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Welcome to the Fit Fundraising Podcast, where we bring you game-changing fundraising topics, direct from our meetings with major donors and non-profits nationwide. While most consultants are busy giving advice, Fit Fundraising stays on the front lines with non-profits and major donors. This podcast is a glimpse into our world of work with non-profits as we get on the field with them and successfully model fundraising. Get ready to get fit with the hottest show in fund development, Fit Fundraising.
Roy Jones: Hi, this is Roy Jones with the Fit Fundraising Podcast. Thank you so much for joining us today. I’m so glad you did. Today we are gonna hear from what I’m calling. One of the legends. And this is Mr. Herb Smith. Herb is a good friend. We’ve worked together a whole lot over the years and Herb was the president and CEO of the Los Angeles mission for 14 years.
Board member, board chairman, chief financial officer, background in non profit development, served at Wycliffe Bible Translators, has been a college president at Vanguard University, a missionary to Brazil, called to serve those in poverty and those with addictions and mental challenges and he’s just worked a lot of places, serves on several boards, past board chair of CityGate National, Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, Regional Homeless Advisory Council, Continuum of Care Board, Global Missions Conference, President of Mission Care Foundation and Care for More in the Philippines. Herb, thank you for joining us today.
We so appreciate it. I’ve got about five more boards I want you to serve on, if that’s okay.
Herb Smith: No, that’s okay and the podcast is over right after reading all that stuff.
Roy Jones: Yeah, we’re done. The interview’s over.
Herb Smith: Thank you.
Roy Jones: Thanks, but tell us a little bit about your work at the Los Angeles mission. I know you started out. It’s CFO.
Herb Smith: Oh, you’re right. Back in the late nine, mid nineties.
Roy Jones: And talk to me about that transition.
Herb Smith: That transition came about because my wife had breast cancer and I was a VP for business at Vanguard University and I just needed to make a change physically and emotionally. And a friend of mine, Giff Claiborne, who you may know, introduced me to the mission and said, we’re doing this thing. And would you come in with your experience and become the CFO and help us launch this other program? And I thought yeah, that builds on my experience with Wycliffe and my education.
And God just opened the doors. And I did that for a couple of years and that didn’t work out as well. And God called me to Newport beach to help with the St. Andrew’s Presbyterian. And I was the COO there for a number of years. But about a year after I left, I got a call. Would you come back on the board of directors for the mission? And I said.
Roy Jones: The cat came back.
Herb Smith: Okay. So I said, yes. Thinking, that’d be a minor commitment. The second board meeting, I became the chair of the board of the Los Angeles Mission, and did that for six years. Loved the ministry, loved every part of what we did in the services in LA. It just really took the gifts that God had given me. I was able to share them, but it also encouraged me every day to see the life change that went on at the mission. And that’s what really drew me to the work. And ultimately drew me into the role of president, which I protested I didn’t want.
Henry Cloud, you may know, great funder. He was on the board at the time, and he said, You should have taken this job the last time it was open. And I said, No. And by the way, here’s the seven things that have to be adopted by the board if I’m going to do it. And he said, I’m sure they will, and they did.
Roy Jones: And they did. I know one of the things I’ve just watched from a distance is just how you’ve mentored and advised and, many other presidents and executive directors in the city gate network. Talk to me about that work and the role you’ve played in all the different regional and national roles.
Herb Smith: It sounds big, I see it just as little bits and pieces of ways to help. One of my passions is to help. It’s education and growing, encouraging and developing people. And so it’s just a natural part of who I am. If I see someone and I can encourage them in a role, maybe direct them a little bit, help guide them, give them some advice. It’s not control, but it’s more help and it’s mentoring, unofficial mentoring, sometimes formal mentoring. But I also look at it and I say, God told us to love him with all our heart and soul and mind, and love our neighbors as ourself.
And if I do those two things, the rest of it all falls in line. I can’t get into trouble. And I also know that if I was in a situation like someone else, and they needed my help, whether it’s food and shelter, or it’s a little bit of guidance, or a pat on the back, or a little bit of Chastise me, I need it and I should be able to do that in a godly way.
Roy Jones: Amen. Talk to me just a little bit, I mean your role, especially in nonprofit leadership. What do you think are the top. I don’t know, three to five traits of a good nonprofit leader.
Herb Smith: I think first of all, a good nonprofit needs to know themselves. They need to know who they are in Christ and they need to have a vision and a goal for what they want to accomplish. That’s open to the Holy Spirit to be changed. I’ve had three or four life career changes. I set out to be an accountant in the jungles of brazil and here I am tonight with you I have no idea how i got from there to here but god did.
Roy Jones: A few little steps.
