I am David Orlandov and I founded Conquered Financial Organization in 1987 to be among other things an interim CFO for at that time in industry and I got my start in the nonprofit world in 1990 at combined in Jewish philanthropies where Sandra and I overlapped. 10 years after that, I was appointed to the audit committee of the United Way in Boston. So, I figure I'm about halfway through my term because I've been on the committee for 25 years. I keep asking about term limits and I keep getting a laugh in return. And then 20 years ago, I started teaching financial management for nonprofits at Boston University. So, I just finished the first semester of my 21st year there and I've also taught at Tufts and Northeastern. And as Dora said, I have a 15-year history with Nonprofit Net. And what’s not on this slide and may be relevant as we go forward is that I've been on several boards and I've been chair of three of them. And so, I kind of have a sense from both the staff perspective and the and the board perspective of some of the governance issues that can either enhance or get in the way of a mission that is vital to those of you who are in the audience. And it's one of those things that comes up all the time, what the favorable or unfavorable impact of govern governance is. And in fact, I'm going to be on a panel tomorrow through one of the big accounting firms and I'm going to be talking about that in particular. [Agenda] So, the agenda for today, because it's set up as a health and wellness kind of thing, we're going to address some of the symptoms that you might find in a less than healthy nonprofit of any size. Then we'll talk about some of the things that you can do to address those concerns in the short run. And importantly, I'm going to call it lifestyle changes because there are things that nonprofits can do that can help them avoid some of the problems in the future. Not just address the immediate symptom, but to create an environment in which more time and energy can be devoted to really the important things in the mission. And just as a matter of logistics, I'm very happy to be interrupted if you have a question. I may not see your electronic hand raised, but Dora will and she can interrupt me if it seems reasonable to do that. Also, some of you sent in some questions in advance, and I know that some of the things I'll have to say, we'll probably address those. But if you don't feel like your questions have been addressed, please answer the ask them during the presentation or after. I can stay past 2:00 if you have questions and I'm happy to talk about it. [Common Problems] So, when you go to the doctor, the doctor is going to say that of course if we're lucky enough to see a doctor and not a physician assistant, but suppose it's the doctor and the doctor says, "What symptoms are you experiencing?" And in the context that we're talking about, here's the answer. How much time you got? Because we have a lot of things that can show up in a nonprofit as symptoms of things that are not working properly, some of which are more dangerous than others, just like symptoms related to anybody's health. And here are a handful or so of some of the things that you may be experiencing. Number one, obviously, if you're running out of cash, that's not great. And sometimes organizations don't understand why they are running out of cash. And several years ago, I published an article that I called Beware of the Cash Wolf, where wolf is flow spelled backwards. So, cash flow being jeopardized by things not working right. And there are several kinds of things that can show up as causes of chronic cash shortages. For example, paying your bills too fast or collecting your receivables too slowly. But mostly they are related to the business model and your flow of cash from your clients or funders or whatever your sources of cash are. And by the way, before I get any further in this, I want to say that when you ask me a question, I will probably tell you that there's a generic answer, which is it all depends. And what does it depend on? Among other things, it depends on the size, the complexity, the business model, where you are in the organization's life cycle. All of these things can affect what any of these issues might might you might be experiencing. So, I'm happy to answer questions, but I may not be able to be as specific as you might like. So, anyway, obviously chronic cash shortages is a big thing. I'm very proud of him about his- I'm sorry. Did somebody ask a question? No, I I just heard something. Okay. Another thing that you might be experiencing and, this really goes to the structure of who's managing your finances, what's the role of a staff, what's the role of a treasurer, what's the role of a finance committee. If your financial statements used to be coming out on time and now don't, it's very likely that the complexity of the organization has outpaced the ability of your financial staff, however you define that, to keep up with the increasing demands. And one thing that's pretty clear is that most nonprofits generally don't become less complex as they grow and carry out their missions. And one of the hardest things to do in financial management is keep track of multiple funding streams. The more diverse your funding streams are, the more accountabilities you have. For example, every restricted grant, you generally have to produce a financial report to show what you did with the funders' money. You may not have either the staff time or the staff capability to be able to manage that. And that shows up not just in poor grant compliance, but also in the financial statements where they're late because there's too much time needed in order to get the revenue stated properly because of multiple funding streams. And related to that is unhelpful budgets. Because if you have a budget that really explains in a way that's understandable about what you expect to happen, then it's much easier to validate the financial statements. When you look at the variance report, I'm using variance report to mean a budget versus actual report. Let's