite is a CRM.
• 7:39
  Yep.
• 7:40
  And you can also manage all of your marketing.
• 7:45
  So your social media, your email marketing, even some web marketing through it.
• 7:50
  Yep.
• 7:50
  Right? Yep.
• 7:51
  You can build websites.
• 7:53
  You can build websites and landing pages, donation pages volunteer signup pages.
• 7:57
  We have surveys, quizzes.
• 8:00
  An event management system that you can do ticket, you can do tickets at the door with QR code check-ins.
• 8:06
  You can do, you can do even do mobile, mobile, tap to pace so you can walk around your events and collect donations with your phone.
• 8:12
  There's like a million different things that you can do, but it's all like.
• 8:17
  Simplified for the nonprofit non-tech brain, and this was one of the key things that we were doing is that in a market where everybody's trying to talk to you in tech language and like when we're doing research for, for our ad campaigns, I'm going on, I'm going on Google Ad Library, I'm going on Meta ad library, and I'm seeing everybody's literally running the same ads.
• 8:37
  Number one CRM best CRM for donor donor management.
• 8:40
  It's like nobody cares like.
• 8:42
  And you're talking, you're not talking to me, you're not talking to the founder, you're not talking to the ED because these guys don't know what you're talking about.
• 8:49
  You need to be able to, and this is marketing 1 0 1, know how to communicate and connect with your audience.
• 8:54
  Then you win at marketing.
• 8:56
  And so by speaking their language and offering tools and solutions that.
• 9:00
  Speak their language, you're going to win.
• 9:03
  I don't even do demos with people anymore.
• 9:05
  I just get on, it's like, this is the joke with the, some of the video ads that we're working on.
• 9:09
  We're working on creating a bunch of commercials.
• 9:10
  This is the joke we're gonna create, like a therapy session.
• 9:12
  It's like, so what's your problem? And because like everybody has a problem, everybody has an issue, and it's all about understanding what that problem is and seeing how, how the software can be a strategy and a solution to the problem.
• 9:27
  So, okay, so you mentioned the not techie nonprofit professional.
• 9:33
  Is this software really difficult to so how long do you think how long do you think it takes to kind of onboard and get acquainted with the software? So it's all relative honestly, for we have people, we've had people who get, get out the gate right away.
• 9:48
  We don't hear from 'em.
• 9:49
  And they, because they're, they themselves are tech savvy and they understand how to do it, but we have other people that takes a little bit of time, like everybody's different.
• 9:56
  My, my philosophy is I'm not gonna take the training wheels off the bike until you're ready to ride.
• 10:00
  We have our onboarding, but we want to make sure that you're able to go in there, create your workflow work, and create your processes, and get in a, get in a, get in a flow so that you know what you're doing.
• 10:12
  Because this, for a nonprofit, especially a nonprofit where you're running around doing a million different things, having your workflow, having your consistency, and knowing your processes.
• 10:22
  You probably, you teach this to people, like, it's, it's the key to success.
• 10:25
  So when you have a system that's doing most of this through automations and you, but you have to build the automations, you know, once you have that going, then it's a lot easier for you to be able to go out there and do more things.
• 10:42
  Mm-hmm.
• 10:42
  Yeah.
• 10:43
  Yeah.
• 10:44
  And I actually, I was just meeting with a client today and we were talking about the automations and so like, some of the donor platforms I've seen allow for automations, but not all of them.
• 10:55
  But one of the things that I really love about your platform is the ability to do automations.
• 11:00
  And so some of the ones that I think are so fun are like a birthday card for your donors.
• 11:06
  Like, you know, we don't always collect our birthdays.
• 11:08
  This particular nonprofit works with kids.
• 11:11
  And so like they have a ton of events, so they'll be collecting event information on their youth.
• 11:16
  It's like it's teenagers.
• 11:18
  Okay.
• 11:18
  His passion, his passion is middle schoolers.
• 11:20
  And I was like, wow.
• 11:23
  Word.
• 11:23
  Yeah, I know.
• 11:24
  So anyway, they have a lot of events and I was like, collect their birth dates.
• 11:28
  Does that provides you a lot of information about a kid anyway? About a student used to work at a university.
