Janice Chan: Strategic Meetings For Teams Of One
As our 2024 Nonprofit Technology Conference coverage continues, Janice Chan returns with the savvy idea of adapting team meeting principles to a team of just one. She’ll have you thinking of yourself as a team leader, rather than one person doing everything. Janice is at Shift and Scaffold.
Steve Sharer: Cyber Incident Cases And Takeaways
We’ve got good stories about bad actors. You’ll also hear the practical steps your nonprofit can take to prepare for cybersecurity incidents to reduce their impact. And we’ll empower you to hold incident prep discussions with your leadership or staff. Steve Sharer, who says “Security is a team sport,” joins from RipRap Security. This is also from 24NTC.
Listen to the podcast
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Get Nonprofit Radio insider alerts!
Virtuous: Virtuous gives you the nonprofit CRM, fundraising, volunteer, and marketing tools you need to create more responsive donor experiences and grow giving.
Donorbox: Powerful fundraising features made refreshingly easy.
We’re the #1 Podcast for Nonprofits, With 13,000+ Weekly Listeners
Board relations. Fundraising. Volunteer management. Prospect research. Legal compliance. Accounting. Finance. Investments. Donor relations. Public relations. Marketing. Technology. Social media.
Every nonprofit struggles with these issues. Big nonprofits hire experts. The other 95% listen to Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio. Trusted experts and leading thinkers join me each week to tackle the tough issues. If you have big dreams but a small budget, you have a home at Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio.
View Full Transcript
Welcome to Tony Martignetti Nonprofit radio. Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. I’m your aptly named host and the pod father of your favorite abdominal podcast. Oh, I’m glad you’re with us. I’d suffer the effects of formation if you made my skin crawl with the idea that you missed this week’s show. And if you think I said fornication, get your head out of the gutter, close the porn hub window. It’s formation. Here’s our associate producer, Kate to introduce this week’s show. Hey, Tony, we have strategic meetings for teams of one as our 2024 nonprofit technology conference coverage continues. Janice Chan returns with the savvy idea of adapting team meeting principles to a team of just one. She’ll have you thinking of yourself as a team leader rather than one person doing everything Janice is at shift and scaffold and cyber incident cases and takeaways. We’ve got good stories about bad actors. You’ll also hear the practical steps your nonprofit can take to prepare for cybersecurity incidents to reduce their impact and will empower you to hold incident prep discussions with your leadership or staff, Steve S who says security is a team sport joints from riprap security. This is also from 24 NTC on Tony’s take two delightful nostalgic women’s names. We’re sponsored by virtuous. Virtuous gives you the nonprofit CRM fundraising, volunteer and marketing tools. You need to create more responsive donor experiences and grow, giving, virtuous.org and by donor box, outdated donation forms, blocking support, generosity, donor box fast, flexible and friendly fundraising forms for your nonprofit donor box.org here is strategic meetings for teams of one. Welcome back to Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio coverage of the third day of the 2024 nonprofit technology conference. We are all together in Portland, Oregon. Nonprofit radio coverage of the conference is sponsored by Heller consulting technology strategy and implementation for nonprofits with me for this conversation, a uh an NTC perennial for nonprofit radio, Janice Chan, you knew she was coming. She’s Director of Shift and Scaffold Janice. Welcome back to nonprofit radio. After many NTC appearances. Many thanks for having me back, Tony. Always good to see you and talk with you. Thank you. It’s a pleasure as well for me to be here in person with you. Not just on Zoom. Yes. Yes. Uh This year your session topic is strategic team meetings for teams of one. All right. All right. Before we get into that, I, I wanna, I wanna talk a little about, I knew that I remembered I was reminded that you were studying Japanese. I, I, when I read it, I had remembered from previous years. Now, you live in Japan? Yes, I, I have been studying Japanese because my husband and I were not realized. But we had decided to take this job opportunity for him, which was based in Tokyo. And so we’re like, all right, we should start trying to learn the language. So, you know, it would be helpful to live there if we’re going to live there. And so, yeah, so we moved about a year and a half ago in 2022 some delays due to the pandemic. Um but it’s been great so far. And yeah, working at learning the language at the place that I live in, I’m sure living there helps quite a bit. You’re immersed. Uh is, is, is English very common or not, not so much, you can definitely get around Tokyo in English outside of Tokyo a bit harder. Um I think they did a lot of things to prepare for the Olympics when they were supposed to be there in 2022. And you know, in terms of the train signage and things like that. So you can get, you can get by in the city, in the city. Actually Japanese people in school, study English for several years. But you know, studying in school is always a little different than talking to native speakers. So I’m having the experience in reverse of going to class and then attempting conversations and often just mangling my way through it. But people are very kind fortunate. You’re, I’m working at it. People appreciate the outreach. They, they’re happy to work with me too, which is nice and really helpful. Do you have Children? Did you bring Children abroad? We brought our cat, our 18 year old grandma cat. She’s lovely and sassy. At 18, she’s still, she’s more sassy now, I think. Well, I know some sassy, 8090 year olds. That’s not surprising. All right. And uh I also want folks to know that if you want to see some beautiful photography, go to uh shift and scaffold.com because you have one stunning one too. There are several but the one of the from the Metropolitan Museum, the Reflection the park is in the background in that room. Yeah. Is that the Egyptian room room? So there are many great photos that shift and scaffold that Janice took there. Alright. So let’s talk about uh team meetings for teams of one. What was the genesis for this uh this uh up the this uh this intuition, this uh creative burst redefinition. That’s what I want resurgence, redefinition, defining redefining one to be a team. So whether even when I’ve been in house and now I’m an independent consultant and so I work for myself. But even when I was in house, a lot of times I was the only person who did the technology, who did the knowledge management, who did the training sometimes. And so I spent basically my entire career mostly being a team of one. Um And, you know, there are certain practices and things that I’ve done over time that I find really helpful in that because sometimes I don’t always have somebody to bounce things off of. Or sometimes when I do, they have a really, they don’t have the same background that I do. Right. So they have a really different perspective which is useful. But sometimes I’m like, I just got to figure things out for myself. There’s nobody setting the strategy. Like my boss is a development director and I’m doing database management, for example, right? So, you know, they’re supportive, but they don’t actually understand my day to day work. And so I need to do a lot of that strategic work by myself. And there were some of these practices I developed over time. And one of them was that I would meet with myself before you have these good practices, which we will absolutely get to. When did you start to think of yourself as a team as a team that emerge? Probably. So I remember, I don’t know why this sticks in my head so much. I had this phone call with this director at my organization at the time and I was supposed to help her team with some and she had a team of like, you know, actual other people. She had about seven people on her team. And I was the grant writer at the time. And so she was like, we have some opportunities. There’s some partners we talked to and, you know, I’d love if we could get your help on applying for these grants, we have the opportunity to apply for these grants in multiple states, but they’re all due at the same time. And she was like, maybe you can get some help from your team. And I was like, listen, I am the team. You were talking to the entire team. I’m the grant rating