Learn how the "Big Quit" is impacting the nonprofit sector and what can folks do to combat the effects.

Mazarine Treyz

Mazarine is the creator of the Asking for More framework and mastermind, a veteran fundraiser with years of experience going from Development Associate to Development Director, host of the Asking for More podcast, and author of the books The Wild Woman’s Guide to Fundraising, Get the Job! Your Fundraising Career Empowerment Guide, and 10+ courses on fundraising.

She has helped thousands of people ask for more, whether in their fundraising work or a business that thrives. She is certified in Transformational Leadership from the Racing to Equity Institute and founder of a woman-owned emerging small business with multiple government contracts under her belt.

Links:

• Web address: https://wildwomanfundraising.com/
• Email: mazarine@treyz.net
• Nonprofit Consulting Conference https://nonprofitconsultingconference.com
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/mazarinetreyz
• LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/mazarine
• Survey: 55% of Americans expect to search for a new job over the next 12 months https://www.bankrate.com/personal-finance/job-seekers-survey-august-2021
• The Great Resignation: Why Millions of People Are Quitting (and How Employers Can Earn Them Back) https://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/great-resignation-employees-quitting-attract-great-employees-wage-rates-signing-bonuses.html
• Research from Cygnet Research Group: http://wildwomanfundraising.com/what-happens-when-you-dont-pay-a-living-wage/
• You can ask for more! https://www.bls.gov/ooh/management/public-relations-managers.htm
• Ways we can do better: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/01/four-day-workweek-pilot-program-is-now-underway-in-the-us-and-canada.html & https://www.dailyscandinavian.com/6-hour-workdays-in-sweden-boost-productivity-energy-and-happiness/
• Work won’t love you back by Sarah Jaffe
• Laziness does not exist by Dr Devon Price

Want to see additional resources? Visit resources.foundant.com

Connect with other members of the philanthropic community at Community.foundant.com

Hello and welcome to our Foundant Connected Philanthropy podcast. Today we are privileged to have Mazarine Treyz from Wild Woman fundraising as our guest and we will be talking about the great resignation and how it is impacting the nonprofit sector. Mazarine brings a wealth of experience to this topic from our work in the nonprofit sector. She offers courses, workshops, consulting and more.

She's been facilitating speaking, writing, content on how to ask for more in our nonprofits and our consulting. So we are very fortunate to have her on our podcast. Thank you so much for joining us today, Mazarine.

Oh my gosh, I'm so excited to be here, Tammy and I'm so excited that we're partnering in the nonprofit consulting conference with Foundant as our title sponsor. This is so exciting and such a great time to talk about, you know, what leaders and funders and consultants can all do about the great resignation, how it hurts you and how you can mitigate that.

Yes. And we are so excited to work with such a fine team of consultants and trainers leading that effort. So I'm going to definitely put the link to the Nonprofit Consulting Conference in our show notes, but we are eager to have you share more information and what you've learned about the great resignation with our community of funders nonprofits and consultants.

How is it impacting the nonprofit sector and what can folks do to combat the effects? So let's dive right in.

Donor retention is way, way, way down, and there's a lot of different factors that go into that. But one of them that I think is consistent over the last several years, not just 2020 and 2021, is that we have massive turnover in our organizations, and there's a few key reasons for that. According to the Signet Research Group. The number one reason that your chief development officer or major gift officer is leaving is because of salary.

That's the research that has taken place over 30 years with Healthy Burke Signet Research Group. And but it's not just about fundraising staff. It's about program staff. I have a client right now who's a development director who's stuck doing the work of program staff because the nonprofit is paying them 18 an hour and they're going and getting jobs at Amazon for 25 an hour.

So we're seeing this huge brain drain on different levels of the organization. Plus, in the last couple of years, executive directors have also really been jumping ship moving around. And they've really been overburdened. Everyone's been overburdened with the people that have left. And so I talked earlier this year when I did the nonprofit career conference with a couple of recruiters, one from the U.S. and one from Canada.

