thank you so much for joining us for Community it um webinar we are presenting today a nonprofit digital Health workshop with Tim locky from Human stack I'm going to let Tim introduce himself in a moment but I'm going to introduce this Workshop by saying we are aiming it at smaller nonprofits with under 15 staff members you might not think you can manage your it needs unless you are the IT person um some of you may have someone on staff who kind of absorbed this responsibility maybe you are The
Accidental techie maybe there is really no one in your nonprofit who feels comfortable managing it but someone has to do it and ended up being you so you've come to the right place today Tim has come to talk with us about some strategies and approaches to help walk you through the uh gaining the confidence to be able to make it decisions and we're going to talk about some free resources and next steps today so my name is Carolyn Woodard I'm the Outreach director for Community it and I'm the mode
rator today and a million years ago I was The Accidental techie in charge of it at a very small nonprofit and I really wish I had had a friend like Tim to reassure me that I could do it and to walk me through what to do like the first steps to take where to start um so I'm very very happy to have him here today uh before I turn it over to Tim if you're not familiar with Community it I'm going to give you a little bit more about us we are 100% employee-owned managed services provider we provide o
utsourced it support and we work exclusively with nonprofit organizations our mission is to help nonprofits accomplish their missions through the effective use of Technology we're big fans of what well-managed it can do for your nonprofit We Serve nonprofits across the United States we've been doing this for over 20 years and we are technology experts we are consistently given the MSP 501 recognition for being a top MSP which is an honor we received again in 2023 and I want to remind everyone th
at for these webinars uh Community it is vendor agnostic so we only make recommendations to our clients only based on their specific business needs and we never try to get a client into a product because we have some hidden incentive or benefit to doing that um but we do consider ourselves a best of breed it provider and it's our job to know the landscape the tools that are available reputable and widely used and we make recommendations on that basis to our clients based on their business needs
their priorities and their budget we do often have guest speakers on our website who have resources and services available and today is no exception but I'm going to say as with any guest speaker that that is between you and Tim if you want to take him up on anything that he talks about today um I took the free quiz that we're about to take and it was very helpful but I'm in a different place from you so your results May Vary so I want to Quick touch on our learning objectives so today we want t
o uh at the end of the session today we hope that you can diagnose your organization through a free digital Health quiz we want to help you understand the human behaviors and needs that are at the root of it management at nonprofits learn the basics of nonprofit Tech decision-making strategies and learn the order steps to take to gain decision-making confidence and I'm very very happy to talk to our expert today Tim locky from the human stack so Tim would you like to introduce yourself my name i
s Tim locky I live in Boseman Montana and I'm really excited to talk with you today um I've been working in nonprofits since I was 18 and care a lot about making the world better and I think we could leverage technology to create so much more impact with the same humans and the same resources so if you um if you would just go ahead and click on this click on this QR code um and is there do we have a link to that as well yes I'm just gonna put it in the chat great cool you can grab that as well t
he URL for that quiz is the human stack.com quiz just give you a preview of what yeah perfect uh what you're gonna see there is six questions um and then room for comments at the end and and these six questions we're going to go through each one of the uh digital Health vitals that the question is centered around and what I want to show you is how it doesn't tell you everything obviously it's just a quick quiz but it's not like one of those you know magazines where the quiz is just not helpful a
t all there's a lot here and I'm going to show you how I use this quiz to diagnose extremely large organizations and really tiny organizations same questions uh thinking about it the same way so that's um and it should take just a couple minutes shouldn't take that long Tim do you want to talk about the human stack while we're waiting for people to do the quiz yeah so how how I got here is that um I just became The Accidental techie at a global organization nonprofit and the more I did the tech
the more I liked it and I finally realized this is my bit in life is to help nonprofits with their with their data and with their technology so in 2010 I started a company called now it matters and that was a consulting firm that helped uh people use Salesforce specifically I became a like a global expert at Salesforce Salesforce MVP traveled the world talking about Salesforce started User Group here in Boseman had six different certifications had like the whole thing and I I was chugging along
that that trail really hardcore and then in 2019 I went to an event somebody put up a slide that said 90% of organizations collect data but only 5% use that data to make decisions and it gutted me because that was my job right like that's not the like Salesforce or Tech you know that's how you collect the data but using that data converting that data that should be what I'm doing with my clients and when I looked at our contracts and the way that we were set up if a client did not use what we ha
