Welcome back to another video edition of Ask a Responsive Fundraiser, where we take your questions to a fundraising expert so that ultimately you can grow generosity. Today, we’re taking your questions to Tim Lockie. Tim is the founder of The Human Stack and a pioneer in nonprofit technology with over 20 years of experience.
He’s the creator of Digital Guidance, an approach that helps nonprofit organizations balance human-centered strategies with technology solutions to drive real impact. Tim helps organizations bridge the gap between people and technology, ensuring nonprofits thrive in today’s digital age.
Be sure to check out past editions of Ask a Responsive Fundraiser and leave us a comment on LinkedIn so we can answer your questions!
Editorโs note: Timโs answers were edited for length and clarity. Watch the video to see his full answers.
Dear Responsive Fundraiser: We struggle to measure and, in turn, communicate our organizational impact beyond the data and financial numbers. What steps can we take to tell the story of the real difference that we’re making?
Tim Lockie: That’s a very common experience that people have when dealing with technology. It goes into the anatomy between stories and data. There’s a chain of events that has to happen in order to convert what happens in technology and what happens in the data that we collect, into a story. So, data has to convert to information.
That’s like the reporting and data analytics that we have. That has to convert to insight, which is our way of understanding that, and that insight has to then convert to a story. When you disconnect stories from data, that’s manipulation. That’s false advertising.
So, I think that what’s so important is to understand that chain of events because some of that gets really practical. What data are you collecting and how does that relate to a story?
Moreover, who’s in charge of each of those steps is actually really relevant. In most organizations, staff are generating most of the data. Directors are converting most of that data into information. Executives are then looking at that insight level. And communities are the ones who own the stories at the end of all that.
That last piece is something we have to really wrap our heads around. These aren’t our stories as funders. We’re talking about the stories of the communities that we’re in. I love the ways that we’re now discussing ethical storytelling because it really is driving us back to a lot of the way that we’re telling those stories.
And one other piece that’s really important about that is to ensure that those stories that we’re telling are creating dignity for the people that we’re telling them of and people that we’re telling them to. The more we keep that in mind, the more those stories actually interact with our data in a way that creates value for all participantsโfor our organization and for the participants and for the donors that we’re aligned with.
Dear Responsive Fundraiser: Our nonprofit organization has invested in several digital tools, but our team’s struggling to use them effectively. How can we align our technology with our team skills and our needs to ensure that we’re making the most of these technology platforms?
Tim: It’s such a great question. I spent years thinking about why itโs so hard to get technology to do what we want it to do. And sometimes I talk about it like learning to driveโlike we’ve bought these really commercial grade cars that need a commercial driver’s license. And a lot of organizations don’t know how to drive a fleet of these technologies that we have. So I think that there’s a lot to do with just the basic skills that we have as an organization to use these tools collectively.
That’s one piece of it. But if you boil all of it down, and you just say, listen, there are problems in our technology and there’s things that we don’t know how to doโwhether they’re identified or not, whether people have said, โI don’t know how to find things in a browser windowโโthey may be super simple things, but that will take someone a lot of time if they don’t know.
So, if we just break those down into lowercase issues, we could solve those ourselves, then work on the uppercase issues. These are issues that we’d have to hire someone outside to help.
If an organization got really adept at being able to surface issues, and then separate them into uppercase and lowercase, and they just focused on the lowercase, they would find their ability to create a cycle where they’re solving little problems that are at the edge of their organizations, furthest away from IT.
If they started to solve some of those problems and got good at that pattern of behavior in their organization, they would create a culture that finds things they can solve. And those big issues can be brought in after they’ve really, really done a lot of work in lowercase issues.
A great example of a lowercase issue would be something like in Virtuous. There are tasks, right? There’s a way to use tasks effectively. Well, if people have got tasks in Google, and they’ve got tasks in Slack, and they’ve got tasks all over the place, learning as a team how to put those tasks in one system and work on them together would be a lowercase issue they can solve themselves.
They just took a month to work on that lowercase issue, and now theyโre all proficient in this. They would start to find that if they just addressed a few of these kinds of things, their technology would be a lot more effective to use.
It’s also reversing the question, right? Because the question is, how do we align our technology with our needs? One of the ways to think about it is to align your needs with the technology. How do we take what it already does and how do we shift what we’re doing so that it meets it halfway? I think that that’s important.
One of the reasons I talk about uppercase and lowercase is really interesting. I asked my wife, โWhat percent of letters in a book are uppercase versus lowercase?โ She just mathed it out. It’s between two and four percent. So, if you tried to read a book of uppercase letters, you could never do it. There’s just too few letters, right? If you read a book from just the lowercase letters, you could make it work.
I think that’s part of what I’m trying to point out is that this is where most of the issues are. And so it allows you to read the technology. It allows you to read the problems in a different way.
Dear Responsive Fundraiser: We’re facing fatigue among our donors and are noticing a decline in the usual donor engagement that we’ve seen. Are there ways that technology can help to create those more personalized connections with supporters and help reverse donor fatigue?
Tim: I’m going to speak specifically to the technology side of this. I think AI (Artificial Intelligence) is opening completely new opportunities to create more personalized donor engagement.
One example of that is to pull what you know about a donor and what they’re interested in into a non data sharing LLM (Large Language Model) to really start asking questions. What is this person interested in? Where have they donated before? Where is their alignment on that? And what approach would we take if we were going to approach this donor? I think that that’s a good way to approach the donors that you are working with that are major givers.
And on your sustainer side, there are LLMs that allow you to interact with a CRM (Customer Relationship Management), pull down some of your sustainers, look at factors inside of there, create really specific, tailored approaches to them inside of fields in your CRM, and then push those back into your CRM. So you’re really actually getting very, very specific about that.
If you combine that with maturity models, like Virtuous has created, which I’m a huge fan of, I think both your ability to do that as a team and to interact with that data and think about your data as something that can be improved by an LLM becomes very, very powerful. Again, I think that these are steps that teams can learn. They can be really effective. They’re very affordable, and they’re super repeatable and scalable.
Responsive Fundraiser: That’s super helpful, Tim. Thank you so much for taking some time today to answer these questions to provide your insight and your expertise. We really appreciate it!
Tim: Thanks. Keep up the great work. I’m always a big fan of what Virtuous is doing!
Learn More
Thanks for joining us in this week’s video edition of Ask a Responsive Fundraiser, where we showed you how to turn data into impactful stories, align technology with collaborative team skills, and combat donor fatigue with AI. We want to give a special thank you to Tim Lockie for contributing to this insightful conversation!
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