Digital Transformation with Purpose: How Unbound Scales Global Impact

Speaker A: You're listening to another episode of open source CxO, the podcast designed to share insights on how to excel in your business using technology regardless of the industry. Host Robert Kehoe is a self taught software developer who has grown to the role of CEO. Renowned for his collaborations with organizations such as Stanford University, Nelnet and Louis Vuitton, he continually seeks new challenges to conquer in the world of tech. Accompanying him is Don Blackburn, a veteran COO with over 25 years of experience in cultivating diverse relationships and driving innovation in various technical projects. Each week they'll be sitting down with some of the nation's foremost technology leaders to develop an open source playbook drawing from their firsthand experiences in the field. Let's talk some tech.

Speaker B: All right, today on open source EXO, we're joined by Rob McElroy and Andy Ewing, both from Unbound. Welcome.

Speaker C: Thank you, thank you for having us. Appreciate being here.

Speaker B: So Unbound, this is a little bit unique territory for us at Open Source in that we haven't done, uh, any guests from a nonprofit and might as well start with you guys because it's a very large international nonprofit. So why don't we start by telling the folks about Unbound?

Speaker D: We are an international nonprofit. We work in 17 different countries. We serve around 280,000 families. How we work with our families is, um, we have what we call our five pillars. And I'll just, I brought a cheat sheet to share and I'll leave this behind for you guys as well. So our program, basically our first pillar is to eliminate poverty. So in the 17 countries we're in, it's in Africa, Asia, India and Latin America. And these are countries that, you know, they have families in extreme poverty. First thing is that we do a sponsorship program. And so you can sponsor a, uh, child or an elderly. And I'll get into that a little bit later. And it's 40 bucks a month. That money goes directly to those families. So we have programs in those, um, communities and then we help them set up checking accounts, which is a very big deal because in these countries, uh, you have to have wealth to be able to even obtain a checking account. So that's number one. And that money goes directly through, we call it, um, direct cash transfer. That's one of the very unique things about Unbound is that the money goes directly to the families that we serve. And then they really get to decide what they do with it. Now there is some goal, um, setting. We use a program called Podcast Poverty Stoplight and they set up goals and then they meet with um, within their communities and like work towards their goals. So if they go blow all that money, they'd still have to answer like, well, why didn't you, why, why didn't you get that bathroom that you were uh, trying to build? But that's the first pillar. Second pillar is we empower women. So one of the like kind of superpowers in the communities are the m mothers. Because the mothers know what the families need and they are very persistent to make that happen. And so the program is really around helping women feel empowered to be able to make decisions for their family and for their community. And I'll talk a little bit more about the mothers groups. Well, I'll talk about it here. So the way the communities work is they form these, what we call mothers groups. So it's a group of moms. And these groups are not just like, they are not just like, um, social circles or. I can't think of the word. Okay. Anyway, these groups, uh, they run like organizations. They have chair, chairwomen for medical needs, chair for education. And then like, I mean they have like organizational charts and there's like levels of accountability through the groups and that's how they help like run everything that they need to do to improve their community. It's pretty dang amazing because they're not educated.

Speaker B: Well, I was gonna say you're not dealing with college educated folks here you're talking about. No, but they like, um, very low level of education, I would guess.