d built for them I got paid the same amount and when I looked at that across the industry I just thought this is we're selling transformation in our marketing and we're delivering deliverables and it's up to clients to just like use it or not and they're not and so I set out to create a different way of engaging clients around how to actually use the data that they're collecting and what I found was maybe sometimes they shouldn't even get off of blackb or you know whatever tool they were on mayb
e they should stay there and learn to drive the car they already have instead of getting a new one and um that was a real Revelation for me and shifted my business model so much so that I started the human stack and if you think of the reason for the name is if the tech stack solves human problems with technology then the human stack solves technology problems with humans because for the technologists Like Us in the world right Tech is the solution but for everybody else like 97% of the rest of
the World Tech is the problem and so we need to actually start addressing how do we use Tech that's a problem for a lot of organizations so I called it the human stack I love that I love the way that you talk about it too because I I think I heard you speak about a year ago and um yeah just you talk a lot about like like the the people right like if you're stressed about your Tech or you're afraid of tech changes or you're super busy and you can't you know you just don't feel like you have time
to do it like all of those emotions play into how you're managing and using your Tech and so you know I really love that bringing the whole person back into the question like it's not just the tech like all of the people using it at your organization are really important too it's so it's so true and something that technology the technology industry has been completely ignoring and um is what is the what what does shame do to an organization not just the human like the single individuals but acro
ss the organization what happens when there's widespread Tech shame or trauma like it's very easy to create Tech trauma by you know and we'll talk a little a little bit about that so yeah AB absolutely these are these are very relevant because we say words like adoption and change management and uh governance and for the most part in the industry none of that actually works we don't know what we're doing we don't measure it we try not to because the numbers would be really bad we wouldn't have c
ase studies like it's just abysmal it fails over 70% of the time and so yeah Tech TR thank you Haley yeah well and I I wanted to say like I think if you talk to any person in any nonprofit across the United States you don't even have to ask very many questions before Tech trauma will come out you know there's some like something they're doing right now that's not working very well that's like you know takes them all day to do and they wish it were just a couple of clicks there's something that a
n implementation they had in the past where they're like oh that was horrible like it was so stressful and traumatic so yeah it's definitely resonating yeah well I think we've probably given people just about about enough time to do the quiz all right did you want to talk about the vitals that they have looked at in that quiz and then we'll get to our poll you answered six questions in that quiz and three of them are related to the tech stack they are solution fit data quality and utilization um
so those are those are di Health vitals digital Health vitals for the tech stack on the human stack side there is system sustainability digital strategy and accountability if I have these six questions for an organization I'll show you what I can do with them but it all starts here and part of what part of what's important here is Carolyn you must have seen this over and over the questions people want to know is that top one what solution should I use and what all of us know is it doesn't matte
r which car you're going to buy if you don't know how to drive it right and so um and so I wanted a way to measure five other things that organizations could start thinking about today because it takes a long time to change a solution fit like an Erp or a CRM that that takes a really long time and in the meantime there's a lot that can be done so that's where this originated um and yeah the uh URL for that quiz is the hum stack.com SL quiz it's a pretty easy one but I for anyone listening to thi
s that's where you can go to find this free quiz that you can take with these six different areas um so Marco says these are six pretty good indicators and um thank you yes so all right so we are going to launch this poll so now that you've taken the quiz um and if you have that you know up in your browser um you can go ahead and um answer the question where is your organization the strongest so there's these six indicators solution fit data quality util ization system sustainability digital str
ategy and accountability and I made this multiple choice so if you scored well in a couple of those you can go ahead and and um you know check everything that applies to you and then if you didn't take the quiz or you're just um you're at an organization that you tried to look at the quiz and it just didn't really resonate with you and you can also choose not applicable um so go I forgot to mention that the answers to the quiz are are you'll get an email and if you click on the email that's wher
