Big heart, bold strategy: lessons from the Boys & Girls Club 

Jaclyn Uloth:
Welcome to How to Market Your Nonprofit, the Counterintuity podcast featuring interviews with experts in marketing, fundraising, strategy, and leadership who offer how-tos and inspiration about how you can help your nonprofit succeed and grow during a time of chaos and change. Bringing his 25 plus years of experience in marketing, strategy, and nonprofit management, here’s our host, Lee Wochner.

Lee Wochner:
Shanna, it’s great having you join us today. Thank you for everything you do for kids and families. And as you reminded me, I certainly didn’t forget, I should say that one of my own children and my own family were the benefit of your work some years ago. One of my kids was in your Boys and Girls Club.

Shanna Warren:
That’s right, I think he attended the Bret Hart location.

Lee Wochner:
I think that’s right. And I should say that that kid is now 23. I think he was eight or 10 at the time, eight, I don’t know. And a previous office of ours, I was really kind of touched because when we moved in and when we renovated that space and moved in, we happened to be right next to your Boys and Girls Club.

Shanna Warren:
Wow, that really makes me feel old. Thank you for that.

Yeah.

Lee Wochner:
And you guys walked over and the kids made a sign welcoming us to the neighborhood and I haven’t forgotten that and I think we still have that. Really fun. So for those who don’t know and I certainly do at this point, what exactly does a Boys and Girls Club do?

Shanna Warren:
That’s so nice. That’s wonderful.

Shanna Warren:
Boys and Girls Club to me is all about mentoring, just to simplify it. We are the largest youth-serving organization in the country. There’s close to 6,000 Boys and Girls Clubs across the United States. And whereas a Parks and Rec or a YMCA may work with infants all the way up to senior citizens, we just work with kids four through 18, and it is a lot of mentoring.

We have a lot of great programs that we mix in with that, but at the heart of what we do is mentoring.

Lee Wochner:
And what do you mean by that? When you say, I mean, I think I have an idea, but what does mentoring mean in this case?

Shanna Warren:
We want to be the safe place for kids to go after school, before school, during summer, winter break, where they have someone to talk to, where they have someone that’s asking them how their day was and what’s going on in their life and someone that they feel safe to talk to and someone that they can go to for advice and someone that is truly there for them because many of them may not have that connection.

You know, parents are working two and three jobs or whatever the circumstances are, a lot of our members really need a positive mentor in their life.

Lee Wochner:
When I was about, I guess probably 14, maybe 12, 12 or 14, somewhere in there, my mother wanted to go buy some cards, so we went to a Hallmark store. And they wound up talking to the assistant manager of the Hallmark store, who seemed impossibly old to me, which means he was in his late 20s. And he became one of the best mentors of my life.

Because he directed me into all sorts of arts and culture and literature and painting and music that I never would have found otherwise. And it was really important. And to this day, he’s one of the most important relationships in my life. And I’m just grateful for that. And so mentoring actually makes a huge impact on people’s lives.

Shanna Warren:
Yeah, so you can think of our staff as the Hallmark guy. And they’re doing the same kind of thing, whether it’s someone to talk to about your interest in visual or performing arts or tech or sports. Those are all the backgrounds that our employees have and very similar conversations that are happening at the club every day.

Lee Wochner:
And I would think that there are a lot of single parent households, and even in two parent households, they’re both working and perhaps more than one job. And so this seems even more important now than before.

Shanna Warren:
Yeah, and it’s not even just that. It’s the single family household. We have a lot of single dads as well. It’s parents who just are working multiple jobs. It’s kids where their parents are incarcerated and they’re being raised by grandparents or being raised by an older sibling. We have kids that are in foster care, group homes, every situation imaginable.

Lee Wochner:
Are there ways in which your particular Boys and Girls Club differs from others, differs from the other 6,000 Boys and Girls Club?

Shanna Warren:
I mean, I would like to say that ours is the best, but that being said, actually, no, and I’m very proud of that. I think that one thing I’ve told so many people is that I truly believe in our mission in that you could go to a Boys and Girls Club in Burbank, California, or in Tennessee, or Washington state, and the mission will be the same, and they will never turn a child away for an inability to pay. So that’s why I’ve been with the organization almost 25 years. And it’s true no matter what Boys and Girls Club you go to. They’re never going to turn anyone away. And I think that’s what makes us very different from other youth serving organizations.

