ASI 2010: Inspired to Finish Strong

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ASI 2010 Seminar: Nonprofits

Ken Turpen

Leadership in the New Millennium: Getting to the Bottom of Leadership When You’re at the Top

I'd like to start out our session today with a word of prayer.

So if you'll bow your head with me, I'd appreciate it.

Heavenly Father, thank you for the opportunity we have to come together this morning and talk about leadership.

I pray that you would be with us in this session, that you would be glorified, and that the things that we learn here would help us to be better leaders and better able to follow you.

These things we pray in Jesus' name, amen.

Well, I'm not used to doing this, but I'm going to go ahead and introduce myself.

My name is Ken Turpin and I work at the University of Texas at Brownsville.

So I see a few familiar faces out here so it's nice to see you.

University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College.

So I work for 2 institutions that are kind of rolled all into 1.

And I'll tell you a little bit about my background so you understand my frame of reference.

I started out my career as a teacher and I taught in our academies for a while and about 6 years, 6, 7 years into my career, I was recruited to become the principal at 1 of our academies.

And so I served as an academy principal for 5 years, and from there, I was asked to serve at the North American Division in an office called Philanthropic Service for Institutions, affectionately known as PSI because it's a lot easier to say.

And PSI is an office on philanthropy that basically not only serves the North American Division but serves the world church in terms of philanthropy because there is no office on philanthropy at the General Conference just at the North American Division.

So I spent 12 years there and then I spent 2 years in North Carolina at Pitt County Memorial Hospital as executive director of their hospital foundation.

And now I'm at University of Texas at Brownsville.

So that's a little bit about my background.

There's only a few thousand of those in the United States.

My job at the University of Texas at Brownsville is that I'm the associate vice president for development and what I do mainly is just help to raise money for the university and build relationships with alumni and help do those kind of things.

I love coming to ASI because I've been to ASI maybe 12 different times.

Every year I worked at the division, I always tried to make it a point to come here and be a part of ASI because there were so many ministries that PSI was working with, and then a lot of my donors to PSI were here as well.

So I found it a great place to be and enjoy the fellowship and the ministry.

So anyways, they asked me to come back here and speak, and so I'm happy to be here with you today.

Now, what I would like to do is to encourage you to be participative this morning.

Nobody, I don't think there's anybody who has all the answers to leadership.

I brought some things that I would share with you today.

I did bring a PowerPoint presentation, and I brought it on a flash drive.

I brought it on a laptop, and I brought a paper copy of it.

Now, the only thing that has really survived is the paper copy of it.

The flash drive, I brought it on my Mac and the Mac won't work here because I don't have an adapter.

And the flash drive, somehow when I connect it to this PC, it's not picking up the PowerPoint presentation.

So I also believe that presenters shouldn't be tied to their PowerPoint presentations.

So, you're going to get a presentation this morning without the PowerPoint presentation.

But I do have copies of handouts, so if you want to take anything with you here today, you can.

And I had no idea how many people were coming, so what you have is what you have.

And if you'll have my email address, if you want to contact me afterwards, I'll be glad to email the presentation to you.

It's not chock full of a lot of information in the PowerPoint because I really don't believe in those.

I think that you should put very few words on the PowerPoint and if you want to take notes you can.

All of us have had the challenge of working for people who were difficult to work for.

And I can remember 1 of the very first jobs I worked, I was working at Florida Hospital in their maintenance department, and I was asked to pick up a push broom and help clean up this mess.

So I went to the tool barn and I checked out this big push broom and as I examined the thing I was just kind of carrying it like this, and I looked at it, and it was rotten, where it screwed into the bristles.

And so I said to my supervisor, I said, this thing is rotten, and I think it's getting ready to break.

And he says, well, if you're careful, it won't break.

So guess what happened when I started using it?

And so, you know, there's sometimes that- and he was not very happy with me.

He was convinced that I wasn't very careful with things.

So, you know, there's a huge responsibility in terms of leadership and how you can inspire people to follow you, and there's a way to get things done.

