Streamline Your Sales Operations with Digital Transformation in Sales for Nonprofit

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hi everyone thank you so much for joining us for our webinar today what is digital transformation and how can nonprofits benefit before we get started I just want to go over a few housekeeping items so all callers will be muted if you have questions feel free to use the chat box that you see on the left-hand side of your screen if you have to drop off early or if you want to watch the webinar again will be hosting the webinar on our website at techsoup.org slash community slash events - webinars we'll also be sending an email with the presentation the recording and any relevant links if you're on social media feel free to tweet at us at techsoup using hashtag tswebinars but like I said earlier we'll be using the chat box on the left-hand side of your screen so just a little bit about TechSoup before we get started we are located in 236 countries and territories we serve over 1.1 million nonprofits offering donated or discounted technology we partner with several companies like Adobe Intuit Microsoft and several others that you see here to make our mission possible today we have a guest from VMware so if you are interested in the VMware donation program feel free to click on the link that my colleague Steven is going to be sending out in the chat box and I am going to go ahead and make introductions so my name is Seema Tucker and I am the senior manager of content at TechSoup we have Stephen Davidson who is the marketing associate at TechSoup and today we have Sean Harris who is the principal business strategist at VMware and I'm going to go ahead and let him introduce himself so without further ado you can take over thank you very much Seema so what is a business solution strategist well I spend my my day job I've been with VMware now for seven and a half years working with our larger commercial customers our enterprise customers trying to help them map their corporate objectives their business strategy through to their busy initiatives and therefore build an IT strategy to support their digital business transformation and digital innovation so I can hear many people asking on earth has that got to do with nonprofits and well we have a program at VMware called take 3 you can read the full definition of the program but it gives us an opportunity to take a 3-month rotation into another part of the business and I did that in 2019 and spent my time working with VMware Foundation to try and answer the question what does digital transformation mean in the context of nonprofits and how can we emulate technologies better help to serve digital transformation and in nonprofits and as part of that I took my experience from the non the for-profit sector and the organizations that I'd work with some of the tools and techniques that I use and brought that into the nonprofit sector and discovered that actually quite a surprising amount of it was reusable but that the language was was was really quite different and that's something of what I wanted to talk about really today but before I start just satisfy my curiosity I'm interested to know where about in the world the audience is from so if you could just take a minute yeah you so that doesn't surprise me give them the time zone but I'm interested to see there are a couple of people from Middle East and Africa and Europe who like me have given up their evenings to join this so I thank you for that thank you very much for that and I thank you for your time and attention so when we talk about transformation and we talk about technology and transformation there are three kind of categories of transformation out there which are all relating all you'd make use of digital technology but in of themselves and not actually truly digital transformation however they are all equally useful in the context of what we're going to talk about there is IT modernization there's using technology with an organization to improve its operational efficiency or operational transformation and then there's true business transformation a component of which can be enabled by by digital technology new and emerging technologies and that's really changing that that business transformation is changing the way you engage with your the consumers of what it is you do so in in a case of a non-profit it would be donors and beneficiaries so I just like to plant before we go into a bit more detail on these three categories I've peppered this with use cases taken from the sector but I'd like to throw out there for you to think about as we go through the next few slides this particular transformation and think about which which one of those categories do you think it fits in this is make-a-wish Foundation in the u.s. who a number of years ago were very much driven by their that their own structure of individual chapters basically covering states or regions in the u.s. they had individual icy solutions for each of those chapters there was no ability to share capacity no ability to manage peaks and troughs and frankly multiple attack services with limited security skills and a lot of underutilized infrastructure but it was particularly hit home when they were shown on CBS one of their the children that they helped and there was there were the one particular chapter was hit heavily with a bunch of donations and their infrastructure collapsed and so they decided they needed to go through this transition this transformation to go for a centrally managed single IT solution they were going to make use of the cloud in form of a hybrid cloud to better manage capacity on demand and seasonal variations they went to a shared service model which enabled them to have enhanced security and far better utilization of their infrastructure and the fact that they were able to drive efficient more efficient IT operations meant that there was more money to grant wishes for