Greetings from the National Archives. I'm David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to today's virtual author lecture with Jonathan Petropoulos, author of Gehring's Man in Paris. As German troops marched across Europe during World War II, the Nazis not only annexed more land for the Reich, but also systematically stole thousands of artworks from individuals and cultural institutions. Weiss, Marshall, Hermann Gehring, hungrily acquired a large collection for his own aggrandizement. Efforts to identify track down and return stolen artworks has continued for decades after the war, and the search often leads to the US National Archives. Our records are used to determine the extent of Nazi looting of gold to identify dormant bank accounts and to investigate confiscated works of art in attempts to recover them. Today's guest author brings us the story of Gehring's agent in Paris, Bruno Losa, who helped supervise the systematic theft and distribution of more than 30,000 artworks, mainly from French Jews, and helped to build Gehring's massive private collection. Jonathan Petropoulos is the John V. Krull Professor of European History at Claremont McKenna College in California. He began working on the subject of Nazi art looting and restitution in 1983, and his books include Art as Politics in the Third Reich, The Faustian Bargain, Royals and the Reich and Artists under Hitler. From 1998 to 2000, he served as Research Director for Art and Cultural Property on the Presidential Commission on Holocaust Assets in the United States, where he helped draft the report Restitution and Plunder the US and Holocaust Victims Assets. Petropoulos has also served as an expert witness in a number of cases where Holocaust victims have tried to recover lost artworks. Now let's hear from Jonathan Petropoulos. Thank you for joining us today. Greetings from Yale University, where I am spending spring 2021 on sabbatical. I'm affiliated with the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, and I would thank my host or for their hospitality of this semester. I'm delighted to be here to talk about my most recent book, Green's Man in Paris, and let me share the screen on that. And this current slide. So yeah, so this is my fifth monograph, and very much grows out of my earlier work. I would mention that it's such an honor to speak in conjunction with the National Archives and Record Administration. I spend a great deal of time at NARA, especially NARA II out in College Park. When I worked for the Presidential Commission on Holocaust Assets in the United States, we had an office in College Park, and we spent months, years there working, and I got to know much of the staff, so I'm very grateful to Greg Bradshaw and Michael Kurtz and many of the other archivists there. I remember Michael, excuse me, Greg Bradshaw had testified in one of the commission meetings that in NARA, there were something in the order of 35 million pages of documents in NARA related to Holocaust-era assets. Clearly, it's a treasure trove of material, and I could not have written Green's Man in Paris without NARA II. So I had been working on the subject of Nazi art plundering for almost 40 years now. I began it back in 1983 as a graduate student, and I was drawn to the topic for two reasons. One was more pragmatic. There was no scholarly academic study of Nazi art luding. There were memoirs and journalistic accounts, but not academic works, but more importantly, it engaged really important interesting issues to me about the nexus of culture and barbarism. I had been reading the work of literary scholar George Steiner on the subject, and I thought this was something that I wanted to explore about how the intelligentsia could contribute to the genocide and what happened to intellectuals during the Holocaust and the role of art in this tragedy, too. So I began mining this vein, and my dissertation appeared as a first book artist politics in the Third Reich, and it focused on the Nazi leaders involved in the culture, starting with Adolf Hitler. But I reconstructed collections for about a dozen Nazi leaders, including Hermann Göring, and subsequent to that book, there have been remarkable studies on these collections. For example, with Hermann Göring, Nancy Jaide, a curator at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., she's written an extraordinary work, a catalog raisonne of the Göring collection, and we now have a better understanding of what kind of art he collected. It was a larger collection than previously thought. But what I was able to do in my book was to analyze this behavior, and I looked at their engagement with art in terms of ideology. I looked at it in terms of sociology. The Nazi leaders often used artworks instrumentally, and here it was a kind of stage prop as they bought grand houses and tried to integrate with a traditional feudal elite. I looked at the behavior more anthropologically. There was a culture of gift giving and the gifts were very expressive, and one could learn a great deal about someone's stature or fortunes by the gifts that they received. That project morphed and led to the second book, Faustian Bargain, because I was interested in the actual hands-on art plunders. Most of them had been intellectuals, academics, art historians, art dealers, museum officials, and I wanted to better understand their role in implementing the Nazi leaders' plundering program. I apologize for the next slide, it's disturbing, but I wanted to point out that this project of looking at the second rank was common in the field of German history, Holocaust studies in the late 80s and early 90s. This photograph, which the Nazis titled The Last Jew in Venetza, has been studied by scholars and they found that it was not just SS officers in the background, but there's uniforms from a number of other units, from Hitler Youth to German labor front, and we're just getting a better sense of the second rank figures and the perpetrators, if you will, and so I try to do that with the art plunders. And for example, one figure I wrote about, I focused on, was Cajetan Müllmann, who's arguably the greatest art dealer in history. Müllmann was an Austrian and he plundered in Vienna after the Anschluss in 1938, and from there he moved to Poland, where we see him in this photo of General Governor Hans Frang, and he in his unit plundered there, and then he went on to the Netherlands, where he plundered under Arthur Seisinkwart, right? And Müllmann continued to produce tones on art history with his Nazi and his SS credentials there. Müllmann and his team, they stole masterpieces, that's the right word, this is the Chartresky Raphael from Krakow. This painting is still missing, arguably the most sought after of the missing works from World War II, but Müllmann and his team took, not just these extraordinary artworks, but ordinary quotidian objects as well. They took, I guess one could say everything, but the kitchen sink, and I think it's really important to keep in mind that art looting and the Holocaust are inextricably linked, that the Nazis, as part of the dehumanization of their victims, first robbed them, right? They took their property and their cultural property, and again, art looting is so linked to the Holocaust or you look at the plundering actually taking place and the way objects were brought back to Germany and sold at official auctions, right? And the crowds that were there buying this Jewish property, there was so much Jewish property flowing into Germany, there were these wild auctions, right? And this is in Hanau, near Frankfurt, and just popping up out of the street corners. The historian Frank Bayor has studied Hamburg and he found that basically during World War II, there was an auction of Jewish property almost every day in Hamburg, and he estimates that over 100,000 Hamburg citizens bought looted Jewish property, right? So it's so pervasive and it has real implications in terms of big questions, who knew what, right? And again, it's part of this process of dehumanization of making your victims impoverished and starving them to death, and then they start to conform, at least in appearance, to the Nazi racial hierarchies, right? So I think Punder was an important station on the famous The Twisted Road to Auschwitz and I would make that link. Well, with Mühlemann, I tracked him as best I could. Every photo I could find, every document, he's at a speech with Goebbels and there's Mühlemann over here. But what I ended up with was just a partial picture. In many ways, this image is a metaphor for what I was able to do in Faustian bargain. It's from Mühlemann's SS file. You can see it's been burned and water damaged. The record has gone through a lot, but it's own partial record, right? And I feel like I had a picture of what they did, but there were still huge gaps missing. And I think it's striking that in Faustian bargain, there's no chapter about any individual that's longer than 30, 35 pages, right? I just didn't have more information at that time. I knew that Mühlemann had been captured by the Americans, that he was interrogated by them, that he escaped in 1947, but I had no idea really what happened to him. And I started a methodology that I would apply in Gurian's man, right? One tactic I used, you can see here, was to go to cemeteries and see if I could find last resting places for these individuals, just to figure out when they died. And I had my Nazi hunting dog there of Isla helping me. I did find Mühlemann. He was a cemetery in Salzburg. And if you can make out there, he died in 1958. With that information, I was able to find his widow and she lived in Austria, the Austrian Alps, and I went to visit her. She had just shut the door when I took this picture. She would not let me take photos of her, but I had asked her if she had images of her husband. She said had died in 1958, so I knew as well from that too. She said, yeah, in the attic they had photos and so I climbed up there and I found some photos of Mühlemann who was a fugitive. He had been an illegal Nazi in Austria in the 1930s and he had come back clandestinely to see his family. And so I found a little bit more, but that made me realize that this was an opportunity to find the old Nazis and their widows and their spouses and their children that this could be really useful. And I went on to visit with a film hotel, for example. He had been an SS general in Budapest in Hungary late in the war working alongside Adolf Eichmann as they attempted to exterminate the Hungarian Jewish population. And the