all right so I think we're going to go ahead and get started uh welcome everyone to the community I innovators presentation on thoughtful Tech Tool selection for nonprofit impact today we're going to hear a case study from the healthy communities foundation on how they approach their workflow around reporting and evaluating grantees from an equity perspective and redesigned their process which included selecting and repurposing some common Tech tools including a as a workflow manager so I'm real
ly excited to hear about this work because I think we can all benefit from hearing more about specifics about how an organization analyzes their business needs and fits those Tech tools to their needs and I'm especially interested in the way they try to intentionally improve equity which is a work in progress for so many of us at our organizations so my name is Carolyn Woodard I'm the Outreach director for Community it and the moderator today our learning objectives for today are uh to learn a p
ractical application of a trust-based approach to reporting connecting your organizational values to how you use tools in practice how to get the tools working for you versus you working for the tools so I think we're going to talk more about how you take those big picture values and make it useful in your nto5 making the tools you have live up to your vision and your values and learn a little bit about how to assess where you are and where you want to be and of course the structure that you hav
e can free you up create options it could have constraints involved in it I think Healthy Communities Foundation had a lot of ability to be agile with this because they're a younger organization with a lot of trust among their team it's a pretty small team and they thought a lot about how it would feel on the passenger side as well allowing the grantees to be a part of the process before we begin if you're not familiar with Community it a little bit about us we're a 100% employee-owned managed s
ervices provider providing outsourced it support we work exclusively with nonprofit organizations and 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 in your mission we serve nonprofits across the United States we've been doing this for over 20 years we are a techn we are technology experts and are consistently given the MSP 501 recognition for being a top MSP which is an honor we
received again in 2023 I want to remind everyone that for these presentations Community it is vendor agnostic so we only make recommendations to our clients and only based on their specific business needs we never try to get a client into a product because we get an incentive or a benefit from that we do consider ourselves best of breed it providers so it is our job to know the landscape what tools are available reputable and widely used and we make recommendations on that basis for our clients
based on their business needs priorities and budget so I am really excited today to talk more about Asana because I know a lot of nonprofits are using it I'm sure some of you are here in this webinar to hear more about it um but I want to make sure to just clarify there's lots of project management tools out there we're not recommending Asana over other ones are saying like it's the best it really depends on what you have um what you need what you're going to use it for all of those questions I
'm very happy to hear from our expert um Jillian would you like to introduce yourself and uh Healthy Communities Foundation hi everybody my name is Jillian Knight I use she her pronouns and I'm calling um from the city of Chicago which is also um historically known as the Council of Three Fires that was the patami Odawa and oju tribes but we also have a very thriving native population that's still contributing to the city to this day so a little bit about me before we get started I have a backgr
ound in Youth Development work in food access and housing and so um once a youth programmer always a youth programmer so I might try to make or crack some bad jokes and since I can't see you you'll have to just bear with me um so I'm really excited to talk to you today I don't I know if I would call myself an expert by any stretch of the imagination but I'm definitely a person that tries to use the tools I have to like work smarter not harder I was about to say harder not smarter which I think s
ome of us often feel that so um Healthy Communities Foundation is a health conversion Foundation that resources on the west and southwest side of the city of Chicago all the way out into Suburban Cook County as a health conversion Foundation we funded geographic region divied defined by the original service area of mcneel Hospital whose sale in 1999 established our endowment and so our mission is that we are a community informed grantmaking Foundation that seeks to measurably improve the health
and well-being of individuals families and communities in our service region by promoting Health Equity quality and access and so on the slide there's some figures about like The Who and the what that live in our region and then this is our grant making strategy so we resource in four specific ways we give um General operation support we give um capacity building resources and then strategic initiatives and responsive funding it is the belief of the foundation that flexible funding and a trust-b
ased approach is the best way to serve um organizations because we trust them to know how to use the resources um so all of these things especially our responsive funding we believe that as a foundation this is not our money it's a commu like it is Health conversion it is a Community Asset we see ourselves as stewards of the asset so even though we have like a grant cycle where people apply it's very standard we also believe that the door to the resource should always be open which is why we hav
