All Volunteer, All Heart from Binky Patrol

When Marlys Vaughan picked up the phone to talk to Susan Finch about volunteering to help with the Binky Patrol website, she had no idea it would lead to lifelong friends, a way she can craft for others, and daily joy from helping the children and teens in Salem, Massachusetts. This episode is the story of her one-woman chapter that grew to three people and a school and continues to grow.
Learn from Marlys' gentle story that you can start with a small effort and add to it as you go along the path. Marlys says one of the greatest and unexpected gifts is the friendships she has in Binky Patrol with people who have like-hearts. Hmmm, Lisa Cintron and Miriam talked about that too. I think they're on to something!

We are still one world and sometimes one very spread out company. A great way to get to know each other is through team-building events, but what can you do that will allow each location to get to know the other locations? An event where you work with one or more charities, perhaps make blankets live, have a guest speaker from the place your teams will deliver their blankets, have a relay benefitting a charity in those big inflatable balls at each location simultaneously rolling in a field. Well, you get it. The ideas coming out of our heads are endless, not very expensive, a lot of fun and build great memories, as well as help you retain talent.  Join Susan and Lisa for this 20-minute event idea firehose. If you have questions, want to talk about more ideas, let them know!

When we deliver binkies we encounter angels of hope. Our guest today, Liz Bias, is an angel of hope for victims of domestic and sexual abuse. As a survivor herself, she knows exactly what they are going through. A lot of these women when they leave, have nothing. They have no clothes, and their driver's license and their social security have been taken from them by their abuser.
Sarah's House gives them all the resources and the contacts where they can make the phone calls and set up the appointments so they can get back their license, and the paperwork that they need so they can get a job. And you always have some that go back to their abuser - that is heartbreaking for someone like Liz. Our Guest Liz Bias helps usher these women into a better life and break these habits. Listen to her story and what she's done to turn it around by creating the Wounded Heart Foundation in Texas.

There is no replacing the in-person experience of laughter, and compassion. Time to dip a toe into these events again through speaking, team building, 5Ks, and more! Lisa and Susan go through some ideas to make it easy for you to do what you are comfortable with and will tell you some of their experience at Race for the Cure events, corporate team building, quilt guilds, and even ski events. It's time to get back out there and really connect with your communities!
From sewing blankets on-site during a Race for the Cure, to golf tournaments, and competitive events, they could all use some warmth from your charity. At least that's what Lisa and Susan think in this episode. They share stories from at least a dozen events where Binky Patrol was exposed to entirely new audiences, kept the crowds entertained and made some blankets at the same time. Tune in.

This episode talks about some of the early deliveries that still impact us as they truly show the full mission of Binky Patrol from holding premature drug-addicted babies in soft, dark, quiet rooms to driving quickly to deliver a binky to a girl in an orphanage that called us to get one for her friend arriving shortly. Carolyn Berndt joined Binky Patrol when the company she was working for was in search of a local charity they could help financially. She showed up and fell in love immediately with Binky Patrol's simple mission of making and giving blankets to comfort children who are hurting, ill, abused, alone, in trauma of any kind. Her background is in marketing and PR, not blanket making so that's what she dove in to help with. She also helped with deliveries.  Join Carolyn and Susan to hear why we continue to do what we do. Bring your hankie as they tell true stories of real kids who were so happy to receive a binky.
Carolyn Berndt joins Susan to talk about how she found Binky Patrol. They also talk about the impact volunteering had on Carolyn's children, Malena and Max. Then break out the hankies as they both tell of deliveries and holding babies with no moms to hold them. It's all a reminder of how the little things and a bit of time can change lives. Consider doing SOMETHING other than "sending love and prayers" - show up, help us comfort these kids. It's easy. This episode talks about some of the early deliveries that still impact us as they truly show the full mission of Binky Patrol from holding premature drug-addicted babies in soft, dark, quiet rooms to driving quickly to deliver a binky to a girl in an orphanage that called us to get one for her friend arriving shortly.

