 Welcome to the nonprofit show. We are so glad you're here. If you joined us for the green room chatter, you've already seen that we're having a fantastic conversation today with our amazing guest, Tim Locky, with the Human Stack. Thank you, Tim, for joining us and actually for returning because you've been on before, which I absolutely love. Today is nonprofit tech talk. So if you're watching visually, you can see that we have a little different, you know, aesthetics to today's conversation because we really are elevating the tech side of our industry. And Tim's here to talk to us about unlocking digital success with just two people. So we've got a lot to talk about here. But if you haven't met us yet, we want to remind you who we are. So hello to you, Julia Patrick. Julia is the CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy and I'm Jarrett Ransom, her trusty sidekick and nonprofit nerd as I push my glasses back up on my nose. You too. CEO of the Raven Group and really enjoy nerding out on these conversations. We are so grateful to have the continued support and investment from our sponsors that also continue to support and invest in you, our nonprofit friends around the globe. So a huge shout out of gratitude to our friends at Bloomerang, American Nonprofit Academy, your part-time controller, nonprofit thought leader, fundraising academy at National University. Also, thank you to nonprofit nerd and staffing boutique. So again, please check out these companies. I like to remind you that their mission is your mission because they really do want to pour into you and your community to help you do more good. We're just bragging and lamenting and y'all dropping about how today is episode 862. We don't always count our episodes, but we are now because we're on the stretch to 900. So really looking forward to that. We have diversified where you can find us through entertainment sources. So download the app. You can scan that QR code now and in just a few hours after today's conversation, you'll get a notification that it's been uploaded. You can also still find us on streaming broadcast as well as podcast. So no excuse of free access, right? Again, thank you to our sponsors and to our guests that really provide this time to us. So again, our guest today, no other than Tim Locky, CEO at the HumanStack. And you can check out his website, not now, but in about 27 minutes, thehumansstack.com. Welcome back, Tim. Thank you. And I'm gonna just pile on your 30, after this one, you'll be 37 episodes from 900. I just, it's just blowing my mind. I'm just so impressed. Thank you. That's incredible. So here's to the last 37, right? Hey, cheers to that. Yeah, I'll drink my water. Sorry, not the last, the next 37, right? The next 37. Yeah, there we go. And I appreciate you doing the math. That is not my forte. I love, I have it on a spreadsheet, but yeah. Tell us a little bit, Tim, about yourself and HumanStack and what you do in this space. Yeah, my name is Tim Locky. I am the CEO and brigand from the HumanStack. And what I do is I think about the ways that humans and technology partner to create more impact in the world. And that comes out in a lot of different ways. There's a methodology, there's a digital health quiz that we do. But fundamentally, what I realized a few years ago is that the tech stack is all zeros and ones. It's all logic-based. And the HumanStack, our base code is belonging. And we need to focus on that as a social stack. And so when we start to think about technology, we need different approaches to the way that we build. The tech stack from the way that we build, the humans that are going to run technology for our organizations. There's so much isolation for the technologists in nonprofits and it's needless. We can do better than that. And so that's what I do. I think about these things and talk about them, create products that help people achieve them. Great. It's amazing. We talk a lot about isolation in the ecosystem of the nonprofit sector as we were talking about in the green room. There's a lot to go by in the nonprofit sector and it's tough. And so you're dealing with so many different issues and technology just seems to be such an overwhelming thing for so many in the nonprofit sector. And so for us, this is why we have a separate type of show, nonprofit tech talk. We really want to start amplifying what's out there, what can be done, how do we navigate this? Because Jared and I have seen from the get-go that those organizations that leaned into technology come ahead and they can do more and they can serve more. And those that don't, they're getting left behind. So not to put too fine of a point on it, but start us off with the six vitals to monitor. Three that are in the tech stack and three that are in the human stack. I can't wait to learn about this. I'm gonna start where I always start, which is how I explain this to my mom. Okay. So that is for all of us because it helps anchor me in a story. So here's the story that I tell my mom. I used to be a technology consultant for nonprofits. And what I realized is that Salesforce, Blackbot, Neon, what now I know all of my friends and all these platforms, so I'm not gonna do the whole list, but they're all like a car manufacturer, right? They're like a car manufacturer and my old company was a dealership. And nonprofits would come, they would order their new CRM car or donor database, whatever, and we would assemble it for them and we'd give them the keys and they would either wreck it or not drive it because they