 This is going to be a quick 30-minute webinar where we're going to walk you through eight steps to divine your project, your goals and constraints, and achieve a buy-in from your stakeholders. My name is Aretha Simons. I'm the webinar producer here at TechSoup, and I have my colleague Amy Hopper. She's going to be in the background. I'm so excited that you're here today. Before we get started, I'm going to go over a few housekeeping. As always, we are going to record this and send you the slides and the video replay within 48 hours. If you need the closed caption, go ahead and click on that CC button at the bottom of your Zoom screen, and you'll be able to get closed caption. If you have a question, please put them in the Q&A. I know oftentimes you put them in the chat. We'll be able to grab them from the chat. But I'm excited to hear about Laura. I've been hearing so much about Laura Quinn. I'm serious, like all over North America, and then all through TechSoup. So we finally have her here today. I have her here today as my special guest. So I'm going to get ready to turn this over to her. She's probably going to say a few hello's before she gets started at the top of the hour. So enjoy your webinar, everybody. Bye-bye. Fantastic. Hello, everybody. I am super excited to be here, and I'm just going to share my screen while we are getting ready to start. And I'll just introduce myself as we are turning over into the hour. I am currently the principal, the only person at Laura S. Quinn Consulting, where I do website and technology strategy for nonprofits. I'm probably best known in the nonprofit world as the founder and founding executive director of Idealware, which has since been renamed, it's been acquired by Tech Impact, so it's under the Tech Impact name, but is still going strong as a way for nonprofits to understand technology decisions and to select software. So definitely check out the Tech Impact Learning Library, which as it's now known, which is my initial work as of 15 years ago. These days, I work with nonprofits, both small and large, to help with the initial stages of projects to go from a vision, whether that is a pretty specific tactical vision or a larger, fuzzier vision, to move through research, if there's budget for research, and get to an action plan. So to move to, for instance, on a website to move from, hey, we should redesign our website, to what that actually means, what's in it, and what does it look like in terms of time and money to get there. I'm also doing these days some mentoring projects. So just like, let's have a weekly or every other week call to talk about what's going on with your project or your website or things like that, and to kind of provide a strategic framework. So more about me at laurasquinn.com. But you are not here to learn about me. You are here to learn about establishing a project vision. And here's what we're going to talk through. So we've got these eight steps in getting started and working towards a vision. I'm going to actually move quite fast through this content, as you would imagine, in our 30 minute session. I'm going to both be talking about some key tips for each of these. And for some of them, I'm going to be showing you some formats or deliverable type things. If you are doing a more substantial project, might be useful to you. And I'm not actually going to talk through all of those things I'm showing you in substantial detail. I'm going to tell you what they are. But they're kind of there for you to look at as an inspiration. You'll get the slides afterwards. And if you find, as I'm going fairly quickly through things, I'm going to try to go through all eight steps in about 20 minutes, please do say as we are looking at it right into the Q&A that you have a question. Here's what your question is or would love to hear more about scheduling the working group for your team. Scheduling the process for your team would actually be a more coherent question. And I can talk more about that. So simply knowing from you where you want more detail is going to be really useful. So let's get underway. Why a project vision? So a project vision, this is the same thing that is frequently called a charter, ensures that everybody has the same understanding of the project and what's important. So for instance, here's a very fairly simple team where we've only got four people in my diagram. I've got Leo, Trevor, let me actually move my controls so I can see everything. Maria and Halima, and they're all trying to collaborate on something. They've all got somewhat different views, hopefully they do intersect as we're showing. And by understanding how they intersect, we kind of defined a vision. Let me just talk a little bit about charter versus the word vision. A vision means something fairly specific in the world of branding and marketing. So if you intersect with that world, you might not want to use the word vision. However, I don't personally really like the word charter, which is more of a project management term. I find that it's hard to get people to engage in actual serious like working sessions around a charter, because it just sounds like something that ought to be simple and easy. And a vision is easier to get people to say, yes, that sounds important, I should do something with it. So there's the reason for those names and why I'm possibly confusing the world a little bit by calling what's usually called a charter a vision. So this can be really quite quick and easy if your team's pretty much already on the same page. If they're not on the same page, it's really important to do it upfront rather than to try to fix a project that's gone really awry because you didn't know people weren't on the same page upfront. So how do you do it? Number one, you want to make sure that you understand who the stakeholders for the project are. So who is going to be affected by the project? Who can help you understand how the processes that will be either impacted or will be replaced will be included? How those are currently