Lee Wochner:
So the Boys and Girls Club of Burbank in Greater East Valley, how did that name come about? Was there a merger or a change in there at some point?

Shanna Warren:
No merger, but what happened was at some point, gosh, this was, I think our name changed in about 2006. At some point when we started opening school sites and expanding into the community, I realized that a lot of our kids were coming to us from outside of Burbank. Whether it was that their parents work in Burbank, so they’re able to get the district permit to attend school in Burbank.

And or our sites were really close to the Sun Valley, North Hollywood, Glendale border. And so we were seeing upwards of like 40% of our kids coming that actually lived outside of Burbank. We also had our deaf and hard of hearing program that was bringing kids in as far away as Pasadena. So when we would go to meet with donors and we would talk to them about wanting their support, it was the Boys and Girls Club of Burbank.

And that’s great for Burbank businesses, but what about all of the amazing donors outside of Burbank? And so it just seemed that making our name more reflective of who we were actually serving would allow us to expand our reach and gain new donors and supporters. So that’s why we decided in 2006 to make the name change.

Lee Wochner:
Well, good for you. And you know, you and I are aware of other name changes. Glendale Community, Glendale Community Foundation became Community Foundation of the Verdugos because they were serving more than just Glendale. I was on that board, constantly explained to people what the Verdugos were. You know, the name change was prior to me getting in there, but I understood the name for it. And then here’s a successful name change.

Shanna Warren:
Yes.

Lee Wochner:
Home Again LA was such a successful name change, I can’t even tell you anymore what their previous name was. What was it?

Shanna Warren:
Family Promise of the Verdugos.

Lee Wochner:
Family Promise of, there was it? There you go, Family Promise of the Verdugos. And they wisely made an adjustment for similar reasons. There was more impact they could make and there were funding dollars looking for a place to make that impact. So very wise. It’s good to recognize when you have an opportunity for positive change and to go get it.

Shanna Warren:
Right, if only Blockbuster and Kodak had done that. Things might be a lot different.

Lee Wochner:
Well, you share that with a guy who thought it would, this was some years ago, who thought it would be brilliant to buy those Polaroid stocks when they were only 90 cents each. But less than well learned my Polaroid stock. I think it’s finally out of my portfolio because it just is, but yeah, I bought a bunch of them like, Hey, Polaroid is only 90 cents. Let’s buy some of that. So

Shanna Warren:
Right.

Lee Wochner:
We’re in an interesting time right now. And so I want to check in on a couple of things. How would you say your organization’s doing overall right now?

Shanna Warren:
Our organization is very healthy. That hasn’t always been the case, but fortunately for the last several years, we’ve been able to continue to grow the organization. I think one thing for us that really helped is that during COVID we stayed open. We never closed our doors. I think we were closed two days in total just so that we could reopen our doors early in the morning and stay open, I think, 11 or 12 hours a day. We had to completely pivot. And I think it’s because we stayed open and we never had to go through reopening and all of those challenges that the organization has grown because there were funding opportunities that came from being open during COVID and being available to the community that we have, we saw the benefit from and continue to see the benefit from.

Lee Wochner:
During COVID, whether you were still working or not, or working from home or not, or in a workplace that was still open, there was a greater need for community, and I certainly felt that. And so I would think that that was really a gift to kids and parents, that you were still open.

Shanna Warren:
I think for parents for sure because it was very hard for many of them to manage working from home and providing childcare and also providing school. And so the schools were closed and the fact that they could send them to us and the kids could do online learning all day and connect with their teachers and get fed and have healthy activities to do so that their parents could pick them up at the end of the day, I think was huge for so many of our families. And it started out really small because the schools were shut down. But fortunately, after a lot of lobbying and pushing, we were able to get the school district to open some sites for us so that we were able to go in and provide additional sites because we had too many kids. And back then, everything was about pods. So we were operating out of all of these pods and you could only have so many kids per room. And it was really crazy.

Lee Wochner:
How did you and your organization make the decision to stay open for COVID? What was that like?

