In episode 60 of The Charity Charge Show, Stephen speaks with Brian Davis, President of BryteBridge, which also runs Charity Net USA.
After a 20-year career in financial services, Brian Davis took over as President of BryteBridge, including CharityNet by BryteBridge, in November 2019. He saw the potential to leverage his expertise building, growing, and leading businesses to support nonprofit organizations in their foundational years, through BryteBridge.
Since joining BryteBridge, Mr. Davis has expanded the team by 36% and focused on providing continuing services to nonprofits throughout their lifecycle, with a particular emphasis on the early years of their existence. To support his aims of finding solutions to the challenges faced by nonprofits, he commissioned additional research, which led to BryteBridge’s first report, The Essential Work of Emerging Nonprofits. The goal was to understand the obstacles new/small nonprofits face in their first 5 years. In collaboration with BryteBridge’s team of experts, who have an average of 7 years’ experience in the nonprofit sector, Mr. Davis aims to help emerging Nonprofits transition from start-up status to achieve financial stability, so they can more effectively accomplish their missions.
Prior to taking his position at BryteBridge, Mr. Davis was a senior financial services executive at various companies including Wealth Enhancement Group, Inc., Occidental Asset Management, LLC, Scottrade, Inc. (Now TD Ameritrade, Inc.), and Charles Schwab & Co., Inc. In these roles, he led change efforts, provided leadership for start-up businesses, and created strategic visions for growth.
Here is a snippet from Brian Davis on the podcast:
“While the study was not intended to be about COVID, we did go ahead and engage nonprofits that also understand what were the impacts that COVID was having on their organizations right in the thick of it – right in March and April, timeframe. When we normally would have closed out the study, in April – May, we actually opened it back up and went back into the field in September to kind of close that gap. So while the study was never intended to be a COVID study, it was intended to really understand the challenges of emerging nonprofits that we define as less than five years old. We also got a great insight into understanding, how did the pandemic hit them? We got a good insight into not only their kind of common everyday challenges but what did the pandemic do to those organizations?
I’ll start with what wasn’t surprising. Just to get that out of the way, what wasn’t surprising is legal and compliance coming in at the number one challenges. Legal and compliance we classify as forming the 501 C 3, getting that status, getting registered, and their states that they’re operating in. They’re legally able to solicit donations, as well as everything that’s involved from maintenance. Your annual reporting requirements and keeping up with all that both at the state and the federal level. Then fundraising was one of the other topics. So many times people have a passion and they get going, they formed their nonprofit, and then they kind of hit that first speed bump of how are we going to raise funds? So yes, those two weren’t so surprising. What was surprising that we found is they indicated volunteer management and setting the strategy as fewer challenges in those first couple years. I would have expected that to be a bigger challenge of how are they going to get volunteers, get them mobilized, and how are they going to organize them, etc. So that was the primary surprise. For the most part, you know, there weren’t any big Aha, Gotchas. It was more of a lot of validation. More importantly, what are we going to do with this information? How can we better support and coach these smaller emerging nonprofits as they get operational?”
Interested in listening to the full episode and hearing more from other nonprofits? Check out more episodes here Charity Charge Show
