Nonprofit Launch Plan Podcast for Startup, Small, and Growing Nonprofits

Tom Atema (00:00)
a cliché.

But I don't know how else to word it. Everything rises and falls on the leader. And leadership is a bigger deal than you think it is. I'm speaking now to the young entrepreneur that just launched a non-profit, It's not about the check. It's about adding value to people. And how do you lead people?

Mat Stockman (00:27)
Welcome to the Nonprofit Launch Plan podcast for startup, small and growing nonprofits. This podcast is here to help you build your nonprofit from the ground up on a strong foundation. That means every episode is frameworks, tools, practical guidance that you need to be able to create lasting impact. My name is Matt Stockman. I'm a nonprofit growth coach. Thrilled you're here. At Nonprofit Launch Plan, we believe that every nonprofit has got to be operating at peak performance in six areas in order to be successful.

Those areas are leadership, fundraising, marketing, programs and services, operations, and finances. So on every episode of this podcast, we dive into a topic that is core to at least one of those six areas. And before we jump into today's interview, part two, if you or somebody you know is still dreaming about launching a nonprofit, I want you to get this special freebie that I've got on my website. It's a PDF that I've put together. It's called From Dream to Action.

your nonprofit pre-launch checklist. It's 10 essential steps for moving from nonprofit idea to impact. 10 things to think about as you crystallize your dream for a nonprofit. It will take you through all the steps in order to get your nonprofit dream to a plan that gets your dream off the ground, including thinking through your why, considering your first teammates, honing in on your beneficiary, getting clear on what your programming is.

choosing your nonprofit your IRS application, and more.

And for each of the 10 steps, there's an easy to do action step that will bring your dream for a nonprofit into a whole lot clearer focus after you've completed it. If you want this free PDF, From Dream to Action, Your Nonprofit Pre-Launch Checklist, 10 Essential Steps for Moving from Nonprofit Idea to Impact, email me at matt at nonprofitlaunchplan.com, M-A-T-T at nonprofitlaunchplan.com, or look for the pop out on my website.

That's nonprofitlaunchplan.com. Today's episode is a continuation of a conversation that I started last week with Tom Adama. Tom's a friend who has had over 50 years experience in nonprofit leadership and fundraising. He's the co-founder of a faith-based organization called Heart for Lebanon, which provides education and humanitarian relief and the gospel to the people of

particular Syrian refugees in Lebanon. Tom now serves as the chairman of the board for that organization, but he's also been VP of International Ministries and Strategic Partnerships at John Maxwell's Equip organization. He's also been a part of leadership at the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and at Word of Life Fellowship and more. I've known him a long time. He's been a mentor to me for many, many years, and I'm thrilled that you get to take advantage of his wisdom and insight.

and coaching. He's sharing some really, really practical stuff in part two of this interview. In part one, Tom showed us why every gift, $5 or $500, deserves the same relational start and how stories fuel generosity. And if you missed part one, be sure to go back and grab it and listen or watch. And today, on part two, we're getting tactical at scale. How many relationships can one development officer really manage?

why you can't transfer relationships, but how to do handoffs to another development officer the right way, the cell phone test for measuring real connection. I want you to listen specifically for that. And also, Tom will talk about quarterly investor calls that he recommends you try to do that mirror Wall Street. 30 minutes, stories, Q &A, transparent numbers about the finances and where you're at, and ultimately, how to stop chasing money and start adding value to people.

and what a healthy board actually does. That's just some of the highlights in this episode. So let's jump right back in with my special guest, Tom Adama, on the Nonprofit Launch Plan podcast for start-up small and growing nonprofits.

Matt Stockman (04:34)
When your nonprofit grows to the point where now there's more donors in the database than any one person can take care of properly, which is the hope, I think, of pretty much everybody who's listening to this is we hope we get enough people on board and who catch the vision of what it is that we're doing that there's more than any one person can handle.

Tom Atema (04:41)
Yeah.

Matt Stockman (04:59)
For you personally, Tom, how many relationships do you try to manage when it comes to that?