Herb Smith: A few little steps and so i think it’s faithfulness it’s listening to the lord I think that’s first and foremost. I think secondly it’s being a servant,
Roy Jones: yes
Herb Smith: I love the greenleaf servant leadership model I’ve tried to emulate that through my life and through my career. It’s very important to me that I know who I am in Christ. My identity is not president of the Los Angeles mission or board member X, it’s Herb Smith, a servant of the Lord. And I think that if we keep that perspective in life, it helps keep us focused and driven and the causes that God puts on our heart to lead and charge and the people that he calls us to serve will grow from that. And be enhanced by that. I have a friend who said, I came to work for you because I watched you one day in the room picking up trash off the floor.
And you were the senior executive in the room and there were three other janitors, why did you do that? Why did you stack chairs? And I said, simply, I saw it and needed to be done. And he said, that’s the kind of person I want to serve and that has been a person has been a friend of mine now for over 25 years. And I consider him a friend and a mentor, but that’s the experience that I can only share with others and say, that’s what guides me, that’s who I am.
And I don’t see myself as better than ever, I see myself as equal to and wanting everyone else to rise at the same level and with the same experiences and gifts that God’s given me. And he’s given me some wonderful experiences as a result of that.
Roy Jones: So true. And, I’ve seen that personally, Herb I’ve seen you do, every single roll in this gritty rescue mission work. I don’t know any other word for it. It’s not easy work.
Herb Smith: We used to do the big street events. We had at one point I wanted to do the Christmas thing a little differently, so it took the kids off the skid row put him in the tent, so Sandy Segerstrom Daniels from the South Coast Plaza who came and with her foundation put this big Christmas tent together. And it was beautiful, all the stuff from South Coast Plaza and the decorations. And I was outside and something happened and there was a gentleman, something happened in the line and it didn’t work out.
I went over to him and he was very upset. We turned out to be Russian, didn’t speak English, and I tried to listen to him, gave him a big hug, took him back and got him in line and got him situated, and went back and never thought anything more about it. The next year we were doing the planning session and every woman in that room said, that one thing you did that we saw changed our lives. We want to be part of this mission and this role as long as we can. And I thought, I just did something ordinary that I never thought anything about, and God used it as an example to change the lives of some of those women who needed their spiritual life changed as well.
Roy Jones: Yes wow. Tell me just a little bit about some of the fundraising industry is changing. Talk to me about just some of the transition, during your, depends how you add up the math, 15, 25, 28, 30 year tenure. But how has that shifted with the advent of direct mail and corporate sponsorships, corporate involvement, foundation giving, talk to me about the trends you’re seeing.
Herb Smith: I think it has changed. It’s a funny thing, when I went to the L. A. mission, that was one of the things I said, I don’t have any background in fundraising other than college fundraising and some estates and trusts and plan giving, I knew that piece. So I said, I’ve got to learn this. And I just barreled down and said, I’ve got to understand what it is, why it works, and some of the things I pulled from that, we had experience with direct mail, a lot of direct mail, newspaper ads, things that changed.
And yet it had gotten to be rather expensive. A lot of turnover, churning of names. And I said, there’s got to be a better way to do it. We’ve got to think this through more and with the advent of technology to do that. And I kept pushing and trying to make change. But I also said, I got to understand what it is we’re doing. And the one thing that really stuck out to me is, in the beginning, a lot of our fundraising was focused on what we wanted and what we needed. And I learned along the way that it wasn’t about what I needed or the mission needed, it was what our donor needed to be able to be involved with the organization.
Roy Jones: Oh, wow.
Herb Smith: And so we turned the tables, it’s my mission is your mission. What do you want to do to help support your mission? And that was really a key, I think, to understanding that it is about how do we help fulfill the goals and visions of the individual donor, whatever that is, and much less about, what our crisis was in the kitchen or whatever we needed that particular week or month.
Roy Jones: Ministering to the donor is just as important as ministering those in need.
Herb Smith: And also it was getting to know them face to face.
Roy Jones: Yes.
Herb Smith: I tell my staff, if there’s anything you can do, for example, to get them a donor to the mission and give them a tour, it will change their heart. And we had one example, a gentleman came and we were going to ask, we were all prepped to ask him for a certain gift, a few thousand dollars, and we gave him a tour and he walked through the men’s workout area. And he looked at the floor and he said, I go to a gym, it’s got much better flooring than this, what’s the matter? It’s full of holes. It’s not in the budget.
Roy Jones: That’s right.
Herb Smith: He said, what’s it going to cost? I said don’t even worry about that. He says, just get it fixed and send me the bill. $15, 000. We had a nice, we were only going to ask him for five. So
Roy Jones: God had something else in mind.
Herb Smith: God had something else in mind and we put that person’s interest first. And we got a pot from somebody else, but a nice new floor from him.
