Dylan Bassett: Systems & Processes So Your People Thrive
Dylan Bassett helps you create your invisible infrastructure, so you can quietly reduce burnout, increase efficiency and make it easier for your nonprofit to grow. He shares the signs that your internal systems are weak, explains how to pick the right tools to complement your work reality and helps you design workflows and templates that ease your team’s cognitive load. Dylan leads Dept. 1 Solutions.
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And welcome to Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio. Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. I’m your aptly named host and the pod father of your favorite hebdomadal podcast. Oh, I’m glad you’re with us. I’d be stricken with Asthinopia if I saw that you missed this week’s show. Here’s our associate producer, Kate, to tell us what’s going on. Hey Tony, here’s what’s going on. Systems and processes, so your people thrive. Dylan Bassett helps you create your invisible infrastructure, so you can quietly reduce burnout, increase efficiency, and make it easier for your nonprofit to grow. He shares the signs that your internal systems are weak, explains how to pick the right tools to complement your work reality, and helps you design workflows and templates that ease your team’s cognitive load. Dylan leads Department One Solutions. On Tony’s take 2. Tales from the gym, 21 degrees, Tim. Here is systems and processes, so your people thrive. It’s a pleasure to welcome Dylan Bassett to nonprofit radio. Dylan leads Department One Solutions, a consulting practice helping small and mid-size nonprofits strengthen their operations, implement practical technology, and build the internal systems that make mission work sustainable. The company is at departmentonesolutions.com. It’s DEPT One Solutions, and Dylan is on LinkedIn. Dylan Bassett, welcome to Nonprofit Radio. Thank you so much for having me. I’m glad you’re with us to talk about systems. This is something, uh, I think it’s undervalued. Uh, I don’t think we’ve ever done a show after 770 something on like systems. I mean, specifically on systems and processes, you know, lots of guests talk about having a process for this or that, but not a comprehensive conversation about. System-wide systems. You have a, uh, you have a strong belief that, that you say that systems create space for people to thrive. How, why? Lead us into this. Sure, uh, well, first, I’m honored, uh, to be the first quote unquote systems process, uh, podcast that you’ve done on the show. Um, and I definitely agree that it is something that is probably undervalued and under. Represented, I think in the general discourse about nonprofits. A lot of what I see in the space is fundraising, communications, and CRMs, and we definitely work on and with and within CRMs, um, but generally the systems and process conversation tends to fall by the wayside, um, to address your question specifically about how I believe they create space is. There are a lot of nonprofits that have tools that they need to work within or need to work with. Um, less nonprofits have tools that work for them and actually support them in their work. And so that’s really kind of the key transformation that we at Department One help to bring about for nonprofits where. A lot of teams are Sort of passengers to the tools that they have within the organization, they work the way they do because that’s, they have to fit into a system and so we try to shift that more so towards what is the way that we work and let’s configure a system that supports that and mirrors the reality rather than trying to fit, you know, a square peg in a round hole of the way we work and the way the system works. OK, so, so the humans don’t need to conform. To the technology we can, you’re talking about processes that reflect the reality of how that, that team that we’re talking about is working. Exactly, exactly. All right, it’s cool. All right, so that’s encouraging. Um, you, you have, uh, the invisible infrastructure that we’re, we’re kind of, you’re kind of talking around it. I mean, we’re talking, you know, we’re, we’re, we’re hinting at it, but what, what’s your, what’s your invisible infrastructure look like? So, the invisible infrastructure is, you know, under the same umbrella that we’ve been talking about of the systems that our sustainable nonprofits. Um, a lot of nonprofits don’t really realize that something is missing until something breaks, and this could be a literal tool in itself, a standard process for the way that things are done. Um, and then primarily as well, the cost of operating without structure, in terms of sunk effort, sunk staff time, sunk cost literally in technology tools that aren’t delivering us value or the, the thing that breaks could be a human. Very much so, the organization or the team, right. Somebody’s, somebody’s burned out, a team is burnt out, they’re underproductive, they’re miserable. It could be a person or a team or certainly, you know, as you said, it could be the technology, but like, how do we know, OK, so this is, we’re trying to create a happier life. You want people thriving, not just, not just surviving, not just tolerating the technology. Yeah, don’t just, all right, it, yeah, it’s OK. It works. It works. It turns on when I, when I get there in the morning, um. But you are thriving, thriving, thriving people, thriving teams. So, how do we know, I mean, aside from people like throwing laptops out the window or bashing them. Uh, you know, with their shoes or something like that, aside, aside from those, those