Tag Archives: Heller Consulting

Nonprofit Radio for May 22, 2023: Multigenerational Technology Teaching & Goals Aligned With Technology

 

Lauren HopkinsMultigenerational Technology Teaching

If you have folks spanning the generations working or volunteering for your nonprofit, you may have noticed they learn technology differently. Lauren Hopkins shares the strategies for teaching tech across the generations. She’s from Prepared To Impact, LLC.

 

 

Jett WindersGoals Aligned With Technology

Step back from your technology decisions before you buy the shiny, new apps. What are your goals for the tech? And how does the tech support your overall goals? Jett Winders from Heller Consulting helps you think through it all.

These both continue our coverage of NTEN’s 2023 Nonprofit Technology Conference, #23NTC.

 

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[00:02:07.29] spk_0:
And welcome to tony-martignetti non profit radio. Big non profit ideas for the other 95%. I’m your aptly named host of your favorite abdominal podcast. And this is number 641 which means we are just nine weeks away from the 650th show. 13th anniversary coming in July. Oh, I’m glad you’re with me. I’d suffer the effects of dextrose gas tria if you upset my stomach with the idea that you missed this week’s show multigenerational technology teaching. If you have folks spanning the generations, working or volunteering for your non profit, you may have noticed they learned technology differently. Lauren Hopkins shares the strategies for teaching tech across the generations. She’s from prepared to impact LLC and goals aligned with technology. Step back from your technology decisions before you buy the shiny new apps. What are your goals for the tech? And how does the tech support your overall goals? Jet Winders from Heller Consulting helps you think through it. All these both continue our coverage of N tens 2023 nonprofit technology conference on Tony’s take to share, share. That’s fair. We’re sponsored by Donor box with intuitive fundraising software from donor box. Your donors give four times faster helping you help others. Donor box dot org. Here is multigenerational technology teaching.

[00:02:29.17] spk_1:
Welcome to tony-martignetti non profit radio coverage of 23 N T C. The nonprofit technology conference we are at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver where we are sponsored by Heller consulting technology strategy and implementation

[00:02:31.98] spk_0:
for nonprofits. With

[00:02:34.41] spk_1:
me. In this meeting is Lauren Hopkins. She is social impact consultant at prepared to impact LLC Lauren Hopkins. Welcome to

[00:02:46.00] spk_2:
Nonprofit radio. Oh, thank you so much. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Pleasure.

[00:02:53.09] spk_1:
I love your topic. We’re talking about teaching to technology skills in a multigenerational workplace on the baby boomer. You’re a millennial. I am and we will try to bring in a couple of other Jen’s as well. We don’t want to exclude Gen X and sometimes it does sometimes feel a little left out or

[00:03:09.88] spk_2:
they don’t think they feel left out. I don’t think so. As long as we provide the tools, I don’t think so. Okay.

[00:03:17.34] spk_1:
Um And Gen Z, of course. Yes, we’re not going any younger than that. Now.

[00:03:21.41] spk_2:
We do have the traditionalist um younger or I’m sorry, older than the baby boomers. And we discussed that in myself. Okay, traditionalists, traditionalists. Yes.

[00:03:33.10] spk_1:
Okay. Because I’m a young boomer at 61 where traditionalists, I

[00:03:38.33] spk_2:
believe the traditionalists if I recall about 78.

[00:03:57.48] spk_1:
Okay. Well, there still are some 78 year olds in the workplace, especially returning to returning to work, perhaps second career. Okay. Okay. Thank you. I don’t want to leave out and I don’t want anybody traditionalists. So uh just give us, give us like overview. Why did you, why do you feel we’re not doing as well as we could training across the generations?

[00:04:45.23] spk_2:
Yeah. Well, you know, so I really enjoy teaching technology skills. I started as a social worker and I started to um teach technology skills in various sectors. And so Department of Social Services, teaching software implementation. And then I went to Aflac teaching the same thing and in the nonprofit field, and I really feel as though we have individuals within, within the various generations that still have a lot to learn and depending on the learning styles, their learning needs are very different. And so the strategies that we use to teach the technology could vary based upon the generations.

[00:04:52.04] spk_1:
So when you say their learning needs you there starting in different places, starting

[00:04:56.47] spk_2:
in different places and their learning styles as well,

[00:04:59.84] spk_1:
comfort

[00:05:01.18] spk_2:
their comfort and um and the tools and strategies that we will use to reinforce some of that learning some of the activities and such may be different based upon the generation.

[00:05:15.15] spk_1:
One of your takeaways is learning how people value training differently, they value it differently. That was interesting what I’m not, I don’t think of valuing training. So I’m obviously not in the mainstream. So that’s why I’m talking to you because I need help. So how do people value it differently

[00:06:12.37] spk_2:
across the ages if you think about it? Um with some of the, with the baby boomers and we the traditional list, they genuinely want to learn. Um They just may need some, some help along the way where we think of millennials and the Gen Zs. It’s sort of as if um they’re just expecting for the information um to be provided to them. And so we just want to make sure that we’re providing the information that they need to be, to be successful. So it really, it depends on how the information is provided that their values may change.

[00:06:20.18] spk_1:
You have some techniques to talk about. Yes, for training across.

[00:06:26.30] spk_2:
Absolutely.

[00:06:28.01] spk_1:
Let’s, let’s dive in. Okay. Don’t sell short now. And nonprofit radio listeners don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t hold out okay. But what’s, what’s the technique? Which, which one, what should we start with?

[00:07:08.68] spk_2:
Let’s start off with the traditionalists. Okay. Yes. So with the traditionalist one, one thing that we do well with the traditionalists and the baby boomers, we want to make sure that we are providing step by step tools and strategies for them to be successful. So if you are training on some technology skills, make sure that you do have the step by steps with screenshots available and really encourage them to, to go ahead and print that out. So within the training, if your training is virtual or if it’s in person, they can follow along really well. Also, we want to make sure to the best of your ability if we do have someone of a younger generation that maybe we can partner them together with someone of the older generation and they can, they can assist in the learning process.

[00:07:31.30] spk_1:
Students.

[00:07:57.50] spk_2:
Yes. Yes, both are learning because we’re talking about a multigenerational workplace. Um And so, um and also with the baby boomers and the traditionalists, they both prefer to learn within a traditional in person classroom setting. But we know that that’s not always possible. And so we want to make sure that we are um making some accommodations to ensure that they are getting the information in the best way that they receive it the best way that we can. Okay.

[00:08:06.56] spk_1:
So in person is better for the older folks

[00:08:11.28] spk_2:
better and well, let me say preferred is preferred for them. Um Research shows

[00:08:19.45] spk_1:
preferred their prey, but it may not be

[00:08:21.23] spk_2:
possible. How do you, how do you like to learn? Do you prefer virtual as a baby? You say your baby? Right. So do you prefer to learn virtually or in person as far as if you’re learning new technology skills? Yeah,

[00:09:01.32] spk_1:
I have a two part answer to that first is I generally don’t like it when guests turn the tables and put me on the spot. That’s the first, that’s the first answer. But the second answer I will go along with you. Is, uh, no, I prefer, I’d much rather be in person. Yeah. I also prefer speaking to in person audiences. Um, I prefer in person into like this. I mean, I have to do most of them over Zoom because the guests are from all over the country and I live in North Carolina. But, um, are you in

[00:09:10.28] spk_2:
North Carolina? I am from, I’m from North Carolina originally. I now live in South Carolina. Where are you, where are you from? I’m from Hickory and then I went to undergrad in high point and I also lived in Wilmington’s.

[00:09:21.44] spk_1:
Okay of those three. I’m the closest to Wilmington’s. I live in Emerald Isle. You know, the little beach town about an hour and a half above Wilmington’s. Yes,

[00:09:30.36] spk_2:
I do love it. Small world. Where’s hickory hickory hickory? It is at the foothills and so it is about an hour from Charlotte and about an hour and a half from Asheville.

[00:09:44.83] spk_1:
Okay. Okay. Foothills. Alright. Alright. I’m originally from New Jersey. Okay. Okay, cool. And you’re in South

[00:09:49.70] spk_2:
Carolina? I do live in South Carolina now Columbia, South Carolina settled down there. So

[00:10:30.84] spk_1:
that’s the capital of South Carolina in Columbia, South Carolina. Don’t think I don’t know why. Yeah. Okay. So, um, yes, so I prefer in person, everything, audiences, learning interviews, um, meetings with, I do plan giving, consulting, fundraising. So I much prefer to meet donors in person, but a lot of times phone has to suffice. And for the older folks that I’m working with, they’re usually not interested in being on Zoom, they’ll do it for their grandchildren, but they’re not gonna do it for me, which is fine. So I pick up the phone, I got you. But I’d rather be in person whenever I can whenever I can.

[00:10:36.81] spk_2:
May I ask something? Then

[00:10:38.82] spk_1:
after my first answer to the last question you’re still gonna ask again?

[00:11:18.05] spk_2:
It’s not a question. It’s not a question. But as far as far as baby boomers and the traditionalist, I also recommend providing an option for them to call. That’s what reminded me uh providing them an option for them to call the, the training consultant, whoever’s doing the training in case they have questions. Um If there’s a phone available phone number, because oftentimes with technology, you know, we want them to email if they have questions or send a message. But with those two generations, they prefer to pick up the phone or if there’s an option to meet in person, not sure if that is possible. But um at least the phone option will be great better

[00:11:42.12] spk_1:
than email or text. Makes perfect sense. It’s what they grew up with. Exactly. And an email and text or what the other generations grew up with. Exactly. So follow up phone offer, phone, follow up anything else for dealing with Boomers, traditionalists? Not right now. Okay. What if maybe we’re gonna get to this. What? Yeah. Alright. So you are we gonna be talking about having multiple generations like in the same class? Yes, like you said, pair off somebody younger with somebody older. Okay.

[00:11:57.72] spk_2:
Okay. Yeah. So one of my suggestions is to um in your training plan, look at the learning styles of all these generations, figure out what is best or how each of them learn best and just implement various little nuggets that meet the needs of all of the generations. That is my suggestion instead

[00:12:16.66] spk_1:
of like what give me some sample nuggets.

[00:13:30.31] spk_2:
Sure. Yeah. And so for the, let’s start, let’s start at the top. So for the um for the traditionalist and for the baby boomers, like I said earlier, you may want to have a um a print out of the step by step guides for the Gen Xers. They love independent work. So for the activities to reinforce that learning, if you have some independent work that would be helpful um for the millennials, they also enjoy group work. And so after the session, if we have some group work, that would be great. And um we can reinforce their learning to by pairing them up with someone who’s a bit older and helping to strengthen both groups. And then for the Gen Z’s, they love videos, training videos. 3 to 6 minutes is the sweet spot videos of 3 to 6 minutes. Because remember this is the generation that goes to youtube for answers to almost anything. And so videos will be great. And so um if we can have trainings and then implement just little pieces that are catering to the various generations inside of the learning plan or the training plan, that would be ideal.

[00:13:37.53] spk_1:
Okay. So take a hybrid

[00:13:39.11] spk_2:
approach. Exactly. Touch

[00:13:45.58] spk_1:
everybody with what they need and this is all research based. We know Gen Z does much better. Exactly. Two

[00:14:01.32] spk_2:
six minute video. Yes. Yes. And for those who have attended the conference this year, the learning materials and my slides with the references are online. Okay, so they can pull that

[00:14:03.12] spk_1:
up, walking your talk. Alright. Yeah. Um what else other, other techniques across the generations? We got plenty of time

[00:14:22.38] spk_2:
together. Okay. So let’s go with the Gen Xers. They really enjoy being active and so their activities, if they can be active, that would the ideal um any type of gaming that would be great too. So um in their activities, if they can get up and move, if it’s in person or if it’s virtual, let’s set up a way that the activities can help them to just be active and implement what they are learning. That’s key.

[00:14:43.66] spk_1:
So active, meaning they get up out of their

[00:15:35.85] spk_2:
seats. Oh yeah, that’s good. Let me clarify, let me clarify. Yeah. So for active you could get out of your seat. But an activity. So what I like to do is say for instance, you have a, um, an activity plan for them to, let’s say I used to work at our local United Way, United Way of the Midlands in Columbia, South Carolina. And I taught the homeless management information system to about two huh 100 users. Right. And so what I like to do is after their New Year’s or trainings, I would email them a task sheet for them to complete their tasks. And once they finish that task sheet, go ahead and send me their work and I’ll look over it. So that is a way for them to be active. Now, depending on the resources that your agency have, you may have um some gaming um strategies or tools. My agencies did not have that. So we work with what we have. Um But that is a way just for them to be um to be actively doing something and to reinforce the learning that has taken place.

[00:16:40.97] spk_0:
It’s time for a break. Stop the drop with donor box. It’s the online donation platform used by over 100,000 nonprofits in 96 countries. It’s no wonder it’s four times faster. Checkout, easy payment processing, no setup fees, no monthly fees, no contract. How many potential donors drop off before they finish making the donation on your website? You can stop the drop donor box helping you help others donor box dot org. Now back to multigenerational technology teaching with Lauren Hopkins.

[00:16:48.01] spk_1:
What about Gen Z. Anything? Anything further further for Gen Z besides the video?

[00:17:05.26] spk_2:
Yeah, just for, for Gen Zs and for millennials, one thing to note is that they love learning management systems or LMS as most people. Um Well,

[00:17:06.23] spk_1:
I have Jargon Jail on non profit radio. So I’m glad you opened with learning management system. LMS would have to call you out. What the hell is an LMS?

[00:18:48.07] spk_2:
Um So the LMS for learning management system that have a feel of social media. All right. So if we have a discussion board, if we um have some sections that just feel like social media, that you can put together a poster or um share a tidbit or tip of the day that just feels like social media that would be helpful. Now, if your agency does not have those type of resources, that is okay. Another thing that is helpful, especially for the millennials is if there is a blog for um this generation really enjoyed blogs. And so if there’s a blog where you as a trainer can introduce some tips, so say for instance, every week or two, you do a tips Thursday or tips Tuesday or whatnot and introduce or post a tip for them to be utilizing the system. That would be, that would be great also. And another thing as well, remember remember that with these videos, we have to have somewhere to store them, right? And so one thing that I do a couple things that I suggest finding a mutual place where we can store the videos via your, the L M s or maybe it’s a site that is open where you can store those, those videos, a screen share videos that could be helpful as well. Um And also I’m not sure if it’s possible, but depending on your agency, if your company has a, a, a, a company, youtube, see if it’s possible where you can record the screen of some trainings, just making sure that it’s not any confidential information on the screen. But see if we can store it on there. And remember too that the videos should be between 3 to 6 minutes if that’s not possible. 20 minutes or less, but the sweet spot is 3 to 6 minutes.

[00:19:19.53] spk_1:
Yes. Um What kinds of you already had your session? I did. What kinds of, what kinds of questions were you

[00:20:21.73] spk_2:
getting? Yeah. So I got a couple questions. One question that we got was for the baby boomers and for the um traditionalists if they are in this um in the classroom and um we cannot implement in person trainings, how do we teach them? What’s the best way? And so one thing that I really enjoy doing, especially with training software is for those generations, I really like to do one on one training. I love to do one on one training. And so what I offer them is let’s meet one on one now in my um in my work experience, we always use teams. And so, and I’ve also um I use some others too, but mainly teams, but let’s go ahead and share your screen. And what I like for them to do also is for them to drive the training. So I don’t, I always prefer if the learners, no matter what the generation is, if the learners will share their screen and, and drive and I will teach them as they practice. Dr

[00:20:32.68] spk_1:
meaning what they decide what the topics

[00:21:54.58] spk_2:
are, training, training agenda. Yes, we have a training agenda. Exactly. So let’s say for instance, I am teaching um a staff member at a local shelter how to check a client into a bed using a particular software. What I’m going to do as the trainer, if this is their first day, I’m going to ask them to log into the system. Be it the live system or a training system somewhere? They can mess up in and practice or whatnot and share their screen. I’ll give them a login, share their screen and I will teach them. All right. This is where you go to enter in the client’s name. Okay, go ahead and do that. Alright. Next, we’re going to click on such and such. Okay, go ahead and do that. Um And so that’s what I mean by driving. So letting them um letting them navigate and, and play around and see what it feels like also I do enjoy and I do suggest rather having step by step guides like I’ve mentioned before. But if your agency does not have that or you don’t have time to create it or whatnot, because we do know that a lot of nonprofits, they have a smaller staff and such or, you know, smaller department. So that’s okay. Make sure you give your learners no matter what the generation time to write notes, um write notes during the trainings. And so make sure that, you know, you’re taking your time and and can write, allowing them to write some notes that that is a huge tip.

[00:22:06.64] spk_1:
Any other valuable questions you got? Oh,

[00:23:01.81] spk_2:
yeah, let’s see here. I did have a question about um oh, confidential information. Um Someone asked me a question about um confidential information and sharing, not sharing the confidential information. But what if it is a part of the new software? Let’s say that it is an electronic health health record that your agency is in implementing. And so one of my suggestions is to just ensure that the company that, you know, the company’s policies and what can be shared during training and what should be only shared, you know, in, in the real world. And so that, that is um that is huge. Someone said that oftentimes that is the question, should we be sharing this or whatnot? So that’s my suggestion that just look at your company’s policies as far as the training or if y’all don’t have that, um, go ahead and implement something, what should be shared during these trainings, what can be shared or if we need to go ahead and make up some dummy data

[00:23:09.39] spk_1:
beforehand, dummy database.

[00:23:12.76] spk_2:
Exactly. And then sometimes with some databases, um if there’s not a dummy database, maybe that we can make up some data in the live one and just delete it. It just depends

[00:23:25.57] spk_1:
or something. Exactly.

[00:23:29.61] spk_2:
Exactly. Yeah. So that’s part of the pre planning process.

[00:23:34.53] spk_1:
You were going to have folks practice designing strategies. Now, how did you, we can’t practice here but how did you set folks up to? It was

[00:24:37.91] spk_2:
great. Yeah. So what I went ahead and did, I created five different scenarios of agency that are implementing a training, a tech training. And so what we did is we went around the room and we split up the individuals and um they went ahead and I created a pre created objectives for the scenarios for the, for the training plan and they put in place some activities for them. And then also that could be um that could be used to teach the information and then a skills check activity. So how can we ensure that the learner has um understands the information? And so it went really well. And then after that, after um after the groups, we probably spent 15, 18 minutes or so and then the various groups went around and shared with the entire um and with the entire class, their ideas one or two minutes, but they gave us some um some fresh ideas that they have utilized in the past. And then, um as they, as they were working in the team, how they brainstormed then went really well. Now

[00:24:57.73] spk_1:
skills check. Sounds to me like a euphemism for test.

[00:25:26.15] spk_2:
Yeah. Well, it doesn’t have to be though. It does not have to be a quiz. It could be say that that task sheet that I was telling you about earlier, do this, do this and then once you finish these tasks, send me say the client number or the client I D and I will check it out. I’ll check it out before you get access to the life site. I really like to do that or it could be um just do this worksheet and go ahead and write down the responses oftentimes to with these skills checks. They don’t need to turn them into, you know, if you want them to and that could be an evaluation part or evaluation strategy for you as a trainer to make sure, okay, our folks really learning what they need to learn but sometimes it’s a way for them to just practice. Mm hmm.

[00:25:47.36] spk_1:
What did you learn in your session? You know?

[00:25:51.06] spk_2:
Yeah. That’s a good question.

[00:25:52.91] spk_1:
I finally 23 minutes in decent question comes out of this guy. I

[00:28:21.56] spk_2:
love it. No. Um So what did you take away? Yeah, my takeaway was that I really through that activity of the scenarios and then creating a training plan. I actually came, came away and walked away with some good ideas, um, that I could actually use in the workplace or share with others. And, yeah. So, um, let’s see here. Oh, one particular group they stated that they would have a hybrid training, so to meet the needs of all of the generations, they would introduce a hybrid training instead. So virtual for some and then in person for others um that’ll be really helpful. Also making sure that we have a step by step guides um available. That is really good. Um I did have if I could go back to the one question that you stated about um about the questions that some folks asked. So one thing that someone came up to me afterwards, they stated that they work for um they work for Salesforce and they train um the Salesforce Salesforce software with different agencies and because sales force can be so customizable, she was wanting to know what are some suggestions or what is a suggestion that you have for the step by step guide piece, especially for some of the older generations or even the video piece also because sometimes you don’t want to create too many videos because the screens may change because it is customizable. And so um and I did ask her, I said, okay, Well, do you have relationships with these individuals? And she said, yeah, so, so she’s not just going in one day and then just leaving. So over time, I did encourage her to just get to know the learners, um try to figure out what their needs are and to create a video for that agency specifically for that agency that may be helpful. And then as the software changes, she may need to um recreate a video, but hopefully that will last a little bit for, you know, once they’ve been, you know, customize their screens have been customized a bit, but that is one suggestion. She said that was very helpful. Um So, you know, she may not, she said she didn’t have time to do the step by step right now guides. So that’s okay. Um But let’s see if we could do some videos and because the video should be 3 to 6 minutes. She said that maybe, oh, maybe I could do some short videos depending on the topic and go ahead and create those and share them with the agency. All

[00:28:50.26] spk_1:
right, Lauren. Um You want to leave us with some uplifting thoughts about, you know, why it’s important to be all inclusive in your training.