e the answers are so if you're not seeing that check your inbox I'm so sorry I did not say that earlier so while we have the poll open you can go back and see in your inbox um yeah there's a little link that you go um and it'll show you and I think at the top it has like a little uh you're running on empty you're you're running you know full over um and uh doing pretty pretty well across the different indicators so we'll give people another um another moment or so to fill in where is your organi
zation doing the strongest um and that's one of the things about taking a quiz right is it gives you a little bit of that insight into it's subjective you're making you know a guesstimate maybe of where this is happening but it helps you start thinking of these different facets and where you know you are doing the strongest um we had about half um a little bit over half said that they were strongest in utilization about half said solution fit um about I'm going going to go down a little bit 30%
said digital strategy um and then a tie for data quality and accountability and a couple people put in that it was not applicable oh you know why you couldn't see because I didn't share the results oh there you go okay very interesting and many things at once but there you go everyone you can see um the results and um if you're were just looking at your results to find the areas that you were strongest in uh we're going to go to the next poll which is um hold on a sec all right so the second pol
l probably no surprise is um where were you the most challenging and um you know we're we're all in this together so don't don't be shy everybody has challenges um and it's just interesting to see if there's any you know patterns of like people are in general um feeling challenged in the same way at their organizations and I'm you know no nonprofit is the same every nonprofit is a special flower so um it's you know it's definitely um you're going to have you know specific challenges and strength
s at your organization but um this will just give us a little bit more to talk about about how you're feeling about how you're doing um let me share it this time all right can you see that Tim I can yep digital strategy wins or loses depending on how we're thinking about that and something you said is so important Caroline about this which is this is not moral failure people like there's no reason to feel bad guilty there is a lot of reason that you will feel shame and that's unfortunate and we'
ll talk through that but um in a perfect world you wouldn't because this is like just here's where we're at this is this is just taking a diagnostic you know uh just running some tests so please don't don't feel a certain amount of way about that um accountability was 47% the next highest was a tie between data quality and system sustainability um the third one is another tie between solution fit and digital strategy and utilization was last which makes sense since it was first on the other one
that does make sense yeah and I think what's interesting here too is there's no I don't see you know like there's no one that was highest for for a lot of people like there's a pretty good spread of the things that people are having difficulty with um so which kind of speaks to what we were talking about earlier like there's there's something difficult about it in all these different aspects right and Marcos you you made a really great comment about why your utilization is higher for your organi
zation which has to do with compliance and in a weird way that compliance then is an accountability source so one way of thinking about it for your organization is that actually you have external accountability that is creating that for you so all right this is my son in the background there with the long hair that's my son his name is John David a couple years ago he came to me and he said can I build a canoe and I said no but the way I said no was I said only if I approve it which was my way o
f saying no because I was never going to approve it because if you if you have a canoe in your wood shop that's what you've got for the next two years couple weeks later I'm on the phone distracted he comes in hands his little cardboard thing and um and I say oh that's cool and he said so can I and I was like okay and I just signed off on the canoe without realizing it so the next thing I know he is out with his grandparents getting Lumber and building this canoe uh so here he is in the backyard
like that's not a coffin that is the canoe and he just started putting it together there's there he is with the jigsaw there it is right there um and if you like he was 13 and I did not think that he would fit finish it but he did and here he is on high like Reservoir and he goes all the way across there and all the way back he went out like four times in that canoe it was a a very Tippy Canoe but he built it and he was not even 15 when he when he finished it so I was very impressed I was like
super excited because uh you know that that was that made me really proud of him um and the the takeaway here is that I love doing projects with myself I really do um and um but and you probably think I'm a good dad and I am hopefully but I want to just show you how one one rephrasing will change your mind about that so if I say I'm a good dad I love working on projects with my son you all are like ah good dad that's cool if I say I work on my son who is a project like red flags everywhere kids
in counseling right you see you see what I'm saying like we are so wired to understand one core truth and in Consulting for over 10 years now I've never seen a consultant make this mistake of calling people projects like it is almost the only mistake I haven't seen but we are very clear that people are not projects if you're in fundraising you know that donations matter but donors aren't donations and if you treat them like they're donations they stop giving and we also know on some level that t
