Community over competition with Heather Yandow and Lauren Andraski
““I think we're attracting folks who understand that mindset. I mean, they're choosing to join a community. And I think also a lot of us recognize that the skills that we've learned, that we base our businesses on, we learn from somebody else.” - Heather Yandow
“I think the abundance and collaboration mindset really helps people do better work… It is much better if I can feel kind of comfortable letting that go, sharing that with other folks that are going to do a much better job and really love doing that work. And then give myself the space to take on clients that are more aligned with what I do.” - Lauren Andraski
In today’s podcast, we are chatting with Lauren Andraski from Consultants for Good and Heather Yandow from Nonprofit.ist. Jess and I were so excited to have them talk about how they have formed open and generous communities for consultants where everyone grows and learns from each other.
Highlights:
The benefits of social connection and having a community where you can learn from and feel supported.
Having an abundance mindset and allowing other people to work alongside you.
Leading with trust and building your network.
Resources Mentioned In This Episode:
Jess' Nonprofit Coaches and Consultants Slack Channel
Connect with Heather:
Website: nonprofit.ist/confessions
Connect with Lauren:
Website: consultants4good.com
Find Us Online: https://www.confessionswithjessandcindy.com/
Connect with Cindy:
Cindy Wagman Coaching https://cindywagman.com/
The Good Partnership https://www.thegoodpartnership.com/
Connect with Jess:
Out In the Boons: https://www.outintheboons.me/
Transcript
[00:00:00] Cindy: Welcome to the Confessions Podcast. I'm Cindy Wagman.
[00:00:03] Jess: And I'm Jess Campbell. We're two former in-house non-profit pros, turned coaches and consultants to purpose-driven organizations.
[00:00:11] Cindy: After years of building up our separate six-figure businesses from scratch, we've thrown a lot of spaghetti at the wall and have lived to see what sticks.
[00:00:20] Jess: We're on a mission to help other non-profit coaches and consultants looking to start or scale their own businesses past the six figure mark by pulling back the curtain.
[00:00:30] Cindy: Whether you're still working inside a non-profit and thinking of one day going out on your own, or you've been running your consulting business for years, you understand that working with nonprofits is just different. We're giving you access to the business leaders who serve nonprofits as their clients, you know the people who truly get it.
[00:00:51] Jess: No more gatekeeping, no more secrets. This podcast is going to give you an inside look at what running a successful nonprofit coaching and consulting business looks like.
[00:01:03] Jess: Basically, we're asking people how much money they make, how they. And what has and hasn't worked in their businesses.
[00:01:11] Cindy: Listen in as these leaders share their insights, their numbers, and the good, the bad, and the ugly when it comes to building a non-profit coaching or consulting business. We're gonna empower you to make the power moves that give you the income and freedom you set out to create from day one.
[00:01:28] Jess: You ready? Let's go.
[00:01:31] Cindy: Hey, Jess.
[00:01:32] Jess: Hi Cindy.
[00:01:33] Cindy: I love today's conversation. It kind of makes my heart smile because we're talking about community. And I think—
[00:01:43] Jess: Community over competition.
[00:01:45] Cindy: Yeah. Community over competition. The generosity that comes with opening ourselves up to the people around us who are doing similar things, playing in similar spaces. And what I've discovered is there are quite a few communities that specialize in nonprofit consultants. You have one which we should drop the link for the Slack channel in this show notes. But today we've invited two people who are doing it very differently. Lauren Andraski who is Consultants for Good and Heather Yandow from Nonprofit.ist.
[00:02:30] Cindy: And yeah, I think there's just such a, I mean, it's a little bit of a departure from our conversations 'cause we do go into a little bit about how they build their business, but it's more about like how we can connect with others as community.
[00:02:43] Jess: Mm-hmm. One thing that I really enjoyed hearing from both of them was that factor about building community and they both have such different spaces. Right? And I loved learning about what the folks who are on the inside get from their various communities. But I also loved learning about their journey of building communities and what they're doing to keep people in their communities and what they're doing to feed and sustain people.
[00:03:11] Jess: I think for anyone who's out there that's kind of curious about building their own community, whether that's for your non-profit clients, or maybe there's a niche of which you want to, you know, collaborate with other business owners of a certain type. This'll be a really informative conversation for you to listen to as you get started on that journey.