[00:29:29.53] spk_2:
It really is. Well, thank you and thank you for the opportunity. So this subject matter is very close to my heart. I really enjoy training and especially those of the older generation. Um No offense but baby Boomers and the traditionalists. Yeah, they’re actually my favorite generation to teach. And I think oftentimes as we’re thinking about technology, we sometimes leave out um, Gen Xers, baby boomers and the traditionalists and we sort of forget about those learning needs. Now. Um I did not share this and you might not, you might know, but I actually have a doctorate in curriculum and instruction and,

[00:29:37.18] spk_1:
yeah,

[00:29:57.86] spk_2:
that’s okay. And so, um so training and learning is just very close to my heart. So just remember that no matter what the generation is, um just please keep in mind their learning needs and that if they’re in the classroom, they might be forced to be in the classroom depending on their jobs. But they all have various learning needs and they have um they have value at the agency and we need to equip them with the tools to be successful. We really do. And so um so it’s just been, it’s been very, very good, it’s been a good experience and I really hope that folks can take some of this information and use it at their workplaces and in their communities, at

[00:30:53.57] spk_1:
the very, very least rages consciousness. You need to be aware, sensitive to the different values, the different learning styles, learning needs of everybody who’s in your workplace. Not just the folks who are new to the organization or not just the folks who are of a certain age of a certain age, of course, So raising the very bad, I mean, you’re going way beyond just consciousness raising, you have a lot of very good ideas too. But greater consciousness is

[00:31:14.33] spk_2:
absolutely. And one other thing if you don’t mind, the you brought up a good point in saying beyond the new user training, the initial training, remember that just because the users of any generation has completed, the new user training does not mean that they don’t need on going training. So we want to remember that and make that a part of the overall training plan for ongoing training.

[00:31:21.49] spk_1:
Our staff, absolutely, internal professional development. People want to feel supported otherwise, quite quick. Yes.

[00:31:29.61] spk_2:
Yes, absolutely.

[00:31:35.61] spk_1:
I would like to put something on the record that I am a very young 61 born, born in 1962. So very among the youngest of all the baby Boomers is me on the record. I love it. Dr Lauren Hopkins, Dr Lauren Hopkins. Thank you very

[00:31:48.43] spk_2:
much. Thank you. I appreciate it, tony. Thanks for having me. My

[00:32:03.59] spk_1:
pleasure. She is social impact consultant at prepared to impact LLC. And thank you for being with me for our 20 our 2023 nonprofit technology conference coverage where we are sponsored by Heller consulting, technology strategy and implementation for nonprofits.

[00:33:23.25] spk_0:
Mhm. It’s time for Tony’s take two. Hello, who can you share non profit radio with? Maybe it’s among your friends, your colleagues who on your board should listen at least who on your board. Would you like to have? Listen, first step is you gotta share the show with them or who did you used to work with that you’re still willing to talk to. Could you by chance mention non profit radio on your linkedin or Twitter Mastodon? I’d be grateful if you tag me. I will certainly give you a shout out. And I thank you very much for thinking about who you could share non profit radio with and then sharing non profit radio. Thanks very much. That is Tony’s take two. We’ve got just about a butt load. More time here is goals aligned with technology.

[00:33:54.88] spk_1:
Welcome to tony-martignetti, non profit radio coverage of 23 N T C. You know what that is? You know, it’s the 2023 nonprofit technology conference that is hosted by N 10 and that we are in Denver, Colorado. We are hosted by Heller consulting technology strategy and implementation for nonprofits. And from Heller with me now is Jet Winders, Director of Sales at Heller Consulting Jet. Welcome to non profit

[00:34:00.76] spk_3:
radio. Thank you for having me, tony. Pleasure.

[00:34:04.57] spk_1:
Absolutely. Your session topic is how to align your nonprofit’s goals with technology. That’s right. Why is this an important session? Why do we need this?

[00:34:24.12] spk_3:
Yeah. You know, for so many organizations and certainly for tech enthusiasts at a conference like this, sometimes we geek out on the and want to jump straight to what system or what tool are we going to use? And it’s really important to step back and think about what is the goal of using that tool. So what is your nonprofits goals to even start with and then align that with the technology? Because the technology is always advancing something the organization is trying to do,

[00:34:52.20] spk_1:
right? The technology is advancing, presumably your mission certainly is stable. Your goals are going to evolve to achieve achieving that mission. But we need to align these moving parts basically.

[00:34:57.38] spk_3:
That’s right. You know, non profits, they spend a lot of time building strategic plans and they’ll outline, you know, what those North Star goals are and then what those specific levers they’re gonna pull, you know, whether that’s increasing fundraising or awareness or patient outcomes. Those are the goals that the technology is driving towards the goal is never let’s adopt a new tool just for the sake of doing it.

[00:35:22.22] spk_1:
So I’m taking from your, from your learning objectives, identifying technology strategies and how those affect software solution. So what kind of technology strategies are we talking

[00:36:13.40] spk_3:
about? Yeah, you know, sometimes we talk about uh organizations, you know, approach to technology, how do they adopt it? What type of relationship do they want to have with it? So for some organizations that might mean we want to be the most innovative in the field were okay taking risks if it’s going to allow us to be a first mover or advanced something or show the sector something they haven’t done before while others might be, you know, we have to be conservative with our dollars. We want to do something that’s tried and true. We want to do what is proven in the space already. And so we want to do what our peers are doing. That’s a totally different relationship with how you might approach technology and the tools you might adopt. And, and that is just, you know, sort of a philosophy that different organizations adopt that can have an impact on what technology they ultimately select.

[00:36:26.61] spk_1:
Okay. Have you done your session

[00:36:28.41] spk_3:
yet? No, it’s to, it’s on Thursday. Okay.

[00:36:31.23] spk_1:
So walk us through, how are you going through it with your in your session? How are you approaching this?

[00:37:30.18] spk_3:
Yeah. So for first, what I like to get organizations to imagine is that changing technology is actually part of a broader operational change within the organization. And whenever you change technology, uh your business processes also have to change along with that. And your people also have to change whether that’s simply training to use the new tools or it could be new roles and responsibilities based on those tools. And so you want to put in contact context, a technology change with the broader impact that it’s going to have to try to make that change. The other way. I like to get organizations to think about it is that, you know, the technology is always advancing those broader goals within the organization. And so we want you to think through the impact that you’re trying to make first and always be. So starting with that impact messaging rather than, you know, again, getting into the nitty gritty of what tools we’re gonna change in systems we’re gonna change. We need to be centering the impact that it’s going to have at the organization for us to actually sell and make that plan for what we’re gonna adopt and what tools we’re gonna move forward. Okay. So

[00:37:58.19] spk_1:
yeah, centering the impact, right? Not centering the tools we’re not focusing on, not focusing on the tools. Um What is there a method of you? I think you have a method of um assessing different options, information systems options. You say what, what’s, what’s that assessment part

[00:39:15.54] spk_3:
about? Yeah, we take folks through a roadmap methodology that starts with, you know, real strategic discovery to understand what organizations are trying to accomplish. Uh you know, get those specific requirements of what do these tools need to do? It’s not about tool functionality. It’s about what do staff actually need to be able to accomplish in their day to day rolls and then from those types of requirements, build out what you need these systems to accomplish for you. So what role will those technology systems play within the organization? And then only then start to put specific names to what those tools are and that’s where you might actually go out to the vendors at the conference to start to fill in. You know, we need a tool that’s going to do this for our organization. Well, let’s find what tool that is. And you know, the way technology has changed over the years, there’s so many options out there. You know, whether you’re going to take an approach that’s based on a platform and build and customize it to meet all those requirements, or if you’re going to try to find more highly special tools and uh take on the sort of integration requirements of using, you know, tools from different vendors. So there’s not one size fits all anymore of, I just need a tool that does X. You really have to think through that broader approach and put the pieces together and make sure it’s all gonna add up to, you know, those, those goals and outcomes you described at the very beginning.

[00:40:14.31] spk_1:
What about the difference between the like sort of the all inclusive, like like a black box solution or Salesforce versus smaller apps that do different things like accounts payable or there’s an accounts payable vendor behind me. Um Behind us, we’re in the same boat behind us. Um or something else does. You know, it is a fundraising CRM is if you’re, if you’re trying to center the goals, there’s, there’s, there’s one, there’s a one, one size fits all system like that really makes sense. Yeah. Well, one can it, I’m, yeah, that’s such a neophyte question. I don’t know.

[00:41:11.54] spk_3:
It’s, it’s a great question because you are centering the goals and then you also want to look at your organization’s relationship with technology. So that is that example I I shared about whether you’re an innovator or you want to do best practices. You know, these are sort of guiding principles on what your relationship is with technology. Another example might be, um we want to build up our own internal capacity to manage tools and systems with a strong I T and operations department where another organization might say we’re first and foremost fundraisers and program managers, and we’re going to leverage experts outside of our organization to manage our technology. So that’s two totally different relationships with technology. So when you start to decide on your own guiding principles at the organization on what your relationship with technology will be that can then help you answer that question of whether it makes sense to use a platform where you’re going to be responsible for maintaining the integrations and maintaining the customization, or we’re gonna look to a single vendor who’s gonna provide multiple tools in the ecosystem because we’re going to use them as our experts and, and not keep that internal expertise.

[00:41:40.23] spk_1:
Is there a case study or story that you can share?

[00:42:06.58] spk_3:
Yeah, tomorrow, I’ll be highlighting, you know, three different examples of organizations that we worked with and, and took them through this process. And so you know, for one organization, uh they were really focusing on having tools that were easy for their users to use. They needed to look across the organization to a platform that could support five different departments within the organization. Um And they were prepared to take on managing that platform but didn’t want to build it all out from scratch. And so that organization chose salesforce as a solution that had built some of the purpose built mission tools that they needed on their platform already working with another organization on the

[00:42:42.44] spk_1:
salesforce. Absolutely. What kind of outcomes did they see that? You think they would not have, they would not have gained if they had done is the way it’s typically done or, you know, focused on focusing on the technology instead of their mission and goals.

[00:43:06.24] spk_3:
Yeah, I think the approach that they might have taken that I, in my opinion would have been a mistake would be to look at each of these departments in the organization individually. So they’d be looking at uh you know, their programs and uh mission support separately from fun raising separately from finance. They might have each submitted an RFP focused on what are the requirements for each of that department? And they might have chosen different systems based on in a vacuum, what looked best for that department and then none of it would work together and I T would never be able to support it. They never get any good analysis of how information is actually flowing within the organization?

[00:43:30.24] spk_1:
Alright, I kept you from another

[00:43:59.59] spk_3:
story. Well, yeah. Well, in uh in contrast, another organization really was looking at efficiency, you know, they were in that state of having different systems within each of the departments and their I T department recognized that they couldn’t support the different systems that had been chosen independently by different departments. And so they really focused on having a centralized I T structure that could manage and develop solutions on behalf of all of these different departments. They chose Microsoft as a platform because it was an extension of expertise that they already had already using Microsoft in some areas of the organization and then building on that. So they have a core competency now as an organization on Microsoft and are able to hire for those roles and maintain solutions across the organization that are sharing from that platform.

[00:44:49.16] spk_1:
If you’re centering your goals, there’s a lot of organizational introspection that’s got to happen first. So are you, are you looking to your strategic plan? I guess if, if you’ve got one that’s current, I mean, how does this, how does this exercise take place before you start talking about technology

[00:44:49.81] spk_3:
solutions? That’s right. You know, when and where

[00:44:52.24] spk_1:
also it’s c suite conversations. Is it down at the user level? You know, so please wear also. Yeah,

[00:45:30.76] spk_3:
absolutely. You know, when we start working with clients, it’s amazing how much work has usually already been put into defining those types of broader organizational, you know, goals, you know what those strategic plans are, those are often already, you know, their year three of a 10 year strategic plan and they may or may not be on track to achieve some of those lofty goals that got put out there. So, you know, technology is really downstream to support those goals. And we’re often, you know, when we’re working with somebody in operations or an I T kind of forcing them to dig up that, that document and, and confirm like this is still the path the organization is, is on, that’s what we’re trying to accomplish so that we can put our recommendations in context of what the whole organization is doing.

[00:45:52.09] spk_1:
Okay. Um And you had a third story.

[00:46:31.72] spk_3:
Yeah. Well, you know, I I shared uh an example of a Salesforce platform and Microsoft platform. We worked with another organization that actually left Salesforce, um really recognized that managing that platform was too much for the organization. They did not want to keep the in house staff to manage that. Uh They wanted to focus on fundraising, but, you know, didn’t really have the internal capacity to, you know, select apps or integrate with, you know, other online tools. And so they actually went to a purpose built solution, they went to virtuous that happened to have a lot of, you know, features and functionality out of the box for them with an easy on boarding process and a lot less ongoing maintenance and cost for them in the long run. And so, uh, there’s no, you know, perfect solution for everybody out there. It’s really about aligning what you need, you know, to work with and the tool and, and finding what’s going to be the right fit for you.

[00:46:57.27] spk_1:
You have some recommendations about evaluating different uh solutions that you might have, you might identify. Okay, they fit your, your, your stated goals. How do we make the, make the decision?

[00:47:28.65] spk_3:
Yeah. Well, one thing I discourage folks from doing is focusing on the old demo with organizations. You know, when we talk with folks, that’s almost the first things that they go to, you know, they wanna see demos of a bunch of different products and the demos only offer a limited insight into some of the usability, you know, how user friendly something might be. Uh people are flying through the

[00:47:33.69] spk_1:
screen, they could never replicate it, you could never replicate it five minutes after it was shown to you.

[00:48:15.84] spk_3:
That’s right. It doesn’t give you the full perspective. And so, you know, what we really encourage folks to think through, you know, once you’ve done that sort of identifying your goals, understanding what types of tools might be appropriate based on how you want to approach and use technology, then, you know, actually identify systems and platforms that could meet those goals. Sometimes there’s only one or maybe sometimes there’s one or two with big contrasts between them. You can actually do a lot more groundwork and understanding whether those are going to be a fit for you or not before you actually see the product, seeing the product is just that kind of final confirmation to see how it works and get a little more familiar. So how do you do

[00:48:22.87] spk_1:
this groundwork in your evaluation? How do you, yeah, what do you do before the

[00:49:07.82] spk_3:
demo? Yeah. So from, from your discovery effort and developing the requirements, the critical step is prioritizing those requirements against the goal. So you know, when you ask people what they need or what they want to be able to do, you’ll hear tons and tons of different things. And so the real critical period is prioritization of what is going to be mission critical for that fundraising strategy. That’s gonna get you double fundraising in three years or what’s that critical requirement? That’s gonna allow you to analyze whether, you know, multiple, you know, whether one of your program participants is actually participating in three programs so that you can actually see, see that rather than it being siloed data in separate program databases. So prioritizing what’s critical for you allows you to then look at different technology approaches and systems and narrow them down before you ever get to the demos. What

[00:49:24.98] spk_1:
else do you have planned for your audience tomorrow that we haven’t talked about yet.

[00:49:59.80] spk_3:
Yeah. You know, the last exercise I’ll talk folks through um is one way to, to map out your systems in sort of a pre work to any technology selection is to track what data is coming in to the organization where that data is stored, how it’s being used by different individuals and what other data folks would want and need. You know, sometimes a mistake that we see organizations make is they just think all data is good. We want to capture as much of it as possible, but that’s actually not the case. You really want to understand what data you’re already getting and where it is, but also what data you need to make critical decisions and who needs to use it. And when, because having that kind of map of where your data is, how you’re going to use it and what you need is really a lens that we can use to look at these technology systems of whether it’s going to support that or not.

[00:50:25.97] spk_1:
Okay. Anything else planned for tomorrow? I don’t know what you’re holding out on nonprofit radio listeners. I think we’re

[00:50:33.15] spk_3:
gonna talk about tomorrow. I think you’ve got the highlights for sure.

[00:50:47.12] spk_1:
Okay. Okay. These Jet Winders, Director of Sales the hell are consulting, which is our 23 N T C sponsor technology strategy and implementation for nonprofits. Jet. Thank you

[00:50:52.14] spk_3:
very much. Thank you, Tony Blair. My

[00:50:54.11] spk_1:
pleasure and thank you for being with tony-martignetti non profit radio coverage of 23 N T C 2023 nonprofit technology conference

[00:51:38.77] spk_0:
next week, equitable project management and make time for professional development. If you missed any part of this week’s show, I beseech you find it at tony-martignetti dot com. We’re sponsored by Donor Box with intuitive fundraising software from donor box. Your donors give four times faster helping you help others. Check out donor box dot org. Our creative producer is Claire Meyerhoff.

[00:51:41.05] spk_1:
The shows social media is by Susan Chavez

[00:51:43.71] spk_0:
Marc Silverman is our web guy and this music is by

[00:51:49.46] spk_1:
Scott Stein. Thank you for that

[00:52:00.34] spk_0:
affirmation. Scotty B with me next week for nonprofit radio. Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95% go out and be great.

Nonprofit Radio for April 17, 2023: #23NTC & Building An Inclusive Board Culture

 

Amy Sample Ward#23NTC!

Amy Sample Ward, NTEN CEO

Amy Sample Ward kicks off our coverage of the 2023 Nonprofit Technology Conference, hosted by NTEN. They cover the Conference details, and delve into weighing the benefits and risks of the fast-moving technology, artificial intelligence. They are the CEO of NTEN and our technology and social media contributor.

 

 

Renee Rubin RossBuilding An Inclusive Board Culture

Let us explore the signs and symptoms of your board’s current culture, and strategies to be more inclusive and equitable, if that’s something your nonprofit needs to pursue. Let us also dive into how to manage toxic people on your board. Renee Rubin Ross is founder and CEO of The Ross Collective.

 

 

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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.
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[00:00:11.08] spk_0:
Hello and welcome to tony-martignetti

[00:00:13.08] spk_1:
non profit radio.

[00:02:02.99] spk_0:
Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. I’m your aptly named host of your favorite abdominal podcast. We’re beginning our 23 N TC coverage this week. And, oh, I’m glad you’re with me. I’d have to undergo counter immuno electrophoresis if you opposed me because you missed this week’s show. 23 N T C Amy Sample Ward kicks off our coverage of the 2023 nonprofit technology conference hosted by N 10. They cover the conference details and delve into weighing the benefits and risks of the fast moving technology, artificial intelligence. They are the C E O of N 10 and our technology and social media contributor also building an inclusive board culture. Let us explore the signs and symptoms of your board’s current culture and strategies to be more inclusive and equitable. If that’s something you’re non profit needs to pursue. Let us also dive into how to manage toxic people on your board. Renee Reuben Ross is founder and CEO of the Ross Collective on Tony’s take 2 23 N T C. Thanks. We’re sponsored by Donor box with intuitive fundraising software from donor box, your donors give four times faster helping you help others. Donor box dot org. And I’m sorry, my voice is a little horse because I did spend so much time capturing interviews at 23 N T C. Here is 23 T C with Amy Sample Ward.

[00:03:08.83] spk_1:
Welcome back to tony-martignetti, non profit radio coverage of 23 N T C. You know that it’s the nonprofit technology conference hosted by N 10. This is not our first interview today, but I’m sure that this is going to be the kickoff of nonprofit radio’s coverage of 23 N T C where we and you’ll find out why very shortly where we are sponsored by Heller consulting to technology strategy and implementation for nonprofits. The reason that we’re going to do this interview first of the many 20 to be exact interviews from 23 NTC is because with me now is Amy Sample Ward. You know who they are, the CEO of N 10 and our technology and social media contributor, which makes them the grand imperial wizard and Grand Poobah of the 2023 nonprofit technology conference. Amy Sample Ward. It’s a real pleasure to see you in person. It

[00:03:25.91] spk_2:
is wild to get to see you in person after all this time. I know I, I am touching you and I think I need to update my, my business card. The uh I have a whole string of titles now, I guess

[00:03:28.75] spk_1:
well, to the extent you’re willing to put on your business card.