• 11:33
  We always called them all students.
• 11:34
  Yeah.
• 11:35
  But being able to send an a happy birthday to your donors is such a nice touch.
• 11:41
  Well, yeah, because it's, because it's, it's, it's, it's a, it's, you're not asking for money.
• 11:46
  You're just showing my, that's what I, on the marketing side of it, I, I'm always a big fan of this.
• 11:50
  We do this lot on the marketing side.
• 11:51
  It's just.
• 11:52
  Con, keep up the conversation, continue the conversation, show them that you're alive and show 'em that you care.
• 11:56
  Because E, because everybody makes this mistake in, in nonprofit world, is they look at their donors as an ATM.
• 12:02
  They look at them as like, we need money.
• 12:04
  Let's do this right now.
• 12:05
  Like, but if you just send out a birthday card or you send out, like, I'm doing this right now with another client of ours, we're working on, you know, creating.
• 12:13
  A a car, a Passover card, and we're gonna send that out and it's like, send it out to your existing list.
• 12:19
  We'll see who's engaging.
• 12:20
  We'll segment them out accordingly so we know how to send out more communications.
• 12:24
  One, you're sending them something tangible that they're gonna be happy with.
• 12:27
  Two, you're, you're te you're being able to better segment your marketing so you know how to communicate with these people even better.
• 12:34
  And three, that you, you, you show them that you're, that you care about them, you're alive.
• 12:38
  Yeah.
• 12:39
  Yeah.
• 12:40
  I think that's one of the big challenges that a lot of nonprofits experience when they are trying to think of the non ask touches.
• 12:48
  They're not really sure like what they can send.
• 12:51
  Right, right.
• 12:52
  And and then it gets really hard to be consistent.
• 12:55
  So I do love that when we think, when we look at Give Suite, we can schedule in advance.
• 13:02
  Our newsletter to go out.
• 13:03
  So it goes out at the same time every year, every month, or every week, however, frequently you, you do it and there's templates, there's nice pretty templates too.
• 13:12
  Yeah.
• 13:12
  So we don't have to you know, as the organization, we can have a day where we work on the newsletter and then it'll just go out whenever you've scheduled it for, so you don't have to worry about that.
• 13:24
  Right.
• 13:25
  Yeah, no, for sure.
• 13:27
  Yeah.
• 13:27
  And then I think another really nice thing is that you can create multiple layer workflows.
• 13:33
  So for me and my organization when I work with nonprofits, it's thinking about the donors and where they are in their walk.
• 13:42
  I actually did a class on this not too long ago about segmenting our donorship, but let's say we have a new donor and when the new donor starts, then we get to walk them through a series of emails.
• 13:56
  So it kind of takes care of the, like how frequently should we contact them? Well, it's, we're going to, we're gonna decide that once and then it's gonna walk our new donors through a series of emails that's going to help welcome them to our organization.
• 14:09
  I do this for my organization, and you learn about, in one email you learn about my newsletter and what it is and how it's laid out.
• 14:17
  And another one you learn about the podcast and what it is and how it's laid out.
• 14:21
  Well, this is really phenomenal for a donor, right? Because you can actually touch on every single program, every single.
• 14:28
  Yeah.
• 14:29
  Event, you know, I mean, and this is what we do on the marketing end with our clients, is we create these different email, what we create these different email sequences that are connected to, we have an a cold email welcome sequence.
• 14:41
  Anybody who opts in from the Google grants or from our our lead post pixel to, they'll get these, they'll get like a welcome sequence talking about who the organization is, what they're all about, you know, everything like that.
• 14:52
  Going step by step, showing off what.
• 14:55
  The different aspects and the different facets of the organization.
• 14:58
  And then once we start seeing who's engaging more often, we send out more targeted emails, more targeted sequences, giving them more of a reason to become a partner with us.
• 15:07
  I never asked to donate.
• 15:08
  I always asked a partner.
• 15:09
  Yeah.
• 15:10
  And.
• 15:11
  People and people do it.
• 15:13
  But when you have, what, what we found with a lot of these other programs that we were using with our clients before Give Suite, we found that there was limited on automations and actions.
