 So I just wanted to welcome everybody to TechSoupConnect. This is the Ontario chapter event and I am Sandra Amar. I'm your local TechSoupConnect host here for Ontario. And TechSoupConnect is a global network of tech for good meetups and it's a nonprofit that has other nonprofits to get, implement and use technology effect a little bit about me. If you haven't met me before, I've been working in the IT space for many years. I help nonprofits and other businesses better use their technology to create efficient digital workspaces. And I'm also currently the national president for the One Parent Families Association. Although I will be stepping down shortly and but I will be continuing my work here with TechSoupConnect and helping you bring amazing resources like we have here today and all the ones we've had in the past. And we'll get to that in a moment. A little bit about our values. We welcome everyone. We put our community first. We're here to support each other at the end of the day. We are going to build stronger nonprofits using technology. And I always invite participation so we can all learn from each other. If you have any ideas for sessions or topics that you would like me to look into finding resources to come and present on, please let me know. And obviously we treat each other with kindness and respect. A little bit more about TechSoup. It helps to connect you with donated discounts and discounted product such as hardware, software, a whole bunch of items to help you run your organization. This is some examples of things that you can get at prices you can afford. Some of them are also free for nonprofits like Google Workspace. So you're Google for nonprofits account. You would validate through TechSoup to get it. That is good to know as a nonprofit. This is an example of how much you can actually save versus retail cost versus what you can get through TechSoup when you're a nonprofit. And if you're not aware, TechSoup has a forum on forums.techsoup.org and it's a great place to ask questions about different technology help that you may need and we all help them learn from each other. I mentioned if you're interested in participating or doing anything, please let me know. Now that we're getting back out there, I'm in the Toronto area. If anyone has a location where we could do an event, maybe we can actually get together and meet in person one of these days. And we're here today for most digital transformations fail, make your succeed. And this is an exciting topic for me and one of the, because of my passion for digital transformation and using technology effectively, that's how I came to meet Kevin. And I'm excited to have him here today to talk about digital transformations and how you can succeed at it. And before we move on, just to note that our next session, I'm taking a break for the summer. I've got a lot of colleges planned and I need to get out there. So I won't be holding any events over the summer, but we will be back in September with another great topic about taking your data to action and making your data visible and useful so you can learn how to tell a story with your data. Keep an eye on your email for more information about that. But right now I'm going to turn it over to Kevin to introduce himself, introduce himself and take us through what we need to know to go through digital transformation. Yeah, Sandra, to your point, it's an area of passion, I think, for you and me because we see the value that technology can bring to organizations of all types and sizes, especially the nonprofit sector. I'll talk a little bit about my background and why I have a certain perspective on how to create a successful digital transformation, having been someone that worked within cloud technology companies and seeing how things went right and how some things went wrong. And that's kind of what I'll bring. So really what we're going to focus on today is how to create good, strong relationships with technology providers because if you're trying to be successful with their solution, it's got to be based on a foundation of true partnership where both sides are trying to be successful and both sides are trying to win. So let's dive right into it. Excuse me, yeah, my name's Kevin. I've got 15 years of experience in the technology sector across a bunch of different areas. The last 10 or so have been spent as a SaaS, a software as a service or a cloud customer success manager or a CSM for short. Now I'm an advisor with Green Merits Consulting. So I took a step out of the for-profit side of the house and decided to take all this tech knowledge and know-how that I've masked over the past couple of decades and applied specifically to the nonprofit and small business side of the house with Green Merits Consulting. To give you some context about the CSM role, I want to help you understand like what a customer success manager does and where they fit into the picture, what it comes to technology and how you buy technology and then how you subsequently use technology, okay? And so when you talk about the sales process, you've identified that you need to buy some HR management software or a CRM software or event management software. Typically what happens, you're going to talk to a sales and the sales rep at that technology company is going to talk about your motivations. They're going to help you create a vision of what the solution can do. They're going to pitch and negotiate with you and then they're going to close the deal or the contract. What happens next is typically you'll get some kind of implementation team or process that goes on where you get set up on the