Nonprofit Launch Plan Podcast for Startup, Small, and Growing Nonprofits

Demystifying Tech & AI for Nonprofits with David Watters

In this episode of the Nonprofit Launch Plan Podcast for Startup, Small, and Growing Nonprofits, host Matt Stockman dives into a topic that can feel overwhelming for new and small nonprofits: technology, automation, and AI. Matt's guest is David Watters, CEO of Simple and Engaging, a company dedicated to helping nonprofits use technology smarter to improve their impact.

David shares invaluable insights for organizations just starting out or still relatively small, emphasizing that technology should always be purposeful and focused on solving clear, actual problems, rather than simply chasing the latest shiny new thing.

Episode Highlights:
Technology Mindset: David stresses the importance of approaching technology with the right mindset – focusing on progress over perfection and starting small, iterating as you go.

Identifying Automation Opportunities: Learn how to identify repetitive tasks that pull you away from your core mission, and how to map out those processes to pinpoint where technology can truly help.

Affordable & Accessible Tech: Discover how cloud-based solutions, freemium models, and open-source technology have made powerful tools more accessible and affordable than ever before, even for new nonprofits.

Navigating AI and Data Security: Understand the valid fears around AI and donor data. David provides crucial insights on how data is processed by AI platforms and what types of data (publicly available, sensitive, personal) you should consider when using AI tools. He also shares practical tips like using locally hosted AI models and anonymizing sensitive information.

Practical Automation Examples: Hear how automation can scale your impact, such as automating assessment frameworks to reach thousands of partners, and using data analysis to identify macro trends in your beneficiaries' needs.

Impact Measurement for All: David encourages even new nonprofits to start measuring their impact using accessible tools, including leveraging AI to generate straightforward impact measurement questions.

Avoiding Tech Mistakes: Learn how to avoid common pitfalls like buying technology without a clear problem to solve or investing in overlapping platforms.

Staying Current Without Overwhelm: Gain strategies for staying updated with technology trends without getting buried, by focusing on your organization's internal problems first.

Don't miss this jam-packed conversation that will empower you to use smart, budget-conscious technology solutions to achieve greater efficiency and more reach in your nonprofit!

Resources Mentioned:

David Watters:

LinkedIn: David J. Watters David Watters | LinkedIn

Website: Simple and Engaging

Email: david@simpleandengaging.com

Sites that David mentions in the podcast:
GPT4All: GPT4All – The Leading Private AI Chatbot for Local Language Models
N8N (open-source workflow automation): n8n.cloud
AlternativeTo.net (website for finding software alternatives): AlternativeTo - Crowdsourced software recommendations | AlternativeTo
Special Offer from Matt Stockman:

Get My Free Fearless Fundraising Mini Course: Matt shares his 5-step framework to take the fear out of asking for financial partnership and help you get more "yeses" early on your journey. It's an easy-to-use workbook with five short videos, absolutely free! Nonprofit Launch Plan | Consulting & Fundraising for Nonprofits
Join the 100 Million Impact Initiative: Matt shares his big vision to empower 10,000 nonprofits worldwide, each impacting at least 10,000 people, to collectively improve the lives of 100 million globally. Join this free community of impact makers!

Book A Free Call with Matt: Contact | Nonprofit Launch Plan
Email Matt: matt@nonprofitlaunchplan.com
Find Matt on LinkedIn: Matt Stockman | LinkedIn
Get My Free Fearless Fundraising Mini Course:Nonprofit Launch Plan | Consulting & Fundraising for Nonprofits

David Watters: Where I would be starting if I was an organization either just starting out or you are in that, pick your favorite ai, ask it to act as a, an evaluation specialist for nonprofits. Explain what you do and get it to come up with some straightforward, like kind of impact manage measure.

Questions, either, through a survey or ways in which you can track your impact. It's not gonna be perfect. It's not gonna be academically, verified by a university or anything like that, but you've gotta start somewhere.

Matt Stockman: Welcome to the Nonprofit Launch Plan podcast for startups, small and growing nonprofits.

This podcast is here to help you build your nonprofit from the ground up on a strong foundation. And in every episode, we give you the frameworks and the tools and all the personalized guidance that you need in order to create lasting impact. My name is Matt Stockman. I'm your host. I'm a nonprofit growth coach, and I'm thrilled that you're here at Nonprofit Launch Plan.

We believe that every nonprofit has to be operating at peak performance in six key crucial areas in order to be successful. Those six areas are leadership, fundraising, marketing. Programs and services, operations and finances. So on every episode of the podcast, we talk about a topic that is core to at least one of these six areas.