And what they both said was, we're seeing that if you leave your job now, you can get 10 to 15% more in your new job. And with the inflation that we've had in the last year, if we had 8% inflation at least. And of course, that's really screwed up. And it's there's no reason for it. You see it when you go to the grocery store.

You see it when you fill up your car with gas. You see it in rent raising and all of that stuff. And so if you haven't renegotiated your wage and gotten a 8% increase, you are now being underpaid if you weren't already. And so that's something for funders and nonprofit leaders to think about, is how can we keep our good people?

And I'm hoping if people are listening to this, they're already interested in that topic. So lots of lots of things to say about that. But we have links in the show notes as well, like back up a lot of this research.

So great. Yes, I'll include those and really thinking about this, what do you lose when you lose your good employees and this whole impact of turnover? Can you dove into that and really talk about is it just, you know, replace and you have to go if you weeks or months without someone in the position what does that what do you lose.

Oh my gosh. Well, the average fundraising position in particular six months to a year is often how much these positions are empty for. And it's a great tragedy because then you're not nurturing and sustaining your donors with that support that they need to feel connected to you. You're not continuing. Sometimes your grant proposals are your funders are wondering what's happening and funders are.

I've never seen a funder ask for how long have you kept your fundraiser? And that's something that cost 117% to replace the fundraiser, 117% of their salary, according to Penelope Berg. And if you lose a fundraiser year over year, you're losing $600,000 and if you keep them year over year for three years, you're gaining a half a million dollars.

So I would like to see funders actually ask more of their executive directors, How can we support you to keep your good fundraiser and give you more operational support or ongoing operational support for a capacity building position like fundraising? You know, what could you do if you dreamed big and said, we're going to pay every single person here 80,000 a year?

And you think that I'm a dreamer, but I'm not because I interviewed Sean. Good is the executive director of Choose 180 in Seattle and every single person in his organization, he's part of a coalition of organizations that are doing this. Everyone is making 80,000 a year, and that's something that you can do right now to stem the tide of people.

Leaving aside from raising people up from, you know, the inflation piece. And people say to me, Mazarine, we don't have the money. He didn't give the money either, but he's still going to expand programs. So if you're planning on expanding programs, then maybe you could put that money somewhere else instead. And a lot of big American corporations right now and European corporations are going to the four day workweek, the six hour workday day.

We'll have links for those in the chat as well. So you could do things where you could have people work less and still pay them the same amount. So they're making more per hour.

I love that there's there's flexibility. There's lots of great ideas and how in the thoughts of how can funders help nonprofits in looking at that side of it, I know we've had several listening sessions with our funders here. Those that that use Foundant in their their grant giving and some of the ideas that came up were just phenomenal, you know, the whole unrestricted, you know, that is going and moving forward with a lot of them.

But some of them then said, no, you have to restrict some of it. And I'm like, okay. And then the next sentence was awesome. It was, you know, to force the executive directors to take care of themselves or to this can only be used for their sabbatical or only because otherwise this whole selflessness, you know, and giving to the cause comes into play.

And so what are some other ways that you can think or creative ways that you've seen or heard how funders can support and really turn the tide of this this movement we're seeing here?

That's a really great question. Over the last several years, with the uprising of BlackLivesMatter, the George Floyd murder, as well as the rising income inequality in the U.S., a lot of people in the nonprofit sector are asking ourselves, how are we playing into this system? And How can we stop playing into this system of income inequality, of people in charge not having consequences, and people who are not in charge having all the consequences?

So one of the things to remember is that our whole society is built on white supremacy. And what that means is the structures inside your organization are not supporting people to do their best work. And so there's ways to do better with this. And when funders think about how what part of replaying, forcing executive directors, even that phrasing is, is very problematic, but forcing them to take a break.

Well, do you realize why they're overworking? Is it that we need to have a more flat organizational structure? Do we need to have co leadership? Could they fund co leadership? Could they fund one CEO and one CEO, for example? And then the thing about and I just talked about this on other podcasts is like white supremacy makes you think I have to have all the answers and have to be responsible for everything.

