Tag Archives: Shift and Scaffold

Nonprofit Radio for May 27, 2024: Strategic Meetings For Teams Of One & Cyber Incident Cases And Takeaways

 

Janice Chan: Strategic Meetings For Teams Of One

As our 2024 Nonprofit Technology Conference coverage continues, Janice Chan returns with the savvy idea of adapting team meeting principles to a team of just one. She’ll have you thinking of yourself as a team leader, rather than one person doing everything. Janice is at Shift and Scaffold.

 

Steve Sharer: Cyber Incident Cases And Takeaways

We’ve got good stories about bad actors. You’ll also hear the practical steps your nonprofit can take to prepare for cybersecurity incidents to reduce their impact. And we’ll empower you to hold incident prep discussions with your leadership or staff. Steve Sharer, who says “Security is a team sport,” joins from RipRap Security. This is also from 24NTC.

 

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 You need to create more responsive donor experiences and grow, giving, virtuous.org and by donor box, outdated donation forms, blocking support, generosity, donor box fast, flexible and friendly fundraising forms for your nonprofit donor box.org here is strategic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

Nonprofit Radio for July 11, 2022: Service Design

 

Janice Chan: Service Design

Our #22NTC coverage continues with Janice Chan sharing her strategies for creating great programs, events and campaigns that offer value while balancing the needs of all your stakeholders. She’s from Shift and Scaffold.

 

 

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[00:01:34.94] spk_0:
Hello 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. This is show # 599. Oh, I’m glad you’re with me. I’d come down with blast. Oh my co sis if you infected me with the idea that you missed this week’s show Service design. Our 22 NTC coverage continues with Janice Chan Sharing her strategies for creating great programs, events and campaigns that offer value while balancing the needs of all your stakeholders. She’s from shift and scaffold On Tony’s take two my three lessons sounds like my three sons were sponsored by turn to communications pr and content for nonprofits. Your story is their mission turn hyphen two dot C O. And by 4th dimension Technologies IT Infra in a box. The affordable tech solution for nonprofits. tony-dot-M.A.-slash-Pursuant four D. Just like three D. But they go one dimension deeper here is service design.

[00:01:39.34] spk_1:
Welcome to tony-martignetti

[00:01:56.34] spk_0:
Non profit radio coverage of 22 NTC 2022 nonprofit technology conference hosted by N 10. My guest now is Janice chan she’s director at shift and scaffold Janice Welcome back to non profit radio

[00:01:59.74] spk_1:
Thanks so much for having me. tony

[00:02:01.78] spk_0:
Absolutely you’re welcome these Ntc’s bring us Together this is your third, your third show,

[00:02:07.76] spk_1:
I think so. 3rd time’s the charm. Right?

[00:02:11.14] spk_0:
Well yes but it’ll be more charming from next year on

[00:02:16.24] spk_1:
you

[00:02:16.46] spk_0:
think you’re gonna go to the to the in person conference next year in Denver have you thought about that

[00:02:27.14] spk_1:
I haven’t thought too much about that because you know, planning a whole year out is uh you know, kind of beyond my brain,

[00:02:28.94] spk_0:
I

[00:02:31.68] spk_1:
hope to be able to attend.

[00:02:34.04] spk_0:
I think I’ll be there.

[00:02:35.29] spk_1:
Yeah, awesome, wonderful.

[00:02:48.64] spk_0:
Your workshop this year is service design better experiences for everyone. That’s uh that’s pretty broad. You’re, you’re promising a lot there, everybody’s gonna be satisfied with this.

[00:02:53.63] spk_1:
I am promising a lot and I

[00:02:57.66] spk_0:
nobody left out.

[00:07:30.84] spk_1:
I think that that is so to give a little bit of a back story um for the context in which I was approaching this session and why I brought it forward was so I was a nonprofit technologist for many, many years. And um you know, when I was in, I said to go to graduate school, I went to school and for information management, which is basically about understanding people’s information needs and how do we make information usable and accessible and useful to people. And that was when I learned about user experience and then service design. And so when I was learning about service design, I recognize a lot of things that I had done in my nonprofit work. Um and it was really, it really resonated. It also was like, how come I didn’t know about this sooner. I don’t know people talk about these methods and a lot of these frameworks I think are really beneficial for people who are working in social impact sector and so too as to why I think so, right? Service design kind of looks at design is just problem solving, which is what people of non profit sector do all the time. And service design looks at if you’re providing your service like an after school program managing donor relationships, running a volunteer program, that sort of thing. It looks at the end to end experience of like what’s the experience of that person who’s going through that program? Who’s a volunteer, who’s a donor, who’s even an employee perhaps. Right. And what are all the things that it takes to make that happen? So, you know, there’s things that the organization, the employees need to do on the back end. There’s systems and Crm s and like processes and resources that they need. Maybe there’s data that they’re collecting. And so it looks at all of these things all together. And for me, that felt very much like what people do in the social sector, right? Because you’re I don’t know, running, let’s say a volunteer program and you want to make sure that like the kids who are coming to summer camp are having a good time, right? Because that’s the point of the summer camp. But you want to make sure the volunteers are having a good time because you’re not you’re not paying them. And then you got to think through, okay, Like I need like supplies and I need to schedule people and I need transportation, right? You have to think through all those logistical things. You might have some data that you need to collect for the funders. There’s things that like organizationally your staff who’s like, you know, hey, we have a policy, we need to like run background checks and the volunteers before they can start all of those things. And so I think that services line offers a lot to helping us think about those, how to tackle those types of challenges. And also because we’re constantly balancing the needs of different stakeholder groups, right? We’ve got our community members, we’ve got our clients and our volunteers and our donors. And then like funders and whoever and we have our staff, right? Different staff have different needs. And so when we’re thinking about that, right? Sometimes like the power dynamics really balanced in this, in this sector that we work in. And so it can be easy just like default to whoever carries the most weight and whoever like has the biggest amount of influence. And I think that even though services is not inherently necessary, like focused on say equity. But I think that the frameworks lend themselves to, okay, if we look at this entire picture, we have to ask the question and it helps to start the conversation. We have to ask the question of like does it make sense for organization to run this program in this way. Right? Like we want the community members have a good experience. But also there’s things like our staff capacity, our resources, right? Like what does it actually take to deliver this program at the level that we’re wanting to to deliver it at and also that safe and you know, accessible inclusive, all of those things. Right. And then it gives us the ability to like have that conversation with the other people who are involved um and to kind of bring them into the room.

[00:07:34.14] spk_0:
So is this a framework for a methodology

[00:07:38.74] spk_1:
of

[00:07:48.04] spk_0:
evaluating existing programs? Uh and I know it applies either existing programs or to, you know, something new programs. But is it is it is there a methodology or is just a way of thinking or what is drilled down? Like what is

[00:07:55.84] spk_1:
what,

[00:07:58.04] spk_0:
what what is I understand it at a conceptual level. But how do you execute service design?

[00:08:09.84] spk_1:
Sure. So service design could be looked at as a discipline, right? Like graphic design is its own discipline. Um Computer engineering is

[00:08:13.03] spk_0:
right.

[00:08:27.84] spk_1:
It’s about the whole process. But I think that there are ways to incorporate the frameworks that we use in service design, the tools or methods that we use in service design and incorporate those into non profit work to kind of help just balance like all of those different things going on.

[00:09:57.94] spk_0:
It’s time for a break. Turn to communications media relations and thought leadership turn to has the media relationships to make you the thought leader and where they don’t have a relationship. They know how to start one and grow it for your benefit? Like for instance with the leading state or local news outlet in your area. So they may not know them now, but they can get to know them. And that means you get to know them. And that means you get your message out when you need to be heard. Like when there is something in the local news related to your work or the national news, you want to be heard. Media relations and thought leadership Turn to communications. Your story is their mission turn hyphen two dot c o Now back to service design. Suppose we’re evaluating, uh, in an existing program. Let’s take those folks, you know, all our folks, all our listeners have programs. They might be embarking on new programs, but everybody’s, everybody’s got got something going on now. So let’s let’s work with that little, that bigger population. We’ve got something going on now. Multiple programs, naturally lots of nonprofits. Um, how do you, how do we start to

[00:09:59.14] spk_1:
think about,

[00:10:00.07] spk_0:
uh, an evaluation process.

[00:13:05.24] spk_1:
Sure. So I think like the way that what we’re looking for and within, if you’re taking a service that approach to looking at an existing program and how we can improve it, write the things that you’re looking at are, I mean for every nonprofit, right? This is less a service design thing and more of a why we’re doing the work we do thing is is it helping us achieve the mission? Is it helping us like move the needles that we’re trying to move right? You always want to know whether it’s doing that. But then sort of like digging down into that further. You want to understand like, what’s the experience of somebody who’s going through and receiving this service? Right? Is that the experience that we want them to have? Like if you’re running like say a workforce training program, right? Like obviously for it to be valuable to the participant, they need to be able to, it needs to help them like find jobs or be more equipped to find, you know, change careers or whatever it is at the end of that program. But in going through that program, right? You probably your organization have some values like we want to be inclusive. We want people to feel like they matter and feel empowered. Right? And do people feel that way going through that program? So that’s kind of like the first, the top layer of it and then sort of like the bottom or sort of supporting layers of that are, you know, in order to make this valuable to the organization right? Valuable to the organization and the social sectors, You know, things like, is it helping us achieve our mission? And also does it make maybe like sense that we’re the ones doing this the way in which we’re doing it. Is it sustainable for us, given our capacity given how we’re structured and set up? You know, I think that’s an opportunity of course to like revisit some things and I think that can come out of a lot of service design work is I think the biggest thing is alignment and a lot of the times when people are frustrated with the process, whether they’re the person receiving the service or they’re the employees in the back end, that they’re like this is just like we can’t keep doing things like this, right? This is really frustrating, It’s taking way more time than it should. It seems like really tedious or we’re not being equipped or resourced to do the work that we’re actually trying to do. And I think a lot of those frustrations come out of misalignment, right? Maybe you started this program 10 years ago and back then, right? Like the way you set things that made sense at the time and it’s easy to let like many years go by and like things are so working, but we never really stand back and take a look at the whole picture to see like does this still make sense given that probably the context has changed, right. Other things have changed. And so what do we need to improve a realign or make sure is actually supporting the end outcomes that we’re working for?