And today on the podcast, we're diving into a topic that can often feel really overwhelming for new and small nonprofits technology automation. And ai. My guest is David Waters. David is the CEO of Simple and Engaging, which is a company that is dedicated to helping nonprofits like yours use technology smarter to improve their impact.

We had a great jam packed conversation with lots of good takeaways in it. I'll get more into the nuts and bolts of today's episode in just a minute. One of the biggest struggles for any nonprofit, especially in the early days, is around fundraising. Fundraising can be awkward and uncomfortable, mainly because for most of us, we get thrown into the deep end of the fundraising pool with no floaty zone and no idea how to swim in it, which can be really scary.

That's why I've built the five step fearless fundraising framework to take the fear out of asking other people to partner with you financially and to get you some more yeses early on in the journey. The fearless fundraising framework is an easy to use workbook. It's got five short videos that go along with it and it will walk you through all five steps, and those five steps are, number one, identify the problem specifically.

Number two, position yourself as the solution. Number three, make the ask, what would you like the individual you're sitting with or writing the email to? To do? Number four is create a sense of urgency. So they act now rather than at some point in the future. And then number five is the call to action. So the five steps, problem, solution, ask urgency and action.

The videos and the workbook will walk you through all five steps and you'll actually craft your messaging. In the workbook for your nonprofit, it'll build your confidence in just knowing how to invite other people to partner with your nonprofit financially. It's absolutely free. You can get it on my website@nonprofitlaunchplan.com.

Again, nonprofit launch plan.com. Okay. As I mentioned at the top, my guest on this episode of the podcast today is David Waters. David is the CEO of a company called Simple and Engaging, which is dedicated to helping nonprofits like yours use technology smarter to improve their impact. And in this conversation, David shares a lot of invaluable insights for organizations that are just starting out or still pretty small, really emphasizing the big idea that technology should always be purposeful and focused on solving clear actual problems rather than just simply chasing the shiny, latest new thing.

David's also gonna talk a lot about mindset for approaching technology and he's gonna advocate for starting small iterating and prioritizing progress over perfection. And he's the actually gonna guide you through an exercise on identifying and mapping out some of the repetitive tasks that you or somebody on your team may be doing in order to be able to pinpoint where technology.

Can truly help. We'll also get into talking about some affordable and accessible tech for your nonprofit, even if you're just at the beginning. Stuff that's cloud-based. Also freemium models. And then we're also gonna talk about the impact of artificial intelligence and how to handle your data, your Don's data, and so much more.

There is a lot coming up in this really important episode. Ultimately, David and I are both passionate about empowering you as a nonprofit leader. To get greater efficiency and more reach through smart budget conscious technology solutions. So that's what today's episode is all about. Without further ado, let's jump into my conversation with David Waters, the CEO of simple and engaging.

Tell me about your company and in a nutshell, what you do.

David Watters: Yeah, sure. We primarily work with nonprofits. Helping them to use technology in smarter ways to improve their impact. So that could be anything from looking at workflow automation, helping them get technology to do some of the work for them, all the way through to how they collect data, how they're analyzing it, and how they're visualizing that to demonstrate their impact and improve it over time.

Matt Stockman: So for a lot of the listeners to the podcast they are either brand new in the nonprofit journey, or not even started yet. In fact, I was communicating with the listener just earlier today about the fact that they're just entertaining the idea. So we, you're talking to people who are by and large.

At the beginning of their nonprofit journey for a new nonprofit that's got a small team, either one or two people tops, where do they even begin thinking about technology and automation? What's their first step?

David Watters: Yeah, it's a great question. And, I think the answer's slightly different depending on where they are in that journey.

So let's let's focus on the folks that have started. Yeah. First a key thing. Is mindset around technology. So it's very easy to get caught up in the whirlwind of shiny things, new things, ai, cool features, buy this. Mindset's really important when it comes to this, technology is, it's useless if you don't have a clear problem to solve first.

It's not an answer in of itself. It's technology is and always will be an enabler. To help achieve an outcome. It can't do, it's not gonna, it's not the silver bullet, it's not gonna solve everyone's problem. So it's really okay to start small and iterate and really focus on progress rather than, getting everything right and getting everything perfect with technology beforehand.

So that mindset is really important. So if you've just start, if you started out and you are, you're, you are working on your service delivery, you're working on your processes. A really great place to start is think about what are the repetitive tasks that are pulling you away from the stuff that you really enjoy doing.

