A Digital Transformation Toolkit with Karen Graham

In this episode of Health Nonprofit Digital Marketing, speaker, trainer, and consultant Karen Graham joins us to share the fundamentals of technology planning and making the case for technology investments. We discuss how to assess your current level of technology maturity and determine what to focus on. We also discuss writing a strategic technology plan, identifying learning needs, building staff technology skills, and pitching technology improvements to your boss, board, and funders. Karen also shares the importance of evaluating ROI for current and potential technologies

If you are seeking to use technology in ways that unlock possibilities you’ve never had before, or that lead to big changes in the way you do your work or the impact you make, you don’t want to miss this episode.

About the guest

Karen Graham is a speaker, trainer, writer, and consultant with expertise in technology leadership and innovation, nonprofit software, and digital strategy. Her consulting work includes strategic technology roadmaps, development of knowledge resources, and leadership coaching. 

Karen was the Executive Director of the national nonprofit Idealware, and has held leadership roles in capacity building, arts, and human service organizations as well as a software startup. She holds an MBA in Nonprofit Management from the University of St. Thomas.

Resources

• Minnesota Council of Nonprofits: https://minnesotanonprofits.org/
• Technology Association of Grantmakers: https://www.tagtech.org/
• AI Episodes of Health Digital Non Profit: https://brooks.digital/health-nonprofit-digital-marketing/navigating-nonprofit-landscape-ai/

Contact Karen

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karentgraham/ 
• Website: karengrahamconsulting.com
• Worksheet: https://www.karengrahamconsulting.com/worksheet

Full Transcript

00:04

Welcome to Health Nonprofit Digital Marketing, a podcast for nonprofit marketers in the health space. Join us as we discuss how to use the web to drive awareness, engagement and action for health causes. This podcast is part of the thought education of Brooks digital, the web agency for health nonprofits. Now here’s your host, Spencer Brooks.

Spencer Brooks 00:26

Hello and welcome back to another episode of Health Nonprofit Digital Marketing as always. My name is Spencer, and today I am joined by Karen Graham. Karen is a speaker, trainer, writer and consultant with expertise in technology, leadership and innovation, nonprofit software and digital strategy. Her consulting work includes stuff like strategic technology roadmaps, development of knowledge resources and leadership coaching. I think I first met Karen in the Nonprofit.ist community, again, this is the second guest, I think that I’ve met there, and also got a chance to connect with her at the recent NTC conference, which was awesome. I brought her on the show today to talk about digital transformation, which is a it’s a broad topic, but we’re going to do our best to tackle the most important pieces here within this episode. So, Karen, first of all, welcome on the show.

Karen Graham 01:22

Thanks a lot, and I’m glad to be a guest.

Spencer Brooks 01:24

Yeah, I’m glad to have you here. Could you kick us off here by, let’s maybe set the stage on what digital transformation is. Maybe there’s some folks that are listening to this that have heard digital transformation, that term before, but maybe they’re not familiar with it. So how would you define digital transformation?

Karen Graham 01:44

When I’m talking about digital transformation, I’m not talking about a one-time thing, and I think the word transformation can sound like, Okay, you make this huge change, and then you’re finished. And so I guess I’d like to try to encourage a different understanding of that, that it’s an ongoing process of aligning technology with your organization’s most important goals and strategies, and making sure, first of all, that the organization uses technology in a way that is stable and secure and productive; the foundations in place. But then beyond that, that it’s an organization that is also looking for ways to use technology that can be a game changer for their programs and for their communities.

Spencer Brooks 02:32

Yeah, that, I think it’s, gosh, such an important topic. I wanted to ask you about different signs or symptoms that maybe your technology isn’t aligned with your goals. I know that’s one of the key things that you mentioned just now in your definition. So, what are some specific things that a listener might be dealing with that could be symptoms or signs that the technology at their nonprofit is maybe not supporting their goals? What’s a good candidate for someone who might embark on on the idea or this, this journey of digital transformation?