Shanna Warren:
I think that it will be the decision that I am most proud of in my entire career here because it was a very difficult decision and we took a lot of heat for it. Difficult decision, but the easiest one to make because it was the right thing to do. Because I knew that there were going to be kids that their parents still had to go to work. Their domestic workers, their first responders, working at grocery stores, absolutely were gonna have to go to work and I knew their kids were gonna stay at home alone. They weren’t gonna have any educational support, they weren’t gonna have access to food, enrichment, and so I just felt very strongly that we needed to stay open for those kids. And I also wanted to keep my employees working. So it was twofold, it was take care of the kids who really need us and are gonna be left home alone, and take care of our staff. And they have the option, right? The staff had the option. Some were too afraid and we understood that and that was fine. But for our employees that absolutely needed a paycheck and wanted to keep working, they were able to keep working.

Lee Wochner:
Feels good to do the right thing and to have it work out well. That’s great. And so how about, now do you call the kids who are there, are they members or are they enrollees? What’s the term for them? Members, okay.

Shanna Warren:
Yes. Yeah.

Shanna Warren:
Members, club members. Yeah. Enrollees sounds a little bit too much like parolees. So.

Lee Wochner:
I know I just heard the same thing. I don’t know why I said enrollees. I don’t know. I’m just trying to find an alternative to members. Okay.

Shanna Warren:
It’s a membership and we want them to be proud of that and have ownership that they are a Boys and Girls Club.

Lee Wochner:
And how is your membership doing overall before the pandemic, during, after?

Shanna Warren:
Before the pandemic, our numbers were really strong. Obviously, during the pandemic, our numbers went down. Numbers after the pandemic have superseded our numbers before the pandemic. And I think that’s just because a lot of people have gone back to work. You know, a lot of people that maybe didn’t know us before the pandemic knew us from the pandemic because they needed our services. And then we’ve also just continued to open sites.

Lee Wochner:
Wow.

Shanna Warren:
So we’ve expanded our reach, which means more kids signing up. And then we opened our new main clubhouse. And I think when we did that, there was a lot of publicity around that and a lot of people that didn’t know us know who we are now. And I think that our building has a lot to do with kind of building our reputation in the community. Because, you know, before we were in the old firehouse, no one could find us. No one knew where we were. It was kind of, you know, falling apart.

And now we have a beautiful facility that we share with other nonprofits and we share it with the entire community.

Lee Wochner:
So just to help people understand, you have that beautiful new clubhouse, and then you also have on-site at schools, a number of programs, right?

Shanna Warren:
Yes, we have a main clubhouse. That’s our administrative offices and we run programs out of here, our deaf and hard of hearing and our teen program. But we also have satellite sites at 32 locations. So we partner with Burbank Unified, we partner with LAUSD and we partner with the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. So we have sites all over the San Fernando Valley.

Lee Wochner:
Mm-hmm.

Lee Wochner:
You’ve mentioned your deaf and hard of hearing program twice and this is a personal interest to me. My sister is very close to deaf. She’s extremely hard of hearing and I’ve told this story I think on this podcast before when she was a little girl she was failing in school and my mother went to the school and said please show me how you teach my daughter and the teacher turns around and writes on the blackboard and my mother said: My daughter can’t hear you, she reads lips. You have to turn around and look at her to talk to her. Can you tell me a little bit about your deaf and hard of hearing program and what that means and how that came about?

Shanna Warren:
Our Deaf and Hard of Hearing program started in about 2003. There was another nonprofit in Burbank called Tripod. And they were the organization that was made up, grassroots, made up of parents of deaf and hard of hearing children. And they started their own nonprofit. And their mission was to ensure that their kids had equal access to everything, education, sports, enrichment.

So they reached out to us because we had started opening school sites and our main club facility was kind of empty at the time. And they asked us if they provided the ASL, American Sign Language teachers, would we give them space to run a program? And we said, absolutely, great, love it. The kids would come from Washington Elementary and Muir Middle School and Burbank High School. Those are the three schools that were part of the Foothill Selpa so that kids from Pasadena, Glendale, La Crescenta, La Cañada, they come to school in Burbank and they’re taught in a classroom with a signing teacher and a speaking teacher. And kids that hear are in the class with them so that the kids that hear are learning sign language. And it’s just an amazing program.

But the deaf and hard of hearing kids didn’t have anywhere to go after school. They were basically put back on the bus and sent back to their district. So being able to come to the club, they were able to stay with all the kids they knew during the school day and they were able to do sports and athletics and get homework help. Well, unfortunately, less than a year after Tripod approached us to partner, they decided to fold. So they came to us and they asked us if we would be willing to keep it going on our own. They had one funder that they said would fund us, I think, for a year or two.