So this would usually be admin tasks or in, depending on the systems you use, or the types of services you're doing. It might be copying information from one place to another. Those really there's parts of everyone's job that they really don't enjoy.

That's the place to to focus on, start identifying what those sort of tasks look like. And that's a really good place to start thinking about where technology might be able to help. A really good way to do this and you don't need to overcomplicate this. Literally, just have a sheet of paper next year, over the course of a week.

Just start jotting down where you're spending your time. In the morning, I did two hours of, donor outreach or whatever I did, three and a half hours of, analyzing this data or I had two hours of moving data from one place or another, whatever that looks like. And then have a look at that at the end of the week and go, that's not, that's an important task, but it's not a great use of my time.

Yep. And that helps you identify where your problems might be. Pick one, pick a relatively straightforward one, and then really start trying to map out what that process looks like. So from start to finish, I do this. I click this button, I, I copy this here, map all of that out.

Again, don't worry about what it looks like. Scribble it on a bit of paper if you want to use, miro or something like that, an online tool to do that. You can do that too. AI can help you with that if you just, get it to ask you the questions. And we'll help map out the process for you.

And then that will help you look at, through that process you'll see, okay, I'm spending a lot of time on steps three, seven, and eight, and that's where technology might be able to help. So you are at least then going into the market of. What technology solutions are out there with a very clear idea of, I need it to be able to fix step three, seven, and eight.

I don't wanna spend so much time there that needs to be automated, that needs to be quicker, that needs to be more efficient. So it just, it really changes the dynamic around you going into the market looking for technology because you're not then. Having technology come to you and everyone's Hey, look at this cool thing.

Look at this feature here. It's very much more, no, this is where this is gonna add value. This is how, what, it needs to be able to do this. To be able to, really add value to, to, to me as an individual. A note on that as well, the technology landscape, depending on where folks are coming from, the technology landscape has changed dramatically over the past sort of 10 to 15 years.

And there's three big thing, technology's never been more cheaper. Easier to access or easy to use. And there's three big things that, that have driven that very quickly. Cloud hosting Google, AWS, all those guys. Microsoft built loads of data centers all around the world.

So hostings really cheap. It means software developers can build stuff really cheaply as well, which kind of gave birth to the freemium model. It enabled them to be able to do that. So you've now got these really. Powerful enterprise platforms that you know, can be really expensive if you've got huge volume.

But they offer, a kind of freemium plan. So if you are really clear with the problem that you've gotta solve, it might be, okay, actually I can just use this, Zapier's free plan or make dot com's free plan here and I'll stay within their free tier limit 'cause it just solves this one problem.

And you're starting to see value from that, right? The the other thing that's, changed over the past couple of years is artificial intelligence so that you know that the explosion of that on the scene has made using platforms easier because a lot of platform providers are integrating into it.

So you don't have to know. Have the background necessarily on how to use the platforms. They're a lot more intuitive. But also you've got on demand tech support now. You've got chatt, pt or Gemini or Claude or whatever, you can message them 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

You can ask them the same question a hundred times and they don't get annoyed about it. There's not that kind of fear of asking the stupid question because it's not, they're just there to answer questions. You know that's really changed the dynamic for. For approaching technology now, it's cheaper, it's quicker and it's easier to use.

The other thing as well is you've got, there, there's, you've got freemium plans, you've also got a lot of open source technology. So open source is just a fancy word for. Where people are building platforms that they give to the community? Yeah. So they'll hand over the code and you can host it yourself.

Sometimes you can host it on your own laptop or you can get some, hosting through, through a hosting provider to set that up. It requires a bit of set a bit of technical know-how to do that, but again, makes things a lot more accessible and lot and a lot cheaper. I run, so there's an open source workflow automation platform called N eight N and then the number eight, and then n.

Really great platform. They do their own. They do a hosted version that you can pay for, but they also do a community edition that you can download and host yourself. I've set that up on a AWS is free to it, so I don't pay for it. You wouldn't want necessarily wanna push massive volume through it, but it works really well.

The situation now is you don't have to invest thousands and thousands of dollars into, in, into platforms to get an outcome. If you're clear on the problem that you're trying to solve, there's actually some really. Cost effective, sometimes free platforms that you can use that are, that can really help you solve that individual problem.

And that kind of gets people over the hump of, buying a big platform. Not really knowing how to use it. Oh, I've got this cool feature, but I don't really know where it fits in with what I'm doing. It can really help bridge the gap there if you're really clear on what the problem is that you're looking to solve and the value that you need to get from technology.