But if you actually deprogram yourself from that, you'll be able to say, I don't have to be in charge of everything. I don't have to have all the answers. I need to talk to people in the community that have the answers, that do actually know how to get this work done. And I need to take a step back.

And so what we're seeing now with philanthropy is people are like, please just give us a common app. We don't want to have to, like go through all of these details in in different applications everywhere. That's how funders can make this easier for folks. But also, instead of saying, how will you show results and replicable program? And all of these things, it's I just say, we trust you.

We trust you to do this work. You've had you do this work because of Reaganomics, taking away all of the social services that are now being put upon nonprofits. I'd also like to see government entities, right, saying we're going to pay you before you do the work instead of 6 to 12 months after you do the work. So you don't have to let your fundraiser go or your other stuff.

And that's the other way that these, you know, government contracts can really screw over small nonprofits. And then when it comes to restricting funding, which was your question, I'd say that it's all going into one bank account and you're making more work for people when you restrict the funding. And we've just barely moved past the whole overhead math problem, and some foundations are still there.

But what I'm seeing more forward thinking foundations do now, more forward thinking funders are saying, how can we spend down our endowment? How can we basically work ourselves out of a job? And I think that's a good way to go as well as, you know, helping folks really start to deprogram themselves from the idea that the system isn't already set up to chew people up and spit them out, because that's where the great resignation really is, is that people are leaving because they just can't take it anymore.

They're getting so little pay. They're getting so much work. The reward for working really well is more work, you know? So how do we shift that?

Exactly. Yeah. And and I probably I didn't want to misrepresent, although I didn't give any specific names. But the whole force. Yeah. Just what are those good ideas where you don't you cause you cause a shift in, in the right direction of who's making the decisions and how the money is going to be used to solve the problems.

But you're not setting up more work.

One of the things we talked about in the beginning of our conversation was simply like less work to give people less work and pay them more. And it's super simple. They don't need another mental health webinar, they don't need another training about getting more done in your day or being organized because we've got so much trauma in our country from COVID over the last two years, two and a half years.

It's it's something that we just can't pretend isn't there. People don't have the same capacity to pay attention. People are in grief. Even if you didn't lose anyone. There's the grief of plans. There's the grief of things that you lost, not seeing your family. And so all of that means we have less capacity to do work and we need more compassion with each other.

But unless we're giving that to ourselves first, we often are just much more impatient. And we don't actually we don't actually give that compassion to other people because we're in trauma. Right. So first I'd say go to therapy. It's been great for me.

I go to.

Therapy. Oh, my God, I wish I'd gone years ago. And I used to say it's it's going to help you be a better person. It'll give you that emotional vocabulary, that emotional intelligence that allows you to be like, Hey, are you struggling right now? Should we give you less work? And I'm like, this is like really counterintuitive, but you can also, as a leader, help your staff rewrite their job description based on what their actual strengths are, not on the laundry list of things you're expecting them to do.

And that can really help them have more motivation at work and say, you know, where do you really want to be in five years? And how can I help you get there? If you say that one little phrase, you can make people so much more loyal to your organization because they see that you don't see them as a work robot.

And that's something that I've said and other people have said my conferences for the last several years, I've done like fundraising career conferences and nonprofit leadership summits since like 2015. I took a break in 2019. I came back and did it again in 2020. You know, this last year we done one called the Party of the Patriarchy, which was great.

But it's really about, you know, supporting yourself to feel like you care, not that you're all a family because that's a dog whistle, right? Not that you're all, you know, going to have passion for the mission, because that is a dog whistle, too, that really says that we're going to exploit you. So instead of like assuming that you have to buy in to all of this, you know, this toxic workplace culture that still exists and people ask people to come back to work or do a hybrid work, why they've already proved they can do it from home for the last two years.

Why are you making them come back in? I know a major gifts officer who is boss is going to make her come back into the office. She's like, I have a health condition. I just had a baby. Like, I've done my work from home for, like, the last year and a half. You really need me in the office and the boss, like, everyone has to be here.

And she's like, I'm getting a new job. And then she went and got one and got paid more and it was great for her. It really left her boss in the lurch. But, you know, if you don't listen to what your people say they want because of the resignation, that's going to come back and bite you. Now, nonprofit employees have way more power than they had.