product. You're going to go through some development, some testing, you might have some training of course on how the new system works and you're going to make sure that your processes are working in alignment with that new technology, obviously. And then after you get to the implementation phase, this is where the customer success manager typically comes into the picture, okay? It's after the implementation. It's after the sales process has been done and the customer success manager is usually focused on the usage of the application. Are you being successful with it? Are you getting your return on investment? Is it actually giving you the reward that the benefit that you're seeking? Are you willing to be an advocate for that solution? So are you willing to tell your colleagues and coworkers and your peers about, oh, we got this great new HR management system that we just implemented, you should check it out. You should use it. CSMs will help to solicit that information, that feedback from you. It'll also be included on some of the processes regarding support and escalation. So if things are really going wrong, typically a CSM is the person that you'll reach out to and say, hey, we've had a lot of technical issues, we're working with a support team, but we need some extra oomph behind these challenges we're having, can you help us out? And then CSMs are also part of the ongoing education piece and then the final one is contract renewal. So typically when you think of cloud-based solutions, you're subscribing to them for a certain term. Sometimes it's month to month, other times it's a year, two years, three years, but typically the CSM, the customer success manager, has been responsible for renewing the contract. So at the end of that one year term, someone has to come and present you a renewal order form that you're gonna be asked to sign. And with the belief for understanding or hope, I guess, that you've actually gotten some value out of the solution, you like it, tell your peers about it, it's working for you and you want to continue using it. And so keep that in mind when we go through this conversation because I was the CSM, I was that person that kind of had to help my customers understand how to use a solution, but how to help them with escalations, how to help them make sure they were getting educated and staying up to date on the solution and all the changes. And then I was the one that was helping to get the contract renewed so they would continue being a customer, okay? And so I bring that perspective as a CSM to what I'm seeing in the nonprofit space and what I think can be done to help set up customers to have really beneficial and meaningful partnerships with their technology providers, okay? So now I'm gonna do a little quick poll just to get the juices flowing and it's gonna speak to where I think technology is going, but using your little icons in Zoom, using the notifications or the ability to kind of raise your hand. Raise your hand if you've got a computer that has a CD or DVD drive in it. If you're looking for it, I think it's called Reactions on. Reactions, that's where I'm gonna fail it. The word is failing me. Reactions is where we're looking for it. Alternately, so another one, if you have a Yahoo Hotmail or AOL account, email account, and I think I'm dating myself on this one for sure, because I've got one of those. I'm not gonna say which one, but I do. You've actually read through an entire software of terms and conditions. We buy these software solutions. We get them all the time. Have you actually sitting down and sat down and read through the actual terms and conditions? If you have kudos to you, I would imagine that a lot of people probably haven't, but those terms and conditions are important because they dictate how you're gonna be able to use the software. And the last one, you'd be just fine if your internet connection had to go back to dial up. And this one, I'm not gonna age my, I don't wanna age myself necessarily on this, but I grew up in the dial up period, right? Where I see a crying face of frowny face. I area, Penny. I grew up in that period and it was great. I remember when High Speed First came out and was like, oh my gosh, I can download information and navigate the web and do all this things so much faster. But you get where I'm coming from. The point is that like times have significantly changed and our relationship with technology has changed as well. Okay. It's not a case where we're out buying a little CD, slapping into a CD drive, installing software and then we never have to talk to the vendor anymore. This subscription based approach, this internet enabled approach, it's really changed how we look at and how we use technology. And that's really what we wanna drive at to today. Okay. What is digital transformation for nonprofits? So I borrowed this definition from our friends at salesforce.com and I've tweaked it with a little bit of the highlighted items that I put in green because they seem to have a much more focus on CRM and like for-profit organizations and businesses that are running a sales team. But I wanted to make sure we acknowledged or inserted some verbiage in there that speaks to what we see on the nonprofit side as well. So digital transformation is the process of using digital technology. So you think about SaaS or cloud kind of solutions to create new or modify existing business processes and culture and customer or stakeholder experiences to meet business or organizational and market requirements, okay? It's the adoption of technology to make how we operate and how we work easier, faster, more efficient, more