Unknown Speaker 0:01 Welcome to Engaging Ideas, the bi weekly podcast from Parsons TKO, bringing you conversations with mission driven leaders and luminaries to shift your perspective and challenge your assumptions on the art of the possible. Unknown Speaker 0:16 Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of engaging ideas, the Parsons TKO podcast where we talk to leaders and luminaries in the mission driven sector about their experiences to gather insights and ideas, to increase our perspective and understanding to always make sure you know, you are not alone. We are all in this together. Today, I am joined by Lindsay Nadeau, who is currently serving as the vice president data insight and campaigns at UNICEF, USA. And as a board member of APRA. Welcome, Lindsay. Thank you, Tony. I'm so excited to be here. Thanks for the invitation to come join your episode. super looking forward to our conversation. Excellent. I am so delighted you joined us I'm gonna dive right in because data insights and campaigns all within a title and a program sounds like a lot. But uh, you know, I'm curious, what can you tell us about, you know, how your team is organized? What's your primary focus and objectives are within the organization? Yeah. Okay. So let's start with how we're organized. Our scope is mostly what would be considered advancement services. If you're familiar with that sector of fundraising. Conceptually, it's like data and data out. And we really sit at the intersection of if it's fundraising, and it's data gives us the actual structure of the team. I have about five different workflows that roll up into what I call Philanthropy Insight, which is kind of the name of my team, because my title is a little bit of a mouthful, as you noted, I like to think about prospect intelligence kind of being the origin of a lot of the work that we do. They are responsible for lead generation, conversion tracking, capacity screening, due diligence, landscape analysis, feasibility assessment, answering questions, like if we're going to add more fundraising staff, where should we put them based off the geographic landscape of our prospect base, etc. So this is what you might call prospect research more traditionally, in our field. Another team that I lead is relationship management, which has kind of been an evolved form of Prospect Management. So this team does a lot of frontline KPI design and tracking, they lead what we call portfolio optimization in partnership with our prospect Intelligence Team projections and forecasting is very deeply rooted in the work that this team does. They also do a lot of business role documentation, like a lot of what they do is documentation and day like on the job training for fundraisers, like really coaching them about how to use some of the data and systems and processes that they build out. And then another team that ladders up to me is our data strategy and management team. I see them very much as the custodians of our data model or philanthropy. They are looking futuristically at like, where are all the different fundraising teams on the data maturity continuum? And how do we get them all to the most evolved and mature state? And what is it going to like? What are the projects in that sequence, I get them to more of an even footing, because we have different relationships with each teams. And then they also do a lot of business intelligence work, ad hoc reporting and analytics, project management with our centralized tech team who are really the brains of the operation, the scope of this team is just like absurdly fast, and they kind of become a catch all for things that don't fit in prospect intelligence, or relationship management. And this team also includes a sub team called gift processing, which every nonprofit probably has this work flow in a team. And they're responsible for getting all of the revenue into our system as quickly and accurately as possible. Last year, they did about 2 million transactions. So we're got a pretty big operation. And I very much see them as the first step in donor stewardship, and making sure that our donors are acknowledged, quickly and accurately. And then the last workstream that I'm currently leading is campaign planning. And I say that very much as a cross cutting team, because there is a role in every comprehensive campaign or special campaign that we're running for prospect intelligence and relationship management and data strategy management, right. So it's like, what we're talking about here are like eight 910, figure fundraising opportunities or campaigns, whatever you want to call them. So we have some, like, funding priorities, or we have like a comprehensive campaign, or we just finished our campaigns in the pandemic. Those are the kinds of campaigns it's not like a marketing campaign or a brand campaign. These are like really massive scale, where the entire organization is working together consistently under one campaign umbrella. So that's kind of how the structure of my team and our roles are set up. We've got about 20 roles right now. Some of them are freelance, but a full time workloads. And then our team is fully remote as well, which I actually take as a huge point of pride. UNICEF USA has been very forward looking and allowing us to hire the right people for the right job, and one of the cultural touchpoint Unknown Speaker 5:00 so that our team uses to kind of figure out how we work together. And what to expect of one another is something that we developed called the standards of collaboration. And it outlines those kinds of expectations and guidelines for how we work collaboratively across different time zones without being a person without being able to drop by each other's desks, etc. So that's a really important part about how we're organized. And then also, I would say, one other thing that we have developed over the last three years is an agile and adapted and kind of pared down Agile Scrum sprint methodology for project management, so much of what we do. Unknown Speaker 5:37 That's kind of how we're organized. And the objectives are a little bit I think, more straight forward, I see my team's mission, as you know, if we can help fundraisers raise money smarter and faster, so that then UNICEF can relentlessly pursue a more equitable world for every child, that is our job smarter and faster. Let's use technology. Let's use process improvement, automation, change management strategies. And what we're trying to do is equip leadership with data to make data driven decisions in particular, but also the entire rank and file staff, how can we get them to use data more? Unknown Speaker 6:14 Love it. Unknown Speaker 6:16 I wrote a lot of notes down while you were talking. I'm curious, cuz the three, you know, there was a prospect and there's the group that goes into the design optimization work, you kind of have documentation, I heart documentation. Unknown Speaker 6:28 And I had some questions about the coaching side, the data's data strategy holder, when you had mentioned KPIs. So like, is it one part of your unit that makes the KPIs for the whole, broader team that you're working on? Like, how are the KPIs conceived? And then how are they communicated back out to everyone. So there's the commander's intent, if you will, we all know these top line goals we're working towards, we probably have three different levels at which we're setting KPIs, we do it for our division, or the philanthropy division. And those are KPIs that roll up into the organization's strategic plan. I work with our chief philanthropy officer and some of our most senior fundraising staff, to gut check what the data is telling us we should set. And I also work with our executive office on those but like, those are really the things that I'm keeping my eye on that my chief philanthropy officers keeping their eyes that the board's keeping their eye on, where we get into more of the weeds with KPIs is when we do individual fundraiser, KPIs. So if you are a major gift officer or a director of major gifts, or a senior director, or, you know, all the way up the ranks, or you work in the corporate partnerships team, how are your KPIs different than how a major gift officer like more traditional version of major gift fundraising, would be situated? So the process for designing those is done in a little bit of data analysis, we benchmark like when we started this program, we've benchmarked what have we seen in the last couple of years in terms of face to face visits with donors, the number of solicitations at what thresholds then yield outcomes that we want, or as we transition to a longer term planning model, or major gift operates operation, we are putting more of an emphasis on multi year asks, as opposed to like an annual recurring amount that we just keep asking for every single year, and really trying to think longer. And so we basically, we think, from a leadership perspective, for the head of major gifts, or the head of corporate or whatever, what are you trying to achieve