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Nonprofit Hub Radio
Whether starting a nonprofit or taking an existing cause to the next level, The Nonprofit Hub Radio Podcast is about breaking down how nonprofits can grow. Each episode features an interview with a sector star with insight, stories, or ideas that can take your nonprofit from good to excellence. Join host Meghan Speer every week to make your good go further!
Nonprofit Hub Radio
Empowering Nonprofits: Integrating Technology and Human Strategies for Scalable Impact
David Watters, CEO of Simple and Engaging, joins us for an enlightening conversation about the powerful intersection of technology and nonprofit growth. Discover how nonprofits can unlock new levels of efficiency and impact by aligning tech solutions with their core missions. David shares his transformation from corporate project management to founding a company dedicated to guiding nonprofits through informed technology decisions. We promise you'll gain actionable insights on how to navigate operational challenges and enhance your organization's scalability by understanding what true growth entails and how to achieve it effectively.
David Watters is the CEO of Simple and Engaging, where he helps non-profits unlock their full potential through affordable, scalable technology solutions. With a passion for empowering mission-driven organizations, David specializes in helping non-profits to use technology to streamline their impact management and help them work more efficiently His work focuses on breaking down the barriers of cost and complexity, providing practical, user-friendly solutions that save time, reduce inefficiencies and drive meaningful outcomes.
With over a decade of experience in digital transformation, David has held senior roles at Valta Technology Group and Pearson Australia, leading global teams and managing complex, client-centric digital programs. At Simple and Engaging, his innovative approach combines deep technical expertise with a commitment to listening and tailoring solutions to each organization’s unique needs, helping non-profits do more with less and focus on what matters most—their mission.
Get free nonprofit professional development resources, connections to cause work peers, and more at https://nonprofithub.org
Non-profit professionals are motivated to make a difference, but the minutia of non-profit operations can get in the way of the meaningful work you set out to do. That's where MonkeyPod comes in. Monkeypod helps non-profits get back to their mission by eliminating busy work. Their all-in-one software includes a CRM, non-profit accounting, email marketing, online fundraising and grant management. Non-profit Hub listeners can get 15% off the first year of a MonkeyPod subscription by visiting monkeypodio slash nonprofithub. Welcome back to the Nonprofit Hub podcast. I'm your host, megan Spear, and joining me today is David Waters, who is the CEO of Simple and Engaging, and we are going to talk about scalability when it comes to nonprofits and some of the tech solutions that are available in that process. I know so many folks in our audience are looking to take their organization to the next level, so I'm very excited to dig into this conversation today. David, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for having me, megan, yeah, my pleasure.
Speaker 1:So, by way of introduction, tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey into the nonprofit world, and how you got involved in this work in the first place.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. So a very brief history of time. So I was born and raised in the UK. After graduating I moved to Australia where I started my corporate career. I've always very much been in the kind of project management digital transformation space, so always kind of occupied in that corporate career that gap between what does the business actually want and need and how do you kind of translate the tech talk into what that really looks like. I had a good career working for a global education company. I moved to a small boutique consulting firm based on digital transformation, this time more around finance and procurement, automation and adoption, which was great. That got me the opportunity to work with a load of different organizations different sizes. Had the opportunity to work with a few nonprofits in Australia during that process as well.
Speaker 2:Something that's always bugged me, though, during my corporate career and working in that consultancy firm and this isn't a criticism of them or anything a common theme that I saw organizations big and small is making bad technology decisions. So spending lots of money on platforms that are either too big, too complicated, doesn't actually do what they need it to do, doesn't actually solve a problem that they're looking to solve. So I had this idea. I'm going to start my own company and I'm going to help. I was primarily going to focus on small businesses and nonprofits, help them make better technology decisions, so very much.
Speaker 2:We started life as a company and I started on my own as more of kind of that digital transformation consultant, software, kind of advisory piece. The first couple of clients that I was fortunate to get this was during COVID, so all done remotely were non-profits and the requirements shifted very quickly. They kind of explained we ran through some stuff to understand what they're looking to do, what their real kind of problem was, the real challenge that they were trying to solve, and realized they didn't need a big, heavy platform. Actually, you just need a couple of these platforms which you can kind of stitch together to solve that problem far more cheaply, far more accessibly. Understandably, the response was that sounds great, can you do that?
