Rob Burke: Welcome to the focus fundraiser. This is where I get to spend time with seasoned fundraisers and consultants in the nonprofit space and discuss what they've learned and give you their hard-earned wisdom on what moves missions forward. Because something that I believe is doing more does not lead to success. Focusing on what matters most does and prioritizing that. My guest today is Tim Lockie, founder of the Human Stack, and one of the sharpest voices, in my opinion, in the nonprofit technology space. So he built a seven figure Salesforce firm. And then he left that to work on the part of tech that is often overlooked in my opinion, the people. You don't often talk about people when you talk about tech. So if your CRM feels like it's a messy closet, or if your team is avoiding the tools that you're paying for monthly, Tim and my conversation will talk about that. So I can't wait to dive into it. Tim, welcome. Start us off by sharing a bit about yourself, your history and path into the nonprofit sector.
Tim Lockie: Yeah, thanks Rob. It's great to be here. I love that you're focusing on focus. As an ADD person, like this is the elusive part of life for me, focus. And so I think it's just, I I yeah, I think it's I think it's really helpful, especially in fundraising. it is it's just such an important element. So like I said, my name is Tim Lockheed. I did start a Salesforce consulting firm back in 2010.
Rob Burke: Yeah.
Tim Lockie: But I was already working in nonprofits for over 20 years at that point. So I've been in the social impact space all of my career. I really want to leave the world better than when I found it. I feel like this is the space where I can most likely make that kind of contribution. I wanted to be a speaker, author, you know, all of that. And what I found is that I was helping speakers and authors with their tech all the time. And I finally just decided to lean into it and really pursue the data side of nonprofit and social impact organizations and work. And the more I dived into that, the more I found this is really what is holding back a lot of organizations from creating the type of impact that they know they can make and they just can't quite get there. And you know, technology is just one of the leverage points, and especially with AI, it is just a leverage point for small teams. And so I think it's more important than ever. And I'm really glad to be here talking about that with
Rob Burke: Awesome. We're gonna touch on AI in a bit, but I think it's important to to call out what you, you know, you call your company as the human stack, so it's very people focused inside of tech. I think something that you've said is that no amount of software or code solves the people problem. So I'm curious to know, let's break that down first for our listeners. What does that look like in an org? And How do fundraisers know when it's a human problem and not a technical problem?
Tim Lockie: Great question. The reason I called myself the human stack, and I think everybody probably gets this, but I just start from the beginning because I find it helpful. But what I found over and over, we were helping organizations, hundreds of organizations, get into CRMs and work in their technology. And what we would find is that almost every time the solutions, the real endemic solutions that we found that were on, you know, that were That seemed like they were tech stack, you know, like do we have the right CRM? Do we have the right collaboration suite? Should we be on Google versus Microsoft? All of these questions that really do matter. I'm not saying that they don't. But they almost always had the roots inside of human solutions. So what I found is that even though there were problems on the tech stack, the solutions were all in the human stack every single time. And I found that so few technologists thought well about how do we bring the same level of engineering and architecture and rigor to the human side of the equation in technology that we do to the tech side. And so yeah, I think that when it comes to nonprofits and especially fundraisers, fundraisers are at the mercy of their systems almost all the time. You know, and I know great fundraisers who are out there slunging it out, making the asks, doing the work, you know Filtering the lists and sorting them and doing all all of these things over and over, the same steps every month, because their CRMs aren't holding that information. And so they're going in and they're creating the lists that they need and they're distributing that to their team or working on it themselves. But the next month rolls around, they have to do it all over again. The next newsletter rolls around, they have to recurate the list. The next, you know, over and over. And it's exhausting and overwhelming. And One thing I love about humans is that we're lazy and we hate dumb work. We just absolutely hate it. And so it grinds on we do not mind hard work. Like I've never met a human that is passionate about what they do that minds hard work, but but we all hate dumb work. And a lot of tech problems are just piles of dumb work that we know instinctively it doesn't have to be done this way, but getting at the roots of those issues. are actually embedded in human systems that are pretty difficult to tease out unless you've got leadership buy-in and you've got the right kind of budget expenditure, you've got the right job description around these are really tricky issues to solve. And so, you know, every month you're just gonna recurate the list.
Rob Burke: What are those signs that you see oftentimes that a development team has maybe thrown in the towel on its database? how do you turn that around? Like what what you're talking about is bad data, is that correct?
