 Thank you all for joining us today. I'm Nate Parsons. I'm the Chief Strategy Officer of Parsons TKO. And I'm excited to talk with you all today. And we're going to be diving in today to talk about why you need a marketing CTO. And what is a marketing CTO? And why is that different from a regular CTO? And part of why I wanted to give this talk today is that we keep running into situations where clients are wondering, why are all these fancy engagement tactics that you see on medium posts and on the web and other things so hard to make part of their day-to-day? Like what's getting in the way of them adopting more sophisticated outreach tactics over time? And why is that challenging? And one of the things that kind of made me think about this, we kept hearing things like this. And I just wonder if any of these sort of sound familiar to folks. The fundraising team might say something like we want to target a very specific set of people that we think are likely to give in a certain scenario. And then the communications team looks into it and they're like, oh man, we're going to have to make an Excel file and do a lot of manual labor to make this happen. Or another thing that we've seen happen is that people are just wondering, their higher ups are wondering why the time and effort they're putting into things isn't creating the value or the benchmarks that they see on the web or other things like that. And they're just wondering why things aren't working. And then the comms team looks and they say, well, there's all this optimization and this improvement that we think is in there that we just don't have time to do. We have the tools to do, we're not set up to do. And from the leadership's perspective, they're just wondering why you haven't already done that. Isn't that your job? There's all these complexities for why that doesn't happen. And part of that is that outreach has become a real team sport. In a lot of organizations, there was a fundraising department, and a communications department, and an events department, and a volunteer management department, and maybe a grassroots organizing group. And all of those were sort of independently operating. And as the tools for outreach have become more sophisticated, the need for coordination and collaboration between these different groups has increased. And the other truth is that as the world has become more digitally sophisticated, the relationships you have with your audience are longer term. They're not three months, they're three years. And to sort of plan for that, you have to have sort of both a long-term view and a sort of collaborative mentality. And that causes things to break down in a number of places. Probably the most obvious is sort of the governance of these shared systems. It's not uncommon for the fundraising team to own the CRM and the communications team to own the email tool and the volunteer management team to own a separate tool and so on and so forth. And that means that even just letting people know in other departments when you're going to make a change, that might impact them, and that change could be how you categorize your audience. It could be how you store demographics. It could be whether or not you pull information back from a system into a shared system. All those things need to be sort of coordinated and announced. And the other piece of that is that sometimes another department needs something that you could provide, but you don't need it. And so you don't provide it. And so that's another place for governance can really help sort of solve those problems. But it breaks down there a lot in organizations. Budgeting and lifecycle is another place where things happen, where a tool can either long outlast its utility because it's serving one department's use case, but it's not serving the organization's use case. Or that the flip side can happen. A system gets replaced that another team was relying on and they didn't know about it and they didn't adjust their business processes and they didn't have a change management plan. Suddenly they're scrambling or the level of service that they're offering to the audience drops because of the systems replacement. And so managing the budgeting and lifecycle planning process is another place that takes just a lot of facilitation and coordination. Then this long-term audience cultivation. We often work with organizations that have sort of like young leaders or new leaders kind of program where they're really helping people get off the ground in their career. And they build a lot of affinity with those folks but they don't keep up with them. And in five or six years when those people are mid-career or starting to break into their late career and have a lot of influence or a lot of ability to direct funding or other sorts of things that organizations might care about, they don't have that connection with them because they didn't plan for a long-term audience cultivation. They're really focused on getting someone from a social media post to a donation but not a long-term relationship with them. And that's just another piece where it takes a lot of people working together to make that happen. And finally just technical expertise. It's very common for different departments to be stronger or weaker in different areas to have better visual design teams, to have better sort of data strategy teams, things like that. And how that expertise is sort of used across the organization often could be improved with a little facilitation coordination and just kind of letting people know like, hey, if you share a little budget here or you sort of fractionally fund this position, suddenly we can all benefit from this. So, why are those things breaking down? I think that's one of the things that people wonder everyone has the best intentions when they start these and everybody thinks they're being a good teammate and collaborator with their other partners in their organization. And one of the reasons that it is hard is that these problems creep up on you slowly. It's sort of like the frog in the pot. Why does it jump out of the pot? And the problem is that when things like