done? Who'd be helpful in brainstorming? Who should be represented? Just a tip is almost always in every project to make sure you include people who are the front-ends and the admin parts of the team. So these are people who are both, if it's a front-end, if it's a public-facing project like a website, they're the people who often interact the most with your public. And they're also the people regardless of whether it's internal or external. They're often the people who are doing hidden workarounds for things that they're doing things because someone has told them to do it and it doesn't necessarily make any sense. And so unless you talk to them, you won't necessarily know in fact that that's even done. And this is often a fairly straightforward process of looking at the org chart, making sure that you know who it is that is relevant to the project and is not relevant at all. And then once you've figured out who's relevant, then you need to figure out number two, which is who is going to be in your working group to figure out this vision that we're talking about. I've got this idea of a Rossi framework, so responsible, accountable, consulting informed that you can certainly learn more about. So you obviously can't include 20 different people in a set of conversations. You'll never get to closure, but you should try to create a core committee and to ensure your core committee commits to, that's a lot of Cs, commits to the time and or the meeting meetings that it's going to take to define the vision. They shouldn't be wandering in and out of the process. You want to define what your working process is. So how are you going to work with your committee to actually get to a vision? So you could, for instance, if it's a fairly straightforward project, you could simply create a document that outlines all of the things that we're about to cover, have an hour, get people to read in advance, have an hour long meeting and be done with it. You could have a workshop for every item on the list, which is kind of approximately what I'm picturing here. So it's probably the way I would do this with most clients who had gone to the effort to hire me to do it in kind of a four workshop framework. Something in between, two meetings, three meetings, make sure your committee agrees on how they'll actually work. All right, so that was all upfront. So that's how you put the team together and how you're going to meet in order to actually define the things in the vision. What's actually in the vision? So your goals. What are your organization's goals for the project? What are you hoping to increase or decrease by doing it? So I really like that terminology. So thinking about it as things that you're trying to increase or decrease, rather otherwise you tend to get very luffy goals or you get things, as per my second bullet point here, you get things that are features rather than the end result. Like, so for instance, being able to support a community on your website is that's a feature and it's not even a very clear feature. So it's not clear what you're trying to increase or decrease or really what the end result is. So something like that would be much more like I want to increase the amount of ongoing communication between actually, let's say, board members could be a target audience there or between members on my website. And you can see a number of, these are good goals or well-framed goals that I've put over here. They'll see a lot of post-its in this presentation because it seems like a useful way to present things. Once you brainstorm goals, you will likely have considerably more than one or two. You want to try to approximately rank order them. So to put them in order from whatever, one to 12. And you likely, I've never typically have success in literally saying this is one to 12, but to at least say, okay, here are our three top priority goals. Here is four and five and then six, seven and eight are about the same priority. So kind of to group them at least. And you want to choose, what are your, oh, sorry, I dropped the word, your North Star goals. So basically your North Star vision as to where you're trying to get to, what are the things that are going to be the difference between success and failure? Like what's the real reason that you're doing these projects? So like for instance, on the right here, to reduce the staff time needed to see the full relationship with a person, that sounds like a kind of a North Star goal for a constituent relationship management system or improve the first impression a visitor receives through our website. That could be a one of a couple North Star goals for a new website. What are your audiences? Another critical thing to brainstorm and talk through. Who is impacted? So it can be useful to think about this as anybody you're trying to address with the goal. So whether they're internal or external. So you want to be specific. You want to make sure you don't fall into traps of saying staff or the general public. Those are not, they're not actionable. So we don't know anything about what their needs are. We can't know anything about what their needs are from those descriptions. You want to make sure they're actual people. So local businesses is not a person. So instead you would be thinking about, all right, what people are we actually targeting at local businesses? For instance, marketing staff would be a potential audience. Policymakers is another one that is a really critical one to to to parse out. If you are actually trying to get to the decision makers at you know state government, you're talking about incredibly short explainer things or petitions probably in order to get their attention. If you're looking to impact policy, you're actually probably trying to get to the staff at policy makers. So trying to think through who the people are is really important. And again, like goals, you want to divide out your primary audiences. You can't effectively have 12 different primary audiences. You'll simply not serve any of them well. So pick some top audiences