Sean: Welcome to The Philanthropy Podcast. Today, we're joined by Lou Nanni, the Vice President of University Relations at the University of Notre Dame. Lou thanks for joining us today on the show.
Lou: Thanks Sean, I'm really glad to be here and I look forward to our conversation.
Sean: I had the great fortune of working for Lou when I was at the University of Notre Dame.
He was one of the most inspiring leaders, and I've mentioned this to you in advance Lou, and I stand by it, you were someone who when I got done listening to you, I was ready to run through a wall for whatever you had just got us fired up about.
As we've been going through all of the changes and the uncertainty around COVID-19 and the coronavirus pandemic, one of the things I've seen throughout the professional development opportunities are lots of techniques, such as how to do our job in a remote setting, but I was really excited when you agreed to come on because I'd love to talk to you about how do we lead and how do we inspire in a situation where so many things have been flipped on their head.
To help our guests know a little bit more about you, can you share with us how you ended up in the role that you're in at Notre Dame and some of your past experiences?
Lou: Well, first of all Sean, thank you for your kind words and it was great to work together and I appreciate what you continue to do for the profession in hosting conversations like this that can help us all learn and grow, every one of us.
I came to this line of work by accident and certainly have a pretty unconventional background. After graduating from Notre Dame way back in 1984, I engaged in a service experience in Santiago, Chile, under the Pinochet dictatorship. I lived in a shanty town and I taught at a very poor school. I saw many of the kids were malnourished and I remember being horrified when somebody came by my classroom and knocked on the door, and all the kids raised their hands. Maybe forty-two sixth graders were in the class and furiously raised their hands and they called four of them who jumped up and down like they were so joyful. I asked “What's going on?” and those four kids that day were able to each get a glass of milk.
I remember being haunted by that and for my little small town newspaper, a town of about 2,500 people in western New York, I began to write a weekly column for this little newspaper and began to fundraise money so that we could set up a little comedor, a little kitchen, that would serve some broth and some basic foods for all of the students who weren’t unable to concentrate on their subject matter because they were just too hungry and malnourished. So many of us come into this through the service model, we don't come to raise money initially, but we see needs and we want to fill those gaps.
After Chile, I worked for three years in the Dominican Republic and then I came to work at a homeless center in South Bend, Indiana for about eight years. There it became really critical that in addition to everything else, I had to become a fundraiser to keep the doors open, to be able to make programs that we were implementing sustainable. And so by hook and by crook, I learned what it took to be a fundraiser. As we grew as an organization, I was able to hire some folks to focus exclusively on fundraising. From there, I went to become chief of staff for the president at Notre Dame for a couple of years. Then they asked me to come into this role where I oversee the alumni association and the development operations.
Sean: So you clearly have experience across the range. You said you see needs and you want to fill those gaps. When you were thinking about those immediate needs that you saw, were you aware that this field even existed? Did you see yourself moving in a fundraising position? I think a lot of our listeners are trying to discern what their career might look like and whether it is linear or how does it look?
Lou: It was absolutely by accident Sean. I never thought “oh my God, I could make a career at this.” I never thought that until perhaps much later in my career when I I came to Notre Dame about 20 years ago and started working as the chief of staff to the president. But even by the point when I got to the homeless center, I remember saying “Listen, I'm not getting into this to be a fundraiser. I want to be able to help people.” I came to learn really quickly that if we really wanted to make a difference in the lives of people, you had to learn how to raise money. And you had to be very good at that. If you believed in the programs that were impacting, in this case, men, women, and children who were homeless, then you had to make those programs sustainable and be able to grow that dream so you had to raise more money. I came by it, I guess, quite organically.
Sean: It's true of so many people in our field, but I'm excited about this next generation as well, who I think are becoming aware of that need in nonprofits at an earlier age. I know Notre Dame has a course in philanthropy. I'm really excited about how that generation is gonna come up through the ranks as well, because similar to you, I fell into the position as well. I was teaching in Chicago's west side, and saw a need for my classroom and my first school actually closed down due to finances. I very quickly became acutely aware of the need for finances in non-profits. In my second school, I raised funds for my own classroom and then was asked to do it as a full-time job, and really got a crash course on how to do individual fundraising.
Lou: That's great.