• 15:23
  And when you're limited on automations and actions, you can't properly set up these type of campaigns because you, you have to figure out what you want to do.
• 15:31
  And then it creates more work.
• 15:33
  Because we did this with one client of ours.
• 15:34
  We were really successful with them, but they were using MailChimp and they had even like a paid plan.
• 15:40
  They had like three automations and two actions.
• 15:43
  How are we supposed to do a 10 part email sequence? We literally had to schedule out emails, and not only did we had to schedule them out, but they, we couldn't schedule them out to be sent at certain times because of the restrictions on their plan.
• 15:55
  So the amount of work that went into this was insane.
• 16:00
  You know, granted they did a nice return, but it, but it was the, the amount of work.
• 16:06
  And, and this is a key component for these small organizations.
• 16:09
  It's like you have to f you have to understand the amount of work that you're gonna be doing versus, you know, what you could be o other things you could be doing.
• 16:17
  And when you set up these automations, when you set up these email drips, you, you, you, you remember a long time ago there was this, this commercial for like, it was, it for like the, the rotisserie chicken oven, the rotisserie oven.
• 16:29
  And the guys, the, the tagline was set it and forget it.
• 16:32
  Oh, yes.
• 16:32
  Uhhuh.
• 16:33
  You know what I'm talking about? Yeah.
• 16:34
  That's it.
• 16:35
  That's exactly it.
• 16:36
  Set it and, and he'd get the whole audience.
• 16:37
  Be like, set it and forget it.
• 16:39
  That's exactly it.
• 16:40
  Like if you set it and forget it and, and then you know, you can go out there and go change the world.
• 16:45
  You can go out there and save the whales, do whatever the hell you want to do, you know? Yeah, yeah.
• 16:50
  When you're logged down.
• 16:51
  Yeah.
• 16:52
  And I do think that that is a piece that a lot of nonprofits don't realize they could have that freedom.
• 16:58
  You still do have to work on the business side of it and the marketing side of it, but now it really takes it down to we're doing it, you know, maybe one day a week, and we are able to get it all done for that week.
• 17:09
  If you have some of these series in place, you do set it and forget it, right.
• 17:15
  For our new donors, every new donor, we take through that sequence.
• 17:18
  And then you only have to kind of revisit it once every six or 12 months.
• 17:23
  Right.
• 17:23
  Or to make sure that it's still communicated.
• 17:24
  Or what you do is once they get, once they get past, yeah, exactly.
• 17:27
  Like you have to go back.
• 17:28
  But once they get past the initial email sequence, then you just segment them out to go on your monthly newsletter, your BI or your biweekly newsletter, whatever it is, because now they're already familiar with you and then, and, and so it makes things a lot easier.
• 17:42
  Yeah.
• 17:42
  Yeah.
• 17:43
  So it's why I really, really love GiveSuite.
• 17:46
  When I learned about it, I was so excited.
• 17:49
  If I had the ability, I would've created this for nonprofits myself, but I don't have that skill.
• 17:56
  So I'm so glad that you do and that you were able to create it because this is what I want to be able to help my clients have.
• 18:05
  It makes it.
• 18:06
  It makes all of these marketing tasks along with the donor tasks manageable for a team of one to three people, right? Yeah.
• 18:15
  Hundred percent.
• 18:16
  I, I'm, percent I'm a single person in my organization and I am able to manage all of it for my organization.
• 18:22
  I look forward to the day where I have another partner where like I can outsource some of it.
• 18:27
  That'll be great.
• 18:27
  Cool.
• 18:29
  I can do it all.
• 18:30
  Yeah.
• 18:30
  But that was like an, our entire like idea behind this was because you see, if you know this and, and everybody's listening knows this, the majority of nonprofits are not major organizations.
• 18:41
  They're small mom and pop shop organizations that are looking to change the world, but they, they're using spreadsheets or they're using something.
• 18:49
  I literally, one of my favorite use cases was a woman who was literally, was using WhatsApp and spreadsheets.
• 18:55
  Even spreadsheets to keep track of all her stuff.
• 18:57
  Her annual revenue was like 14 K when she started, when she came to us and she, at the end of 2024, we saw this in her donor dashboard.