Karen Graham 03:14

I find that recently, sometimes there’s a big wake up call that happens when a nonprofit falls victim to a phishing attack, a ransomware attack, you know, some kind of security issue that gets their attention and makes them realize maybe we need to, you know, put a little more effort into making our data more secure, making our systems more secure. So security could be one thing, but there are also ongoing issues that just sort of gradually suck the life out of you, having equipment that’s old and just runs a little bit more slowly than would be optimal, having software that is under utilized because of user adoption barriers and inefficient processes, not enough data to make really well informed decisions. Little things like that can seem small if you just look at them one in isolation, but if you add them all together, they can actually be a huge barrier to an organization’s effectiveness, and they can also create issues with job satisfaction that leads to increased turnover, poor staff retention, and just people not enjoying their work. And so if you’re experiencing any of those kinds of issues, that might be a signal that maybe you need to look at a technology plan, a systematic look at how you’re using technology, because there are better ways to do it.

Spencer Brooks 04:42

Yeah. How do you think organizations get in that spot to begin with? Do you think it’s just sort of slow atrophy, you know, where just technology descends into chaos without a plan? Is it leadership? Is it something else?

Karen Graham 04:56

It’s all those things. It is easy for nonprofit organizations, because there’s a motivation to be frugal when you’re using public funds that have been entrusted to you, people’s donations, you don’t want to spend that money on something that’s not really valuable, that’s not going to have a direct impact on the community that you serve. And so because of that, I think a lot of people tend to underspend on technology and but it’s sort of a myth. It’s not really true that spending on technology doesn’t have a direct impact on an organization’s mission.

Spencer Brooks 05:36

Yeah, I think about the idea of, you know, when you’re evaluating a nonprofit and looking at the cost of the overhead versus what’s going to the programs. And it’s always so interesting, because technology can enable highly effective outcomes, but oftentimes it, maybe there’s just not a strong link between we spent this money on technology and it enabled us to achieve these outcomes that are related to our mission. And it just kind of gets categorized in a separate, you know, in this separate line item when you’re reporting. But I would agree with you, I think that it does enable it, and I don’t know, maybe there’s that disconnect between…

Karen Graham 06:19

It’s difficult to measure it when it’s working well, and to directly attribute success to a technology initiative, a technology investment. But you sure can tell when it’s not working well. It’s pretty easy to blame technology problems when things break down, you know, it’s just maybe not as easy to give them credit when things are working well.

Spencer Brooks 06:40

Yeah, that’s true. That’s as someone who works, you know, in tech, I yeah, I certainly understand that, right? Yeah, you know when stuff, when stuff isn’t going well, yeah, you’re right, it’s like, it’s very obvious, and when it does go well, it’s almost invisible.

Karen Graham 06:54

Right. There are some pretty well established benchmarks for what it looks like to be a tech savvy organization. What technology maturity looks like in nonprofit organizations. And I’ve been involved with some work by Tech Soup on that topic. Tech Soup has a digital maturity framework that is the underpinning for a free assessment that they offer on their website and the higher levels of digital maturity in their framework include things like decisions made in a much more strategic, less ad hoc manner, about technology, systems thinking, being able to think about when you make a technology change, or when technology is or isn’t going well, how does that affect all the other different parts of the organization? And a couple other things that are in their framework for higher levels of technology maturity are people who are well trained and adaptive in their use of technology and well developed processes. So, it’s not just about the tools, it’s also about people in process.

Spencer Brooks 07:59

Yeah, it kind of goes back to, I think what you were saying before is that this isn’t just a one time thing. All of these markers of digital maturity are much more operative, how the organization is operating, what habits and behaviors it’s using, as opposed to, we did this project, and now our technology is mature because we’re using the latest, you know, whatever AI, right, whatever that is. And I think that’s what I’m hearing, right? Is that this is not just we need to fix this problem by changing our technology and undergoing this six month or a year or multi year project, but it’s really about enabling the organization to behave differently.

Karen Graham 08:40

Right. Yeah, I would say technology success is a lot more about habit, culture, decision making, process, things like that, than it is about the actual tools that organizations are using.

Spencer Brooks 08:52

Yeah. So when, let’s talk a bit more then about the technology maturity, right? You mentioned some specific markers of, here’s a high level of technology maturity, but when going down to the other end of that, what would be the lower end of maturity, or medium. What are some, some markers, I guess, that people should be looking for as they’re assessing their own organization’s level of maturity and trying to plot where they are on that spectrum?

