Enhance your organization's efficiency with Sales process management tools for Nonprofit

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hey everyone this is kyle haynes with build consulting we're just about ready to get started we are going to wait another minute or two for people to join for folks joining from the west coast they might be grabbing lunch so i'll go back on mute and we'll be starting the webinar shortly all right let's go ahead and get started we are recording today's webinar so for folks that joined in late your colleagues friends family please let them know that after today's webinar we will be making the recording available i want to welcome everyone to our webinar for november 2020. we present it in partnership between build consulting and community i.t in today's webinar two of our experts are going to be answering questions that were submitted in advance of the webinar that will hopefully help you figure out how to select the best software for your organization we're going to be covering questions about software selection about project leadership change management how to involve stakeholders and what you should think about when you're evaluating platforms when you're thinking about changing business processes and more you can read more about this topic in our blog it's something we talk about frequently we'll provide a link near the end of the webinar and if your question doesn't get answered in today's session please contact us for an answer we'll give you some information about how to contact us and we're happy to answer any questions that we're not able to get to so a little bit more about build and community i.t things that we share is that we both exclusively work with non-profit organizations and we help them make informed decisions about technology and information systems that's going to ultimately support their mission we both approach our work collaboratively and we're most satisfied i think when we're able to empower our clients to make informed choices for their organization some of the ways that build leads in the social good sector is uh we work on projects that range from assessments to selections and implementations we also serve as part-time and interim cios both david and i who's on today's webinar with me are part-time interim cios and then lastly for clients we work as outsourced crm managers we were founded in 2015 our goal is to help non-profits transition or sorry help non-profits transform themselves using technology that's our mission and it pretty much motivates and organizes everything that we do part of what drives our interest in today's topic is that our analysis combined with our with direct observation of hundreds of organizations that the success rate for nonprofit technology projects is under 50 and the reality is that oftentimes this is because the technology is moving forward but the organization is not we show this visual to all of our clients it usually resonates it gets a laugh sometimes rounds of applause it stands for old organization plus new technology equals expensive old organization so our belief is that in order to take advantage of any new technology it's your organization that has to transform to work in new and hopefully better ways so originally there were going to be three of us for today unfortunately peter mears is not able to join us he was going to serve as the moderator so you're stuck with me both moderating and presenting today but i'm kyle haynes i'm a partner at build consulting i was one of the founding partners i have a long history in non-profit technology it's pretty much where i have spent the entirety of my career including working at a non-profit uh for the first five years of my career uh and i'm happy to welcome david one of my colleagues and he is the other expert for today's session david why don't you take a moment to introduce yourself thank you kyle really happy to be here today i've also spent my career in nonprofit technology i did my first software selection around 1995 or so so i've seen and evaluated a lot of different uh software products and and vendors for non-profits during that time so uh also one of the co-founders of build uh originally the founder of community way back in the day so i'm really happy to be here today great yeah and the truth is is that david and i don't get to work on that many projects together recently so today's gonna be really interesting because i know obviously both of us work together but we have different experiences with different clients so david i'm super excited to hear uh your answers to some of these questions and i'm sure i'll learn from you today as well so we got a bunch of questions what's that were you saying that you probably are going to get more from me than i already got from you exactly i technically said likewise but that's a good paraphrase so we got a bunch of questions in advance and we tried to boil them down into 11 that we'll plan on answering during the session if we have extra time we're going to answer questions we get during the webinar there is a chat function within the webinar hopefully everybody at this point knows how to use those please feel free to submit your chats or your questions rather and david has volunteered to keep an eye on those and if we have time intersperse them in today's presentation or get to them at the end the first question last time we did a big crm project it didn't work and how can we prevent that in the future and david if it's cool with you i'll i'll take the first stab at this um i know earlier we had earlier we had quoted the success rate of 50 of technology projects failing this is entirely anecdotal but i'm guessing that less than 10 of the time it's really about the technology my experience has been that if a project is failing miserably oftentimes it starts at the very top and it starts with perhaps a lack of leadership alignment or leadership buy-in or leadership support so for those of you who have worked with us in the past or who read our blogs change management is something that we think is really important and i know for me really fully appreciating the value of change management and really