083 – Operational Excellence in Non-Profits: A Masterclass with Alyson Caffrey

Episode Transcription

David Pisarek: Ever felt overwhelmed setting up systems for your non-profit’s operations? Stay tuned and transform your approach to operations today with Alyson Caffrey.

Welcome to the Non-Profit Digital Success podcast. I’m your host, David. And in this episode, we will be talking about how to set up and streamline operations. I’ve got Alyson Caffery here, the operations guru who specializes in guiding leaders to focus on the right things in the right order at the right time.

She’s the founder of Operations Agency, a best selling author. She’s revolutionizing the way that small teams function.

Alyson is also a dedicated mom of two young boys. Cherishes family time. We were just talking about that. Alyson, thank you so much for joining us today on this episode.

Alyson Caffrey: David, I’m so excited. Good to be here. Thanks so much for having me.

David Pisarek: Welcome. So I guess we should probably start off, level the playing field here. What is operations?

Alyson Caffrey: Excellent question. I think operations, as they relate to a small business in pretty much any capacity.

Operations is a set of systems that helps the business fulfill the promises that it makes.

And I know that’s a really colloquially answer, but at the end of the day, one of the biggest things that I’ve done over the last six years working with small businesses in high growth periods, develop and really streamline their operational function is we have to shatter that traditional interchangeable parts notion of how the large corporations do operations.

Because in a small, growing business, we really are in the business of systems stacking. We need to make sure that our marketing system produces leads. We need to ensure that our sales system produces us paying customers, donations, or whatever that looks like for you.

We need to ensure that our fulfillment produces results for the people we’re helping.

And we have to make sure that our systems, our processes, our HR, and our finance are really batten down behind the scenes, making sure that we’re providing great reports and great results behind the scenes, too.

So I think when we start to think about operations, it really comes down to, “Are we fulfilling the promises that we’re making?”

And I think it’s elegant to think that way because then you start to consider, “Well, what promises am I making to my market with this lead magnet? What promises am I making at my donor dinner to these people who’ve joined me?” And I think it’s interesting and elegant to start to solve for the other side of that equation.

So operations to me, really comprise of three main things inside of keeping those promises. It’s your people, it’s your systems, and it’s your processes.

David Pisarek: I love that. People, systems, processes. Let’s bring them all together, make the work that we do easier. If we can get our systems aligned, then it allows us also to scale. So, as volunteers might come and go out of your organization, you be like, “Hey, read through this or watch this video and learn how to do X, Y, and Z, and then go forth, create and do what you need to do in the role that you’re sitting in.”

Alyson Caffrey: Yeah, exactly. And it’s like a Venn diagram. They all overlap with one another in really meaningful ways. So when people overlap with our processes, we usually get the project management function. How are people literally moving things ahead inside of the business following our exact process?

When we’ve got our processes and our systems colliding, that’s when we start to consider our automations. What are we moving forward within our systems that don’t actually rely on our people? And when we look at our people and our systems, we want to really take a look at what key data comes out of that. “How are we performing? What is the actual performance mechanism?” We can start to draw key performance indicators for the business, for the people.

And really at the center of that typically lies the founder in the middle of that Venn diagram. And it’s really, really challenging to weave ourselves out of that because we find ourselves bouncing around between all of those things inside of the operational function.

And we are training up our people or we’re building out our processes or we’re setting up brand new systems and shiny new pieces of technology. And it can feel really cumbersome if we don’t approach it in a really simple manner.

David Pisarek: So we might think about this as a playbook of sorts. “Here’s what you need to do. Here’s how you need to organize. Here’s all the different things that we need to deliver on.”

So as a non-profit, if you are going to issue a press release, what is all the stuff that needs to be done to get the press release put together? Then what happens once you’ve got it and it’s completed, and you’re ready to go out with it? So as a non-profit marketer or leader in the marketing and communication space, where do you even begin?

Alyson Caffrey: Yeah, something like that, David.

So let’s take this example. You’re preparing a press release, and you want to make sure that not reinventing the wheel every time. There’s a handful of key ingredients that go into that.