Karen Graham 09:22

Sure, maybe indications of a lower level of technology maturity would be decisions made in isolation, without any sort of guideline from the organization, or without any discussion or collaboration, and in a very ad hoc manner, not really taking into account what the organization’s goal is, or the whole technology ecosystem that it has, and of course, that can lead to all sorts of problems down the line, and then also people who are either not trained or not motivated to use the systems that the organization already has, and sloppy security and sloppy practices around data, data entry, data privacy, all those sorts of things would be indications to me that maybe the organization needs to drop everything and do something about this. If it’s somewhere in the middle, then organizations certainly stand a lot to gain from going through a technology planning process and investing a bit into increasing their sophistication, their maturity, and using technology and data. Maybe it’s not quite as acute, but that’s the place when you’re in the middle, where it’s actually maybe most difficult to realize how much benefit you could get from really taking a deliberate look at technology.

Spencer Brooks 10:49

Mmhmm. So Karen, if let’s imagine there’s, there’s a listener, multiple listeners right now that are raising their hand and going, all right, we need, we need to do something about this. We I think that our organization might benefit from it. What what’s next then? How would you take an organization that is or even a person within an organization that says, I think we need to do something about that? What advice would you give to that person on what to do next?

Karen Graham 11:19

First, think about your situation a little bit in terms of like, do you have the capacity to do a technology planning project yourself, or do you need help with that? Do you need an extra pair of hands? Do you need outside expertise to be able to advise you on that? And if the answer is yes, then maybe you start by looking for a consultant or a firm. Maybe talk to, if you have a managed service provider, some kind of IT service provider. Then maybe start with them and see if that’s a service that they can offer you and then another decision is, are you at a point where you should be looking at a strategic technology plan, or are you at a point where you should be fixing the leak in the roof, you know, like addressing a really urgent, big problem that is going to prevent you from moving forward on anything else and an example of that might be if there are really poor security practices in the organization, or if you have unreliable internet, slow internet, things like that, that sort of are sort of foundational. Those might you might want to just address those things first without being super strategic about it, because those are things that are huge risks for an organization and could be draining a lot of productivity or money from you. But let’s say you do want to start a strategic process and you want to do it yourself. A few steps I might take are starting with some kind of assessment, maybe the TechSoup assessment that I mentioned earlier. Or there are a variety of different online assessments that are available at no cost to nonprofit organizations. And so you could do one of those assessments, see what the results point to in terms of what your priorities might be. You could start making a list of all the technology you use. Maybe go through your accounting records and find out what you’re paying for and just get a good inventory of everything. And then start prioritizing fixes or improvements or opportunity investments using some kind of cost benefit matrix. I actually just went through this with an organization that’s one of my clients, and we had a grid with four different quadrants and then the directions you could go to get into different quadrants were how much effort or expense is involved in this in this project was one axis and then the other axis was the amount of benefit to the organization, or, you know, kind of mission benefit, and then it became pretty obvious right away that there were some projects that would be really big wins, but they would also require a substantial investment and a good deal of planning and some time. And so we treated those a little bit differently than little like quick, low hanging fruit that was high impact but very easy and cheap to implement.

Spencer Brooks 14:15

I love that.

Karen Graham 14:17

And it also helped us identify the things to just leave alone, because they were perhaps very costly or time intensive to address, and they didn’t actually have a lot of benefit. So that’s equally valuable. I think to know what it’s okay to just say, like, we’re gonna leave this be.

Spencer Brooks 14:33

Yeah. I would absolutely yeah. I would agree with that. I think that, it seems to be that just that structured process alone is so helpful to be able to think clearly and strategically. It’s a strategic technology plan after all, about where to invest limited time and resources. And I guess my follow up question then would be, this is something that could be started in isolation, but it certainly can’t be finished in isolation. So how and when do you recommend beginning to involve other stakeholders or other people in the organization? As you know, this germ of an idea comes out of maybe one person and needs to effectively spread to the whole organization?

Karen Graham 15:22

That’s a great, a great thing to think about when organizations are really successful with this, they’ve often involved someone at the executive level. Maybe it’s the executive director, maybe it’s someone else on the senior management team from the start, so that that person can be a champion for the project. I mean, this is basic like project management and change management, right? You choose a champion and make sure that they are going to advocate for the project. From the beginning, I’ve also found it’s helpful to form a committee of people that represent different perspectives in the organization, and it might be people from different departments or programmatic areas. It might also be people who have different levels of technology comfort themselves, or people who have been with the organization for a shorter or longer time. So think about a lot of different dimensions of diversity in that team, and that can be a team that provides input that helps you make better decisions, and it also can really pave the way for adoption of new technologies or for acceptance of changes in procedures and processes.