subtle clues that the technology is not working for us, what, like what are we, what are we looking for that, that hints that we don’t have the right tools supporting our, our people? Yeah, um, the couple of things that I look for are when we are. Supporting more of our work through like manual inputs than systematic inputs. So this is, you know, it could be anything from systematic like Exports and uploads, which is a really common thing that we help organizations resolve, as well as the integration of the tools that we’re using. Um, ultimately, we want teams to be able to deliver programs, steward donor relationships, um, you know, plan at the executive level. Having tools that support each of those kind of core work streams, um, across the organization. And so, a lot of the time, what we look at Is what are the tools in our technology stack, which is just the array of tools that we might be using, uh, either across the organization or within a given department. How are they talking to each other and really honing in on the areas that they’re not talking to each other. So a really common example of this that’s probably relatable to a lot of the audience is in the fundraising space. A lot of organizations have. Either a donor platform, a CRM, and an accounting platform that the go-between is them. And what we try to shift is that the go-between is no longer them, and the go-between is actually those systems natively working together. And what this enables is rather than someone having to check the donation platform every day, week, month, whatever it may be, to find donors. Enter the donation in the CRM, account for it properly on, you know, a QuickBooks or another accounting platform, and then go, you know, write a reminder down in their notebook to send, you know, a thank you note or give that donor a phone call. We build systems that all of that stuff happens automatically. So when we get a new donation in, it’s integrated to our CRM we get that notification, it automatically creates a task for someone to go and do it, and then maybe sets a task up for our book. Bookkeeper bookkeeper to go and reconcile that in the accounting platform. That is a system where a nonprofit professional can thrive and focus on the work that they’re meant to be doing, which is stewarding a donor relationship, not entering data into QuickBooks. OK, and I, I would add another level of interest, which is maybe it flags that, that process flags donors above a certain level because that, that person we wanna do a, a human call, uh, for us, for some people it might be a $50 donation. If your average is like 5 or $10 it might be $5000 if your average is $1500 or $2000 you know. And then, and then so, so sends a, sends a task. You, you just got a $5000 donation from this person. You can tap to see the record or, you know, just here’s the phone number, you know, whatever you want. OK, so you’re if I can add to that quickly, um, so you know when you talk about how we handle certain relationships, this is a bit of A sidebar, but it’s definitely in the same ecosystem. Um, when we talk about, you know, how we handle or escalate relationships like above a certain donation threshold, for example, this is an extremely common use case, and a lot of folks, the word that people use for it, at least that I see is segmentation, right? Segmenting our audience based on their capacity to support us. Um, a lot of organizations do it based on On that gift level. Some organizations do it based on engagement or a blend of the two. But what we’re talking about is reaching different pieces of our audience with messaging that is more relevant to where they sit in our mission. And a lot of folks think this is a strictly communications issue where we need to have a way to message those people in a more relevant way. In order to message those people in a more relevant way, it’s really a technology problem in that we need a way to identify what these different segments are, what these different levels of giving, what these different levels of engagement are, and the primary way to do that scalably and sustainably is through well integrated technology. You’re looking for spots where humans are intervening. Between the technologies and, and you’re trying to, you’re trying to eliminate those, like you mentioned uploads or manual data, manual entry of gifts or something like that in the, in the accounting system and because the CRM doesn’t talk or something like that. All right, all right. Is, is there technology where, um, uh, uh, we can do this with, uh, paper checks? There’s still people. Uh, no, I don’t write that many checks, but I am a baby boomer, uh, young, young baby boomer, very, very, very, very young, right at the cusp of baby boomer. Uh, but I’m, I’m sure I write more checks a month than you do. Suppose, suppose we’re getting paper checks. Can, can that be, like, can, uh, is there a scanner, Is there a technology that’ll scan that name and Either add it to the CRM or, or maybe find it in the CRM and then you have to manually create the record if it doesn’t currently exist. Does that, does that kind of technology exist with paper gift, paper check gifts? It does, um, if it doesn’t, if it doesn’t, you can say no, it’s OK. It’s less common and the way that we account for that is, um, I’ll use the word systems thinking, um, so at department. On solutions, um, we’re not communication strategists by trades, we’re not strategic planners by trade. We are technologists and systems thinkers and so as part of systems thinking. The baseline, you know, the 101 is, we think about