with your team? Where do you see the opportunities to grow? And what we, you know, what matters is what we measure, right? There's that mantra in our field. So let's put those into the KPIs. We then have to develop the reporting definition, right? But how are we actually going to use the data in our CRM to be able to quantify this. And then we have a training and communication plan where we launch it to the frontline fundraisers, there's usually a lot of dialogue, a lot of clarifying questions, because this is important to them. This is how this is one aspect of how they're going to be Unknown Speaker 8:57 evaluated by senior leadership, right? It's one of the biggest data's a part of the conversation, right? Not the entirety of it. So we do a lot of work to socialize and help people feel comfortable with them, and that they're there as a tool for them to equip them to advocate for themselves, and the results that they're seeing or where they need more support or the effort that they put in. And yet the cookie just didn't crumble their way this year, that they're doing the work to make the asks etc. So that's how we kind of roll it out. And then eventually, once we finalize everything, socialize it, we start on building a Power BI, or any kind of business intelligence dashboards so that there is automated real time and transparent and equitable analysis around progress to goal for each fundraiser. And then the other version of KPIs. We do our own KPIs for failing to be insights, we have a lot of data driven ones for ourselves about how many prospects we identify how accurate our projections are, etc. Thank you for that. Follow up on that just when you're getting those KPIs and the numbers and your Unknown Speaker 10:00 discussions with the frontline fundraisers? How do those conversations go when you're trying to socialize it? And you know, I think it's that get everybody comfortable with it. And so they feel supported by it not burdened by it? Because it feels like how do you lead those? And is it like one big group at a time? Is there a lot of one on ones that go into it? Traditionally, what I've seen not just at UNICEF, USA, but across many of the nonprofits that I've worked at, it's one big launch with a large group conversation. Now we've vetted it through leadership, right. So maybe the top tier of that team has seen it and fed into it and are, in some cases very much the decision makers, right. And our chief philanthropy officer has weighed in as well. And for some teams, they've been doing this for years. So it's more about like, what are the KPIs this year, and they've already we've done the change management work to you will be evaluated in a data driven way, at least is one component of the evaluation, we did just recently launch KPIs for our institutional philanthropy teams, which include corporate and foundation partnerships, and a member based organizations team that we call global cost partnerships. And so for those three teams, for some, it was very, very new. So we're very fresh in the change management work with those teams to help them understand why building or why feeding their data into our CRM is important for institutional knowledge. And leaving a digital footprint about past strategies considered the the cadence of outreach that it takes in order to secure grant or corporate partnership, to demonstrate how they are collaborating with other teams outside of the team that they work on. Because the intersectional fundraising asks, help maximize our fundraising success, we've done a lot of work in small focus groups. And we were able to kind of home the KPIs that they thought would best represent them, which is hard. Because every team is a little bit different with those different lines, corporate foundations and this member based organization, and they want to prioritize different things. And so we have to start from a very basic level, we have to walk before we can run. And my CEO, I distinctly remember him telling me as we went on that journey with our institutional philanthropy colleagues, we just need to start somewhere. Once we start it, once we build a report, once we have everyone looking at it, then we can like layer on refined approaches. But let's start with the basics. And that was so encouraging to know that we had that kind of understanding of what it takes to build something that is data informed, at least so that we can then evolve to a truly data driven place, because some of our institutional philanthropy teams have a very rigorous data entry process, and some have less more in my flat file and spreadsheets. And so it's, we're accounting for a disparity among even this, this cohort of people who raise funds from organizations, it's been a lot of re emphasizing, reinforcing, reinforcing is one of those letters in the ADKAR change management, you know, structure and your work is never done there ever. And even from the beginning to the first couple of months to the end, we're still constantly focused on reinforcing and it actually also took input from our chief philanthropy officer speaking directly to those teams about how she viewed it. And I think it was important for them to hear directly from her. Some folks thought that this was like a Lindsey thing, or the CPO, you know, was coming up with the idea of doing KPIs. And I think it really took her saying this is a normal thing. And fundraising, I know that it is they change, it can feel threatening. It's emotional, perhaps. But this is not different than what other nonprofits are doing. And we are going to be a best in class one. So I can't even say how important like that level of leadership is when you're trying to make these large data driven changes. Unknown Speaker 13:56 Thank you for all that. Yeah, I hope everyone was listening in. And yeah, getting that buy in from the top is extremely important. And the backing to make sure that you could push the word forward, just for people listening to I mean, a lot of times do I feel like if people get where do I start? And I think, you know, based on what your SEO is saying, it's not where it's now. Like, just start, pick, pick a few things like the blank page is the worst thing ever when you're writing, right? And then once you get some stuff on it, now you're like, oh, I can edit. Oh, I didn't like that piece. I can move this around. Oh, now we see how it works. Yes, definitely. You know, the first year that we piloted it at UNICEF, USA with our major giving team, we had some huge lessons learned and it's okay, when you were being innovative and piloting things, to say a little that didn't work, and you're to make it even better. But you've just got to keep that it's an experiment. We're going to build it better. It is iterative. We end like I actually had my chief philanthropy officers say to the institutional philanthropy teams, it's not going to be perfect in year one. It's not and we expect that it won't be and we we invite your feedback Unknown Speaker 15:00 But we want you to engage with the process. Right? Right. So I think that's a helpful way. Just name it. And that can help disarm people from being like, well, this is terrible. We should just scrap all of it right away. Yeah. So important. Yeah. That's the evolution that we're all going through, right. And so much transition to change and transformation of the rod on us by COVID. And all the things we're trying to keep pace with and technology so fast and yeah, had to get those inputs keep learning keep working with it. I'm curious to just what does you know you had talked about there's it sounded like there was like a, almost like an open dashboard that's stored somewhere that everybody can see is that now there's no if you're a remote, there's no board in the office. So is it like on a wiki or an intranet? And if that's one way of reap, I'm gonna tuck two questions in here. Sorry, if that's a I'd like to know how how people look at that, how often they look at it, where you store it. So other people listen to Mike get a sense. And then to I'm curious, just like, what to report readouts look like, what does it look like when you're doing the analysis? Or they have group conversations? Do you see with each group? Is it just something you email over and they look at? So two questions? Sorry. Unknown Speaker 16:10 Alright, so yes, it is open to everyone who is in the philanthropy division, we're not necessarily like our marketing communications team. Right now what we have in place is we're major in principle giving, and we are building out the specification and requirements for the institutional plan for the one since we just came out of setting those KPIs. So for major and principal getting anywhere in the philanthropy division can go into our Power BI BI portal, we have all of our revenue reports, our pipeline reports, board, giving reports like all of the things in this one for a one stop shop. And one of them is the KPI dashboard for individual staff members. And so anyone can view it. And I think that that provides