Just a few weeks ago I had a personal reminder of the true value of “show & tell” when it comes to lifting up mission.  I was visiting with my Dad in Boston and spent a morning volunteering with him at a food pantry he supports.  I must admit that although I have dropped off food to can drives and donated money to various hunger-related causes; I had never been to a food pantry.

Once we arrived I was assigned to help “clients” shop in the pantry.  There was a color code system that determined which foods and at what quantity people could choose.  As I shopped with folks, I learned their names and a little about them.  We joked around and I even offered a few simple recipes for the some of the vegetables we had that day.  When the supervisor was not looking, I even snuck a few extra sweets into the bags of some of the elderly clients.  Although I was only at the pantry for about 3 hours, it was a very impacting experience.  Before I left for the day, I stopped by the supervisor’s office and wrote a check.

I have a different view of hunger now and a closer connection to the mission of food pantries. Now that I am back in NJ, my family and I are looking for a local pantry to volunteer some time.  We have been touched by the cause of hunger in a personal way and feel compelled to help.

You have the same opportunity in your YMCA.  Never underestimate the value of “show & tell.”

Are you going to be a “newbie” at this year’s conference?  Shhhhh, don’t tell anyone but here are a couple ways to gain the most out of the event and look like a veteran!

First, offer to volunteer.  As a totally volunteer-created and run conference, you can jump right in helping with registration, introducing a speaker, collecting evaluations or greeting others.  Take on a shift, you will automatically be linked to a volunteer team, know the inside scoop and ta-da, you are technically not the newbie anymore.  That was easy, huh?

Second, map out your conference session plan pre-conference.  Check out the web site for on-going session updates and circle the ones that fit your unique needs.  Coming with a team of folks from your YMCA?  Live on the edge…. split up to maximize the territory.

And third, look for the nugget.  Walk into each session, each keynote, every meal and even the breaks on a mission to find just one take-away.  Now, you are going to find a bunch more, but that’s the bonus.

We’re glad you chose NAYDO this year and relax… there are no newbie initiations, no secret handshakes, no pledge paddles awaiting you – just authentic philanthropic resources and a bunch of new friends.

Much is made – and rightly so – of creating a strong case for support. Organizations and charities spend an incredible amount of time, effort and money to get their case just right. To show the need. To show how they can make a difference. To ask for support.

Twitter, the much-ballyhooed (and often just plain booed) micro-blog site, provides a unique way to make your case. Twitter forces you to be concise. You have to make your case in a bare sentence or two. But you can make your point.

Love146 is an organization that works to end child sex slavery and exploitation and to provide shelter and support for those who have suffered this abuse. They use Twitter to inform and inspire advocacy, as well as ask for support. But I think tweets like this encompass their entire case for support in a few simple words:

Can you make your mission – and the need for your mission – come to life like this?

Charity:Water recently ran an e-card promotion for Valentine’s Day. Proceeds from the e-Cards went to support their work to provide clean drinking water.  Here’s how they thanked donors (well, one of the ways) and how they summed up that promotion right on the heels of its completion:

I don’t know about you, but saying that “745 people will get clean drinking water” is much more striking than simply listing the dollars raised.

The American Red Cross has done agreat job of communicating their responses to the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile, but this tweet reminded me of the work they do right here in the U.S.  It was a powerful reminder of the breadth of their mission to someone who has been a long-time donor and thought she knew everything about the organization:

What stories can you tell in 140 characters or less? Who could you inspire with a tweet?

This will be my 6th NAYDO Conference, including the one we hosted in Montreal in 2008. Every year that I attend NAYDO, I come away with at least one big learning that directly impacts my work. Sometimes it appears during a workshop, sometimes on an elevator ride. At NAYDO in Indianapolis, after attending a workshop, my CEO and I completely transformed a presentation we were to make to a major donor. That presentation still serves us – very well – today.

Organizing the 2008 Conference gave me unique insight into the tremendous amount of work – and thought – that goes into making every moment enriching and productive for attendees. Everything is thought of with YOUR interests and benefit in mind: what kind of knowledge are you looking for, who do you need to connect with, how can NAYDO inspire you to bring your YMCA Philanthropy to the next level, what would it be fun to do in Charlotte?

So take some time to think about how you can benefit most from the conference. What are the challenges you are facing right now? Who in your team would benefit from meeting one of their peers? How can one of our sponsors or exhibitors facilitate your life and help you achieve your goals. But also think about what you have to offer! What have you been doing really well? What expertise can you share during a discussion or break? How can you help someone else?