say month by month, possibly quarter by quarter in some organizations, and the differences between the budgeted amounts for revenues and expenses and the actual amounts. And one of the things that's important to understand about this kind of variance report is it does not have any answers. It only has questions. So if you're seeing some revenue item being way higher than the budget, for example, one of the things you have to you have to ask yourself is this a real thing that we're going to bring in more revenue than we planned or is this a thing where we have a timing difference and we have more money, more revenue during this part portion of the year but we won't have as much in the next portion of the fiscal year? So, those are the things that you would ask yourself when you see a a budget versus actual report. And there are a lot of things that you can do to help make your budget, more effective, and I'll come to that later in the presentation. But one of the questions that I got in advance was do we need to have a balanced budget? And the short answer to that, as I said before, is it all depends. And afterwards, Dora is going to be sending out some links after this presentation. And one of the links is an article that I just happened to see today, which is do we have to have a balanced budget? And it was on in the nonprofit quarterly. And one of the points raised in that article is that if you have a balanced budget where revenues and expenses are exactly equal to each other, which is kind of a goal for many of us, putting something in front of our board, it means that something got estimated in a way to make it come out exactly even because real life doesn't really work that way. So that's something that you might consider when you get a chance to read that article. Ineffective grant and contract compliance. It's been my experience, mostly negative, that organizations don't always know either the requirements or the deadlines for reporting back to funders. And that's because you have a person who's the grant writer. Let's call him or her the executive director and writes a grant and then it's achieved. There's a big, happy smile, but then the money comes in along with maybe there's another document with a lot of details about it and the executive director signs it. Yes, thank you. We'll take your money, but there might be terms and conditions in there that the finance team broadly defined has to comply with. So those are things that you need to look at and make sure that you are taking the right steps to comply with any requirements of a grant. That's beyond just the programmatic aspect. If it's a restricted grant to do a particular thing, mostly organizations are pretty good about that, but they aren't necessarily good about the paperwork piece of it. A common symptom in growing organizations is information hoarding. I think we've all had experience where there's a person in the organization who likes to know everything but doesn't like it when everybody else knows everything. And in finance, that's particularly dangerous because of the possibility, for example, of running out of cash, but nobody knew because there wasn't enough internal reporting or sometimes there's some adjustments made to a vendor relationship or a donor relationship and somebody has taken responsibility for that but not gone through the appropriate procedures to make that happen. And I'm familiar with a case recently where some cash was moved around that wasn't authorized, but it was not because anything negative was happening. It was supposed to move, but the proper authorities and proper authorizations had not been achieved because the person managing it hadn't shared the right information with other people. And finally, at least finally on this list, and I'm hoping that maybe somebody might want to add another one or two, but boards. Boards, we can't live without them. We can sometimes be very frustrated by the actions or inactions of the people that are responsible for the oversight and financial and reputational and other health of the organization. Obviously, the biggest the biggest problem that many boards present to managers is not enough people on the board are actually giving donations. If you've ever filled out a grant application, you know that sometimes the question is asked what percentage of your board contributes to the organization? And it's very embarrassing to say zero and it's almost as embarrassing to say 50%. And I believe that that's a problem that many nonprofits need to address because it actually hurts them in terms of their reputation and their ability to get certain kinds of funding. And not only that, it's also sometimes difficult to get board members to get donations, not just give but get. And I'll just tell you a story from my own experience. I was doing some consulting for an organization and they had never had a development committee and I was making a presentation to the board and I was trying to make a pitch for why they needed a development committee and one of the board members said why do we need a committee? We can just all go out and raise money ourselves. Well, that would have been great if he had been doing that, but he wasn't. But even so, I said the reason you need a development committee is because you need a chair of the development committee to hold other board members responsible. And that's a big piece of what, you know, most organizations have. A working finance committee or there's a treasurer at least who has some sort of role. But the development committee really should be organized in the same way as the finance committee with a chair who is going to hold his or her board peers responsible for what they're committed to do. And of course, obviously, the board has a leadership responsibility, and we all probably have had experience and may be perpetrators of this where the organization is so staff driven that the board feels neglected or isn't being used as much as they could be. So, all of these things are the symptoms that that I think reflect poorly on the health of an organization. So, I'm