[00:13:43.94] spk_0:
Alright, write these big picture questions are align when you talk about alignment? You mean, I I think alignment with mission alignment with the impacts that you want to create in the community. You know, does it like you said, does it make sense for us to be for us to be doing it and doing it in the way that we’re doing it? So, you know, so these big picture, but it is it’s important to step back and be introspective, be, be scrutinizing all the work that you’re doing because you don’t want to maybe it’s better done by another organization or better done vastly different than you’re doing it, or just a little bit different than you’re doing it.

[00:14:15.44] spk_1:
Yeah, it can be the little things too like we, you know, are sending these volunteers out and they’re not having a good time and, you know what? We have really inconsistent training for them, Right. And and that could be a thing that’s not a line. We want them to do things in a certain way and feel equipped to do things, but we’re not providing them the support that they need in order to actually do that. Um, so it can also be for incremental improvements as well.

[00:14:22.04] spk_0:
Your right eye. Thank you. There’s another level of alignment to just aside from alignment with mission and impact, but alignment within the

[00:14:28.99] spk_1:
program,

[00:14:36.64] spk_0:
you know, are we are we not reimbursing our volunteers sufficiently or are we asking them to do too much or too little? How do you start to get this feedback from all the different cohorts. You’ve got your service recipients, you’ve got your volunteers, you’ve got your staff potentially very likely. How do you start to get the honest feedback

[00:14:53.14] spk_1:
as

[00:14:53.45] spk_0:
you’re, as you’re trying to be introspective?

[00:16:00.54] spk_1:
Absolutely. And I think is very much a team sport, right? Like I cannot tell you the the frontline picture if I’m not the front line person, right? I can’t tell you what it looks like from that perspective or what would make my job easier. And so I think the really big thing is to a product like identify of course, like who are all the people who are involved, who are all the people who are impacted and people are impacted to varying involved to varying levels of course. Um, but just figure out like what are the questions that things that we need to understand from these people, like who do we need to get in touch with? And I think just honestly getting people to sort of participate in drawing the picture of what things look like now. So one of the core tools in service design is the service blueprints. And that’s sort of like just mapping out a diagram of like what are the all the little bits and pieces that make up the service and you know, what does that journey look like for somebody who’s like going through? Like maybe like we have a summer program, right? Someone who’s going through a summer program,

[00:16:06.54] spk_0:
it’s

[00:17:07.44] spk_1:
like journey mapping with extra layers right? With the entire back end of you know, here’s the workflow that the employees are doing here, the support processes here. The systems we use, maybe there’s a data level, it can be really kind of whatever makes sense for your organization. But I think the biggest part is like getting, you know, and you can get feedback in many ways. Um you know the research methods you would use in service design or similar to other research, you would use another discipline. So like interview surveys, um you could do a workshop so all of these things right, contribute to to making up this picture. But I think the really powerful part of getting people from these different stakeholder groups involved in creating that picture, is that then everybody sees the same picture and can have that conversation about, oh like I can see why there is a problem or like these things are just kind of disconnected and we didn’t plan for like how somebody would get from step A to step B um or like hey they have like no resources, we have no staff because like somebody left and we never like refilled that position or what have you. Um it allows people to see agree on the problems because they can all see them together.

[00:18:39.94] spk_0:
It’s time for a break, 4th dimension technologies, business continuity in case of emergency break glass then what as part of four D’s. I. T. Infra in a box. They’ll work with you to develop your incident response plan which includes who disseminates the tech info. How does I. T. Security change now? What hardware and software changes do we need? What changes I. T. Wise in the office and how about remotely business continuity is part of the I. T. Buffet so you can take it or leave it the same with security like multi factor authentication and they’re help desk and I. T. Audit and training and a technology plan for you. All these are part of their I. T. In. For in a box. Fourth dimension technologies. tony-dot-M.A.-slash-Pursuant four D. Just like three D. But they go one dimension deeper. Let’s return to service design

[00:18:43.94] spk_1:
then. How

[00:18:53.54] spk_0:
do you start to uh makes make change? I mean I imagine you have to have leadership buy into this to this process to this introspection.

[00:18:56.54] spk_1:
You know how do you

[00:18:58.04] spk_0:
studies if this is a substantial program, there’s a lot of moving parts.

[00:19:02.14] spk_1:
How do you

[00:19:04.94] spk_0:
start to tweak something and make sure it’s not

[00:19:05.85] spk_1:
gonna

[00:19:11.84] spk_0:
adversely impact something else or some other group of stakeholders that you didn’t anticipate. You know how do you start to tweak these changes.

[00:22:08.14] spk_1:
So I think the biggest part about the approach of service design is that you’re involving. So at least you know some representatives from each of these stakeholder groups you can tell you like. Yeah you can’t change that because of this other thing. It’s going to break or if you change that, right? Like we need to figure out how we can address this particular need or process or what have you. And so by doing that right? Like I can’t know everything. Like no one person can know every single thing about all the different components of a service or program, right? So it’s sort of like, let’s build up this brain trust so that we’re not missing those important things. But to your point, right? Like to even start that process you need but the culture that supports that, right? In terms of we’re open to input, we’re open to getting um feedback into taking it seriously and to to really thinking about like who is getting the most impacted by the service and any changes that we make and you know, of course leadership, right? In terms of depending a bit on like how your organization works. But in most organizations, right? If you don’t have buy in at some of those key levels or for like key people with it. Like, if you’re looking at a program and the program director doesn’t hasn’t bought isn’t on board yet, right? With doing this process, then, you know, that’s gonna be a hard thing to you have to address that first. But I think that like in using participatory methods and helping people just visualize like, here’s what’s going on, right? Like I know that you’re frustrated and you think it’s this one thing, but there are these five other things going on. And I think that offers the opportunity also to show people how it could be better because a lot of times, right? And I’m sure you’ve had this experience, many, many of us have of it’s frustrating, it’s annoying like this just feels like it’s not working. Why are we still doing it this way? But like nobody knows how to fix it, but you can’t begin to fix something if you can’t identify what is actually causing, like what is the actual root of why it’s so problematic. And so getting people to agree on that, right? That’s a point from which you can begin to brainstorm about what could be better. Or I feel like a lot of times when I do this work, people come out of the woodwork like, oh yeah, like I’ve been thinking for a long time, but this could be better and I had an idea but I didn’t know where to go with it, right? Or I didn’t think that people would be on board with changing it, or I was worried that if I made this change that it was going to have this ripple effect and I don’t I don’t know what that is, right? So some of it I think is also kind of empowering people to be, you know, sort of change agents within their organizations as well,

[00:22:16.84] spk_0:
Okay, um what else should we know about, about service design, whatever we talked about

[00:22:21.42] spk_1:
yet that, that

[00:22:22.63] spk_0:
you, you shared in your, in your session.

[00:23:55.04] spk_1:
So I think that like one of the, you know, I think this is a common, common challenge, right? And change projects, is that like a lot of times they can be so big, right? And seems so overwhelming and then like the time you get done with it, you’re like, is this what we wanted or have other things change and should we have changed things along the way? So I think in service design and many design disciplines apart, one of the things that you want to do is to keep iterating and to your point about like making making big changes and them having those having implications, right? Because you can ask all of the people get input from everybody involved and roll something out and there’s still something that you didn’t anticipate, right? Like there’s just, it’s just the way of life and technology and working. Um, but if you roll out parts of the time where you test that little parts of the time and then test and design testing is really just, I’m going to try a thing with real people and just see how it works out in the real world, not in this, like on the computer, it looks like this lovely flow chart of like how this is supposed to work, right? And then where the rubber hits the road is when you test it out with real people and then iterating your stress like okay, we tried it, that was draft one. We’re going to make some changes based on what we learned from that. And so it doesn’t have to be like this like massive pilot program kind of situation, right? Like you could tweak one small thing and just see how that works and then tweak the next small thing and see how that works.

[00:24:05.84] spk_0:
That’s probably a better approach. Anyway.

[00:24:08.34] spk_1:
You

[00:24:08.43] spk_0:
know, I was saying, you know, I was saying big overhaul changes, you know that that can be upsetting for everybody involved and you know, it might mean delays in delivering the program. You know, it

[00:24:20.72] spk_1:
seems like

[00:24:27.44] spk_0:
tweaks R and then iterating R r is a better way to, there’s a better way to go about,

[00:25:03.14] spk_1:
right? And and it’s different right? If you’re starting a new program right, you might take the big approach because you’re starting not really from like nothing is really from scratch, right? But there’s not an existing program that you need to keep operating at the same time when you’ve got something existing. I think incremental is a lot better. And you know, you can avoid things like, oh that completely just broke this other thing that, you know, when we made this change, right? You can go in and fix that and then adjust course as you need to and you know, because otherwise it’s like it’s just you can’t do all of the things that once there’s no like staples easy button

[00:25:15.44] spk_0:
Yeah right. And it becomes overwhelming and creates lack of inertia though. Um What were some of the questions that you

[00:25:17.84] spk_1:
got in

[00:25:18.13] spk_0:
the session?

[00:25:19.24] spk_1:
So I will admit I really jammed a lot of tent into my

[00:25:24.42] spk_0:
session.

[00:25:34.14] spk_1:
Um so I didn’t get a ton of questions but but I think one of the things that I would say when I try to explain what I do to other people, first of all people here design and they’re like graphic design, visual design, right? That’s like usually what pops into people’s heads, right? But so much of us do design every day.

[00:25:48.32] spk_0:
You’re stuck with me. I didn’t even, I didn’t even think along those lines and and as soon as you said it it helps us understand what what practices. So

[00:25:56.61] spk_1:
yeah, bring

[00:25:57.90] spk_0:
me along slowly. I’m trainable, trainable but take it in increments please.