First and foremost is thinking with the end in mind, “What is the end result that we want to create?” This typically looks like, especially if you’ve done press releases in the past, which surely you have, you’re in a position where you can take this tangible thing and say, “This is actually what I’m looking for when I say this thing is going to be done.”

Then we want to establish what the path is. So that’s the SOP. “What buttons do I push? What levers do I pull? Who specifically needs to be involved? And how does that need to look?” And then “What resources can we give ahead of that SOP? Can we give them a template? Can we give them a couple of pointers or a couple of soft skills maybe that they can build before? What voice are you trying to write this in? What key outcomes can contribute to that definition of done?” Those are some of the ingredients that I would start to prepare ahead of time.

Can we get them further, faster with a template or a trick or a hack or something that they can use that distills down your years of industry expertise and can transfer it to a new person? What is the specific SOP? And then what does the end-in-mind definition of done look like?

David Pisarek: You said a really great acronym a number of times, an SOP. Let’s pause for a second here. What is an SOP?

Alyson Caffrey: Yeah. So I get asked this question a lot, actually, David. It’s great because in a lot of people’s minds, operations is everything. And I love that you started off with that question, and now we’re digging into “What is an SOP?” Because I also get asked this question often.

And the way that I see process, quote-unquote, is that it has three layers. The first is the strategic layer. So that’s the top-level process. It’s a strategic process. It’s usually rooted in your intellectual property, your core process for transformation, the results that you’re providing. It’s a lot around your marketing. If you’re teaching about your process, that’s really what you want to look at.

The next level is the management or workflow level process. This is like onboarding new customers, onboarding new team members, really something that has several different hands in the pot and probably likely several different standard operating procedures, which is the acronym SOP, which is that third baseline level that basically means:

“Push this button, pull this lever, get this result.”

It’s the step-by-step. It’s the most documented, and it really is supposed to be “Start out at this stage and then come out at the end kind of transformed with something here to show for them.”

David Pisarek: I love that. And we use SOPs at WOW Digital as well with the team. We want to make sure that, one, we’re doing things the way that we want them to be done. And two, all the boxes have been checked that we didn’t forget anything along the way.

And in non-profits, you’re busy, you’re running around, you’re doing all kinds of things, putting out fires on the left and the right, and really trying to stay on top of everything.

And if you had a checklist to go, “Yeah, okay, I did these eight things,” coming out of whatever it was, you can go, “Okay”, right? Put that aside. “I’ve done this. I’ve completed it. On to the next thing.”

Alyson Caffrey: Yeah, absolutely. And at the end of the day, even as leaders, we’re all just human beings.

And so it really does behoove us to get some of this stuff down on paper. Because at the end of the day, if we want to provide our team with the best resources and our clients and our customers with the best resources, our donors with the best resources, we really need to get a lot of that down on paper.

And then even if it’s just 80% and we can customize that 20, that’s a win, right? That’s a huge win. And it really can help us provide a more consistent experience across the entire business for everybody involved, all of the key stakeholders.

And it doesn’t really rely on us waking up, feeling on, feeling really productive, carrying all the weight, juggling all the balls, whatever other metaphor we want to throw at this. It’s really, really challenging to feel like we have to be as consistent as a system or a process.

That’s the beauty of it. It allows us to really lead from a place of intention, integrity, and we can actually access some more creativity when we know that some of that other stuff has been taken care of.

David Pisarek: Absolutely. We know that there’s many roles, from the CEO, right down to the caretakers, to the receptionist, whatever the role is. If you can create some documentation, a manual, a guide, as you have people come and go out of organizations, it’ll help with onboarding.

You can standardize and you can create SOPs around what does your onboarding look like. Have you set up an email address? Have you given them a phone extension? Have you given them access to the right CRM or the right donation platform that you’re collecting data in? Making sure that you’ve got these key things organized, whether it’s word documents, Google Docs, a couple of videos.

Videos aren’t really ideal because then you got to watch the whole thing. But I think there’s some things that you can do to just start.