[00:03:33.04] spk_2:
This was all a

[00:03:43.27] spk_1:
joke. But nobody uses business cards anymore. So I’m not offended. Although there’s this little stack of cards, I’m trying to get rid of. Still some people take them. Yeah, there are some, maybe,

[00:03:45.35] spk_2:
maybe they’re really helpful. Maybe

[00:03:47.33] spk_1:
they’re all boomers. I don’t know. But somebody, somebody’s, there are people who would rather not just scan a code, would rather take a physical card. So I have

[00:03:57.10] spk_2:
actually don’t even have business cards. You don’t, I don’t have business cards no longer if I wanted to

[00:04:06.11] spk_1:
no longer. Okay. That’s fine. Well, then don’t add it to your business card. Um We’re at 23 NTC. Congratulations.

[00:04:11.57] spk_2:
Congratulations happening. We are looking around at a big old hall. There are booths, there are people, there are snacks.

[00:04:21.96] spk_1:
How many people, how many people are here with us in Denver? We

[00:04:30.14] spk_2:
have 1600 people here in Denver. 400. That’s a lot of people online. Four

[00:04:33.31] spk_1:
104 100 virtual 1600 in person. Yes, we’re feeding 1600 people toilet ng for 1600 people. Yes, we have, we

[00:04:43.17] spk_2:
have lounges, we have many parks. We have everything.

[00:04:47.19] spk_1:
Yes, there’s, there’s a quiet room, there’s birds of a feather rooms. There’s yoga. There’s,

[00:05:18.21] spk_2:
did you see the, the everybody yoga out downstairs earlier? It was beautiful. It was like 50 people and it was yoga. You don’t need to have ever done. Yoga before you don’t need experience for everybody. You know, there were folks who were in chairs versus sitting on the floor, you know, and everybody was just doing it all together out in that big foyer downstairs. Yeah. Yeah, it was, it was beautiful

[00:05:23.26] spk_1:
wall of windows.

[00:05:42.24] spk_2:
Yeah. I mean, we can be at a technology conference but I think, you know, we’ve talked about this lots of times whether it’s the NTC or, or just how we think about technology in general. It’s actually not about the technology, right? It’s about people and people being able to meet the needs they have and honoring that those needs are different for different people. You know, like there have to be a lot of different lounges because you maybe want a different lounge that I want, right? Like somebody wants to not be talking. Tony-martignetti wants to be talking, you know, like to

[00:06:08.22] spk_1:
talk. Yes, indeed. Right. So you, yeah, you take care of the whole person, you the NTC collective, the collective. Yes, the collective. Absolutely. Um Today’s keynote. Yeah, I don’t know which of the three I was interviewing

[00:06:13.50] spk_2:
this morning was no ball.

[00:06:15.34] spk_1:
Okay. What was, what was their message?

[00:07:16.99] spk_2:
She had so many different things to talk about. And one thing that I want to call out and that encourage people to maybe think about themselves and go follow, go find she’s written books. She has lots of ways that you can follow her content. But this morning, we talked a lot about technology as a social economic and political practice. It is it is happening, you know, it’s not static, it isn’t just there. These are, these are ways that certain economic issues, classes dynamics are, are, are actively being managed. These tech through technology power, social dynamics are being managed, right? Like those things have been baked in from the beginning. So when we think of and we’ve certainly talked about this before, like bias that gets built into a tool. It isn’t just I like orange and you like blue or something, right? It’s biased that some people will forever be able to better use that tool. It’s bias that some people maybe never access that tool. That um the, the idea that we are in surveillance systems all of the time and we are kind of being told these are utilities, we must all use these tools right there. Their convenience, they’re making our lives better

[00:07:45.95] spk_1:
safety and security are often uh just justifications. Yes.

[00:08:51.14] spk_2:
Yes. And even if, even if it does feel this is this is the point that made this morning, maybe it does feel kind of casually better that the ads you’re getting are things maybe that you actually would consider buying versus something that’s totally unrelated to you that is not worth you. Your data being sold, used, misused and deciding who you are, right? Some of some of our data being sold um and being used by other, other. Well, anyone that isn’t us is deciding, can you get alone? Right? Can you do? Are we even gonna, like, actually believe that you can graduate from college? Are we gonna let you in? Are we gonna hire you for this job? Right. Um, so it isn’t just this like, I think we kind of, um, anim eyes it or make it, make it so generic that it loses a little bit of its harsh reality when we think, oh, the data is out there but whatever, it’s like my purchase history and I like that they recommended a good product, right.

[00:09:05.44] spk_1:
Right.

[00:09:56.03] spk_2:
But, but that same data set is determining if you know, like Sophia said in the UK, banks are looking at social media to decide if they’re going to give you a loan. Does it look like all the people that you’re connected to our, like historically separated from any access to wealth? Well, we’re not going to give you a loan. Well, then that means we’re not using, we’re not predicting anything we are deciding with that technology, right? This isn’t predictive analytics, this is restrictive analytics, right? We’re using this to gate keep and to continue to oppress people. Um And I think a really big part of that conversation too was we everybody here at the NTC and folks that are listening to non profit radio are folks who are both the users impacted by that and organizations in a position to maybe not realize they’re playing a part in that, you know, like, maybe you’re sending all of your users into those tools because it was easier. Or you thought they were already on Facebook or even if it’s not social media, you’re using a certain product and you didn’t realize that

[00:10:23.67] spk_1:
because you didn’t do your due diligence around exactly their privacy rules. Jeez. You gave me chills. I’m getting my synesthesia kicked in and I’m sure it’s not the air conditioning, that’s it. We need to show about this remarkable

[00:10:34.23] spk_2:
this,

[00:10:34.53] spk_1:
right? We could be contributing ourselves, right? Uh innocuous, unknowingly

[00:12:18.15] spk_2:
unknowingly, right? Um And she works um and as a faculty and leading a department at U C L A and brought up an example from the academic world of years ago when there was the tool that was being sold marketed to professors and universities that you could upload all of your students papers into it. And then it would tell you if they had plagiarized from the internet, you know, oh, that’s something else that already exists. And she and her colleagues immediately said, oh, this is not good. This is actually not good. And a lot of other folks like, what do you mean this means like we’re catching the students who were trying to plagiarize. Of course, we all know that means that small successful company got bought by a bigger company who knew what they could do with a big old data set. Right. So what just think if you wrote a paper in college when you’re still trying to, like, figure out your ideas and you’re still learning, like, the paper is meant to be a learning practice. It’s, it’s not meant to be published for the world. And now 15 years later you’re applying for a job and that shows up, you know, as part of your data record. Right. And maybe it has ideas that you fundamentally don’t believe now or even ever, but didn’t really know what you were saying and now you can’t get a job because people see this and say, oh, you wrote this paper. So as organizations, when we think we’re saving time or we think that we’re doing something by, by letting the robots do it so that we ourselves are not subjectively making decisions, right? We might actually be making even harder subjective decisions down the line for those people, right? We might be setting them up into systems where their data and their issues are.

[00:14:14.62] spk_1:
This is so enormously timely with, with all the talk about artificial intelligence, chat, chat GPT. The other ones I can’t name off the top of my head and, and our use our use of them. Look, there was a guest on maybe an hour and a half ago. He said we’re not going to know it was Maureen will be off. I think we’re not, we can’t stop this. It’s like trying to stop the the, the innovation around automobiles, you know, or the phone or trying to stop airlines, airplane, airplane flight, it’s not possible but are smart use of it and, you know, are constrained use of it. So I shared with this another thing you and I, you and Gene and I need to talk about this, the three of us together, informed, informed and, and thoughtful and, you know, I’m concerned about the, the more the likely less the due diligence, but just the thought that goes into it. My concern is that I shared this with Maureen and um the advice, a lot of the advice that I see is use artificial intelligence as a first draft. And then so you’re not, you’re no longer facing the blank page, put a pin, I’ll come back to that in a second and then you put your own tone to it, your own language. That’s exactly my concern. You’re reducing yourself from creative thinker working from a blank blank screen to, to relegate it to copy editor. And I don’t mean to insult any copy editors

[00:14:21.63] spk_2:
very valuable

[00:14:22.73] spk_1:
but not nearly as creative process as looking at a blank screen working from

[00:15:28.53] spk_2:
nothing. I think the really big piece of that is we have seen plenty of evidence. We do not need more evidence to know that what these artificial intelligence tools are providing to us is misinformation. The tool is not only giving us quote unquote facts, right? So it isn’t even that you need to add a copy editing layer. If you were to do that, you would need to go back and actually say, is any of this real like Sophia Sophia said this morning, they had received um you know, that other people in academia are making this point of, you know, oh, this is leveling the playing field, right? Because now folks who maybe aren’t naturally confident or comfortable writing and they communicate better in other ways. Now they could use artificial intelligence to help them get a jump start on the paper and then they edited and you know, whatever, but they have reviewed papers written in this way. All of the footnotes are not real articles, they’re not real books, right? Because artificial intelligence made up a book to reference. So

[00:15:38.17] spk_1:
the footnotes are not

[00:16:02.10] spk_2:
real, right? Because artificial intelligence was told to make a footnote. So it notated words in the format that it learned online is what a footnote looks like, right? So the idea that it is there, I like I like you’re saying, you know, the idea that gets us started and then we go in and like we judge it up. No, I mean, unless you’re using it for the outline structure of, I want an intro paragraph and then I want, you know, but what, what then is left that is viable. We are not helping people get a jump start. We are actively creating more in misinformation in in content.

[00:17:14.98] spk_0:
It’s time for a break. Stop the drop with donor box there. The online donation platform. How many possible donors drop off before they finish making the donation on your website? You can stop that drop and break that cycle with donor boxes. Ultimate donation form you added to your website in minutes. There’s no coding required when you stop the drop, the possible donors become donors. It’s four times faster. Checkout easier payment processing, no setup fees, no monthly fees, no contract required. You’ll be joining over 40,000 us non profits that use donor box, donor box helping you help others at donor box dot org. Now back to 23 N T C.

[00:17:24.69] spk_1:
There’s another layer on top of that because you mentioned the footnote specifically uh linkedin Post someone I I follow a lot on linkedin. He follows me. Um I think I can George Weiner at the whole whale whole whale. Um

[00:17:33.94] spk_2:
Who’s maybe here

[00:17:35.73] spk_1:
is George here, George,

[00:17:37.74] spk_2:
I don’t want to be part of this information, but I think that George might be

[00:18:11.92] spk_1:
here. His concern was he did a search of something that whole whale is very well known for. I guess it was, I think it was S C O basic seo basically. And um he did a search in artificial intelligence. He was using an AI tool for search and it came up with a top result that was taken from Whole Whales resource page or something. And it credited Hole, it did credit Whole Whale. His concern was that the next step would be, it would take from Whole Whales resource page and not credit Whole Whale, right? There was no requirement for it. So in this case, it was a legitimate footnote, but his concern is that it’s gonna be stealing his intellectual property and not crediting him in whole

[00:19:24.95] spk_2:
Whale. Because if you think about what artificial intelligence is doing is like at scale able to read all of the internet, right? We’re not able to read all the internet. It’s reading, not technically all of it, but like, you know, so much more of it than we could read without the kind of human context that we’re able to put on something. I know that on the nonprofit radio website, there are pieces of content where you’ve said, Amy said, quote blah, de blah, de blah, right? I work at N 10. My name is Amy Sample Ward. The idea that artificial intelligence would know to read the next sentence to know that I said the thing when that thing is all that mattered because it was relevant to what it was trying to create. And even if it did create a footnote, it would likely be non profit radio, right? But the radio show doesn’t talk, right? It wouldn’t be crediting you. So it’s already set up to fail.

[00:19:35.14] spk_1:
But even the greater likelihood is that it’s not going to credit anyone. It’s just going to take the it’s going to take the intellectual property,

[00:20:08.19] spk_2:
right? Of course. And so, you know, I think we’re over estimating what it could do and putting human expectations onto artificial intelligence that it can’t and shouldn’t, it doesn’t need to be human, right? But we are we are blurring the lines of what is best for humans to do and what is best for a data crunching tool to do, right? We did talk about things I

[00:20:26.90] spk_1:
feel like I’m drowning, drowning in the ocean that I live across the street from. Look. Um Alright, so we know we need to talk about this again, but I mean, I guess you know what we’re talking about is thoughtful use, but I’m not, I’m not convinced that humans are thoughtful enough to to to to thoughtfully use this wave. That’s the tsunami that that’s gathering such speed that even Elon Musk said, signed something that said, let’s take a six month pause, which

[00:20:45.04] spk_2:
which, which is ridiculous. Well,

[00:20:48.70] spk_1:
but, but the idea that there be a pause and artificial pause in in technological growth is absurd.

[00:20:56.52] spk_2:
So this thing, what we know of is not actually accurate to what has currently been developed that just hasn’t been released.

[00:21:02.62] spk_1:
I don’t know it’s happening nefariously and, and the Washington Post will uncover it in, in six months or something when it’s already too late.

[00:21:13.26] spk_2:
And I think

[00:21:14.47] spk_1:
the point is it’s not stopping and no, we need to be thoughtful, but I’m not, I don’t have a lot of confidence that were thoughtful enough beings to not take advantage of this

[00:23:18.18] spk_2:
about necessarily that were not thoughtful and we need to be more thoughtful. I think what, what I see at least, and here in the community is that folks feel like there wasn’t a choice. This was the only tool that was available and we’re sitting in the middle of a giant exhibit hall, right? With like 100 and 20 people. And there are people in here that do the same things as each other. You know, there’s no other nonprofit radio in here. But, but there are people, you know who do the same thing and the the illusion that we don’t have a choice as individual nonprofit organizations or as individual users of technology is a myth that is being over and over and over told to us so that we don’t go looking right? That we don’t unsubscribe that we don’t opt out that we don’t say no, you cannot have my data, right? Because that’s the say it’s the same story of you need this, this is useful to you. This is improving your life is also and don’t look behind the curtain. There’s nowhere else to go. There’s no one else, you know, because that’s, that’s the power that is the that is that political, social, economic practice that’s happening by technology to keep us as we are, right? And so breaking out of that is not okay. Everybody here has to go make their own tools. That’s not what I’m saying either. Even just knowing that there are options, pushes you into thoughtfulness because now you’re saying, oh, well, how would I decide between these? Let me ask some questions, right? And when we think there’s no choice, we don’t bother asking the questions. We don’t know what they’re gonna do when we sign up for their product. Right? So even just thinking, well, let me like, shop around already sets us up to be so much more mindful of what we’re doing with technology, the decision, the investments we’re making, you know, what products were putting our communities data into, you know,

[00:23:22.21] spk_1:
your consciousness, right?

[00:23:40.59] spk_2:
So I don’t think it’s hard to like turn that to go over that hump. And it’s not like we’re asking everyone to become enlightened on a topic that they’ve never heard about were saying just ask questions. I know that there is more than one option, right? Um And that already gets you moving the power back on to your side, right? They are answering to you now versus you feeling like, well, I just signed up and now now we’re using this tool, you know, you have

[00:24:08.84] spk_1:
options, you have options. NTC is one place to find out what those options are. 10 is thoughtful use of technology and 10 the courses and you can do them for certification for God’s sake. If you need certification diploma, they have them. Uh 24. Yes,

[00:25:07.14] spk_2:
Portland, Oregon. We really thought when we had the NTC in Portland in 2019. Um and we thought, oh, everybody loved it. We just got so much great feedback from the community that the city was fun and accessible, that restaurants were good, you know. Um People had a great time and we’re like, okay, well, we can come back to Portland. Let’s really put this a long time from now and now it will be, you know, we just had Denver and then we’re back in Portland because we had three years of not being on offline. So, yes, back in Portland, everyone on the team is super excited just to be back in a place we’ve been before and it makes all the decisions easier. Um We already have ideas for making it better. So, and, you know, we’re in Denver here, but we’re also online and there are sessions that are only in Denver, their sessions that are only online and then there are sessions that are simultaneously in both places. And let me tell you, we are learning a lot.

[00:25:20.41] spk_1:
There’s a lot of that takes a lot of technology support, especially the, the ones that are here and virtual.

[00:25:31.86] spk_2:
Yes, I would say in person stuff, you know, fine under control, you know, regular snap,

[00:25:36.15] spk_1:
totally

[00:25:54.20] spk_2:
online stuff also totally fine, you know, every once in a while somebody logs in the wrong zoom or, you know, whatever, but that’s fine. It’s the hybrid sessions where we have really asked a lot of technology and technology seems to still be deciding how it feels about us. What does it

[00:25:59.14] spk_1:
look like in those rooms? Can camera, can we see the the audience members who are virtual screen with all of them?

[00:26:35.76] spk_2:
Both places can see, you know, back between and we have and 10 staff person or one of our trained volunteers is a host on both sides so that there’s somebody who’s not the speakers or the attendees themselves trying to say somebody has a question or the questions over here or you know, like those two hosts can talk 1 to 1 and like own their side, right? So we have those two house, we have the actual like zoom and then we have all of the technology that needs to be in the Denver room to make sure that the microphones are sinking in real time to the stream to the video, to everything else.

[00:26:55.46] spk_1:
Yeah.

[00:27:59.56] spk_2:
And honestly, so far, knock on wood, I think we had a snafu this morning where, you know, and it’s like the perfect worst thing to happen. You know, the bad thing that happened was volunteers wanted to make sure that their sessions were great and tried to log in early to set them up early. And so they booted the session that was already happening. So it wasn’t like nobody came or nothing ever happened. You know, the caption ear’s have all been there and it’s the normal caption team we work with who are just so great and consistent. All the volunteers have been early, if not on time, you know. So the pro and then we realized, oh, the problem is that, that volunteer logged in? Oh, that’s why we all got booted. Oh, they were able to figure it out. Send a message to everyone and say if your shift starts at 9 15, we mean 9 15, we do not mean 9 13. Yes. So it wasn’t easy to fix challenge,

[00:28:02.27] spk_1:
conscientious volunteers. Not

[00:28:20.38] spk_2:
so we’re learning a lot about like what prep do the folks on both sides really need to pull that off. Like maybe maybe, you know, Ash and Jeremy and Drew have a session with you in the summer and talk about doing hybrid virtual events and how to make them really successful. You know, people are still doing. I mean so many folks fundraising gala have kept the hybrid piece where they’re like, oh, we could have 100 people at home donating that we didn’t buy food for. Yes, please, you know. Um so I think I think we’re really gonna see hybrid stay around. People are gonna want to keep doing that. Um and you know us, we’re happy to share all of our mistakes so that you can learn from them. Yes.

[00:29:30.55] spk_1:
Alright. Alright. So 24. So I would expect 24 NTC is also going to be a hybrid. It sounds you wouldn’t abandon that. All the learnings. Yeah, all the, all the problems next year, it’ll be 800 virtual. Alright, thank you. All right, we’re looking forward to 20 well, we’re loving 23 NTC here in Denver. Looking forward to next year. You and Gene and I, I think we just picked, identified probably three different subjects that the three of us could spend an hour talking about. I’m glad, you know, I’m glad I’m not the only one who’s concerned, even George wegner kinda, you know, he was more leaning towards, well, the risks aren’t, you know, I don’t, I don’t think that, that, that had great. Yeah, but I, I need George to be more and more thoughtful before he comes down on one side or the other.

[00:29:42.55] spk_2:
And I think that from, from any position

[00:29:44.61] spk_1:
Georges, let me just not put it on George wegner. I need the Georges Georges to be more

[00:30:56.77] spk_2:
thoughtful. I think it’s important to also remember that when we’re thinking of what are those risks, we’re filtering that through. What do I think those risks are? And, and I, or you and who you as the listener, whoever the one asking that question cannot be the one assessing risk for everyone. You have not experienced the same harm that everyone has experienced from tech in Ology. You maybe don’t have the same view of what you need that technology to do so, the idea that any one of us could say, oh, the risks aren’t that bad or these are the definitive list of risks. We just can’t, you know, it’s too dynamic of a constantly changing situation to say that the risks, the risk list stops or that it is or is not too much to care about, right? Because for some folks, there are people who are not online because of these risks, right? They are choosing to not even have access to some of the utilities that we all can benefit from working remotely, having access to education remotely because these risks are too harmful, right? So I just want to caution any of us from saying this is it or this is the view, right? The view is changing every day when all the people in this room release a new version of their product, right? Or by each other and decide to do different things and it’s

[00:31:12.82] spk_1:
also very personal. Yes, it has to be personal, organizational

[00:31:37.77] spk_2:
and that’s the that’s the place from which I want everybody here to take their duty, right? Is that it is personal and you have a duty as an organization to honor that personal level of choice and risk for every community member that you are expecting to give you their data, right? That you’re expecting to trust you. And that that’s kind of an entry point to to that mindfulness around technology is like it’s not yours. It is theirs. And are you allowing them to have choice? Are you allowing folks to decide how much data to give you a knot or what you can do with their data? Like it just opens up a whole five more shows of what we talk about, right?