hotel had played a key role in dispossessing Hungarian Jews and the so-called Hungarian gold train with valuables that came out of it. So I interviewed him on a couple of occasions at his home in Altause and it was very useful, especially for writing Faustian bargain. And I also was at this time that I found Bruno Loza thanks to a tip from Anne Weber. She was in a filmmaker. She's now the co-chair for the commission on Lutard in Europe. And she said that Loza was alive and well in Munich and I could look him up in the phone book. So I did. And I wrote to him and he agreed to meet with me. And this was the first of many meetings over the course of nine years prior to his death in 2007. And I would estimate that I met Loza about 30 times. And while that may seem like a lot of meetings, I thought it was necessary. I found it was necessary because he wasn't gonna tell me his secrets on the first meeting, right? When I had to develop a relationship and ask questions repeatedly and then triangulate. And then I was able to discern more about his life and other issues regarding Nazi-illuded art. I would mention that the archival basis for this project also changed since 2000 when I finished Faustian Bargain. I had been agitating, that's the right word, for museums to open files. In this case, the curatorial files that are in museums. And certain archives did open up that were really important and useful. The archives for military justice in Leblanc near LeMotion, France, they had been closed till 2016. Because Loza went through a trial before a French military tribunal, the trial records were incredibly important. It was not much of an archive in many respects. It was on a military base, but it was a gold mine. I was the only one working in there for the week I was there. Or the Swiss Federal Archives in Bern, right? They're also a treasure house. And those files have not been fully exploited. So the archival basis also grew and that allowed me to write this book. So who was Loza, and why is he important? Well, Loza was an art dealer in Berlin in the 1930s. He had received his PhD in art history in the mid-30s with a dissertation on Jakob Philipp Haakert, an 18th century German painter. He was not a particularly distinguished dissertation. An academic career was really not open to him. So he went into art dealing. He was also a member of the SS. He had joined the SS shortly after the seizure of power. And he remained in the SS throughout the Third Reich. And so those were two key elements. Loza had fought in Poland in the fall of 1939. And by 1941, and he was still in the East, he was in East Prussia. He had been injured and he had recuperated. He was still with his unit in the East. He was preparing along with this unit to go into the Soviet Union with Operation Barbarossa. And he received a letter inviting him to transfer to Paris where he would assist the Reichs-Marshal Hermann Göring in the Göring's pursuit of artworks. And so Loza went to Paris on a trial basis, trying to decide what he was going to do. At least that's what he claimed after the war. And he realized that Göring was trying to create a great collection. And I think Loza found that to be quite interesting. He also met Göring. And it's clear that the two men developed rapport. They had a chemistry. Loza was very self-confident. And it was PhD in art history. He would prepare for the meetings with Göring and study up. And he did very well in these presentations. And Göring liked him. And so Loza decided to stay. I think it was an easy decision in terms of the alternative going to fight in Russia. And Loza was assigned to the Nazi plundering operation in Paris, headquartered in the Judo Palm. It's called the ERR, short for Einsatzdauer Reichsler Rosenberg. And Göring paid 20 visits to the ERR headquarters in the Judo Palm. Loza was there for 19 and would organize these exhibitions. And Göring would decide what he wanted to acquire. A value was ascribed to each artwork, even though Göring never transferred any money. No payment was ever rendered. But they had this charade as if Göring was buying these works. And Loza assisted him in this way. Now, when Loza died in 2007, he left his private photos. And many have come to me in my possession. And so I was able to get an up close and personal glimpse of the life of an art plunder in Paris. And one gets a sense of how grand his existence was. This is a banquet for the ERR. And we can see there's wine and there's salmon, the next image here too, the silver. In short, it was a very good war for Loza. And that's what the photos reflect. He's out at restaurants with colleagues. There are a number of them with different women. He obviously had girlfriends there, even if he seems to be in this photo putting the antenna into her nose. That might say something about him and the way he has saved his misogyny. I think both adjectives are actually justified. This image survived as well. Loza in an SS sweater with two women on the bed. It's a very strange image. It's posed with the comrade on the phone. Part of a certain genre of wartime photography of occupiers and their lives there. I talk about it in the book. Really, you get a sense of what it was like for Loza to be in Paris and to be Gurian's man there. Here they're looking at two paintings by only Matisse and Loza and the others are laughing at them. These were too modern for Gurian's taste. Although he did like some modern art impressionists and even worked by Van Gogh, but Matisse with the colors was too much. So I think Gurian is passing on that as he holds a Dutch landscape in his hand. But this is an important picture because it reflected an important opportunity for Bruno Loza. The modern works were sequestered in the so-called room of martyrs, but they were fodder for trade, for exchange, right? And Loza was involved in these exchanges. Many works going to Switzerland. And I believe that Loza was able to embezzle, to abscond with certain works from the ER cash. And this was the basis for his post-war business, his post-war wealth. It's speculative, we can't prove this, but it seems to be the case. There's no doubt that Loza was wheeling and dealing while at the ERR in Paris, right? And again, the images give us a sense of the punders on the ground, right? And sometimes a seemingly innocuous photo is so poignant when you see all these frames, all these pictures stacked up, you get a sense of the scale, right? The ERR in Paris stole over 30,000 artworks from French Jews there. Now, Loza was not unopposed, if one could say. He had a nemesis, and that was Rose Vallande, who was a French curator, who was allowed to stay in the Chateau Palme. And Rose Vallande pretended she didn't speak any German. Loza was fluent in French, conversed with her in French, but in fact, she was a spy. She was keeping tabs on Loza and the others in the ER, and sending reports to French museum authorities about what was happening there. Later on, Rose Vallande became a Monuments Officer. The phrase Monuments Men is inactive because there were women Monuments Officers too. And she was positively heroic in her efforts on behalf of France's cultural patrimony.  It's actually rather amusing because you see the Loza figure and the Gering characters rendered as cartoons, if you will. And yeah, so for the French, they know Rose Vallande. Another fact that I find fascinating concerns, Max Beckman, who is probably my favorite artist, and the German master, he painted Loza in one of his paintings, a painting titled Dream of Monte Carlo from 1943. It features both Loza, here's a croupier, and Erhard Goepel, who is another art plunder, and a friend of Max Beckman. Goepel was bringing food and letters and artistic supplies to Max Beckman in Amsterdam during the German occupation during the war. And Goepel was also an agent for Adolf Hitler and a sense of rival of Loza, who's collecting for Gering. And Beckman painted the two of them as croupiers with swords with these knights behind them, these dark knights and bombs, they look like terrorists. And we're still trying to figure out the picture, blood on the hands here. Other figures we've been able to identify, this is Pierre Bonny, who was head of the Bonny Lafont gang, a criminal gang that collaborated with the French Gestapo, right? And Loza used Pierre Bonny and some of his raids there, too. So I think it's rather extraordinary that Max Beckman rendered Loza perhaps not, you know, complete surprise in that Max Beckman was dealing with the themes of culture and barbarism and Loza was appropriate in that way, but I think still rather extraordinary. So once Paris was liberated by the Allies in August 1944, Loza returned to Germany. And more specifically, he spent time at Neusch-Fonstein. The castle was one of the major repositories for the ERR, in fact, the major repository, with over 21,000 artistic objects stationed there. So Loza was helping safeguard the plunder at Neusch-Fonstein. He also helped protect the so-called card catalog. And these were the records of the ERR that linked each object to its previous owner. And the card catalog was indispensable for restitution. And Loza helped preserve both the art at Neusch-Fonstein and the card catalog. There were rogue elements of the SS that were interested in destroying this, not letting these things fall into the hands of the enemy. And Loza had to deal with some of those SS units, and he did well to keep them at bay. Loza was arrested on May the 4th, sitting on the wall of this convent right here, reading a book in French about Jeune Arc. He was arrested by this individual, James Rormer, and Rormer went on to become the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And in the movie Monuments Men, he's played by the Matt Damon character. And Rormer himself was a very interesting figure, the first Jewish director of the Met as well. So he was the one who arrested Loza. He, Loza was transferred to an OSS, an office of strategic services unit in Altausé. And the art-looting investigation unit of the OSS, they interviewed over the summer of 1945 about a dozen of the top Nazi art plunders, obviously Loza included. And a key member of this art-looting investigation unit was Ted Rousseau, theater Rousseau, who went on to be a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Well, Loza made a rather good impression on Rousseau and the others, and they were undecided in their initial verdicts and recommendations from the fall of 1945. They thought he deserved further scrutiny. The Americans ended up handing him over