I am very excited to announce that this website is being redesigned professionally by the best web designer I know, Eve Simon. What you’re looking at right now (assuming you’re reading this in September of 2023) is a website that I designed. Having worked with and for lawyers most of my life, I know the adage about fools representing themselves, and I’m here to tell you that the same is true of consultants designing their own websites.

In preparation for the new site (which I expect to have up sometime next month, I’ll make a lot of noise about it when that happens), I’ve been pruning out all of the outdated or irrelevant posts on this 300 post blog which I’ve been running for close to 20 years. I’m weeding out obsolete things like my multi-post sets on using Google Reader and developing on Drupal 6; most of the off-topic political posts; all of my “where I’ll be at the Nonprofit Technology Conference” posts, but not the recaps; and other things that over the years have grown embarrassing or irrelevant.

What’s clear is that, in 2009, I saw things differently because things were different. A big theme for me was that information security needs to be applied judiciously so that it doesn’t alienate users and stifle innovation at a time when the web was introducing new strategic tools for nonprofits daily. “The ROI on Flexibility” is still one of the best I’ve written, and it was important at the time. But I’d be a lot more cautious about suggesting that the need for security might be a problem today.

It’s interesting to see how my thinking about technology has grown, and how accurate or inaccurate my predictions were:

• In 2008, I explained very clearly why your org should be using Slack or Teams in addition to email.

• And I was really big on the theme that security threats and regulation were going to force nonprofits to either invest more heavily in IT staffing or get to the cloud, where it can be managed for them. That was a good call.

• But then there were the three posts talking about how Google Wave is going to replace email and Word, and I missed not just the boat but pretty much the whole ocean on that one.

• I was big on Wikis replacing word processing software, and I was close, but what has actually happened is that word processors now function a lot like wikis.

• I loved RSS. I still love RSS.

On the new site, I will need to treat these posts less like a blog and more like a book. I need to highlight the utility posts on topics like “how to write a technical all staff email“, “why help desk metrics are useless” and “why nonprofits need to compensate techies fairly“. These are old posts that are perfectly applicable today. In the early 2000’s, I had pretty relevant thinking on the intersections between technology and organizational culture, a lens that I bring to my current consulting work that I think elevates my assessments, which not only recommend what the company should do, but how they can do it given their budget, resources, and culture around technology use.

I have some valuable thoughts and recommendations here, but I can’t expect anyone to wade through it in reverse chronological order hoping to find them, even after the weeding is done. When this blog was active, the readership was relatively small. In the last five years, since I stopped posting more than once or twice a year, it gets little traffic. If any of the three people reading this have ideas on how I might highlight the good stuff on a new website that is in the process of being redesigned, I’d love your input.

Data Ethics & Security Panel.mp4 from Data Analysts for Social Good on Vimeo.

The risks fall into two categories: Internal and external. Internally, your staff might now be using home computers and routers to perform company business. Do you know how secure those systems are? Do the computers have adequate threat protection software? Do the routers have unique passwords?

Externally, the scammers are out in force and their texts and emails are extra compelling in an environment where we all are on a heightened alert for our health.

Certainly, organizations that had mature security plans and procedures were better prepared for this than those just scraping by. The presentation linked below starts by addressing the urgent items, but covers the range of what you should do both during and after the current crisis ends.

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First, I’m presenting a webinar today (4/21/2020) on Technology Best Practices in Pandemic Times for the Greater New Orleans Foundation. If you’re reading this before 3:00 PM EDT, you can register here. My audience, I’m told, will be 100-150 employees of New Orleans Nonprofits. My assumption is that half of these orgs are already in the cloud, so the switch to remote work wasn’t too technical a challenge for them, but that the other half have documents on a shared drive on a server and their options for connecting from home are difficult and likely insecure. Beyond that, what I’m seeing is that companies that are using collaborative tools like Slack and MicroSoft Teams to keep staff engaged are doing much better with this than the ones that just made sure that their people could connect and are communicating strictly through voice, email, and the occasional video-conference. Virtual work can be isolating and challenging, and the transition is about far more than just the tech. I wrote an article about this for Marcum’s CoronaVirus Resource Center a few weeks ago.

Much of my work at Marcum Technology involves helping companies with their CRM and document management implementations. While I support orgs on multiple platforms, the ones I see most often are Salesforce and Office 365. For the former, I find that there is some confusion as to what Salesforce is and isn’t. We know that it’s a powerful contact management and sales/fundraising system. But it seems like it’s being used to do just about everything these days. My take is that it’s better at some things than others, and that the investment is not always justified. My article “Should You Use Salesforce?” dives deep into those questions. Similarly, Office 365 offers a variety of tools for managing documents: Sharepoint, Onedrive, and Teams. I don’t think it’s as much a question of which one to use as it is how to use them in concert, making the most of each application’s strengths. My article “Managing Documents With Office 365” pitches a solution that makes use of all three applications.

But that’s not all! If you’re too late for today’s webinar, I have a few more scheduled. On May 6th at 9:00 Am EDT I’ll be doing a webinar on “Business Essentials: Disaster Recovery vs Business Continuity” for the Raffa Learning Community (Raffa being the nonprofit-focused division of Marcum; people that I work with regularly). And you can join me the next day, along with Jeffrey Bernstein, Marcum Tech’s Managing Director for the Cybersecurity Group, when we present on “Information Security Governance in Times of Pandemic” on May 7th at 1:00 EDT.