[00:32:02.44] spk_1:
Alright, good. This is not, this is not there, this is not their last appearance.

[00:32:06.97] spk_2:
Let’s talk about Jean about the legal piece of that too, right? Because there’s a social conscience of what you do with your community members, data and there’s actual legal.

[00:32:46.00] spk_1:
We will, we will. All right, Amy Sample Ward, the C E O of N 10 grand high exalted mystic ruler of 23 NTC. Um I was surprised to see them walking on the street today. I thought I’d see them in a chauffeured limousine. You bring 1600 people in the city of Denver. I thought you get the penthouse suite concierge Bellman. Okay. Thank you very much. So. Good to see you. Thank you and thank you for being with our 23 NTC coverage where we are sponsored by Heller consulting, sharing the booth with us doing technology strategy and implementation for nonprofits. Thank you.

[00:33:04.34] spk_0:
It’s time for Tony’s take two first. I need to thank Heller consulting. So thank you Heller consulting for your sponsorship of tony-martignetti non profit radio at the 2023 nonprofit technology conference.

[00:33:21.78] spk_1:
Very

[00:34:52.37] spk_0:
grateful that we shared a large booth together that I was able to make lots of interviews to Heller after each interview, bringing folks over to meet the Heller team that was Kaya and Paige and Jet. And I also met the CEO Keith Heller. Uh Thank you. Thank you. Hello, consulting for partnering with me, sponsoring nonprofit radio at the 23 N T C. Thanks so much. Thanks to the listeners who came by, but a bunch of folks come over say, oh, you’re the, you that radio got, you know, the nonprofit radio guy, one guy said in the bathroom. But in any case, I got a chance to meet lots of listeners. So that’s very gratifying. Thank you to those folks came over. I’m not gonna name who came over in the men’s room. We’ll just leave that uh to lay right there. But thanks listeners who, who joined us at 23 N T C and thank U N 10 N 10 supporting nonprofit radio. I’m grateful for our partnership. Thank you to the team at N 10. Congratulations to the staff for a successful fun valuable conference. My thanks, my congratulations out to end 10. That is Tony’s take two. We’ve got boo koo, but loads more time here is building an inclusive board culture.

[00:35:28.60] spk_1:
Welcome to tony-martignetti, non profit radio coverage of 23 N T C. The 2023 nonprofit technology conference were at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver, Colorado where we are sponsored by Heller consulting technology strategy. And implementation for nonprofits with me now is Renee Reuben Ross. She is founder and CEO of the Ross Collective. Renee Reuben Ross. Welcome to nonprofit radio.

[00:35:35.60] spk_3:
Thanks so much. Great to be here.

[00:35:39.78] spk_1:
Absolute pleasure to have you. Your topic is building an inclusive culture on nonprofit boards. Right. Right. I think I have some sense, but I’m gonna let you articulate because you’ll do it better. Why we need this session?

[00:36:51.10] spk_3:
Oh, wow. Well, so many things. But, um, I think that I do a lot of different things. I do strategic planning and board development facilitation. And I also teach board development at Cal State University, East Bay. And so I’ve had so many, I identify as a white person and consultant. I’ve had so many people come up to me who are on board saying, wow, we are really struggling to build a positive culture and what do we need to do? How can we make things different? And I mean, I would say people of all different racial backgrounds, people who are, you know, people who might just be joining the board, who don’t know what’s going on. And so in, in, in having these conversations, I’ve developed a way of thinking about all right, what are some practices that support boards to do better work? Because I think that many of us, you probably know someone who’s joy. You know, it seems like everybody else knows what’s going on here and I’m trying to catch up, but I just don’t feel like I’m part of this and that might be around information. It might be around the culture in terms of racial equity, it might be around relationships. So, really thinking about what are some great practices that boards can keep in mind gender equity as well

[00:37:18.08] spk_1:
as a board. And there are two women and one’s a woman of color and, and we, you know, we feel minimized. Yes, I’ve heard things like, you know, we feel patronized, minimized. All the power is in the middle aged white guys.

[00:37:45.07] spk_3:
I start with the assumption that we all that we each have something to contribute. And going back to this idea of equity that the people who are closest to the problem should be weighing in on the solutions so that we really need to do consciously design boards and organizations in a way where all voices are heard and affirmed. And that that’s a good thing. That’s not, that’s not anybody losing anything that’s actually all of us getting to do better work that supports everybody. Yeah,

[00:38:01.01] spk_1:
the zero sum game where, well, if, if she has a voice than I’m losing that much of mine. But it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s

[00:38:12.05] spk_3:
ludicrous. Right. Right.

[00:38:12.78] spk_1:
Power is, power is infinite. Power, infinite. So you’ve got some signs and symptoms, indicators of, of what your current culture

[00:39:55.78] spk_3:
is. Right. Well, I am going to have a story that I’m going to share stories. So I was on a board and I had a colleague who came and joined that board. And at the beginning, she was pretty quiet. But then over time, what happened, which I had not expected was she started to come to the board meetings and there was always something bothering her and she was really angry and she, she became sadly this, this angry person in our meetings. And I didn’t expect this. She was someone that I knew she had some good things to contribute. But I started to think about what can I do? And I know that many of my students, many of the clients that I work with have the same issue which we’re going to talk about tomorrow in my session, which is what do you do about somebody who, who has, what do you do about somebody who has become a toxic board member? And so I suggested this kind of, this is really what happens. This is not like, oh, we’ve never met this person before. Usually people who come on board, somebody knows them ahead of time. But what ended up happening was I did my, I did my checklist, which is our, the board procedures. Good. Yes. Are we generally building positive relationships? Yes. Are we honoring equity and listening to all voices? Yes. And then it was like, what I ended up doing was counseling Micah colleague off the board. And I just said to her, you know what I’ve noticed is, it doesn’t seem like it makes you happy to be on this

[00:40:03.54] spk_1:
board. She probably realized it herself.

[00:40:21.46] spk_3:
She realized it herself. I’m somebody who’s not afraid to have the tough conversations. I wasn’t, I wasn’t angry with her. I was stating the truth in a courageous way and it got her to reflect on her participation and to leave the board. What

[00:40:23.47] spk_1:
do you think? Was, was there anything having to do with the, with the organization? Was it was, it was, it was some

[00:40:47.30] spk_3:
other things that were going on. And so many of us have a lot of things that are happening in our homes and with our families that maybe we are bringing to board meetings, right? So it’s really a matter of how can board members act courageous and proactively so that the board so that everybody feels, everybody feels like, wow, when I come to this meeting, things are going in a positive direction because what I’ve heard about boards these days is people really need to feel like their time is worthwhile and if they don’t, they want to do something else, especially now in this post pandemic time, my time is really valuable.

[00:41:13.58] spk_1:
Take off your three little three questions that you ask.

[00:41:16.68] spk_3:
Right. So, so I, so I have this framework that I share with my students, with my clients and my blog. It’s all about, are you utilizing formal practices? So that the first one is formal practices, goals agendas, agreements, term limits. We could just have a

[00:41:34.43] spk_1:
whole bylaws,

[00:41:39.98] spk_3:
bylaws, right? And, and I have, I have encountered or that will say, oh, no, we don’t have term limits. We have people on our board have been here for 20 years. You need to tighten that up. That is not responsible.

[00:41:51.17] spk_1:
You’re saying, I notice you’re saying not just have procedures. Are you following the bylaws may have two consecutive three year terms as the max and you’ve got this 20 year board member. So great,

[00:43:25.55] spk_3:
you got to enforce this and have a way of being in conversation. So first of all, for good, good meeting agendas that are aligned with the goals of the organization. Second of all informal procedures and this is really the relationship building peace. And I think that in these days, if anything, people want more than ever to feel that they feel connected to other board members, they feel a sense of belonging on the board that there’s compassion understanding that, you know, that it isn’t just get the work done, but they’re really that there’s some sort of positive team feeling. And I will say that I share this on a podcast on a webinar and someone said, well, how much does it cost to build? It doesn’t we’re talking a Starbucks coffee. Yes, presence, right? So, so first, so formal practices, informal practice and informal practices given attention, given, given attention really accounting for the fact that people process information differently, learn differently. That’s another informal practice that can really support good, good culture and good

[00:43:33.49] spk_1:
meetings on this, on this one before we move to the third, can other social events for the board which don’t have to be expensive. The person who’s concerned about spending too much money, you can, you can bring everybody into witness, witness some of the work you’re doing if you have that type of work.

[00:45:15.15] spk_3:
But you know what you just is, there was a board that I was invited to join and they said we want to have, we want to have, we’re having all of our meetings at seven a.m. And I was like, I know that I’m a working parent that’s seven a.m. is a horrible time for me. And, and so it is also a matter of being aware of how are, how, how can these practices of, of the board be as inclusive as possible. Um So, so then, and then going on to equity and the reason that so, and I define equity as being committed to shifting systems and sharing power as we talked about before. And the reason that I mentioned equity is that sometimes and I do some work as part of a cross race team where I’m leading along with my colleague, Crystal Cherry. We lead conversations for, for mostly historically white boards around racial equity. Sometimes there is the one person who one person who may be black or who may have something really, really important to say. And that person, even if it’s one person, that person needs to be hurt. Uh And so there’s some, some stepping back that needs to happen on behalf of, you know, by white people sometimes and some real perspective taking to focus more on equity

[00:45:16.30] spk_1:
sharing, power sharing. Uh

[00:45:32.37] spk_3:
And, and this is, we’re all on a learning journey, but it’s like start the journey, the train is going and, and again, if you, when we leave these conversations, we talk a lot about how does this align with the mission of the organization? So we had an arts organization that had their location in a primarily white neighborhood. Um Alright, how do you, what are you going to do in terms of outreach? Given that 45% of your city are people of color. You are not serving the mission to serve the whole community

[00:45:53.92] spk_1:
perceived in the community as a white elitist organization. So you’re not, you’re not attracting new supporters of any type volunteers, donors, board members, whatever is really

[00:46:04.04] spk_3:
about how does this work of um shifting systems of listening to more perspectives, deepen and strengthen the work of the organization?

[00:46:16.29] spk_1:
Anything else on the on the culture? Before we talk about dealing with your toxic person personages?

[00:46:26.56] spk_3:
I think that what I would say is I when I do this work, I encourage, I’m sure you do the same kind of thing. The first step is really assessment. How are you doing right now? And so as people are listening, I would say, put your podcast on pause for a second.

[00:46:52.19] spk_1:
Okay, come back. So, so,

[00:47:17.83] spk_3:
so, and, and these are questions for, for not just for one person, for the whole board. Um I will say that, that we had, we did one conversation with a potential client and it was this man, white man. And we said to him, well, are you building belonging on your board? And, and he said, of course, I am so and we said, well, how do you know? He’s like, well, I’ve asked my three best friends and they all feel a sense of belonging, you know, it’s like, okay, you got to go beyond beyond who you hear from. And maybe that means you survey your whole board or do you have a consultant come in and do interviews, whatever the way that you’re, you’re gathering data, you need to be more comprehensive in, in your learning and perspective taking.

[00:47:44.26] spk_1:
Can we go to toxic, toxic folks had to deal with? I mean, you had a good sample of a good story about your friend, your friend did the board experience.

[00:48:50.06] spk_3:
She’s still my friend because I spoke in a caring way. I wasn’t angry with her. I can see I do that. This is how I approach any kind of service or work, you know, and the same thing that I um that I would suggest for clients, positive or negative. In her case, there was she was having more of a negative experience. So it wasn’t the right fit for her. Other times, sometimes the situation comes up where somebody is on the board, they had a really strong relationship with the previous executive director with the previous staff. And then those people have left, the organization is going in a new direction and this person’s really frustrated. That is a pretty common scenario, right? And so what do you do? It’s up to the new leadership to say yes, we affirm the direction that we’re taking. We’re, we’re sorry that you, that you are not with us, but we are going forward. That’s okay. Again, it’s sometimes leaders, some of the leaders that I meet need just more courage to take this kind of action.

[00:49:10.61] spk_1:
Yeah, other other advice about approaching someone who’s, who’s toxic on a board.

[00:49:17.22] spk_3:
I think that’s just

[00:49:27.99] spk_1:
straightforward factual, you know, conversation. What about, what about in the moment in the, in the, in the heat of a meeting? Someone is dominating the conversation or, or just belittling someone else’s idea? That’s a good, that’s a better example, belittling someone else’s ideas were in the board meeting right now. Thank you for

[00:49:56.99] spk_3:
that. So, some of the practices that I do. So, one of the things that I do when I lead a meeting, I always use meeting agreements and meeting agreements are how it takes a minute or two. How do we want to be together? I have a list of meeting agreements around listening to one another. Curiosity respect

[00:50:03.32] spk_1:
before you joined the board meeting, at

[00:50:06.02] spk_3:
the beginning of each meeting for a minute. And then, and then it’s a matter of depending on how the meeting that helps frame

[00:50:14.81] spk_1:
things. How do we,

[00:50:55.00] spk_3:
is there anything you need to add? Um But I do think that this is where this is where some of this goes back to the framework that I’m a before. Because if, if there is, you want to start with a good agenda and you want, and it is possible to say, all right, well, we’ve been talking about this for 30 minutes. We said we would talk about it for 15. We’re going to cut it off here because we have other things that we need to accomplish and we’re gonna need to talk about this in committee. But so two different things. So one is if somebody is sort of going off, you can use some of those kinds of moves. But then the next part of it is is if someone is belittling somebody, I think that goes back to how do we want to be together and

[00:51:03.86] spk_1:
remind them of what we all agree half an hour

[00:51:06.90] spk_3:
ago and, and have maybe it’s the board president, maybe it’s executive director again, going back to that person. It should be the

[00:51:13.84] spk_1:
board chair in the, in the heat. Of the men in the heat of the meeting. It should be the board chair. It’s their job to run the job to run the meeting.

[00:51:24.00] spk_3:
But it may be that, that person, you want to talk to that person offline, find out what’s

[00:51:27.98] spk_1:
going on. But I’m putting you right in the, in the battle right now. We got to defuse the situation right now because someone is feeling someone has been hurt and, and minimized and someone else’s trotting over them. I think I would like, what do we all agree at the beginning of the meeting? This is not appropriate

[00:51:53.00] spk_3:
and I would go and what I would do would be to go back to them. Like I went back to my colleague and just said, you seem really angry in these meetings were all trying. We’re all working to get more meals to seniors what’s going on. You know, this is really a little bit beyond hear what they have to say and then see what the next step for them is. But, but really, but really again, courage, directness and, and I want to say, protecting everybody in the meeting by, by keeping a safe and caring environment.

[00:52:23.02] spk_1:
It’s also gonna depend on how the person reacts. I think in that moment with apology, you know, I’m I’m sorry, I got carried away versus

[00:52:34.27] spk_3:
okay. Fine. Yeah, that’s true. You’re right, you’re right.

[00:52:36.24] spk_1:
But this possible responses in between those but you know, apology a public apology in the moment goes a long way.

[00:54:03.20] spk_3:
Right. I had, I had another person who reached out to me and said, you know, we have one person who’s hijacking our meetings and he just won’t stop. And so then that was where I went back to my framework. And all right, do you have term limits? Do you have a structured agenda? Do you know what the purpose of these meetings is? I’ll use your checklist to have that structure. Have you talked with other board members to get clarity on what you want and how, how you want to be together and once you can get that, oh and adding the equity piece, are you, can you confirm that this person doesn’t have a perspective that are you sure that this person doesn’t have a perspective that needs to be listened to because I don’t want to, I don’t want to take that off the table. It may be that, that they do. In this case, the person did not. And when, when I talked to this client, it gave her the permission to say, alright, we understand that you want to do blah, blah, blah, but the nine of us don’t. And so we’re going forward over here and it seems like maybe this board isn’t right for you anymore. That’s okay. And that actually kept, it’s that it’s that 2020% of the people or 5% of the people taking up, you know, so much of your time and, and then the board got back on track through that. Okay.

[00:54:05.24] spk_1:
Um What else? What else? We’ve only spent like 20 minutes together? What else are you going to share with folks tomorrow that we haven’t talked

[00:54:12.14] spk_3:
about yet? Yeah, I think that. So I just, this is my first NTC to see how it is. I would say that, that, that

[00:54:23.47] spk_1:
congratulations on being selected as a speaker community, the community voted and chose you.

[00:55:55.14] spk_3:
It’s exciting. Um What I’m trying to do now is create a lot of spaciousness in the meetings that I lead in these presentations. And by spaciousness, I mean, spaciousness, interactivity you’re really giving because people more than ever want to talk, want to have the opportunity to talk. So how I’m, how I lead this conversation, so how I recommend board members should lead these conversations really to say we want to hear from you, we want time for us to talk it through and sometimes there may not be enough time in um in the meetings themselves that may mean that you need to go off and you know, have committee meetings so that you can be more expansive in exploring a certain topic. But really understanding that with everything going on in the world, people are holding a lot and there is a need for more processing of all of this and that needs to go into the design and to just come into you don’t want to come into a room and say, let’s, we’re just getting down to work. It’s really the opposite of that. It’s really what’s here in the room right now. Um, I, I have, there’s a book called Permission To Feel by Marc Brackett. Don’t know if you’ve ever heard of it. And there’s an app to that and it’s really about how you’re feeling right now and it’s such a simple question, but just to say as a check in with your board members, how are you feeling right now? And again, it doesn’t cost very much, but it’s a way to say we’re all here together. But what do you need to leave behind? So you can be here in the room and that creates a lot better work.

[00:56:25.24] spk_1:
You’re promising the folks who attend tomorrow that you’ll, you’ll leave them with a take away the next the next step, next step for building a healthier board. How do you help them identify that next step?

[00:57:33.26] spk_3:
So my, my theory of learning is what you care about. What you embrace. What you notice is what you’re going to start working on. So the reason that I am handing them my hand out with the Venn diagram of these three areas and sorry, I’m being technical, formal practices, informal practices, equity is because I, I don’t, I want each person in the room to reflect on what is working and, and what they want to do next. And to commit to something, right? Something that they want to change in the organization. And it might just be, um, I’m gonna go back to my board and I’m gonna share this with them and we’re gonna have, uh, you know, group conversation about this understanding that we are doing really well in terms of informal practices because we all get along really well. But we actually, we don’t have term limits and that’s hurting us because we’re not getting new people involved with our organization. So a

[00:57:39.50] spk_1:
lot of his internalized what you believe should be a next step where you believe you should work first.

[00:58:17.40] spk_3:
I have a longtime background in education, doctorate in education and studied adult education. Truly believe that we are building our own knowledge and motivation from what we care about and boards are too. What are you giving your attention to? So give my goal for the session is that people give their attention to these three different areas and think. Okay, I’m going to share many practices, but which ones do you need to pay more attention to? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Can we leave it there? What do you think? Sure. Feel good.

[00:58:20.02] spk_1:
Yeah. Alright. You know, feeling like there’s something else we didn’t talk about. He didn’t ask me.

[00:58:46.44] spk_3:
Um I think we’re, I think we’re good. It’s really exciting to, you know, it’s really, I’m very curious about who’s going to come to this session and the challenges they’re bringing and I was, it’s very energizing to see okay room full of people, most of them I haven’t met before. And what will they, you know, what questions do they have about this and what, what’s working for them most? And where do they find, where do they feel like they need to do more fine tuning? What are you excited

[00:58:57.59] spk_1:
about that? What drew you to the nonprofit technology conference? This is your first one, but you’ve obviously been working with nonprofits a long time. What brought you to an NTC?

[00:59:07.30] spk_3:
I was, I was interested in, you know, in meeting all kinds of people and connecting and, you know, learning about some of the ideas that are out there and how this conference works. You

[00:59:17.40] spk_1:
just have never heard of it

[00:59:34.55] spk_3:
before. I have heard of it before. Yeah. And I mean, what I’ve noticed in my work is I have a lot of referral partners who are fundraising consultants who are sending me work and I’m sending them work and I’m guessing that I’ll connect with some new people, you know, who could be potential referral partners. So, yeah, you know, it’s funny because I did have a friend who said, wait, your, your facilitator, why are you going to the technology conference? But I was like, well, there’s a leadership track and so it’s not

[00:59:48.62] spk_1:
only for technical techies I T directors, we all know

[00:59:52.41] spk_3:
that. Right. Right. Right.