Matt Stockman: There's a. I guess a certain level of fear around the big idea of artificial intelligence, especially when it comes to nonprofit data, whether it's personal data or donor data as well, and just using tools that accidentally we're exposing donor data to AI tool just in the whole desire of trying to be more cost effective or more streamlined or whatever.

Can you address that a little bit?

David Watters: Yeah, absolutely. So I think the first thing to acknowledge is that, and that fear is perfectly valid. There, there is, literally over the weekend there was a massive data breach with a, an airline that, that I've used before. They've now all of my details are out in the world.

And that's not even, that's not even AI related. It's a data security, data privacy data. Protection is really important. So it's a very responsible thing to, to do, to be considering that as a nonprofit, you are the steward of that information, right? You are, you're in control of it.

The way that I would encourage people to think about this is there's two sides to, to, to this coin that you need to consider. The first is how and where the data is processed, and the second is what data you put in. So let's pick up the first one. So when you think about how data is processed, so if you use chat GPT, if you use their free version as a, as an example, what they're gonna do is they're gonna take the conversations, they're gonna take the information, they're gonna feed that back into their language model to help try and improve it.

Anything that you put in there is gonna get fed back into it. A lot of the, the platforms have that model what has been released over the past couple of years, which is super interesting is, the idea of locally hosted open source AI platforms, so AI platforms that you files obviously.

And you can host them the smaller models you can run on your laptop. So there's a really cool app you can download called GPT for all, for the number four, and then all. And what you can do with that is you can load that onto your laptop. You can download a large language model, an open source one, and run it completely offline.

So the data never leaves your laptop. You could don't even need to be connected to the internet. I've used it on planes because I'm like, I need to do a bit of work and that kind of stuff. Yeah. The downside with those is obviously they're smaller, less powerful models, so you need to be like, that's the trade off that you're making.

They do often, there's big, there's much more powerful open source models that you can download, but you'd have to pay to host them. That can get quite expensive. AI models are quite resource intensive. So it can get quite expensive to to run, but that's an option if you absolutely want to put a concrete wall around your data and how a AI uses it.

Yeah, you've got that option there. The other side of it is the likes of Claude and Gemini and Chat GPT, they offer more expensive plans where they make the promise that they don't feed your information back into the model to do that. I'm still a little bit skeptical around that, so I think you've gotta put, a slight grain of salt with with that when they say that, but that's another option.

On that side of the coin is what do how is your data gonna be processed? The other side of the coin. Is, what data are you gonna be putting in there? You can break it into three groups. So publicly available information. So if you are feeding in, if you're a nonprofit and you are feeding in the text from your homepage and you want it to optimize it, make it better, it's all publicly available information.

The large language models already have access to that. It's out there in the world, right? So you don't need to worry about that sensitive data. So this is, this might be. You have a unique process around how you do something, your or some commercially sensitive information.

You just need to be thinking about how you're anonymizing that data. So don't include your company name, don't include names. You can still utilize language models, keep the, keep the detail a little bit higher so you as a individual company can't be identified.

So the third bucket is personal data. And that's where it starts getting a little bit a little bit fishier, a bit more complex. AI models are actually getting quite good at analyzing data. So you can feed it a spreadsheet, export data out somewhere, feed it a spreadsheet. It'll give you trends, it will tell you what to look for and, spit out some visualizations and stuff really useful.

But before you do any of that, if you've got names, email addresses, personal details, delete all of that. If you still need to have some sort of. Link to, to a record use like a, an alphanumeric code or some sort of record ID, something that means nothing to the ai Yeah, nothing if, if they did look at that record that they're looking at, they've got no idea who it is, where it's from or anything like that.

So yeah, you've got your kind of, your different buckets of information there Now. I think a large portion of this really depends on your own. Personal level of comfort. So again, with this, start small, build out what your comfort level is with stuff. And it all depends on the types of information that you're processing.

I'm doing some work with a women's organization in Australia at the moment. They deal a lot with domestic violence. Obviously the systems have lots of case notes. Some, pretty sensitive and tough information. It doesn't go anywhere near an ai.

But, you just you really compartmentalize out the data that it needs to, that, that you need it to to look at or what you want it to do with it to make sure that matches. The key though is. AI's not going anywhere. It's not a fad.

It's not a trend. This is how, organizations are gonna continue to move forward. So I think, those organizations that are launching with AI at their core, not necessarily it's used for everything, they're considering AI and how they do things. They're gonna have an advantage over those that don't.