[00:26:51.64] spk_1:
I appreciate it. So design is really just problem solving right? And it’s things that we do every day. It’s like if you move the dishrag to be closer to the sink because that works better and you’re dripping us on the floor right? Like you’re redesigning your space so that you have less dripping wet dishes on the floor right? You’re solving your problem for you. And so we do this every day research is you know, sounds like a big thing but it’s just information gathering, right? If I’m trying to pick new software. I probably like look up if they have any reviews. What are the features? Maybe I talked to somebody who’s using that product that their organization, right? That’s research. But we don’t necessarily research. Sounds big and academic and formal. I’m sorry. Were you gonna say something?

[00:27:00.34] spk_0:
Only that I was gonna riff on your example that now that you’ve moved the dishes closer to the sink, you’re getting less water on the floor, but your elbows are breaking the crystal.

[00:27:04.40] spk_1:
So perhaps perhaps so now you have to iterate, right?

[00:28:39.64] spk_0:
Didn’t anticipate that. Right? Alright. Maybe it belongs on the other side. Your less dominant side. That doesn’t move as much It’s time for Tony’s take two. As you know, As you heard this is my silver jubilee in planned giving. So I have a blog post To memorialize my three top lessons takeaways, whichever parlance you prefer. The lessons for the That used to be until they became takeaways several years ago. I’ve got the three of them. The top three and the first one is it’s all about relationships and relationships are much easier and hopefully they go much deeper then you might expect. So that’s my first thinking first take away from 25 years in planned giving the others and a little background but not too long. Let’s not get carried away. Let’s not get narcissistic But some background about my 25 years, my my initiation getting started in planned Giving that is all in this blog post, which is at planned giving accelerator dot com. And then you click blog. Thank Giving accelerator dot com. Quick blog. That is Tony’s take two. We’ve got boo koo but loads more time for service design. With Janice chan

[00:28:49.44] spk_1:
All

[00:28:49.60] spk_0:
Right, well you said you uh, you said you packed your session full and you’ve really been talking like 20 minutes or

[00:28:54.87] spk_1:
so, what

[00:28:55.92] spk_0:
what else are you not sharing with non profit radio listeners? Maybe a story maybe a case. Did you share a case?

[00:29:51.74] spk_1:
Sure. This this was so one of the things that I went through walked through in detail was um, so I talked a bit about research and I talked about different methods, one of which, you know, mapping and diagramming. Just like, let’s get on the same page, literally right. Like let’s, you know, take this intangible service of how we don’t know, provide meals to seniors and drop them off at their homes. And let’s put it on the paper so we can see like where things are misaligned. And so one of the core methods is the service blueprint, which I’ve mentioned. Um, but I took people through. It’s a little hard, I guess if it’s just audio, but I took people through, if you think about, have you ever been a new employee somewhere?

[00:30:01.14] spk_0:
uh not recently, not in the past 25 years, 23 years or so. But yes, I’ve been in the past. I was a new employee twice.

[00:30:07.04] spk_1:
So you’ve had the experience of like you start, you don’t know anything there.

[00:30:08.99] spk_0:
Where’s the bathroom

[00:30:09.99] spk_1:
need to do? Yeah. Where’s the

[00:30:11.29] spk_0:
bathroom, where

[00:30:12.61] spk_1:
mask

[00:30:13.38] spk_0:
use the copy

[00:30:14.23] spk_1:
machine. Exactly.

[00:30:16.64] spk_0:
What’s my code for the copy machine?

[00:31:41.04] spk_1:
So, you know, I took people through the experience because I was like, you know, I don’t know your your fundraisers if your program people of your executive directors, HR folks who knows. Right? And so this could work for all sorts of services. But we’ve all, I think most everybody has been an employee somewhere once. And so I took them through the example. And so service blueprint is like, if you think of a service, like a theater production, right? So you have on stage or the front stage is what the audience can see. And then backstage, right, there’s like people doing lighting, there’s people doing the music, there’s you know, directing whatever it is, costumes. And so the key part of this diagram is always thinking about what is front stage that other people can see and what’s backstage. And so I took people through these layers. There are there’s a physical evidence, right? So like if you’re a new employee, you have maybe you get an email, maybe you got a phone call from your like hiring manager, right? Like congratulations, We picked you like, here’s the offer letter, write the offer letter is its own piece of physical evidence, Its own sort of touch points is a term that we used to call it. And this could be other also things like if you, there’s a website to like enroll in your benefits, that sort of

[00:31:45.03] spk_0:
thing

[00:32:27.54] spk_1:
and sort of the next level or thinks that the as a new hire, right? Like I am enrolling in benefits. I am reading this email about what to do on my first day. You know, things like that on the other side of that are there was an employee internally who had to do something right? Like your manager had to send you that email about what to do on your first day or HR had to send you, here’s the link to the enrollment website for your benefits, things like that. There are also things that are sort of backstage, right? Like as a new hire, you’re like, oh great, I’ve got a new computer, it’s just there, right? You didn’t see somebody ordering that computer for

[00:32:29.99] spk_0:
you.

[00:33:37.74] spk_1:
So that’s also a thing that’s specific to you starting as a new employee, right? They didn’t need a computer if they weren’t hiring somebody. And so that’s specific to you. There are also support processes going on. So when you come right, you’re expecting, I will get paid every two weeks or whatever the period is that payroll processes a support process. So that goes on every two weeks like clockwork and as a new hire you would get folded into that of course you would be paid. But when you start doesn’t change that schedule, it doesn’t change how that process works. That process is just gonna run every two weeks, Right? And then there is a system. So maybe um for example there is an HR system, right? And that works together with with how payroll gets processed. So when you start, your information gets entered into the HR system as a new employee and that that feeds into payroll and and possibly other things. So kind of like that’s those are the layers of things. When I talk about the all of the layers that make up the end to end experience so that that service, it’s possible. Those are the kinds of the layers I’m talking about.

[00:33:52.99] spk_0:
These are all these are all included in the service blueprint.

[00:33:57.34] spk_1:
Exactly, exactly. And so there’s it I go through this in the slides which are in the collaborative notes and and people can certainly check those out and see that example.

[00:34:07.91] spk_0:
Where are those, where are those notes?

[00:37:40.33] spk_1:
Those notes if you attended? Um And D. C. They’re in socio under the session page, you know, So if you went to look up service design my service design session sort of you scroll towards the bottom underneath the description, there’s a link to the collaborative notes and I’ve got tons of resources in there too. Um I think another thing that I love to talk about if we’re good on time is making sure like there are a lot of ways in which I think in the past several years now, profit have gotten better about how do we incorporate our values into our day to day operations? Right. Like if we value inclusion, right, that’s not only about the program that we’re running externally in the community, but also like what does that mean in house? Right? Like how does that, what does that mean about how we treat our staff and treat each other? And so I think what the things that you’re doing in a design process, right? I think it’s always a friend and I were talking about this the other day, right? That there are a lot of accessibility resources for like accessibility outwards, right? But not maybe as many resources for accessibility in words for your staff. And so I think, you know, when you’re going through this design process, the point is, right, we’re not only thinking about whoever is receiving the service who may or may not be external to this organization, but also about what are the needs of the people who are actually like providing the service inside the organization. That could be things like training and and systems and equipment, right? But it could also be about what they need to be successful. And so some of the other things that I touched on um I didn’t have a chance to get in depth but included more resources on some of these topics. Um one of them was participatory design or co design. So there’s kind of like, there’s a spectrum of how much you involve people, right? There’s like, we’re not asking anybody, we’re just gonna create whatever we think is best. You know, there that’s sort of like the one end of the spectrum and the high end, right? You might even bring the community members on as sort of like project team members, right? You might compensate them for their time. They get to have a say in the decision making right? That’s like a really big in terms of shifting power, right? Having a say in the decision making is a really big piece of that, you know? And then they’re sort of like in between is we did some research, right? We got their input but maybe we didn’t, but we the internal people made all the decisions and then they’re sort of like somewhat more participatory, maybe they have even helped like co design pieces of it or gave us some ideas but they weren’t involved in the whole project or they didn’t really have a final say in the decision making right? These are different place points on that spectrum. And so, you know, there’s a lot of debate. There’s also like differences in how people label them as co design or participatory design. Um So some people are like, yeah, this is all just the same thing, right? The whole spectrum is the same thing, you know, and some people are like, no, these are very distinctive like points and we should be clear about them. Um, also talked about

[00:37:43.25] spk_0:
the finer points of arguments within the service design community,

[00:37:47.93] spk_1:
yeah. Within the design community,

[00:37:50.96] spk_0:
what’s

[00:37:51.39] spk_1:
co design, what’s

[00:37:52.43] spk_0:
participatory

[00:41:47.21] spk_1:
design? But I just say that so that when people are looking at the resources that they know that people will call it different things and that nobody agrees on what these are called. Um, so that’s not confusing. And I think the other things are around like in order to make things like accessible, right? Like that needs to be baked into the project from the beginning, both in parts of like how we’re going to think about the process, who involved in the process and it should be accessible both for participants, write your external audience, but also internally for the employees who are working, working at your organization. Um, and then the other thing I touched on was charming firm design. So trauma from designs kind of an emerging area of practice and it comes from trauma informed care and social work. So it’s sort of, I think people are beginning to recognize that, you know, obviously the organizations where you’re clearly working with people who have experienced trauma, right? Because you’re, I don’t know, maybe working with abuse survivors or veterans or things like that. But the, I think the point being is that there’s a lot more that goes on that’s unrecognized. And so sort of flipping the switch from assuming that people haven’t experienced trauma too, if we assume that people were working with most likely have experienced trauma, right? How do we design services or products or what have you, how do we provide care in a way that is going to take that into account and two sort of, you know, make make sure that we’re not re traumatizing people, make sure that we’re actually supporting and empowering those people. So that’s a lot around centers a lot around, you know, giving people choice, making sure that a space is safe for them both physically and emotionally, um, making sure that we’re doing what we can to sort of place the control back in their hands of people, you know, who’ve had that control taken away from them. And so a lot of those, those, um, a lot of that kind of comes out of things that work that has been done in social work, but I think it’s a really important thing to think about, especially for those of us in the, in the social impact sector, you know, and, and then I think the other big thing was like change management. So, you know, you talked about this right? Like how do you get people on board, how do you get the leadership on board? And I think that this is really lacking in a lot of service design resources because a lot of service deciders. So I wouldn’t say that service design is, is the most common in the United States, but I would say that probably most people who are working in service design in the United States, there are people who do this work in government. So the federal government in local and state governments, because you’re providing services to citizens, right? That’s a core part of what our government does, you know, and then there’s there’s some in like health care and and financial services and things that are kind of a little less simply web based um but it’s not super common and so the service designers who are working a lot of them are either at really large institutions or their external external agencies so they can design the thing, they can do the research, they can help involved and pull this design together, but then they’re usually handing off the implementation, but I’m going to guess for most of the listeners of non profit radio most attendees of ntC but that’s not the case, right? Like we are designing, you know, we’re improving the program and then we got to go implement

[00:41:53.06] spk_0:
it.