e this responsive funding component but today I'm going to be talking about our general operations support work so that's kind of the how we fund and this is the what we fund so we have four different funding areas the first is access to Quality Health Services because we know that so many people do not have physical access linguistic Access Transportation a access to Quality clinical care and so we resource organizations that are being very Innovative in that work the next thing that we resourc
e is organizations that are addressing the social deter determinance of Health we also know that so much of an individual's Health um is determined by things outside of a clinical care space so where you live where you work where you play where you grow where you love and worship are all places that can impact your health and so for organizations working in that space we resource there we also especially coming out of the pandemic but it been true for a very long time is that there are some poli
tical determinants of health so how organizations we resource organizations that um organize communities to push and pass policy that impacts health so that is like a really kind of community organizing power building Base building and then the last one is augment local Health knowledge so the public health field is really crowded with data but it lives in institutions that are not in community areas and so we also resource um organizations and institutions to ensure that data is actually living
in the communities that the data was collected from instead of having it extracted out and lived in institutions so it's really about connecting people's lived experience with the data that has been collected about them so that they can make meaning of it on their own and develop their own Solutions so that's just a little bit about hcf so we wanted to get a little information from you about how your organization approaches software selection so the first option is We Gather stakeholders and go
from there very thoughtfully and strategically um the second selection is it's a free-for-all every department or staff can purchase Tech tools for themselves uh the third option is the IT department decides what everyone can use and the fourth option is something else or not applicable um so I want to stress like there's no no right answer to this question um there's no judgment so please just fill out how your nonprofit is approaching this question there are so many different nonprofits with
so many different um you know Styles and internal culture and management um Text SA all of those things kind of fold into this question so we just wanted to kind of get you thinking about um how how thoughtful you are already about um choosing your technology tools that you're using for different business processes that you're trying to you kind of organize Jillian could you read the results for us sure um so the most popular was We Gather stakeholders and go from there um very thoughtfully and
strategically congrats the next or there was a tie for third with it's a free-for-all every department or staff can purchase tech for themselves and the IT department decides what everyone can use or other not applicable well that's great that is great to hear so I think you're in the right place if you're trying to find more information about how to organize this um selection process and uh listen to this case study and uh then if you're just looking to get like a few more tips on how you could
be even more thoughtful about it you've come to the right place um too we're going to go ahead and um start with the case study um from from Jillian great thank you so I'm going to share a little bit about kind of the problem and then this the way that we use technology to kind of solve um the pro like the problem that I'm going to outline I was brought on to helpy communities Foundation to help um the organization figure out how we were going to Define learning and evaluation and impact and so
often with evaluation means you have to do a some reporting and so we kind of created um a theory of change and an evaluation framework and indicators and like we launched that in Winter of 2021 so right here you can see this kind of like data collection timeline so we have information from the Grant application we have site visits organizations got their award in summer 2021 so I have a degree in public health so if you think of our grants as like a dose so the dose is the grant because where
we have like some pre-test we give a grant out and then we have our report to kind of see what changed as a result of the resources so one thing that I um believe in is that like we should have an engage in choice and also that in the past my experience as a person who was a grant Seeker my program officer often would act like they've never met me before never heard of our organization before and it just starts Blank Slate every Grant cycle and that's just not how human beings work and so the ot
her thing is is I had program officers that I did not want to hang out with if I'm being totally honest and I wanted to limit the amount of time I spent with them so kind of like holding all of these things together um we've embed we've embedded choice in our grant making process in two different ways so um the other thing that I was going to share is that this is the first time that healthy communities Foundation had done reporting and because it was our first time we were allowed to experiment
