High Impact Philanthropy: Colleen Cook Of HighTide On How To Leave A Lasting Legacy With A Successful & Effective Nonprofit Organization
An Interview with Karen Mangia
Donors are excited to invest in organizations like this, and it’s a gift to them to develop a strong fundraising plan that meets your short-term needs and sustains your organization long into the future. Many organizations find themselves in positions where a founder is retiring or grant funding has dried up and they’re scrambling to develop an annual fund program to fill the gap. However, it’s near impossible to do that in a short span of time without building some momentum and trying different approaches to see what catches with your donor base.
For someone who wants to set aside money to establish a Philanthropic Foundation or Fund, what does it take to make sure your resources are being impactful and truly effective? In this interview series, called “How To Create Philanthropy That Leaves a Lasting Legacy” we are visiting with founders and leaders of Philanthropic Foundations, Charitable Organizations, and Non-Profit Organizations, to talk about the steps they took to create sustainable success.
As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Colleen Cook.
Colleen Cook is the co-founder of HighTide, the world’s first fully-customizable CRM built specifically for nonprofits. Built from the ground up to adapt to any nonprofit’s needs, HighTide’s instant migration and complete customization empowers organizations of any size to securely relate and track all of their data in a single system, while leveraging marketing, automation, and AI tools to fuel fundraising strategies that change the game. Colleen has years of experience working in the nonprofit servicing sector, focusing on the priorities, pain points, and strategies that make or break nonprofits.
Thank you for making time to visit with us about a ‘top of mind’ topic. Our readers would like to get to know you a bit better. Can you please tell us about one or two life experiences that most shaped who you are today?
I spent several years as a leader in a nonprofit performing arts center, working as a fundraiser and a marketer. When I joined the organization they were in dire straits following the 2008 recession, more than $1M in debt following a failed capital campaign (which was a death knell for an organization of that size), and I walked into a development office with absolutely no records or gift management system.
There was a new board chair, though, who was full of fire and hope and he cast a vision for our leaders, staff, and donors that made us believe that we could find a way out of the situation. And, we did it. The donors took the leap of faith because of his faith in the organization and the bank’s extended lines of credit, and helped bridge the gap.
That was more than a decade ago, and the organization not only withstood that storm, but was transformed under visionary leadership. We raised all of that capital debt, and then went on to have another capital campaign — a successful one — which allowed the organization to create meaningful new programs, expand their footprint and transform the neighborhood, amidst the strains of the COVID-19 pandemic, without any staff layoffs.
A bold vision can build energy that’s magnetic, and an organization can achieve great feats with visionary leadership and genuine faith in what you’re doing, giving you the power to truly transform the lives of those you serve. I feel my calling in life, at least in part, is to help fuel that work in the world.
You are a successful leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? We would love to hear a few stories or examples.
1. Success means different things to different people. For some it may mean material wealth, while for others it may mean career achievement. For me, success has always been about living a life of significance. This perspective has been invaluable in my own journey, and has led me to where I am today both personally and professionally.
In the nonprofit world, those who have had success creating material wealth have a unique opportunity: using material “success” to create significance. When a person becomes a donor, and chooses to offer their material wealth to others, their actions take on a more significant meaning. They are creating an impact that has significance for others, offering their material wealth in exchange for a higher purpose.
2. Organizations often reflect the health (and the unhealth) of their leaders. So the second character trait that I see as essential is a growth mindset — both personally and professionally. Remaining curious and seeking wisdom is always of benefit to you. However, it’s easily forgotten if our egos grow in light of our success, which is all too easy to succumb to. Building a new company from the ground up is an intense and refining process for a leader to undertake, and the leaders on our team would attest along with me about how essential it is to foster our own growth through healthy practices and intentional learning.
3. One of the values our leaders build from in leadership is taking a posture of grace and truth towards difficult situations: grace when someone is giving themselves too much truth, and truth when someone is giving themselves too much grace. As people, we all have a default mode, trending towards too much grace for ourselves if we’re too easy on ourselves or too much truth if we’re harsh with ourselves. Being attune to the needs of the individuals in the room allows you to adapt your posture to guide them to a balance of the two, which is the point where problems can really get tackled and growth can begin.
I’ve found that in organizations where there’s too much grace culturally, the downsides are that people can often feel unsafe and uncertain about what people aren’t saying to their face. In cultures that are abundant in truth, but not grace, employees can feel that leadership is harsh, and they’ll be afraid to take risks or be forthcoming with hard information. You really need to strike a balance of both, in equal measure.
What’s the most interesting discovery you’ve made since you started leading your organization?