team. So in addition to my other jobs foisted on you the redefinition, talk to get some support from your team, the rest of myself. So your best practices, these are things you’ve been doing through the years for yourself in your work. So a lot of times often, you know, either at times when I really needed to say plan for the year or I’m about to take on a big project or start something new or I really want to maybe make some changes. Often. I would kind of set aside some time and just sort of be with myself, but I would take notes during that time, right? I would have a little, ok, here’s the thing that I want to work on for this hour or two hours or something, right? I need to plan out 2024 or I need to figure out how to work with that stakeholder who is, you know, I’ve got some stakeholders that I have to manage. And I’m trying to get that on board. I’m kind of trying to come up with some strategies for that. And I’m kind of sitting down and having a little meeting with myself with an agenda because I would be like, wait, what was I supposed to focus on for this hour? Right. And so it’s like a little reminder to myself and I’ve always been a note taker And so it’s just kind of a thing that I kept doing and then I would do it for planning my week. I would do it for reflecting on things at the end of the month and I was talking to someone and I realized that maybe some other people do it, but not everybody thinks of it that way. Um And it was really helpful that I ended up just taking things that I sometimes did in meetings with other people. I was like, oh, you know what, this is really helpful to take notes this way or whatever it is. And then I would do that when I was still doing it just by myself. So that’s kind of where it came out of. What else should we be doing with our team of one. Um So I, so to back it up a little bit part of, I didn’t really think a lot about the practice of meeting with yourself in that I didn’t necessarily articulate it. I was just like, oh, this is what you do. Right. You had a to do list. I certainly had a, to do list, but you didn’t think of devoted time to specific tasks. Well, I did but I think I didn’t think of it as maybe a thing that other people didn’t think of. And I was so, I also like to do creative writing. I was at this conference last year for creative writing and I talked to someone and they were like, so I told my new manager that I don’t start work before 10. She works from 10 to 7, but I don’t start work before 10 because the first two hours of my morning are dedicated for writing. That’s my writing time. And I realized so I live in Japan and I work with clients in the US. And so sometimes I wake up really early for meetings. I have meetings at like six in the morning, sometimes five in the morning. But on days when I don’t have super early meetings, I’d still wake up, my body just wakes up at that time now. But I would just stay in bed, you scroll through my phone or something. Like I wasn’t doing anything at that time. And why would I get out of bed for, for clients or for other commitments? But I wouldn’t do that for myself and for my own work, my own creative writing, et cetera. And I think so I recently, at the end of last year, I was like, all right, I’m going to really make this a regular practice. Um Yeah, and I thought it would be a really interesting session and tool to share with other people at the ante community as well. OK. Um Other, I don’t know, other tactics for you say tactics to make time for strategic work as a team of one, you got to take care of yourself, you got to take care of your team, take care of your team of one. Exactly. So I think a lot of this, so there’s tools and strategies and then there’s the mindset. And so um maybe I’ll talk about the mindset first and then talk show and strategies. But I think sort of as that team of one, a decent host would have asked you about the, you’re suffering a lackluster host. You, you think the host would ask about the mindset and the culture of the team of one first before you get into the, the tactics and strategies. It’s OK. That’s why we’re here to learn. We’re all still learning. And, you know, I think a lot of times where we start, right is when we want to do something better. We’re like, oh what are the tactics we’re doing it better? What’s the technical stuff and not the organizational culture or the mindset, all the internal work that we need to do when we work with people or work with ourselves. And so I think one of the, I don’t remember what started it, but last year I had this epiphany one day of like, wait, who’s leading my team? Like, nobody’s leading my team. Wait, it’s supposed to be me and I’ve not been leading my team and it was a really big sort of flipping the lights of it, John in my head. And I think realizing also whether I’ve been an independent consultant or when I was in house, right. Yes, I could run around and do all of the things and I would do all the things but not necessarily in a, I think I assumed that because I was the same person that it was cohesive and coordinate, right? And it was in a unified direction, you’re only one person, right? So of course, clearly going in the same direction as myself, I would think. And then I realized at one point I was like, I don’t think that’s actually the case and the, and part of that, what does that feel like when you felt like you were not going in a unified direction, I felt really scattered. I felt like, ok, I’m doing these things because it seemed like a good idea at the time or like you’re supposed to post more regularly on social media or you’re supposed to, I don’t know, go out and meet people and network and things like that. But I wasn’t necessarily doing them all in a unified direction. And I realized that I was doing sort of the different job functions like business development and content development and my consulting work and things and, but I wasn’t sort of doing the work to actually unify them intentionally. And so part of that was, I didn’t necessarily think of myself as a team or as a business or as an organization. I just like, I’m just Janice, I’m just showing up and doing the things and, you know, that works, you can get away with that for a time. But I think also, and you see this also in people when they go from being an individual contributor to being a manager or they kind of step from the, I’m just doing the things that my boss told me to do. So now I have to set the direction even if I don’t have any direct reports. And I think really, I realized that it was, I was kind of lacking that direction and I hadn’t made the time or really put into place the practices to do that on a regular basis that I wasn’t leading my own team and that spot was kind of vacant. And I think that’s a really big shift, especially in small organizations where a lot of times you just get thrown into like, hey, we need you to do, you’re like, hired for communications, let’s say, and, and, you know, you’re the only communications person and so you’re doing the writing, you’re doing the graphic design, you’re doing all the digital things. Um And then you’re just, you know, fielding whatever people think is your job honestly, a lot of the time and there’s no, if nobody is trying to make all of that cohesive for, say your external audiences, who’s managing the stakeholders, who is making sure there’s a cohesive strategy, you know, it, it starts, you’re not as effective for your organization. And some of that is, it’s easy to get caught up in all the urgent stuff. But some of it is also just I think that a big part of that mindset shift is we don’t respect ourselves as leaders as teams in the same way that we respect other leaders and teams, right? Like if I saw this meeting with you, Tony, right? There wasn’t a time to show up here, right? There was a process, there’s things going on, you know, I noticed that I would show up to meetings with other people differently versus I will reschedule things on myself all the time. And I’m not going to say that I don’t still do that, right? But I think just being more conscious of like, OK, I’ve pushed aside, pushed aside my time that I set it aside to do the strategic work and I’m putting out fires for other people because they’re urgent, you know, and that happens a lot. But I think the, I think especially in the social impact space, a lot of us, we want to make things better for other people. We care about other people, those requests that other people are making are not unreasonable. But it can also be really hard to, you know, especially for those of us who are taught to put other people first or that we exist for the community, not only for ourselves. Right? And that’s a very common ethos in the