[00:42:46.00] spk_1:
Yeah, so really like building in that time for change management. So it’s like getting external feedback is not something your organization is used to doing right, Like that’s gonna be a change internally for how you and your colleagues are used to working, it might be a change for leadership, you might need to get by and for that. Um but also, you know, the the program itself, right? So there’s maybe a few people who are starting like starting something new, but a lot of us were trying to improve the existing programs and services and our existing operational functions and so there’s always that that change piece that you’re gonna have to build in that time for to just like let’s spend time on this, like let’s make sure that we have like people on board before we try to move forward. Otherwise, you know, as you pointed out, it’s not gonna be so successful

[00:42:52.00] spk_0:
Janice just to wrap up, explain that your company name shift in

[00:42:57.00] spk_1:
scaffold, what

[00:42:58.92] spk_0:
does that mean?

[00:44:15.09] spk_1:
Sure. So I like to think about a lot of the work that I do, but also a lot of the work that we do in the social impact sector general as sort of shifting the lens, shifting the narrative. Maybe we’re shifting power, maybe we’re shifting like who gets centered um in the decisions that are made and whose voices get heard and then scaffold so scaffolding in education and um so I also like used to be an instructional designer scaffolding in education is about when you’re teaching somebody something new, you want to make sure that you’re building on what they learned already, right? You’re building on their existing knowledge and then sort of you add a little bit of new stuff every time. And so I like to think of my work as partnering with people so that when I leave the engagement, right? So like, usually I work with people on a project basis or I do coaching. And so like after the end of our engagement, I don’t want people to be like, oh, like now we have to find somebody else to do that thing, right? I’m not you know, that’s not the point of the work I do. What I want to do is build people’s capacity to carry that forward themselves. So that’s why I named it shift and scaffold.

[00:44:24.29] spk_0:
All right, thank you, Janice, chan director shift in scaffold Janice, Thank you very much.

[00:44:26.29] spk_1:
Thanks so much for having me. tony It was great talking with you and uh I hope you are doing well and I’ll talk to you again later.

[00:44:37.79] spk_0:
Yeah, maybe next year’s in T. C. All right, thank you. Thanks for sharing Janice.

[00:44:39.36] spk_1:
Thank you. Take care.

[00:46:16.99] spk_0:
Next week. Woo! It is the 600th show, The 12th anniversary, the 12th Jubilee 600 Shows Next Week. That means my fabulous co host and our creative producer Claire Meyerhoff will be with me scott, Stein, you gotta have the live music, the live cheap red wine plus he’s gonna do a couple of other songs for us. Amy sample Ward, Gene Takagi, our sponsors are gonna chip in, It’s all on the 600th show next week. If you missed any part of this week’s show, I Beseech you find it at tony-martignetti dot com. We’re sponsored by turn to communications pr and content for nonprofits. Your story is their mission turn hyphen two dot C. O And by 4th dimension technologies I. T. And for in a box, the affordable tech solution for nonprofits. tony-dot-M.A.-slash-Pursuant for D Just like three D. But they go one dimension deeper. 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 style. Thank you for that. Affirmation scotty, you’re with me next week for nonprofit radio Big non profit ideas for the other 95% go out and be great.

Nonprofit Radio for April 26, 2019: Strategic Knowledge Management & Ethics In Your Prospect Research

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My Guests:

Dar Veverka & Janice Chan: Strategic Knowledge Management
Documents. Data. Projects. Governance. Training. They’re all components of knowledge management and our panel from 19NTC explains how to manage properly. Both returning, they’re Dar Veverka from Urban Teachers and Janice Chan at Shift and Scaffold.





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Maria Semple: Ethics In Your Prospect Research
There’s a lot of personal and private info available on your donors, volunteers and prospects.  Your researcher’s job is to find it. Where are the boundaries? How do you protect it? Maria Semple takes on these and other potential landmines. She’s our prospect research contributor and The Prospect Finder.