effective to give us a bigger impact, okay? I wanna make sure that we level set on what it means to go through a digital transformation because it's not just buying software, it's really having technology being much more pervasive in terms of your business process, your culture, your stakeholders and other key factors. And so why are we talking about cloud technologies in the first place? This is a study from B2B Tech Reviews. It shows that in 2018, 51% of organizations were running purely on SaaS and the expectations that's gonna continue to grow through 2023, okay? I'd say upwards of 86%. And again, this is running purely on SaaS or cloud solutions, right? So we're not slowing down anytime. The unfortunate thing, it's not all rosy. So the biggest challenges for organizations that are using SaaS today are things like security, governance and compliance, staff lacking cloud experience. What does it mean to actually have applications that are sitting on the internet versus having applications that you install locally on your computer? Privacy concerns is always a big one. Vendor lock-in. So I talked about that whole renewing the contract. Sometimes organizations feel like they're locked in, like they don't have a chance to try and get out of that contract or things aren't going out of cost. Lack of visibility, unplanned outages, support challenges and what happens when the system goes down. But despite its importance, organizations have a tough time when it comes to being truly successful with cloud technologies or software as a service. And so this kind of takes us to that next step. When you look at those factors that are really challenging about being successful with cloud tech, this other study was pretty interesting by N10 and it's talking about Manjul non-profit technology change in 2022. But this is the most important and unfortunate least known metric. And it's really a look at what is the return on investment of your investment in technology? Okay. And this question was posed to the survey respondents and was how often do you evaluate the ROI of your technology products and services? And the unfortunate piece if we're looking on this biograph is 46% very rarely or not at all and 19% don't even know. So we're going out and buying all these different technologies and solutions. But when it comes to actually taking a look at whether or not they're delivering what we wanted them to deliver, what would be the reason we bought them? We really don't know. We're not doing the best job of going back and really evaluating whether or not we're successful whether we're getting that ROI or not. And so the ultimate outcome when we take a look at this study by the Boston Consulting Group, just another example, only 30% of digital transformations are considered successful and success meaning are they creating the value, the return that we thought we were going to get when we first bought them, okay? And this is where, we talk about this title of why most digital transformations unfortunately fail. It's because they're not delivering the value that we thought that we're going to deliver when we first bought those solutions. And this study by Boston Consulting Group really shines a light on that. So for the remainder of today's session what we're going to cover off on is what contributes to a strained relationship with technology provider, signs that it's not going so well and then how to write the ship if possible, okay? Again, this is from the perspective of how do we work with and identify true technology partners so we can both be successful, right? They want the contract renewal, we get it. Their business is based on selling software, having successful customers and our benefits, our success is driven on increasing our impact, running better events, increasing donations, all the things that we look for in our nonprofit organization to be considered successful. How do we create that win-win type of partnership between the two of them? All right, so what contributes to a strained relationship? First and foremost, poor communications. So when it doesn't seem like the other side is really listening or may not understand the challenge you're trying to solve there's that misalignment between what you're really trying to do and really understand it and having the other side really understand it. That can often contribute to miscommunications and ultimately a strained relationship with your technology provider. Team changes. And I'd be interested to show hands who's ever undergone team changes either internally at your organization or at the vendor side. And there was a bit of, there was some lost knowledge or some gaps. It was like, oh yeah, Frank used to know how to use this software really well and now they're not around anymore. Or yeah, we used to really work with this awesome rep at tech company XYZ and we lost that person and now they don't really understand why we bought the solution in the first place and like I'm seeing some hands go up and I think that's something that we've all experienced. And it's unfortunate, it's good nature of the beast with changing organizations, career development, but it's something that we have to acknowledge that can contribute to a strained relationship with a technology provider, misaligned objectives. And this really stems to the poor communication side of the house but keeping in mind that the motivations that I alluded to for a technology company, they're not always perfectly aligned with what your goals might be as a nonprofit, right? The technology side is gonna be more focused on selling more users or more modules so that you will