And welcome to Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio, big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. I’m your aptly named host and the podfather of your favorite hebdominal podcast. Oh, I’m glad you’re with us. I’d get slapped with a diagnosis of cladospoosis if you infected me with the idea that you missed this week’s show. Here’s our associate producer Kate with what’s up this week. Hey, Tony. Our coverage of the 2025 nonprofit technology conference continues with Inclusive and engaging virtual meetings. Our panel reveals how you can host accessible virtual meetings that foster active participation by removing barriers for diverse audiences, so all voices are heard and valued. They are Tiffany Ferguson and Aayla Jenkins McIntyre, both from Develop Well. Then RFP request for partnership. Kylie Aldridge Ogden and Ashley Stagg help you reimagine the RFP as a request for partnership. They share advice on what a good RFP looks like, how to involve your teams and get buy in, how to keep the work on budget and on time, and more. Kylie and Ashley are with Image X Media. On Tony’s take too. Hails from the gym. The know it all. Here is inclusive and engaging virtual meetings. Hello and welcome to Tony Martignetti nonprofit Radio coverage of 25 NTC, the 2025 nonprofit Technology Conference. We’re kicking off our day two coverage. We’re sponsored here at 25 NTC by Heller Consulting Technology services for nonprofits. The topic right now is facilitating inclusive and engaging virtual meetings. My guests are Tiffany Ferguson and Ayla Jenkins McIntyre. Tiffany is principal consultant at Develop Well. Welcome, Tiffany. Thank you pleasure to have you. It’s OK, relax. And uh Akayla Jenkins McIntyre is managing director and principal consultant at Develop Well. Welcome, Michaelayla. Thanks, pleasure to have both of you. Um, all right, so inclusive, inclusive and engaging virtual meetings. What, uh, first of all, what’s our, what, what are we what are we doing wrong? Uh, OK Kayla, why don’t you just give us an overview of the topic? We got plenty of time together, but just give us a high level view you want me to start with what we’re doing wrong? No, start with the high level. a little overview of your session. Did you do your session yet? No, we haven’t. OK. Well, what it’ll be about overview first. Yeah, we are excited to be here and to talk with folks about this. This is one of the things that we really enjoy chatting about, um, and so in terms of what it means to have. a meeting that is inclusive, um, first it’s important that we start with the working assumption that people who are facilitating meetings have a certain amount of power, um, and sometimes that power isn’t addressed. People tend to uh have a. Certain amount of trepidation to address that they’re holding power, but if it’s not addressed, then we don’t know what to do with it um and so that tends to be our, our kind of baseline that when you are in charge of being a facilitator that it comes with a certain amount of responsibility. Um, it’s also important that folks recognize that because power comes with responsibility, the key of that is sharing that power, and that shows up in a number of ways to us. And why don’t we hold, can we just that that’s a good overvie. Yeah, OK, we’ll we’ll get up, we’ll get into how the powers. OK, I just wanted to overview for folks, and for me too because you’ve been thinking about this topic for months or years, and I’ve been looking at it since just a couple of weeks. So thank you, um. OK, um, Tiffany, what, uh, do you want to get us started with how some of this power, well, what are we, I’d like to identify to what, what are we getting wrong about meetings like what, what isn’t inclusive about virtual meetings that we need to address? Yeah, I think there’s several things I think thinking about the context of a virtual meeting is important because what happens during a virtual work day or remote work day is you’re booked back to back you’re running from meetings into new meetings you’re usually probably pulling together agendas at the very last moment um you may not be sort of very intentional about how you’re using people’s time, um, folks also. Sort of treat meetings as if they’re these things they just have to do and showing up is enough and I think what we think about in terms of inclusivity and engagement is talking of thinking about what Akayla said you have a responsibility to prepare to plan to be thoughtful to think about what you’re trying to accomplish and whether or not your facilitation strategy or your agenda items are setting you up to accomplish that. And a lot of times what you need to accomplish is probably information gathering or decision making or prioritizing and there are different tactics to use to kind of approach doing those things that may not always be aligned with how you design your agenda so a lot of what we’re talking about is preparation. Uh, the, the role and power of being a facilitator, sort of being the person who’s watching and observing what’s going on in the meeting, who’s talking, who’s not talking, um, where the conversation is going and whether it’s going off track or not or, or staying on track, um, and then making sure you’re thinking about where where you need to go in the meeting and so sometimes you may have a rich discussion but you’re not getting to the decision. And so sort of the role of the facilitator is really important in the way we think about inclusivity and engagement because you’re the person who’s sort of what we like to say holding the container for this space that people are showing up in to do something together that’s usually probably a little bit hard um and that requires people to kinda make space take space or be aware of the dynamics in in the room. That’s that’s an interesting metaphor holding the container. Say, say a little more about, about that. What what what do you mean by that? Yeah, I would say imagine uh let’s use like a standard kitchen container Tupperware. Um, there are things that are built to take cold liquids, things that are built to sustain hot liquids. There are things that are glass. There are things that are plastic like being very rudimentary here on purpose, um, because a meeting is essentially a, a, it is a it is a holder. It is a place where people are meant to do something inside of it, um, and you’ve gotta have the right sort of structure, you’ve gotta have the right materials you’ve gotta have the right construction. In order to accomplish whatever you’re trying to do inside of it. Thank you. OK, so let, let’s come back to thanks for the overview. let’s come back to some more detail about what you were saying about uh how powers it we we’re in a meeting right now. I’m the facilitator, right? So I have the power that you’re, I, I presume, right? I have the power that. You’re asking me to acknowledge that I’m the host and I have some things I definitely can see I’ve got some bullets that I like to cover. They’re they’re not, they came from your session description, so I’m not imposing anything on you. I don’t, I don’t, but, um, so let’s go through an exercise where I am facilitating, I’m hosting. How is my power showing up? Or if you don’t wanna make it about this, no, that’s fine the abstract too. No, I’m happy. So because this is, you know, your podcast, this is sort of happening on your terms. We’ve shown up here and you do sort of get to, uh, dictate how this goes, um, and so if I’m gonna put that in meeting terms um dictator. We would hope that yeah, yeah, but it, um, even