with something that um had never been done before I was sitting in a session where they like a two um foundations were talking about how they had totally removed applications and reports and that the program officers do them all by check-in conversations and then there was an argument that kind of broke out in the workshop because the belief that like all all the reporting requirements and applications being done by the program officer could Rob community of voice could be misrepresented and so
then people were like saying that written word is better and I just sat with the fact that there were no nonprofits in this conversation at all it was philanthropy arguing with itself about what is best but it wasn't really informed by any of the partners that they have to interact with so I was like well why can't we do both like it was new so these are the two places that we've been able to invent choice for organizations that we have had a prior funding relationship with they have the option
to have like a long because for like Equity purposes like if you want all 75 minutes with me and my bad jokes you can do that but if you're like keep it pushing like you can select a 45 minute Zoom call to just kind of update me on what's going on with your organization um so that's kind of choice one and the other piece is when we set out on this reporting process we used all the data collected from the application site visit Grant award Grant term there was also like parallel to this our 2022
Cycle open so we took information from site visits conversations emails newsletters and prefilled our um we prefilled their written application we notified everybody that their report has been partially filled and that they had the option to either just write their report and submit it or they had the option to schedule a 30 minute phone call with myself or my colleague Danny on the learning team to talk through their answers and so that it was an experiment we piloted it with two grante partne
r organizations that were very different one very small um nonprofit under a half million is budget size and then we did a large Health institution and both gave us some really interesting feedback the smaller organization said that they wanted because I was like I don't know how useful this is for you but they actually share like our report for their work and the leader at the small org was like actually I would like a copy of my report because so often in conversations with funders I say somet
hing really important that I wish I had written down so I could put it in a different application so they encouraged us because I felt like it was too big brothery to record to record and so that we could offer the transcript and then it helped us on the back end because then I didn't have to like type and listen and do all of that together so our piloting process really helped us kind of Latin or like kind of decrease more like make our process a lot more frictionless so that's kind of how we g
ot to this place of like just how do our partners feel about either checking in with us verbally or written it was about half and half so about half of our partners did written half did verbal and they the big thing that we learned is they that writing a report wasn't the favorite but verbal wasn't the fav either that the strongest finding we had was they liked the ability to choose I'm going to talk about some of our like the values that we have as a foundation what tool we used and then like h
ow it showed up in practice so we believe that order to build trust you have to be in relationship so like a relational approach sometimes requires having a conversation versus an email and so we use a tool called calendly where people are able to schedule time to meet with us so that was something that we were able to deploy when we were launching reporting we use it for our site visits and check-ins it is a timesaver the amount of emails back and forth to try to find a good date is always toug
h and calendly really eliminates a lot of that back and forth and so then and again with this practice piece organizations are able to choose what works best for them on their timeline and it syncs with my calendar and so does all that kind of administrative work for me the other thing is a trust-based practice called doing the homework and so we took on finding answers to some of our reporting questions in site visit notes applications all of that stuff and we were able to prefill their like ki
nd of the different questions and sections with information they've already provided us one to kind of honor the work that they've already done two to also signal the kinds of things that we were thinking about in response to those questions because for some people um when if I ask you what is a square someone might say a shape but someone else might say a person that follows the rules and so the piece of that is when we prefill we're able to signal that if I'm asking you what is a square here's
some examples of shapes you're able to respond in shape so that has been really um helpful for us and we it also has led to better answers and data because of that signaling and then in a conversation we can say again what is a square and they start saying a person that follows the rules and I'll be like actually we were thinking more like shapes and then we again back to better data so that's that piece too because we want to um use what we have and put the burden on us because we're the ones
that are mandating reporting not them and so we should be the ones doing all the like heavy lifting and then they can do the refining work we also have like a value of being a Learning Foundation we want to know and build the case for why General operation support and specifically multi-year commitments of General operation support like we're looking to build the ca like the case for why more resources need to be done in this way and adjust our practice and approach year-over year so our first y