So I think it's really important that you are considering what that looks like and start building out an AI policy. It doesn't need to be over complicated. Make a living document that you change over time as the technology changes, just to reflect that. What's your level of comfort with what goes into ai?

And that should always be driven by the outcome that you're looking to achieve. For example, if you were looking to use AI to really hyper personalize your donor outreach. You might, there's information that might not necessarily be, need to be fed into the AI to be able to drive that personalization.

Probably don't need their name. You probably don't need their their exact address. You probably don't need you could probably just get away with postcode or state or whatever that, looks like zip code, sorry for the us. So yeah, it's, it, it's being really mindful about what outcome you're trying to achieve and therefore what information do you feed into it.

That's really good for a new nonprofit leader. Can you give a couple more just kind of practical examples of things that your company has done in the early parts of the journey with them to break the ice and get them acclimated in thinking about using the tools and automation in technology in order to create better processes?

Processes for them. Yeah, absolutely. So I think they broadly fall into two caps. So one is how can you be more efficient? So how can you cut out some of the, the processing time. And then the other side is how can you do more of what what adds value to your beneficiaries or your program or your or your donors.

And expand that out to more people. On the scale part we've done a lot of work with different organizations where and typically you see this with nonprofits who work with corporates and other organizations where, they're looking to help them, IM improve their practices.

I've worked with some organizations that's around culture or diversity, equity, inclusion or. How they supporting their employees or loads of different stuff. And each of these organizations will usually have some sort of a, an assessment framework, some way in which they're, able to say, okay, based on what your organization's doing, you are here and best practice practices up here, and this is how we're gonna help you get to what that looks like.

A lot of organizations that I've worked with and have been doing that very manually, so they'll be collecting information. Surveys or interviews or whatever that looks like. Then they go away, they have a look at the information. They're like, okay, this means you're here. And then they, will provide some feedback back to the organization to, as to what that means and what they need to do next.

Great work. Really useful, but very, manual limited by what they're able to do. We've done this with a couple of organizations in Australia one in the uk, one in the us where we said, okay, how can we automate that process? So let's break that down. Data collection data gets, through the survey, we push that into a database.

We apply the logic that you are applying to analyze what that means. So they get a score here, it means this score, this, this score means this, or maybe it's a combination of scores. And then we can generate automatically. And this happens within about, 45 to 50 seconds from when the person submits the response automatically generate a report.

That tells them what that means. So it's just meant that these organizations have been able to go from, we'll maybe able to do that with 20 to 30 partners a year to 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, a thousand. Organizations. Sure. And it's really hands off. It means they can focus more on what does this mean for you, which is where the real impact comes.

Not just telling them where they're at. So that, that's been, that's been super interesting because what, initially the organizations that, the nonprofits I've worked with, that I've done this seas, they're like, great, that's awesome. We get to, expand out what we're doing and we can reach more people.

What they don't think about, which kind of comes a couple of months in, is they're collecting all of this data. So they're now getting, this big database of information about where the different corporate partners are at where their beneficiaries are at, whatever that kind of looks like.

So you can start doing an analysis on that to identify macro trends to un, to understand where. Where do we need to be going, next everyone is has this bit as their biggest problem. Let's focus our training, our

programs, our service, or whatever that looks like to try and uplift that.

And you're starting to track your impact in Yeah. In, not necessarily the most, robust way, but you're starting to get an indication of the impact that you're happening over time. Which is where, for me I geek out about this sort of stuff. Yeah. So it's where I find this stuff really interesting.

Matt Stockman: Impact measurement obviously is the important KPIs, for any nonprofit is just being able to get a trend line as to what kind of a difference are you actually making? So any tools that. Can start to illustrate that for leaders is great.

David Watters: Yeah. And there's some really cool, a again, free tools that you can use that, that, that are out there to do that.

I think that the bit that I'm seeing particularly with smaller nonprofits is, they're not evaluation experts. They're not social impact measurement experts. And that's fair. They shouldn't be, but the expectation still is from. Funders from the broader community is that they're still gonna be able to do that.

Where I would be starting if I was an organization either just starting out or you are in that, pick your favorite ai. Ask it to act as a, an evaluation specialist for nonprofits. Explain what you do and get it to come up with some straightforward kind of impact measurement questions.

Either, through a survey or ways in which you can track your impact. It's not gonna be perfect. It's not gonna be academically, verified by a university or anything like that, but you've gotta start somewhere. And the trend that I'm seeing. And this is probably more with established nonprofits, so it's a bit of a warning to those that, that are just starting off.