increase your adoption and increase what we call your annual contract value in the use of that software. That's what they're motivated to do. That's what they're compensated on but we have to understand that metric, those metrics that are related to increasing sales on the technology vendor side, they don't necessarily align with your metrics, your business metrics around increasing efficiency and maintaining security and all the other things that you try to deal with in your nonprofit. So it's not a bad thing but we just have to acknowledge the fact that they can be misaligned. I think really forward-thinking technology companies are starting to realize that if they wanna be successful, you have to be successful and this was kind of the role of the customer success manager. It's one of the kind of fastest growing post-sale roles within the cloud and SaaS realm because we realize that if customers are gonna be successful, that will in turn yield success for the technology company. So it becomes a kind of symbiotic relationship but just understand that those misaligned objectives can factor into your conversations. Now this one is rough. So broken promises, those always strain a relationship, dealing with expectations versus reality. Often this is uncovered typically during or after the implementation. We saw the demos, we bought the software, we signed the contract, we're implementing it. And now, wait a second, we saw some features in the demo or we saw some things in a PowerPoint presentation and they're not showing up in the actual software or we have to get really creative and really tweak things to make things work that we thought we're gonna just be pretty turnkey when we got the solution in the first place. So things like that can really strain a relationship too. I'm gonna pause, Penny, I see that you've got your hand up. Did you wanna ask a question or say something? And if you are, you're on mute. I think just to raise hand. Sorry, yes, I just forgot to take it down. Gotcha, no, been there, done that, not a problem. Okay, all right, we'll press on. So technical issues and we all know that they're gonna happen but it's when they happen too often and they're not resolved fast enough. I'm sure everybody would raise their hand. Dealing with technical issues is a headache. If you're locked into a contract with technology vendor and there's constant technology issues, when they come to you with that renewal, you're gonna start thinking, are we happy here? Is this working out? What should we do? So we wanna try and mitigate those as much as possible. And then surprise costs and this stems into technical issues and stems into all the previous buckets. But that conversation where it's, oh no, to do X, Y, Z you're gonna have to pay additional money to do it where you had thought, you know, we thought that we bought this solution that was gonna do all these great things. We saw it in the demo, we saw the great presentations, all that stuff but then you're surprised to hear that you're gonna have to spend more money to get core functionality that you thought was gonna be out of the box that you weren't prepared for. And it could be not just add on users or modules, it could be, no, you have to get professional services from our team to configure the solution to do it the way that you wanna do it. Those surprise costs never make anybody happy, especially those that kind of hold up her strings and dictate how our budgets are actually spent. Okay, so we've talked about things that can strain the relationship. And I'm sure we've seen some or hopefully not all but some of those elements in our relationships with our technology providers. The signs that it's not going so well. So that's what I wanna focus on next. And these are the kind of clear cut signs that all of those things that contribute to a strained relationship end up leading to, okay? And the first one that comes to mind is decreased usage. So when you realize your team isn't utilizing the solution to the extent you originally thought they would. And I've seen this, it's an example would be we went out, we bought this fancy CRM system but we've still got our team members that are relying on Microsoft Excel to keep track of their contacts, clients, et cetera, or donors. So we invested in the solution. We made that decision as an organization but we're still relying on this other solution that doesn't really tie into what the overall strategy was. That's not a good sign, okay? No or low responsiveness from the technology vendor. So when you call for support or assistance or training or even best practices, right? What are other customers doing with your solution? How can we solve this problem? And those responses, you know, they go unanswered or are very delayed. Constant escalation. So we talked about technical challenges before. If those escalation, if those technical issues are ongoing and they're not getting resolved, what happens is you often have to try and escalate. We've worked with support but now we want to talk to a support manager or we want to talk to a VP because we're still not getting the results that we expected to get as a result of all these technical challenges. This one is interesting. So complaints versus collaboration. This was a sign that I learned about that kind of told me that things weren't going so well either. And I look at this in terms of fixing a list of problems. So when you come to your technology vendor and say, you've got a list of 30 problems that we want you to fix and you throw it to them to resolve them. And it's a legitimate concern because you're paying for the solution and you