equity, it can be challenging for some and I did work at an organization that did not agree with this. But HR said we were not allowed to share that information, because it is related to people's performance goals. And in the same way, you wouldn't have an HR portal about your goals open to everyone that they had us to permissioning so that only the supervision pillar could see individual staff members performance to goal. So those are two different approaches you can take I personally, very much value, the transparency and the equity that having an open source KPI dashboard provides to an organization just because two people with the same title or same level of experience have different KPIs. Targets doesn't mean that it's an equitable, you have to take context into consideration. And so the most important things when we're doing goal setting is to understand what the rationale is for why one target might be higher than the other. So when we set our KPIs, they are considered thresholds, we want to see everyone hit this baseline, but they can always be higher, it could be higher, because they have a donor who is, you know, being receptive to a $10 million conversation. And that might not be typical of that title level. But we then want to set an ambitious aspirational goal for them. And so having it open allows people to see for like whether it's equitable or not, but then also to for supervisors, and other leaders to have conversations about the reason why it's maybe someone's on leave for six months of the year, because I'm preparing to leave. And that's why someone's goal is lower. And then your second question I'm blanking on when I need him. So what does it look like when you're doing analysis or report readouts or sharing it? So that would go back to our portfolio optimization meetings that I briefly mentioned, our relationship management team leads those and right now, the prospect Intelligence Team also sits in on them, but it's really what we're talking about is more relationship management, II, because they're the ones who create the KPIs. And the fundraiser is invited, and their supervisors usually, in most cases, also invited and so it's like the pure coach who's from my team, who's the neutral, I understand the data. Here's what the data is telling me when I look at how on track you are to meet your KPIs. And then the supervisors there to help like reinforce or underscore other, you know, management impressions or observations, as someone who actually like has been in the frontline position before and knows how to think about challenges or successes from their view. And obviously, they have the management authority, like we do a lot without the authority, right? We're really, we see ourselves as the pure coach to say, you are really strong on the number of asks you've made, but I'm seeing that the you know, average ask amount is actually kind of low and not hitting that. What big asks do you have in your pipeline, let's look at that together. To see if you focus on these three that's going to get your average ask KPI, you know, or, Hey, you told me you just went on a trip to such and such region. Your visit count looks a little low or we may be just a little behind like what visit should we make sure we're getting in the system for you. So it's a little bit of like accountability, buddy. Unknown Speaker 20:00 but in a very benign, like, we want you to be successful. And we're here to help be your backup spotter for where there might be some gaps in what we know you've done or how to prioritize your work to make sure that you hit the KPIs you're supposed to accountabilibuddy and love it hadn't heard that before. Unknown Speaker 20:21 Delivery. So that last question on this follow up, and then I got another one for you after this. But the way you're phrasing it at the end, you use the word spotter. And so I, I work out and I get it, and I do like the metrics when I'm doing it, and I like them delivered to me, because then it does make me think how I could be doing better. It's like, a lot of people, you know, runners or athletes would talk about perceived exertion versus actual exertion. You know, if you've got something where you're watching your heart rate, and like, you feel real tired, but then you look down, you're like, I'm really not working that hard. Is it that kind of like the accountability, buddy, were people are seeing it? They're like, Oh, yeah, you're right. I had a gap there, I didn't realize it. Like, are people like, is it that type of utility to someone who's then out back in the field, just trying to be getting the conversations going? Because any of us, you know, for myself doing sales work with my company, it's like, you gotta go out and have conversations, and then you forget all the small pieces you might need it to do after the conversation. So is it kind of like that a little bit? Yeah, I would say that's pretty accurate. Now, I will say like, every fundraiser is different. And so the approach that we take, we are sometimes more hands on, we're sometimes more hands off. Like there are actually some fundraisers who used to work in like my data sphere, who are my best friends. They go into the front line, because they ask the best questions, or they come in, and they're like, I saw the KPI report. I know, these were my three gaps. I loved Unknown Speaker 21:44 what we talked about now. And like those are the unicorns of fundraising. From my perspective, obviously. But yeah, I would say that that is generally how it operates. Yeah. Enlightening. Your last interview there, when you talked about the team, you talked about campaign planning, and it was a lot more cross organizational. So you know, one of the questions I did every year was, you know, how does your work on day to fit into the broader fundraising and outreach strategy, which I think we've covered a little bit, but then, you know, at the higher level of the org strategy and planning, so yeah, how do you map KPIs to the main organization? And then when these campaigns come in, that you have to plan against? I imagine they're coming from a CEO level type of decision. Unknown Speaker 22:28 To correct me, yeah, yeah. Well, the board the board, the CEO, and our chief philanthropy officer, and then of course, the CFO holds a lot of the purse strings. So yes, that's a very critical group to help us determine when we do and don't activate on large campaigns. Unknown Speaker 22:45 So I can answer the org strategy one first, I think that's a little bit higher level. And then like that, we get a little nitty gritty at times. But I've got a couple examples that came to mind. Unknown Speaker 22:55 So for org strategy, the strategic planning process is something that our executive office leads, obviously. And I help feed into that, because one of the goals, one of them is like a more integrated and maximize fundraising operation. And so I work with my chief philanthropy officer and are in the executive office, we have an executive vice president who helps lead on some of the planning work. And they have certain objectives like sometimes this strategic client comes to me with like, these are at least three of the KPIs the board wants to see you focus on. And for instance, one of those was a longer term solicitation pipeline, I'm like, that is my jam, I'm here for that, I'm going to go all out on making sure that this organization can do a little bit longer term planning and have a sense of where we might land. So we get some of them that way. But then there are others that we are electing to add to that. And so one of my chief philanthropy officers, initiatives and priorities is breaking down the silos that used to exist because we our fundraising operation used to be split across three different divisions, and she's integrated all of them. So she wants us to work together outside of our teams cross pollinate, when we are soliciting an individual who is a corporate executive, how are we also blending in a corporate partnership, ask for instance, like that's how she wants us to be thinking about it. And so we set a KPI for our division and at the team level for each team, and then also at the individual fundraiser level, to reach a certain number of integrated strategies where they are co creating blended, ask strategies, right, so the KPIs can be done in different ways. And then I work with our tech team on saying, Well, how are we going to define what is the data marker in our data structure for an integrated collaboration, right? So that's kind of one of those big broad things that we're working on. And then there is a dashboard that will show our progress to the board on them with like traffic light colors, or whether we're on track or not. And a lot of the work that we do with our strategic plan is underpinned by something we developed and we're in our third year now, which is our four year financial model. So our strategic plan is four years so therefore we have Unknown Speaker 25:00 A correlation with our four year financial model. And