just going to pause for a moment and ask if anybody wants to contribute anything more along these lines. And please don't act like all my classes and think that you just heard everything you need to know. Somebody has a question or a piece of input out there. I know. I know. No, there's just a couple of comments. I'll just read them from the chat. Okay. Ellen said that 50% participation by the board would be amazing. And Carolyn said, "I push my boards to have 100% giving from board members. Some grants require that." Yes, exactly. And you don't want to be in the position of having to explain to a potential funder why the board isn't giving. And worse, you don't want to be in you or maybe you do want to be in the position of telling your board why you didn't get a grant because they didn't do their job. And that's such an important piece of the relationship between board and staff. You know, on paper, the board hires the executive director, but as an organization goes through its life cycle, more and more executive directors pick the board members or at least pick candidates for a nominating committee to consider. And so, the board and executive director relationship is obviously the most important one. But when it comes to board compliance with best practices, it's really the board chair and possibly the treasurer if there is a fundraising chair. Those are the people that really have to exercise their influence. So, Janice has a question. It's not directly related to board, per se, but she writes, "As a grant writer, I face the dilemma or clients not doing project or program type of budgets." And she's a grant writer, so she says, "I'm not comfortable creating these budgets even though I'm able to do so. What is your advice as to communicating to EDs or program managers the importance of a program or project budget when applying for funds? Yeah, that's a great question because I have a bias being a financial person and my bias is that no budget should leave the organization that hasn't been reviewed by somebody in finance. And I wish I could enforce that in some of my clients, but I can't. And budgets go out without my review or anybody else's review. And it's a combination of grant writers having to do it because somebody has to do it and then also in the case of the questioner here being a little uncertain about whether he or she is doing it properly. And a way of dealing with that is to make sure that there's a finance checkpoint along the way. and I will say also that many finance people in my experience are not comfortable doing grant budgets. And you know one of the biggest mistakes you could make in a grant budget? Well, I'll talk about two big mistakes in applying for grants. One is failing to put an allowance for indirect costs into the into the grant budget. And you can think about it this way. If you do a thought experiment, let's say you're an organization that gets all of its funding from grants and every grant pays specifically for the direct cost of a program. Where's the money coming from for you, the executive director? So, think about why you have to put an allowance for indirect costs into your grant budget. The other thing that I found and is also a negative is applying for grants because the money is out there even though it may not be a really good fit with your mission or your capabilities, more important the capabilities. I will talk a little bit more about this later on, but it's been my experience and I think many of you will agree with me that the most limited resource in many nonprofits is not money, it's management time. And if you get a grant for something that's outside of your core competency, you run the risk that you will be diverted from putting the best effort into what you're already really good at. So, I think that's always a problem and grant writers sometimes want to be measured on the success of bringing in grants, not necessarily on the success of how they ultimately wound up benefiting the organization and its mission. And this is not to put any grant writer down. It's just a different part of the organization with different rewards and incentives. [Solutions] So those are some of the things that we can identify as symptoms, and I want to move on in the interest of time. So, the doctor then says to you, or you say to the doctor, how do I get well? And the doctor says to you, how much time you got? Because there are a lot of different ways that we can address some of these issues that are disturbing our mission in the short term. I'll get to the longer-term ones in a little bit. Number one, and remember that cash shortages are number one on the list of symptoms. Well, the number one treatment is make sure you know how much cash you have. And not only that, make sure you know who owes you money from accounts receivable or pledges receivable and how much you owe out accounts payable. I'll tell you just a quick story. 20 years ago, I was asked to do some consulting for a smallish nonprofit, and the executive director asked me to do some analytical work on part of their mission. And while she was on the phone, I strode into the bookkeeper's office. This was an organization with about a $25,000 a week payroll. And the bookkeeper says to me, you know, today's Wednesday, tomorrow is Thursday. The payroll company's going to take the money out of our account. At the end of that, we're going to have $93. $93. So, what do you do when you have no cash, but you have to pay your employees? Well, the first thing we did was look at our accounts receivable aging. And we discovered that some funders had been holding on to money for months and not paying over. So, in the space of about six phone calls, hundreds of thousands of dollars came in. The organization is still thriving 20 years later. That's just so important to understand that and also checking your bank regularly. I'll come back to that. Another thing that I strongly recommend is looking at your budgeting process and making sure that you are not spending too much time on the trivial, so much that you're overlooking the important. One