In this episode of Executive with a Cause, host Tammy Ven Dange chats with Martin Fisk, Chief Executive of Menslink. http://www.menslink.org.au
How do you enact societal change, whilst also growing the resources available to support this shift? In this episode, Tammy and Martin discuss funding efficiencies, board risk appetite and the positive multiplier effect of reducing the stigma associated with men’s mental health.
From increasing the annual donation income of $2,000 to over $1m, Martin explains the importance of achieving alignments in funding, such as his three-way partnership model, as well as how every leader needs to understand their organisation’s costs. Furthering this, we learn how Menslink have been able to calculate and publicise a ‘per person’ costing amount, and how organisations should not separate administrative from delivery data when considering this. Also on data, Martin describes defining outcomes to measure and dealing with negative results. Finally, amongst great discussions on changing stigmas surrounding male mental health, we hear how the inherent risks of delivering this service coexist alongside the board’s risk appetite.
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IT in Plain English
In this week’s segment, Tammy answers the question, ‘what is encryption?’. Encryption is a method to secure data by ‘scrambling’ it so that it is unreadable to non-intended recipients. Likely already in place on your payment gateways, consider encryption for information sharing, such as with vendors as well. To learn more about the potential implications of improperly protected data, watch our IT in Plain English episode on PCI compliance.
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Topics from this episode:
- 0.00 | Introduction
- 02.00 | Menslink
- 07.32 | Changing perceptions
- 12.51 | Growing the impact
- 14.45 | Funding opportunities
- 17.30 | Applying economies of scale to funding models
- 20.20 | Calculating individual delivery costs
- 24.18 | Adjusting the delivery model
- 29.55 | Data utilisation
- 45.20 | Boards and rirsk appetite
- 57.11 | IT in Plain English
Quotes from Martin Fisk in this episode:
“And for the last 20 years, we have been helping young guys through the tough times in their life. Loneliness, bullying, disability, mental health issues, suicide, drug abuse, family violence, and getting them through those tough times with the least amount of harm to themselves and those around them.”
“I think challenges that young men, young people, all of us face can be very amplified by the online world that so many of us live in.”
“So they started Menslink to be a safe place for young guys to come and talk to someone in a non-judgmental, understanding way. And it’s just grown from strength to strength to from there.”
“Mental Health in the 1980s was absolutely stigmatised; you did not talk about it, ever. And I thought, ‘wow if somewhere like Menslink was available when I was a kid, it could have turned my life around quite significantly. Now, the upside was that there wasn’t, and I went down to rock bottom, which then gave me the lived experience of being able to reapply that to Menslink, and I joined Menslink in 2011. So that was a little over 11 years ago, and I’ve never looked back.”
“Now, when I started, we were tiny, you know, we had one part-time counsellor, we had a handful of volunteer mentors. And so one of the things that I knew was that we had to grow our organisation to be able to meet the demand that I knew was out there.”
“I think the challenge was getting support for a young guy would never be cool. You know, it’s not cool to go, ‘you know, I’m really struggling, my girlfriend’s dumped me, my boss hates me, I’m about to get fired’, that’s not really cool. But if we could get it to a level where it was okay.”
“I also organised to get the Canberra Raiders, which is our local football team, involved in promoting a campaign to schools to say it’s okay to have hassles. But it’s not okay to stay silent about it. And that had an incredible effect of just people going, ‘you know what, yeah, it’s okay to talk about this stuff’. And importantly, you might be feeling the worst you’ve ever felt in your life today. But tomorrow, you might be all right. Or next year, you might be all right once you get through this hurdle.”
“So one of the things we did is went ‘, okay, with wherever we’ve kind of worked, it’s like, what are the cohorts that we’re not reaching?’. Right, the squeaky wheels are always going to get help, right? Whether it’s from us or any other organisation. What about, and I remember a teacher telling me this, it’s the grey kids that nobody sees. And they’re actually the ones that can often be at most risk. So you know, we went out on a limb quite a few years ago and, you know, really worked out how do we reach some of those kids?”