Sean: Obviously from what may be some humble beginnings, you have successfully proven yourself, and led some incredible operations. I know you're probably too humble to share the success of the University of Notre Dame yourself, but I'm gonna toot your horn for you, Lou. Notre Dame just concluded one of the most successful comprehensive campaigns in higher education history, and I know hearing the news that your Boldly Notre Dame campaign was successfully able to raise over 5.3 billion dollars, it's just a tremendous amount of success and success for a team that I know you believe passionately in and love the institution, the mission, and also your team. But you had a different conclusion to the campaign than anyone anticipated, wrapping up the campaign during the coronavirus pandemic. Can I ask you how did that play out at Notre Dame when you were having such an incredible success at a time where everything was flipped on its head?
Lou: So often these campaign numbers are brandished as braggadocious numbers and in the end, I think they become more an extension of your ego than something that is truly rooted in the mission and the vision of the institution. We were probably the first major university to run a campaign without announcing a goal. And when we went public with this seven-year campaign, we also did not mention how much we raised. Now, we were not trying to hide anything from anybody, but we wanted the focus to be on the priorities. We wanted to focus to be on the why, not the what. Why are we doing this, to be able to make education more accessible. The only number that we announced was that we’re going to try to raise one billion dollars for undergraduate need-based financial aid. That's the only number that was announced throughout the entire seven-year projection, nor had we brandished the number of how much we raised. Those can be good tools to incentivize your team internally, but we wanted the focus to be on how we can be a force for good in the world, how we can use Notre Dame as a conduit through which to impact real-world problems, whether it be homelessness or whether it be how to build cities that are more livable, or how to resolve conflict in some of the most troubled spots in the world, or you name it, medical breakthroughs to help people confronting different diseases. All of these types of things, we wanted that to be the focus of the story and not some big audacious number that would, in fact, distract from what this is really about.
Sean: I think that that focus on the mission, quite frankly just from a practical standpoint, it probably aids in the fundraising because of the fact you continue to connect. I know one of the challenges and higher ed is that question of “what do we need these funds for?” What oftentimes people don't realize is in higher ed, if your ambitions become such that you don't need those funds then yes, they should be asking that question. But I was always very impressed when I was on campus about all the different things where a university can touch people to really create a place that is impactful beyond the scope of the campus.
Lou: Correct. You know, we talk about three characteristics always. We say, stay hungry. humble, and hopeful. Those are three things, both individually and collectively as a team, we're always asking ourselves. Are we hungry? Are we pushing to do more, to achieve greater heights? Are we dreaming boldly enough? Are we humble? Are we staying grounded? We never want to take credit for somebody else's sacrifice and generosity. We want to give all the credit to those who are the benefactors. Lastly, in a time like we’re going through right now, with tremendous racial unrest, with a horrific pandemic, with a staltering economy, it's really important that we stay hopeful too. And it's not easy always to stay hopeful. So those three characteristics: hungry, humble, and hopeful are words that our team knows very well and we talk about on a regular basis, whether times are good or bad.
Sean: To dig in on that idea of hopeful a little bit more, as the severity of the pandemic reached you, what were some of the most important steps that you felt were needed for your team to stay hopeful in a time when many people took a look at the landscape and said “fundraisers we should be locking ourselves way.” What did you bring to your team for that?
Lou: Well, the first thing that we did is that we didn't make an ask from March 11th, from that point we did not make an ask to anybody for 57 days. We did not make an ask for a gift for ten dollars or ten million dollars, nobody was asked during that period. Everybody was encouraged to be respectful of the times, do not let haste get the better of yourselves. So what we asked all of our fundraisers to do was to make as many pastoral touches as they could. Every crisis creates an unprecedented opportunity to listen, to check in. It was really a beautiful time. In fact we said to every one of our fundraisers “when things get better (and we didn't know when we could go back, if it was going to be 57 days, or 15 days, or 90 days for that matter), nobody should be calling somebody for the first time and asking them for money without having checked in with those donors first. To call them up and say ‘how are you doing,’ ‘how's your family,’ ‘how's your business,’ ‘how are you grappling with all of these challenges health-wise as well as economically.’”