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Hello and welcome to Tony martignetti non-profit Radio Big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent on your aptly named host. Oh, I’m glad you’re with me. I’d come down with a case of stati O p Jia if you kicked me in the butt with the idea that you missed today’s show Strategic knowledge management documents, data projects, governance, training They’re all components of knowledge management and our panel from nineteen ntcdinosaur planes. How to manage properly both returning there. Dar Viv arika from Urban teachers and Janice Chan at Shift in Scaffold and Ethics in your Prospect Research There’s a lot of personal and private info available about all of us and your donors. Your researchers job is to find it. Where are the boundaries? How do you protect it? Maria Simple takes on these and other potential landmines. She’s our prospect research contributor and the Prospect Finder. I’m Tony Steak to be the one we’re sponsored by Pursuant Full service fund-raising Data driven and technology enabled Tony dahna slash pursuant by Wagner CPS guiding you beyond the numbers weinger cps dot com and by text to give mobile donations made easy text NPR to four four four nine nine nine Here is strategic knowledge management from the twenty nineteen non-profit Technology Conference. Welcome to Tony martignetti non-profit Radio coverage of nineteen ninety si. You know what that is? It’s the twenty nineteen non-profit Technology Conference. You know that we’re in Oregon, Portland, Oregon at the convention center. You know that all of our nineteen ninety si interviews are brought to you by our partners at Act Blue Free fund-raising Tools to help non-profits make an impact with me now are Darby Burka and Janice Chan. Dar is director of information technology and at urban teachers seated next to me and Janice Chan is consultant at Shift in Scaffold. Welcome back to the show. Both of you think you can be back. Thank you very much. Let’s so we’re talking about strategic knowledge management Your your workshop topic Strategic knowledge Management Don’t stop halfway. Janice. What? What? Halfway. What? What? What’s the problem here? Why do we need this session? Uh, my dar actually chose the name of the sessions and maybe you want to talk about that. Okay, Well, either won or you go for a lot of places. People think of knowledge management as solely just We put some documents and SharePoint. We organize the things on our file server and that’s it. They stop there. But that’s really just a foundational piece for knowledge management, and it’s really just a small part of it. So our session was going over the other things you need to consider instead of just we filed our documents. Okay, Janice, how would you know? Let’s make sure everybody has a common understanding of terms. What we need, what we mean when we say knowledge management. So this is, you know, when you’re in an organization, everybody needs some type of information. People have a lot of experience and expertise, but it’s it’s often trapped in people’s heads or we have the file somewhere, but nobody could find them. So I just end up asking darl the things. And so how do you make it so that the right and the people confined the right information at the right time when they need it on DH in the way that they needed? So they’re not spending an hour digging through unorganized sheer drive when we could have just organized and they’re like, Oh, I know howto Advil unt ears to our serum because it’s in the volunteermatch judgment folder and that, you know, like it’s in a place that makes sense. Teo Awesome to our organization. Okay, okay. I said, uh, the So the halfway point is the documents in a share point. And that’s where a lot of people are stopping but trouble? Yeah, a lot of folks just think that’s all you do, and it’s You need to go beyond that and get buy-in from the rest of your organization and think about the other ways that knowledge flow. A lot of knowledge flows through organizations, and it’s not just sitting in your SharePoint drive and you need to deal with How do you manage all that? A lot of places waste a lot of time. What are what are the other elements of knowledge? Management? Um, knowledge management comes into play with data governance. Were all data driven organizations these days. So you’ve got everything sitting in your databases. Why isn’t why are people dealing with processes around that? For knowledge management, you’ve got project management. You do you know these these built out tech projects that cost you thousands of dollars and nobody does the documentation or things about thinks about building things in. Like, for instance, whether the examples we gave it our session. If you’re redesigning a website you’ve already thought about who’s gonna be maintaining that. Whose job is that? After the fact? What do you need the vendor to do? What type of documentation. But people don’t build that into the project. They think about it, but he never actually get it into the formal project. So that’s all part of knowledge management. Okay, eyes, they’re more generous. And also things like training, right. Like when we have new staff, we think we need to train them. We need to onboard them, we think actively about that stuff. And then we don’t always think of it after That person is no longer the new employees. And so we don’t keep that going. And we lose a lot that way because things change right? We don’t necessary. Maybe updated as a star. Kind of referred, right? Like we know we made the how to guide. Great. We never have to update it. But that process of balls because we realized hey, this doesn’t work out as well as we thought. So now we’ve changed it, right? We’re applying that learning that can get loss of It’s not documented when that person who made that improvement walks out the door. You know they find your job or whatever or, you know, even just things like, you know, when people leave right, we don’t always capture that institutional knowledge. My people, when people leave and we’re just like all right, give us your email account password on like you know it. So making sure that that stays within the organization also that it just feeds back into the world, you know, sort of like when you manage a project and you kind of do be brief sometimes after a project. Hopefully you debrief. Does that go anywhere? Because if you have that meeting, then it’s only in the minds of people who were at that meeting. And that doesn’t That’s a lot of knowledge that maybe it’s useful to other people. Normalization will be used for moving forward, and it can easily get lost. We’Ll capture it. I presume you spent a lot of time in the session or have you had your session? OK, you’re dahna downside. Okay, Talking about resource is tools tools that we can use for for knowledge management going beyond documents. So let’s spend a good amount of time doing that. Janice, you want to start with, um, with a tool? Sure. So I think one of the things that way talked a little bit about there. Two types of knowledge is the explicit were just like here you do Step one. And here you do Step two, and usually the task knowledge is sort of like, you know, when you’re baking and you’re like what this done look like? Great. And it’s hard to figure that out sometimes. Like, you know, data governance. You’re like, How do I define those? Like, What does this mean? Why does this number look like not what I was expecting? And I think a lot of times we don’t always have the language. We don’t always have that shared language. Tio have that discussion. So when you map out a process right, if you do that diagram of like here’s, here’s what happens. Here’s which systems are connected to each other, and somebody’s like I never realized that right, Like that’s not the model that I have in my head of how these things fit together, and I had these other pieces that are not on the diagram that you just wrote. The act of like making those diagrams is is you know, Wei Tau have that conversation, get that knowledge out of people’s heads and get a documented right than other people can see. That s so There are a lot of tools for that. Like really simple. I’m sorry. Taxonomy. Taxonomy is another. Another helpful thing I think about autonomy is Oh, no Texas. Tow the grant like different things. Teo also think about it. Buy-in named Tulip zoho. I really like like paddle. It is really, like, cheap. Easy. It’s not made for that necessarily. But you can use it. Pagnoni. It’s really it’s men for teacher. A lot of teachers use it, I think. But it’s free. It’s You don’t have to, like, learn how to use it. There’s not like a steep learning curve, which is helpful for diagrams. You’re like, you know, you can just do pencil on paper, but you know, good, more advanced toward, You know you’re losing charts and all of that or more advanced. But they take longer to learn how to use, so that vanish now. So I’ve got a I’ve got a question. It may be embarrassingly basic, but we ask anyway. All right, So now if we have created this, uh, sort of this organizational chart or this this flow of this chart that in paddle it how do we How do we now preserve that so that people confined It is, It is. It is a simple is the shared drive on a network. I think it depends on what it is and what it’s for, right? Like if it’s hears we’re documenting our process for maybe managing volunteers. Or maybe this is how you make updates on your way you might share. You might save it wherever you might be in your share. Dr. It’s wherever you have your documentation, which honestly, should be wherever people go, because if people don’t go to it, then you have to do that whole, like trying to get people to go to. No place is just more on top of more like it’s just not gonna happen when they already are exactly exactly wherever they are. Just just make it work for there. Okay, okay. Time for a break. Pursuant. the art of first Impressions. How to combine strategy analytics and creative to capture new capture, captivate its, actually captivate new donors and keep them coming back. It’s their e book. It’s on donor acquisition and how to make a smashing first impression. You will find it on the listener landing page at tony dot m. A slash pursuing capital p for please, of course. Now let’s go back to strategic knowledge management. Another tool door you can share with you a couple things I can think about. We demonstrated some visual tools, just having simple visual guides to guide people on what systems do what we demonstrated several of those yesterday, and we also know what kind of systems are we talking about? A different knowledge systems. Maybe you’ve got databases. Maybe you’ve got documents, shares, maybe a process. Documents for the finance system live somewhere else. How our users supposed to know what system Teo use if they don’t even know what systems that you have so doing visual guides for where do I find this? Or where do I put that simple stuff that people can literally stick on? The fridge is in their offices, so people see that constantly as a reminder. We demonstrated some landing pages in Portales. A lot of people think of of that is just a way to get into the document management system. But you could do so much more with a portal you can have links to. Resource is links two different systems guides on where you should put stuff. Updates from the internal newsletter. To remind people of recent resource is way did a whole system of links. If folks check the collaborative notes for our session, we put about a page and a half of links for folks to different tools. And then he also made a Google drive of downloadable resource is for folks to express. Okay, well, we need to identify the first. Where’s the where’s the sheet of patient half of links that’s going to be in the collaborative notes for our session. With that, it’s it’s on this session. If you go to the session page on the NDC agenda, there will be a link to our social. Okay, so you start in ten dot org’s, then you go into the conference, extend into the agenda. Great. So on on Wednesday morning, we have is the strategic Knowledge management. If you click on that the session description, all of the links Aaron there Wave also tested it on both of our Twitter accounts. And then we can also post at the forums and handup Florence under the Where do we want? Put that one in the main discussion or debate? Remain discussion with the mid discussion for him with us. The links because we did a lot of resource, is this is a lot for folks to absorb. Let’s take time. What is your what? Your Twitter ID? Oh, sure example. At Darva arika d a r E v e r k Darby murcott Janice What’s yours? It’s a curiosity bilich at curiosity. Bone or bones? Singular singular curiosity. Bone going challenge metoo way. Curiosity is much easier to spell them. Geever. That’s curiosity Bone. OK, OK, good. All right, So now where else is it? Besides the Twitter Twitter accounts, you said it’s in a forum. Thie tenn dot org’s community forums will go ahead, and we’ll post that on the discussion. And then I think the decision makers would be a good one for that as well. And folks confined that okay, community forums within within ten dahna. Or there’s an decision makers as well as a discussed one, and we’LL go ahead and put that link up for folks because we did a lot of research, and a lot of resource is because we know it’s it’s hard to keep track. We’re gonna have to talk about some of these because we’re doing this for about ten minutes and I have a half hour segment to fill. So it’s okay. You don’t hook with Don’t look with go to the community forum, weigh a lot more. Okay. Okay, Janice, go ahead. Your turn, please. S o. I think that Okay, way talked about sort of the diagram diagrams. They’re, like, my favorite way. Talked about training, right? So I think also in terms of thinking, we talked a little bit about, like, the explicit versus task knowledge. And so sometimes it’s sort of like you’re like, where do I start? Right, So, like, I think that, like, just starting with getting things out of people’s heads, and you’ii think you come up together with some strategies like the, you know, shadowing people and sort of like doing the retrospective after an offense or things like that about shadowing something in real life. What’s that about shuttering people? So, you know, sometimes I don’t know if you’ve ever had that experience. It’s like, maybe haven’t somebody knew who’s coming on board and they ask all these questions. You’re like, I never would have thought to explain them if you had an *** that question. So sometimes, you know, in terms of getting that knowledge out of someone’s head, we don’t always realize that we have