Non-Profits: Technology is The Biggest Donation You Aren’t Leveraging

Any non-profit COO or CTO will tell you that finding the technology that appropriately addresses their needs is tough to come by. The existing platforms with the non-profit in mind often cost upwards of $25,000 to engage. There are several problems with this situation. First, it is impossible to know that a CRM/donor database/360° fundraising platform will meet your needs long-term. Second, these platforms will lock you in for a year at least, and the much-needed updates will never come. Lastly, these platforms are insular systems without API or any means of connecting them to other solutions. (San Francisco, feel free to help us out here.)

I’m lucky to work in a non-profit vertical that spans from the tiny side-project to the multi-million dollar behemoth fundraising machine. In a space where we’re all working towards the same goal, it’s interesting how organizations leverage technology to carry out their mission.

Over the past six years at Stupid Cancer, we have stopped and started with so many different platforms my staff now cringes any time I tell them I’ve found something new. It’s true that I’ve probably worn out my welcome by having them help me test new things, but old habits die hard. When it was just Matthew and myself, we had to compensate for the lack of staff. It was the wild west of free trial exploration, and I learned a lot from it.

As we’ve grown over the past few years and hired staff to help us, my instinct remains to take a tech-forward approach.

I am also a big believer in putting automated systems in place where appropriate and removing the human element. There is no reason to try to do things better than computers. I see it way too often in this community of limited resources. It will only reduce your capacity for upward growth.

We recently did an internal exercise where we measured how much time each staff member spent on their respective duties. While they mostly landed as we thought they would, there were some instances where outside forces were pulling us away from getting out jobs done. In any company — especially a growing one – this is bound to happen. Ultimately, we took a look at the results and have begun to figure out how to mitigate these distractions by adding articles to our Zendesk FAQ, for example.

In this world of highly scrutinized non-profit budgets, there is so much time and money that can be saved by utilizing low-cost platforms like Zapier or IFTTT (Which doesn’t cost anything at all). I actually find most SaaS-based companies are willing to give deep discounts just based on your merit.

Google and Slack are two examples of companies that reward 501(c)(3) organizations with a lifetime subscription to their platform for free. If a platform doesn’t offer free or discounted services, offer to create compelling content for them that will be mutually beneficial.

We recently received a lovely donation from a platform we had used in the past that was in transition. The temporary separation was a mutual agreement, as they changed their core product offering. When the dust settled on their end, we jumped right in line to sign up.

As the maturation of Stupid Cancer continues from a tiny startup non-profit to million dollar organization, I remain vigilant in making sure we stay nimble and unburdened by the unnecessary.

Drinking from the Data Firehose

When I started with Stupid Cancer in late 2009, the organization had just invested in a SugarCRM database to manage relationships. I had used pharmacy management software since ’02 in my former life as a Pharmacy Tech, so I was familiar with the core functionality. SC had just hired a dev company and spent a considerable amount of money on what was then a worthwhile investment.

Being new to the organization, I didn’t want to rock the boat by accelerating development in ways I knew it could go. I also knew that at any given moment something could happen that would result in some kind of database related disaster. I didn’t have the keys to back up the database regularly. I probably didn’t think back then that I should have been.

Long story short, our self-hosted CRM wasn’t the right fit. We could have made that instance of Sugar work for us, but it was kind of doomed from the start. Before long, we landed on Mailchimp and our Sugar lead forms were replaced by Mailchimp signups. Our contacts became more valuable as subscribers and their journey with us carried on as such.

In 2011/2012, we began to see an uptick in traction across the board due to a corporate rebrand. Suddenly, our lists were growing. In March 2012, we launched an online store and began down an interesting e-commerce journey. All of a sudden, we had rich customer data. For the first time in organizational history, we had an influx of physical addresses. We had real people, spending money and willingly giving us data.

Mailchimp, along with Volusion, were our first two SaaS engagements. We were able to negotiate non-profit pricing which was in the 20–25% off range or sometimes free.

Very quickly, we faced another dilemma. Our email marketing platform and online store weren’t communicating with one another. Luckily, I caught wind of a cloud connector called Kevy. Up until this past summer, Kevy functioned solely as an integration platform. It moved large amounts of data from one cloud-hosted platform to another via API. They have since discontinued their integration service to focus on email marketing. We look forward to utilizing their service at the end of our current ESP contract.

Before we knew it, we were generating a ton of rich data every single day, from all sides. So much so, we couldn’t keep up with it. We had analytics and longitudinal information but were only in a position to glance at it and move on. With a small staff, there was no sound way to compile reports and make informed decisions, for the most part, other than from 35,000 feet up.

Last Summer, Slack was brought to market and changed everything for Stupid Cancer, and team communication everywhere.

Slack isn’t the first team communications platform that our organization has ever used. We were loyal users of Yammer, before it was acquired by Microsoft and the platform didn’t keep up with our needs. We put our best effort into Bitrix24, which only lasted until we caught wind of Slack.