ear we learned that Staffing was or flexible funds were critical for Staffing and then this year a really interesting finding from our multi-year partners is they're like using unrestricted funds for like utilities like keeping the lights on and so there's something going on that we're going to start asking about so we're able to like iterate with what we learn and point to what we heard and then point to the action that we're able to take so for this completing the report piece the Grant Manage
ment System we use is wise hiive so that's that pre-filled place we utilize zoom and then otter AI as our transcription service as well as cley to kind of have multiple modalities to collect better data so that we can build relationships with organizations because nobody like has Amnesia every time you talk like I think it's really useful um to be able to do that um and then another value is like organizing our process and progress internally one thing that we've been working really hard at at h
cf is how do you communicate or quickly learn how everybody's projects are doing without bothering them all the time because like how many times have we gotten the email or the like teams message like hey what's the status on on XYZ so for us I wanted to minimize that kind of like I don't want to say tinkering but it slows me down when I have to reorient you to like where start middle and end is um so we used Asana to manage this process of the reporting thing that we were doing so that my team
members could see oh we haven't reached out to this organization oh I'm planning on having a conversation with them I see they haven't done their report I'll remind them so it allowed a level of visibility across the project that allow like freed up my time and my like colleagues time in addition to like having all the critical documents related to the process linked to the Asana board as well so and we're about yes so we're about to get into some Asana specifics but I want to be super clear I b
elieve Microsoft is working on a version of this Monday is one I believe there's all kinds um we so wise hiive and Asana were softwares that were picked by people before me so this is what I got when I came on and since I had previously used it as a project and Work Management tool I figured our organization had previously been using it more as like a library Warehouse like easy to search and find things and then used it for um like internal planning um but ASA generally is a flexible tool that
can um help map your workflow and you can use it for time sensitive one-off projects frankly I had a big party at my house recently and I used AA to plan the party um content calendar for social media all kinds of events planning meeting agendas I use ASA for my one-on ones with my supervisor um we use aana to onboard new staff with things that they need to read or activities that they need to complete and we also have begun using it as um a CRM where we can kind of send emails with relationship
s to their kind of organizational profile so we can see in real time the last time an organization has been engaged in some sort of way so that is generally how we have used aana over time so this screenshot shows what our asonic project for reporting looked like at the beginning of the process before I get into our process on the next slide I wanted to give some context about some masic keywords that'll be helpful for understanding the process for the project so super quickly the project is tha
t top box um Asana organized work into shared projects as boards or lists for your initiatives meetings and programs hcf also refers to them as boards the next item is tasks what needs to be done to complete or support the projects tasks outline who is doing what and by what date for a reporting project each organization that needed to complete a report was added to the project as its own task subtasks are additional steps needed to complete a larger task subtasks are attached to the original ta
sk and sections the sections Will Group tasks based on what workflow stage each task is in for the reporting project our workflow stages or sections were pending meaning we hadn't heard from them verbal reporting prep meaning they had scheduled a meeting via calendly but it has not come up yet verbal reporting meeting complete meaning we had had the meeting um but had not cleaned up our notes and then completed verbal report is when we were able to fill it into wise hiive and then completed writ
ten report report is when an organization would just submit the written report and we'd get a notification from yive and we'd move them into complete so we knew who we had spoken to and where they kind of were in the pathway of the project um it can be really anything so it could be tracking the stage of a workflow pending in progress or completed it can provide categorizations for the type of work you're doing so let's say you have a new person joining your team and you want to create an onboar
ding assana project to house the material the new hire should riew or information that would be helpful to know you might have sections like HR and payroll list serves and mailing lists to subscribe to different Communications and suggested trainings you can also add custom fields to easily track information these fields can be used for filtering the tasks in an Nana project the custom fields we used for this board included report type so used for tracking progress for each organization unknown
organization has yet to select a report type calendly scheduled organization scheduled a verbal reporting meeting verbal meeting complete the schedule meeting with the organization is complete completed verbal report all tasks associated with the verbal report are complete including the cleanup and submission in the grant portal and written report complete so the organization submitting that written report in the grants portal we also used grantee type um annual or multi-year we used this field