to the French who put him on trial in 1950. So Loza was in a French jail for about three and a half years, and he served one of the longer prison sentences for a Nazi art plunder. Rousseau and the other OSS officers tried to help Loza. They felt that he was still in prison when other plunders had gotten away, and he had made a good impression. And they wrote to their French counterparts asking for leniency and understanding that French didn't receive this intervention well, but we don't know how it played into their decision. Rather extraordinarily, Loza was acquitted in 1950. And this is the document he kept in his papers until he died, right? The 4th of August, 1950, he is exonerated, and this allowed him to go back into business in the 1950s. And he moved to Munich, as many in our world did. And in the later 50s, he bought this apartment in Bogenhausen, a very elegant neighborhood in Bogenhausen, and Loza had the top floor here. It was a fairly modest residence considering his wealth, considering the paintings he had in his possession. He could have afforded a villa on Lake Sternberg, for example, but I think he chose to live a more modest life to fly under the radar, if you will. And this apartment was part of that strategy. But Loza still pops up in the 50s and 60s. You know, we see him offering a painting by Murillo for 1.5 million Deutsch marks there. We see records from another art dealer, Julius Buller, and we can see some acquisitions, 53, 57, $20,000, 12,000 Deutsch marks there. Loza was part of a network centered in Munich. And, well, he's part of several networks. There's just not one network. There's multiple networks that overlap. And the network of old Nazi art plunders was at its core and included people like Walter Andreas Hofer, who had been the director of Göring's art collection. This was the position that Loza had aspired to, to be the director of the collection. Hofer, by 1966, is advertising in German art magazines like Die Welt Kunst.  He lived in this apartment, this beautiful apartment, right on the English Garden. He had the upper floor.  Loza and those in the know called the Brown House. The Nazi partner headquarters in Munich which had been called the Brown House, right? But Haberstock had also been a Berlin dealer, much more successful than Loza. And he relocated to Munich and had his elegant apartment on the English Garden. Haberstock had profited greatly from his sales to Nazi leaders and amassed his own collection. He put it on loan for his hometown of Augsburg in Bavaria, and eventually gave it to Bavaria, to the Augsburg Museum.  There's a Karl Haberstock, Strasse in Augsburg, which is extraordinary because, you know, he was an art plunder. He was the major dealer for Hitler in the first half of the war. And, you know, to have the street named after him. Yeah, it's problematic. So, you know, this was the world in which the Gurbits operated too. Many of you will have heard of Hildebron Gourlet, another art dealer, and his wife and children who inherited the cash of about 1,500 pictures. And those were discovered in 2012, 11, 12 when the story came out. And they were valued at over a billion dollars in artworks. Hildebron Gourlet had died in 1956. So he wasn't there for the whole history, you know, the revival of the art world. But his wife and sons sold pictures off that were part of these networks, right? With Loza, it's interesting the networks extend all the way to the United States. And even though Loza was prohibited from entering the US, here we see him on the list, here Loza Bruno, doctor, chief assistant of Rosenberg Luttingen Office, they didn't have computers back then. They didn't have effective mechanisms to screen, you know, people on the war criminals trying to come into the country. So Loza was able to come in. And as soon as he got out of prison, one of the first people he had written was Theodore Rousseau at the Met, and said, there are works I want to show you. I'm sure there are things you'll be interested in. And Rousseau's papers became available a few years ago. They're in the archives of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And I was astonished to see these correspondence. I mean, first, how close they were the correspondence last decades. I was also surprised that Rousseau did not destroy any of these records. It seemed to be a rather problematic, embarrassing correspondence. To his credit, he kept the letters. But what do we see? We see Rousseau reaching out to Loza on Rousseau's trips to Europe. He would go on buying expeditions almost every summer. And he would check in with Loza regularly. And I have Rousseau and Loza meeting not just in Munich, but in Paris and in Switzerland. It seems very interesting, right? They didn't render much of what they were doing in writing. I was able to identify 35 works that Loza offered to Rousseau. Loza would write in German. And they're extraordinary works by Botticelli and Cézanne and others. But I have not been able to prove that Loza sold to the Met. But there may be a reason for that. He may not have sold directly to the Met. There may have been an intermediary. We're still trying to ascertain that. But it's clear that Loza was coming to the Met. And by 1961, he's just dropping in on his friend Rousseau, leaving his card and saying, I'll come back. And again, it's extraordinary that Rousseau was meeting with Loza. Rousseau knew about Nazi art plundering. He knew who Loza was. The issue of Nazi art plundering was still in the press. This is from the front page of the New York Times in 1964. So there's no ignorance in part of the Rousseau. Rather, he was just ambitious. He wanted to create the best collection of European paintings in the Met that was possible. And he was a risk taker. He was a swashbuckling curator. And whether that meant flouting European export laws, which he did sometimes, or dealing with old Nazi plunders, this was the way that Rousseau pursued artworks. Loza himself was transformed. He was no longer the malnourished, frightened war criminal who emerged from France. He had a certain presence, charisma even too. And when he came to New York, he arrived. He traveled in style. He would stay in the best hotels in the city, the Samurits. And he put on a show that he was a successful European art dealer. And so I met Loza in 1998 in these interviews as we tried to figure out what he was doing. And it was a process. At the center of our discussion for many years was this painting by Camille Passaro, called the Fisher Passaro. It's one of the last works done by the French impressionist artist who was Jewish. Done from the room where he died. And the picture had disappeared during the war. It had been looted from the Fisher family, the famous publishing family. And we didn't know what had happened. But it had been exhibited in 1984 in Switzerland in Lausanne. And the lender was discovered was Fondation Bruno, the Bruno Foundation. And so representatives of the Art Lost Register approached me and asked if I would inquire with Loza about his knowledge of this picture. And Loza said he had never seen it. He had never heard of it. But I continued asking him, the point where he referred to it as the damn Passaro picture. Are you going to ask me about that? That's for Dap de Passaro build one more time? And I did. And eventually Peter Griebert, the dealer shown before this slide, Griebert, he came to me with this letter. And it's a receipt, actually. And it says that Loza has sold the Passaro for $10,000 US. And Loza has received a commission of $1,500. So I realized Loza was lying. He had something to do with it. I was allowed to inspect the painting. And so I traveled to Zurich. And I saw the painting in the Zurich Cantonal Bank. We looked at it in a conference room. And we examined it to make sure it was the right painting to look at the condition. This was in early 2007. Loza died in March 2007. And upon his death, the story of his bank fault in the Zurich Cantonal Bank came out and attracted a lot of press. There were 14 masterpieces here, they say, in the bank fault, including works by Renoir and Monet, among others. And so this was really a question of what was Loza about and how many other looted works that he have. Well, as part of this process of figuring out the trail of the history of the Fischer Passaro, I ended up in Lichtenstein, which is a kind of appendage to Switzerland, but clearly autonomous there in the Rhine Valley. It has a population of about 35,000 people. And there are more foundations registered than there are residents in Lichtenstein. And I was taken to this foundation. It was called the Schönauer Foundation. And the idea was that Frederick Schöne, this lawyer who was never seen before, he had bought the picture and his children had the pictures. That's what I was told by all involved. That turned out not to be the case. It turned out that the Schönauer Foundation, the Schönauer Anstalt, was owned by Loza. I didn't know that at the time. I was lied to rather systematically about that. But through this whole process, I came to understand how Lichtenstein, with his foundations, played a role and helped Loza evade taxes and park his money. And I learned that this Frederick Schöne was a very important person in Loza's life and in the art world more generally. So ultimately, the Fischer Passaro was restituted and the heirs sold it off. But I kept going with my research, of course. And one thing that had come to light was Loza's relationship with the Wildensteins. Now, the Wildensteins are arguably the greatest art dealers of the second half of the 20th century. I think that honor goes to the Duvenes for the first half of the 20th century. But they had extraordinary holdings. And they were a French-American family. They have a ranch in Kenya. There's a lot of tabloid fair surrounding them. Plastic surgery gone wrong. And expensive divorces and what have you. But the fact remains, they are powerful. They have tremendous holdings. Artworks valued in the billions of dollars. They're known to keep paintings and their vaults for generations. And they decide when something comes on the market, right? And so it was rather extraordinary to find that Loza was in their orbit. And one clue concerned Frederick Schöne because it was clear from documents in Nara that the Wildensteins up here were shipping huge quantities of art to the United States in the 1950s, 60s, through Switzerland, right? And we see this image here from the U.S. State Department, right? The Wildensteins of 54 bringing in three Gogan's, two Cézanne's, a Monet, and who's doing it? Frederick Schöne, right? So that was a link. Loza's personal lawyer, the person who organized this foundation in Liechtenstein who gave him his name for Loza's foundation, who controlled Loza's money. Loza would go down there and get cash from Schöne. He was the Wildensteins' lawyer in Switzerland, right?  