Leveraging Technology

One of the things that I hate hearing from people is I’m not any good at technology. I don’t like technology. Technology doesn’t like me. And I’m just I look at that and I’m like, no, you’re not being open to it.

Hello, everyone. My name is Rachel Myers. I’m guest hosting the Connected Philanthropy Podcast today as we take a closer look at how we can work smarter, not harder with our technology, we’re going to take a close look at how we can stay on top of the technology tools that we have and also some great techniques for evaluating new technology and how we might integrate new technologies into the work we’re doing.

So we have a great guest with us today, Cory Brester. He’s the director of I.T. At Foundant technologies is going to be chiming in with his expertise. But before we dive into Cory, let me just set the stage a little bit. The dust settling from the pandemic times. We’re working in new ways. We’re remote, we’re hybrid where all the things now how can we sort of take another step back and look at how we can create the space, the time and the energy we need to focus on the work that is most important to prioritize those projects, those people and those priorities that really make the biggest difference for our communities.

So that’s what we’re looking at. And today’s topic, as I mentioned, is leveraging technologies. So first question for you, Cory, Can you share with us sort of your journey? Like how have you managed to make technology your friend not foe? How did you do it? Cory

Yeah, and Rachel, thanks for the great introduction. You know, one of the things that I’ve been fortunate to be able to do over the last several years is I’ve been I’ve been at Foundant technologies for just over 11 years. I’ve seen the organization in many different stages and through those different stages, there’s a number of different adoptions of software, there’s a number of different scalability opportunities that we’ve experienced from the more hyper startup organization, with very few people just trying to be as efficient as possible with everything that you do and try new tools, see what works, see what doesn’t work to more of those phases of steady growth, two phases of cost cutting so

many different opportunities have arose in those last 11 years. And in prior to Foundant, I also was in the IT field at a couple different organizations at a university, very different adoption of technology within a university setting, within a public school setting for several years. Again, another very, very different phase of where technology was back in that time.

And not every student had a computer that they could that they could leverage. And and I even worked in I.T. at an oil refinery, which, again, a very different end user, a very different experience to try to support and try to integrate technology into, but all super great experiences. I had this kind of epiphany as to where my love for for computers, for for doing things in a different way, for for trying new things came from.

And it was way back when I was in elementary school and it was that there was a time where, you know, PCs were very expensive. You did not typically have a computer in your home If you did, You know, it definitely was not set up and connected to the Internet. It just but it was it was cool. It was cool to have that.

Cory has terrible handwriting and and I have terrible handwriting, too. To this day, it has not improved. And I either had to slow down and improve my handwriting or I had to figure out a way to work smarter. And so as a fifth grade student back in the day, when not every student had a computer, I typed every piece of homework.

Wow.

And so I as simple as that sounds, starting with utilizing word.

Yes

was where I started, you know, trying to to the title of this podcast and our topic here of, you know, working smarter, not harder. And so that just continued to evolve with me through many years, being able to just be engaged in what was being offered, what I could learn.

I would spend time just watching people in my school work on projects and ask questions like, Why did you do it that way? What if you did it this way? And just beginning to build this background of of systems?

Absolutely. I love the example of deciding to type instead of work on your handwriting. You’re sort of like, Listen, the handwriting is it’s probably not going to get better very quickly. So why don’t I choose a new technology? Word processing instead and make that work for me? So that is a perfect example of sometimes we forget about those early moments, things that are now complete integrated into our work style in our work life that at the time were a big leap.

I was chatting with Logan the other day about Excel. I was terrified of Excel at first and I just avoided it with every fiber of my being. And then eventually a friend sat me down and she’s like, You need to make this tool your friend. This is going to do great things if you sort of get over this fear of starting.

And I did. And she was right. I mean, I can’t even imagine my work life without Excel in it now. Right. But at the time it felt like, Ooh, that’s a mountain to climb so.

Excel is an awesome I’m a huge Excel fan but Excel is great opportunity to How can you do something better? There’s one way to do it, but there’s a dozen other ways that might be more efficient, that might be better. And I think Google can be everyone’s friend on on how do I do this differently? Taking advice from others.

There’s don’t trust everything on Google, but you know, you can start there as a place to to get better and learn new tools and learn how to make things more efficient.

Absolutely. And I think that’s one of the challenges at least that I’ve faced over my career, is like when it comes to technology, we don’t know what we don’t know, you know? And so sometimes it feels like we get very comfy with some of the skills we have. I’m speaking from experience and it’s hard to stay on top of like, well, I could try doing that differently, but I already know how to do it this way and I feel really comfy in this space.

So I’m kind of curious when you as you lead your team and I know you’ve been, like you mentioned before, through all kinds of phases of growth and expansion and with different types of organizations, what strategy used have you used effectively in your team? How what strategies have your team used to stay on top of the capabilities of technology and kind of stay current on what the technology can do for you?

