 Welcome to the nonprofit show. We are so glad you're here for a Monday as we start off this week, extremely strong with Alex Lapa, extremely excited to have him. He is the CEO at Dryad Consulting, joining us on the nonprofit show today. He's here to talk to us about something that we often talk about, but he's gonna tell us how to use it right. So are you using tech or technology right? So Alex is here to talk to us about that. And before we jump deep into that technology conversation, we want to remind all of you, our loyal viewers and listeners who we are. So hello to Julia. Julia Patrick is here, CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy. I'm Jarrett Ransom, your nonprofit nerd, CEO of the Raven Group, honored to be alongside Julia each and every day for these nonprofit show episodes. We've been going strong now, coming up on four years, over 750 episodes. And we have to say thank you, thank you to thank you to our amazing presenting sponsors that allow us this platform and the opportunity to talk to the great minds like Alex today. So a shout out to our friends over at Bloomerang, American Nonprofit Academy, Fundraising Academy at National University, nonprofit thought leader, your part-time controller, staffing boutique, as well as the nonprofit nerd. Do yourself a favor, do us a favor, do all of our sponsors a favor, check them out. They're here for you. I really like to say their mission is your mission. So they're here to lean into your mission and help you do more good in, around and throughout your community. Hey, if you missed any of our episodes, that's okay. You can find us on Roku, YouTube, Amazon Fire TV, Vimeo, as well as podcasts. So go ahead and queue us up wherever you stream your entertainment in just a few hours after our conversation with our guests today, it will be live on many of these streaming, all of these streaming platforms. So without further ado, Alex, I wanna introduce you. Alexander goes by Alex. Lapa has joined us here today. Again, he is the CEO at Dryad Consulting. We are so glad to have you. So officially welcome. Thank you for having me. Yeah. Okay, Alex, we called you out on your beautiful, I would like to call it Northern accent. Where are you coming to us from today? Normally I'm in Montreal in Canada, but actually today I'm in Spain. So I'm a digital nomad where I spend half this time, half the year in Montreal, the summer season, and then winter seasons, which are really awful in Montreal, I head over to the south of Spain. Holy cow, you're like my dream person. What part of Southern Spain are you coming to us from? It's a small town near Malaga. So wonderful temperatures, 65 to 70 degrees in January and February. Wow, okay, now we're really gonna believe what you have to say because you're coming to us from this like totally amazing place. Well, talk to us about what Dryad Consulting does before we get into peppering you with more questions. Sure. So Dryad Consulting was formed about 20 years ago and we basically do Salesforce consulting. So Salesforce projects for nonprofits. Yeah, that's basically the core message and then we have a bunch of apps and other types of promotion items as well. Great, and you had shared with us, you have the app, you do a lot of Salesforce training and kind of forums, you have your own podcasts. So where do we find your podcasts? The podcast is called Agents of Nonprofit and I'm basically interviewing people in the nonprofit space, helping nonprofits using technology. Fantastic. Awesome, well, that's a huge thing and Jarrett and I have been talking about this and I can't wait to get to this conversation with you is that we feel like so much technology was kind of for nonprofits put on the back burner but then with the COVID pandemic it just really forced the nonprofit sector to embrace and move forward. I mean, in the beginning of the nonprofit show Jarrett, isn't this true? We spent a lot of time talking about how to get your staff on Zoom meetings and how to get on Zoom, I mean, hello. The very basics, even like connecting to technology from their home, computers, I mean, really the basics and here we are again, almost four years later. So a lot has changed. There was a very popular comic a few years ago just after COVID started that said, indicate which of the four following factors was the biggest driver toward technology? CEO, CTO and then COVID and all the answers were COVID. Really pushed the frontier forward in terms of technology. Yeah. I mean, I believe that and I've got to believe that you have spent a lot of time and talked to us about that before we go any further. Have you found yourself spending a lot of time just talking about the implementation of technology versus the actual technology? Almost like in a cultural sense? Yeah, the key for any technology is making sure it's the right tool for the job, making sure it's the right technology because you have so many choices out there. How do you know which is the right one for you, for your particular task? And that's like the first conversation to be had. And then it's narrowing down the categories of, okay, now we need this kind of software to do this. What are our choices? Where do we go for advice? And how do we filter it down to the what are two choices before making that final assessment? Amazing. Well, let's delve into that because one of the first points that you have that kind of amplifies that sensibility is understanding when to use technology and drama when not to use technology. What do you mean by that? So