• 19:07
  She closed out with over a hundred K in the bank annual.
• 19:10
  She was able to hire a whole team to come out and work with her to be able to manage the day-to-day, manage the, manage the CRM, manage the database, manage all the other campaigns, and she's just rocking and rolling and, yeah.
• 19:22
  It's insane.
• 19:22
  Like one of my other favorite use cases, another small town organization, one person show doing everything.
• 19:28
  She was leveraging the social media scheduler and a bunch of other, and event management system because, and she said she'd never had such a good year with her organization.
• 19:38
  'cause everything was organized.
• 19:39
  Yeah.
• 19:39
  And it's like this.
• 19:40
  Like, regardless whether it's my system or something, it's all about the strategy.
• 19:45
  You imp you, you implement with it.
• 19:48
  And it's also about just having a system in place because you can't just run around with like, right.
• 19:54
  I had a call today with somebody.
• 19:55
  They're like, we, we need a system.
• 19:57
  We have.
• 19:58
  Like, all our records are on 17 different spreadsheets.
• 20:01
  Mm-hmm.
• 20:02
  We have, we had one Ed, the original Ed, who was like, you know, she had her way of doing things and she left and it was all based on connections and all the, all the, you know, classic nonprofit stick.
• 20:12
  And I was like, well, well, regardless of you work with me, you need to get your shit together.
• 20:18
  Like, yeah.
• 20:20
  So she's like, yeah, a hundred percent.
• 20:23
  And yeah.
• 20:25
  I just find that like these other platforms out there, and again, like everybody's, everyone's got their quirks and, and features to them, but I just feel like everybody's focusing on the same thing, whereas they're not.
• 20:38
  They're, and, and even the free systems, it's like, I don't understand why people are going to the free systems.
• 20:43
  You have so many limitations, and why do you want to be limited when you're already limited? Yeah.
• 20:50
  Yeah.
• 20:50
  Well, I, I think that, you know, there is a growth process when it comes to fundraising and that moving into like, oh, this is a thing that my organization has to do.
• 21:00
  And so like a lot of organizations are growing up through that.
• 21:04
  But then what it very quickly becomes evident that like when you have the right tools, you, it's so much easier for the person who has to do the fundraising, and so it really supports you.
• 21:18
  He just said something super interesting and I, and a lot of people I talk to say this, say the same thing.
• 21:23
  I don't know if they realize it consciously or not.
• 21:25
  It's like nonprofits always say, well, this is what we have to do.
• 21:29
  Like I don't get that.
• 21:30
  Like why is it like, or it's like this is what everyone else is doing, so we have to do fundraising.
• 21:36
  It's like.
• 21:37
  Yes, but you have to create, it's fundraising is, fundraising is a sale.
• 21:42
  You have to go out there and sell yourself.
• 21:44
  You have to go out.
• 21:44
  This is one of, one of the things we also discovered in the marketing spot was what's the difference between abandoned carts and donation? Like what's the difference between purchase and donations? Nothing.
• 21:53
  Right? So we implemented e-comm tactics with donation, with donor retention, and it's skyrocketing, but like fundraising is all about sales.
• 22:01
  You don't, you're not gonna go in your company and say, oh, we have to do sales.
• 22:04
  No, of course you have to do sales.
• 22:06
  Like, how are you going to get business? You have to get excited about it.
• 22:09
  You have to like be, you have to get really excited about it, and you have to work on your pitch.
• 22:14
  You have to work on how you're going to sell your organization, sell your product, and, and I feel like having the right tools in place.
• 22:22
  Will really make or break the way that you go out there and sell your organization.
• 22:27
  Yeah, I think, I mean, and I think that that's.
• 22:31
  A lot of times a piece that is missing because fundraising can be really, really difficult when you don't have the tools in place to support you as the fundraiser right now, you're having to remember things.
• 22:46
  You have to remember to do each of the next steps for people.
• 22:49
  You have to.
• 22:49
  And the truth is that none of us are that good.
• 22:53
  And this is actually.
• 22:55
  What I know, and one of the reasons that I love technology is I'm not that good.