more beneficiaries faster but I wanted to think as I go through the next few slides which one of those three categories that I highlighted you think this one would fit on them so let's look first at the IT transformation or IT modernization and what does this mean in the context of a non-profit well actually it's not that different from it from any commercial business it's simply about changing an organization's IT platforms and applications or application delivery model to use a more modern technology solution and it's typically about driving greater efficiency within the context of IP but it actually has very little material a change on what it is an organization does and the way it does it so when we look at the impact across the organization we see that the major part people impacted at the IT staff the staff and volunteers maybe may have to change a little bit some of the systems that they use and how they use it but there's no no significant impact on the donors or beneficiaries and therefore also when it comes to looking at an organization's outcomes or mission it really it doesn't change that at all and as I mentioned in terms of impact there is a limited benefit in terms of impact by freeing up operating expense to be able to be used for donations to beneficiaries second one I talked about was organizational operational transformation or just simply operational transformation and that's changing the way an organization actually operates internally to make it more efficient or to increase impact but it doesn't really materially change its mission or the outcomes it achieves other than potentially increasing scale so again when we look at the people that are impacted it's largely internal for the organization's IT staff staff and volunteers not so much donors and beneficiaries again the goal of this is driving efficiency to improve impact but not really changing the outcome or the mission so when we start to talk about true business transformation what we're talking about here in the context of the nonprofit is changing the way that you would engage with your donors or your beneficiaries to significantly change the organization's impact and outcomes and this may also lead to an extension of the mission or modification of the mission so as we look across those people that are impacted it's much much wider than just simply within within a nonprofit organization and if we look orgonite so if we look at true digital transformation what we're talking about is transformation of an organization digital and in its external engagement with its external stakeholders in which is enabled by digital technology and that is truly what we mean so if I go back to the example I gave you earlier would you like to tell me what you just think which one of those you think it fits under you chan are you there I can't hear you personally yeah yeah no sorry I was just waiting for the numbers to come in okay make sure so this is this is really interesting because we see here that the two lead runners were under digital business transformational business operational transformation I personally would put it under IT transformation they changed the way they delivered their IT services without significantly changing the way they operated as an organization or and without changing the way they engaged with their beneficiaries or their donors although obviously and what this shows is with any of the examples that there is that there can be a crossover between those two so in going through their IT transformation they did have an impact on their their operational transformation by changing the potentially the efficiency of their their volunteers and their staff so let's take another example um this is one taken from the UK and that's where I'm based if the accent hadn't given it away already but it's an interesting on to me this the Billy the Billy chip oh sorry Billy Allison Hope Foundation came up with a tech with a solution called the Billy chip the gentleman involved was a young ambulance driver in the Bristol area in the UK around 20 years old who volunteered over Christmas in a homeless refuge Center giving food drinks and a comp in some cases shelter and accommodation to homeless people in the area and the young man noticed that while people were very generous in giving donations to nonprofits that supported the homeless sector they were less keen to donate directly to the homeless and the reason behind that was a widely held belief certainly in the UK that the opportunity for misuse of those donations on drugs or alcohol was was quite high and that's why people didn't want to make donations directly to the homeless so he came up with this idea with these like chips where individuals who wanted to donate directly to the homeless could purchase these when they purchased food or coffee in a local cafe or restaurant they could then donate them directly to do people on the street homeless people on the street who could then take them to any participating retail outlet and refund them for food tea coffee soup whatever as you can see from their mission statement at the moment that the the the solution is is widely deployed around a number of small retail outlets or smaller retail outlets in the Bristol area but their mission is to go global with this so let me ask you the question again which one of the categories do you think this fits into you I'm just waiting for them line again an interesting answer so for me personally this is about non-digital business transformation there is there's no digital interface used in the in the connection with the homeless people there obviously is technology behind this solution enabling this solution but the real transformational piece is actually in the non digital space it's in these these chips that are can be sold and refunded but again it is an example that not all transformations in in a bit thinner an engagement context has to be driven by digital and that leads