didn't know how to drive and what I realized four years ago is that we professional services only do dealerships, there's no such thing as a DMV. We don't do driver's ed and we don't, we have an unregulated driver system. And so we blame the tech all the time. We're like, we drive our car into a tree and then we say our car doesn't work, right? Like that's the story of technology in the nonprofit space for so long. I'm not trying to pile on any guilt on that. I'm saying there's a reason for it, it's a logical reason and there's a solution for it but we have to identify that the problem here is not a car problem, it's a driver problem. And the cars are the tech stack and drivers are the human stack. And so I focus a lot on knowing which issue are we dealing with. In order to understand that better, I took the hundreds of organizations that I'd worked with and I looked at the way that we had approached them, the discovery that we had done, the questions that we asked them and I boiled it down to six really simple questions that get at the digital health of an organization really quickly. And I call this a diagnostic and a diagnostic's different than a discovery, right? So a lot of consultants start with a discovery and to me that feels a little bit like starting with exploratory surgery, right? Like let's do some exploratory surgery and then run some tests. I'm like, no, let's do that the other way around. Let's start with a test and then if we need to, right? And so I just wanted to create a diagnostic that would skip the step of discovery and get us there faster. So if anybody's interested, you take this quiz for free, it's you can go to humansstack.com slash quiz and you can just take this quiz. It'll take you less than, less than five minutes. And when you're done, it will have asked you six questions. I'm a little bit uncomfortable with that because I'm a econometrics student. And so I know we need like all of these more questions. And so I feel like I kind of want there to be more scrutiny, more science behind it, all of that. But you know what? We didn't need it. Six really simple questions and you can get there. Anyway, from that, you'll get an output and it will divide up your scores into three human stack vitals that are a solution fit. Sorry, human stack vitals are system sustainability, digital strategy and accountability. Of those three, accountability is the most important. We'll talk about that in a little bit. And then on the tech stack, there is solution fit, data quality and utilization. Right now in our world, solution fit, which is our tech stack, like what are all the different pieces that you have? And most organizations have between 30 and 50. That's all we think about. We just think about what, like, what's our solution? Does it fit all of that? I just want to give people five other things to think about besides that because that's the most expensive and hardest to change. If you want to swap something out, it's the easiest to purchase. It's the hardest to change and it does not get at the behavior, which is really what's that issue with driving. So that's, so I created that. I'm able to do now in one hour with an organization, what used to take me between 25 and 100 hours. Wow. It makes that big of a difference. And I don't need to know, I don't need to interview people. I don't like, you know, I don't, I'm not looking at the politics, none of that. All I'm doing is just saying like, according to your score, here's what I see, does that sound right? And I've been blown away. People are like, it's like you're following me around. So I think that that's, so I think that's been really interesting to me to just see like, there's a lot that we could do to just start asking the right questions. That is fascinating. Tell us the quiz again, the human stack. What is it? .com slash quiz. Quiz, okay. And it's like five minutes and then we get the report on that. That is fascinating. So I can only imagine that that is such a valuable tool for us to have. Who should be taking that quiz? But like the driver, the person that's using the donor database, if we have a tech person on our team, who's the person that would be best to take that quiz? Yeah, I think whoever is curious should take the quiz. And here's the thing that really caught my attention on it is that I started to realize we're not measuring, we're not getting into the telemetry of the actual database. I'm not actually running a background diagnostic to see how well is the data being used? What is utilization? And you can do a lot of that. What I am measuring is people's perception. And perception is reality for behavior, right? And so if you're curious, you should take it and you'll get a view of your perception. Now, what I do with an organization, if I do a paid review with them in a service that I do either for enterprise or small organizations, for really small organizations, part of the Digital Drivers Add program that they can take is doing this themselves and learning from it themselves. But I have whole teams take it, I'll break it down into different departments and then I'll start comparing where the departments are and that tells me a lot. When you see an executive team that is low digital strategy and everybody else has high digital strategy, like they're rating themselves high, you know there's a breakdown there because strategy needs to flow from the executive team. So if they don't feel like it's there, that says a lot. So that's the kind of thing I'm thinking through. Anyway, answer your