understanding that a big part of change management is not only focusing on the people who are going to be asked to make the change but it's also focused on the people who are expect to endorse and advocate and champion the change so some questions come up for me in this question about how aligned was leadership uh in a project that would be described as failing miserably i would also just i think the last question that comes up for me is whether the project has truly failed miserably all shouldn't be lost more and more my experience is that there is enough commonalities around crm products that it's unlikely again to go to my earlier point it's unlikely that it really is owing to the technology so i would be looking for ways to salvage this project and the salvaging of it may start as i said at the very top so i think kyle i'll just quickly add a little something to that i agree with everything you said and i think another thing that's important is just making sure that internally you're really bringing certain types of leadership to the project certainly project management which everyone probably already thinks about but i also think about communications plans and i think about a change management lead uh and roles like that and a small nonprofit maybe project management change management communication plan is something that one person can be responsible for at a larger nonprofit maybe those are distinct roles on a specific project but filling those roles all of these roles is really important to the success of any enterprise nonprofit project my wife would probably kill me for not having made that excellent point david because that's that's exclusively what she does for a large corporation is there's a team that entirely focuses on internal communication and obviously much of that is around change itself and so that's a really good point i had forgotten to mention that i'll just point out this is being recorded so thank you for that compliment i think we have pretty sophisticated editing software so i'm anticipating that i did that afterwards all right let's see what the next question was so we're about to select a software system what are the top two or three things we can do to make the selection successful or more successful david why don't you so yeah yeah i'm eager to answer this one i think uh i would quickly say it's defining requirements it's engaging stakeholders and it's really going through extensive demos are the three things that i'd really like to focus on there's a lot more that goes into a successful software selection project but if i have to narrow it to three those are the three i'm going to call out and so first i'd say you know defining requirements is important uh because a lot of times uh people within a non-profit don't even fully agree on what they're looking for or what we find in going through the requirements definition process is oftentimes it's a great opportunity for people to learn what other people in the organization do as part of a process that kind of spans teams and so that's really an internal uh discovery and learning and alignment process there the process of defining requirements um and so i really recommend that as opposed to just inviting vendors in to to demo their software the other reason that uh i think the other thing that i think is really important is making sure to engage all stakeholders uh so if communications is a stakeholder and organizing is a stakeholder and programs as a stakeholder make sure that those different stakeholders are represented in the selection process otherwise you end up with communications getting an email marketing solution that doesn't meet organizing's needs maybe it works for one use case but not another or in large organizations you may getting into departments selecting software that doesn't really fit well within the larger ecosystem of technology and information so um i think the third thing i'd highlight is just when you get the demos from the finalist vendors i really think it's important to ask them to show processes end to end basically give them a script give them space to share their you know the dog and pony show i call it but also ask them to demonstrate specific processes from end to end that really relate to the things that you're trying to do as an organization and i think that needs to be with the same group of attendees seeing all the finalists i think you need to do them relatively close together uh not weeks apart but days apart and i think you need to capture feedback from those demos as soon as possible after you see them one of the things i thought that an interesting point you made david is the extent to which this process can be educational and how if i heard what you were saying sometimes what you get out of this process is new awareness internally around what your colleagues are doing or a new understanding of the difficulty in which they do the things that they currently do and how this software may change that or the extent to which the constituents they interact with if you're talking about crm are impacted by technology that you don't have or they envision how those constituents are going to be engaged with as a result of making a selection so it's the idea of education i really like we have 11 questions i think so i'm going to move on to the next one any change requires a cost to your institution how do you weigh the benefits versus the cost and the example they used was retraining all their users my i mean it sounds a bit obvious but trying to get to the roi or the return on investment of making the change is probably the most direct way of understanding the benefits versus the cost and i think prior to investing energy in costing out what the solution's going to be thinking about how you can quantify either the opportunity costs or the actual costs with not making the change and i say that because i think as i said too often the emphasis is on calculating what the cost of moving would be and there's not really an emphasis on the cost of staying and i think there's one opportunity cost that i i think oftentimes get missed and that's the opportunity cost of diverting staff energy diverting