the ideal path, which is kind of like what we just described. Someone, you know, submits a donation digitally through our online giving platform, we can easily hook that into our CRM and our accounting software. We also can. Consider what are called edge cases, which are things that kind of fall outside of that ideal flow through our systems. So in the case of paper checks, we obviously know that this is something that we’re never going to get away from entirely. At least maybe not for another generation. Yeah, you gotta, you gotta wait till a lot of people, a lot more people have died. Yeah, yeah. Or I mean for some nonprofits they, they, it, it could be, it could be the typical use case if their donor base is very old. I mean if their donor base is 55 plus, the, the which is perfectly valid, it just, it just changed. what our ideal case is and what we spend more time investing into building a solid process for. And so when we look at those edge cases, we say, OK, this may not come in through the digital giving platform, but what’s, you know, if you think of the process as a bunch of steps and maybe we have a person kick one thing off, then the technology does 6 or 8 things, and then we do one thing to wrap it up. How far can we get that technology to stretch along the lines of the steps that we need to take, um, and that’s how we, you know, account for something like a written check. And so, short of having it end to end integrated, it may be, OK. When we get paper checks, we know this is something that we need to do, say, monthly. We go and enter them in according to you know their CRM profiles. And then from the CRM then we can go and hook that up with our donation platform and our accounting platform. So there’s a manual entry step. But again, there are some, you know, the cost of doing business, uh, right, there are some things that will be unavoidable, but we do as much as we can in those kind of edge cases. Yeah, sure, alright. But so you’re not aware of a technology that’ll scan a check. And, and Find the, find that name. In the CRM based on Based on the check scan, I would caution against the technology that does that like it would be a proprietary, it would be a, I’m I’m envisioning a, a proprietary reader. I mean, not just a scanner, but you know, the part of the platform is the hardware where you feed checks in, ideally high speed. And it searches the CRM. OK, is that, uh, you were caution. You were gonna ca, I would say for something like that, when, whenever we translate from like something handwritten to data, unless we’re, you know, we always want a verification step. So, you know, in, and this is like the technologists, the systems thinking when we, you know, imagine something like a fantastic proprietary scanner that could handle all of these checks at speed. We would be careful not to automatically go and assign them to a record in our CRM because we could kind of misclassify certain donations. Maybe someone has the same last name, but a different address, and it puts them in the wrong bucket, and then we’re having a conversation with a donor that they have no context of. So yeah, there’s the handwritten amount. To, uh, uh, suppose somebody leaves the zeros off or something, you know, or, or, or there’s a messy writer and you can’t, you can’t reconcile the number with the, with the letter with the words. OK, so you would, you would want a manual step of reconciliation before the, the CRM and the accounting system get updated. Yeah, this is a great business idea. Is it? OK, good. Well, yeah. All right, go. You run with it. I got my businesses. I’m publishing a book this year. I’m, I’m booked. You, uh, you think about it. You, you think about it. Um, all right. But you know, the baby boomer, of course, has got ask about paper checks. What else? What, what are, what else are we looking for? Like symptoms of symptoms where scenarios where the technology could, could be, could be pushed together more, fewer human interactions. What, what else are we looking for? Any, anything else, uh, I mean. There’s a lot of different places I could go with this, be it like use case specific in terms of like the process that we’re trying to conduct, or tool specific in terms of, you know, what this is meant to do for us. Um. A few very common symptoms are that I hear across different departments, across workflows, across tools is we’re using XYZ tool, but we’re not really making the most of it. To me, that is like the number one thing that I look for because there is A lot of underinvested effort in actually making these tools do what we want them to do. Particularly with the advent of, you know, just to name a few of, and department One Solutions, we’re system agnostic, we work across these tools because we’re systems experts first, and a lot of these tools are really built in the same way. So if you’re familiar with one. You can pretty much go pull all the levers that you might need to in another. But for example, you know, your Salesforces, your HubSpots, your Monday CRMs, your Bloomerangs, your neon ones, all those types of tools, um. Teams will get these tools in place and they will be shiny Excel sheets, more or less, where we have a list of a bunch of names and a lot of information and the tool, we have it, but we haven’t invested in actually maximizing what we’re paying for it. A lot of these tools don’t come for free. Some of them do, which is very interesting from a technology perspective. There’s a lot of You know, upright quadrant tools, industry leading tools that are starting to offer their products to nonprofits, nonprofits