nonprofits face as makes sense. And also, you know, depending on who we are, I’m a woman, I’m the daughter of immigrants. And so there are a lot of things that when somebody comes to me and ask me for my help to do something, right? I’m like, oh, let me figure out how I can help you. And it’s easier to keep putting my stuff on the back burner, put myself on the back burner. But then that builds up over time. So if you’re the only, let’s say you’re the entire technology team at your organization, your single team of one, then if you don’t make the time to do the strategic work, your organization is not going to be able to use technology strategically and effectively, you know, your organization is going to be a little bit hamstrung in advancing the mission because you’re not carving that time out and you’re not respecting the time and the energy you need for that. It’s time for a break. Virtuous is a software company committed to helping nonprofits grow generosity, virtuous beliefs that generosity has the power to create profound change in the world and in the heart of the giver, it’s their mission to move the needle on global generosity by helping nonprofits better connect with and inspire their givers. Responsive fundraising puts the donor at the center of fundraising and grows giving through personalized donor journeys. That response to the needs of each individual virtuous is the only responsive nonprofit CRM designed to help you build deeper relationships with every donor at scale. Virtuous. Gives you the nonprofit CRM fundraising, volunteer marketing and automation tools. You need to create responsive experiences that build trust and grow impact, virtuous.org. Now back to strategic meetings for teams of one with Janice Chan. I it’s interesting really, the realization that you treat others better than you treat yourself. Essentially, you treat others work more importantly and more respectfully than you treat your own. Like you’re talking about putting off your, putting off your own time, putting off your own tasks. Um Yeah, minimizing your own needs or the other, right? It’s just I’ll get to it. You wouldn’t do that for somebody. You wouldn’t, you wouldn’t procrastinate like that you wouldn’t put off the work of others that you might have been asked to do or that, you know, as an individual, as a solo consultant, you realize you need to do, you wouldn’t do that to your clients or to your, to your organization that you’re where you’re a team of one, you wouldn’t do that, but you’ll do it for your own, your own stuff. We need to shift that. This is the mindset that we’re talking about. This is the mindset. And, uh, you know, and some of that I just completely lost my train of thought. That’s, that’s right. I think, well, you made the point and I just was, like, underlining it. So, how about some of the other things that you do besides have, you know, agendas for your, for your solo time? What are some other, some other tips? Yeah. So the, you know, a lot of the things that are about running effective meetings and I know we all have this joke about meetings that should be emails. Um But I think there are times when it’s important to when the meeting is the right tool, when you’re making a decision, you’re trying to get alignment or you’re doing something where dialogue is essential to moving forward with care often, you know, to building relationships um and maintaining trust. And so a lot of the things that are crucial for effective meetings with other people are also useful when you’re by yourself, meeting with yourself, the agenda, taking notes, keeping track of decisions that were made, keeping track of the action items, not just in the notes, but hopefully in whatever project management tool or however you normally keep track of your action items. Um I would say the big difference when you’re meeting with yourself is, of course, there’s not, you know, in a, in most meeting notes, at least the way I take them in a group, I note down who is attending the meeting. Right. There were people we invited to the meeting. We’ve made sure there was somebody from finance and someone from programs and someone from fundraising or whatever. And when you’re meeting with yourself you’re like, oh, yeah, I don’t need to. It’s just Janice. right? Um And something that I find helpful that’s different for a meeting with yourself is to think about the different roles that you need at that meeting because I, so this is a pet peeve. I have of in meetings with other people where they’re like, OK, we finished the agenda for, let’s say the project’s status update or whatever. Actually, this is the same group of people that, you know, for the data working group. So could we just throw that in right now? Right. And then you’re like, I, that’s a total mind shift. Yeah, it’s a total mind shift. I didn’t prepare like I’m not ready. And also, now this was like an hour long meeting that was going to finish faster. And now you’ve just messed with my head because now we’re going to be here for an hour and a half. Right? And so, and I think not part of respecting yourself, right? Is to not do that to yourself either. And so being clear about what is the purpose of this meeting. We use different meeting types for different purposes, right? It’s very different that we’re like a strategic planning meeting and a project planning meeting. And a team general team, weekly meeting should not look and feel the same, you’re not doing the same things. And similarly, when we’re meeting with ourselves, let’s not do that to ourselves either. Um And so naming those roles who needs to be there. So, you know, if I am the communications team and I am the writer and the graphic designer and the digital person and also the uh communications director leading the team, right? Have all of those roles been represented in that time and space. And even if it’s something simpler, like as an independent consultant, right? Is it consultant me? Is it business owner me? You know, or at a more basic level, is it decision maker, me or implementer me? Because if it’s only implementation, that’s just like me writing the report, I’m not making decisions, this is not a meeting, I’m just working on something. So I think calling attention to those um is a key difference that I would say for meetings with yourself. I, I like the idea of different roles because I, I think it helps make you accountable for, for the different, for the different uh areas of responsibility that you have and not only areas of responsibility but individual tasks that you have, you know, the the the business development person is gonna come down on, on the uh the writer who hasn’t done a blog post for six, for six weeks. Right. So III I see an accountability role. Absolutely. I love that. Calling that out anything else? So I think there are a lot of different uh like let’s be real, right? We only have so many hours in the day, but more importantly, we only have so much mental energy and mental capacity for things, right? And so part of that, you know, it’s some tools and tactics for protecting your time. It might be things like no meeting Tuesdays or it might be the last Friday of the month is always dedicated to strategic work. So I think some of it is like making time and actually putting it on your calendar to do that work, right? Um And it’s helpful if your whole organization does it and put it in the calendar, put it in the calendar, this is an important time exactly like you would do for a meeting with three other people. So if you know, sometimes life happens, you need to reschedule, but reschedule it don’t just cross it off the list and then never come back to it. And, you know, there are also other things that, um you know, I think that that time thing is one thing, right? There’s only so many hours, but that’s also a little bit more straightforward in some ways, it’s much harder to protect your mental brain space to do strategic work. So for example, I’m an introvert. I like people. I love hanging out with people at N DC. And also at the end of the conference day, I go back to my hotel room and I’m like, I just need some quiet time for a little bit. But also I know that at the end of the day, I can expect of myself to do strategic work, right? Like maybe I reply to emails or something, but I’m not going back and planning out some major initiative at night because it’s not realistic of where, how tired my brain is. Um And so I think that’s harder because that’s also individual what works for one person isn’t going to work for another person. And so some of that is figuring out what you need to be able to get into that, to have that spaciousness to do the strategic work and to figure out how to ask for that for your team. Um