things as simple as um setting the tone for what we would expect of sharing the space with you and so during a virtual meeting as an example that would be something like uh setting agreements or norms among the group so that we are all clear about how we are expected to engage in this space. There has to be someone whose responsibility it is to tell people that. Because otherwise, um people come at things from varying backgrounds um they approach engagement with one another in various ways and so even things um as simple as an agreement to step up and step back um helps people to understand that the expectation is that we are sharing our perspectives in this space that’s stepping up and we are also making space for other people. to have their perspectives shared and that’s stepping back there are meetings where it is the norm for folks to talk over each other. It is the norm for um people to kind of like drill in until they’ve gotten their point across, right? And unless someone is the person who’s saying in this space, the expectation is that we blank, then it can default to whoever the person is who decides that they would like the meeting to go on a. Particular way and so when we say that um power is certainly something that a meeting facilitator holds that is also the power to indicate for folks what the expectation is of a shared and inclusive space that allows all voices to be present and often what is required is for that to be stated and then for there to be someone who is responsible for holding the group accountable to that um as an example a question here about. Uh, some logistics details, um, you, you’ve said a couple of times there’s someone who’s responsible for upholding the group the norms that have been explicitly stated, is that necessarily the group, the the person who’s leading the meeting, or is that could be another role like a moderator? It could absolutely be another role, um, and again when we talk about what it means to share a space, we actually do think that it’s. A good idea for people to hold roles in general because what we desire is for people to be invested in the meeting that they are attending and so we’re clear about your role here we’re clear about our roles here we are here to share about the topic that we know about and are presenting about and you are here to ask us questions about how to how to do this this is a very straightforward sort of set up in this way, but that’s not always the case with meetings. People aren’t always clear about how they are expected to engage assigning people roles, note takers. Someone who’s gonna serve as the moderator, someone who’s gonna serve as the as the timekeeper, someone who’s gonna serve as the person who holds us accountable to our agreements and to name when it feels like perhaps the space is not adhering to those agreements are all responsibilities that we can assign to people that make people feel more invested in the space that they are attending. We don’t want people to be kind of backseat participants in a meeting, we want them to feel as though they are able to actively engage in the meeting. And we feel is the responsibility of the person who’s in charge of facilitating to make sure people see themselves actively reflected in the space that they are engaging in. OK, like I would call it delegation, but, uh, having roles, giving people agency authority in the meeting, um, Tiffany, do we, do we talk about these, um these norms in, in every meeting or I get. I guess it is every meeting when the audience when the group is different then you have to acknowledge these suppose you have a standing weekly meeting and it’s the same 4 people every Tuesday at 2 o’clock in the afternoon. Do you, do you, uh, make these norms explicit each each weekly meeting or is it just kind of assume it’s gonna carry on from you know from week to week. Yeah, I think in that case you would kind of presume that folks are bought into the norms and the way you do that is typically facilitate a conversation periodically um where you set the group norms right? so these yeah it it’s like yeah like whenever we facilitate a session we always start with group norms, but when we have our team meetings, right, we don’t go through the group norms every single time. Um, but you can sort of set a cadence for reviewing them, making sure those are still the norms, making sure people feel. Um, like if they wanna add some or if they wanna talk about, you know, I, I, I feel like we haven’t been living into these, and I think there’s a case to be made for a sort of periodic check in on your group norms as an organization when you’re the same group of people kind of meeting on a regular basis. OK, OK, did you have something to add um. Something that we often hear from people when we’re doing trainings about this kind of thing is that um that’s particularly relevant to agreements is that they will say that and they’re usually talking about a particular person who somehow. Consistently steering meetings away from something exactly, exactly that, um, and they’re trying to say what do I do? It’s a guy. Well, well, I mean you said it not me. I did. It’s a basic assumption, not 100%, but so but this is very common that folks are coming and we’re like giving these strategies and they’re like, OK, yeah, great, all that sounds good, but what about this particular person who is always doing this thing? And the reason that agreements are important is because people don’t know how to address that because um. The sort of, uh, what’s being named implicitly is that they don’t desire there to be a confrontation. Like they don’t desire to confront this person about their actions and how their actions are impacting the group and what group agreements do is that they take that pressure off and instead it becomes about we have agreed that this space, um, the expectations in this space are blank blank and blank and so it is not now, you know, Joe was saying to Bob, hey, you’re doing this thing and you need to stop because you’re blah blah blah. It is a person whose responsibility in this shared. Space is to hold us accountable to the agreement, the title is we all agree and you’re not doing that adhering to what we all agree, yes, and so it becomes much more, much less of a personal Tiffany, you wanna speak to that? It depends on the meeting. I think these are important. Yeah, it is gonna be new to folks. It, it can depend on the meeting, um, and it depends on who’s watching. I think there are a lot of like when we talk about inclusive meetings. Uh, what we’re talking about with inclusivity engagement, people who are sort of actively part of the meeting, not people who are hanging back off screen in their kitchen making coffee or doing whatever people do when they’re in virtual meetings. I’m talking about meetings where people are leaning forward. People need to be watching and when you have that kind of engagement, people can see when there’s a person taking up a lot of space. People can feel when there’s a person who hasn’t said anything in a meeting. People can feel when there’s someone who. Can’t quite uh wrap their head around a thing and and and they’re stuck and and that’s the agreement we typically refer to as uh. Except non closure, right? Like sometimes you’re just not gonna get every answer every question answered, so you’ve gotta be able to sit with that and so when you start to see that stuff having group agreements allows you to know that everybody sees it and once everyone sees it, it’s a lot easier if there’s someone appointed or someone who