question. Whoever's curious can take it. And if the organization needs to get a fuller picture of that, they can reach out and we can do a review together. So talk to us about this concept because I really, I love the way you've described this because I do think that we can, within the ecosystem of our nonprofits, we know things aren't working, we can see that there's a breakdown but then we can't figure out where and how. And I agree with you, I think we blame it on the software box, you know, through the old days that was sitting on the cover on the shelf and now the download. Talk to us about this difference between the leader and the driver because to me that seems like a pretty big deal and you kind of tease this in the green room chatter, aligning it to an indie race. What does that look like? In every successful project and digital transformation process I have ever seen, there's one common element. It's not the technology that they use, it's not the size of organizations, it's not even the budget or timeline. It's that they had a strategic leader and a tactical doer and those two people had a really good relationship with each other. It's the core of what drives technology success is a relationship in the organization that is part strategic and part tactical. And I started asking other consultants, do you see this, do you see this? Everybody was saying, oh yeah, now that you mentioned it, they could name names, they could say, oh yeah, the strategy person was this. They weren't the, they were not even the CIO, they were this other person, but everybody looked to them. So anyway, I just said, hey, we need to start working with what works, right? And if it's this relationship, then why is that so important? I went to an indie race a couple of weeks ago. My friend is the Honda sponsorship king. And so everybody there knows him. I was in like the Honda hospitality VIP place where they've got a chef that travels with them. It was amazing. I was in the pits, it was so cool. Oh my gosh, Ken Unger, my friend just hooked us up. It was amazing. We went to the pits and we're talking about this, right? And he started describing this role of the race strategist. This is a person that is in at the pit and he's got wall-to-wall screens. There is so much monitoring that goes on in these cars. It is unbelievable. And he's monitoring everything going on outside the car. And he is in constant communication with that driver. And the driver is sitting here going 200 miles an hour around corners and stuff. Not around corners, but anyway, you got it. And it was, yeah. And the success of the race really boils down to their ability to navigate these incredibly important decisions, like when you come into pit and the timing for that, your tires, all of these tiny, tiny little details that make a huge difference in the outcome of the race. And it just struck me how similar this is to what we do in Digital Drivers Ed for small teams and digital guidance for larger teams. And you really have to isolate what is it that these two are doing with each other? And I think the thing we constantly feel like is happening with technology is that we need to get more logical about it and better at executing it and diving down into project management and making sure that we're grooming tasks and running agile like a scrum master and all of that. No, that's not what works. What works is getting the energy aligned between these two roles and then building teams around them. And a lot of what gets misaligned on that energy is what's under the surface of their emotions. So there's a lot of thoughts that they have that we can all identify, like what if this one person that knows everything about our system, what if they leave or win the lottery or get hit by a bus, right? That's the one that we always talk about we're not supposed to do anymore. And so, but really what's driving them is this anger about being accountable for something you are not in control of, right? So the leader is accountable for everything in the organization, but especially the digital. And they have no tools. They don't know what to do with that. They don't have the expertise, but they're still accountable for it. That's a really uncomfortable situation. And we don't really think about what that's like for the leader. Also, the leader eats last when it comes to data and information, especially insight, right? So the data has to be accurate. It needs to get converted to information and then converted to insight. So any leader is two transformations away from the original data going into the system. By the time it gets to them, they've moved on and they're running on instinct, not insight. And so this is a really non-rewarding process for leaders to run technology. It feels like they can't win a lot of the time. Does that make sense? Yeah, I mean, you're speaking my truth today. Absolutely. I see it, you know, within my own business and I see it within, you know, how Jared and I work on the nonprofit show. It's absolutely what you just communicated is definitely a pain point. And I agree with you on this, you know, that the number of people involved and if you've got two people as we started off today, why we need those two people to be understanding what this looks like. And I wanna move into, we don't have a lot of time, but I really thought that this was amazing, this phrase that you used, instinct versus insight and that piece of passion versus tech experience. You have somebody, you know, doing the tech work, but they might not be out in the field