I’m fortunate now to have a small team that that’s working with me and what I’ve been able to do and very fortunate to do is to have each of those individuals be an expert in different tools because it is really hard to know everything. And we’re talking about like, you know, these bigger enterprise applications, the Office 365 Azure, other tools that we integrate with, but designating people that can stay on top of those release notes.

You know, every software company publishes release notes in some fashion. Being able to consume those, some companies, I think, do them better than others in terms of what they highlight and how they introduce that those new features through webinars or even just, you know, whatever be weekly monthly emails that that highlight things that you might be able to use.

And if you can select people that are really your your application owner, the person in your organization that owns that that tool and they are the go to they are the expert, then they can kind of stay on top of that and and not be kind of bothered by the rest of the noise of other applications that don’t that don’t apply to them on a regular basis and then seek help from each other.

So we’ve really designated like an application owner that really owns that, that tool than an IT owner, somebody on my team that is kind of the go to from the configuration standpoint, the the contract standpoint that the knows ins and outs. And then on your kind of business finance side, who’s your advocate for it and this is going to be different depending on the size of the organization.

But as an organization grows, who at that higher leadership level is in charge for advocating for the use of that app? And because as all these organizations are experiencing, wanting to do cost cutting, wanting to also work smarter and more efficient, there’s a balance between keeping those apps, leveraging all the functionality of them. So a lot is going to be kind of asked of these teams from the the application owner that it’s the owner and the business owner.

One of the things that I remember when I was at the Walkin Community Foundation where I worked for the past nine years before I went out on my own as a consultant a year ago, one of the things that we tried to do was create kind of build in time to staff meetings on a regular basis where we would highlight either a new tool that we were integrating and trying to use or like you mentioned before, release notes or a new feature from something that we were already using.

So that way, because it’s one of those things, at least this was my experience. It tends to be difficult to keep it at the top of the priority list as far as training the whole team. But if you create some space on a regular meeting where you’re like, okay, here’s some updates about the Office 365 or here’s an update on a new tool or a or a tool that we’ve been using.

That’s a way to just sort of always have space to share kind of the latest and greatest. And I love what you said about having kind of an owner or a, you know, a main person for each application that can sort of stay on top of those release notes and say, Hey, did you guys know you can now use GLM to do XYZ or you can now use Excel in this way?

Have you ever created a pivot table in this way? I mean, I don’t even create pivot tables. I just use that phrase because it sounded fancy, but, but I think that’s really handy if you can carve out regular time just for technology sharing, because learning from our peers, you know, my experience anyway, learning from my peers is the best way to learn because it feels so tangible and relevant.

Absolutely. And to piggyback on that, something that that we’ve done successfully more prior to having a lot of remote team is if you can’t make time in your staff meetings to set aside time for technology schedule some lunch and learns and everybody comes and sits down, whether the organization provides lunch, everyone loves free lunch, so you’ll definitely get more people involved if if you bring in some sandwiches,

food works!

but, you know, designate somebody each week, each month, whatever that works, that cadence and do a lunch and learn and let people one get together, sit around, work as a team, bond as a team, but then learn. I don’t think you can go wrong with getting people in a room to be able to talk and learn and then also be able to grow those interpersonal skills.

That reminds me, when we first moved over to communitysuite when I was at the Walkin Community Foundation, I actually connected with some peers in other community foundations around the region, and we set aside a time once a month, this is this is back before Zoom was as ubiquitous as it is now. So we were actually on a phone call together, an old fashioned conference call where we would take turns kind of sharing like, this is what I’ve done with Community Suite.

This is how I’ve used it to set up, you know, something for some kind of a donor campaign or something like that. And as time went on, we did eventually moved to Zoom, but that felt like a big lift at the time. I’ll tell you, it’s funny how you have this resistance. Like I mentioned before, sometimes to doing something new, and now it’s just so integrated into our lives.

But that that pure learning together where we would set aside time because we were working in very similar ways, you know, we had very similar functions within our organizations and then learning together eventually, honestly, Cory, that team, that group of of folks ended up being we ended up talking about things way beyond community suite and really learning together in all kinds of very important ways.

But it did. It was such a great glue, is such a great way to start. We actually had someone we had Margaret from Foundant come and join us for one of our calls once to really dig in. And we had some of those specific questions, but it was terrific, pure learning. So I love the idea of a lunch and learn or some kind of special time together to focus on learning.

So moving away from sort of leveraging the tools that we have. One of the other things we wanted to talk about today is looking at potential new tools, and that could help us with our work and help us work smarter. And I’m curious how you recommend sort of evaluating or, you know, sort of investigating or trying out potential new technology tools.

In organizations and individuals need to evaluate what their organization needs from a compliance perspective and what that process needs to be. A larger organization is really going to need more of that definition of where does that tool fit into our tech stack? Are we a Google shop? Are we a microsoft shop? How are we going to be able to leverage those those tools with integrations down the road?