And you know, that could be, it could be things like the no meeting Tuesdays or working from home instead of working in the office. But it could also be things like, you know what I need to go for a walk. I need to actually, when I’m doing this type of work, I need to not be at my regular desk. I need to be in a physically different location so I can get into a different mindset than my day to day, putting out fires, et cetera. Sometimes it might be just like, you know, um, knowing that your team, knowing that, hey, the first hour of my day, every day, that’s like I do not take meetings, right. I’m working, but I do not take meetings so that I can make sure I do the important work, whatever it might be. So it’s really helpful to make sure that you’re asking your boss or your team or your colleagues for that and making that clear. But in doing that, you’re also modeling that for other people as well as you honor yourself and your team. There’s nobody else to advocate for you. You go out and do it. You know, I mean, if you, if you, if that team leader role has been empty, that means there’s no one else that means you need to step into that role. So, you know, I told people in the session, give yourself that promotion already. If you haven’t, how about we leave it right there? That’s perfect. Wonderful. Give yourself that promotion. If you haven’t, she’s Janice Chan director at Shift and Scaffold, Shift and scaffold.com. Always a pleasure. I hope to see you 2025. You think you might come, come back. That’s the I, I’m hoping I will see you all in 2025 Baltimore. My old home city. It’ll be a little closer for you. Five hours closer. All your old home. I used to live in Baltimore. I look forward to seeing you. I know you’ll have a good topic. I don’t have to say, have a good you will. You will you so much to my p Thanks for sharing, Janice and thank you for sharing in our conversation about teams of one where we’re sponsored by Heller consulting, technology implementation and strategy for nonprofits. It’s time for a break. Donor box open up a new cashless in person donation opportunities with donor box like kiosk, the smart way to accept cashless donations. Anywhere anytime picture this a cash free on site giving solution that effortlessly collects donations from credit cards, debit cards and digital wallets. No team and member required. Plus your donation data is automatically synced with your donor box account. No manual data entry or errors, make giving a breeze and focus on what matters your cause. Try donor box live kiosk and revolutionize the way you collect donations. Visit donor box.org to learn more. It’s time for Tony’s take two, Alice Antoinette, Bernice Charlotte, Constance Deidra. Thank you, Kate. These are some of the delightful names that I’ve kept on a personal list for years now of women in their seventies, eighties and nineties. And there’s even one who was 100 years old on the list and I just II I just get nostalgic over names that are so uncommon now. I mean, these are women who were born in the 19 thirties and forties. So not surprisingly, you know, names change, of course. Uh, but yeah, I don’t know, the, the names just move me. Um, and so I’ve been keeping this personal list and I did, I, I posted some of it on linkedin and I thought I would share some of it today. Um, the, you know, it’s, it’s the names and, but it’s also the, the women’s stories, you know, growing up in the 19 thirties, 19 forties, fifties in the United States. Uh, what that was like, you know, education wise for some, some women went on beyond high school. Uh, a lot did not. Some women went on to marry and have families and some did not. So it’s, you know, it’s the combination of the stories and, and I guess the, the richness of the stories makes me love their names as well. Um, and just as I said, you know, get nostalgic for these names that we just don’t see anymore. Like Geraldine Gertrude, Gussie Hazel, Jacqueline Lenoir, Lottie Mabel Marlene Maxine. Many Myrna, Ophelia, Penelope, Rochelle Selma Veronica. All right. I’ve got a lot more on my list, but that’s just a sample of names that I find, uh, delightful and I get nostalgic about them. Have you got any if, uh, if, uh, if you wanna contribute your mom’s name or your grandmother’s name or maybe your own name. Uh, let me know. Love to hear it. Tony at Tony martignetti.com. Let’s see if the names you know, are on my list. That is Tony Stick two, Kate. I would like to add Carmella both with one L and then one with two Ls. Yes. All right. So share why the name Carmela is important to you is I had a great grandmother. You might know better than me. But, but that I’m, you know, my name is my first name is Carmella. Well, I know that, but listeners, listeners could very well not know that your name is Carmela. Kate. Mar uh Carmela and then Kate is, is short which I never understood. I don’t know how Kate is short for Carmella. Carmel. I could see Carmel what? I have an aunt Kate but I have like a grandmother. Caramel, right? So, yeah, but they’re two different, they’re two different women. So how does because Kate is not your middle name? No, it’s not. Anne is my middle name. Like great grandmother Ann or? Right. Where is your great grandmother, Anne? Who was my grandmother? Right? This Carmela was on your other side, on your mom’s side of the family. So I, I didn’t know, I didn’t know Carmella. I don’t know. I’m, I’m happy to call you Kate, although, you know, I often call you Carmela as well because nobody else does. So I like to be different and I think it’s a beautiful name but Kate being short for Carmela, I, I don’t know, it doesn’t make sense. No, it’s been 21 years. It’s never made sense to me. Well, we’ve got VU but loads more time here is cyber incident cases and takeaways. Hello and welcome to Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio’s continuing coverage of the 2024 nonprofit technology conference in Portland, Oregon. We are all convened at the Oregon Convention Center in downtown Portland and Nonprofit radio is sponsored at the convention at the conference by Heller consulting technology strategy and implementation for nonprofits with me. Now to have a conversation is Steve Sheer. He is CEO and co-founder of Riprap Security. Steve. Welcome to nonprofit radio. Thanks for having me. My pleasure. Have you done your session? I have done my session. We were the first in the first session on the first day. So you set the bar high. I feel bad for the presenters that came after you. We just met a few minutes ago and I’ve already, I already know that you set the set, the bar high. Uh gave quite a challenge to the uh to the presenters that that succeeded. You. Your topic is cyber incident, uh preparation and what we can learn from real world incidents. So it sounds like you uh you are bringing some stories that we all are glad that it did not happen to us. Um Maybe these are major headline stories. I don’t know, maybe these are some of the big ones, but we can uh we can take some things away. Exactly. Ok. Ok. Um Why did you feel the need for the session? Yeah. So um I run a cybersecurity consulting company that’s focused on mission driven and purpose driven organizations and helping them improve their cybersecurity. And one of the key ways that we start working with new clients is that they call us and they say, hey, my house is on fire. We’ve experienced an incident, we need help and so we go and we help them and it, when we go in and we’ve never met them before and they don’t, they’ve not really prepared for an incident. The incident is much more severe. They end up incurring a lot more losses. They have a lot, it’s all very, it’s all much more stressful and the chance of recovery is lower than if they had prepared ahead of time to deal with an incident. And so the, the talk is all about how organizations can prepare ahead of time to make it less stressful, to make it cost less to respond to an incident and really reduce the impact of the incidents that happened to the organization. Ok. Iii I don’t think I’ve, I’ve thought about that or I haven’t heard it said that way that you can make it less impactful, less of a crisis by preparing. I mean, what I’ve heard is you should prepare because you can, well, you can never eliminate the possibility. You can greatly reduce the possibility of being attacked having an incident yourself. But you can actually make it less with preparation? Ok. Excellent, excellent. So um is it, are we just gonna share a bunch of unfortunate stories and, and take away lessons from each one? Maybe we can talk through some of the best practices and I can weave in some, some stories here and there. So why don’t we start with some of your, your best