So I went to our board and asked our board if they would support me in taking on the program and they were very supportive of it. And they have been ever since. So it’s a great program. We run it after school. We run it in the summer, during winter break, spring break. We have our own ASL staff. And the great thing about the program is it’s also offered to SODAs and CODAs. If you are a sibling of a deaf and hard of hearing person—

Lee Wochner:
What’s a SODA or a CODA, please?

Shanna Warren:
—or a child of a deaf and hard of hearing person, you can be in our program also and it’s completely free. So it’s a great program, TK through 12th grade, for anyone in the deaf and hard of hearing community.

Lee Wochner:
So I’m already hearing, you know, I know you somewhat for a long time and I’m already hearing a lot about partnership, which I know you’ve always been a big proponent of partnership. And that’s one of the drums we’ve been beating here in recent months, especially for nonprofits because people are trying to adjust to different sorts of changes, government pulling out of some things and how are other things going to work. And I applaud you for your partnership approach that you’ve always had. Really great. So let’s talk about some of this change recently. There are programs that have been defunded. Funding has been shuttled around in all different sorts of ways from the federal government. And then states and counties are responding and people are jumping in to fund different nonprofits that had more government funding. So PBS being one example of that. Has your, in particular, your Boys and Girls Club been affected, impacted by this in any way?

Shanna Warren:
Thankfully not yet, but that being said, it has affected many of my peers who are running Boys and Girls Clubs, especially those that are running teen programs because a lot of the federal funding that clubs were receiving for 21st century drastically cut the funds for teen programming in Boys and Girls Clubs. And it’s been very hard for some of those clubs to maintain those programs because they’re all free programs.

So it’s very scary. Department of Education obviously was a big funder of many Boys and Girls Club projects. We’ve been recipients over the year. It wasn’t ongoing funding. It was like one-time project-based funding that you could apply for, but that’s all gone. So that affected a lot of clubs and we’re just watching everything else very closely. We get a lot of funding, pass-through funding from Boys and Girls Club of America through Department of Justice. And we have been writing letters to every single elected official the last few months, really advocating that they don’t cut that funding. And we continue to advocate with all of our local government officials to ensure that that funding is there. Seems to be working.

We receive a lot of state funding and so far the state funding is okay for now. We’ll have to see what happens when we have the election for our next governor. We have to hope that that funding stays in place. If that state funding is cut, that could drastically affect our operations.

Lee Wochner:
Have Boys and Girls Clubs talked about adjustments they would make if this funding goes away?

Shanna Warren:
That’s all we talk about. Yeah, have to plan for every single scenario. And it’s also why I think another reason why we were okay during COVID is that we’re not too reliant on any one funding source. So we need to be very diverse in our funding streams. I saw some of my peers during COVID that they completely shut down because all of their funding was coming from the government and everything shut down. So we try to be very diversified in our revenue streams and we save. We constantly put away money. I’m like the little squirrel that’s just, you know, burying all the little acorns because you never know when another COVID or something else is going to happen again. So even though the last few years have been very good to us because of all the funding opportunities that came from COVID, we are being very cautious and trying to save as much of that as we can for when the next possible thing happens so that we have safety and security for the organization.

Lee Wochner:
So in two or three years of doing this podcast, I think you are the very first guest who has talked about saving money into reserves.

Shanna Warren:
Yes, have to.

Lee Wochner:
So now I want to ask you about that and hats off to you. Not everybody does that. I’m not even sure everybody is capable of doing that at the moment. Do you set aside a certain amount of revenue that comes in that automatically goes into reserves or how are you managing that?

Shanna Warren:
So we have a finance committee and we created a couple years ago when we started to see our funding increasing from these government grants, we came up with an investment policy and so we decided that when our cash got to a certain amount that we were going to invest it and we were going to have a diversified investment plan. We meet once a month to review it and it’s the members of our finance committee and our board treasurer and our CFO that provide the information. We have the great conversations and then we act on what everyone thinks is the best interest of the organization.

Lee Wochner:
This is an amazing part of this conversation. If anybody takes anything away from this, they should listen to this. Because reserves protect you. Reserves provide a cushion. Do you know how many months of operation you have in reserves? You don’t have to give me the number. Do you know that number?

Shanna Warren:
I do know that number where it’s many months.