Where do we see that product fitting in the long term business plan? Are we is the pricing going to fit with us for long term? Are we always going to be a five person organization or do we need to scale this to a 500 person organization? And you’re not always going to have those answers and you can pivot.

It’s okay. You know, being able to create that, making sure that you define who owns that app when you bring it into the organizations, that doesn’t get forgotten.

Oh, great idea.

But if you don’t that an app owner, then what happens when when that person moves on from the organization or when the application comes up for renewal, you might be on auto renewal clause and you’re, you know, being paid for it. You may not know what information is being stored in that in that app. So another step to that would be you’re just documenting what is the purpose of that app and what kind of information is being stored in there.

Is it purely just, you know, notes? What are those notes contain? Is it going to contain PII? Is it going to contain all these sensitive pieces of information and how is it secured? What does that tool tool doing?

I had never really defined it in that way, but I love that that framing, like give it to somebody now because that person who could be an advocate for it also can be the person hopefully that continues to train up the group and keep everybody on board with, Oh, did you see this? Now this piece of software can do this and we should try this out.

So there are a lot of different lenses to look at when you’re evaluating, you know, a piece of software or a new technology tool. And then I think is the is the organization who creates this piece of software or this tool in alignment with your mission is another lens. I hadn’t thought about, but I love looking at it from that perspective.

I’m also this makes me think about again when I was at the Walkin Community Foundation, when we started using DocuSign, which was not a new piece of technology by any means, when we adopted it, it had been used broadly, so we knew it was, you know, it was effective. Lots of different organizations and businesses were using it. But still, you know, we went through our process.

Is this really what we want to use? Is it secure? Does it make sense for our processes, all those kinds of questions. And then when we finally adapted it and started using it, I personally still was a little hesitant. I’ll be completely honest. I was like, Well, that’s not you know, I like having those in-person meetings with folks to sign paperwork to set up funds, etc. And then we tried it and the donors loved it so much.

We loved it so much and it saved us hours and hours of time. So that was such a great, you know, example for me personally of sometimes you just have to jump in and try it and you might be quite pleasantly surprised at the time and energy that saved.

Absolutely. I remember e-signature is something that I brought into the Foundant sales process way back in the in the day when we were wearing many hats at that at that point in time. And I was in charge of all of our renewals. And so there was hundreds of license renewals that we had to renew with, with clients like yourself and asking them to print, sign scan back..

then I had to download it, then I had to re upload it back into the in our CRM. It was so much work and I was like, I can’t do this. We need to use an electronic signature that automatically does all of this stuff for us. And so that’s just like one of those opportunities of like looking at what you’re doing and trying to find a better way.

Yes, for sure. And I think there’s also you and I had talked about this before, but challenging ourselves to stay open and curious to what might be possible to kind of touches back on that idea of you don’t know what you don’t know, but being open to like, okay, what if, you know, kind of asking myself, what if I used this tool in a different way?

What would that look like? You know, that’s I guess if I were to leave folks with one takeaway, it would be don’t get in your own way when it comes to technology, like be open to experimenting with some new things, not just new technologies, but new ways of using the tools that you already have to make, you know, to make the most of those tools.

I’m wondering if you have kind of a key takeaway that you want to leave folks with about this conversation Cory?

I just like I want to just the one I’ll put on my security hat and say, make sure you put a security lens on on whatever you’re doing when you’re trying new apps. But second is, you know, I’ve worked with so many different types of people, different generations of people using technology. And one of the things that I hate hearing from people is I’m not any good at technology.

I don’t like technology. Technology doesn’t like me. And I’m just I look at that and I’m like, no, you’re not being open to it. Like you’re choosing what you’re being open to. And I can guarantee you that the car you’re driving has way more technology in it than the one your grandfather drove. You have way more computing power in your cell phone that you’re leveraging and the things you’re trying there than I had on that Windows 95 machine back in elementary school.

Like the technology is there be open to trying the new things it’s okay to fail you can recover you can you know if that’s not the right tool, if it didn’t make your life easier, delete it. You know, remove yourself from it and and move on to the next thing. You can always go back. But being open to trying those new things is is really going to help everyone in the in the coming coming years as well as we’re working together through all these different types of working styles, working locations, Everything that the last couple of years has has brought to us is really just opened a lot of people’s eyes to different tools, different technology, different opportunities.

100%. We can adapt to new technologies and we would love to hear what this community is trying out, what they’ve tried out and adopted, what they’ve tried out and not loved. On the technology side. So please join us as a part of this conversation on compass and share out your successes or your questions about leveraging technology. We would love to hear from you as we continue on this journey to sort out how we can all work smarter, not harder, to create the space, time and energy we need to do this important work.

Thank you so much for listening today.