Alyson Caffrey: Yeah, absolutely. I love what you said, David, because I think it can be as simple, and I do recommend this to a lot of companies that I work with and anyone who asks me. So I’m like, “Start today and start in a Google document or start in a Word document.” And my thought on this is because a lot of folks want to shortcut their way to implementing systems and processes.

And what I mean by that is they’re usually attracted to these shiny tools like project management software or documentation software. And what they forget is that they don’t have the stuff to fill it up that actually makes it effective.

So when you see this demo for this incredible new software that’s supposed to change the game for your business operations, all of a sudden, you get it. And then it doesn’t look anything like the demo because the demo had it all built out and everything was in there.

So I always say that we want to build out our processes so that we can audition systems to fit that bill, that we can create repeatable processes, run through those, and then decide that we’re going to buy a shiny new system.

It’s like that person at the first of the year who buys the Nordic track or the Peloton in the hopes that they will work out, but they haven’t built the muscle to run and bike consistently. That thing is likely going to collect dust in the corner of your bedroom or in your basement.

And I’m not saying this from experience or anything, I guess. But actually, it’s true, right? If you don’t build the muscle first, no piece of technology or shiny new thing, it’s going to be really costly and not super effective.

David Pisarek: Absolutely. One of the old adages is, in terms of web design, Form follows function, right? You need to understand what is the purpose of what you’re doing and then figure out how whatever software, whatever platform, whatever that’s going to look like.

You can do your whole SOPs in spreadsheets. It makes no difference as long as it’s something that you’re actually going to use. So we’re talking about this, what processes or activities should be documented?

Alyson Caffrey: Yeah, wonderful question. I fundamentally see businesses in two specific buckets. So the growth side of the business and the delivery side of the business.

We can get into all the departments and all the things, and that’ll just really be specific based on how your team is set up and what your core functions of your non-profit are. But at the end of the day, those are the two sides of pretty much any business. And operations sit in that delivery side. That’s how we basically deliver on all the promises, like I said.

So what you want to do is you want to focus on some of those core systems in the very beginning. So the first is, “How are we generating new leads?” You want people coming into the world, you want folks understanding about the problem problems that you solve. You want people understanding what it looks like to work with you. They want to see your content as valuable. They want to see your presence as valuable. I mean, you work on this quite a bit, David. I think this is probably one of the most underrated systems you can build inside of your business.

And then the second is, how are we taking those eyeballs, those people who really are enjoying our content, people who understand what it might be like to be working with us or engaging with us in some transaction and then building in that sales function or that transformation? So how am I taking eyeballs to paying customers, donors, whatever that looks like for you.

And then the third layer is “How are we fulfilling on those transactions?” So that’s your core process for fulfillment. So if you’re in a position where you’re taking donors and there’s several things that you’re delivering as a donor on your docket, you want to make sure that you’re able to deliver on those and your team also understands what specifically they need to be doing to help deliver on those promises.

And then, of course, we want the HR function, being able to find and hire and train new people. Those are the baseline things that pretty much every business, I think, overcomplicates at times. They’re like, “Oh, the way that we do marketing is totally different than the way anybody else does marketing,” or “the way that we fulfill is totally different than the way that other companies fulfill.”

And I think you probably have about a 20% difference, but most companies I’ve worked with across several different industries usually have about an 80/20 rule, which is universally true in most things, right? If we’re going to be totally honest, 80% of what they’re doing is fairly standardized.

There’s a huge administrative function in pretty much all of those systems that I listed off. And I think a lot of us want to reinvent the wheel because it’s… I don’t know, it feels good to be a unicorn, right?

It feels good to consider that your company is breaking all the rules and doing all the things, which I’m not saying you’re not in certain capacities, but the bulk of the way a business runs, the way a non-profit is structured, it’s most likely going to be that you’re going to have those handful of systems that I just listed off.

So starting there with the way that the overall health of the business can function is going to be instrumental.

David Pisarek: As a side note for everybody listening, I’ve hired Alyson, and we are awesome and fantastic. And one of the things that we started with was, “What are the tasks? What are those things that we’re doing over and over?” I have to do something twice or three times.