non-standardized categories for audiences or different naming conventions for topics of interest are used across different systems, the impacts of those are not realized for a long time. And often they're realized only when you try and do something more sophisticated, all of your basic outreaches are not impacted by those lack of standards. But when you wanna do something a little more fancy, a little bit more data driven or a little bit more personalized, that's where those troubles start to pop up. And usually that's in the late game out of the beginning. Related to that, it's not really anyone's job to manage these holistic things within most organizations. If you have a CTO or CIO, they're typically focused on making sure the organization works effectively. And that includes all sorts of things from information security to make sure laptops work, to making sure the bills get paid on time, picking hosting vendors, managing email security. There's so much on their plate. They're rarely focusing on the outreach or marketing function. And often the people in those roles don't come from a background where they have a lot of exposure to marketing and outreach needs. And so they tend to not be focused on your outreach platform or your audience engagement, even if they have that technical capability. COO's office, the chief operating officer, they're often a great place for this role to live or for this kind of function to live, but they have a million things on their plate too. And just between budgeting, staffing and interdepartmental management, they often can't focus on this effectively. Next sort of group that you might think is the communications department. They often have the most outreach tools that they're kind of the leading edge of your audience engagement. They're out there meeting the new people your organization interacts with, but they're often have these firewalls that prevent them from owning all the systems. Hey, don't get involved in fundraising. Oh, for our own benefit, we're not gonna get involved in the volunteer management system. How can we kind of keep our scope of work reasonable? And so they tend to kind of create breaks where they don't sort of expand and manage the whole organization. The events department, just forget about it. There's so much intensity and so much firefighting on the events department side. They rarely are gonna have the wherewithal to cover the entire outreach stack or think about how audience is engaged longterm. Fundraising is usually typically the most invested and interested in longterm relationships and in holistic relationships. The challenge for them is that they are not as invested in the day-to-day contact and on the early parts of the funnel. And their team is often very sort of results focused. How is this leading to donation? And they can track all of that. And so that creates some data disincentives for them to own a lot of the speculative longterm planning of the outreach stack. Then finally, if you do have folks focused on volunteering or on grassroots organizing, that's another place where there's a lot of interest and expertise on this, but it tends to be seasonal. They tend to have strong areas of volunteering or particular political campaigns they're focusing on. And again, it just kind of shortens the timeline and things they're looking for. So there's not anyone in the organization who's managing these problems or hooks on these problems typically. And the flip side of that is it's really expensive to hire for this role. If you already have a CIO or CTO, hiring another one seems like a real luxury. And most departments don't have the wherewithal to hire somebody like this just within their own department. It tends to be something that needs to be cross-departmental or on the executive team or the steering team or whatnot. And so it's really difficult for there to be a funded position that can handle this. And so that leads to this sort of miasma. How can we get out of this? And you might be wondering, who can save us? Who can save us from this terrible fate? And it's a good question. Like we need somebody who can solve these problems. We think about the long-term interconnections of our platforms managing them and helping improve the situation so you can reach those more sophisticated and more meaningful ways to engage your audience. And that person, whoever that person is, it needs to be thinking about how the outreach systems fit together. They need to be thinking about how that actually feels on the outside. It's really common for somebody who's on the outside to get an email that looks a certain way to go to the website and it's a slightly different field to maybe come to a volunteer event and see and have a different experience. And that all sort of creates friction in your brand. You're not creating a unified brand experience. You're not sort of making them feel like they're part of a cohesive whole. And that's often because you're jumping between departments that aren't coordinated and their systems aren't coordinated and even the visual branding has been always coordinated. And then you need somebody to focus on the long game. A lot of this audience engagement takes, at least a year, if not multiple years to kind of grow because you're having sort of a value arrangement with your audiences. You're trading them information, you're building affinity and trust with them and you're helping them advance their personal brand and their career through your interaction with them. That's just not something that happens overnight. They might give you a donation when they're feeling very motivated or there's a crisis in the world that they want to help support, but that's a little different from having a long-term and high affinity relationship with them. And I think to do that, you need sort of more mature tactics. You shouldn't be sending the same outreach to someone who's been with you for five years as somebody who has just signed up for your mailing list. And that's like instinctually true, but it's actually really difficult to turn into operational truth. And to do that, you need somebody sort of