want it to work the way that it should work. Obviously, of course. But I think the mentality here that I'm trying to articulate is there's a difference between sending a list of problems and saying go fix them versus having a list of problems, taking a look and really articulating what the impact is and how it's negatively impacting your organization prioritizing them and giving some sense of urgency to say, we've got this list of 20 challenges. Here are our top five or six. Here's why, here's the impact, the quantitative impact that we're having with them. And we really want to partner with you to help find a resolution to them. What that does is that it shows that you're willing to come to the table and really collaborate on how to find resolutions to these things. As opposed to we've got a bunch of issues, go fix them and get it done. And sometimes I've been there myself, sometimes that's how I feel if you want to get it done. So I'm paying for the software, how can we get this solution up and running and to the point where it's being effective for us. But I really want to focus on the mentality here because the focus is on partnership, right? Not just flipping things over to the other side, the kind of them versus us kind of perspective. Lower, unclear return on investment. So this one is, this one's obvious. This is coming back from that intent study that I showed you, right? Where you can't prove that you're being successful with the use of the software. And this one's challenging because after a year of having the implement, after a year of having the software in-house and using it, you want to avoid those situations where someone is coming to you and saying, okay, so we bought and we're paying for that software. It's 10, 15, 20,000 bucks a year, whatever it is. Is it really delivering what we thought it was going to deliver? And how do we prove it? Show me, where's a report that says we're getting that ROI? You want to be able to really articulate or show that message using data. And then this one, not referenceable. This is a really big sign that things aren't going so well. If the technology vendor or partner reaches out to you and says, would you be able to jump on a reference call for us and working on this other account? They're about the same size as you. They're trying to do similar things, but they want to hear from an existing customer. And you don't want to or you hesitate very much to offer up that reference. That's not a good sign. If they're saying, can we use your logo on a sales presentation? And you're saying, no, don't do that. That is also not a good sign, right? That's a saying that you're not ready or willing to be in habit. And there's some privacy things around here, around where you can put your logo and that kind of stuff. But think about your internal thought process if a technology sales rep comes to you and asks you those kinds of questions. That is usually indicative of something that, of a relationship that's probably not moved in the right direction. All right. Sandra, just tell your comment. Yeah, I once had to search LinkedIn to find an escalation point to get something resolved. Yeah. So things like that, when you have to start getting creative and really going outside the norm, all of these technology providers and vendors typically have some kind of support process. It's when it's unanswered or it's really delayed and you have to start getting creative and looking on LinkedIn or talking to your peers and finding out who knows who to get, touch with somebody. Yeah, again, not a good sign, right? Definitely not a good sign. Okay. So how to write the ship? And I alluded to this one. So consider using verbiage related to partner versus vendor. Vendors are easily replaced and partners are in it for the long haul. When you think about these SaaS or cloud subscription agreements, usually they're one, three and I've seen as high as five years, right? What that means that you are, you're tied to that organization, that technology partner over a period of time, right? It's not just a one and done thing. So start using the word partner and start thinking of them as a partner as opposed to just a vendor. And I know we often get caught up in the use of the word vendor when we start thinking about RFPs and RFIs and going through the whole process, like what's our list of vendors? Who are we gonna reach out to? How do we source vendors? How do we contract with vendors? We use that word just naturally because that's part of the process, but start thinking about changing your mentality and thinking about the term partner, not only internally, but even when you're talking to a potential technology partner that you're thinking about signing on with. Be transparent. So kind of part and parcel of having a technology partner is that you're in it together and therefore you should be able to openly talk about goals, challenges, timelines and your expectations. The key thing here is when you're talking about all those things, you wanna document them so that everybody's reading from the same page and you wanna keep it really close to the contract, the final contract that gets signed, okay? Because you wanna acknowledge the fact that there are certain goals that you wanna hit, right? Certain metrics that you wanna hit and using their technology. There are timelines, there are challenges that you wanna overcome, and then you have expectations of what that partnership is gonna look like, okay? You wanna start getting those things really formalized and documented. And like I said, you may not be able to attach them directly to the contract. If you've got a