for filtering or tracking completion of both of our reporting cohorts we also utilized something called rules so Asana allows you to put logic to automate manual process such as updating Fields moving to a different section assigning additional tasks for subtasks and we use rules to keep our workflow moving and to automatically set next steps for us based on the information we add in a so for example one of the rules once the um verbal meeting was complete it would move into like so we'd have a
date on it and when that date would passed it would move into the verbal report complete so we had set up and then whenever we would have it complete it would assign myself or the person that did the report additional steps so checking off if we put it into wise hiive if we've uploaded the transcript and so that we would know even so then I wouldn't have to bother Dany about where she was at and she wouldn't have to bother me so we really use those rules um pretty comprehensively so section one
is pending so when we create an Assa project we added all the organizations that were required to submit a report to the pending section we set up the report type to unknown and the grantee type depending on which was applicable the verbal reporting prep work that we would do is the tasks or organizations in this section scheduled a verbal report with us but we have to prepare our notes for that meeting beforehand using rules um and then tasks of organizations that have scheduled their meeting w
ill move to the section and add subtext for the next steps will be created so in a scenario we're we're notified via Outlook that fake organization one scheduled a verbal report with me on December 1st I open the reporting project in a and select the task for fake organization one and update the following Fields the assign so I assigned the organization to myself since they scheduled the meeting with me due date I set the due date as the day of the scheduled meeting and the report type as I chan
ged it to calendly scheduled after updating the fields our rule for this section triggers two changes the task is moved to verbal reporting prep so we know that something has been scheduled and it created a subtask prep verbal report template for meeting assigned to the original assign with this rule you can select a due date in five amount of days or however many um when the task is triggered so for this example I set up for three days and after the rule was triggered that is when I updated the
asse due date and Report type the details of the subtask include the information and attachments needed to complete the subtask section three um verbal report meeting complete the organizations in this section completed their verbal report and now we have to clean up our notes and submit the report in our grant database again using our rules tasks of organizations that have completed their report will move into this section and the rule will create a second subtask for next steps so the scenari
o kind of continues I've completed a scheduled verbal report with fake organization number two I opened the reporting project in Assa and assigned or selected the task for fake organization to and updated the report type field to verbal meeting complete after updating this field our rule for this section will trigger two changes the task moves to verbal report meeting complete and it creates a subtask to clean up reporting notes assigned to the original assign and the due date for the sub task w
ill be set for x amount of days so we for this example we gave us 14 days later to be able to like clean up our work we have section four um so the tasks of this section um have completed all steps required of the veral report including meeting note cleanup and submission on wise hiive rules associated with this stage will move the task into this section and mark the task is complete so with this scenario I finished a verbal report with fake Organization three as well as the subtasks associated
with the main kind of parent task the report has been submitted in our grant database base and I updated the report field type to verbal report complete after updating the report type field the rule will trigger two changes the task will move to the completed verbal report section and the task will be marked as complete section five is completed written report so the organization's tasks in this section completed a written report on yive and no further action is required um of that organization
at this time so the scenario is is we we also monitored wise hiive throughout the process to see if organizations when they submitted their written report um upon seeing that fake organization 4 submitted a written report we update the tasks report type field to written report complete the rule moves the task to completed written report sections and marks the task as complete this is just one small way we use aana to house all of the details and tasks associated with a project and not to only ke
ep us on track in our work but to also make information easily accessible to our co-workers we've talked about how we believe in transparency with grantee Partners but internal transparency with our colleagues is another value of the foundation so we often ask ourselves how we can embed the practice of sharing information internally into our processes so we're really doing it from the start rather than sharing back information at the end of a project there's also a lot more you can do with rules
