133 – How to Scale your Non-Profits Impact Without Burnout with Michael Toguchi

Episode Transcription

David Pisarek: Feeling stuck in outdated systems? Michael Toguchi reveals how non-profits can scale their impact by aligning leadership, tech, and communication. Unheard of, right? Whether you’re running a small team or managing complex programs, these tips are going to help you do more with less without burning out your staff. Let’s future-proof your mission one system at a time.

Welcome to the Non-profit Digital Success podcast. I’m your host, David, and in this episode today, we are going to be talking about scaling impact with tech, communication, leadership, and alignment. And I’ve got Michael Toguchi here with me. Michael is the Chief Strategy Officer at eResources, where he helps non-profits and universities scale impact by aligning leadership, communication, and tech to empower teams to achieve more.

Michael, thank you so much for joining in, and welcome to the show.

Michael Toguchi: Thanks, David. Pleasure to be here. Really excited to chat.

David Pisarek: We know, and I think everybody listening knows, that non-profits often work with limited staff, tight budgets, and definitely tight timelines. What are some ways that you’ve helped or that you’ve seen that technology and workflows can help teams maybe do more with less?

Michael Toguchi: Yeah, that has been the challenge for decades. In this current environment, it’s really amplified, given how grants have been cut, federal funding. It is at risk in a lot of places, and folks are trying to figure out AI and all the different variables that make it challenging for a non-profit of any size, really, to operate. On our side, we start from the idea of what systems do you have in place? Where are their automations available? Where are their efficiencies that can be created?

There’s really any group that we work with, we want to help them be mission-driven. Their staff, that’s why they signed up for this, in most cases.

And so thinking of it less of spending on either technology or spending on the staff as the budgetary component, but how do you get the ROI on their time? How do you get them back to impactful work? A lot of them are siloed.

That’s one of the biggest challenges that we see is that even amongst, whether it’s an association, whether it’s a university and departments, groups have their own little subcultures. They’re siloed. They don’t have consistent data for leaders to be able to action.

You have to break down some of those things and help them streamline those processes, and find, you know, it shouldn’t be about just picking a tool and saying, HubSpot or Salesforce is going to save us, because that’s going to be the cure-all.

It’s really building that culture and saying, “Here is what our mission is. Here are the ways that we are going to digitally transfer and use that nexus point of; this is how we’re going to give our staff back their day.”

So it’s not, oh, I’m copying and pasting from a Google Doc into this. The amount of manual time that gets wasted at non-profits, just doing repetitive tasks in messy systems, is really problematic. If you give people back 20, 30, 40% of their day, you can get them, too. It doesn’t matter if it’s marketing, fundraising, research, or the work that they are going to enjoy and be really helping you advance their short and long-term goals. We try to focus on those elements and break down where those inefficiencies exist.

David Pisarek: I want to talk just a little bit about one of the things you mentioned, a little closer to the end there, about finding efficiencies and having people work on the stuff that they enjoy working on. I do this with our clients, and I do this internally with our team here at Wow Digital. We do quarterly strategic planning. We are very clear on what is the goal for the overall business or the department. We do this with our clients also.

I want my team and myself operating in what I like to call the ‘zone of genius’, the place that you can really thrive the most.

But I also have a conversation with everybody: there are going to be things in your job that you’re doing that you don’t like doing. What the goal is, is to minimize that as much as possible. And if there’s a way to bring in automation like Zappier or Albato or Make or Integrima, whatever those platforms are, to move things back and forth automatically, you end up eliminating potential data corruption. You end up eliminating human error as long as everything’s set up properly. You can put systems in place to make it easier.

And part of that, and a lot of organizations aren’t thinking about this, is around SOPs, standard operating procedures. You need to have guides on how do you do this thing. So donor calls in, what are the steps that you have to follow? What are the things that you need to do after you hang up with them? Do you need to notify? Do you need to put them in a CRM? Do you need to, etc., etc. So make sure, everybody listening, that you have… SOPs are never really a finished thing, but you can get 80 or 90% done. And it’s not about eliminating people’s roles.

It’s about standardizing the process so there aren’t any steps that are missed along the way.

