Latest news with #nonprofits
Yahoo
15 hours ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Pushpay targets church payment niche
This story was originally published on Payments Dive. To receive daily news and insights, subscribe to our free daily Payments Dive newsletter. The payments company Pushpay has a clientele that makes it stand out from its industry peers. Rather than processing purchases for for-profit companies, the Redmond, Washington-based firm handles donations to faith-based non-profits. Pushpay CEO Kenny Wyatt explained this month how the Redmond, Washington-based company moved to the U.S. and settled on this niche customer base after being founded by New Zealanders Chris Heaslip and Eliot Crowther in 2011. Wyatt joined the company last year and became CEO last month. The vast majority of the company's customers are churches, he said. A Pushpay spokesperson declined to say what the company charges customers in monthly and transaction fees. In a May 9 interview, Wyatt noted that processing donations is different from handling other kinds of transactions, such as credit card purchases. The following interview has been edited for clarity and brevity. PAYMENTS DIVE: Tell me how Pushpay got started. KENNY WYATT: We were founded primarily as a payments provider focused on faith-based organizations as well as nonprofits, and we've continued to grow and move into more pieces of that category. Our church management system pairs churches with donations. We've also moved into streaming content, streaming media. We work with some of the largest churches in the United States. We serve about 15,000 churches preliminary across the U.S. Can you tell me a little bit about the history of your company? Our U.S. headquarters is here [in Redmond, Washington]. We were founded in New Zealand. The founders both came from New Zealand, but since the vast majority of our customers are here in the U.S., we consider the Great Northwest our home. Can you talk a bit more about the services you provide? I'll start with the software side. If you're an executive pastor for a church, what you care deeply about is connection. Who is walking through your front door, or who is watching you on a livestream? How do you create a connection? Sunday services, Wednesday services, running child check-ins, the volunteer schedule, the people database — organizing those things, that's the software piece of it. But the church all started around the congregants who walk in the front door [and donate to the church], and that's where the payments piece picks up. As they are in the service, or even outside of the service, they use the payments platform to process credit card donations or ACH donations. Do churches only see cash, credit card or ACH donations? Congregants can process crypto as well as other non-cash gifts [such as stock in a company]. Are stock and crypto donations common? It's a small total, but it does represent the largest gifts. We're seeing quite a few donations come through crypto. While it's a small percentage of total donation volume, it's multiples of cash or credit card gifts. How do you make money? The insights we can provide, people data, donation data, taking in the processes by which the church is operating and helping them do that better, that is worth something to them. [We charge] a monthly fee, and that gives them rich insights about their congregants. And then on the payments side, we are a payments business, so depending on the type of payment, we're collecting a very small fee. But it's making it much easier for the church to be able to collect donations and fund its ministry. Is processing donations different from processing payments for for-profit companies? The interface can be a bit different. If you're sitting at a service and there is a giving moment, there are multiple ways you can give. One is a recurring gift that you can set up on ACH or a credit card. One is a QR code, which is for new joiners or new congregants. Another is to be able to interact through a website or through a giving platform. We just launched Tap to Give [which lets congregants donate by tapping a button on a mobile app] a couple of weeks ago. Apple Pay has been adopted pretty heavily by many of our churches because of the ease of giving through the phone. There are a multitude of ways that congregants will engage that are different from swiping a credit card Recommended Reading BNPL growth prompts change from credit bureaus
Yahoo
17 hours ago
- General
- Yahoo
Contributor: Three ways the government can silence speech without banning it
When most people think of how governments stifle free speech, they think of censorship. That's when a government directly blocks or suppresses speech. In the past, the federal government has censored speech in various ways. It has tried to block news outlets from publishing certain stories. It has punished political dissenters. It has banned sales of 'obscene' books. Today, however, the federal government rarely tries to censor speech so crudely. It has less blatant but very effective ways to suppress dissent. The current actions of the Trump administration show how government can silence speakers without censoring them. My quarter century of research and writing about 1st Amendment rights has explored the varied tools that governments use to smother free expression. Among the present administration's chosen tools: making institutions stop or change their advocacy to get government benefits; inducing self-censorship through intimidation; and molding the government's own speech to promote official ideology. Read more: Contributor: Once, international students feared Beijing's wrath. Now Trump is the threat As to the first of those tools, the Supreme Court has made clear that the 1st Amendment bars the government