So this was part of the connection here, right? There's other evidence such as this letter from Alec Wildenstein, part of the Wildenstein dynasty. I have known Bruno for more than 60 years and he was always a good friend. This is the time of Loza's death in 2007.  So I explore that relationship and why it might have been. But just briefly, the Wildensteins, even though they, you know, the key members of the family, the patriarch George Wildenstein got out of France in 1941 and came to the United States. There are reports, unproven, unverified, that he was still able to control things in France and communicate with agents and other representatives in France. And that he was, and the family were active during the war in France. This is the allegation. And who would have known about what the Wildensteins did during the war? Loza, right? He was the king of Paris, if you will. And so one possible explanation is the Loza, the Wildensteins viewed Loza as a threat that he had incriminating information about them. And it's best to keep the threats close to you, right? So that's a possibility. We're still trying to figure out more about this relationship. You know, with Loza, he tried to conceal his traces as someone pointed out to me. The only time he kept a receipt was to conceal something, to mislead. You know, he generally preferred handshake deals and cash transactions. And when he sold works, he apparently used intermediaries, right? A cutout. We know that Loza sold these two works to the German Historical Museum, but he used an intermediary, Peter Griebert, his partner to do that, to approach the German Historical Museum. So Loza made efforts to conceal his activities, and I've made it my project to, you know, to combat that effort at concealment. And so I feel like I've been able to write a more textured and nuanced treatment of Loza than, you know, it's been possible with any other art plunderer before. There's no doubt that Loza took his secrets to the grave, many secrets to the grave, but it's been my endeavor to counteract that effort. So I just wanna say in closing that, you know, this story is not just about one person. It's not even about the networks of dealers and museum officials who interacted with Loza during the war and after the war. I think it has broader implications, right? About intellectuals and culture and its relationship to barbarism, right? Germany was arguably the most advanced nation in the world culturally in the 1930s and they descended into this barbarism. And so when one sees, you know, an orchestra at Auschwitz playing Bach and Beethoven, it raises similar kinds of questions about culture and barbarism. So that's my account of my book on Bruno Loza, Green's Man in Paris. I hope that people enjoy it. So thank you for your attention.


Hello, everyone, and thanks so much for joining me today for our webinar on the five best ways to spend your fundraising budget. This is actually our first webinar of 2021, so I'm very excited about that. My name is Linda Gerhardt, and I'm a community engagement manager here at Mighty Cause. I've been with the company since 2016. And before coming to work for Mighty Cause, I spent most of my career in the nonprofit sector. I've worked for one of the largest nonprofits in the country, and I've also worked for very small local nonprofits. So I hope I can marry those two perspectives together here today and talk about nonprofit spending in a way that's useful in eye-opening to smaller nonprofits. Here is a look at today's agenda. We're going to try our best to keep things to 30 minutes and leave some time for questions at the end of the webinar. We are recording this, so you will have access to both the recording and the slides. And if you have a question while I'm presenting, just type that into the questions box of your GoToWebinar panel, and we'll make time for it at the end of the presentation. All right, I hope you guys can see my screen now. I'm so sorry about that. All right, so I apologize, GoToWebinar played a mean trick on me. So that was what you missed, my introduction slide and the title slide. So thanks for letting me know in the questions. All right, so before we dive in, I wanted to take a step back and talk big picture about nonprofit budgets and spending and how to decide how to use what budget you have. So when you're talking about spending, there are some key things you'll want to keep in mind and use to evaluate where your fundraising budget is best spent. First is return on your investment. So a particular tool or service pay for itself. How long will that take? Some tools pay for themselves pretty quickly with the money that they bring in, and some may be a longer term investment. So you'll just want to work to understand the cost versus the potential return when making decisions about spending. The second thing you'll want to consider is efficiency, which hits on a couple of different things on the most basic level. Is the tool itself efficient and does it work? How you want it to work? How hard or easy is it for you to use? And how long will it take to implement the tool and master it? And on a higher level, does this tool or service actually make your operations more efficient? There are certainly tools like the ones we'll talk about in just a minute that are very easy and simple to implement and easy to use, but can actually hinder your operations. And finally, you'll want to think about growth. And by that, what I mean is looking to the future and considering whether a particular tool or service will continue to work for you as you grow and if it's built to support your growth. Is there an upper limit or a threshold that you can identify where this won't work for you and you'll have to transition to something else? That's a theme we're going to revisit a lot today. So these are kind of the key things you'll want to think of, and we're going to get into more specifics as we go on. But before we do that, I want to pull back and talk about the relationship between spending and growth, because especially for nonprofits that have smaller budgets, you can sort of focus on the dollars and cents and ignore growth. So when you're thinking about spending and growth, you'll want to think about a few specific things. Sustainability is an important thing to consider, not only the sustainability or the tool or area of the tool or the area of spending itself, but how well it supports building sustainable funding that will allow your organization, your programs and your services to grow and allow you to innovate and expand. And on that note, when you're thinking about spending, you'll want to consider growth. Are you investing in tools in areas that will encourage your nonprofits growth and actually grow with you? And finally, you'll want to think about value, which you may need to reframe if you're working for a smaller nonprofit that has to pinch pennies. Value does not translate to this is the cheapest I can get for this particular thing. But what you get in return in relation to what you spend. So a free tool you can use for fundraising, for instance, might seem the most valuable, but you might get more value from investing a little bit more money in a tool that costs you a bit more, but provides more control and flexibility and can support you as your nonprofit grows and changes. And before we move on, there's a really great TED Talk from 2013 from a man named Dan Pelota. You may have already seen this one if you've been in the game for a while. And it really dives deep into the austerity mindset that a lot of nonprofits have when it comes to investing in fundraising. If you're from the school of nonprofits that wants to reduce overhead, it all costs and dreads questions about how much money is used on things like fundraising. This is really a fantastic watch. The whole video is about 18 minutes or so. And I'm just going to show a clip of it to you. That's very relevant to the things we'll be talking about today. So hopefully the audio for this works OK. The third area of discrimination is the taking of risk in pursuit of new ideas for generating revenue. So Disney can make a new $200 million movie that flops and nobody calls the attorney general. But you do a little $1 million community fundraiser for the poor and it doesn't produce a 75% profit to the cause in the first 12 months and your character's called into question. So nonprofits are really reluctant to attempt any brave, daring, giant-scale new fundraising endeavors for fear that if the thing fails, their reputations will be dragged through the month.  If you kill innovation and fundraising, you can't raise more revenue. If you can't raise more revenue, you can't grow. And if you can't grow, you can't possibly solve large social problems. So that's just a taste of the video. Hopefully you got the audio OK. But if you're interested in watching the whole thing, the video is called The Way We Think About Charity Is Dead Wrong. It was something that was passed around a lot when I was working at a nonprofit in 2013. And it's just a really great way to reframe what you think about spending for your nonprofit. And it can also be a really great tool if you need to make a case to your board about expanding the budget for fundraising. All right, so the first area where it's important to invest is donation processing, which is obviously key because it's the foundation of fundraising. Donation processing is vitally important because it's something your donors see and use. And it's the thing that they see and use during the most critical moment as donors, which is completing a donation. And if you have a clunky or inconvenient or hard to use donation processing tool, you might actually lose donors. You're actually highly likely to specifically when they're inside that clunky tool. That's where most donors, if they leave the process, that's where they leave. And obviously, this is just the foundation upon which your entire fundraising program is built because if donors can't make donations, you can't fundraise. And if you can't fundraise, then you're going to find it very, very hard to run your programs and offer services. So it's really kind of at the core of a good fundraising program. And the important thing to understand here is that not all donation processing is the same. So this is more complex in terms of how the payments actually work than I'm able to get into here and or actually understand in some circumstances. But here are the two basic options available to nonprofits. The first is a single-use tool, which is a tool that processes payments. And that's it. Paypal is a single-use tool. So is Venmo. So is Stripe. Those are tools that I've all I've seen nonprofits use in my time here at Mighty Cause, so they are used by nonprofits. Usually what you get is a donation button or a widget, or in some cases, your donors may actually need to go off of your website to complete the transaction. These tools can be really appealing to small nonprofits, especially because they don't require a contract or a financial commitment beyond just paying fees that are associated with each transaction. And they're usually scaled to the size of the transaction. So bigger transactions will cost a little bit more because it's a percentage and smaller transactions won't cost that much.  