Speaker D: Exactly. But they are extremely persistent and innovative and they just, they know how to make things happen. And so. And they'll present to you when you go to the communities, they'll like present to you these org charts of uh, how they're, how they're running their communities. It's just overly amazing. So. But those mothers groups also like hold each other accountable. So I talked about the poverty stoplight every. When you come into unbound, you fill out a survey and it kind of gives you a readout of what your situation looks like and then you set goals from that and then they hold each other accountable to hitting their goals. So that's why the self directed funds really work. Because it's not like someone from unbound is watching over and saying, you know, are you spending the money or are you doing these things that community members are holding each other? And it's not, it's not like a stick, uh, type of accountability. It's an accountability like, we're in this together. Let's make changes to our community. Advanced education that's really the foundation of how unbound started. It started around education. There's just a big, a big correlation between your level of education and being able to overcome the chains of poverty. And, and so the original focus was sponsor a child, keep a child in school. And that still is the requirement. If you're a sponsored family, then the child needs to stay in school. And that's a huge thing in the countries that we serve because once they get to a certain age and they can start working, um, it's a really big sacrifice for these families to keep them in school. And so, you know, that $40 a month may not sound like a lot to you and I, but that helps that buffer so that those children can stay in school. The second thing that we have is there was a recognition that, okay, so we get them through, you know, like what we would consider primary school or high school. But there was still a gap of, okay, well the world is really competitive right now. For instance, in the Philippines, to get a contact center job in any of the BPOs, you have to have a college education, right? So even if they get through their primary school, that doesn't guarantee that they're going to be able to further their, um, economic status. So we have what we call our scholarship program. And what's really cool about the scholarship program is not only is it for, uh, you know, youth, it's also the parents in our program. So let's say a mother comes into the program, she does poverty stoplight, and one of the goals that comes out of it is she wants to become a social worker, she can apply for the scholarship program, she can go to college, and it can have a complete life changing effect on her life education.

Speaker B: I'm guessing college education not as readily available there in most countries.

Speaker D: That is exactly it. It's like, I don't even know if community colleges. I mean, every country has its own nuances, but yeah, it's definitely a privilege to get to go to college. Building community. I kind of spoke about it with the mothers groups, but one of the really cool things that came out of our mothers groups was so, you know, they all have their individual goals and they're all working towards their individual goals. But as a community, the mothers started realizing, hey, your child is coming home from school dirty because of the rains and the dirt paths home and to school. So is my child. Let's do something about it. And that evolved into our program called Agents of Change. And what that is, this is a community based program where these mothers, again, uneducated Mothers don't have work experience like in a corporation, but they have figured out how to put business cases together. And they have put these business cases together. They propose them to unbound. Um, when they get approved, they get put out to our, um, supporters, communities. And people can take an agent's exchange for $500. Money goes back to them. And these families do it. And these are like. I mean, these are probably some of the most impressive things I've seen. I'll tell one story. I have so many that I've seen in my time, but I'll tell this one story because it just, it still blows my mind. In Medellin, Colombia, we have a community called New Jerusalem. And it's way up in the mountains. The government doesn't even recognize this community and their senses. So it's about a million people up on this mountain that the government doesn't even act like exists. So if the government doesn't recognize them, not public resources. So water, electricity, those things. Well, the mothers in this mother's group just finally got fed up and they were like, we need water up the mountain. Like, this is not sustainable. So they pooled their money together, saved up enough to get tubing to build water pipes, figured out how to go down the mountain to the river, build a pump, and they hand dug this piping up into their community and into their houses and are pumping water from the river up the mountain. Mothers, not engineers.

Speaker C: Wow.

Speaker D: Not professionals, just mothers determined to make it happen.

Speaker E: That is impressive. I don't, I wouldn't even start with that.

Speaker D: It blew my mind. And so that was my, so my first visit, there they were and they had just installed the pump and they had started the construction. My second visit, about six months later, um, the mothers were like saying, well, now we have to fix our houses, which are not houses, like what you and I live in, but they're, they're living space because when they put the pipes in it, you know, opened up the walls or whatever, and so they were like working on, okay, now we have to fix the houses back up. Mother's figuring this out. That's the power of the community.

Speaker B: Well, you need drains. Once you have water, you're going to drain the water.