advice? Sure. So I think the primary thing that you want to do is when you’re preparing for an incident is really ensure that you have really good buy in from your stakeholders in inside your organization. So people that are working in the marketing and communications portion, senior leadership members of the board, so that they’re involved in the planning and the preparation process. So that when you do have an incident, they’re not caught by surprise. This is not the first they’re hearing about how to deal with an incident. And so, you know, we, we tend for organizations that, that have not prepared. We, we end up spending a lot of time trying to brief the senior leadership and the board about what’s happening and they were very nervous and they don’t, they don’t let the, the the people responding to the incident have time to actually respond to the incident. And, and part of what they don’t have in place is a AAA management plan for this crisis, right? I mean, uh um if it’s, if it’s become public now, we have APR issue. So, who’s the, who’s the public facing voice? Is it our, is it a, is it a crisis communicator that we’ve, we, we knew we would hire in an emergency or are we scrambling for that? Should it be the CEO, should it be the board chair? You know, uh, should it be the chief technologist or if we have one, our audience is small and mid size nonprofit. So the likelihood that they have someone devoted to tech, tech is, you know, off and on because I’m certainly not 100% don’t, but, but a lot don’t. So you know, who should even be the voice? And then what should we be saying? How much should we be telling the public and our stakeholders? So, all right. So we need to have a plan in place um as well as managing the expectations that you’re saying of the board, the C Suite. Alright. What else? I think another important thing is really clearly defined roles and responsibilities of who’s going to be involved and when should they be involved in an incident? Right. So you touched on it already is, when do we bring in the CEO or the board to talk with the public on our behalf or? Hey, when does it make sense to not have them do that? Who is responsible for taking the operational steps to respond to the incident? The hands on keyboard, very technical investigation that goes along with responding to an incident. What third parties do you need to bring in? Um, depending on the type of incident you need to bring in your web development team if you’ve outsourced the web development team, because the website is having an incident, but you wouldn’t need to bring them in. Maybe if you’re having a ransomware attack on one of your, your computers, right. They’re not probably the right people to bring in. So you really want to make sure that you’re involving all the right internal first party and third party people and assigning them roles, specific roles and responsibilities. So that, you know, hey, we need to do this thing. We need to go talk to this person who’s directly responsible for this activity. OK. Yeah. Um Who’s gonna speak and then you know who’s gonna speak to uh are there aside from the public, if this involves donor data, volunteer data, who’s gonna speak to those groups? What do we say to them? How do we reassure them? Um Yeah, I’m giving chills. I mean, my synesthesia is kicking in. Actually, I really did. I just got chills thinking about because I’m, I’m not a CEO of a nonprofit. This is I’m a one person entrepreneur. It’s not gonna happen to me like most likely, but to put myself in that position and to try to figure that out and now maybe we’ve got press calling perhaps. I mean, I’m kind of thinking worst case the press is calling, what do we say to them? Like if you say no comment, that sounds bad. Do you not respond at all? And then they’ll just say, well, we’re not, was not immediately available for comment. Maybe that’s better. I don’t know. But ok, I don’t wanna have to and then it’s a crisis, it’s a crisis and the whole planning you deal with these. I mean, we do, let’s take a worst case scenario. I mean, how do you, how do you walk in and manage the, I’m gonna make it even worse. Do you get called in by organizations you’ve never talked to before? And that’s the most stressful. You don’t know anybody. We know, we don’t know anybody, we don’t know their technology, we don’t know much about them. And what do you do? We, you know, you learn real quick. Uh You ask a lot of pointed questions and you figure out who the right people to have in the room are because we find that there tend to be too many cooks in the kitchen when we show up. Right. There’s too many people involved and they’re causing more uh rotation and more work to be generated than really what there needs to be. So we really focus on, hey, who are the key people we need to bring in and then the people that are kind of excluded from that group, say more senior leadership, we promise them, hey, we’re gonna give you an update every hour or every three hours or every day so that they know what to expect when they’re going through an incident that they should. Ok. At three o’clock, someone’s gonna come and brief me on what’s going on and tell me what are our next steps, right. So we, we keep, keep everything really communicative and what that also prevents is we also tend to go in and serve as a bit of a firewall between the upper leadership and the board and the very technical people in terms of blocking and managing access to the people that are trying to do the hands on keyboard work so that they’re not disrupted by someone saying, oh, I need an update. I need an update is calling and I can now I can’t deal with the crisis. Oh man, how do you, that was like promotion for riprap security. How do people find you in that kind of crisis again? An organization you’ve never talked to before? Yeah. So it’s a lot of word of mouth. It tends to be, you know, who, who knows an organization that can, that can help us. Um And you know, there are a lot of organizations that can, can help, but there are not that many organizations that are equipped to work with nonprofits that are attuned to their needs and the times of data and stakeholders that they’re working with. And that’s why we like to work with these mission driven organizations is because we have a lot of experience there and we, we really can feel like we help them because we’ve, we’ve responded to incidents, all sorts of incidents with all kinds of different nonprofits and other mission driven organizations. All. Let’s, let’s take it down a notch now from the, from that worst case, like somebody you’ve never heard of before and they’ve never heard of you and they’re calling panicked. Right? I mean, they are panicked. Alright. We can remove ourselves from that situation. Let’s go back, let’s go back to some of your uh your, your advice for uh for preparing. Yeah, so, uh, I, I think the next thing to really understand is you got to really understand what your capabilities are. What, what about incidents and managing incidents? Are you realistically going to be able to handle on your own? Do you have a very technical person that’s going to be capable of doing the analysis and the investigation to figure out how the attacker got in where the attacker is, what the attacker is doing? Or do you need to make sure you go find somebody to help you do those things? I mean, the reality is most organizations they don’t have a person like that. Um, basically forensics, forensic forensics, deep digital forensics. And you know, we, unfortunately, we, we’ve come in in a lot of cases where our nonprofit, our nonprofit partners, they think they can rely on some existing third party relationship that they’ve got say with their it managed service provider or their web developer to help them address the incident. But the instant response is like pretty specialized set of capabilities, right? So you wanna certainly include those people in the incident response, but you really need to know you have someone that can help take you through from beginning to end from identifying that the incident has happened all the way through recovery to help you through that whole process. And though understanding your who’s, who’s on your team, who’s responsible for what um and really making sure that there’s clear lines and expectations is really key to making sure that you can successfully recover. Can we, can we launch into one of our unfortunate stories? Yeah. Yeah. Um Yeah. Uh we, we worked with one organization. Um It’s about 100 person um company and it’s a nonprofit. It’s a nonprofit. Yeah. And uh what happened to them is that they, uh uh they didn’t have multi factor authentication configured for uh their, their email. And uh an attacker was able