Making Your Nonprofit's Data Work for You with Isaac Shalev

Introduction 0:03
Welcome to the nonprofit Hero Factory, a weekly live video broadcast and podcast, where we’ll be helping nonprofit leaders and innovators create more Heroes for their cause. And a better world for all of us.

Boris Kievsky 0:20
Hi, everybody. Good morning. Welcome to Episode Six of the nonprofit Hero Factory. We’re talking today about making your nonprofits data work for you with our guests, my friend, Isaac Shalev. Before I get into that, though, the goal of the show is to empower nonprofit leaders with ideas, strategies and tools to activate More Heroes for their cause and create a better world for all of us. So today, I just need to acknowledge and say a special word of thanks to all the nonprofit organizations and individuals working tirelessly in the face of tremendous obstacles and entrenched in justice to make this country in this world a safer and more equitable one for all of us.

Boris Kievsky 1:01
If I can personally be of any help to your nonprofit, your cause and the work you’re doing, please reach out to me and let me know. So with that, let’s get to the subject of this episode and how you can create more heroes, with Isaac, who is going to talk to us about how to maximize your nonprofits data to activate More Heroes for your cause and increase your impact. Were excited to bring him on to the show. My friend, data therapist Isaac Shalev, who is the president of Sage 70, Inc., is a nonprofit strategist and CRM expert who helps make data work for nonprofits by focusing on people policies and systems in that order. So good morning, Isaac, and welcome to the show.

Isaac Shalev 1:41
Good morning Boris. Thanks for having me this morning. Great to be here.

Boris Kievsky 1:44
Always happy to collaborate with you in any way. As we get started, can you tell us a little bit about your story and tell us about your nonprofit superpower?

Isaac Shalev 1:54
Yes, thank you. I started in nonprofit really at the very start of my career. I’ve been working kind of at the intersection of technology and nonprofits for the last 20 years or so. And I was lucky enough to have been raised in a computer savvy house and my dad was a database guy. And so I absorbed a lot of these things in the same way that you know, Millennials are really good with technologies like the phone and social media that some of us older folks are struggling to catch up with. I kind of was born into databases. So I use that superpower. And about 10 years ago, I founded Sage, 70, Inc., which is a boutique consultancy devoted, as you said to making data work for nonprofits. And so my superpower is X ray vision. I can see right through your data I can see right through your policies and I can get to the source of your trouble. I know what kinds of problems are blocking you are the obstacles for non-profits to use data more effectively, and to tell stories that activate people using data.

Boris Kievsky 3:06
That’s pretty awesome. As soon as you say that I have a visual of it the original I think Superman movie where he x rays with his vision of the kid’s leg and sees exactly where it’s broken so he says, it’s okay, Billy, you’re going to be fine. So, how quick are you with nonprofit data?

Isaac Shalev 3:23
Well, look, I’m not faster than a speeding bullets. But I can leap tall data silos in a single bound.

Boris Kievsky 3:30
Well, we could go with superhero puns all day. I love it. So tell me then in terms of your expertise and nonprofit data, what are you seeing is going on in the world today in the nonprofit sector,

Isaac Shalev 3:46
So the nonprofit sector is I think, starting to shake itself from the shock that we initially experienced with COVID-19 there’s still a lot shocking that’s going on in the world. And, you know, we were at a protest last night and over the weekend, and so there’s still a lot happening in the world. But nonprofits are starting to come around to taking control of their destiny. And to bouncing back from a really, really stunning kind of right cross that we all took. What I’m seeing is that there’s quite a lot of focus right now from nonprofits about how to be more scalable in the work that they do. And I want to distinguish this from efficiency. People are not talking about how do we do more with less, and I’m so happy about that. We’re not coming from that, that culture of scarcity. What people are really saying is we have all these incredible tools that we’ve been under using, how do we use them? What barriers lying in the way just as a small example, a client of mine was, they called me up they had a chat panel that they had implemented for their memberships and sort of a private place to chat. And this is all, you know, funders who wanted to chat with one another collaborative funding opportunities. And they called me and they said, Hey, you know, it seems to have gone down, can you help us put it back up? And and then they said, but before you do that, can you tell us why nobody’s really using it? And that was a magical question. Right? Because it wasn’t about what tools they had. It was about why wasn’t it being used in the why had nothing to do with the technology? It had everything to do with people and with community building? And is there a use case, right? Can we actually use this? So we looked at the data in the data set, no, nobody’s using it and we rethought. So that’s an example of how nonprofits are not coming from a position of scarcity but really thinking about effectiveness.

