Building Community and Youth Engagement

Welcome back to another episode of the Drug Prevention Power Hour. I’m your host, Jake White from Vive 18. And today I’ve got two guests, Cassandra and Marnie. And Cassandra is the development director at Influence the Choice. And Marnie is the executive director of Influence the Choice. And the reason why I wanted to ask them to be on the show is they’re doing incredible work. I think I came across them online maybe, and I saw how full their event was, their youth program was, and that they had gone beyond the DFC program and are still just going full steam ahead with amazing programming. So Marnie and Cassandra, welcome to the show.

Thank you. Thank you for having us.

Of course. And, let’s do this. Marnie, will you go first? Just tell us a quick intro on who you are and how you got into the prevention field.

Influence the Choice: Mission and Impact

Well, my name is Marni Maraldo and I got into the prevention field actually as part of the DFC. I was the sector rep for schools. I’ve been on my local school board for 15 years. And so one of my concerns from in that position was how many kids were not graduating because they were getting caught up with substance use. And so that’s really how I got into prevention and wanting to do what was best for our students. So when the position in the organization came open, I applied and here I am.

Wow. Awesome. I love your mission. You saw a cause and something you wanted to tackle and you went in for it. That’s cool. All right, Cassandra, you’re up.

So I was on a school board next to the district that Marnie is on the school board for and so I met her several years ago doing that type of work together and it’s always impressed me the strength and passion for preventing substance use. We did have a really unfortunate incident happen 2018 or 19 in a city that both our school districts actually have students in and we lost two students within seven weeks of each other due to fentanyl poisoning. And at that time I was still on our school board and I started donating to influence the choice because you feel so powerless and that you’d want to do something and you want to prevent this from ever happening again of course.

And so Marnie became the executive director and then said, hey, I’d love to work with you over here. And I said, yes.

Wow. Okay, that’s cool. did you have, because you’re in charge of development and raising funds, is that something from your past world that you’ve done before or did you just step into it with this role?

So in the sense that I run a couple of campaigns and had to raise money for myself, which is not fun, asking money for yourself at all, I got to thinking about it I thought, but I can ask for money for kids. I can definitely do that. And so I took the challenge.

Youth Leadership Development Initiatives

That’s awesome. I love it. I had to do that at the beginning as well, raising funds for my own salary. And it works really well when you have a team around you. But when you’re doing it by yourself and it just, it feels weird. And sometimes the mission gets lost because you’re raising money. But when you have that team and everyone knows what their job is, just magic can happen. It’s really, really cool.

Absolutely. Yeah. so I would love to learn about some of the excitement that’s going on with influence, the choice right now. what are you most excited about? What are some wins that are happening? You’ve been in the game for a while. and you know what? Tell us a little bit about your town as well. so yeah, maybe give us a background and then tell us some things that are going on with you guys.

Yeah, so a little bit about our area. We are just east of Seattle, so we’re in a suburban area. We are our DFC grant was for a school district which actually had access to five different municipalities plus unincorporated King County, which is a county that Seattle is in. And so, you know, one of the challenges, yet also a benefit is that you have five different sets of city council members that you have to build relationships with. Plus a county council, which when you have a large urban area such as Seattle, can feel intimidating just being able to say, who am I that I’m going to get to know my elected officials so well? But it really is a benefit to be able to reach out to all of those groups of people.

And so I think that’s a real benefit pretty either health conscious in our area, a lot of activities. I tell you, it is the most beautiful place in the earth when the sun comes out in the Seattle area. And so people really do love to spend time in the outdoors. And so we want kids to be making healthy choices, which is why our name of our organization is Influence the Choice. So that’s what we were hoping we’re going to be doing.

Okay, awesome. And I, so I did a couple keynote presentations in Washington this year for different prevention conferences. And one of them was in Seattle and I am obsessed with Rainier cherries. Whenever we go there now, I’m just like, where can we go and get those? It’s, they’re so, so good.

You need to come in the right month. And for anybody listening, they’re just a delicious yellow cherry with color of red running through them. And they’re just so different from a Bing cherry. It’s quite a treat around here.

They taste like candy. It’s that good. Yeah, it’s a healthy candy. That’s so good. So what kind of things do y’all have going on right now that you’re really excited about? Yeah, that either your students are doing, your team is doing. What kind of momentum have y’all created these past couple of years?

