Discover Free Bill Book Design for NPOs

Free bill book design for NPOs

all right you guys welcome to another future live event we're here in Santa Monica on a holiday and we're gather amongst friends and we're going to be talking to Matthew Manos and he has a very nice company and we're gonna be talking to him he's gonna share his models of impact and how his company's philosophy of giving half the work away for free that's an interesting philosophy that's an interesting approach to business and somewhat controversial to some people so we're gonna get into it so you guys stick around [Music] all right well back let's do it through the miracle television there was like a show open or something there you guys okay Matthew you have some slides right I do I have some slides I want to blow through I want to give you guys a little bit of a sense of my background and actually spend as much as time as much time possible with Chris brainstorming some things with this pretty dice right here first of all just to have these on deck who how many of you like the color orange okay so that's quite a few how many of you don't like the color green okay so we'll use orange and green because half the audience likes orange and no one dislikes green so we've got that covered this is models of impact it's a methodology for balancing revenue and impact that's something I've been doing with my own company very nice for quite a while I want to tell you guys a little bit about my story and how that led me to the design of this game that will demo as well so my story starts with this number eight billion dollars that's not my money sadly but that's the amount of money that nonprofit organizations in the United States alone are actually spending on people like me every year on design and marketing professionals granted sounds like a lot of money it is a lot of money but there's also actually a million nonprofit organizations in the United States even when you divvy that up equally this is a lot of resources and I don't know about you but for me when I heard about that I couldn't help but think what would happen if there's some kind of new model that would allow organizations especially small nonprofits to have access to these really important design and marketing services but maybe at a fraction of the costs or completely for free if we could figure something like that out could we actually help put a bigger dent into some of the world's most persistent problems like hunger housing water access and more without actually doing any extra work just by taking resources that already exist so I got really obsessed with that idea and I came to learn that there's something called pro bono has anybody here done pro bono work before okay you guys know what pro bono means pro-bono short for pro bono publico literally means for the good of the public so it doesn't actually directly translate to for free it's really for good right to better society to contribute to society most people attribute it with free work the the pro bono movement started in the late 1800s in the legal industry a guy named Reginald Hebert Smith wrote a book called justice in the poor that basically advocated for lawyers to donate their services to immigrants coming to the United States and in the 50s and 60s with the ad council that started to hit the design and marketing industries and got more popular there for me I actually got my start doing pro bono work when I could do stuff like this I used to skateboard competitively when I was in high school started skateboarding competitively in middle school as well and as a result I was pretty much always at the skate park training sadly I can only kind of do this still at a very depressing scale I can still I can still get around a ball and I still you'll still find me at skate parks here and there but there was one trip that I went to the park and I met a man who was in a wheelchair and he was ripping around the park far better than I and anybody else and this is before YouTube so as before you saw really cool stuff online all the time he actually did a flip in the bowl and I knew I just had to approach this guy so I approached him learn he was the founder of a nonprofit that taught kids in wheelchairs how to participate in extreme sports about a week prior my godmother had given me a pirated copy of Photoshop and so I had just been teaching myself design and thought hey why not design some stickers for this guy as practice and that became my first pro bono client told were you I was 16 at the time Wow so a few years later when I was 19 from my sophomore dorm room at UCLA I launched very nice and very nice is now a design strategy consultancy that gives half of its work away for free to nonprofit so still inspired by that time at the skate park basically been doing the same thing ever since but just in slightly different ways this give half model is something that is core to a lot of my flock Sophy of approaching anything basically of balance how can you give and get how can you balance yourself in terms of sustainability but also in terms of purpose or fulfillment as well we've worked with all kinds of folks a lot of people you've heard of a lot of people that you haven't heard of hopefully yet like Google UNICEF NASA MTV etc and our services span quite a few things we started in the visual graphic design space but actually now do I would say primarily design strategy which is things like workshop facilitation or consulting for nonprofit organizations etc a couple of projects we worked with Google on a project called billion acts short for billion acts of piece really cool mobile application that's trying to get a billion people to do something good that's that's the entire goal it's backed by a organisation called piece jam they've been around for about 40 years and so far has almost 15 million acts of piece submitted through the app this can be something as small as picking up a piece of trash something