In this series of Group Thinkers podcast episodes, our focus is on leadership. Throughout each episode, we’ll chat with leaders in the nonprofit and commercial space to learn more about their careers and the unique journeys that led them to where they are today.
On this episode, we sit down with Matt Monberg, Director of Supporter Experience at Compassion International, to discuss:
- How Compassion International thinks about and defines the supporter experience (5:26)
- Lessons learned from the early days of his career (11:10)
- Some of the mentors who helped him along the way (21:12)
- How a particular Teddy Roosevelt quote has impacted the way he approaches his life (26:42)
- His approach to mentorship (31:28)
Meet our guest
Director of Supporter Experience, Compassion International
“Just say yes. Take the opportunity. It’s OK if we fail, we’ll figure out how to do it. Talented people always figure out a way. I truly believe if you hire and invest in talented people, they can do almost anything … make it safe for them to take risks and take action.”
Podcast transcript
Justin McCord: Welcome to Group Thinkers. I'm your host, Justin McCord, and with me is Ronnie Richard. And on today's episode, we have Matt Monberg from Compassion International.
Now, here's the thing, Ronnie, is that we've had people start to approach us with ideas, recommendations, suggestions. And you and I, I mean, from the journalists in each of us, we like to have the editorial process, like have some editorial integrity on choosing, right, some of these things. But we've more and more been able to connect with some of the most interesting people in philanthropy because of these recommendations. And Matt is one of these guys. Tell us a little bit about Matt.
Ronnie Richard: So, Matt, he's the Director of Supporter Experience at Compassion International. So, he's … you'll hear in the episode, we talk about this idea that he's very forward looking.
And as he's planning out these experiences that his constituents will have, they're looking ten, twenty years down the line at what know, what kind of interactions they're gonna have with the organization. It's really just fascinating, but he's an incredible leader in coaching and mentoring people, and we'll get into all of that and kind of his past and everything he's done there. But you'll sense this theme of just kind of going for it, you know, just putting yourself out there and going for it.
Justin: Yeah, I think that the idea of putting yourself out there stands out to me. And from the formation of his professional career, up until even the choices that he's making and the chances that he's taking with the Compassion team. It's not that they're not well informed, but there is a presence of courage and a presence of determination that I find to be inspiring in Matt's story, and the way that he thinks about the work and the role that they play in connecting people with their mission.
So yeah, I mean, with that, here's Matt Monberg from Compassion International on Group Thinkers.
Matt, I didn't I don't think I told you that when you were put on mine and Ronnie's radar, the way that you were described to us was, hey, y'all gotta meet Matt. He's a really forward-looking guy.
Matt Monberg: OK.
Justin: To this day, like, I'm still not sure, like, does that mean that you're always looking at like next week's calendar? Does that mean that like you're like, are you gonna … are you Nostradamus? Is that like …
Matt: Yeah. That's a that's a that's a new way. I've not I've not been described that way beforehand. But yeah, I would guess that it comes from … I'm kinda never satisfied with the status quo, right, and that kinda shows up in my personal life, but also my professional life. We can do better.
We we can do better. What if we did it this way? What if what if we what if we approach that problem, we've never been able to solve for another direction. So maybe maybe that's what they I I don't have to ask a heads statement. Yeah. Yeah. You have to ask.
Justin: And and I really if if I wanna nitpick at it, it was that you're a really forward Like so there's some sort of variance, by the way, between just being a normal forward looking guy and then one that really is forward.
Matt: Yeah. Apparently, there's some levels to this to this ranking.
Ronnie: Like binoculars or something.
Justin: Yeah. Yeah. That's yeah. Yeah. It's telescopic. Really forward looking.
Matt Monberg from Compassion International. Welcome to Group Thinkers. We're excited to chat today.
I am always excited to have someone join who has the bald and beard look as I do to, you know, pressure Ronnie into joining the club. So, never know.
Matt: I mean, you got it kind of under a bushel, just saying a little bit to be kinda
Justin: Yeah. I've hid it. Yeah.