technology is a tool, right? And any other tool, you need to know when to use it and when not to use it. Just like when you have a hammer, you're supposed to hammer nails in, but you wouldn't want to use a hammer to do screw driving, to work in screws. So it's making sure that whatever you're trying to do, you have the right tool for the right job. And a tool is supposed to be about automation as well, right? It's supposed to automate these tasks that are more structured so that you can focus on the things that you really add value to as opposed to things that just can be done really quickly. So the whole concept is use the tool when it works in that favor and then don't use it when if it doesn't work in that favor. And I feel like there are so many tools when it comes to technology and we think of nonprofits around the globe, Alex, and some departments within an organization use one tool, another department uses another tool. Sometimes they intersect, sometimes they don't. So I'm really curious if you can talk to us again just off the cuff, what does that look like and what are you seeing when it comes to organization, systemization and integration? I've noticed that for smaller nonprofits, people and teams are very separated, right? Each one has their own preference. Some might be paper, some might be Excel. One team might have a CRM, might have a donor management system. And most likely they are very separate because they're choosing it within their own capacities and capabilities and they don't really wanna have too much inter-team communication. At least that's not a requirement at the beginning. But then as nonprofits have become more and more advanced, that's when the cohesion and the communication inter-teams make a big difference because you become more effective at what you do. So that's the point where you start evaluating as a team as a full unit, when does it make sense to approach what tool and which tool to use? That would be the starting point. It's so interesting because it seems to me that these tools that we use are so specific for our silos. And when we look at programming versus development, you know, wow, what a hard thing to try and even communicate. I think what the jobs are because I think a lot of times, and Jared, I'd love to get your feedback on this. Development has this whole ecosystem and concept of what they think programming does. And programming has a whole ecosystem and thought process about what they think the slackers in development are doing. Like they're just going out to lunch and having a good time. Right, right, getting paid to have coffee. Yeah, I think there's a lot of misconception, but Alex, you hit the nail in the head and I really do think that, you know, the smaller the organization, the greater the silos, and I really think it comes to the team, the executive team, really all players, you know, to really create that cohesiveness because you're right. Like coming together in technology, having this system overlap, that's when you see success. And I always, I love a good executive dashboard, you know, like show me a good dashboard, that will make my day. And there's nothing wrong, by the way, having a disjointed system at the beginning, right? You want to focus on the mission, on your users or your customers or your clients or your volunteers. The tool you're using at the time probably doesn't matter too, too much, but it's as you get more effective, as you grow as an organization, that's when you'll start seeing a lot of cost savings and time savings and very money savings as you become more cohesive as a single unit. So apart and parcel of that, you always say, or I don't know if you always say, but in our preliminary discussion, you've talked about making tech work for you and not the other way around. What does that mean? So a big part of the tool in technology is making sure that the user experience works for you. And user experience is something I'm actually certified in as well as being with CRM, in that you learn that to build a system that your users are already used to using. And what I mean by that is, when you go to a website, for example, you already know more or less how websites work. You know, there's a menu going to be over here, you might have that hamburger, three-bar menu, and various other points. You know what a hyperlink looks like, you know what text looks like. You already know these things because you've used it hundreds and hundreds of times before. It's the same thing for any kind of technology. When you're building a technology, you wanna make sure that you're adopting user experience principles. So you don't have to train, this is what you need to click on, this is what you need to do next. It's intuitive based on the fact that it's been done many times before, you're not building anything original. So making sure that the tech works for you is making sure that the choices you're making, the technologies you're choosing has a good user experience. And you discard the ones that don't, the ones that don't work for you. It's interesting, cause you know, I think sometimes we get lured into the concept of this is new and different, exciting, and nobody has it. And I love what you just said about making something familiar so that you have greater success or comfort and engagement. It's really an interesting way to look at this. There's a lot of cool things happening on the edge of frontier of technology, but nonprofits is an area I wouldn't recommend should evolve to that cutting edge. They should be using