Lee Wochner:
That’s great. A few months ago, I had lunch with a nonprofit leader who was panicked because money they had been promised was not going to arrive. And he laid out the situation, nice guy, and immediately needed that money to resume somehow rather immediately. They had no reserves. And by the way, their board was a working board, not a donating board or a fundraising board.

Shanna Warren:
Well, that’s what we were for years. I mean, to be honest with you, we operated that way for years. It’s just with time and with growth and growing our programs and expanding our footprint and really growing our board that we’ve been able to get out of that situation. And it’s very hard. I mean, most of the nonprofits I know operate that way.

Lee Wochner:
Yeah.

Shanna Warren:
You’re a not-for-profit. It’s hard.

Lee Wochner:
It is hard. It is hard. And when you want to change the world, as we do—positively, let’s put in positively. You want to make a positive impact on the world, you’re committed to it. And that’s why I’m so interested in your discussion of reserves, because seriously, it’s the first time I’ve heard it. I started a nonprofit theater company in 1992.

Shanna Warren:
Yes.

Lee Wochner:
And that’s always been hard. And now we’re doing far better in a number of ways, financially, the balance sheet, et cetera. And I’m heading up a little fundraiser that we’re doing in a month. And we’ve put in place real business-oriented changes to manage, do things like manage cashflow, establish reserves, project revenue, all of these things. And it used to just be, how much money did this show make? Good, now we have the money to do the next show. And that was hair-raising.

Shanna Warren:
Yeah, I will say one thing that has helped us is the last several years we’ve always had really savvy board members that have always said to me, don’t bring us a budget that isn’t balanced and the strategic plan needs to align with the budget. Meaning that when we would present the strategic plan, we would also present the budget because they wanted to make sure that whatever I was trying to accomplish in the strategic plan, we could pay for.

And so I think that’s just part of our mindset is always making sure that at the very least there’s a balance. And then the other thing is we really looked at our fundraising events over the year and started to do analysis, the return on investment for our fundraisers to make sure that the amount of time and labor that we’re putting into those events made sense.

Lee Wochner:
A lot of these things that you’ve been able to put in place, you and your board and your team over the years help inoculate you against a potential future COVID type event because you have a cushion, you have something to rest on. That’s really great news. I’m really glad to hear that. Let’s talk for a little bit about marketing. What marketing are you doing to spread the word about Boys and Girls Club of Burbank and Greater East Valley?

Shanna Warren:
So for marketing, we do a few different things. We have an e-blast that goes out every other week, goes out to the entire community, any of our donors, community members, anyone that supported us. In addition to that, we also do an e-blast for all of our families. So it goes out to like 3,900 families. So it’s pretty big footprint that we have out there.

We’re also on Facebook and Instagram and LinkedIn. We do regular postings, not every day, but maybe every other day, every couple of days. I think we’re pretty good with our marketing. We have a great marketing director that is the one behind the scenes doing all of this. We go to a lot of events to try to promote, you know, what’s going on with the club as well. We’re always looking for new suggestions or ways that we can improve our marketing. We work with the Chamber. They’re really great about putting our information in the Chamber bulletins.

And I think the other thing that’s really important for marketing for us is the Nonprofit Coalition, which you kind of touched on briefly before that with the partnership we do with the other nonprofits. When we had the economic downturn back in 2008, I started the nonprofit coalition with all of the nonprofits working together. There’s right now currently about 57 of us. We meet every month and we, many of us share the same clients. We refer to each other. We have events together. We share resources, but that’s another great way that we market is that we share all of the events that we’re each having with each other.

So for example, if Holla was having an event or an open house, we promote it. And if BTAC is doing something, we promote it, they promote our events. And I think having that nonprofit coalition really helps us with our marketing as well.

Lee Wochner:
I certainly agree with you. You also said essentially networking and people don’t often think of networking as marketing, but networking is marketing. And that’s why it’s important to have the elevator speech, the thing that you can say in 30 seconds that says what you do. And it’s interesting to me that essentially your elevator speech was that you provide mentorship to children. I find that attractive.

But yeah, networking is marketing, collaboration is marketing. You also talked about the chamber. We’re lucky in Burbank to have a good strong chamber. So there’s lots of positivity there. So this marketing that you’re doing to spread the word, you mentioned you have two e-blasts. How do you link your overall marketing with your fundraising? How do those two work together?