Sustainability and Long-Term Strategies

Go ahead, Cassandra. Well, I was just going to say immediately last month we had the Power of Me, Power of We conference, which is youth leadership development for middle school students facilitated by high school students and then an overall facilitator who used to be one of our high school students. Our high school youth group is called TECH, Teens Encouraging Community Health. So it was amazing to see the full circle with Addie coming in having started in sixth grade and gone all through our program and then on to college and then back to actually be the presenter at this conference. And, you know, obviously she’s so much closer in age than we are to the kids. think it really resonated with them having somebody younger delivering the messages and it’s extremely interactive. They learn communication skills. They learn substance refusal skills. They are in scenarios where you’re really having to think about, how did that make people feel? How did you feel when you were on the outside of the circle, even though we were playing a game and we knew it was a game, how did you feel? Well, yeah, I kind of felt singled out. mean, kind of all of those realizations and the feedback we got was amazing. The pre and post surveys showed growth in every area. I would say it’s one of our, well, it’s our biggest recruiting event of the year. I don’t know if you want to add anything to that.

No, I thought that’s a great way of saying, some of the work that we do isn’t necessarily directly involved with substance use prevention. Some of it is that skill building in youth. When you create leaders, leaders try to make better choices for themselves. And so that is really what we’re looking for and also engagement. And so there’s a lot of evidence around disengagement from school and the difficulties that that creates often is where kids start to get involved with other kids who are disengaged. And then nothing positive happens from that usually. They’re not off making businesses, right? So we really try to help them become engaged with each other and really prepping them at that middle school age. And part of what we’re focused on now is looking at middle schoolers as they move into high school. We are like most places, if you look at your data, you know, it’s like a hockey stick and that 12th grade comes and it just shoots right up. So we’re thinking if we can really build some of those refusal skills when they’re young, that that will help them when they get into high school and beyond. That they’ll be able to make the choice that’s healthiest for them and positive for them.

Measuring Success and Future Goals

Yeah, I love that. I like to say that if we have community, confidence and coping skills, we can resist peer pressure because all those things are kind of the outside pressures, but you need those internal things to protect yourself. Cause you can’t, you can’t get all that stuff from the outside. It’s as hard as we look. It’s, tough to build that from the outside in. And so that’s what you’re doing. You’re building skills. And I love starting at a young age because like you said, those middle schoolers are going to bring it up through high school, not only the skills and the leadership, but that motivation, their goals, their talents and abilities, all that stuff is gonna pay off. And I love the mindset too, because we were talking about this before the call, Cassandra, that oftentimes we think so much in the term of what do I have to do this year, instead of, no, what’s the five, what’s the 10-year plan, because this is a long-term strategy course, everybody wants us to stop the bleeding now, but that’s usually not how anything works. It’s all a long-term play.

Right, I mean you could stop the bleeding for one year and then walk away and say, hey we did it! And your strategy will fail. It has to have continuous work. You have to have people in these roles continuing the conversation and the messaging and the events and the trainings and it’s not a one and done.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And when it’s young people, it’s sustainable because like you said, she’s coming back, you know, to help out with that conference. That’s so cool.

Right and you have a new set of youth that come through. So your social norms now are not going to be the same in five years if you don’t keep that work going. And so that’s why we’re really targeting what can we do for our middle schoolers so that really we’re looking at lifetime usage. So our lifetime usage when we started in 2010 was about 62 % of students. By 12th grade it said, yeah, they’ve consumed some type of alcohol.

And in our latest Healthy Youth Survey data that came back, because Washington State uses a Healthy Youth Survey, it was in the 30s. So I think it was 35%. So we’re really seeing some great work going on. And so how do we maintain that?

That was for seniors, right Marnie? Yeah. was for seniors. So by the time they were seniors, lifetime usage was down to about 35 percent.