Speaker 2:So we shifted very quickly from that kind of advisory to actually doing the work, so more of a managed services provider. And that's kind of where we've continued our journey over the past three, four, four years, working primarily with nonprofits. We work with some small businesses as well, but primarily nonprofits, to help them look at how can you use technology to manage your impact better. So the kind of data collection, the data analysis and the reporting piece, but also just in terms of being more efficient as an organization. Nobody likes doing lots of typey-typey manual work. There's technologies that can actually help now super affordable, super accessible. So that's really kind of how we've grown as an organization and where we are today, working with nonprofits in Australia, new Zealand, the UK and hopefully the US very soon.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. I love that. So to that end, let's kind of start with that as the framework for today's discussion I'd love to hear you know I know from your background you've worked with organizations of all sizes, our audience specifically we have a lot of folks who are trying to grow their organization to that next level. They're trying to scale, but I feel like sometimes it's almost become a catchphrase of sorts trying to grow their organization to that next level. They're trying to scale, but I feel like sometimes it's almost become a catchphrase of sorts right, like, we're an organization that wants to scale.
Speaker 1:Great, what does that mean? What does that look like? And if you did it well, where would you end up? So I'd love to hear from you about, maybe, either an example that you've seen or even, as you're talking to clients, where do you start beyond the idea of like? Because I do think that there are some leaders who embrace scalability and some who are like we're good, but when you have that first one, the leader who's ready, they are bought into the concept of scaling and growing an organization and moving it forward in that direction. What's the first step after saying like, yep, that sounds like a good goal, I want to do it. What does that look like?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely Great question, and it's something that I do see very often. Typically, my experience in the nonprofit world is you've got very smart, very passionate people, really dedicated to the work that they're doing, doing a great job, working really hard and really kind of doing whatever they can to stay afloat. So it doesn't leave a lot of space for considering how things can change, how things can be different. So there's kind of two schools of thought on how to approach this as a kind of a whole. One is okay, let's look at putting a big system in place, something that will cover a lot of different areas, big, steep learning curve, usually quite expensive, and that has its merits. In some organisations. It kind of depends on what the kind of setup is before. The approach that I prefer to take, and I think works a lot better, is working directly with um, that leader who realizes they want to change something, and sitting down and going okay, let's try and find what takes up the most amount of time for some of your staff, because the real value that technology can add is is freeing up time. So it's not about replacement, it's not about, you know, kind of people completely having to not do any work anymore, which would be great, but obviously that's not the case. It's more about how can you free up the limited time that your staff have to focus on activities that either they're really passionate about, really really good at, or require more complex thinking, trying to move them away from the kind of repetitive activities that are there Equally. The other side of that coin is how can you augment your skill set, particularly with the advent of artificial intelligence now.
Speaker 2:So unfortunately I can't mention the name of the nonprofit, but we did some work with a very small nonprofit two or three full-time employees, a bunch of contractors that work with. Their biggest challenge that they were seeing was how efficiently and how well they were able to apply for grants. So the original kind of request was hey, do you know anyone in your network that is a good grant writer? Through the conversations that we had, it became apparent well, they can't really actually afford a grant writer. So it wasn't that we had. It became apparent well, they can't really actually afford a grant writer. So it wasn't about just trying to shift the work, it was how could they do the work better? So we did some work with them looking at okay, well, how can you use generative AI tools like ChatGPT or Chord or that sort of stuff to help you draft some of the responses to your grant application, but also use it to review some of the responses to your grant application, but also use it to review some of the responses that you've written. So how can you use technology to improve that process overall? So we did some workshops looking at how to craft effectively prompts that you can use um and they're now starting to see that process be more efficient, starting to see, you know, the quality of their grant applications go up. I haven't looked back into them yet to see if their grant success has improved um, but they, you know they feel a lot more comfortable in that process.
Speaker 2:It's they're not using artificial intelligence just to write it for them. That's a terrible idea off the bat. That's it's not about getting it to do it for you. It's about how can you augment the wealth of experience and knowledge that artificial intelligence has to improve the work that you're doing. So it's that kind of co-work. Together you've got someone who can do a first draft for you.
Speaker 2:A lot of folks like to edit rather than you know. They find you know, it's the blank page syndrome where I like to do that first bit. So artificial intelligence has really helped them with that. So that's really quite small and quite targeted. But how technology can kind of fill a gap, moving to something a little bit bigger and looking more towards scale. Um, so we did some work with diversity works new zealand. So they're a leading non-profit New Zealand promoting diversity, equity, inclusion practices across businesses in New Zealand Do some fantastic work, really lovely people.