[00:03:35] Cindy: Yeah, and I think at the end of the day, we all uplift each other and consulting can be very lonely. So I think there's just so much richness to having these conversations, connecting with other people. And with that, here's our conversation.
[00:03:52] Cindy: Heather, Lauren, welcome to the podcast.
[00:03:55] Heather: Thanks so much for having us.
[00:03:56] Lauren: Thanks so much. We're excited to be here.
[00:03:58] Cindy: When Jess and I started talking about having you both on the podcast, we got really excited because what I love about my experience in consulting with our non-profit sector is that there's a lot of collaboration. There's a lot of community and I think that that's something so special and has made my journey as a consultant feel way less lonely.
[00:04:25] Cindy: And so we wanted to have both of you on because both of you are creating communities of consultants, specifically nonprofit consultants. And what I've experienced in both of those communities has been so open and generous. And so we're gonna talk about community today. Let's start. Lauren, do you wanna tell us a little bit about your origin story and how you started your community?
[00:04:50] Lauren: Sure. Happy to. So I started Consultants for Good when I was a consultant. I had come from kind of learning what nonprofit consultants do. They're an organization in Madison, Wisconsin called Consulting for Organizational Reflection and Effectiveness, or C.O.R.E. And I support nonprofit consultants.
[00:05:11] Lauren: I wasn't one yet and thought maybe someday I might do that. So then when I moved to Denver and started my own consulting business, I found that most of the folks that I was reaching out to for, as I was just getting started, we're still in that network and I was looking for people that were in my area.
[00:05:30] Lauren: So I reached out to somebody that I was connected to on LinkedIn who I didn't know very well, but he was a non-profit consultant. And I said this would be helpful for me. How about you? So we met in the basement of a coffee shop four years ago. And part of it really came from when I was consulting, I was looking for resources.
[00:05:49] Lauren: I was looking for kind of collegial relationships. And I would, for example, I was prepping for a presentation as a consultant and asked my husband if he would let me do a run through with him. And we did it, and he works in healthcare IT, so he's not at all connected. And he was like, Are they gonna know that word?
[00:06:10] Lauren: And I was like, I don't know. I, I hope they know that word. And really found that I needed people that I could kind of run things by like that. I was also noticing that within consulting there was a lot of hesitancy for folks to share their approaches. Kind of treating them as something that is really proprietary.
[00:06:29] Lauren: And the only way that they get business is because they do their work this way. People wouldn't share RFP examples or what their pricing was. People were keeping it pretty close to the chat. So I was looking for folks that were willing to share things and be in a space where there weren't any potential clients in the room, but we could actually get some input specifically and be a little bit more vulnerable than you can be in those other spaces.
[00:06:52] Cindy: I love that. And before I come to you, Heather, Lauren, can you also just tell us where the community is now? Like Consultants for Good, what does that look like? How does it operate?
[00:07:03] Lauren: Yeah. So as I said, we started in the basement of a coffee shop in Denver about four and a half years ago. Now I think there are probably about eight folks that joined that meeting.
[00:07:13] Lauren: And now we have, I think last I checked, 436 members. It's all global at the moment. It's completely free with some changes to that coming up in the next six months or so. Yeah. Did you wanna know also how we operate now or do you wanna get into that a little bit later?
[00:07:30] Cindy: No, that's perfect. We'll come back for sure, to talk about some of the nitty gritty. Heather, how did you get started? Because your community is quite different and also quite unique, so tell us that, words and story.
[00:07:42] Heather: Yeah, so, you know, a lot of this mirrors what Lauren said. So I've been in the nonprofit sector for 20-plus years. About 12 years ago I was wanting to get out of my nine-to-five non-profit job and really started thinking about what I could do next.
[00:07:58] Heather: And I thought maybe I'd be a photographer or a massage therapist, like I was thinking way outside the box. And I had an experience with a bunch of non-profit leaders that really brought me back to how much I appreciate the sector. I've been in North Carolina for all of that time, so I really have some long-standing relationships.
[00:08:18] Heather: And so I wanted to stay in the sector. So 12 years ago became a consultant. Probably about eight years ago, I started pulling together folks very similar to Lauren called Consultants Cafe, we met at a cafe at first. It got bigger and bigger, and eventually we had to meet at a co-working space. But about four years ago or so, I started really thinking about how to make the really terrible Google spreadsheet that we had into something more useful.