Michael Toguchi: No, I 100% agree with everything you had there. I think the quarterly component is important because when you’re doing modernization or transformation, the minute you’ve created that roadmap, things have already started to change. You have to be consistent. You have to be checking what has worked, what hasn’t worked, where are we on track, where are we off track.

The SOP component is critical. A lot of folks, they will have the concern that you just mentioned where it’s like, ‘Oh, if you’re making me write out what I do, or are you just trying to get rid of me or replace me? Will somebody else will.’ It’s just administrative work that people don’t always enjoy.

That’s where it’s important for the leader to be transparent in communication, make sure people are being held accountable, but tying these changes in the work back to the overall mission.

I think that’s where we’re always explaining that. It’s like, even if there’s a limited budget, it’s not necessarily a matter of people trying to get leaner and shave off a staff. It’s often more a matter of like, ‘Hey, we’re not able to finish what we need to finish in order to achieve what we want.’ That’s where you need those automations. There’s always going to be pushback.

Changes are very difficult, and you run into a situation where somebody says, ‘Well, I can write this down, but here’s nine edge cases where things go a little bit different.’ I was like, ‘That’s fine. That’s why they’re edge cases. Write down the standard process to make sure you have it in place, and then you adjust in your day-to-day as you go.’

That is a really critical element, just making sure that it’s living documentation. You’re not writing a manual that you print out, and then that’s what it is forever. It’s something that has to be updated, particularly in this age of AI.

You need people experimenting with new tools, some of which are going to flop spectacularly. You’re never going to write out like, ‘Well, this is the way we’ve automated, and it’s going to be like this for three years.’ It just needs to be something that you’ve documented, and then you go back and update as needed.

David Pisarek: Yeah. I think a lot of leaders might be concerned. To your point, that people might be thinking, ‘Oh, you’re getting rid of me, that thing.’ That’s where people like us come in. Hire Michael, hire me. We’ll come in as an external vendor and make a recommendation that you do these things, that you have standard… That way, you’re not taking the heat. We can take the heat for you and eliminate that struggle and be like, ‘I can’t believe they want us to create documentation on this.’ You can be on their side with it.

Michael Toguchi: Yeah, we’re happy to be the bad guy. But the thing about that is that we work with a pretty broad range of groups. We are trying to establish partnerships. We don’t mind being the bad guy in the beginning, but we want to quickly work to establish why we’re doing this and how it’s going to be helpful to people, both in terms of achieving the organization’s goals, but also their individual goals.

I think that it’s fine to be the tip of the spear, but then helping the leader be the one who communicates, because they need to champion any initiative like that. 

We work with non-profit leadership a great deal, trying to make sure they understand that you need to make your staff the hero. Give them a story to be telling to themselves about how this adjustment, this transformation, this new strategy is going to work and be different from other ones that may not have been as successful.

The new leader comes in and throws a tool at them, or, ‘Hey, we just got this grant, and now we have to scramble to meet the specific terms of that grant.’ It really is a matter of balancing the idea of you have to be more agile than you used to be. You have to be more innovative. It’s a disrupted space right now for non-profits, but there still has to be steady leadership. We try and create that balance of staying the course, but also understanding that it’s not going to be as smooth sailing as you’d love.

David Pisarek: To your point, it’s okay to fail at things. It’s okay to try something as long as it’s not a critical system. Try things, test things, even if it’s a critical system, make a clone of it, do something offline with it. You have to try. I don’t like to call things failures. I like to call them lessons.

What is it that you got out of that? What did you learn from running through this edge case XYZ? That’s okay. Leadership, ultimately, for those of you that are in leadership positions, you need to be okay and you need to empower your team to understand that it is okay.

Not everything is going to be a success. How can we learn from it? How can we prevent that moving forward or adjust pivot, etc.?

Michael Toguchi: With you 100% there. You have to create the space for… If you want people to experiment, push boundaries, and create these efficiencies. There is no magic silver bullet that’s going to work for it. You have to give them an opportunity to test out new technologies. When you’re talking about, and we work with a lot to try and figure out cross-departmental or integrations. If you have things that are siloed, you’re going to have to do some testing to try and figure out what is going to be the best process.