from conditioning benefits on the sacrifice of free speech. Government employers may not refuse to hire employees of the opposing political party, nor may they stop employees from speaking publicly about political issues. The government may not stop funding nonprofits because they refuse to endorse official policies, or because they make arguments the government opposes. The 1st Amendment, however, works only if someone asks a court to enforce it, or at least threatens to do so. The Trump administration has issued orders that withdraw security clearances, cancel government contracts and bar access to government buildings for law firms that have opposed the administration's policies or have advocated for diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI. Some law firms have sued to block the orders. More firms, however, have made deals with the administration, agreeing to end DEI programs and to do free legal work for conservative causes. Read more: FCC commissioner sounds alarms about free speech 'chilling effect' under Trump The administration similarly has withheld funding from universities that embrace DEI or that, by the administration's account, have fomented or tolerated antisemitism. Harvard University has resisted that pressure. But Columbia University has capitulated to President Trump's demands, which have included cracking down on protests, giving university officials more control over controversial academic programs and hiring more conservative professors. The Supreme Court may ultimately declare the administration's gambits unconstitutional, but the White House has already succeeded in leveraging government benefits to make major institutions change their speech. The Trump administration's second form of indirect speech suppression is even more subtle — intimidating speakers into silence with actions that deter or 'chill' expression without squarely banning it. That means the government may not regulate speech through vague laws that leave lawful speakers uncertain whether the regulation reaches them. For example, the Supreme Court in 1971 struck down a Cincinnati ordinance that criminalized any public assembly the city deemed 'annoying.' Read more: Editorial: Free speech or discrimination? Colleges need help drawing the line Likewise, the government may not make people disclose their identities as a requirement for acquiring controversial literature or for supporting unpopular causes. In the classic case, the Supreme Court during the civil rights era blocked Alabama from making the NAACP disclose its membership list. The mechanisms of chilling speech make it hard to detect, but the current public climate strongly suggests that the Trump administration has dialed down the thermostat. College and university campuses, which rumbled in spring 2024 with protests against the war in Gaza, have gone largely quiet. Large corporations that challenged the first Trump presidency have fallen into line behind the second, as evidenced by the tech leaders who donated to and attended the president's inauguration. Big donors to some liberal causes have folded up their wallets. Some of that dampening likely reflects fatigue and resignation. Much of it, though, appears to reveal successful intimidation. Read more: Contributor: Mahmoud Khalil's pro-Palestinian comments are protected speech, not grounds for deportation The administration has proclaimed that it is deporting noncitizen students, using their lawful speech as justification. While those expulsions themselves are classic censorship, their hidden reach may be much more effective at stifling expression, even among U.S. citizens. The Trump administration could not lawfully treat citizens as it is treating foreign nationals. But most citizens don't know that. The vivid spectacle of punished protesters seems likely to chill the speech of others. The administration's final tool of indirect speech suppression is propaganda. The 1st Amendment only bars the government from controlling private speech. When the government speaks, it can say what it wants. That means people who speak for the government lack any 1st Amendment right to replace the government's messages with their own. In theory, then, every new federal administration could sweepingly turn government institutions' speech into narrow propaganda. That hasn't happened before, perhaps because most governments realize they are just temporary custodians of an abiding republic. Read more: Contributor: Art for art's sake, or the president's? The Trump administration has broken this norm. The administration has ordered the purging of ideologically disfavored content from the Smithsonian museums, implemented book bans in military libraries and installed political supporters to run cultural institutions. None of those actions likely violates the 1st Amendment. All of them, however, have significant implications for free speech. In what may be the most quoted line in the 1st Amendment legal canon, Justice Robert Jackson declared in 1943 that government should never 'prescribe what shall be orthodox … in matters of opinion.' A 21st-century federal government can dramatically skew public discourse by honing government speech with the flint of official ideology. Trump has assigned Vice President JD Vance, who sits on the Smithsonian's board, the role of 'seeking to remove improper ideology.' If Vance decides what the Smithsonian can and cannot say about slavery and Jim Crow, for example, then the Smithsonian will teach people only what Vance wants them to learn about those subjects. That influential source of knowledge will push public discussion toward the government's ideology. Read more: Contributor: Daunted by our nation's big problems? The solutions start small and local When government beneficiaries agree to say what the president wants, when the government intimidates speakers into silence, and when the government sharpens its own speech into propaganda, no censorship happens. But in all those scenarios, the government is doing exactly what 1st Amendment law exists to prevent: using official power to make speech less free. Gregory P. Magarian is a professor at Washington University School of Law in St. Louis. He is the author of 'Managed Speech: The Roberts Court's First Amendment.' This article was produced in partnership with the Conversation. If it's in the news right now, the L.A. Times' Opinion section covers it. Sign up for our weekly opinion newsletter. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Yahoo