[00:08:48] Heather: So we had about a hundred members of this networking group that would come together to share information and talk about their own practice, what they're thinking about, what they're learning. But we had this really awful spreadsheet that just had 30 columns for all the different specialties. So I started really thinking about how I could make that more useful.
[00:09:09] Heather: Because a lot of what we were seeing was people in the network were referring across the network were, you know, I need a communications person, I need a fundraising person, kind of moving back and forth. So that was the seed that then germinated over time into Nonprofit.ist. So we launched in early 2019.
[00:09:27] Heather: So we kind of, Nonprofit.ist has says three things. We're a network of nonprofit consultants, coaches, and other experts. So we do a lot to create connection in the community. We host professional development, so three monthly webinars and other experiences. And then we have a directory so anybody can come to see the directory and find somebody to help.
[00:09:49] Jess: So helpful. Before I ask my next question, Laura, can you describe what the contents of your community is outside of community? As Heather just mentioned, it's professional development, it referrals, it's what does it look like in Consultants for Good?
[00:10:07] Lauren: Yeah, sure. So Consultants for Good meets monthly. And in those meetings, every single session is based on what members want to teach and learn. So every six months or so, I'll send out a survey to get that information, and then I basically just pair everybody up based on their availability for the primary topics that folks wanna hear about.
[00:10:27] Lauren: And then we also have a Google Group lister. And within that we have folks that share RSV's, share different opportunities. Ask, will you listen to this presentation I'm planning because you're not my husband and you are actually in the field. We've also had folks actually partner together on projects and in some cases build a consulting firm together after some of those connections that they've made through the lister.
[00:10:54] Jess: Amazing. And my question for both of you is, now that you've been doing this for a few years, what are some of your findings? What are some things you've uncovered from building this community? Is it, is it just more community? Does it feel good? Or is there anything concrete? I would just love to hear. Heather, why don't you go first?
[00:11:14] Heather: Sure. So a, a couple of things that we have seen. One is just how important that social connection can be. So we started in 2019, 2020; everything changed March. You know, people were really freaking out about what was gonna happen to their businesses? What was gonna happen to the nonprofits they loved?
[00:11:37] Heather: And we started weekly phone calls because people just needed to check in face to face. We had been doing some connecting before that, but that was really the impetus to turn on the jets for our community connection. So we did weekly phone calls for a while, and then we moved them back to monthly, but they were really all about people getting emotional support, people working through the PPP process, talking about the challenges they're having with their kids being home. So just seeing how critical that was and for those of us who are solos or at small shops, we don't have that workplace to talk to. We don't have those kind of built in connections.
[00:12:24] Heather: So the people who were showing up and were really coming to this, this was the place they were getting that kind of support. And so that continues obviously, at different levels throughout the past few years. But people really do as you've already mentioned, feel alone in this work. And so having that community connection is really important.
[00:12:45] Jess: Super important. How about you, Lauren? What are some uncovers, findings, things you found out from, from running your group for a while now?
[00:12:52] Lauren: Yeah, I mean, I would echo what Heather said about people wanting social connection. I've tried in other spaces to have just virtual networking calls and basically nobody wants to show up.
[00:13:03] Lauren: People aren't that interested. And yet in this space there are some of our most popular meetings. So every quarter we have a social connection call and basically there's a prompt with randomly assigned breakout rooms for an hour and a half. And it's never enough time, no matter how long I put people in breakout groups.
[00:13:18] Lauren: And I think it is unique to that space of being a solo 'preneur especially because you don't have colleagues. And it's a great way to be able to connect there. I've also seen that people really want to collaborate and be generous, but I think there's a lot of pressure to be more competitive, especially if a lot of your resources are coming from a more typical business perspective.
[00:13:39] Lauren: I was finding that when I was consulting that those were not really the spaces that supported the more collaborative work that I wanted to do. And I think that we've also seen that members when members are driving the work and are self-organizing, that's been much more effective community building than when I'm kind of organizing and telling people where everything is.
[00:14:00] Lauren: So that includes finding out what people want to learn and using that to structure sessions. But our onboarding team is also led entirely by volunteer members at the moment. We have social meetups roughly every month in Denver. Those are all member-led and I see a lot more buy-in and investment in the community when people get to take that initiative.
[00:14:22] Lauren: The last thing I'll say too is that I think the abundance and collaboration mindset really helps people do better work. Even though it can be scary and it can feel like, "Oh, if I just keep everything to myself, that's the most effective way to do this." But actually, if I, for example, see a social media RFP comes through, and that is so not my thing, but I could technically do it.