• 23:01
  I'm not so good that I can remember all of the pieces.
• 23:05
  I actually, and I believe in James Clear, you know, you rise mm-hmm.
• 23:09
  To the highest level of system that you have in place, right? Not, yeah.
• 23:14
  You can't make it a habit.
• 23:15
  There's no way to make all of these things a habit.
• 23:19
  When you are a small shop or even a medium shop, without all of the support that you need in some of these different areas, you have to have systems that can do a lot of it for you.
• 23:31
  And technology has come so far, but a lot of this technology is really old.
• 23:37
  Right.
• 23:37
  I was, you know, I worked in a university.
• 23:41
  It literally is 23 years ago.
• 23:44
  I, I started at the university and we were moving onto a, this is how old I am.
• 23:50
  We were moving onto a Windows based platform from a DOS space.
• 23:52
  Oh my.
• 23:54
  Oh, wow.
• 23:55
  But the DOS space was very effective and they all, everyone knew how to use it.
• 23:59
  So they were slow to adopt a new system because it was going to be an investment and a real investment because their staff.
• 24:08
  Didn't have any idea how to use windows.
• 24:11
  And so that's funny.
• 24:12
  I know, isn't it? So anyway, I learned that technology can support you or it can make life really hard, but learning how to use technology and utilize it well actually makes life so much easier.
• 24:30
  And so something that you said that I think is really important is that the, so sorry.
• 24:39
  But that the, the user, like they have processes in place and the technology's there to support it, right? Correct.
• 24:47
  We are not like trying to put in software that you have to like design around.
• 24:53
  Actually the software is so flexible that you can, you can create it to support any of your current processes? Well, well that, that's, I say, that's one of my, one of my biggest things with this, and I think one of our main things is that, you know, we work, we can, we can build work based around how you wanna work.
• 25:11
  And what I've seen with other platforms is that kind of, it's like, this is what, this is our thing.
• 25:16
  This is what we do, this is how you use it.
• 25:18
  And you know, you kind of have to work around their, their system and how it's.
• 25:24
  A lot of or, and then if you want to change something because it doesn't fit your specific workflow or process, then it's gonna cost you an arm and a leg and it, it shouldn't be that way.
• 25:35
  Yeah.
• 25:36
  And software shouldn't be that way.
• 25:38
  And one of the other things that we're doing, I noticed, is that we're not charging per.
• 25:42
  Person, because you know, when you're dealing with small organizations, you know, I've had this question like, okay, so who's going, you know, they have to give us access to the CRM, but they don't wanna pay for another license.
• 25:51
  So we have to, you know, we have to get creative.
• 25:52
  It's like we're pay.
• 25:54
  You're paying per organizations.
• 25:55
  You can have one person, you could have a thousand people.
• 25:57
  The whole goal is to grow and scale.
• 25:58
  Your organization's gonna grow and scale, please God, and we want to be there with you.
• 26:03
  Yeah, and but on the marketing side too, you know, when you're talking about fundraising, you're talking about having processes.
• 26:11
  You also have to have a good marketing behind your fundraising because you can't just, you know, it's not just about knocking on doors and making phone calls.
• 26:18
  You have to be able to give people, you know, what show people what you're doing.
• 26:23
  You have to be able to present it and, and.
• 26:25
  In a way that people can engage with you and why they wanna engage with you.
• 26:29
  Because I always say this, what I always tell this to my clients like, what makes you so special? Why should I give a crap about you? Let's be honest.
• 26:35
  Let's call it what it is.
• 26:36
  And it's like, well, it's like, well, tell me straight what everyone else is trying to go for the same money that you're going for.
• 26:44
  How are you gonna do it better? How are you gonna do it different? How are you gonna raise your hand higher than everybody else in order to get that money? And.
• 26:52
  The smart ones think about it and try and come back to me with an answer.
• 26:55
  And the silly ones are like, I don't know.
• 26:57
  It's like, well figure it out.
• 26:59
  Yeah.
• 27:01
  And, and that's you have to, you have to have a message.
• 27:03
  Yeah.
• 27:04
  But like, that's where I feel like a lot of people miss the boat.