since a lot of the forecasting and projections work at UNICEF, USA comes from the philanthropy division, because we are like the primary source of revenue for the organization that starts with me and my team. And we look at industry growth rates by fundraising sector, we look at our actuals, and the trends and the growth that we've experienced, and we take into account outlier things that may not be replicable or repeatable, and we kind of, we do the data, and then we blend that with our gut. Right. So my chief Lampi, and I should be officer and I are, you know, aware of where we plan to invest where we think certain sectors have expansion opportunities, who we think a campaign might resonate with, and I mean, audiences, to the to the audiences are. So we take the industry growth rates, we take our actuals, and the trends and then we blend in a dash of gut instinct or out, we think we can push that stream more, or we just invested there, or we think that they're going to resonate more with a campaign. So we're gonna push that one up, we're gonna find that one out. Unknown Speaker 26:08 And so that's another way that I think we are having an impact on the future of the organization, the long term planning, because then we use the targets from that financial model, which gets updated every year for goal setting. So if we're thinking about our next fiscal year, how much are we expecting that our foundation's team is going to be able to raise and it's the starting point instead of just like throwing darts at a wall. And then one of the aspects of our strategic plan or one of the goals of our strategic plan, rather, is digital transformation. I'm sure a lot of nonprofits have this as a huge priority. We're, we're not alone. And we have a tremendous partnership with our centralized technology team, I think they would even say we are their biggest clients. And we have piloted a lot in partnership with them. So we were the first division to pilot business intelligence, we used to be like, when I got here, we used to be running Excel reports for like how much we raised. And we'd only do that once a week. So we had like, you know, tremendous knowledge gaps across the organization, and everything was in flat files was not great. They said, Hey, we've got, you know, a dashboard platform now. And we're like, Sign us up, like, how do we get there, show us the path. And so we partnered to pilot that for them. And now other divisions, like our Meridian communications team, which they have dashboards and like different platforms, that digital platforms that they use for direct response work or digital strategy, but really bringing it in house and being like Master and Commander of our own data, is something that I think the technology team has really helped us think about the strategy about how we do that. And we were the first to really set like data driven KPIs. Because you know, all of the different divisions that UNICEF, USA, they're at different levels of their own data maturity, and how much is in a centralized data repository versus things are just manually tracking. And so we're lucky that we're positioned that we use a CRM, right, it's all there for the taking. And I really been working closely with the technical side, my team, the smart, Unknown Speaker 28:04 they have been working very closely with the technology team and trying to push for a multi source data repository and like build out, what does that roadmap look like? And what data do we want in there, so that we can start to cross functionally distill down the insight, instead of just thinking about the fundraising lens, let's pull in information from a marketing lens, advocacy call to actions etc. Like, let's blend this all together so that we can get more robust 360 view of our constituents. And then, you know, we're also thinking through with the technology team, what would a self service model look like, in terms of reporting and analytics, and we're at the beginning of this, like we've kind of Unknown Speaker 28:45 outlined what we think some use cases would be from, like, super advanced, and like, you're plugged into the warehouse, or the lake or whatever the reporting resources to like, preset datasets, to more training on ad hoc query stuff, and we're helping, I mean, they're the experts, they're going to help us actually like, we would give them a concept, they're gonna then help us like, refine that, and really fleshed it out for what the use cases are. But those are some areas that my team specifically gets to think very broadly very futuristic Lee and kind of be on the innovative cutting edge of UNICEF, USA, because we are so lucky to have such strong partnerships with our executive office team and our Unknown Speaker 29:27 technology team. And then you also asked about outreach. So Unknown Speaker 29:31 there's a lot of different examples, and we've talked a little bit about optimization meetings that we lead that are very data driven. I think that that's one of the biggest horses that we have on guiding outreach on a micro level, like helping a fundraiser prioritize their work, and who they should reach out to and why is one of the most impactful things that we can do to kind of influence the outreach strategy. We're also doing a lot of data analysis of say Unknown Speaker 30:00 Our direct response Donor Program, which is under $25,000, generally, and trying to identify who is right for an upgrade, who should we try and see if they will be receptive to a leadership getting or a major giving or principal giving strategy. And so we're screening for capacity, we're looking at their affinity indicators through a composite score we have and then we are trying to move those prospects up the continuum, to deepen their relationship to build more connection to give them one on one tailored information about the impact that they're having as a donor, and then eventually, hopefully solicit them for a larger gift. One thing that came up recently, actually, and I know we're not unique here, either, every nonprofit, like the Holy Grail of funding has unrestricted funding, right? That means we can use it for anything that we need, right. And when you think about it from the donor lens, it means that they trust us to make that decision. It's really what it's about. It's about trust. And so we're always thinking about how we raise more unrestricted funds, and my senior vice president of individual life became to me, she was like, We need to help our fundraisers understand who has given to unrestricted in the past, who hasn't renewed this year, and unrestricted gifts. So it's like a light bulb, or Saigon, if you're familiar with those acronyms, but like last year, but they haven't done it this year. And so we built a Power BI dash, actually, we had one already built, that's a gift table, which kind of shows donation amounts in brackets, and how many gifts are in those brackets, and then what the total value of those gifts are just so we can kind of understand the distribution of gifts. And we just very quickly layered in the fundraiser, who manages that donor, and a drop down for the type of funding so that they can default to unrestricted and themselves. And then they see across the last 10 years, who's made unrestricted gifts in the past, but haven't this year, and therefore we're driving the outreach to prioritize donors who give us the most flexible funding, and we have the strongest trust with essentially is what they're saying, then. Okay, the last example I thought about this, our corporate donors are unique in that they have like a hierarchy structure of subsidiaries, and parent companies and their gifts kind of come in from various sources, and various points throughout a conglomerate. And so our constituent record management, around corporate partnerships, is a challenge. And it's a challenge for many nonprofits, and keeping them clean, and not having duplicate records, or making sure that they are linked as a subsidiary to a parent company is something that we don't have the human power to stay on top of as much as we would like to. So one of the things that we're trying to do is partner with someone who has like a big data set on the corporate linkages, and can use like address and other attributes like metadata about the corporation to overlay into our CRM, like, here's the structure we have for this corporate entity, can you tell us how to link them through the relationships table of our CRM. And I think that that will actually help unite our outreach strategy as we interact with these corporations, because then, if everything rolls up the way it's supposed to, to the parent record, we can say, hey, mega corporation, you have like 50 records in our database. But what that tells us is, you've actually given us this huge amount, and totality, but before it was all fragmented and fractured, right. So the way that we steward them, and prioritize them, because we can see the whole totality is really just going to be the outcome of a data cleanup project that