that are going to be your primary audiences. What are your audiences goals? So for your top audiences, what do you imagine they would most like to see? So I've used the word imagine here. If you have research about them or if you have the time or budget to do research, this is the probably in my mind the top place on a whole project to use that research budget to understand what your audiences want. Failing that or in addition to that, it's a great thing to brainstorm with a working group. And in fact, what I've got here is this is a screenshot of a Miro board. A Miro is a tool that I like a lot. Miro is M-I-R-O. Miro spelled like it sounds is very similar to it. Great long distance brainstorming tools where the idea here is that I've simply put up, okay, what words would you describe them? What do they want? I've got blank post-it notes and I then go ask my meeting participants to fill them out and I give them two, three minutes to go crazy fill out post-it notes. As you do this, make sure you're realistic. Your audience is probably not just waiting with bated breath to do whatever you want them to do. They want to make their life easier, they want basic information, they want free things. You make sure that you think through carefully that there's likely a push and pull of what you want versus what they want. And you need to balance that if you want your project to be effective. What are your constraints? So another critical thing to define for your project. So your budget and your timeframe are the obvious constraints. So this typical over thing, the diagram I have here is often called the golden triangle of project management. Time, scope, meaning how many features you have in something and money. You can only pick two if you expect to get quality. You can only reduce, sorry, one, two, if you expect to get quality. Otherwise, you're just going to get a mess. You're going to decrease quality. Personnel, definitely think through the staff you're going to need to both create your project. And what's more frequently forgotten is the staff you're going to need to support your project. So do you need to support it with certain people, with certain skills in a certain amount of hours? Technology, do you need to, does this project need to fit into a particular set of existing technologies? Like for instance, you've got a content management system for a website or a constituent management system. And this project isn't about changing those. So if it needs to fit within those, those are critical things to define. But of course, think through what other constraints you might have. Fantastic. So basically the idea is that either you are gaining buy-in on all of those things through the course of the project, or you, this would be a kind of with the assumption that everybody already pretty much is on the same page, you could try documenting that and sending it out to the stakeholders and getting buy-in on it. So either way, make sure you have both buy-in and documentation. So if it's a meeting process, make sure you have it written down and that people agree to the stuff that is written down. This is the type of thing where it's pretty typical, especially if you're doing a project internally, for things to kind of wander astray from the initial kind of goals, audiences, vision, and to be able to go back to the documentation and say, but look, this is what we agreed to, is really useful. All right. And where do you go from here? So you've got this overall document. This is obviously not a project plan. This is not a necessarily even an action plan for your project. This is just basically an agreement on what's going to happen. So what are the next steps? So if it's basic and it's clear to you what's going to happen, you can just define a schedule and a budget and start work. Otherwise, if it's not completely clear to you, I would define a tactical definition of what you're going to do in what order. So for instance, are you going to do any research? Is there going to be a kind of a high level strategy or action plan creation before you go? Is there going to be a site map? Is there going to be an entity model? A requirements document would be another key thing to do here. Very hard to define what the right next steps might be, because we're trying to cover all possible technology projects. And there is different first steps for those, though if you will potentially have some time to talk through in our last 10 minutes, particular next steps. So if you throw what's interesting to you, we could potentially have time to talk through some of those. Or another obvious one, if you're feeling quite overwhelmed with where you're going, is to put out a request for information to hire someone to do the project. I very purposefully have used the term request for information, rather than a request for proposal, which I could do a whole webinar about the difference between those terms and why I think they're different. But the core difference is that you are not asking for a huge amount of detail and a price without talking to people, which has equity implications and is going to get you less good people, because it's incredibly time consuming to put together a lot of detail and a lot of budget for a project you have no idea if you're going to get or not. So the idea of a request for information is to try to get a larger swath of people to give you a little bit of information about themselves, and then you narrow them down before asking for more information. And I've in fact brought it in at 21 minutes. I'm excited by that. And I see that we definitely have some questions at least. What do we have? Are there things that rise to the top, Amy? So there's just one question asking if we get a copy of the presentation, which I just want to reiterate that the recording will be sent to your email within 48 hours. Somebody has asked, do we offer project management? I'm not sure exactly what you mean by that. If you want to expand a little bit more, TechSoup does have some resources for that. You