feels. They have uh someone who feels safe to say, hey, I just want a name that it feels like we’ve been hearing a lot from some folks or hey Tony, I really appreciate your contributions, but you have been talking a lot. I wanna make some space for others and then there are some folks who maybe don’t need to call them out by name. Say hey there are a couple folks here we really like to hear your perspective. Maybe the operations team we haven’t heard from you all. We know you’re working on a big project. What are your thoughts? Do is anything coming up for you? And so a lot of the typically because we tend to facilitate meetings we take on that role, but when you’re working in a team where sort of you want to distribute or share responsibility or agency or or power, you want to make sure it’s safe enough for other people to be able to say, hey, we had this agreement and. We, it, it feels like we’re a little off track, yeah, yeah, and I, I, I completely agree that. Everybody senses what’s happening. Everybody feels it, and it, it, I don’t know now I’ll personalize it to me it’s like it builds up attention and I think the person who’s got the authority, whoever that named person is, has a responsibility to ease the tension for anybody because we all feel it. It’s now it’s an elephant in the room, the virtual room, and it’s if it goes unaddressed then that everybody just just leave the meeting tense and and it’s trying to get to your forget about. Like trying to get to your goals for the meeting, everybody’s got this tension that that can be relieved with a couple of firm reminders and and you know what’s happening while no one’s talking about in the meeting, they’re all back chatting, they’re they’re talking about it’s like, oh my God, there they, there she goes again. Oh my God, they don’t shut up. Oh that was so rude. Can you believe? Oh, that person always in in and then that becomes the place where conflict is confronted. And that just builds resentment and that actually begins to erode your culture. You, you, you lose trust, you lose confidence in people, uh, you start to second guess and that’s when, you know, we typically get clients coming to us saying like we, you know, are we’re struggling. People aren’t engaged our culture, you know, we need to take a survey. We don’t know, you know, we, we need better performance management like we, we get clients because we do organizational development consulting. Come to us with a myriad of entry points and one of the first things we like to do is discovery. And typically when we get a chance to sit in on their meetings when we do we can we can start to see what’s going on in the culture you can see people hanging back you can see people off screen you can see whether or not the chat is lively you can see whether or not people who are commenting or commenting from a place of they’re invested or they’re just commenting because they want to break the silence. And that’s, that’s that begins to tell us, OK, there’s something going on here and it’s not about meetings. It is just the, the meeting is just the, the, the, the place that it’s happening but it is not coming from the meeting, yeah, and can, can I add to that that ultimately when we talk about a thriving organizational’s. Uh, so much of it though is about accountability and so, um, part of a thriving organizational culture is, um, having, uh, having an entity to which people feel accountable to and agreements certainly help to do that, but when people are not accountable to one another are not accountable to a shared space um it is difficult to have a. Thriving organizational culture overall people have to feel accountable to something in an organization in order for accountable to the mission, accountable to one another accountable to the agreements that you all have set as an entity in order for an organizational culture to thrive and if that can’t happen at meetings typically have a purpose we are seeking to execute on something that ultimately is seeking to fulfill the aims of the institution in some capacity. And if people feel like we can’t even get certain things done in meetings, there is a trickle effect that happens over time where people just start to disengage. I’m imagining a trickle up at the meetings and then it develops the and then it works its way up, you know, to, uh, you know, we’re ignoring the mission we’re not fulfilling which is why are so important. I was gonna, oh yeah, uh, people who aren’t active in meetings, how do we, Tiffany, you, you kind of either of you for either of you, but you kind of touched on it, you know, there are some folks who are hanging back and you call them out by name, but, but how are the strategies for encouraging participation. Either in the meeting or maybe after the meeting, maybe coaching after the meeting for folks that you know kind of routinely are not participating even though they they have they have they have to contribute, but for some reason, you know, they’re just not comfortable in. Yeah, I think this is where curiosity is really important. Um, and thinking about how the meeting is designed and whether it’s designed in such a way that everyone can participate or the people that need to participate or participating, so some of the things we talk about in the session are sort of what’s the purpose? Is the purpose clear and are the people who are gonna be there the right people. Sometimes like to diagnose why people aren’t engaging it’s a much broader exercise. It’s not just like Tony, you’re here why aren’t you talking? You know it it could be a follow up with Tony with you and say, hey, I noticed we’ve had a few meetings now and I haven’t heard you participate. I just want to learn more about that if, if that’s OK, you know, like making it safe for you to share what your orientation means. That’s one approach curiosity. Another approach is just taking a step back and thinking about whether the meeting is effective. Is it effectively designed for people to engage and participate? Some of that one of the the the tips that we offer in the session is um frame your agenda items as questions. So instead of just saying. Item 1 or item 3 because you wouldn’t do this as the first item. Item 3, nonprofit radio show. You might reframe it as. What’s the best way to leverage our speaking engagement on nonprofit radio, right, so you are prompting people. You’re, you’re not just giving people information, you’re giving them a thing to engage with. So I think there are, you know, OK Kayla can say a lot more about this. It’s agenda. There’s a, yeah, and if, and if you know what that is as a person designing the agenda. Um, then why not just give it to people in advance, you know, don’t just get on and be like, oh yeah, I just threw the unit together. Like, like we have to be real about how we run meetings. Yeah, we’re, we’re talking about preparation. People, people meet their own stuff together, you know, and then they, and then they late and then they’re like, oh yeah, I didn’t, I’m guilty of this like we, we, it’s, it’s not, it’s not. Hard to be guilty of this stuff, and I think these are the types of things that you, if you don’t step back and ask these questions, get very curious then you end up in this weird place where you’re like no one’s engaging. We just had a meeting no one said anything. I don’t understand it wasn’t helpful. And then if you ask people like one of the questions we ask people in the session is turn to your neighbor and and name a a meeting yay or a meeting nay. Is there a meeting you, a virtual meeting you you