and logic and other features that we didn't use on this specific project with rules there's really so much more than creating subtasks or moving to different sections one we use a lot is a trigger that will add a comment and tag a relevant staff member in the comment there's also a feature called dependency where you can make a task dependent on different task or subtasks so for example if you had two tasks one was for sending an email to your board members and another was for reviewing the dra
ft of that email you could make the first task the draft review dependent on the second task meaning that the person assigned to sending the email cannot send the email until the task of the person assigned to reviewing the draft completes that task so you can like link work together and have assana do that notification of like hey I reviewed this and that it's you it eliminates that and it just notifies you that it's ready to go um so what we learned from the process of doing this was one we as
sessed how much Foundation time it takes because you know nothing happens in a vacuum each report that was verbal utilized from start to finish about 95 minutes of Staff time per person um so we were able to split among two team members for additional perspectives and decrease staff time and the new process allowed for us to adjust questions in real time and produce clearer in Insight so back to that kind of what is a square question the other thing that we learned about the partner experience u
m is that we had kind of an exit survey and what we learned from Partners is that pre-filled reports signaled what we wanted to learn more about and save Partners time and effort um the pilot respondents lik the choice of the report format and asked to have it again so they liked the fact that they were able to do a verbal report and piloting with Partners helped us refine and streamline further to a more co-created process so this process we were able to refine and utilize and this year we're g
oing to be much faster on delivering what we learned in the report than we were this year um or in 2024 we'll have better insight and more kind of publicly talk about what we learned um because it took us about nine months to assess all of our data and this time it's about it's probably be going going to be about four months um and then the feedback on the process Partners received the report questions ahead of time for both format choices um we also kind of did a popup video style um with the q
uestion and then kind of information about why we were asking each question and so um Partners shared that the clarity on the why behind the questions and the new reporting process they said it enhanced their opinion of the foundation so we also asked it's like did this improve your view of hcf did it hinder you and like everyone said that they really appreciated it and one of their requests of us was kind of doing some of these presentations to other funders to share how we were kind of doing t
hat homework um and like kind of streamlining our processes so I was I've been able to present to a variety of different places and trying to get people on board with choice so that is all I have thank you so much I feel like that was just such a um feel like I already learned a ton about your specifics of how a sa is working for you but also how you went through and we looking at the process and being so thoughtful about it um so we did have one question come in I just shared the article that w
as shared in Q&A it's an article from Washington post about using AI in your meetings so the question was um when you enable AI or autter AI for meetings how do you consider consent and how that might impact the organization culture when choosing to launch it as well as privacy concerns for you know either party I would say yeah so consent is built in so in cley you have the option to add questions of like whatever so for us in the time that they chose to schedule they were asked like we're hopi
ng to record this to provide a transcription this is like how one we shared that like we're only using it for transcription Services we can delete it so we ask them if they're okay with us recording we're asking if they want a copy of it because like maybe they want a copy of the video or the transcript themselves so we asked if they wanted a copy of the transcript video and like everything or if they wanted us to delete it after after we were done and then we like had a section where we outline
d um what our secur like our kind of um what's the word I'm looking for like our teex security so it's like we're in SharePoint it's like password protected and we had one organization ask us to passw protect their report um so we did so we were able to kind of outline the different kind of consent yeses and NOS in that scheduling process so for organizations that said no we didn't um but yeah so that that is how we kind of built in consent there and like kind of again as an exchange for their t
ime like if they wanted a copy of the transcript like we want to provide it to them so that's how we figured that one out that's a that was a great question especially because a lot of what you're talking about was that trust based like you're in a partnership with them so I loved hearing that about the consent being or the questions being write up when you're making the appointment calendly that's a great way to handle it um I just put in the chat and I wanted to mention we did a webinar last m
onth on data cyber security and this issue did come up several times about not just if you choose to use like a third-party AI tool to do a transcript um some of the tools that you're using have ai within them that's being released like oh here's the upgrade and now you can use AI like in Zoom or in teams to um you know to do a summary of your meeting or what have you so and somebody said I don't know I thought it was a good way to put it there like for a lot of people as long as you say that th