[00:14:44] Lauren: It is much better if I can feel kind of comfortable letting that go, sharing that with other folks that are going to do a much better job and really love doing that work. And then give myself the space to take on clients that are more aligned with what I do. So I've really seen some of those shifts in the past four years within the community too.
[00:15:02] Heather: Absolutely. I'll echo the abundance mindset. I think we're attracting folks who understand that mindset. I mean, they're choosing to join a community. And I think also a lot of us recognize that the skills that we've learned, that we base our businesses on, we learn from somebody else.
[00:15:22] Heather: We stole from somebody else 'cause we saw them do it live. We read a good book, we listened to a podcast. And so there's just a lot of willingness to share. So I mentioned those webinars that happen monthly. Majority of those are led by our experts. So our graphic design, one of our graphic design experts led a DIY branding for your business.
[00:15:43] Heather: Like she was, you know, "here, take all that I know, take all the tools." So we really try to actively kind of push back against that competition mindset. And against that thinking that you kind of own all of this and you can't possibly share it.
[00:16:03] Heather: Again, though we do always have questions about how do I find great leads? How do I market myself? So we're actively answering those questions and kind of trying to do both at the same time.
[00:16:11] Cindy: I love that. Do you have any sort stories or examples? Like again, having been in both of your groups, I'm sometimes just like blown away by people's generosity. Also, when I started consulting, I found there were two schools, like generous people and then the people who were more guarded. And there are some like, surprisingly delightful acts of kindness, openness, and sharing.
[00:16:37] Cindy: I wonder if, Heather, let's start with you, if you have any examples where you were just personally like, "I can't believe that person just shared that."
[00:16:46] Heather: Yeah, so I'll say late in 2020, a lot of us were grappling with what's our role in race equity and in becoming anti-racist practitioners. And so we sponsored a couple of more in depth trainings for consultants who weren't necessarily equity practitioners, but really wanted to include it.
[00:17:09] Heather: So we had a wonderful leader for one of them named Melissa Jolton Hewitt. And she was a paid class for people to be in. At the end of it, she came back a few months later and did a webinar for all of us.
[00:17:24] Heather: That was what she learned by doing this great course for us. And so it was just so generous, so useful, so timely. So that's, you know, in the kind of programmatic context of what we do, that was one place where it was just so lovely and generous.
[00:17:42] Cindy: I love that. How about you, Lauren?
[00:17:44] Lauren: Yeah. I think the most rewarding part of seeing folks who come in, in that early stage of like, "I think I might maybe someday wanna be a consultant" especially for folks who actually are already consulting, but are still feeling a lot of hesitancy around kind of owning that a little bit.
[00:18:02] Lauren: And so I, there's one particular consultant that she started off that way. She was a little bit unsure. She wasn't sure if she was gonna actually take the dive and do it full time. And a couple of years later, she's now running a firm jointly with another Consultants for Good member. They have a couple of staff people and that other member has quite a bit of experience, but was looking for a partner and generously shared a lot of what she had learned on her journey.
[00:18:30] Lauren: Another recent one, somebody shared an RFP and said, "Would love to get this out to the network. Just so you know, I'm also applying." And I thought that was just such a beautiful example of something that yeah, you are creating direct competition for yourself. And yet because there's that kind of more of an abundance mindset, knowing that even though you're doing this, you'll still have plenty. There's plenty for everyone. And just really love to see people still being willing to share, even when it's in direct competition with their own work.
[00:19:02] Heather: For me, that's tied to all of us want to do the best for the nonprofits we work with. And so I am always, if I'm talking to somebody and they're looking for other people, they're kind of gathering proposals.
[00:19:15] Heather: I'll make suggestions for people who are my competition because I really do believe I'm not the best person for everybody. In fact, I'm the wrong set for some people, and I really want these organizations that I care about to find the right person.
[00:19:28] Jess: Definitely. I wanna switch gears a little bit and talk about the maybe more operational side of building a community.
[00:19:39] Jess: And as someone who also builds communities, I know how much work can go into it. I also know both of you have full-time proper jobs that you're doing. And so, not that this is a side hustle, but it's kind of like a dual business. And I'd love for folks who are listening in that are curious about building communities of their own, whether it's with their clients or other business owners or what have you.