systems that are a bit more established, a bit more refined and have been used and adopted by many users. There are some exceptions to that rule, but by generally you wanna make sure that it's been tried and tested before you actually adopt it. Yeah, I do feel that we, the nonprofit sector are often the latest to adopt innovation. And I really see that when it comes to technology. Now I was at the Association of Fundraising Professionals conference last year in Vegas this year. It's coming up in New Orleans. But what I saw at that conference, Alex, and again, this is really fundraisers, right? Is that it was a fundraising conference with technology first. Like the entire showroom I felt was just filled every row of technology, technology, technology. So there's so many things out there. I love that you said like, hey, let's not be the beta. Let's not be the first adopter. Let's have someone else kind of write the ship so that it's ready for us. What are you seeing when it comes to, like, I don't know. Once we adopt something, has it then become obsolete? Definitely not. Yeah, no. And before I answer that question, there was something you mentioned, you said nonprofits are the latest to adopt technology. You mean the last or the most? Yes, like we're not, yes. We are like, you know, the latest being. We're back. Yeah. The last, okay. And that's perfectly fine. I mean, you don't want to be the very last, obviously, but the idea is you want to wait for the technology to be a year or two old before you adopt it. Something that's really new might not succeed. It might not be around after a long period of time. You want to, like I said, make sure that it's been tried and tested before you start adopting it. There's a risk to becoming, to using that shiny new toy in that it might not be around, or it might be not exactly what you needed to do. Well, I think a year or two is safe because that's probably the average amount of time before we even hear about it in our sector. You know, the fact that it's kind of been tested. So you mentioned the shiny new toy and that is interesting to me because I do feel that there are so many shiny new toys out there. So talk to us about that shiny new toy syndrome. Like anything else, you want to make sure that the tool is established to a certain degree. And I mean, there might be some interesting things that you want to explore on your own personal time and might want to introduce to the organization at some point, but the need or the desire to jump to something new, every single day, week, month, whatever technology comes out, it can just be destructive. You'll just spend all your time researching things. We might, it would much be better to have some kind of help, external help like a strategist or a researcher do this kind of work for you and then propose certain technologies to you. So you don't have to spend your time and you doing all this kind of research on your own. Yeah. So going the other direction, Alex, I'm interested. I mean, and this is like such a broad question, but is there a shelf life? Like new technology really is changing, you know, every 24 months or like, should we kind of get into a pattern of understanding that we're going to need to make shifts or even just updates? What does that look like across the trajectory? Yeah, there is a misconception that once you buy something or you use a technology that you can just use it forever. And technology unfortunately requires a bit of energy, sustained, you have to sustain that energy constantly. And it's something you just have to reframe or reimagine or re-change your perception of and that technology just requires a certain amount of energy. So my idea usually is to do an evaluation, is to basically audit your systems, every let's say six months to a year to make sure that the technology you have is still working for you and then maybe see if there's something better out there that you can use. But it's not like a need where you have to do this every day or you wouldn't want to do it every five years, but let's say on a six months to a 12 month period, just to make sure that you're keeping that technology alive, you keep on feeding it and it's still working for you. Who's doing that assessment? Is that, is this like the IT person, if you're fortunate enough to have one? Is this each individual department? Who should be leading that charge? There probably should be one person at the organization if you're lucky enough to have a one person that kind of drives the conversation in the various departments. If not, it's a coordinated effort. If you don't have one person that can be dedicated or like I mentioned earlier, you could have some external strategist come and help you evaluate that process. So let's talk about this elephant in the room, AI, artificial intelligence. And what's that, what that is doing essentially to all of us and this spans beyond obviously the nonprofit industry, but that's a shiny new toy. And I love it. It's a really cool toy. So it's a toy in the sense of it's a tool as well, right? I mean, we already use automation in our daily lives. We don't do everything manually anymore. Everybody to a certain extent already uses some kind of automation. And this chat GPT for example, as an AI example, is just another tool that we can use. And people have this fear that it's going to replace people's jobs. And the consensus is more, it's people using chat GPT and AI in general who will be replacing people who are not using AI. So it's basically another tool in