Shanna Warren:
Every single fundraiser that we have, which is not that many because again, we had to really look at the amount of events that we were having. We have three key events. So those three key events, we have a plan in place for when we first start putting out our flyers, our save the date, our invitations. We calendar everything. So we have the posts set up in advance so that they go out. We look for opportunities to read other people’s posts to share our events. So everything around our special events is tied to our marketing, planned out in advance, calendared, and something that we watch very closely because that’s how we get our tickets sold to our events is through the marketing. If we just put it out there on our website, that wouldn’t be enough. The website’s great to add our flyers and information to, but we have to be doing a lot more than that.

Lee Wochner:
Yes. There’s a discussion about whether or not websites are dying, and I would say no. But because of changes with artificial intelligence and what’s now a zero-click environment, which I think I was sharing with you recently, where people just want to put something in ChatGPT or Google and get the immediate response, and then that motivates their decision rather than going to any website.

All of these things are important and it’s more than just the website, it’s your overall presence. So good for you for having the two different e-blasts and for being on social and no, you should not be posting every day. So good for you for that as well. Yeah, I think there’s a lot that’s working there. We’re gonna take a short break here, but when we come back, Shanna and I are gonna talk about nonprofit leadership a bit more, what drives her to succeed and more, stick around.

Jaclyn Uloth:

According to the Association of Fundraising Professionals, the shelf life of a website is two years and seven months. So if your website is three years old or older, it probably needs a tune-up or a complete overhaul so that you can stay current and engaging. A website refresh provides design and content improvements to drive donations and new technology to save you on time.

A website refresh provides design and content improvements to drive donations and new technology to save you time on tedious tasks while keeping your website safe from hackers. a free assessment of your website, contact us through our own website at counterintuity.com or email lee at lee@counterintuity.com. We’re ready to help. And now back to our show.

Lee Wochner:
And we’re back with Shanna Warren, Chief Executive Officer of the nonprofit Boys and Girls Club of Burbank and Greater East Valley, headquartered in Burbank, California. Shanna, in 2002, you were the director of the club’s first after-school site. And this is gonna be my segue into talking about leadership and adaptability, which you are well qualified to talk about. How did it come about that you were the director of the club’s first after-school site?

Shanna Warren:
I was working as the Director of Operations at that time and we had a principal from Roosevelt Elementary School approach us about providing after school programming on campus. At the time they had the district’s program in Parks and Rec and she just felt like there was something missing. There was nothing wrong with those programs but she had a very specific enrichment program in mind. She wanted a place where kids could get their homework done, have tutoring, do computer art. And so, you know, she was basically describing what we were doing at our main club. And so we opened our first satellite site at Roosevelt. And I think within that first year, we opened five more. I think the word of mouth got out to the principals. I think our price point helped because we were less than any of the other afterschool programs.

And again, we didn’t turn anyone away. So parents could come to us and sign up. And if they couldn’t afford the program, they could apply for financial aid. So I think that there was just a great need for what we were offering and another great option for parents to have.

Lee Wochner:
And well, so just listening to you kind of answers the question. And then you became CEO and you’ve stayed with the organization for 23 years now, something, 23 years?

Shanna Warren:
24 years.

Lee Wochner:
I was gonna ask you how you became CEO, but I think it’s just clear. I mean, I would pick you. But what has led you to continue this mission for 24 years and counting?

Shanna Warren:
It’s the kids. It’s the staff. It’s the board that I get to work with. I think when you really believe the hype—when you really believe in what you’re doing and you believe in the mission—it’s very easy. And I talk a lot about burnout with other CEOs that have been doing this work a long time and thank goodness for me so far, I haven’t experienced that. When I do, then I know it’s my time to gracefully bow out and let someone else come in. But for now, I’m still very excited about what we’re doing. We still have a lot of opportunity and room to grow. And I think as long as I feel like I’m guiding and steering the ship, I’ll stay because I truly love what I do.

I wake up in the morning never with a sense of dread, but always with a joy of what’s coming next. What are we going to do next? And you know, when you go on vacation and all you can do is think about getting back to work, then you must really love what you do. And I really do love what I do.

Lee Wochner:
My fiancé asked me when I was gonna retire and I said, never. I love what I do. And what you just said reminds me that the greatest feeling on earth is leading a life of meaning. And I just—sure. I mean, the kids and the board members and the incredible impact you’re making on people, sure.