A leader has to create a culture that allows them the space to do that, understanding that it’s part of there’s going to be long-term gains.

David Pisarek: Along those lines, what practical steps would you recommend to leaders to help evolve their digital infrastructure without overwhelming their teams? People are really busy. They’re stuck putting out the fires, maybe playing with some new technology, 10%, 15% of their time. But I worked in non-profits for 16 years. I get the overwhelm of all the tasks and all the pressure that comes with that.

Michael Toguchi: Yeah, that’s a great question because people are really asking folks to do almost two different jobs, like, ‘Hey, we need you to stay the course of everything that we assigned you to begin with, to keep things working, keep the lights on, keep things running smoothly. We also want you to help us radically transform ourselves to become a different organization.’ That’s threading a needle to do those two things concurrently because they’re not really… They don’t have the same goals.

I think, again, from a leadership standpoint, is framing your digital transformation as a communication strategy, both internally to your staff and externally to your stakeholders.

That could be students and applicants for university. It could be donors for a regular non-profit. It could be members for an association. But you need to be communicating to them. Digital transformation is not about we just got a new tool or we’re using Copilot or something like that. It’s, here’s these real-world objectives that we have on KPIs, or however you want to frame them and say, ‘This is what our mission has been. This is how we’re going to achieve them.’ And you start with the small wins.

Figure out who’s going to be the champion of it. Figure out one workflow that you can streamline. Try and break down barriers between if it’s fundraising has one set of goals, and the marketing folks want to do it a different way. Work with those two to create something that is efficient.

Looking at data, you mentioned corrupted data. What we see is often groups that have their own process and their own tools, and therefore, a leader is like, ‘I don’t have the business intelligence or the good data in order to be a data-driven leader.’ You have to find a way to harmonize those. To your point, setting aside the expectation of, if your normal day is eight hours, then X percentage of it needs to be part of experimentation, maybe X percentage of it needs to be integration.

Starting small, communicating, giving people that space to grow into the change that you’re trying to implement, those are some of the ways that we try and coach the leaders and try to implement roadmaps.

The idea is where you can say, ‘Hey, we’re going to do everything super fast and radically shift this in three months.’ Those, no, those always fail. Even if they don’t fail in the first couple of months, they fail long-term.

David Pisarek: I believe that over the course of a week, maybe 20% of the time should be play time. If you figure about 20% of your time, and I was at a conference in New York, was about a year ago, and one of the speakers there was talking about team efficiency. After serving however many hundreds of businesses and organizations, he found that typically employees are 70 to 75% actually spending their time working and that it’s okay. Nobody’s going to be pushing it 100%. That’s just going to lead to burnout and all of that.

But if you allow some of that time to be applied for play, you might be able to get 85 to 90% because they’re doing something that they’re enjoying. I think in terms of a leader, when you come to the team, you’re like, ‘Hey, we need to be thinking about AI. How can we implement in our non-profit?’ You need to give them a scenario to try to work towards. Don’t just be like, try to figure it out. Come up with something. You can use AI to come up with something. You can totally do that. But come up with a way that you can bring the team together and rally around it.

One of the things that I like to talk about in those scenarios when I’m dealing with leaders is the design thinking approach. How can we or how could we X, Y, and Z? Then go through that approach, the brainstorming, the whiteboarding on the walls or whatever your process happens to be. Come together with something specific that you want to try to solve, and then work towards that. Otherwise, people are just going to flounder. If you don’t have a target, you don’t know what you’re aiming for.

Michael Toguchi: Yeah, no, that’s absolutely right. I agree on the utilization side that you want to make sure people understand that there’s time set aside, that you’re not just tacking something on to the rest of their responsibilities. I think, both from the leader standpoint, from our standpoint in terms of us interacting with these groups that we work with, that is part of that communication to make sure people understand there’s going to be some extra time, change, and effort as part of the transition.

Doing that is going to get you to this place where it reinvigorates what you’re doing.

If you might say, ‘Oh, my gosh, how am I going to fit this into my day?’ It’s like, well, your day might be 2 hours of work that you shouldn’t be doing. It could be inefficient work, it could be spreadsheet work, it could be manually following up with donors when you could be automating things. You have to transform people’s way of thinking about it to get that buy-in internally.

