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Monthly Archives

April 2020

Apr 20

Help your team care for themselves and they will care for others

By Sponsor Insight

By Jodi Snell, vice president, Hedges

We work with some of Indy’s best at Hedges. Hard to believe, it has been five weeks since we all started working from home. While working remotely is not a completely new concept to our Hedges team, working from home 100% of the time while being surrounded by our loved ones is new to us.

Last week, we took the time to send out some extra communication via email to let Hedges employees know how much we value them. It was something we called Monday morning motivation. The response from our team told us that we were right on the money. They needed to be reminded that it’s okay to care for themselves during this time. As a result of this intentional communication, we received positive feedback from team members and learned that people felt relief, support, and gratitude for such open communication during this time.

We were inspired by how much this message meant to our team and during this time when collaboration and community mean so much, we wanted to give others permission to “borrow” our idea and hope that it can be a resource for those nonprofit leaders looking to communicate the value of self-care to their teams amidst COVID-19.

Here’s what we sent to Hedges employees

We have made it 4 weeks!! Thank you all for taking such good care of our clients. Each of you have gone above and beyond in so many ways. You have reflected the Hedges values repeatedly during this time and we appreciate you so much!

With that said, we wanted to touch base and make sure that you are caring for yourself as much as you are caring for our clients. Below are a few things that we want to reiterate and put out into the universe for each of you to read:

Let go of any guilt: We are so thankful to have a team of high achievers. That is what makes this transition to the full team working remote so easy for us. We know that you will take care of our clients and go above and beyond for them.

So…let go of the guilt about not being your most productive self right now or not getting in eight hours a day. We know you will take care of your clients and all client work will be completed. We aren’t counting hours and you shouldn’t either. Put that guilt on a boat and send it down the river!

Loved ones included: Dog barking? Cat walking across your keyboard? Kiddos popping in on a meeting? Partner walking in during a meeting? We are all in the same boat – all of us at Hedges and everyone else in the community. Try to remember those little windows into us as humans are okay – find the joy in those moments rather than worrying about them!

Give yourself a break: Hitting a wall? Can’t seem to finish that deliverable? Kiddos asking you to play? Want to have lunch with your loved ones? Feeling down? Need a nap? Have a desire to help and volunteer right now?

Give yourself permission to take a break. If you need to take part of a day away to just recharge during this time, please do so and don’t use your PTO. Consider it self-care and do it! You will be way more productive if you take a break and come back to your work. Please, please, please take the breaks you need to care for yourself right now.

You do you: Depending on your workload and the type of work you are trying to knock out you might need less or more face-to-face time with others. Please determine what you need each week and plan accordingly.

Need some heads down time or a break from Zoom? Let the team know, turn off Microsoft Team chat, and move unessential meetings to emails. Need a space to process and talk through a project with someone? Tap into someone on the team who has the space to do that with you! We all have different capacity levels each week, so let’s lean into that as a team.

It is our hope that these reminders will remove any stressors that you might be feeling related to work. In a time like this, we will each have good days and bad days. If you are feeling a certain way, someone else is probably feeling that way too. Check in on each other – take care of each other.

There are some videos about mental health related to identifying stress, your workspace, and practicing gratitude in First Person’s resource hub that might be helpful during this time. And, if you need additional supports or resources, please let us know.

With gratitude for all you do.

Focused on equity, justice, and serving others, Jodi Snell is leading the way to make Central Indiana a vibrant place to live and to strengthen the nonprofit sector. Jodi has worked and volunteered with an array of nonprofit organizations for more than 12 years providing leadership and strategy, serving on the front line of direct service, and leading fundraising efforts. Since 2014, Jodi has shared her valuable leadership skills as an essential thought partner and problem solver at Hedges. She leads the Hedges team and clients in a manner that transforms visions into impactful and measurable change.

Apr 20

O’Neill grad students put classroom lessons to work for communities

By Sponsor Insight, Uncategorized

By Leslie Wells, assistant director of communications, O’Neill School at IUPUI

As two teenage girls stood before the Batesville, Indiana, City Council, they waited to make their case for funding. The Batesville Mayor’s Youth Council had received $5,000 through the Indiana Housing and Community Development Authority’s (ICHDA) My Community, My Vision grant program (MCMV). If they couldn’t come up with another $7,000, they’d have to take their public art project back to the drawing board.

In the crowd at the council meeting was Stacy Robinson, a public affairs graduate student from the O’Neill School at IUPUI. She had been working with the Mayor’s Youth Council for months through her My Community, My Vision Fellowship at the O’Neill School. Her assignment: to help the teens develop a proposal that would bring national artist Kelsey Montague to Batesville to paint two interactive murals.