Shanna Warren:
Leading a life of meaning is what led me to the organization because I wasn’t in nonprofit before this. I was in for-profit, in marketing, and I had a lot of free time and I just felt like I wasn’t giving back. I wanted to give back. I wasn’t married yet. I loved kids. I didn’t have kids. And that’s what led me to the Boys and Girls Club and why I have never left.

Lee Wochner:
So you talked briefly about the Burbank Nonprofit Coalition and that there are 57 nonprofits in that and that you started that. Again, another leadership moment. And so you bring a lot of nonprofit management expertise.

So I would assume over all of these years, you’ve seen some highs and lows. So I’d like to dig in a little bit to see what you’ve learned that maybe some other nonprofit leaders could learn from. And you talked about burnout and we talked about motivation. When you’re a nonprofit and you find a problem and you need a solution—a money problem, a marketing problem, a management problem, whatever—what is Shanna Warren’s process for navigating from “uh-oh” to “yeah, we can do that”? Do you have a process for how you handle problems?

Shanna Warren:
Well, I think of every problem as an opportunity to solve. So obviously I must enjoy puzzles because I embrace it. You can’t run from it. And I’m someone that has a checklist and is constantly checking off the items. So when there’s a problem, I go into immediate mode of “I need to solve it.”

And that doesn’t mean I need to solve it on my own, but that means I need to surround myself with people that are going to help me solve it. So I’ve learned over the years to ask a lot of questions and to ask for advice, especially from other business leaders, my board members, and even our staff. I’m very proud of the fact that at most of our director meetings, we meet once a week. When there are issues going on, I am very quiet. I try to listen more than I talk and kind of sit back and let them do the problem solving for me because I’ve learned that I don’t have to be the expert at everything. I’m really the expert of nothing, but I know how to surround myself with good people and I know how to find the answers.

Lee Wochner:
It’s good to know your own strengths and weaknesses. And I’m with you. I think I’ve certainly learned what I’m very bad at, which is good. So I don’t try to do that. I have a handful of strengths and I have a garage full of weaknesses. And this is why we have other people on planet Earth, because they’re good at those things and I’m not. What’s the greatest challenge Boys and Girls Clubs are facing right now?

Shanna Warren:
I think I’ll say opportunities again, but I think some opportunities I see are that teen membership is dwindling across the country. We have a lot of amazing teen programs that we offer, from college bound to workforce readiness. And we just see that fewer and fewer teens are coming to the club. I’m sure there’s some correlation between social media and cell phone usage and technology, where they don’t have the same great need to be with each other because they’re able to connect in other ways. So our organization as a whole is really trying to strategize on engaging teens in creative ways.

I’m happy to say that our teen program is growing. We’ve been doing a lot more around workforce readiness. I think for many years there was a push—everything was about going to college. And now there’s an acceptance and an understanding and even an embracing of not every teen is going to go to college and that’s okay. And there are some amazing careers out there for them that they don’t need college. And so trying to pivot and provide more opportunity and education around that is something that more Boys and Girls Clubs are trying to do.

So I think trying to improve the teen membership, funding is obviously a concern across the country with everyone, with nonprofits and Boys and Girls Clubs especially. And then one that is just my pet peeve that I will add in here because it’s something we’ve experienced, as have many of my peers, is the insurance industry. We’ve just seen the last few years that insurance companies are cutting people left and right. And for a nonprofit, for your general liability and all of your insurance to be dropped is really scary. And some organizations can’t get insured again. They’re having to look at self-insurance. So that’s something that I think our large school districts and many other large nonprofits are facing. And it’s a struggle.

And it’s not going away. I mean, it’s affecting everyone.

Lee Wochner:
Just to be clear, I think you said that—I want to make sure that listeners hear this. You’re talking about insurance companies dropping their clients, not cutting their staff, dropping their clients. And is this a national situation or principally California?

Shanna Warren:
Dropping their clients. Well, I think it’s principally California, but it is happening more and more, but principally California. It’s with nonprofits and for-profits and individuals. I mean, just across the board, it just feels like they all want out of California. And obviously everything that’s happened the last few years doesn’t help, but I hear of more and more businesses in California that are losing their insurance and having to figure out other means and rising prices that they can’t afford.