Tim Lockie: it's partly bad data, you know, but I think that there are like ten big big issues that you see in technology. And I'm like going to blank on almost all of them right now. I was like, what are those 10? I cannot remember off the top of my head. But they are things like we can't do the reporting that we want to do. We don't really trust our data, right? we don't know if we have the right solutions here, is another one of them. You know. Siloed data, you know, is another one. And I think part of the issue, Rob, is that we have the wrong image in our head about what the problem is. So here here's the image that I feel like if a team is feeling if what I'm saying resonates with you, right, in in in the work that you're doing in your nonprofit, whether you're on a small development team of just a few, or just yourself even, or whether you're on a large development team, if if this is resonating with you, what I'd say is. Your organization is like an orchestra when it comes to technology. Right? And so you have instruments are your tech stack like you've got a crm you've got your business app suite you know probably either using google meet or you're using slack or something right you've got your collaboration tools but most organizations even small ones i were with a small team of like nine people they had over 48 systems and so you know those are your instruments in the orchestra and then you know you've got your the notes that you're playing on the page. These would be like the all that's your data, right? So, and and and then you've got your musicians and those are your people, you know, and what I think is hard to understand is that you can't just play one section and sound good. Right? This is an actual a a whole organization issue and you feel that in different ways. And so the problem that we have with tech as an orchestra is that we don't like the way we sound. And so we keep investing in new instruments, right? Like we're gonna change out for a new instrument here. You know, we're gonna upgrade, you know, we're gonna do a little bit of a harder arrangement of the William Tull or o overture or whatever, right? And what we have not done is really focus on we have a musician problem, right? And you can't solve a musician problem by throwing more money at instruments. It's never gonna work. And we know it's an instrument problem because if you brought the Philharmonic into play, like those musicians to play on your tech stack, they would do great. It would sound good. So we know what we what we need to understand is that if we have a musician problem, we need to find musician solutions. And that's human stack. That's a culture issue. That's it's not even adoption, actually. It's orchestration. Adoption is just whether a person can play their instrument, right? Probably people can.
Rob Burke: Mm. Yeah.
Tim Lockie: That's not really the problem. You can have people that can play their instruments really well, but unless they play it together exactly right, you really don't sound that great. And that's really what the problem is with technology, is we have to actually get good at how we sound together. And that's more about finding the right conductor or the right strategy or the right timing, you know. So I think that if we start to think about this as a musician problem, we start coming up with better solutions almost immediately.
Rob Burke: I love that analogy. And I think it's interesting to hear somebody that is all about tech talk about the importance of the human side of it and the buy-in on leadership. Because that's you're also really talking about you t you talked about somebody the conductor, like the the leader needs to be the one that's pushing excellence through the people for versus trying to shore up the problems with new technology. Is that correct?
Tim Lockie: Yeah, exactly. And and that could feel like it's got wider application than just to a development team. But one thing one thing I'll say is conductors actually don't conduct to the entire orchestra. Conductors conduct to first chairs in different sections. And sections follow that first chair. Like first chair is a big deal. Turns out I've never played in an orchestra, by the way. I just got into the analogy and started looking stuff up. So Just if before people come at me like talking to me about their experience in orchestra, like I was a choir guy and not even that great. So that said, it's it's interesting to me that orchestration isn't about everyone, it is about key champions on different teams. I call these guides. And what we need is in the fundraising department, we need somebody who is you know even in a small team, need somebody that when there's a problem with your technology, CRM. You know, the e-blast system that you've got that you're using, like, you know, fundraising teams use multiple different tools. And if there's something that goes wrong, almost everybody will look at that one person. Like, I don't know who they are. Like they probably don't have an official background in tech or anything, but either they've been around long enough or they were just like more willing to try or whatever. But everybody kind of knows who they are. If teams would just take that person and say, You know, one sixty-fourth of your time, one thirty-second of your time, right? Is this part of our of tech for for us, right? Just a small carve out on their job description. So it's not off the side of their desk. It's not accidental. It's not incidental, right? It's an actual part of what they do. I think what you would see is that you could you could create a lot more momentum in that department, in in your fundraising team and around your fundraising team. And you know, then you start to give that person training, right? You get that person to whatever conference they need to go to. You help them get a carve out so that they understand their CRM a little bit better. Give them a budget where they can go and find a consultant that can handle the five small issues that are actually holding their team back instead of trying to replace their entire CRM. Right. I I firmly believe fundraising teams are a job description away from actually being able to solve a lot of these problems. If they just thought about it as a human problem that we could solve within our team without an expensive consultant where we just really dial in on that person. Because teams really know their tech well. Like this is what I know after working with hundreds and hundreds of teams. So does that make sense? I feel like that's not the standard perspective around tech, but I think that it I think it should be. I wish it was. I think it is a lot more achievable for teams.
Rob Burke: Mm. Mm. Yeah. Yeah, I I think y you know, the person you're you're describing is that the techie that became the techie by necessity, right? They're wearing it they're wearing every other hat in the org, but nobody's managing their CRM, so they took on the the mantle for that. w when you're talking to those
Tim Lockie: Right. Yep. They showed like two percent interest and suddenly they're in charge of one hundred percent of it, right? Like that's right, yeah.