investment diverting focus away from what you're working on now and diverting it to a technology project that may not truly move the needle that much and because so many of the questions today have been about fundraising often i've seen this emphasis on moving fundraising systems because the perception is that by moving it's going to change create the opportunity to generate new revenue it'll enable you to engage with constituency differently and enable you to engage with constituents differently which was i trying to say but really trying to get people to give you specifics around that i think are it's essential um and so my experience has been when i can outline both the roi of staying and the roi of moving it becomes pretty clear or at least clearer around the benefits of moving um and weighing the costs of moving personally i don't think in this example retraining users is the biggest cost i really think the biggest cost is taking a finite quantity of organizational energy and diverting it and using it for the purposes of a software selection and implementation david what are your what do you have anything any different thoughts i think that's a great point yeah i hadn't thought about it from quite from the energy perspective before but it takes a lot of time and energy as well as money to change software systems so we're certainly not saying that that always outweighs the benefit of changing um but you know if someone comes to us and and says hey we need some new software for a b and c that's why we really want to take a step back and say okay what are you using now and what are the problems with it and a lot of times you know many of the problems don't have anything to do with the technology itself yeah i wish peter was on today's call because he's really he has really helped my thinking evolve on this notion of thinking about time as being finite thinking about time is how as having a cost and making sure that people are in agreement that those costs and that time are worth it so our next question and this one you get to take david but somebody in our organization wants to go with uh we anonymized it to shiny solution x but i'm sure it's not right for us how can i help ensure we make a good decision so this this could be tricky of course if it's the executive director who wants you know shiny solution x uh that can be a tricky conversation um i think if it's someone else in the organization there's really no substitute for senior leadership saying look before you go and purchase the software for yourself for your team you really need to engage with i.t or you need to engage with these other teams who are stakeholders in this senior leadership ensuring that that's the way the organization is going to operate is the the best scenario that's not always the case and so i really encourage if you're in a position to engage whoever wants this new software around what the business value of this is going to be what are the objectives uh who are the stakeholders i think starting to ask some of those questions can kind of frame it in the right way to have a meaningful conversation before someone just goes out and buys new software so when they talk about the objectives there may be other ways to meet those objectives maybe the organization already has software that can help to meet those objectives and maybe you should check that out first with respect to other stakeholders maybe there are other requirements that aren't being considered that would affect what the choice would be so i think just having a conversation with the person or the team around those things business value objectives and stakeholders is a good entry point for kind of taking a step back i think about i think about that slide that was in the intro and you could almost change the formula to be old organization plus shiny solution x equals expensive old organization and i think what you were saying was or at least what i heard you say was it oftentimes is not about the technology it's about something else or it's about some existing technology and trying to come up with a process for to explore that in a little bit more depth yeah yep so for selections there's a question about who to involve in it um you know i'll be interested to hear your answer on this david so for me at least at the outset it's been rare that organizations start thinking in a way that might have over representation in these selection processes it tends to be under represent of under representation and i think you talked about this in an earlier question um about having the right people at the table one of the things that even helps me at the beginning of our work with clients is to start the creation of a stakeholder map and what a stakeholder map is it's something that it's visual the way a map is and it helps me at least visualize all the people who are going to be impacted by a technology change and as that gets refined it can actually paint a picture for who should be involved in the selection process so we oftentimes start our projects before a selection with an assessment and that's where we start to do the stakeholder map build out because it's really important to make sure their voices are heard and understood in the selection process and there's an important distinction in that and again it goes back to a change management principle that this is less about when you think about who's involved in a selection process it's less about everybody being in alignment or everybody thinking or agreeing upon the direction it's about everybody feeling as though their voice was heard so being involved in the selection process can look very differently for leadership they need alignment they need to be in agreement and support and champion the project like i talked about in an earlier question but in terms of other types of involvement through things like surveys even through simple listening sessions there's ways to involve people in the selection process that are much broader than a small group of senior leaders or or a group of it professionals pilot i think those are all great points i think on the stakeholder map that's a place where i i think a little bit more of a grid