Slack was new and interesting. It came with a lot of bells and whistles that we didn’t know we needed. Slack pointed me in the direction of Zapier, an integrations company. By this point, I had already experimented with IFTTT (If this, then that). Zapier connected Slack with platforms we didn’t even know it could.

Slack became the soul of Stupid Cancer overnight.

A year ago, I wrote this post about Slack. Since then, Slack has helped us refine a lot of our internal processes by making us take a tech-first approach. Throughout our work day, we track projects, finances, social media, customer service, customer feedback, event registration, and more.

After 7 years of creating data, we’re relaunching a traditional CRM on theBase platform. Using the same workflows that we have with Slack, we’ll be able to focus less on the minutiae and have a tool that serves us well.

How to Be Less Busy with Slack

The Beginning

In the early days of Stupid Cancer (formerly I'm Too Young For This! Cancer Foundation), we had two employees and a small team of "executive" volunteers. Everyone was spread out around the country, and keeping in touch was critical.

Back then, in 2010, Yammer was the gold standard of the emerging corporate social networks. The design took cues from Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. It was a great tool that ultimately became the backbone of the organization.

Yammer was eventually acquired by Microsoft, which is when the product kind of lost its way. Upgrades and tweaks became less and less, and the pricing structure also changed, for the worse. We made the decision to migrate platforms in early 2014, to Bitrix24.

Bitrix24 was fine for a time. It had the threaded posts, just like Yammer. It also had tasks, which was new and interesting. The team was underwhelmed by their mobile app, which wasn't as good as Yammer's had been. The search resumed.

Enter Slack

Slack is a communications platform, with an emphasis on chat, search, and integrations. It's hard to put my finger on exactly what I like most about Slack. Perhaps it's a 3-way tie between the custom emoji's, Slackbot responses, and custom loading messages.

I originally intended on making this blog post purely about how I use Slack (IE: Integrations), but I felt it was relevant to discuss where the team was coming from.

The initial kickback was that Slack didn't have the threaded chat view like we were all accustomed to. There was an initial flood of conversations that were disjointed and hard to navigate if you'd been away from Slack for a few hours. Keeping track of ideas was like nailing jello to a wall.

Upon further inspection, it was our Slack naivety that contributed to the mess. We suffered from what I would call "FOCC" (Fear of Creating Channels). Slack channels are essentially chatrooms that live in the left navigation of your Slack app. You can star the important ones, and they get pinned to the top of the list. DM's and private groups live under them.  You can learn more here.

Our watershed moment came when channels went from being just chatrooms, which is how our Internet brain works, to actually being channels. I will list below some of my channels and their purpose. (Keep in mind we're a non-profit that serves young adults with cancer.)

My Slack Channels

#discussion

We have broken conversation-based channels into buckets based on our programs and projects. There is also a channel to list items throughout the week that you'd like to discuss at the weekly staff meeting.

#development

This channel integrates with a Trello board. Any time a change is made on that board, it's reflected in this Slack channel. It's a great way of keeping everyone in the loop on a critical part of our operation.

#rss

I have tried several RSS-feed-based channels. They can be helpful in keeping you up-to-date on your favorite blogs and news sources. I have a channel that syndicates everything we post to our Tumblr, which is a syndication of our Facebook page via IFTTT. (Inception, anyone?)

#incoming-money

This channel is my favorite, for obvious reasons. We have a web store that uses PayPal Pro, and two incoming donation sources that send emails when donations are received. I send information from all three sources to #incoming-money via Zapier.

#outgoing-money

This channel lets the team know when bills have been paid. Using Zapier's email channel, we can capture bill pay notification emails from bill.com or Capitol One and have them post to this channel. It keeps information flowing and helps the finance and ops team in the loop.

#random

This channel syndicates all the inquiries into our Zendesk. It also shows Mailchimp subscribes, unsubscribes, and campaign activity. It should probably be called #customerservice.

#feed-instagram

Another great Zapier fueled channel is our Instagram channel. In this channel, we track images posted on IG with #stupidcancer. It's a great way to source content for our Facebook wall, and see what conversations are happening related to our brand.

#feed-twitter

Just like above, except this channel syndicates all mentions of @StupidCancer.

#feed-reddit

Reddit has an active /r/cancer community. With this RSS integration, we can see what kind of conversations are happening and source content for our FB wall.

#giphy

Slack has a great direct integration with Giphy that I've taken advantage of since we upgraded our Slack plan from free to paid. Once enabled, you can write things like "/giphy blogging" and get an image like this one on the right.

In Closing

This story has a happy ending. Slack has quickly become the pulse of the organization. It's our Death-Star-for-good, making us incredibly efficient. I'm told threaded conversations are in the pipeline, which will make my team members happy.