folder where you keep all your technology vendor or partner contracts, that one should be right next to it because we'll get into it, but it's something that's gonna come up through the course of the partnership, okay? The next one, build a roadmap to success. So again, in the spirit of true partnership and transparency, you wanna collaborate with your technology partners on what it looks like to become successful with the solution. And I have this little image here of a roadmap. I've literally seen presentations where it's like, this is what the roadmap is gonna look like in terms of buying the solution, implementing, training, go live, product updates. And it's actually mapped out step by step to say, okay, we are in this together. We're gonna be riding alongside with you to the point where you get success and value out of the solution. What's key with this is that you wanna document this and you wanna share areas of responsibility. Some of it is gonna fall on you obviously as the user of the technology. Other parts are gonna fall on the technology vendor. You're gonna be responsible for things like internal change management, getting your staff to the meeting, making sure they're going through the trainings, putting policies in place and putting processes in place that have your employees or your staff use the solution the way it was designed and set up. That's gonna be heavily on your side as a nonprofit technology user. On the vendor side, on the partner side, the technology partner side, there is overcoming technical challenges, making sure that the product works, making sure that new features are coming out, making sure that they're making training available to your team. Accountability on both sides and you wanna document who owns what and make sure that, again, you're keeping that really close to, really close to retired to the contract, right? Again, it keeps everybody open and honest with each other. Taking a step further in the next piece, when we start thinking about how to get value and ROI, is you wanna monitor the metrics together, okay? This one's really important. What you really wanna do, this is, I would say is probably best practice, is after you've talked about where your goals are and what you're trying to do and what you're trying to achieve with the solution, you wanna sit down with the technology partner and say, okay, how can we build reports or how can we extract data from this system so that when I get asked if this solution is proving value, it's easy. I run a report, I do an extract, I come up with the data that shows how we're getting that ROI, how we're getting that value and that technology partner should be there to help you really understand how to build and work with that report so that you can subsequently take that back to your staff and your higher ups to show them the value that you're getting. The key is to do it together because you wanna be able to quickly and easily equate your goals and your challenges with the metrics that you can pull from the system, okay? All right, now have regular and quality meetings. So I suggest tactical touch points at least once a month, sometimes they're optional. If we can't meet this month, let's meet up next month, that's fine. Those are more short, kind of short windows or shorter calls. Then you wanna have strategic meetings at least once every three months. Now, the reason why I try to go for this cadence is because during these strategic meetings, that's where you're gonna talk about the metrics, right? You're gonna take a look at that report and say, okay, this is the report that we built together, how are we doing? This is when you're gonna take a look back and see who's accountable for certain things based on our roadmap. This is when you're gonna talk about the goals and challenges and timelines and expectations. That strategic meeting, that session that you're gonna have is when you can sit down and really talk about how is this partnership going? And what do we need to do to get it back on track? Or what do we need to do to, unfortunately, pull the shoot, which is the last piece? And the conversation on pulling the shoot and having to look at another vendor, another partner, it's easy if you've done the previous five steps. Because there's no mystery to it. You've already been meeting and sitting down and talking with your technology partner and saying, okay, yeah, we're good here, but on these other things that were really critical, we're not doing that well. So when the renewal contract comes up, when that renewal discussion comes up, you have all the information there. Everybody knows what's going on because you've been open and transparent and you've been reading from the same playbook, okay? And so these are these kind of key elements that I want you to focus in on. As you look at really, before you buy a technology solution or subscribe to that next technology solution, or even as you're looking at your existing relationships with your technology vendors now, like start to think about how you can elevate the partnership beyond just a vendor customer one. It's one where it's like, oh, we're in it together, we're gonna work on this together and we wanna make sure that we're mutually successful out of it. All right. Now, should you need assistance, I should say, sorry? One of the things that my company does green merits consulting is, given my background as a customer success manager, working within technology organizations and helping my customers and clients learn and use and adopt the technology and be successful with it, my SaaS or software as a service subscription assistance, what