Speaker E: Exactly.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker D: Yeah. It's, I mean, it was just, it just blew my mind. So that's, I just love to share that story. And then the last, our last pillar is we promote well being of all ages. So I talked about, you know, started around supporting, keeping children in school, but then there was also a need for our elderly they're especially in the countries where we work, um, there's just not a lot of programs out there to support elderly. There's actually, you know, other sponsorship, child sponsorship programs out there, there's other programs for children kind of universally. But the elderly is a community that's really forgotten about. And so here at Unbound, uh, we are the only sponsorship program that has sponsor an elderly. And I have to tell you, it is like the children are amazing. You know, getting to see the children, it's uh, is just amazing. But our elderly, this is something really, really special. If you're ever feeling down, just spending a day with them will just brighten you up. They are very fun, have tons of energy. They're gonna make you dance with them. But you know, one story I was telling Rob on the way over here, my very first visit to the elderly, to an elderly program. I had an elderly lady that just looks like a sweet grandma. And I was asking her like, what, you know, what, what does Unbound mean to you? And she was telling me that, you know, she didn't have any family left. And so she's left in, you know, really bad economic situation all by herself, doing life by herself. And it was very depressing. And um, then she got into the unbound community and she has a other people to do life with. And you know, it's just like, I think everybody can relate to that. There's, you know, I think everybody can kind of relate to. Like what would it be like if you didn't have your family and you didn't have anybody and versus when you have a community around you. So, so that's who we are at Unbound. We are, um, here in Kansas City. Uh, a lot of people don't know we're here.

Speaker E: How, how big is the organization?

Speaker D: So we're 140 million dollar organization. 90% of everything we bring in goes back to the families that we serve. I mean it is huge. And it's, that is, I mean when

Speaker E: you think about, isn't that more than the requirement? That's by far.

Speaker C: We're always, you know, A plus rated by all the agencies.

Speaker E: Yeah, I love hearing that.

Speaker C: Yeah, we have high ratings. We always have. And we do. We do. Our cost to acquisition for a sponsorship is very low if you compare us to others in our industry. And so, yeah, we have a lot of really great things to stand on. You know, we, if you go in our building, it's, it's not super fancy, but it shouldn't be, you know, for the, for where we're at and what we're doing in our space. So, yeah, we're very proud of, uh, how we squeeze dollars out of.

Speaker B: So how many employees? Because you got to have people on the ground in all these countries, I'm guessing, to do all these programs.

Speaker D: Yeah. So we have about 140 headquarter employees, and then we have about 1700 affiliate employ. That work is, you know, work in the communities. The social workers, the, uh, some of

Speaker B: those, I'm guessing, are volunteers. Or are they all paid staff?

Speaker D: They're all. Those are all paid staff. Now, we do have also a volunteer network that helps us with some of the, like, stuffing, stuffing of letters and things like that. But. But no, I mean, here's the crazy thing because, um, I still am sort of processing all this. I've been at Unbound for three years. I came from the corporate sector where, you know, very large Fortune 500 type organizations. And I think I thought coming into a nonprofit, oh, it's going to be like kumbaya, uh, and everybody's just, you know, here to do great things. And we are, but kind of, I guess our segue into talking about our digital transformation is we also have to run a business in a very scrappy manner. We have to be smart. We have to be efficient.

Speaker E: Well, if you run on that little of the entire revenue, I would imagine so.

Speaker D: Yeah. And we still have to take care of our employees because even though there are, you know, our team members are working for a nonprofit and they're here because they love the mission. It's still their job. And so we have to balance all of that and make sure we have this really engaging and positive culture that people love to work for. Because at the end of the day, it's still work. It's still, you know, a, uh, TS team doing TS very, very important work. It's still contact center team, taking call center employee or call center calls, you know, so and so forth.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker D: It's just the difference is, you know, you can go work at any organization. I mean, I could go work in doing what I do in any organization. And I compare this all the time. Like when I was in the cell phone industry, I would like, you know, try to rally everyone around how important it was to keep people's phones working. Because. And I would, like, come up with some anecdotal story.

Speaker C: Sure.

Speaker D: I don't have to, like, I don't have to search for that here, because what we're doing is.

Speaker E: You don't have to sell it, Right.

Speaker D: No.

Speaker B: Everybody knows what the mission is.