to gain access to the emails of the CEO the coo and the CFO and the attacker sat for months watching emails come in and out of these three mailboxes and they were able to understand what, what, what is the process this nonprofit uses to get new vendors on boarded. What is the process for the vendors providing the bank account information for how to pay the vendors. What’s the process for when a vendor needs to send an invoice to the nonprofit, for the work that they’ve done and what they were able to do. So they’re, they’re, they, I went to law school. Well, I used to be, I used to practice law. They’re lying in. Wait, I would say this is what, this is what makes it a first degree murder and lying in. Wait type murder versus a heat of passion. This is lying in. Wait. Exactly. Yeah. And Attackers will maintain access for a long time in an organization to really learn about them in the same way that I learn about an organization when I’m trying to work with them, right? I want to profile all the activity and understand how to make them more. Did you used to be a bad guy? Did you come over the other side? Luckily not my style. Um And so what happened was that the, the attacker understood this payment flow and this vendor approval process and was able to issue their own invoices or they were able to issue their invoices to this nonprofit. The nonprofit was just paying them just they said, ok, this isn’t approved, everything looks fine. They posed as the CFO and the coo to like give the approvals, sending an email on their behalf and giving the approval stamp and just hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars just walked out the door over a six month period and no one, no one realized, right? So there’s, you know, the there’s the aspect of, hey, you should have had multi factor authentication configured to protect those accounts. So the attacker couldn’t even get in from the beginning. But there’s also the side of, hey, what is your, what is your vendor approval and uh vendor invoice approval process look like and how, how could an attacker use that process and take advantage of it to issue their own invoices and get the money sent to their own account. So there’s, there’s a bit of a traditional cybersecurity and it portion of this incident and how to recover from it and as well as a more financial and a financial process and accounting process that, that we help them improve um to make it less vulnerable to these kinds of attacks. Once the crisis is over, then make it less likely to happen again. So that money was never recovered, was never recovered. Um Do, do nonprofits typically co-operate with law enforcement or would they rather just let it go, make it go away and, and, and the uh end the nightmare? Yeah. Uh it’s about 5050. We find um you know, there are some, there are some nonprofits that have an obligation to report something like that if they’re working with say health data or something like that, really something to be truly sensitive. Um A lot of organizations we talk with them about that of like, hey, you know, it’s worth reporting this. Like you’re not gonna get in trouble for being attacked, you know, it’s, and uh I, we, we almost always recommend going to talk with law enforcement. We almost always recommend that we submit the, the technical indicators of the, of the, of the attack. Like how the attacker, what the attacker did, how they did it to the, the federal law enforcement authorities so that they can go and cross analyze that information and try to help more people and try to, in some rare cases, go and track down the Attackers and, and do things like make arrests and disrupt the operations, rare cases though. Ok. So at least contribute to the, the FB I’s database of forensics and then maybe not pursue prosecution or. Well, it doesn’t sound like there’s prosecutions very likely not. Like, can nonprofits participate like that? Like, anonymously, the FBI is not just not gonna reveal the identity. You could go to your FBI field office that’s in, that’s in your state or your city and go and make these reports if you need to. There’s, um, a federal cybercrime task force that has a forum open that we use pretty regularly. If you wanted to submit something anonymously, you could do that through that, that, that manner. Ok. Um, and do you do the forensics, can you, can you figure out how they got in what they did? Yeah. Yeah. So we, you know, we kind of the process and the workflow of the incident is after we get called or we see that there’s a potential incident happening. We start in the stage called identification. We’re really trying to profile what the threat is, what they’re doing, what they start to understand what the impact is so that we can go start taking steps to say, hey, let’s make a plan for how we’re going to contain the attacker. So the attacker cannot, we want to essentially put a force field around what they currently have access to and kick and start to limit their ability to escape out of and, and pivot away and gain more access to the environment. So after we are able to contain them, we work to eradicate their presence. So we, we remove access to accounts, we will pull computers from desks and erase them and reformat them. Um We’ve, we’ve done a lot of work. This is when the attacker knows now that, that they’re being, they’re being surveilled typically. Yes. Yeah. We, we, we’ll look under cabinets behind desks up in the drop ceiling in closets to make sure there’s no computers or devices that are hidden in those areas that the attacker is maybe using to. They’ve gained some physical access to the organization. It happens. Yeah. There’s sometimes there’s physical access. Oh my God, it’s even creepier. It’s way creepier. Where have they been? Right? Have you seen that? We’ve seen that damn. Is that, is that a disgruntled employee could be a disgruntled employee could be an attacker that, you know, they’re wearing an orange vest and they have a tool bag and they walk right in, you know, there’s a lot of these ways to, you know, just kind of walk waltz in and uh with Verizon, you optimize your, uh your wi fi we’ve seen evidence of degraded signal. We’re very proactive. Come on in. We’d all have, we all love higher performing wifi all. Oh my gosh, physical presence, man. Ok. Um Alright, so the takeaways from that, let’s just, just go a little more detail. That’s a, that’s a bad story, a couple, couple 100 1000 dollars. What do we take away from this? So what we take away is that you really have to understand the, the the impact of the incident to really understand what are the goals of the attacker? Is it opportunistic? Are they being specifically, is the organization being specifically targeted? We’re finding these days it’s more opportunistic of like the Attackers are not specifically targeting an organization. They’re just sort of, you know, hoping they get into any organization. And the question we get from a lot of nonprofits and any organization that we work with on an incident is like, why us, you know, and, and it’s unfortunately like it’s almost impossible to say, right? Um And they’re like, who would do this to us? I’m like, well, it could be anybody. Right. It’s, these people are all around the world. You know, it’s hard, they’re hard to track down. Um, even, even for the government, it’s hard to track these people down. And so we kind of help redirect that energy and it’s like, ok, you know, we, we may not be able to tell who did it or why they did it. But let’s get you to a better perspective. Let’s get you to a better place. Because what we end up doing after we’re able to remove the attacker is we, we have to work to help the organization recover and get back to business as normal. Now, most organizations that do this on their own without any help, they sort of kick the attacker out and then they just go back to doing business as usual without fixing the underlying reason. The attacker got in, in the first place and that’s a tough thing to come back or to return to somewhere or to get called in later or say we thought we had it under control, we won’t get struck by lightning twice. Exactly. Right. You know, if you’re not a, it’s not a good strategy if you don’t lock your front door, you know, it’s kind of like this happens again. Shame on you. Right. It’s like you gotta take the time. And so we work with the organizations who say, hey, how did the attacker get in? What are the things that we can do to close that method of access in the future. What are the other security capabilities that you can put into place the policies, the technology and what people need to be involved to make it so that you’re prepared for the next time. Um And then what we, what we always recommend