Platforms like Mighty Cause, Classy Network for Good and so on are full fundraising platforms where donation processing is one of the things they offer. But they also provide a suite of fundraising tools that you can use to bolster your fundraising. Like single-use tools, they offer buttons, buttons and widgets, typically, but you'll also get things like forms, text to give and more advanced options and flexibility for how you want to collect donations and changing your donation processing for wherever you're collecting them. And usually platforms have a recurring fee associated with a subscription, sometimes platform fees that take a percentage of each donation to help pay for the service is pretty typical. But in general, this space is moving toward a subscription model. And some companies actually have a hybrid where they offer affordable subscriptions and then they supplement that with a small platform fee. So there's a lot to consider with donation processing. The biggest one is data. What do you have access to and can you get what you need from those transactions that are coming in? And this is a huge one. We're going to revisit this a lot, but can donors set up recurring donations? Recurring donors provide a stable, productive, predictable income. And the most successful nonprofits are built on the backs of donors who give on a monthly basis. So that's really important to consider is whether a donor can set up a recurring donation. And do you have control over the donation process? What are the payment options and do they meet the donor's needs? So, for instance, some donors may not be able to use an American Express card with some donation processors because as a company, American Express has higher fees. Now, most donation processors just sort of adjust their fee to account for that. But there are some out there that don't accept AMEX. Can they pay with things like Apple Pay? Do they have a CH payments available for larger donations? And it's also important to think about their customer support. Can you call them and ask them a question? Do they outsource their support? And then is the tool easy to use both for your organization and for your donors? And finally, an important question I think everyone should ask when evaluating donation processors is if my nonprofit doubled in size tomorrow, would this tool still work for me? If the answer is no, that's likely a clue that perhaps this donation processor is not something that's going to be able to grow with you and is more of a temporary solution. So, obviously, I'm a little bit biased here, but I highly recommend that all nonprofits, even small ones, use a platform and a fundraising suite unless there's some reason why that's completely out of reach for your nonprofit. They offer more than just payment processing. Though most of them do offer more that very capably as well. So they're often the best in the market at providing donation processing, but they offer you more. And they offer you different ways to collect donations from forms and widgets and buttons to more complex solutions like text to give and campaign pages. They are built to support growth because they're built to serve nonprofits and they're not a static tool and they're not just serving. They're not serving nonprofits and e-commerce. They do one thing very well and they have a vested interest in your ability to grow and raise more money. And the more room you have for customization and making your donation process work for your organization, then say a PayPal button. That's better for your nonprofit because you don't you aren't beholden to another brand, another company. You're able to customize it to a process that works for you. So, again, I'm biased and I work for Mighty Cause. So I think that Mighty Cause is the best. And we do actually have a subscription service called Advanced that offers a lot of the things we're talking about here like custom donation forms, text to give, branding options, priority customer support, which is a big one and robust donation reporting. So if you're looking to upgrade your donation processor, if you've been using a PayPal button or something like that, it may be time to give Mighty Cause Advanced to try.  So the next area you want to consider investing in is donor records. So I've been working with nonprofits at Mighty Cause for just about five years at this point, and I've seen a lot of nonprofits that use manual donor tracking systems and have seen a whole lot of spreadsheet situations happening. And I totally understand why nonprofits end up with these systems, but they do have some issues. The first thing is sustainability. If you just track your donors on a big spreadsheet, that's a fantastic system if you have like 100 donors and 100 lines. But if your nonprofit gets to the point, and I sincerely hope you do, where you have hundreds and even thousands of donors and lines on that spreadsheet, it's not going to work. Your spreadsheet is going to be a mess. These systems also add a lot of administrative burden. Having a volunteer that is maintaining a spreadsheet, may be quote-unquote free in terms of money you're spending on a CRM, but you pay in time and effort and frustration instead of dollars. And lastly, we have disorganization, which is really ultimately what makes these systems unsustainable. Manual donor tracking can be really confusing. And since it's humans doing all the data entry, there's a lot of room for human error. Like I'm one of those people, I've probably been one of those people I probably will make a mistake. So it's in my best interest to not be doing all of the work myself, because I'm not a computer. And what makes sense to the person who set up your spreadsheet and your system or whatever you're using, it maybe makes sense to them, but it's very hard to onboard staff or volunteers to accomplish a manual process that worked for somebody several years ago or works for you personally when your nonprofit was just you. So again, it's totally valid when you're getting started, but over time, you'll see that these manual donor records and systems don't set you up for success in the long term. The solution to a manual system is a CRM, which stands for client relationship management. And this is basically a centralized donor management system or database where you house all of your history and your knowledge of your supporters. A CRM is built with engagement in mind so you can create tags, segment your donors easily, instead of having to parse through a spreadsheet and find donors who maybe gave last February but haven't given this February or whatever it is you're looking to do, you can track key metrics, you can manage your communications. And a fundamental piece of a CRM is being able to email them through the software, log your calls, set follow-ups and stuff like that so that you can stay in touch with your donors. So there's a lot of variability in CRMs, typically talking about something like Salesforce, but there are also big, big databases where you have dedicated staff who are there to manage a big donor database. So there's the smaller side, then there's middle of the road, which would be Salesforce, and then you have big databases like a Blackwater, Razor's Edge or something along those lines or Oracle, where it's a little bit more intense. And I just wanted to mention here that we do actually have a Salesforce integration and our own CRM tool at MyEcause. So we can work with both. So how do you choose a CRM? First, you want to take a look at your nonprofit's needs and goals and think about what kind of support you would need from a CRM, consider your growth and what you're aiming to do in coming years. And this is important because a lot of CRMs have contracts and will lock you into so many years with them. And it's also a big commitment in terms of setup, moving from one CRM to another is really messy and awful. So you'll want something that you hopefully don't outgrow anytime soon. And finally, the last thing to really consider is capacity. As I said a minute ago, there are massive, intense donor databases that allow you to do incredible detailed things, but they might require a full-time staff who specialize in those kinds of databases. And if you're small, that's probably not going to work for you. So you might need something that's a little bit less intense that still gets the job done. And one important thing to know, as I mentioned before, especially if you're already using MyEcause, is that we do have a CRM that's fully integrated into our system. It's included with an advanced subscription, which is $99 per month. And one thing I want to point out here is that you can actually subscribe to advanced on a month-to-month basis. So we're not going to lock you in for a year or two years or however long. You can decide whether it works for you on a month-to-month basis. And it does everything we've talked about here. It centralizes your donations, your donors, and provides reporting and analytics. You can add custom tags and notes. So there's a lot of things that supporters can do, especially if you're stuck with a manual system and you're thinking about taking that next step to a CRM. So you can always try a free trial of advanced or try out a subscription for a month and see if you like it, if you're thinking of moving up to a CRM. And I just wanted to circle back to our Salesforce integration. Our CRM is awesome, but if you're a