17 hours ago
- Business
- Yahoo
SF mayor's $15.9 billion budget proposal includes layoffs, service cuts to address deficit
The Brief The mayor's $15.9B budget proposal calls for 1,400 job cuts in 17 city departments. There are no cuts to SFPD or sheriff's department officers in the proposal. $400 million would be set aside to offset potential drops in state and federal funding. SAN FRANCISCO - San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie announced his $15.9 billion budget proposal Friday for the 2025-2026 fiscal year, acknowledging that it includes difficult cuts to jobs and services which he says are necessary to address San Francisco's $817 million projected deficit for the next two years. "This is a painful budget, but I am hopeful and I am optimistic about our economic future in San Francisco," Lurie siad. Mayor Lurie says there are structural problems with the city's finances, that have led to the city using one-time funding as a stop-gap measure to pay for services, as businesses have left and tax revenues have fallen. "Any job loss is difficult. I take no joy in this, and yet, I was elected to make hard choices," Lurie said. Lurie's 150-page budget proposal calls for cutting 1,400 jobs from 17 departments. Most of those positions have been vacant for more than two years, but 100 of them are filled and would require layoff notices. The proposal has no cuts to sworn officers in the San Francisco Police Department or Sheriff's office. It also maintains funding for the Fire Department, District Attorney's office, probation services, and the Public Defender's office. It would cut $100 million to nonprofit providers and contractors. Funding would be maintained for a 'First year Free' program that gives incentives and support for small businesses, by waiving their fees for one year. Lurie's plan also calls for setting aside $400 million in reserve to offset potential drops in state and federal funding. "Close to $2 billion comes through from the Feds to San Francisco through Medicaid and housing and other forms. So it's a big risk," Lurie said. "I'm going to focus on what we can control and that is prioritizing clean and safe streets, making sure we are bringing business back, conventions back, tourism back." Lurie said he couldn't comment on the city's costly legal battle with AirBnB, which claimed in a lawsuit that it should receive a refund from the city for over payment of taxes. Lurie also acknowledged that the city was in a dispute with the Federal Emergency Management Agency over reimbursements and future funding. "We're going to fight for every dollar our city is owed. Whether it's at the state or whether it's at the federal level," Lurie said. "There was a report and an ask by FEMA. We're going through a process where we appeal that, and so that will take a number of months to find out." What they're saying Labor unions issued a statement Friday saying the city should be more aggressive in raising corporate tax revenues instead of cuts to staffing and services. "Essential service jobs should never be on the line. Jobs should absolutely not be cut. I think the Mayor needs to hold these large corporations accountable," Sarah Perez, the San Francisco Vice-President of IFPTE Local 21 which represents some 6,000 city employees. "At the moment we prioritize investments in permanent housing. he wants to shift that into temporary housing, more shelters. Shelters are more expensive," Anya Worley-Ziegmann, Coordinator of the People's Budget Coalition said. The SFPD Police Officers Association president Tracy McCray said she was glad Mayor Lurie appears to be upholding his campaign promises of prioritizing public safety and increasing the police ranks. The Sheriff's Office also said it was pleased with Mayor Lurie's budget plan showing no cuts to sworn police officers or Sheriff's deputies. "We were asked to make concessions to help support the City's financial stability, including the elimination of several professional staff positions. Some positions in our Records and Personnel Units are currently filled with deputies, who will now remain in those role," Tara Moriarty, a spokesperson to the Sheriff Paul Miyamoto, said. What's next The San Francisco Board of Supervisors Budget Committee plans to address Mayor Lurie's proposal at their June 11 meeting. "We will prioritize clean and safe streets while keeping people housed, fed, and cared for, including individuals living on our streets. We can do this while cutting wasteful spending, reducing our structural deficit, maintaining city services, prioritizing critical city services, and preserving essential workers," Budget Committee chair and Supervisor Connie Chan said in a statement. "We will fight and protect our community against attacks from the Trump administration." "We need to fix the structural deficit. That's a real thing and the mayor is trying to do that. And this budget doesn't get us there either. Deficits continue to grow in the 3rd,4th, 5th year going out," Rafael Mandelman, SF Board of Supervisors President said. Click to open this PDF in a new window.