echnology matters but that humans aren't Tech unfortunately in this area we are particularly bad about forgetting the humans and it makes sense that we've done that but it is so important for us to start dividing issues that are technology from issues that are human one Valley ran into this they a Community Foundation that's local to me Bridget is the CEO she's a really good friend of mine mine and I want you to pay attention to that triangle right there she's the CEO and the leader and Jennifer
works with her she's the COO and you can see the two little feet right there they came to me they were on a CRM they had a lot of questions about the CRM and they just came and said hey like is it time to move off this is not going well so I had them I had Jennifer just do the quiz you just took these are not her results but she got results back and I looked at them and I said here's what I see right now um when I'm when I'm talking with you I feel like you're a little bit off balance there's a
lot of what you're hoping for is that somebody will come in and be the expert for you and um and solve some of this and you've got a lot of impostor syndrome and when I checked in with Bridget what I found is Bridget knows a lot about tech but did not know how to lead Jennifer when it came to the technology and so you've probably already seen my logo which is uh these shapes but not in this order you can just look behind me you can see what it's supposed to look like and the idea here is you co
uld see very clearly that the human stack their human stack was not aligned well and so we came up with a plan and we just first we said we're going to measure your digital Health we're going to identify who's driving we're going to identify who's leading we're going to create a monthly plan and ultimately they ended up getting into our program called digital driver ed that's not the only thing that can happen from that but those four things right there are really essential in terms of what next
steps most organizations should do when we get down to that fourth step on monthly plan that that gets a little bit uh you want to be really clear about what that looks like the rest of those are pretty easy to just start looking at uh and to start knowing who's who's who's working on what um I will tell you why they got to this place but today it is totally different Bridget is leading really really well Jennifer is killing it um their their data problems they thought that they were going to n
eed middleware instead she's just solving the their issues she's working with another consultant that consultant is done more in the last few months Bridget said than in the prior two years combined so and there's just a lot of confidence Jennifer's the boots on the ground person and Bridget is the leader so the triangle's leader the boots on the ground that's the driver that's what I call the driver and maybe you're the same place you're like where do we start and what I want to say is you star
t here um and we have I have other workshops that I give but I start with this one which is your digital health and then there are other workshops that we can go through to solve those other questions that you want to look at more immediately but it does all start with your digital health and you've already taken this so if you didn't before you can grab the code there take it if you were hesitant before now you feel feel like you want to then great um okay and you've got something like this the
se are the six vitals your answer looked something more like this if you saw it I just want to say the overall score honestly is not that helpful it just tells you like you know out of 10 where are you but really what's more important is to know in in which areas are you higher or lower so for example both of these are organizations that got a 5.2 out of 10 they have very different vitals you know different measurements on their vitals completely different uh scores and so um here's what here's
what that quiz will tell me so I'm just going to take one organization that we worked with and um the when they took this they all their whole team took it and when we looked at that I compared it to a puzzle and I just said your team is like you have all of the pieces you flip them upside right and you counted the pieces you group them by color all the other stuff that us puzzle nerds do but the box is gone and now your team is arguing about what the picture looks like right and the reason I wa
s saying that is their executive team the L the lowest score for all of the metrics that we took was from their executive team on digital strategy and that's the team that's supposed to be making the digital strategy so when I saw that I was like that's really telling um and so that's uh and also when I've looked at the range of scores on that you could see like there's a lot of variant here people are not agreeing even on what the problem is so just by comparing like how wide was the variance o
n that we can see like system sustainability is almost the only one they really agreed on that and solution fit I guess but there's a a pretty high variance uh besides that so that's what it can tell us here's a like this is a more detailed version of that this is just so interesting Tim because I was gonna ask like do you have multiple people take this quiz and then kind triangulate their answers of who thinks which part is you know their guesstimate of how it's doing that's really interesting
and I'm working right now with an organization like it's a large organization over 100 staff have filled this out and um I'm running analysis I'll be on site with them week after next to talk with their executive team about what I'm finding with that um so I do offer a diagnostic um for larger organizations and the only extra thing I do is I allow them to add comments behind every question and that's I actually don't want more input than that this is not Discovery it's a diagnostic and the diffe