Spencer Brooks 16:35

So what about the executive team member or leadership that is skeptical about all this, right? Maybe you’re sitting somewhere in the organization where maybe you’re a director of marketing, communications, development, as I know a lot of listeners are. You know that this is going to be valuable. You’ve been convinced. But maybe your boss or someone on the executive leadership team isn’t so sure. What advice do you have for people to make a compelling argument for a strategic technology plan?

Karen Graham 17:11

Well, if you are in communications or fundraising, you probably know how to tell a story, so lean on that skill hard, I have found that data can be convincing, but a personal story is probably more convincing even inside your organization, the same way that that it is maybe for donors or other people that you communicate with externally. So I would start by thinking about who are the stakeholders that you need to convince, and what do they care about? What level of detail might they need? What objections might they have? Really think about the persuasion ahead of time, and don’t make the same pitch to everyone, because an executive director or a board member might be very compelled by the mission impact of a change that you’re going to make. The CFO or the finance director might also be interested in that, but what they really want to know is, how is this going to affect our budget? How is it going to affect cash flow? And so you might have a little bit different way of presenting things to someone like that, based on their role in the organization, and also based on people’s personalities, how busy they are, how much detail they tend to ask for, that sort of thing. But in general, I think even as you’re differentiating your pitch to all those different people, you always want to focus on the impact of the change and not as much on technical details that just put people to sleep. Honestly, some of us are very nerdy about this stuff, but most of us just want to know what’s the benefit of this investment, and how is it going to affect me, and how is it going to move our organization forward?

Spencer Brooks 18:59

Do you think there’s a situation where there’s too few or too many people involved? I sort of, I’ve seen this in other, you know, projects or, I mean, my background is fundamentally in websites, right? Which is a, it’s one could be one aspect of implementing something specific, but I do feel like it’s kind of a microcosm for larger strategic technology planning, in that I have seen people err in not involving enough people, or involving too many people, and both of those things can spiral out pretty hard. So could you talk a little bit more about that, about maybe I don’t, maybe you don’t even agree with that, but,

Karen Graham 19:44

Oh no, I do

Spencer Brooks 19:44

Do you  think that there’s a right number of people.

Karen Graham 19:46

I don’t think there’s a magic number. I think it does depend on the situation. In one organization I’m working with, they have a very small team. There are four staff. All four of them are working on the plan together. Yeah. In another organization, there are 150 people, and we also have four people, so maybe that means four is the magic number. But I don’t think that’s I don’t think it’s really anything about four. I think it’s just that we had people that represent enough different points of view and are trusted enough by their colleagues to provide input and make decisions on their behalf, that it was able to work. What’s maybe more important than the size of the group, to me, is to be clear on their roles. Are they advisors? Are they decision makers? Are they hands on implementers, helping them understand that, like if they provide input, what will be done with it, and what decision weight does that carry? That that’s really helpful.

Spencer Brooks 20:46

Oh, yeah, I’m glad that you mentioned that, because I I’ve seen, I think, when you get into a smaller organization, ironically, you know there’s less that can go wrong in terms of people, because there’s just fewer of them, right? Four people in an entire organization, it’s a little bit easier to steer that ship sometimes, although you have to deal with other things like lack of resources or maybe having to be a little bit scrappier. But I think, yeah, the people, getting people in the right roles, and soliciting input from the right people in the right way, seems to be a bit of an issue for larger organizations. I’m thinking of, for example, you know, yeah, let’s say you have 150 people in your organization, and you’re putting together a strategic technology plan, or maybe you’ve actually already identified, hey, here’s some low hanging fruit, or a significant project that we could undertake and we’re going to go and do this, not everyone can be involved in all of those decisions, but if you’re implementing some sort of technology or process that’s going to impact people on the front lines, obviously those people do need to have input on some level, but I think defining their role, like you mentioned, is so important, because otherwise you get one of these extremes of, we just didn’t ask anyone, and all of a sudden we come and start to train them. Hey, we’re going to use this new tool. And they go, why didn’t anyone ever come talk to me about this? Because we got problems X, Y and Z. But on the other hand, if you have 150 person committee, then you know you’re never going to get anywhere. So,

Karen Graham 22:21

Right! Oh, that would be a nightmare.