People would watch Oprah DAILY. She inspired, and continues to do so. But she was upstaged in 1996 by little Hydeia telling us what it was like as a child to be born with and live with AIDS. The entire country wept with her, even though she fought back tears with enormous strength to tell her story and drive us to action. In the middle of it, Oprah showed a photo on the screen of Binky Patrol founder, Susan Finch holding a blanket and with her business phone number if you wanted to help comfort kids like Hydeia.
Let's put this in a better context. The internet was just starting. People got their news and found who to follow on television, radio, and in newspapers. Oprah was a big presence. AIDS was still a stigma. Children who were born with it were shunned, ridiculed, and ostracized as if they had a choice in the situation. They felt alone. When Binky Patrol started it was specifically for children like Hydeia. Plenty of organizations made blankets for kids with cancer and other diseases, but they were not addressing those with AIDS, born drug-addicted, in foster care, abandoned, forgotten, or invisible. Those 30 seconds launched Binky Patrol nationally because when Oprah tells you to call a number to help kids, you do it. We are forever grateful.
Lisa Cintron joins Susan to recall the impact 30 seconds on the Oprah Show had on Binky Patrol. We had launched less than 30 days prior, weren't officially a 501c3 yet, but were approached by the staff at the show because we were focusing on kids like Hydeia who had AIDS. People would watch Oprah DAILY. She inspired, and continues to do so. But she was upstaged in 1996 by little Hydeia telling us what it was like as a child to be born with and live with AIDS. The entire country wept with her, even though she fought back tears with enormous strength to tell her story and drive us to action. In the middle of it, Oprah showed a photo on the screen of Binky Patrol founder, Susan Finch holding a blanket and with her business phone number if you wanted to help comfort kids like Hydeia.
If you want to help, visit our site - there are many ways to help comfort these children. https://binkypatrol.org
 

People volunteer for different reasons. After doing this for more than 25 years, Susan Finch has seen a lot of motivators. One is the need make their mark to be seen, heard, to feel important. That can still work for an organization, but without some guidelines and roadblocks in place, it could result in a website going down, social media debacles, embarrassment, loss of sponsors and volunteers. Tune in with Nina Hambleton and Susan as they go over some simple, helpful tips to prevent this and still allow your incoming volunteers and board to make their mark in the most positive way.
I want to take this opportunity to talk a little bit about the nature of nonprofits and we're well-meaning volunteers can kind of botch stuff up. This is more coming from our experience, what I've experienced with my clients, because in addition to running, Binky Patrol, I have a marketing firm, Susan Finch Solutions that takes care of all online pieces for companies, including their website, social media domains, podcasts, and more. And I've seen a lot of organizations have their online presence, social media websites, everything gets botched up because of well-meaning volunteers, interns, or those wanting to make their mark. You know, the ones at the ego, it's kind of the nature of nonprofits and business organizations. They have a rotating board of directors and officers, and many times, well-meaning volunteers and board members want to help and change things.
They want to bring what is familiar to them and make changes to create their mark. And then they leave the next year and in their awake as a mishmash of methods code to that incoming volunteers and board members have to detangle undue redo, fix rebuild.
Here are a few suggestions to keep this debacle from happening in your organization. It's never too late to do this. If you don't have it in place yet, start now document this stuff and create a guide to onboard volunteers and board members, two different guides. And this can include a style guide. What fonts do we use? What colors here's our logo. These are the right logos. Don't please don't do this. Please don't say these words, please do this. And an explanation of the tools used for the website.
If it's WordPress, that would mean plugins. Why you use it, the theme that you use, and that you don't want people changing those. And the easiest way to do that is to not give them access, to be able to make those changes. You can't just make them all admins and let them do everything. Make them contributors. If they want the bigger stuff done, they can send you a request or something. Same with social media. You don't want them to be able to invite all their friends or whoever they want to, to be able to contribute to your stuff and give them access, limit it with all your marketing material, same thing we use Drive, you know, a nice central location for all of our templates that we use. And so we allow people to use those because drive like it has versioning, which is super cool.
So if somebody breaks something or botches it up, I can go back a couple times to where it wasn't broken. And we limit admin access to most things I know for the Binky Patrol website, it's not in WordPress yet. It's in, some other proprietary content management system and there are only three super admins that can make big changes. Everybody else is a user and they are locked down to only be able to edit their pages, and their stuff. And it's worked out really well and it makes it easy too. Then we can lock people out, remove them, delete them, and update them whenever we need to.
Another thing is passwords, I know it's tempting to make one sheet and say, here's how you get into everything. Be careful who you share that with. Be careful who has access, and what the sharing rights are. Can anybody with the link get to it, or only those invited? Can those invited invite other people? Lock it down, and make sure it's safe and protected.
So one of the ways to fix all this is to have a constant point person. Somebody that doesn't change out year to year, you might have this amazing volunteer that says, yeah, I can spend three hours, you know, a month or a week or whatever, doing these pieces. It can also be an outside vendor like me, a founding volunteer, or an advisor who can be the gatekeeper.
I work with a business organization, the SDIPLA. That's a San Diego Intellectual Property Legal Association. They work with me as their constant and have for about eight years because their officers change every year, including who has to access the PayPal account. Each year we update the passwords. That's just the drill we do. And they all know it. The officer's page gets updated and the access gets updated. They send me the content to add.
They add an event and an article each month, that's all they do. It's not a whole lot. So it's not very costly, but they don't have to spend the time on the learning curve each year. They can just focus on getting good speakers, and talking to their members and they leave the maintenance to me.
Maybe you can find one of those constant people, somebody that has some knowledge knows how to write and spell has good judgment. Maybe you can find somebody like that. And that's the volunteer. Even if that isn't what you guys do. Maybe you're like us. We make blankets, but we have a couple of volunteers that I trust to do social media for us, whom I trust to edit the website. They don't make blankets. They're no good at that. They don't deliver. They don't do anything else. That's the piece they help with. It's a way to get more people involved too.
Recently, an organization came to me, pulling out their hair. The key point person had been outranked by a board member and the board member had limited website experience but didn't realize how limited her experience was. She thought she knew it all. So she didn't ask any questions about the structure of the website that had been working perfectly for five years. And she added this invasive editing system. She added Eliminator when they already had Cornerstone on the site, which is already invasive. And then you have Eliminator, so the plugins are fighting for who's in charge of the site. And what it did is it blocked all the existing pages from being edited as they had been for years, the constant point person has to rebuild the homepage, the key inside pages because it's no longer editable due to these conflicts.
The board member is leaving this week. So at that point, they will remove the plugin scene. If that will solve the issue. If not, they have to start from scratch and rebuild a complex, beautiful page that was built for them by a web developer a few years ago. They had just certain areas that they could edit without breaking the page or having to know a lot about code and things. So they have a mess. There was nothing I could do either. And I can't walk that person out until they tell me I can. So just something to be aware of. People might think they know a lot and have different reasons for it, but they're just coming in that first year, trying to help, trying to do something. You know, they, oh I know a better way to do it. Oh, we did it this way before.  Or I've used this before. No, find out more from them and why they want to add those things. It might be just something simple that they're just not familiar with yours and they need to know how to use it.
Don't let people have access to everything, especially to change your website, because it can bring it all down and cost you a lot of money to get it fixed.
If you have an ever-changing board, remember to remove their rights when they leave. They'll also stop getting as many notifications too, which they will appreciate because they're not responding to them anymore. And it just clutters up all their inbox. We also suggest when you add the new board members do not give them the ability to add new editors and admins only let them be contributors and comment on behalf of the organization.
Time is precious and it's limited trying not to spend it undoing and fixing so you can spend it growing, having all these policies and writing board members and volunteers should have to sign off on these. So, you know, they've read it. There is no gray area or confusion and they can ask questions then too. Maybe, you need to update those policies. Sometimes those get outdated. I have my volunteers at Binky Patrol. They send me reminders every year. “Hey, don't forget to send us our anniversary graphics.” Oh, crud, forgot that. “Hey, remember to do this, and mm, this is outdated”. And those amounts aren't high enough yet for, you know, donation, values, and things for blankets. Okay. So I need to update it, but they send me those requests. We talk about them as a group, we review them and we make decisions on what to update, and then they have it all in one place, one master place, one master document drive folder.  This ensures everybody's working from the same consistent materials, the same consistent guidelines you want your volunteers to feel successful.
The main thing you want to be able to do is to serve who you're serving, be able to bring on volunteers. So they feel successful immediately and can begin to contribute rather than botching things up.
 
