 Welcome back to the nonprofit show. I also want to say happy Friday Eve because today is Thursday as we're recording. Today we have with us Christine Chaco. She is associate at your part-time controller and really excited to have you Christine to talk to us about how we might free up our time and what it looks like when we are embracing technology to get our work done. So stay with us because Christine has a lot to share here. We are also really excited to be here for those of you that we haven't had the opportunity to meet you yet. Please say hello to Julia Patrick and Julia. Please say hello to everyone else, CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy and I'm Jarrett Ransom, nonprofit nerd and CEO of the Raven Group. Together we are so honored to have the ongoing commitment, support, dedication, investment from these amazing partners. So shout out of gratitude to our friends over at Bloomerang, American Nonprofit Academy, sorry, nonprofit thought leader, staffing boutique. I was so excited to say your part-time controller because Christine is here. Also, management group, fundraising academy at National University. Also thank you to JMT Consulting, nonprofit nerd and nonprofit tech talk. You know, I really like to say their missions are your missions because they are here on your team, in your corner cheering for you to help you do more good in your communities. Together, they also join us once a month. And so just like Christine is joining us here from YPTC, they have collectively helped us to produce over 960 episodes and you can find all of them if you can go ahead and take your phone. Vanna White, thank you Julia Patrick. You can scan that QR code and download the app. You can still find us on streaming broadcast and podcast platform. So, oh, Christine, that's all from me right now. That's the key up. Thrilled to have you again for all of our viewers and listeners around the globe. Thrilled to have with us a representative from your part-time controller, Christine Chaco, associate at your part-time controller which we also refer to as YPTC. Welcome to you. Thank you so much. It's really, it's exciting to be here. Now where are you coming to us from? I'm in the Philadelphia area. Okay, so, ooh, chilly. Yeah, we got a little bit of snow this week too. I think it's supposed to snow again tomorrow but hopefully there'll be enough to go outside and play but not to slip and slide all over the roads. Well, it's an amazing thing what YPTC does and being that you have tentacles across this country specifically with the nonprofit sector. Jared and I have really been interested in meeting so many of your different team members learning about what it is you do. And it seems to me that you've all kind of gravitated towards unique things. You're not all the same. You all have different personalities. Talk to us about what it is you do and how you think you help the sector maybe more differently than somebody else on a team. Oh, well, I guess right now I kind of have a dual role or a hybrid role. I do client services where I have like my regular clients where I help them with their monthly clothes, their monthly financials and board reporting, specific help they might need for strategic planning or grants. And I also, I am doing some work with our data visualization group. And that's where like another associate will kind of come to us and say, hey, we need help like developing these charts and graphs or developing this parallel occasion or something like that. And we kind of like take on that project and help them develop something. Amazing. Well, we'll talk about that a little bit more because Jared and I have really leaned in to that whole data vis part of our sector. And that's gonna be really interesting to hear what you have to say. But today you're gonna be whipping us into shape about automation and you're telling us to automate as much as possible. And I'd love to get this perspective because it seems to me like a lot of times we think, oh, we have to invest in some big system that's gonna come in and automate everything. I think you're gonna tell us something different. And what does that look like? I mean, honestly, like every little teeny tiny bit of automation that you can do will help you. Automation is about kind of saving time and freeing up your time for like the real like people centered work. And you can use some really simple tools for just one aspect of what you do. For instance, QuickBooks has a spreadsheet sync feature now where instead of spending a lot of time manually entering things into QuickBooks, you can basically just like import a spreadsheet and it'll create like your journal entries or it'll create your budget in there or it has a lot of different options and that alone might save you a few hours. There are tools available like Bill, formerly known as bill.com where you can use it to receive payments or make payments. And it really, it speeds up the process by kind of automating that receiving the invoice, approving the invoice, getting the payment out. It makes it all like quick as a wink. And you don't have to do all of the things, you can just do like one thing. Christine, I did not know about the spreadsheet and I have to ask perhaps a remedial question. Is integration automation, is that the same or like how does that compare? I mean, I think integration is really part of automation. I think you had a guest on last week who talked about kind of automation as really just like making any process easier. Honestly, I think that's a great definition for it, like anything that you can do to kind of like take work off your plate, just kind of like condense the steps that could be integration, that could be figuring out a better way to document things so that maybe there's an annual report you do every year for one specific funder. And it's December now, you have to do it again but you cannot remember for the life of what you did last year. You just write down everything you do or document it as you go. That's really gonna save you a lot of time and effort. Yeah, I really appreciate that. And I've heard from a lot of people, oh, we tried that, it didn't work. So we're going back to all the steps that we used to do. Do you have any, I don't know, words of wisdom for anyone, perhaps myself, that's like, yeah, I tried that and it failed. Like that automation thing or that integration, it's not always the