Rob Burke: Right. So when you're talking to those people or you're talking to leadership about those people, what is something that you've found that they should stop doing, those techies that are in that role by necessity?
Tim Lockie: They should stop doing the work until they have a job description that said they should.
Rob Burke: Mm. That's tough, right?
Tim Lockie: I they should dig in their heels. Yeah, absolutely. It me it look makes you look like you're not a team player. But really what you're doing is you're saying this too this work is too important for us to not actually do it well. And I think that so the first thing I'd say is there's a massive power differential. The person that you're talking about is usually three layers under whoever's leading the organization, right? So there's a really big power differential there. And one thing that I would say on that. is that my work is switched from really focusing on that person. I call digital voluntals. Like they got voluntold that they were working on the digital systems. My work my heartbeat is always for that group. Like they're working the hardest they are doing so much good work. The fate of their fundraising team rests on the data that they are working to make sure works well. Right. So like mad respect, but what I found is that even when I would go and create systems that would help them. And it would really transform their work. Their leaders would have no idea of the value that they were providing. Right. I've seen teams where that person left and they had to fill that with three different people, right? Over way over six figures to fill that one position. So, you know, just at a at a like at a money level it makes sense for the economics of it. But what I have found is what teams and leaders need most of all is to is to have a strategy around that. And so, And the very first question is, is your culture in front of your tech or is your tech in front of your culture? and until you know that question, you really leaders don't know what move to make next. Because if your tech is in front of your culture, right? And for 84% of the organizations that I've pulled, their tech is in front of their culture and their culture's struggling to catch up, the solution's not more tech, the solution is actually more people. Is more investment on that side. And so you need to know what's going on with that. You probably run into change capacity where people have, you know, they you've saturated their capacity for change. They just can't handle any more change. That's before you hand, you know, all of the disruptions around federal aid and grants that are not coming in now. That's before you handle all the disruption of what's happening in the social sector, like all all of those things contribute to that, to that saturation. And so people are really overwhelmed and and tech is one of those overwhelming places. And so I think you have to know first of all which is leading, tech or or or your people. And if it's your tech, then your next move is really to get your people in front of your tech. And that's a different move than if really what you need to do is dive into your tech and work on it a little bit. Does that make sense?
Rob Burke: Yeah, I think so break it down for me. when you say tech in front of people or people in front of I'm in front of culture, culture in front of tech, what are you getting at there? Are you talking about that the the the tech is dictating how the culture is run?
Tim Lockie: Yeah. Mm-hmm. That's good question. I think I'm more looking at it like you know, if your culture is behind your tech, you'll have issues like we don't know what the plan is overall. We don't know if what the roadmap is. We've got these, you know, strat plans that are three years out or whatever. All of them are gonna have either one or more like direct or indirect objectives around. Things that require information, information gathering, measuring, you know, technology, et cetera. Some of those are related very directly to fundraising. Some of them are indirectly related to fundraising, but they all kind of tie together. If people aren't clear about what the plan is, if they don't know that there's a roadmap, then it's kind of anybody's guess. And that also means that leadership hasn't committed to a budgetary outcome for those issues. I can tell you what'll happen next with that. Is that those issues are gonna pool up, get so large that teams feel like the only way out is to get a new CRM? And so instead of diving in on small issues incrementally, it stores up and then they spend a lot of money focusing on getting a new tech system in place, right? And that actually puts tech further ahead of their culture every time we do that. Does that make sense? Is that helpful?
Rob Burke: Yeah, that totally makes sense. And I I think I'm gonna lead you into the next question here then because I think it you kind of just answered it, but tech rollouts when when they do get new tech in, and it can die after it's launched, right? You get all this forward momentum and then it it dies. So what separates adoption from just becoming expensive shelfware?
Tim Lockie: Yeah. So I have a I I kind of have a unique view on this that I've emerged over a lot of years of doing this because I saw the same thing. We would work with the client and you know, after we left, they wouldn't use it as much. We'd have a support bucket, those would get used, you know, and then after that, then there it would just drag on and teams were frustrated and it would feel like it just wouldn't ever really perform the way they wanted it to, etc. During the life of that project though, things went pretty well. And I took a step back and started to say, what if the reason that things are going well isn't because of the tech project, it's because they're actually coordinating their efforts. And so I just started to create a service where instead of doing a tech rollout, we did the things you do in a tech rollout, which is you have a weekly meeting, you look at the problems that are coming up, you figure out a way to solve those, you meet monthly to see like where we're at. And we just didn't add New tech on top of that. And what I found is that that is the forever state teams really need to start operating in. It's like bookkeeping. Like, at what point do you stop reconciling your accounts because they just work? Right? Like, there's no point, like, that's not how it works. There's a certain amount of maintenance that needs to go on. And the big the the big lie that big tech has been selling for years is that you can install tech. It will change your life and you don't need to do anything afterwards. If you just get the right tech, it's effortless. And that is just a crock. Like that's just not actually true. And so yeah, I I feel like yes, that is a problem. And you do need to still have rollouts. I'm not saying that you don't. And they need to be done well. All I'm saying is when the tech is installed, just don't stop the thing where you s you meet and keep the engagement high because engagement is actually the problem. People disengage. And then it kind of all goes, it all slides. That engagement, another word for that engagement is accountability. Right? So what we actually have been giving up is accountability that someone's tending to the system. And so I yeah, I think that that again, that's another major red flag to me that that tech is in front of culture. Does that does that exp is that jive with the experience that you've seen?