dealing with programming or leadership or fundraising. I can totally see this drama, if you will, being played out. How do we navigate that? It's so interesting that you don't need to start. So the driver's the one that really is going to be responsible for the tech, right? So the leader is accountable and the driver's responsible. So that driver needs to actually be the one that knows all of the 50 tools that they're using. They need to be a functional CIO in that organization, right? And that's why that communication piece is so important. I think curiosity is the most important trait in a driver. I could be challenged on that, but I don't think it starts with tech experience. I think it starts with curiosity and it starts with, in our digital maturity model, it starts with being either engaged or resilient in technology themselves. So that's kind of who you're looking for for that role. And once they are in that role, they need to be given the green light to proceed with that role. And a lot of times it's a digital voluntold who's on TikTok and so the executive director asked them to just run all the tech, right? That's how it starts. And I don't think that's bad. I think that's fine. What the executive director needs to do next though is to put that in their job description, pull some stuff off their job description and meet with them at least once a month. And in that meeting once a month, just say what were your goals last month? Did you meet them? What are your goals next month? How can I help, right? It's that kind of a check-in so that you're rewarding that person for doing that hard work. That leader does not need to know all of the 50 systems or what's going on in them. They just need to know this person's got it and I'm in contact with them about it, right? And I think that that's what's so important. That instinct versus insight, it's the long road and it's the North Star. What that leader needs to think is, if I do this and you are talking about consistency, this is about consistency and about patterned behavior that builds on itself until you get an outcome that you're looking for. So when we start working with an organization and we implement this methodology, I tell the leader, you can complain to me all you want for the first four months and I will not change a thing. After four months, if you still think we need to make changes, we'll talk. But you're gonna think this is not working for the first four months and I get that, I would think that too. But I'm leading you and I'm not, I'm actually not asking, this is, if you wanna get to this outcome, I'm an expert in this and so this is the path. Every time I've done that, at the either three month or four month, the light bulb has gone off and they say, oh, I get it. And the reason that happens is because in the first month, the driver doesn't take it seriously. And then when they meet and talk about goals and they haven't done anything, that driver's like, oh man, I do not like this feeling, right? And so then they do that the second month and they show up and they only did half of it so they don't meet their goal. And they say, I don't like this feeling and I'm never doing this again. The third month they show up and the work is done and they can't wait to show it and they talk about it. And that's when the leader connects. If I meet with them and I pay attention to what they're doing, I can now get them to go where I and we need them to go because we can talk about what their next goal is and that functionally puts a steering wheel in the hands of the leader so that they're accountable for something but not responsible for it but they can now partner together on it. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does, but I gotta drill down a little bit deeper and challenge you on this because it seems to me like and you started off by saying we can have between 30 and 50 different pieces of software, all different. We're trying to get them to work together. We're trying to fit them into our work style. A lot of times we don't look at tech goals. We look at just trying to get the work done, right? And so we have fundraising goals and we have staffing goals and programming goals and donor meeting goals. I mean, we could go on and on and on. So what is a tech goal? I mean, how should we look at this so that we can even figure out if we're doing the work that's gonna ultimately matter? I love that you just asked that. Thank you so much. Okay, I wanna put this into the race conversation. I think you're asking about is something like, okay, it can't just be the finish line. In a lap, what is it that they're measuring in that lap to know if they're on the right track, right? Perfect, so in our methodology, we call that the result KPIs, right? And so we're looking at two things. There are two types of goals that the driver is working on every month. One is data quality. So they're going in and they're identifying, okay, we have 686 duplicate records. This month I wanna just take 10% of those and de-dupe those. So at the end of the month, I should have about 608. I think that's the right math I can't remember now. But I should have about 608, right? And so then the next month, when they look at that goal, they say, hey, you only got 30 of these done. What happened? What could you do differently? Gotcha. So that's what I'm talking about is a conveyor belt of goal making around data quality. Perfect. And that's in my mind that I was like, what is it that we should measure because it just seems like we should be measuring