[01:00:02.14] spk_1:
Great, Renee Ruben. My pleasure. Thanks for Thanks for sharing a Reuben Ross founder and CEO at the Ross Collective. Thank you for being with tony-martignetti non profit radio coverage of 23 N T C where we are sponsored by Heller consulting technology strategy and implementation for nonprofits. Thanks for being my pleasure, Renee. Thank you. You’re welcome. And thank you

[01:01:16.37] spk_0:
next week. Technology Governance for Accidental Taxis as as accidental taxis, technology governance for accidental techies. If you missed any part of this week’s show, I beseech you find it at tony-martignetti dot com. I’m not sure you’d want to do that though. Actually, this week were sponsored by Donor box with intuitive fundraising software from donor box. Your donors give four times faster helping you help others. Donor box dot org. I’m sure my voice will sound better. Next week, our creative producer is Claire Meyerhoff. The shows 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 B with me next week for nonprofit radio. Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95% go out and be great.

Nonprofit Radio for January 27, 2017: Successful Tech Projects & Inauguration Social Networks

Big Nonprofit Ideas for the Other 95%

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Smita Vadakekalam & Sandy Reinardy: Successful Tech Projects

(L to R) Smita Vadakekalam & Sandy Reinardy at 16NTC

Up to 70% of technology projects fail. How do you manage tech change to avoid the fail? Smita Vadakekalam and Sandy Reinardy have the strategies to prepare, communicate and manage change in your project. Smita is at Heller Consulting and Sandy is with the University of Wisconsin Foundation. We talked at the 2016 Nonprofit Technology Conference.

 

 

Amy Sample Ward: Inauguration Social Networks

Amy Sample WardAmy Sample Ward returns to reveal what went on behind-the-scenes to make social networks buzz this month. She’s our social media contributor and CEO of NTEN, the Nonprofit Technology Network.

 

 


