 everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Nonprofit Show. We're really excited that you've joined us. We have a really great guest today. You know, if you've been watching our show, how much I love books and I love thought leadership. And so we have one of the authors of the Smart Nonprofit on today with us, Allison Fine. Welcome. Thank you, Julia. It's an absolute pleasure to be here with you. We're really excited. We're going to dig into this in a big way. I have a lot of questions for you. Beth Cantor, as I mentioned, won't be able to join us today, but we will get her back. So we're really fortunate because we have Allison all to ourselves. And I have Allison all to myself because Jared Ransom, my co-host, has the day off. It is her birthday. And so we said, go away. And so she'll be rejoining us shortly. Again, we want to thank all of our presenting sponsors. Without them, we would not be here. Blumerang, American Nonprofit Academy, Your Part-Time Controller, Nonprofit Nerd, Fundraising Academy, Staffing Boutique, and Nonprofit Thought Leader. And as we've been saying, because I think we can't even believe it, we're marching towards our 600 episode. And you can find us in addition to our live daily broadcast, which we started more than two years ago, you can find us on Roku, YouTube, Vimeo, Amazon Fire TV. And we're now putting all of our daily episodes onto podcasts. So streaming and many, many platforms wherever you get your content, load us up. We would love to get into your ears with the latest episode of The Nonprofit Show. Okay, Allison, fine. Writing books is not new to you. No, thank you for asking. So this is my fourth book and my second with Beth Cantor, which is always an honor to work with Beth. Wow, that is amazing. And I would imagine you did a lot of this digitally and on Zoom because of the pandemic. So we saw each other in Las Vegas in May, Julia, which was the first time in over four years that we were in person together. So we wrote the entire book virtually together. But look, we've worked together for over 15 years. So we know each other's rhythms. And, you know, Beth is a wonderful partner. So it was great fun. You know, the Smart Nonprofit is really a cool title because we think of, you know, the passionate, the empowered, the well-funded, you know, the well-marketed nonprofit. But we don't often say, pull back. And how smart are you? So how did you come up, the two of you, with this concept? And maybe I should ask the question, why did you feel it was important to talk about this right now? So we started to work with the Gates Foundation about four or five years ago, Julia, on the ways that AI could increase given in the sector. And as we dug more into the issue of advanced digital technologies like AI, but also machine learning and voice-activated technologies and robots, the robots are here, but it occurred to us that we were on the precipice of yet another chapter in digital tech. And we thought, this is so important. We want not a need nonprofit leaders to understand what the tech is, what it isn't, and how to use it well. So the universe of technology is called, we call smart tech. So to use it well, you need to be a smart nonprofit. I love that. And I think that, you know, to your point, just in this short period of time of the pandemic, which seems like a long time, but really, it has been a short period of time. I am stunned at the number of nonprofits that have moved into digital donor relationships, giving stewardship management that I think they would have put off. Yes, yes. Look, virtual work, meetings, talking to donors online, all of these technologies were accelerated because of the need in the pandemic to work, you know, apart from one another. But in addition, it's also been a great lesson for nonprofit leaders to be less fearful of tech, right? So what seemed impossible three years ago, letting staff work virtually or in hybrid mode now is just a regular way of doing business. And so that issue of the pandemic accelerating tech adoption and the commercial availability of smart tech that is now inexpensive, it is going to disrupt every area of organizational life, Julia. It's going to be in development, comms, back office, finance, everywhere. That was the urgent need we saw to get in front of this technology and provide guidance for nonprofits on how to automate, meaning having the technology make decisions for and instead of people in careful and thoughtful ways. So one of the things that you talk about, and I really would love to get you to almost set our lens and our mindset and our mindset is the concept of embracing humans, the human centered approach to this. Because I think you use that word that I just love. And that was fear and how we tend everything that we look at with this fear of tech. Tell us about how we can mitigate some of that. So too often the response we hear from the C-suite when it comes to automation and smart tech is no. First and foremost, no. It's too complicated for us, it's too expensive for us. But most importantly, our work is human centered, right? We're serving people and communities and we can't have robots do that work. The entire purpose of our book, Julia, is to show the incredible opportunity that comes when you have smart tech do the road tasks that are taking up 20 to 30% of staff time, right? The answering the same questions over and over again, the reconciling expense reports, the, you know, reconciling spending days before a board meeting, you know, updating the budget. All of those tasks can be automated for the purpose of freeing your people to do deeply human tasks, right? To build relationships, tell stories, and to solve problems. In order to make sure the tech does that, you have to design it in very human centered ways. And by that, we mean engaging a wide variety of stakeholders to talk about what we call the