Spencer Brooks 22:23

You know, yeah. So anyway, this is me waxing poetic about, you know about this, just because I think it’s so important where and how people are.

Karen Graham 22:31

One more thing I’ll say about working together on this kind of thing is that, you know, if you’re in a fundraising or communications role and you’re working with an IT person in your organization. There might be an opportunity for you to present rather than them, not to stereotype. But I’ve worked with a number of technology people who have really great technical skills and don’t have great presentation skills, because they just haven’t been in a career path where they’ve been mentored on that, where they’ve received that kind of professional development, or had a lot of opportunity to practice it. And so I think there’s some opportunity for people in roles where they do have those skills that have been really sharpened and honed over the years to work well with their IT colleagues, to make sure that they can get the changes they want approved by leadership or by boards or whatever, by collaborating on a really strong pitch.

Spencer Brooks 23:27

 Yeah, you know, one of the things that came to mind when you’re talking about that, because I would definitely agree. I think that the thing about a tech person, I say this as someone who, my career path started as a developer, right? So, you know, I try my best to, you know, make it so that no one ever knows. Hopefully, it’s, you know, it doesn’t, doesn’t always come through in, you know, my some of the speech, but as a person who has come from that kind of role, the thing that can be difficult is that a tech person will know if I explain, okay, if we use this piece of software and we configure it in this way and we, here’s how we would implement this, they immediately can see the value. That’s all that’s obvious and implicit to them is, oh, right, I could see how this would be valuable, or, Oh, this would solve this problem, or things like that. I don’t know if it’s just a, you know, this part of an inbred skill, or they’ve just, you know, they’ve seen that, and so, yeah, having someone else explain it is, I totally agree with that.

Karen Graham 24:29

Right and maybe not starting with the technology. I’m thinking about trying to make the case for automation. And rather than approaching the program assistant and saying, I’ve got this automation that can can do this and just, you know, describe all the technical steps to it. I might instead ask her, How many minutes a day would you say that you spend on processing these PDF documents and then I might say, what if I could save you 20 minutes a day, would you be interested in hearing about that? Well, then you’ve really got her attention, and she has something to kind of hook the technology concept onto, rather than just coming at her with the technology right away. That might not be her area of interest, but she’s certainly interested in saving time.

Spencer Brooks 25:20

Yeah, that’s so good. That is so good. Karen, one of the things that I wanted to ask you about, and I have to ask you now so I don’t forget, is it’s kind of related to what we’ve been talking about, but it’s the idea of staff, technology skills, right? We’ve been talking about how there are some people in an organization that may be more, they have a technology career path, and there’s a lot of other people in an organization, though, that, you know, they have 1000 other things that they’ve been trained to do, and they might be average in their use of technology, but they don’t have, you know, maybe they don’t have the skills or the training to specifically use technology in the way that would enable them to impact the mission of the organization in a more meaningful way. So, do you have any useful tips, strategies, resources that the leaders could use to I both identify and say, Hey, here’s areas where the organization’s staff might be weaker, or areas that we need to address, and then also any tools or tips for actually then doing the professional development to help build technology skills within their organization?