rence there is is a discovery is like exploratory surgery this is more like running some tests if you go to a doctor you want the doctor to say let's run some tests and then do exploratory surgery like you don't ever want it to be the other way around right so um yeah and also if you're ever out on the street Caroline I'm sure you'll you'll get this too if you're ever out on the street and you need to diagnose somebody's Tech really quickly you can boil it down to two questions you can just say
is your Tech getting a little bit better or every day and do you trust the data and with those the answers to those two questions will give you a lot of information about where they're going how they feel all that kind of stuff so okay uh does that make sense that is a great those are a great two questions of course there's six dimensions in this but yes I definitely when you talk to people even just like you talk to them a little while you can get that sense of is Tech getting better or is Tech
going down yeah and and the other thing to say if there are any other data nerds like me on here I am not measuring actual data quality I'm not measuring solution fit I don't even really care about that what I'm measuring is people's perception of it and people will behave based on their perception which is really key to know because we humans change on a trend and we measure on the trend so if you if you start to treat the trend and reverse the trend of people's thinking you'll actually adjust
their behavior way before the data actually tells them that it should be adust adjusted so you can relatively quickly have them start behaving as if the data is higher quality just by starting to work on it together and creating a sense of oh we're improving this data together that was another thing I really loved about this quiz is that you don't have to go out and find the answers and come report back on like this data or that process or this tool or anything like that it really is your perce
ptions yes exactly um yeah good um good point yeah uh okay here's the order in which you want to work on these issues and what I expected when I first started doing this work is that there would be like five different archetypes that we would find that you should do this work on and instead the same pattern kept emerging and kept emerging finally I was like this is the pattern um and so that doesn't mean that the quiz is meaningless at all it just it basically tells you how much time you're goin
g to spend on each one of these steps uh and it always starts with digital strategy very first thing and then second thing is you'll work on data quality and system sustainability together um you'll usually stagger that so you're starting one before but you could do either one uh in either order and the next thing you do is work on uh accountability and here's the big trick solution fit is adjusted when you start working on anything after digital strategy so as soon as you start to improve the d
ata quality you're actually adjusting solution fit and especially when you start working on system sustainability it's basically continuous Improvement and so um you're starting to adjust the solution fit along the way um and then utilization is a trailing indicator almost always um it's it's really helpful to know something like and I think this was the case for marus if you have low accountability I mean I don't know for Marcus if you had low accountability you had high utilization I always co
mpare utilization to solution fit data quality and accountability to see if it's high then is that because there's High accountability or is it because the solution fit and data quality or High and um so that's what I'm looking at there um can you leave it on the slide just for a minute and I wanted to just ask you to go through your sub questions because there may be some people listening or on the webinar who are like utilization like that sounds really Tech yeah but that just means our staff
using your systems the way they were intended or do they have to do a lot of workarounds like oh I download this into a spreadsheet and then I reupload it to the other you know like that sort of thing right yep and I'll actually go through each one of these okay I think I've still got time so um so yeah um so this is just the this is what I call the magic order you want to start digital strategy then data quality system sustainability accountability and utilization and solution fit are indirect
things that you work on unless you do a big lift and start adding another system for solution fit okay first up human stack vitals so there are three uh system sustainability digital strategy and accountability and I'm going to tell these or talk about them by looking at my logo and the first thing to say on that is we're not talking about individual use of Technology techology we're talking about an organization's use of technology and just like the tech stack is a community of Technologies the
human stack is a community of humans that use Tech together and when you're working in on the human stack there's always a leader that is accountable strategic and a driver who boots on the ground responsible and tactical so one way of think about this is that it only takes one human to imagine a better world right like that's easy but to actually make a better world you need more than one person you need a stack so two people is the smallest you can have a human stack with so um and the first
one of those is digital strategy digital strategy you should think of as alignment right the leader is very aligned with the driver in this case and um so this is a starter digital strategy if you don't have one right now if you don't have a road map you're not sure what your strategy is make this your strategy figure out your digital Health find out who's driving figure out who's leading and then make a monthly plan um if it's helpful to join digital drivers head which is our online course grea