Yeah, that should be documented in some way so that I can get somebody else to help with this if I’m too overloaded with it, or if I just like, “I don’t want to do this anymore. I need somebody else to help with this,” and to get that knowledge transfer.

This is a knowledge base. This is the foundation of all the stuff that you do that we do. We need to document that. The question then becomes, and I think this is probably one of the first ones that I asked Alyson, is “Who has to do this? Is it me? Is it my team? Who does all this?”

Alyson Caffrey: Yeah, it’s everybody. I think it’s interesting.

A lot of companies will come to me and say, “Hey, listen, I’ve made these wonderful SOPs, and my team doesn’t follow them.” And then I immediately ask them. I say, “Well, do you follow the SOPs?” And it’s confronting for some, but to others, it’s like, “Actually, no, I don’t.” And so “Maybe if I did that as well.”

This is a team effort. Every person on your team and in your organization has a small percentage of their job that needs to be dedicated to creating repeatable process.

And I think some team members, if you don’t frame it up properly, will say, “Oh, my goodness, they’re coming after my job,” or “They’re going to restaff me if they’re asking me how I do all the things that I do and we want to write them down.”

But we really want to invest in A players who see the growth trajectory of the company if we can create these repeatable processes. Because suddenly somebody who’s onboarding new customers for you and they’re able to get that into a repeatable process, they can manage a team of people who are onboarding or manage the systems that are automating your onboarding.

And I think if we can see that this is an investment into the business and the growth and the longevity of our entire team, it’s going to be huge.

And I love that you brought up starting with your time and starting with the things that are repeatable, because this is the best way to position it to your team where they can fold their time and it doesn’t feel like a cumbersome additional hour or two at the end of their day, because then it’s going to fall to the back of the queue and off the docket completely.

Everybody says, “Oh, I’ve been meaning to create systems for X amount of time, or it’s been a quarterly rock for the last three quarters.” And I just laugh because I say, “Nobody wants to spend two extra hours at the end of their day writing down SOPs, opening up a blank document and starting to account for their entire day.” It’s stressful, it’s cumbersome. You want to go home to your family.

So one of the biggest things I do is I say, “Hey, listen, as you’re doing this, go build the SOP. Go record yourself doing this so that somebody else can do it.”

And I think it’s really interesting to consider, again, that everybody’s job is SOPs. This is a muscle that we need to build inside of the business. This is about building a process culture, a team that really just thinks naturally, “Oh, okay, I’ve done this more than once,” or actually, “We did this process this way, and now for the past month or so, we’ve been doing it this way. I should probably go update this SOP.”

Building that into the brains of your team is going to only come with repetition and clarity, and doing that as early as possible in the growth trajectory of the business is really valuable.

David Pisarek: In terms of actual tangibles of making this come to life and come to action, I opened up Zoom when I started doing this. I had a free Zoom account. I opened up Zoom. I shared my screen. I hit record, and I just made some little videos. That’s what I did. That’s how I started with it. I’m like, “All right, I’m doing this every single time for invoicing. This is what we have to do.” So from a non-profit’s perspective, you’ve got a potential new donor, you want to get them into your CRM.

What does that process look like? How do you tag them? What data do you need to enter into the system so that it connects with all these other things that need to happen? What automations in terms of email sequences and all that, and how can you put that together? I would implore everybody just open up Zoom or whatever screen recording thing you’ve got and just record yourself doing something.

You can have a volunteer, turn that into a document with screenshots. You can hire a virtual assistant to do that for you.

If the work you’re doing is mostly web-based, I’ve got a really great tool that we picked up. It’s called Komodo Deck. You can share your screen with it. It’ll make a video and make a guide with screenshots as you click on stuff. We’ll have a link for that in the show notes for you. But really, I think it does start with actually starting.

Taking that first step, you can sit, you can talk, you can meet, you can chat with your colleagues, your teammates. But if nobody’s doing it, then what’s the point in even talking about it?