as big as actually housing a refugee for example we did a big branding project for a UNICEF for their project called u-report which is a SMS based system for reporting natural disasters famine need for certain things all across all kinds of countries as well this is just one slide to show a really big variation of color that comes from that there was a time when we had in New York office and my partner left led this project to actually really be there close with UNICEF working on this initiative and here in Los Angeles we have a big homeless population and this is something that we spend a lot of time with as you can imagine a lot of nonprofit organizations working in that space especially our offices in the Arts District just a couple blocks away from Skid Row as well so we get involved into doing a lot of annual reports or visual graphic design etc for those kinds of organizations so through this give half model so far we've donated over seven and a half million dollars worth of services to over 500 organizations and we also donate resources as well which you'll learn a little bit more about with models of impact and a few other things that we have but this is talking about our pro bono work I decided that that wasn't enough though that eight billion dollar number that I told you guys about earlier right if you subtract seven and a half million from that it's kind of depressing how little impact we've actually made right if our goal is to help organizations alleviate some of these expenses we pretty much can't do this by ourself so I wrote this book in 2012-2013 called how to give half of your work away for free which basically open sourced our business model and shared best practices and actually some of the business benefits of doing pro bono as well it spent a lot of time thinking about that model this is where we start to get into the models of impact story couldn't help but think ok what else is out there how else can businesses balance impact in revenue turns out there's a lot of ways I actually collected over 200 different models that are out there and this is what I would refer to as models of impact there either impact models of sustainable ways of creating some kind of impact in the world or revenue models sustainable ways of actually generating income for your business map to these things out did way too much research on this stuff I'm really really a nerd when it comes to these kinds of models so if any of you ever want to talk about it you know how to find me just Google very nice first thing that pops up we mapped these things out we started piloting it as a workshop with different communities and next thing you know I had a pretty decent methodology that I was ready to share with people so we put it up online models of impact CEO and it's essentially a role-playing and ideation game that helps simulate the process of starting a social enterprise so starting a business that balances revenue and impact it's designed to be a lot of fun it was originally designed actually with designers in mind so that actually it can teach people about business in a non scary way because let's face it right designers don't really like talking about business models too much at least at least I didn't a lot of people that I surround myself don't so I wanted to really frame it as a game something that's fun so that you can engage with it's been used in a hundred countries it really had a lot of organics a lot of these workshops kind of like what Chris and I'll demo popping up all over the place to teach people about business model design about this kind of ethos as well I mentioned earlier what a social enterprise is - to me the way that I define it is a organization that bounces these two things impact in revenue so the traditional way of thinking about a business model is it's purely a revenue model it's purely a way of actually making income right which obviously every business he needs income every business needs revenue otherwise it's a hobby it's not a business there has to be some kind of exchange going on my whole theory is that if that's the only focus that it could lead to burnout because of a lack of fulfillment that might come with that and that businesses also actually have a really great opportunity to give back to communities in places especially that government might be falling short as well I think when you look at you know thinking about the situation here right with Chris's story I see you know blind in the future actually kind of living in this Venn diagram you take this really successful design firm and you take this really successful platform that's creating a lot of impact that marriage is actually this Venn diagram you know from my perspective the process itself is really easy it normally takes around three hours normally it's done in groups of five or with about 30 people in a room the most people we've ever had at one of these workshops was in Mexico City last year was about 500 people is absolutely insane if any of you have ever facilitated a workshop basically don't do that we ended up having about eight facilitators in total running around in all these different rooms full of like hundred people here under people here etc but it follows learn invent program report the basic idea is in the learn phase you're and you're embedding yourself in what are these models what is social entrepreneurship etc invent which is what we're gonna focus on tonight you're coming up with ideas you can see this as blue sky anything's possible ID eight have fun program bringing that back down to earth so okay great idea about how will we actually do this and then report basically encouraging you to go out share your idea get some feedback and probably cycle all over again so I do want to play to start or before we start Chris I don't know if you have any any questions before we hop right into this I do have some questions for you I just want to let you guys know a little bit about