at significantly discounted rates or entirely free, um, for very robust technology, uh, which is very interesting. Um, and great from an implementer standpoint because I get to work with world-class tools for organizations that are really now making the most of them, um, but yeah, mainly it’s, you know, we’re looking for organizations that have tools but know that they’re not making the most of them because a lot of it, we’re paying for this thing, we’re, we’re paying whatever licensing fee or, you know, depending on the size of the tool, there might be consulting fees that go along with it or. You know, 100 hours a month of, uh, and, and we’re not, and we’re not, yeah, we’re just not, not taking advantage. All right, yeah, and how that, how that really impacts the organization and the mission is we’re, Investing money in technology, and we’re not getting any return from it. Um, and then we’re also kind of forcing our staff to use these tools that do nothing in return for them. You know, if I’m gonna go and plug a bunch of information into this tool and be forced to kind of abide by the framework that it prescribes me as a nonprofit professional, I want it to do something for me on the back end, whether it be automating a process for me, covering some, you know, lightweight follow up. Being able to generate a report that’s reliable, um, but a lot of the time we get in, you know, get to kind of the first step of setting it up, and then the other operational and capacity needs come rushing back in and we say, OK, you know, we’ll, we’ll get to this, and it never gets gotten to, which is the problem that we solve. You’re how the, to do gets done. Uh, let’s see, uh, How do we Pick the right to, well, uh, it’s not, not quite there yet. What can we do on our own? Like, what, what, what can we, you’ve given us some like some symptoms of, you know, what to, what to look for, but What can we, what can we try to do on our own? Well, I guess one thing would be take full advantage of the system, the, the, the technology stack that you have got. Like talk to the vendor. If you feel it’s being underutilized, talk to the vendor for Pete’s sake and find out how, how do you, how do you do this other, uh, this other reconciliation function automatically instead of us doing it. What else, what else could we be tweaking on our own that can better utilize the technology we’ve, we’ve already got? So before we get to systems, um, systems work best within a controlled environment, and obviously we try to build systems that are adaptable and flexible and resilient to changing variables, but. Before we jump into a system, the best place to start is to begin standardizing processes. So the things that we do as a team on a week to week, month to month basis, start writing these down, whether it’s how we plan for and deliver events or. Or what is our standard communication process for a new donor, for a major donor, for our monthly newsletter, for our annual report, start writing down the how to make a peanut butter jelly sandwich steps of each of those processes, because ultimately when you start that, then everyone begins. Executing the process in the same way, which helps efficiency, there’s less questions, it’s easier to onboard new staff, so that has benefits in itself, and that’s part of what we do as well. That’s the beginning of a lot of the projects that we do is, what do we do today? From that, it becomes much easier to map that to what we need out of a tool. Um, and so, assuming that there are some elements of technology in that process that we’ve documented. We start again trying to expand the number of steps that technology can do for us. So if it’s kind of, you know, for example, um, You know, a, a, a new donor follow-up sequence that we’re gonna go and get in touch with them. If it’s, all right, it lands in technology, and then I have to go manually send an email, and then I put, you know, make a note that I sent the email, and then create a task for myself to follow up. Where there are gaps in that technology, it starts to come back to kind of where we started, where we’re trying to extend that technology. From where it typically starts either at the middle or at the very beginning and extend that closer to end to end, um, but the best way to start is writing down the process that you’ve got now. It’s kind of an audit, you know, a little bit, a little bit of it and document it, but you know, it starts small. Like you can’t, you can’t document all your programs or audit all your programs, but, you know, maybe just in. Like a new donor sequence, for instance, or you know, how does, how does a gift get into the accounting system after the CRM or, or you know, some something like that. Audit is a, audit to me is a, a gray word. It’s very, um, you don’t like that word. I don’t, I don’t mind it because it is, it’s an accurate representation, um. It’s not super fun. I like current state analysis or process documentation. Wait, wait, requirements gathering. Wait, wait, wait. All right, so current state analysis. What was the second one? Process documentation, um. Developing SOPs, um, and then requirements gathering. And requirements gathering is basically taking our standard process and then saying, OK, what do we need from this process? What do we need the technology to do within that? And that’s our requirement of the given technology. All right. So audit, that’s two syllables. All right. Current state current state analysis. I agree it sounds, I agree it sounds a lot sexier than audit. Uh, OK, well, it’s people hear audit and they think, they