magic key. Yeah, I mean, honestly, like there's no one size fits all. Different things are gonna work for different organizations, for different leadership styles, for different personality styles, like you can't forget about the human element. Like you are still a person using the tech or using the process. And so is everybody on your team and that's why I think honestly, a big part of it is really communication. Like you can't think that tech is just gonna replace all forms of communication, but that's really the key to kind of making anything work. Yeah. Christine, it almost seems to me like you're advising us to adopt a mindset first and then looking at the technology because I loved what Jared said, there are a lot of times when you can try things and the frustration goes up or you think this is never, this is, I've already spent too much time and then it also seems like things just keep changing. I know they're improving, but this is not a one and done as we were saying earlier. And I kind of love to move into improving timelines and collaboration, especially as we work with a distributed workforce, we can't just pop down the hall and talk to somebody as you mentioned in the spirit of collaboration or communication. So how does this impact us when we're trying to get better, when we're trying to improve things? Yeah, well, one thing I wanted to talk about here specifically is project management software, things like Asana and Trello, Microsoft has Planner where it's kind of, it's easy to use software where you can integrate everyone from your organization. You can just assign tasks to somebody or to multiple people, they can kind of document what they're doing in there so you don't have to constantly pick up the phone or send an email and say, hey, what's the status? Yeah, where are you? Yeah. Yeah. But honestly like it is, it's part of a bigger communication plan. Like I say it's best to kind of take a step back and look at what are you really trying to do because there might be situations where project management software just is too much and it's too much effort for everyone to go in and try to use it. It really, it kind of depends on the situation but when you're able to use it and you can upload documents, you can share timelines, you can view it as a calendar, view it as a list, it can be very useful but again, it really depends on what your needs are. Christine, I love that you mentioned the save the time and I think we're all looking to save time. You know, continue to add more and more and more to our descriptions, to our plate, to our day in all of the ways, personal and professional. You know, there's like, there's never enough time in the day. Can you speak to the time saving efforts and initiatives and I'm really curious, and I'm sorry I might be putting you on the spot from the organizations you work with, how have you and YPTC really put in some automation efforts to save the time with the charities because I just have to perhaps call out charities don't get into businesses to say I wanna automate everything, right? So like, how does it work? I mean, like again, it kind of depends on the size and what you're trying to do, but like things that basically like help people communicate with each other or even just like mapping out the processes and let's see what it looks like right now. Let's see where the holes are and then we can identify like where time is being spent, where it doesn't need to be spent, where like somebody's waiting for something for a long time and nobody knows about it maybe. And in those cases, like even just simple documentation can really help address some of that and help create some efficiencies or like help people redistribute the workload or help figure out like, oh, I need to notify somebody that this part is done. Right, let me throw a curveball at you so get your catchers met because you know, pictures and catchers report very soon. I'm just saying. What do you do when you have a workforce or a team, whether they're in the same geography or not, but that they're not so good or they're intimidated by the technological aspect? It seems like we're hearing about this more and more. It's a grumbling, it kind of smacks of ageism and a digital divide if you will. But what do you do? I feel like there are a lot of organizations and Jared, I don't know if you see this, but they kind of have like one thing for the youngins that are good and technically savvy and then they have another thing for maybe the later adopters. So how do we do this? Because it seems like we're doing a lot of our work twice. I mean, that's a great point and there are so many intergenerational workforces out there. Honestly, maybe part of it has to do with age, but there are some people who no matter what age they are, they're a little afraid of what they don't know about. So I say start people really small with things like Slack or Teams, for instance, they're a great way to kind of supplement that in-person conversation that would happen by the elevator or by the water cooler that would lead to productive conversations. It's a great way to do that virtually, but some people are like, I don't want to use that because I don't know what it is. You just kind of, I feel like it's best to start with the social aspects of it and introduce things like an informal water cooler chat or an informal like happy hour chat and just make it a no pressure, a low pressure thing, spend time making sure everyone knows how to use the tool and if they don't, then that first informal thing is everybody's opportunity to kind of help each other. It also really helps to have like a champion, like one person whose job it is to be like, this thing is great and I'm gonna help everybody get on board. You know, do you see a difference of these items that we can be investing in, whether it be financially or just time in relationship to the size of an organization? So for example, let's say you're an organization doing the work of the angels, but you only have like five people versus somebody that maybe has 15 or 20. Is there a place where we need to be looking at what the size of our teams are before we really lean into this? Yeah, I mean, as I said before, different things will work for different teams. You really just need to take into account like what are the personalities, what are the communication styles of everyone on my team? It could be that like