and a stakeholder impact grid that maps out the processes or or functional areas that are going to change and who the stakeholders are for those changes it's accomplishing the same thing i think just in a slightly different format um but i think that's an incredibly useful tool for expanding awareness about who needs to be represented who needs to have a voice in some of these enterprise software and organizational changes yeah well you know i like things with lots of colors and lots of bubbles on them so i go i gravitate towards a map but i think you're you're absolutely right for some organizations seeing it laid out as a matrix and being able to filter it and sort it and understand it at a greater level of depth is really helpful and i did david catch that you said i made a great point in the last question just so you know next question is what's the most effective way to trial uh and evaluate multiple platforms yeah so so thank you all for this question and i think uh i'll also point out someone specifically asked about minor versus major solution selections so i wanted to address that as part of this answer first of all i'd say you know the difference between a minor and major solution selection is kind of like the difference between renting a car and buying a house if it's if it's minor software if it's a smaller decision like what are we going to use as a virtual brainstorming tool that's the type of thing you just download it and try it uh i've in the past couple of weeks in fact tried a group map and then something else called lucid spark and it's okay to be uh a little bit of an independent pursuing solutions like that if you don't like the car you rented you take it back and you get another rental as opposed to buying a house like a major software selection these enterprise systems crms erps project and grant tracking software which one attendee asked about those are major solution selections major meaning it impacts multiple teams where it impacts a large group it requires behavioral change organizational change it requires migrating a large amount of data for those types of larger decisions i strongly recommend the requirements gathering process i really strongly recommend an rfp process you know uh vendors don't love rfp processes but it's really if you look at it as a way to to have a conversation with that vendor and have them get to know you as well as you get to know them uh then i think that can be a really helpful way to think about it i think it can be helpful to have brief introductory demos early in an enterprise software selection process you know just to make sure the product doesn't look like it was built in 1995 there are still some of those products out there and because those brief initial demos can give you an idea of what's possible these days with a certain type of software i do think it's important towards the end of the process though towards the end of this rfp process to really make sure that the finalists are providing scripted demos where you're giving them the list of the things that you want to see end to end in that process and then finally if it's an option to do uh uh kind of a pilot or have a sandbox kind of test version of a system before you uh before you're fully committed to it then i think that's a great thing to be able to do as well even if it takes some investment and some time and some effort to get that sandbox set up in a way or that that test environment set up in a way that makes it possible to evaluate it yeah those are the only thing that comes up for me is sometimes how you can use trials in a hybrid way with a larger rfp and i think about a selection for project management tools and in that we decided that the best way to get feedback was to actually let people play around with the project management tool and be able to provide feedback on what they liked and what they didn't like and why that was helpful on i think this was embedded in something you said david was project management tools were really new for most of the organization and it helped us identify what adoption challenges there were going to be and what training challenges they were going to need to be met and those training challenges some of them it was obvious they were extended beyond the technology itself it required people to understand about how this technology was going to integrate with their work and so i think that you can use a hybrid approach where you can use these trials to inform a subsequent larger selection and bring more educated evaluators to the process yeah the next question let's see what steps should we go through to define the requirements for the software we need the i'll take this one david the i mean i think what i would say is the most effective requirements and it probably mirrors our approach is not a list of three or 400 things that the software needs to accomplish i think they have a role in requirements but you talked about this earlier david in answer to one of the earlier questions but really the requirements should be based upon what are the processes that this tool or solution are expected to support and those requirements should be really tightly linked to the way that your organization wants to work in the future i think a lot of the software vendors who are on today's call oftentimes they'll say they get rfps that are spreadsheets with hundreds and hundreds of requirements and some of those requirements look like they were developed a long long long time ago with requirements that pretty much anyone would be able to meet so it's akin to identifying a requirement for your car that it has a steering wheel and a horn it's highly unlikely that you are going to be shopping for a car where you need to get to that level of specificity around table stakes functionality what you need to do is to give the vendor an understanding of your requirements do we need a minivan or do we need a ferrari both have a steering wheel we didn't need to outline that but one is much different than the other one is going to be awful to load a car seat into the other one is going to be awful to take someone out on your first date with and i'll let people make their own