• 27:07
  That marketing and fundraising and all these things really have to culminate together in order for you to have a successful organization.
• 27:14
  And when you have everything all in one spot and you don't have to be thinking about, you know, a million different other things, then you could be 10 times more successful.
• 27:24
  Yeah.
• 27:25
  Yeah.
• 27:25
  It, and, and it does, it frees you up to be able to do the amazing work that you're.
• 27:30
  You were meant and called to do.
• 27:33
  Yeah, exactly.
• 27:34
  Because people get involved in nonprofits for a reason.
• 27:37
  Mm-hmm.
• 27:37
  And PE because people who like to help people will get, get involved in nonprofits.
• 27:43
  And just because you like to help people doesn't nec doesn't mean you can be, it mean, doesn't mean you're a pushover, doesn't mean you're not allowed to make money.
• 27:50
  Yeah.
• 27:51
  You just gotta be smart about it.
• 27:53
  Yeah.
• 27:54
  Yeah.
• 27:55
  All right, Sean, thank you for this great conversation.
• 27:58
  Can you tell our listeners where they can find you? You can find me on LinkedIn.
• 28:03
  I'm, I'm all over the internet.
• 28:04
  You can find me on YouTube.
• 28:06
  Our cha, our YouTube channel's, a nonprofit academy.
• 28:08
  I put out videos every week.
• 28:09
  You can also find me on Spotify, iTunes all major podcasting platforms with our podcast.
• 28:16
  The non-pro profiting with nonprofits, which hopefully, Sarah, you're gonna be a guest on our show soon.
• 28:21
  And you can check us out on g suite.com.
• 28:24
  We got all our blogs and all our articles up there.
• 28:27
  You can find me on the nonprofit resource hub with all my articles and content over there, nonprofit all sorts of different places.
• 28:34
  I have my content all over the internet.
• 28:35
  I kind of spread myself all over the place.
• 28:38
  All right.
• 28:38
  So they can Google Sean Littman and find you, right.
• 28:40
  You, you, you'll, you'll Google me and I'll probably come up.
• 28:44
  Awesome.
• 28:45
  All right.
• 28:45
  And then one piece of advice that you would like to give all of the nonprofits before we exit.
• 28:51
  Oh, this is always this, you know, I ask the same question to everybody on my show too, so it's funny.
• 28:56
  I would say that when you're getting into the nonprofit space, make sure that you have, you, you have the right people working with you.
• 29:03
  Make sure you're not going into this to make money.
• 29:07
  Because I've dealt with a lot of people who've started nonprofits to make money, and they're like, how come it's not working? It's like, because you're an idiot.
• 29:13
  You went into this to make money.
• 29:15
  But you, if you go into the nonprofit space with the right people surrounding you, you have the right S systems and the right tools working with you.
• 29:25
  You're going in there with an open mind that you're trying to change the world, but at the same time, you also have to run it like a business.
• 29:33
  Then you're gonna be successful.
• 29:34
  And don't be scared of marketing because marketing is your best friend.
• 29:38
  Mm-hmm.
• 29:38
  Yeah.
• 29:39
  It's funny, every time you say marketing, one of the things that I always teach in grant writing is that nonprofits don't market.
• 29:45
  They do community education.
• 29:48
  So, because in grant writing, you can't request marketing money.
• 29:52
  You can request community education money.
• 29:54
  So anyway, just a, just a tip for all those nonprofits out there writing grants, you should always include community education money in anything that you do.
• 30:02
  So well, it is a creative way to do it and I've, I've actually explained to people how they can get grants to pay for me and they're like, really? You can do that? I was like, yeah, of course you can do that.
• 30:11
  Yeah.
• 30:11
  So.
• 30:12
  Awesome.
• 30:13
  Well, thank you for joining us today and to our listeners, I thank you for tuning in.
• 30:16
  I look forward to talking to you again next week.
• 30:19
  Thanks.
• 30:20
  Bye.
• Thank you so much for tuning into this episode of Nonprofit 4 1 1.
• I hope you found today's conversation as insightful and inspiring as I did.
• Remember, building a healthy nonprofit requires a holistic approach.
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• Until next time, keep pushing forward in making a difference.