exquisite pain point, the problem you're trying to solve, right? What the impact will be on people and how you'll know that it's making your work and your organization better, not worse. And it's that careful preparation that makes the difference between a smart nonprofit using a tech well. And I won't say the opposite, but the opposite. You know, one of the things that I love that you said, and this is one of my favorite questions to ask guests, is how do you know when you're doing it right? Or when you're doing it well? And I think that's a, that's a hard question to ask. Because in so many ways, it almost starts with this concept of scarcity and fear. And that's one of the things I would love for you. You started off by saying most C-sweets going to say, no, no, thank you. We'll wait. And it's such a mindset. How do we navigate this? So I had a first career, Julia, in program evaluation. So in measuring good outcomes, and at the heart of measurement is finding the right measures, right? Defining us. The last chapter in digital tech was so focused on going faster, everything going faster, right? To the point where now the norm is that we're each checking our emails on average 74 times a day, right? That's just crazy making. Smart tech should not be implemented to make your organization go faster. It should be implemented to free up staff to be really human centric. So those are the measures that you need to use, right? Is the technology engaging outside people in ways that feel helpful? Or is it those chatbots that are crazy making, right? Are you now retraining staff that maybe haven't been human centered before, right? To be more focused on being deeply relational inside and outside. So this is why it takes care and thought to do this well, because you really have to focus on how are we using smart tech to make ourselves more human centric, to solve problems, to be deeply relational, not to keep spinning the wheel faster and faster. And I'll tell you, one key metric that drives me nuts is what we call the leaky bucket problem, Julia, right? From year one to year two, only less than a quarter of new donors make it from year one to year two. You're losing over 75% of donors, right? It's horrible. So if your first reaction of having smart tech do a ton of research on donor prospects is, ooh, I get to cut fundraising staff versus ooh, I get to reposition fundraising staff to increase donor retention, that's the difference that we want to see. You know, it's such an interesting thing, Allison, because you're asking us and I think you're encouraging us to reassert bigger pictures as opposed to just task management. Just get it done, just get it done, check the boxes. And that takes a lot of discipline and it's uncomfortable to stop what you're doing. Right, this is what we call the implementation of smart tech, becoming a smart nonprofit is a leadership challenge. This is not a technology challenge. Anybody can go grab the technology off the shelf. That's easy, right? Reorienting your organization, building a culture that's human-centric, that's why you get paid the big bucks. You know, I love that you have brought that up because you're absolutely right. And I would go even further that there are a lot of CEOs that will engage, purchase, contract for automation and smart tech and then say, okay, you all for there, go do it. And they don't really understand because they haven't been involved in the process. And I'd love for you to talk to us about that because are you seeing that? Oh, that's our biggest fear, Julia, right? That folks are just going to tell the IT folks down the hall, go grab the software and put it in. It's not only that you won't be able to reorient your organization around the culture we were just talking about. But another huge problem, Julia, is that most of the commercial software you're going to grab has racial and gender bias built right into it, right? It is the nature of programmers putting their own bias into code, then grabbing historical data sets that have its biases built in. And you put into practice, say, a smart tech tool to screen resumes or smart tech tool to screen for clients for services that is by definition, racist and gendered. So this is such a critical part of leadership for organizations is not to relinquish that important task and throw it down to the IT folks, but to dig in and to learn about what's built into your tools and how to mitigate it. That's your job to do that. So let's drill down a little bit in that because, you know, it may not be popular to say, but when we look at leadership, we have an aging leadership segment. And I think that there's a lot of fear there and maybe that's part of why they don't want to adopt, you know, technology or, and or I should say, it's so easy for this work to be handed off. So how do we get our leadership across this country, 1.4 million nonprofits in that aging leadership to understand this? So part of this goes into the boardroom, right, that the boards have to set the expectations that organizations will use every tool available to them to advance their mission, right. Part of this is the need for generational shift and leadership. And we're starting the pandemic started to accelerate that as well. And part of the need is for staff to learn how to manage up when it comes to this technology. We heard from somebody at Care International that they used our book Julia to make the case to the C-suite for why they needed to broadly adopt smart tech in really smart, thoughtful ways, right. So all of those things need to come into play. But the issue you're raising, right, the issue of the norms of being, of having a scarcity mindset, right, that the sector is traditionally fear-based and slow to adopt technology has left us in a place where we've got the leaky bucket and we're checking our email 74 times a day. So good. The outcomes haven't been