attended that was, that was fantastic. It it it it was engaging and why was it facil facilitation? Was it structure? Was it content? Or maybe you have an example of a meetingna. It was insufferable. It was long. It was, it was boring. It was a waste of time and a lot of people have examples of the latter. I was gonna say it’s probably more nays than more nays than. All right, well, we’re working to turn that around. OK, um, the, the your description talks about the tools, tools that promote equity. Are there, are there platforms or resources, uh, that you recommend folks use a cable? Um, just to, to go back to how people are engaging, um, and when we say like what do we do when people aren’t participating, another question that we tend to pose is how people were being asked to participate. So yes, the questions are important, but people should be given multiple, um, ways, particularly in virtual. Weanings of engaging with what you are asking of them, um, and so participation isn’t always going to be verbal. Everyone is not going to participate in that way and so when we talk about what it means um for meetings to be inclusive, it is also about meeting people where they are for you to get what you are asking from them. And so what that looks like in real time is making the chat available to people. It looks like putting people in breakout groups and giving them something to respond to. Sometimes people are not getting what they’re looking for for meetings because they’re just talking at people for quite some time and people don’t know what you want them to do. People need something to do for you to get what you’re trying to get usually. And so, um, there are many platforms that that this can, many ways this can take place. You can put people in breakout groups and give them a Google doc and say put your thoughts here and we’re going to come back and chat. You can have them put in the chat. You can indicate for them that there’s going to be, you know, I’m looking to hear from blank person, blank person, blank person on this question and tee them up. You can do a lot of things to get interaction in that way. Zoom. A whiteboard function you love Zoom is doing things, OK, at this point they have realized that people need to engage in different ways and we are not just sitting here trying to do lecture style meetings until the end of time and that white board function is great. It’s really helpful for collaboration um and so yeah, there are plenty of functions that exist out there to polls. Zoom polls are great in order to to get people talking in that way, um, but. Yeah, I, I really do think that part of inclusivity is um allowing people to engage in a way that best suits their needs, and that is not always just gonna be unming themselves and talking out loud. OK you said meeting people where they are to get what you what you’re hoping to get what you need to get from them because there is, there’s a purpose to all this. Otherwise we shouldn’t have be having the meeting Tiffany, you, I think mentioned, uh, you know that evaluate whether this meeting is even necessary. You’re kind of touching on, you know, so there’s worthy scrutiny of the weekly meeting or the biweekly meeting, you know, they may not be needed. It may not be needed every week like maybe weekly is a default, but we all have the option to say, you know, we don’t, we don’t have any agenda items. Let’s not meet. Possibly it, it really depends on what your goal is in a remote culture. Um, I, there was a time when we all used to work in person and when you had a meeting, it was in the conference room and you showed up at 11:30 and you sat in front of a screen and there was either a PowerPoint or someone talking, sitting around a table, um, and the way you participated in that was very straightforward. You listened, you wrote notes, you kind of threw your hand up when you had something to say, or you didn’t say anything. And that was fine, you know, like I, that’s how meetings were they were very static and if someone’s PowerPoint was good or bad, it didn’t really matter if you tuned out or walked out to go to the bathroom it didn’t matter. It was a lot more implicit and when you move to a remote environment in you know in today’s work workforce workplace rather it’s intergenerational. You have people who have never worked in person, so you actually have to be extremely explicit about what meetings are. What the purpose are, what the expectations are, what we’re trying to accomplish together, why it’s important for people to be engaged, and you have to always connect it back to the mission, and I know people might find that oh man, it’s so much. Why don’t people just should know, but why should they know if you’re not talking about it as a as an organization like. What work really is if you take a step back, is getting a bunch of people who don’t know each other from different walks of life who have all different kinds of ideas about what it means to be with people, to work. Some people are there, we’re all there for our livelihoods, so the stakes are high. But we’re also there for different reasons and, and we there’s no singular code of engagement and so what you have to do in a workplace is really design a place that people can come in, have shared values have shared understanding and have shared buy in on why they’re doing anything that they’re doing and if your meaning is not a clear sort of if it’s not clearly correlated to why you’re there. Then people aren’t gonna care. It’s just gonna be a waste of time. Oh, I’m just in that meeting. I’m gonna do a bunch of other stuff. And so for a lot of what we are trying to convey to folks is you, you gotta get explicit, you gotta get intentional. People aren’t just gonna show up and be fantastic. You, you have to give them instructions. You have to give them directions. You have to give them directives and you have to be creative. You know, like, I’m, I’m, I’m a dancer by training. I love to put on the show. So I’m looking for funny pictures, silly songs. I’m looking for visual, visual representations of what we’re talking about to Kayla’s point, like you gotta be able to engage people in different modalities. Um, live polls are also a really great way to engage people like you’ve, you’ve really got to be willing to rethink why you’re bringing people together and what you’re really asking them to do and a lot of times you’re asking people to come together and think about think and do hard stuff and so if you don’t give them enough information, if you don’t create enough safety if you don’t create enough uh sort of clarity, you’re you’re not gonna get people to do what is needed to be done. So if you have a weekly meeting and you’re like. Oh, it’s really unproductive. Maybe you don’t need it. But it also might be an opportunity to rethink what could we use uh team time for every week and maybe it’s not task because a lot of people need to do tasks when people might be listening there like I don’t need to rethink my weekly one on one. We’re just talking about work that’s moving. Well maybe you need to be talking about something else as a team. You know, maybe you need to be talking about culture, maybe you need to be thinking about sort of checking in on the goals. Maybe you need to be thinking about. Talking to the team about what meetings could be helpful with them what a shared agenda could look like, like there’s so many ways to leverage people’s fantastic skills and contributions that whatever you’re doing may not be the right thing to do that, but I, I’m sure that there are ways