thinking about what are the different stages of engagement with our audiences and how do all these technical platforms and outreach platforms fit into that? And what's the data model we need behind all those things to kind of know when to send somebody the right content, when to segment them into different audience segments that receive different content and how does that all go into work? And how do I sort of train the different teams and get the other teams on board with this sort of segment and plan of attack? And part of that is creating resiliency because every organization suffers turnover and with technical systems that are complex and hard to learn and there might be a steep adoption curve. When somebody who really knows when to grab your systems leaves, that can create a big gap in your audience experience. And you need somebody who's helping to think about that proactively. How can we minimize that gap? How can we fill it in quickly? How are we gonna manage the always present turnover that is gonna be a truth forever? It's not something you can avoid. You just need to plan into it. And then the other piece of it is you need somebody who's saying, we've done this for 10 years. We should stop doing it and do this other thing. And they need to be out there exploring what I call positive disruption. How can they go out there and find things that will change the status quo in a positive way in your organization? And do that in a meaningful and change managed way where people accept it and adopt it and find it useful versus just somebody who's lighting fires. So who is this person? Spoiler alert, it's the marketing CTO. You know, really what it takes is a, pardon me, my voice is going a little bit, a commitment to address these issues directly. And you need empathy to do that. You know, if you don't really understand the stress and the anxiety of the other people you're working with, forgive me. Then you're gonna have a problem sort of getting people to come on board with you. And it doesn't matter how good the plan is if the resistance to it is high. And so there's this acronym FRMP that I like that is sort of facilitating conversations because a lot of it is just getting people to talk, make sure those conversations are factual and balanced and not sort of blame games. Someone who can receive the ideas and kind of enhance them and organize them and share them back out. Somebody who's sort of a trusted partner in that planning process. You need somebody who has a little more time to investigate and sort of understand what the real needs are. You know, often people will complain about something but you have to really dig into it to understand the nuance of what the problem is. You know, it's usually a little tiny, important intricate bit that needs to be changed. And it may not even be that hard to change but somebody needs to investigate and figure that piece of the puzzle out to really move your platform forward. And that's part of the managing process. You know, a lot of this is communication like letting people know what your plans are ahead of time, letting them see what the roadmap is, letting them influence the prioritization and the timing of those things. Just kind of making sure that that's something that everybody can see and engage with. And finally, it's really important to have somebody who can, you know, manage and massage different departmental budgets. Most of these tools are budgeted in one department but they need to be budgeted across the whole organization. And that might not be easy depending on how your organization manages budgeting and manages like how people pay for things and how tools are funded and depreciated. And if you're using capital expenditures for certain kinds of tool replacements and so you need somebody who's kind of thinking about that, talking to everybody and kind of working out all the kinks in that so that when a change is proposed the budgeting for it suddenly doesn't become a huge roadblock. You know, what are the skills that somebody like this needs? You know, and this is something we get asked a lot. We're asked to like help people hire people or to suggest people for this role. And you know, the truth of the matter is they need to be really good at managing up. You know, a lot of the sort of marketing CTO's job in any organization is to sort of say, hey, I'm gonna take away all the technical systems here all of the buzzwords. And I'm just gonna turn this into a business question where there's this challenge there are these pros and cons to different approaches. I recommend this approach but seeing the pros and cons of these different approaches to use a collective leadership team agree. And if you have that skill in your organization managing your technical platform is suddenly gonna become a thousand times easier because people will have trust and will be bought into the solutions and the choices that are made. Even if they don't understand all the technical implications of that they'll understand the business implications which is what's really important. You know, and related to that is having strong communication skills, you know managing up sort of requires you to have some empathy and understand like if people are feeling anxious or if they're feeling tense or you know, if you're feeling excited about things and kind of communicating what you want to this folks often means creating visuals for things that are abstract, you know writing textual descriptions that are maybe a little longer form than you might to another technical person but you know that will really help other people kind of see a challenge and see what you're trying to achieve. So there's strong communication skills that are really key and you know, empathy is important because when you're dealing with technology it's often a black box to people that often directly impacts their business performance they often feel really frustrated and they can't make it do what they want. You have to have a lot of empathy for that if you're gonna be successful in change management. You know, if you just say you're right and you might be right that's not gonna