Tom Atema (05:06)
I tried to manage three to four hundred and I think any good development officer can do three to four hundred. ⁓

Matt Stockman (05:09)
Okay.

Tom Atema (05:16)
And that includes doing some banquets, breakfasts, lunches, roundtables, whatever you call them. Call them events, call whatever you want to thrown in there. But three to four hundred you can do easily. When you get up into the really high end major, major, you'll be down to about one seventy five, two hundred, two twenty five. Because they take a lot more. Now they invest a lot more, but they take a lot more.

Matt Stockman (05:43)
Sure. Right.

Tom Atema (05:45)
⁓ And you've got to be very careful because they're very fragile.

So fragile is... ⁓

I want to say opinionated, but that's not true. Well, maybe partially true. But they have their opinions on how things should be done. Now by this time, if they're going to give you a major gift because they've been with you a number of years, they understand your processes, they understand your procedures, they understand your heart, and so they understand you.

But if you make some major thing, let's just say very innocently you promised to do something and you never did it, never apologized when God brought it to mind and you just didn't do it and it just, it can tick them off and you're done. You might never get that relationship back.

⁓ When you have when you reach the ceiling of how many people you ⁓ Can handle effectively and you want to bring somebody on board I? would Encourage you to bring them on board, but remember You cannot transfer relationships All right, I have a rule when I brought somebody else on board to help with

Matt Stockman (06:43)
Mm-hmm.

Tom Atema (07:02)
relationships, ⁓ I don't give you the people that you're going to be in charge of cell phone number. You have to earn that from that person because that's how I measure relationships. You tell me how many people's cell phone numbers you have in your cell phone and I'll tell you how good you are with relationships. Everything's measurable.

Matt Stockman (07:11)
I see, okay.

Tom Atema (07:26)
and relationships are measurable by how many cell phone numbers are in your cell phone. And therefore, I don't want to give you a number. Number one, I don't have their permission to give you their number. But number two, you have to earn it. You have to build that relationship with that person so they give it to you. Now, I've been in enough meetings to know that when I take them around and I introduce them to Henry or whoever.

Matt Stockman (07:36)
Right?

Tom Atema (07:51)
Henry will say, well, Tom, just give them my contact information. That's fine. That's perfect. But sometimes it doesn't happen that way. They'll say, well, you contact me. And what that is is that's a test to see how fast they're going to contact, what are they going to say when they contact. And let me just say this in contacting people and thanking people. And this might get you another podcast going. Don't use AI.

Matt Stockman (08:01)
Yeah.

Hahaha

⁓ yeah, great, great point. Yeah.

Tom Atema (08:26)
Make it yourself. Do it. You can use AI to spell check and grammar check. I do that for obvious reasons. nothing irritates me more when my wife and I give a gift and you can tell it's AI-generated thank you note. It just, it takes the personality right out of it.

Matt Stockman (08:28)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. That's a great point, you do the handoff, meaning like you've brought another development officer on and you're transferring a certain number of the people that you were taking care of to this other individual, walk me through how you typically do that.

Tom Atema (09:07)
typically do that is I will contact, let's use Henry seems to be the name of the case, I'll call Henry and I'll say, Henry, we brought on Peter and Peter's our new advancement person and it's not that I don't enjoy you, me anytime you want, but you know, God's blessed and we now have a mailing list of 30,000 people and I'm way above my capacity and as you probably have seen, I've dropped the ball a couple times and I don't mean to but.

Matt Stockman (09:12)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Tom Atema (09:34)
so that we can be as an organization all that you entrusted us to be, I would like to introduce you to Peter and when is the time that we can Zoom together, Skype together, or whatever together. Now, I will say that probably 65, 70 % of the time, the Peters will say, just have him call me.

Matt Stockman (09:59)
The Henry will say, ⁓ don't worry about it. Just have him call me. Yeah. Okay. Okay.