On top of that, we have people talking about nonprofit employee unions. We have people talking about, you know, more democratic workplace structures like the Co-op Institute. And so if people, like, want to look those up, we can also have those links in the show notes, like, there's ways for you to structure your organization that allows people to have more power and maybe like take a little bit of the governance, quote unquote, off of your board shoulders and say, we don't actually need you to approve the budget because you've only skin in the game.

Instead, how about you just ratify our decisions? And that's how boards used to be back in the 300 years ago when our 400 years ago, when Harvard was founded as like the first American nonprofit and corporation, they were like the professors were making all the decisions. And then the board was just ratifying them. And now because of, you know, Puritanism and I would say neoliberalism and things like that, we believe that people with more money are among the elect.

They're really smart. They know everything. The people that have no less money are stupid and know nothing. And we have to, like, make them do things and they don't know what's best for them. And if you would just unpack those attitudes and those biases a little bit, we all have them, right? But if we linpack them a little bit, you'll see that.

Oh, okay, this isn't personal. This is how the whole culture operates. And I can unplug from this and stop being like a zombie. That's like, only parroting what I've been told. You know what I mean?

Yeah, I love that. And I love. I love what you started with. I get therapy and because because how how do you draw the lines? How do you how do you bring this to light? I, I have a great manager mentor here Foundant that. Like you said, see things, you know, recognizes. And and I've also seen when that isn't the case and and just the ease of my doing my work when I'm doing something that like, for instance, this working with partners, just, just lights me up and it doesn't feel like work versus doing something that's harder for me or that doesn't come with as much interest, you know, so, so things like

that. Could you know, really still make the organization successful in its mission, but just a different way of looking at it, rather than viewing people as, you know, just pegs to to throw at the problem. So what what more can employees or even, you know, the leaders on the nonprofit side do to stop or or support this effort to heal from this?

Let's talk about power. Let's talk about accountability. Let's talk about how you may not have positional power as an employee yet. And having a unique organization may take a year. But once you start to see how the people who make the decisions maybe don't have as much responsibility as you do, you can start to shift the conversation from, If I'm responsible for this, then I need everyone to have accountability, not just me and I think that's a really big mental shift people need to take when they look at what's currently happening in our organizations.

The other thing I'd say is we have we have so much invested in the structure as it stands, and it may just have to be begin again, honestly, and you have to be really open and honest about what you need as well. And so if your current organization isn't giving you what you need, look around and see who could and have these be willing to have these conversations and name your needs and claim them.

You're not being selfish, you're not lazy. There's a book called Laziness Does Not Exist by Devin Price. Dr. Devin Price, which is excellent, came out last year. There's another one called Work Won't Love You Back by Sarah Jaffe, another wonderful book that came out last year and we have to remember that the more people try to get us to speed up, the more we need to slow down and push back and say, I'm not ready.

This doesn't work for me. Let's figure out another way. And and if people are not being compassionate with you being like, you know, a little compassion would be helpful. Right now, I know it's easy for me to say sitting here as a consultant, but like, this is why people like me are brought in because you're losing people. You don't have someone to mentor your person that you just hired.

You're wondering how you can stem the tide. So I want to give you some more research. Ellen Bristol of the Bristol Strategy Group has a book called The Leaky Bucket, and she has an assessment called The Leaky Bucket on her website. And if you go there and you put in this how many donors we had last year, how many donors we have this year, you'll see that the stat that that the vast majority people have like 50, 60, 70% donor loss every year.

And the actual results from the survey she's had over 1000 organizations take the survey and that was in 2019, probably even more now. What she found was that the people that had the best donor retention, if you want to make more money, if you're a funder listening and you want to help your organization make more money, this is what the number one organization on that list did.

They are LDS, the Mormons. What they do is they hire a fundraiser and then for two years they say, you are not responsible for fundraising. All you're responsible for is learning how we do things here, suggesting improvements, getting trained, and then you can fundraise for us. And that taking that pressure off of the fundraiser really allows them to feel supported in their work and makes them feel much more loyal to the organization.