Alyson Caffrey: Yeah, it’s interesting.

There’s a saying that I’ve heard from plenty of coaches over the years, “The map appears when the car is in motion.” When we pull up the GPS, it shows us which way to go. And I really like that quote because I think it’ll also help refine our actions.

So if we’re doing what you’re saying, David, like opening up Zoom, or I love Loom. It’s a great tool that I just have right on my Chrome extension. And I think the free version is five minutes, which also I think is a really cool forcing function for starting out with your SOPs because it can really get lengthy when you start to explain something to a novice where you really are forced to say, “All right, How can I explain setting up new donors in my CRM in five minutes or less? How can that go?”

And I think it’s great, too, to build the muscle because you could be in a position where you spend 25 minutes recording this video, and then you’re exhausted because you’re like, “Oh, gosh, I just spent 25 minutes making this video, and I now only have a video, and I got to go do the thing, or I got to do nine more things.”

And so I think it does a nice job of building the muscle for you. And something I can say is, honestly, toward the first of the year, one of my favourite books that I try to read every year is Atomic Habits by James Clear.

Something he says early on in the book is, “Standardize before you optimize.” And I think that’s just so profound, because a lot of us, especially the recovering perfectionists listening or in the room, I’m talking to me, I can tend to let perfectionism hold me back.

I think I want something to be absolutely perfect, or “This is the ideal way that this process will go.” Unfortunately, the scenario inside of your business today might not be meeting the expectations that you have for the future, but that’s okay.

We need to document it as it is now and then build the muscle for repair over time, rebuilding these processes as they get better, as our team gets more sophisticated, as we’re able to implant automation and those types of things. If I was in a position where I would be training for a marathon, I wouldn’t go out and run the marathon on day one.

I’d get super hurt. I probably wouldn’t run the next day. It would totally derail my progress. I think a lot of us do that. We’re like, “Gung Ho on writing SOPs or jumping in and streamlining our operations.” And then we get really burnt out by it. And then we build this half-built bridge with no use in our business whatsoever.

So I always recommend that starting slow, starting small starting today, then you can refine it over time.

David Pisarek: Absolutely. So a couple of questions coming out from everything you just said. You were talking about refining over time, right? Like what’s standardized and then fix. So how often should we be reviewing SOPs? In theory, we should be using the SOP every time we do that task, make sure that we followed all the steps, that we’ve got the completion filters all checked off and all that. But how often should we actually sit down critically and look at it?

Alyson Caffrey: Yeah, it’s interesting. So I have a primary methodology called the Sabbatical Method.

I wrote a book about it earlier this year. And really the biggest thing that happens in our physiological, our personal life, is that there are different levels of rest that we need to take in order for us to show up as a fully functioning and high-performing human being.

We need to sleep every night. We need to take the weekends off here and there, maybe monthly or quarterly. We have a family trip or we take a week off from the business or whatever that looks like.

Our business also needs that fundamental rest and rebuild period for our operations.

So every time we go to do something inside of the business, we should absolutely be thinking, “Is this the best way or the current best way that we’re doing this?” And writing down some opportunities for improvement is really helpful so that when budget or resources or a new team member becomes available for that thing, we can say, “Hey, listen, we’ve been actually meaning to upgrade our donor onboarding process for a really long time, and now we have the means to do that.”

And so it actually takes that friction away from really upgrading your processes if you’re reviewing that at a consistent cadence. So it follows that rest cadence, right? It follows the daily or monthly usage, whatever it is that you’re using that process. It follows the weekly review.

If all of a sudden you finish up your week and it either creeps into your weekend or if it feels like it’s been a crazy week, I’d take a look at your processes.

I’d be like, “Why does it feel like everything’s on fire right now? Is it just that we’ve done a lot of new things, or is this because people just weren’t fundamentally understanding how to move the ball forward without creating a bunch of fires?”