think tax people, they think legal people, that’s not me. I’m much more fun than that. It’s time for Tony’s take 2. Thank you, Kate. tales from the gym, 21 degrees, Tim. You may recall Tim. He’s the, uh, gentleman, oh, might be 2 years ago now. So it’d be a stretch for you to recall this, but he was the guy who was, uh, telling everyone it was his birthday, that, that one day in the gym. So Tim, uh, I’ve seen Tim twice walking one time from the gym, another time to the gym. As I was driving my car to the gym, he’s walking. Shirtless. He’s got his, uh, t-shirt in his hand. Wearing a pair of shorts, you know, sneakers, of course, but both times it was 20 degrees or, or it was like 21 degrees. So the 2nd time after I saw him, I was in the gym. I was on the elliptical, and he came in. I, and this was, I guess it was the 3rd time I saw him walking by the window because I like the elliptical that faces the window. All the others face the center of the room. There’s one elliptical that faces outward and it’s right in front of a window, so I get to look out the window, and so I saw him coming by. Shirtless, 21 degrees out. So, when he came in, I asked him, what’s, what’s with the, uh, you know, I’ve seen you a couple of times now. What’s with the, everybody else is wearing parkas and pants, of course. What’s up with the bare chest in the, in the 20 degrees? He said it’s invigorating. And he builds up this something called brown fat. And he explained that brown fat. Helps keep you warm, uh, but it, because it, the way it metabolizes, it’s creating heat energy in your body. So it’s not just that the brown fat keeps you warm because it’s fat and it, it protects you from the cold weather because it’s a layer of fat, but it’s, it’s the way it’s, uh, consuming itself creates the heat and that keeps you warm and then he also explained that he uses a breathing technique. From this guy called uh Wim Hof, who I looked up, uh, and this breathing technique helps him avoid the cold of the pain. You, you hyperventilate and then you hold your breath. Uh, I, I’ve read about it, but, you know, I’m not, I’m not here to teach the, uh, Wim Hof breathing technique, but it’s this series of breathing, uh, different breaths and, and holding breath that you go through and it helps you, uh, Reduce stress and even pain, he said it reduces the pain of the cold, and then, 21 degrees, Tim. He said he goes home and he does not take a hot shower like you would think. He takes a cold shower when he goes home. After walking, I asked him how long the walk is. He said it’s 14 minutes from his home to the gym. So he walks home 14 minutes, takes a cold shower. And then he warms up by presumably putting clothes on. I didn’t, I didn’t wanna ask what he does after the shower. I don’t, I don’t really need to go that level of detail. What, what, what happens when you step out of the shower naked. Uh, it’s not necessary. I don’t really, I mean, I have to look at this guy in the gym from time to time, so. But that’s the story of, uh, 21 degrees Tim. He likes to be invigorated. Does it routinely throughout the winter. And that’s Tony’s take too. Kate Oh yeah, I was supposed to give you a cue, Kate, Kate. Your, your story was making me cold. I’m freezing just sitting inside my house. Yeah, go take a cold shower. You can go take a cold shower. Oh, how is the snow by you? Melted now, but I had 14 inches in the driveway. All gone now. It got a little bit warmer and it rained for several hours today. That’ll do it. Yes, yes. We’ve got Beauco butt loads more time. Here’s the rest of Systems and processes, so your people thrive with Dylan Bassett. Tell us a story. We’ve been talking kind of in the abstract because of the questions I’ve, you know, the questions I’ve been asking, things I wanted to talk about, but tell us a story about a, a nonprofit that, that, it doesn’t have to be a, an overarching revolution in the organization, but tell us a change story based on improved technology and, and, and processes, you know, you, some systems, some processes that came to them that, uh, they, they weren’t, they weren’t previously doing. You didn’t just come to them, you create, you helped them, you, uh, you created them for them. Give us a, you know, like a, a good, a good case story, case study. So, um, a use case that comes up often is for service delivery organizations. So think of these as Um, you know, for example, these are organizations like, um, folks who help outfit, um, low-income individuals to get their first job, uh, or a new job, um, you know, help them with boots and, um, outfit that they need for work, um, or. Organizations that provide legal aids, um, you know, service delivery organizations, they tend to have intake processes. Um, they may be done through a form on a website or through a piece of paper in the office, and then that form tends to be entered into some system somewhere. Um, and then we do a lot of kind of manual follow up based on that. And so one. use case that gets brought up frequently is an intake and sort of triage automation workflow, where rather than maybe we have a Google form that sends to a spreadsheet, and then from that spreadsheet, we need to copy everything over into our system or a. form that we go and then manually enter. Building up a system where we have a form that’s accessible. You know, if you’re in the office, you can use a device that we have. If you have your own device, you can scan a QR code or you can find it on the website. We enter that information in. It’s automatically sending to our system, whatever it may be, a CRM or a program