Because they're, they've got this idea in their head that it needs to be perfect. They need to, it needs to tick every single box. It needs to be academically verified. They don't do anything. So it's, it's in this box of I'm not gonna measure any impact because I can't do it perfectly, so I don't do anything.

And that's not a great way to go. It's all about, incremental progress. Because that's. That sort of information is what helps you communicate your impact. It's what helps you gather, more support, be it financial or otherwise for the work that you're doing.

So you've gotta, it's better to start and, then iterate on that and build on it over time rather than just. Put it to one side and, we'll pick that up one day when we can pay an expensive consultant to do it for us. Yeah.

Matt Stockman: That's that's really important for all of us to hear.

I think I have to believe, David, that the point where you encounter people from time to time and you end up with clients is after a nonprofit has maybe made some less than awesome decisions when it comes to technology, and then they come to you to go, David, help us unravel the mess we've gotten ourselves into.

Can you talk a little bit about what that looks like and how people can avoid it?

David Watters: Yeah, absolutely. So the conversations raise from range from, we've just got stuff everywhere, there's just data everywhere. We've got platforms everywhere. We are not really too sure kind of what this all means.

I'm doing some work with a, an organization in Australia there. They've got they, so they brought in a social impact consultant to, to build out their impact framework and, they've got some kind of surveys there and. To do that, but they've got all this other data and all the other systems that they work with.

And they're like, what does any of it mean? So we're doing a bit of an audit for them to help 'em understand that. The kind of drivers that I find people come to, to, to me with a conversation, it's, it falls into one or three buckets. One is, we're drowning. We've got we've grown.

We're not keeping up. We wanna use technology to help us, do, be able to do a bit more with the resources that we've got. The second is, okay, we've got some funding to do something specifically that needs to involve some technology, and we wanna understand what that looks like.

All the third parties, like I mentioned, we've just got, it's just, it's all over the place. It's filling out everywhere. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. What I typically don't get, and I think there's a bit of a missed opportunity here is the organizations that are starting out here, like, how should we be thinking about technology?

Where should we be starting? And I think it's, the a, a really important part A around that. And it goes back to my earlier point is just technology should always be purposeful. There should be a reason why you're using specific platforms. There should be a reason why, you've decided to do things in, in, in a certain way.

And that can be as straightforward as just keeping a bit of a, an inventory of the platforms that you are using, right? It's really easy ah, just, $5 a month here, I'll just use that for this. So just keeping a very simple spreadsheet of, we use we've got a subscription to, or a free, free or paid subscription to Google Workspace.

What do we use that for? What's the primary purpose of that? So the, as you are building out your tech stack you are aware of what you're already paying for and making sure there's no wave overlap. I see that all the time where organizations buy two platforms that largely do the same thing.

But it's just been sold to them slightly different, right? So it's oh no, I use this for this and this for this. That has the same functionality. It's like you're reading my email, man. Yeah. And the interesting thing is, the other thing you can do with that inventory and this takes a bit of time.

It's something consultants could do as well. But you could go through that list, particularly the ones you're paying for, and see if there's any cheaper or free alternatives. That, that can do the same job. There's always a, the one asterisk I put with that, there's always a cost to moving platform, whether it be, not necessarily financial cost, right?

But there's always a cost to moving platform, but. There, there's some really good options out there. For example, a lot of people, Adobe have, a fantastic Photoshop suite of editing tools and stuff like that. There's open source platforms you can download to your lap laptop it's called Photo Pea, I think.

Photo pea that has very similar functionality. Download it, it's free, it's all open source. And has very similar functionality. So it's things like that to think about the, how you can compare the two to try and lower your tech costs. It's particularly when, the economy's biting like it is at the moment.

Yeah. Market conditions are like, they are, tech's actually one of the areas that's slightly easier to try and find some cost savings either through. We don't need to use that platform anymore or is there an alternative that we can use? If folks do get into that sort of space, I'd check out, there's a website called alternative to.net Where you type in the existing software you're using and it will.

Come up with some paid freemium and open source alternatives where they're available. So just gives you a bit of a, an opportunity to find some alternatives if they're available. There, there's a way to approach that as you start getting. Bigger.

So that's where, as you are, you're starting out, right? Keep costs low, keep it simple. As you start getting bigger, that's where you probably need to start thinking about data strategies and how your tech stack will work together and things like that gets a little bit more complicated.

But but that's, as long as you, you are taking a modular approach to technology, it's not the one system that's gonna rule them all. It's easier to plug and play different things into each other, and platforms are much more designed. Now on much more robust to be able to work with each other.