We really checked in with each other to make sure that we were making multiple pastoral calls every single day. The second thing, we have, like many places, a student call center. We changed the name of the student call center a couple of years ago. They don't call for money at all, we changed the name for it. It's “ND Listens.” They just call to thank people and they just call to check in on people. So during those 57 days, the team of about 30 students or so that were working remotely with us made over 3,000 calls. They had a 40% pick up rate and they connected with 3,000 people. They just checked in with them. When they heard that some people were battling with COVID-19 issues or other crises, they would FaceTime them, and they lit a candle at the grotto for them, or they sing the alma mater or the fight song to them and they were deeply moved by these touches but we made, no asks. We just wanted to listen and make really good pastoral touches.
The other thing somebody said to me early on in the crisis was “you can never over communicate during a crisis” and at that point we stepped up and we put together a weekly live chat on YouTube Live and we invited all of our donors together and we interviewed the president, the provost, the executive vice president, the athletic director, this faculty member or that faculty member. We did this and have been doing this since the pandemic began. We get anywhere from a thousand to two thousand computers that view into each one of these live chats, usually on Wednesdays. Then we do something weekly where we have a live chat with our team, a zoom chat where everybody gets in. We put a lot of time in preparing these to make them interesting, informative, and inspiring. And I tried for the first three months to send a daily email to everybody on the team. Now, it's more like twice a week. We tried to really make sure that we are communicating, both internally and externally, at the highest levels.
Sean: That's an incredible set of outreach. I really like that the change with the student call center, ND Listens is a great way to get more people to pick up the phone, right?
Lou: We went from about a 5% pick up rate when we were asking for money to between a 30% and 40% pick up rate now. The other thing is we never called cell phones before because we thought it was too much of an interruption, it was too impolitic to call somebody's cell phone and ask for money. Now we can call cell phones just to thank people and just to check on people, so the pickup rates have increased accordingly.
Sean: I think now there's definitely the feeling that a cell phone call is not invasive, as it may have been in the past.
Lou: Right.
Sean: Lou, obviously your team, you say “okay, we're making pastoral calls only,” there had to be some fears, and nervousness, and worry from your team. How did you communicate with them about what was happening with their annual goals? I'm sure that were people who were looking at it saying “in the second half of the year, I was gonna close out,” “I'm behind goal, but I'm feeling good,” or “Hey, I'm having a great year” or “I really need some things to come together.” How did you handle the uncertainty and nervousness that was extant on your own team?
Lou: Constant communication. Discussions about it. On our weekly zoom chats, people could submit written questions to myself and the other leaders at any point. They would ask questions like that. We said listen, we most importantly want to protect what Notre Dame stands for. A big part of that is to be respectful and to care for people appropriately. So do nothing in haste. We do not want anybody feeling pressure that they've got to hit some external goal. We understand and we'll adjust to these difficult times. We stand behind you. That doesn’t mean that you’re not doing anything. That means that there’s a lot to be done pastorally, and don't miss that, because when the day comes, and we don't know when it will come, we're going to say “okay, now it's time to ask.” If you have not been in contact with your donors, you're not going to be nearly as successful as those who have, those who’ve made those pastoral touches.
We just kept reminding people, stayed in contact with them, and tried to be really clear. We did not lower their goals, we just said “Listen, we don't know how this is gonna play out. We will be understanding and we’ll make the necessary accommodations and adjustments when that time comes.” But just having that close connection with them I think was helpful.
Sean: I was going to say that you've never been through anything like this in your life, and maybe the exact details yes, but when you share your stories of Santiago, you've seen things that are as challenging, if not even more challenging than what we're living through today. Now that the dust of the initial response is settled, what do you feel you've learned? Is there anything that you would change about the way you responded if there was a future crisis like this? What have you come out of this with?
Lou: You know, I think a lot about the biblical quote from Ecclesiastes which says “to every time, there is a season.” And so whatever this season brings to you, our job is to make the most of it. So if it is a time for listening, if it is a time to grow more pastorally close to people, to get to know people better, it was actually really joyous those fifty seven days for me to be able to call up people and have no agenda other than to check on them, to see how they're doing, and to ask them questions, and to see how we can be of help, to go like candles at the grotto, to pray for people, to be in close contact with them spiritually, really, it was a blessing. It was a beautiful season. Now we've got to raise money and so not all seasons are going to be like. You have to be prepared to adjust. When I was in college way back when, I took a full semester course on the theory of evolution, chronicling Darwin's journey around the world. One of the things that really struck me that has affected me from a management perspective, impacted me more than anything else perhaps I learned as an undergrad, was Darwin said that the evolution, or the survival of a species, will not go to the smartest or to the fittest, but to those who are most readily adaptable to change. In my 18 years in this role, I've seen a lot of really talented people,
I've seen a lot of people of integrity, not make it because they couldn't adjust. They couldn't adapt to the changes that were called for. So we talk a lot about the importance of adaptability.