my team is working on. So those are some examples. I love that hope anyone listening heard that data cleanup example, ways to get in there. And do it. I, you know, I took some notes too, in the early part. And you know, you had mentioned data and context, when you're working with the chief philanthropy officer and putting a lot of heuristics as well in there, you know, it's like, Hey, this is what we think we can get done. Because the team might be feeling good this year, the winds have changed and maybe COVID that are back, you know, we can try to go forward. So I think that's important for people to hear, because what I run into a lot, you know, and when I worked in house, it be charitable trusts. We tried to do this a lot, too, which was, it's not all just quantitative, like qualitative matters, too. And you're working there because you're not an AI robot. And you do have experience and heuristics and life lessons that you're bringing forward to how this works. So just because when I was in DC in December chat, GPT just released sort of publicly and everyone who was in the communication space, it was just like, what, this thing's gonna write everything now what do I do, but it's like, it's still just a machine like it doesn't have your doesn't have that gut instinct for where things could go. Unknown Speaker 34:48 It's the Self Service Model Two, I might want to dive in a little bit everyone. You know, Stefan Byrd-Krueger is on my team chief analytics officer here always talks about democratizing data. You know, I know in big Unknown Speaker 35:00 You're wargs, it gets a little harder, because how are people accessing it? Where are they accessing it from? What are they doing when they get it? Are they putting something back into the system? That now changes the system? Like, how do you manage that? And we're in conversations with organizations from larger ones like yours to smaller ones. And they they are all thinking about how can I get this of these folks can get in there and access it more easily. So I'm not just servicing them all the time, because they care about it a lot. But I don't have a good way to do it. So yeah, if you could talk just a little more about what you all are thinking in terms of self service models, and what kind of protocols governance needs, your thinking about to go into that I'm sure there's a lot of people in the audience that would be really interested in hearing about how you all are thinking about it. So a couple really smart people on my team who are way more technically inclined than I am, when we previously were using a data lake as our primary data storage. They had direct access into that and were able to build their own Power BI dashboards. Now we try to align like, if this is a report that tells us exactly how much money we've raised this year, let's let the tech team make sure that they have like, validated, vetted it, etc, they'll do the primary build. But if it's something like my prospect intelligence team has their own KPIs for how much they prospect the conversion, Unknown Speaker 36:23 you know, lots of different things, but it's not going to go to the board, etc, right? Like we've tried to think about fit for purpose, who's designing it, given the risk of that data, perhaps not being 100% accurate? Unknown Speaker 36:35 someone on my team was able to go into the lake and build their own dashboard, or that or like the gift table report that I described with something that someone on my team actually built. And so I've got folks who we would put in our metaphorical and this is not like fully vetted and launched yet, but the tier one like the super users, who are not in Central Tech team, but who have some skills, and know how to leverage that kind of a resource. So I think like, that's, it's a decentralized model, because, you know, nonprofits resource constraints, we're never going to have enough people in the technology division that we would all want to make our data dreams come true. And so how do they then empower people who have the aptitude, you know, desire to lean into that and become their super users? So we've got that as tier one, we're switching over to the warehouse. And so we're thinking through, like, how do we get them plugged in to that now? And how do we scale the two people I know on my team who like actually know how to do that, where how do we scale that to a few other people and create maybe four to five super users on my team is kind of where I'm thinking, Tier one is going to go, but it's going to be a very small number of people in the flag of the division, and they will like they're going to be on my team. They're gonna be the data people. And fundraising. Tier Two, I believe. Now, I'm like, my team is probably gonna be like, Well, that wasn't quite right. But tier two, I believe, is having prepackaged datasets. So to your point, how do we get the data so that people beyond my team can do like can can answer their own data inquiries at times without having to know how to use the ad hoc tool and our CRM to do their own query design? How can they pull datasets down, and be able to look through for what they are seeking to answer. And so for that, you know, I've worked in shops where I'm able, in a self service capacity, I'm able to filter, like our overall constituent base down to the population I'm looking for, and then able to use that population, that segment, to run it through a standard output. And say, I want like the constituent report, or I want the transaction report or whatever it is, based off the population that I whittle down on my own parameters. And I didn't have to have any coding, I'm not a coder. I'm not a programmer. But I love data. And so that's the model that I hope that we can kind of explore as people who are the data focal point for major giving, or the data focal point or corporate. So it'll be probably a handful of people on each team, who then know what they're looking at. With these data sets, they know where to go to find them, they understand what's in there. And they then understand how to manipulate the data and excel, right. So they're going to be like the end user super user, which is different than what I've got on my team. And then I believe that tier three is a little more like an all in all open form, like who can just access the data in a little bit less sophisticated of a way. We're trying to put data at the fingertips. But I think the most important part about the self service model is that it helps Unknown Speaker 39:46 nullify some of the needs of data literacy and I don't mean that like in the pure way that I just said it, but when you go into our CRM, there are like five different amount of fields. And if you use the wrong amount field, you Unknown Speaker 40:00 got the wrong data and you don't stand a chance of getting the right answer, right. And so even people on my team actually learned in the last year or two that all of these different variations of amount exist. And so in order to have the data literacy you need in order to use the Self Service query tool in our CRM, there's actually a really high bar. Unknown Speaker 40:18 And so we do get a lot of requests that are technically someone could do in our CRM, and you don't need a fancy self service option. But if we want to limit the risk around people not knowing what the right amount field is, for what purpose, and having more prepackaged, like datasets would allow people more confidence. And we will spend less time saying, How come you guys got a different answer than I did when I pulled the same data? Right. So it kind of helps put everyone on a little bit more of a equal footing on how we use data and kind of can speak the same language about some of that's how I see it. If you brought in the folks on my team who have way more technical skill, they would have a lot more commentary to add on that. Unknown Speaker 41:05 I think that's wonderful. Actually, thank you for that, that truly eliminating hope you've really listened to that is just so there's that nuance, right? There's these five different fields, and they mean five different things. And if you're not steeped in it every single day, but you want an answer, and then you're like, What the hell like? Unknown Speaker 41:23 i Yes, because I think that's the curiosity that I find for a lot of groups is they don't want to know, but all the five fields are they want to know the thing that's impacting whatever they're trying to figure out at that moment. So I really liked that idea, the prepackaged queries Unknown Speaker 41:37 as part of that self service model. Thank you for that. I'm going to switch this up just a little bit, but keep rolling here. So in an earlier discussion, we had you pointed me to apres ethics and compliance committee Diversity, Equity and Inclusion dei data guide, which is an incredible resource, we'll make sure it is linked for everyone in the show notes here. Unknown Speaker 41:59 But you know, just real quick if you for anyone, before we dive in, so you can give us