Rob Burke: Mm. Yeah. Yeah. Hundred percent. I think adoption often comes down to ownership. Somebody needs to own the system, the tech, whatever it is. There needs to be a human in the loop with that. So yeah, I couldn't agree with you more on that, Tim. All right. we didn't we haven't touched AI and we're already at twenty minutes, but I so I just wanna touch it a little bit. We'll bring you back on in in a few months. Let's just talk about AI for for a full episode, but
Tim Lockie: Yeah. Right. Sure, yeah. Yeah, glad to.
Rob Burke: I I said we were gonna touch on it, so let's touch on it at least. Y you helped shape fundraising.ai, correct?
Tim Lockie: yeah, I mean I wanna be very clear, like Nathan Chappelle, Mallory, like were the but yeah, I was around for the original edit on the first on the framework and then have been around for the summit every year and am part of the part of the team. Yep, on the advisory team.
Rob Burke: And I yeah, and I bring that up just to give listeners like you have a very ethical approach to AI, I i I think. So I I'd be curious to know your I don't know, ten thousand foot view of how should orgs, how should fundraisers let AI into the work that they are doing right now and where should they keep it out?
Tim Lockie: Yeah, I'm gonna I'm gonna make three points around this for the sake of time and would be fun to come back on do a podcast around AI. The first thing I'll say though is AI is an accelerator and it is an amplifier. It will accelerate and amplify either the way that well and it and it rests on the infrastructure that you already have both for your human stack and for your tech stack. So your culture and your tech is going to rest there. Right. So it will amplify and it will accelerate what you're doing. And if you don't have strong culture practices in place, it's going to amplify the lack of those processes, right? And and and humans are feeling that, feeling that deep in their bones, and they can't always rec they can't always articulate what's wrong with it. So they blame AI. But actually what they have is a structural problem inside their organization around how tech is probably not talked about enough. Right. So Point number one. Point number two is I would just say humans are the loop and that what we need to do is focus on the agency that humans have rather than the automation that AI can bring. That doesn't mean that we don't use AI. In fact, I use it a lot. I really like it. I know how to use it well. But all of that has happened because I took the time to look at a framework and develop one for myself and then it's helpful for other people that says what can I control, what can't I control, what things are good in life and what things are bad in life, how does AI affect those things? And then how do I handle the parts of AI that are creating like negative impacts in the world versus the beneficial and responsible use that I can participate in when I'm using AI? That just helped me kind of clarify where's my agency personally in deciding how to use tools. And then the third thing that I would say about AI is use the tools you're paying for. Right now you're either in Microsoft or Google. I've never met an organization that's not in one of those for their core email platform or whatever, right? That's your like maybe you don't love Gemini. Like it's okay, learn it. Like you're gonna find that it does a lot for you. So you're gonna have a base tool that everybody can use that is inside of your Privacy and security policies. That's your base, you know, it's either Copilot or Gemini. And then for, you know, very practically speaking, you're gonna probably want a specialty one as well. And that'll be Chat GBT or Claude almost all the time. So that I would say focus on that base level for your whole team and then get specific with one of those other tools. That's I I I I know that's like just glancing off the surface there, but I hope that's helpful.
Rob Burke: I think that's super helpful. I can agree with you more. I love it. All right, Tim. I always end with what I call a tactical takeaway, something very practical to give to fundraisers that they can do today to move their mission forward. So what is one thing that every fundraiser should do today that you believe matters most?
Tim Lockie: Yeah, rel relative to this conversation, I'm sorry to be a little bit self promotional here, but relative to this conversation, if you go to the human stack slash or humanstack.com slash quiz, there is a there's a six question quiz that you can take there that actually tells you if your tech's ahead of your culture, your culture's ahead of your tech. I would say go find the answer to that immediately because you really do need to know which problem you're solving. So that would be my most tactical thing is go and and Take that quiz, see what it tells you.
Rob Burke: Fantastic. We'll put that link in the description as well. Tim, thank you so much for joining the conversation today. You we're a wealth of knowledge.
Tim Lockie: Thanks, Rob. It's always a always a pleasure to talk with you. Really appreciate it.