that small five person team, they're all spread across the country or across the world. They do need additional virtual tools to help or it could be you're all in the office at the same time once a week and that's really like your check-in point or something. It could be some simple easy free tools from Google that get everyone on board or it could be something like that slightly larger companies usually use that might get you more on board like Asana, where everybody has access to it. It really depends like, does everybody have a smartphone? Does everybody like getting all the notifications all the time? Do people like without these tools are they good about communicating with each other? And sometimes when that doesn't happen, it's a whole different issue to address. That's true, the adoption of it. You know, I'm really curious for our audience which are all nonprofits, nonprofit leaders, professionals, let's talk about the board, right? And the board's role in this and how we might be able to save time in preparation for board meetings. I've heard a time or two board members really like to see charts and graphs and numbers, you know, in that way. So shout out again to the data visual team. How can you use automation to tell a story with our financials? Cause I'd love for our viewers around the globe to say, okay, I'm gonna take this piece from Christine's conversation and move it into our board discussion. What does that look like? Yeah, that's a great point. And as my YPTC colleague Bill Schwab said on here earlier, he, you know, does a lot with this. And it's a lot easier for our brains to kind of comprehend visuals than it is to comprehend like a wall of text or a wall of numbers. So what I like to say is make things easy for people to understand. Like, if there's one thing that people take away from today, let that be it. Like, honestly, like a full, very detailed income statement will give you a lot of information. If, you know, like if you're trained how to read it, if you're familiar with the history of the organization, if you know exactly what you're looking for and all of those kinds of things. But when you present that, you're usually trying to say like one basic thing, which is like, all right, we need to raise this level of income or we need to really look at how much we're spending on X. And it's really a lot easier to get people's attention by just telling them that one thing, whether it be in a graphic, in a chart or just like, you know, a very simple few words on a slide or something like that. And I'm sure all of that can be automated. You referenced a previous guest and that was Margie from Bloomerang. She talked about automation of reports and I can only imagine, you know, I don't spend a lot of time in financial reports and that's a good thing because it's not my genius zone, but there's gotta be a way to automate whether it's QuickBooks online, Sage, like whatever accounting system you're using to generate some of these reports, perhaps put them into an Excel document that populates that graph or another document that populates it. Do you have anything along that line you can share with us of how that's been used in particular to tell the story to the board when it comes to the financial automation? Yeah, we at YPTC, we're actually using Reach Reporting right now, which is one tool that connects directly with QuickBooks. And so you don't have to like keep re-exporting whenever you make an update, it just, it links to it and it can create all your financials, it can help you create simple charts and graphs and memos and once you get it into Reach Reporting, it basically like you can just set a format in there and it'll already have the report ready to go. So it is possible to do that for sure. But again, I would say like, you know, it's great for people to have all that detail and all that backup, but people have limited time and attention and honestly, I say, when you're trying to get something across to your board or to your donors or to your volunteers, just boil it down to your elevator pitch and try to make that communication as effective as possible. Yeah, you know, it's interesting that you would kind of pivot us towards that because I feel like there's a sense that if we don't do this data dump and we don't push all of this information that we're not going to make good decisions because we don't have everything that we need to make a decision. And I hear you kind of shifting that paradigm a little bit saying, no, be more judicious, pick a more prominent conversation or topic and drill down on that. Am I hearing you correctly? Yeah, I mean, it is very important to have all the information and to know that the detail is correct. And, you know, your accountant or your finance person or whoever it is should definitely be on top of that. But when you're having a conversation with like a major donor or a board member or something like that, honestly, the more detail they have, the less easy it is for them to engage really. Like they really usually just want something simple. Like what is the ask here? What is the point? What do I need to know? Do I need to decide something? Like again, you want to make it as easy for them as possible to really engage with what you need them to do. Yeah, and I feel like a representative from your team, you know, it really said less is more. And the more you give them, the more questions they'll have, the more opportunities for confusion, really looking at it from that aspect, I'm curious. And unfortunately we don't have too much time. Our time always goes by super fast. But how do you know when our automation is working and it's being successful? Like what do you get with that successful automation? I mean, hopefully you'll be able to tell that you're saving some time and that you're able to spend more time on some of the important work that you're doing and like engage with people and spend more time on donor stewardship and stuff like that. And you will also hopefully get like more engaged board members, staff, volunteers, donors, because they will be able to tell what the message is that you're trying to tell them. And they'll really be able to like attach to that message. There are a lot of ways that like even the teeny, tiny automations can kind of have that far reach. Yeah. I'm really curious, Christine, if you could speak to how we might consider automation, I'm thinking now