good. It's such an interesting thing too, because one of these things that you brought up, I was literally experiencing this yesterday, you know, the giving USA report was released and it's released interestingly enough in major American cities, just a few. And I was really privileged to be able to be in one of those cities where that was released. And just looking at the theater where nonprofit professionals had gathered, I couldn't believe the disparity in age. And you had one group over here that was, you know, the graying of leadership in America. And you had this other group here that was really young. I mean, we're talking under 30 and just how they, you could see the difference on how they were engaging and the pushback on some of these reported aspects with the giving USA. And I'm fascinated by this Allison, because it seems to me that we're going to have a group within this sector that moves forward really well. And then we're going to have a group that does not and nothing in between. I'm wondering if you're seeing this or is this, if this is just kind of one of my observations. Well, I think this has been a long time in coming, Julia, right? It's not a terribly new phenomenon in the sector that we have had a generation of folks leading organizations in what I think of as very traditional top-down controlling ways. But, or and, we feel really strongly that the next chapter in organizational life, there's going to be a distinction between those organizations that continue to be largely transactional, right? And have that leaky bucket problem and, you know, keep rolling right through staff, treat staff dreadfully. We have a very high burnout rate in the sector. And those that take a very human-centric relational approach to the work and to their staff and understand that we need to spend as much time thanking donors, engaging them, listening to them, talking to them on the back end as we do on all of the front end that we do for fundraising. I want to see organizations become in the habit, Julia, of asking people how they make donors, volunteers, board member staff feel. How do we make you feel, right? Do you feel known, acknowledged, heard, appreciated? Or do you feel like an ATM machine and a cog in this great big machinery that we built? And that to me is everything. But I'm still waiting for somebody to ask the question. So, you know, why is that question not being asked? Are we afraid of what the answer might be? Yes. I mean, we're afraid. And look, the norms of that traditional way of working are so embedded in organizations. And Beth and I have been doing this work for a long time. You know, it's 12 years ago that we came out with the network nonprofit saying take your fortress walls down, right? That idea of becoming more fearless, of being out in the world, of not worrying about making one donor angry. This is very, very hard for organizations and even the younger organizations that just saw a report last week about advocacy grassroots organizing. And too many of those younger organizations and younger leaders are taking the lessons from that last chapter and bringing it forward, right? And not treating people well and running through staff and not treating donors well because the mission is so important. And all of that needs to be left behind. We really need to turn the page on that last chapter of organizational life. You know, so interesting, Allison, because it's one of those traps. I feel like we chase the money, chase that metric, that financial metric, to the point where some of these things are hard to measure. If you put humans first, Julia. No, it's not, but I think it's hard to ask those questions. I think we need to be asking those questions, but it's not so easy to check off a box somewhere in your metrics about what you learned. Now, you can say made a donation, didn't make a donation, you know, it's easier and faster to your point of the original discussion. But you know, I think all of this goes straight into the boardroom, Julia, right? What questions are the board members asking? Have you ever been on a board that was all window dressing, right? The staff shows up and says everything is perfect. We haven't had any problems. We're hitting all of our revenue, right? That's just nonsense, right? So when the board doesn't insist on the creation of a learning culture, right, where we're going to try a bunch of things, some are going to work, some aren't going to work, no one's going to get in trouble when it doesn't work, and we're going to learn, right? And if that isn't coming at, you know, if that isn't developed in the boardroom, it's not going to happen. I love how you position this as an operational issue, but also as a leadership issue with the board. Because I would imagine, Allison, to your point, there are not a lot of boards that are even thinking about this because we've drilled down this message to the boards that they shouldn't really be involved in operations. That's management. That's the CEO-led issue. And so, you know, and they're trying to manage your own companies or their own jobs. So again, it's a heavy lift, too. It's a different lift. I think that's a better way, right? Yeah. Part of the huge problem is that most board members have no idea why they're there, right? I have a huge problem with the way boards are run, right? Bill Ryan from Harvard talks about the focus of boards should not be on technical problems, should be on adaptive problems, right? Where are we in five years, 10 years? Yeah. And that requires a different set of measures than what we normally have, right? Because how much of your board time right now is spent just on revenue on that front-end transactional, get the money in the door, we don't care how, right? Which creates all the problems we've been talking about. Where these organizations ought to be talking about, how are we engaging with people