Prior to HighTide, several of our leaders ran a digital marketing agency that worked primarily with fundraisers at universities and nonprofit organizations. We were helping them to run campaigns that were built upon the principles of inbound digital marketing, which uses a high volume of value-driven content to drive engagement and walk alongside a buyer through their entire journey. Though it’s natively used in the for-profit sector, this approach was radically new in the nonprofit sector, and we found ourselves introducing the concept at conferences for years as we found success with it.
What was incredible was, the organizations leveraging the approach were raising far more money with these strategies — on average anywhere between two to four times more than they had prior — but consistently, they couldn’t track their digital marketing efforts in their technology, at all. They owned rich raw data that would tell them exactly what message, what platform, what content, and what strategies had led their donor to make a gift, and what was working for them and what wasn’t, but they couldn’t access that information simply because the technology predominantly used in the space wasn’t built to receive and display it. We were stunned and tried everything we could think of to bridge that gap. In contrast, in the for-profit space, everything we were trying to do has been commonplace. In fact, it’s been standard practice for decades, but it wasn’t easily used in the nonprofit space because of the specific nature of tracking charitable donations.
That has been a major driver for us. If we were able to see those kinds of results without a complete understanding of the data, we felt we could achieve anything if we could build a strategy upon a complete understanding of how donors and constituents were engaging digitally.
Can you please tell our readers more about how you or your organization intends to make a significant social impact?
The founders on our team have spent years fighting the technology in the nonprofit space, desperately trying to measure ROI on efforts and draw connections across disparate data sets. The current state of CRMs in the space leaves a lot of room for improvement, but it can be challenging for an organization to adopt a horizontal-market solution due to the specifics of tracking donations.
When I talk to clients in the space, they’re spending days and weeks trying to get data into or out of their system in a way that’s needed, often building their own spreadsheets to track things outside of their database that no one system will track. Moreover, they frequently can’t track their program services alongside their revenue, which makes the necessary reporting to maintain funding near impossible without great expense of time and money. They simply can’t get a complete picture about what’s going on. I read a report recently that 55% of data lives outside an organization’s CRM, which is meant to be the source of truth. But 45% accurate doesn’t seem like the truth to me.
HighTide is a fully customizable CRM for nonprofits that is custom-built around their organization’s data, rather than formatting their data to fit a standard system. This allows organizations to bring everything into the system, tracking it exactly the way they want, and report on all of it in one place. While we’re early in the market, we are already hearing from early users that this is going to give them back days and weeks to focus on the work their organization needs them to do, rather than the bloat of insufficient tech. We can only imagine the capacity it will increase for organizations in the coming years as they build upon that power.
What makes you feel passionate about this cause more than any other?
Nonprofit staff members are making less than their for-profit peers, working long hours for the good of their mission. At the same time, they’re fighting a lot of friction in their technology. I have personally spent hundreds of hours consulting on and toiling over CRMs that don’t track everything the organization is doing and give an inaccurate picture to leadership of what’s really happening due to that incomplete data. It hampers organizations, and it drains the life out of their teams to be constantly beholden to these problems. I have heard numerous people in the field say that they left their organizations over a bad CRM. We have an opportunity to correct this problem in the space and truly build capacity for these organizations and the good they are doing tremendously by equipping them with an accurate and complete picture of what’s happening inside their organizations. That’s what drives our entire team, and has inspired us to bootstrap our building of HighTide over the past year and a half.
Without naming names, could you share a story about an individual who benefitted from your initiatives?
One of our early adopters runs a successful and growing children’s museum. He’s a visionary leader who has multiplied the impact of his organization over and over, and he has never been able to find a software that would allow him to track donations, memberships, visits, and merchandise all in one place. He was one of the earliest adopters of HighTide because he saw the immediate value in a custom CRM and the meaningful connections he could draw from unified data. Businesses live and die on the accuracy of their data, and being able to see everything together and draw meaningful connections allows them to make decisions based on that information and grow.
We all want to help and to live a life of purpose. What are three actions anyone could take to help address the root cause of the problem you’re trying to solve?
If you’re in a donor or leadership capacity in a nonprofit organization, ask more questions about the completeness and accuracy of the data you’re drawing conclusions from. Great strategies are built upon deep understanding of what’s really happening, but data silos often corrupt the total picture and send organizations down the wrong path. So, it’s valuable to seek deeper understanding about the sources of data you’re using, and the ones you’re not, and how it all interconnects to better draw meaningful connections from your data.
If you sit in a nonprofit board or committee leadership role, ask your staff members about the things that are causing friction in their work and really listen to the problems and see what you might be able to help resolve. Many people working in the sector don’t have the exposure to the same things as their for-profit peers, so you may know of a resource that’s off their radar.