Navigating Social Norms and Healthy Choices

Okay, that’s cool. that’s recently I read that’s more in line with the national average, like 60s, that’s very high, but down to that’s, that’s incredible. That’s so good. there’s, there’s something that happened. This is what I looked at the national data recently and saw there was a big jump between that senior year that nationally it hovered around 30 for a while. And then in college it jumped up. And I think that’s part of social norms too, is that students just think, well, I get to college now, I have to do this. And so they, maybe they start to prepare or they start to experiment with those things thinking they’ll be alone. And of course that was my story too, feeling alone for making a healthy choice and wanting something different. But I love the fact that you mentioned like the social norms change for each generation every year. It’s hard now to keep up with everything that’s going on. Like just what’s coming out of their mouths. I don’t understand a lot of it.

I want to ask y’all about some sustainability as well, because it’s so impressive that y’all have actually, can you tell me how long you’ve been in existence and then how long you’ve been running without the DFC? And then I’d love to dive into a conversation about that. Any tips for sustainability.

So we’re new to being outside the DFC. So we started as an organization, I think started back in 2010. We eventually got our DFC grant in about 2013. So it ended last September, but it had been actually on my mind since I was brought on board in November of 2021. So it was the first thing I dived into is what are we going to do when the grant ends? And really had to take a look at what can we do to be sustainable? And if we weren’t, what was gonna happen to the work? So one of the things that we shifted was I took my sector reps and made them board of directors once we became our own nonprofit. So we became our own nonprofit probably back in 2018. after the first five years, so as we were going into that second five years, we became our own 501c3. And so I took my when I came on board, we still had just basically the exec committee was running the organization and I thought, well, I need a board of directors. And really these are the right people. And so we continue to take that DFC model even into our leadership, right? So our governance is based on those 12 sector reps.

We still need that representation. And I think that’s really impactful is that they are still sector reps even though they’re board members. But when we came on, when I came on board, I knew that I was not gonna be able to do this on my own. We had about $30,000 worth of cash in the bank. And I thought, well, we have to grow that, right? To replace a DFC grant. And really taking almost that responsibility of I have people that I have to feed as well as work that I want to keep having to happen. So kind of my biggest goal is I was hoping either that my staff would have a place to land in another organization if we weren’t gonna be able to continue the work, or how are we gonna build up the funds to do that? And so I brought Cassandra on within my first 30 days of work, and she’s been fantastic. And what we realized from the very start is just how long the cycle is for funding if you’re going after a city grant or a county grant.

So she came on in December of 2021. In January of 2022 is when the cities started their application process for what would start funding in 2023, which I needed at least three months of funding in 2023. So it’s really, you know, when the DFC says you need to start in year seven to really think about your sustainability, there’s a reason for that because the government moves slowly. So whatever grant you’re going to get, is going to take some time to do. And so we were able to get city grants from two of the municipalities in our area. So that was hugely helpful. And there’s one where, you know, where the Isoquois school district. So it’s Isoquois, the entire city is within our school district. And so they’re our biggest city funder of the five cities that we have. And so really kind of taking a look at that was really important for us to realize in January of 22. If we want to be here in September of 23 and beyond, we had to start that work in diligence.

Building a Strong Governance Structure

Okay, wow. that leads us, Cassandra, you jumped on board with this mission. And I heard you say earlier, Marnie, that it was kind of two years before the DFC. You started to think about it and that’s when you had your board? Or was that at year five of the DFC where you had your board?

No, the, the, the sector reps were still just like an advisory and we had like an executive committee of like a chair, a vice chair. And those were who were the decision-maker for the organization. So when I came, came in, I said, I want everybody involved in the decision-making so that they felt ownership because the sector reps weren’t coming to the meetings. They weren’t finding them meaningful. And like, how do I do that? Well, if they’re in charge of the governance.

Yeah then they’re gonna find it’s really important to be here. Yeah, right. There’s a reason why you should show up like this. This depends on you. That’s a good point is how, how much ownership did they feel? So that’s cool. One thing that I’ll pull out too, that you said that’s easy to gloss over is that you started a nonprofit to house the grant for the second half of the DFC. And I wouldn’t have thought that was a big deal. But now since working with so many programs, realizing, well, the school district was housing the DFC and sometimes I work with ones where the school district is the fiscal sponsor. Sometimes it’s the health department. Sometimes it’s a nonprofit or something else. But if the, if the organization is so big, sometimes they have their own fundraising limitations on what you can or you can’t accept or what you can use money for. And it can limit your sustainability. So is that, is that why you moved to a separate nonprofit or was there a different reason to say, Hey, we’re going to not be fiscally sponsored by the school anymore and we’re going to start the new thing.