That I hate this word. The interoperability between the two. Yeah. Is is far easier and higher than it ever has been in history.

Matt Stockman: So let me land things here. This conversation's been really enlightening. It feels to a certain degree that if we were to come back in six months or whatever and check in again, that we.

That everything is changing so quickly, it's hard to know how to keep my finger on the pulse of anything. So talk a little bit about just staying current with the tools and the trends without getting overwhelmed. Like how do you navigate that without getting buried in the weeds of it?

David Watters: And it's really tough. There's a lot of content out there. Because of the way that our social media networks are designed, it's all very click basey. Here's the must have, here's the, if you are not doing this, then you're gonna, you're not gonna exist as an organization.

All of that sort of stuff. None of that is new though. It's just there's more of it. The proliferation of that sort of news is there, nonprofit leaders, particularly those starting out. Take that load off your back a little bit. You are not expected to be a tech expert.

Know you've started what you've done because you wanted to make a difference in the world. You've got expertise in that specific era or a really strong passion towards that. It's not fair to expect you to be on top of it all. There's always gonna be a shiny new tool.

There's always gonna be a new tra, a new fad, a new trend. There's a couple of, good. Folks on LinkedIn who are posting about this sort of stuff. A small plug from, for my own feed

Matt Stockman: I was gonna say David Waters is one of them.

David Watters: Yeah. Yeah. Just, there's a lot of people doing it.

So I think it's about finding folks that, speak the same as you. Sure. And something that you can really align with. Where, what I would encourage folks to do though is, take the pressure off of under try expecting to know exactly what's going out in the world, how technology's training, changing, all of that sort of stuff.

Put the most of that effort into understanding your own organization, how it works, where you know, issues are, and let that lead your investigation into tech. Rather than the other way round. Because the moment that you start trying to bring tech in without a clear problem, it's where you're gonna be spending money on stuff where you're not you're not gonna see the value.

As, as an example, you might look at, okay, we are getting 500 inquirers a week through our website from our beneficiaries and it's answering, some of the similar questions all at the same time. What's a way that we could solve that? And, obviously the answer will lead to an artificial intelligence powered solution in one way, shape, or form.

But that's a better way to approach the market to find out what's going on because you've got a very specific problem to solve. It's not a cool, sexy approach, right? It's, getting into kind of the latest pieces. But, most of and hopefully people take this as a source of solace or criticism.

Most of the organizations that I speak to, their level of technology maturity is still quite low. The idea of automation's quite. Quite out there in advance for them. It's about making sure that you've got a clear understanding of what your organization's trying to achieve, what that specific process is, trying to achieve the problem that you're trying to solve.

And then looking to see how technology can solve that not the other way round. And that's really to, that's where I see the biggest mistakes are made is shiny core thing. Yep. Great. Let's buy that. Yep. Let's change our processes. And what usually happens is most people just keep doing it the same way they did before.

Oh yeah, our CRMs over here, but I've got like this spreadsheet over here that I still use, makes that investment. Especially given how tight money is for a lot of nonprofit folks at the moment, every cent counts, right? So it's making sure that you're getting the most out at that.

Matt Stockman: To encapsulate what you said, making sure that whatever decisions you make about technology and use of technology and software platforms and ai, et cetera, make sure that you start with what problem are we trying to solve? Rather than, what did my friend down the street, what did they just put on their website?

We need one of those. Stop thinking that way and just think about what problems do we need to solve? What things can we be more efficient at? And then, yeah, go search for tools rather than find tools and go I, nonprofits use this, so we should probably try to figure out a way to use it too.

David Watters: Yeah, spot on. Spot on. And it, a classic example that I've seen more times than I care to admit is, folks will be like, we need a chat bot on our website. So they go away, they build it, or get a company to build it and that kinda stuff. And and they don't get a lot of traffic to their website, so it doesn't get used.

Yeah. A chatbot's not gonna change the fact that your website's not getting a lot of hits. So the actual problem to solve is how do we get more people going to our website? Then how do we deal with it when it gets there? So it's, it's but it's a co again, it's a cool, sexy thing to launch, right?

New chatbot. Wow. Yeah. It's that kind of it's that kind of approach. So I do see that far too often, unfortunately, but it's and it's a lot of time, a lot of effort and in some cases a fair bit of financial investment that is poured down the drain.

Matt Stockman: Yeah. How do people get in touch with you if nonprofit leaders listening who'd like to learn more and maybe talk to you more in depth about the problems that they're trying to solve with technology? Walk us through what the next steps look like.