of the symptoms, one of the phenomena that I've come across in the nonprofit world, regardless of the size of the organization, board members find it much easier to focus on small items than on big items. And you need to focus on the big ones because those are the ones that are either going to threaten your mission or enhance your mission. And people tend to spend too much time on things like office supplies or things like that that they think are really important and they're not. You can be off by 100% in your office supplies budget and it's not at all threatening to your organization. But if you're off 10% in your payroll budget or if you're off 10% in your earned income budget or your contributed revenue budget, those are things that matter a lot. So, those are things that are really important. I attended a board meeting once that was discussing a $24 million bond issue, and it was a very substantive discussion, surprisingly so. And afterwards, I said to the board chair, I said, "That was so substantive, you would have thought they were talking about $2,400 instead of 24 million." Because boards focus too much on the small. So, you as board members and staff people, executive directors really have to home in on what's important, what can make our mission work or not work and forget about the small stuff. Because on the small stuff, if you just say, "What did we spend last year? Let's do it again." How how far off can you be? Another big thing is this grant compliance that I talked about earlier. It's a very simple thing to create a checklist for what has to be done to comply with a grant. And again, carrying out the programmatic side, that's in the DNA of program people. But checking off a list of reporting and budget compliance and all that stuff, that's not - pretty much it's not in anybody's DNA, but it can become part of the organizational process. It's pretty easy to develop a standard form that says what do we have to do and who do we have to account to for it and what document do we have to produce. It's really that simple, but it's not done often enough. Obviously, if people are working on government grants, they're more used to that kind of after-the-fact reporting, but it's just as important if you've gotten a grant from a funder who's not the government and says, "If you want to apply for another grant here, you'd better submit your report by XYZ date, and if you don't, we won't put you on the list for any other grants." I mentioned information hoarding as a symptom. This is a cultural thing. And here's what I bet some of you have experienced. You have a staff of people or a board, a group of people, and there's one person in that group who regularly holds on to information as a means of exerting power. And so, it's very hard to confront that person and try to get that person to change. So, what often happens is that there's a meeting and the meeting talks about the importance of information sharing and everybody hears the message except the person that it's directed toward. And so, it's really incumbent on the people at the top, whether it's a board chair, a treasurer, an executive director, to address that kind of behavior with the actual person doing it. And it's not so easy, but there's no better treatment for that symptom than to go to that person. And maybe your organization is lucky enough not to have that person, but the statistics tell us that there's one person, maybe two, somewhere in your organization that that is guilty of this of hoarding practice. And obviously a lot of what I'm talking about depends on having the right culture and that starts at the top with the board. The culture of giving, the culture of openness, the culture of everybody being involved in the mission in one way or another. I'm working with a larger organization right now that just came out with its strategic plan and I think for that, frankly, I think the term strategic plan in this case is a misnomer. It's more of an operational plan for the next three years but let's for the sake of argument call it a strategic plan. So last week at the board meeting the chief strategy officer presented highlights of the strategic plan to the board and it was good presentation. She's really good at that. But I happened to be sitting at a table across from two other two board members and I heard one of them say to another, you know, we're just getting a report. We're not really being engaged in this. And so, after the board meeting, I went up to the board chair and I said, "I heard these two people talking about this and I have an idea. There are five themes in the strategic plan. Why don't you designate some board members who will each take part in one of those themes working with the key staff that's going to implement those?" And the board chair thought that was a really good idea. And I also passed that idea on to the CEO. Well, I don't know what's going to happen. I've done my part, but I think that a way of making sure that board members really are engaged is to give them something to do. And you know, some of you are in organizations where it's the board that does everything. That's not the kind of organization I'm addressing with this. I'm talking about the kind of organization that's very staff driven but has opportunities for board members to provide their expertise or ask the right questions or go out and raise money for a program or whatever it might be. And if you don't have people like that on the board, well, that's another place to go back and rethink what the what the organization is really doing well and doing not so well. I again I'm going to pause here and ask for questions or comments about any of these things or even going back to the previous slide. Any comments, Dora? Anything? Yeah, there's been a couple of comments and I'll just - I don't know if you want to address them now. They're not exactly related to what you're talking about or if they'll come up. Look, let me just say before you say that, on the question of relatedness, there are three kinds of people who know that everything is connected to everything