to leverage people in a meeting format. That’s perfect. Thank you. All right, OK, let me start with you, Tiffany. They’re both from Tiffany Ferguson is principal consultant and Jenkins McIntyre is managing director and principal consultants sings Tony Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio coverage of 5 sponsored by Heller Consulting. It’s time for Tony’s sake too. Thank you, Kate. Tales from the gym, continue. This week Oh The insufferable. Jim, know it all. One guy asked for his advice. Uh, this was, this is somebody who we know, um, his name is Rob. We, I’ve, I’ve talked about Rob before, former Marine, we talked about semper fi. Uh, I’ve talked about him a few times. So Rob. At the gym often asked a guy who I’ve never seen before. Uh, about, uh, helping his lower back pain. And I’ve heard Rob ask other people because he sees people doing lower back exercises and. I don’t know, he, he, I over here, you know, I’m like I know the guy, I know everything except the guy’s social security number. I got, so I know he works with a personal, uh, he works with a physical train, sorry, he works with a PT, a physical therapist. He has a physical therapist, but he also asks. Strangers in the gym for their advice because he has this chronic lower back pain. So the guy, uh, of course, um, at this point, I don’t know he’s a know it all, but, uh, learning later that he is a know it all, you know, of course, he’s effusive with the advice. Oh yeah, you got to do these stretches. So he showed him a couple of stretches and do them with light weights, lightweights was the point and bands. You gotta work with the band, the band is very important, the band. You know, the stretchy band thing, all right. So that’s fine. Um, and then the know it all. Uh, moves over to somebody who’s doing planks. Thankfully, it wasn’t me, because I do planks. I do a lot of planks. I do regular forward planks, I do 6 of those, and then I do 6 side planks, 3 on each side. Thankfully, uh, the gymno it all did not come over to me. He went over to somebody else who was doing planks. Maybe the other person, uh, looked, I don’t know, looked like a victim, uh, looked like they wanted help. I don’t know, but he goes over and explains, you should do better plank, you can do better planks. This is unsolicited. He’s just walking over to a stranger. You could do better planks. They’re called around the world, and he demonstrates, he’s he’s in a plank position. And around the world, you rotate one leg at a time, and, and then you rotate your torso, so it’s kind of going around the world, you know, around just doing circles with your torso and your legs, uh, one leg at a time and then the torso. And uh he’s, and he’s saying, make your abs burn. You can make your abs burn, right? Totally unsolicited. I mean he just walks up to a stranger. And then there was another one. The same, this is the same, uh, insufferable gym know it all, going up to with a third person now, well, to, second one unsolicited because the first one, Rob did ask, unsolicited. He goes to, and, and it’s all guys, he’s helping. I don’t, you would have thought, well, maybe he’s insufferable, you know, like he’s, he thinks women don’t know how to work out of the gym or something, but no, he was, he was only going to guys. This one, he said, you, you, you should try doing fewer reps with more weights. Uh, on a machine. The guy, the guy was working on a machine. Now, first of all, that is contrary to what I’ve read about free weights and also machines. You’re supposed to, uh, I think it’s better to do more reps and lower weight. That’s what I’ve read, OK, but again, Mr. uh Insufferable, you know, Jim know it all, he didn’t come up to me. So he’s advising this, uh, other stranger now do fewer reps with more weight, uh, and so. You know, the guy is just, he just has to share his unsolicited, probably unwanted advice with strangers loudly, cause I hear him. You know, keep your advice to yourself. OK, fine. Rob asked you, yeah, yeah. Help Rob. Help all Rob all you want. The weights and the bands and the up and the lower back pain, absolutely. But the other people, leave them alone. Leave them alone. That is Tony’s take too. Kate Sounds like a lot of free coaching to me. Yeah, it’s probably worth what you paid for it. I don’t know. Especially the fewer reps with more weight. That, uh, uh, maybe it’s different goals, like if you want to bulk up versus just tone or something, I don’t know, but you know, you just, you just don’t do these things. You just don’t walk up to strangers and start telling them how to, how to exercise any more than you would tell them how to. I don’t know, drive a car, push a shopping cart, uh, take care of their children, you know, but you just, you just keep that, you keep that shit to yourself. Mhm. Yeah. I like um watching the Instagram influencers who go to the gym and yeah, they’re filming themselves, but they have like a, like a base to give tips and whatnot, and they have like their headphones on and that’s like a pretty big like don’t talk to me sign. And like tap on them. Like, do you not see like this on and then I I don’t know such big influencers that people want their autograph or something? Is that why they’re tapping, it’s usually just like, hey, could I hop on your machine or giving unsolicited advice, you know, people are so entitled and like. Exactly, yeah, entitled. Why are you entitled to invade my space with your unsolicited, uh, advice? You’re not, you’re not. We’ve got Boku but loads more time. Here is RFP request for partnership. Excellent. Thank you for moving us along. Hello and welcome to Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio coverage of 25 NTC. You know what that is? It’s a 2025 nonprofit technology conference. You know that we’re at the Baltimore Convention Center. What you don’t know is, oh, you also. So now that we are sponsored by Heller Consulting software services for nonprofits, what you don’t know is that the current topic is request for partnership redefining the RFP process. Now you do. Now you’re in on the secret. With me now are Kylie Aldridge Ogden and Ashley Stag. Kylie and Ashley are both with Image X Media. Kylie is senior portfolio director, nonprofit, and Ashley is sales director. Kylie, welcome. Thank you, pleasure to have you. Have you done your session 3:30, 3:15, 3:15. OK. Uh, OK, it’s a good thing you have the marketing director here, not, not a properly attired. She’s off brand on the pants, but, but she’s keeping you, she’s keeping you organized. Um, Kylie, I’m just gonna fix your, your right headset. You probably can’t hear me in your right ear. Oh, that makes sense. I’ll fix that. OK. I’m OK. Request for partnership redefining the RFP process. Um, let’s see Ashley furthest furthest from the host, just give us an overview of the topic that you’re gonna cover this 3 o’clock. Sure, thanks so it’s as we kind of redefining the RFP process. It’s about the way that you can structure an RFP process to get better outcome, uh, and also from both sides, vendor and the institution better outcomes and also bring humanity into the process, um, because. We feel that if you’re working with someone in a partnership kind of capacity, it’s really important to know not only that they have the technical aptitude but also that they have the humanity and the ability to work with you in a positive way. I know you’re even renaming it’s it’s request for redefining the RFP process that that uh that subtlety was not lost on otherwise lackluster host. um so so uh. How do we, so the, the RFP