Let me ask you here, how many of you are leaders in your ministries or organizations that you're in right now?

How many of you are a kind of like a sub-leader and your boss is here today?

Okay, so you be careful what you say and questions that you ask.

It's kind of interesting because I have a philosophy that everyone should be a leader no matter where they're at in the organization.

And the best way to get things accomplished within an organization is to empower the people that work for you so that they feel like they are leading something and that they have some ownership.

This has been an interesting transition for me because the first 25 years of my career I worked for the Seventh-day Adventist Church in various capacities, and I found that leadership on that level, at least in the church, was fairly good about empowering and trusting.

And a lot of times it was due to just simply not enough people to go around to help give oversight.

But what ended up happening is that people end up filling the vacuum.

Sometimes people fill that vacuum with good things, and sometimes people fill that vacuum with negative things.

So if you do a good job and you have what it takes, then you have a lot of opportunities in the church.

Fundraising Basics for Ministries: Understanding boards, direct mail, and how to raise funds for just about anything!

How many of you were in this morning's session?

And these, when I present at workshops and things like that, I hate it when I have to introduce myself because you have to start out with all these I statements.

And It's just a tough way to start out a presentation.

But I want to tell you a little bit about my background so that you'll understand that I know a little bit about the subject matter.

So I have about 25 years of experience working for the Seventh-day Adventist Church in various capacities.

I started out as a teacher, then I became a school principal, and I ran a boarding school for 5 years, and I worked at the North American Division for 12 years, where I was the director of a department on philanthropy.

And I don't know if you knew that, but the church has a department on philanthropy.

It's called Philanthropic Service for Institutions or PSI.

I was the executive director of PSI for 12 years.

So from there, I left and I went to a hospital where I became the president of their foundation.

Did that for a couple years, and now I'm at the University of Texas at Brownsville down along the coast right next to Mexico.

I look out my back door and I can see Mexico in my back door so that's how far south and I'm the associate Vice President for Development at the University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College.

And so what I do is I spend most of my time raising money and working with alumni and foundations and corporations.

Let me tell you a little bit about my experience with philanthropy.

I never thought I would have anything to do with fundraising at all.

You know, I was a boys dean and taught PE.

And then when the principal left Platte Valley Academy, they asked me to become the the principal.

And my first day in the office, you know, I'd never been on the other side of the principal's desk and I'm sitting in the only swivel high back chair I'd ever been in.

I've risen to such power at such an early age and I was just 29 And then the treasurer walks in my door, carrying a stack of papers, and this is the transition of power meeting, and I'm scared to death, you know.

And so she starts laying them out, and she says, well, and here's 1.

You need to raise $10, 000 in the next 30 days, or we lose a $10, 000 challenge grant.

And so, you know, for someone who grew up doing nothing but selling light bulbs and candy and doing car washes and things like that and was in charge of a gymnasium budget that was about $300 a year.

It was quite intimidating to have to raise $10, 000, and so I did the first thing that anybody would do.

I called up and asked for an extension on the Challenge Grant Program, and they told me no.

And so, when I asked them, well, why not?

And they said, well, we'll help you raise the money.

And so they told me about how direct mail works, and sent me samples, and I wrote a direct mail piece, used my faculty and staff to fold it, stuff it, stamp it, and get it out in a day, and in 2 weeks, we raised $15, 000.

And so, you know, I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed, but I figured out that there's something to this.

You know, there's a reason why you can write a letter to people and they'll stick a check in and they'll mail it back to you.

And then another thing that intrigued me is that Every piece of literature that would come across my desk from any educational association or organization would talk about scholarships, capital campaigns, endowments, and things like that.

And I thought, wow, there's something going on here.

I didn't know anything about philanthropy and then I ended up getting a scholarship from PSI to go to the fundraising school and my life kind of changed.

By the time I left Platte Valley we had a 47% of our alumni giving a gift back to the school every year.

And so I've fallen in love with philanthropy and I'll probably spend the rest of my career in it.

And so that's a little bit about where I'm coming from and I have a deep, deep love for philanthropy.