Lee Wochner:
So this seems like a real challenge and one that I would imagine you guys are letting legislators know about. Well, I hope there’s a solution coming to that. So we’ve talked a little bit about change. This thing with insurance companies, your one school site went to five or six in the first year pretty quickly. You established reserves. We had a thing called COVID that we all had to live through. You started the Burbank Nonprofit Coalition. So there’s a whole bunch of change going on there—some of it positive and some of it just adapting to the circumstance. How would you advise nonprofits that right now suddenly found themselves in crisis? I mean, it doesn’t sound like that’s gonna happen with you guys and I’m glad to hear that, but you know enough other nonprofits. If you were a smaller nonprofit with not quite the reserves or the staff or the board that you have, and suddenly you were in real crisis. Is there a three-step action plan that you would take? Is there something you would do?

Shanna Warren:
I think the first thing I would do is make sure that your board is very aware of the current circumstances. Lean on them. They’re there to support you. Ultimately, they’re responsible for the organization. I think a lot of smaller nonprofits carry—the staff maybe carry, the leader carries—the burden and maybe doesn’t share as much with the board because they don’t want to scare them or whatever it is. You need to lean on them and ask for support.

The second thing is to rely on your peers. There’s a lot of nonprofits out there and we’re all to some degree going through the same thing. So that’s what’s gotten me through many ups and downs is talking to my peers, asking for advice on what to do and looking for opportunities to partner. Because when the economic downturn happened, many of us were out of luck, out of funding, didn’t know what we were gonna do, didn’t know how to make payroll, and having those conversations and coming up with ideas and sharing resources really helped many of us get through it.

And then as controversial as maybe it will sound, you should also look at merging. It’s not for everyone. We’ve explored it a few times over the years, but you should know what other nonprofits are out there doing similar services to you and see what the health of their organization is and have conversations. Maybe it could lead to some back office partnering, some informal partnering and/or a merger.

Lee Wochner:
The value of the support network, the peer network is limitless. I mean, it’s just unlimited. We belong to two different marketing consortiums. So we have peer groups and it’s really important for research and development. Find out what other people are doing. Find out problems other people are having so you can head them off, sharing your own problems to get responses. Whatever we’re applying with one client that’s working really well, we’ll try to take it to another client’s sort of thing. So I applaud you for that because as John Donne said, no man is an island. It’s better this way. Boy, there’s a lot we could talk about and we should do more of that in person or back here at some point. But let me ask you just a couple more questions. Shanna, God, there’s so much doom and gloom. It just drives me crazy. I know there are some challenges, but there’s lots of positives and opportunities as well. What makes you feel hopeful?

Shanna Warren:
I think the kids for sure, because as difficult as they’ve had it over the last several years, living through COVID and living through all the awfulness that’s happening right now in our country, they’re resilient. And seeing their curiosity and their excitement and their optimism inspires me and I think inspires our team. They’re so full of hope and even though so many of them have been through so much, they’re resilient and they show up and they want to participate and they’re excited about their future. And I just feel like as long as there are kids and as long as kids need us, we’re going to be here for them and that’s what we’re all here to do.

Lee Wochner:
There is a lot of awfulness and yet somehow or other I’m incredibly hopeful because my experience is the awfulness doesn’t always last and it doesn’t always win. And the previous guest we had on here a couple of weeks ago said, you know, people who care about kids care about the future. And you know, most people care about kids. Where can people learn more about the Boys and Girls Club of Burbank and Greater East Valley?

Shanna Warren:
They can learn about the Boys and Girls Club by visiting our website www.bgcburbank.org. They can get involved as a volunteer or if they’re interested in joining our board or having a tour. They can also reach out to me at my email address and I’m always happy to provide a tour, answer questions. We really embrace anyone that wants to learn more about our organization.

Lee Wochner:
And you may have answered this—if listeners want to reach out to you, what’s the best way? Is it your email?

Shanna Warren:
Yes, shannawarren@bgcburbank.org.

Lee Wochner:
All right, well, Shanna, thank you so much for doing this. Thank you for your career commitment to the kids and the future. It means a lot to a whole bunch of us.

Shanna Warren:
Thank you for having me. This was very fun. I really appreciate the opportunity.

Lee Wochner:
Thank you.

Jaclyn Uloth:

Thanks for listening. How to Market Your Nonprofit is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. Please like and follow the show. Visit counterintuity.com to learn more.