[00:20:06] Jess: Walk us through some of the ways that you are working to market this, grow this. I'd be curious if you have, you know, paid ad strategy, versus word of mouth, versus visibility. I would just love to hear about your evolution of getting this out to people over the years that you've been running this.
[00:20:30] Jess: Lauren, you wanna start first?
[00:20:33] Lauren: Sure. I've been, I mean, I think in almost every space I'm in, I've done some sort of community building. Every job that I've had in the non-profit sector, my full-time job is convening a community in international development. I convened an orchestra string quartet in my living room.
[00:20:55] Lauren: So most of the work that I do is around community building regardless. So in some ways that's come pretty naturally. But as I was starting, I did a little bit of outreach early on, and that outreach was just googling "non-profit" or looking in LinkedIn "non-profit consultant Denver" and saying, Hey, here's a group you wanna join.
[00:21:16] Lauren: In some ways I think it was easier because the group's been free for four years, that there's not a lot of risk. So it's pretty easy to put your email in, you can drop off if it's not for you. But the upfront risk is pretty low. In spite of that though, other than kind of some early outreach as we grew to our first, I don't know, 50 or so members, it's been almost entirely word of mouth.
[00:21:40] Lauren: I don't do any advertising strategies. We didn't have a LinkedIn page until like two weeks ago. Our webpage, which I'm working on updating at the moment, is an old page for my old consulting website that's very bare bones. So really, I haven't done any marketing strategy. It's been a lot of word of mouth, and I think some of that has worked because I've let the community grow itself and because I was part of the community when I started it, so it was something that I needed.
[00:22:11] Lauren: I didn't need to put a lot of pressure on it succeeding beyond at first, especially just for me to have a network of peers to run things by. And I think because of that and being able to then have all of our sessions, all of our content, everything be completely member driven in part, just because I didn't have the time to put in more than that, I think it's really helped it keep a pretty strict focus that is very much based on the needs of nonprofit consultants.
[00:22:41] Lauren: I think it also helps that it's very specific. I mean the name Consultants for Good. I actually, I hate naming things. That was supposed to be a placeholder until I started hearing people call it "C for G" I was like, "Okay, like we have acronyms now." I think it's stuck. But I think actually because it's pretty obvious what we do based on the name, I think that's also made it really easy for folks to know, is that me or not? So I think that's helped a lot throughout.
[00:23:08] Jess: I love it. They're over clever baby.
[00:23:11] Cindy: Yeah. Can I just say I hate my business name. I don't know anyone else. I never liked it. Same thing. It was supposed to be a placeholder. It was supposed to be like, "Okay, I got nothing better", and then it just stuck. But other people like it and I'm just getting over it. So I, I can relate. I can totally relate.
[00:23:33] Jess: How about you, Heather? How, how has your evolution of getting the word out about Nonprofit.its been? What, what strategies have you used? Would love to hear all the thing.
[00:23:44] Heather: Yeah. So, one of the lessons I learned is I created a two-sided marketplace. I did not know I was doing that, and I probably wouldn't have done it if I had known I was doing it.
[00:23:55] Heather: So I have, because we have a directory, we need both nonprofit leaders to be coming to the site to look for people and nonprofit experts, consultants and coaches to be joining. Our business model is all based on the consultants and coaches. So they're the paid members. And all the advertising we do is aimed at our nonprofit leaders.
[00:24:19] Heather: So we do have a Google ad strategy. We have a content marketing strategy, a social media strategy, but it is all around the attracting those nonprofit leaders. So we have about 4,000 leaders who are part of the platform now. Our nonprofit experts have grown by word of mouth. So we, it's the, the network is invitation only.
[00:24:43] Heather: So one of the challenges we had when starting a directory was how do we make sure it's full of good folks? And that good folks qualification was actually really hard to figure out. There's not a certification for us particularly. There's not, you know, a set of references that would really work.
[00:25:00] Heather: So what we landed on was kind of the transitive power of trust. So if I trust Cindy and Cindy, trusts Jess, then I should trust Jess too. So, it's invitation only. We've got about 300 folks who are part of the network now. But we haven't done any paid advertising for those, for those folks.
[00:25:19] Cindy: I love that. And yes, the trust factor is huge. So important. So I wanna ask both of you, maybe Heather, you can start this one. In terms of your evolution around like pricing and what did it start with? Where are you now? And then Lauren we'll come to you after. Cause I know you're moving towards a paid model, and so we can talk about that. But let's start with you, Heather.