for an impact report or an annual report, and I use those interchangeably. So whether it's a mid-year in December because our fiscal is July one, like how can we create the successful automation so that it carries out to these communication areas? I mean, honestly, the key is making those things with as little manual input as possible, like as little room for error. Again, I'll mention reach reporting because that kind of has the ability to link into your actual financial database and QuickBooks and it'll just bring in the numbers even into your text boxes and things like that. So you can kind of design it however you want and it'll update for you. It's a really cool tool. I love that. I've not heard it before. And so you've blown my mind twice, one with the Excel spreadsheets being able to, yeah, automate into QBO. And then now, this reach reporting, that just sounds fascinating. And I have a feeling your data visual team is like chomping at the bits for us to talk more about this. Julia, like what are you finding in automation? I'm curious how this is really landing with you and what you're seeing is working because you serve on a lot of boards and you're very engaged. You know, I think the thing of it is that it's, as we started this conversation with Christine and that is it's a mindset. I think a lot of times we think, oh, we have to buy into a system and it's gonna change everything. And we're gonna have all new software and in some cases we're gonna have new hardware and it's gonna be this whole thing. But I think the more strategic and intelligent and cost savings approach is to kind of narrow it down and say, okay, how are we dealing with our email? How are we, I mean, perfect example, how are we managing our calendars? I mean, you and I talked about this within the last 14 days about how the software system Calendly has revolutionized how people can set up appointments with one another. And in a very short period of time, how we've changed our mindset about what that looks like and how to use it, right? So it's not a one and done thing. I also believe that we need to be more open to updates and changes and things coming down the pike because I can see a board saying, wait a minute, we already spent all this time and money doing this and now you're asking us to do something else. And that's the wrong lens. That's the wrong approach, right? We need to be changing our mindsets. Well, yeah. Thank you for that, Julia. That's really insightful to hear. And it makes me wanna ask Christine, how often should we be looking at our automation, reviewing it, revising it, editing it, kind of like looking at all the ways because we look for saving time. And I think that's the number one thing. In addition to raising money, right? We need a lot of money and we need a lot more time. That's true. That's true. How often should we look at this? So like, you know, technology is changing all the time. It's changing right now as we're talking and we don't even know what's changing. So it is impossible to really keep up with the pace of it. But I would say whenever you're coming up on some kind of frustration, something where you're like, this should be easier. Or I should not be so like scared to do this or like it shouldn't be so hard for me to do this. There's some kind of opportunity there to either like just make the process simpler with just like simple little tweaks or documentation of figuring out what's going on or some kind of technology. Yeah. You know, I love that you said there's an opportunity there because what I hear is an invitation to figure this out. And we have a guest who's watching and I won't shut out her name, but she helped me with an organization really create this, you know, this flowchart of processes for every program, for every tech stack, for every everything that process bringing the team on board to map that out with post-it notes on a wall was super insightful. And so I love the invitation of an opportunity. So thank you. This is super insightful for me, Julia. No, it really has been. And I think Christine Chaco associate with your part-time controller and you can reach them at yptc.com. You know, this is at the forefront of a conversation that we wouldn't necessarily have had about accounting not too long ago, but we're looking at these things in a much more holistic way. It's not just about the reports. It's really about an approach and almost a philosophy on how you run your nonprofit. I mean, we've used the word mindset several times today, but I really do think it's a new dawn for how we look at these things as complete ecosystems and not just the, you know, as we always say, Jared, you know, the bean counter sitting in the back room, with the crappy furniture, right? In the dark, in the dark with their lights, you know, yeah. And I think Christine, it's been fun to have you on to talk about that and have you bring forward and shed some light, so to speak, on this whole thing. Again, check out Christine Chaco and part of her team at yptc.com. They have a lot of information on there, a lot of additional training. You don't have to be one of their clients to get the information. They're great teachers. And of course, they want you to be their client, but still they share their information. And Christine is just one of those amazing people. Thank you so much. Yeah, it's been a lot of fun. We look forward to having you back on again and chatting even more. Again, I'm Julia Patrick, CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy. I've been joined today by the nonprofit nerd herself. I'm wearing my black glasses, pushing them on. Thank you. You're at our ransom CEO of the Raven Group. Again, as we said in the beginning, Jared so beautifully introduced our sponsors. They are with us day in and day out and they include Boomerang, American Nonprofit Academy, starting to say your part-time controller, nonprofit thought leader, staffing boutique, 180 management group, Fundraising Academy at National University, JMT Consulting, Nonprofit Nerd and Nonprofit Tech Talk. These folks are amazing advocates and champions of our sector and we are delighted that they are with us. Hey everybody, as we like to end every episode, we leave you with this message and it changes meaning to me and for me every day and it goes like this, to stay well so you can do well. We'll see you back here tomorrow, everyone. Christine, thank you.