Rob Burke: Yeah. for those listening, how can they connect with you?
Tim Lockie: You can find me on LinkedIn. You can also f email me at tim at the human stack.com. Either of those are great. I'm really excited to hear from people. So let me know. Reach out.
Rob Burke: Awesome. And if you're curious about how DonorDoc can help you find clarity, build retention through what we call smart stewardship, you can visit us at donarddock.com to learn more. And we will see you next week.
Tim Lockie: Yeah, thanks Rob. It's great to be here. I love that you're focusing on focus. As an ADD person, like this is the elusive part of life for me, focus. And so I think it's just, I I yeah, I think it's I think it's really helpful, especially in fundraising. it is it's just such an important element. So like I said, my name is Tim Lockheed. I did start a Salesforce consulting firm back in 2010.
Rob Burke: Yeah.
Tim Lockie: But I was already working in nonprofits for over 20 years at that point. So I've been in the social impact space all of my career. I really want to leave the world better than when I found it. I feel like this is the space where I can most likely make that kind of contribution. I wanted to be a speaker, author, you know, all of that. And what I found is that I was helping speakers and authors with their tech all the time. And I finally just decided to lean into it and really pursue the data side of nonprofit and social impact organizations and work. And the more I dived into that, the more I found this is really what is holding back a lot of organizations from creating the type of impact that they know they can make and they just can't quite get there. And you know, technology is just one of the leverage points, and especially with AI, it is just a leverage point for small teams. And so I think it's more important than ever. And I'm really glad to be here talking about that with
Rob Burke: Awesome. We're gonna touch on AI in a bit, but I think it's important to to call out what you, you know, you call your company as the human stack, so it's very people focused inside of tech. I think something that you've said is that no amount of software or code solves the people problem. So I'm curious to know, let's break that down first for our listeners. What does that look like in an org? And How do fundraisers know when it's a human problem and not a technical problem?
Tim Lockie: Great question. The reason I called myself the human stack, and I think everybody probably gets this, but I just start from the beginning because I find it helpful. But what I found over and over, we were helping organizations, hundreds of organizations, get into CRMs and work in their technology. And what we would find is that almost every time the solutions, the real endemic solutions that we found that were on, you know, that were That seemed like they were tech stack, you know, like do we have the right CRM? Do we have the right collaboration suite? Should we be on Google versus Microsoft? All of these questions that really do matter. I'm not saying that they don't. But they almost always had the roots inside of human solutions. So what I found is that even though there were problems on the tech stack, the solutions were all in the human stack every single time. And I found that so few technologists thought well about how do we bring the same level of engineering and architecture and rigor to the human side of the equation in technology that we do to the tech side. And so yeah, I think that when it comes to nonprofits and especially fundraisers, fundraisers are at the mercy of their systems almost all the time. You know, and I know great fundraisers who are out there slunging it out, making the asks, doing the work, you know Filtering the lists and sorting them and doing all all of these things over and over, the same steps every month, because their CRMs aren't holding that information. And so they're going in and they're creating the lists that they need and they're distributing that to their team or working on it themselves. But the next month rolls around, they have to do it all over again. The next newsletter rolls around, they have to recurate the list. The next, you know, over and over. And it's exhausting and overwhelming. And One thing I love about humans is that we're lazy and we hate dumb work. We just absolutely hate it. And so it grinds on we do not mind hard work. Like I've never met a human that is passionate about what they do that minds hard work, but but we all hate dumb work. And a lot of tech problems are just piles of dumb work that we know instinctively it doesn't have to be done this way, but getting at the roots of those issues. are actually embedded in human systems that are pretty difficult to tease out unless you've got leadership buy-in and you've got the right kind of budget expenditure, you've got the right job description around these are really tricky issues to solve. And so, you know, every month you're just gonna recurate the list.
Rob Burke: What are those signs that you see oftentimes that a development team has maybe thrown in the towel on its database? how do you turn that around? Like what what you're talking about is bad data, is that correct?