I think ITC was trying to, that’s what we call it, ITC for short. We were trying to find where was a good place for us to land. So when the organization first started, it was a community network and the funding, our fiscal agent was the city of Issaquah. And so they were just paying all the bills and it didn’t seem to matter. And then we tried to be housed under our school’s foundation. So a lot of school districts have school foundations

And so, but we got lost in their mission. Their mission was not our mission. And I think it was at that point that we decided we have our own mission of what it is we’re trying to accomplish. And it’s separate. And it may not stay in the Issaquah School District anymore, which is part of when we get into discussing, that’s probably part of an ongoing plan.

So to strategize and just really to be able to say, how do we own that? And you’re right. A lot of grants won’t pay for food, right? We’re looking at being able to pay for, know, stipends for students. So there’s things that we wanted to be able to do and prize money. So we have an art contest that has prize money. So we still have to find funding from other sources and having it go from us to this, like it was. Receiving those donations, I think was a piece of where does the donation go and how do we make sure it comes to us as an organization?

Yeah. Okay. That’s good. That’s super helpful to know. And Cassandra, what did you do when you came on board? How, what can we learn from you and your experience doing this? Cause it sounded like you just jumped in cause you were ready to make a change and we could probably learn a lot from what you learned.

Grant Writing and Fundraising Strategies

So like we were speaking earlier, Jake, having run for election and been on a school board, I had experienced running my own campaigns, which is very awkward and uncomfortable asking for money for yourself, even though you’re trying to do work for kids. feels counterintuitive to anything I’ve done in my life. But I thought, but I can ask for money for kids with no problem. And so I jumped in and I can’t remember now how we determined the city grant application was due almost like right away. And so just jumped on and dived in and you know, writing grants is not the easiest thing to do. There’s a lot of trial and error. We were very fortunate to get two city grants the first year I was there and then really started looking around at other places and organizations.

No, it’s not. Of course you’re working your own personal connections and the organization’s connections and working for individual donations, but I very quickly realized we need big dollars and we need it fast. And so I reached out to Primera Blue Cross and they had an application process and it was a fantastic experience because they really had one or two people that would interact with me. We ended up getting, you know, a nice sum from them. We also looked at the local tribes in our area and the one most closely connected with the Issaquah School District and applied for a grant from them, did not receive it the first year. I said, well, let’s try it again the second year. Did receive it the second year and it was a nice chunk of change for us.

You know, it wasn’t more than 10,000, I’ll put it that way. And just the networking involved going to your chamber of commerce meetings, meeting business people, meeting people who have other connections to other organizations like mental health, that you can find some common ground. And it’s not like a competition between you going for the same grant. It’s, hey, you should look at this grant and I would use this approach and think about XYZ. So you’re kind of all trying to work together to make sure that kids have the resources they need and the supports that they need from the organizations.

Okay, that’s good. what was it like? Because I mean, I hear networking, I hear meeting and grant writing. If you had to break down your sustainability right now, what percentages would you think is, this is how many we have for individual donations, these are corporate sponsors, these are grant funding, where are y’all at right now?

Funding Sources and Financial Health

I would say right now about 60 to 70 % of our funding is through grants. And then probably another 20 is going to be corporate donors coming through. And the thing is, those rotate. You have to find those year after year. That’s the toughest part. And then building up that individual right now, we’re probably about 10%. But I’d like that to get closer to 30%. Because one of the things that we had to do another piece right away. It’s really starting to work on that individual. And the reason those corporate donations were really important is because we needed them to be undesignated and not tied to work that was actually being done. So a lot of grants are reimbursement. You do the work and then you get paid. Well, you need to have a pocket of money in the bank in order to do that, right? You have to front load that. So that’s why those corporate sponsorships and local donations are really, really important. It’s for cashflow reasons. You need to be able to have that money there in order to pay the bills. So we needed to build up. I wanted at least six months of dollars in our reserves before the end of the grant. And for me, if that didn’t happen, I was probably going to say, we need to figure out where this work lives, because the organization wouldn’t be sustainable.

Between that and revenue we knew was coming in, we were able to make that happen through a couple of federal grants and the city grants. We’ve gotten smaller grants from our county, but we’ll be growing that.