ere's AI involved like they just want to know that it's been aied um and then you can you know then they like accept it and go on with it and then I I loved how your process actually did pull out the people who didn't want it recorded or wanted it password protected um and it helps all of us think too about like what you know any tool any platform can be used in an insecure way like you can upload your password to SharePoint like that's on you you know like you can do you can you know share some
thing in a meeting that then you're like oh that was actually private information so it also makes you think about you know like what you're sharing and in which context as well like as a foundation and then what the AI you know may be sharing or keeping or or making public so that you need to do yeah well and this process like I think I had shared in this prep call is this process has allowed us to streamline a lot of other ones so in practicing this prefilling piece with the report we're actua
lly implementing pre-filled Lois this year for organizations that are returning applicants because you know organizations core programs and services don't meaningfully change year-over-year however like we are keeping some blank because for example what racial Equity goals or work they're doing should be changing year-over-year so we're putting in like kind of the big pieces that don't move that often and are leaving some items blank to make sure and signal that we're expecting a different answe
r this year guys so there's some of our partners that are you know using the same talking points that they were using in 2019 related to their racial Equity work so the goal is to kind of make the LOI process much easier for partners to just do those quick updates to get them into the swimline to get funded um so we were able to do that we also were able to utilize kind of this assana um board to kind of manage our site visit process so who was meeting with which organization at what date we als
o used some uh demographic data zip codes and we were able to say like who's present in this ZIP code and we can like hit with the the assana topics or like the categories we could just hit a specific category and then count how many um organizations were in a particular ZIP code or in working in domestic violence and so like from a regional perspective we could look at it we could see from a leadership perspective and from like a subject matter perspective so we had really good Bird's eyee View
of our organizations and like how the whole kind of Suite of recommendations came together that's excellent thank you so much for sharing all of this with me we did have a couple of questions at registration and so I just wanted to um kind of surface one of them which also is a question that I have which is you you talked about um using the tools that you already had so I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about kind of your thought process in that was that because you had you know budg
et constraints or like cultural constraints like we already use this platform we're not going to get another one how can we make it do what we want how did you approach that yeah so I had the privilege of getting or being clear and using AA as a project management tool in a previous role Ro so that is how I had seen it used and so the organization had pulled like paid for Asana I don't know how that came to be and the same thing goes for the grants management process and I guess I just tried to
make it work because that's what I had and I probably still have like the nonprofit you know duct tape and a nickel and you're making it go um and so I was just like we need things to be better like our internal Communications needed to be better like we kind of had a culture of bugging people for things all the time and so it's really hard my role in The Learning and evaluation space it's a lot of data work and I need to like Focus but if I'm like answering easy questions every 15 minutes it sl
ows me down so that was the piece um that we are as a team really building um like muscle in a SAA because it has not been used this way before and so I would say that like myself and one other person would be like you know I don't want to say expert level of SAA users but are like use it a lot for things and then we have our like speaking transparently and I'm sure Maria would not care like our foundation president like looks at a SAA gets nervous and like exits so it's just like and we're work
ing on like getting that going a little bit differently but we as a team internally we're really across the Spectrum when it comes to like how we use the Santa um and so for the design set up test and train luckily it was just myself and my colleague Dany managing this project management platform um with the site visit temp or board that I shared about there were five of us working in it and um we have some work to do right around that training piece so with the design setup test and train for t
he um reporting process it took like an hour um um and I walked through it with my colleague Danny and then we were good to go um and then I see this other question of how important do you think the particular platform so Asana is versus the strategy intent and process and so I'll answer that question and there's another one um I don't I personally believe that it's similar like when people talk around fear of AI I really believe that your intention and your strategy and your process matter way
more than your tools um we've like I can share at the foundation that there have been some technologies that were adopted because we thought the tools were magical and I am very famous in my office for saying like it is a tool it is not a magical tool um you have to and like if you get it working and humming again for this have the tools work for you as a as opposed to you working for the tools like when we embed rules when there's kind of logic in embedded in our process it allows for that to h