it because we’re like, Oh, yeah, like I just do it. And I’ve been doing this for a long time, and I don’t realize that that, you know, personal system that I’ve come up with for how to get this done really efficiently, that that’s actually knowledge that is useful and that I can share with someone else, like I could teach somebody else I do. This, it is, may be hard to think about how to do that, and sometimes the best, like the easiest way is to have someone who doesn’t have that experience watch you do, you know, like maybe how do I, you know, host a good podcast? How do I do an interview, right? And so you watch somebody else do it, and then you come up with these. You either like notice. Oh, they’re doing it. This and this order, they’re doing it in this way. Or it’s an opportunity to ask that question of, you know, like, why did you choose to do it that way? Right? And I wouldn’t have thought to explain the decision for me, Like, you know, I’ve done this a million times advantage, just, you know, So I think that’s a good, easy way to pull it out. Anybody could do it. Another simple related to that. Is it sort of just telling someone like, Oh, yeah, you just go enter this over there. You could use simple tools that we all have on our laptops I movie or another, you know, quickie tool, off of Windows, laptop and just scream cast really quick what you’re actually doing and capture that in a thirty second video. You know, you could post that internally. A lot of us use chat programs at work, you know, slack or G chat or whatever. You could post that straight in there on a team channel and say by the way. This is how you do the thing. And then if people have questions about, why are you doing it? That way you can have more of a live back and forth and just a static. You know, just go do that thing. But I think even to write, like not just the not just sharing it in that moment when somebody has that question, but making sure that it’s it’s stored somewhere that people confined it later because they’re like you had that question. Probably five other people will have that question. So let me just save save the time now and just put in a place where you could find all of the screen cast on DH. Yeah, they’re a lot of simple, like snag. It is. Another one is just really. It’s really simple to use on. It’s not that expensive, so a screen Flo would be another one that’s a little bit more pricey. It’s maybe ninety nine, but it’s it’s another good moflow captures maggot. What you’re doing live on your computer to demonstrate that for folks, Maybe you’ve got your Tio. You know, a lot of folks are purely remote offices, so you might not have that ability to sit one on one, but you you could capture what you’re doing for a training video like Janice mentioned. If one person has that question, you know, ten other people have got that questions of capturing that knowledge of them, making sure you get that knowledge out as well, Not just capturing at once, but making sure people know where that resource is good. And sometimes that’s faster, right? Like trying to get somebody to like, can you? Right, the out, all the stops and documentation. They just look at you with that leg. Look like I don’t want to need you to spend time like if you were to ask him to show you that I’m like, Oh, yeah, like you did so did it up right? And and so that’s almost a wayto document more quickly. So especially people who don’t like to write things out or like they’re really stress out about it, but are willing to answer that question in that moment. If you can capture that then and make it easy for them, I think sometimes that it’s pompel for that, Uh, I don’t have anything else to say except what other? Whatever tools we got when I was trying, I was trying to think of some different types of data needs, but I can’t I can’t think of any that that I was going to ask you about specifically. So you may as well just keep going. We can talk about women defremery. Sure, a couple of the other items we talked about that are sort of the basis for when we talk about knowledge management. People look at that and they go, How did I do that? What are some practical ways to do that? So we talked about having a knowledge management framework, and frameworks can be really intimidating for folks. They see that they look online and they say all these diagrams and they go. I don’t know what that is, but it’s really just a lens for thinking about the structure. Framework is just a structure. It’s a scaffold. Eso It’s how you build your knowledge management and a focus of what’s important for your organization. Is it that is Janice mentioned? Capturing tacit knowledge is a huge problem. Your organization nobody writes anything down. They leave and then you don’t know what they did so maybe you want to build your knowledge management process, focusing on capturing tacit knowledge. Maybe it is that you guys love doing documentation, but nobody ever updates the documentation. So maybe you need to build your framework on a continuous capturing of that knowledge and continues updating instead. So we talked about different ways to to think about how knowledge works at your organization and how you should build your structures around that. And then another simple tool that we talked about is a taxonomy, which most people already have at their organizations. But they don’t think about it, and it’s not really written down. And that’s the way you refer to commonalities. So maybe your know it. Urban teachers. We’ve got three remote offices, and we use acronyms in particular terms to refer to them. We’ve got terms for referring to our program and for different stages of our participants. That’s a taxonomy. That’s something we can use across all of our systems as a common language, and it usually starts in the in the document management system, and that’s often where people see it. They build that out across multiple systems that can be used in your CR M. It could be used in your HR system. It could be used in your documentation on when you start having a common taxonomy or lexicon like that, it makes it easier to capture knowledge management cause People start using the same things to refer to processes, and it helps bring teams together and really provides a cohesion around your knowledge in your organization. Just a common understanding. Yeah, and people are often they already have one. They just don’t think about it, his attacks on me, but in general, they’ve already got one. The other thing, too, is that you can capture all of this documentation, right? But if nobody knows what it’s called like if you call it volunteermatch judgment and I call it, I don’t know constitutent management or whatever, right, I that’s no good, because then I’m not finding I’m not looking under there because I don’t think that that’s relevant to what I’m looking for. So I think that that common language is also what makes it you know, that your consistent about it you can other people confined it. They know, like OK, when someone says like this is you know, our hears their marketing materials, right? I know that that our logo is considered our marketing materials, right? And some other places it might be under something else entirely. Might be, like under and join our brand your brands, right? So it doesn’t matter what that is, as long as there’s that shared understanding the organization. This is what it means so that I can go into the document German system or, you know, if I ask, ask somebody. Hey, I’m looking for acts, right? Like we have a shared. Understand what that means and what they look for it. How do you create the shared understanding and taxonomy if one doesn’t exist? You were saying, You know, it probably exists and you don’t know it, but suppose it doesn’t suppose you know, just lots of examples of people referring to the same thing by different names. That’s where you need treyz glossary. What do you do it? It’s where you need to do a little bit of legwork. Someone on your team. It’s usually on the team, but not necessarily needs to do some knowledge. Management work needs to work with those teams, and, you know, maybe you’ve got eight sites but they and they’re all talking about his Janice mentioned things under different labels, but they’re all really doing operations, functions or volunteermatch judgment. So you work with those individual departments are sites and you find out what their commonalities are because a lot of knowledge management is about finding commonalities between things a lot of groundwork. Yeah, And you do you have to, As Janice said very aptly yesterday, you’ve gotta invest some time to save some time. You know, you can’t get saved time for free. You need to invest some some leg work up front. So if you work with those different departments to figure out what their commonalities r and you work with them to build a lexicon, you’re going to find that people aren’t is really determined to refer to something as a particular thing as they once thought. When you start showing them the commonalities on DH when I’ve done taxonomy, is that organizations? In all three cases, I’ve had to do it. People end up agreeing on the taxonomy because they you know when when you get him talking, they’re really just talking about the same things. And they’re really not that invested in referring to it as a particular thing. They’re okay with going with operations instead of, you know, office, office management or something like that. You know, they released a little bit, and they realize special and you promoted as like, you know, we’re trying to make it easier to work together. They tend to release a little bit and go. Yeah, okay. We’re cool with operations, OK? I’m surprised to hear that, actually, people would stick to their This is operations. Well, that’s what culture. So that way, that way. So So, Yeah, we talked a bit about organization because I think any time you talk about language, any time you talk about the way that we do things here, right, that is organizational culture. And you know you don’t have unorganised age culture that supports knowledge management that supports learning, right? Sharing of information. You know, sometimes people will get very Don’t touch my stuff. Stay in your lane. You know, this is my job. That’s your job. Whereas I think if you are learning organization, if you want to build that college culture of you know, we share our knowledge here and we all learn from each other. You know that obviously you don’t want those silos. That doesn’t work out very well. That’s kind of the essence of what you’re trying to do. But I think like the one of things that we talked about in terms of road blocks, where you’re trying to roll some stuff out and maybe people are like insecure, they viewed their knowledge is job security. And it’s not that Maybe that doesn’t come from a place where they used to work somewhere where you know that was an issue and that that certainly can be at an issue and in some organizations, But a lot of times it’s just that really, that individual like, you know, I want to make sure that I keep my job or I want to be seen as valuable. And you can use that to write because so it can be not were trying to steal your knowledge and take take your job away from here, take things away from you, but also you know, Hey, your knowledge is valuable and sometimes people don’t see that and helping them see that you’re acknowledges really valuable to the organization and look how much stronger the team could be if we all had could use that knowledge, and we could help you even more. And, you know, whatever you’re you’re role is all right. Gentle persuasion, all but all for the good of the mission. Absolutely. Way all could do a better job if we could come together with this agreement around this common language. Yeah. Yeah. And also acknowledging that you might be in an organization where you know there is a toxic or culture, and they’re no amount of knowledge. Management is going to fix that. So they’re just, you know, knowledge management cannot fix broken business process buzzes and broken culture. So there is an acknowledgement of that. You you’ve got larger problems if that’s going on in your organization, and we can fix that for you. We’ve had discussions about on the show previous ntcdinosaur about blaming technology when leadership or processes or culture are the problem, right? And I’m looking for a technology solution to a bad CEO, right? No amount of pretty software is going to fix something like that. No amount of nice, you know? Well streamlined document man, aren’t you? Knowledge management is going to fix that. Wait a couple more minutes together. Uh, what else did you talk about? That maybe some questions about some of the Okay, Well, a lot of the questions were related about related to culture and trying to get people on board with things when people were resistant. Because it’s hard to make it hard to make culture change. Absolutely, absolutely. And I think it’s sort of like it needs become a part of the way you do that here. And so it needs to also be part of, you know, one way. Besides, getting people’s buy-in is also making a part of job expectations, making it part of your performance performance evaluation on DH. You know, just making it like every time we haven’t have a project meeting, right reflection is part of that. Every time we have a staff meeting, there’s there’s some aspect of knowledge mansion or we talk about. You know, every quarter we talk about what do we need to update? Maybe in document management? Maybe. What do we need? So like, nobody uses this folder. Nobody looks like this like it’s maybe we need to just archive it. We don’t need it anymore or things like that and building that in and acknowledging that you can’t do this solo, you need your stakeholders and identifying who those are early on and that you’re going to need some executive stake holders. Get them in. Earlier on, we talked about different techniques with you know, that straight project management type stuff. But in terms of knowledge management, get him onboard early. You know you’re going to need them to help you push this through on DH. Really? Make sure you take care of your stakeholders and you deal with the people that are not liking your process. Figure out why they don’t like your process and try and work with that. You know it might not make them your favorite stakeholder, but if you understand where they’re coming from, like Janis was just talking about, like understanding why they’re a road block that could be really key to getting past them and really making them invested in your project and turning them around to liking your project. Having good office relationships helps also yeah, long before we’re