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Hello and welcome to tony martignetti non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. I’m your aptly named host. We have a listener of the week it’s caused you. They are a cr m platform causevox dot com and at causevox you, they blogged four fund-raising podcasts that can help non-profits of any size now, the other three were something about fund-raising authority and tiny, messy non-profit sparks like that, but for non-profit radio, they’re fourth in the in this block post said they said all encompassing, quote, if there were parts of the other three podcasts pod casts that appealed to you than twenty martignetti is non-profit radio may be perfect, perfect martignetti podcast has gained popularity and for good reason if you have a lot of time to listen, you’re in luck. Non-profit radio has hosted over three hundred episodes today is number three twenty four. By the way, like, thieves have ah, markham of specificity. Three, two, one for today. Touching on industry news, best practices and bright new ideas and quote thank you so much. Industry news. Um, yes. Check. Because last week’s review we have twenty sixteen forecast and the twenty seven. Twenty sixteen review on the twenty seventeen forecast who writes this copy? Look, i wrote twenty sixteen forecast i needed i need an intern so badly that was the news industry news best practices, of course, every guest shares best practices bright new ideas, we have ideas, let’s not get carried away break new, i don’t know, but we got good ideas cause you thank you so very much for including non-profit radio in this podcast roundup, congratulations on being our listeners of the week cause you oh, i’m glad you’re with me. I’d be hit with rubio. Sis, if i saw that you missed today’s show successful tech projects up to seventy percent of technology projects fail how do you manage tech change to avoid the fail smita ve arika column and sandy reinardy have the strategies to prepare, communicate and manage change in your projects. Smita is at heller consulting, and sandy is with the university of wisconsin foundation. We talked at the twenty sixteen non-profit technology conference and inauguration social networks. Any sample ward returns to reveal what went on behind the scenes to make social networks buzz this month plus will have ah couple of the topics inauguration related she’s our social media contributor and ceo of intend the non-profit technology network on tony steak, too. Empower your volunteers responsive by pursuant full service fund-raising data driven and technology enabled, you’ll raise more money pursuant dot com, and by we be spelling super cool spelling bee fundraisers. We be e spelling dot com here are smita arika column and sandy reinardy from ntcdinosaur sixteen welcome to tony martignetti non-profit radio coverage of sixteen ntc that’s, the twenty sixteen non-profit technology conference hosted by intend the non-profit technology network. This is also part of ntc conversations. We’re in san jose, california. Of course, in the convention center with me now are smita vatikay column and sandy reinardy, and their session topic is change workshop managing change to ensure a technology project’s success we’re gonna get to that very shortly. First latto highlight are on ten swag item and tc swag item of the of the for the interview you want each each session, this is a smartphone shortbread cookie from ray’s mohr. And then, of course, the obligatory napkin for wiping your hands and and your lips very gingerly, it says yea for those of you don’t have the benefit of the video and this was in our swag pile. Oh, that’s. All right. There it is. Okay, ladies. Um oh, let me give you a proper introduction. Smita is vice president of professional services at heller consulting and sandy is managing director for gift and constituent records at the university of wisconsin foundation. Welcome drinking. Thanks for having my pleasure. Thank you for indulging my swag swag moment. Should i presume, sandy, that you had a ah project. You’re a project manager on a project, a tte university, wisconsin foundation. Sort of. I came. I came in on the tail end rape as we went live doing a full implementation of a serum system website. General ledger, a portal for our campus users. Whole thing. And, uh, i came in about six weeks before we went live and have been working a lot on post project and reflecting on how ah, things maybe could have gone differently. And what’s thinks he did. Well, alright, some introspection. Okay, now. Oh, and, sweetie, you were involved in this project or with the university? Wisconsin or no, i wasn’t. It was not involved in that project, but actually, sandy. And i have worked together at heller for many years previously, and both of us were working with many clients and we would talk about this topic quite a bit, and i’ve kept in touch with sandy, and we would just sort of talk about lessons learned and what she’s experiencing at the university of wisconsin and the things i’m learning from the consulting perspective. So we just love this, you know, exchanging ideas about the topic. Have you done the workshop already? Yes. Okay. Went well, yes. Okay, i think now i read in your description that seventy percent of technology projects fail. What is that? When something fails, meet oyu there’s, our consultant on the panel with something fails? I mean, is that? Does that mean it just doesn’t work? That’s a great question in terms of what failure means, i’m going to take the generic definition of failure being it’s the project’s not meeting timeline, scope or budget and i wantto and any one of those and actually the part that i like to focus on it’s also not meeting employees, adoption or usage, which, really to me, is a key driving, you know, metric for success. So project users hated exactly yes face in thinking you don’t like. Ok, so you have ladies you have strategies for not well helping to minimize the likelihood, i guess i guess you probably can’t prevent it, but minimizing likelihood of project failure is that right? Yes. Ok, where should we start with sandy? Where should we start with this topic? We’re in the convention center and the hallway is noisy. So there’s, no food bins coming by or something you know, but not proper radio perseveres. We don’t care about your mere background noise. Meaningless. You’re very sophisticated audio system here. So you’re here just in the rumbling in the background. Okay, santa grecian rescue. We start with this topic. I think it start with the fact that it’s primarily in terms of change management, it is so people first on this and the because all of our organization’s air made up collectively of a bunch of people who find themselves in different personal positions with relation to change people that are i want to be quick to innovate, and they just you’ve got a lot of energy and they want to always be kind of moving to the next thing, all the way down to people who really would prefer just to more steadily and consistently improve on stuff that they have or and all the way across that kind of arc and organizations than can tend to take on their own profile based on the number of people in the nature of their leaders and things like that when it comes to change and so really understanding where individuals are and how that’s going to affect an impact as you go through a project like this, how you’re going to ensure strong adoption by meeting people where they are, and treating each of those people differently, and utilizing their their position with different aspects of the project because it was a lot in there. Let’s, let’s start unpacked. That’s fine overviews stage let’s. Try to unpack that bit when we’re in the women in the planning stage of ah of a project i’m guessing it’s important who’s in the who’s in the process from the beginning. Okay, metoo my my right. Absolutely. Okay, i think that way you should be in there. Yeah, one of things i like to think about a project and is to think about it, it’s like a campaign, you know, a sandy said, i project is it’s there’s a technology and there’s the people side of it, and if we just concentrate on the technology side of it, the people get left behind. And if you look at change, management is really about it’s the it’s, the methodology it’s the tools and processes to recognize there’s change in a technology project let’s, be proactive and manage it. And so, like you said in the planning part of the project, ideally you’re getting a head start in recognizing that this is what it is understanding who your stakeholders are in a sandy said, those stakeholders range from leadership, those seemed like the obvious stakeholders, and we’ll be business process users. But there’s, you have to really think holistically about your organization and think thoroughly about who is impacted by this change. And in the early start of it, i think it’s good to get buy-in from all of those groups and understanding where they are, sandy mentioned, let me let me just dive into that a little more, the groups you obviously can’t have all the users in in each office or team. Whatever’s going on whatever it’s called that are that are impacted by this, so there has to be a representative should that necessarily be a senior person within that team? Or is that not necessary? I don’t, so i think they’re i think there are different types of state groups and committees there’s definitely, for example, in a project it’s good to have, ah, way of of proving and making key decisions, you know, approval process, which sometimes you need the people who have that power and influence in the organization, but then there’s a equally as an influential and important group, which is your key users and those don’t necessarily have to be, you know, it doesn’t have to follow the organization’s hierarchy, it could be r really a power user or someone who’s going to really be impacted by this change, and they’re excited to work on this project, and they might be the best representative on that committee. So if yes, it’s really important to be deliberate and strategic about the people you choose, you know, in in in engaging them in this project was i’m guessing sandy if they’re not part of the process, but they’re going to be impacted by it, we’re going tow. We’re going to increase the likelihood of the bad adoption that we’re talking about. Exactly. And i think you really have to include people that are sort of on all sides of that rains. You need to have some of the resistors, some of the naysayers, so that you could understand what their concerns are and figure out how you’re going to strategize around that and and kind of take that holistic approach. Okay? Yeah. All right, so you want to have some of the difficult cases in your in your process, you’ll be happier even though even though there’s gonna be difficulty through the process and in the end, you’ll be happier that that they were part of it. Exactly. Okay, okay. You’re tuned to non-profit radio. Tony martignetti also hosts a podcast for the chronicle of philanthropy fund-raising fundamentals is a quick ten minute burst. Metoo fund-raising insights published once a month. Tony’s guests are expert in crowdfunding mobile giving event fund-raising direct mail and donor cultivation. Really, all the fund-raising issues that make you wonder am i doing this right? Is there a better way there is find the fund-raising fundamentals archive it. Tony martignetti dot com that’s marketmesuite n e t t i remember there’s, a g before the end, thousands of listeners have subscribed on itunes. You can also learn maura, the chronicle website, philanthropy dot com fund-raising fundamentals the better way. Where should we go next after we’ve assembled are our project team basically is what we’re called this group you’re ah, could project team yeah, and then you can get super depending on how big of a project is, you can get a simple as just a team versus many committees and big and infrastructures, but yes, essentially the key people who are going to be involved in this project what’s next? Yeah, i would say, you know, i like to think of the analogy of running it like a campaign. So think about naming the project thinking, aligning it, you know, explaining the why behind why we’re doing this? Actually, actually, if i had to say that’s probably the first step, okay? Because in order to get people engaged in order to get even, funding resource is to do this, we really it’s critical that were very clear about why we’re doing this project, and it should align very closely to the organization’s mission, and there should be a good business case that support set and ideally, you know, it’s clear enough so that everyone can get behind it and can just buy a few sentences, understand very quickly. Oh, this is why we’re doing this change. This is why this is so i think, it’s making sure that’s clear and understood by all parties and you’re nodding a lot, anything from the university wisconsin you won’t share at this point. Well, our project, we really had very outdated systems, and we were the environment that we were working and really changed in terms of the critical nous of the foundation as a fund-raising toe offset ah reductions in state funding and things like that. So it became very critical that we figure out how to advance our capacity to raise money. And while that was fairly clear, i think to most people there needed to be a lot of visioning for people to say, well, this is why in the big picture, what do i need to do in my own role if i raise money for this particular school or college? What are the things that i need to do to engage my constituents and to improve my capacity to work with them and have individual people really picking up on that vision on the why? Why should i do this? Not just why should we do? It as a whole. What does it mean and breaking it down into those specific things? Okay, okay. I can see how that’s going to contribute to end user buy-in exact and that the ultimate you know, we’re all our goal is great adoption and buy-in and exactly all right. All right. Uh, well, shall we go who’s got the next next idea after? Well, you know, you want to continue thinking about it like a campaign. Sure. Yeah. So we got, you know, in lining the vision mission and being clear on the why we’re doing it. Engaging the right people. Stakeholders. Being clear on what your communication plan is your strategy. So, like a campaign, you know what we communicate and what frequency to whom? Throughout the project from the start socializing concept. You know, before the project start socializing this idea with those various groups just so they get understand before it happens. What’s happening. Another idea, too, is once you start telling people about a big change, people immediately think about how is this going to be done? You know? And i think it’s important to build that knowledge up front, or at least show them a visual of, say, if it’s a technology project what that road map looks like at a very high level, show them different milestones, milestones, timetable. Yeah, that’s one way without getting into the nitty gritty. But generally, is this a two year thing? You know, in these, you know, first half of the year what happens generally, you know, because people have a lot of questions as much as you can in the beginning, too illustrate that will just ease people’s fears and anxieties. And also no. Oh, yeah, we have a plan for this. We’re not just diving into this without any knowledge and to set the appropriate expectations around it. Okay, okay, sandy, anything you want to add to that just in terms of the visuals, the before and after picture also something that shows them this is where we are now. This is what’s going on. And this is what it’s going to look like at the end. What their system, diagrams, process things, stuff like that. Okay, to the extent we know from things going change without without qualification. But here’s, the better world vision that we have for you. Exactly. Better vision we have. For your world. All right, all right. Uh, okay. So as we’re moving along now, was there. Sandy was there consulting assistance in the project management at the university? Wisconsin. There was way worked with our vendor with blackbaud on the project that did the implementation. Ahs well, as had external project management involved to help shepherd things through and keep a focus. We’re a fairly large organisation and had were able to fortunately dedicate a fair number of staff some full time on the project and budget, accordingly, to put those resources toward in the investment in the time which was right. Okay, what kind of thing this is? Maybe this should be a question for the end, but i’m too anxious to hear what kinds of things that sandy you came in six weeks before implementation. So you kayman thes e stage. Yeah, well, maybe not, but you didn’t come in. You missed. You missed the blood and gore, maybe i don’t know. Right? So what kinds of things were the people in your your team, the records gift, inconsiderate records. What were they saying about the process that you missed? Right? Well, we had a really interesting situation on my team, which is within my department. I’ve got three teams, and one of them are constituent. Records. Area had really excelled throughout the project, in the planning, in testing and definite, identifying their requirements in vetting the solutions and really working things through and spending a lot of time doing that on the gift processing side. For a whole number of reasons, they were less ready, and there was some some significant change resistance that that had gone on way too long and on, and also just capacity. There was not as much time able to be dedicated from that team. And so that’s been a very different thing that we’re we’ve had to do a lot of making up for that after we’re live, which has been a significant challenge in that area, and i went to go live. Thiss was in august two thousand fourteen, so almost, yeah, okay. All right, so one team didn’t really come along as well as give processing, right? Didn’t come along as well as the others. Okay, sametz all right, so what’s ahh let’s. See what’s next. What other strategies for helping ensure success? Anybody? Sure, i think one one thing that is important is if you’re still in the planning phase. Ideally, you are really assessing the abilities you have in house or the resource is you have to do this project project? Yes, whether you need to be realistic about what you need help exactly. So it could range from budgeting obviously being really stick about that, but also your team. So thinking about from the leadership level even do the leaders have a very specific role to play on the project to the understand what that role is to they need coaching our support. Teo, help them what’s the leadership role in this real leadership programs are now weak leadership leadership of the project team or leadership of the organization. The organization? Yeah, what’s the role of the ceo, executive director, maybe even the board and i don’t know if the board is wrong. Let’s talk about these, so i’ll talk about the ceo maybe sandy has an example, but the board, university wisconsin but at least the ceo because ideally, you’ve already articulated the case of why this is important, why does it aligned with the organization’s mission ceo or someone of, you know, executive director, executive director? Sure, they should be visible and just be kind of, you know, your cheerleader about why this is important, because throughout the course of the project, it’s going to take people’s time, it’s going to be challenging it’s just not going to be a lot of fun. Many touchpoint saying it is a task being added to evaluate wireframes and processes and after test and, you know, i have a job to do too exact looking this on top, all right? So the somebody leaders tryto help us stay on mission on mission, right on goal are mission focused? Yeah, and i think it’s just being vocal and articulating and being there and have a presence of why this is important, that this still this is the reason why we’re doing this it’s lying to the organization’s mission, and then i think that just it doesn’t feel like this is just a project thrown onto this particular department or group, and they’re on their own. But there is support from the organization as a whole that we’re all behind this. We all support this. This is important. And the organization’s i’ve worked with as a consultant that have had strong leadership, who have done that job have been more successful. Ok? And so sandy is there something board hated you? Well, maybe. And maybe not even just at the wisconsin but general engine, the board’s roll. And then if you want to and if there’s a wisconsin story, we love stories. Sure. Well, i will use their story just because i think that we were we had excellent leadership in this regard. From both our ceo president and from our board. They were highly committed from the start. Our our president had been there. This was a major initiative for him and he’s been there for five years now. So this is fairly early. The implementation was about a three year project on dso. He recognised where things needed to shift in the organization and really was pivotal in making that happen. Some of the specifics he did throughout the project is it became a regular part of his communication when you talk about a campaign every week posts that go out on our internet from him with updates for things, there was regularly a section about what was going on in the project in trying to keep people aware of what was going and constant positive, a reminder of why we were doing it and what the vision would be. In addition, our board has technology committee that received regular reports and asked excellent questions along the way they were engaged, and they still are, you know, that they still are interested in seeing the metrics and seeing things and what’s what’s happening on the adoption side at every quarterly board meeting, our ceo does a presentation and an update on adoption and utilization in various things as the outcomes that have come along, which i think is is excellent, so they’re asking for those metrics and wanting to see them is one of the best ways to, i think guarantee adoption is that if somebody at the highest levels is looking at the reporting in metrics and outcomes of what year bilich the of what you’re trying to achieve? So not just adoption for adoption sake, but when you embed those into these air, huh? Hyre measuring our performance in our effectiveness if they’re not looking at that than nobody’s going to wanna, you know, going care to adopt it. So, you know, so that’s going really well, i’m sorry. Did you say the board had a technology committee? They do. They was that for the purposes of this project or there had always been a technology committee. I’m not actually sure how long it’s been in place, but it’s an ongoing it’s a permanent okay, that’s a committee i’ve never heard of. Technology committee looks at the use of tech throughout the brothers, the foundation, right information and tech. Okay, excellent. All right for interest. What else? One of the strategies do we have as we either of you move along our project project process, we got one thing that i would say is when it comes to change resistance and and this is a little bit, you know, maybe idealistic, but the more comfortable that in organization khun b and that the leaders khun b with the idea that you’re going to lose people but some people are not going to be on board with a change in direction and that’s okay, and people mean they leave the organization organization and maybe that’s not going to fit for them and that’s that’s a tough thing. But if you’re really looking out for what’s best for them and what’s best for you, you work you want to see this is why visioning, how their lives are going to be different is really important and what these benefits are so that people can evaluate it. Am i able to really put into this and my ableto continue to be committed to my job? Do eh? Is success in this how it what i view as personal success, and if those answers are no, then maybe you could be supportive and helping them figure out their next step, and because it doesn’t help to have people, of course, and they’re going to hold it down and they’re gonna hold it back and they’re never going to be satisfied. They should. They should leave. That seems really extreme to me. Does that happen? Often? People leave. Do you know if it happened to us was constant? I don’t want to do. I don’t want a new computer system that have to work with, so i’m gonna leave absolutely it having fun. I think almost all of the implementation projects we’ve done you’ve got coming to do. They tend to be people who aren’t very tech savvy. Maybe they’re older. What kind of people do this? I know this is so alien to me. Yeah, maybe i’m narrow minded. I don’t, but i mean it’s, just a new computer system, and i understand it’s going to impact your your your work every, you know, eight to five or, you know, whatever you’re our lever, however lengthy a day you have, i understand it’s gonna be a big change, but quitting a job over it? Well, i think it depends on where people are at in their career to, you know, some people, certainly, if you are, i can completely understand being at a certain point in your career where, like, you know, i did this fifteen years ago were ten and i’m just i’m done, you know, like i’m i don’t have the energy to do this again, learning something new, you can take a long time and khun b really, i know i personally if i have to get a new laptop, i i hate it because i know even as even though i know it’s going to be a week maybe where i’m like getting reoriented and everything still dread having to do it. And so when you’re using a major system and you’re changing the actual way that you’re working, that’s, it’s really exhausting, and so i can i can see where some people, if they’ve been through it before, and they really know what it’s going to take would say, i’m just not up for this right now. Interesting speech. Do you see this? You definitely i mean, i think the sandy brought up a great example. Sometimes it is the organization it’s the time they maybe this person hasn’t been reforming necessary that well. And then when it comes to a technology project everything’s going to change and it’s their opportunity to make sure they have the right team in place because it’s going to be a lot of work. So i’ve seen sometimes decisions about staffing being made once the project starts that’s, the organization leadership bilich making that for the first direct manager, okay, and at the same time, there are some people who just disagree with that decision. And because if they’re usually going to a new system, it might be a completely different platform, totally different set of skillsets and training that they needed a lot of investment for that person and for the organization. So they may decide that this is not where the direction they want to go in and okay, you have to be prepared for this. Yes. Ok. And so and it’s? Not necessarily it’s. Painful in that it’s. Not easy, that side of it, but sometimes that’s for the best of the organization, for that individual and for the project. Okay, wei have just a couple of minutes left now, sandy, you already alluded to pretty well, i mean, like, what we should be measuring in terms of are our outcomes on dh, how we’re going to measure success on this. Anything more that you want to say or that smith so that you want to add about evaluating success? Oh, yeah. That’s a big, big topic. Yeah, i what? What? I will say that it doesn’t happen enough. And i do think that it is important from the start to set out what your success metrics are for the project and because otherwise you decided the outset. Yeah, okay, because it’s otherwise, there’s no way you can meet, you know, every something’s going to give, you know, so just being clear, what are those most important metrics? And actually, sandy had a really interesting thought she brought up in the workshop about being realistic about in the context of a project. Do you have the same goals for your organization? You know, in terms of goals, um, set of activities like are you expecting when you’re going through this technology change to have the same outputs, to have the same fund-raising goals like it might? Maybe you could elaborate on that for sure. I think so. Hopefully when you’re implementing a new tool, it’s, because you’re looking to measure something, you’re looking to change something in the way that you work and how how effective you are doing your work so inherently in that hopefully the tool, whatever reporting or whatever kind of metrics are part of the tool itself, are reflective of that that you’re establishing those in such a way that this is what we’re looking to measure in order to inform further changes in strategy or whatever it might be. How well is this fund-raising initiative working in performance compared to this one? And so inherently in those tools? By capturing that data, you’re seeing adoption and it’s a cycle at that point. So the reporting on the outcomes is helping to inform how do you change your strategy, which you, in turn, use the tools to measure again and to kind of go around so it’s a little bit, but self fulfilling in that way, in terms of success measurements, the one other well, can you make you want to make a brief point? That’s? Ok, that’s ok. All right. We gotta wrap it up chanpreet leave it there. Thank you very much, ladies. Thank you. Sweet about a cake alarm. Vice president of professional services at heller consulting and sandy reinardy, managing director. Gift and constituent records at the university of wisconsin foundation again, ladies. Thank you. Thanks very much for sharing. Thank you. Thank you. And sandy. Especially from the university. Wisconsin. You know, sometimes it’s. Hard to share introspection. Thank you for doing that. Thank you. Thank you for being with us, this is tony martignetti non-profit radio coverage of sixteen ntc non-profit technology conference, thanks so much. Inauguration social networks with amy sample ward is coming up first pursuant, their latest white paper is overcoming the major donor dilemma. The dilemma is the possible gap between data and activity. If your data doesn’t help you decide what to do, which course to take, then it’s not valuable? Yeah, time not well spent collecting it. That is the dilemma, and i actually might call it a paradox that they were this is what they wrestled with and their advice for howto bridge this gap is in the paper, it follows the life cycle of your major donor relationships, identification, engagement and cultivation it’s very much worth reading. Overcoming the major donor dilemma you’ll find it at pursuing dot com click resource is and then content papers we’ll be spelling they’ve got a new video up from the night that they raised a hundred ten thousand dollars for help for children spelling bees for fund-raising there is one hundred ten thousand dollars in a spelling bee because they include live music and dancing and stand up comedy it’s all in the video. They know what they’re doing around today’s. Um, spelling bees, not your grandmother’s spelling these. Check out the video it’s at wi be e spelling dot com now, tony’s, take two. My new video is from inauguration weekend. I was there in d c a met a volunteer collecting metrocards for martha’s table. They strengthened children, families and communities in dc jan’s story as i got to know her is a lesson on empowering your volunteers toe act on your behalf. My video with jan is that twenty martignetti dot com and it’s, the last one with luscious eleven inch hair for a long, long time last one for no other reason you got to check that out. That is tony’s take two. You better do the live listener love because amy’s ample warden, i have a lot to talk about, so let’s get the live love out there. Let’s go abroad. I mean somebody people abroad. I mean, i can’t believe asia always checking in korea multiple south korea, anya haserot comes a ham nida uh, the uk multiple. We can’t see the cities, but we know that you’re with us somewhere in the u k one of those one of the three countries china is with us new year, chinese new year. I can’t say that in chinese can neither cantonese nor mandarin. Can i speak? However, i can say ni hao and enjoy the new year tonight. Most right now. That’s. Twelve hours later is tomorrow night. Is it? Tonight is tomorrow night. Okay. Tomorrow night, because twelve hours earlier. Still tomorrow night. Happy new year. Glad we got that straightened out. Germany, germany is with us. Goodson housing in germany and guten dog. I wish you ah alvarado obregon, mexico. Buenas tarde days. Brazil is with us. Sao paulo, brazil is with us over the gado. Unbelievable. Thea foreign influence non-profit radio let’s. Bring it back. Domestic multiple new york city. I love that when new york new york checks in multiple times. Thank you. Jersey city, new jersey. Right across birthplace of my father in greenville hospital. Used to live on mcadoo. Have jersey city probably different part of the city and from where you are, you’re listening. I would bet. But that’s where he was born. New bern, north carolina is with us. Live love. Always going out to new bern. Woodbridge, new jersey, tampa, florida, houston, texas live listener love to you what comes next? We know it’s the podcast pleasantries over twelve thousand now podcast listeners ten thousand for sure old number over twelve thousand podcast listeners thank you pleasantries to you. Thanks for being with us and the affiliate affections to our am and fm stations throughout the country. Thank you for listening on your station. Whichever day, whatever part of the week that you’re, the station fits us into the schedule. Affections to our affiliate listeners. Amy sample ward. I’m very glad when she’s on glad to bring her back. She’s, our social media contributor and the ceo of intend the non-profit technology network. Her most recent car third book is social change any time everywhere about online multi-channel engagement she’s that amy sample ward dot or ge and at amy rs ward welcome back, amy. Hi. Thanks for having me back. Happy twenty seventeen, twenty, seventeen. We haven’t chatted that’s. Right. Happy to you. Thank you very much. I note that oren luis is going to be nine months in two days. Do i have that cereal? I believe the twenty ninth is his ninth month. Isn’t that? Right, i remember. I remember, uh, happy, happy nine, happy nine, teo xero another quarter, he will have been a year. I know it just goes by so fast, goodness gracious. Andi, in the meantime, well, a little after that. Ah, but before his first birthday, you have a little conference coming up seventeen ntc we do a small gathering gathering thousand twenty five hundred some like that a little chat, little chat group, community group until i like that. A little chat group of twenty five hundred people go oh, it’s a tight community. You’re going to be the warden in park marriott march twenty third, twenty fifth what can we expect? Well, um first it will be it really will be a packed house were on track to sell out in advance. So if folks are listening and are interested, be sure you register soon, but we are gonna have, you know, obviously by selling out the largest in-kind attendance so that we’ve had before. And that means we’re trying to have the most content that we’ve had. I think they’ll be eighteen concurrent sessions, so tons, tons of speakers, lots of great content and three days full, just like we have in the past on dh will be in d c so i imagine that inevitably there will be a folk using their attendance at the conference is an opportunity, tio go just a mile or so down the street, teo the large white buildings to connect it with some of their representatives and be a part of all all the different conversations that are happening now, too, which i think is exciting that that folks can come to the conference, talk about and learn about all different ways to use technology and their work to support their their organizations, and then maybe also get to be in the seat of our democracy and go connect with their representatives. Indeed, is there any part of the of the conference schedule? That’s ah around organized, so we don’t have a formal advocacy day or anything at the heart of the conference, but if folks are interested and support, we’re happy to help them make a plan for that, but we don’t have ah, because the conference really covers organizations of every different topic and mission and geography, etcetera. We don’t formalize an advocacy day in that way, but like i said, folks, they’re interested and need more resource is there aren’t sure how they would go about connecting with their representatives were happy. Teo, help them all the info is that in ten dot or ge? I believe there’s, we’re in the mid tier pricing now like the early bird is gone now aren’t regular and then comes late, but regular has another couple weeks, doesn’t i don’t yet regular is still open and it may be that we don’t even get toe late registration because we are like i said on track to sell out early. So be sure that you register now also, so that no matter what you do, get the regular rate and you don’t have to pay the late hyre rate yes or risk being blocked out completely and then exactly super disappointed, alright and ten dot or ge, it is an excellent conference all about using technology it’s more smartly, more efficiently to help you focus more time on delivering programs and services. So it’s not just for geeks by any means. I understand what people saying when i interview the man it’s tze for everybody who uses technology, and unless you’re still using index cards and pay a long paper sheets, then you’re using technology, so it is an excellent conference highly recommend seventeen ntc and ten dot org’s check that out. Um, okay, let’s, look at some post inauguration or around the inauguration social networks. You you do some research on the march? Yeah, what you have what you find out, what did you find out? They’re well, so a couple things to talk about. So i think there’s plenty that we could talk about as far as the march that happened last saturday. The women’s march, but just one. But if you are listening live to non-profit radio, which you should right now in dc live is another march happening called the march for life, which is maybe some overlap between those communities, but probably very different communities marching about a week apart and very kind of looking, comparing and contrasting that, too is interesting because there are some things that, you know, tony, you and i have talked about before best practices for engaging your community, calling people to action, things like that, that both marches really did well. And then there are some things that are very different in their approach. So first, kind of looking at the organization of it all. You know, one thing that we’ve talked about in the past, probably multiple times, is that you don’t just want something to exist in one channel he wanted to be able teo be found content wise, schematically wise, everything across different channels and i think bull marches, you know, there’s a website where the domain of the website is the same saying that you’re using the hashtag, which is really helpful for people who maybe don’t know what to look for if they see the hashtag and then the domain of of the website related to that march is the exact same words that is super helpful for making sure they know they’re in the right place on both have that going, though i am not able to go to the march for life website unless i go teo kind of a sub page from a knitter net search results, so i don’t know if their main domain is just got so much traffic that it’s down or what’s happening, but i thought that was an interesting note on that their their website maybe isn’t quite er up to speed there, and then, you know, another kind of and that’s something we’ve talked about before trying to remember when we would have talked about this, but you know, there’s there’s, the role of hash tags in in a campaign in organizing people across different geography is and, you know, i just said the two hash tags that were used were women’s march and march for life, but then there’s also inevitably other hashtags that people start using in association with those events. So then you start to see tweets that have, you know, two or three hashtags, and and it kind of creates, like a niche community within that that larger world and one that i have noticed, justin trying teo kind of pay close attention and analyze the two experiences from last saturday and then the march today is the use of the hash tag, why i march versus why we mark and there were, you know, lots of, um, signs and videos and pictures and, you know, content compilations from last saturday’s, women’s march, where people were trying teo share their story and i think also document maybe the diversity of issues that people were bringing to that march experience with the hashtag why i march and in i think, uh, a crowd setting where there’s millions of people having on opportunity to feel like you’re telling your story, there’s, there is a unique voice that you’re adding to that because sea of people can be really empowering. And i found it interesting that today there’s a number of folks within the march for life world using the hashtag why we march, which certainly you can make the cases, is a unifying message. But i think also loses a bit of that opportunity for it to feel like anyone is that’s, anyone’s, individual story and more than that, um, you know, maybe talking points or thoughts, or kind of larger ideas versus their own experience. That that was an interesting observation on dh may be lost opportunity, right? Feeling like it came from someplace central versus personal personal experience. All right, and we’ve got to wait for a break. Hold all those thoughts, let’s, keep talking, excellent. Stay with us. Like what you’re hearing a non-profit radio tony’s got more on youtube, you’ll find clips from stand up comedy tv spots and exclusive interviews catch guests like seth gordon. Craig newmark, the founder of craigslist marquis of eco enterprises, charles best from donors choose dot org’s aria finger, do something that worked neo-sage levine from new york universities heimans center on philantech tony tweets to he finds the best content from the most knowledgeable, interesting people in and around non-profits to share on his stream. If you have valuable info, he wants to re tweet you during the show. You can join the conversation on twitter using hashtag non-profit radio twitter is an easy way to reach tony he’s at tony martignetti narasimhan t i g e n e t t i remember there’s a g before the end he hosts a podcast for the chronicle of philanthropy fund-raising fundamentals is a short monthly show devoted to getting over your fund-raising hartals just like non-profit radio, toni talks to leading thinkers, experts and cool people with great ideas. As one fan said, tony picks their brains and i don’t have to leave my office fund-raising fundamentals was recently dubbed the most helpful non-profit podcast you have ever heard. You can also join the conversation on facebook, where you can ask questions before or after the show. The guests were there, too. Get insider show alerts by email, tony tells you who’s on each week and always includes link so that you can contact guess directly. To sign up, visit the facebook page for tony martignetti dot com. If you have big dreams in a small budget tune into tony martignetti non-profit radio, i d’oh. I’m adam braun, founder of pencils of promise. Welcome back to big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. Amy let’s, let’s keep comparing and contrasting these really interesting. The women’s march and the march for life going on today i love it. So the next big area and you know this is like the most important things for me when it comes teo technology. And that is how how do we use these tools to organize people? To call them to action and to have that action will be kind of either or offline, and towards riel impact, right? That that idea that social media is just kind of collectivism and no one’s really doing anything is going to be a self fulfilling prophecy. If all you ever ask people to do is click on things, right? So one thing that i was paying attention to, of course, since that is my my area of passion, is how both of the kind of organizer’s behind the marches focused on that. And of course, that means what are they doing ahead of time? How are they planning that? How are they getting consistent messages out, etcetera? And one thing that i was very surprised about is that with the women’s march, there were, of course, you know, not everyone can go to d c so there were marches all across the u s and actually even internationally. And they were all organized to happen on the same day, so that your amplifying that experience it feels like a shared experience, regardless of where you may be participating. You know, everyone in all those different cities is using the same hash tag, etcetera. But with the march for life there are also some some local marches happening in various cities, and they are not all on the same day, they’re kind of scheduled on various days come across a two week spread which i thought that’s again. A huge missed opportunity when it comes to creating that shared experience that people are all kind of in support of and and sharing this message that they would happen on all different days just feels disconnected. What do you mean? Ok, i mean, smart people put these things together, what’s the what’s, the other side of that. Why might they just to extend the time of the messaging and the conscience consciousness? Really think you could argue that it is? Extending the time that also it’s enabling, you know, local organizer teo time the march with maybe other actions or speeches or things that are otherwise happening locally at a different time, i think another reasoning that i’ve heard in general when it comes to more distributed timings like this is that way people have kind of their own day locally, but then everyone’s paying attention to the central event. But i still you know, if i was in charge, that wouldn’t be my strategic think the shared experience stronger. Okay, right you wanted to buy the same day same hashtag we feel the feel the joy and the passion across the world all over the same six hours. Yes, exactly. On dh then the last piece that i wanted to kind of compare and contrast that i thought was really interesting is so so what are they doing to drive folks toe action, right? Like the march is one action but that’s not going to be what changes the hearts and minds of politicians, local and national. You know, etcetera. So? So what? What are the other actions? And because the march for life is happening right now, i noticed and took a quick screen grab that in their live stream they have been flashing up. Ah, tex call so you would, you know, text ah word, teo, a certain short code on dh the word that you’re supposed to texas march for life, but i’ve noticed that had changed for two the number for which i think is very confusing because then your hashtag is spelling out fo r so there’s, i think a quick place where people are going to get hung up, but that’s, what you’re texting into is basically prompt tio notify your congress people that you are pro life. Yeah, so that felt like a very narrow channel to me. Andi in the march for women right away with with all the energy from marches all across the world, they have used the same website to create a centralized action process that they’re calling ten, ten actions in one hundred days. So every ten days, there’s a new action that they’re kind of owning and pushing out from that central march website that, you know, everyone was already going to. And if you look on the march for life website, they also have an action center and at resource is etcetera, but the actions are all outdated. The very top one references ah mother’s day campaign so, again, you knew the march was coming right? It feels like a riel missed opportunity to align that energy with action. And i think the march for women organizer’s have had a very strategic eye on riel action and forward momentum from the beginning. And you can see that in the way that they’ve set up some of those. Come on, you know, both the online content in-kind of the process for getting people to move forward. Okay, wey have to leave that topic there. That’s excellent. Comparing count contrasting. Thank you very much. Way just that we have about a minute left and i wanted to get to something that that you noticed about president trump tweeting from treating from his personal account versus the at potus twitter yes, i find it so i mean, you know, i think there’s going to be a lot of opportunities where we say i have nothing to compare this to and this is surprising. But i have, you know, no idea what to expect anymore. But this is certainly one of those situations, i find it so surprising, i guess, is the word that our president trump continues to use his personal, you know, longstanding twitter account at real donald trump to tweet things out all day long, and that the official potus twitter account is just a stream of retweets of his own personal account at what i think feels very strange on dh. I think what i mean by strangers is a reflection on the voice on the message. You know that our official presidential twitter account is a is a retweet, makes it feel and is reinforcing this feeling that president trump is separated from from that role. If he’s tweeting as himself and the quote unquote, the president is retweeting it, that just reinforces to me a very strange separation. I understand, okay, thank you. We gotta leave it there. Amy sample ward. You’ll find her on twitter at amy rs ward and again, check out seventeen ntcdinosaur provoc technology conference at in ten dot or ge. Thank you, amy. Next week, grow your sustainers revenue and protect your donor’s data both from the non-profit technology conference last year. If you missed any part of today’s show, i beseech you, find it on tony martignetti dot com. We’re sponsored by pursuing online tools for small and midsize non-profits data driven and technology enabled. And by we be spelling supercool spelling bee fundraisers. We b e spelling dot com our creative producers claire meyerhoff. Sam liebowitz is the line producer. Gavin dollars are am and fm outreach director. And we have to say goodbye to him because he got promoted to station manager at que tiene que carbondale colorado. He’s been outstanding. He got us off the ground with the affiliate stations. I’m gonna miss working with him. This is what happens. The best people move on and they move up and it’s. Gratifying and disappointing at the same time. So i i need to hire more lackluster people. I think that’s the lesson. More, more mediocre. Sze, um congratulations, gavin que tiene que better be our next affiliate station. Start the music, please, sam. Congratulations, gavin. And lots of good wishes to you. The show’s social media is by susan. Chavez. Our music is by scots. Dine with me next week for non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent go out and greet. What’s not to love about non-profit radio tony gets the best guests check this out from seth godin this’s the first revolution since tv nineteen fifty and henry ford nineteen twenty it’s the revolution of our lifetime here’s a smart, simple idea from craigslist founder craig newmark insights orn presentation or anything? People don’t really need the fancy stuff they need something which is simple and fast. When’s the best time to post on facebook facebook’s andrew noise nose at traffic is at an all time hyre on nine a m or eight pm so that’s when you should be posting your most meaningful posts here’s aria finger, ceo of do something dot or ge young people are not going to be involved in social change if it’s boring and they don’t see the impact of what they’re doing so you gotta make it fun and applicable to these young people look so otherwise a fifteen and sixteen year old they have better things to dio they have xbox, they have tv, they have their cell phones me dar is the founder of idealist took two or three years for foundation staff to sort of dane toe, add an email address card. It was like it was phone. This email thing is right and that’s, why should i give it away? Charles best founded donors choose dot or ge. Somehow they’ve gotten in touch kind of off line as it were on dh and no two exchanges of brownies and visits and physical gift. Mark echo is the founder and ceo of eco enterprises. You may be wearing his hoodies and shirts. Tony, talk to him. Yeah, you know, i just i’m a big believer that’s not what you make in life. It sze, you know, tell you make people feel this is public radio host majora carter. Innovation is in the power of understanding that you don’t just put money on a situation expected to hell. You put money in a situation and invested and expect it to grow and savvy advice for success from eric sabiston. What separates those who achieve from those who do not is in direct proportion to one’s ability to ask others for help. The smartest experts and leading thinkers air on tony martignetti non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent.