judgments about which one is which the next thing i'd say is i think of two types of requirements gathering one is where the organization already understands how it wants to work and can envision that in some level of detail and the other one is where the organization has perhaps an overall vision but they have no clue or no experience with what that process might look like and i've actually led two selections in the past i think five or so years for organizations around crm and i know that questions come up a couple times today they understood what crm was and what it could do but they didn't know what it looked like in practice and they both shared this idea they knew they needed to better manage and engage with constituents and manage those relationships but they didn't really understand in concrete ways how it was going to change the way that they worked and so it goes back actually perhaps to the last question where does that education happen how do you educate them on what the future might look like when does it happen does it happen during the selection process or do you rely on an implementation partner and to try to weave that just a little bit more concretely in my last into the last question rather is that by trialing and demoing software sometimes that helps uncover requirements that people would have never considered before so i said a lot there i think that the main question that we have or at least that i have when i start with a non-profit is how important is it to define the future state and to what level of detail before you start implementation and uh there are two different approaches one is to do it pre and to ask people to do it in advance and the other one is to really put the emphasis on finding a strong partner or a strong vendor who can help walk with you to do that in the implementation itself and i i think the quick thing i'd add to this is i i do think the the learning process really starts even before you're in the software selection process it's just starting to talk about your processes then it's in the vendor demos and the software selection process and then it's even more so during implementation so i think throughout the process we did get a comment from catherine thank you for the comment and i thought it was especially relevant here but one of the things she sees a lot is people document requirements based on what they don't like about the current solution and sometimes completely ignore things that they absolutely must have because they're so focused on what to avoid and i i think that's a great point i'm working with a client right now where we we spoke last spring about what the current products could not do or what they did not have it configured to do in an attempt to use that product more effectively and now that we've decided to explore some other solutions we've circled back to really focus on that second part that you mentioned which is uh what are the must-haves the things that may be working well with the current solution that also need to be in that new solution so great point catherine yeah that is a really good point the next question is uh when we are looking at our existing processes do we want to design for how we work now or the way we want to work in the future and when we know the ways will work um how or sorry i'll just read it verbatim how will we know the ways we'll work in the future without experiencing the new software david i'll hand this one to you yeah the chicken and egg dilemma you know yeah um i really think that the starting point is understanding how you work now and flagging any challenges with the current way of working and flagging any opportunities that people already know about that's got to be your starting point because you don't know what you don't know and i think i think you it's helpful to see some brief demos really early in the process that helped to spark some ideas for what else is possible with different or newer software and then i think i think it's important to not try to figure it all out in the requirements definition phase or even in the rfp process i think you should approach the rfp process as an opportunity for the vendor to be a partner in figuring out new and better ways to work and run the rfp process in a way that acknowledges that it really can be a conversation with them and then finally during implementation i think it's important to work on it iteratively where you know the partners bringing their expertise you're bringing your uh your internal expertise and you know really bringing a a process focus to that work doing implementation because vendors tendencies is to really be focused on their technology and configuring their technology and what we believe most organizations need is someone who's there focusing on how you want to use that technology what are the what are the processes and uh who are those processes impacting and what changes is it going to you know have on those different stakeholders of that process so this is where that stakeholder impact grid that we were talking about earlier kind of comes into play you can use a tool like that that maps stakeholders and processes and impact you can use that to identify hey who do we need to engage as we're doing the design and build of our solution who do we need to engage in user acceptance testing and in that process you know get get a a workflow here that's really going to work for the organization by the time they they go live with it last little plug i'll put in here is for a a business analyst role in more organizations i think that's a role that doesn't exist in many many non-profits and what i mean by business analyst is you know someone who's fluent in an organization's processes what they're trying to do and has some familiarity with how technology can be used to do that more effectively so it's not your cis admin although some sysadmins have some some business analyst competencies um but it's a different person it's a person who sits between the business units and the technical configuration and can kind of marry process to technology something i was thinking about as you were talking was a question i think it was one of the early