Boris Kievsky 5:49
I love that. You’re trying to get away from the focus on scarcity and doing more with less although at the same time using technology well, doesn’t in fact help them do more with less, it doesn’t take as much in terms of finance, financial resources, and hopefully even manpower once it’s set up or human power, once it’s set up and running, to be able to reach more people more effectively, right, more directly more focused and specialized in the ways that you’re reaching to them. And to your point that you were just saying now in the media that they want to use it in ways that they want to use that media, right. So it’s not a one size fits all. But we can actually customize the experience for our stakeholders.

Isaac Shalev 6:35
I think that I want to encourage nonprofits to think about how to do more with more. And what I mean by that is, there are so many opportunities to actually do better than we’re already doing. And the costs for that aren’t necessarily greater. They’re different though. So a lot of organizations have been thinking about their gift acknowledgement process, and some of that is a real struggle of who goes into the office to pick up checks, open them, they’re all paper Do we need to disinfect, right? There’s this whole health concern and an access problem. By the way, we normally do this with two people, because you’re not supposed to open mail with only one person, somebody’s got a login, you know, all of those processes are being challenged. And so a lot of folks are suddenly saying, hang on, why don’t we shift to email acknowledgement for gifts under some number, right. And this is something that we could have done 10 years ago, or even 20 years ago. It’s true that even in the year 2000, we use email. And we could have done this. And by the way, we could have done more with more in the sense that emails can carry multimedia, they can carry links and calls to action that can be measured more effectively. They’re in some ways, much better for building grassroots relationships than a paper envelope is. So we can do more with more and the more here is thinking through, why is email a great tool and taking advantage of what it has to offer instead of saying, oh, let’s attach our acknowledgement as a PDF to the email, right? We’ve all seen nonprofits make that kind of mistake, right? Here’s the new technology and you’re like, I love this car, I’m going to carry it around on my bike.

Boris Kievsky 8:24
Or drawn by a horse. Right? That actually reminds me there’s a there’s a Facebook group that you and I are both a part of where somebody recently asked, What is the best magazine like tool to publish their annual report online that they’re finally moving from print to digital, but they’re looking and there are tools like issue I know. I think that’s how you pronounce it is su u where it basically gives you a magazine layout online. And I was very happy that some people chimed in and said yeah, there are those tools but why not make it a true online experience? You know, build it out in an interactive format that is designed for the web rather than something to retrofit, you know, and get your printed version up online.

Isaac Shalev 9:11
Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. I do think that you need to consider your audience and how they want to consume your content and why there was a strategy for a while fundraising Gala’s to produce what are called journal books. So these are essentially ads that donors can purchase to send a congratulatory note to essentially express their support in a visible way. And you write a yearbook of sorts, and there wasn’t there were quite a few attempts to digitize this in some fashion. And it didn’t work. Because the only time that you look at that journal book, is when you’re at the gala. And when you’re at the gala, you don’t want to pull out an iPad from your You know, your suit pocket or your non existent dress pockets? Because oh my goodness, why are we not making pockets on dresses. But you’re going to pull that out now and write and start connecting to service to download a thing to flip there? No, you’re going to take a piece of paper and look through it. Papers, also a technology, you need to deploy it where it makes sense. On the other hand, if you’re going to project messages of thanks, if you’re going to do a video tribute, you know, there are there are great opportunities. So we need to think about doing more with more, because there’s so much that these tools can offer us that we can do more with.