Nonprofit Radio for August 22, 2014: Integrate Social And CRM & Technology And Organizing

Big Nonprofit Ideas for the Other 95%

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Bryan Giese & Jenn Smith: Integrate Social And CRM 

With Bryan Giese and Jenn Smith at NTC
With Bryan Giese and Jenn Smith at NTC

How do you integrate social media data into your CRM database? What social media data should you preserve? I talked to Bryan Giese, Heller Consulting’s director of marketing, and Jenn Smith, Heller’s vice president of digital agency, at the Nonprofit Technology Conference (NTC).

 

 

 

 Austen Levihn-Coon & Rachel Butler: Technology And Organizing

With Austen Levihn-Coon and Rachel Butler at NTC
With Austen Levihn-Coon and Rachel Butler at NTC

Technology has created opportunities for organizing, but also challenges. Austen Levihn-Coon and Rachel Butler identify the challenges and how to overcome them. They share strategies to deepen engagement beyond petition signing and identify leaders in your community. Austen is chief innovation officer at Fission Strategy and Rachel is campaign representative for the Beyond Oil campaign at Sierra Club. We talked at NTC.

 

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Hello and welcome to tony martignetti non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent i’m your aptly named host and i’m glad you’re with me. I’d be forced to endure pseudo member nous stomach titus if it came within my ken that you missed today’s show integrates social and c r m how do you integrate social media data into your cr m database? What social media data should you preserve? I talked to brian gz heller consulting’s director of marketing, and jen smith heller’s, vice president of digital agency at the non-profit technology conference and t c and technology and organizing technology has created opportunities for organizing but also challenges. Austin levine kun and rachel butler identified the challenges and how to overcome them. The share strategies to deepen engagement beyond petition signing and identify leaders in your community. Austin is chief innovation officer at vision strategy, and rachel is campaign representative for beyond oil at sierra club. We talked at and t c on tony’s take to a new non-profit radio knowledge base sponsored by generosity siri’s hosting multi charity five k runs and walks here’s the first of the two ntcdinosaur views today with brian gz and jen smith welcome to tony martignetti non-profit radio coverage of ntc the non-profit technology conference two thousand fourteen we’re at the marriott hotel wardman park in washington, d c and with me are brian gc and jen smith. Brian is director of marketing at heller consulting. Jenn smith is vice president digital agency at heller consulting. Brian jen, welcome, thanks so much. Thank you very much for having i’m glad. Thank you for taking time on a busy conference. You’re workshop topic is bridging the gap between social media and cr m let’s. Make sure everybody’s on the same platform on the c r m of course, constituent relationship management which would be your date abate your software for fund-raising and all things engagement with with your constituents don’t have that right. Yes, that is correct. We’ll have no, i know the acronym, right. Is that how you would? What would define cr m as? Yes, definitely. Serum is, you know, your your underlying systems that keep track of everything that your constituents might do. So you know the best case. Everything is connected with the central point being your actual constituent so you can find out. Everything they do across all of your efforts, whether it’s volunteering or fund-raising or communications, if you can have that all center around that one single constituent it’s a great thing, instead of trying to merge databases and merge content. Okay, and thank you and jen what’s the what is the gap between social and cr? Um, well, you know, i think that socialist still a relatively new it’s, a new endeavor for a lot of organizations not necessarily knew in terms of the content they’re creating, but in terms of how they’re thinking about data, so, you know, you can get a lot of information, you can get a lot of social data out there, but how you tie that back into your serum and what you actually do with that data and how it can change things that your organization, i think it’s still a little bit of a mystery for a lot of organizations, so i think, you know, when you’re thinking about social media, you’re really trying to say here’s, a place where we’re engaging with donors and constituents, um, and we want to make sure that we’re capturing the right data from those engagements in order to really make use of that in your overall marketing and communications strategy with with a donor and constituent does this start with mission? Is that the place to evaluate start with our evaluation of how we’re going to integrate these two doesn’t begin with mission. Yeah, i think it always needs to begin with mission, right? And i think it begins really with with your goals and what you need to do strategically as an organization. So, you know, you need to be thinking about what we want to do with fund-raising what do we want to do with advocacy? How do we want to mobilize people? And those things need to still remain in the core of what you’re thinking about even when you’re talking about social media. Okay on dh how do we start this? The integration between social and r c r m you want to field that one? It’s it’s? It depends upon your organization. I think jen said it just a moment ago is starting off with your goals and what you want to achieve what you want to what type of communication you want tohave with your constituents and another argument. Why? Are we in social? Right where we drink, right? Why are you doing it? Where do you want to reach out to them? Where does your audience live? Are they on twitter on facebook on linked in? Are they just gonna read blog’s? How do you connect in with them? And what do you want them to do? What messages do you want to send them? Once you figure out what messages you want, then you can figure out where’s the best place to put them. And then how do you want them to react to those messages? What actions do you want them to take? And and how do you want them to react back to you? Are you trying to just get more followers? Um, that’s a great thing. But you really want to be able to do something with them once they’re following you. Do you have a conversation? Do they feed information back to you? Do they let you know what’s going on in their world on the front lines of whatever your mission might be. And are you encouraging them to do so? Hopefully, yeah. Back. Yeah, yeah. Hopefully that’s where you really want to? Do you want to create this interactive engagement to make people feel mohr integrated and important in your cause and not just give us money? Give us money? You know, you want them to really feel involved in what you dio and an important part of your mission because they really are, you know, obviously we all know that, but people don’t always feel that way. They give their money, they volunteer, they walk away from it, and then they see something in their e mail or something that comes into their mailbox. And they’re like, oh, i did do this feeling kind of transactional. Yes, not relationship, right? You mentioned. Where are your people? Where are the people? You’re going to be engaging through social. How do we find out where they are? Wei have just sorry you were about poor guy. Took a breath ready to talk and i have more questions. But i’m trying to start a hypothetical spot. Supposed to just have them. Ah, us mail. We just have us mail addresses and an email. I suppose we have those. How do we know what social channels we should be in to be talking? T this? This constituency, i think i think a good way to start off with is but there’s a couple approaches, one of them is to do smaller tests and, you know, if you set up in twitter, you set up in facebook and start reaching out in telling your audience that you’re there. So if you have their email address, you have their direct mail address put those presence is up and say, yes, we do have a twitter account, we do have a facebook account, follow them if you like us and then you’ll start to see one gets a little more traffic than the other, you know, ifyou’re on linked in you’ll see, oh, mohr and more people have us on linked in, so we’ll put more effort there, there’s others there’s tools that are available that let you take your e mail address and it’ll search all the channels and say, yes, this person is on twitter is on facebook is on linked in, and i’ll show you all the accounts that they’re on so you could bring that data back into your cr m and connect that together and that’s a huge help, any tools that you can share that sites you can share that that would enables users non-profits to do that there’s one that directly does that it’s called small act their social profile. They do it. Casey golden, ceo of small act, has been on the show from bb khan. Yes, blackbaud unconference last year, casey well, mabe in two years ago, but i was there two years, but one of those past two years of e become casey casey golden was from small act was on. Yes, they have ah there sweet of tools is great for taking your existing set of data and constituents and connecting that to whatever their social networks might be. Okay, so that’s a great way to come back and say, these people are involved in these networks and they’re active there influencers or they just have an accountant don’t do anything so it’s figuring out where they are and if they participate, if they have a facebook account, it might not really matter if they never really use it. And i believe when casey was on, he was on with someone from blackbaud and i apologized to that someone i don’t remember his name hyre they they had done their homework before coming on the show and actually labelled me a key influence, sir, i think i was just so they get me to air the interview, i think it was heavily overstated. I’m barely a user, and but they were they were very generous, jen. Now, once we know where our constituents are, how do we start? Teo engage and then we’ll talk about putting that together with rcr. Um, yeah, i mean, you know, one thing i want to say just in relation to where people are is i think, you know, a lot of organizations end up feeling like they have to be every place when it comes to social media. So as soon as you know, instagram got big, oh, god, we have to have an instagram account or so we have to have a pinterest account or we have to start to get on snapchat there’s a lot of pressure within social media to kind of be on the next new thing, and i think for non-profits, you know, you’ve got limited resource is limited time it’s difficult to prove for a lot of organizations that the investment is worth it when it comes to social media, and i think there were getting better all the time at ways to do that, but i think, you know, as brian said, i think if you start small and and starting with the big too, starting with facebook and twitter is probably going to be a pretty safe bet for a lot of organizations, and once you do that, you will start to see patterns of, you know what? Like, we really have a lot more engagement on twitter and so maybe that’s really where we want to focus more of our investment on and then, you know, and then i think it’s another really difficult thing for organizations to do is to not just treat it like it’s, another channel to push out information and organizations tend to get really wrapped up in like, this is our agenda, these air our goals, these, you know, this is the program i want to tell everybody about without necessarily really listening to their constituents about really what they want to hear or how they want to engage with you or what kind of lifestyle are they leading, you know? So i think, you know, being able to take some risks about not always having, you know, tweets or facebook post that are, you know, specifically on mission, you know, about the organization about a program, but are really relating to people, you know, it was like, you know, if you love animals, this is probably something else you think would, you know, is great, you know, you should totally watch his video, and it may not be directly related to mission at all, but it helps really build loyalty and social media channels when you when your authentic on dh, when you’re not so focused on this is just a channel for us to push something out. But that it’s a way to start to develop, to weigh engagement, but isn’t that what we do in our offline in our real life? How you interact on facebook or twitter yourself, right? Found i’m walking past a restaurant, i think a friend of mine might like it, you know, you snap a picture and said, right, i read an article thought this might interest you forward it to a friend right now, just talking about essentially right, bringing what are thoughtfulness, right online and into the social network, right it is, and it’s it’s the same conversations you might have in person with someone. So, you know, if you’re sitting there talking to your friend and you only talked about your work and your mission and that’s, all you talked about, they’d stopped listening. They would walk away and they’re tired of hearing of it. But then if you say, hey, i saw these other things and you expand the conversation into the richness of us as humans and have that conversation. Then you have friends that stick around, and they like to talk to you because they get a great wealth of information from you and that you should do the same thing with your social networks and be able to have those engaging conversations and listen back to what they say and be interested in what’s going on in their life right? E-giving anything duitz e-giving, e-giving, ding, ding, ding ding. You’re listening to the talking alternative network waiting to get a drink. E-giving this’s. The way we’re hosting part of my french new york city guests come from all over the world, from mali to new caledonia, from paris to keep back french is that common language. Yes, they all come from different cultures, background or countries, and it common desires to make new york they’re home. Listen to them, shed their story, join us, pardon my french new york city every monday from one to two p, m. Are you stuck in your business or career trying to take your business to the next level, and it keeps hitting a wall? This is sam liebowitz, the conscious consultant. I will help you get to the root cause of your abundance issues and help move you forward in your life. Call me now and let’s. Create the future you dream of. Two, one, two, seven, two, one, eight, one, eight, three, that’s to one to seven to one, eight one eight three. The conscious consultant helping conscious people. Be better business people. You’re listening to the talking alternative network. Yeah. Dahna listening key, right? Absolutely not. When we have a conversation. It’s two ways and right. So don’t treat our social platforms is just bulletin boards where where we post and you eat and we we’ve had the broadcast model for a very long time what our media has always been and it’s sometimes difficult to transition into an engagement model, but you really do need to do a lot more listening and finding out what what is interesting to them now, how do we start to integrate this with our cr m that’s? Your that’s, your larger your larger topic? What? What? We need to he’s thinking about teo accomplish that. So i think there’s a few things. I mean, we keep talking about listening. You know, i do think it’s worth mentioning that there are social listening tools out there. And the way that you were identified, for example, is a key influencer was probably through one of those tools, right? Maybe through small act, you know of saying, hey, you’re a cute influencer, and it might be because they said let’s look at how many people follow tony and that’s. What made you a key influence or not? Necessarily, that you tweeted all the time, right? So i think on and let’s take a step further and how engaged those heimans retweets, right? Replies so it’s not just the right number of followers, but how engaged are they with your content, right? Right, so, you know, so you really can get a wealth of data from from those types of tools and when you’re doing social listening and i think what is really important is actually to just go back to some fundamentals and say, ok, if i were looking at everybody talks about a three hundred and sixty degree view of a constituent, right? So if that were really possible and what we were looking at, what would be the data that would be really important to see in a donor record when you’re talking about social media and it might be, you know, you might think about your major donors and you might say, you know, what would be really helpful for a major donor staff would be to know how much that major donor is engaging with us on facebook or twitter, right or or if we’re solving kind of a customer service issue, right? So we had somebody complained on our facebook page, and we responded within twenty four hours and here’s how it got resolved. And so that when that major donor stuart, goes ahead and calls that person a week later, they can say we, you know, we heard you had a little problem, but i think it got resolved, how’s everything going right? So i think part of it is really being able to step back and think, ok, what’s the data that’s going to be most useful to bring back into our serum, and that is going to be different for each organization. And i think it really should be driven by your overall organizational goals and strategy on and then you, because the data could just get completely overwhelming. You know, social listening sometimes, like, you know, you can get a lot of noise, so you have to be really strategic in terms of how you set it up and then what you do with that data. Once you get it on dh talking to the different constituents in your organization about what their needs might be, right, what would the major gift officer liketo have? Right as she picks up the phone and great calls calls her boss because the thing that’s probably least useful but is really what is often how we measure success and social is, you know, number of fans or followers, right? And and it is a measure i’m not saying it’s not important, i mean, i think when you’re reporting back to your executive leadership and you’re saying, hey, we grew our facebook page by ten thousand, you know, fans or whatever i mean, that is a way to measure, but i think it’s really going beyond that and saying, ok, so what? What do we do with those ten thousand people like, how can we serve them better? You know how when we make the experience with us a better experience so that they stick with us forever? You know? And and that’s i think those follow-up questions and thinking about your data in terms of those follow-up questions is really, really key, okay? And it’s important to to consider you’re gonna have different segments of your social media audience? You might have a donor who donates lots of money to your organisation never tweets never gets on facebook or anything like that you might have someone who only donates ten dollars, a year to your organization. Who’s a huge advocate for your organization. And you have to deal with each of those differently. You know, they’re they’re both definitely vitally important to your organization, but you have to include them in different ways. You want to make sure that the person who’s an advocate has the information. They need to talk about your organization effectively and then the donor. They want to see a return on what they’ve given you. So they want to see something that’s important about? Yes, i donated this money. What is it doing for the actual recipients? Is it delivering the mission? They want to find out about that and and see that result. So you have to be very conscious of what you’re different. Social media audiences in general are interested in and provide that information to them. And with such a direct channel you khun definitely look through it and find it. Do you have advice on where to preserve this information within a person’s record? I mean, if we start with razor’s edge, are we able to drill into that level of detail? Like, where would you preserve this information that a program officer or a major gift officer might liketo have? Where we where we actually put it in the c r m? Yeah, years ago, i think that’s a little tricky question because it really depends on the serum that the the organization is using, you might end up needing to do some custom fields you might not depending on what you’re using. So so i think part of that is part of figuring out your strategy for how this comes back into your sierra is saying, where is this actually going to live? And how are we going to access it? And how are we going to run reports, you know, or what can we pull? You know, from a tool set that we’re using, you know, that allows us to get kind of a big picture of you, you know, outside of the serum in different tools will let you do different things like, you know, with sales force if you use radiance six and marketing cloud, they’re already set up to connect together and tio integrate all that data, so that process is pretty much established with small ax tools you could do a data upend, and it brings it back in and connects it for you. But then you have to work with your database administrators to figure out okay, what specific fields are going where? What new tables do we need develop? So you kind of have to work that out in very specific cases. There’s not just a, you know, a big old plug in that’s the social media plug in that everybody uses. I’ll also say just not to plug our session too much tomorrow, but we’ll be joined by daniel birgitta from the national wildlife federation, and she actually they went through and did a small act depends on dh, so she’ll be talking a little bit about that experience and what data they were looking at and how that got presented back to the rest of the staff, and i think it would be a really interesting, you know, organization that’s actually executed some of these things and how that’s look, can you can you talk a little about either that example or another client example, where, uh, i’m sort of interested in in the in the what we need to capture? On dh what? The benefit of that was any you share a client story around something, you know i could share. And i could share an example from something that i actually heard it. Dreamforce. So i went to a social listening session at dream force. And and there were some folks there from the gates foundation talking about their social listening program. What is dreamforce, dream forces? Salesforce conference that’s just todo norvig that’s their eyes. Their ntcdinosaur yes. Thank you. So i interrupted, but i like, you know, i don’t know how to be behind, okay, but, you know, but they were talking about how, you know, when they were when the u n general assembly was meeting, that they had specific you no interest in listening for certain terms in order to engage with people around certain issues. And it was it was a really interesting, practical use of social listening. In terms of, you know, one of their goals was to talk a lot about malaria, right? So so they did some social listening around malaria and the u n general assembly. And when those conversations really started a trend and that was, you know, something. People were talking about, you know, the foundation was able to capitalize on that and really focus some of their communications out into the world around what people were already talking about, and tio insert them in a really smart way into the conversation. So i, you know, i think there’s a lot of different examples, but but you do need to be pretty strategic and how you decide, teo, you know, deal with your data, do social listening on dh, what you decide to bring back into your systems and the ultimate benefit of all this is deeper relationships. Is that is that what we’re striving? Well and ultimately conversion, you know, i mean, i think like, it can be difficult to measure conversion sometimes, but i think, you know, in the end, organizations need to raise more money, right? And so how dio how do these better relationships are more engaged or two way engagement? Really, with your donors and constituents help fuel conversion and whether that’s conversion too? You know, we need more activists on the ground, you know, taking action or changing a law, or we need more fund-raising in order that, you know, help establish. Or run a program you know, that is ultimately what organizations need to do is is convert people. So i think, you know, there is a way where you can have a better customer or constituent service type relationship through social media, a better, better engagement, really, in terms of content that you have out there that can result in better conversion down the road, we still have a couple of minutes left. What else? What else do you want to say about this? I haven’t asked you about anything we talked about. You want to go deeper on anything your i know you’re feeling in our workshop. So what do you want to say? One of the big challenges? Whenever we have the discussion with people about this is, you know, exactly like you were asking, what specific data do i add in and it’s, we can’t emphasize enough how important it is to think about what you want to achieve. I know we’ve said that a couple times, but, you know, we keep hammering it in because everybody forgets about it, and they’re like, oh, no, no, no, we just we just want to get followers and tweet. Counts and and how much they tweet and how many people listen to him and it’s it’s so much more than that. And it’s really that strategy part and what are you trying to do? Why do you want those people? Why do you want more people following on twitter? What do you want them to do? What’s the purpose of having them follow that we were right trying to get up and what’s the purpose of following what kind of communication do you wanna have? And to me, it’s not any different from what we went through with email marketing. It started off the same way where everybody thought email was the next great thing, and we’re just going to send out a billion e mails and everybody’s going to come running after a couple of years you figured out you needed a better strategy for it, and social media is going through that same process of of what works, what doesn’t work? How do you communicate with people through this broadcast? Television went through it, radio went through it. Every new media channel that opens up goes through that same process of figuring out what you can do. What works? How do you make it effective? And how do you really track it and prove its worth gen anything you like, tio, you know, i just would say that it is i worked for a little bit with the corporate sector in particular around social media, and i think, you know, there is there is a great pressure to prove the value of social media, i think, you know, across across corporate culture across non-profit culture, but i will say that, you know, corporations tend to think of it a little bit more as this is a way that we build brand loyalty, right? And and in a lot of ways, it’s that’s, incredibly difficult to measure, like, how do you measure loyalty, right? But they’re spending a lot of money and trying to figure it out. And so i think, you know, that’s, something that the non profit sector will benefit from is the closer they get to kind of figuring some of that out in terms of how do we really measure, you know what this really did for us and you know, and that directly impacts their investment. How much are they going to invest? In social media, right? So so i do think that there’s some everybody’s kind of struggling with us a little, but but i agree with brian it’s, you know, it’s, another channel, it’s, another marketing channel, right? It’s not really mysterious like it’s. Another way to talk to people? It’s a slightly different format, you know, it’s, obviously a shorter format, but, you know, but email was a much shorter format than direct mail, right? So i feel like we’re kind of we’re on. We’re on