Learn more about Binky Patrol at https://binkypatrol.org. 

When we start a non-profit, we are usually pretty open to ANY help, any donations. Sometimes the cost of free can be higher than you'd expect. When we started, we were approached by several fabric companies wanting to help. Some were a perfect match, some were overwhelming with their generosity, and some simply put a piece of paper over "Basura" and said, "Binky Patrol" (Basura is trash in Spanish.) In this episode, we visit about the first donations and how they are still dear to us, even though they were challenging at first.
Just because you are a charity, doesn't mean you have to say yes to everything people want to donate to you. When we started we received generous donations of amazing fabric, and a bunch of "what do we do with THIS?" fabrics. We learned pretty fast how to politely turn down the donations that really didn't fit.
Our first amazing donations came from Mirage Framing in Santa Ana, CA, bb dakota (became Steve Madden), Lucy Max Children's Boutique in Laguna Beach, and our beloved, Hoffman Fabrics. Within the first week, we had to secure donations to cover the cost of a 10 x 10 storage unit and shelving to organize it all. Following that, anyone with scraps wanted to donate them to us, but it didn't all work great for binkies. We bartered for cottons, flannels, and fleece and gave away the sheers, drapery fabric, upholstery fabrics, double knits, and wools.  Join us for this episode, "It's OK to say, "No." to free fabric on All-volunteer, All Heart from Binky Patrol.
Learn more about Binky Patrol at https://binkypatrol.org. 

Hear about a spontaneous non-profit grew to a nationwide organization from three people who were there 26 years ago. Miriam talks about walking the streets – of Laguna Beach, and Lisa talks about the streets of Skid Row, and how volunteering for Binky Patrol forever changed their lives. Learn about Binky Patrol and hear the reminder about volunteering and how it can be FUN, easy and give you forever friendships. Join us for this episode of All-Volunteer, All Heart from Binky Patrol hosted by founder, Susan Finch.
Learn more about Binky Patrol at https://binkypatrol.org . We are an all-volunteer 501c3.