Speaker E: Yeah. So I am very curious though, how, uh, you guys, you said digital transformation, how you guys like being this organization? It's been around for seemingly a little while, 30 years. What does that mean? What does the digital transformation even mean? You know, because I imagine it's such a generic term, to be honest. So, like, you're not doing stuff on paper. I can't imagine that was the. What you. What you mean by that. So I'm very curious, like, what to you guys, what does digital transformation mean?

Speaker C: I might give a little background, just something like. So we. We take photos in. Every year we get a photo of, like, let's say you're a sponsor and. And we. You. You could get a video. Every year, get a video of your friend that, uh, you could see online. You could log in and see that you. You could get a letter, you can write a letter. You see that you can do all that stuff online. And you can also get a. Also. Well, when I started over 20, almost 23 years ago, people uh, were our international offices, which we call projects too. We kind of use that term interchangeably, but they were actually. We were requiring them to take a photo. They would take a photo on film, and they would send us a copy in the negative. I think they would actually send us two copies and they would actually ship it overseas. That was 23 years ago, right when I started.

Speaker E: I see how that should be digitally transformed.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: And so just to give a little background. And so what we would do is we would take that. We'd get that photo here, and then at Unbound, we'd get it and we would catalog, uh, it in like a card catalog. You know, it was crazy. No, it wasn't a digital catalog at that moment. It was like, just open up some drawers. Yeah. Physical catalog. Right. And then fast forward that all the way to. What we have now is we have, uh, a CRM that we've written for our international offices, our projects. And they can upload photos. And they upload them. The families can upload them with a mobile app. With a mobile phone.

Speaker E: So out of curiosity, these countries that you serve, they have like, proper Internet, and that's not necessarily.

Speaker C: What's that called? Like a cafe or something like that?

Speaker B: Cyber cafe.

Speaker C: Yeah, cyber cafe, something like that.

Speaker E: So they make it work.

Speaker C: They make it work. So they get a photo to us either through their cell phone or they go into the project office and get a photo taken. They now that digitally gets uploaded to us. Okay. And one thing we've really. This is really cool. How we've used artificial intelligence is we've taken, uh, so we have a process, right? We take a look at a photo, we make sure that the photo has no identifying characteristics in it. That might say, you know, you're on Kenneth street or you're in Overland park, right? Something like that. We also want to take that photo and crop it a certain way, right? And we also want to make sure that the photo we have of you today is the same as the photo we got last year. You're the same person. Just because accidentally, let's say the photo gets cataloged wrong to the wrong person, right? We, uh, use IDs for everything, right? And so, um, we do that and um, what we've done with artificial intelligence. So right now, uh, like last year at this time, it would take from the time they took a photo of you and uploaded it to our systems before it would get to Don so he could look at it online. It's like 90 days because we review it, we crop it, we make sure it's decent. There's nothing in there that's bad. Using artificial intelligence.

Speaker E: Yeah, it was a manual process before.

Speaker C: Right now it's manual process. Now. We've used AI to actually crop the photo. We've used AI to compare your photo last year and this year to see if they're the same person. And then, uh, we also used AI to see, uh, if there's anything in it, identifying characteristics. Now when we take a photo of you, Rob, and we upload it to our systems, Don can see that in three days. So last year it took 90 and we're down to three. That's what they added.

Speaker E: It sounds to me though, like this is less of a digital transformation, it's more like a journey. Like you just continue evolving as you go because you guys started off one way, you know, you kind of continue through it and it's never ending, Correct?

Speaker C: It is never ending. I mean, I know like Andy's been done a lot to push us, you know, she does a good job of, you know, digital transformation process improvement. And we've done a lot with sms, you know.

Speaker D: Yeah, we introduced SMS last year for the first time, using it in some. We haven't fully got it in every interaction, but we have have it to push communications around, around their payments being late and that's been really effective.

Speaker B: So that's for the donors?

Speaker D: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker B: Okay. So you're reaching them, uh, not just email your.

Speaker E: I was done. I didn't realize that I was gonna say you keep track of these people's bills. That's a whole step. I didn't realize

Speaker D: it's the full business. I mean it's, it's a business operation. So we have. They were a lot of tech.