Tom Atema (10:01)
Yeah, Henry was, just have him call me. I

love the organization, I bought into your mission. As long as I have access to you once in a great while to say Merry Christmas or something, just have him call me. Now, he better call him within 48 hours. He might get a voice message because they don't know his phone number, but he better do that, or she better do that really fast because the longer it goes without the call,

Matt Stockman (10:20)
Right, right.

Tom Atema (10:28)
It's like, well, this isn't going to work. Who is this guy? He doesn't follow up. He doesn't do this. She's not doing that, whatever the case may be. The next step in the process is I will send out an email to everybody announcing the change with phone numbers and emails and all that. But that might be three, four weeks after we actually started to transfer stuff over to that person.

Matt Stockman (10:30)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Tom Atema (10:57)
that and then we do everything we can to make that person known and highlight them that they're on the team and this is their function, this is their lane, this is whatever. Always with the caveat that you can reach me anytime you want as a safety net. ⁓

know, people are different, personalities are different. I connect with some people, I don't connect with some. That he or she might connect with some and might not connect with some, might have a misunderstanding. So always do that. So that's the process that I normally go through.

Matt Stockman (11:24)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

That's good. I meant to ask you about this before, but the organization that you're a part of now, Hartford Lebanon, you do these investor calls. Talk a little bit about what they are and what the goal of those are.

Tom Atema (11:58)
So when I started the investor calls, we started them and we still do one a quarter. And they're based on Wall Street's investor calls. ⁓ Because again, we want an investment, we want to give you a return, but we want to treat you as an investor. We want you to look behind the curtain and see what's actually there. So we want to give you stories, we want to tell you what's happened. Some more stories, maybe show you a video.

Matt Stockman (12:06)
Okay.

Tom Atema (12:25)
We keep them to 30 minutes so we don't get long-winded and boring. We let questions come in through the chat or verbally. But we always end up with a financial ⁓ accountability at the end. Here's our budget to date. Here's where we are. We're not inflating the numbers, not deflating the numbers. This is it. We're either behind, ahead, on, whatever the case may be.

⁓ If we're going into a special program like during the summer of hope which is our summer parentheses where we focus on the children in the area we work We'll give a special report on that ⁓ Maybe bring somebody from the field, but it's to have our investors join and we have anywheres from 30 to 47

individuals join that from foundations and churches to individuals that are investing in the ministry so that they get a feel that they're part of this just like an investor would of stocks on Wall Street. Same kind of call.

Matt Stockman (13:26)
anybody is invited to that?

Tom Atema (13:30)
Everybody who's invested is invited to that. And now, when I say invested, that can be $5 or it could be $500,000. It makes no difference. They give them. The net goes out wide. again, it's not about how many people are on the call. I want people to understand that we are accountable and transparent to them, the investor. And it's up to them to be on the call or not. Life is...

Matt Stockman (13:32)
Okay. Gotcha. Okay.

they've given. Right. Okay. Gotcha. Yeah, no, let's

Tom Atema (13:59)
busy, right? They might not have time, but at least they know we're doing it. And if they want a copy of the call, they can just ask for it and more than happy to send it to them.

Matt Stockman (14:00)
Right.

Right.

One thing that I think is probably ⁓ sort of commonplace for a lot of new nonprofits and for leaders in this role is fundraising is a, ⁓ I don't want to call it a skill, but it's something that you develop over time. And most people don't get into this with a penchant for it.

You know, they don't understand it. It's awkward, it's uncomfortable. ⁓ Was that you to begin with, and how do you feel like you sort of got past that?

Tom Atema (14:48)
Well, the first book I wrote, Leadership in Blue Jeans, I tell the story of one of my first assignments with the ministry I was with. They sent me to visit this person and I knocked on the door in Boca Raton, Florida and they took a while but they finally came to the door. When they came to the door, I could instantly say something was wrong. I could sense this. I mean, it was like, okay, this isn't good.

Their son had just hadn't died, but had taken an overdose of drugs and was in the hospital and they were ready to go. And I never said anything. I went to the hospital, prayed with them, did all that, got back to the office and my boss chewed me out for not coming back with a check. And I went, okay, this isn't for me because that's not what...