[00:25:46] Heather: Yeah, so our original membership was a hundred dollars a year, and the idea there was that it was reasonable for anybody to join. It was certainly less than a lot of the other directories or consultant networks. We actually let our first 50 people in for $50, so kind of ramped up.
[00:26:08] Heather: After about a year and a half, we moved to $149 a year. Still pretty cheap for all that we were doing, but we realized we were doing a lot extra. That also, you know, allowed us to hire somebody. So we actually have somebody who works on the community 12 hours a week who can push out a lot of our content.
[00:26:27] Heather: So we do wrap-ups of every webinar, we do community calls once a month, we send out notes for that. So all of that kind of making meaning of what happens in the community my colleague Kate does, she's fabulous at it. But that allowed us to make that happen.
[00:26:44] Cindy: And Lauren, tell us about what's going on in your head right now. You're moving towards monetization. How is that going?
[00:26:52] Lauren: Yeah, so I've had this in my head to monetize Consultants for Good for a few years now. But running it on the side of my full-time job, I've been able to kind of keep up what we have going right now, which is our monthly meetings, our Google group, and a couple of other resources.
[00:27:10] Lauren: As you just said, I'm in the process of figuring out what that plan looks like. The plan will be to basically, I guess the reason that I'm even looking at monetizing it all is because I think we're providing really good support now, and I think there's still so many other areas where consultants need support.
[00:27:30] Lauren: It is really hard to get cheap healthcare as a consultant because you don't have an employer paying for it. I think I was spending like 500 to $800 a month when I was consulting to get an okay plan. I know that there's a lot of consultants that don't like the RFP process. There's a lot of inequities in the RFP process.
[00:27:50] Lauren: There is a lot of inequities in pay between consultants. Rebecca Andres, who's in Consultants for Good, did a study recently and found that there's not a lot of basis for how much consultants are actually getting paid based on their experience. It's just kind of who, which clients you happen to talk to and what you're asking for.
[00:28:13] Lauren: So being able to kind of adjust for some of those inequities, provide some more holistic support, provide alternatives to the RFP process. I can't do any of that by being able to just grow from this for your network. So the idea is starting out with a pay what you can model. So the plan is somewhere from 15 to 35 bucks a month, or 150 to 350 for a year.
[00:28:37] Lauren: People can choose whatever they wanna pay in that range. And I'll just let people self select based on kind of a scale that says, or a guide that says to pay more if these apply, pay less if these apply. And we'll be starting with our current offering. So we'll have a new free version that's a paired down version so that both can still opt in if they're not totally ready to commit yet with a trial and a newsletter.
[00:29:02] Lauren: But then our current offerings will be what's part of that original membership. Once there's enough funding from that for me to either scale back at my job and take the time to build them out or hire somebody as Heather has done, then hopefully you'll be able to build out those other pieces that provide more holistic support, mentoring, shared services, staffing, other things like that so that we can really provide a more holistic support to folks that are doing it on their own.
[00:29:31] Jess: Absolutely. As we wrap up the conversation, I'm thinking about, it's one thing to get folks in, it's another thing to keep folks. And I'm just curious for our last question, if you would speak to any strategies or methods you've used to not just get folks in, but keep them. I know your answer's gonna be different, especially because Lauren, your community currently is free.
[00:30:01] Jess: But especially Heather, maybe we start with you. Have you any data on how long folks tend to stay? Members do you do anything at 3, 6, 12 months to really celebrate? I'm just all the things. Because I think this applies to whether you're a nonprofit listening and you have a monthly giving program and you're trying to keep people or you have your own community. I think that this answer can and inform so many people.
[00:30:32] Heather: Yeah. I love the question. So, we do have data, we have at about an 80% retention rate. Which as a nonprofit fundraiser, I'm really happy with that number, honestly. And that includes, you know, folks who are leaving the sector or who are, you know, moving into full-time work.
[00:30:50] Heather: And we are, you know, at a former fundraiser it has ingrained in me to really think about how you're retaining your current numbers. That 20% who we lose every year, finding the replacements for those to keep the community at its level and growing is just really challenging. You all know that's the most expensive part, right?
[00:31:10] Heather: Is finding those new donors or new members. So we really pay attention to it. We do a good welcome series, we do check-ins, at different points, we put together an annual survey where we ask people for their feedback and then we tell them what we heard and make changes based on that.