Matt: There we go. Yeah.
Justin: Matt, here's the thing, man, like, we gonna spend tonight a time today just talking through talking through your path talking through the moments that have made a difference in your career up into this point, how you think about you know, the current future state on the nonprofit giving side. And I think it's apropos because in your role, you have to think about, as you call it, the supporter experience.
And so I'd like to, you know, maybe just start there and and understand how you think about and or define what the heck is supporter experience? What does that mean to you and what does that mean to compassion?
Matt: Sure. So, if you think your own lives ...
First of all, thank you for having me on. It's a great honor and privilege to be here. I'll try and be appropriately forward looking today as we ...
Justin: Really forward looking.
Matt: Really forward looking, even though you wanted me to be, like, really backward looking, in my own journey. We can get superlative in both directions.
Justin: OK, good.
Matt: But, no, when you think about a supporter’s experience with your organization. how many of us think that the average donor, the average supporter wakes up, rubs their eyes and says today's the day I'm gonna make a charitable gift.
It's just it's not usually the need that presents itself to us on on a daily basis. It's usually that we wake up and it's, you know, we're pursuing meaning, we're pursuing purpose, we're pursuing a deeper value of which often giving intersects with. Not always, but sometimes, and that giving is the start of a journey to express that meaning in more concrete ways. And so, at Compassion, we invite supporters to sponsor an individual child. And so that meeting is really expressed in a one-to-one sort of way.
You get a picture, be able to put it on there, your refrigerator, or in some place important to you, but that experience, just like customer experience, is the sum total of moments that you have from when you became aware that the organization existed and that it might be able to meet a need that you have all the way through to when whatever job you hired that organization to do, you're ready to move on. Right? To move to the next part, the next phase that you would have in. Kind of everything in between And so a lot of times we think of givers as people who, you know, they give us money, and we go out and do program, and then we take the results of the program, and we send it back to them.
Which is a highly transactional way of looking at it, right, resources flow one way, reports and impact flow the other way. What we found is that it's actually a lot more deep and meaningful for supporters, at least at Compassion. That these are choices they make that are about expressing deeply held beliefs and values, and becoming more of the person that they want them to be. So we want to arrange an experience that continues to, you know, reinforce that in their lives and to create moments of deep impact to where they every time they look at that photo, every time that they see correspondence from Compassion, they say, this experience matters. This is something I want to be involved in now. And and always because it just continues to fulfill a a need that I have. So that that's how I would look at it at least at this stage.
Ronnie: How much of that like, I'm thinking about as you describe that and this idea of forward looking. Like, how much of that are you looking at this experience that they're getting and planning out ways that they're gonna interact with Compassion, and how far out are you planning these things? You know, like, how forward looking are you in this?
Matt: Well, you know, given that you can sponsor child, at least in the Compassion context, pretty young, you could be looking out ten to twenty years if you wanted to go that far.
You know, if you're … the dynamics of being the sponsor of a child who is, you know, two or three years old, who is communicating through a caretaker or through a parent, is totally different than when they enter elementary school and on to high school and then into their post-secondary life.
And so when you look at the child's journey as kind of running parallel to the supporters' journey, you have to have those moments along the way that makes sense for a supporter. So, again, in the Compassion context, we wouldn't really be presenting opportunities to give to, let's say, vocational training to someone who sponsors the three-year-olds.
Those things just don't mix. And at the other end, you know, we wouldn't really be targeting a supporter for gifts to, you know, maternal health if their child is about to leave the program and move on into their career. So, when you think about the child kind of provides you kind of a built-in journey, so to speak, for you to arrange those moments around, and we know that oftentimes, that's a pretty long relationship that a supporter can have. I think the farther out you look, the better. But the one thing I will say is that experiences and journeys are nonlinear, you know, and support to show us that all the time.
You know, we'd we'd like to map them out on a piece of paper. We have done that. It's a very large piece of paper, and we can show, you know, the different emotions throughout that journey, but it ends up being nonlinear because people and relationships are also nonlinear.