t glad to have you but you don't need to you can get going with this right here so that can be a a starter digital strategy if your strategy is not in alignment it won't work you can just see right here and so Carol and I have worked with so many organizations that want Tech they've budgeted for it they've done all this work all these rfps all of this other stuff and did not take care of this piece right here which is to make sure that their Tactical Team and their leadership team are in alignme
nt and ready to go and it's not the whole team it is a person and a person right there's a strategic person and and a tactical person all of Technology success boils down to those that the relationship between these two people um okay accountability is a facet of that relationship I call accountability just it's attention plus power that's what I that's what I call accountability and when you're when I look at my logo and I think about accountability it's the gap between the leader and the drive
r it needs to be close enough to collaborate but not over lapping so that it's micromanaging right and and accountability has three different forms so the kind of the worst form of it is to ignore behavior when leaders ignore behavior that is not positive account accountability you can police undesirable behavior and that's better than ignoring but the best is to reward the behavior that you want so recognition based Behavior it just hits our brains and we're like okay I want to do more of that
and um especially especially I don't know if anybody's paid attention to the report around retention and nonprofits that came out recently but one of the main causes of churn or of people leaving organizations is the relationship between their supervisor and themselves and that's not different in technology so um when it comes to accountability if you if you're not find that's one issue here is digital strategy but also this does this doesn't work they're not close enough to each other right um
or if you're working with someone who just ignores you right that's that's the worst so that's what we're that's what happens with accountability another version of this can be if there's static in between what's going on so if there's constant conflict between the leader and the driver you're going to run into issues with your technology and the last one is if there's just a wide Gap can never get any questions answered you've met like two times in the year to talk about technology but anytime
your leader needs something they're coming to you about it and but they won't answer your question like that's what it feels like and then you end up feeling really small and distant um yes Haley it does apply so much more than just to Tech I am not I'm not putting in that box at this point I really want to just say let's fix the tech with these ideas but you're right there's a lot of organizational Theory and design here thank you for that comment um system sustainability this is are you creati
ng relevant ongoing system improvements and the way I think about this is that are people complaining complaining is a sign of Hope and what you want to do in a system is get people to feel comfortable enough to complain because if they will then you can keep shaping the data in the systems so that they are improving and working when it comes to um how I think about this I think you at it as keeping things proportional right and so um when people say hey this isn't working for me you can grow uh
you can grow the system out in that area so that it will work so this is my version of uh where system sustainability is not working the leader wants a lot more that like this is where like the human stack missed leg day right so um and then you can have the opposite too where you've got like a a full stack developer under somebody that doesn't really know what to do with them and that can create a lot of problems one time when my daughter was very young she went on a trip with her grandmother
and everything went wrong wrong destination flights cancelled just everything went wrong and my daughter held it together all day because her grandmother said when you get to where you're going I'm going to get you chocolate ice cream and when they got to where they were going got to the front of the counter and ordered chocolate ice cream the man said we're out and my daughter just dropped to the floor heap of heap of Tears big mess because humans can only handle so much change right so when it
comes to sustainability one of the biggest issues in technology is this idea that you have to you have to pay attention to how much disruption you're creating by by getting a new solution fit by making any of these adjustments and how much capacity for change people have and that's not how much Tech capacity for change that is organizationally how much how much does this person have and just like my daughter had a negative reaction to being disappointed and hitting a level of change that she ju
st couldn't deal with that one last thing when humans hit high levels of change saturation over and over they respond negatively and they associate associate that negativity to whatever caused it so if we're implementing a CRM which I did lots of times and created disruption and change saturation for months on end for people at the end of that they were not happy with that CRM even if it made their jobs easier and they turn to the one thing that would give them Mastery and autonomy which is spre