actually help change things as much as if you're understanding anxiety you work with people and you make them feel like they're being brought along on the path in a successful way that's gonna make them personally successful. And you know, that's part of the trust building as well that's really key to this position. You know, you can't be a nautocrat and manage a collective. You know, I think that's a, you know hopefully it's actually true but like, you know in a lot of ways the marketing CTI is somebody who builds trust by soliciting a lot of input and feedback. You know, they're asking people what they need how they need it, when they need it and they're saying, hey I brought all that together into a cohesive and useful plan but it's not necessarily my plan it's everyone's plan that I've just self-organized and facilitate. And you know, when you look at this list you might be wondering I thought the CTO, you know needed to be technical and you know, it turns out that's a help. It's really helpful to have a technical background. You know, I was a developer for 10 years before I sort of got into, you know more of the CTO style of leadership but it turns out that many of the technical skills that you might think they need are readily available outside of your organization at an hourly rate. And you know, one of the tricks of the trade is to use all of the expertise that's out there and just not be afraid of the sticker shock. You can get somebody who's a Salesforce expert spend three or four hours with you discussing options for 100 bucks an hour, $125 an hour and that may sound expensive on an hourly rate but the expertise imparted to you as a leader and the experience that you get from that is worth far more than that amount of money. And I think a lot of organizations think of it as a binary problem. We can either have a technical expert or we can't as opposed to we can have an organizational expert a management expert who can learn how to do those things or can bring in experts to help them understand the problems. You know, and I think that to do that effectively you do need some comprehensive understanding of your outreach systems. You need to know what systems you have how they're connected which vendors and experts you have internally and what they're up to but you don't necessarily have to be a deep expert or domain expert in each of those technologies. I think another piece that happens here is you have to be comfortable discovering and hiring outside help. A lot of people want to go to loan but the truth of the matter is the more experts you bring in the more outside help you bring in the smarter you're going to be the brighter broader your perspective will be and the more likely you are to make a good choice and you know, part of that is the process and governance like even if you get expert advice from somebody they may say you should just do this tomorrow but you have to kind of step back and say oh, I need to do this at the time when the organization will be receptive for it and have I done all the groundwork to make the organization receptive for it and so part of it is always balancing your technical need and expertise of the knowledge of what needs to be done with your business knowledge of what the organization can adopt and absorb and actually achieve with that change. So you might be saying, okay, I'm buying this this all sort of makes sense but we still don't have a marketing CTO and I don't think we have the budget for one so what are we going to do? And the truth is it's possible to get many of the benefits of having a dedicated marketing CTO with just some of your existing staff if you're willing to sacrifice or devote a few hours a month to this management process from your team. You know, and I think one of the challenges here is that the team has to come together and think about how they're going to govern first and the executive team of your organization needs to give them the power to govern. And I think that's one of the challenges for the CTO by committee. You know, each department using or managing our system has to participate, you know, or at least a large percentage of them do. You know, it doesn't help if only half the team that doesn't manage the outreach systems is involved. The governance and decision-making rules that you adopt have to allow for relatively quick decision-making. You know, if a decision takes six months to make that might be okay, but it's probably too long and you're going to need to work with your organization and your leadership to develop a process that lets the decisions to be made a little more quickly. I think another part of that is that the CTO by committee needs to have a lot of sunlight. And this is one of the challenges a lot of organizations, especially if they're not already built out internet that everyone uses or some other place to kind of show this, but you need a very sort of public backlog of changes, enhancements to the systems. And you need all of the participants and all the departments to be able to look at that and plan their own sort of change management processes around that and also sort of impact things to say, hey, I really need this to be a slow period. Can we not have changed during that period? That's the kind of thing that a public roadmap or public backlog of enhancements can help you find and discover. And I think the other piece of this is that CTO by committee only works if the departments agree to sort of jointly fund and license the systems involved. They'll have to have a sort of shared ownership of it and a shared stake in the game. And that also helps when a system replacement comes up. Different departments can weigh in on is the value proposition good or not for them to make that systems change? And then, as I mentioned, the committee really needs to be able to hire expert help. It's really valuable for a committee of folks who are not focused on technology day to day to have somebody come in and just kind of explain like what's happening with the system or this tool? What's the landscape out there of other systems that are coming up and what you're competing