responsibility lies with the organization, so they have the power initially I, I, I’m sure in a partnership we want to share the power, but, uh, so Kylie, uh, how do we open the minds of those who take the first step with RFP? Yeah, we get a lot Ash gets the great privilege of reading. Through most of the portfolio the RPs that come into the organization and you get to start when you start looking at them, you start to understand which ones are good and which ones are bad or which ones are the the us being the vendor, them being the person pursuing a partner who, what they’re looking for. You get a sense of it. If it’s really well written, if it is if they’re using things like looking for partnerships, looking for longer term engagements, looking for. Um, instead of just things that are like we have a budget, we have a timeline, we have a very set, you know, 34 or 5 features that we want you to build, it takes away sort of the personal nature of what they’re looking for and most people specifically in the nonprofit space need someone they can trust. They need someone who. It’s showing their creativity who’s showing their um imagination and helping them execute their internal goals and their internal dreams so trying to bring that back together and helping because we see so many and because Ashley sees so many of these sort of RFPs that come out into the general world, you start to get the sense of the ones that are. Strongly worded or strongly written in a way that they’re going to solicit the right partnerships versus people who are just either lowballing the estimates or trying to figure it out or just trying to gain additional workers you want a you want a partner in this process, especially if it’s a longer term engagement. Do you resented. We do, because oftentimes that will lead to a conversation and that’s when we can really shine and kind of suss out from both sides what a partnership could look like. We find that there’s often. Unnecessary tension between procurement and say the wants and needs of the organization so they’ll have wants and needs and then by the time that has been communicated and makes makes its way through procurement, it becomes very boilerplate and it again it’s just not an efficient way to pick a true partner. OK, uh, you mentioned the humanity and I, I questioned you’re bringing humanity into the RFP process. um, Kylie kind of touched on some things. What what what else are you? Encouraging those of us who though not us, I don’t run a nonprofit, those folks who hold the power in the uh in the the now renamed request for partnership relationship. What else are you encouraging those folks to do in their R maybe it’s even before they start writing the pre-typing what should we be thinking? You you can you can almost game the RFP process, I would say so. If you are stuck in a more formal procurement kind of cycle, there are certain things you can do to help again bring that humanity back in and make more educated partnership type decisions so you can do things like research um the different marketplace and get an idea about who you would like to potentially respond. So maybe you have a bit of a closed process where you send it to 12 vendors say instead of opening it up to everyone to respond and having to go through all the work and at the end of that still maybe not getting what you need to make an educated decision. So as an example it’s OK to talk to some of the vendors. It’s yeah it’s like you’re gathering. You’re not cheating, you’re not cheating any of the others that you didn’t get a chance to talk to, but to 4 or 5 to get a I guess a way of appropriateness is our budget appropriate. Yes, certainly, and something else that we we do research and it’s it’s often something we see where there’ll be say maybe 50 vendors have the technical aptitude to accomplish what it is you’re looking for, but again you have to remind yourself that you’re working with these people for 9 months, years. You have to, you have to work well together. There’s often because they’re not willing to talk to you. It makes it tricky and you’re not gonna get it. And that’s what we’re talking about where she’s bringing up the concept of humanity is it’s actually elevating that like reach out, talk to people, have a conversation. There’s a process that will sometimes organizations will go through which is they’ll actually like interview a number of different potential vendors and then they’ll take the list of questions and everything and share it across the board to keep it equal among the vendors that they’re interviewing. But how do you know how an organization works? How do you know if the values match? How do you know if the way that they are going to deal with your team is aligned? Project management and project execution is really critical in the completion phase like RFP is one part, but the second part is how that project is then going to be executed and if there’s not a. If it’s all procurement, there’s no conversations. Once it comes into the to the execution side of it, you’re sort of starting from scratch and you don’t know what everybody’s wanting and you’re kind of figuring that out differently. So anytime you can elevate those sort of interview style, you wouldn’t interview you wouldn’t take an employee without interviewing them, also interview your partners. You have a very active uh media is it like snapping 60 pictures already. We’ve been in this for 8 minutes. That’s great. We appreciate you want lots of content and then you use the best of the best, of course. It takes about 6 pictures to get a good one. You’re not doing portrait, are you? You’re not blowing the nonprofit is coming through. OK, thank you thank you. Um, we’re all working together. It’s humanity. It’s a partnership. There we go. She’s grateful that we have the lights. That’s what it is. It’s, it’s the ambient lights. She’s like finally they look good. So now I’ll take all the pictures. Yeah, this is what I’ve been waiting for. You said it. I did not. No, we can be self deprecating on ourselves. Yeah, no, I, from my stand up comedy, I I always recognized you make fun of yourself, no one can be offended. Um, alright, so can we talk a little more about what, what a good RFP looks like? I mean, uh, Kylie, you tipped off a couple of things, um, but what else, what else should we, now we’re like we’ve done our research phase. Now, we are typing. We probably got something off the internet, some boilerplate, and then we’re hopefully we’re extensively modifying it’s for. You’d be surprised how few extensively modify it, to be honest with you, but the piece that you’re starting to look for is, I would say just to add to it that organizational alignment is a big one that you’re gonna start with. So once you’ve kind of got the RFP, you want to make sure internally within your nonprofit, nonprofits I’ve worked with them for 25 years and there are. So many needs fundamentally within every nonprofit and not everybody is wearing so many hats that when the concept comes up of like hey Tony, what do you want the website to do? Well, you have one goal, another person in your organization will have another goal, another person will have another goal and it’s now trying to figure out across the whole organization of these like 60-70 goals that you’ve elevated. What are the top 10 that you’re actually going to achieve in this process. So making sure you have organizational alignment internally and that. Within that organizational alignment, you’re also setting to your internal people like, hey, I respect your goal of whatever