Speaker 2:They developed a very, very complex framework to assess and analyze the maturity of the practices that organizations had around diversity, equity and inclusion, around diversity, equity and inclusion. Now it's like a 150 question kind of self-assessment process that, depending on the answers that you have, is how many questions that you receive. So it's kind of iterative in that process. And they had this. They developed all of this ip around this, but they had no way to take that to market. They were doing it manually.
Speaker 2:The challenge with that is obviously the data collection is a bit of a pain. But also the whole point of a self-assessment is to be able to tell you where you are and where you need to go next. So there was the analysis piece that came up, came with that. So we were able to work with them. We developed out a digital tool that firstly captured the data. So add all the logic in around you, logic in around phasing out which questions they should see based on the responses previously, centralized all of that data collection into one database. And then we added in some automation logic that analyzed the response from the organization.
Speaker 2:It's a self-assessment to score them against different areas of maturity in their DEI practices, to score them against different areas of maturity in their DEI practices and then automatically generate a report that gives them their results and some recommendations based on where they are in their journey. So this, this kind of, enabled them to scale across New Zealand infinitely. So they'd gone from doing a handful of assessments over the course of months to, since this tool's launched, they've done 360 and it's all kind of been hands-off. So they can focus more on the membership team can focus more on what do the results mean? So you've got your results, you've got your report. Okay, let's sit down with you, let's go through that mean. So you've got your results, you've got your report. Okay, let's sit down with you, let's go through that. You know, here's some bespoke services that you might be able to that might be suitable for you as an organization based on where you are, so it's actually helping to drive their financial sustainability as well.
Speaker 2:Uh, I, I always feel bad using business concepts in non-profit world, but actually it's super important it. It provides an upsell pathway, right, so their members can do this that doesn't cost them anything off the bat, and obviously it can scale infinitely across that. Where it gets super interesting and apologies, I geek out about this massively so obviously there's a huge amount of value just in the individual assessments being done and the insights that are being gathered at an organization level. Where it gets really cool is you've now got all this data in a central database, so we then built some visualizations out so they can analyze that data to start looking at okay, what's going on in the industry? What are some of the trends that we're seeing? What areas are people falling short in the most? Which is helping them to drive? What does their service delivery look like in the future? It's kind of moving, not quite predictive analytics, but moving towards understanding.
Speaker 2:Okay, if our gaps are here at the moment, what do we need to be developing now so that next year we can help raise that kind of profile? Equally, you're also starting to see, sorry, final point. I promise, um, I told you I geek out about this stuff. Um, the the last point is they're starting to be able to in a fairly rudimentary way but able to do it track their impact. So they're starting to see organizations that they worked with at the start where they are when they first did their self-assessment one year on. How do they compare? What does that improvement look like? And starting to see the kind of impact that they're having and being able to measure that and then report on that more broadly. So, yeah, really, really cool project.
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Speaker 1:I think one of the things that I love about what you shared and I love when people geek out about stuff they're passionate about, so I'm totally good.
Speaker 1:But I think one of the things that's so interesting and maybe a point that we tend to gloss over or not think about in the process, that we tend to gloss over or not think about in the process right when we think about technology solutions that help us to scale part of the thing that has to go along with, kind of hand in hand with that technology side, is the people side, because one of the things that I've heard a lot of folks say is like oh well, we have a person whose job that is, but what you were very clearly describing is a new way of thinking of like okay, but if they weren't tied up in this manual process, what could that person do? What value could they bring to the organization beyond sitting there and just creating these reports or doing the data entry or all of those pieces? I think one of the things that is so fascinating to me is to watch when organizations can embrace how both the technology scale as well as the changing mindset of somebody's capacity and impact as a said hand in hand. I'd love to hear from you if you've seen maybe some red flags before. Like you know, we, we scaled and then then, but nothing on the people side changed, so nothing's the impact doesn't grow.