it really does is provides an experienced set of eyes on your cloud subscriptions, okay? Someone who can understand the nuances and things that go on within a technology organization and how they can apply to what you're trying to do to be successful in the use and adoption of that solution. Someone on your side, at the someone on your side of the table, I should say for purchase or renewal. So you're, you've seen a couple of demos, maybe you're thinking about buying a particular solution, but you want someone that has seen it and in through that process before multiple times to kind of weigh in and provide some guidance or insight around what you should do or what you should think about or talk about before you actually put pen to paper, either at the initial purchase or the renewal of your subscription contract. And then while I'm not a lawyer, I can provide some contractual insight into the business, legal and technology elements or clauses in those subscription contracts that may or may not impact how you plan on using the solution. A perfect example, when I was doing a contract review with the nonprofit just late last year, there was language in the, what we call the master subscription agreement, the MSA that actually limited the ability for that nonprofit to use the solution in a way that they expected to. Now, again, I'm not the lawyer, but this is one of those things where I flagged it and said, okay, I think you want to get your legal team to do a review of this because there are legal elements in here that limit your ability to effectively use the solution to achieve your desired outcome of the solution. So it's things like that where I can provide some insight and say, okay, I understand how you want to use solution. I understand what challenges you're trying to resolve or trying to overcome. How does that manifest itself? How does that line up with what we see on the actual contract that you're about to sign? Okay. And so this is a service that I put together really to focus on and help nonprofits get more value and become more successful with their technology investments, especially when it relates to cloud and software as a service technology subscriptions. All right. So with that, I think by the time, the one quote I wanted to quickly leave off with was, this is from Kevin Kelly of Wired Magazine. Since a relationship involves two members investing in it, its value increases twice as fast as one's investment. And this really speaks to the importance of partnership, the importance of working on things together, coming to the table together, not in us versus them mentality, but really in it together because ultimately, your investment will just increase drastically when you have that mentality and that perspective. I've got my site there, greenmerits.com. Feel free to jot down my email and reach out anytime with questions, thoughts, concerns. I'm also active on LinkedIn. And thanks again for giving me some of your time to go through this very important topic as we see more and more, I'll say nonprofits, but organizations of all types really leaning into and having to adopt technology solutions, especially because of the world we've lived in over the past two years and seeing if folks having to work from home and work remotely and all that kinds of stuff. So an important topic that I'm glad I can share some insight with that Sandra. Yeah, that was awesome Kevin. I'm not sure if anyone has any questions. If you want to raise your hand or put it in the chat, come off mute. I'm going to make a comment on MSAs and everything you were just talking about because I've worked with organizations of all sizes. And I think the bigger you get and the more you adopt some of these solutions that aren't just cookie cutter out of the box, okay, Google Workspace, you can't really bargain with them. You don't really have that kind of relationship with that kind of vendor, but especially when you're talking about your CRMs and your HR payroll software, your accounting software, and you need that special kind of support and making sure that your organization grows. Having somebody to review that MSA because it can be tweaked. And I think a lot of us that start small and get big, take it for granted that we can't change things because we've always just clicked yes, exactly. Click yes, right. And as you get bigger and as you're, especially if you're talking to any sort of sales rep who's trying to sell you something, it's not just check off the box. You can actually negotiate those contracts and having somebody who's an expert in it guide you through that and call out those things. I've had to read many MSAs. I'm not on the customer service side, I'm on the IT side, but trying to enforce things after the fact is a lot more difficult just because you use a term wrong. You called it one thing instead of another and you have different definitions as to what an application means versus what a platform means. And getting those things cleared up upfront before you push forward with any implementation is that will help set you up for success and use that software to meet the solutions you need. Totally. You raised a really good point, Sandra. I was working with another nonprofit and it was interesting to see how things were defined on the technology partners website versus how they defined it in the contract. And this was about support. And the support was basically on the website, it was like, you'll get access to dedicated resources and this and that and the other. But on the contract, it was like, you'll get access to dedicated resource, but it wasn't a named person, which is