this particular feature is, but We aren’t gonna get to that this time we’re gonna deal with these because this is helping us solve this critical issue. So as you kind of go through writing the appropriate business case for the for the goals that you’re trying to achieve internally is a huge portion portion of the process and making sure that you have that internal alignment. OK, anything else that we wanna see an RFP? Sure, well this is, this is almost kind of skipping beyond the writing and more the evaluation stage, but it is all it is all encompassing. It’s gonna sound probably weird for a sales director to say, but be, be careful of people that pitch well because realistically if you win the like if we were to win the partnership, you’re not dealing with me every day, you’re dealing with Kylie and her team, so it’s important to actually get a handle on who it is you’ll be dealing with and make sure there’s alignment in the fit there and and conversations too. I don’t want to talk to the sales when we get it right, as you said to the evaluation phase. Projects that have come in and they’ve never spoken to us like they’ve never spoken to her yeah it’s it’s all. Please submit, here’s the deadline and then you get an email back that’s like, hey, you’ve won. And then when they start coming into Image X, we’re effectively day one. We’ve never. So tell us about yourself. You’re kind of in that level of like welcome to the family, let’s figure this out together um and. Frequently in those cases, the people that she was working with over email communication aren’t even the same people I’m dealing with. They’re completely different. So there’s a it’s incredibly hard. So you’ll you’ll take the work and we’re happy to start from scratch. The piece that I find from a delivery execution side of that is that you always, you often will have struggles. Getting it moving or figuring out because sometimes the people who are executing the project aren’t aware of the priorities that got put into the procurement process. They don’t know what the contract was negotiated. They don’t actually know many cases what was in the RFP that was sent to them. Um, because it was so siloed, so trying to create that’s where Ashley was talking about bringing the humanity and it’s like have the conversations up front, incorporate your project lead into the process, create organizational alignment internally and decide what are the corporations or the organization’s top priorities. Figure that out, have that internal like do your internal homework and then also meet with the partners and figure out what that’s what is going to be the best personal fit for you. OK, very good. Uh, let’s let’s move to the evaluation. Sure, yeah. No, no, no, no, not at all. Um, what, uh, right, well, clearly with the team that’s gonna be doing the work. Don’t undervalue gut feeling again, this probably sounds like I’m banging on the same drum, but that’s where the humanity piece comes in like you don’t. You, you will have a gut feeling about things you’ll you’ll get OK this this person doesn’t communicate well, um, they don’t provide solid answers they didn’t handle conflict well on the on the initial call. They, you know, there’s all these little things that do build up so certainly yes, there’s you say yes pile a no pile, but also have those maybes, those gut feelings, and then use the opportunity to. Actually engage with the vendors and ask follow up questions if the deal looks too good to be true, it probably is. So if the timeline looks really aggressive, it probably is really aggressive and un unable to be executed in that structure. If the budget looks really low, if everybody’s coming in at 1000 and you have this one that’s 23,000, there’s a really good chance that the 23,000 can achieve that budget. Like there’s a certain perspective of. There’s a gut instinct there that’s like that’s not factual, that’s not realistic it’s too much of an outlier and and where the communications can come from people are really good at assessing like do I, do they seem trustworthy does this person seem like they’ve got my best interest at heart do they specialize in my field? Um, ImageX has a dedicated nonprofit channel. We support over 100 nonprofits within our channel of businesses, but we also have education. We also have commercial, so we see a variety of different things, but do they have a specialty in my specific style of work? Do they actually know what they’re getting into? Do they have history? Can they show evidence of their work? These are all excellent excellent things to be asking, right? OK um. And certainly I mean in terms of your, your gut like if there’s a company that won’t won’t give you access to the team or we don’t know who’s gonna we don’t know yet who’s gonna be assigned and that’s kind of that is that a red flag or is that a fair thing to say we don’t know who’s from I’ll just answer from the there may be a case so there’s times where we’re working with contractor with project during the procurement process and I don’t know so I’m responsible for signing resources like that’s my job within one of the within our organization. And I will, she’ll say who’s going to be on the project team and I may not know. It’s because I don’t know their exact timeline. If they signed in 6 weeks, it could be this one. If they sign in 8 weeks it could be this one. If they take 2 years I don’t like it’s a hard sort of space so they may not know the very specific project resources, but they should be able to provide you with some representatives at least, and we can always do that. I can always have myself or a director of design or a director of development. There’s people who can step in that’ll give you a sense of the organization, but you may not know the exact. Project manager you’re working with just because of the way that resources get settled, yes, certainly, and that’s I guess like what Kylie was speaking about for excuse me what Kylie was speaking about um in terms of having the representative have like she’ll come into the calls on not for profit finalists and she is going to be the consistent figurehead. She’s she’s always going to be there so at least. Again through the process, the institution can meet who will actually be delivering and get a feel for the way she works, what she prioritizes, all these different things, and even though the resources that will actually do the work are somewhat interchangeable because again depends on project start dates at least Kylie is there and you know what she’s about and I can talk to our methodologies and anybody you’re meeting should be able to talk through like your your delivery methodologies your process in terms of your execution process. And making sure that there’s alignment there if you’re gonna if you most nonprofits are looking for a partner, they’re looking for somebody because it’s a lot of work internally to set up a new vendor to set up that process to create that relationship for them they don’t have the time or the energy even if they have the money they don’t have the time and the energy most of the time because there’s so many other things in the world that they need to spend their time doing. So wanting to create longer term partnerships, which is what we find with nonprofits, most of our partners within the nonprofit space have been long term 1015 year partners like we’ve been together through the trenches. You wanna know who you’re going to deal with. You wanna understand how they’re going to execute, what’s their delivery requirements? How do they work with you? How