rather nicely onto the next example this is actually from Christopher wrong there we go excuse me this actually comes from Australia and it's actually one of TechSoup global network partners was involved heavily in it and again this was for supporting the the homeless typically the way in which historically the homeless had found out about available resources or opportunities was simply through going to community centers or refuges and seeing things on a pin board and in this solution they decided to replace that pin board with an electronic solution in fact a what it was originally supposed to be an app and then they found by feedback from the homeless that they web mobile website was actually preferable partly because the homeless was suspicious of any app being installed on an device that might track them and so it was put together as a website you can you can go on the URL is here you can go and look it up and it's basically a directory of homeless help of different services you can see here in terms of housing in terms of you housing food other everyday things Health's were a number of topics and organizations that want to make their there services or products available to the homeless can post on here the services they offer and details of how and where to access them obviously using location-based services they can now that you can find out information about what's available right now and nearby so let me ask the question again where do you think this sits on the scale you okay Shawn I'm not sure if you're speaking or hear unmute Victorian equipment okay I am very sorry I'm very sorry but here here's another example which is in based in Switzerland is actually in the Italian speaking part of Switzerland they support over 600 users or beneficiaries of their service they help adults with disabilities to regain their independence through work they freely estate was they had 25 pcs in fixed locations they were shared by over 200 different staff which meant staff words sometimes waiting to be to access to systems their data transfer methodology was by memory stick between these different platforms meaning it was not non real-time and the backup and archiving depended on an individual doing that on the individual pcs within the individual locations they moved to a virtual desktop infrastructure using thin clients which meant that the client access devices were cheaper so they were able to deploy an additional 60% their whole the data management was done in a centralized way over the network they had automated backup and archiving with a real-time sharing of data and this meant that the staff were able to support more beneficiaries so let me pull the question again which one of these four do we think misfits include you you you excuse me my application has crashed it did okay do you want to maybe take a second to re-establish connection women yes that's gonna clear up let's just give me a second okay colleges come out if you have your slides and you're unable to reconnect we're on their wooden spoon slide and I can I can move them along the connection isn't working okay yeah if you so we at the moment is what type of transformation is this yeah and we have about 40 people said IT transformation 33 business operational 30 percent of non deshaun 22 pretty good digital so yeah I would say it's IT IT transformation rather than with some business operational impact I am just still truly get reconnected here try once more sorry so for the audience do you guys have questions we have Whitney from TechSoup we have baraka from VMware who are available to answer your questions but feel free to submit them as we go along and we do have a Q&A at the end with Sean so we'll we'll try and help get your questions answered there okay could somebody else drive the slide in that case is icon not able to control it yeah okay so we are on the wooden spoon slide if you wanted to yeah I'm seeing I'm seeing the slides but I've got none of the controls I'm afraid so so it is just another example of somewhat smaller organization again it's uk-based this is a children's charity using rugby to help disadvantaged children the relatively small organization it was established in 1983 they have about 450 volunteers they have in their current environment a couple of hosted servers to do email calendar and exchange and a bespoke [Music] a bespoke CRM system they the reason that they have that and it's common for another number of established charities is simply history at the time they set up things like office 365 things like salesforce.com and other SAS services just simply weren't available on the only way to have these services was if they posted them themselves their plan now is to move too fast based CRM solution to office 365 and to use VDI and digital workspace to provide those services to their staff and to their volunteers and to their board of directors so the question I'd again ask is what sort of transformation do we think that one covers again I'm just watching for me you so yeah it is for me IT transformation they're not changing what they do or how they do it in any significant way my last example is from actually from Germany it's a collaboration between again one of TechSoup global partners in Germany house dish stiffens and yeah I struggle with that one and a commercial company called particulate but this was about changing the way so particulate interestingly didn't come up this particularly a UH nonprofit or social background they were talk they came from a direction of marketing for commercial organizations and their concept was that commercial organization could donate as part of their customer loyalty program what they referred to as coins but these are actually electronic credit through an application to their customers as loyalty bonuses those customers could then choose where they donated those electronic coins and send them to send them to the organizations of their choice they built this