and this is a thing that uh a lot of organizations skip as well is we, we have a very lengthy uh lessons learned session and the lessons learned sessions are really critical because you really want to bring in all the stakeholders from the dealing with the incident after everything is done while everything is still fresh in your mind. And you want to start understanding what did we do? Good? Like what do we do really well in the incident, we communicated, we bought pizza for everybody. So no one had to leave the office like simple things like this, right? And what, what didn’t we do? Well, like, ok, well, you know, it turns out the attacker was in the network for six months like that we should have known five months or 5.5 months ago. Um You know, things like that and then what we recommend is giving specific, having specific action items with specific due dates assigned to specific people so that things get followed up on. And that every time you have to step through this process, you’re improving a little bit more, you’re reducing the impact of future incidents and you’re just better prepared for the next time that it happens. What’s the, uh, proportion that you see that, uh, nonprofits take that proactive step after the crisis to mitigate the likelihood and the impact of a future crisis. Um, these days, the rate is much higher than it used to be. Five years ago. We wouldn’t have seen many follow through unless they’re quite a large organization. But people feel the pain and people see this in the news all the time. Right. They, they see major corporation Southwest. Yah. I don’t want our providers pipelines. Right. It’s always in the news. So people are a lot more aware of it. Want to have the conversation. It’s less of like, oh, no, we’re totally secure. Nothing can ever happen to us. Sort of just like hoping that nothing happens. But they, they want to engage more deeply and say, like, what do we really need to do? You know, what are the, what is the foundational things we need to put in place that we just don’t have. How did you come up with Riprap security? What’s the significance of that? Yeah. So, Riprap is a type of shoreline protection on, like, in a bay or on a river. It’s all rocky and the erosion patrol like those sort of not really rock walls but little rock islands or mounds that riprap. That’s exactly right. So you’re protecting the nation’s coastline, like our Coast Guard, our silent warriors. We’re not, we’re not quite as seaworthy, I think, but, uh, get nauseous sometimes. Um, let’s see, being able to hold the incident, incident, preparation discussions and leadership. Is that why we talked through a lot of that? Um Have you seen, I, I feel like I’m, I’m speaking to law enforcement, you know, like, uh about uh crime trends in the nonprofit community. Have you seen ransomware? Ransomware is a common one? We see you got a ransomware case story. You can tell we, we deal with these a little bit less these days than we used to. Um You know, honestly, the fact that people are more organizations are more fully remote means that the ransomware has trouble spreading to other devices on a network. So that definitely is a, is a nice thing to work from home or work remotely. Um But we’ve had cases where um we, we, we worked with one, this is one company. They’re, they’re quite small and um they’re 50% manufacturing company that we worked with and they called us up one day and they said, hey, we’re having this ransomware incident and our production floor of like they made um like metal machine parts, our production floor, everything is encrypted by ransomware. All the business side of the network was encrypted, everything was fully offline. They sent out most of their employees home and they’re just, you know, they turn the lights off right. They’re like, what do we do? And so we’re there, we’re trying to understand. We’ve identified obviously that there’s ransomware. We’re trying to understand, you know what it is, how they got in and the it director comes in and he’s like great news. I have backups like, oh, this is great. No one ever has backups. Right. Because if you’ve got backups, you can restore the data, you can get back to normal. No problem. So he stored them at his house in a little safe in his house, brought him back. He takes them out of the box and the, the, the backups are, they’re a week old, so it’s not ideal, but a week ago is better than nothing or two weeks. Um And he opens the box, it’s like an old tiny, like lunch crate, metal lunch crate. And they are tape drives and tape drives are uh like almost like a cassette deck. Um But they’re, they’re, they used to be used very frequently to store a large amount of data, but the downside is, are very slow to help move data on and off those tape drives. So I’m like, ok. All right. So he’s gonna say, oh, I’m gonna go restore the data to get us back up and running. He comes back a couple of hours later. He’s like, it looks like this is gonna take 14 days to restore our data. Like that’s a, that’s a really long time. And so ultimately, the leadership of the organization decided to pay the ransom because it was gonna cost them less. I think it was four or $500,000. It was gonna cost them less to get, to pay the ransom, to unlock the computers than it was for them to be down for two weeks. And that’s a hard choice for an organization to make. We’re paying the bad guys, but it’s a business decision. It’s a business. You see, are these foreign actors? Not this one specifically. But do you see a lot of foreign actors as the bad guy when you can identify, maybe, maybe, sometimes you can’t even identify where in the world they’re located. It tends to be pretty geographically spread. Um You know, there, there is a whole business model and, and business life cycle for these ransomware attacks. So an organization, uh 11, malicious organization will go and they’ll perform the initial um exploitation of a, of an organization. So they’ll go in, they’ll get access to a computer or an account and they do that tens of thousands of times and they’ll, they’ll collect all these logins and then they’ll sell them to ransomware Attackers. So there’s almost, they’re almost like a data broker providing these account credentials and this access to the ransomware Attackers and then the ransomware Attackers will go and they’ll install the ransomware on the computers that are associated with these accounts and they’ll just see who calls them back. And so there’s this whole ecosystem of, hey, you know, uh the Attackers know, like they need to be pretty, pretty quick to respond to their customers email, right? Their victims emails. Otherwise people aren’t going to trust that they’re going to provide the key if they get paid. And so we tend to, we tend to say that they’re so they’re good on customer service, customer service because there’s hundreds of thousands of dollars at stake. They, they, they’re great communicators, some big corporations, I promise we’ll get back to you within 15 minutes. Uh Crypto are they, are they typically paid in Cryptocurrency, typically paid in crypto? Um And they have a variety of different cryptocurrencies that they’re using almost as many as you can count. Um And they take pretty significant steps to once you’ve paid them, they typically give you one address to send the money, the, the, the, the digital currency to and from there, it’s almost immediately um essentially like chopped up into smaller chunks and sent out to, you know, potentially hundreds of other, you know, digital currency and Cryptocurrency accounts. So it’s very difficult to trace that, that kind of that kind of thing. Have you seen a case where the ransom was paid? And the key was not provided, the encryption key wasn’t provided. We’ve seen, we’ve seen where the attacker has provided the wrong decryption key by mistake. Uh But email them back back, he made a mistake they sent the customer, they got back to you. So you don’t have to go through a gateway or anything 800 number. Just go right to the right to the principal and then they provided the correct key. Now, now you do have to be careful. Right. We don’t, we don’t recommend paying the ransom. Not necessarily, but if it’s a business decision, um, you do have to be careful because, uh, the Department of Treasury and law enforcement agencies, they, um they’re very closely tracking these ransomware Attackers and what they do is they’ve placed some of these Cryptocurrency wallet addresses on the sanctions list. So the same sanctions list that has uh Russian oligarchs and um you know, um Chinese hackers through financial crimes enforcement network, Department of Treasury. I know exactly. So, what’s the, what’s the caveat there? The caveat is