“Internal communication based on long-form writing, rather than a verbal tradition of meetings, speaking, and chatting, leads to a welcomed reduction in meetings, video conferences, calls, or other real-time opportunities to interrupt and be interrupted.”

and principle 5:

” Meetings are the last resort, not the first option.”

and principle 6:

” Writing solidifies, chat dissolves. Substantial decisions start and end with an exchange of complete thoughts, not one-line-at-a-time jousts. If it’s important, critical, or fundamental, write it up, don’t chat it down.”

All in all, the guide is highly dismissive of discussing things face to face, or, particularly, in group settings.

Now, I’m no fan of endless meetings, and I’ve worked at enough “management by consensus” nonprofits to know what’s what. But I have major issues with the advice above:

1. Written communication is written communication, and it only communicates words, not tone, not excitement, not how invested the person is in what they are discussing. You can’t easily bring people on board to your initiatives, or get excited about theirs, without the body language and vocal inflection that sells ideas as they’re discussed. We’re human, and we respond to emotion. Business writing is generally geared towards stripping emotion out of things.
2. The best business ideas are not ones that are written up by individuals, they’re the ones that are brainstormed up and refined by teams. This manifesto completely ignores the value of collaborative planning and strategizing.
3. Have you ever attended a scrum? The simple, face-to-face, focused meeting where everyone coordinates on what they will do that day? It’s much more efficient than doing the same by email, believe me.

This one killed me:

” If your words can be perceived in different ways, they’ll be understood in the way which does the most harm.”

Well, yeah! But if the words are spoken, then they are less prone to misinterpretation than if they’re written. Who hasn’t been advised to be careful with email, because tone can be mistaken? And, if I’m in a room explaining something to you, and I see on your face that you’re confused or offended, I can immediately pivot to address that.

But the mis-hits keep on coming:

“Poor communication creates more work.”

“Companies don’t have communication problems, they have miscommunication problems. The smaller the company, group, or team, the fewer opportunities for miscommunication.”

So suck it, big companies! Here’s my number one principle, which all of this “communication is dangerous, don’t do it unless you have to, and then only in small groups” advice:

“We make more drastic mistakes by under-communicating than we do by over-communicating”

I learned that from the best mentor I ever had, the Executive Director of a law firm that I worked at in the 90’s. In organizations, keeping information close to the vest is toxic. Lack of information fuels distrust. In my current work, as a consultant, I see more organizations that dislike and distrust their IT departments than those who get along with them. In each case, IT is terrible at communicating. They upgrade systems and software without warning anyone. They don’t respond to help desk requests until they’re ready to address the issue, leaving the user wondering if they even read it.

In the late 90’s I ran into a sticky situation. I was working as an IT Director in San Francisco at the height of the dot.com boom. Tech wages were rising quickly. And HR made a mistake and, on a routed email announcing the hire of my new Database Analyst, attached his offer letter. Every one of my ten employees saw it. My Database Administrator, who was making $10k less than that offer, was irate, and he stormed in my office with a salary guide that he found online that said he should be making $10k more. I asked him to do something for me and come back: “Find the next nine, similar articles and tell me what they average to.” He came back with a ten match average of about what he was making. Then I discussed the goals we could set to get him the extra $10k. I had similar compensation talks with each of my staff, and my relationships with each of them improved.

So my business style is to talk too much, and maybe reveal too much sometimes, but in the interest of all of my staff and peers being on the same page and feeling like a fully-briefed part of the team.

We now live in a world where our closest co-workers aren’t always in the same building, city, or country. That means that face to face communication is more important, not less, because the danger of alienation is higher, and you can’t build trust with people that you don’t see often. In the 2000’s, I had a job where my System Administrator was in Seattle, my Trainer was in Chicago, and I was in SF. After a couple of years of poor communication and teamwork, we went all in on videoconferencing, and it solved the problems.

The Basecamp manifesto goes on, and it has some good points mixed in with the bad, but the overall “communication is messy so do it very cautiously if you must” theme strikes me as the opposite of a good business practice. Businesses certainly need to be disciplined, manage meetings in ways that are efficient, and support the right mix of long form communication, social or instant messaging, and face to face. But many of the companies I work with suffer from issues caused by pervasive organizational distrust. Upper management doesn’t explain things well. There are no internal newsletters reporting on what’s happening. Strategic plans, if developed, aren’t shared in a manner that incorporates staff feedback, and staff aren’t asked for input at the start. When something bad happens – key staff depart or the White House drops funding – they don’t call all-staff meetings to discuss how they’re responding.

The organizational impact is simple. Staff aren’t engaged; turnover is high; the best people – the ones who want to make a difference – are discouraged, while the unambitious ones stay. Because you can’t manage people without interacting with them; you can’t gain their trust without sharing with them, and you can’t develop the best mission-focused strategy without collaborating on that strategy.

While geared somewhat for legal aid programs, the toolkit is fully usable for all sorts of nonprofits and businesses. It focuses primarily on document management, but includes advice on email, social media, and even non-technical information management practices.

The goal of the toolkit is to help orgs capture and easily manage not only the work product that they create, but also the thought processes behind that work. Too often, I’ve been at nonprofits that, after key turnover, knew what they had, like offices in certain cities and various programs and initiatives, but didn’t necessarily retain the reasoning behind the opening of those offices, or the strategy in pursuing some grant. Knowledge Management is about having all of the information that goes into your mission-based work at your fingertips. And this toolkit, hopefully, is a useful roadmap for implementing information management and knowledge capturing systems that will keep you focused on your key objectives. I hope that it will be helpful.

You can download the toolkit (for free!) here.

MAP has released an additional toolkit on securing your organization, and is funded to release two more. Idealware is overseeing the development with the help of subject matter experts like me. More evidence that the nonprofit sector is the BEST sector!