Salesforce user or you look at the options and you decide that Salesforce is just gonna be working best for your nonprofit, we do offer an integration to our advanced customers that allows you to connect Mighty Cause to Salesforce and transfer data automatically so you're not constantly exporting and uploading lists. So you have both options at your disposal with an advanced subscription. You can go to plan management on your dashboard and start your free trial. And it's really up to you. We don't wanna lock you into using supporters if you would prefer to use Salesforce. So there's options with the Mighty Cause platform. And we do have this new Salesforce integration which we unveiled last month. And piggybacking off of our CRM discussion, the next area where you'll want to invest is in communication tools. So what I'm talking about communication tools, the main thing I'm talking about here is email. Now there's a lot of other things that can fall under this umbrella, like a multi-line phone system or direct mail marketing. Those are all big investments that you'll wanna think long and hard about. But for the sake of simplicity and sticking to the most common communication tools that orgs use in the digital age, I'm focusing on email marketing software. And this is key because you'll need to be able to market your campaigns and communicate with your donors about upcoming events and news at your nonprofit, getting them involved, getting them into your facility when that's safe again, getting them to volunteer and just trying to move them down the donor pipeline. And the most common way that orgs accomplish this is through email marketing. So when you're considering tools, think about what you're doing now and what you would like to do more of. There are a lot of tools. Constant contact is great for blast emails. There are programs like Autopilot that are heavier duty and they're great for intricate automated journeys. And MailChimp is kind of somewhere in between. All of them have their pros and cons. It's all about what you wanna do. There's really no right answer or tool that will work for every nonprofit. The other thing to consider is the learning curve. If you don't have someone managing all of your email marketing and your lists, you may need something that's super easy for people to learn on the fly so you can bring in volunteers or you can sort of cross train people to send emails. But if you do have more resources at your disposal, you could try to invest in something that's a bit more heavy duty that might take some more setup and a little bit more time to dig into but might do more for you in the long run if you're willing to invest in email marketing. And then finally, can it grow with you? Something that's really frustrating. And I say this as somebody who's done email marketing for all of the companies I've worked for is bumping your head up against a contact limit. In most cases, the more contacts you have, the more you have to pay for the email marketing program. So get a feel for how many contacts you have now and how many you hope to get in the next few years like how you intend to grow your list and explore not only the pricing but how well the software is built to accommodate larger contact lists and a higher volume of emails. And I don't wanna get too into the weeds with email marketing beyond just talking about the tools but if you want some more content about email marketing you can go to mightycause.com slash guide and check out our webinar library. We've done a lot of great webinars on email marketing. So there's a lot to dig into there if you wanna learn more about email marketing. And the last thing I wanna mention about email is that last month along with our Salesforce integration we announced an integration with MailChimp. So we can automatically feed donor info into MailChimp, add custom fields and tags and there's a lot of cool stuff you can do with that like setting up email journeys for new donors. So that's available with advanced or you can also check out a free trial if that sounds interesting to you. And another thing I'll mention is that one thing that's very frustrating when you're looking at various tools to use is finding choices that integrate with other programs because there's not many tools that are going to serve all of your needs. So that's one thing to look for is integrations. So MailChimp has an integration with us. So if you're using Mighty Cause and you're looking for an email marketing program MailChimp is a great choice because you can just automatically feed data back and forth. And next up is fundraising infrastructure. So what does that mean? What's fundraising infrastructure? But what I'm saying when I talk about fundraising infrastructure is basically the tools and systems that support your overall fundraising efforts and support the growth of your nonprofit. And honestly, that kind of includes everything we've talked about today. But what I wanna talk about specifically in terms of infrastructure is fundraising tools. What I mean here is having a toolbox that's full of varied, flexible fundraising tools that you can use to connect with your donors. So that includes peer to peer fundraising, team and event fundraising. Those became very important when COVID hit and most people were moving their in-person events online, having campaign pages and tools to engage donors like sending thank you messages, having branded receipts and things like matching grants that you can use to sort of capture donor interest.  So not only the ability to just accept recurring donations, but the ability to manage them from the user end and also from your end as the nonprofit. So that's something you really wanna look into when you're exploring new tools is how does this support recurring donations? Because as you grow your recurring donor base, your nonprofit's going to have more sustainable revenue. And the reason this is so important is because it's really dangerous as a nonprofit to put all your eggs in one basket. You wanna diversify. Grant funding is fantastic, but grants alone will not make your organization sustainable. Having a Gala is as the centerpiece of your fundraising calendar is wonderful too, but as we all saw in 2020, circumstances can change really, really quickly. And so you'll need to be equipped with tools that can adapt and offer you multiple streams of revenue. And again, in 2020, this was really important because all of the in-person fundraising events that orgs had to do actually became dangerous and organizations had to go digital just to survive and pay the bills and keep their programs running. So having a lot of tools in your toolbox will make it easy to respond to an emergency situation like COVID, but also like a natural disaster or if your facility has a roof leak and you need to repair that, you can easily respond to that when you have fundraising tools at your disposal. And then oftentimes you start with what tools you have when you're thinking about a fundraiser and figure out how to use them rather than starting with an idea and then finding the tools. So finding a solid fundraising infrastructure and setting that up is going to help you fundraise year-round and in all kinds of situations. So that's why it's really important to invest in a solid foundation, solid fundraising infrastructure. So going back to commitment, like we were talking about with CRMs, an important thing to consider is whether a piece of software or a platform locks you into a particular way of fundraising or whether there's some flexibility. Just like a CRM infrastructure is a hard thing to change when you commit to it. So also be aware of whether you're signing a contract that will lock you in for a period of time and think about how comfortable you are locking yourself into any limitations that a platform or a piece of software has considering how tough it can be to move. So once you have these roots in place, they're very hard to dig up and plant somewhere else. Can you use this one tool or do you need to supplement with other tools and does that change the value for your organization? Maybe you're looking for a tool that has everything all in one and maybe you're open to using different tools that work for you and just trying to get them to work together. Does this infrastructure inspire you and seem like it'll open doors to new fundraising opportunities and new ways to engage donors? And again, can it support you as you grow? So when we're talking about spending, it's really about investing in your organization's future. So you wanna make sure you're finding a solution that not only works for you now but will likely work in five years in the future when you have a larger donor base and are hopefully expanding. And just to note that Mighty Cause provides a great fundraising infrastructure. That was what we were designed to do is to provide an all in one tool that you can use to fundraise. So you can see a small list of what we provide here on the slide. This is just a sampling. But if you wanna go to our pricing page, we have a full rundown of everything that we provide. All right, so we are in the home stretch. I know we're just budding up against 30 minutes but this is the last bit. The last thing I wanted to talk about is investing in fundraising staff. So I say this as somebody who worked in nonprofits for a significant amount of time. Staff is really make it or break it for most nonprofits. Having a skilled set of people working for your organization means that your operations will be more efficient and you'll be able to grow and meet your mission related goals as well as your financial related goals because those things go hand in hand. Volunteers are fantastic. I love volunteers. I am a volunteer but they cannot do what full time staff do or even part time staff. Fundraising staff understand your mission and the ins and outs of your cause and your organization and they're excited about your organization. They're passionate about it. And that's why they're the best messengers for your cause and why it's worth donating to your cause and caring about this cause. And finally, fundraising staff are important for building relationships with donors, sponsors and people in the community which is what helps build your nonprofit and get it more deeply ingrained in your community. Again, volunteers are fantastic. I love volunteers but they simply cannot do what a team or even just one skilled, talented staff member can do. Fundraising staff, especially as small nonprofits can sort of play second