And of course, with religious organizations, the tithing thing is huge and obviously people don't really change religions very much. So there's that aspect as well. Obviously. But when you consider how much people in America are not going to church as much as they did in the LDS is losing people. You know, it's still an achievement to say that they have the best donor retention, but the reason they do is the way they treat their people.

So really want leaders, funders and employees to get this. If you're not being treated well, your nonprofit is a machine made of people and the machine is going to start breaking down. So the oil in the machine is you taking your vacation, you're working your proper hours, you asking for a four day workweek in a six hour workday and then getting a petition signed.

If you don't want to do that, starting a union and getting that done or asking for more democratic workplace structures or, you know, citing these other examples that we cited, saying like this is how it could work if we all worked together and trusted each other and made more collective decisions that the people that actually know this is a good databases isn't.

Stop using a spreadsheet, stop using a series of spreadsheets when I get hit by a bus in the street, hopefully never. But if I did, you know, no one's going be able to solve this. And I've seen it happen over and over and over again. Organizations that are just really not good places to work. They have just toxic parts of workplace culture.

For example, an organization that I know of had a boss that said I was the only one here at 7:00 last night. Where was everyone else? You know, it's like you're assuming that you can only get your work done if you worked there longer. And that's really a toxic assumption. So asking yourself to say, you know, what do I know?

And why do I know it? Like, why do I think 40 hours a week is not enough? What do I think 50 is better? That's what he was exhibiting. You're asking yourself, why do I think this particular database is going to solve my problems? Who do I know? Who's an expert at this? And that's why I love that you're going to be speaking at the conference.

Tammy, about how to be a better partner with organizations like yours. Because I really see so many people just suffering for lack of an integrated system. And that really can help you ask for more. If you have a fundraiser that's passionate about the organization but is also passion about how well they get treated, you'll be able to ask for more if if you like, comfortable with your boss, you'll be able to ask for more.

Like building these relationships internally is more important than externally. Like you have to be strong inside first and really like it. We talk more about what other things we could do, but does that make sense?

Yes. Yes, it does. And and, you know, with the whole values and what your mission is, when you go to present any of these ideas or thoughts that would make it easier for you and showing it how it does align with the greater accomplishment of what you're you're looking to do. You know, if that gets shot down, then you kind of know who you're working for and where the problem lies.

Right? You know, so if you align that, that makes great sense. I and I've seen it, like you said, time and time again, where is this is the contest to see how many things you could hold in your head and remember until you forget something and then you feel horrible that you missed the deadline? Well, you weren't given the tools, you weren't supported.

And and just taking a quick look at at the return and the investment required for, you know, solution versus solution B and at least getting a solution, you know, that does have a positive return on that. That's got to be exciting for employees to learn new technology, to know that they're not, you know, have to sit here and do the same thing three times into three systems.

It's just, you know, counterintuitive to being appreciated, you know.

Oh, my gosh, it shouldn't be right. Like, it shouldn't be counterintuitive to appreciate your folks. And you can simply ask your folks, you know what what is meaningful praise to you or do you want to be praised? Would you prefer present? Would you prefer, you know, something else from us? Would you prefer just more time off? Because everybody is different, right?

And so if you're a good leader, you understand that you can't just treat everyone the same. So having these crucial conversations like we know we have problems here, what's keeping you from doing your job? Like having that question, having not have like bad things happen if you ask that question and answer it honestly, you know. Yeah. So building trust deliberately, I could talk about that for a whole other episode.

Well, that is some of the you know, sometimes when I look at what has made me successful in different leadership roles and it, you know, it isn't some pre calculated move, it's just, okay, let's remove barriers like I want you to be successful that you know, it all lines up to success is, you know, for everyone so I yeah well we'll have to have you on talking more about building trust.

Yeah. So presentation on that.

Yes it's one other thing you mentioned that if you could speak a little bit more about is like when you come in as a consultant versus listening to your staff or and or, you know, one of those those things that that could play a dynamic is when do you support yourself in your organization with consultants and understanding the dynamic of the board and organizations.