Matthew so not everybody here knows who Matthew is he mentioned briefly he went to UCLA to get his undergraduate then he went to Art Center to get his MFA and I just recently discovered he's no longer teaching at Art Center because he's got it and the means a more amazing gig he's teaching at USC with what is it called the Iovine and young academy the Iovine of young do you guys know who I mean and young are dr. Dre Andre Young is dr. Dre's technically my boss that doesn't mean that I've met him yet though but if you just if you follow the you know if you follow the hierarchy I technically work for dr. Dre now so that's pretty cool yeah Jimmy Iovine and dr. Dre started a program for the Arts right at yeah so they saw a big gap basically in a lot of higher education which I tend to agree with is that it's very disciplinary you go to school you get really good at design you get really good at business you get really good at engineering but what happens is as many of you have probably faced in your jobs those worlds actually connect all the time so this program is is really about integrating arts business and technology together mm-hmm so it's not so siloed there's that crossover trying to break down those walls mm-hmm so let's start with very nice how long has very nice been around as a company so April is our 10 year anniversary 10 years from the dorm room Wow graduations thank you thank you just a few short days weeks away from hitting that 10-year mark yeah and siding and we started in 2008 which was the worst time ever it was to do something is that when you graduated no I graduated in 2010 from undergrad okay so you started before you graduate I did yeah okay so tell me about the motivation to start the company and how the the whole giving away half started yeah so very nice really started as hobbie I mentioned that moment in the skate park that's when I started basically doing some freelance design but mainly doing pro bono projects for local organizations when I started at UCLA when I moved down here basically I was interfacing with different student groups all the time on campus and they tended to be representatives of nonprofit organizations and basically found myself being not not happy with only doing the assignments given to me in the classroom and really wanting to start applying that right away to things and really it just kind of escalated from there so we went from student groups to real organizations outside of the campus sort of snowballing and had this light bulb go off actually of this give half model when one president of a student group graduated college they went and got a job somewhere and they needed a designer and they called me up and that was a paid gig and that was this kind of light bulb of oh really interesting right maybe maybe I don't have to only have an organization that does you know pro bono work maybe as a nonprofit itself or something maybe the pro bono work can actually lead to business as well and maybe these things can be balanced so it was kind of the really origin of seeing it as a business as opposed to a fun thing that I did at night okay well if you give away half your work so here I'm not on the internet trying to teach people how to charge more this seems diametrically opposed to like what I'm about like do you make any money are you starving how does this even work yeah so it's a great question I'll talk about how it works so something really interesting about very nice is our core teams pretty small we have about 10 people that come to the office but we have a network of over of almost I can't say over yeah we're like one shy so if anybody here ends up being interested let me know of almost 600 different volunteers those volunteers are also paid freelancers on paid assignments as well and this is essentially designed to give us the bandwidth of a pretty large firm while actually being a small firm and so as a result actually doing the pro bono work costs us very little money because most of our role is on man ajumma of this kind of external group of people that are doing this work unpaid a lot of that creative direction comes from me as well and I'm not I'm somebody that's not salaried with the company either so that helps so that's kind of our model of actually getting the work done that's sort of the secret sauce at any given moment we're working on 20 to 30 different projects and if you do the math right about 10 to 15 of those are our pro bono work some of these are also actually sliding scale rate so sometimes if a larger organization approaches us we'll discount our rate slightly to fit the budget of whatever grant they might have gotten to do that project and that helps too but yeah we've actually we've been able to grow we've been profitable ever since starting and you know I think a lot of times people see giving something away as losing something but I have found that there's actual benefits to it there can be the networking component of hey let me do some work for this nonprofit Oh turns out their board is super well-connected other companies that might hire me or hey I want to actually pivot the company has this happened a couple of times to integrate new services turns out no one will trust me to do that and pay me so why don't I reach out to a non-profit do it for free and gain some credibility in that space that's actually entirely how we're able to pivot our company towards more design strategy work is by offering that up for free and gaining that proof mmm you guys have questions before we kind of dive into a little bit deeper how do you manage your guidelines with the free projects guidelines as in making sure that the works done right or yeah as far as like you know it's it's easy to follow you know design its you can do something in one day or if you like it you can do that you can spend a week so you have to be strict with that with the guidelines with the free projects so how do you manage them yeah great question so