The toughest thing about this crisis, and I think the toughest thing about suffering in general, is not how accurate the suffering is, but not knowing when it's going to end. So when this pandemic initially hit, we thought okay, we came in with guns ablazing, a lot of energy and passion, we said we can weather this. When you get three months into it, and then all of a sudden it looks like “wow, we could be making no visits, not doing any travel, not hosting anybody on campus through the end of December at the very least.” Then all of a sudden it kind of hits you and you start asking yourself “Do I have the staying power? Do we have that long-term vision that is necessary to sustain this and to keep everybody spirits up?” There's no question that you're going to be down, and you're going to be struggling, and even for some despair can start to creep in. So how do you keep spirits up and how do you adjust from what you thought was going to be a short experience to look at something that could be several months or even years before we bounce back to some level of normalcy?.
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Back to our interview:
Sean: I agree with you on adaptability being so key. I think of the initial response to the pandemic, what we saw in the news, and there was a lot made of the rush for toilet paper, what we didn't realize is that you'll find a way with that, but what are you doing with the relationships in your life? I think as we're now four months into this as widely acknowledged by the public, I think what people are starting to see is that the strain is no longer on physical products as much as it is on the spirit, on your relationships, and what have you invested in them. Did you invest in them the same amount of care and consideration as you did the material goods when this first came upon us?
Lou: You’re exactly right and now this is kind of the trifecta, right? It's not just the fears and the horrors of a pandemic that we have really struggled to manage, it is the ensuing economic fallout that certainly has hit main street much harder than it has hit Wall Street to date, many people unemployed, many of our our students graduating and about to graduate and going into a market where they don't know if there's going to be jobs or internships. There's a lot of anxiety due to the economy and then on top of that we have this really very difficult time of racial unrest. So when you put all of those things together, it's going to take some real intestinal fortitude and some grit. It may not be as fun and it may not be as fulfilling on a daily basis as things were before, but we're going to have to dig down into a well of reserve, do the best we can, and take a long-term view here.
Sean: I agree, there's very important work to be done and very challenging work to be done. That is oftentimes not the most fun when you're in it. It’s the type of time that when you look back, if you succeed, you take great pride, but it is a tough time.
On that note, you're talking about how despair can creep in amongst your teams and the measurements of success that they looked at in the past and the relationships that sustained them. One of my big fears at the beginning of this was will digital visits be as personally fulfilling as when I sit down with a person face to face across from them? And honestly, my fear wasn't for the time period of this pandemic, but honestly it was that maybe they'll be just as effective for fundraising, but the fear is that they won't be as personally fulfilling, and I would no longer love the act of a fundraising as much as I did. And that would be a permanent change if institutions moved to that. So there's a lot of worries and as you said, a lot of anxiety. How do you choose your internal messaging during a time when you're facing that many uncertainties? How do you choose what you share with the team and where do you draw that information from?
Lou: First of all, I try to listen to our team a lot. One of the first things I did after the George Floyd killing, is we have 18 African Americans who are members of the team and I didn't know what to do. I talked with a very close African-American friend of mine and I said I think I'm gonna call each and every one of them individually, and I did. I spoke with each one for maybe 30 to 45 minutes apiece. I just said “I want to check in on you and your family. I know this is an incredibly difficult time for our nation and I know that this hits, people from the African American community even more acutely, so I just wanted to check and see how you're doing, how your family and friends are doing, and how you're coping with this?” Then this friend of mine said ask them a question that no white people ever ask a black person at Notre Dame. They said ask them a question, how have you experienced racism and/or microaggressions here at Notre Dame. In my list of queries, I asked that question and it was amazing how forthcoming people were. I learned a lot from those individual conversations and now we're working as a team to find out how we can become a more diverse, inclusive, and an equitable place to work.
