It's Halloween season, which for me means it's Ghostbusters season. I love that movie. I'll stop on it every time it's on, and I'll tell anybody who asks that it still holds up.
If you've seen it, you know the setup. Strange things start happening all over New York, and nobody knows what to do about them. The city doesn't need a manual. It needs somebody to call. The team sets up shop in an old firehouse, Janine picks up the phone at the front desk, and pretty soon the whole city knows the number.
That's what I've always loved about it. When something weird showed up, people still needed an answer. They just went looking for it in a person. And when you get your answer from a person, you get the person too. Somebody who knows your name, remembers your problem, and shows up.
There's another part I think about a lot. Early on, the team gets one rule they're never supposed to break. Don't cross the streams. Then at the end, with the whole city on the line, the only way out is to do exactly that, all of them together at the same time. They can only pull it off because they've spent the whole movie leaning on each other. By the time it counts, they know exactly who they're standing next to.
Nonprofit work runs on that same idea.
We don't get through the hard stuff alone. We get through it because we know who to call, and because the people we've been calling all along are the ones willing to cross streams with us when it counts.
A lot of our offices had their own version of Janine's phone. It was a list taped to the wall by the front desk, full of names, numbers, and notes in the margins. It told you who could help with what and who to ask for by name. It looked like a list of numbers, but it was really a list of people. Nobody looked that stuff up. Somebody told you, and then you told the next person.
These days, that list lives in a chat window.
Can I be honest for a minute? I use AI every day, and I'm not writing this to tell anybody to stop. When you're stretched as thin as most nonprofit leaders are, getting a few hours back is a gift.
I spent a lot of years running nonprofits before I started consulting, and the help that mattered most almost never came from having the right answer. It came from the people I called to get it.
That's what worries me now. Typing a question is faster than tracking somebody down, so we type, grab the answer, and move on. Nobody sits down and decides to stop building relationships. It just slips away, one quick answer at a time.
Honestly, it's easy to let it go. Some of the old ways of connecting were a pain. The meetings ran long, and plenty of events felt like an obligation. I'm not nostalgic for any of it. But that's where a lot of us met the people we would end up calling for years.
Skip enough of those conversations, and somebody ends up paying for it. Usually it's the people we serve.
A family gets handed a phone number and sent on their way. They go in as strangers, explain their story one more time, and lose a little more of their willingness to ask for help. Some folks don't come back after that. Now think about a case manager who knows someone at that program and calls ahead first, so the family walks in and someone is expecting them. The first family got an answer. The second family got a person. It's the same need and a completely different experience.
Let me see if I can make this plain.
Who told you a partner was struggling? A person.
Who told you a funder's priorities had shifted? A person.
Who connected you to someone you needed to meet? A person.
Who noticed you needed help and offered it? A person.
Every one of those started with somebody asking somebody else for something. That's what we lose when all we want is the answer. When you call a peer for help, you're telling them what they know matters to you. If you do that enough times, over enough years, and you've built something solid for the day you really need it. You can't start building that in the middle of a crisis. Funders work the same way. They give to leaders they know, and they get to know you by hearing from you before you need something. If your biggest funder pulled back tomorrow, who would you call? And who would think to call you?
There's one more call I don't want us to lose. As executive leaders it can be lonely in a way most people don't see. You can't share everything with your staff, and your board needs you steady. The people who really get it are usually other leaders doing the same work. Those calls often start with a simple question, and before you hang up, you're telling each other the truth about how things are really going. That's the conversation that keeps a lot of you in this work.
None of this means giving up the tool.
Let AI handle the quick answers. When someone's well-being is on the line, or the relationship matters as much as the answer, pick up the phone. When AI points you to a person, reach out to them instead of stopping at the answer. And every so often, call somebody you don't need anything from at all. Those are the calls people remember.
The list by the front desk is mostly gone, and that's okay. The people who wrote on it are still out there. A chat window can give you an answer. When you get it from a person, you get the person too. So the next time a chat window hands you an answer, ask yourself the question the movie got right all along.