Karen Graham 26:40

I would start by just asking people what they think they need, or what skills they might need to acquire to be able to do their work better. And so there are a lot of different ways you could go about that, through conversations. But also, I know a lot of organizations do an annual staff survey, and I like to see questions on the staff survey that ask about like, what’s your comfort level with the technology that we use in our day to day work? That’s not necessarily going to help you pinpoint an individual who needs help, because those surveys are often anonymous, but it will help you see over time how that’s changing. Does your staff as a whole feel like they have the technology skills they need, and they have the equipment, software, other sorts of resources they need to do well. So that’s one thing you can do. I’ve also seen some exercises and I actually help to develop something like this in a past job, where you create kind of a skills matrix, and you’ll list all of the skills that you think the organization or department needs to be successful. And then also, like, kind of compare that with the people that you have, and have them rate themselves, or have someone else who’s qualified to rate them. You know, kind of see, like, where, where do those skills, the actual skills, map to the desired skills, and then you’re able to sometimes see gaps. You might find that there’s nobody who has a I don’t know, I’ll give you an example. Recently, I had to do a bunch of shenanigans with DNS records with my website, and I did not have that skill, and there’s no one else in my organization who has that skill, and so I was pretty reliant on just kind of figuring it out by myself. That’s a situation where an organization could make a choice to bring somebody up to speed on that and help them gain those skills, or outsource it. That’s a perfectly viable way to do it as well. And there might also be other areas of technology skill where you need a lot of redundancy in the organization and you want more than one person to have really strong skills in that area. So, I guess, to summarize all that I’ve been saying here, it’s helpful to have some kind of systematic way of matching the skills you need with the skills you have, and identifying where the growth areas should be, where you most should be investing in training and development.

Spencer Brooks 29:17

So then I wanted to talk about what is probably this, is my theory anyway, is that the biggest blocker to doing something like that, into investing in staff skills is the actual capacity of the organization to do it, how much workload each person has right the time and attention and frankly, the prioritization of the time. I don’t know if you agree with that, but it seems to me that you know, hearing you speak about that, I can’t imagine that anyone listening is going to disagree that investing in professional development and technology skills is important, especially if, you know, they recognize as an organization, we need to level up in digital maturity. But I think when you actually get into the practical details of it, and you look at someone’s calendar and go, Okay, when are you going to?

Karen Graham 30:12

When is this going to happen? Yeah,

Spencer Brooks 30:14

Yeah, when are you going to block off an hour or two this week to do it right? Is, that is my theory anyway, I don’t know if you see other blockers or if you think that is a major one, but I’m curious to get your take.

Karen Graham 30:25

Oh, absolutely. People sort of recognize logically that this could be useful, but it doesn’t translate into their behavior. And I think it is a matter of literally blocking off time for it and holding people accountable for it. If you, I’ve said this many times before, if you really want to be a learning organization, if you’re going to sort of put your money where your mouth is as a learning organization, then it needs to be scheduled, and it needs to be on people’s performance appraisals, managers need to be held accountable for that, for their direct reports and then it’s going to happen. But if it’s just sort of an intention, and everybody wishes it was like that, they’re not really going to do it.

Spencer Brooks 31:13

Yeah, I think that, especially for managers. I know it’s so easy to say, hey, you need to do this, and I need to hold you accountable to it. And I would also chime in and say, if you’re adding something, if you’re adding something into someone’s schedule, you also equally have to decide or tell them, here’s what you’re now having to say no to because I’m assuming that people aren’t sitting around going, Gee, I don’t have enough things to do, I’m really just bored.

Karen Graham 31:44

But the beauty of this is that it does make you more productive. So if you invest in learning how to use technology better, arguably, you’re freeing up more time in your future weeks.

Spencer Brooks 31:58

Yeah, I think that actually is a great point right where, if you’re identifying, here’s the mission critical things that we need to do, and if I spend an hour or two a week for the next couple weeks learning, you know, how to use Zapier or something I don’t know, right, something that’s you know, it’s going to be interesting to or might help you, you know, automate parts of your job, or do something quicker or easier, I think you’re totally right. You can take, it is shocking, shocking how much time, like a well built system that is empowered by technology, it’s shocking how much time you can get back. So I think that’s a, it’s a point well made. Karen,

Karen Graham 32:37

There’s another thing to think about is employee retention. It costs a lot more to hire a new person than it does to keep someone. I think we can probably accept that. And I wish I could tell you where I’ve seen this data, but, but I have seen data that indicates that when you provide people with good technology tools to do their jobs, and we when you provide them with the right training to use those tools, then they are more likely to stay in their jobs. And so that’s something that maybe doesn’t feel very immediate, but over a longer period of time, you can really get a lot of return on that investment in terms of lower turnover.

Spencer Brooks 33:19

Yeah, yeah. It’s I love that too. It’s something that I had sort of forgotten about in, you know, in this whole conversation. But yeah, no, I think that you’re absolutely right. I know that, you know, some frustration, and I’ve seen people who’s like, the big frustration with their job tends to be these little paper cuts, death by 1000 paper cuts

Karen Graham 33:41

Exactly.