your trade to make you better, faster, stronger, more effective, more efficient, not to completely erase you or replace you. So I've used it and I think it is fascinating. Sometimes it's a hit, sometimes it's a miss, but really looking at, okay, what exactly is this? What's the possibility of it? So I'm really curious, if this is what's come out now, imagine what's gonna come out in just two more years or maybe even one year. Yeah, I would call this version 1.0. So I imagine version two, version three, I mean, it's just gonna get better and better. You're gonna be able to use it in more situations. Just again, you'll be able to focus on the things that actually bring value to the organization as opposed to writing a proposal or explaining certain technologies to you or certain concepts to you. That's what this tool can be used for. Ooh, you got me a proposal. I've not written a grant with it, but I think I'd like to try that to say, yeah, I think I would like to try that. At least as a starting point, at this point as version 1.0 as I call it, it might get you 80% of the way there and you'll have to make modifications, tweaks and whatnot, but at least it's 80%. So that will save you a lot of time so you can focus on the parts that you can only do. Sure. You know, I love that you brought this up, the piece of it in terms of the value of our own teams in that these tools are going to help to amplify the workload that we can take on, the work that we can do, and that ultimately, if we don't have these skills, then we will be replaced by people who do and that's the engagement of this technology. I think when you framed it that way, it makes it a lot less frightening for some people who feel like they're gonna be left behind. Yeah, right. That's really what it is. It's making sure they even have a name for it now. It's called Prompt Engineer. Someone who knows how to use this chat GPT is called a Prompt Engineer because it's like a command prompt back in the old days of computing. And the idea is that the better you are at using these kinds of tools, just like you are at any other tool, if the better you are using a CRM, the better you are using a hammer, the more effective you will be and the more in demand you're going to be. Oh, I'm gonna start looking for that key phrase, you know, on resumes. I'm curious if that's being integrated into resumes and just overall, you know, talking about the workforce in general, a prompt engineer. I've not heard that. Have you, Julia? No, I haven't, but it's, I mean, when you do use, just think about chat GPT. You have those prompts, you put those things in and the better you are, I think the more robust the work that gets spit out. And you're right, back in the old days of learning COBOL and FORTRAN, I'm dating myself, you had to do, you know, it was all the prompt piecework. So yeah, it makes sense. You know, it's been so interesting to talk to you and I wanna spend the little bit of time that we have remaining. Having you talk to us about Salesforce and I realize that you are certified and that you work with that product, but Salesforce for nonprofits, it seems like it's really, I'm hearing more and more organizations use it. Can you kind of give us an overview of what you see going on with that technology? Yeah, I don't know where to begin with that one. And I do want to respect that one of your... That's a big question. Yeah, and I want to expect that one of your promoters is Bloomberg, which is a competitor to Salesforce. I want to respect that as well. The idea is it goes back to the right tool for the right job, right? There might be some situations and even I promote that as well. Even the fact that I do work with Salesforce, I don't necessarily mean that Salesforce is the right tool for every nonprofit. There will be situations where it's not. And the biggest difference I find between Salesforce and some other CRMs is that Salesforce is more of a platform. It's not just a CRM, it's bigger than that. So that tends to attract the larger nonprofits. The ones that really need to have this cross-system, cross-enterprise level of communication versus the smaller CRMs, which are very, very good at very specific tasks, they're meant generally for smaller organizations. One thing I've seen with Salesforce and happy to chime in on this, Julia, is that often when there's volunteers that come from the sales world and they're very familiar with like a business development CRM, they are easily integrated into Salesforce and can often help build customized forms, things like that. Not to say that it's seamless, but I just feel like there's a lot more knowledge around that and when it comes to that interchange as opposed to a platform that's been designed specifically for nonprofits. So I've seen that as definitely a positive and I know there's so many amazing user groups out there. We have some here in our community, which has been a lot of fun to watch. And what you had shared, Alex, about making sure it's the right tool, you're not gonna use a hammer when it's something that you need to screw in or maybe even dig a hole, things like that. I've found myself throughout my career, really getting into a system to say, okay, this is what I want it to do. This is how I used to do it with X, Y and Z platform. And I think you had touched on this a little bit, Alex, about having it be user-friendly and intuitive. We wanna say, if we wanna pull this report, for me, the way my brain works is, if this is how I did it in this other system, how might I do it