else. There's Zen Buddhists, there's chiropractors, and there's nonprofit CFOs. Everything is connected to everything else. So, please go ahead. Absolutely. They are connected. I wasn't sure if I'll actually - I prefer to have the folks who are asking the question. If you're able to Sandra, you go first and then Suzanne, if you're able to, please ask your question. David, can you speak to the importance of having an auditor make a presentation to the board? I know of several organizations that never had that done and it's good practice. It is very good practice and about half of the organizations that I've worked with have had the auditors present a report to the finance committee and then the finance committee presents it to the board. I like your idea, Sandra. I think it's generally better when the auditors can speak directly to the board. And also, it's extremely important when necessary to have an executive session where the CEO and all the other staff leave the room and the auditors whether speaking to the finance committee or speaking to the board and the auditors get a chance to report on what they found, what they wish they had found, what they what they wish they hadn't found, all that kind of thing. And it helps make the board more accountable too if they are not just taking the word of the finance committee. Because they are charged with governance and governance means really abiding by fiduciary responsibility including the duty of care to really understand what's what's going on. So absolutely best practice. Have the auditors report to the board. So, you think it's also educational because a lot of the board members don't understand finance. So, it's an opportunity for them to learn. Yes absolutely. I recall about 20 years ago I was the interim CFO of a well-known organization that I'm not going to name. And what I discovered in my very first meeting with the finance committee is that they had no idea how to read the financial statements that were produced internally or externally. And I really spent the bulk of my first two meetings with the finance committee walking through the financial statements so that when the next time came about when the auditor was going to present. They had a much better sense of what the of what the financial statements meant. And in that case, it was really important because there was a a risk that the auditors were going to say that the organization was not a going concern and it would have been not very helpful if the finance committee heard that for the first time from the auditors and not from me. So, thanks David. Suzanne, if you're available, please ask your question. David, you mentioned earlier that if a budget balances to the penny, then we've made it so with the numbers. So, if an organization is fortunate enough to have a reserve that goes beyond 3 months, let's say, what are your thoughts about these two parts? One, including money from the reserve in order to present that balanced budget and/or at the end of the year plugging repetitive annual deficits with reserves. I prefer the honest approach, which is if you're going to have a deficit, say it's a deficit. But I also believe that there are many times when it's important that you should deliberately budget a deficit. Again, I'll speak from experience. In the decade of the 2000s, I had two separate clients, each of which had well over a year's worth of cash in the bank. And in both cases, I went to the chair of the finance committee and said, "I think you should go into the board with a a deficit budget." And he said, "Why?" One of them said, "Why?" I said, "Because you’ve got so much money that donors might say, why should I give you any more? Spend down what you have before I give you any more." He bought that and went into the board with a $2 million deficit on a $35 million budget and it was approved by the by the board. I had that same conversation several years later with another board, another finance committee chair who did not want to do that and so the organization just had a balanced or surplus budget. Really the considerations on this have to do with three different factors in my opinion. Number one, there's a cultural factor which is that sometimes there's just so much resistance to the idea of budgeting a deficit that you just can't do it. You're risking your job as an ED or a finance director by going to the board because they just don’t, they won't listen. That's number one. Number two, most of the time you should be budgeting for a surplus, but you have to be realistic about when you can't possibly do it. And you don't want to be plugging a number to make it look like you've balanced the budget when you haven't. And then number three, again, strategically, I think there are times when it's important to go in with an unbalanced budget. But in general, it's probably better to have a slight surplus in your budget. Not so much. You know, one of the things I often say is that a budget is not just a financial document. It's a statement of the organization's values. And just to take two obvious points about that, one is what do you pay your people? Where do you target your salaries? Do you target at midpoints of ranges or above? That's a value system. Another is who do you accept money from and who do you not? Like organizations that don't take money from the US government for various reasons. Those are values. And then a hidden value is what's our stance on meeting the problems today versus holding on to some money for the future. And there was just an obituary in the Globe the other day of somebody who was on a board, and I remember him at a board meeting taking a very strong stance. He said why do we have an endowment? Why aren't we using this money right now to help people? So, he was obviously looking at the budget of the organization from a values perspective that was different from the way the the board went. So, I hope I've answered your question on that, and I'll come back to this question of reserves and how much cash because I want to talk about that too, but I want to give somebody else a