Speaker 1:Or are there other red flags that maybe people need to think about, as those two things kind of go hand in hand? What does that look like?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah, it's a really good point Because far too often, unfortunately, you do see nonprofits of all sizes spending considerable amounts of their budgets on big platforms. They've had the salesperson come in pitch to them here's all these things you can do. It all sounds great and then a lot of these platforms can do these things, but obviously it's such a big change to the organization you've got to see that change management piece come through. The approach that we try to take to help address that is, rather than looking at changing lots of things at once, just look at one thing so you know if it's, you know what's causing. Someone described it. They played it back to me one time. They're like you know work is. Everyone has aspects of their job that they don't enjoy. It's, you know, the parts of their job that they have to do. All the time they're like, oh, I need to do this and it kind of takes them away from doing the bits that they really enjoy, which impacts, you know, well-being in the workplace and burnout in the nonprofit spaces is very well reported.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So it's about how can you take that bit out, rather than let's find a piece of technology just to insert into that and means that you might have to change how you do things. Let's have a look at actually mapping out that process. And this is the bit that almost every organization, large and small, nonprofit and for-profit don't always do, because it's not the most exciting of jobs to do, but it's super important. You've got to understand what problem you're actually trying to solve. For. So you know, if you're looking at a big platform, a big CRM, we're going to get a new CRM Great.
Speaker 2:What's the problem with your existing process that you're trying to solve? Do you understand where the bottlenecks are in that process? Because what you'll start finding is that you know you'll have a process which has a few bottlenecks in it. That causes frustration or angst or means you can't then do something else with it, and there might be ways that you can just fix those. So, rather than, okay, how do we change your process completely, how do we just make it a little bit better? So this could be, you know, to the examples I spoke to before automating all of it or large portions of it, or it might just be automating a little bit of it. That takes the most time. So for the end user, for the folks in the organization, the change isn't dramatic. The change isn't drastic. Folks are already busy enough. The last thing they want to do is have to reinvent the wheel, and people are very comfortable with how they work. It may not be the most efficient, it may not be geared to scale exactly.
Speaker 2:They're very comfortable with the processes that they're in, so it's very much more around. How can you, how can you, like kind of almost process by process, start improving pieces within that, rather than this dramatic, you know, top-down kind of change? And you see this far too often. Where organizations have paid lots of money for something, either they're using half of the functionality because no one really knows how to use it. It's made a process more complex. So either folks are doubling up they've got their own spreadsheet somewhere that they still use because they don't like using the system. That's there, um or it's just making the, the process, uh, more complicated than than it was, and that's.
Speaker 2:That's not the point of technology and that's not the best way to use it. Technology isn't an answer in itself. It's an enabler to achieve something, um, but it's all about how do you apply different technologies to different problems in a smart and targeted way. That also helps with understanding whether you're actually going to receive any benefits from it as well. So you know, if you're looking at something, that, if you're looking at a process that takes you three hours a week, if you're going to spend $100,000 on a technology solution that solves that, three hours a week. Probably not worth it, yeah, unless you've got some very, very well-paid staff. So it all starts with understanding what you're doing now and what kind of challenges you're trying to face. So you're really clear on that. So when you're then speaking to software companies, speaking to the salesperson, you can look past that. Look at all the shiny things. Look at all the bells and whistles, yeah exactly too okay, we needed to do this.
Speaker 2:Specifically, having that in your back pocket means that you're far more armed to be able to have those conversations, because they're very, very, very smart and talented technology sales folks out there desperate to try and help organizations solve their problems and also, you know, kind of increase the awareness and adoption of their products as well. So it's just trying to kind of balance that a little bit. So very much you got to start with the challenge that you're trying to solve.
Speaker 1:I love that Mostly. I love it because, one, it gives us a framework in which to start, which is always helpful to me, but two, it's a good reminder to me. I think so often we get caught up in the nonprofit sector of you know we're doing good, we're a nonprofit. It's a different mindset somehow when it comes to the operations side. But I think this whole conversation is a really good callback to this.
Speaker 1:Nonprofit is literally nothing but a tax status. Right, it's still an organization. It still has to run like a business. And for some reason, I feel like for a very long time we've kind of looked at like oh, we don't do things like businesses do, as some sort of badge of honor, and I'm sure that it has led to a lot of inefficiency. Right, it's led to a system we don't need. It's led to not making sound choices that say, hey, if this is going to cost you $100,000, but it only frees up three hours of someone's time, that is not a smart economical decision or a good use of your funds. And so I appreciate the kind of call back to the root there of like no, we still need to make sound decisions in the business process if we're going to scale effectively, regardless of our tax status as a nonprofit entity.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely, and it's typically what I see, particularly with founder-led nonprofits. You know they've grown from usually a one-person operation.
Speaker 1:One person who's passionate about a thing but may not have that business background or business skillset.