a little bit of what that guide was all about sort of what's in and how it came to be. Just for anyone who isn't familiar with APRA? Who is APRA. Unknown Speaker 42:13 What does an APRA write? So for 30 years, we were known as an acronym, APR, a first we were The American Prospect researchers Association. And then we became the Association of Professional researchers for advancement. And now we're just APRA. Like we've we've taken away the meaning of each of those individual letters. And we are now a noun. So it's capital, a lowercase pra. Unknown Speaker 42:37 And, you know, the reason that we did that was kind of controversial. The reason that we did it was because we are more than the sum of those letters and prospect research is not the only discipline that Ashgrove apre community represents, we have members who definitely do prospect research, but also do relationship management, data science campaign planning. And often some of our members, their roles are like they were five different hats at a smaller shop. They might be data management, annual giving, CRM, administration, stewardship, etc. So we no longer wanted to feel tied and wedded to those four letters. You just can't sum it up really, that way. So that's kind of like the background on APRA. The elevator pitch for APRA of like, who are we as an organization is, we're the premier professional association for individuals who strategically harness information and data to drive fundraising for their nonprofits. And what we tried to do, we do a lot of education. Unknown Speaker 43:41 But we provide tools, educational resources, and networking, that help those that work in that prospect development field, which is kind of the umbrella term we use for some of those domains that I mentioned earlier, to achieve the missions of their nonprofits. And I just have to underscore that, like, if any of the things I said about prospect research religion, if any of that sounds like you, abra is an amazing giving resource and a community. And we are the type of people that it's like, Hey, can I see that KPI report that you just mentioned? And yes, screenshot here you go, like we are so transparent with one another, and really want to drive innovation and cross pollination of ideas. So please, please go join the apple community, you can have a guest account, we've got a new associate membership level, it's the best thing I ever did. And like once I found APA, I realized that it wasn't a job. It was a career path and a community. So I hope that underscores for folks how important APA has been to many of us. That's powerful. And, yeah, just going on the the giving of the community. I mean, the the DEI data guide y'all created is very impressive, you know, I'm curious to know what what prompted it, you know, how, how was it developed within a group, as you know, it gives APRA or how many voices were involved Unknown Speaker 45:00 Did it if you know any of this? Oh, yeah. Unknown Speaker 45:04 leniently. I do know this, I was on the board when it was great. It was my first year when I was on the app report. And I was actually the liaison to the committee that created it. So I got kind of like a front row seat, how it was created, although I wasn't one of the officers of it, the ethics and compliance committee is the committee, it was probably about 12 to 15 members at the time, who helped develop it. And they just sat and built an outline, and took accountability for certain sections of it, like different authors focused on different sections. And it went through a lot of review, we had other Unknown Speaker 45:39 like, we have a we had a at the time, it was Dei, now we call it the E IB, ja, for justice, belonging and accessibility are the other three letters that we've added, they layered in their feedback, their thoughts, their advice, as we were building that out on the ethics and compliance committee. So that was kind of the process that it went through. And how it came to be. I mean, I think Apple does this really well, we just recognized a need in the market for a written best practice, on the ethical, you know, collection, storage and use of identity or diversity related data. And I think we had been having a lot of conversations in our industry, the nonprofit industry, the data industry, about the philosophical approaches to like why we needed to change what we were doing with data, but from my experience in the field of Prospect development is often the field that gets things done, like we will write the documentation, we will brainstorm the ideas, we will innovate something new, we're kind of like the activators of fundraising. And I think that that's how a lot of chief development officers see us and they come to us for things like that. And so our association work very much reflects that, like the industry had a need. And we are often the ones who sit at the intersection of ethics and fundraising, or data and ethics. And, and so it was a very natural thing for us to do. And you know, when we created it, there just wasn't anything that provided like a tangible resource to support data driven decision making and advancing and supporting diversity, equity inclusion in philanthropy. And so we usually hold ourselves to the highest standard in trying to represent professional ethics, and the work that we do day to day as opera professionals, so the guide was just natural for us. Yeah, it's incredible resource. And so you know, to tie it into your work at UNICEF, USA, I mean, what have you been doing in your current role? You know, having that frontline experience being part of it, getting to see it, getting to see it come together? You know, what all What are y'all doing in terms of data ethics? And D? Unknown Speaker 47:49 Yeah. Unknown Speaker 47:51 No, I think with the UNICEF, USA like scale that we operate at, and being like UNICEF being a partner of choice for so many donors, because of the credibility of our brands and our programmatic expertise and the scale at which we operate. Unknown Speaker 48:09 It comes with a lot of trust and immense responsibility related to data. And so we hold on, we try to hold ourselves to a very high standard. And I think there's some work that we've done, but we're not perfect, and we have more work to do your work is never done in this regard. So UNICEF, USA, we've got an amazing, Unknown Speaker 48:30 compelling moving Vice President of Diversity, right? Racial Equity and belonging. And so we don't use te n, we use d r, Eb, because that racial equity piece is very, very important to be like naming that very explicitly is very important to the work that we do as a nonprofit, and to our leadership. Unknown Speaker 48:52 And so they are centralizing the overall effort at UNICEF, USA. And then with within that, if we take it down a notch to the philanthropy division, one of the things that is being developed right now, and it's not fully fleshed out, so I can't really share a lot, but is an inclusive philanthropy strategy. And it's going to very holistically look at things like how do we engage different diaspora communities? And how do we do that authentically? Unknown Speaker 49:23 And how do we diversify our board pipelines, and things like that, as we're thinking about potential candidates to nominate and my work gets intersect with that, which makes me very happy. But our chief philanthropy officers office is the one who's leading the inclusive blend three strategy, but I think that it will have a significant impact on any campaigns that we launch in the future and how we approach our work. So that's really exciting. Unknown Speaker 49:48 But those strategies are still very much like coming together in a coordinated way. So me and my team, what I have put in place and I putting in place again is me Unknown Speaker 50:00 statement, I have an amazing team member who her passion is D and I work. And I'm so very lucky to have her on the team. She has spearheaded a lot of the work as we think about how we can do better with data within the realm that we command. And she has helped us draft in identity data management policy, which offers guidelines around how the prospect Intelligence Team conducts prospect research and outlines the ethics around, Unknown Speaker 50:29 you know, we're going to, we are only going to use self identified information, we are not making assumptions, we are not looking at a photo or a name and inferring, you know, racial markers or ethnicity, etc. And so that has been a real educational touch point for the prospect Intelligence Team. And I would really love to be able to like start expanding and scaling that document the guidance that it provides to the entire division, which is something that I talked about with our fundraising leadership. So I hope that that is on the horizon soon. Another thing that I've been able to do is kind of put it on the radar of our data governance committee. So we have a data governance committee at UNICEF, USA. And it's I think it's about in its second year at this point. And you