delivery system, where we are then creating a new record of a client and what type of intake information, whether it be demographics or services needed, or referrals requested, we capture that information and then we can triage it to the correct program specialists depending on the diversity of the programs that a nonprofit might deliver. So if it’s. Exactly, you know, addressing the issue, or if it’s a referral specialist, we can send that to the correct dashboard for that program coordinator, and then they can go and see that land at the top of their list and say, I need to reach out to this person. When they reach out to that person, maybe we have an automatic integration with our email, maybe not. Um, but that might be one spot where they need to intervene in the system. They say, all right, I sent this email, and it automatically creates a follow-up task reminder for them to go and get back in touch if they haven’t heard anything. And then through that system as well, we can track, you know, almost that like a line. like a tab at a restaurant of like, we helped this person with this, we helped this person with this, and then ultimately close their case and say, OK, this is a person we served in X Y Z way. And then that all feeds into impact reporting that we’re accumulating over the course of a year. This is something that happens frequently, um, just the nature of the organizations that I work with, a lot of them tend to be direct service delivery, um. And in my opinion, that is kind of the essence of, you know, creating space for people to thrive, because then that program coordinator isn’t so much focused on how they need to handle the information or what they need to remember or put in their notebook. Then we have a system that is supporting a program coordinator as they deliver services. to a client or a constituent, um, and they don’t have to worry about keeping track of it because the system does and then at the end of the year when our executive committee goes to put together our annual report, we’ve got great information about who we served on a demographic basis, when we served them, and what services were delivered to them, um, that we can then go and demonstrate on the development and stewardship side. Yeah, you got your outcomes. Yeah, exactly. What’s your background? Do you have some kind of systems background or engineering or human, human, human factors? What, what are you, what are you all about? I am, um, so I’ve, my formal education is in information systems and entrepreneurship. I studied at the University of Minnesota, um. So I learned systems thinking, the system development life cycle, how to implement tools, how to understand the way that data behaves in systems. I was never a software engineer. I was never a coder. I was never a computer. Programmer, when I was coming through school, they told us explicitly, you are gonna be the translator between people who don’t speak technology and people who speak technology better than you. And so I interface between. You know, non-technical people, and either technical tools or, you know, software engineers, coders, computer scientists. And that’s my formal education. I spent a couple of years in, um, working at a national bank as a business analyst, so doing exactly that, working with the business functions of the bank, helping them turn their business need into stuff that computer programmers could work from. Then jumped into corporate consulting, which got into a little bit more of the uh problem diagnosis, the assessment type work, the kind of consulting narrative type work, and now in Departmental Solutions. Um, you know, after a handful of years in the corporate space, um, I just knew that I wanted to do values driven work. Always had a sense that I wanted to own my own business and do work that served a greater purpose. And so, kind of just had a, you know, straw that broke the camel’s back moment at, uh, my consulting gig. And said, I’m gonna leave this, and made the decision to serve nonprofits almost exclusively, um, with no connections in the nonprofit space, no prior experience at nonprofits, no, not even a real good understanding of how nonprofits worked, just knowing that they make an impact, they do work that helps people, and I wanna help them help people. Um, and that was kind of the start of Department one. Can you, uh, give a little detail on the, the straw that broke the camel’s back moment? Like, I, it was, um, What happened? I just didn’t have any emotion about the work that I was doing or the people I was doing it for, and this was also somewhat aligned with the pandemic. This was in consulting, the consulting gig, correct, yeah, yeah, yeah, correct. So it’s corporate consulting, you know, I’m working at a firm with like 50,000 employees in the United States, um. aligns with COVID, those timelines overlap almost 100%. And there was just kind of this, you know, everyone kind of went through it, this awakening of like, You’re pinned at home, you can’t leave the house, and, you know, you wake up from bed, roll over to your desk, do this work that you don’t care about, and then repeat. And I was like, I don’t want my life to feel this way. Um, and so, it was a mix of that along with some of the corporate consulting staffing practices in terms of utilization of employees or overutilization of employees, which If anyone’s worked in consulting, um, they’re probably familiar with. And so it was a mix of those things where I was like, my life is more than this, and I want it to feel better and more impactful. Um, so yeah, that was, that was kind