Boris Kievsky 10:38
Right on. Absolutely. So what are what are nonprofits doing right right now? What are what are what are you advising some of your clients to be doing at this time? Well, let me take it from kind of a data and CRM angle. I think that’s even though I love talking about some of this other stuff. That’s that’s really the core of my expertise. And what we’re seeing is a couple of things. First off, there is a an acceleration on access projects. And what I mean by that is, a lot of folks have a CRM database, maybe they have some reporting tools connected to it, that were built to serve a an audience of employees who are working on site. And so there’s just a tremendous acceleration of remote access. And it’s a great opportunity because once you’re starting to rethink how you’re serving that data, you’re also starting to rethink what that data is, and in what format it should be served. So reporting projects, Business Intelligence projects, we’re seeing them become prioritized. We’re also seeing that organizations that realize that they’re kind of behind the curve with databases and that they have allowed you know, too many non web based or non web powered database technologies to proliferate they’re suddenly starting to see some of the challenges they and are looking to sort that out. So those those are at the system level what we’re seeing, but we’re also seeing a really powerful change and how people are communicating. You know, if you’d have asked me, you know, two years ago, what would happen to communications, if something like COVID hit, I would have said, Oh, my goodness, this is going to be great. We’re finally going to kill meetings, right? We’re finally going to get out of this. We’re going to realize we don’t need them. We’re going to, you know, all work in Trello and Basecamp. And whatever it is Slack, just the opposite. We’re seeing more meetings. They’re shorter, for sure. They’re all video. And I think that that’s actually the real magic here. We’ve finally gotten over the video adoption hump, to the point where your default meeting is now a face to face video meeting instead of a phone call. We finally realize that the phone is just this really bad app on our phone?

Boris Kievsky 13:06
Totally fair, totally fair. I do think at the moment there are I personally, I think we’re overusing zoom videos. And I think it’s a sort of knee jerk response to, oh, I can’t walk into someone’s office now. So I’m gonna, you know, pull them up instead of actually using some other technologies like Microsoft Teams or slack or something like that to keep smaller threads of communication going consistently. Because I, I think there are too many meetings going on in general, in every kind of organization right now. A lot of it is also based on the fact that people are struggling to figure out what to do and they want to collaborate and the most collaborative form usually feels like a all hands on deck meeting or a one on one meeting with with video conferencing, but I’m hoping that it’s going to tail off a little bit and we’re going to find other more effective ways to communicate, in addition to video,

Isaac Shalev 14:06
It’s exactly right. We need to learn how to use the tools better. And we are learning we’re learning how to share our screens more effectively, we’re learning, you know, we’re learning that if you talk and you’re muted, you’re not heard, right. And so, we’re getting better at this. And we’re gonna, we’re gonna pick up on on that more and more, what I, what I think we’re also learning is that it’s not just about showing up to the meeting, the real question is, how do we communicate? How does everyone look at the same data and see it the same way or at least have the opportunity to reflect on and understand it and you know, and kind of get everyone on the same page about it? What is what was never especially effective was sitting in a room with somebody trying to explain the data. You need analysis, you need to be able to show things visually so that people who understand things visually can see them, you need to then be able to talk to the data and tell a story from it so that people who understand things, you know, through their ears will understand the exciting opportunity right now is to recognize that with video as our primary means that we have so much more bandwidth to fill our communication channel with, right that we have so much more opportunity to express our data in a meaningful way. That’s where we’re seeing a huge uptick is folks sitting, you know, we’ve always talked about metrics and so on. But we really have a need now to name a couple of KPIs of key performance indicators, and managed to that we really have a need to understand processes that we didn’t understand before. And we have also suddenly more data because we’re encouraging our participants to engage with us through systems through the internet because they can’t do it in person. And all of those interactions are easy to count and they’re easy measure. So folks are saying, what can we measure today that we couldn’t measure before? And what should we measure? What counts?

Boris Kievsky 16:09
So then how are they presenting this data in the new visual formats in video? Are you talking about, you know, charts that get converted into animation? Are you talking about monitoring user flows and diagramming that, what is it that people are doing or should be doing?