Forbes
a day ago
- Business
- Forbes
How Leaders Can Help Gen Z Have Authentic Conversations At Work
Communicating across generations, particularly for fundraising organizations, requires a thoughtful ... More approach and a little practice. If you're managing a Gen Z professional, especially in mission-driven sectors like nonprofits, you may have noticed something: They're smart, digitally fluent, and passionate about purpose. But when it comes to live conversations, especially with people outside their generation, some feel underprepared. When the stakes are high, such as asking a 70-year-old donor for financial support, young professionals can find themselves unsure how to start, how to connect or how to end the conversation effectively. Susan Kahan, founder and principal at Sapphire Fundraising Specialists, sees this all the time. To help nonprofits solve this challenge, she created a course called Gen Z's Guide to Donor Conversations, designed to equip young professionals with tools to build stronger relationships by phone, on Zoom and at events. The communication gap isn't about ability – it's about exposure. Many Gen Z professionals grew up communicating via text and Slack. They didn't grow up chatting on the phone for hours or navigating face-to-face conversations with adults outside their families. The pandemic further limited in-person practice, making today's workplace interactions feel even more intimidating. Kahan serves up tips leaders can use to help Gen Z professionals thrive in real-time, cross-generational conversations: 'Most people are nervous in professional conversations,' Kahan said. 'They just don't talk about it.' Let your team know that nerves are normal, and you don't need all the answers on the spot. In fact, admitting what you don't know can build trust. 'Say, 'that's a great question. I don't have the answer right now, but I'll follow up,'' Kahan said. 'Then actually follow up. That's how you win the race.' Phone calls are rare for digital natives, which makes them more intimidating. But Kahan insists they're essential, especially in fundraising. Her guidance: Keep voicemails succinct, name the purpose of the call and add a little curiosity hook to encourage a callback. 'Most older donors still listen to voicemail,' she said. 'Leaving one shows respect for their time.' It helps to write notes on what you plan to say. Not a full script that can sound stilted, but bullets about your key points. Philanthropy professional Beth Lye, president of the Chicago Council on Planned Giving, says that your organization's mission is a great place to begin establishing rapport. 'If you're with an educational institution, ask where the person went to school,' Lye said. 'If your organization supports animal welfare, ask whether they grew up with pets.' The idea is to focus on questions that draw the person into your cause to identify why they might want to support your mission. Kahan takes it further by suggesting that people look for ways to connect on video calls by taking in the other person's background. 'Do they have a porch behind them? A framed picture? That's your entry point for conversation,' Kahan said. Observing and asking curious, respectful questions is a fast way to build rapport. Networking can be daunting at any age, but Kahan emphasizes that most people, even that 70-year-old major donor, might be unsure about how to start a conversation. Younger professionals might hold back, relying on senior team members to take the lead. But a mindset that all staff members are there to serve as hosts will make the event more enjoyable for everyone. 'Introduce yourself, thank them for coming and ask, 'What brought you here tonight?'' Kahan suggests. 'Being the person who starts the conversation is a leadership move.' As with those intimidating phone calls, it helps to practice in advance. Business development expert Nikki Jeffers organizes internal 'networking' happy hours for employees to give them practice at discussing her company's capabilities in casual business settings. An advance team meeting to exchange icebreaker ideas and review key messages about your organization is always a good idea. Authentic conversations are not about becoming best friends or putting on a performance. Kahan reminds her students that fundraising conversations, and professional conversations more broadly, are about authentic, respectful relationships. 'You're not their grandchild, and this isn't a social chat,' she says. 'It's a conversation between two people who care about the same mission.' The good news? These are learnable skills. 'Being uncomfortable at first is part of the process,' said Kahan. 'The great communicators are the ones willing to practice.'
Wall Street Journal
3 days ago
- Business
- Wall Street Journal
Of Course Workers Want a Four-Day Week. Companies Should Too.
In 2022, I signed on as lead researcher at 4DWG, an international NGO that aims to make a four-day workweek the new standard. Since then, we have studied 245 businesses and nonprofits as they adopted four-day-week pilot programs for more than 8,700 workers, in countries including the U.S., U.K., Brazil, Portugal, Germany and South Africa. For those employees, the results of working one day less every week, with no reduction in pay, have been outstanding: 69% experience reduced burnout, 42% have better mental health, and 37% see improvements in physical health. Thirteen percent of participants say they wouldn't go back to a five-day schedule for any amount of money.