So first of all, I think you can't shape messages if you don't listen, and I think you have to listen attentively and I think you need to listen broadly. Sometimes you listen directly, sometimes you listen through the people who report to you and they feed back what they're hearing, but I'm constantly asking “What are you hearing out there? What's out there?” And then I think it's important to be vulnerable as a leader. I think it's important to acknowledge that things aren’t always perfect and I'm not just coasting through this. I have my moments of doubt and struggle and family dynamics, amidst all of this. It's important that you show a level of empathy, and understanding, and even connectedness with the team. Lastly you have to, even though you empathize and you connect, you have to testify to hope. You’ve got to be optimistic. You've got to show that you believe we're going to get through this and I think that that's a critical component of leadership.
Sean: That’s one of the things that I felt. When I was on Notre Dame's team, the listening was probably a little more, you know, we ran into each other from time to time, but it was probably more through the reporting hierarchy. But I think what really marked my impressions of your messaging was that willingness to be vulnerable and that testifying to hope. Also, I feel like you always brought amazing connections to the mission, to the people that we were impacting. I found that fascinating because I also knew that you were working in many ways with Notre Dame's most transformative benefactors, right? So I'm thinking about what's drawing your time and I'm thinking that you're having building discussions, and endowments, and centers, and everything of the sort, and yet you're coming to these meetings with incredible testimonies of how we are impacting the students and the recipients of the the research that's going on at Notre Dame. How did you bring together all those sources into the milieu of stories that you chose in order to share?
Lou: I think that we teach best what we most need to learn. A lot of times, I may be talking to the team, but I'm really talking to myself and you guys are stuck eavesdropping because I’m thinking, “What is it that I need to remember? What's really important here? The greatest instruments that we have in the work that we do are our mission and our vision. Mission being the guiding principles that emanate through, that go to the heart of what your institution is all about and the vision is what you'd like to achieve in the next time period, over the next five years, or ten years, or however long that vision might be. The way that you animate that mission and that vision is by telling great stories, finding great stories. People won't remember the details, but they'll always remember a great story.
We kind of say euphemistically that those who tell the best stories win. We're always searching for those great stories that go to the heart of what the mission is about, that talk about the vision of what we want to achieve. You can find those stories, usually the best stories, they come from the margins. They come from the places that you least expect them. They don't come from your president or from somebody in my position, they could, but they come from all over the place: students and graduates, your alumni and third-party credentialers, and parents, and so forth. So looking for those stories is really really critical if you want to stay grounded in that mission.
Sean: That's a really great perspective on those coming from the margins. Those at the center, one of the challenges we all find as we rise through the ranks, a big challenge becomes how do you stay connected with that direct service experience that in many ways fuels us. That's a good point of listening on the margins to be able to find that information.
How do you tell the story of what Notre Dame is doing? I've heard during this time of great need for racial justice and response to a truly global pandemic that there's a lot of challenges that come with that as people ask or see that they have a very local need. You talked earlier about sharing with people the needs that exist, and they're seeing their local needs, they're seeing racial and ethnic tensions and injustices in their community, I imagine that there are some challenges right now to telling the story of a higher education institution, when higher education might not look anything like what they've known in the past. How are you sharing the needs at your institution with benefactors when those other needs are so very transparent, and very real, and at the same point, they might be physically less connected to you than they had been previously?
Lou: First of all, any great vision is one that captures the imagination of the public and inspires them to kind of rally around in service of that mission and that vision. So any great vision is other centered, any vision that is really about you or your institution is a shallow vision. It's not going to do much to inspire. So if I'm going to tell you that hey, I want you to give us a lot of money because we want to move up the rankings, we want to be ranked higher than this institution or that institution, or if I tell you that we really want to get our SAT scores up, or we want to get to point where we're even more selective in terms of the classes that we admit, all of those things, they just reek of of ego and and self-aggrandizement and they're not going to inspire anyone. Notre Dame is a wealthy nonprofit among a huge sector of nonprofit institutions and I've worked for some that were just struggling to get by every day. So many will look and say, “you’ve got a big endowment why should I give money to Notre Dame?”