strict is a really good word where we're really strict with all of our projects basically the big mistake that I used to make with pro bono work is I would get so inspired I'd be like hey let's do this and next thing you know it's two years later and we're doing 20 things that we didn't say what we're gonna do right you can imagine that that happens it's you you get into it right so what we started to do is I started to reflect on our paid work and I thought why does that happen very limp that those kind of scope creeks why does that happen in a limited way there oh because we have contracts or we have a scope that we've agreed to right so we started actually generating pro bono contracts and so what happens is someone will come to our site they'll apply to benefit from our pro bono services we'll accept them we'll send them a contract and it'll actually say state what the monetary value of that service would have been if we were charging for it and this triggers a lot of things and it's it's actually ever since we've never had issues with scope Creek I keep saying Creek scope creep scope Creek would be a fun place to visit scope creep that's like where you go up the creek without a paddle right yeah perfect or the water just keeps getting taken away from you so so yeah we've never had issues with that ever since and part of it is this psychological thing that happens when you sign a piece of paper the other thing that happens though is they're being told hey that would have been worth $10,000 and that really actually immediately forces them to rethink the way that they're valuing that service yeah hi I'm Brandon is there a philosophical reason that you chose half 50% or did you see that as the most generous you can be well most Inc that's financially feasible that's a great question have you ever written read any of my stuff online before okay well it's pretty cool to ask that questions actually use that that term philosophical quite a bit when I'm talking about 50% where it came from is realizing that basically from my perspective anything that you spend at least half of your time doing it's no longer an extracurricular it's core to who you are it's integral to what you do and so that's actually why I picked 50% that that's the reason I wanted giving back to be a core thing that I do integral things I do but I also wanted to be I also wanted getting to be Court or what I do right I wanted to sustain myself I wanted to grow my business take care of my people so that that's really the idea is not treating business or impact as extracurriculars but both of them as really you know the the courts the cordial they're good question man who's up next somebody else had a question hello hey guys my name is Samir I have a two-fold question the first one is how do you decide between all of the nonprofit's that apply when do you decide which projects to pick and then the second question is do you think that there's a difference between the quality of work that you produce for a non-profit versus paid work great question yeah ok so your first one is is pretty easy to answer so this we we actually maintain a give half balance at any given moment we're making sure that we're giving at least half of our work away for free and I've said in I've said all over the world if we ever give less than half that I would quit so now I'm saying it here as well and so we actually are constantly monitoring that and we publish on our Facebook page as well each month what our current give half balance is so what that also allows us to do those allows us to know if we should even be considering new pro bono projects for example if we're 55% pro bono I'm not even going to look at applications that are coming in but if we're 50/50 that means were really close that's when we'll start looking again we'll start accepting so the short answer is it's complete luck when people actually submit that their application will be reviewed immediately or not right it's really based on that bandwidth we have this large network but we're not a crowdsourcing company we're not taking on you know hundreds of projects at once right so we have to be pretty careful with that the second question that us was around the quality of the work and if that differs funny enough it hasn't so far and I think part of the reason is whenever we have our paid staff working on pro bono projects we tend to actually not tell them that they're pro bono projects so that they don't even actually see it in a different way the other thing is these pro bono your these volunteers that we're working with some of them are really seasoned actually and have been in in in the industry for twenty thirty years and are doing really great work others may be our more junior level but they're getting coaching from us as managers as well if anything I think sometimes the pro bono work is of higher quality because the client actually is a little bit more open to us trying new things as well that's something that I've noticed so Matthew if I want to become part of this 600 person Network where do I go to apply or how do I get more information yeah great question so so joining the network is actually slightly mysterious and that's by design and I want to tell you a little story about that so I was walking in Pasadena with a bunch of Chinese food on Colorado Boulevard in Old Town and what happened is a canvasser came up to me right someone with a clipboard you know taking down emails right and they came up to me and says excuse me sir do you care about the hungry and I was like oh I I feel like such an ass right now because I'm carrying all these bags of food but I'm actually really in a hurry right now and so I totally blew them off and I realized that I felt really bad and that bad feeling that guilt as the trigger to actually try to inspire someone to get involved is a terrible strategy because you might get thousands of volunteers but all none of them are there for the right