There's very few things that can top it in terms of the power to change.

Love would be number 1, and we know the source of love.

Philanthropy many times puts love in action.

In fact, if you know what philanthropy means in Greek, it means the love of mankind.

And so when we think of the word philanthropy, it's not just the exchange of money, but it has something to do with the exchange of love between people, and it doesn't just have to be money.

Right now in our culture, philanthropy is quantified in terms of dollars.

So, I love philanthropy, and I have about 30 slides and a lot of different information for you.

This presentation is designed to kind of give you an overview of fundraising.

I would encourage you to, if you have questions, that you might write them down.

I'm going to try to go through some of these slides, and as I go through them, some of your questions might get answered, because I'm gonna kind of give you a nice big picture of how this thing works.

And so if I give you a good overview of how philanthropy works, then maybe I'll answer your questions as I'm going through, And then at the last 5 or 10 minutes, we'll have Q&A, and we'll just talk about some of the issues that you're facing and if you have any questions for me.

And my email address will be up on the screen, and you can get it at the end of the presentation.

And if you don't have the PowerPoint presentation as a handout, basically you can email me a note and I'll email you back the presentation if you'd like to have it.

The bottom line is, is I want to talk about why some organizations are strong when others reduce their services and close their doors.

Why do some people tend to thrive and other organizations always tend to struggle.

First of all, you have to understand that with fundraising, there are reasons why people give to organizations.

And people are going to give to your organization for a lot of reasons other than you need the money.

In fact, the fact that you need money has very little to do with the reason why people will give it to you.

The reason why most people will give you money is because you're accomplishing something wonderful with your ministry.

You have to realize that in the US and in Canada, I don't know what the Canada exact numbers or Canadian numbers are.

In the United States, it's estimated there's like 1 and a half million non-profit organizations.

And as you know, when you go down to the ASI Convention Center, there's a lot of ministries there.

You're competing with 1.5 million nonprofit organizations that are out there looking for the philanthropic dollar.

So quit thinking that because you're a good cause, people are gonna give money to you.

The other thing is, you have to realize, is that people are going to give to vision.

In other words, people want to know what it is that you want to accomplish and what you will accomplish.

It doesn't mean that they won't give to need because every organization does have needs but they're not going to give to needy organizations because when you have a needy organization, what happens is the donors tend to think, well, why aren't other people supporting this?

And a lot of the fundraising I've done over the years, I'll approach a donor and I'll say, would you consider supporting us with this type of gift?

And they'd say, well, who else is giving?

And what they want to know is, why should I give?

1 of my academies that I attended, and I won't tell you which 1 it is, but sent me a direct mail appeal and sent me a picture of a roof that had a hole in it and asked me to give a gift because they needed to repair this roof.

I wonder like, alright if I help you fix the roof, what's going to keep it from getting in that condition again in the first place?

I felt like it was wasted money, so I didn't give to it.

So you're not going to inspire anybody to give to your organization by telling them how badly things are operating in your organization.

Talk about in your when you talk to people about giving to your organizations try to focus in on the things that you are accomplishing and how you are changing lives and try to quantify that with real life stories, not statistics.

People don't, you know, the numbers are important because they paint a particular picture, but the most important thing that people wanna hear is how is it that you're changing lives and they want to hear a real life story that relates back to it.

So people want to give to organizations that are successful and they don't want to give to organizations that are struggling.

Realize that philanthropy is not a short-term solution to a crisis.

Philanthropy does not work well in a crisis situation.

Steven Grabiner

Decisions, Decisions, Decisions

Okay, well this seminar for nonprofits is about decisions, decision-making, both in your personal life but more focused on decision-making in your organizations.

My name is Stephen Grabner and I'm currently vice president with an organization called OCI, Outpost Centers International.

We have around 75 ministries around the world that we work with.

I sit on a lot of boards, I do a lot of helping with leaders, consulting with leaders.

For 10 years I was a missionary in Africa, a place called Riverside Farm, and for 11 years before that I was a pastor in southern New England.