And so I usually do that. I’ll reassess about once a week and I’ll say, “Okay, what is going on with our systems in this particular category if I felt really burnt out by sales or I felt really burnt out by marketing?” And then monthly, of course, as you’re really shoring up and taking a look at your month-over-month gross profitability, a lot of the financial metrics that are tied there, I like to take to look and crack the hood open and be like, “What’s going on with our process here if our month end came in and it looks really, really weird on our balance sheet?”

So that’s another big one. And then, of course, quarterly. As you’re launching new things, foundationally, we always need to be in this state of standardizing our process but growing at the same time.

Because if we’re not growing as a small business, we’re not doing our job. So fundamentally, taking a look at what are our growth goals for the quarter and how can we make sure that our SOPs on this side of the business, on the standard side of what we’re doing day in and day out, can be really ironclad so that it doesn’t cannibalize one way or the other. We don’t want to be so in pursuit of our growth goals that we forget how to onboard donors. And we don’t want to be in such ruthless pursuit of keeping our stuff standard that we forget to grow into new opportunities for our business to serve. And I think that is the fundamental balance of how we need to keep that. And again, it can come in several different forms, but I think that cadence for, quote-unquote, rest in our business, right? Reviewing it daily, reviewing it weekly, reviewing it monthly and quarterly is going to be huge.

David Pisarek: Okay, so we’ve talked about what are these procedures, how we could start creating them, where we should start, how we should be reviewing? Let’s talk about where do we store them?

Alyson Caffrey: Any place that everybody on your team can access today.

So if I was in a position where after this call, I was like,”Here’s my follow-up process for how I interview on podcast,” let’s just say. I’m on David’s podcast. “It was amazing, and I loved it, and I really wanted to follow up and just send him a personal note.”

I reach out to my assistant and I say, “Hey, can you put some time, 10 minutes on my calendar later today? Reach out and follow up with David.” Let’s just say that that’s the process. Immediately, I would record my screen and do that. And then I would send it over to my assistant and say, “Hey, listen, can you document this into a process?” And we just have ours in Google Sheets.

So if we didn’t have any software, if you’re not using anything, I know you guys use ClickUp internally, David.

You don’t have to start going down the rabbit hole of understanding where to put all this stuff. We just need to make it centrally locatable for our team. And I am very against just dropping stuff into the ethers of Google Drive. I talk about this all the time.

But Google Drive, for whatever reason, is not the most intuitively searchable tool. However, if you put everything inside of a spreadsheet, you can use the find and replace function and really consider this to be an easy way to find and index your processes.

And the great thing is, after you build this muscle, you will natively get more return on investment auditioning systems when you can just pipe all that information in instead of paying $300 a month for a tool that can house all of your standard operating procedures, and then it takes you six months to build it out, right? Do that work beforehand, iron out specifically what you want to position, and then audition those pieces of technology.

So I love Google Sheets. We personally still… I mean, my business turned six years old, which is so crazy. It’s so wild to think that we’ve literally done our company training, like that inbound onboarding on a platform called Trainual. And for the most part, all of our day to day templates, checklists, SOPs, they’ve lived in Google Drive and Google Sheets the entire time.

David Pisarek: I love the idea of using Google Sheets. Let’s employ the KISS methodology here. Let’s just keep it simple. We’ll ignore what that second S is, but let’s keep it simple.

Let’s organize things in a way that is searchable. If anybody is listening to this, if you’re going to use Sheets for this, put a column in for who’s responsible for updating for when is the last date that it was actually reviewed.

Then you can use that and you can search through it and you can make sure that whoever is responsible for it is maintaining it at least, I would say at minimum on an annual basis, trying to be realistic in terms of the actual amount of time and work that people have in non-profits.

That’s really awesome. If we think about operations from digital marketing, what can we do you do, maybe optimize the digital marketing operations to get better outcomes?

Alyson Caffrey: I think thinking ahead on this one is probably the most critical.

I think a lot of us can probably operate about a week ahead of anything we need to fulfill on the back end for our customers or whatever. But marketing is a little bit of a different type of beast.

I think marketing operations really needs to be thought out well in advance.