reason they're there because you guilted them so that's the context is saying that we never advertise hey join our network sign up online basically people here that we do this and they just email our info address and then we take care of it we get you in that network so saying that to this room right anybody that's listening to it right if you email us basically that's that's how it happens but we try not to make it that easy alright anybody else with a question it's a little bit of different direction what's your name my name is Tam I'm sorry how does the program of work affect the business model with regards to you know just become a some type of a tax deduction when you do your filing for your corporate taxes or how does that free work benefit the company with regards to taxes yeah that's a great question so the answer is is depressing actually pro bono work is one of the things that's most difficult to write off for a number of reasons one because we're using volunteers we're not actually spending too much paid staff hours on that so there's not a lot to actually document to say hey here's the tangible cost that our services you know burdened us with and so therefore here's what we should write off there's instances where you can if you track hours of a paid employee that was doing this you could in theory track that have the nonprofit write a letter for you and give that to your CPA and I'm not an accountant by the way but you could do that where it's easier is when you're actually giving money or physical goods because those are much easier to basically say hey this is you know fifty cents right and this was given with services it's a lot more subjective on paper so it's it's it's actually not much of a benefit there that's kind of depressing man it's depressing maybe one day I mean maybe somebody that hears this is in Paul is in policy or whatever and can do something about that because I think it would encourage a lot more people that don't have this network that I have to do pro bono work right to actually allocate some of their time towards that who knows maybe one day that will happen shoot I don't think I would pay any taxes my entire life if this is the case so you guys are watching this you're trying to figure out what's in it for Matthew and it's like nothing no there's a lot there's a lot i already said right so that was the networking there's building your portfolio maybe in a space that you have not been in and then there's karma oh you can just play the karmic card like that so you guys are all evil you have Oh karma and Matthew has plenty just some work with me give you karma yeah no but but but seriously though the the networking has been invaluable I mean this is how I've gotten my largest clients is by doing this and you know and I started this when I was just a kid - I'm still kind of just a kid and that opened up a lot of doors but the other thing that I'll say is being able to pivot from visual design to design strategy by way of doing pro bono work that's that was insanely beneficial to me into my company and being able to actually get us into spaces that are even more profitable to be honest as well so so that's been a benefit okay so far I've been very nice I think we should have a little bit of a debate yeah it's okay with you guys because this is very interesting so you guys just to kind of recap here math he was able to leverage relationships built on trust and giving very generously without a lot of benefit to him but when he needs to stretch creatively or do something different he can call upon that and say and say you know I'm trying this new thing I want to offer this new service is there something I can help you with and clients that you build a relationship or more likely to do that so you brought up you went from doing visual design to doing strategy design would you call it design strategy design strategy and not entirely from one of the other I would say it's 50/50 so from 100% visual design to 5050 design strategy visual design okay so we also if you guys have been following the story with the future we also made that transition but I only had to give it away one time and I did that mostly because I'm kind of new to it myself so I offered up to my clients I did it they had a good time I learned a lot they got a lot of value the very next time I parlayed that into to business so how would we how do we engage in this like there's two sides to this so let's talk about it yeah do you see flaws in the way I'm approaching it let's say we're friends you guys we're friends the internet and it hates me that's why I like now every stream I do I just shut up I just shut up because like why don't you let people talk I would say so I would say to be honest I don't see flaws in the way that you did it because you know looking back I think that there was that you need that one ample to basically be like hey look I can do this will you trust me enough to pay me for it so I don't think there were flaws we kept doing it right and I think one of the benefits that we kept doing is strategy is a big bucket right so maybe we did that one project let's just say it's in you know brand strategy or something and that goddess's paid brand strategy project well we've also gotten into marketing strategy competitive analysis facilitation strategic planning I mean the list goes on right so we did keep on adding new benefits from different projects maybe we could have done that in one if it was a really big you know example but we kind of split that up and it's like a whole pizza of different strategy services right yeah so we're not different those far and you guys keep thinking about this because you can pour gasoline on this fire if you want or just it'll smolder out and that's fine so we're both in agreement there that in order for you to do something new and different you need somebody to trust you that you can do it for and I use old relationships you use sometimes old and