Isaac Shalev 16:28
Well, I’ll say this, the first thing that people should be doing is connecting their logic model to their metrics. In other words, what are you trying to do? Why do you think what you’re doing is going to accomplish that goal? And what are you going to count to make sure, right, so if you don’t have that, right, if you haven’t done that, essentially strategic planning work, where you lay out your goals, you define your activities, and then you identify indicators. You’ve got to start there. And that’s, you know, technology can help and support you but nothing can replace human beings thinking deeply and caring deeply, and then trying to act. So you’ve got to be doing that. If you’re doing that, you need to be really, really specific about those indicators. What are you measuring and take the leap of faith. One of the greatest challenges that we have in this work is that it’s hard to measure directly the things that we’re trying to achieve. Even something straightforward, right? Let’s say you are running a soup kitchen. So you think that’s fairly straightforward. There’s a need people are hungry, you’re going to cook food and serve it to them. And that’s how you’re going to meet at least this immediate need. And then I asked you, Boris, what should you count to know if you’re succeeding?

Boris Kievsky 17:47
Number of people served the number of meals served, the number of people who still haven’t been served who still need your services, whether they know it or not, I don’t know. There’s a lot of different factors.

Isaac Shalev 18:00
There’s a lot of different factors. And so really what we have done not so well is defined what success is for our operation. So you might say, and this is sort of a process oriented approach is you might say, our operation is intended to serve as many people as possible. And so then you’re measuring things like cost per meal, right? Because you want to make sure that you’re serving as many people as possible. And you’re measuring things like how many people are you able to serve? And how many meals are you able to serve? But you have to take the leap of faith that says that if those metrics look right, you’re also solving this larger problem. And that’s not always true. But you have to at some point, take the leap and say, what we’ve chosen to measure we have to believe is actually helping us achieve our goals. Because day to day, that’s what you have to be focused on. Your strategic process should take a step back from that on an annual or two year or three year basis and say, did we choose the right actions? Have we impacted the way that we thought? don’t measure impact quarterly? It’s a meaningless timespan over which to shift, major challenges that nonprofits are engaged with. But do you measure your efficiency quarterly? Right? Do you measure your operational quality at a much closer interval?

Boris Kievsky 19:25
But I also think that it’s not just believing that the goal that you’ve set for yourself are the right ones, I think periodically, you should evaluate and reassess them because Sure, maybe you’re serving twice as many people this year as last year. But are they still the people that are most in need? Are you finding that you’re serving the right audience, right, because maybe you’ve expanded too far or maybe people are taking advantage of the system? Or maybe there are other programs that are in place that might help some of those people more effectively, whether they’re within your organization or someone else’s?

Isaac Shalev 19:58
Yeah, one of the things we struggle with is measuring our success. So I’ll give you an example. Just the other day I was talking with a director of technology, who was trying to understand whether the trainings that they were delivering to their staff were effective. And, you know, initially they were thinking about a survey and I said, Look, you know, staff as of under 50 people a survey is just not a meaningful method to learn very much like you might learn some very extreme trends, but it’s just not reliable to few people. But let’s try and predict some other outcomes or some other things that might happen if our training is successful. So for example, one thing that you know, tech folks like to do is measure how many tickets come in on support requests. Okay, so if you are going to train people to use some new process, what do you think will happen to support requests following the training

Boris Kievsky 20:58
There going to go up at first

Isaac Shalev 21:00
Right. And that’s the key point, they’re going to go up at first. In other words, you’re you can you can, you can picture this in your head, right? The the director of IT walks into the senior staff meeting and says, I have such great news. We did this training, we taught everyone how to use our CRM, and we have just experienced a 70% drop in support tickets. Isn’t that great? Everyone’s learned how to use it. Right? And, you know, what’s really happening is that everyone is now terrified, because they’re supposed to know. And so they’re not asking support, they’re asking each other, if you’re lucky, or more likely, they found like the three people who really know how to use the system, and they’ve shifted all the work on to them and those folks don’t need as much support. They know how to use the system. Right? So we need to recognize and anticipate what is the shape of our indicator going to be in the beginning. More support tickets over time, less and that’s really tricky. That’s a hard thing to do. And organizations do struggle with it. And that’s why a lot of them throw their hands up in frustration and say, I’m not getting real value out of measuring. So why am I wasting all my time here? Let’s go back to relying on the instincts and the professional acumen of our staff. And you know, the measurements, we can always find a statistic to put in the annual report. I really want to encourage organizations to recognize that that approach guarantees that you’re not going to make progress. It guarantees because you’re always going to find a reason why what is expedient, or what is easy, is also good. That’s our nature as humans, right? If we don’t hold ourselves accountable, we don’t do the stuff that we do, and we do hold ourselves accountable.