fiddle to program staff. They're not really seen as being on the front lines or people think they're just being counters or people who sit at a desk all day and talk on the phone but they are the people who make everything at your nonprofit possible by keeping you funded. So that's important to remember fundraising staff is super valuable and worth paying as well as you can. So a question I get a lot around this issue is should we hire a professional fundraiser? This usually comes up when a capital campaign is coming up or there's some other big event that they really want some help with. And I wanted to actually get into the difference between staff members and professional fundraisers because there is some confusion around this topic. So professional fundraisers are individuals or companies that you hire to run campaigns, consult with them or solicit donations directly. So their consultants essentially and they come with the huge consultant price tag as well not knocking consultants but they do charge high rates. They usually bring in a lot of fundraising experience to the table and they can fill a lot of roles from helping you shape up your fundraising operations to running an actual fundraiser and even calling donors and knocking on doors and trying to sell Gala tickets or raise money. These are contractors, so in some states you actually need to submit their contract to the state for approval. And fundraising professionals are usually independently licensed. So in 45 states, you'll need to make sure that you understand the laws and that your professional fundraiser has all of the necessary licensure because you could get in trouble if you don't have that in place and you hire a professional fundraiser who doesn't have the proper licenses.  They're permanent staff whose tenure at your organization is indefinite. So there's no end to their contract. They don't have a contract in most cases. They're paid hourly or salary so you've got the payroll like work to do for them. And you'll also need to provide benefits in compliance with state and federal laws. Staff members don't need any additional fundraising licensure because they are part of your organization. So you just need to make sure that your organization as a whole is in compliance. So for small nonprofits, I recommend investing in staff first and considering professional fundraisers if you need them down the line. Building a development team is going to carry you a lot further than hiring a consultant for a period of time and a specific one-off purpose. And you're going to get much more from staff members in the long run. Again, nothing against professional fundraisers. They are fantastic experienced people in most cases. And there's a reason that they earn what they do but when it comes to developing your operations and developing your fundraising program you wanna walk before you run. Okay, so I hope the case for staff is pretty obvious. You really do get what you pay for with employees. When you offer a living competitive wage you're going to attract better talent and have less staff turnover as people leave for better offers. Experienced development staff are truly, truly worth their weight in gold because they bring a vast sea of knowledge and experience to your nonprofit and can provide important perspectives. These people will help you grow. Their literal job is engaging donors and bringing in sustainable revenue. And again, all of the good your organization does all of your programs and services need funding and fundraising staff bring that in so that you can do what your mission is to do. And investing in skilled fundraising staff will bring in more revenue. They usually earn their keep very quickly and then some. So with all that funding you can expand your programs, add new ones, build new ways to help your cause and so on and so forth. So investing in your fundraising staff is one of the most impactful things that nonprofits can do. And in many cases you have to make a case to your board and some donors will keep their eye on it very heavily and see how much you're spending on staff but investing in your fundraising staff is extremely important if you wanna grow your nonprofit. All right, so I'm a little bit over time that I did wanna make some time for questions. So I'm just gonna check and see what's in the questions box. And if you have something you wanna ask just go ahead and pop that into the questions box. What is donor box considered? You know, honestly I'm not too familiar with donor box. So I'll have to take a look at them. I'll have to Google them. I'm not familiar with them. So I don't wanna give you any bad information. I'm not super sure about donor box. Does Mighty Cause work with Blumerang? We do not. Blumerang is a competitor of ours. So we try to integrate with as many other programs and systems as possible but they do directly compete with us. So unfortunately we don't offer that kind of integration with them. Oh, this is a big one. What is text to give? So we actually did a whole webinar over the summer with Harbor Compliance about text to give. And text to give is it can work in two different ways. The most traditional method is the one that the American Red Cross used in response to Hurricane Sandy where you texted a short code or what you would think of as a keyword to a specific or you text a keyword to a short code, a short number and that makes a donation to the organization and that's deducted from your phone bill. So that's the traditional way to do that. It's very expensive. You don't get your donor data but typically how it works now is sort of a text to donate where you can text a keyword to a short code or a phone number and then the donor is texted back a link where they can complete their donation. So it's very handy for live events. Obviously we're not doing many of those right now but they are really great if you're adding events, a busy event and people wanna complete their donation really quickly. They can just text that keyword in, get the link, make their donation, Bing, bam, boom, they're done. So that's what text to give is there's a lot of demand for it and we do actually offer text to give with advanced. Let's see, how do you transfer our current data base to Mighty Cause? So there's a lot to go over there. I would say email support support at mightycause.com and they can sort of set you on the right path because there's a longer conversation to be had about migration but we can certainly help you out with that. Just email our support staff and they are very friendly and very knowledgeable and they will help you get the information you need and help start the process for you. So email support at mightycause.com. Let's see. So this is a question about email templates. So in terms of email templates, we are working on that actively. We don't have anything to announce just yet and obviously we have the new integration with MailChimp so you can integrate with your work on MailChimp if you're using that but that is something that we are actively working on. We haven't upgraded it yet but it is in the pipeline so it's in development. So just stay tuned for information about our email services because we are working on that. How does Mighty Cause work with offline donations? We have many donors who write us checks as do many nonprofits. So we do have offline donations available, well not available but you can add them to your Mighty Cause account so you can account for them. You'll get a separate offline donation report. You can log those checks and you can sort of use Mighty Cause as your central donation database. So you can log checks. You can also log cash donations. You just need to enter them in but they can display however you want them to. They can be added to your total amount raised if you're running an event or a campaign and we do offer a report. So if at the end of a big team fundraiser you wanna make sure that you have a list of all of the checks that you need to find, you can easily pull a report through your Mighty Cause dashboard and get a report of all of those offline donations. So we don't actually handle the money of course that stays with you but you can certainly log them and the donors will be added to your database if you're using supporters. So you have your donations reports where you can keep them and if you're using our CRM it'll also add them to the CRM so that you can use the RCRM tool to track those donors as well. All right, is there a rule of thumb for ROI on fundraising staff? Salary of X can equal overtime return in revenue of Y. What are the ingredients that need to be in place to set up hired staff for success? So I don't know, there's a lot written out there about professional fundraisers. Basically you wanna look at what you're hiring them for so that can be highly variable. So for instance, if you're hiring a professional fundraiser to sort of help get your fundraising housekeeping in order then that's a little bit trickier but the basic math would be if I'm running a capital campaign and the amount that I want to raise is $20,000. And this person's time they are contracted for this amount or this is what they charge for this amount of time, how does that equal out? And does that make sense? So for some smaller campaigns, it doesn't make sense.  So it really depends on what you're bringing them in to do like it can make a lot of sense for a big capital campaign and it can also not make sense if you have a smaller campaign based on what they're charging. So it really depends on what you're bringing them in to do because there's a lot that they can do and some consultants will even come in and just make sure and help you stay in compliance with laws. There's a lot of back office things that they can assist you with. They all offer different services. So it really depends but basically you wanna look at the revenue potential for whatever they are helping you with versus what they're charging and make sure that that is an acceptable amount to you. So I hope that helps. See, I think that's everything. So thank you for all the fantastic questions. You will get access to the recording. You'll get access to the slides.  And if you have any other questions from me you can always email me at Linda at mightycause.com. If you have any technical questions or you need some technical help with Mighty Cause or if you just wanna get set up on the platform you can email support at mightycause.com and we'll help you out there. But thank you so much for joining me today and have a great rest of your day.