against? Should you stay or should you go on the platform you are? All those sorts of things an expert can come in and help you quickly decide without having to be there full times. So that's one way to handle this is to have the CTO by committee. The other way, and this is probably the most common way we see it, the clients we work with is the knighted non-technical CTO, somebody who is sort of blessed by the organization to come forth and manage the technology stack or the engagement platform. You know, maybe this goes without saying but it is worth mentioning that this person should be pretty charismatic and should be well liked by your executive team or at least by your department heads because they're going to have often not a lot of executive clout to make these things happen and that's why this particular approach can be challenging is that these people tend to be the most technically skilled in your organization but not necessarily the highest ranking or the people who have the most pull. And so that means that they have to utilize a lot of soft power to make things happen. You know, they have to have strong communication skills. They need to continue to develop their own technical skills and sometimes their personal interpersonal manage up skills and so they often need a development budget attached when they get knighted. They very much need outside experts and advisors because that helps build credibility with other department heads and other people in the organization if they can say, I've examined this problem myself and then I brought in an outside expert and they've either validated or helped improve the path forward. So that's really important. And then, you know, they may need a new boss like who the knighted CTO reports to is really important. And, you know, typically if they're a thin one department that's kind of, you know, debating and working with other departments and how the outreach platforms work or part of one of the stove pipes you already have in your organization that's not the right place for this person to sit. Often they need to be reporting to the COO or the executive director or somebody higher up who can give them kind of a neutrality between departments but also give them a little bit more gravitas if they need to go and get a decision made or need to like get some people in the room who are avoiding them for some reason. So this is totally a possibility but just know there's some pieces of the puzzle that need to happen to make it successful. So let's go on to the quarterly course correction. This is a lot of organizations default which is that they will say a couple of times a year maybe not even every quarter maybe every half year or a third of a year we're gonna come together and we're gonna try and figure out what we want to do. You know, the struggle with this is that there is a lot of value in this at least you're addressing these problems and moving forward and looking at them but a lot of the day-to-day nuance and a lot of the day-to-day feedback about frustrations, wants, ideas things that can be improved aren't captured in a quarterly way, right? They're captured in a day-to-day way or a weekly way. So you need to really focus if you wanna do sort of just a quarterly course correction where there's no one really managing it day-to-day on mechanisms that let people have an inbox or other ways to just kind of put their complaints in the box and whatnot and you can like look through those and have a process to review those before this meeting comes together. The quarterly course correction tends to take a lot of time it needs to be planned almost like a major event. Somebody needs to do a lot of prep work for this. They need to come together, hear everybody's complaints and needs, sift through that, organize it, try and categorize it. They need to brief each of the departmental champions and people who are coming to the workshops. Agendas need to be set. Often there need to be different discussion times figured out and it usually is pretty time consuming for everybody involved. It's like a half day or a full day of planning every quarter, every time you have one of these meetings to kind of go through all that information. So it's definitely possible, but it's not necessarily the best. And so this is kind of a little bit of an option of last resort or maybe a starting point for sort of adding on to your sophistication over time. And it's also important you have a spill facilitator. I should just mention that that these meetings tend to be a little contentious or people can easily have strong opinions in them. And it's really important to have a clear facilitator figured out beforehand. And often it's good if they're sort of a neutral party. So this takes us to our last one. So maybe my favorite one, there's a little picture of me on there, which is the fractional CTO. So this is our little sort of personal plug, but we do a lot of this for organizations where we will offload a lot of that platform management and engagement planning from your organization. And we're a neutral party, so it often helps. And we've often done stakeholder interviews when we come in, but even if it's not us, there are lots of fractional marketing CTOs out there, people who have deep technical skills and are kind of doing this on a consulting basis. And that consulting experience gives you a lot of the manage up skills and communication skills you need for this. And you can often find marketing CTOs or fractional support with people who are expert in at least one, if not multiple parts of your outreach platform. So that's another nice thing is you can kind of fit people who have that already built in expertise and breadth of expertise at other organizations to come in and help your organization. And they can range from being there an hour a week to being there a half a day or a day a week, but you can kind of figure out a way that works for you. And the nice thing about this is that often these folks are engaged on a weekly basis, if not a daily basis. And so they hear a lot more, they know a lot more about what's going on and they're able to kind of bring