God called me to do, and as I read scripture, that's not what God called development officers to do. We're to develop people, period. It's God's responsibility to send in the resources. We develop people. You know, the average development officer in the United States right now lasts two to three and a half years, and then they burn out and they move on.

because they're chasing money. When you relax and all you do is tell stories that are interested in the person and want to talk to them and find out what they're doing and just have a conversation over coffee like I've been explaining on just, boy, you're a deacon, you do this, you do that, just house life, just talk about life, just be a friend, just be in a relationship like he's, hey, your family's a good old buddy. It's not work, it's fun.

There's no pressure. again, at the end of every one of those conversations, they will say to me, or to you if you're doing it this way, so what do you need? How can I help you? You spent this time helping me. It's a reversed model, but it's the biblical model. I'm convinced

Tom Atema (16:58)
We're to add value to people and then people will add value to us. I'm not sure how we got this messed up, but we did. So the average development officer in the US, two, two and a half years, maybe three, and they're stressed out. They're burned out because they've been chasing money. Of course you're gonna get worn out. Every time I have a breakfast, a lunch, a phone call, I gotta produce some money. No.

That's not adding value to people. I want to sit down and have a cup of coffee. I want to get you on the phone. I want to talk about your dreams. I want to see how your vacation was. I just talked to Christina this morning, literally this morning, and this is a true story. said, Christina, you just were in Israel. Tell me about your trip. At the end of the conversation, she said, is that all you're calling for? I said, yes. She goes, well, how are you doing? What can I do for you?

Mat Stockman (17:24)
Yeah.

Tom Atema (17:53)
That's the attitude. That takes all the pressure off. That takes... I can be honest with you. That's why it's fun. Yes, development is skill and strategy and all those things, but the skill is how do I stay away from asking for money and how do I add value to people.

Mat Stockman (18:12)
Wow, that's huge right there. do you feel like the relation or the role of the board is when it comes to financial investments in the organization?

Tom Atema (18:25)
Okay, so there's, in my opinion, there's a number of kinds of boards. I've worked for an organization where the board was a funding board. Literally, they had to produce a million dollars a year or they couldn't be on the board no matter what the story was, why you didn't have it. If you didn't have your million dollar check at the annual board meeting, you were off and they'd find somebody else. Nothing wrong with that, if that's what God calls you to do, but that's very limiting and...

Mat Stockman (18:53)
hard. Yeah. Yeah.

Tom Atema (18:53)
has its own problems, I think, but it's a funding board.

Then you have an operational board that gets in the weeds and they tell you everything to do and I think that's got problems as well. I prefer, and I've worked with a number of organizations and helped them switch to a governing board that's an accountability board. So every year I ask the office team to put together, here's your goals and strategies for...

In fact, I just did this last week. I'm served as chairman of a board and said to give it to us and we'll meet in two weeks as a board and we'll go through that and okay the budget, okay the plan, and then we'll meet three times next year before the annual meeting and where are you in relationship to your goals? I...

To be honest with you, Matt, I don't call them goals anymore. I call them a journey. What is your journey going to look like in your development office in 2026? What's your journey going to look like three years from now? I'll only go out three years. think anything beyond that gets to be problematic. Now, sometimes you have to, with foundations, project a little bit, but that's rare.

Mat Stockman (19:51)
Hmm.

Tom Atema (20:06)
⁓ So it's what kind of board number one do you want or what God's calling you to be more accurate. I believe the board should be accountability. Now here's the problem you run into. Development officers who are after money want to go to the board and say, you need to give me a check and you need to have lunch and I'll come up and these 10 people need to be willing to write the organization a check. I think that gets us in trouble.

⁓ That's not relational. That rides on the heels of gimmicks and all kinds of bad things to me. I want my development officer to say, Tom, you're chairman of the board. I've got this meeting coming up. I need you to come with me and share some of the history and some stories that have impacted you as co-founder of this ministry ⁓ to help us move the ball forward.

Mat Stockman (20:43)
Hmm.