adsheets right saw it over and over and over so if we're implementing systems and we're not paying attention to change saturation we're going to run into issues I I feel like that's also like a cultural issue as well like that change capacity for Change and a lot of organizations um I just heard this recently you know there's you got to really read the room like if you're an organization that that um has kind of a top down culture then telling people this is how we're doing it now may be fine fo
r you change wise like that's what people are used to or if you're more entrepreneurial people people need to know like why are we doing it this way who's going to do it how are we going to do it then if you're just telling them we're going to do it this way it's going to be a misfit right so you need to be aware of that you know like with your daughter you know read the room like what is going to happen if there's no chocolate ice cream at the end you know and one of the one of the reasons I sa
y complaining is a sign of Hope is because you and I have both seen organizations swap out massive systems unnecessarily and if they would have just solved some of the lowercase issues then actually they would be using the system just fine but instead they delayed they're GNA spend 18 months getting to the same spot with a new system and spend six figures getting there and um and they haven't practiced the art of saying what's not working and fixing those things you know incrementally and so tha
t's why that's why I put chain set ration under system sustainability how do you create regular small amounts of change that are effective for specific users all right so all of these are different ways that the human stack can be shaped in the wrong way there's only one that it looks the right way in that's the 10 out of 10 on all three of those factors um I'm going to fly through these because we have so little I do not know how like we got so little time left but I'm kind of glad because it's
more understandable what's happening on the tech stack side of things than the human stack side solution fit is just if you have the right Tech stack the thing the one takeaway that I want to leave people with is how Stacks are formed right so this is a legitimate Tech stack and when I was a consultant I felt like anybody that doesn't have a CRM doesn't have a legit Tech stack and that was a really stuck up way of thinking because actually a lot of small nonprofits like these are all different
like this is how Tech Stacks form over time as organizations evolve but there but from the first one the starter website and the financial operations all of those were legitimate Tech Stacks um and there are about 34 boxes on here so when your team says we've got too many systems just keep in mind like there's 34 types of systems if you double up any of them you have more than 34 and um so that's all just to say in modern workforces you're going to have lot of systems every time you have a meeti
ng to reduce a number of systems you'll have a new system at the end of that meeting I guarantee you it's just the way it works every single time the issue isn't if you have too many systems is whether you're using them effectively and whether you know who's supposed to be using them so data quality here's what I want to say on data quality this is a six-word theory of change about data so data is plural for a thing called datam by the way which I didn't even know but I keep finding out uh data
turns into information and information turns into Insight if you do not have data that you trust you should not be using that to make decisions the big reason that organizations don't use their data to make decisions is that they know better they've seen how it's made and so organizations really need to start treating data as an asset base especially in a world of AI because the AI differentiator is basically the quality of your own data and what you know um and then there are different levels a
cross an organization on who spends more time in which of these areas so staff spend the most time making data directors spend the most time with information Executives spend the most time with Insight it's not to say staff aren't insightful that's not the point here what happens is that directors become the bottleneck they need to find out from Executives what insights do we need and they need to pair that with the available trusted data when they don't find that data they need to make change o
r they need to clean up the data so um that's a six word theory of change if you really dig into that it will change so much about how you're working with systems the last one is utilization and that's just are you using the systems as intended and that's actually all I'm going to say about that um all right so picking up the story with Jennifer what happened with Jennifer and her team was that they did go through a lot of the they actually did their own work on understanding their organization
counting up their systems they were using 48 systems and by the time they were done they were using 49 systems and it wasn't too many it was just it was like what it took they did do digital driers Ed the four skills that we taught Jennifer are assessing her current state that's how she became an expert and seen as an expert instead of bringing me in to be the expert at hundreds of dollars an hour she became the expert and she's so good uh she knows how to maintain the data she knows how to mana
ge requests and she is driving the culture by meeting with uh the team around that they're really succeeding at that if digital driver Zed sounds interesting to you I'm glad to talk with you about it the main point isn't that the main point is that it's possible for someone like Jennifer working about two days a month on data and information systems to actually feel confident and for Bridget to spend one hour a month meeting with Jennifer to hear what's going on with the system that's really the