new relationships to do this with this is fine we also I think are in total agreement here where if you want to do something different you got to make the effort and close the gap you have to offer something up and sometimes it comes up the price of free and I'm okay with that too so this is where we differentiate here is that once I've done something you know so you would say like well why did you need to do in the first place couldn't you charge the first time yes you can if you're really really good and you're tenacious and you have the ability to sell anything to anybody but really the reason why I did it I can only speak to this is I did it because it wasn't for them it was to prove to myself this is valuable and I can do it because the next client I did it for never asked me for proof so some of you guys think you have to do this to prove to them show me the case study but really this is to prove it to yourself to have the confidence that you can do this and it is valuable so now having done that I've been able to exchange this knowledge that I've been able to acquire to be able to do this for other clients for real money and I'm still trying to find the ceiling how much we can charge so this is where maybe I'm pure evil and you're like purely good or something because I want to be paid I almost feel like it's a contest for me that I have a belief that what we do is very valuable yeah but until it's externally quantifiable in a dollar amount then I say within is just in my head like I could think I'm the world's greatest father but until my kids send me the world's greatest father plaque I don't know yeah kids well let me ask you this when you started blind right aside from hey I want to follow my dreams I want to do stuff that I love yeah one of one what was your measurement of success when you started it I think early on I had some dumb ideas of success now I started blinded in 1995 very young person and I wanted to just be able to have employees yeah I thought I thought I could have like three or four employees that I can hire yeah on staff I've made it and what do you need to hire employees clients and what what do clients give them anything so money right yes so I think money is a is a measurement of success and I've certainly measured success in that way as well right as any business should but when I started very nice I actually started it thinking that it was not a business I started it as a project I thought what's a weird interesting new model I could create to bridge this gap between access to design and designers right and so for me from day one the success criteria was basically get my in my impact value up as high as possible as fast as possible and that's what's been my target so I think that is a core place that we differ right where I obviously need to generate revenue from my business right and support my employees and myself right I've got a mortgage to pay I have a wife a dog to cats but at the same time one of the success criteria is in my mind is getting that pro bono valuation up because to me then I actually you know met what my mission was when I started hmm so I think what it is is it's a difference in framing between us as opposed to much much bigger much more of a difference beyond that you know now I do want to just today this for the record that blind is a service company that's driven by profit yeah and the bottom line for sure I'm not going to deny that but here at the same time I'm producing videos that cost me a lot of money to make I'm giving it out for free absolutely they are the model of impact or the measurement or the unit of success is very different it's about how many lives we can reach and touch in real meaningful ways absolutely and that's why when you look at that Venn diagram I showed earlier of impact in revenue I think any business that is currently thriving surviving but also has a founder or a CEO that is in any way happy is actually embodying those two that Venn diagram right it's not literally Oh impact as always you're giving your work away for free impact can be a lot of different things I like I said impact for you I think is this I mean this is this huge gift to the world right you get all these people looking at these videos maybe some of them were gonna go and spend a bunch of money on college and now kind of get the chops they need without having to do that right that to me that is your give model right your your give back model whether that's half or not who cares right half as we talked about that was my philosophy so how about this point of view why don't you just charge 100 percent is that give me an away for free and use 50 percent of your profit to donate to donate money yeah how about that model because of I have a lack of trust so I have a lack of trust of where that money goes a lot of the times that money will go to hiring a designer that'll do a really crappy job and then it was it was they basically blew that money this is speaking particularly you know in the design services world obviously that money could also go towards other things but more often than not if I'm donating money to an organization I have a lack of trust that not necessarily in them but in who they spend that on that that'll actually get done well and so for me part of what I like about pro bono is money is kind of taken out of the picture now I'm just doing something that was there and anyways and I'm hopefully doing it right in a way that actually leads to even more success for them okay hold on now I'm kind of trying to wrestle this my brain you're giving away free work because you believe in a company you've added them what's the difference between doing free work versus giving them money you're helping them one way or the other how they use your free work how they use the money you give it's at some point up to them and you either believe in them or you don't I think the difference is if an organization really wants you know ten thousand