[00:31:29] Heather: We try to do kind of special things every once in a while. So we just released our ethos earlier this year, which was really based on community conversation. We are doing curated coffee conversations. So, connecting people across the network to have some one-on-one conversations. So try to do just some special things there. And then every year we send a kind of thank you for being a member postcard.
[00:31:56] Heather: Jess, I know you love the graphic design stuff, so we do kind of a special mailing and people really like getting something in the mail. So it's, it's part of the way we think about it all year long, but those are a few of the things that we do.
[00:32:10] Jess: I love that. That's so clever. How about you, Lauren?
[00:32:13] Lauren: So I'm still building this out. I just made a note that I need to come back to some of the planning for this. Because the group is pretty low stakes. It's also you get out of it what you put into it. So I know that we have a lot of people that just hang out on the email list and don't contribute and that's okay.
[00:32:32] Lauren: But for the most part, we've had people say, you know, there's too much content I actually need to unsubscribe from the email list. Although than that, it's mostly just been folks that aren't planning to continue consulting. But yeah, looking forward to learn from you all when I hit that hurdle.
[00:32:46] Cindy: Amazing. To wrap up, can you both share with our listeners where they can connect with you and learn more about your communities? Heather, you wanna go first?
[00:32:57] Heather: Absolutely. So you can connect with Nonprofit.ist at nonprofit.ist. If you are interested, if you're a consultant and you're interested in becoming a member, because we were doing this kind of public conversation, we built a little way for you to request an invitation, so nonprofit.ist/confessions, so you can go read all about us. And if you want to apply to be part of the community, we'd love to hear from you.
[00:33:27] Cindy: Amazing. And Lauren?
[00:33:28] Lauren: Yeah. You can find Consultants for Good at consultantsforgood.com. And the four is the number four, so consultants, number four, good.com. Or on LinkedIn.
[00:33:38] Lauren: And I also just wanted to add kind of a final note about collaboration in Consultants for Good because I know as somebody who's been doing this for a while, but I'm kind of taking this big scary step of monetizing. Sometimes I'll hear about an organization like Nonprofit.Its and think, "Oh, well somebody's already doing that, so I shouldn't bother. I'll just keep doing what I'm doing." And one thing that I've come to in the past few weeks is imagine if that happened in other sectors.
[00:34:10] Lauren: Imagine if you had Dali for example, say, "You know, Van Gogh is already painting. I'm just gonna call it quits and you know, keep things to myself." Because I think it can be hard when you hear about other people doing what they're doing and feeling like you have to compete and you don't necessarily.
[00:34:28] Cindy: I love that as like a final thought because everyone listening, that's exactly what they think of when they are building their business and they see other people doing similar things. And I think, was it you, Heather, who said at the beginning like, none of us are creating anything from scratch? We're always copying, but there's, I mean, last week as when as we're recording this, I think I was on four, three or four commun non-profit consultant community calls.
[00:34:57] Cindy: And there's different people in each one. And there's still plenty of people and there are people who come to multiples like me. Like there is so much and again, I think that's why this conversation is so timely right now. And so important is because there's so much room. And I think both of you, and I'll add Jess because she has a community too, we can talk about it.
[00:35:21] Cindy: But I think that spirit of abundance and like we're, you know, high tides raise all boats, I think is the saying. I think that's very much, the ethos for how all of us operate. And I think it's such an important conversation to have. So with that's a beautiful note to end off on lauren. Thank you. Thank you, Heather.
[00:35:47] Jess: Thank you so much!
[00:35:48] Cindy: [Thank you] so much for joining us and thank you to our listeners for tuning in. We'll see you next time!
[00:35:55] Cindy: Thank you again for listening to the Confessions podcast for non-profit coaches and consultants. If you enjoyed today's episode, which I sure hope you did, you can show your support in one of three ways.
[00:36:07] Jess: Number one, post the screenshot of this episode to your Instagram stories or LinkedIn profile. And tag Cindy and I so we can repost you.
[00:36:15] Cindy: Number two, share this podcast with a fellow nonprofit coach or consultant.
[00:36:19] Jess: And number three, leave a positive review on Apple Podcasts that we can continue to grow and reach new listeners.
[00:36:26] Cindy: And of course, make sure you subscribe so you can get the latest and greatest interviews as they drop every Thursday.
[00:36:32] Jess: And to our fellow nonprofit coaching and consulting friends, remember we're an open book and here to answer your burning biz questions.
[00:36:40]Cindy: See you next time!