Okay, that’s great. And Cassandra, maybe this is a question for you. If someone’s on year seven of this DFC grant, and we’ve been throwing around this term, if anyone’s just now getting into the show, Drug Free Communities is a grant, you get $125,000 a year for prevention in your community. So let’s say someone’s on year seven, the grant’s gonna close at year 10, they’re right at that spot. What would be a couple things that you would say, do this right now, what would you recommend?

Preparing for Grant Transitions

Well, I would look at CADCA, Community, well, I think they’re called something else now, but it used to be Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America and the free trainings that they offer. So we went through the whole National Coalition cohort and graduated, and that was very helpful in organizing our work and really focusing on the things that we needed to focus on before the DFC ended. So would you recommend the CADCA training morning? 100%.

100% and it really is, you I know that for most organizations, travel is going to be, you know, the basic, biggest expense there. I would say it’s worth it. Of course, Cassandra and I had the luxury of being about 15 miles from where the train was going on. But it’s interesting because you really, it puts a plan to your work, not only just for the work, but being able to talk to funders about what that work is. So, I’m trying to build my story for what are we doing as an organization and Cassandra’s hearing and we’re working on the same stuff. that messaging though is her messaging that she’s putting forward before funders. So it is incredible and it is well worth the total of four weeks in a year that you go and do it’s broken up into one week sessions. So it’s a little more manageable. And I think it’s actually four days out of the week.

Networking and Relationship Building

Okay, cool. So the CADCA training, they have a specific training for this. What other things would you recommend?

So in our area, there’s a couple of organizations that help with fundraising and one is called the Corporate Giving Network. And actually now she’s in several states. So you might want to look up Joy Stevens at Corporate Giving Network. And she brings in corporate sponsors once a month. So you can join that webinar and even ask questions and find out if their grant are covering the kind of work that you’re doing and might help you. And so then it also gives you a connection to, you know, a corporation that you didn’t have before. And there’s been a couple where none of our work overlapped and so I wasn’t going to apply for something that I didn’t think we would get. So that was super helpful. Speaking of not applying for something that isn’t a really good fit.

Truly don’t do it. If you are not a close fit for that grant, you will be wasting your time and stressing yourself out and then disappointed in the results. Don’t try and fit that square peg in the round hole. Make sure that the grant application really aligns with the work you’re already doing. Another thing I did was I found this for a smaller nonprofits actually out of Tennessee, get fully funded with Sandy Reese. She does small nonprofit fundraising and also does webinars, also does trainings, also is constantly giving, here’s an email, here’s some strategies. She has a whole system called Fundraising TV that for a price you can belong and get training in whatever sort of areas you’re looking for. If it’s grants, you know, great, but she mostly focuses on how do you do individual fundraising events and how do you get, you know, big dollars when you need it, the messaging behind your communications, et cetera. And then sort of taking all of this and taking it all in and then saying, okay, what’s going to work for Influence the Choice for new work, for influence, for what can we take from all of this and use in our fundraising plan choice. What can we take from all of this and use in our and again, I know we said relationships. It is so much about relationships. is getting to know people, getting to know what their business does.

Maybe it’s your local bank. You sit at the Chamber of Commerce breakfast with them. Once maybe you end up at lunch with them and then you have a relationship built and you can say, do you have any funding opportunities coming up? And you just ask those questions and you work those networks and you will find success to some degree, I promise. If it’s enough, I’m not sure, but you will find success if you work it and you just ask those questions and you work those networks and you will find success to some degree, promise. If it’s enough, I’m not sure, but you will find success if you work it.

Personalizing Donor Engagement

Yeah. And that’s one thing that I’ve learned too, is it’s oftentimes as you build your network, it’s keeping in touch with them because people are so busy. We’re all consumed with family and work and all the things that we’re involved in. And just having that way to stay top of mind, to pick up the phone and call someone and say, Hey, I was thinking about you today is oftentimes when they’re like, by the way, I wanted to become a monthly donor or by the way, I want to and stay top of mind to pick up the phone and call someone and I was thinking about you today. It’s oftentimes when they’re like, by the way, I wanted to become like you had this event going on and I want to volunteer or something, but people are so busy they saw it they moved past it because they’re on your newsletter or something. and I think that’s, that’s so important for a role when you, when you are in a fundraising role and position, it’s making sure you’re, you’re loud about your mission. You’re so enthusiastic. You’re eager to get people involved, but you’re also just keeping in touch with people.