inside and out? How are we making them feel? How are we growing our human capital? How relational are we? What's our donor retention rate? What's our volunteer retention rate? It's a total different set of measures. And it's a different reason for being in the boardroom. And that requires leadership. Yeah. I love this. I think it's just such an interesting arc of not only information and approach and a mindset. But what's fascinating to me about this, Allison, is that we're not really just talking about smart tech. We're talking about intent and mindset and really kind of making this a lot more holistic, probably, than most people would ever even realize. So the question we always get asked, and we were asked this last week, Julia, is we're a small organization and we're so busy, right? We don't have time to adopt new technology. We don't have time for anything, right? So the response to that is, you're so busy generally trying to do too much with too few resources, right? You're never going to be able to solve all of these problems you've put on your table. You haven't prioritized the programs and services that you have, right? You keep doing, keep doing, keep doing. God bless you, right? I mean, you're doing such hard work. It's exhausting. You're burned out. You need to take a good hard look at what's the most important thing for me to do, right? Have that really tight theory of change. What are the bottlenecks to doing that? It's not about money. It's about systems and relationships and then where and how smart tech can help you free up your staff to do the work they came to do. That's a totally different way of working for most organizations, Julia, but those small organizations that are working themselves to death, it breaks my heart whenever I see it. You know, it's a really interesting way of understanding the difference between management and leadership. And when you are just in that hamster wheel of life just trying to make it through, it really seems hard to step back. In the short period of time that we have left and Allison, I could speak to you for days on end, but in the short time that we have left, how do we get out from under this external pressure reel or manufactured? I mean, do we have to like literally leave our offices for the day and go sit in a park or what is it that we can do so that we can refresh our approach? Oh, I think you need to leave your office for a week. I think everybody ought to just get out and stop, stop, right? And take a breath and figure out what are you doing that is moving your organization forward? What are you doing that is just noise and you do it because you've always done it like sending out that monthly newsletter nobody reads, right? How do we simplify our organization and our purpose, Julia, because organizations, as you want to, they grow sideways, right? Just adding, adding, adding services. We've got to bring it down to what can you do within your resources and then how can you do it in deeply human relational ways that will feel better for you and your staff? You'll be able to keep staff longer and will make a much bigger difference in the world and smart tech can help, but it has to be done well, right? I think it's a fascinating conversation and I, that we've, we've had and I really, I think that we've got to get this book in the hands of our nonprofit sector because this is where we're going, whether we like it or not, but it's, it's how we get there. It's how we go on the journey maybe is the way to say it. Allysonfine, allysonfine.com, a great website with a lot of Allyson's information and some of our other books. I would check that out definitely. Beth Cantor will join us again in the near future and that was just an unforeseen thing that popped up. Here is what we have for you on the screen for those of you listening. The smart non-profits staying human centered in an automated world by Beth Cantor and Allysonfine published by Wiley. Check it out. I really think this is an amazing opportunity to kind of reset the journey that you're going to be taking and understanding how you can get there and why you should get there maybe even more so than just, as you said, I loved, Allison, I saw myself when you said this pulling things off the shelf and plugging them into your system. I've been there. I am there. And so I love what you had to say about this. It's kind of somewhat frightening, I must say. Again, I'm Julia Patrick, my co-host Jared Ransom will be back with us tomorrow. She's got the day off as she celebrates her birthday. Again, I want to make sure that we thank all of our presenting sponsors without their support. We would not be here day in and day out. Bloomerang American Non-profit Academy, your part-time controller, non-profit nerd, fundraising academy, staffing boutique, and non-profit thought leader. These are the folks that have been with us most of these sponsors day one, which is pretty exciting. Allison, you are a gem. Thank you so much. My pleasure, Julia. It's just a delight to chat with you about these important things. Thank you. It's really amazing. And I have to say, when I hear the wisdom and the knowledge from someone like you, it gives me a lot of hope for our sector. I have an enormous amount of hope. And the book is an easy read, Julia. It's not a tome. And the opportunity for us to be really different in the next couple of years is right there. We can do this. It's very exciting. I love it. Well, thank you. Keep working hard for us in this sector. We can't wait to see how this journey evolves for not only our non-profits, but for you and for Beth. Your work is just outstanding and so well known. And we're honored that you came on the non-profit show. Everybody, as we like to end each episode, we want to remind you, our viewers, our listeners, and I think ourselves, stay well so you can do well. We'll see everyone back here tomorrow.