that plan together in a little bit smoother and easier way because they're capturing a lot of information right from the get go rather than having to kind of deep dive with people every quarter or whatnot to find that stuff out. And the truth of the matter is you might be a little to be this person. If you're in this meeting and you're thinking maybe I could be a marketing CTO, you might be right. And I think there's a couple of things you can do to get started on this. There's a ways to assess your engagement platforms current health, like where are you starting from? Where are the challenges? And sometimes that's the best way to start a conversation inside your organization is just kind of say like, hey, we're here. I think we could be here. These are the benefits that we would receive from that. And I think it would really help our bottom line or would help us engage your audience in these ways. So starting the conversation there is part of starting an assessment of what needs to happen. It's really easy to run a workshop internally if you can get people to, you know commit a little time to it where you can kind of think about the cross dependable challenges and needs things you might need like a shared taxonomy between departments that sort of stuff, you know sometimes there's just a conversation and a facilitated conversation in a workshop can uncover a lot of it and build a lot of shared momentum and that's sort of shared support for it. So once you kind of know where the challenges are having a little workshop like that is a good way to kind of get started and dive in a little bit. Then, you know, begin planning your technology roadmap. You know, once you have people bought into like what they want to change and how things can be improved sort of starting to put those on paper is really a good way. It might not be funded yet. You might not have everyone's total buying yet but you're starting to come up with a plan and people are so much better at editing a plan from a non blank piece of paper than a blank piece of paper. If you give them something and they say Oh, that's not right. They're going to adjust it and make it better and they're going to start to feel some ownership and some investment in it versus if you say, hey, give me a roadmap and it's a blank piece of paper they're going to probably come back with a blank piece of paper. So it's really valuable to kind of start putting all of those things after you have sort of workshop like that together on that roadmap and sort of figure out your path forward. Then, you know, as you do that it's not uncommon to find there's missing pieces of engagement architecture. And, you know, we have a lot of thoughts on that. One of the things I like to hear was a contact model. So how do you actually track and manage each audience member? What's the data on there? Which systems have that data? Can you put all that data in one place? Like, is there processing you need to do on that data? Like, hey, if they've come to like three events and open three emails in the last month do we put them in the likely donor bucket? And can we put that as like a processed like tag or signal on their contact record? So it's easy to find those folks without having to remember all those rules all the time. There's things like that that you can start to bring together. And, you know, if you do this over time suddenly you start to find that you're unlocking a lot of those more sophisticated and powerful outreach possibilities, things like personalization or optimization or automation. I mean, all those things require, you know the systems and the platformers to be working well together and the contact model and the data model buying these things to kind of support that kind of interaction in a way that feels positive. So yeah, I think it's like I said it's a conversation is all I need to start, you know bring these people together, you know like get people thinking about these problems but, you know, don't let them languish, you know I think a lot of organizations are saying our department's working great but, you know, it's really about your organization working well and it's about your audience experience, you know, building and being more sophisticated and more meaningful to your audiences over time. You know, you want somebody who's been consuming and being involved with the organization for two or three years to have really high affinity to be a brand supporter and to really help your organization enhance and move its mission forward. And that can only happen if you, you know really focus on them and have empathy for them and figure out how you need to build your system and your tools to support them. So yeah, thank you all for your time. Yeah, this has been great. If you want to continue the conversation or if you have any questions I'll let an artist or anybody pop up here and let me know if there's been any questions during the conversation, but my Calendly link is up here you can schedule a meeting with me anytime and we'll chat about stuff and my LinkedIn and our company LinkedIn is on here and we do have a little project thing there if you're already like, oh my gosh I have a project in mind you can go to our little project planner and pop in there and we'd love it if you just fill out our survey from this link as well and let us know what you thought and if there were any things we didn't cover that you wished we had or any insights you have that you'd like to just kind of share with the group we'd love to hear those too. So thank you. Awesome, thank you, Nate. We did have a couple of questions in regards to advocating for the position are there any suggestions that you can make for getting prepared to start those conversations to get ahead of the politics at all? Yeah, so the first thing I think is to start the conversation like not with, we need to hire this person but more so we have these organizational challenges that we need to overcome, you know and I think that the thing you wanna do and build consensus around is this idea that there are these things in the organization that are holding you back from the best value