Boris Kievsky 22:54
Yeah, and this happens in all levels of society, not even to talk about politics. But you know, there’s a type of thinking, which is magical executive thinking that I know best that I know this market. I know this audience, I know this process, right? And I can predict what they’re going to need. I know how to respond, rather than actually testing, generating data oftentimes, but at least looking at the data that you already have, and validating in terms of a systemized process, these assumptions, the approaches to them. A lot of organizations I feel are tied to the way that they’ve always done it, because it’s worked. And so there’s that fear of why break something that that’s working, why fix something that that’s not broken? Right? But they don’t know what the possibilities actually are, what the potential possibly is, and if they go back to their mission instead of the way that they enact a particular program. They might see that if they test the data that the programs generated if they generate more data, they might see that it’s not as efficient and as maximal as it could be.

Isaac Shalev 24:07
Yeah, what I find is that the journey into exploring your data is a strategic journey. In other words, a lot of times we think about it in terms of operational efficiency, because there’s so much data around operations. And so it’s easier to sort of understand it there. But for most organizations, that’s not really where the the obstacle is to becoming more data driven. And it’s not where most of the rewards lie. I mean, there are certainly some rewards there. But it’s not really where the the rewards lie. When I talk to folks about why data is important. I say data is a hippo repellent. Hippo is the highest paid person’s opinion, right? That’s how we often make decisions. Whoever’s got the authority, whoever’s got the money, whoever’s got the biggest mouth sometimes, right? That drives too much of our decision making. Data gives you is the ability to overcome some of those entrenched, folks who are driving the bus because that’s how they like to do it. It gives you the opportunity to reframe the work that you’re doing. And that is incredibly valuable. I don’t know. I mean, look there, there are enterprise organizations that invest in greater data capabilities and save 4% of their data processing costs. And that represents millions of dollars. And that’s fantastic. And they should keep doing that. But for most nonprofits, that’s not why you want to look into data. Right? That’s not a sufficient reason. What you want is to look at your data, because you want to know that you are doing the mission work that you’re committed to, not just in the best possible way from an efficiency perspective, but that you’re pointed in the right direction, that the kinds of activities that you’re engaged in, help solve the problems. We live in a world of unintended consequences. There’s so many times where with good intentions, you launch something, and you end up stoking the opposite behavior, bad behavior. If you’re not looking at your data, you miss it. And then you entrench it. And then it’s really hard to get out of it.

Boris Kievsky 26:21
I’d love to keep digging into some specific, some more specific ways that people should be looking at it and maximizing their use of data. We’re gonna run out of time soon, though. So I want to jump to some resources and recommendations where people get started, what should they look at? tools, books, whatever it might be, that’ll help them go in the right direction.

Isaac Shalev 26:44
I want to give you two different resources. One is about your data. And one is about everyone else’s data. Because really, that’s how you establish a context. So there’s a tool called the fundraising report card fundraisingreportcard.com. The link is in the notes, and this is a 100% free tool it connects with , easily processes data from databases like the razor’s edge, which I’m sure many of the viewers are familiar with and probably using. And it generates a series of KPIs of essentially metrics that you would want to be looking at. And it does it in a visual way. So you can generate charts and graphs really, really easily. Just walk yourself through it, pull, you know, pull your date range, pull your accounts, you know, whatever it is that you want to count, and just create these really easy to use and appealing charts and graphs. They’re specially fantastic for talking with senior leadership and lay leadership about your fundraising operation. And they’ll do things like calculate the lifetime value of your donors based on the data that you’ve got, if you know the lifetime value of a donor. Now you’ve got a number that you can go look at and say, Well, what are my acquisition costs for a donor? And are they in alignment with this lifetime value. So it’s really giving you some terrific top line insights for essentially 15 minutes of work, you go, you sign up, you export, you know, a spreadsheet, you upload it. And suddenly you’ve got these great charts, you can do it for years and years of data and start comparing yourself year over year over year. It’s a great tool for giving you the ability to explore and what’s especially nice about it is you can create dashboards for different people in it. So you can actually create, say, a series of board dashboards. So for your reporting to your board of directors, they can be looking at a specific set, and they can each do it from their own browser on their own time whenever they want. So there’s transparency benefits as well. So that’s a tool I recommend to anyone who doesn’t already have a business intelligence tool isn’t already in a fantastic engine for generating reports. This is a great place. You’re not going to Be able to use it for like, everything this is for high level stuff. So, you know, this is not where you’re going to query give me you know, all donors who donated last year but not the year before that at over $500 but less than 1000. Like that’s not it’s not going to give you that kind of querying capability. But as a as a high level tool, it’s a great place to start the conversation about how to use data effectively.