talking about knowledge management. Just if you’re decent and it isn’t to your peers and colleagues and, uh, you get to know them outside the office, you know? And you’ve got his foundation of a relationship than when you’re calling on them for some. Some compromise. I think you’re more apt to get it. Yeah. They didn’t trust that. This is going to be good for the organization. This is We’re working towards the same goal if you don’t have that trust, and you need to start there like you need to start establishing Janet. You also mentioned the archive folder. I do plan e-giving consulting on. So I’m brought in sometimes to revive a program that’s stalled. And maybe there was a plan e-giving consultant or director. You know, four years ago. And then they eliminated the position, and it just kind of faded away, So I’m so I’m invited. Tio, update the files. Update the files. I can’t tell you that the first full day I makes archive, I’m opening this. I don’t know what everything is from two thousand six. We’LL move archive. You know, it has no relevance reducing that I think producing that clutter are not overwhelming to people. What are things you that actually relevant to to our organisation and our operations now, like maybe we need to keep that. You know, we don’t care. We’re not sure if we need to keep out, and we’re keeping it just in case that sort of get it, clear it out of the way, right? Because, like, it’s not the stuff you’re using all the time. The stuff that you are using frequently That should be, you know, really central and real quick. Good technique. With that, people get really nervous when they say you’re going to delete those archives and they hide a copy of them. So you just do a process where you keep them. But you put them in a place where it’s not clogging up their search terms and assure them they really, really need that. You can still get that back for you, and that really helps them move it out of what? What’s searchable their day today life. But if they know that it’s still there somewhere, they often are much better with being able to archive because they’re not worried about you pushing the w good. Okay, Janice, I’m gonna give you a chance to wrap up. Oh, like she’s pulling together. So I think some of the biggest things we talked about were really like, Get things out of people’s heads, Get the knowledge out of people’s heads, make it organized so that people can find it in a way that it’s It’s not overwhelming to people what makes sense to them, right? And also not, you know, being aware of people’s what people are scared of or what people. But those hang ups or obstacles might be to make sure that we can address them and get them on board. And it sounds like a lot of rigging it is, but the passing that time out front will really help you save time down the road. All right, that was Janice Chan. She’s consultant Shift and scaffold on DH. Also Darby arika, director of information technology at Urban Teachers. You are with non-profit radios coverage of twenty nineteen, the non-profit Technology Conference. All of our nineteen ntcdinosaur views are brought to you by our partners at Act Blue Free fund-raising tools to help non-profits make an impact. Thanks so much for being with us. I need to take a break. Wagner, CPS. They’re free. Webinar came and went earlier this month. Tips and tricks for your nine ninety you missed it. You suck. No, but you can get it back. You watch the archive? Yes. Lamenting wayward listener that’s you gets the archive. You learn how to use your nine ninety as a marketing tool. You goto Wagner cps dot com Click seminars go to the month of April. I know it’s a little convoluted, but they don’t have a landing page there. Wagner cps dot com Click seminars Go to April and you’LL find tips and tricks for your nine ninety. Now time for Tony’s take to be the one that is my video this week. Inspired by in an Air Force reunion that I put together. It’s not really fair for me to say I hosted it because it was on the Air Force base, where we all worked Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri in the mid to late eighties, and about thirty five of us came together and then you add spouses was like fifty people, a total, but we all had this shared experience of doing an unusual job. We were launch officers for Minuteman nuclear missiles at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri in the Reagan years, and so we came together and It was just wonderful seeing everybody reconnecting you. No way have had we’ve had to reunion since then, So some of us have gotten together at other times. But some of us we have some haven’t been seen since, like nineteen eighty eight eighty nine. But there’s a re connection immediate, and that was the inspiration from my video. Be the one and what? What I mean by that? You’re just gonna have to watch. The video is at tony martignetti dot com, and that is Tony. Take do now. It’s Miller time. No, it’s not Miller. It’s Maria time. Real simple. Maybe Maria drinks Miller. I don’t know. Probably not. She has better taste. She has better taste in that. She’s much, much more refined. She’s, Ah, she’s the prospect. Find her. She’s our our trainer all. She’s a Strainer and speaker on Prospect Research. He’s our research contributor. Her latest book is Magnify Your Business Tips, tools and Strategies for Growing Your Business or Your non-profit. She’s our Doi End of Dirt, cheap and free. She’s at the prospect finder dot com and at Maria Simple Maria. Simple. Welcome back after many, many months. Yes, thank you for having me back. It’s great to be here. Absolutely. You’ve been absent since Hurricane Florence, which you and I all know know verywell. Now we track hurricanes because we live in North Carolina very close to each other on that was last September, like September twelfth or so. Yes. You’re supposed to have been on. And you had to. You had to cancel because the hurricane was imminent. Yes, I was evacuating your evacuating, right. We had an evacuation order in my town, too. On. That’s last September. Now, are you Are you done with? You had some damage. You had more damaged than I did. Are you done re rebuilding? No, they haven’t even started. Yeah, that’s the problem that people don’t get. It’s hard is held to get contractors. And this is back from September. We’re talking about September. Well, yeah, well, we’ve got this contractors on site, but there have been a lot of insurance related issues, so that’s a whole other thing. Yeah, well, there’s that too, but but just the idea of getting contractors, people don’t realize that. Of course, I never did When I lived here in the city that it’s it’s It’s not uncommon for it to be years later. I mean, I guess we experienced it somewhat with Katrina. You saw, you know, the one year anniversary, the two year anniversary. But everybody, you know, Katrina struck me as a riel aberration. Although now as the climate changes, it’s it’s less so. But at the time, it seemed like, you know, it couldn’t be that devastating. But But even just Hurricane Florence from last September in the Carolinas, it is devastating. And people are still rebuilding and have not like like you. Yeah. Yeah. Still still waiting on a lot of a lot of work to get done. But you know what? I’m grateful and blessed to still have a roof over my head and we can live in our space so that that’s all good. Yeah, yesterday. I mean, when I say rebuilding, you weren’t destroyed. But you had you had damage damage in your in your apartment. What do you It’s a townhouse. Where do you have their townhouse? Condo. Thank you. Answer. Okay. That word eluded me. That’s a That’s an advance word from a condo. Right on your in your condo. Alright. So welcome back. It’s been many many months. I’m glad you’re back. Thank God you’re back. Um, so we’re talking about ethics? Um, what’s I mean? There is a lot of there’s a ton of private information and personal info, and you know, they have to be boundaries around what we collect and how we save what we do collect. That’s that’s issues here. Yes. So, you know, that’s definitely a lot of the issues here. You know, it’s it’s interesting because sometimes people will call me and they will say, You know, Maria, I need you to work up profiles, whatever these five or ten people we need, Thio know everything they’re interested in. You need to know their network on DH a sentence. They actually, as soon as they say that word network. I know that there’s a certain level of educating that I’m going to have to do even if I begin to start to work with this particular client. And and the reason for that is because what we as prospect researchers have access to, So whether you’re working for a small to midsize non-profit or you’re a college or university or ah ha, that all you have on ly to information that’s in the public domain. We do not have access to private information such as credit reports, right? So it’s important to make that distinction. Because when we’re looking at publicly available sources, we can never come up with a net worth. I don’t tell someone. Yeah, we’re going to get into detail on the Net worth conversation. I know you. Yeah, You specifically have wrote something on it. We’Ll get to that. Um but so let’s let’s let’s pursue what you just said about public versus private sources. I mean, I would think that when your clients hire you to do prospect research or when we task our prospect researchers if their in house, uh, we want all sources, whatever you can get it. Where did you get your hands on? No, right, that’s not so right. That’s that’s an uninformed doesn’t mean she can’t get your hands on. It might not be something that your organization would consider ethical. So an example of this might be, um, divorce records, right? So sometimes those be publicly access. However, think about this. If if you have to stop and think to yourself, how would how would this donor for a perspective donor-centric er ds. And if the answer to that is G, they might sever the relationship with our organization altogether. Then it’s simply not worth looking at those divorce records or even hey, even, maybe not. Maybe not be so extreme, but they would be upset that we were evaluating that. But But But But it has value. Okay, so let’s have a conversation. So I’m gonna push back. It has value to the organization. Um, if I’m trying to find out how much a person’s settlement is in a in a divorce, you know that that goes to what I think their capability is for giving to my organization. How much they gained or lost in a divorce is goingto figure into that calculus, all right, but just let’s say they’ve gained a million dollars from that divorce settlement. Are you entitled necessarily to that million dollars? It’s just like anybody making their money in any other way. Just because they have it doesn’t mean that they would want to gift any part of that settlement here working well, you, But you could say that about you could say that about anything. You could say that about their salary. Just because they make one hundred fifty thousand dollars a year doesn’t mean I’m entitled to any of it or one and a half million dollars a year. You could say that about anything, right? But that’s why I think you really want to rely more heavily on good old development, work and cultivation and developing a relationship and under standing what those people have an interest in funding on DH whether it’ll the lines properly rather than knowing the final settlement amount of what their divorces. Okay, But it’s still I mean, I I agree that it’s unseemly, but I’m I’m challenging it anyway because, uh, you’re stuck with me as the host. I mean, that’s the best. You’re the best reason I’ve come up with. So you’re stuck with it. You can either hang up or continue. It’s your choice on I’LL be fine without you. So don’t worry. You know, if you want to end up going so I mean, I’ll entertain myself. If nobody else, I just amuse myself. Um, no. Okay, so now but it’s still it goes to their potential. I mean, you’re you look at other sources of potential, right? Like like you public public public stock holdings, right? If the person happens to be an insider, you and I have talked about this, so this is not jargon jail material. You know, I’ve talked about this. If they’re an Insider Inc. Then their public, their their their stock holdings are public. That goes to their capacity to give. So why write? You have to find another reason why divorce settlement either gain or loss is not is not valuable info because because so far so far it’s analogous to a matter of public of insider stock. So when those when those insider stockholders file with the federal with the SEC right, the Securities and Exchange Commission, they know that this becomes part of a public filing that is completely searchable online, etcetera, etcetera. Operation will have it on their website. No eso again. It’s just what is the perception that they’re goingto have of you looking at the different types of records. So I think that again, and it’s just if your organization ends up having a policy that it’s perfectly fine to do that, then that’s fine. But I think that you do need to make a decision about you know if if are there certain types of records that you will consider off limits for your organization and just put a policy in place, whatever. Whatever way you decide to go, in the matter of, say, divorce records, for example, what’s another word not going against your policy? Do you think of another category of data? That’s Ah, a gray area. Um, you’re a professional, and you’re professional researcher. Yeah, well, you’ve been asked three years for other stuff that you felt uncomfortable with. Well, they’re what they’re I can remember one time in particular when I was researching an individual. Ah, that I decided not to put something in writing because I knew that the perspective donor-centric lorcan ization And this is this is across the board. You need to be aware of this, uh, altum non-profits do that. They could walk into your organization and say, Show me what you’ve amassed on the show Me any. Tell me my donor records. Show me my files. Right. Uh, so you need to be able to turn that over and know that they’ve been written in a very subjective and objective way. I’m sorry and not put anything subjective into it. No subjective statement. So, for example, there was something that I passed along to a development officer verbally, as opposed to putting it in writing, because I felt that it was going to potentially jeopardize our relationship that they were developing with that individual. However, it was very important that the development office, they’re new, that this person had insider trading and had done some paid a lot of fines for it in their