that you could potentially be in sanctions violations by paying one of these ransomware hackers. Um If it’s, if it’s a track sanctioned uh uh Cryptocurrency, it’s the Russian hacker or the Indian hacker and the Treasury Department are both, it’s not a good position, you want to call your lawyer for sure. All right. That’s a, that’s a great caveat. Alright. So what can we take away from this, uh, this uh lessons learned from this particular ransomware account at the manufacturer? Yeah. So I think the key thing is make sure you have ongoing current backups and uh and a lot of organizations they’ll set up backups, like in this story or they say, ok, we’re taking backups every week. That’s probably fine. But the downside was, they never tested it. Right. They never verified that the data was complete and they never made sure that they understood how long it was going to take them for them to recover. That if they had known they would have probably chosen a different, a different way to back up because it doesn’t cost that much more uh these days to not back up on a tape drive. Say, um are there where in the world are these, are these uh bad actors clustered? Are there, is there parts of the world like II, I mean, I mentioned India and Russia but I’m, you know, I’m not a cybersecurity uh professional. Where, where are these, can you say generalize where these folks might be clustered? So, so they, they tend to be pretty geographically spread. Um You know, the, the, the, the reality is that it’s, it’s no longer that hard for someone to gain the skills that are necessary to do, to perform some of these attacks. And we’re seeing more and more of these organizations of very young people going out and committing these types of crimes and, you know, ultimately being successful in a lot of cases. And so, you know, youtube is great for learning all sorts of things, you can learn how to hack and do all these things on youtube and by research there’s a lot of great information out there. Um, but the reality is like, it’s almost impossible to know who’s doing this in a lot of cases. Right. Either the Attackers are using all kinds of intermediaries and bouncing their communications off other computers all around the world and it’s very tricky to really track them down unless you’re a fins or a large government organization. Um Is there truth that if, if you, if you are a victim of a hack, uh let’s say it’s your credit card, you know, your credit card company says that uh your, your, not only your credit card number but your, your address and maybe your date of birth or something, you know, was, may have been, it may have been, may have been compromised and you know, they’ll typically give you one year in one case. I saw two years which double but still my question gets to the value of all this two years of like credit monitoring and you know, the suspicious monitoring alerts and things like that. But I’ve also read that the, the real value comes more comes longer from the, from the incident because because it’s harder to track back to where it happened, what the source of it was. So like 3 to 4 or five years later, your birth date hasn’t changed, your address might have changed, but a lot of people’s addresses haven’t, so they’ll use what they’ve got and they’ll get lucky and in a lot of the, a lot of their, uh, ill gotten file. So, is, is that true that the, the longer the time, the more value valuable your data is on the, I guess on the dark web in the black market. Yeah. And, and, you know, I think it speaks mostly to the following impact that can have. Right. If someone steals your data, that’s, and there’s a big breach, that’s one thing, but that data gets repackaged and sold to a variety of other people on the, on the dark web and, and, and the reality is that most people, they’re not going to be able to pay attention that long. Right? They can’t change some of these core things about them, like their phone number or their social security number, you know, some of these things. So you really have to be mindful all the time and really watch your accounts and really understand like, what is the impact here, you know, the one year of credit that they give you. I just don’t, I mean, yeah, sure, I’ll take it, I’ll sign up for it, but I don’t see the value because so my, what I’ve read is, is accurate, the longer, the longer the time, the more valuable actually. And the more likely it’ll be used after, after one or two years from the incident. Um, we got a little more time. You want to tell us one more story. And, and some lessons from it. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, we, we have, you know, we’ve, I’ve told a lot of, like, kind of dark stories, you know, but there are bright spots. Right. So, you know, we, we come in a lot of times, come in an organization, they, they’re having an incident, we work with them, we really, we help, you know, kick out the attacker and the leadership, they really get it right. They really want to understand they really want to learn because, you know, we hear things at conferences and read about online and hear on the news that all these bad things are happening, but it’s not until you really feel it and you’re really in it that you’re like, OK, this is, I understand this, you know, and that that’s a hard lesson to learn certainly. Um But we, we in a lot of cases have been able to say, hey, here’s how you fix the underlying root cause that caused the incident. But you know, here are, here are another 10 things that you could do that are low effort, low cost, very minimal business impact that you can do to really reduce the chance that this is gonna happen again. And it’s those organizations that tend to understand that security and it and operations and the success of their organization are all very deeply linked and that it requires, it’s not just like an activity for it to be worried about or security to worry about. It’s a whole security is a team sport. Everyone has to be involved and be a stakeholder. The reality is that an attacker is they’re gonna, they’re gonna target the CEO and the leadership of the organization when they’re trying to get in. Um And so by bringing all those people all together, it’s just, it leads to better outcomes um to have them involved and have that buy in um in a continuous way. So, is there a bright story? Yeah, the right story is that they were able to kind of plug the holes that they had and, and go on this journey where they were able to modernize their, their it stack and their tools that they’re using and their processes, um you know, really embed security very deeply into that and we’re able to reduce the, the likelihood of, of these kinds of incidents happening again. And we, we, we’re in a spot where we can watch the Attackers attempt these types of attacks and that’s what we really want. So you get early warning that there’s an attempt happening, we can take some additional steps without having to wait six months to learn that you’ve been compromised for six months. Steve Sheer. Thank you very much. He’s CEO and co-founder of Riprap security. Thank you for sharing, Steve. Excellent. Thank you and thank you for being with our coverage of 24 NTC, the 2024 nonprofit technology conference where we are sponsored by Heller consulting, technology strategy and implementation for nonprofits next week, more 24 NTC Goodness with intergenerational communication and the four day work week. If you missed any part of this week’s show, I beseech, you find it at Tony martignetti.com. We’re sponsored by Virtuous. Virtuous, gives you the nonprofit CRM fundraising volunteer and marketing tools. You need to create more responsive donor experiences and grow, giving virtuous.org and by donor box outdated donation forms blocking support, generosity. Donor box fast, flexible and friendly fundraising forms for your nonprofit donor box.org daughter box. It’s obvious. Well, who else would it be? It’s daughter Box to Box. Our creative producer is Claire Meyerhoff. I’m your associate producer, Kate Martinetti. The show, social media is by Susan Chavez, Mark Silverman is our web guide 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% come out and be great.
It’s a new form of decision making you might want to try out. Justin Birdsong from 
Let’s take lessons from the experience economy to create meaningful, memorable experiences for your donors. Brittan Stockert, from 
This 2024 Nonprofit Technology Conference conversation helps you ensure your email acquisition efforts are targeting those interested in your work. You can incentivize your social audiences so they’ll willingly share their emails and you can measure the success of your acquisition campaigns. Melanie Schaffel from 