To make this really concrete, pull out your agenda for the next 4 months. What is the single biggest project or challenge you will be faced with? I guarantee that you will find the answer – or someone to help you find it – at NAYDO 2010!

There is no question that the YMCA is having a positive impact on children, youth and families in North America. I also believe that we could be doing considerably more, and that it’s up to each of us to make that happen.

With almost 1 million charities in the US, and over 80,000 in Canada, the YMCA must do better to rise above the clutter, and make its case for support to attract the resources it requires. It needs to build on the success it’s had working with major donors, corporations and foundations – to work together on developing sustainable solutions that address the increasingly complex health and social challenges our communities face.

Beyond the resources it requires to build and maintain its facilities, the YMCA must expand its reach to low-income communities with children and families that will never get to the YMCA facilities, to deliver programs in their communities using new and different approaches like the Virtual YMCA – a unique community outreach program offered at a number of YMCAs in Canada, and modeled after the program at the YMCA of Greater New York, that provides children with the additional help and attention they need to develop their academic and socialization skills in order to improve their capacity to learn and reach their full potential. (read more about the Virtual YMCA)

Both Y-USA and YMCA Canada have embarked on ground shifting brand review and development strategies that will lead to plans that will strengthen the YMCAs they support, and to position each of them to have a greater impact on children, youth and families, than ever before. Working in lock-step with our YMCA program partners, those of us in YMCA philanthropy will be called upon in the implementation of these plans, to engage more donors on our promises with their volunteer and financial support, and to deliver on those promises.

The 29^th Annual NAYDO Conference in Charlotte, North Carolina, April 8-10, 2010, will be a significant philanthropy education experience for up to 1000 YMCA staff and volunteers from across the continent, and your best opportunity to:

• Get an update on the Y-USA and YMCA Canada brand development strategies

• Gain knowledge on best practices and new trends in philanthropy, that you can apply at your YMCA

• Define your personal role in helping the YMCA advance its impact on children, youth and families in your community.

Go to www.naydo.org for conference details. I look forward to meeting you in Charlotte, and to learning more about my role too!

At Donor By Design, we get to work with terrific non-profit organizations around the country. In the course of that work, we also meet insightful, innovative leaders, whose experiences and expertise shed new light on the work we do.

We’ve asked nine of those thought leaders to join us as members of our new Advisory Council. As a group, they’ll join our staff in discussing and debating needs, trends and future technologies which will ultimately affect our clients in the not-for-profit sector.

If you had access to this group of experts, what would you ask? What resources could they provide that would be helpful to you?

The NAYDO Conference is a unique tradition that draws on some of the best of what it means to be the YMCA.

Who knew that a totally volunteer-driven organization that started with eight Y guys around a table talking financial development shop would grow to be the largest annual conference in the movement?  While the conference is “big” with a thousand YMCA professionals and key volunteers gathering each year to swap challenges and solutions, share resources, remind of best practices and find inspiration in our collective ability to strengthen the foundations of our communities, it still feels “small” as you link up with old and new friends.

Still trying to decide if you are coming this year?  Think of this as your philanthropic reunion… without the pressure to lose weight, puff up your career choices or avoid that ex-girl/boyfriend!

To be very honest, I am struggling to fully understand the scope and scale of the devastation in Haiti.  The media has reported that over 100,000 people have died, thousands of children have been orphaned and an estimated 1.5M people are now homeless.  Intellectually, I understand that this is a tragedy on a massive scale but I am still having trouble getting my arms around the full picture.

Like so many, I am compelled to help out.  I have decided to make a financial contribution but feel very unsure of how my small donation will make any difference.  My donation of $100 seems woefully inadequate and insignificant when I hear that over 100 million has been donated worldwide and that the need could exceed one billion dollars.

Less than a week after the earthquake, I got my answer.

I watched, as a young boy was pulled from the rubble, exhausted, dehydrated and malnourished.  A reporter covering the story interviewed a doctor asking about the boys chances of survival, what I remember most about his answer is that he said that a $10 donation would feed this boy for a month.  For the first time, I understood the power of my small $100 donation. I was not tossing a pebble into the ocean; I was nourishing a young boy who had lost everything and everyone for almost a year.

Do your donors understand how their dollars can make change?