Greetings and welcome to the Introduction to Astronomy. In this lecture we are going to give an overview of the solar system that will be covering over the coming lectures as we look at all the solar system objects in detail but today we're just going to look at a brief overview and get a little idea of what is coming in future lectures. So what do we find in the solar system? Well it changes depending on the time. Right now we knew that right now we know that there are these things in the solar system. One star, eight planets, five dwarf planets, more than a hundred and fifty moons plus asteroids, interplanetary gas and dust, the Kuiper Belt objects and the comets. Now in ancient times this was quite different. We thought that stars were part of the solar system which we now know they aren't. The one star that is is our sun. The number of planets has increased from five to eight. The one moon that was known has now multiplied to over a hundred and fifty. Meteors really are within our atmosphere. Comets were known however. So you can see how much new, how many new things have been discovered since ancient times. And ancient times isn't necessarily all that long ago going back into the mid-1700s before the most recent before Uranus was discovered. That was all that was known. Now what about their masses? Where is all the mass in the solar system? Well the sun contains 99.8% of the mass of the solar system. So it is the solar system. If we look at Jupiter and Saturn they contain about 90% of the remaining matter and that leaves 0.02% of the remaining mass for everything else. That's all of the other planets. So the other six planets that includes all of the comets, the asteroids, the moons, all of the other debris that we'll be spending a lot of time talking about but is actually a very small percentage of the mass of our solar system. So let's look at the planets first. So what is a planet? Well in 2006 we gave a definition as to what a planet actually is and it has to do three things. First it has to orbit the sun. Second it has to be massive enough that it has pulled itself into a spherical or ellipsoidal shape. And three it has to have been able to clear its orbit of debris. So there are eight objects pictured here, Mercury out through Neptune, that meet all three of these criteria and our planets. And we will look at all of these planets in far more detail coming up. Now let's look at some of the smaller objects. Well we have moons in the solar system. Well this is not a complete picture of all the moons. This is just a few of the moons that exist and we start off with our moon, the only one known in ancient times and one of only three moons in the inner part of the solar system. We also have one moon here known around an asteroid. There's actually more as well but one asteroid has a moon shown here and then we see lots of moons in the outer solar system. Now the only thing if we do picture our earth here just to give you a sense of scale that you can take all of these moons and you really don't even make one earth. So while there are a lot of them and some of them are fascinating that we will look at, they are not necessary, they are not really a big part of the mass of the solar system. So how about the dwarf planets? Well a dwarf planet has to do two things. It has to orbit the Sun and they have to be spherical early ellipsoidal. So they meet those first two criteria for a planet but not the later one. And as I didn't emphasize the moon is an object that orbits a planet or other larger object. So some of the moons are as large as some of the smaller planets but they are not planets in themselves because they do not orbit the Sun. So here we see the five known dwarf planets, the best known of those being Pluto and Ceres. And you can see by the images these are the two that we have actually explored. We have had close-up images and have studied these in detail. The other three, Eres, Homea, and Makemake have not been explored in detail and we see them only as we can see them from her earth as blobs of light. Now there are also a lot more small objects. We have the asteroids, meteoroids and comets. We see some of the asteroids here and the asteroids, several of them that have been imaged and that we have actually gotten relatively close-up images of, to give an idea. Ceres, which is actually one of the dwarf planets, is pictured here about 600 miles across. Vesta, a little smaller than that, almost half that size. And then three others that have been observed closely here but you can see again how small they are relative to these. Most of the asteroids are relatively small objects, just tens of miles across. Now what do these have to be? Well these objects have to be things that orbit the sun. So a very basic definition, you notice how they are not shaped spherically. See how they're all odd shaped as compared to Ceres, which qualifies as a dwarf planet. Now let's look at how things orbit in the solar system. So when we look at them, the planets all orbit in the same plane. The planets shown in blue here are all orbiting in the same plane and in fact you can draw them on a piece of paper and that's a relatively good approximation of the solar system. When we look at things like dwarf planets and asteroids shown in the red here, we start to get to orbits that are a little bit tilted. Not always horribly tilted but much more tilted than what we see with the eight planets themselves. And not shown in here are comets. Comets would have highly tilted orbits and could come in in any direction and in fact sometimes are so tilted that they're coming in backwards. Now let's look at the properties of the planets. So what do we see? Well this is just some general properties, distance going from Mercury as the closest to Neptune at the furthest. Mercury a little over about about 0.39 astronomical units away and Neptune about 30 astronomical units away. Revolution periods going from about 88 days here for Mercury about a quarter of a year and up to 164 years for Neptune. Sizes, we note that there's a big difference in sizes, that we have much smaller planets in the inner solar system and much larger planets in the outer system, the solar system. And that is by diameter, that is also by mass. You can see that there's a distinct difference there and there's also a distinct difference in density. Densities are very large in the inner solar system, smaller in the outer solar system, telling us about the composition. These are rocky and metallic materials whereas the others are more gas and icy material. So let's think about our solar system to scale and we can imagine scaling the Sun down to about 25 centimeters or about 10 inches in diameter. Mercury would be less than a millimeter in size and would be 10 meters away. So within those 10 meters between Mercury and the Sun is nothing. Earth would be a little over a millimeter in size and about 27 meters away, almost 100 feet away from the Sun and between it only two small little things about a millimeter in size or less. Jupiter would be nearly an inch in size, tremendous compared to the others but would be 140 meters away well over a football fields worth away. Go out to Pluto, Pluto would be tiny half a millimeter and would be over one kilometer away. So trying to make a scale model of the solar system is very difficult simply because there's so much empty space there that if you scale things to the size correct sizes the distances will will be so tremendous and in fact there are places where you can have walking trails of a scale solar system that will stretch out over kilometers to be able to see things to this kind of scale. Now if we continued on we'd have Alpha Centauri which is the nearest star close in size to our Sun so about another 25 centimeters and would be 7500 kilometers away. So on the surface of the earth that's a good chunk of the way around the surface of the earth. So in between those just a few little specs. Again most of the universe as we looked at in previous solar system and the universe is mostly empty space. Now where do these objects get their names? Well they are named by the astronomical union gives those so the conventions are set by the IAU which is the international astronomical union. So we look at some of the examples here for the most part planets and moons are named after the gods and heroes from Greek and Roman mythology. With one exception Uranus has moons named after characters from English literature. So everything else from Greek and Roman mythology Uranus a little bit different. Comets are named after the discoverer so if you discover a comet it would have your name attached to it if you are the first to discover it. With most automated methods looking for comets now many comets currently found are found by automated telescopes and are named after them. Asteroids are named by the discoverer. So if you discover a new asteroid you get to pick a name subject to certain restrictions on it but you can select a name for that asteroid. However since almost all asteroids of significant size to be visible on earth have been detected by now that there are no further namings very little chance of detecting one that would end up being named. So while you technically could name an asteroid it's not very likely that this would ever happen. How about features? Naming features let's look at some of the craters. How do we name craters? Well it depends on where the crater is found. On Mercury they are named after artists musicians painters and authors. On Venus famous women for larger craters and female names for smaller craters. The moon scientists engineers and explorers Mars continues that with the larger craters for scientists and writers and others who contributed to the study and lore of Mars. So writers who wrote about Mars. Small craters are actually named after small towns and villages of the world. So depending on which object you're looking at they get their names through different sources and they are again approved by the International Astronomical Union. Sometimes you'll have common names that people refer to things by but the official names are set in this way. So let's go ahead and finish up with our summary and what we looked at today is that the solar system contains a really a wide variety of types of objects but where is all the mass? All the mass is in the Sun. That's where almost all the mass of the solar system is. The smaller solar system objects have really varied structures and features and we'll be looking at that in more detail over the coming chapters. And we looked at how a scale model of the solar system is next to impossible to actually construct because of the tremendous distances between the planets relative to their sizes. So that concludes this lecture on the overview of the solar system. We'll be back again next time for another topic in astronomy. So until then have a great day everyone and I will see you in class.


I'm in Sydney and people are getting arrested for protesting lockdowns. How do you protest against something when the government rules the protests are illegal? How do you do it? You do it, right? You show your neighbors, your family what is going on. Sometimes, sometimes for people to understand the general population to understand what is going on they have to see their family, friends, neighbors resisting, questioning and unfortunately being brutalized by the fascist regimes that we are governed under right now. That will make them question their own belief system and that is what is needed right now. We need the general population to question their understanding of the world they live in. I know it's difficult to do. Man, it's difficult to do. I know because people don't want to give up this imaginary world, ideal world that they've created in their own minds. They know it's not there like they know it's not there but they refuse to step outside of their bubble and go what's going on because they're scared shitless and rightfully so. The tyrannical fascist regimes that we are being governed under right now are scary not because they are psychopaths or in power is because they have policing that is backing them up for now, military that is backing them up for now, millions upon millions of indoctrinated people that have gone through a centralized indoctrination center. Some people call it education schooling that they've been taught to obey right. They have been branded by corporations. What do you want this or this right? Which side are you on right?  That's their paradigm they're in. That's their dogma. How because if we really care about the rest of humanity our brothers and sisters family, friends, neighbors we have to make them understand right but not by force but by showing them what's going on.