And so they take on that type of characteristic for as much as we want it to be cut and dried and step by step, it's gonna be human. And we think that's why it's so sticky is because it's human beings in relationship with one another. And it it just doesn't tend to follow that cookie cutter or stair step as much as we might like it to.
Ronnie: That makes such a great segue. You said nonlinear, thinking about that and looking at your career, starting back at the beginning of your career, you had a couple of different roles. You were you worked for Habitat for Humanity, an operations manager, did some consulting, take us through kind of the early days of your career, if you could, and sort of, like, what you learned during that time that you're applying today as you’re, you know, thinking about experiences, but just also in your role in general at Compassion.
Matt: Sure.
Justin: And also, Matt, how in the world, bachelor's degree in political science plays into ...
Matt: Plays into all that? Yeah.
Justin: … into all of that.
It's a fun story. So, you know, I think growing up, I was fascinated by politics. Whenever I had to do a book report, it was on a president. When I was in fourth grade, it was on Ronald Reagan, we played ‘Hail To The Chief’, made everybody stand up, went to the front of the room, did the presentation.
Just totally loved that, was involved in student government and leadership all throughout my high school, and college years. And it was in college when I was interning at a fairly high level for a couple and nationally known political figures that I realized that so much of what we were focused on, so much of what we were working on had this one dimensional political impact. No matter how like bipartisan or multi partisan that it was, it was still for this this very earthly short-term gain. Right? You'd stay in the public eye to become elected, and I was looking maybe with great forward thinking about what would my life look like in twenty years?
Let me just say, I am so thankful that around 1997, as I was making these decisions, I don't think I would like to work in politics today. It's far too polarized, I'm much more compromise-oriented, and I've just felt as though we're consistently in that arena forced into a number of different false choices, which were very, very difficult for me to reconcile at the time. And so very late in my college career, I said, I'm going to finish out my political science major, but I'm gonna take a hard right turn into kind of the nonprofit third sector so to speak. There were a number of influences that brought me to that point.
But the main one was just being so involved in where I thought I wanted to go and looking at it and saying, I need to be in a place where the church is present in making impact in the world, not in a place where people are vying for power in our country. And so that really represented kind of a little personal earthquake for me, I actually finished up my degree, but had to remain a student through the spring semester, took a course called jogging, not a joke, that was an actual course offered.
And so that's when I walked down to the habitat for a humanity office and said, do you need somebody to help? And they said, you can be the construction coordinator. Well, I hadn't built anything.
You know, I struggled to build toothpick bridges in science class when I was in high school.
But what I learned through that experience is that the worst thing you could be told is no. That's really ... and you're nowhere software being told no. I mean, I was twenty one then walked into Habitat for Humanity chapter, and DuPage County and said, you know, do you need help? And is there anything I can do? I can literally be here full time.
And they taught me this is how you raise money for a nonprofit. This is how we raise gifts in-kind. This is how we approach people. This is how we make our case for support.
At that time, we were literally doing it by fax machine, you know, faxing requests to people, but it was a really great time of getting introduced to what this sector was all about, and that was the change I was looking for. You know, people coming together around a mission that you know wasn't going to make money in the for-profit sense. It wasn't going to be a government service. It literally was going to be the people of God coming together and doing something important for people in need. And I thought this is what I wanna give the rest of my life too. So that first lesson was just you know, no is not the worst thing that could happen to you. Getting told no.
And I remember walking in the front door and just say, you know, I've got this entire semester. You wanna use it? Like, I'm here for you.
Ronnie: You could jog over anytime.
Justin: That's a subtle plug for the range of curriculum available at Wheaton. That, you know, that you can study anything from things on the theological side, to political sciences, to also jogging.
Matt: I guess it was my way of, like, making good on their promise to integrate faith and learning. Right? So, yeah, you have to figure out how to get that into all of the coursework. So how do you integrate faith with jogging? And so, you know, apparently, you jog on down to Habitat.
Justin: That's awesome. It leans towards some of those sliding doors like moments, right, that as you said, you walked in that day and just said, how can I help? And what that's done in terms of your career ... So spending time from there going on to leading an organization.