Tim Lockie: it's partly bad data, you know, but I think that there are like ten big big issues that you see in technology. And I'm like going to blank on almost all of them right now. I was like, what are those 10? I cannot remember off the top of my head. But they are things like we can't do the reporting that we want to do. We don't really trust our data, right? we don't know if we have the right solutions here, is another one of them. You know. Siloed data, you know, is another one. And I think part of the issue, Rob, is that we have the wrong image in our head about what the problem is. So here here's the image that I feel like if a team is feeling if what I'm saying resonates with you, right, in in in the work that you're doing in your nonprofit, whether you're on a small development team of just a few, or just yourself even, or whether you're on a large development team, if if this is resonating with you, what I'd say is. Your organization is like an orchestra when it comes to technology. Right? And so you have instruments are your tech stack like you've got a crm you've got your business app suite you know probably either using google meet or you're using slack or something right you've got your collaboration tools but most organizations even small ones i were with a small team of like nine people they had over 48 systems and so you know those are your instruments in the orchestra and then you know you've got your the notes that you're playing on the page. These would be like the all that's your data, right? So, and and and then you've got your musicians and those are your people, you know, and what I think is hard to understand is that you can't just play one section and sound good. Right? This is an actual a a whole organization issue and you feel that in different ways. And so the problem that we have with tech as an orchestra is that we don't like the way we sound. And so we keep investing in new instruments, right? Like we're gonna change out for a new instrument here. You know, we're gonna upgrade, you know, we're gonna do a little bit of a harder arrangement of the William Tull or o overture or whatever, right? And what we have not done is really focus on we have a musician problem, right? And you can't solve a musician problem by throwing more money at instruments. It's never gonna work. And we know it's an instrument problem because if you brought the Philharmonic into play, like those musicians to play on your tech stack, they would do great. It would sound good. So we know what we what we need to understand is that if we have a musician problem, we need to find musician solutions. And that's human stack. That's a culture issue. That's it's not even adoption, actually. It's orchestration. Adoption is just whether a person can play their instrument, right? Probably people can.
Rob Burke: Mm. Yeah.
Tim Lockie: That's not really the problem. You can have people that can play their instruments really well, but unless they play it together exactly right, you really don't sound that great. And that's really what the problem is with technology, is we have to actually get good at how we sound together. And that's more about finding the right conductor or the right strategy or the right timing, you know. So I think that if we start to think about this as a musician problem, we start coming up with better solutions almost immediately.
Rob Burke: I love that analogy. And I think it's interesting to hear somebody that is all about tech talk about the importance of the human side of it and the buy-in on leadership. Because that's you're also really talking about you t you talked about somebody the conductor, like the the leader needs to be the one that's pushing excellence through the people for versus trying to shore up the problems with new technology. Is that correct?
Tim Lockie: Yeah, exactly. And and that could feel like it's got wider application than just to a development team. But one thing one thing I'll say is conductors actually don't conduct to the entire orchestra. Conductors conduct to first chairs in different sections. And sections follow that first chair. Like first chair is a big deal. Turns out I've never played in an orchestra, by the way. I just got into the analogy and started looking stuff up. So Just if before people come at me like talking to me about their experience in orchestra, like I was a choir guy and not even that great. So that said, it's it's interesting to me that orchestration isn't about everyone, it is about key champions on different teams. I call these guides. And what we need is in the fundraising department, we need somebody who is you know even in a small team, need somebody that when there's a problem with your technology, CRM. You know, the e-blast system that you've got that you're using, like, you know, fundraising teams use multiple different tools. And if there's something that goes wrong, almost everybody will look at that one person. Like, I don't know who they are. Like they probably don't have an official background in tech or anything, but either they've been around long enough or they were just like more willing to try or whatever. But everybody kind of knows who they are. If teams would just take that person and say, You know, one sixty-fourth of your time, one thirty-second of your time, right? Is this part of our of tech for for us, right? Just a small carve out on their job description. So it's not off the side of their desk. It's not accidental. It's not incidental, right? It's an actual part of what they do. I think what you would see is that you could you could create a lot more momentum in that department, in in your fundraising team and around your fundraising team. And you know, then you start to give that person training, right? You get that person to whatever conference they need to go to. You help them get a carve out so that they understand their CRM a little bit better. Give them a budget where they can go and find a consultant that can handle the five small issues that are actually holding their team back instead of trying to replace their entire CRM. Right. I I firmly believe fundraising teams are a job description away from actually being able to solve a lot of these problems. If they just thought about it as a human problem that we could solve within our team without an expensive consultant where we just really dial in on that person. Because teams really know their tech well. Like this is what I know after working with hundreds and hundreds of teams. So does that make sense? I feel like that's not the standard perspective around tech, but I think that it I think it should be. I wish it was. I think it is a lot more achievable for teams.
Rob Burke: Mm. Mm. Yeah. Yeah, I I think y you know, the person you're you're describing is that the techie that became the techie by necessity, right? They're wearing it they're wearing every other hat in the org, but nobody's managing their CRM, so they took on the the mantle for that. w when you're talking to those
Tim Lockie: Right. Yep. They showed like two percent interest and suddenly they're in charge of one hundred percent of it, right? Like that's right, yeah.
Rob Burke: Right. So when you're talking to those people or you're talking to leadership about those people, what is something that you've found that they should stop doing, those techies that are in that role by necessity?
Tim Lockie: They should stop doing the work until they have a job description that said they should.
Rob Burke: Mm. That's tough, right?