Speaker B: Yeah. Well it's amazing how much it is going through SMS uh now versus email just because everybody's got their phone on them 24 7.

Speaker D: We weren't even email, we were print.

Speaker B: You were mailing snail mail which there

Speaker D: is some effectiveness to that especially in a nonprofit getting in front of them. So there are certain things that. There are certain things we still want in front of our donors in paper. But yeah, I mean we just launched using SMS for, so people can sign up for sponsorship, what we call our church appeals. So we have preachers that go preach at churches and people will sign up and they can say pay later. They may not have their information on them. And before we were reaching out to them by phone call. Well, you know how that is, people don't answer their phone.

Speaker E: Not when they don't know the number anymore.

Speaker C: Correct, exactly.

Speaker D: And so we just launched an SMS out to those new sponsors that haven't fully paid and we're seeing already like a 45% conversion of them, you know, making their payment within six days. So. So those are the types of things that we're just looking for digital solutions to. I mean I know, uh, it took me a while to understand we would have like regular business operations. But yeah, it's the exact same thing. So it's very similar as we're talking about the customer journey part of the digital transformation. It is very similar to the work that I did when I was in the cellular space.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker C: I'll add too that one thing that's cool about what the founders did with our company is they were all pretty tech savvy. Even the 80s and 90s. One of our founders was graduate with great honors at Rockhurst. He's one of the smartest people to come out of there and he was really neat guy. I never got to meet him. Unfortunately he'd already passed away. But he was very tech savvy and he. We were using a DOS based system when I got there and one of the reasons I was hired was to write our own CRM in Net and we've had our own CRM now.

Speaker E: That's the wrong framework.

Speaker C: Yeah, gotcha.

Speaker B: I'm kidding.

Speaker C: No, no, it's cool. They're all wrong frameworks anymore. Right. You know, I mean you're always going to choose the wrong one but uh, so what's really cool, what we can do with Andy and I collaborate and obviously we have teams behind us. You know, we don't push all the buttons ourselves, but we take all the credit. But we don't either. But uh, we have built our own CRM. So we've made changes to that. Just like you talked earlier about digital transformation, we've made changes to that CRM every two weeks, every three. You know, whenever the business needs something, we can make a change. And it's our own custom software. And so back when they made that decision, they run a DOS based system called smartware. And they thought what they did was they actually sat down and they identified how do we function as a business. And they had a company come in and help them, you know, interview everybody at the company, here's how we do business. And then they actually looked at, you know, out of the box solutions and you know, back in that time there would have been a Siebel. It's similar to some of the other. And I don't know if it's round anymore. I think Oracle bought it but, and they, they had some, you know, there's some out of box stuff even in 2001, 2002. And they said, you know what the best for Unbound is? We're so unique. Our business is to write our own software.

Speaker E: That's why that's one of the things I like about nonprofits is they're always super unique in how they handle data, how they have to communicate with people, how they have to do things. It's almost always custom. That works out for us as a business too. I'm just saying it's so the use cases are unique and honestly a lot of companies go for like Salesforce, you can customize that, right? So that was one of my questions is why did you decide to just build your own? Because honestly, the bloat and development, year to year, edge case to edge case, eventually there's gonna be some tech debt you gotta have to pay back and there's all sorts of things. I'm just very curious why you went down that, that monster of a task.

Speaker C: It is, you're right, it is a monstrous of a task. When the business uh, identified how they wanted the software to function, then they actually, you know, you know, put out a rfp, said, who can do this? The company here in town actually helped and they did a great job. And I was there, I helped learn from them. And, and, and so uh, what the whole thing was, the whole, we saw it as competitive advantage. Every Year we have a, uh, I don't think it's every hour and a half. How often do we do the, the meeting with other nonprofits?

Speaker D: It's once a year.

Speaker C: Once a year. What's that called?

Speaker D: Interagency.

Speaker C: We have an interagency, uh, meeting and there's actually other nonprofit in town that's similar in our space. And.