Spencer Brooks 33:41

They often have to do with these, you know, oh, man, I just, you know, we’re using all these different systems. Or I have to go do this. Or, gee, whenever I click Edit on my website, the whole thing breaks, like, you know, God forbid you should click Edit on your site, right and it breaks, you know, all these things, right? Where that’s I think that is such a valid point. And I would also say that, you know, coming from the perspective of someone who provides services to nonprofits, I think that where I see people under investing is, I’ll just talk about websites, because that’s what we do, right? There’s not an unlimited budget for these things. And so where I tend to see people, this is probably true in all sorts of technology, by the way, but I see people going, Okay, we need to spend the most money on features, right? That we need to get the most things on our list possible, which is, I mean, that’s good thinking, right? A lot of these things, ostensibly, if they’re prioritized and planned well, are going to contribute to the mission. But then there’s not thought given to what amount of budget are we going to spend on documenting how this works and training people on how to use it. And then what ends up happening is that a nonprofit pays a lot of money for a Cadillac, and people, you know, drive it as if it were a bike or something, because, you know, they are effectively using it like that. I mean, it’s, you know, they don’t, they pay for a ton of stuff, and then no one ever knows how to use it, or maybe the one person who is in charge of that project knows how to use it, and then there’s turnover, and then all of a sudden, you know, it’s a lot of wasted money. And so that would also be like from the perspective of someone who’s, you know, boots on the ground implementing a lot of these projects I see, unfortunately, this happen in a lot of a lot of cases, and I find myself sort of having to advocate during the planning process, or when I’m, you know, I’m talking to a potential client about a project is saying, like, the reason you have to invest, and it’s not like, it’s this, you know, it’s going to take 30% of your budget or something to do it, but you know, if you don’t pay to have this documented, for someone to sit down and write a Google doc that’s going to be a user guide that’s customized to, you know, your particular site or technology or whatever, and then train people on how to use it, hold training sessions you know, be able to communicate that information, then you’re spending a lot of money for nothing. And so anyway, this is my, you know, I’m stealing your platform now to advocate for pain points, but I think it’s true of a lot of different technologies.

Karen Graham 36:36

No I agree, yeah, a lot of organizations get seduced by these amazing systems that have all the bells and whistles, and the reality is that complexity is hard to maintain, and it’s often organizations are better served by something that’s a little bit more simple and that comes with good documentation and solid training and user adoption, really good change management. I would rather see an organization use a simple tool and really use the heck out of it than have a the Cadillac of tools and only use 5% of it and that not even well, and some of that comes to leadership. I don’t know if we really touched on this as part of staff skills and training, but one of the biggest needs for technology skill, I think, is at the top level, the executive director, the CEO, or if you’re, if you’re in a department, you know, maybe it’s a VP of fundraising or advancement, or, you know, the head of the communication department. Those people need to have a different set of skills that includes not just operating technology, but also understanding the change management related to it. They need to understand how to think about return on investment for technology, how to select and work with highly technical staff and consultants and have an effective relationship with them. There’s, you know, just a lot of other sort of strategic level tech skills that don’t have anything to do with operating tools that those leaders need to acquire.

Spencer Brooks 38:10

Yeah, that that right. There might be one of the most important things, you know, if I were to highlight save, is that alone. Because it inevitably comes down to a lot of that, right? You could, you could have individual staff members that are quite skilled, but I think at the end of the day, all that does fall flat if there’s not, if there’s not the leadership skill. And when I do look at the organizations that are crushing it, I cannot find examples of organizations that are crushing it that don’t have someone with fairly deep, mature technology skills in a leadership position that is helping steer and drive that. And without it, there’s just, it’s a very poor shot, I think, in my opinion, that it’s, or at least that it’s going to stay for, you know, a period that would be on just a, just a single project, right?

Karen Graham 39:05

Agree, part of it is even just having the imagination, as a leader to say, every time a problem is presented to you, could technology help to solve this problem?

Spencer Brooks 39:14

Yeah, I mean, honestly that some people have that, have that thought, and other people, other people don’t,

Karen Graham 39:21

And from a risk management perspective too, like, could technology break this? There’s another side to that coin as well.