Have you seen them when that's gone awry or some good rules of thumb to keep in mind, because I always think a good consultant could save you so much time. You know? And so but not to only respect consultants and not your staff.

Right. So I'm often brought in because the executive director wants to be held in what's going on with them and helping them kind of deal with the overwhelm and deal with kind of everything going on and helping them kind of make order out of chaos, helping them with a fundraising plan or helping them with other aspects of their individual giving program.

So I love doing that. I also love mentoring, fundraising staff. I also love helping other consultants ask for more as well. And in each of these areas, like the common theme that runs through is how often are we listened to but not heard? How often are we watched but not seen? And I really like holding that space with people.

And when we do engage in that deep listening and that holding, we're able to really tease out what is the thing that is making you stuck? What is the thing that's that's making you feel like nothing will ever work? And oftentimes in the day to day of our organizations, there's nobody who's designated to hold that space. And that's what a consultant like myself can help you do.

And I love doing that, especially now as I've gained more skills during the pandemic, being able to be like, Let's talk about how this is really affecting you instead of just trying to push through power through and pretend it's not happening because it's just going to blow up in your face later, you know? And so that's very useful for some organizations that I've worked with.

I mean, we've gotten more money, of course, we've gotten more donors. We're monthly givers, more major givers. But we've also really uncovered some key problems that if the organization is willing to let their fundraisers have the budget to solve it and let them be the expert or entertain an experts opinion instead of their own uninformed opinions that can be I hate to use the word impactful, I'll say that can be extremely powerful.

So I highly recommend folks bring in consultants, especially when there has been turnover and say, why was there turnover? How can we stop this from happening again? And I'd be happy to you know, be that voice in the room and saying whatever the rest of the staff is saying, because if they need someone to listen to you, that's an outside voice.

I can just repeat it, because oftentimes that's what consultants do. And the reason they do that is because you're paying them more. And that's why you think they have more of a better opinion than the staff. So did you listen to an outsider than it is to listen to somebody inside that? Yeah.

So, yeah, yeah. We see I've seen that in relationships, everything.

Yeah.

That's familiar. Yeah. Yeah I love that. And then the, the investment and the payoff of it, you know, to get someone like yourself that really can bring so, so much experience to the task at hand and how quickly that helps mentor while achieving the results you're looking to achieve. It's, you know, going to a class or a conference like the that we're working on together, all that could be helpful as well.

So looking at all of it and seeing what fits and what's available to you as a first step versus, you know, the end game, all of that is good. So this this is all been so helpful and and thanks again for helping our community learn more about what the great resignation is, what are the factors that are causing it?

And really, what they can do and all the other parties together, how we could turn it into the great attraction, like you've said. And I want to remind our listeners that we are going to be including all of the links. I love your research back points that you've been putting out and having those items that you've mentioned in our show notes, including links to your selves, your website and all the offers of assistance one on one coaching, training, all of that.

We, we really appreciate you taking the time out of your busy schedule to join us and want to leave some space for you to share. Any final thoughts or advice for our listeners today?

Well, thank you again so much for having me, Tammy. I'm just so grateful that Foundant cares so much about the nonprofit sector that you're willing to really ask people these harder, deep questions and say, look, it's not enough to just pretend everything is fine. What's really going on that shows that you really care? And so I'd like to extend that ask to any leaders or funders listening.

Ask your people what's really going on, how can we really help? What do you really need from us? And and just give them that space to say it. And it could be, I need a break. I need more vacation. It could be. I need to rejigger my whole job. It could be I need to get paid for childcare.

It could be I need an assistant and I know an executive director still waiting to get one of those after like five years of organization. So, you know, you can do a little bit with where you are now, but if you really want to go further to consistently asking those deeper questions, building that trust deliberately, that's going to that's going to help you get through this time.

If anyone has learned anything from today's Connected Philanthropy podcast or if you think someone else might please share it with others who could benefit from it. And we look forward to connecting on future webinars, podcasts and our community discussions. We wish you all the best success and again, thank you for all you do. Take care.