Speaker E: And you guys meet?

Speaker C: Yeah, we meet. We talk about tech and they.

Speaker E: This other nonprofit. Yeah, all of us.

Speaker B: Yeah. Ah.

Speaker C: And actually this year they're meeting in Kansas City, Kansas, but at our organization. But they're all very envious that we have our own CRM. And, you know, and I am very fortunate to be part of that. And it does give you a competitive advantage.

Speaker D: I just want to say our competitive advantage is.

Speaker B: Rob.

Speaker C: No,

Speaker D: uh, no, I mean, it is. There's definite pain points with having the custom CRM. Um, you know, when we opened up the two call centers, things that you don't think about in this scenario are we didn't have point to point connections. And so getting computers to Medellin, Colombia, or into the Philippines that were provisioned was a, uh, real pain point. We had like, one of our very first learnings in opening up the Columbia call center was not thinking about the computers going through customs. We had a computer get stuck in customs for like, what was it, like, six weeks?

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker D: And, um, you know, and because we aren't cloud based, so we couldn't just provision somebody over the air. So we. But we've overcome some of that with. We've put in some point.

Speaker E: Um, uh, are you still currently not in the cloud?

Speaker C: Yeah. So our CRM is Windows based, winform based. And so, yeah, we haven't converted to a, you know, cloud based because, you know, back in 2001 it was. Yeah, you're right.

Speaker E: You know, Internet really what it is.

Speaker C: Right, right.

Speaker E: And it's still kind of expensive, so, you know, who knows about that?

Speaker B: But if you're international, kind of makes sense.

Speaker C: Our website's in the cloud, so we use Azure. We lean into Azure for our cloud. So our website runs in the cloud, but yeah, and our applications are CRMs that the international offices our projects use. That's out in the cloud doesn't run in the cloud. But yeah, Andy's right. There's been some challenges with our CRM because you need a, uh, somewhat decent connection. And that's why we've established these point to point connections. And so did you develop your own call center software?

Speaker B: Because that's a beast unto itself of managing Incoming calls, and I'm assuming you're talking about donors that call in. Then you have somebody on the line

Speaker D: that's going to any other call center. We have a phone system, and then we use our CRM.

Speaker B: Um, so they're always entering all the information into. Goes directly into your CRM.

Speaker C: This process, they integrate well, the call center system. We do stuff.

Speaker E: Usually have an API, you guys.

Speaker D: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker C: Like for PCI compliance, when. When somebody calls in to give their credit card, we've got it set up so that the. The. The agent can't hear their credit card, they punch in the number. So we've done some integrations there.

Speaker D: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker C: Cool with that?

Speaker D: Yeah, yeah. I mean, our stuff is actually, you know, I mean, it's pretty good. I would. I would put it up to compare it to anything I used in my previous lives.

Speaker B: So you don't. Do you have outbound as well, or is it all inbound?

Speaker D: No.

Speaker B: So you have outbound.

Speaker D: So outbound. Inbound. We have chat, we have an email, communication.

Speaker B: Have you gone to the AI bot yet?

Speaker D: We have. We have a bot. I'm not loving it,

Speaker B: but it's frustrating to me. I'm a tech guy. I live in this world, and the AI, uh, bots are really annoying me.

Speaker D: There's got to be a better way.

Speaker B: Yeah, I agree. They're getting better, but they're still annoying.

Speaker C: It's always escalate. Right. You're not giving me the answer I want, so let me talk to somebody. Live with a lot of the AI bots. Sometimes you can get something.

Speaker D: But the questions on the bot are good. It's the positioning of them. I have yet to find one. That's the experience on the website. Yeah, it's the experience.

Speaker B: It's also the demographic you're serving too, right?

Speaker E: Well, every time I start to use an AI bot, the first question is, I want to talk to a real person.

Speaker D: That's all right.

Speaker E: I'm just like, no, not doing this.

Speaker B: But they won't let you.

Speaker D: Two years before I started, they had live answer.