Tim Lockie: I they should dig in their heels. Yeah, absolutely. It me it look makes you look like you're not a team player. But really what you're doing is you're saying this too this work is too important for us to not actually do it well. And I think that so the first thing I'd say is there's a massive power differential. The person that you're talking about is usually three layers under whoever's leading the organization, right? So there's a really big power differential there. And one thing that I would say on that. is that my work is switched from really focusing on that person. I call digital voluntals. Like they got voluntold that they were working on the digital systems. My work my heartbeat is always for that group. Like they're working the hardest they are doing so much good work. The fate of their fundraising team rests on the data that they are working to make sure works well. Right. So like mad respect, but what I found is that even when I would go and create systems that would help them. And it would really transform their work. Their leaders would have no idea of the value that they were providing. Right. I've seen teams where that person left and they had to fill that with three different people, right? Over way over six figures to fill that one position. So, you know, just at a at a like at a money level it makes sense for the economics of it. But what I have found is what teams and leaders need most of all is to is to have a strategy around that. And so, And the very first question is, is your culture in front of your tech or is your tech in front of your culture? and until you know that question, you really leaders don't know what move to make next. Because if your tech is in front of your culture, right? And for 84% of the organizations that I've pulled, their tech is in front of their culture and their culture's struggling to catch up, the solution's not more tech, the solution is actually more people. Is more investment on that side. And so you need to know what's going on with that. You probably run into change capacity where people have, you know, they you've saturated their capacity for change. They just can't handle any more change. That's before you hand, you know, all of the disruptions around federal aid and grants that are not coming in now. That's before you handle all the disruption of what's happening in the social sector, like all all of those things contribute to that, to that saturation. And so people are really overwhelmed and and tech is one of those overwhelming places. And so I think you have to know first of all which is leading, tech or or or your people. And if it's your tech, then your next move is really to get your people in front of your tech. And that's a different move than if really what you need to do is dive into your tech and work on it a little bit. Does that make sense?
Rob Burke: Yeah, I think so break it down for me. when you say tech in front of people or people in front of I'm in front of culture, culture in front of tech, what are you getting at there? Are you talking about that the the the tech is dictating how the culture is run?
Tim Lockie: Yeah. Mm-hmm. That's good question. I think I'm more looking at it like you know, if your culture is behind your tech, you'll have issues like we don't know what the plan is overall. We don't know if what the roadmap is. We've got these, you know, strat plans that are three years out or whatever. All of them are gonna have either one or more like direct or indirect objectives around. Things that require information, information gathering, measuring, you know, technology, et cetera. Some of those are related very directly to fundraising. Some of them are indirectly related to fundraising, but they all kind of tie together. If people aren't clear about what the plan is, if they don't know that there's a roadmap, then it's kind of anybody's guess. And that also means that leadership hasn't committed to a budgetary outcome for those issues. I can tell you what'll happen next with that. Is that those issues are gonna pool up, get so large that teams feel like the only way out is to get a new CRM? And so instead of diving in on small issues incrementally, it stores up and then they spend a lot of money focusing on getting a new tech system in place, right? And that actually puts tech further ahead of their culture every time we do that. Does that make sense? Is that helpful?
Rob Burke: Yeah, that totally makes sense. And I I think I'm gonna lead you into the next question here then because I think it you kind of just answered it, but tech rollouts when when they do get new tech in, and it can die after it's launched, right? You get all this forward momentum and then it it dies. So what separates adoption from just becoming expensive shelfware?
Tim Lockie: Yeah. So I have a I I kind of have a unique view on this that I've emerged over a lot of years of doing this because I saw the same thing. We would work with the client and you know, after we left, they wouldn't use it as much. We'd have a support bucket, those would get used, you know, and then after that, then there it would just drag on and teams were frustrated and it would feel like it just wouldn't ever really perform the way they wanted it to, etc. During the life of that project though, things went pretty well. And I took a step back and started to say, what if the reason that things are going well isn't because of the tech project, it's because they're actually coordinating their efforts. And so I just started to create a service where instead of doing a tech rollout, we did the things you do in a tech rollout, which is you have a weekly meeting, you look at the problems that are coming up, you figure out a way to solve those, you meet monthly to see like where we're at. And we just didn't add New tech on top of that. And what I found is that that is the forever state teams really need to start operating in. It's like bookkeeping. Like, at what point do you stop reconciling your accounts because they just work? Right? Like, there's no point, like, that's not how it works. There's a certain amount of maintenance that needs to go on. And the big the the big lie that big tech has been selling for years is that you can install tech. It will change your life and you don't need to do anything afterwards. If you just get the right tech, it's effortless. And that is just a crock. Like that's just not actually true. And so yeah, I I feel like yes, that is a problem. And you do need to still have rollouts. I'm not saying that you don't. And they need to be done well. All I'm saying is when the tech is installed, just don't stop the thing where you s you meet and keep the engagement high because engagement is actually the problem. People disengage. And then it kind of all goes, it all slides. That engagement, another word for that engagement is accountability. Right? So what we actually have been giving up is accountability that someone's tending to the system. And so I yeah, I think that that again, that's another major red flag to me that that tech is in front of culture. Does that does that exp is that jive with the experience that you've seen?