I would answer that question and a couple different levels. One is, I worked for 15 years of my life in shantytowns and among the homeless, and I can tell you it is incredibly difficult to break cycles of poverty, cycles of dependency, cycles of violence, cycles of addiction. The recidivism rate when working with these populations in the social service world is exceedingly high and what I've learned over the years is if we can get a very poor student oftentimes coming from very broken, difficult backgrounds to Notre Dame, we are going to graduate that student at about a 92% rate. 92% of those kids after four years are going to graduate and it is going to transform their lifetime. Going forward it transforms, not only their lives, but their future lives: their spouses and children. But in many cases they do so well that they're able to pull their parents and siblings out of poverty as well. So one of the things we need to do is, we need a more socio-economically diverse student body. We need to give the opportunity of Notre Dame not to say 12% of the families that come to us with annual household incomes of less than $40,000 a year, but we need to double that. They should be at least a quarter of the student population. That takes a lot of money and it takes a lot of resources, but then you're permanently breaking cycles of poverty.
The second thing is, we need to talk more and more about our institution, you know, it's not what is the impact at Notre Dame, but what is the impact through Notre Dame. So as we talked about before how can Notre Dame be a conduit to really impact real world programs? We just did one of those live chats last week with the executive director of the Lab for Economic Opportunity. We have a great economics department here and with a large gift, and then a lot of other support that followed, developed this lab. One percent of the trillions of dollars each year that are spent on anti-poverty initiatives in the country, only one percent of those programs are actually evaluated for their efficacy. So we really have very little evidence on what works and what doesn't work. And what we need to do is study what works and scale it, and we need to study what doesn't work and either discontinue it, or tweak it. So this big lab is working with nonprofit organizations across the country to do economic statistical studies on what is working and what is not. I can tell you when I was at the homeless center, I would have begged and borrowed and done everything I could you know, with an organization like this. This is a way a university can use its intellectual prowess to have a real impact on alleviating poverty and suffering in the country.
Sean: That's a great program. Sharing that ability of large institutions, and as you said, very successful institutions, to partner with organizations that are doing good work, but don't have the resources to examine that kind of impact is a great example. Sharing “How do you support, and how do you impact, change through Notre Dame?” is a great way to share that need for that continuing need for higher ed in today's landscape.
You talked a little bit about adaptability and you mentioned needing to be able to to stay on top of new things, what's something right now that you are just learning, or getting into but it scares you because you're just learning it, or you're not sure if you're good at it, but you realize it's going to be important for you and your professional growth?
Lou: Well you know, it's funny because with a large team now, I worked when I was the solo person and the development office, it wasn't even my full-time job, to now we have a team of 300 people and so it's been at both ends of the spectrum. But I was talking to people we appoint into leadership roles, and I've been trying to tell them to talk to our team, I don’t know that there's ever been a tougher time to be a leader. We have so many groups out there that are justifiably fighting for their just recognition, and equity, and so forth. We've got the Black Lives Matter group that's out there, we have the #MeToo movement, we have the the growing recognition and push for folks that are coming from LGBTQ backgrounds, we've got the Latino movement, we've got international and immigrant movements, we've got all of these groups and every time you make a decision as a leader these groups that are kind of fighting for their own, want to know “Why wasn't it somebody from my constituency?” “We're not represented enough.” and it can get to be difficult to try to get the appropriate representation at every level of leadership. And I think it's really important. I think this is good pressure. It's a good sense of restlessness first us all to be stretched. I think we all want to have a more, not only diverse workforce, but a more diverse leadership team. But I say to the team that first and foremost, I want to make sure that we hire leaders who are ego-sturdy enough that they can be other-centered. That they care more about the team that they're leading than they care about themselves. And whatever their background is, that to me is the primary criteria for being able to select the right type of leaders. Now you want to recruit and search aggressively and we want diversity amidst that, but we're not going to sacrifice that for getting the wrong kind of leader. So you've got to look hard and sometimes you don't make immediate hires if you're not ready, but this is a particular challenge in these times as a leader. And I'd say there's a lot of pressure on a lot of people to make sure that they're responding to all of these different constituencies for very just reasons and equitable reasons. We want to be more inclusive, but you got to get the right people at the same time.
Sean: How do you discern that? How do you identify that other-focus in candidates that you're bringing in, when they're all probably, on paper, very successful?