that our teams don't take their computers and throw them out the window because they get so frustrated, right? I mean, that's not a goal. How many computers did we lose this month? Oh, that's brilliant. Well, I mean, that shouldn't be a goal, right? But did you see what I'm saying? We just wanna lose 50% fewer computers next month. I love it. Okay, so the second thing that they're doing is that we are trying to convince people to complain about the system, not whine. Whining's useless. If you get people whining at the water cooler, they're just sabotaging the system. But if you can get them to complain specifically about what's not working for them, then you can create the feedback loop. And so we teach people complainings of sign of hope. We get that driver to create a way to submit a complaint in less than 30 seconds without leaving the page, right? And when they can do that, then suddenly people are like, okay, this report doesn't make sense, this filters off. Small change, huge outcome. If they can make, if in 30 months they can catch that and adjust it, now that person's gonna go to the water cooler and say, hey, I complained and this got fixed. And suddenly people start believing, okay? So what we're looking for is between eight and 12 complaints per month for whatever department they're focused on. And that's the last thing I wanna just really, I wanna make sure I get this in. The third role that I'm not talking about very much is the passenger. Now let's switch so that the driver's an Uber driver now. Okay? And the driver's an Uber driver. And you've got the fundraiser that needs to go to year-end campaign, right? And so they put that into the app. And so the driver's job is to get them there with the technology. And the passenger's job is to know where they wanna go and the technology use they wanna do and making sure the team's on board. When we try and make the development director, the driver, that it doesn't work. You have to have somebody that is overseeing all of the technology that is helping that development director and their team get to where they're going. Same thing with the program, same thing with the finance. So the driver is a centralized role the same way that a bookkeeper is, right? These are the two things. Finance and tech run orthogonally across the entire organization. Does that make sense? It does. So much sense. Yeah, I've loved this so much because I definitely see myself as a passenger. I've had to play a driver and I'm not the driver. Like I can tell you absolutely where I wanna go and what I'm looking for, right? And even tell you the point, I'm taking this into driving as well, where I'm like, okay, I need to pass this McDonald's and this Starbucks and this restaurant. Yes, yes. I know I need to see these things along the path, but don't ask me to get behind the driver seat. All I wanna do at the human stack is teach people how to drive their tech. I don't care why, I mean a little bit. And I don't care where. As long as creating a better world, that's it. But all I want, like a driver is ed instructor does not say, what car are you driving or what are your five-year goals. They say, today I'm gonna get you around the block. That's right. Tomorrow around the city. I don't need to know your why. No, I just need, you know, like bring your own car. You're gonna learn to drive it. And I think that that's the misconception that we've had. So I've narrowed it down. I teach people how to drive their tech. That's my lot in life. That's what I wanna get really, really good at. I love it. I can see this ad campaign where it's like, you can show up with your big wheel or your Tesla. Like I don't care what you pull it up in. Yes, 100%. Oh, I love that. Yeah. So this has been great. Thank you so much for joining us for non-profit tech talk. We of course could keep talking about tech with you. You've told us amazing stories. I love how you talk about this as if we're all your mother because it makes so much more sense that way. Tim Locky, CEO at the HumanStack. Please take him up on that quiz. Thehumansstack.com slash quiz, probably like a backslash or four, I don't know, one of those things. I shouldn't be driving, but thehumansstack.com slash quiz, check him out. He's here, the driver's ad and all kinds of, I mean, he'll get you to the Indie Race if that's what you wanna do. So Tim, it's been a pleasure. Thank you. Thank you so much. It's always a joy to be on your show. Well, thank you. Again, I'm Julia Patrick, CEO of the American Non-profit Academy. I've been joined today by the non-profit nerd herself, Jared R. Ransom. We are here with the special edition of the non-profit show called Non-profit Tech Talk, and we have amazing sponsors behind us. They include Bloomerang, American Non-profit Academy, your part-time controller, non-profit thought leader, fundraising academy at National University, non-profit nerd, and staffing boutique. They're the ones that allow us to have these amazing conversations. And I think it's just crazy how you came into our world today. Yesterday we had a guest on talking about investments and the tech aspect for non-profits and their investment strategies. And so it's just amazing to me that this is where we need to be rowing towards. And it's been great, Tim, to have you on. So thank you, thank you so much. Hey, everybody, as we end every episode of the non-profit show, we want to remind you, ourselves, our viewers, our listeners, and our guests to stay well so you can do well. We'll see you back here tomorrow, everyone.