Speaker 2:Absolutely and been successful to grow to the point that they're at. But it's kind of that what everything that you've done that got you here isn't necessarily going to get you to do. You know, kind of that next level If that's where you're wanting to go is to scale that out. Technology is drastically different today than it was, you know, 10, 15 years ago. So that, yes, the the way that I see, there's been three kind of big changes in in this space that have meant that you can kind of throw out a lot of your old assumptions. So the first is around cloud hosting. So you've got organizations like Amazon, Google, Microsoft. They've built huge, great big data centers all over the world and you can now set up some software in there very cheaply, very accessibly. You don't have to manage the physical server, you don't have to hire people to keep an eye on it, all of that sort of stuff. So it's made everything far cheaper to do. Now this benefits nonprofits because you're starting to see and you've started to see over the past seven or eight years software as a service, the idea of freemium models as well. Organizations can afford to do this because hosting is so cheap. So now you've got platforms that you can use and you don't even have to pay anything for. You're limited on volume usually, but if you've got a very specific problem and you can find a free tool that solves that problem, that's a great win. And you can find a free tool that solves that problem, that's a great win.
Speaker 2:The second piece is kind of fallen off the back of this proliferation of cloud computing and cloud hosting is the interoperability I hate that word, but I always have to say it Between platforms, because everything's built in the cloud. Now it makes much more sense, it's cheaper and it's easier for software developers to create ways in which other platforms can talk to them, so everything can integrate a little bit easier. So they create these APIs, or basically just doors into their platform which allow other platforms to say hey, I need you to do this, I need you to do this, I need you to do this, which makes that automation piece far easier. So you've now got platforms that can talk to each other far easier than before. Before it was hiring a big team, a lot of work, you had much more closed ecosystems. So you've got cheaper platforms. You've got platforms that can talk to each other far easier.
Speaker 2:And then the third piece is what's on everyone's tongue these days is artificial intelligence. Now I look at this a little bit differently than the kind of mainstream. It's great for content creation and marketing and stuff like that. Sure, of course, that's a valid use case. What I see in nonprofits in particular is very hardworking, very smart, very passionate subject matter experts. So they are experts in their particular field.
Speaker 2:What artificial intelligence gives them is access to someone who knows a lot sometimes quite a lot about everything. So suddenly you've got this generalist that you can call on and a lot of these platforms are free to use as well. You've got this generalist that you can call on and a lot of these platforms are free to use as well. You've got these generalists that you can call upon to help with things. So, particularly you know. Going back to the point around, you know nonprofits not running like a business. If there's a financial concept you don't quite understand, you can ask ChatGPT or Claude. Sure, there's no judgment in their response. There's no. Oh, you should do this and you get an answer. And if you don't understand it, you can ask more questions. It's available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. So suddenly you've got access to this knowledge that you didn't have before, and it can help you to apply it in your specific situation.
Speaker 2:So, even around process mapping, as we were talking earlier, AI can help you with the right prompt, with the right questions and a bit of information about your organization, it can help you work out where the bottlenecks might be. So you've suddenly got access to this fantastic assistant that has no judgment when you ask it. Quote unquote, stupid questions. Yeah the silly question.
Speaker 2:But in reality there's no such thing as a stupid question. It's great that you're asking it in the first place. So yeah, they're kind of the big three trends that have changed over the past 10, 15 years. So the result is software is cheaper, more accessible, easier to use and you know, you've now got this kind of virtual assistant you can call on whenever you need. So it's dramatically changed the landscape of this.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's great, david. We only have a couple more minutes, but if somebody wanted to connect with you they wanted to learn more about your company or there, maybe have some questions or follow up how would we find you? What's the best way to reach out and connect?
Speaker 2:LinkedIn. So I post two, three times a week on LinkedIn sharing lots of different tools, insights, frameworks to try and approach technology in nonprofits. Very, very happy to chat with folks. I'm not a great salesperson, to be honest with you, so it's not something that, if we do have a chat if I can add value, great.
Speaker 2:If we can then work together, fantastic. If not, but I can add value, that's even better. So, yeah, I see our role as supporting folks trying to make the world a little bit better, so whatever role we can play, that's great, fantastic.
Speaker 1:I love it. Well, david, thank you so much. This has been a fascinating conversation. I'm really excited to give folks some practical ways to evaluate solutions to take their organizations forward, so it's super helpful. I really appreciate all of your insights. Again, my guest has been David Waters. Definitely go connect with him on LinkedIn. We're excited to have him on the podcast today. This has been another episode of the Nonprofit Hub Radio Podcast. My name is Megan Spear and I will see you next time.