know, some of the things that we do on that kind of a committee are aligned around what do we mean when we say campaign and we outline like different kinds of campaigns, we can all speak with the same vocabulary. And so one of the things I've asked is that we think about who has access to what information and why, like, if we have a data pan, which we do on the back end of our CRM, does everyone need access to that and all of the indicators that could be demographic, race, ethnicity, etc? Do we need everyone to have access to that? Can we think about the ethics around it and how and how we agree as an organization to leverage that data or not. So that's a conversation that I hope will have soon, as well. But then one area where we've actually already been able to start seeing some good results in is our work with consultants. So the vice president of Dr. Ed partnered with our general counsel to create a procurement policy, we didn't have one for a little while, but they really pulled it together quickly. And a big focus of that is making sure that partners that we choose to contract with how they align with our organizational values around DRDP. And so that was like, wind in my sails as I was looking at some new contracts, we're gonna get out. And we were able to make it part of the scoring rubric, and a big focus of the interview with some of our finalists. And, you know, the consulting world is kind of all over the place on like, some are like, yes, it's our jam, here's everything we do. Others, it seemed like an after that, perhaps, or like they had tried and it hadn't moved forward. And so during the interviews, were able to dig in quite a bit. With some of the applicants, the consulting firms I had applied, and really push them on like, well, how a lot of this work scope that we were contracting for it involves analytics and modeling. How do you root out systemic bias and predictive modeling? What have you tried, what have the results been trying to help them understand what it means for us and what we would like to see. And then, actually, the candidate that we went with, like, they had a pretty robust DRDP program at their own firm. And I think that did factor in to why they were the right fit for us. And then when we got to the contracting phase, I didn't see anything about it in there at all. And I was like, hold up, reflect back to me everything that we talked about in the interview, about how you are going to bring the values of our DRBD work into the data analysis work that you're going to do. So we had the opportunity to do that. We added it, which is great. Unknown Speaker 53:58 But another area that we're thinking about a little bit forward looking, but I think it's a really good opportunity is we're gonna be doing a constituent survey, a digital survey for our constituents, and probably the next six months. And I very much want to put more than just my one team member, probably someone from our central DRDP office, the person who will lead inclusive philanthropy, I want all of their input on how do we design that? How do we communicate the intent of the survey, and who's going to have access to it and how we're going to use it. So I see that as like a very tangible way that we can make sure that the the survey design is equitable, and that we are not marginalizing people just by the way that we set it up, etc. So that's an opportunity that's coming up, it's very much top of mind. Unknown Speaker 54:48 And then I'm lucky enough that I have this amazing resource of a head of DRBD at UNICEF, USA, that I have been able to partner with them. We're in the initial phases of it, but Unknown Speaker 55:00 This fiscal year was the first year that my team and I are starting to engage with the team and like the centralized TR Ed team, and really think about like, what would it look like if we start to integrate that way of thinking, questioning, Unknown Speaker 55:16 sharing different lived experience in our day to day work? And what would the intention be? I mentioned the standards of collaboration earlier as like a really important cultural touchstone for my team, there's no mention in there that we embrace the DRTV values of our organization, and that we try at all times to be explicitly anti racist. So how do we do that? Not in a performative way. But how do we put that at the center of the way that our team operates? Unknown Speaker 55:45 And how do we engage in the work that intentionally blends personal and professional and just the growth that we have, that we all need to do? So? Unknown Speaker 55:55 That's a little bit of a rundown. Like, I think we have a long way to go still. But we're starting and I think that's the most important part. You said it earlier. Right? This works. It's it's always ongoing. It's we got to do it. But it's it's great to hear you have so much going on is it's that operationalizing part that really starts to matter. You know, a lot of statements were made over the last couple of years. And then how do you actually start weaving it into the operations of your organization where it's not just the thing we talked about? It's this starts to become the standards, and then eventually, that's just the way you operate? Like, here we are. It's like, this is normal, and is all flowing. It's great. Thank you for that. And a lot of people took some lessons from that. And you know, one thing I hear a lot, maybe it's because I run a consulting company, but is that you know, work on data is never something that has an allocated budget, and a lot of nonprofits. I think there is a clear value of having good data that is well understood, though some curious what advice you might have for other organizations, on how to structure teams and or practices or their data practices that help define that they're not just a value, I think people see the value, but that there's a need, and there's a lot of pieces that go into it. And if you're not budgeting for it, you're not going to get to the place you want to get to what advice would you have for folks that don't know? How can they convince people that this is something to start thinking about as a line item? is a really hard question. Unknown Speaker 57:25 That's the biggest question out there. And you know, with nonprofits in general, we have such fixed resources, it's really hard. I'm super lucky to have a forward looking leadership team at UNICEF, who I'm not paying lip service, I swear, super forward looking super empowering around the importance of data and data strategy. And that hasn't always been my experience elsewhere. And so if you were at a nonprofit, where you are struggling to convince leadership like that, that is very challenging. And I have at times left shops, because we haven't gotten the vision alignment around what our team is capable of in the prospect development sphere. Unknown Speaker 58:06 But I think your question really gets at like the nonprofit servation cycle a little bit. Unknown Speaker 58:13 And I remember this moment where I saw Darren Walker, the Ford Foundation, President, do a 60 Minutes interview where he was like, Who wants to invest in a nonprofit with no infrastructure? Who like why would the donor do that? Why are we forcing the nonprofits to work without the data budget that they need in order to be on the cutting edge and work more efficiently? And that really resonated with me? And so I think that this question is very much in that. Lane. I'm glad that people are starting to realize like more and more that nonprofits do need the types of resources that the for profit sector has, I think it's incredibly important. Unknown Speaker 58:52 So how I would structure it, there's a couple of different resources that you can consult in our field. To advocate for more resources. My team has grown a lot. Actually, when I started, about three years ago, we had five staff, we're up to about 20. Now, some of that is new headcount. Some of it is a restructure. So the gift processing team that reports to me used to be in finance. So like, six positions were moved over. But the rest, the difference is all net new headcount that they've chosen to invest. So I'm very lucky. And one of the ways that I was able to advocate for new resources was by looking at the AHPRA salary survey, which is a terrific member benefit. And it gives you like industry standard benchmarks that there are usually seven or seven frontline fundraisers to a prospect development staff member. Now, we currently if you just look at the staff who comprise prospect development on my staff, Unknown Speaker 59:54 which is only a fraction of the entire team that I lead, we're at 14 to one. So that gives you a sense like we have Unknown Speaker 1:00:00 We are understaffed by half. And yet I actually think, compared to some other shops I've worked in, we're pretty lucky. So I don't know who the mythical unicorns are out there that have seven frontline fundraisers to one prospect development staff member, but using data points like that, and helping senior leadership