chance. Looks like actually there's a question from Nicholas on endowment funding which is great segue. So, Nicholas, if you are able to please, if you're … Otherwise I will read your your question. Yeah, the question really is one of how does endowment funding, and I'm thinking of smaller organizations, fit into the financial health of an organization? Is it something that should be looked at building or is it something that as I that I really enjoyed that story you just gave about someone saying no, don't have an endowment, let's get rid get give our cash away. Yeah. I can't answer that because I have no idea what the circumstances of the organization. There's no right answer. It's going to be a matter of what are the values, preferences and cult and habits of the organization that you're talking about. I think this is personal opinion which I'll be happy to share. I think it's not an endowment until it's throwing off multiples of $10,000 a year, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. If you're really strapped for the money that you might take four or 5% out of your so-called endowment in order to balance your budget, then you probably think need to think about revenue enhancement some other way. Or, you know, saving money some kind of way. By the way, one of my philosophies is you can't save your way to fiscal sustainability. We can talk about that at another time. But your question is really in my opinion unanswerable without knowing what are the other circumstances around the the real dollar amounts. Great. Ellen, you've been very patient. Oh, no. No problem. Well, I guess it's two part two parts, two different questions really. But, I mean, supposedly not just an endowment, but you know, I've always heard that you should have a rainy-day fund. And so, how much what is a rainy-day fun? I guess it really depends on what the me, like you said, it depends. It depends what your what your expenses are, I suppose. But you know for example during the pandemic you know it really helped to have extra cash on hand, right? So, but what is considered a reasonable amount? I mean is there like it must be some equation that you use or some sort of fraction. You know, I will say I will say this. There's folklore. I would put it in the realm of folklore that every organization should have six months of cash on hand. That's crazy to me. And by the way, it it's not just your expenses that drives how much cash you have you should have. It's the predictability of your cash receipts. So, depending on where your funding comes from, if you're selling stuff, maybe you have a more predictable flow of revenue. If you're depending on grants and you don't know when they're going to come in, that's kind of unpredictable. So, the more predictable your inflows are, the more comfortable you can be with a smaller cash - I don't even like the word reserve, but let's just call it account. Several years ago, the state of Massachusetts, in the universe of social service, provide human service providers in Commonwealth of Massachusetts 60% of the respondents to this or to the people that filled out the required reports - 60% of the organizations ended their fiscal year with less than 30 days of cash, less than a month. And the reason they could do that is because in the month of July, the next month, the state was going to be sending them money to make their payroll. You see, so it wasn't life-threatening the way it would be if, let's say, you're an environmental organization and you don't know where your next grant is coming from and you have a payroll due in two weeks and you have no money. So that organization should have a cushion of you know 3, 4, 6 months whatever it might be. So, these are the considerations that you have to think about. Where is the money coming from and how predictable is it? And that to me is more important than how you can control your expenses. It's very hard to get your expenses down so far so fast that it can make up for a really severe shortage of money coming in. Unless you have a mass layoff, of course. Yeah. Okay. So, the second question I have is how do you, if you've tried to encourage a culture of giving and they just, your board just flat out refuses and says, "Well, we give our time." What then you're kind of stuck and then they continue to, well to you know, bring on new board members who also don't give money. Well, at that point, you have to say there is no they. You're part of them - and not you personally, I mean the audience that I'm talking to about this sort of general thing. And whoever you are, you have to decide, is that a culture I want to be part of or not? I mean ,if they keep on bringing new board members on who are from the same group of unwilling donors then there is no - you know, you just have to say, this may not be for me. A thing that I did with a client once, and I was so frustrated, I was an adviser. I wasn't their CFO. I was an adviser to this organization. I got so frustrated with the board not giving. I said, "Look, it's been my habit to contribute to organizations that I support with my consulting. So, I'm going to give you money in the form of a challenge grant. I'm going to give you X number of dollars if you can match it with new or increased board giving." It was a modest sum of money, but they did match it. And so, I felt like I had done something that I was going to do anyway, if you will, but also put it in the hands of the unwilling board members to step up. And so, I'm thinking that there are ways to do that, but and it doesn't have to be by a staff person or an outside person. It can be by one board member who believes strongly in the importance of board giving who can come up with something like that especially if they were going to give the money anyway. Just rebrand it. Thanks. Caroline's got a one more question. Let me add that to Ellen. So, Ellen, what I do with boards, I'm on four boards right now. We have board member job descriptions. Just one page bullet point list of what a board member's role and responsibility is for the nonprofit. And in that we always