Roy Jones: You never know. That’s interesting. Take another minute. And, looking back on not just your career, but the time period in which you were involved. What are some of the biggest mistakes you made and what are some of the biggest surprises you’ve had?
Herb Smith: I make lots of mistakes. It’s an old business model. Make mistakes, that’s called learning.
Roy Jones: Yes, it is.
Herb Smith: I think the mistakes I made early on were to put too much trust in the so called professionals. And we worked with a company that did a lot of our direct mail. I didn’t fully understand, so I bought into some of the lingo and the process more than I should have. Then we decided to make a change. I think I was so enamored by the potential of change is what they call vaporware. We went,
Roy Jones: greener on the other side,
Herb Smith: much greener on the other side, but never could produce. And that was a huge and costly mistake for the mission. But I learned from that to go back to the basics. And look for an organization that put the donor first, understood the donor, and understood our donor base. And that was a huge success. And really turned our finances around. We tried middle major donors. Middle donors for us is always a struggle and major donors for some reason in LA. We had some, and they were very generous.
But I found that It was, again, more about putting that person first. We had the Ann Douglas Center. And Mrs. Douglas and her friends had helped fund it, but it had really fallen away in terms of a relationship. And I wanted to reestablish that so I worked very hard to work with Mrs. Douglas and understand what it was that was her passion, why did she do this? Why is she still involved? And we became the best of friends, we had the same birthday, we celebrated our birthday.
Roy Jones: I did not know that.
Herb Smith: She’d come to the mission and she’d give me a tie or a bottle of champagne or some crazy thing, and we’d put on a little party for her with the ladies, but what I learned was, her life experience, what had brought her and what had brought Kirk to where they were today. And they had not forgotten. He had meals at the L. A. mission. She had lived in an attic during the war to be protected from her Jewish background.
Roy Jones: Wow.
Herb Smith: And that really bonded and what I tried to do was let her tell me what she wanted to see and how we could help execute that. And as a result, I went to her office one day and she said, my husband and I have been talking, we’re doing our thing, we’re selling this art I bought in Europe a hundred years ago, whatever. And I wanted to give you one amount, but he decided we were going to give you a different amount. So here’s $5, 000, 000, would you sign the paperwork?
No ask, completely out of the blue, but God did it because I simply built a relationship with her and the investment in that 5 million turned into 15 million over the course of a couple of further conversations. But again, taking what she wanted and what Kirk saw as her passion, what he called was her jewel. She had a big jewelry box, but her jewel was the Ann Douglas Center.
Roy Jones: Wow, it’s about the donor. It’s not about us.
Herb Smith: Oh, it’s about the donor and never about us.
Roy Jones: If there were a young, aspiring fundraiser that was standing in front of us, what advice would you give them? What advice would you give her?
Herb Smith: My first advice would be back to the beginning. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and love your neighbor as yourself. And if you’re loving God and paying attention to his direction, he will give you the skills and the ability to speak. But also look at your donor and how would you want to be approached? How would you want to be treated? Do you want to be a statistic? You want to be a mark that’s just, Oh, I’ve got my $500, 000 and onto the next one, or do you want to make a relationship with that person? The most important thing I think fundraisers can do is to become friends with the individuals that are supporting the organization. And sometimes they become friends with that person across organizations, which is also valid. But I think as a fundraiser, it is again, focus on the person, know your cause, know your material, be prepared, be trained, but be friends.
Roy Jones: Right? It’s about the relationship.
Herb Smith: Yeah, you’re there to serve, not to be served. And it’s not about your name, it’s not your name on the mission. It’s not your name on the business card. It’s about that donor in the heart and whatever God has instilled in them to be able to give, you’re there to become a vehicle to make their wishes come true, by helping to fulfill the goal that they have that matches the goals God’s given you and your organization to be fulfilled.
Roy Jones: Wow. Herb, thank you so much. I so appreciate the time. We are so honored. And just to see the impact you’ve had on this movement.
Herb Smith: Oh thank you, and I’m honored to be here with you. You are a rock star of all rock stars. I always tell people Ro Jo is the guy to go to. I’ve enjoyed working with you over the years. You’ve been an inspiration. You’ve been a straight shooter and I appreciate that. And I know God is blessing your ministry and we’ll continue to do that.
Roy Jones: It is my honor. Thanks for joining us.
Herb Smith: Thank you, my friend.
Roy Jones: Thank you. Once again, I want to remind you to tune into the Fit Fundraising Podcast and if you need help out there please call us. Last year we helped 41 nonprofits, for free that’s our marketing strategy. We help people out, we provide free fundraising council. Now of those 41, eight of them eventually did hire us. So that may work for you too, but we so appreciate your time, your investment. And please call us if you need help in any aspect of fundraising, we’re here for you. Thank you.
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