And so, you know, talk to us about that. What did that look like in terms of your time of stepping out in into small organizations? But in a significant leadership role, and then from there going to a large organization, ultimately, like Compassion in a very instrumental strategic role? Like piece those things together for us.
Matt: Yeah. So it started for me with really after that time at Habitat, not knowing what I wanted to do next and ending up at an internship program out here. In Colorado.
And I thought I was gonna spend the summer outside doing rock climbing and rappelling and literally about three weeks in. They said, you're really good at other stuff. Could you come work in the office? And so, I ended up taking over the internship program and the fundraising for it. Really, during that time is where I got deeply exposed to several mentors to just the world of fundraising from small sustaining donors all the way up to foundations. And kind of learned how to do little bits of all of that. Spent several years consulting, both formally in kinda my first, what I would call my first real job outside of the camp profession because we got to do a lot of stuff outside.
But, you know, we're consulting with, you know, large nationally known nonprofits helping to resource their mission again, just learning, we're learning a whole lot.
And then 9/11 happens, and our first daughter was born right after 9/11. We travel a lot for work. One of the interesting parts of my story is that when I was younger, when I was nine, my father died in a plane crash in Dallas, Texas. And so, I grew up for most of my life without my dad, and he had been traveling for work, you know, and not that I've ever been, you know, I've traveled the world. It's not about being afraid of flying, but it was, do I have to fly everywhere to do good? Like, I'm very, like, really great organizations here, like in Colorado Springs, don't we have like a zillion of them that we could work with?
And so, I took this bold step to start my own, you know, kind of small consulting firm, and I was gonna provide fund development and fundraising consulting for organizations that couldn't afford one that was as pricey as us. So, I was specifically trying to niche myself in, you know, organizations that needed help, but just they just couldn't afford these very large contracts or really didn't need them.
And I'll never forget when I was leaving that, the new ownership of that company said, they said, Matt, why do you think anybody will pay you? And, you know, it was just one of these, like it was like a gut punch, like all the air, all everything. I'm pretty quick on my feet and I had nothing.
And fortunately, one of, you know, my professional mentors and someone who was, you know, kinda in my corner as I was leaving, he said, well, you know, they pay them right now through us. They pay them right now. And then, like, all of a sudden, that air came back in. And I said, well, yeah, that's right.
They pay me right now to do this. And so over the course of about ten years, cultivated a variety of of clients here locally, one of which is Children’s Hope Chest that I work both as a consultant and in their fundraising and operations apartment for quite some time.
And but that that, again, when I was going out, that whole concept of like you know, why do you think anybody would pay you? You know, why do you think anybody would do this? And just seeing my myself and seeing my development through the eyes of a mentor versus through my own eyes. I mean, for me, it was, well, of course, they'll pay me because I want them to because I need this to work out because, you know, I'm wildly optimistic in my youth that that this would be something that would go well. And to be reminded of, like, no, you're actually doing that work right now, and you're doing it in a way that people would want to pay you for it was really life giving from that that particular mentor at that time.
Ronnie: What a great way to reassure you because, you know, we all have those moments of self doubt, you know, the fake it till you make it in posture syndrome, right, and to have someone say, they're paying you now because you're doing it. Always incredibly helpful.
Matt, as you think about that, who are some of the other mentors who kind of helped you along the way? We'll get to, you know, you paying it forward and stuff like that. But I'm thinking, you know, who's kind of brought you along? You mentioned that one where there are other some other examples, some other cases of people who've helped you in your career?
Matt: Yeah.
Absolutely. I think that in in those years, I had I had left in went to work for one of my clients who was a former McDonald's franchisee here in Colorado Springs, and it was Steve Bigery. And very successful innovative McDonald's franchisee, and he wanted to write his own business memoir. Right?