organization could have and in a lot of ways, the thing that is holding you back is creating a lack of return on investment from the effort you're already spending, right? Like most teams are already spending tons of effort conducting outreach, you know it's not that people aren't putting their backs into having great audience experiences it's that the efforts they're doing are limited because they're using, you know like simple hand tools instead of like electric driven machine tools and things like that. And, you know, if you can kind of get the challenge to be the focal point of the solution and then you can say, I think one of the solutions if not the best solution to solving these challenges that we all agree are important and would, you know, derive the organizational value from is to hire somebody to manage these pieces and here are the concrete things they're gonna do that really helps you can say like they're gonna help organize this taxonomy and implement it in all our systems they're gonna help build a data model that helps us, you know capture and manage context of the longterm they're going to work with each of the departments to help coordinate their budgets and as you list those things out the time commitments required for each of those are gonna become really apparent. And, you know, then the question is we have these things we wanna accomplish we have these concrete actions need to be done how are we gonna fund those with staff time? And now you're in a really good place I think to start talking about that hire so that's kind of the approach I would take. Great, thank you so much. Another question about recruitment strategy if you are working in an organization that has not had a position similar to this or with these technological skill sets how do you educate yourself as an organization on where to look for the best talent for the position? Yeah, I think there's a number of ways probably the simplest way is just to go to one of the big like freelancer recruiter sites look for a freelancer who seems a little more senior and uses one of the tools you use and hire them for an hour and just ask them those questions. You know, I think there's a lot of industry expertise and the people who freelance and interknowledge about these tools because they probably learned those tools working in another organization working with the group of people just even knowing how they onboarded it to those tools. So there's a lot of ways to bootstrap your way into finding the right experts by already investigating people who claim to be experts and it's not necessarily the first freelancer you find is gonna be great but it's a really quick and cheap way and I think a lot of times that especially in mission-driven organizations the idea of spending like 150 bucks to have like an hour conversation feels like really anxiety producing but the actual cost to value ratio is immense there you're saving yourself hours if not weeks of time and you're really getting quickly to people who are experts. So I'd say please try and leverage the community of experts that are out there to find the right experts but don't assume the first person you pick will be that just that they're kind of an entryway into the great community of people to like ask and become knowledgeable out who can advise you. Great suggestion, thank you. Now, when you talked about being the person who could potentially step into this role that's I guess the other side of recruitment is kind of recruiting yourself almost. So how do you prepare yourself outside of the organizational and product management side of the change for your own role? How do you prepare yourself for this position? Yeah, that's a really good question. I think the first thing is to think about how you're gonna sort of split up your week and to give yourself some different pie wedges of time that you're gonna focus on. And I think those are things that are really good to be intentional about even though they sound sort of like basic at the beginning but how much time are you setting aside to do sort of stakeholder interviews with the different departments each week? Where are you gonna document and capture these things in a way that you can share them back with people and sort of demonstrate value by just writing down what they told you. I mean, it's amazing at so many organizations how there's this kind of like cottage industry knowledge or like folk wisdom about how they do their outreach but they would love to have that stuff written down and often it just takes somebody interviewing them spending a little time writing it up maybe making a few diagrams and if you hand that back to them you're suddenly building a lot of affinity and support. And part of your week and your planning for taking on this role needs to be thinking through what's my value proposition back to the people I'm servicing? And that's usually different from somebody's previous role where they're, I need to make my boss happy, right? Like, so there's a mindset change in these that happen where you're thinking about how you can build value with the new organization and affinity with the new organization through your work in that role because all of the good grace and all of the good energy that you build as you learn about what people need can be spent and will need to be spent actually getting them to change what they're doing in the future and adopt and get on board with change management to things you want to improve. And so the big change here is probably a little bit of a value exchange mindset. That's a really key one. I think from a just like practical perspective like doing things like toastmasters and whatnot is really valuable. I think if you don't feel comfortable being a public speaker or you don't feel comfortable being a convincing speaker I think that's a really important area to focus on. And there are a lot of good skills trainings for salespeople. I hate to say that but I still hate salespeople but around the skill called active listening. And, you know, active listening is what it sounds like. You just, you're really paying attention to what people say and