background because they were considering this person as treasurer for the organisation Esso. I felt that it was my duty to toe let this officer know that this was in this person’s background because they just didn’t know that, right? Very Jermaine. Yeah, I think you might have used that as an example some other time for something else we talked about. That sounds familiar. Yeah, okay, but it’s a good one. It’s a poignant story. Okay, okay. All right, so So I. So I guess you’re saying divorce records. That’s the main. That’s the main thing that you find unseemly. And I do kind of like your standard do of what would if someone came in and read everything that we have on them. What would they say? How would they feel on that? That’s going to go to not only what you include, but how you describe it to how you describe your conversations with them. You know, you and I both agree that the best some of the best research, not all some of the best research comes from face to face meetings. How do you describe those meetings in your CR M after you’re back from the lunch or the dinner on DH? So thinking how the person would evaluate that feel about it could shade how you describe it? Okay, I gotto now. I just did a lot of talking. I gotta take a break. Hold on, Maria Simple. Stand by our last Break last break text to give you diversify your revenue by adding mobile e-giving. It is a misconception that this is only for disasters. That’s not true. You can build relationships by text. You do what you do it all the time with your family and friends. You can build relationships with donors as well. It’s very possible to do through texting. You learnt how, with the five part email, many course, um, to get into the many course you text NPR two four, four, four, nine, nine, nine. Now we gotta do the live listener, love. Ah, and it’s Ah, live listeners are in starting abroad. Seoul, Seoul, South Korea Gotta send annual haserot comes a ham Nida, of course, to Seoul Moscow, Russia Welcome Moscow on DH Hanoi Hanoi, Vietnam Sometimes Vietnam is with us, but we can’t see the city. But today we can we know. We know it’s Hanoi. Welcome, live! Listen, love to Vietnam and also Istanbul, Turkey. Very happy to have you with us Live love to you and Burundi. I’m sorry. We cannot see your city Brandy, but we know you are with us. So live love. I think that’s a first for burned e cool. And here in the U. S. Only couple Tampa, Florida Live love to you New York, New York Multiple love to see that. And on the heels of the live listen, love comes the podcast Pleasantry are pleasant trees. It’s multiple. There’s more than one listener podcast. In fact, they’re over thirteen thousand, so I can’t just send one pleasantry. The pleasantries to you so glad that you are with us. However, non-profit radio fits into your schedule. Pleasantries to you. Thank you for being with us on the podcast. Now, we’ve got lots more time for ethics in your prospect research. Um, anything you want to say, Marie Sample. I gave a big diatribe, and then I cut you off with a with a with a break. Anything you want to add or comment on About what I just said. Now, Now, I think I think we covered that in general. But I did want to spend a little bit of time talking about, you know, potential code of ethics that the organization might want to follow on where they could find some guidelines. Yes, you get your dirt free and dirt free. Resource is cheapen defremery everything. Okay, So there’s this awesome organization that you’ve heard me mention it before. That professional researchers prospect researchers either belong to it were at minimum, will adhere to their code of ethics and its apra a p r a. Dahna work. So that stands for the Association of Professional Researchers for Advancement. And the thing about APRA is that they’ve got this page of their website that is actually dedicated to their statement of ethics. So it would be great if your listeners at least went to the after a website. Took a look at the ethics statement Whether or not you remember and really take a look at you know what is involved? What are the areas that you need to be aware of as you’re putting together your your code of ethics for your organization. And they’ve even got a wonderful ethics tool kit. A za pdf document that’s chock full of great resource is so I really would encourage your listeners to go check out our our listeners. Maria. Simple, please. You made that mistake. You made that part in that pronounced twice. I share the listselect hours. No ownership here. Yes. So I I went through. I was disappointed with the statement of ethics. I I found it kind of vague. However, the tool kit had the good examples. Like I was looking for examples. All right, um, of you know, they talk about, for instance, in the statement of ah, statement of ethics, they talk about bilich shall only record data that is appropriate to the fund-raising process. So I was thinking for I was looking for examples of what’s inappropriate, but it gets flushed out when you go to the when you go to the tool kit now, right? So let’s, uh let’s talk a little about Oso in the ethics statement, it suggests a couple things like you should not be. You should not be friending prospects that you’re doing research on with your personal accounts for one is that that’s right. Is that your statement? Yes, yes, that’s correct. And and also, you should be transparent when you are doing any type of research on behalf of your organization, right? So if you’re, uh if you’re if you’re calling somewhere to find out, you know, whatever. Somebody stop holdings are something like that, you know, in public stockholding records and and they ask you, you know who’s calling you. You have to be transparent as to who you are on DH, you know, and what organizations of your work you know as well. So you want to just make sure that your you do have maintained the standard. Okay, so So when you’re calling, you’re not just saying, uh, my name is Maria Simple, but you’re giving the name of the organization that you’re calling on behalf of two. Is that what you mean? Right? And quite frankly, it is rare that you’re going to be asked for, you know? So when they’re publicly source to information, they’re typically not going to be asking, you know who’s calling? I mean, I’ve never called. For example, if I can’t find information on tax assessment records, right or tax property tax records and I call it an assessor’s office, they’ve never really asked Who is this? Why are you asking? Because they know it’s publicly available information. They just give you the information that you’re looking for, you know, on that property record so you can call and ask about any property you know, anywhere in the United States, and you’d be able to get that information without being asked. But if in the in the event that you ever are rushed to be transparent, so the same goes on social media, right, um, you can That’s why you don’t want to make a fake profile. But I know I saw that. Yeah, people do that. You don’t want to make a fake Lincoln profile with the, you know, with the intention of trying to take all these people into becoming your first degree connections just so that you can reap all this wonderful information off their profile, right? Because now they might be okay. Here’s an interesting one. Suppose they’re talking about their divorce on, um, Now, don’t make it Facebook, because the likelihood of friending prospect on Facebook is pretty slim, I think. But let’s see. Well, wait. Now let’s see if they’re If they’re a fan of your organization Page, does their personal feed become visible to you? No. No, it doesn’t. No, no, it doesn’t work that way. Okay, but if they made any comments, you know, on DH, I got in. Any person would make a comment about their divorce, and I’m trying to I’m trying to make it more like trying to make it more likely. Okay. Suppose this supposes Twitter, Um, suppose you’re the organization is following them on Twitter. Um, and, uh, and there another bitter. Or maybe they’re ecstatic. Maybe they did great. You know, maybe the guy reaped a big reward. Um, it feels like he you know, he’s got over. So the guy or the woman is now bragging on Twitter and you’re following them. That’s that’s public now. Right now, it’s now it’s public. Now it’s public. So in my opinion, I think my fellow researchers would probably agree with this. It would be perfectly fine Teo to take a screenshot or quote what was said and then give attribution to the day, uh, that you saw this particular quote on Twitter. Ah, and but again write it in a very objective way. So you know you don’t write. You don’t introduce it by saying, you know, looks like metoo windfall in their divorce, as evidenced by the tweets. And, you know, just you know this so and so commented on their divorce by saying, you know, the couple was divorced, It would appear the divorce is final and the prospect had the following tweet regarding their divorce. Not now. Very objectively written. Okay, I agree. I see. Um, so going into the going into the er going to the tool kit? Um, they said something about list sharing that I was surprised by, um, list sharing. Never share lists with volunteers, key stakeholders, um, etcetera, etcetera. But But they were saying they said volunteers and key stakeholders. But we’ve talked about Andi. I’ve had other guests to talk about sharing lists with board members. But but this opportunity, it says you shouldn’t be sharing this with volunteers and key stakeholders. What do you make of that? Yes, so again have a very clear policy in place. So if your organization’s policy would be that the only stakeholders who would have access to discussion of proactively created list would be boardmember and state that on DH, then maybe put together ah, confidentiality confidentiality policy for your volunteers board members on employees. Also, by the way, on DH, we could talk a little bit later about a particular organization that has an excellent example of those types confidentiality agreements. But if you are going to start doing that type of list creation, discussion of lists or even quite frankly, discussion of any prepared profiles that you have on individuals, it’s going to be a good idea. Tto have thes confidentiality policies in place. Okay, okay, shut out the organization now go ahead. The one that has good, good examples. What right? And so there’s one called the National Council of non-profits. Ah, and the the way I actually got to their their confidentiality agreement was actually through through the two tool kit and through operas website. So that would be a really good place for you to start. And then, you know, get your way over to those agreements that they get very good samples that you could literally just, you know, very easily modify, um, plug in the name of your organization, you know, run it by your attorneys to make sure that being the language would be appropriate for your organization and then actually have these folks sign it. So, Fury, let’s say you’re only going to have the Development committee is going to be the only folks that have access to any, uh, any of these profiles or these lists that you create and make sure that everybody on that development committee, whether they be a boardmember or outside the board, you might have you might have some outside boardmember is also involved in development efforts. Have them sign the agreement as well. And then these documents have to be treated properly after they’re after there. You set the board meeting, right? Absolutely. Absolutely. If you decide to print anything out, be extremely careful about what happens with those documents. Try not to let any of them walk out of the room, make sure you’ve got a shredder in house. The last thing you want is for something to go into the trash and, you know, or recycling or whatever and then get, you know, literally the wind blow it around the neighborhood. So did you want to be careful? And even though it’s all publicly sourced information, still, it is something that, uh, that they were accepted the donor or perspective donor. You know, out there in aggregate, it could be a lot more valuable than individual discrete pieces of data that people have to go and find on, especially when it’s a list of fifty potential major donors, etcetera or even foundations. All right, I want to give you a shout out. You are. You are named in the Capital kit because you wrote an article about being more than networth for from non-profit times and we so So you already already explained why you need need no liabilities, not just assets if you if you’re going to do real net worth. But they shot you out in the tool kit. So I wanted to mention that. Okay, wait. Just have thiss flies, but it always does with you. So we just have, like, thirty seconds left. Um, wrap us up. Okay. So to wrap this up, then you’ve got all this wonderful information. Make sure that it is stored in a secure way. Locked file, password protected files if you you share it through e mail. Make sure through password protected, encrypted ways that you’re communicating this thes profiles and so forth on. So make sure that the data is all security in some way. Ah, if your whatever you’re using Teo as your cr m Teo donorsearch software, make sure it’s password protected. And I know exactly who has access to those passwords, then change them often. Thank you very much. Maria. Simple. She is the Prospect Finder trainer and speaker on Prospect Research are doi and of their cheapened free you’ll find her at the prospect finder dot com And at Marie, a simple thank you again. Maria, Thank you for having me. Good to see you again. Thanks. My pleasure. Next week, more from the non-profit technology conference. If you missed any part of today’s show, I beseech you find it on tony. Martignetti dot com were sponsored by pursuing online tools for small and midsize non-profits, data driven and technology enabled Tony dahna slash pursuing by witness Deepa is guiding you beyond the numbers when you’re cps dot com and by text to give mobile donations. Made Easy text. NPR to four four four nine nine nine A Creative producers. Claire Meyerhoff Sam Liebowitz is the line producer show. Social Media is by Susan Chavez. Mark Silverman is our Web guy, and this music is by Scott Stein be with me next week for non-profit radio. Big non-profit Ideas for the other ninety five percent Go out and be great. You’re listening to the talking alternate network e-giving Good. You’re listening to the Talking Alternative Network. Are you stuck in a rut? Negative thoughts, feelings and conversations got you down. Hi, I’m nor in Sumpter potentially ater. Tune in every Tuesday at nine to ten p. M. 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