“But what I did to government is I said, ‘I think we can achieve some efficiencies’. Basically, through economies of scale, we had a bunch of fixed costs. What had a lot of flexibility was in variable costs. And I said, if you give us an increase in funding, and I think at the time, it was like, give us 15% more, I will actually deliver back to government 40% more output. And we did.”
“And I would say to business; you’re now in a partnership with the ACT Government. And I think having the community sector, Menslink, a business organisation, and the government all working together in a three-way partnership is probably one of the best models I’ve ever seen.”
“I think our admin and overhead costs may have been like 30% or 40% when I arrived. We got them down to like 18% or less. And that’s how you do that sort of stuff. But you’ve got to know your costs; you’ve got to know where the money is going. You need to have a firm grasp. I always talk about being a CEO of a charity; it’s somebody with a heart who loves spreadsheets. And maybe that’s the difference between a service delivery person and that sort of CEO and some of us finance types.”
“They view overheads as different when it’s actually required in order to deliver a counselling session to a young man that needs a counsellor. But the counsellor also has to be paid for note writing, downtime, professional development, supervision, the cost of payroll, all of these things actually go into that counselling session. So it doesn’t, in my mind, make any sense to say, ‘well, we’ll take away all the finance and admin people and cost them separately’. No, they’re an integral part of that counselling service because you could not provide that counselling service without it.”
“One of the really interesting challenges that we didn’t see coming initially, we kind of had a bit of a reluctance to go online. But what we found is the young guys hated it. Really, and this was not necessarily just our experience. This was also the experience of other user delivery services here in Canberra and quite possibly further afield as well. And I think the reason is they love online for entertainment. But counselling is actually a kind of work. And like they don’t like online schooling. They don’t like online counselling.”
“But I want to know, particularly after the fact, have we changed some of the things that we’re in business for? Have we improved mental health outcomes? Have we reduced the amount of damage to others? So have we reduced violence in the home aggression in the home? What about aggression in the school? What about aggression in the workplace? Have we had an impact on anger management? For those kids who are socially isolated and really at risk? Have we improved their connectedness with their family, with their school classmates? With their peers? You know, outside of that? Have we improved respect for women?”
“Because frankly, if we’re not making a difference, we either need to change the program, stop the program, because maybe it’s been effective and no longer is, or do something different.”
“And I think that’s a challenge in the community sector; somebody once told me that it’s the best job in the world with some of the worst days. And I think that’s a really good thing to remember, as a community sector worker, that you’re going to have some crashing days. And sometimes it’ll be your fault. Sometimes it’ll just be that stuff has happened. But that will only be a day. And it will change and get better again. Yeah, but sometimes you have dark days.”
“We’ve got some absolutely fantastic directors, both past and present, who worked on our risk appetite, which is, what are we prepared to do in order to deliver the outcomes that I’ve spoken about for young men? Because to have no risk would be to not deliver services, because inherently, as soon as you get to humans in a room, there’s a risk, or in a car, or we take them camping, and we do all sorts of stuff. So we took the board on a journey of actually defining the risk.”
“One of the things that was interesting. One of our board members said by having visibility of the incident register, they got a much more in-depth view of some of the real challenges our young men face. Unfortunately, like so many people in the community sector, we deal with some of the worst of human behaviours. And actually having a board that goes ‘wow, yeah’, it starts to give them empathy for what the staff and even our volunteers are going through, let alone our clients and their families.”
Links & Resources
- Connect with Martin on Linkedin
- Visit the Menslink website
- Learn about mentorship and partnership opportunities
Other Episodes Mentioned in this Show
- Watch our interview with Heidi Prowse of MIEACT
- Watch our interview with David Hubbard of Cinch Transform
Credits
Thanks to our Producer, Nick Whatman, and the entire team at Lonsdale St. Studio. Thanks also to our Digital Content Creator, Laura Kleinrahm.
Tammy Ven Dange is a former charity CEO, Not for Profit Board Member and IT Executive. Today she helps NFPs with strategic IT and data decisions with her business, Roundbox Consulting.