I, like millions around the world, watched with shock and horror as the massive scale of the tragedy in Haiti unfolded in the days following the earthquake.  Television, radio and Internet reports of the ever-increasing tallies of those displaced, injured or dead filled my days.  Like most, I prayed for those in harms way and tried to understand how I could help.  After quickly coming to grips with the fact that I could not go to Haiti and lend a hand, I settled on making a financial contribution.

As it turned out, the decision to give was the easy part, but I still had some real questions:  How much should I give, and to which organization?  How will my contribution make a difference?  How will I ever know if the money got to those in need?

I suggest that these questions are not unique to the tragedy in Haiti.  I believe that these are the questions that all people ask themselves before making a meaningful contribution. I challenge you to answer these questions for your organization before you ask others to support your worthwhile cause.

Occasionally life gives you a second opportunity to do something very special. That was the case for me when I was asked to return to Jerusalem in the fall of 2008 to again serve as the director of the Jerusalem International YMCA (JIY), a YMCA founded in Ottoman Turkish Palestine in 1878 and which in 1993 had been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

The YMCA leadership in the U.S. and Jerusalem had determined that after 60 years of Y-USA oversight of JIY operations, a relationship that had been ‘temporarily’ put in place as a result of the 1948 war which led to the establishment of the State of Israel, it was time to returned full operational control to a local JIY Board of Directors, including the responsibility for the JIY Board to hire their own director.

This transition reached a significant milestone last summer when, for the first time in nearly 100 years, a fully empowered JIY Board of Directors, led by an outstanding Board Chair, Simon Benninga, appointed Forsan Hussein, a Palestinian from a small village in Northern Israel, to direct the JIY. Forsan’s journey from Northern Israel to Jerusalem and the JIY took him through three elite U.S. Universities (Brandeis, Johns Hopkins and Harvard), significant work experiences in the U.S. and numerous commitments to Middle East peace and reconciliation programs in the U.S., Canada, Israel and Palestine. He is everything the JIY board hoped to find: a natural leader with a unique skill set who can lead the JIY into an even more effective mission in the Holy Land.

It will be 35 years ago this summer that I first traveled to the Middle East to serve for two years as a YMCA World Service Worker in Nazareth, Israel. Those years were followed by numerous other Middle East journeys, including an assignment with the World Alliance of YMCAs to work in Jordanian refugee camps and two tenures as Director General of the JIY. Throughout the years I’ve always been aware that the Middle East is an amazing ‘classroom’ and that there is no end to the personal and professional lessons to be learned from living and working in the Middle East. Upon reflecting back upon my most recent assignment, there are two things that consistently come to mind:

• The unbelievable power of the JIY’s mission has to positively influence the quality of live for all people in the Holy Land. This mission somehow is able to overcome 40 centuries of recorded Middle East history (and in a sense, 40 centuries of recorded conflict), creating healthy relationships and communities that reflect the fact that peace in the Middle East is possible. The related take away for this is the realization is that this is the same mission that YMCAs put into play in nearly 3,000 communities throughout the U.S. and 130 countries around the world, communities where issues and opportunities may be different, but certainly no less important than in Jerusalem.

• The incredible results that come when the roles of highly capable and committed YMCA volunteers and staff are properly defined and put into action. The transition of the JIY from a branch of Y-USA to a secure and viable local YMCA in Jerusalem could never have happened without volunteers and staff working effectively together, both in the U.S. and Jerusalem. Volunteers took the lead in setting policy, worked together with staff in defining related strategies and then empowered the staff to put plans into action. When outstanding volunteer and staff leadership in Jerusalem assumed full operational responsibility for their YMCA and worked within well defined roles, great things started happening. Although there is still much to be done, the initial phase of a new relationship between Y-USA and the JIY has been successfully accomplished and the long-term strength and viability of the JIY’s mission in the Holy Land is closer to being secured.

Although the Y-USA / JIY relationship is changing that doesn’t mean that the JIY’s relationship with Y/USA, as well as with literally thousands for friends in the U.S., is being diminished. On the contrary, there will be even more opportunities for mutually beneficial relationships between the JIY and local U.S. Associations in the years ahead, relationships that offer great learning opportunities for all involved. For those attending the 2010 NAYDO Conference in Charlotte, there will be an opportunity to meet the JIY leadership, Simon Benninga and Forsan Hussein, and to get the conversation started!