in this one? Yeah, it's hard. Alex, what do you see moving forward that Salesforce and some of these product lines are moving towards that, or are they really digging in and holding on to their original direction that they took when they were originally designed? Yeah, it's hard for products to change like that over time. Usually they, like Salesforce and these larger enterprise organizations, they more like buy smaller companies, integrate that into the system, as opposed to changing their entire way of doing things. And you're right, there is a process, of course, of learning as you change from one system to another. But the fact that you know how reports generally work is probably a concept you can transfer over to your new CRM, for example. The details of how that's done might change, just like you were, and I'm dating myself as well, back in the day when I used to use WordPerfect and switch to Microsoft Word, you know what you can do with it, exactly. You just need to figure out how to do it in the new system. So there is obviously a change management and a learning process that can be awkward and uncomfortable, but the idea is it's difficult or I don't see it too often where a platform like Salesforce would change the way they do things. There are reskinnings that it did recently move from classic interface to lightning interface which made things better overall. But that's more of an interface level thing was supposed to, this is the way that the future changes completely. Yeah, and you mentioned automation and I see that happening more and more and coming up because I feel like our workforce, we talk about compassion fatigue, we talk about burnout, we talk about many nonprofits pride themselves on look what we do is so very little, and so really adding more and more to the plate. So automation, I think the software or the system, whatever it is that we're using really needs to have that automation. And I'm curious, Alex, if you see that automation from teams are actually being used to their full effect or if we're just like touching on that surface? You're talking about in terms of the Salesforce context or the overall context? Overall in general, I'm curious what you've seen. I'm not sure there's an end to automation. I think there's something you can always make better, faster, stronger, simpler. The idea is to again, use a level of comfort that you're, use automation to a level that you're comfortable with. So if it works for you, you're able to do what you're doing, you're able to focus on the work that you add value to and you can outsource some of these automation, great. If at some point down the road, you realize maybe there's something more I could automate, let's see if you can simplify this part of the task and try to automate that part or outsource it, for example, or different ways of shifting the work so that you don't have to focus on some of these tasks that someone else can do or a system can do, just as good as you can. I love that mentality. I think that's just, that's kind of magical thinking because we do have, as Jared said, we have so few resources in many, many ways and then we're trying to, you know, do the work of the angels, heavy loads on our backs and so, yeah, reasserting how we tackle a problem or a project, yeah, it's a good way to look at this. Alex Lapak, CEO of Dryad Consulting, coming to us from fabulous Southern Spain. Okay, I gotta ask, is it past your dinner time now? It is. Well, we're just getting started here in the West, Western United States. Check out Dryad Consulting. It's really an interesting website. You can read about Alex's journey as a digital nomad, how he has framed up his work in the nonprofit sector. Really quickly, you have an actual app just for the Canadian nonprofit sector. Right, so I noticed a need for Canadian nonprofits using Salesforce and that's for tax receding. There are not a lot of great choices out there. So I'm actually introducing this as a brand new product available now to do that. So tax receding for Canadian nonprofits using Salesforce. Okay, I know that. Yeah, Dryad receding. Dryad receding. Dryadreceding.com. Awesome, well congratulations. Thank you. That's really amazing and I've got the nonprofit show is gonna be announcing their app very shortly. I'm just, I'm not trying to be competitive, but I am trying to be competitive. That's great. Super cool, really, really cool. Well, everybody, again, I'm Julia Patrick been joined by the nonprofit nurse herself, Jared Ransom, CEO of the Raven Group. Again, we are so fortunate to have these amazing sponsors who join us day in and day out. They include our friends at Bloomerang American Nonprofit Academy, your part-time controller, nonprofit thought leader, fundraising academy at National University, staffing boutique and the nonprofit nerd. They are so important to every episode of the nonprofit show. And Jared, next week, my friend, I think we kind of start, in the next couple of weeks I should say, we launched our fourth year of broadcasting. It is coming up. And we also will be taking the show on the road much more this year than we did last year. So there's a lot happening. It's very exciting. It is. It's very, very exciting. Alex, our dream would be to come and do a live broadcast in Southern Spain. You're more than welcome. Yeah, we might have to make that one happen. Absolutely. Hey, everybody, we like to end every episode of the nonprofit show. We want to remind everyone to stay well so you can do well. We'll see you back here tomorrow.