Spencer Brooks 39:31

Yeah, that is, that is true, right? You do get the person that could actually be much more technical but may not actually understand the implications of that. I really love that. Thank you for for highlighting that the two sides of the spectrum. Karen, I do have a couple questions that I wanted to ask you. You know, unfortunately, we are running out of time. I knew that we would right. I don’t think we’ve scratched half of the things that we could really talk about. I feel like we. Yeah, we went over a lot of the big ones. I wanted to ask you about what one thing in digital that you’re working on right now that consumes a lot of your brain space. And if you have any takeaways or thoughts for listeners that might be going through the same thing.

Karen Graham 40:13

I don’t know how I could say anything other than AI in answer to that question. That’s just the sort of consuming a lot of headspace for me right now, generative AI, and just to give like a little quick advice about that, I would say, don’t fall for shiny object syndrome. Be very cautious about privacy and bias. But also don’t miss out. There is so much amazing stuff that we can do with AI and it could be used for good or evil and we need to be part of that. I I think that it’s, it’s important for people who work in nonprofit organizations to realize that, that we especially because of the position we have in our communities, as kind of an intermediary as people who understand what some of the most disadvantaged folks in a community are experiencing, we have a chance to be an advocate for responsible use of AI and to help decision makers understand possible unintended consequences, and we owe it to our constituents to participate in that conversation.

Spencer Brooks 41:22

Yeah, I’m glad you mentioned that. I think that is very worthy of a shout out. And for listeners as well, we’ve done a couple episodes in the past on AI. So if you haven’t checked those out, feel free to go listen to those. Think by the time this is out there, there should be one with George Weiner that talked a little bit more about AI, so I’d encourage you to listen to those. But Karen, I also wanted to ask you, what are two or three resources you regularly use to keep up on news and trends in your work?

Karen Graham 41:52

I’ll tell you one is my local nonprofit association. I’m in Minnesota, so it’s the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits, and they have some great resources on all kinds of trends in technology and nonprofits, but they’re actually making quite an effort this year to make sure that technology is front and center. And I know that there are about 30 other state nonprofit associations or regional associations that are all doing some kind of work in that area. So think those are great resources. Another one that I look to, which a lot of people listening to this might not be familiar with, is an organization called TAG, the Technology Association of Grantmakers, and that is an association for people who work in philanthropy IT, and the reason I mentioned that one is because they are very similar organizations to a lot of charitable organizations, but they tend to be maybe just half a step ahead of of nonprofits who are receiving grants. The grant makers are maybe a step ahead because they have more resources and they arguably have a little bit more time to think about these things, and so I often find that I’ll discover a trend or a new idea there just a few months before it kind of hits the nonprofit space.

Spencer Brooks 43:14

So interesting, I actually haven’t, haven’t heard of them before. So that’s one I’ll definitely have to check out, and for listeners too. I’ll make sure and get these links for you in the show notes, so you can go and click those directly instead of having to do the Google but Karen, I only have one more question for you today, which is, how can listeners get in touch with you if they’d like to learn more about your work? 

Karen Graham 43:38

I have a website. It’s Karen Graham consulting.com and my contact information is on there as well. And I should mention if, if anybody out there is just looking for a little bit of advice, wants to get pointed in the right direction, I am a consultant, but you don’t have to pay me for the first 25 minutes,

Spencer Brooks 43:59

Which is great. You should go do it. Karen is awesome. I will personally vouch for her. So please, please take her up on that offer. And you know, and unfortunately for listeners that that’s all the time we have today. And so if you liked this episode, as always, it’s hugely helpful. If you rate it and review it on wherever you’re listening to this whatever podcast platform helps a lot and only takes two seconds of your time, and means a lot to me. So the show is also part of the thought leadership of Brooks digital. We are a digital agency for health nonprofits. We focus a lot on usability and accessibility in particular. So if you like this podcast, feel free to check out our website at Brooks dot digital, and you can find more of our insights and learn about our work. But with all that said, Karen, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. It was a blast to have you.

Karen Graham 44:50

Thanks for having me. It’s a great conversation.

44:57

Thanks for listening to Health Nonprofit Digital Marketing. If you liked this episode, leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform, and don’t forget to check out the Brooks digital website at www.Brooks.digital where you can find other resources like this podcast, learn how we help nonprofits like yours, and get in touch with our team. See in the next episode.