David Watters: Yeah. Chuck up the bat signal. I'll find you.

So yeah follow me on LinkedIn. If you want if you want to just. Follow my con, keep up to date with kind of some of the stuff that, that we're talking about. We post I, I post a lot of content on there that's very much around what's happening in the industry.

Some advice, some guidance. And then the odd tool to use that, that might be of use. If you're interested in contacting me directly. My email address is I'm sure we can put this in the podcast notes as well. David@simpleandengaging.com. I'm always happy to have a chat with any folks that are.

Trying to grapple with this sort of stuff. Much to my accountant's dismay I'm not a very pushy, hard salesperson, so always happy to have a conversation. Always happy to try and point you in the right direction if that's. Us helping you. Great. Awesome. That's a, a win-win for everyone if it's not very happy to point you in the direction of other ways that you might be able to do that.

And that's regardless of your budget. A again, it's a bit of a common myth that technology's very expensive, that, months to deploy, that kind of stuff. Regardless of your budget, there's always something that can be done. As an example, we. We had a very small nonprofit, I think it was two part-time people, and then a handful of volunteers.

They wanted they actually came to me asking if I knew any good grant writers. And I do I said, you know what sort of your budget? And they're like, I don't really have one. And I said, what's the problem you're trying to solve? Do you have. Is it an issue with the quality or, is it an issue with, just getting them done, is what are you trying to say?

Do you wanna save your time? And they're like it's quality. We are happy to put the time in. We're just, we need to improve the quality. So I ran a really small workshop with them, really close, really low cost, couple hundred dollars. How can you use AI to, to help you with that?

And just upskill their team on using some of the free AI tools, with that. Particular use case in mind. So happy to do stuff like that all the way up to, some of our biggest projects have been, tens of thousands of dollars. So it's, it really depends on the scope.

There's always something that can be done. It's never the case that that, even if you don't have much or any budget, that there's nothing you can do in the technology landscape that can help.

Matt Stockman: What a great conversation with David Waters from simple and engaging with what I believe is gonna be a lot of great insight that you can actually start to implement today in your nonprofit to make the whole idea of technology and processes and systems and AI less scary. All the links to the things that we talked about are in this episode, show notes.

And again, if you'd like to get in touch with David. You can find him on LinkedIn. Just search David J. Waters, WATT, two Ts ERS, or check out his website simple and engaging.com, and his contact information is in the show notes too. Now before we wrap up the episode, the Vision for Nonprofit Launch Plan, this podcast, my coaching business, is to empower 10,000 nonprofits worldwide.

That each commit to impacting at least 10,000 people so that together we improve the lives of 100 million people globally. Even saying that is a mouthful. I'm calling this the hundred Million Impact Initiative. If you've heard me talk about vision statements before, this is a big vision statement.

It's aspirational and inspiring. Hopefully when you hear it, you say, yeah, I wanna be a part of that. It's future oriented. It's not gonna happen anytime soon. It may go on beyond my lifetime, even. It's clear and concise. It's just one sentence, and a good vision statement for you as a leader should scare you a little bit.

This one scares the daylights outta me. So my question to you is, do you want to join? Do you want your nonprofit to be a part of the a hundred million impact initiative? No doubt you're listening to this podcast. Because you've got a dream for a nonprofit or you're part of a nonprofit that is growing or you're hoping it will grow, and you're just trying to get some practical insight along the way.

And what is driving you is a desire to see people's lives changed, and my dream and desire is to come alongside you and help you with tools and insights and expertise that will help you reach at least 10,000 people with the impact that your nonprofit is meant to make. So my question is, if that's your dream for your nonprofit, will you join with me in the a hundred million Impact Initiative?

I just want to be able to count your nonprofit. As part of the community that we're building together, the community of impact makers. And world changers. So if you are in, just drop me an email that says I'm in, and you'll instantly be a part of the community of nonprofits that we're growing. It's free, just like the podcast is free.

If you get value from the podcast that I would just love for you to join the a hundred million Impact Initiative. It's not a business thing. It's just about us uniting together to start tracking the impact on the world that we're making together. And to help each other do it more effectively. So that's it for this episode of the Nonprofit Launch Plan podcast for startups, small and growing nonprofits.

Thank you so much for listening. Don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss out on the next episode. And if in some way or another you found this episode to be helpful, please share it with another nonprofit leader who you think might benefit. Until next time, keep making a difference and thanks for listening.