David Pisarek: I remember I’ve got a little story here. I remember I was working at the hospital, and one of my employees was trying to figure out. This is going back to 2013, I think. Zapier was a thing, but people didn’t really know about it. There’s something called IFTTT. If this or not. We had our website. We rebuilt it on WordPress.

The IT team bought a touchscreen that they were going to mount on the wall for navigation of the building. So people coming in, they hung it too high. It wasn’t accessible. It was myself and a lawyer that were managing accessibility. So we made them move it and whatever. But they were like, ‘Well, we need something to run on this screen.’ ‘Hey, David, this is going up next week. We need something on this.’ I was like, ‘Are you kidding me? You ordered this two months ago. Okay, fine.’

So my employee and I, we built a WordPress site, and we were trying to figure out, we wanted to populate it with news from the main website, but it’s a totally separate environment. We ended up using IFTTT. The amount of jumping in joy and glee that we had once we figured out how to automate posts going back and forth, it was awesome. It was amazing. Now, it would take me probably five minutes to set up, but that was part of the play time.

That was part of the, let’s figure out how can we automate things so we don’t have to duplicate efforts.

Michael Toguchi: Yeah, no, that’s great. I mean, that’s where I think that extra time that you’re talking about and setting aside the time and then connecting it to the type of work that people actually enjoy, whether it’s creative problem solving, whether it’s… We work with a lot of groups that have student or member-facing support, and they really enjoy the services providing that interaction. Helping find ways that they can participate in something new, solve a problem like that, it’s really a special piece of it.

David Pisarek: You did mention briefly communication.

Communication is super, super key, and it’s the only way that things actually end up working properly. Having clear, concise, legible communication.

I get emails, I’m not going to say the name of the organization, but I get these like, you have got to scroll seven times on a computer screen. Links in the email are black and underlined in like, giant paragraphs of copy. You can’t see. Clear communication is super important.

Let’s take a step back for a quick second. I’m going to ask you, so how important, from your perspective, is clear communication when introducing new tools or workflows when you have a mission-driven team? What happens if you don’t have clear communication in place?

Michael Toguchi: Well, if you don’t, it’ll likely fail. That’s where I was mentioning.

The communication strategy to me is that it’s as critical, if not the most important piece. You have to have leadership and stakeholders that are communicating clearly with the staff so that they understand how, when, and why to use these things, how they’re going to interact with them, and then the communication with your external parties.

Again, it doesn’t matter, donor, a member, a stakeholder, board member, just general public. The communication there, whether it’s integrated text messaging for campaigns that you’re running or automated responses to somebody for thanking them for attending an event, you have to have, you have got to have that clear communication strategy, and it has to… That’s where the digital strategy and transformation, the communication is the nexus point of that.

It takes the technology and helps create the connection between the mission-driven work that your staff is doing and these external parties that you need the engagement from. It can’t be like, ‘Hey, help me increase the number of people signed up for my email or my email list, or help me get more views for this.’ It’s like, ‘What is your actual engagement? Are you getting people to attend something? Are they donating? Are they with your organization, your non-profit, in any particular way that is meaningful?’

All of that communication helps get the data that’s so valuable from our side in order to help leaders make good decisions. To me, the communication strategy is way more important than the tool. That is the part that is like tools are diamonds, doesn’t know. You can pick anyone.

If you have a good team and they understand the mission and they’re connected to a strategy, you can make any tool work. But if you start with the tool and then try and retro for it, it’s likely to fail. We really focus on both internal and external communications and make sure that they are consistent and adaptable for leaders.

David Pisarek: I love that. We need to make sure, as business owners, that we’re communicating with our clients. It’s the same when you’re in a marketing communications team, an IT team, wherever the folks listening to this are sitting, you need to communicate. If there’s going to be a network outage, if systems are going to go down because you’re doing an upgrade, you need to communicate well in advance.