kind of a very similar path, and really, we just want to have the best kind of engagement in foster the most loyalty for organizations and social media is a really great way to do that. Do you find many clients come saying they get the type of questioning that you’re suggesting, general, why? Why are we doing social media from the board? You get bored? Or maybe ceos? Why? Why? Why are we doing this? Yeah, i mean, i certainly in in the for-profit space, you know, social media budgets are minuscule compared to their other budgets around advertising and public relations, right? So the pressure to prove, uh, you know, return on investment, for example, it depends on the company, but some companies say we don’t really care. This is like, you know, less than one percent of our annual expenditure, right? Okay, that could be actually liberated, right? And others say, you need to prove to us that you know, the reason we’re giving you another x amount of dollars is because it’s actually doing something for our bottom line, but i think brands more and more are seen in particular, i think the loyalty that is inspired by the really great customer service, you know, right? And that that in particular for social media for brands becomes, um becomes really important, you know? I mean it, you end up feeling better about, you know, united airlines, for example, if they respond to you when you complain on twitter, you know, you alright somebody’s actually listening to me and i’m not sitting on hold for forty five minutes, you know? So so i think there’s a lot to be learned there just in terms of, you know, responding and engaging and the listening and the things that really in a in a regular relationship, not online, are really important to people. On di think thatyou wantto you want to foster that as well on your social media program? Brian, we have a couple of seconds. You are no it just increasing, increasing that visibility. You know, if it’s a diabetes foundation or something like that, if you see lots of tweets of them providing advice and help too people with diabetes and you visibly see that, then you see the mission is being accomplished. You see that they’re really doing what they set out to do and that it helps your organization overall help you convert. You are seeing it absolutely into as you just, jen. Whatever the forever conversion might mean it’s. Not necessarily all about older fund-raising but what could very well be excellent. Thank you very much. Thanks. Both. Thank you. Taking time in a busy conference. Brian. Brian, g c is i have it. Don’t don’t coach me. Director of marketing heller consulting jen smith, vice president, digital agency heller consulting. Thank you both very much. Thank you. Pleasure. Tony martignetti cover it. Not non-profit radio coverage of and t c twenty fourteen the non-profit technology conference. Thanks very much for being with us. I have another. Auntie si interview very shortly generosity siri’s you know them, they host multi charity peer-to-peer five k runs and walks multi-channel ity means that you can have an event with a small number of runners because together all the charities at an event make up many hundreds of runners, and then you have a great fund event all day around a five k run and walk. They have events coming up in new jersey, miami, atlanta, new york city, philadelphia and toronto. If you think a run walk makes sense for your fund-raising talk to dave lynn he’s the ceo tell him you’re from non-profit radio he’s at seven one eight five o six, nine triple seven and on the web generosity siri’s dot com i have a new non-profit radio knowledge base this week, online engagement, real dialogue, real engagement in the social networks is critical. You’ve heard lots of guests talk about this, it takes strategy and planning and staff and their time and patients. I’ve got links to videos and other interviews with beth cantor, amy sample ward, j frost on a bunch of others all around the topic of online engagement. Those air at tony martignetti dot com that is tony’s take two for friday, twenty second of august thirty third show of the year here’s my interview from ntcdinosaur on technology and organizing welcome to tony martignetti non-profit radio coverage of the non-profit technology conference two thousand fourteen and tc the hashtag is fourteen and tc we’re at the marriott wardman park hotel in washington, d c and with me are austin levine kun and rachel butler. Austin is chief innovation officer for fish in strategy, and rachel butler is campaign representative for beyond oil. Austin rachel, welcome. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for taking time. Busy at a busy conference. Your your workshop topic is real talk on technology and organizing. Rachel technology has created challenges for organizing. I thought technology was improving our lives and making things so much simpler. Yeah, that’s a great question. I think that really it goes both ways. Technology has created a lot of opportunities for organizing, and it’s also created some challenges that are new on that the world that that i work in the world that we work in has has had teo learn how to use these new tools in the most effective way. To create social change, what are what are some of the challenges that you’re seeing? I think there are a lot of challenges around technology and organizing in making sure that the new technology tools that we have at our disposal don’t overtake and overcome a lot of the tried and true grassroots organizing methods when it comes down to it to create social chains and the campaigns that i work on there’s really nothing that replaces relation, organizing one to one conversations with people and that’s really part of the tried and true methods of organizing that technology can provide opportunities, tio, expand the reach that we are looking at with with the kind of outreach and campaigns that we do. But it’s, really the grassroots organizing tools that that’ll help actually makes sense of of the the reach that technology is able to give us and actually translate that into real bored world change. And i would hope that part of what technology could do is bring us two potential people tto have these deeper relationships with way we’ve broadened our reach, sort of at the at the initial stage at the meeting stage. Absolutely okay, austin, more more let’s, talk more about the challenges before we come. Absolutely and i think i think one of the things building off of what rachel was saying that i cz difficult is really making sure that you’re using the tools that we have at our disposal effectively, and i think a lot of organizations all of a sudden, sudden have access toe so much more data about the people that they’re interested in their cause but don’t necessarily know how to use it effectively, or, um, are having the challenge of understanding you have all these thousands of people who sign your petition online, but how do you actually transition from a petition signer to somebody who is willing to show up in an event or to deliver a those petitions that at the end of the day, too their representative in congress and so on with all these advantages and expanding the met of supporters that you’re able tio really attract your cause? Come these challenges with how do you then deal with or use effectively that other tools or that tools that you have available actually help to train and then to mobilize people? Okay, and what are some of these tools that we’re talking about for, for listeners, perhaps warrant themselves organizing. We’re talking about what kind of tools and then also it’s clearly data as well, right, and one of the one of the more common ones that a lot of organizations have started to look to his hand in this on online petition platform, it’s. Whether whether that’s on your own site or change that or gore move on has developed their own petition in-kind user generated petition platform that’s one of the opportunities to engage with new audiences and new supporters in one of the ones where that has also started to cause many challenges within the adivasi community, as people are still our learning over time, what were they used best for? And where are they not going to be effective? Okay, interesting. So you know, those of us who are outside the organizing community are not aware that technology and these tools are are creating some obstacles for you. Can we can we talk specifically? About what? What? Some of the online petition tools. What kinds of problems are created by them? Yeah, absolutely. Were what, like what? And so i think. One is there becomes this expectation that you’re able to win campaigns with petitions on lee, ok, and so what? And then money is starting to g o and pressures on non-profits to use petitions to raise the, um there visibility of the campaign that they’re working on, and that works for that one specific piece. But you’re not going to be able to win long term campaigns just by starting petitions, there’s a whole host of other tactics that and campaign strategies that need to accompany in online petition for it to be successful. Rachel has a good bit of experience with on this type of work with a beyond oil as well in the campaign strategy, peace and sort of this conversion. Yeah, so the way that i like to think about it is that the’s petition tools and a lot of these online tools are exactly that their tools to enable effective campaigning. And so when we have a petition tool, you know, that brings people in the door. The petition is one tactic that’s part of a larger campaign, and one of the challenges that i think austin is speaking to is what’s that arc that we’re building what’s that overall long term strategy that a petition is an important part of it’s, an important tool, but there’s there’s much more to winning a campaign and toe actually creating change, whether it’s through the sierra club’s beyond oil campaign or any campaign that’s out there there’s much more to it than just the petition, and then delivering those petition signatures. It’s an ongoing process, and that’s really where we get back to the basics of grassroots organizing. And once you have supporters are interested in issue, how do you activate them? How do you mobilize them? How do you give them the skills that they need to become organizer’s in their own right rather than just signers on a petition and at the outset, we need to have our strategy developed let’s not just put up a petition exactly. Let’s get twenty five thousand signatures on a petition that’s not a strategy that’s a that’s, a that’s, a tool and part of ah, you said, you know, part of ah process in a spectrum, and it really translates to social media also where there’s an incentive from to have more facebook fans to have more twitter followers, but the challenge that emerges from that is then what? What next? What after that and one advocates for youth, one of the organizations that was on there was represented on our panel this morning. One of the examples of the work that they do is actually when you get people commenting on their facebook page, when all of a sudden you have these thousands of support fans online, you need to actually reach out to them and see what is it like, how how would you like to be involved and really build that two way street, that relation relationship that rachel was speaking about in order to then bring them into the fold and start to build your campaign more effectively for the long term? Okay? And so the metrics for success in the pathway to success isn’t based on just the number of fans on your facebook vanity metric, right? It’s really about the deeper organizing that that enables, before we get to howto overcome these challenges, rachel, is there another one that you can share again with, you know, people who were maybe outside the organizing community, aside from what? What austin gave voice to that petitions seemed tio be the end all and be all t people what other? What other? The obstacles we try to overcome and using these tools? Yeah, i mean, i wouldn’t even necessarily talk about petitions as an obstacle. I would talk about them or as an entry point. And so if using a petition is an entry point is a great way to engage people in a campaign and some of these platforms that have been developed in recent years allow anybody to use the tools that historically have been in the hands of non-profit organizations and really democratized them and provided platform and an avenue for people that teo start their own campaigns. And so i think part of the part of the challenge that that that we’re working out, you know, as a community of advocates right now is, you know, everybody at this point has the ability to start a petition and then there’s that next step of how do we how do we really democratize that training piece so that anybody who’s starting a petition was also has the skills and has the resource is that their fingertips to how to build that into? An actual campaign. Okay, so the field is becoming a lot more crowded because of the empowerment, because anybody can create a campaign. But how? Well, well skilled are they take it to the next step? Yeah. I mean, i don’t even know if i would i would talk about it in in terms of the field being crowded. It’s that these, you know, there are lots and lots and lots of issues in this world that we need to solve, and we need lots and lots and lots of people to get involved to solve them. So i see it as really an opportunity for people who see an issue in their world to be able to have access to tools, to solve that. So to me, it’s it’s a huge opportunity to get training into the hands of people to you know who are interested in making a better world. And i think these online petition platforms are, you know, it’s, a it’s, a great tool and resource to get people involved and one of the next opportunities that were looking tio two faces, you know, howto latto bring it just beyond starting a petition and mohr into the sense of how are we training? Um, how are we training organizer’s? So that, you know, organizing is not just something that organizations do it’s something that people d’oh. You’re listening to the talking alternative network. Have you ever considered consulting a road map when you feel you need help getting to your destination when the normal path seems blocked? A little help can come in handy when choosing an alternate route. Your natal chart is a map of your potentials. It addresses relationships, finance, business, health and, above all, creativity. Current planetary cycles can either support or challenge your objectives. I’m montgomery taylor. If you would like to explore the help of a private astrological reading, please contact me at monte at monty taylor dot. Com let’s monte m o nt y at monty taylor dot com. Are you suffering from aches and pains? Has traditional medicine let you down? Are you tired of taking toxic medications, then come to the double diamond wellness center and learn how our natural methods can help you, too? He’ll call us now at to one to seven to one eight, one eight, three that’s two one two, seven to one eight, one eight, three or find us on the web at www dot double diamond wellness dot com way. Look forward to serving you. Talking alternative radio twenty four hours a day. Lively conversation. Top trends, sound advice, that’s. Tony martignetti, yeah, that’s. Tony martignetti non-profit radio. And i’m travis frazier from united way of new york city, and i’m michelle walls from the us fund for unicef. It’s not always just don’t online, right? It’s not yeah, go ahead, austin, i think two and two that one of the challenges that is presented with this democratization of kind of social change or being able, anybody being able to say start a petition or sign a petition is then kind of that that next step of identifying we’re identifying which of those petition starters, we’re going to be the most effective leaders and able to then carrie, their campaign through to the end and actually win. And it’s not i think we’ll move on, for example, is struggling with this right now in terms of how do you know which which petition starter is going to be the most effective advocate in the long term? And then, are you able to identify that person were based on certain sides of chris characteristics or some other assessment, and then if they are, and then how can you train them and support them as they go through their campaign so that they’re more likely to be successful in the long run? Or more likely to start more petitions in the future and really become leaders in their communities? Let’s talk. About overcoming some of these challenges. Now, it sounds like it’s a lot more than just share this. But thank you for signing. Please share. We need to go a lot deeper than that. But again, those of us not in the community of organizer’s not not familiar, not aware of how you go a lot deeper. And rachel had it. How do we do some of the some of the training, for instance? Sure. That’s a great question on dh training is one of those pieces that personally, from my perspective, you know, i would love to see the development of better technology tools. Teo teo, you know, not only democratize the who can start a petition but democratize the training that it takes teo effect to run effective grassroots campaigns. So my background is is in grassroots organizing. You know, i come at the work that i do from a perspective of, you know, local organizing from state organizing, and since then i’ve moved. I’ve worked with national campaigns, and so training is one of those those pieces that gives people the tools. Tio i not only identify a problem and maybe started, you know, in the just sort of what’s what’s happening sometimes is that, you know, people identify a problem, they start a petition, but when we’re talking about campaigning, there’s there’s a whole other set of steps that goes on before you start a petition, which you can talk about is a tactic. But when you identify a problem there’s a there’s, a set of planning that that goes on in organizing, where you, you know, you identify what solution it is, you’re working for, you make it a smart goal, and then you figure out what’s the best strategy to achieve that goal, and only after that strategic planning has gone on. Do you go forward with implementing tactics like we’re going to use the petition as a tactic to reach out build abroad, supporter base and then from there will mobilize that supporter base by doing tactic non-technical number one tech to come or to attacking number three, you know, whatever it is that it that fits for your strategy, that’s going to achieve your overall goal to solve that problem that you’ve identified austin, anything running at about the training? Yeah, i think one of the i think, as rachel was saying one of the things that is key and many of these instances where there is an issue that your work men, organizations working on and there may be individuals out there that have started petition a petition on change dot org’s to try and change this, but reaching out to those both either the i think a combination of the individual that has already started the petition, but then also to your network in the communities where you’re looking to effect change and find asking them who are your existing like volunteers are leaders that are active on this issue and then asking them to start the petition so that they’re actually much more well versed in the issue and able to have the likelihood of being more successful and before that even happens, doing the media training, doing the, um so so that they’re actually once this petition is promoted, it’s not just a petition it’s a media moment and you have a spokesperson and you’re able actually tow start to mobilize around it. I could use a little more about identifying who the among the many now now in power petition creators how do we identify how among? Who among them are likely to be the the strongest leaders in the issue? Great question and there’s a there’s, a variety of different ways that this can happen and some larger organizations tend tohave metrics, systems of metrics in their databases that they used to assess how act active and individual supporter is, have they? How many different types of actions have they taken? Are they eh facebook fan? Do they have they signed an online petition? Have they attended in person event? And so through kind of those metrics, you’re able to identify some of the more likely candidates that could be those really strong super supporters in for your campaign. In addition to that, yeah, there’s the opportunity to tio have these people then go through essentially what are a series of tests instead of like an application, you asked them to take another action a couple like write a letter to the editor or write a blogger post about this issue that you care about, and in that way, vet them for your organization and then and as a result, are able to really, um, identify passively who who these people are that are most likely. To be good, good leaders for your campaign. So something that appears a call to be a call of action may actually be an organization sort of putting you to a test and seeing if you’re stepping up. Absolutely okay, yeah. Rachel, you’re going. Yeah, i was going to add. I would say, you know, it’s it’s one way vetting them is one way to think about it, but i think another way to think about it is providing opportunities to take further action because it’s, you know, think of if you get sent a petition online when i get a petition in my inbox, it may be an issue that i really care about a lot, but there’s no way for the organizer of that petition to know unless i’m provided another opportunity to take action. So part of what austin is talking about is providing those additional steps, those additional opportunities for somebody to rise to the top if it’s an issue that they are really passionate about. So part of what is what austin is talking about is providing a you know, what’s called a ladder of engagement, quote unquote, that allows people tio take further action. And get further engaged on an issue that they’re interested in in and passionate about going and what’s important to realize at the same time is that the latter is not the same for everybody and that some of your more passionate advocates are going to be turned off when you’re asking them to sign an online petition because they don’t know they know that they want to do more, and you have to give them that opportunity and so understanding that some of your more active supporters are going to be turned off by your request for them to do a any action when what they really want is to organize their friends and their community around the issue. And how are you going to know that? How do you know if you’ve offended someone? Because you’re ask is too small and here’s where the interesting challenge comes in? Is that it’s it’s an ongoing attest and battle tio identified teo figure out within your own community? What are those indicators were one of the easiest ways is really to talk to your supporters to send them an e mail to call them after they take an initial action. And or don’t take one after they’ve our been so active for a long time, okay? And in the world of of traditional grassroots organizing, part of part of one of the tools that’s used to really identify what somebody’s interested in what they are passionate about is is a one to one conversation. So you actually sit down with somebody and talk to them and ask them, you know what it what is it that motivates you? What’s, what are you interested in? And that way you’re able to not only meat your supporters where they’re at, but you’re able to gauge what’s the best way and what’s the way that they’re most interested in being involved. So i think part of part of the, um, one of the challenges that we’re facing is how do you use a lot of these tried and true grassroots organizing techniques and apply them in a digital world where you’ve got the challenges of just, you know, being in front of a screen rather than face-to-face we’ve also got these challenges of scale where you’ve got, you know, potentially, you know, one hundred thousand people signing a petition, so i think that’s part of that’s, part of the challenges that come along with technology and organizing and in in the real world, in grassroots organizing campaigns, there are some tried and true methods and tactics that we use and tools that we use teo build and win on issues and learning how to use those in the digital world is part of what you see happening right now. Okay, we’re gonna leave it there. Thank you both very much. Thank you. Uh, thank you. My pleasure. Austin levine kun is chief innovation officer for fishing strategy. And rachel butler is campaign representative for beyond oil again, thanks very much. Taking time. Thank you. Pleasure. Tony martignetti non-profit radio coverage of ntc non-profit technology conference. Thank you very much for being with us. My thanks, as always to everybody at the non-profit technology network and ten. And at and t c was great fun being there. That was last march or april. There was last april. Loved it next week. Dori clark is with me for the hour to talk about your personal brand. Whether you’re an employee or out on your own, you’ve got a brand. What is it? And how do? You manage yours. If you missed any part of today’s show, find it on tony martignetti dot com. Remember generosity siri’s for those five k runs and walks, generosity, siri’s, dot com or seven one eight five o six, nine, triple seven. Our creative producer is clear. My raph sam liebowitz is our line producer shows social media is by julia campbell of jake campbell. Social marketing on the remote producer of tony martignetti non-profit radio is john federico of the new rules. Our music is by scott stein. You with me next week for non-profit radio. Big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent go out and be great. Co-branding dick, dick tooting. Getting ding, ding, ding, ding. You’re listening to the talking alternate network duitz waiting to get into thinking. Nothing. Good oppcoll are you stuck in your business or career trying to take your business to the next level, and it keeps hitting a wall? This is sam liebowitz, the conscious consultant. I will help you get to the root cause of your abundance issues and help move you forward in your life. Call me now and let’s. Create the future you dream of. Two, one, two, seven, two, one, eight, one, eight, three, that’s to one to seven to one, eight one eight three. The conscious consultant helping conscious people. Be better business people. Dahna hi, i’m lost him a role, and i’m sloan wainwright, where the host of the new thursday morning show the music power hour. Eleven a m we’re gonna have fun, shine the light on all aspects of music and its limitless healing possibilities. We’re gonna invite artists to share their songs and play live will be listening and talking about great music from yesterday to today, so you’re invited to share in our musical conversation. Your ears will be delighted with the sound of music and our voices. Join austin and sloan live thursdays at eleven a. M on talking alternative dot com, you’re listening to talking alternative network at www dot talking alternative dot com, now broadcasting twenty four hours a day. Have you ever considered consulting a road map when you feel you need help getting to your destination when the normal path seems blocked? A little help can come in handy when choosing an alternate route. Your natal chart is a map of your potentials. It addresses relationships, finance, business, health and, above all, creativity. Current planetary cycles can either support or challenge your objectives. I’m montgomery taylor. If you would like to explore the help of a private astrological reading, please contact me at monte at monty taylor dot. Com let’s monte m o nt y at monty taylor dot com. Are you suffering from aches and pains? Has traditional medicine let you down? Are you tired of taking toxic medications, then come to the double diamond wellness center and learn how our natural methods can help you, too? He’ll call us now at to one to seven to one eight, one eight, three that’s two one two, seven to one eight, one eight, three or find us on the web at www dot double diamond wellness dot com way. Look forward to serving you. Talking. Hyre