Rob Burke: Mm. Yeah. Yeah. Hundred percent. I think adoption often comes down to ownership. Somebody needs to own the system, the tech, whatever it is. There needs to be a human in the loop with that. So yeah, I couldn't agree with you more on that, Tim. All right. we didn't we haven't touched AI and we're already at twenty minutes, but I so I just wanna touch it a little bit. We'll bring you back on in in a few months. Let's just talk about AI for for a full episode, but
Tim Lockie: Yeah. Right. Sure, yeah. Yeah, glad to.
Rob Burke: I I said we were gonna touch on it, so let's touch on it at least. Y you helped shape fundraising.ai, correct?
Tim Lockie: yeah, I mean I wanna be very clear, like Nathan Chappelle, Mallory, like were the but yeah, I was around for the original edit on the first on the framework and then have been around for the summit every year and am part of the part of the team. Yep, on the advisory team.
Rob Burke: And I yeah, and I bring that up just to give listeners like you have a very ethical approach to AI, I i I think. So I I'd be curious to know your I don't know, ten thousand foot view of how should orgs, how should fundraisers let AI into the work that they are doing right now and where should they keep it out?
Tim Lockie: Yeah, I'm gonna I'm gonna make three points around this for the sake of time and would be fun to come back on do a podcast around AI. The first thing I'll say though is AI is an accelerator and it is an amplifier. It will accelerate and amplify either the way that well and it and it rests on the infrastructure that you already have both for your human stack and for your tech stack. So your culture and your tech is going to rest there. Right. So it will amplify and it will accelerate what you're doing. And if you don't have strong culture practices in place, it's going to amplify the lack of those processes, right? And and and humans are feeling that, feeling that deep in their bones, and they can't always rec they can't always articulate what's wrong with it. So they blame AI. But actually what they have is a structural problem inside their organization around how tech is probably not talked about enough. Right. So Point number one. Point number two is I would just say humans are the loop and that what we need to do is focus on the agency that humans have rather than the automation that AI can bring. That doesn't mean that we don't use AI. In fact, I use it a lot. I really like it. I know how to use it well. But all of that has happened because I took the time to look at a framework and develop one for myself and then it's helpful for other people that says what can I control, what can't I control, what things are good in life and what things are bad in life, how does AI affect those things? And then how do I handle the parts of AI that are creating like negative impacts in the world versus the beneficial and responsible use that I can participate in when I'm using AI? That just helped me kind of clarify where's my agency personally in deciding how to use tools. And then the third thing that I would say about AI is use the tools you're paying for. Right now you're either in Microsoft or Google. I've never met an organization that's not in one of those for their core email platform or whatever, right? That's your like maybe you don't love Gemini. Like it's okay, learn it. Like you're gonna find that it does a lot for you. So you're gonna have a base tool that everybody can use that is inside of your Privacy and security policies. That's your base, you know, it's either Copilot or Gemini. And then for, you know, very practically speaking, you're gonna probably want a specialty one as well. And that'll be Chat GBT or Claude almost all the time. So that I would say focus on that base level for your whole team and then get specific with one of those other tools. That's I I I I know that's like just glancing off the surface there, but I hope that's helpful.
Rob Burke: I think that's super helpful. I can agree with you more. I love it. All right, Tim. I always end with what I call a tactical takeaway, something very practical to give to fundraisers that they can do today to move their mission forward. So what is one thing that every fundraiser should do today that you believe matters most?
Tim Lockie: Yeah, rel relative to this conversation, I'm sorry to be a little bit self promotional here, but relative to this conversation, if you go to the human stack slash or humanstack.com slash quiz, there is a there's a six question quiz that you can take there that actually tells you if your tech's ahead of your culture, your culture's ahead of your tech. I would say go find the answer to that immediately because you really do need to know which problem you're solving. So that would be my most tactical thing is go and and Take that quiz, see what it tells you.
Rob Burke: Fantastic. We'll put that link in the description as well. Tim, thank you so much for joining the conversation today. You we're a wealth of knowledge.
Tim Lockie: Thanks, Rob. It's always a always a pleasure to talk with you. Really appreciate it.
Rob Burke: Yeah. for those listening, how can they connect with you?
Tim Lockie: You can find me on LinkedIn. You can also f email me at tim at the human stack.com. Either of those are great. I'm really excited to hear from people. So let me know. Reach out.
Rob Burke: Awesome. And if you're curious about how DonorDoc can help you find clarity, build retention through what we call smart stewardship, you can visit us at donarddock.com to learn more. And we will see you next week.