different than what was alluded to on the site. So if you didn't read between the lines and really been and raised some of these questions to that vendor, you would sign the contract thinking, okay, like who's gonna be our, who's our support contact person where we can take all of our issues to and you'd be told, I don't know, you have to log a ticket online and then you'll get here back in 20. And those little things, those are the things that come up and those are the communication challenges ones that I mentioned, those are the broken promises. We thought we're gonna get this, but we're not actually getting it. Those are things that, like I said, can really strain a relationship and sometimes you gotta get to the weeds to do it. I've been on calls in my for-profit kind of technology life where going through an MSA with the legal team, like my legal team at the time and the customer's legal team at the time, contentious discussions over and versus or. Oh yeah, our legal team is always never use the word or, never read it. Right, but it's so small things. And to your point, we default to saying, okay, they're a technology vendor, yeah, let's sign it, let's just get this, let's get this going. We're excited, we wanna use the budget up before it disappears, but there is room to talk about those things and make sure that everybody's clear. Some things you won't be able to negotiate, some things you can. The point is being able to go in eyes wide open and really understand and talk about it really transparently. Yeah, and I think the other thing for nonprofits to be aware of, especially if you're a smaller nonprofit that maybe been using free subscriptions and starting to move, I think sometimes there might be a fear of moving to picking up that phone and calling that salesperson and getting sold to versus, let me just try it out. But that can really make a big difference for the way you use technology and the way you transform digitally in your organization because having, like maybe you're upgrading a bit, maybe the cost isn't even that different. It's just they have a different sales model and you need to call them to make that sale and make that relationship, build that partnership, but the value you're gonna get back is gonna be a lot more than if you just sign up for a QuickBooks account, for example. And you don't think anything of it, but you go with another solution like the bigger ERP solution where you can have a customer success manager, they can actually help you better use the product and figure out solutions and guide you to help your organization grow. Yeah, totally. I'm seeing a lot of things, even on the smaller side, I'm working on another contract with HR management software and in contract, in subscription term, price changes that were unexpected for the numbers of I think 75 to 80% increase because there was no contract in place. So they went, this nonprofit was going month to month because you get the flexibility of month to month because they can leave whatever you want. And I get the allure of that. The problem or challenge with that is that if you don't have anything written down and signed to, you're subject to whatever whims and price changes come up. So that ended up being an interesting conversation. We were able to work out some things that helped mitigate some of the pressure of that kind of knee-jerk price change. But unless you have the comfort or the confidence to go into that conversation and really articulate what the challenge is, besides just saying, this isn't fair, it's too high, sometimes you might not be able to get much with or with them. But it's all about having that conversation for sure. I spent the majority of my career implementing HR payroll software. I understand those MSAs and the challenges that come with that and same thing. I get the allure to going month to month, especially when you're small and maybe you only have 10 people. But when you're talking about your HR payroll data, that's core to your organization. It's what manages people. It's what pays people. It's what keeps you operating pretty efficiently, taking that extra time to set up that MSA properly and making sure even data retention, right? Like a lot of these options out there that have anything related to attachments, not just HR payroll, but anything that has an attachment. You need to know, where's that data? If I decide to leave, how do I get those files? So I've seen a lot of help organizations do system selection. That's one of the things I look at. Are you going to be able to take that information with you when you leave? How is it easy to extract? And that's something that would be in an MSA to ensure that, okay, you'll get a data dump of all those files and we'll transfer it however. But if you don't take the time to think ahead and have somebody try to really review it, then you can feel the headache later on, right? An ideal world and the perspective I'm coming from is you don't want to get to that spot. Like ideally, I always go back to both sides that are successful and happy and you're renewing and you love the solution and maybe you are buying more modules or new add-ons because you see value in it. But yeah, those things that you don't consider when they come up and things aren't going so well. So we should have talked about that before. Like now we're in a tricky spot, right? Yeah, and you don't know what you don't know. I think you and I have had the benefit of having done this many times and hopefully we can impart some of this from today. So I thank you again, Kevin, for sharing all that with us and thank you to everybody for joining us.