of the moment of like, Something needs to change. Um, and it was less about the work that I was doing, and more about the purpose that I was doing the work, and the people I was doing the work for. Had you worked with nonprofits when you were younger or volunteered or like what, what, what, you just, you just always knew nonprofits existed? Nebulous, like I knew charities existed. I didn’t really like understand the, the nonprofit as a business model, um, until after I had left my previous job, um. And no, it, it really was just a desire to do work that aligned with my personal beliefs, the things that I cared about, um, you know, environmentalism, human rights, um, economic equality, all those sorts of things. I knew that those were core to who I was as a human being, and I wanted my work to be reflective of that. And it’s, it’s a decision that’s been validated many times over because I, and I’m sure you know this as well. When you do work that is really aligned with your purpose as a human, um, there’s no friction or conflict between what you do for work and who you are as a person. Um, and it just feels like it’s just an all an expression of me, um, and that feels really satisfying. I, and, you know, the, the system side of everything, I’ve always just kind of been like a A take apart toy kind of guy, like a systems guy, like step wise type of person and so that fit well from an educational perspective and now I get to apply this way that I feel like my brain has always been wired to, you know, the values that I believe deeply at my core as, as a human. Congratulations. I admire the, I, I admire the alignment. Thank you. Did you play with Legos when you were a young boy? You did. See, I thought maybe, all right, I was Legos. Did you wait, did you go outside the Lego, you know, the step by step and create your own? Oh yeah, design? Yeah, I was making like, I was making like battlefields and houses and like castles and universes and Had bikes and skateboards and, and cars and all that sort of stuff. It was always Tinker toys. Interesting. Yeah, all right, all right. So it goes back to the Legos. Yeah, something like that. And from an entrepreneurship perspective as well, uh, there are a number of people in my family that would, uh, gladly share the story of when I, um, I started a vegetable garden in my parents’ front yard, um, and was selling cherry tomatoes for like quarters apiece because I was driven to make $500 in one summer. This was like. I think I was like 5 or 6 years old. I was like, I just want to hustle. Uh, so now all three of those things, the Legos, the vegetable garden, uh, have now kind of come together. And, and the added dose of, uh, formal education. I love the vegetables. Yeah, yeah, no, I love the vegetable garden selling cherry tomatoes. Cherry tomato, did you meet your goal? Did you make the $500 in the summer? I did. There’s a picture of me. With 5 $100 bills and like a toothless smile like I got it. All right. That’s, uh, that’s a lot, was that 2000 cherry tomatoes, isn’t it, for $500? It was a lot. I also did 25 cents apiece. I think that’s $2000 housework, yeah, I mowed some lawn. I did, I did all that stuff, yep, at 5 years old. This is a 5 year old story. Whenever I, I feel like it was early grade school, so I, I, somewhere between 5 to 8, honestly, I don’t even remember how old I was at, at like kindergarten. Well, thanks for sharing all that. Let’s get down the Legos and the cherry tomatoes, cherry tomato in the front yard, front yard, not the back. There wasn’t enough sun, but there was not enough sunlight in the back. There was a good patch of grass in the front yard that my parents were willing to sacrifice to my adventure. Look what that sacrifice led, led to. What else do you want to talk about systems, systems and processes that, that I haven’t asked you or, you know, you just, you feel is important for us to know. I think one of the most important trends that I’m seeing in the nonprofit space is a. Move away from some of the quote unquote nonprofit first technology platforms towards some of the more traditional industry leaders, um, just to say I’m not, uh, you know, I’m not sponsored. I don’t get any commission or anything from any new platform you can drop names, OK, that’s right, yeah, yeah, um. So for example, like HubSpot is a big one that I know many organizations use but underutilized, and that’s a really, really capable tool. I have mixed feelings about Salesforce just because the user interface tends to be less intuitive than a lot of nonprofit professionals may do best with, um, and one that has been. Very pervasive in a lot of different conversations, both from like a work management tool, so something to help us manage our tasks, as well as a tool that can support CRM functions is Monday.com. Um, Part of the reason that I like Monday.com a lot is They offer their professional tier, which is like their 3rd tier of a tool. It offers hugely robust automation capabilities, communications capabilities, the number of different templates and layouts that you can have, and custom fields, and it’s a fully flexible system that they offer to qualifying nonprofits for free. And so it’s a tool that’s extremely flexible, um. It’s easy to use, easy to jump into their tutorial videos and their knowledge bases, um, to implement for either a project management tool or a CRM or both, um, and it’s free. And so a lot of nonprofits, at least that I’ve been working with, I know there are other tools out there that have similar offers. Um, Monday.com is the one that I’ve got the most experience with and