dollars to rethink their social media strategy this is the very specific scenario I'd be really worried that they are given that check from me and then they go and hire a vendor that basically does a bad job and all that money was wasted versus I trust myself I know that I'll get it done right and so if I can give them ten thousand dollars worth of services that they would have otherwise had to spend that check on and do it right I feel better about it that's not to say that donating money is something that everybody should stop doing it's just not it's just not how I give back mmm I guess we were talking about this in a very specific design services way but there are shelters for battered women homeless shelters tons of things scholarships those kinds of things where it's not about creative services so I don't I'm not gonna argue with you if you give $10,000 for them to buy creative services for somebody else who better to do it than you right that makes sense but I'm just talking about like say the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation where they're pretty smart about spending their money so smart that Warren Buffett's like here's my money I trust you guys to spend it because you'll vet it right you make it go to something like curing cancer or some other disease well here's the thing right so those kinds of people they have they have monetary resources far beyond me but I actually have insane amount of resources in terms of people that I can actually put into a place and so me not being a multi-millionaire guy right I'm actually able to give a multi-million dollar gift without needing a whip out my checkbook and what's in what's cool is that actually brings a lot of power versus riding a $10,000 check you're kind of limited in a scope that that could that that could accomplish even actually when you talk about buying a you know buying a new shelter space or new bed right you might get a few beds but then that they won't be maintained and they might break overtime right so so that's that's the thing services obviously need to be maintained too so there's no perfect story here but but that that would be my perspective okay I like the way he said that you've obviously thought this through so just want to say in case you guys are figuring it out you don't want to give dumb money away ten thousand dollars because that doesn't leverage any of your skills and talent but if you give ten thousand dollars for creative services away given your network how you know how to design an art direct and pull resources together that ten thousand dollars could look like a hundred thousand dollars and so you're multiplying your your your money your capital and that's a great way to put it okay there's a social entrepreneur named Ryan Scott that I've worked with and he said talent is a multiplier and I think I think that that's a really great quote it really mimics what you just said right that if you get the right people in the room focusing on the right cause I mean yeah it can lead to these incredible things okay so let's say I'm a really rich guy which I'm not and I just want to give you money because I believe in what you do yeah do you would you accept that I'd accept it I got plenty of things work and I'll go execute it all right so they just need to search you out and send you an email if you guys want to give Matthew and his company very nice and his models of impact now give 10% hey all right this is how like social good and commerce work together I love that beautiful you guys any questions you guys want to push this around a little bit Pro cons you know we're all adults we're all friends we can talk okay boom who's got the mic my name is David and I've been following two of you guys a couple years and you guys are doing a good work in my question is it was kind of piggybacking the question and the other guy asked so let's say you have a room for accepting pro bono works and let's say there are a bunch of organizations who've applied within that period of time then how do you that the organization is and the reason I'm asking this is what what Chris brought up was very interesting so for example organizations typically nonprofit organizations they spend money for their programs and their fundraising and for fundraising requires a lot of visual design work because it's marketing for them I think it makes sense to provide a create creative service instead of money but programs is something that you kind of trust because you're vetting the organization's so back to the question like so you're accepting applications you're checking different organizations work and their programs in marketing how do you pick an organization that you want to support and work with really great question and and hopefully you know I'm about to say will help all of you guys to if you're about to whether it's donate money or donate time or whatever it is I look for either if it's a big organization do they have a great track record of success right have they actually accomplished really great things or are they just a marketing funnel right for awareness and not actually doing anything if it's a smaller organization which is much more common with who were working with on a pro bono basis I actually look for a how specific are they so if you said a lot of times you'll get a small nonprofit that comes out saying hey we're gonna end world hunger and it's kind of like you're probably not you know and so therefore will my work actually really lead to something kind of tangible versus if they're saying we're gonna end hunger between fifth and sixth Street between Los Angeles and Wall Street in downtown I would really be excited to work with them because they're actually trying to limit the scope of what they're doing and therefore they might actually achieve their goal there's a wonderful nonprofit I think you all should support called dig deep and they this in an incredible way there there a water rights