platform this solution it was actually taken up by Deutsche Bahn who are the national rail operator in Germany and their bike rental scheme a train station was the platform through which they gave out these coins and this allowed as I say users of their service to be able to be accumulate these coins and donate them to nonprofits in their local area so final question which one do we think this is you and again I would agree completely clearly the examples have helped significantly here in terms of it is a digital business transformation it's changing the way that organizations can collect donations can engage with with commercial companies for those donations and is highly dependent on the apps and the back-end infrastructure for this now I want to make it clear at this point we've talked about the differentiation between these three or four different types of transformation and all of these transformations can be benefit beneficial to an organization they can they can all deliver benefit to an organization or on an equal footing on that basis one is not better or worse than the other also I would I would argue that a lot of these are built on top of each other you're not going to be able to go for changing serious change in the way you engage your your beneficiaries in your when your donors electronically if you haven't got the supporting platform underneath that I either mob Mikey so often one will lead through into another if you give your staff so another quick example is the British Heart Foundation here in the UK I gather their staff they they run a series of retail outlets that take in secondhand good typically furniture but other goods as well and then resell them and they put in a set of digital services to support those operations that then allowed them to actually see availability of particular goods or products in different parts different retail outlets and therefore move them from one place to another so there things have it started with just an IT transformation it moved into an operational transformation and then when people had this information the staff in the store the associate had this information they were able to change the way that they engage with the customer and therefore offer new services to the people who were coming in to purchase these goods or provide them so hopefully that's given you some insights into where you might want to think in terms of how can technology how can technology help you in transforming either what the way you do it or what it is you do and grow your impact I would recommend once you've thought through that there is another one of these webinars by Michael eNOS of TechSoup who then talks about building a strategy for implementing and a roadmap for implementing that sort of transformation by use of the cloud and it's an excellent follow on from this however I have one final polling slide which is there are a couple of other follow-on areas from this that typically I talk to organizations about one of which is how to actually design your technology strategy to support your mission and outcomes and how to map those two together and the second one is actually then quantify quantifying the business of that digital the benefit story of that digital transformation and I just like to ask as the final closing question if there are either of those would be interests of interest for this audience for a future webinar you and there you go with me I there is the total of approaching a hundred responsive but I think it's clear which one we need to do next and on that note I am I know there's been questions coming in on the on the chat but I haven't been following them yeah I'm happy to read a few of them off to you or if you want to Han select a few of them [Music] so we had a question from John and he was curious to know what are some of the reasons to choose VMware over other cloud services such as AWS um that's a that's quite a complex answer obviously AWS offers their cloud services and we partner with AWS by the way so it's not a VMware or AWS indeed one of the discussions that we're having with TechSoup are about how we help them move their VMware if they're at the my environment which is currently hosted in Colo into AWS is cloud and how we help so I wouldn't say it's an either/or and again it's about what solution is the best fit and there really isn't trying to cover that on this but AWS or one of our key partners we obviously have our on-premise solutions but my blows historically and increasingly we're moving to cloud-based services in conjunction with companies like Google and AWS okay we have another question from Catherine so she said all of this interesting but isn't a bottom line to decide how to improve IT to maximize the overall business services to be donors and recipients so maybe if you want to actually expand them on that a little bit yes it's exactly that but it can be done but that in different ways of different layers so simply optimizing the IT services won't deliver you new ways of engaging with beneficiaries and donors however it's a good starting point for building that so as I said all of the the key driver here for for any nonprofit organization would be to maximize your impact and improve your outcomes and when I compare that with the business sector that I'm used to working with it's the same for them and they want to drive more similar they want to drive market share they want to drive revenue or they want to drive profit so yes I agree completely ok so we have another statement here from Amman - that I'm concerned about how nonprofits push changes like these with scarce resources including funding time staffing I'm a manager of a digital strategy and essentially a one-person department I can see the changes that need to happen but it feels like a daunting task to shore up the technical debt my museum has accumulated over the course of many years of not caring about valuing or updating our tech infrastructure so