hear about very, very frequently. Um. I have a client that uses Monday.com just for project management. But, but you’re saying they have a CRM also? Yes, yep, they have a CRM. It’s very flexible and so like to someone jumping into it for the first time, it might feel a little big blue ocean, um, but. It has a lot of, you know, third party integrations with your donation platforms, with your communications platforms. It’s also a communication platform in itself, has solid automation capability, and it’s free. And you know, if you look at from a technology perspective, if you go look at some of the leading tools in the CRM space and the project management space, Monday.com is right up there. So from The perspective of a technologist who works in these tools and has to recommend them to clients. It’s hard to justify a decision that doesn’t at least incorporate that as a consideration. Um, so just something, and, you know, there have been organizations that have been deeply invested in Monday.com that I’ve arrived to, and they’re paying for it because they, they weren’t even aware of this nonprofit pricing offer. Um, I don’t know. If that offer will change, or if, you know, they might restrict it further or might add a, you know, a discounted rate, but currently it’s free. Um, and it’s been working exceptionally well for a lot of different organizations that I’ve helped both optimize existing use and implement from the ground up. Do you take advantage of TechSoup and, and their offerings for nonprofits? Do you, do you, some clients sometimes benefit from that? So, definitely, um, something I’m aware of, I have seen. Kind of mixed relationships. Like I’ve seen organizations really make a lot out of it, and then some organizations not really have a great experience using TechSoup. Um, I use it as a point of reference if we are in more of an assessment type exercise where we, we wanna get off the tool that we’re currently using. And we’re evaluating alternatives. It helps from a cost perspective to see what kind of discounts are available or what kind of offers are available on TechSoup, and we can incorporate that into our decision criteria, but in Candor, it’s not a huge kind of piece of my operating model. OK, OK. All right, so Dylan, leave us with, um, like inspiration, inspiration around systems and processes. What, what, where we can get to. Where we can get to, um, Thriving. Yes, thriving, um, I think there is a misconception. Maybe I’m speaking to our, um, you know, our donor audience that, that might be listening to this show, um, but give general operating, um. From where I sit, general operating expense is the thing that holds most nonprofits back because that is the line item in the budget that tends to get invested in the type of work that I do. And as, yeah, and as someone who is. Working in these tools and sees the transformation from a team that has tools that don’t work for them, versus a team that has tools that do. If you want your nonprofit, whichever one is closest to your heart, if you want your nonprofit to be successful, give general operating. Um, give unrestricted gifts, because those gifts can be allocated. Also, if you trust the leadership of your nonprofit. You should trust them to make wise decisions about the cash that’s being spent, um. And if you don’t, maybe consider an organization that you do have that trust with, or ask them, ask their program coordinators, ask their, you know, their development director, their advancement director, if I give unrestricted, what are you guys gonna use it for? And I’m sure they’d be happy to share with you their strategic plan and let you know what’s on the roadmap. And some of it might include, yeah, we want to migrate to a new CRM. And I think a lot of those expenditures. tend to be viewed as unnecessary or Um, not additive to the mission, but in terms of reach and operational efficiency, ultimately nonprofits are businesses just like any other, and they need those tools, they need these systems, they need efficiency in order to be able to deliver on their mission. Um, and just, and just sort of flip that to our listeners is, you know, technology is an investment. Absolutely. It’s worth, it’s, it’s worth spending the money. To not only implement, but then continue to upgrade, maintain. Because it comes together for your team. I think so. We want our teams to be thriving, not just surviving alongside the technology, but thriving. With it and spending our time on the human side. Exactly. When things can be done at, at de minimis cost faster by the technology we’ve got in, you know, in this, in this, in the, in this decade. Yeah, that would be my, my, my big call to action. All right, Dylan Bassett. From, uh, cherry tomatoes to current state analyst. That’s right. Thanks very much for sharing. Thanks so much for having me on. This was a pleasure. No, I’m glad. The company is at departmentonesolutions.com. It’s DEPT, the number 1solutions.com, and you can connect with Dylan on LinkedIn as I have done. Thank you very much again, Dylan. Thank you, Tony. Next week, savvy CSR seeking. If you missed any part of this week’s show, I beseech you, find it at Tony Martignetti.com. Our creative producer is Mirer Meyerhoff. I’m your associate producer Kate Martinetti. The show’s social media is by Susan Chavez. Mark Silverman is our web guy, and this music is by Scott Stein. Thank you for that affirmation, Scotty. Be with us next week for nonprofit radio. Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. Go out and be great.
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