Lastly, I’d encourage anyone, in any capacity, to donate financially or with their time or expertise to support the operations of an organization they care about. Operational support is critical to organizations and often overlooked by funders and donors, in light of more exciting programmatic or capital opportunities. Great organizations are built upon great teams and great infrastructure, and the more you can invest in that, it’s a multiplier for success.
Based on your experience, what are the “5 Things You Need To Create A Successful & Effective Nonprofit That Leaves A Lasting Legacy?”
Without a doubt, the most important place to start is with a bold and engaging mission. What are you doing, who does it help, and why does it matter to more than just yourselves? Donors are looking for a wave to ride, to take their resources and sow them as seeds toward the greater good. How are your programs flowing out of your mission to meet a real need in the world? That’s near impossible if your organization doesn’t have a compelling reason for existence that everyone deeply believes in.
One step behind that is a great team of passionate and hardworking leaders. Nonprofit work is hard, with limited resources and long hours in many cases. The energy of your team resounds throughout everything you do, both through your program work and your administrative efforts. It’s easy to tell from the outside the quality of your team and culture based on the quality of the work you do and the way you do it.
If you have both of those things in place, great systems are next in line. Healthy business and financial operations, cutting edge technology, and strong communications keep visionary and talented teams running well. A complaint I hear frequently from donors is how poorly they are recognized by the staff at their organization for their giving, and I know from experience that has all to do with poor systems, not lack of appreciation for most organizations.
Donors are excited to invest in organizations like this, and it’s a gift to them to develop a strong fundraising plan that meets your short-term needs and sustains your organization long into the future. Many organizations find themselves in positions where a founder is retiring or grant funding has dried up and they’re scrambling to develop an annual fund program to fill the gap. However, it’s near impossible to do that in a short span of time without building some momentum and trying different approaches to see what catches with your donor base.
Last, but certainly not least, strong brand and marketing efforts can make a wealth of difference for an organization, but often fall by the wayside in organizational budgets in lieu of program support. Great brand marketing is built upon a deep understanding of who a brand is at its essence and how that aligns with the hearts and minds of the people they serve and partner with. When you can engage people in that story, there’s a tremendous amount of momentum that can build around your efforts so you’re not constantly starting from scratch.
How has the pandemic changed your definition of success?
The pandemic was a perspective shifter, causing many people to hold up to the light and reevaluate cultural expectations and norms. So, as it relates to success, for me personally it shattered some of the image of what success looks like, and boiled it down to a more distilled essence. For me, it is less about gaining fame and accumulating fortune, those things will come and go, and instead about living a good life every day, giving my best effort to use my gifts well towards worthy causes, and serving those around me as generously as possible.
How do you get inspired after an inevitable setback?
A phrase we say around the office a lot is, “All fuel.” It’s our adaptation of a quote from Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius that can be summarized to say that a fire consumes all you throw at it, and obstacles are powerful fuel. It’s a challenging path we’ve taken, choosing to bootstrap a SaaS company while running another established company, and the road here has been filled with obstacles any business faces with profound change. We joke that by Tuesday we’re all in the depths of despair and Thursdays are “magic” because we typically will have breakthroughs on whatever obstacles we’ve been tackling all week, followed by celebration on Friday. All of that comes along with a high performing team moving at an aggressive pace towards a vision we all believe in. With that perspective, it’s hard not to be grateful for the obstacle, because we always integrate those challenges and translate that energy into an even better product, brand, and business strategy.
We are very blessed that very prominent leaders read this column. Is there a person in the world who you would like to talk to, to share the idea behind your non-profit? He, she, or they might just see this, especially if we tag them. :-)
I’m deeply encouraged by the philanthropic vision that Mackenzie Scott is championing, particularly as it relates to the no-strings-attached approach to philanthropy. Leveraging her platform and resources to support initiatives that drive better reporting, operational support, and fewer restrictions on gifts for organizations is of critical importance to the health of the sector.
You’re doing important work. How can our readers follow your progress online?
You can follow me on LinkedIn and follow HighTide as well on LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, or Facebook, or by visiting hightide.com.
Thank you for a meaningful conversation. We wish you continued success with your mission.
About The Interviewer: Karen Mangia is one of the most sought-after keynote speakers in the world, sharing her thought leadership with over 10,000 organizations during the course of her career. As Vice President of Customer and Market Insights at Salesforce, she helps individuals and organizations define, design and deliver the future. Discover her proven strategies to access your own success in her fourth book Success from Anywhere and by connecting with her on LinkedIn and Twitter.