can take a look at our website and you'll find some resources and courses and blogs and all that kind of thing. Robin has said that they love the request for information idea. I wonder if you could maybe talk a little bit more about that, go in some detail, like how would you, yeah, I guess like go about doing that in a nonprofit organization. Yeah, are you able to speak a little more into that? Yes, absolutely. And I have an article up on my website about this. So certainly refer to that for more information. But the general concept is that you kind of think of hiring a consultant like you would hiring an employee. So you put out a general description of what it is that you're looking for and you ask people to send you an overview of themselves and their skills. And instead of a resume at this point, what you ask for back is, please basically tell us a little about your company, give us case studies of when you've done similar types of work with other organizations like ours. And the purpose of this is that that is the type of thing that most organizations have already. So like if I'm a small website consultant firm, for instance, I have information about my general process, what's important to us, I have information, I should have information certainly about the projects I've done and can relate those to you. What is much harder to do for me as a small nonprofit or sorry, a small website firm, is to say, all right, I'm going to try to interpret the page or three pages of text that you've sent out to the world. I'm going to then say, what is the explicit process I would do for your project for your particular needs, and how much will it cost? That's probably takes depending on the project anywhere from six to 12 to 20 hours to put that type of proposal together. And if you've just put your request for proposals out into the world, then it's very unlikely that any given small website firm is going to get that project. So they look at that and they say, well, that would be great for us, but we're not going to get that project. So we're not going to put our time in. But they could be awesome. And they could be disproportionately, they could be women owned or minority owned or in exactly the community that you'd like to work with or things like that. So basically when you get those back that the overview, so you basically you sent out your request for information, you potentially get a lot back now. So you potentially get 3040 different overviews, you skim them, you throw out a bunch of them who don't have any useful case studies of things that they've done that seem compelling or similar or, you know, like you would with cover letters and resumes or it just aren't well written. They don't seem at all compelling. What you're left with is a set that seemed interesting. You schedule a half hour phone call with them, particularly potentially to talk more to get to know them and no one's going to turn down a phone call. So that's a straightforward way to learn a little more about them. And then ideally with just one or two finalists, you ask them to do a whole costs and schedule. And very few people being a set of finalists are going to turn down. It's still the same amount of work, but now they know that they're a serious contender for it. It's not much more work for a nonprofit, if much at all, and it gets you a much better pool of organizations because it's not the ones that are only staffed for marketing and outreach. I'll get off myself to ask about that. That's great. Thank you so much. Something that's popped up in the chat that I think could be interesting for lots of people. Andy asked how you've managed scope creep and added, of course, all requests for changes in scope are important, which is very true. So yeah, could you speak a little more into that? Yes. So this process itself, so simply having a foundational document, so a vision document or a charter document is very useful to try to manage scope creep, to be able to point back to it and say, okay, we defined that this was the schedule and the budget and here were the objectives. Our scope is now getting further than we thought it was. Is it in furtherance of these objectives? So if it is, then you're going to have to move to a second foundational document, so a foundation document that is after this, like a requirements document or something like that, but to basically say, okay, we've defined the schedule and the budget and we've defined a set of scope in furtherance of these goals and these audiences goals. If it's actually in furtherance of the audience and objectives, then, so okay, so number one, either it's not in furtherance and then you can easily push, well, hopefully easily, push back on that. If it is in furtherance of the audience and the objective, then you're back to essentially that the golden triangle to say, all right, great, I can either do this stuff which does seem really useful or I can keep to the scope and the time that we talked about, but I can't do all of those things because that will bring down the quality. Yeah, 100%. So I guess on the other side of that, of asking for some changes in scope, a couple of people in the Q&A have asked for your ideas on how to get leadership on board with a project. Oh, this is a fantastic way as well, this vision process, it's a great way to get leadership on board to either to ask them to be part of a minimal process. So defining this, if it's a not a gigantic project, then potentially they are actually on the committee that defines this stuff or they are, so back to the if you remember, I had the RACI, it's responsible, accountable, the C is something and then there's informed. So there is sort of figure out where on that chart they are to make sure that they are in the loop and things are not moving forward without someone who is designated by them to for the project. So to basically try to convince them that this vision, I mean if it's a small project it might be hard to get leadership to to acknowledge it, but if it's a big project to either