understand that if they're going to invest in the frontline, and grow those teams, that they have to help you keep pace with it, we should never lose ground on resourcing of the frontline versus the operations or data side of things. So that's been helpful to me. I'm also a fan of asking for what I want and settling for what I need. Unknown Speaker 1:00:40 And really having like that growth mentality set out and saying, like, what I really want is this, and it's like five new headcount. But if you give me two, here's what I can do with it. Right? I also think a lot about you know, I've been talking about headcount, everyone always wants headcount. And that's the hardest thing to come by projects. So like that corporate data cleanup project that I mentioned, carries no benefits, no overtime is you have to worry about whether you lay that person off if something were to turn in the economy, right. So what kind of data projects can you advocate for, instead of headcount has been really helpful. Also meeting your senior leadership halfway, so I could have said, No, my team is not going to build Power BI dashboards, that is Tech's responsibility, what strategically, I was like it's in everyone's interest. If we meet them halfway, we're not going to get all the headcount we need for our tech team, we're not gonna get all the headcount I need from my team, let's try to do some cross training and help each other out. And that builds my team's expertise in influencing in the past, now UNICEF, USA, but in the past, we've also looked for, if you're, especially if you're in higher education, fundraising, looked for grad students who are pursuing data science or business intelligence degrees, and they are a very economical way to come in and help you do data transformation and clean up and visualizations. So that is one strategy that's worked elsewhere. For me. I also think part of my success in like trying to advocate for either the role of my team to expand or the size of my team to expand or funding for specific data projects, has been positioning leadership at the center of the data culture. And so when I had my chief philanthropy officer go talk to the institutional philanthropy team about their KPIs. I am using her visible leadership right to frame the importance of data, it's not just coming from Lindsey whose job it is, to make sure that the data is strong and accurate, and that we can use it. This is the culture that our very top leadership is setting. And so I think if you do that, it lends more credibility to it, it makes people sit up and pay attention a little bit more, because it's not Lindsey, the squeaky wheel who loves data. I also think in terms of like, how do you demonstrate the ROI of a data project, you can do this, it seems hard, but I promise like, it's never gonna be perfect. But you use it as a directional indicator that there was a payoff for it. So for instance, Unknown Speaker 1:03:12 we did a project recently, within the last year or so, where the solicitation pipeline that we had in our CRM could not be trusted, let's just say that it was not complete, the data that was in there was not accurate. When I arrived, not even all the teams were using it. They just had some flat files that they were keeping track of all of their assets. And so we really went through a three year project to integrate everyone into that solicitation pipeline and have them feed into it. And we got to that point. And then the next thing we did was we inventoried all of the complaints about why that was really hard for them, what doesn't work for them and the structure of that form? And we analyzed, how many errors are we seeing things that we know are obvious errors, like they're saying they're expecting to make the asset and that asset was six months ago, something's not right. Right, they either failed to update it. They weren't nudged to do it. Or they could have actually had a typo in the date too, and put like an old date. And we do have like human error issues too, even if they're trying to do their due diligence and update it. Unknown Speaker 1:04:17 So what we did was we compiled all of those requested changes. And we completely streamlined the the form that they input the data into. And we introduced a conditional logic, we help them understand like, when to put something in and to feel comfortable doing that. And it helped increase like or decrease rather all of the error rates significantly. Like I used to look at the pipeline and say 30% of this isn't accurate. And I can tell just because certain things are not the way that there's like data missing from different fields, or like they've put one thing here that contradicts something else here. And now it's like less than 5% gives me pause. And obviously that's just Unknown Speaker 1:05:00 is an obvious data problem, there could still be things that are like out of date. And I just can't tell that from just looking at the data could be a little stale. Because it's been a week or two. Since I've looked at the record, it's not up to date. But we've taken the obvious data error rate down just by more intelligent design and getting everyone to use it and then repeat back to us all the things that they wanted improved. And so like that kind of an ROI, of saying it used to be this and now it's that as a baseline is really helpful for them. Because now as we are like, talking about the need to build a Power BI dashboard for the projections that we run, which we actually have already accomplished, thank goodness, Unknown Speaker 1:05:36 we're now looking at like, Well, how do we retrospectively say, this was worth the investment from our tech team, and the licensing fees and all that stuff. Because we can tell how accurate our projections are now, because we have this like centralized resource where we can go back in time and say, at this time, we projected that based off this information, and it landed within this percentage of accuracy, right. So I think that like there are definitely ways they're not perfect, they're directional, but you can demonstrate the value, the time saved, my team's on having to nudge the fundraisers about their pipeline being inaccurate, it's easier and more straightforward for them to use it, they complain to us, and then we spend less time talking about it. Now, those are all like the qualitative things that you mentioned, that I think being able to switch to Unknown Speaker 1:06:22 the quantitative can also help demonstrate the value that you're having. And now I'm like trying to advocate for a headcount to basically shut the fundraisers out of the pipeline. I don't know if this will ever happen. But like, I've worked in some places where my team would be the only people who can update that data. Because we basically just take like a qualitative download from the fundraiser about, well, this is what happened with this solicitation. And then my team just translates it into all of the data so that the accuracy can get within like one or 2% of rejecting my last shot was able to do that. So if I can demonstrate like, Okay, we did this, and that was zero, I did this and that was error. I know, give me one more resource. And we will get you here is kind of like, approach that takes. Unknown Speaker 1:07:05 Excellent. Thank you. Yeah, I like that idea, too. I mean, find the projects, show the value, make it a little smaller, build on one ask get the next one. Keep the winds flow and Unknown Speaker 1:07:16 that approach. Thank you. This has been very illuminating and instructive conversation. And for anyone who's a regular listener knows I have one question that I end every podcast with. And so Lindsey, what is your go to song when you need a boost? And why? This was so hard to answer. I love music and like I love prioritizing things, but I don't like prioritizing my song list so so a lot of time thinking about this probably tension Unknown Speaker 1:07:43 isn't an artist that is missing from your lineup, because I did look at the full playlist that you have. I'm gonna go with a throwback. Missy Elliott, who's control that. I want music I can dance do that gets me going. Love it. Missy Elliott is coming to the playlists. And I hope everyone out there if you need a good boost, grab that playlist on Spotify. Give it a listen, Lindsay, thank you for this conversation today. Really appreciate your time. It's very illuminating. We're going to go through all of this conversation, grab a lot of links for the show notes for everyone. A lot of things you mentioned here, I think, especially a lot of the apple resources will make sure they get up there for everyone and thank you so much again, really appreciate it. Thank you, Danny. All right, bye now. Unknown Speaker 1:08:29 Thank you for listening. Join us again for more engaging ideas with your host Parsons TKO CEO Tony Kopetchny. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a comment and share with your friends. Send us your feedback at create change at Parsons tko.com. Transcribed by https://otter.ai