questions in today's webinar and it's this idea you know somebody was talking about shiny solution x is what we called it um and i was thinking you know this is a little bit tangential but i was thinking about the role of what we've talked about and some of the questions exposing people to multiple solutions that do that thing that people think shiny solution x will do and then perhaps what it does is it makes it less about i hate what we have and i want something new and i know what it is and it does it better and my thought is david that it what that does by saying it helps by seeing multiple shiny uh shiny object x's or shiny product x's that really anyone might be able to do that but it's about how the organization wants to work in the future and it might cause organizations to ask the last part of that question which is okay i get that all of these new things do that thing how do we wanna work in the future so using a specific example if the old solution doesn't allow you to do text to give for fundraisers showing them there's lots of ways to accomplish that how do we want to do that how does that integrate into our existing strategy and does it really require acquiring an entire new solution so i know that was a little tangential but i thought it was such a good idea that i didn't listen to your answer at all and i just been waiting to get my plug in for that idea well usually you think about going to sleep while i'm talking so i'm just i'm glad i sparked some creative thought there yeah i mean i just it made me wonder for the future whether that's a tactic for the person that's like oh my gosh we have to move to uh solution x uh to to make it less about a specific solution more about where the overall space is moving and whether that can be a catalyst for having some of the deeper conversations that you suggested they need to have you know good idea next question i love this question because it doesn't have a lot of words and i clearly stumbled on the last one i had too many words when is an rfp or a request so a request for a proposal or a request for in information appropriate in a software selection um just before i answer that question as i talk the way that i think about the difference between those two are that when an organization does have a fairly strong sense of how things need to work and need to see somebody who can demonstrate that they have a solution capable to meet those needs that's more of a request for proposal when you're looking for somebody to help co-design it it's more of a request for information so that's how i think about those things um those two and that might help provide some context for how i might answer this question um i'd say overall um i'm a big fan of these mechanisms because the way that i try to construct them is not in the way that most people think of them too often people think an rfp or an rfi it's a way to get information about or its sole purpose to get information about vendors i actually think that this is a way for organizations and i forget how you termed it david but i might say know thyself it's an opportunity to do what you talked about earlier where it might create awareness among your colleagues about the way that you work or some of the challenges with the way that you work right now it's a way for the organization to come into the selection process with a clear understanding of where it is the other thing and uh catherine might have been alluding to this and her the point she made earlier um rfps can be a way for the vendor to understand your organization so it's not just a way for you to learn more about the vendor but a way for the vendor to learn more about you it helps them understand sometimes in black and white how much have you already figured out and how much have you yet to figure out what's the gap between the requirements you know and understand now and what's going to mean need to be done in an implementation it can help rfps can help them understand who they're going to be working with what are the capabilities of them or sorry what's the capabilities of your organization is what i meant to say do you have somebody that is really strong in project management but has never ever done an erp implementation before that's really helpful information if the reverse is true they've led an erp implementation but they're not particularly adept at managing a project it helps the vendor understand more about you what do they need to bring to make the implementation successful um so i'm a big fan of them even if they are scaled based on the size of the project or the amount of the investment they're just incredibly useful for if no one else for the vendor to understand more about what is expected of them and their product i think i'll just add that rfis and rfps can be done really well or they can be done really poorly and that certainly has an impact on the value that they provide um i i think on a separate note one of the principles that i try to bring to this and i think build as a whole i think we do this it's don't waste people's time whether that's staff members whether that's vendors if a vendor if you're not seriously considering a vendor don't make them reply to an rfp i think it's also helpful to you know vet vendors beforehand and only ask for rfp responses for those that are legitimate contenders right i think there's i i think it ends up wasting people's time to get more responses than your review team can seriously consider it's a waste of vendors time it's a waste of staff time and it doesn't give you a better answer so do the vetting up front find a few that seem like a good fit get rfp responses from them and only do the finalists demo after that if they remain a serious contender you know don't waste anyone's time whether it's vendors or staff that's certainly what we aspire to and hopefully achieve when we run the rfp rfi process yeah i mean that's a really good point and i mean especially staff time um asking asking staff to be highly invested as we've suggested throughout this and then making them sit through vendor demonstrations and understand the capabilities of a vendor that is just not going to be a fit for you it's