He wanted to write a business book of his own business lessons, and I was contracted to ghost write for that. Which was like a master class in sitting with somebody who had fought and won so many different battles about innovation. You wanna talk about someone who's forward thinking, this was a guy who figured out how, when credit cards were in a thing in the quick service industry, how to use the tip edit function that waiters and waitresses use in restaurants inside of McDonald's, and he combined two different technologies into one, and people would pre-authorize certain amount, and they write in the total, and people could then use credit cards. You know, multiple drive through lanes, I remember him telling me that people were gonna order food on apps.
He's like, you're gonna order all this on your phone. It's all gonna be parallel service. You're gonna be able to call, go in, use an app, do it over the web. It's all gonna be, like, you know, completely completely integrated. Now it's like, well, man, I kinda I don't think we're ever gonna order food over an app. Like, that's crazy talk.
But being able to sit with Steve and go through a number of the things that had made him successful as an entrepreneur. You know, the title of the book was 'The Box You Got.’ That's what he titled the … because people were always saying like Steve, you think outside the box. He's like, not really. He's like, I just you know, you gotta start with the box that you've got.
And you gotta get up and you gotta do something with that box. And for him, that meant working within the constraints of the fast food industry or, you know, later working with he had sold his franchises and became open to call center to take orders for restaurant chains so that their hosts and bartenders wouldn't be taking the orders, it would go through a call center. It was pretty fascinating stuff. But Steve is always looking at what could be and not necessarily what was, but he was looking at through the lens of what he had right now.
Which again became a very powerful lesson of, you know, you don't have to wait until you have all of these resources, or till you have, you know, had twelve McDonald’s stores and sold them, like, you don't have to wait for these things. You innovate as you go, you innovate with what you have. You push the borders of what you have. You know, don't take no for an answer.
You know, that was a big one. Like I think about the lessons I learned from Steve, it was really about how to not take no for an answer. You know, by working within the constraints of that box. But the other one was, I'm gonna still say this all the time to people. Problems don't get better with age.
And I absolutely loved that concept, and we would look at things, so I would look at things when I worked for him. And you know, problems don't get better with age. You've got to address them. You've got to address them quickly. Ultimately, I ended up working for Steve a social enterprise that he started to help put payday lenders out of business. We tried to create a US-based microlending organization.
So, we were a nonprofit that owned a for-profit lender, and, you know, worked on that for a couple years to see if we can avoid people getting trapped in in really, really high interest payday loans by offering lower interest loans combined with financial counseling.
Not something that worked out long-term for me, but learned to talk along the way about how that that industry works.
Justin: See, it's super interesting, man. I mean, so first of all, like the This is the first time that I can recall Ronnie that we've had a focused conversation on what ghost writing does.
And both Ronnie and I have done that. Many times, many days, many hours, and you're right. There's something about when you're ... There's a difference in the learning style and the mentorship that comes when you're watching someone do something and you're doing something to be complementary to what they're doing, which is kind of like normal management. Like, I do this part and then you do that part. Versus when you're sitting with someone so that you can interpret and put something out that is to represent them. Like there's an inherent difference in that sort of thing. And there's a lot of lessons that come from that activity. I think that that's something that I don't know that I've taken enough stock in what that's done for me and the way that I think and so thank you for that.
I noticed on your LinkedIn, your header image has a quote from Teddy Roosevelt that I want ask about. And as you're just talking about, you know, some of these lessons that are quips, right, that we develop these short hands, there's this quote that you have on your social profile that says, ‘Whenever you're asked if you can do a job, tell them certainly I can. Then get busy and find out how to do it.’ Again, it's a Teddy Roosevelt quote.
Like, unpack that. Like, what's the relevance of that in the way that you think, the way that you approach your objectives right now in your role or even the way that you approach coaching club soccer, like just break out that as a as part of your world view.
Matt: Sure. I think it goes to that action bias, right? And I think I do have an action bias or a fail forward sort of bias. That quote was given to me by a dear friend and former employee. When I moved on from Children's Hope Chest. She gave me that quote, framed it, it’s somewhere, hiding around here. Oh it's up there on the wall.