engage them in forming the vision is important or the idea that these are the objectives and that's why it's important. So basically at the end of the process to use this as documentation to management as to why this project is important to the organization. So both sorry that was a little rambling but one and the other. Yeah, that was great. So we're just sitting half past 10 but Laura, if you have a couple more minutes to answer just one or two more questions people obviously if you have some way to go totally fine but if you want to stick around for another couple minutes we'll just go through one or two more questions and then we'll let you get on with your day. So how would you go about defining a target audience without giving a general description? So I think the question here is around getting that sweet spot between you know you can't use actual individuals but how do you you know like group those characteristics of your target audience without going to general? Yeah I think that sorry as I make everybody nauseous by going to that slide. So I think that so when I say general I don't mean like obviously it's not towards individual people it's more like saying it's a like for instance next we are going to try to define what that audience wants and trying to so for instance if the general public is an audience it's impossible to say what the general public wants because there are sorts of people like there are many different people. So trying to hone in on what are the different kind of varieties and flavors of groups who want different things from you in a specific enough way that you can say you could differentiate so you could say ah these people want this type of thing from us but these other people do not and you'll see I do have some in my examples here um for a fairly wide sleeping site um like for instance low income people with a legal issue um is a pretty broad target audience and in fact when people have as broad a target audience as that often they dive down a little bit into like for instance different types of information seekers so people who are um looking just immediately looking for an answer they want they have a question they want an answer as opposed to people who want help they want a human to help them with something um is in fact a fairly well known way to break down this particular note there's a third in fact this particular audience of low income people with a legal issue um so yeah so to try to find the sweet spot as Amy said between it's not people but it's something that's workable for your particular project great um just as a final question um there are one or two that we haven't managed to get to but um I don't want to take up too much of your time uh is there a difference Derek is asking between vision planning for an external client and an internal project how would you go about managing those differently if there is a difference I've I've covered them both um in this uh in this presentation but I do think certainly the way you approach it is going to be different um so I'm going to interpret that question as um so if the project is externally facing compared to a oh Amy do you think it's is the project externally facing versus an internally facing or whether you are in a consultant or whether you are in the organization um I mean I think both would be useful yeah Derek saying the first one so okay the first one great I yeah probably more broadly applicable um so yes um I think most types of different projects you know like a uh something that is primarily database oriented is going to be different than something that is primarily uh knowledge management oriented although they are both um internal facing um and then definitely something that is like an intake project or a website project I do think it's going to be more challenging to uh and probably requires a bigger vision process for an externally facing project um because you uh have less knowledge about your external audiences than you do your intern you can logically just go talk to your staff to understand what they want and it's what's important to them uh unless you have research budget or time um it's a little harder to put yourself in the shoes of your external constituents um it's definitely worth trying to put yourself in their shoes and definitely important to remember that you are not your constituents you are not your users um so to not assume that they want exactly what you would want in their shoes um I think so that's a big one that feels different to me so the goals would be similar uh the audiences you might have harder time trying to define the right specificity then definitely the audience goals become harder um they're probably I would imagine that the external facing projects are reasonable sized you're not going to have tiny external projects and you might have tiny internal projects so they're going to be a difference there and actually hopefully it's easier to get your um leadership on board with an external project certainly you can at least make a a really solid argument for um what you're going to increase decrease why that's important how that actually leads to things they care about time money saved or time and money saved money earned things like that great um yeah there are just wondering that we didn't manage to get to but um we're over five minutes over so I'm gonna hit pause there and I guess your email I believe is on these slides is that correct um I'm certainly my website is and there is a form that does in fact email me um and it does literally go to me and I read it okay great so people have a way of getting in contact with you if um there's anything from this that they would like to talk about um Aretha I'll hand it back to you to close this out this is great thank you so much um just to remind you of beginning of video replay and the slides within 40 hours thank you Laura and thank you Amy for being in the background really appreciate you guys thank you so much and thanks to everybody who who participated this was really great thank you