kind of oversight that we're talking about so that's what we did with digital driver ed my dad joke on digital driver ed is learn to drive your Tech before your Tech drives you crazy how can we collaborate with Community it to support our needs with no in-house Tech person and I would say you know for outsourced it a managed service provider that is really really really difficult um it's very difficult for us to work with a organization that is not aligned as you were talking about Tim with the
different pieces going the different ways we sometimes get people you know and our heart just goes out to them it's like the intern calling us and they'll say something about how the executive director you know we're using donated laptops but I really think that we need to you know do this and that and it's just it's so difficult because until you have that executive buying um and you start doing the alignment that you're talking about and building up that maturity and ability like in a lot of
cases there like you need the ability within your organization before you can get an external um it support to you know function if you're so dysfunctional it's not going to be a good relationship so can you talk a little bit more about that and like kind of how you I know we talked about how you landed on helping smaller non profits develop the skills within to be able to manage their it but um can you talk a little bit more about it yeah absolutely um so the way that we've structured that in a
nd this was really intentional because we did so much uh support work over the years uh as a as a consultant um inside of zone three skill Zone 3 which is managing requests the the first thing to say is never fix something that wasn't requested technologists have a really bad habit of fixing things nobody wanted fixed in the first place so always wait for there to be a request and it can be the intern that's making the request that's fine and then there are six buckets six cues that we teach our
drivers to put them in and the intern by the way is a great use case for digital driers in that's why we built it so that that intern can say okay here's the training nobody in that organization can give them and one of the cues is called a consultant queue um and what happens is that they go to a conversation ceue first and then to the human stack community and says hey does anybody know how to solve this and if neither of those are working and it's important and needs to be solved it goes int
o the consultant queue that's where it would be ready for a service provider like Community it innovators to come along and say okay right this is really clear youve thought it through you've got it prioritized you've got all of the questions answered already so now we know what to do with it um and you know and a lot of that is you'll spend half your time with a consultant figuring out what you don't know in order to find out what you need all of that could be done without charging hundreds per
hour ahead of time beforehand yeah yeah to really figure out what the business need is so I love that we have a quick question in the Q&A and that is would you say the human stack is a way to set up a data Tech governance method and engagement I love the word engagement there because um that is like I don't here's what we don't we don't have an adoption problem actually we don't have a change management problem and I don't think we mostly have governance problems although sometimes we do adopti
on is actually accountability change management is actually habits and when it comes to governments governance those are meaningful conversations that are relevant and so yes this is a in fact one of the cues is called the conversation and that is specifically for governance questions and it rolls up to a monthly meeting for larger organizations we have this built inside of a fullscale white glove uh methodology and in that methodology yep both engagement and governance are part of what we what
that methodology was built to handle so great question yeah that makes sense that makes sense because like you were saying like you might be queuing up that consultant ask um and it's for you know like a database consultant or you know like some there's a specific piece of the tech stack that you need outside expertise on um so that makes sense can you can you flip to the next um slide because I want to make sure that we are mindful of the time and uh talk about our learning objectiv so we were
I think I think we did pretty well we wanted people to be able to take this free digital Health quiz um and you have that uh link if you want to take it uh later um we wanted to understand human behaviors and needs that are at the root of it management um learn the basics of nonprofit Tech decision- making strategies so you gave us some like a very quick Whirlwind um you know kind of teaser for uh how to understand a lot more about how to make nonprofit Tech decisions and then learn some of the
orders of steps to take to gain that decision making confidence like the um the woman that you were talking about um who you know was able to just handle running things um while once they while she's doing it and it's become more aligned uh with her leadership so I want to thank you Tim so much for joining us today I feel like I mean it was a whirlwind but you've just given me so much to think about and I hope theum attendees as well I want to thank everybody who attended um you know thanks for
joining us for this hour I hope it was useful we have our contact information you can get in touch with us um after the webinar if you have more questions um and yeah please use the quiz use the resources that are on on Tim's um site and uh let us know how it goes we always want to know the the good success stories and the challenges thank you so much for having me it's been great talking with everybody thank you Tim thanks everybody
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