I was actually just on a session with one of my agencies yesterday, and we were planning out their holiday marketing. I was like, “This is about end of October, and really, you should have been doing this in August.” And he was like, “I know, but what if we’re doing this now?” So my thought is always be disciplined in the pursuit of trying to get more and more and more ahead of your marketing efforts.

I also think that making things as automated as possible is going to the name of the game there. So crystallizing your core process and then considering “What I can lop off of the bottom in administrative function?” And really consider as many automations as you can possibly put in in this experience so that you can spend the most time delivering one-on-one incredible conversations with the people that you want to work with most.

To me, that’s like, “Deliver the thing that you said.” If you have a lead magnet or you have somebody signing up for a donor event or whatever, give them that welcome email and a quick overview as soon as humanly possible.

Build that goodwill as quickly as you can and deliver on those promises as quickly as you can.

My husband and I last night were talking about this concept of honor. Honor, back in the day, used to be, “I’m going to give you this feed today in the hope that in six months, you’re going to bring me back some sheep.” That was massive trust. Now we have the beauty of instantly building honor.

We have the ability to instantly fulfill the processes and promises that we’re making. And so as much as you can in that digital marketing, fulfill as quickly as possible, right? So I think it’s interesting when businesses try to really bespoke and customize their marketing, which is great, and you can focus your efforts in a direction in that capacity.

But really getting into automation, I think as soon as humanly possible on the marketing side of things is going to just build the most goodwill with your followers and your email list and anybody who’s in your stratosphere as quickly as possible.

David Pisarek: I think that’s spot on, Alyson. Good job.

Alyson Caffrey: Oh, thanks. I nailed it.

David Pisarek: There you go. Nailed it. Perfect. Cut. That basically brings us to the end of the episode here. So funnily enough, cut, right?

But Alyson, these have been some really fantastic insights. I hope the people listening have been thinking, “Oh, you know what? Yeah, I did do this thing six times yesterday.

What if there was a way that I can automate some of that and save myself 20 minutes a day?” What can you do with that extra time? Alyson, do you have a challenge that you can issue to people?

Alyson Caffrey: Yeah. Start recording your screen today. If you listen to your podcast in the evening, start first thing tomorrow. So I’ll give you that leeway. But start today, right?

You probably have some stuff that is on your to-do list that you know is repeatable and, you know, may even be delegatable to somebody else in the org. “I can have somebody else handle some of those things. That way, I can just be wildly present where I’m at,” whatever that looks like for you, where you feel like you can add the most value.

David Pisarek: Alyson, for anybody that has stuck it through till right now, you’ve got a little bit of a gift for it.

Alyson Caffrey: Yeah, Yeah. If you go to operationsagency.com, you can grab a free copy of exactly how I organize my playbook, and I tell my clients to do the same. That’s absolutely free.

And since this is coming out here in the beginning of the year, if you’ll send me a direct message on Instagram, it’s @operationsagency, just send me, “WOW”. So I know that you guys are coming from here.

And what I want to do is give you my free annual planning training. And what this is, is a systematic way to implement your goals when you are coming into the first of the year.

Because I know so many companies that come to me and they’re like, “Well, we weren’t It’s not anywhere near what we thought we would do,” or “We didn’t actualize a lot of this stuff.” And so I created a system that I share.

This isn’t something that I do. It’s just something that I’m good at. And I really wanted to distill down some of the systems that I use, year in and year out. I’m not trying to toot my own horn here. I’m just the systems gal.

So the goal planning side of things, I totally have a coach come in and help me with that, but on the implementation, I always rock it. And everybody’s like, “Oh, my goodness, that’s the hardest part.” So I’ll give you that training for free. I think it’s about 50 minutes in length, but it’ll break down the exact system, and you guys can crush it in 2024.

David Pisarek: That’s such an amazing offer. Everybody take Alyson up on that. It really is transformational.

Alyson, thanks so much for joining in. It’s been great having you here on the Non-profit Digital Success Podcast.

To everybody listening, if you want any of the links or resources Alyson provided, just head over to our podcast page at nonprofitdigitalsuccess.com. Click on this episode for all the details. And until next time, keep on being successful!