list that they have to give a meaningful gift for them because some people can give $50, some people can give 5,000. It varies, but they have to give a meaningful gift every year of money, not just time. Plus, also bring in other, you know, help find other donors or bring people to our events or you help with other aspects of fundraising, too. But we put it right in the job description. I usually run it through my governance council or my executive council if you have it on the board and get the leaders to agree and then roll it out to the entire board and then it's on paper and you can - I use that in some boards we track if people give or not and if they haven't given in a couple years, we have a conversation with them and say, hey, you have actually one board. If they don't give every year, they get a conversation about it because it's part of their grants that they have to. So, yeah, I think that's really important. You know, a lot of governance issues come back to one word, leadership. And if boards are following the wrong leader, then they're going to make the wrong decisions. I'm going to move on because it is approaching 2 o'clock and even though I'm willing to stay till 3, I'm not sure everybody else is. So, I want to move along. So, you ask question. Stay until two o'clock. Yeah. Yeah. Two o'clock. I don't know a good answer to this other than some of the things I'm going to address now because the doctor is saying I might be able to help you. Number one, avoid mission creep. This is what I was talking about before. Don't apply for grants that you don't want to get. I refer to this in our family as never accept a present that eats because if you somebody gives you a pet, that's a commitment for a long time. And if somebody gives you a grant for something you're not already doing or not doing well, you may be stuck with that. For follow-on expenses, you need to be really careful. Align the staff and the board on shared values. How many times have we used the word values already in this conversation? Because not everybody feels the same way and if there's not enough alignment, which doesn't mean by the way that you can't have disagreements on boards or between boards and staff or whatever. But if you can't get to some sort of shared vision, it's very hard to address any of the other issues and you have to align the step of the board not only on values, but on what do we mean by our mission is being carried out effectively. Are we measuring it by some sort of quantitative measures, the proverbial KPIs, key performance indicators, or are we measuring on the satisfaction that are the people that we serve are getting? In other words, it's not so much that we put more people in the theater, but are they enjoying more? Are they enjoying the shows more? Those kinds of things. So, you have to have a shared vision and a shared approach to measuring. Are we doing what we say we do and are we doing it well? Establishing firm controls. This is a management 101. if you don't have the right controls over who can sign checks, who can authorize disbursements and so on. I also want to talk about the issue of banking very quickly. Somebody in the organization needs to be authorized and charged with checking bank balances every single day. Not just when the statements come out, but every single day because in the blink of an eye, money can disappear from your account, and you won't know till you see your statement or you bounce a check. And there are various tools that banks offer to make sure that fraudulent checks are not honored by your bank. It's one of the main ones is called positive pay. And you put it in so that the bank will not honor a check or a disbursement from another means unless you've pre-authorized it. Or if it comes through and it hasn't been pre-authorized, the bank will check with somebody authorized in your organization to do that. So, positive pay for checks, positive pay for transfers. You need to do this, and you need to have somebody checking the bank every day. Nurture a culture of openness and collaboration. I've already talked about that. And ensure that contingency plans are in place. You know, we can we can buy insurance for things that you know, our building burns down or something like that, but while the building is burning, can we keep our mission going? Do we have off-site backup for our systems? Do we have a a plan for replacing somebody who might be injured and not able to work for several months? Some organizations have this in place as a matter of routine. Some it's informal. It doesn't really matter as much right now today whether it's written down or formal. But what does matter today is that there's a conversation about it. What would we do if and you don't have to go through every possible bad thing that can happen. But it's generally a good idea to have a sense of what we would do if the executive director were suddenly hospitalized or if our systems were suddenly compromised or held for ransom or something like that. By the way, you should have cyber insurance. If you don't have a million dollars worth of cyber insurance, you're probably more exposed than you should be. And that's pretty much what I wanted to talk about. I appreciate the questions and I'm very happy to address any other concerns that people have. if you take away a couple of things from this, don't get crazed. It's not as hard as it might seem to to manage your organization financially in an organized and effective way, but you have to think about it. You can't just assume that somebody who's been there for 20 years can do it for you. Great. Thank you so much, David. This was, as we've learned, financial health has everything to do with your organization's culture. I just want to do a quick plug for our next month speaker who is going to talk about time, tension, and transformation. Start the new year off with the right mindset mindfulness practices for executives. Thank you so much everyone and have a great holiday. For anyone who wants to, please stay on and David is available to answer further questions. Thank you.