“The meeting actually was a little tense,” Robinson recalls. “Some of the city councilors didn’t like their idea.”

Former Indiana Lieutenant Governor Sue Ellspermann started MCMV in 2014 to bring development to Indiana communities and engage young people. Every year, youth-led organizations from across the state apply to the program. Each group selected receives a $5,000 grant toward a community development project. They are also paired with an O’Neill IUPUI graduate student who guides them through the process. As part of the fellowship, each grad student receives $10,000 over the course of two semesters.

“Community engagement is the lesson plan at O’Neill,” says Marshawn Wolley, O’Neill’s director of community engagement and strategic initiatives. “This is a great example of the innovative partnerships we try to develop in order to advance student learning and impact communities at the same time.”

Wolley and O’Neill Associate Professor Adam Eckerd helped create the partnership with ICHDA and bring the MCMV grant program fellowship to the school.

“Students come into an MPA program eager to foster policy change and make communities better, but they don’t often get the opportunity to see that change actually happen,” says Eckerd. “The My Community, My Vision program allows our grad students to get hands-on experience using what they’re learning to lead real positive change in Indiana communities, while also having an influence on high school students who will be future public leaders.”

That combination is why Robinson applied for the fellowship. She came to the O’Neill School because of its reputation in the nonprofit world. Yet experiences like this one help her learn how to apply her education to any sector.

“I liked the idea of learning more about how local government works while working with youth,” said Robinson. “They’re at an interesting time in their lives when they care so much about what’s happening around them, but they often aren’t given opportunities to make change happen.”

Once she was paired with the Mayor’s Youth Council, Robinson sat down with the teens to get a better understanding of what they wanted to do and why.

“They already had community surveys that told them there wasn’t a lot for young people to do,” she says. “They wanted to make Batesville feel like a more vibrant place that young people would want to come back to after graduation.”

Robinson taught the enthusiastic teens to think critically about how to turn their artistic dreams into reality. She worked with them on how to evaluate the project and get more feedback from their neighbors. That community buy-in, Robinson told them, was critical.

“If the community doesn’t like an idea selected by a small group of people, that’s not a good public art project,” she said. “You need to make sure the community is on board with it.”

Not only did the community support the project, but so did the city council. At the meeting, they agreed to cover the remaining costs and move the Youth Council’s plan from paper to paint. Since last summer, two murals now enhance downtown. The first is a tree swing painted on Miss Shannon’s Music Studio in the Batesville Shopping Village. The second, a butterfly mural, is on Hillrom’s Training Center on Walnut Street.

Kim Linkel, an advisor for the Youth Council, says Robinson’s guidance not only made the project better but also helped the teens develop leadership skills.

“Stacy always allowed them to drive the project,” Linkel says. “They’ve realized that they’re not just some club that doesn’t make an impact. They see that, even though they’re young, they can drive change in their community.”

Their newfound confidence came through in the City Council meeting. The teens presented a strong case and convinced councilors to provide additional funding to cover the remaining cost for the murals.

The My Community, My Vision partnership paid off for Batesville, its Mayor’s Youth Council members, and for Robinson.

“It was a really positive experience,” she says. “It was great to actually be able to put things into action that we learned in the classroom and I enjoyed working with the youth. They made me feel excited and hopeful about the future.”

To read the teens’ proposal, click here.

Leslie Wells joined the O’Neill School at IUPUI as its assistant director of communications in 2018. She previously spent more than a decade in broadcast news and three years as media relations manager at the Indiana Youth Institute.

Apr 13

How do women give of their time, talent, treasure and testimony?

By Sponsor Insight, Uncategorized

By Abby Rolland, communications project manager at the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy

For more than a decade, the Women’s Philanthropy Institute (WPI) has conducted research to answer this question. Known for its studies that specifically focus on gender and giving, the institute doesn’t just report on the findings, but incorporates practical perspectives and applications in every study it conducts.

When Jeannie Sager joined WPI as director early this year, she was especially drawn to WPI’s mission to curate and disseminate research.

“Sager will be a dynamic new director guiding the next phase of our Women’s Philanthropy Institute, which is helping to understand the full potential of women in philanthropy and the potential of women’s philanthropy to transform the world,” said Amir Pasic, Ph.D., the Eugene R. Tempel Dean of the school. “Her experience working with women philanthropists as donors and volunteers will further inform the institute’s work, and her strategic, creative leadership style will help launch a new decade of excellence for WPI.”  