Boris Kievsky 29:21
Sounds awesome. What’s the other one?

Isaac Shalev 29:22
The other one is m&r benchmarks. So Mrbenchmarks.com it is not mister benchmarks, although I kinda wish it was. But m&r benchmarks has been doing this for a long time, like maybe a decade if not more. They have been benchmarking statistics across nonprofits in different sectors. So if you’ve ever had that conversation where you say, Well, our open rate was 22%. Is that good? What should it be? You need benchmarks. benchmarks are the collected statistics across many similar organizations that tell you oh were Arts and Cultural Organization turns out 16 to 18% should be our open rates. So we’re 22, we must be doing something, right. That’s the power of benchmarks. They create context that allows you to take data and turn it into insight.

Boris Kievsky 30:14
I dove into that website, maybe a little too hard. I got lost in the awesome insights that they have there, including they actually showed some great trends. So it was really interesting to me to see how, for example, mobiles are definitely on the rise. Finally, in the US, it’s been, you know, huge around the world, but I’m on the rise here in the US. And even though some mobile response rates have dropped, overall, mobile usage is up and overall mobile responses is up. That’s just one of the many things that I was fascinated by. And I’m actually going to bring on someone else that I think, you know, Mike sabet, in a couple of weeks to talk about mobile specifically. And I had to send him a screenshot of what they were talking about there. It was really eye opening and in hardening in a lot of ways To see the things that they’re talking about that are trending that are moving forward, and also the things that aren’t working as well, so that nonprofits could spend less of their time and energy focusing on those things, and more into the right directions that’ll help them grow.

Isaac Shalev 31:15
Yeah, it’s really interesting to see also, the impacts of COVID on mobile use have not been as dramatic, I had anticipated that they would decline, because people are home and they’re not out and about as much and so forth. But it seems that that’s not the case. And I speculate it’s because with everyone sharing internet connections with their families, and so forth, the phone suddenly becomes this really reliable internet device, whereas the computer you know, it all depends on how many people are on zoom right now. But, but I think it also just reflects that we’ve incorporated the phone into our lives in a really sort of intrinsic way. And nonprofits have been behind the curve on this. So, you know, this is this is sort of a perpetual call, but If your site is not yet responsive, if your donation cart doesn’t work effectively on mobile, if your emails don’t read well, on mobile, start there, don’t worry about data. We have some data for you. It’s that you should fix these things.

Boris Kievsky 32:15
Absolutely. Yeah. And the phone is becoming an appendage. Right? We In fact, the reason I think behind some greater usage at the moment is because we no longer have to sit at our desks in front of a computer for X amount of hours a day continuously, we can get up and walk around the house and get a snack. We’re constantly checking our phones on our phones, something pops up, we were going to click it. So I think, especially with younger folks, the usage of phones is only going to go up and up, no matter what the pandemic or other circumstances are, Isaac we’ve run over time, because as always, you’ve got tons of value to share. So I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for coming on the show today. Thank you everyone out there in nonprofit land for watching. And listening to the nonprofit Hero Factory. I’m going to give my little call to action here, which is go to the website and check out the show notes. You can just go to NonProfitHeroFactorycom and see all episodes there or slash EP six. It’s going to be on the timecard in a second here at to see the particular notes from this show. But please, please, please follow us on YouTube, Facebook on your favorite podcast platforms. We’re on all the major ones now. And subscribe, download, listen, and please if you have any thoughts, we would love a review positive negative share your thoughts leave a rating and we could then reach more people help more nonprofits do more good. Thank you, everybody.