instead of waiting for your turn to speak you're processing and thinking about what they say and then you're reacting to it and trying to really respond to what was said to you in a really empathetic way. And having that sort of skill set is extremely valuable. And so there's a lot of sort of the soft skill side I'd say people should work on. And the other piece of it is just you need to kind of think about how you're going to organize all this data. Like it's really easy for there to be mounds of data and it for not to be useful or lots of documentation and not be useful. You really need to think through your sort of your own content strategy for how you're going to manage all of these things. Then, you know, that's really valuable. So when somebody asks you a question and you can quickly share with them the answer share with them where they can discover the answer and you can make it additive. Because at the beginning often you're going to be the person managing all of this documentation and all these systems diagrams and the red map and all that. But if you're successful over time you're going to democratize that and there can be more people involved. And that's where, you know the system not being your weird personal like hodgepodge system is really going to pay off. If you have like a thought out system that you feel comfortable and proud of sharing with other people you're going to be able to enroll them into your process more easily. And so that's the really key part of these successful here is that you're a facilitator. You're not somebody who owns these things. Great. Thank you so much. That was really great information. If anyone else has any questions to add please do so now. But otherwise I think we're going to get ready to wrap up. Oh, Liza Hogan had a question. What tool or software do you use for organizing this type of data? Yeah, it's a great question. So we have evolved many way, many times in different systems for this. You know, we started out using Confluence which is a wiki software for this and we actually still use it. So it's actually been pretty foundational for us. But over time we've moved more and more of this kind of information to Miro which is a real time kind of dashboarding system where you can kind of like drag and drop things and most people can get in there and collaborate with things and it's really useful because it kind of lets us both have static documentation and visual diagrams next to each other and it lets us collaborate really easily on it. So we're doing a lot in Miro right now to kind of manage and sort of create this and it kind of has a low barrier to entry and lets people feel like it's a little more fun. So those are all really positive things. I would say though that for us a lot of it is about where our team spends their time. You know, we try and make sure that these things are accessible and you know, not another thing that's a barrier to entry to learn. So if your organization already has a place that they are sort of like centered on and focused on for knowledge management, even if it's not ideal sometimes that's the best place. So I just kind of caveat to saying that our tool set was also based on our cultural history about how we've picked tools and worked together and collaborated remotely. Great, did anyone else have any questions before we wrap up here? Hating that kind of wiki or you know, record of that knowledge on behalf of your clients or just to have insight about them or no agency operations in the same way? Yeah, it's a great question. So we do both. We have a wiki for every single client or we have a wiki space for every single client where we document our technical approach, everything we've discovered about them. We also use another product called Teamwork which is kind of like a project portal software and it has a like much crappier but still useful wiki functionality in it and we actually put a lot of our evergreen client facing documentation in there so they can be involved in it. And then I will say for some clients we actually go into their knowledge management systems and either build or transport our stuff in there. Yes, so like one of our clients is super duper into Microsoft and so they have SharePoint and even though I don't really love SharePoint we have built documentation and SharePoint so that it is like, you know, accessible and everybody's cool with it and knows where to find it. And you know, in a lot of ways the collaboration is so much more important than the quality of the documentation. I hate to say that because documentation is very important but you know, people looking at it and consuming it is the key and feeling a part of it. So yeah, we will both manage it for ourselves and for our clients. That's another nice thing about Miro is that it's not internal for us. Like we can easily add clients to it and then they can own it and yeah. I mean, we've also used Lucidcharts. There's a lot of different systems that are valuable for this and one thing that's interesting just slightly side pandemic related technology changes is that everybody who made some form of online collaboration is now adding documentation to it, you know, like the ability to keep and manage documentation to it and like Lucidcharts example, like they just launched their like real-time board competitor to Miro just like last week or something. So I think there's a bunch of tools that are starting to get really good at this and Microsoft Teams has actually improved a ton in the last two years. So it's actually pretty competitive now too, I'd say. All right guys, do you wanna have any other questions? Let's go around. All right, I think we're good to wrap up. We will be sending out further communication with the recording of this webinar. Nate, if you have any closing remarks, feel free to take the mic. Oh, thank you guys, this has been great. I just think it's really valuable for a lot of organizations to start diving into this and taking this full by the horns. And if there's anything we can do to help you, let us know. Like I grabbed my event on my Calendly thing, little chat. So thank you, I appreciate it.