it's it doesn't set the stage well for implementation in terms of future asks that you're going to make of their time the next question is uh system demos when should we let the vendors demo um and when how do we ensure that the vendors are gonna show us what we're interested in not what they're most interested in showing us david why don't you take a selfie yeah yeah i'll take a shot at this i think i i did mention earlier the idea of brief initial demos early on in a process before you issue an rfi rfp just to see what's possible and it also helps with the vendor screening as well it really helps to narrow down that list and take it from you know a lot of times in some solution categories you may have 8 10 12 20 even more potential solutions and so doing brief demos can really help you to narrow that list to the ones that you want to seriously consider then i think after the rfp process once you've reviewed the rfps and decided yeah we got these three responses we think they're all finalists or yeah we got five responses but only two are serious finalists do demos with those serious finalists and again make sure that they're operating from a script that represents what you need to be able to do how you envision operating and you know that being said i would still give them space in that finalist demo for the the dog and pony show uh show us the things that we may not be thinking about that are really special special about your product just don't spend the whole demo on that and i think about those are all really good points and i think what can you do to bring educated evaluators to the process so that the vendor doesn't have to spend time doing dog and pony show um type reviews of things that you could accomplish through watching a recorded webinar or asking people to watch a product demo overview what can you do to bring people to the process so that the vendor doesn't have to spend time orienting them to the very basics of the software or the technology and you can get right into what's most important for you so this is uh david this is the last question that we got in advance of today's webinar i'm not sure if there are questions that have come in during the course of today's webinar but how can we make sure we're getting good estimates and i'll take this one since you took the last one this is probably another reason to do an rfp and the better your rfp or your rfi the more inclusive the more accurately you represent your organization the more realistically you work you represent your organization the more honest the more the more whatever you are the more likely you are going to be to get a realistic answer and the the truth is that when you're in when you're trying to get estimates around a project of this size vendors or at least good vendors they are equally motivated to giving you a realistic project estimate they want you to understand what the costs are going to be so that they don't have to come back to you later there's there are no vendors who think that a good approach is to under bid and then come in midway through the project and say we wildly under-budgeted this and an rfp a well-designed rfp gives them a sense of the scale of the project and is going to then lead to a better estimate i also encourage organizations or i should say i encourage vendors rather to give us a realistic estimate show us what you think this will take to do well some organizations like to share their budget up front um and the vendor might want you to but this sort of this idea that uh the idea that i'm trying to convey here is you really want to know from the vendor and you're hopefully finding experienced vendors in your experience what is a realistic project estimate and it's almost all the way through this webinar and i still don't think i've used a metaphor or a story so i here is my metaphor for this recently my wife and i we wanted to remodel both our kitchen and our bathroom and i guess originally i said i think we can actually do both and we got a bunch of estimates and guess what we couldn't afford to do both so it then became up to us it became up to my wife and i to decide how did we want to approach this did we want to dial back what the vision looked like did we want to get a different kitchen and a different bathroom or did we want to pick one and ultimately we decided we wanted to pick one and wait on the other but if i had started and said we only have ten thousand dollars and we have to do both i risk getting a kitchen and bathroom that might not have indoor plumbing uh and it definitely wouldn't be something that we wanted and lastly i'll say this um whatever process you choose to get realistic estimates and whether you use a film like or a firm like us um or do it yourself uh it's your job it's the organization's job to get realistic estimates this should be a partnership with a vendor but ultimately it is incumbent upon you to provide the information to get a realistic estimate i'll just add a couple of things here kyle um i think you know you alluded to this there's there's really no substitute for someone who's been through it before and having them on your side i'll put in a shameless plug here you know build of course has a lot of experience with this or you know have a staff member who's been through a similar type of implementation before give you a reality check of what it's going to take typically what i find is the implementation vendors don't capture all of the the costs they're incented in a lot of cases to keep the implementation cost lower so that you'll go forward with it and then put some assumptions around it a lot of times they'll call it maybe a best practice implementation and for some organizations that's realistic you check some boxes on a form they configure it ing to that you know what you selected from the menu uh and and maybe you're done most of the time i don't think that's how implementations go most of the time it requires some discovery some customization meeting unique needs and so i typically recommend at least a 25 contingency on the implementation labor uh if not 50 sometimes from what the implementation vendor initially says and i don't think you know