Tom Atema (21:05)
Can you speak at this event? Can you go with me to this Rotary Club? Can you go with me to whatever the case may be? In other words, Matt, what I'm saying is I think board members can be a help to the development person move the ball forward rather than being the ball forward. Does that make sense?

Mat Stockman (21:23)
Yeah, perfect sense, that's great. ⁓

Tom Atema (21:25)
You have to be a support role, not

the role. And that is a new trend, and I would call it a trend with development officers. They all want to go to the board and give me your top 10 people and invite them to lunch and I'll make an ask. No, you're not ruining my relationships that way.

Mat Stockman (21:41)
Hmm.

Think younger version of Tom

however far in your earlier life that you want to go. ⁓ Given the wisdom that you have today, what would you have told yourself, particularly when it comes to the fundraising piece, way back?

Tom Atema (22:03)
Well, going way back, I think the number one thing off top of my head would be is that I would have to be, I would want to become more intentional about adding value to people. Not for money, just because they're made in the image of God and they're worth value. They have a purpose. But I would also do that with my team. I think...

That's where it starts. If I can't add value to my team, I don't have any right to add value to the people outside of the building.

That would be the number one thing, I think. And that's the thing that brings me the most joy, to be honest with you. I've had some unique privileges in my life. as I get emails and videos and whatever, all from different people from all over the world, is to sit back and see what they're accomplishing. Because this is the second thing that I would say. It

Mat Stockman (22:45)
Mm-hmm.

Tom Atema (23:05)
a cliché.

But I don't know how else to word it. Everything rises and falls on the leader. And leadership is a bigger deal than you think it is. I'm speaking now to the young entrepreneur that just launched a non-profit, It's not about the check. It's about adding value to people. And how do you lead people?

into a dynamic relationship with Jesus Christ. That's not something just for church or for your field operation to do. That's for you to do with the people that God's putting in your path. You need to help those people see that they have value, that God died for them. There's a purpose. There's value in that.

And I would study

I think I did fairly well with this, but I would have started earlier because I know now the deep value of it is honing my leadership skills, which hone your communication skills, which hone life skills.

Mat Stockman (24:12)
That wraps up part number two with Tom Adama. Some big takeaways like carry the right size portfolio, earn trust one conversation at a time, keep your investors close with short, transparent quarterly calls, and let your board support momentum not be the momentum. And above all, add value to people. Don't chase money.

and let God handle all the outcomes. Now, before we wrap up this episode, if you're tired of the constant stress and worry about money, where it's coming from, how you're going to cover the costs of all the impact that you'd like to make, fundraising is tough. We get it. We're here to help. You are not alone in this struggle. Take a quick minute to head to my website and get the free Fearless Fundraising mini course. It's a workbook and five short videos that I put together

that will walk you step by step through a game plan to build your fundraising messaging with 100 % clarity. I believe most nonprofits struggle not because of funding, but because of lack of clarity. No matter the size of your nonprofit, whether it's one person or 100 people on your team, if a donor can't understand instantly what you do and how their participation with you can help, they're not gonna get involved. They're not gonna give financially.

So this Fearless Fundraising Workbook and the five videos that go along with it will help you get the clarity that you need and get you more donor dollars quicker so you can make more Workbook and the videos that go along with it for free right now on my website. Go to NonprofitLaunchPlan.com. Again, Nonprofit Launch Plan.

to get those. Also, don't forget about the other free PDF resource from Dream to Action, your nonprofit pre-launch checklist, 10 essential steps for moving from nonprofit idea to impact. You can email me at matt at nonprofitlaunchplan.com. I'll send that to you. Or look for the pop out on the website, nonprofitlaunchplan.com. That's it for today's episode of the Nonprofit Launch Plan podcast for startups, small and growing nonprofits. Thanks so much for watching.

for being here. Do not forget to hit the subscribe button so you don't miss out on the next episode. And if you feel so inclined, leave a review on your podcast platform. That helps with the growth of the podcast tremendously. And if in any way possible, you found this podcast episode helpful, please consider sharing it with another nonprofit leader who you think might benefit. And until next time, thanks so much for watching and keep making a difference.