are you going to get information from them? What’s the reporting structure? Figure all of that out because once you’ve answered that can they build it? Does the budget work? You want to make sure that there’s partnership alignment. How about you? Pretty easily, truthfully, most of it like everybody is assuming from a project management perspective staying on budget and time is like some sort of mythical concept of how we do it. It’s mostly through conversation and realistic expectation setting. It’s making sure that as you go through the process within Project Manager there’s a if you’ve seen it before there’s we call it the iron triangle which is no that’s fair it’s called the it’s a project management strategy and it’s literally the iron triangle which is scope budget time. Two can move, one cannot. So when you’re having a conversation with an organization, you sort of say like, what is your what is your like most important piece? Yeah, yeah. So if you sort of look at it, otherwise you can move to, but you can you can move one but the con the concept is is like if if to your organization the number one priority within your project is budget like the number one thing of those three that can’t move is budget. Budget is fixed, then the only things that can move are time and scope so to make sure that we stay within the budget process, I can do one of two things. I can either say to you, we to hit your budget we have to move faster so that it’s more efficient. You need to potentially have less scope to hit your budget you might be able to look at things in a different manner to hit your budget, but we’re still talking about the primary goal is to hit your budget if your primary component is time, OK, so how do you want to play this as an organization we can either. You’re gonna take to get it done we have to add more resources we have to do sort of things, then it becomes a budgetary conversation or conversely you reduce scope to get into the time frame. Everything becomes a mechanism of time and budget from a PM and that’s how they sort of navigate their way through it. So to ensure an organization stays on time and budget, we just have to set realistic expectations for scope. And then as long as the company that we’re working that you’re working with and the partner that you’ve assigned so between the vendor um and the client relationship, if everybody’s got an alignment that the scope is manageable, we’ve done our investigation and research you can do it it’s possible but it’s just communication. It’s called. It’s called the angle. I don’t know who gave it that time. It’s like it’s like who named the Venn diagram. We just sort of use it and accepted the name. I’m assuming it’s it’s a triangle. It’s it’s the same concept that you can have something cheap and. Cheap and easy but not quick like it’s that same sort of like analogy, same concept yeah and then this is actually where again to take it back to the RFP process for a second it’s important because in the RFP it it may be indicated that they have a $100,000 budget. It has to be done in 6 months and this is the scope we’re prescribing so it puts us in a rock and a hard place and without. Having that conversation with them, we don’t know like to Kelly’s point, what the most important priorities are like what what what is not moving. OK, final question for you. Do we need an RFP? Maybe we don’t even, no, we should be questioning, you know, do we even need the RFP process? So why might we not. So selfishly I would say no just pick, pick your vendor but I also do understand that a lot of times with budget budgetary constraints and all of the different um stakeholders within an organization, yes, exactly, yeah, yeah, more nimble organization is gonna go through an RFP if they have 5 or 10 employees don’t yeah no it’s the bigger sort of more bureaucracy if there’s federal funding, if there’s there’s some rules that are put in place. Yeah, so we propose. kind of living with the quote unquote necessary evil of the RFPs, but there’s certain things that you can do to make the process more efficient and again have a better outcome for yourself and the vendor. Yeah, we’ve had it and that’s just as a as a concept we’ve had people go to RFP before they submit, they go out to the public in a general RFP process. The way they’ve written the RFP is either not strong enough or is difficult to interpret. They get their 1020, 30, 50 responses back, and they actually have to recall the RFP often in that case it’s because they yeah yeah I think the worst one worst quote unquote again uh was around 70 yeah 70 in the past year and that’s yeah and that’s the other thing they end up doing more work, yeah, you’re giving yourself a ton more work and but. Yeah, certainly. It is, it is a lot. And when they do it, so what ends up happening or what ended up happening in many of these cases where they aren’t like the specificity within the RFP is not sufficient, we end up having, they end up recalling it because either they’re getting just like budgets that are like $400 500,000 dollars and they have a $100,000 budget or the timelines are completely incorrect. So if you’re not like meeting with them, meeting with the potential vendors, which you can’t do if you’re looking for 70 responses. Um, which is where our team for sure would say go out, do your research, investigate different partners that you think would be a good fit, do a directed RFP, get 5 solid responses to people whom you’ve met with you think might be a good fit for your organization, submit it to them, ask them to fill it in. Now you’re getting 5 from people you’ve already vetted versus this open ended 70 responses as Ashley mentioned that somebody is literally grading them on a, you know. Budget minutes, this means that, you know, take a check grades system and now you can take a look at it. Do yourself a favor. Nobody has time for 70 RFPs. um, so Ashley, as the person who uh at at Image Media, who writes these, why don’t you take us out with the, uh, you know, just uh some, some parting thoughts about why this should be a partnership, a request for partnership. I would say again you’re working with these people, the vendor that you choose for 9 months, probably at minimum, and you’ll be talking to them multiple times a week. If you don’t like the person that you’re dealing with, that’s going to be an incredibly painful process. Usually 2 or 3 times a week. Yeah. OK, we’ll leave it there. Yes, yes, always seek partnerships, especially in the nonprofit space but always seek partnerships. You’re gonna have a more fulfilling like working relationship. All right. That was uh Kylie Aldridge Ogden, the senior portfolio director. And uh also with Kylie is Ashley Stagg, sales director both at ImageX Media. So thank you very much. Thank you Ashley, thanks very much thank you for sharing and thank you for being with Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio coverage of 25 NTC, the 2025 nonprofit Technology Conference where we’re sponsored by Heller Consulting. Next week, more 25 NTC coverage with adopt new software and put the fun in fundraising. If you missed any part of this week’s show, I beseech you. Find it at Tony Martignetti.com. Our creative producer is Claire Meyerhoff. I’m your associate producer Kate Martignetti. The show’s social media is by Susan Chavez. Marc Silverman is our web guy and this music is by Scott Stein. Thank you for that affirmation, Scotty. Be with us next week for nonprofit Radio, big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. Go out and be great.