i don't think the nonprofit needs to share that they're doing that i think it's better to keep it in reserves because things will come up in any enterprise software implementation that uh you you need to be prepared for it with a budget um and then you know i think the last thing is just make sure you read i mentioned the assumptions make sure you read the contract and how they frame the implementation in their contract what are the assumptions they're making about the implementation and are those accurate for your organization a lot of times it's easy by the time you get to the contracting stage to just sign off and say let's go when all of your assumptions are based on what you think they said not what's written in the contract and that that i've seen get some organizations into trouble i love the idea of having sort of an internal budget and a budget that you share with the vendor itself so that your you are already prepared if those sort of unknowns come up or some something that was unexpected comes up i think that's a great idea david i'd say you know keep keep a card that you can play right you don't have to play all of your cards at the beginning um and i'll just add here not specifically related to this we did get some other questions um i think some of those questions are outside the scope of this webinar there was a question about the nist framework which is a cyber security framework uh community i t may have a webinar about that um i'm just saying i don't know that they that's the type of thing that um they have any webinar plans for but it's a little bit more the type of topic that they would tend to cover um in a webinar someone else asked about not-for-profit legal services setting and leading software vendors i think that very specific conversation is probably more appropriate for a one-on-one conversation so please feel free to reach out to us about that and then we also did get a question kyle about um which platforms perform the widest array of functions and what tips can we use to try to figure out if that path is a good fit and i'll just point out we do have other webinars on what it means to take a platform approach and when is a platform right for you um and i would encourage you to you know look through our history webinars for uh some some of those topics i see crm platforms like salesforce and microsoft dynamics are not the only way to go about you know that type of project there are definitely other options erp options there are alternatives such as individual solutions combined with middleware uh but that's a whole topic unto itself so please look at our history webinars for more on that and i think what's interesting is you know for organizations that are thinking about moving to platforms and i'm sure that this is touched upon in a webinar or a blog post that we've done is that those have sometimes significant staffing considerations and staffing changes it might be entirely new roles you answered an earlier question david this idea of a business analyst role and it not being present in a lot of non-profits for thing for platforms there's also um sort of architecture roles there's technical roles and answering the question about how your organization's going to support those roles via either staff or through outsourced vendors i think that those those are important considerations for people who are thinking about making a move to a platform yeah absolutely kyle and i'll just say we we got a couple more comments here uh just on the importance of you know sometimes the software vendor is not the implementation vendor uh this is of course oftentimes the case with salesforce it's the case with microsoft dynamics and it's really important to look at all the costs both one time and maintenance related to you know choices like that and a couple of areas that can be overlooked a lot of times some are the transaction costs and payment processing costs uh which this this person mentions in the comment um and it but i think one other thing i would point out is if you're gonna adopt a platform like a sales force or microsoft dynamics uh or even an erp really you need someone in house who has some capacity you either need someone in-house with that technical capacity or you need to plan to have that implementation partner on an ongoing support agreement with you to really be able to support that sort of technology in-house so david i'm looking at the time we have just about two minutes left we probably have time for one more question if we have them otherwise i can wrap us up and share uh share more information about how people can get additional information some of the resources that you talked about but i'm not sure if we have any questions left in the queue i think that's it why don't you go ahead and wrap us up excellent well first of all david great to do a webinar with you today you did deliver on my hope that you would give me new perspective and new learning so i really appreciate you being here today the couple things david alluded to these we have a number of resources that take the form of blog posts webinar recordings today's webinar will be recorded and provided afterwards we'd also encourage you to subscribe to our newsletter which is a great way to find out about new content that we are that we've developed what be that blog posts or webinars here are some ways that you can directly engage with us david offered to answer a question specifically about the nonprofit legal services setting uh there's information about how to reach out to us via email connect with us on twitter connect with us on linkedin and then lastly uh community it is doing a webinar january 27th from three to four pm non-profit technology trends and uh roundtable i will be interested to see given some of the recent security events of 2020 the extent to which they touch on uh security you mentioned them being community i.t being a great resource for those types of conversations david so please do join in on the 27th and lastly i just wanted to thank everybody for joining today's webinar and i hope everybody here in the us has a great thanksgiving and we appreciate your attendance today thanks so much