Speaker C: So you could talk to me live.

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker B: Yeah. Wow.

Speaker D: Okay.

Speaker B: So there was no automated answering or anything?

Speaker E: No.

Speaker C: Okay.

Speaker B: Um.

Speaker D: And it's been a little bit of a journey to find kind of what that meet in the middle with the IVR is.

Speaker B: So I'm guessing that when. When I call up to donate, it goes to a single. A single 8 number or 800 number, and then it's directed to whatever you have multiple call centers. Right. In other parts of the country or Other parts of the world.

Speaker D: Yeah, but it's, it's similar to any other like BPO kind of operation. It, you know, you're in by a queue. So it's going to go to whatever, whoever's available.

Speaker B: So I may talk to somebody in the Philippines or I may talk to somebody in Latin America or somebody here.

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker B: By calling the same 800 number. Okay.

Speaker D: We're going to do some smart routing that's on our roadmap.

Speaker B: So I was going to ask. Because that's one of the products we're developing now as a CRM and it's in the insurance world. And that's part of it is, is directing calls to the agent that's most likely to be successful in that call. So using demographics. Right. I mean it, it pulls in, it, it knows who's calling, where they're at.

Speaker D: Yep.

Speaker B: Age range, everything else. And then it'll direct to an agent.

Speaker D: Yeah. Based on that, like, we're gonna, we're gonna look at a couple different things. One of the, one of the ideas floating is if you are sponsoring in Latin America, then your call would be directed to the Columbia call center so that you're speaking to somebody in the region.

Speaker B: Makes sense.

Speaker D: Same thing in same language. Yeah. And then. Oh, they speak, they all speak English, but, but they could speak to, you know, like, I'm actually right here in Medellin. Because, you know, one of the things that in especially in international nonprofit, a lot of people question like, is this real? Is this, you know, that's why the picture integrity is so important. Because people, you know, are skeptical and, you know, and I understand that. But so one of the things that we think about all the time is like, how can we continue to validate that? Well, let's hire from our sponsored families. Let's hire where we're serving people so they can speak to it. And that is just. Get me choked up talking about that because that is just something that I am super proud that we do because we're not just like taking care of our sponsors, but we're also the people taking care of our sponsors. We're also creating impact, life changing careers for them as well. So it's just win, win, win, win.

Speaker C: Sure.

Speaker E: That's amazing.

Speaker B: So how has, is most of the fundraising coming from the individuals or organizations or. I know there's been a lot of cuts to international aid lately, so has that had any impact?

Speaker D: Luckily, we weren't, we weren't using any of that aid. Um, ours. We have amazing sponsors and donors. It's I mean, if you want to feel good about something, spend a day like listening to our sponsors and donors. They, they just give so generously. Um, I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that we do give 90% to our families and you know, we have that A rating. But the majority of everything we do is really from individual sponsors. So those 280,000 families that we, um, support, there's, you know, in most cases there's a singular sponsor behind them. We are starting to expand our portfolio and look at the, like building out more donor programs. So agents of change, scholarship, things like that, where people can just donate money and looking at more of that, cultivating those relationships. But that's something really new to us, really. Since 1981, it's really been around a uh, one to one sponsorship. That's what's kept us going.

Speaker E: So are you saying that most of your guys revenue comes from individual people or families as opposed to like businesses or corporation?

Speaker D: Yes.

Speaker C: Yeah, that was what's cool about one of our founders, Bob Henson. He was big on, you know, a little bit of money from a lot of people. Yeah. Can make a big difference and, and then, you know, like, it makes the

Speaker E: entire organization in my mind just more stable. Because if you have a. Somebody who says, I can't do this anymore, it doesn't quite affect you guys as much. You still do what you guys do.

Speaker B: Well, I think we've, we've covered a whole lot.

Speaker E: There's no official outro or anything.

Speaker B: No, no, no.

Speaker C: Just no dance.

Speaker E: We don't dance. Well, that's.

Speaker B: There is a secret handshake. We'll teach you.