appen and so I think if we can identify so like more complex projects so like our site visit board around the how long did it Tes to to test train and review like it took about an hour to set up the board and then I had to train every single person for 45 minutes and then we realized that perhaps one training one time was not enough and that we're going to this year in our grant cycle Danny and I will review how to fill and populate the site visit board so that It ultimately helps us with our pr
ocess so it helped us manage like how site visit season was going but it also was able to populate um a document that we provide to our board with our grant recommendations so like amount we were able to kind of do amounts um who's their leader so like all of those kinds of um categories that I shared we were able to like use that from like a planning strategy perspective but also it created a document that we submitted to our board for their review so it was both a process and a product that we
were able to create um and then Microsoft is working on something similar so if you have Microsoft teams or if you have up updated to the new outlook there is a light bulb that has tasks that have been assigned to you and so there you can see that there's like this it's probably coming because you know those big Microsoft Amazon they don't like whenever there's little guys doing something that they feel they should be doing and so there are um a couple ways in your outlook and Via teams that yo
u can assign tasks um and to yourself to other people I will share that when I've used them like they there's no like reminder or like popup like you have to go searching for your tasks versus not so it's not as useful as a SAA yet yet yeah I had the opposite actually I had somebody I knew a colleague was fooling around with it and like oh how can I do this and like set tasks for like several of us that were like I've never heard of this task and then you get like this little you know reminder a
nd you're like wait what I didn't agre to that so yeah I think the Microsoft is not quite and I'm sure it'll be Microsoft e that it'll have like 20 different ways to do the same thing whereas sometimes like you said the little guy it's like it's just I mean even a SAA is already it's got all these complexities which I feel like you took us through so well today and I I actually use aana to do my stuff and I'm like I've got a bunch of good new ideas and like how I can play around with it a little
bit more um so thank you um for that but definitely um I loved another piece that you um that you pulled out around we had a question about efficiencies um and I have a colleague who always says like every time you solve a problem you if you ask the right questions like you get every time you get efficiency like you have like five more things you can do because now you have like extra information you have extra you know like an extra piece of the puzzle and you're like that makes you ask ask mo
re questions um so I loved the way you talked about this workflow helping you pull the data together at the end so that you have a better or maybe more efficient like all of those things were things that you could know before but you'd have to go out and get them whereas in this workflow it seems like um you they're kind of assembled for you and then you have to massage it a little bit and then you've got your report and more information but I'm sure that that's like well now what are we going t
o do with that you know for the next the next piece that we're going to do so I love that aspect of this because when you do use AI or use a workflow uh process like you're doing you know to solve one problem it it helps you you know see more of the picture and more of the things that you could do so I love that um I think we're getting I'm sorry did you want to jump in oh I was going to just share like with our site visit board that we developed this year um previous years I think when we would
get down to kind of like deliberations on Grant amounts or like who were saying yes to who were saying no to I my first grant cycle it was two five hour meetings and then like a final 4H hour meeting this year we like cleared it in two like my supervisor was like what are we going to do with the rest of the day I'm like I don't know so it really yeah so it really does when you're able to kind of really have like create less friction in your processes you really find that you have more time yeah
and I just you have so much more collaboration with your grantees through this process that that's going to be leading to more projects as well I I love that um if you're watching on YouTube today we encourage you to subscribe to our YouTube channel so you'll get the updates every time post a new webinar and we invite you to register for an upcoming webinar on our website because then even if you can't attend you can be on the mailing list you can register and ask your questions uh and you can
always you know watch it later we try to get to all of the questions um that we can you can always also suggest topics that you'd like to hear about in um upcoming webinars and I just want to make sure to thank you again um uh Jillian for sharing so frankly you know what your process was and what the community foundations is trying to do and kind of where you are on that Journey thanks for sharing these specifics around assana and around the the tools that you chose and kind of how you did that
um thinking through your processes so really appreciate it thank you so much thank you and thank you everyone for joining us
Comments