do you maybe want to talk a little bit about because I think a lot of our nonprofits here are currently small and and resource strapped so maybe if you have any advice I guess in terms of you know priorities or or resources if you have an H and a recommendations on where I get started if you're that small of an organization um yeah absolutely and I clearly experienced that challenge on a number of the organizations that I got connect while I was working in this sector and it is my hat my hat goes off to the people involved in this because you know you are working at the extreme end of limited resources expertise and budget to deliver these things my advice would be that what you need to understand in terms of the debt that's there and I agree with you know getting over that technical debt is either is that the first priority but again that needs to be broken down because that in itself can be overwhelming um my advice would be relatively simple is to look for the quick wins that are going to generate the maximum benefit for your organization and again that that requires almost mapping it back to what is your reason for existence what is it you're trying to achieve and how can you have the biggest impact on that by making a change and that's where I would focus my investments to start with yeah that that that again that's how we do it with with large or a small organization it's making sure that you map to those outcomes and prioritize based on those out outcomes okay um and then I guess like one thing you know that we always kind of like to do on these webinars like if there were you know one or two things that that people could do once you know to get off this call you know I guess what are kind of the if you were to rank sort of in order like priorities what would you kind of recommend for especially small organization so the first thing as I say would be to try and produce however simple amount of how what you're going to what you're going to do in terms of those IT modernization and dealing with that debt would map into the outcome and have the benefits to the organization and typically I start with just listing out those benefits in a qualitative form but then see if you can quantify those the other one is to look at what's what's costing you most again you know this is this it is relatively things relatively straightforward but where you're going to get again where I can get the maximum impact for the minimum cost and expenditure the second one I would I would say if at all possible unfortunately as I've been around in the technology business for 35 years we've done a great job of convincing everybody that they needed everything on premise and then suddenly come along and say actually you need to buy everything as a service which would have made more sense for many of the nonprofit's on this call to have done that in the first place rather than acquiring huge amounts of Technology debt but I do genuinely believe the as a service model is better suited to organizations where any organization where IT is not not your business is not your mission and I would say that applies to virtually every nonprofit out there with the possible exception of TechSoup but you know technology is not not the core of what it is you're trying to achieve and so try and offload that to a service provider even though the service may may seem to cost a bit more on the surface typically when you drill down into the true cost of delivering that service you find that you're having having the people the equipment and everything in your house could deliver that is not the right answer would be like my quote perfect okay and we had a couple of people I guess when we had the technical difficulty the category for Billy chip I don't think that the audience ever got that answer I don't know if you remember off the top of your head which can yes I do so yeah that was where I was I was talking to a mute button Omicron I apologize um so yet for me that that fits in the category of our business transformation but I wouldn't put it under digital business transformation but although there's clearly technology under the surface supporting the financial systems behind it the main way in which people interface with it has nothing to do with technology whatsoever it's to do with plastic chips but that is the category I would put that one on right gotcha all right so I think that is it for our questions today I don't see any other any other ones coming in so thank you so much Shawn for your presentation we want to let you guys know we have another webinar coming up on February 18th 7 things your nonprofit can do to get the most out of your website in 2020 if you're interested Steven will be sending out the link in the chat with a link to to sign up for that webinar and then also if you guys have not heard of or taken any of our courses we do offer both courses and services and my colleague Steven will be sending out a link to that as well and we have a couple of recommended courses that we like to share so that kind of are in alignment with today's topic so Steven will be sending those out as well and if you guys don't mind we'd always kind of like hearing from our audience what you learned in today's webinar so if you want to take a second to chat to Sean one thing that you learned in today's webinar we also have a post event survey so if you have any feedback for us it looks like you guys gave us some interest in future topics but any feedback that you have for us we always review that carefully and take that into consideration when we're planning future content and you're on social media feel free to give us a follow we're on Facebook Instagram Twitter and we also have a blog blog at techsoup.org where we post a lot of helpful tips and tricks and again I just want to say thank you to Shawn and to Whitney and Taraka for helping out today and to our attendees for attending and lastly to our webinar sponsor readytalk [Music]