organization they actually started with a story of we're gonna you know we're gonna build water wells like everywhere all over the world and they pivoted their mission to focus on Native American reservations in the United States and for a while there they're actually focusing on just one single reservation in New Mexico and they actually gave water to every single family on that reservation I mean that's crazy right they actually fulfilled their mission and now their mission change to another community so it's just it's really cool when it's that specific one of my earlier pro bono clients all that they did all that they aspire to do was throw birthday parties at retirement homes right so people that maybe don't have families to come celebrate with them they'll show up with a cake and they'll throw you a party it's just such a tangible mission and so that that's what we get really excited about I would say something that feels like they could actually change what they want to change not these big audacious things that not like try to change a billion lives and planet Earth yes totally and some organizations maybe could but it's just very few of them actually could do that mmm okay over here question a little bit more about design not as far as a business strategy do you guys use it design systems how expensive you guys go with their client so do you prefer the pro bono or you do yeah do you buy the typeface do you do packaging for them do you do you know everything or you're just trying to keep it simple that's a great question we focused purely on the services so if they're trying to let's say they're trying to run you know a thousand books that they're printing that cost would be on them same with things like typefaces etc and actually what's really cool about that is that becomes a really great creative constraint any designer right we thrive on constraints right that's that's kind of what creativity is all about so what we'll do is we'll actually kind of pose the question do you really need to print this thing you know or could this be a website right or a social media campaign we actually try to think okay what was the goal of this project and how can we do it in the most economical resourceful way possible and we've gotten pretty good at that because pretty much everyone we work with doesn't have resources so to answer your question we don't pay for that kind of stuff but we try to find ways around it great so right behind you go ahead hello Justin hey Justin they do conflicts so what if you're in a you're on one side of the 50% and you're working on a project and it's going really well it's very ambitious and lights at the end of the tunnel anything's good but you also happen to end up picking a paid client on the other side how do you resolve those conflicts where and so for an example okay we're in California so it'd be maybe you're doing a marijuana farm or something and then you get Pfizer knocking on your door you know that's such a good question and I can honestly say I haven't faced that scenario yet so I actually not too sure what I would do I'm kind of the person that just would just try to find a way to make it work and maybe that's by pushing out the timeline or something like that but I actually haven't honestly faced that so another question I get quite a bit is what if you have some bad company come try to work with you would you work with them right like like BP or something would you work with them and the answer is when your company is called very nice and literally everything that you ever spew out in marketing is around social impact you don't get bad companies even approaching you so that's another type of conflict that I've never had to face because we just are so not interesting to those people so the fill the filtration is built in it is it is through the messaging through the marketing through the brand yeah I think you're gonna find that to be pretty consistent with branding altogether your site your work how you speak what you talk about it should act as a filter this is why we will often say you got to stake something in the ground and claim some space that nobody else has claimed and then you will attract the kinds of people that are attracted to the kinds of things that you say and that's just the way it's going to work so people who just put up a portfolio site have this problem you stand for nothing so you you are for everybody and for no-one and that's why you get a lot of bottom-dwelling clients saying do this thing for a hundred bucks that's the problem so the ethos that Matthews put out is very clear the name is clear I'm sure that all the messaging is clear so evil corporations don't come knockin yeah saves you time yeah for sure yeah hey guys my name is Liam I had a question what would you say to more junior designers who are starting out who are kind of stuck in a rabbit hole of doing free work and not actually being able to get paid yeah so I would say I mean one thing is actually to just stop doing that it depends on free work for who though I would say start to actually put some strict rules write the word strict came up earlier around who are you giving this work away to and who aren't you and after them after five projects or something like that you have pretty good proof that you can do this stuff and I would say you have what you need actually start getting some paid work you could also go back to the current unpaid clients and say hey you know maybe you guys don't have resources for this but I want to let you know like I'm trying to pursue this you know I want to build a practice around this is there anyone you might refer me to and you'd be surprised what what happens right I still get projects to this day that ten years ago is where that seed was first planted I'm sure that happens with you too I mean people you meet a long time ago they either they pull through or or somebody had connected you to them [Music] [Applause] you [Music]