Bu she framed it and she gave it to me, and she said, this is what you represent to me. This is how you led for our organizations. This is how you led from me. That if there was ever anything that you didn't know how to do. So anything that I didn't know how to do as your employee, it was just say yes, take the opportunity.
It’s okay if we fail, we'll figure out how to do it. Talented people always figure out a way.
You know, I truly believe that if you hire and invest in talented people, they can do almost anything. You know, now I don't know if that means they can do brain surgery if they've never gone to medical school. But, you know, in the main, you know, in the in the average, you can hire really talented people, make it safe for them to risk, make it safe for them to take action, and they're gonna figure it out along the way. You know, that's something that, you know, you talked about like, you know, political science into this field.
You know, a lot of the content. A lot of what drives that action bias for me is, you know, just how I see people what I believe about human development, what I believe about how we show up at work, that we all are driven to do our best. Right? I mean, you can choose to look at people as, oh, you know, we need to constantly provide direction and be very overbearing and crack down and make sure plans that would be very top down, or we can say, hey, you know what, everybody's kind of on a growth spectrum.
Everybody wants to kind of master new things. Kind of like babies wanna sit up and then roll over and then walk. Like, it's kinda programmed into, you know, who we are as humans. And for me, that crystallized in Dan Pink's TED Talk, ‘The puzzle of motivation.’
If you want to understand what believe how people work and, apparently, what Dan thinks, go watch that. He talks about autonomy, mastery, and purpose, that those are the three ingredients to motivate people. And so when I pair that with a quote like that one from Teddy Roosevelt, it's like, yeah, do people who have autonomy or mastery of purpose, are they willing to say, certainly, I can do that job and then figure out how to do it, absolutely. And if they've got people around them who believe. Yeah, I believe that you can figure out how to and you can do it really well. It's gonna go even better. So for me, that's always represented my action bias. Like, never say no because you don't know how to do something.
It's just a learning to be discovered, which is in some ways to this idea that you know, if you possess the belief that you can affect change, you probably can.
And I think that's well documented throughout human history that people who believe that they could affect change are the ones that affected change. The ones that didn't, the ones that sat out. That quote pairs nicely with the whole the arena, the man in the arena, which is also from Teddy Roosevelt that those two damn mighty things, those would go into the ring.
You know, they may get knocked out, but aren't they better off than the people sitting on the outside of the ring, criticizing their performance? I certainly think so.
Ronnie: Makes me think of something my kids get taught in school all the time, the idea of a growth mindset that don't say I can't do this. I can't do this yet.
You know, you're gonna get there. You take your chances and don't just quit. Like, you're saying, don't sit on the sidelines and judge and say, oh, look at them. They're failing. You know, get in there and make it happen.
So, is that something that you, like, as you are kind of mentoring others and teaching people and and coaching them, is that something that you really instill in them? That's just, like, this fearlessness of go for it, take action, I don't care if you fail. Because, you know, you talk about forward looking vision, but, you know, we know you could have a vision, but if you don't have action with it, you're not gonna get there, you have to combine that.
So, yeah, I'm just curious. Like, is that is that the style that you're going for?
Matt: You know, on our team, we have a a variety of sayings and kind of some of our core principles are you know, we want our work we wanna show up and it's fun, flat, fast, fearless and faithful.
Right? Those are kind of our five f's of the journey experience team or the JET, as we call it, I wish that it's ironic that, you know, with my history that I just shared, but I lead a team called the JET, and I have a little plane in my in my email signature, but you now God is always up to interesting things. But those are kind of those five values, but fearless is really where that would camp out in the sense that we're not gonna be driven by fear, we're not gonna be driven by fear, we don't know how to do something or fear that we're going to fail because failure is our best teacher.
Our Chief Marketing Officer, Ken Caldwell, had talked about, or he talks about he likes reds and greens, not yellows. Right? Like, if something is green or red, you have either clearly succeeded, or you have clearly learned. If something is yellow, tap it.
Right? You just did not stretch far enough. Maybe played it too safe, you know, and you didn't quite put a test out there that was big enough. To get a result, either positive or negative, but you're either succeeding or learning.