An established leader in philanthropy and fundraising, Sager brings a wealth of expertise and more than 25 years of nonprofit leadership and development experience in a variety of fields, including higher education, independent schools and healthcare.

At the Indiana University Health Foundation, she was part of the leadership team that created a flagship statewide foundation from several disparate hospital foundations that collectively exceeded its first-year fundraising goal by more than 330%.

Sager also built a full-scale development program from the ground up at University High School of Indiana, raising over $30 million in private philanthropic support by establishing a major gifts program focused on annual gifts.

She believes nonprofits must form deeper relationships with donors by creating community, establishing personal connections with potential donors, encouraging longevity and donor education and inspiring deeper engagement. Nonprofit practitioners, she said, should incorporate easy-to-understand research findings into their daily work as they help donors — women and men — discover their passions and reasons for giving.

She recently shared two donor anecdotes from her firsthand experiences that illustrate how WPI research can be embedded into practitioners’ daily experiences and help inform donor strategy.

“I worked with a woman on her first ever “major” gift. It was the largest personal gift that she ever made. She was inspired to make this gift as an opportunity to give back to her department in honor of two physicians whom she felt invested in her at the beginning of her career. So, she wanted to create a staff education fund to help other team members have the opportunity for professional development to hopefully inspire them to choose that area of healthcare as their specialty. 

“She was very adamant about the idea of an endowment and having these funds available in perpetuity and not subject to budget constraints. Moreover, she was resolute about finding others to match her gift and to achieve a goal of $100,000. She was willing to personally solicit her network of colleagues, both retired and current employees, her family and grateful patients.”

APPLICATION: Consider the various ways that women donors engage with each other in giving.

  • Women also appear particularly interested and involved in collaborative giving, especially compared to men. The donor in the story personally solicited her own network for donations to the staff education fund, illustrating her desire to engage others and give collaboratively to set up the fund.

Leveraging and maximizing dollars for greater impact can be seen in the growth of giving circles. From 2007 to 2016, the number of giving circles tripled, with women making up the majority of members in 70% of giving circles. It’s estimated that giving circles have given as much as $1.29 billion since inception to 2016.

  • Women also report needing first-hand involvement to increase their motivations for giving. The donor above felt a strong connection to the department that she dedicated her career to, and wanted to help support other nurses and staff long-term.

According to the report “Where Do Men and Women Give?” female-deciding households are more likely to give to health (like the woman above), youth and family, and international causes. In couples when the wife is the sole decision-maker, the household is more likely to be motivated to give by believing that their gift will make a difference.

“When working in the independent school space, we often engaged in discussions with spouses or adult children about considering a gift to the school that honored and equaled the time and talent that their spouse or mother had invested in the school — imagine hundreds of hours serving as PTO president, working open houses, organizing fundraisers and working concession stands, etc.

“Reframing their spouse’s or mother’s time in terms of value helped elevate a major gift conversation.

“Women philanthropists tend to give more than money. In addition to being more likely to donate than men, they also are more likely to volunteer — and volunteer more hours on average — compared to men. In other words, women give of their time and talent, for example as PTO presidents, board members, and fundraising committee members, in addition to giving their treasure.” 

APPLICATION: When approaching a woman donor or those close to her, consider the time, talent, treasure, and testimony she has given your organization.

  • Women tend to engage philanthropically beyond giving money. Fundraisers should keep in mind that potential women donors may desire a deep and first-hand connection to the causes that they care about. Women donors may require a deeper level of engagement from the organizations to which they donate — from serving as a volunteer or a board member, to requesting frequent communication and updates about their donation.

Women’s monetary donations are important, but keep in mind the many other ways women show their generosity. They volunteer, and they use their networks and their voices to galvanize further support for causes they care about. In an estimate of informal giving over the last 10 years, 72% of Americans said they helped a stranger, and 42% said that they volunteered. Women are also more likely to volunteer than men. As a result, there’s large potential to engage potential donors, including the woman herself as well as her family members, by illustrating the impact that she’s had on the organization.

The bottom-line is as development professionals, think about the last few times that you interacted with women donors. If you can’t think of those interactions, why not? If you’re speaking to only men donors, who or where are the women in their lives that might be involved in those giving decisions? Why are they important to include? Take the time to analyze and evaluate your donor solicitations, and think of how including women will help your fundraising grow.

Abby Rolland serves as the communications project manager at the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, and is also working towards a master’s degree in philanthropic studies. She holds a bachelor’s degree in history from Gettysburg College.