Lou: Yeah, it's a great question, and let me be really clear, however I discern it, I don't get it down to a hundred percent accuracy. I could tell you that much. This hiring process, you can get some people you go to hire than me think “oh my gosh, I can't believe we got this person they're going to be exceptional” and they turn out to be, good. And then there's some other people that you hire them and you're like, “I don't know, I think we should hire them but I'm not sure” and they turn out to be great. There’s a lot that you can do to predict, and we do testing of folks, we have them do some diagnostic and personality kind of tests. We also do very thorough referencing, not just from the people that they tell us to call but especially supervisors that they work with that maybe they didn't list as references, we want to hear from them all. We also do social media screens for them. We want to see before we’re going to bring somebody on our team, we partner with a third party, we want to see what people are putting out there. It’s all public information, you just have to look thoroughly and if we see that people are putting some stuff out there that is really off color, those are certainly yellow flags, if not red flags, for us. And then we interview. We interview thoroughly, aggressively, we have multiple people involved in those interviews, and before that we try to recruit aggressively and recruit a very diverse pool. It’s not just trying to post a job description and hire whoever surfaces to be the best at the top. And you’ve got to have the will to walk away if you don't feel like you've got somebody great. We want each hire to be like we're walking down the aisle getting married and we're pinching ourselves saying “I can't believe we're going to get this person” and that's got to be the threshold that you hold for each hire that you bring into your team.
Sean: That's a comprehensive search process. Lou, I know we're coming close to the end of our time here, one last question for you: what's next on your radar or Notre Dame's radar, either personally or professionally, what's got you most excited for the future?
Lou: You know, we just completed a seven year campaign.
Sean: So you can take a breath for a moment
Lou: Yeah, yes we take a breath. But we're trying to navigate, like everyone else out there, incredibly uncertain times and very challenging times. We don't know how long it will be, and how this is pandemic, and all the other unrest in the country, is going to play out. But the mission and vision is more important than ever. You want to make sure that you come back to it in good times and in bad. We're really blessed to have a place, and to have hired a team who are all really rooted in that mission and that vision. So we're going to keep to the basics. Two years before this campaign ended, so a little over two years ago, a group of myself and other leaders already started planning for the next campaign. We put our really audacious goal internally of what that goal would be. Basically to double the production of this campaign and again in a seven year time frame. So we've tried to work backwards, we put out that audacious goal and say “okay, if we're going to do that, what would a gift pyramid look like? What qualities would we need in the leadership? How big of a staff would we need? What innovative ideas would we need to pioneer to drive philanthropy? We started asking all of these questions, we met for about a half day every three weeks over the last couple of years, so long before we completed this campaign and we’d bring in members of our team to present on different topics, and to engage them in the process, and we started planning for this next one. It's trying to build all the fundamentals and be prepared to do something that'll be truly extraordinary.
The only way you can keep great talent is with a vision that is bold enough and with a community of people that they feel so grateful and inspired to be a part of, that they don't leave. If you don't have a really bold vision, if you are just trying to maintain excellence you're going to lose a lot of talent. If you do not set the bar higher, and help people to dream really big, you're not going to be able to retain or attract great talent.
Sean: Well, I think that's the perfect place for us to wrap up, Lou. I think that's the thing that you've been able to do at Notre Dame. Congratulations, I thank you so much for sharing your perspectives on leadership and communication, both internal and external, with our listeners. I'm tremendously excited to know that Notre Dame is continuing with those those truly bold goals and I think that they've got some great leadership there to get them there.
Lou: You’re far too kind Sean and generous, but I want you to know I'm not inhaling here for a second. So again, we're gonna stay hungry, humble, and hopeful and we try to make sure all the time that we don't take credit for other people's generosity. We want to make sure that it's not about us, it's about the cause. We're stewards of a mission greater than all of us. I know that you understand that to the core. If we keep humble and grounded everything's gonna work out just fine.
Sean: I'm excited.
Thanks for tuning into this week's show. I hope you enjoyed our conversation with Lou and found value in his reflections on leadership, staying humble, hungry, and hopeful, and the way he shares Notre Dame's mission. Again when you cap off a $5.3 billion dollar campaign, you’re doing a lot of things right. Lou deserves a lot of credit for guiding that work and building the team that achieved that level of success.
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