You know, it's one of those two things. And so you mentioned soccer, and really it's kids are kinda like your purest laboratory about this, but we do it with the parents as well. It's like everybody raise your hand if you're gonna make a mistake this season. Right?
And like every hand should go up in the room.
You know, I tell the parents, like, you're gonna behave in ways that you don't think you are right now. Right? You're gonna get worked up by the game and you're that's okay. Like, we learn.
You know, girls, I expect you to make a mistake. You know, there's a reason that we practice all the stuff every single week, I practice over and over and over again, and it's not to get to the game and then play it safe. You know? I gave my parents a list of sixty things that are not scoring goals, that they can look for as evidence that their child is growing.
I mean, little things like dribbling with your head up or checking your shoulder, you know, looking for a pass, communicating to a teammate. All these little building blocks that are part of success that you're gonna have success in, but we tend to look at the end result like, well, who scored the goal? Who score the goal? Who is that person?
Well, that's great. But that that play may have started seven plays ago, you know, with a really good throw in and a really good first touch and a really pass and so on and so forth. So there's so many different parts to that is if you believe that failure is your best teacher and that you're not afraid of failing, then you kind of remove its power to control your decision making. And there's a difference between being fearless and being reckless.
And so, I don't endorse recklessness, but I do look at things and say, you know, are we risking big enough? And if I could link it to Compassion's mission, Compassion's mission is about the violent urgency of poverty.
Particularly in the lives of children and their families.
It's it is a violent urgency in in my opinion.
Why would we not risk bigger? Why would we not take bigger steps, have bigger vision, you know, move in faster ways? Time is not on our side. Right? Time is not on the side of someone who is food insecure and doesn't have proper nutrition. Time is not on the side of the person who has to choose between sending their child to school or having them go work for income, time is not on their side. We often act like time is on our side. That's a first world problem, having too much time, killing time, that's a first world problem.
You know, when we talk about … I just can't separate the two, Robbie.
They go hand in hand for me, that we have to be putting forward a bigger vision and more action because the stakes are just so high, particularly in the work that I'm doing right now.
Justin: I man, that's so well said. And I think it it puts into light for us why, you know, our colleague think so highly of use to describe you as forward looking. It is, you know, it's in the same vein as another Roosevelt, and that's Eleanor Roosevelt, you know, do one thing every day that scares you.
Like that there's value in that idea of stepping out. There's value in pushing forward and collectively no matter where you are as a part of the supporter experience or no matter where you are, in your role in philanthropy, it is worth it to take a chance. It is worth it to step out. It's worth it to push something new because the stakes have never been higher.
Right? We just we applaud the mindset that you bring to Compassion. And you know, it can be challenging when you work in a large organization, or an organization that has the legacy and the width of Compassion to be a spark plug. But we can definitely see how you are one. And so we appreciate that one and encourage that, Matt.
As we wrap our time as a part of this conversation today. If we've got, you know, folks from the sector that are listening to this and they want to pick up this conversation and connect with you, talk with you, how can they find you, where can they connect with you?
Matt: I always point people to LinkedIn.
I used to joke that one of my superpowers was talking to strangers who contact me on LinkedIn. I love talking about Compassion. I love talking about philanthropy, journey experience, my own life story. So, I would say LinkedIn is the absolute best place to connect, and love talking to people that that I meet there for sure.
Justin: Awesome. Matt Monberg. You're a good one, man. You're a good one. Do something that scares you today. Okay?
Matt: I'm going to the NBA finals game five tonight, and trust me, if we win, that could get a little scary in downtown Denver.
Justin: Alright. Right on. Well, we certainly wish the Nuggets the best of luck, or I do as a Celtics fan wish the Nuggets the best of luck tonight. And, man, we yeah. We'll catch up down the road.
Matt: Awesome.
Thank you so much.
Group Thinkers is a production of RKD Group. For more information, including how you can partner with RKD to accelerate growth for your fundraising and nonprofit marketing needs, visit rkdgroup.com.
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