And one of things that I always do now is I’m not, I’m not fundraising, but I want to stay in touch with the people that we’ve worked with because we’re not a one and done type. Like company, we want to be invested in our organizations and just in the car. We’re in the car all the time. All right. Well, what else am going to do? I could listen to this amazing podcast, the drug prevention power out, but I was part of this. So I’m not going to do that. I’m going to pick up the phone and call some people.

And for me, that helped a lot with finding those opportunities and they’ll think of their friends. And I end each phone call with a, is there anyone you think that I should meet? Or is there anybody who can benefit from what we’re doing that I haven’t met yet? And you’ll see your network grow.

Yes, yeah, because people generally like to be helpful and they will think of somebody. They’ll put some thought to it and they will make a recommendation or say, hey, I’ll send an email introducing the two of you and then let you take it from there. The other thing that I did, and this might sound a little silly, is all of our sector reps that became board members have name tags. So I said, hey, sometimes I just wear my name tag to the grocery store and people what’s influence of choice? And then it really gives me the opening to talk about it. And I said, and then you need your 30 second, you know, elevator pitch. And so we walked our board of directors through their 30 second pitch so that if somebody did comment or if they have a sweat, their sweatshirt on, what is that logo? They would have a response. And sometimes it revolves around why did you get into this work? Well, I believe in this mission because somebody did comment or if they have a sweatshirt on, what is that logo? They would have a response. And sometimes it revolved around why did you get into this work? Well, I believe in especially because and sometimes, you know, they had no personal connection to addiction or reasons other than if we want kids to be healthy, in which they would really talk about how.

And sometimes, you know, they had no personal connection to addiction or reasons other than that we want kids to be healthy, in which they would really talk about how important it is for kids to be healthy. And it just gave our 12 sector reps the ability to have the conversation without, because not everybody is comfortable with fundraising. Like I said, running my own campaigns, hated it my gosh.

I asking for money. Hey, could you donate to my campaign? But for kids, it’s so much easier. I think another thing, just since it’s tomorrow from the day we’re recording this, tomorrow is Give Big. So we have Give Big and then we have, or I’m sorry, Giving Tuesday. We also have one in the local area called Give Big that starts in May. And so those things are really, really important as well. They have a much larger network of who they’re going out to. So oftentimes there is a giving Tuesday, yeah you end up sharing some of that money that comes in. Usually they’ll take a small like 10%, but it’s totally worth it because you’re extending that reach of people that you can continue to reach throughout the years. so building that network of those individual donors, along with the work that we’re doing with corporate donors, and then the work of getting to know our city and local and state and county kind of lawmakers that are doing the funding.

Okay. Yeah, that’s so helpful to think about those times of year, those events, those shared resources. I’m curious because we’ve talked about grant application, we’ve talked about personal networking. Has there been any maybe donors or corporate sponsors that have come in where it hasn’t been through an application and how do you go about asking for that?

So again, I know I keep saying networking, but when when you’re networking, you meet people who own businesses or who work at a large corporation. And we’re really fortunate to have Microsoft in the next town over. So there’s a lot of Microsoft employees here. And one of our board members happens to work for Microsoft and brought us in to do virtual lunch and learn type events. So even if you’re not asking for money.

If you know people who work at a big corporation or organization, you can say, hey, we have this program for adults on how to help your kids avoid substance use. Would you like to do a lunch and learn? And that exposes us to a lot more people, usually who have kids because they’re interested in coming to a lunch and learn to support kids. And you can grow donors in that way getting yourself out there, doing community events, going to churches and offering to speak really helps that networking.

Yeah. that’s huge. this, and do y’all keep in touch with people? So for example, you do this lunch and learn, which is fantastic. They’re getting to learn about what you do. You’re being helpful. And some of them are thinking, Hey, this is great. Probably I want more. And so are you collecting emails, phone numbers? What are you doing to move them down the path of support?