Let people know, ‘Hey, there is going to be this period. It’s going to be approximately this long.’ You’re going to let them know when everything’s back up and running and have that conversation to set expectations. Then you end up not having all the fires happen and all the emergencies because you’ve identified, ‘Hey, we’re going to be doing this this time. This is what’s going to be happening.’ If they didn’t pay attention, that’s not a you problem, that’s a them problem.

Michael Toguchi: Yeah, and that’s where some of that communication piece, you start connecting it to, is it a non-profit that has an internship or scholarship program, and they feel like they’re really busy? Can you automate your reviews? Can you have AI scan people’s essays, or maybe it’s a job applicant, or really, the process ends up working the same? Can you have a chatbot that provides some level of support? Again, that’s not something…

You’re not looking for that to replace the worker. You’re looking to take the worker and put them in a position to do real substantive work.

Instead of answering, they’re like, ‘Oh, well, I spend all my time. I got phone calls. How can I send in my resume? Or emails answering ridiculous questions.’ Again, it’s communicating to the staff, We’re not trying to get rid of you. We’re trying to make your life better and easier and have you working on more productive pieces.

David Pisarek: There’s an organization that came to us very recently and said, ‘Hey, we want to implement AI on our website.’ Okay, well, what do you mean you want to implement AI? They said, well, they’re a local YMCA. They want to have essentially a chatbot that people can use to find out what their preferences are and what courses and services would be available to them, and we built it out for them.

So that is saving people internally from dealing with phone calls or emails, having to deal with people signing up for the wrong programs or the wrong days, etc. And externally, it’s making it easier for the people that want to participate because they’re finding the information more rapidly. They don’t have to search, they don’t have to hunt. It’s not necessarily just about fixing things internally, but also helping those outside as well.

Michael Toguchi: Yeah, no, that’s a great point. I mean, you connect whatever you’re putting in place to, how can we better serve the audience that we’re trying to connect with? And so that’s part of that dual communication is like, we’re trying to make your life better, staff person, and we’re trying to help you do your job better for…

If it’s donors, if it’s students, whoever it is, those are the lifeblood of what we’re doing. If we’re not serving them well, someone else will. So you need to ensure that’s communicated as well.

David Pisarek: If anybody is feeling stuck in maybe old systems, old processes, old workflows, where should they start when they’re trying to align and get things moving?

Michael Toguchi: Well, you have to take the early step back for the 30,000 Florida and say, ‘What’s the why here? What’s our mission? Where are we failing? Is it a culture issue? Is it a people issue? Is it a siloed issue?’ You have to be able to do some assessment and audit, whether it’s auditing your tools, auditing your people, or some comprehensive part of that. That would be one. Then you’re looking at design and implementation.

I think we talked a little bit earlier, starting small, finding wins, having clear communication, starting to show people victories, little workflow changes that can start improving things.

That’s when you start to get into more powerful automation. People will start to buy into to what you’re doing. Then you just have to make sure it’s a continuous process. We talked about failure, we talked about constant change, and I think people, leadership, people who are in charge of these things, and even just staff themselves, they need to be continuously analyzing what’s going on. Figuring out whether it’s successful, whether it’s quarterly check-ins or something different. Then you optimize the process. You determine what’s been successful and what isn’t and go from there.

You’re right, that can be a very overwhelming thing, I think, especially as it goes to the, well, I’ve got my day-to-day, and then I’m trying to transform on the side. But you just have to come up with a structured plan or roadmap for it and get the right people in the right places.

David Pisarek: I love your idea that you mentioned about starting small. Find one thing, make it a win. Make people understand, oh, we spent 10 hours figuring this thing out, but now I don’t have to do this thing that I don’t like doing anymore, that I was spending an hour a week, right? Half hour a week, half hour a day, five minutes a day, whatever it happens to be. Then people will start to understand that this isn’t about replacing you. This is about making you… I don’t like saying making you more efficient, but that’s what it is. How can you be doing the stuff that you really like doing more than what you have been?

Michael Toguchi: Yeah, it’s just, again, we’re talking for non-profits. They’re often mission-driven, and the folks that are there support that mission, but everybody wants impactful work. Nobody wakes up in the morning saying, I can’t wait to copy and paste these cells into some other field in the system. You’re trying to find the ways, or even some of the support things that we talked about. Nobody wants to answer people’s phone calls and emails over and over again. There are ways to reduce that and give people a fresh perspective.