And leadership's been a special study of mine for the past number of years.

Because as Ellen White makes a comment in the testimonies, you know, the level of a church only gets really as far as the spirituality of the leadership in that church.

And I think we can look at different organizations and see how leadership decisions, board decisions, individual leadership decisions, have either contributed toward this success or the failures of those organizations.

So that's what we're going to talk about this morning is decision making, the process of decision making.

You should have a handout with you as well.

And I may be good in leadership, but I'm really technologically challenged.

So what we're going to talk about, I found this on the internet.

I thought it was a great illustration for the complexity of decision making.

We're not really going to talk about that chart and fill your mind with all that.

I really want to kind of hone things down.

And just as we begin, I want to ask you a question.

Have you been involved in an organization, either a ministry or a church, a non-profit, something like that, in which you can look back and think bad decisions have been made?

So just do me a favor and just jot that down on the top of your paper.

I'm going to come back to that hopefully later as we go through this.

And think of a specific incident where you were with an organization and some decisions went the wrong direction.

And the reason I want you to do that is because as we go through this process together, I'm hoping that you'll be able to reflect on that situation and be able to pull some of the things we talk about and say, you know, I think that contributed to our poor decision.

Because our whole purpose this morning is not just to find out about bad decisions.

It's really to learn how to make better decisions, just to make good decisions.

I think they're on your handout, I believe they are.

First is, sorry that's a little light, to identify key decision making saboteurs.

Things that will derail the decision making process.

And most of us, when we go through a decision process, and if we're to talk about, you know, what went wrong, It's easy to say, well hindsight is always 20-20.

Boy, look back, you know, I really wouldn't have done that.

But too often we use that as a kind of a cloak for not learning from our mistakes.

And it's like, okay, well, hindsight's 20-20.

But maybe we were tripped up by some sabotage, some certain things that happen in the decision making process.

And then secondly, I hope that we can identify some ways to improve our decision making.

So again, identifying areas that will trip us up and then looking forward to ways that can improve.

Now on your handout there's a couple of Bible verses I wanted to share with you.

And it's interesting to me that in Proverbs in 2 places we get almost the exact same quote, and certainly the key emphasis, where now counsel is, what happens?

People fall, people perish, hang on, translation.

But in the multitude of counselors, there is safety.

Without counsel, purposes are disappointed.

But in the multitude of counselors, they are established.

That there's a value, that there's a power in teams.

Now, you're probably familiar, maybe you're not, you're probably familiar with the TV show, Who Wants to be a Millionaire?

Well, I've never seen it, I've only heard about it.

But as far as I understand, question and answer.

And when you're being asked the question, 1 of the things you can do to get a right answer is what?

What are the different ways, if you have any idea?

And the audience is right an astounding 95% of the time.

Here you get this group of people and if you were to ask them as a group, the audience is right about 95% of the time.

At the GC, those of you who were there, there was a ministry that talked about God as the elephant in the church.

I forgot the name of it exactly, but they had a jar of peanuts, about that high.

And the whole thing was they wanted people to guess how many peanuts were in there, and then they were giving a prize.

Most times, the aggregate, the average of all the answers, all the guesses, will be the closest.

So I had this idea, I was going to stand there and I was going to ask a hundred people how many peanuts they thought were in that jar.

And statistically the average would have been closest to the right answer.

And that is that there are certain dynamics that come to play that shortcut the power the teams can bring to things.

And that's why if we think of our boards, we think of our organizations, you know, here we're together, we have this different things, but there are certain processes that impact the potential of teams, of groups, of boards, of different clusters of people.

So the scripture reference is, hey, in a multitude of counselors there's safety, great.

But how do I get that group of counselors to really fulfill their potential?

What is it that negatively impacts that group of counselors?

A couple of other quotations here, just look at them briefly as well, from Second Selected Messages 198.

In making important decisions, we should study every side of the question.

We are ever to remember that we are given a place in the work of God to act as responsible agencies.

I love that phrase, study How many sides of the question?

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