Well, the case with our board member at Microsoft, he had permission to share people’s emails with us because he had asked them all ahead of time. So, yes, we were able to grow our not just our email database, but grow our communication and relationship. So don’t think about it as a database because they are all individual people and they all are deserving of a relationship. And that’s what you’re really nurturing.

Yeah. Well, and that’s the misconception is people, we always look fast. Just like in prevention, we want to do something fast instead of thinking, no, this is a slow build. We’re networking, we’re providing value, we’re developing relationships and learning what these people care about. Because if it’s a good match, we can partner up and they’ll want to fund us. And it takes the scariness out of it when you think, hey, this person, what better could they spend money on than saving young kids lives than building a drug-free culture. there is, I would ask for money all day, every day. If that’s the outcome, let’s go get money for it. so, I mean, having that posture, number one, if you’re listening to this and you’re scared of fundraising, please just don’t ever apologize ever for asking for money. You are saving lives. Like you need to get good at this to learn whatever it takes for you to do it, if that’s your role. But two, it’s realizing that if I rely on an outside source, like, you know, listeners of my podcast or followers on social media or anything like that, someone else owns that platform and I need to get their information so that I can get in touch with them so that I can learn more about them instead of relying on those outside platforms. So the, the database is your, it’s your home for all your people. And I think it’s one of the missed opportunities that people don’t do is they don’t have that database yet. they, they just think, well, I mean, I got my friends in my phone. Like I can call them or ask them, but it has to go beyond that.

Definitely has to go beyond that. And this just popped into my head. But if you’re doing a Facebook fundraiser and lots of good money has been raised for great causes on Facebook, but you don’t necessarily have any way of contacting the people who donate. And so like you said, Jake, they control sort of that communication ability. And again, that might work for you in where you’re at right now but I’ve always found I try and write a personal thank you. Yes, it can be a lot. Sometimes we ask board members to write out handwritten personal thank yous. Sometimes I say, you might have to print. don’t know if people read cursive anymore, but anything that gives that personalized touch is so much more meaningful than a text or an email or even a typewritten postcard that comes with the bulk mail stamp on it.

I don’t know if people recurse it anymore, but any way that you can find to personalize a thank you and really truly show your gratitude is a win that you can find to personalize a thank you and really truly show your gratitude from his opening. And there was a time that Cassandra was, even for our larger donors, was doing a video thank you. And so the email came through, but there was a video on that where she’s literally talking to them. And that’s why things like a podcast, right now we are talking to people and they feel connected to us. There’s the amazing piece of video and a video, thank you, is really fantastic..

And you gotta keep all your little foibles in there. Like I didn’t say that correctly. I mispronounced that. I said, you gotta, you leave it because that is reality. And that is how they know you are genuinely care about them. It doesn’t have to be this polished, prim and proper. It’s gotta be heartfelt.

Yeah. Wow. I like that you said that. wouldn’t have thought of that, but it is more genuine. There’s a little break in your voice or there’s a pause or a stutter. Like that’s so natural when you’re talking to someone and yet we come up with a script and it’s like, they sent me a commercial. that’s so cool. All right. This has been so valuable. I’m looking at the time. I could talk to y’all for another hour because this is awesome. But just to end I want to be on theme too. So you might share this podcast with people in your community or other people who are listening and resonating. I’m thinking already, you are great stewards of your finances. You know, like I want to make a donation today. Where can I go and donate?

Call to Action and Community Involvement

We have our website is InfluenceTheChoice.org and so we have a big donate button on there. You can find us right away.

Okay, perfect. And for all the coalitions and educators listening to this, you can go to that website, check out all their ideas. They’re doing incredible work and we do this stuff better together. So I’m just going to say it for you. Like, can we steal your stuff? Can we steal your ideas and all that?

Absolutely. Free for the taking, please take it.

Yes, I love it. And I want to give a shout out because one of the things I saw on your website is y’all are doing the protect your game campaign from substance free athletics. And that is just getting awesome, awesome results. if y’all are listening to this podcast, you might remember episode 73, we had Debbie burnt on, we’ve given her a shout out a couple of times because the program is so good. So if you’re missing that, or if you’re on the, on the website, looking at it, you can check out that episode but please go check out influencethechoice.org and see all the things that they’re doing. And then we’ll see you next Monday for another episode of the Drug Prevention Power Hour.