David Pisarek: Absolutely. When phone systems came in and started integrating push one for this, two for this, three for this, that was really the start of helping freeing up some people’s time instead of it going to one person, and then they have to triage and direct people. So think of it like that. How can we make your life a little bit less irritating?

Michael Toguchi: Yeah, or if you’re thinking, if you’re in fundraising, like you don’t, you’re non-profit fundraising, you need that audience analysis, you need calls to action in all the right places.

But then, once you have that funnel built, do you have good data? Do you have good follow-up communications to go with it? You’re not going to be able to cover everything. You need automations in that in order to cast a broad wide net and bring in more people. It’s a lot like that where you just break it down by department or by task, and then also bring those, integrate those together so that they’re all working, rowing in one direction.

David Pisarek: That’s what it’s about, where everybody at your organization is working for and pushing forward towards the goal, the mission to help, to provide, to clean, to whatever your mission is at your organization.

Michael, loved our conversation today. Amazing insights around scaling and implementing and working smarter. Ultimately, that can lead towards better digital strategy in the organization. I hope that people listening have been able to get some great advice and pointers from our conversation. What I love to do is put my guest in a hot seat.

Michael Toguchi: Okay

David Pisarek: If you were to issue a challenge that you want somebody to do within 24 hours of listening to this episode, what would that challenge be?

Michael Toguchi: I would say if you are on a I’m going to give two connected answers.

One: if you’re a leader, assess whether you’ve created a strong culture with the right people to enable transformation. Because I think it starts from leadership. If you, again, a bad tool or a bad process, you can fix bad people, bad leadership, bad communication; those things are fatal.

If you’re a leader, I would be looking at it and saying, ‘Have you created the culture? Have you communicated to your staff in order to put yourself in a position where digital transformation is possible?’

If you are a person, if you’re a departmental person, if you’re a staff or anyone who’s in non-leadership, I would say, ‘Are you integrating yourself or are you siloed? Meaning, do you just want to get up, go to work, do the same things and not have to change? Are you putting your organization in a position where the data isn’t the same as it should be, isn’t consistent, and you’re not interested in experimenting, you’re not interested in shifting philosophies, and you’re not as open to… From a personal standpoint, you just would rather check the box and get the paycheck.

I think the challenge there is just this disrupted space we’re in; if you’re that person, those are the people that are going to be at risk. If you’re not open to understanding how radically things are shifting, how there are threats and risks to funding, and just the model overall.

The challenge I would present is do a self-assessment. Do you want to experiment? Do you want to innovate? Are you a person that’s willing to reach across to other departments?

David Pisarek: I love that. If the answer is no, that’s not something that you want to focus on; you can bring in outside consultants to help with that. You can charge them with helping to figure out, here’s what needs to be done. There’s a certain bit of artistic troubleshooting that needs to happen with it.

Some people are more artistic, some people are more logical, the two hemispheres of the brain. It might not be part of your capability. And that’s okay to understand that that’s the case, but you can get support. You can leverage support for that. So I love your idea. Sit down, take some stock of what’s going on, where things are at, and where you might be able to move forward. I love that.

Michael, if anybody wants to get in touch with you, what do they need to do?

Michael Toguchi: You can find me on LinkedIn. There’s not a lot of Michael Toguchi floating around there. Or you can visit eresources.com. That’s our website. We also have an online application platform called Orchestrate. You can search for that. We work with all sorts of non-profits, disability centers, membership organizations, the whole gamut. Like I said, we’ve been blessed in order to work with a really diverse group of clients.

We love partnerships where we’re able to not only just help reframe things, but also stay to see the impact go. I love to hear from anyone, whether it’s just questions or to actually partner with.

David Pisarek: Love it. Michael, thanks again so much for joining on the show. It’s been great having you here on the Non-profit Digital Success podcast. To everybody listening, if you want any of the links, resources will have a link for Michael’s LinkedIn so that you can find them easily. Just to our podcast page at nonprofitdigitalsuccess.com. Click on this episode for all of the details.

Until next time, keep on being successful!