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Are you feeling burned out?
Nonprofit IT can be exhausting. Learn how to de-stress to better tackle your job and help your nonprofit succeed.

There is so much stress in managing nonprofit IT.

There are conflicting agendas, tight budgets, and unrealistic demands.
A lot of us have been burned by IT projects in the past that still give us nightmares. The tool was expensive, required a huge project to implement, took a ton of time, didn’t work, everyone hated it, the training was terrible, and the vendor or consultants or your boss left you holding the bag.

Some executives really do understand how crucial functioning IT is to your nonprofit – to your work life and to your ability to achieve your mission.
But even if you are lucky enough to have a lot of leadership, IT management is still tough. It touches every staff member and even little issues can make your work unworkable. Don’t get us started on cybersecurity fears.

While you work on the big picture of IT management at your nonprofit, don’t forget to work on managing your own stress and avoiding burnout.
With all the recent research and attention paid to self-care in nonprofit careers we wanted to spend a webinar focused particularly on
de-stress and self-care in nonprofit IT roles.

Join Director of Marketing and recovering IT Director at large and small nonprofits Carolyn Woodard for a webinar exploring the latest research on the benefits of de-stressing and some tips on incorporating self-care in your nonprofit IT management routine.

If your first reaction to the idea of self care is that you are too busy to put it on your to-do list, this is the webinar for you.

But also, if you feel like you have a pretty good handle on your stress levels and the IT you manage is working well, please join us and share your strategies. This webinar will encourage peer learning and we invite you to listen in or jump in with advice as we support each other in this career.

This webinar is appropriate for nonprofit executives, managers, accounting, development, and nonprofit IT personnel – and as with all our webinars, it is appropriate for a varied audience.

Community IT is proudly vendor-agnostic and our webinars cover a range of topics and discussions. Webinars are never a sales pitch, always a way to share our knowledge with our community.

Presenter:

Carolyn Woodard self care in nonprofit IT roles


Carolyn Woodard is currently head of Marketing and Outreach at Community IT Innovators. She has served many roles at Community IT, from client to project manager to marketing. With over twenty years of experience in the nonprofit world, including as a nonprofit technology project manager and Director of IT at both large and small organizations, Carolyn knows the frustrations and delights of working with technology professionals, accidental techies, executives, and staff to deliver your organization’s mission and keep your IT infrastructure operating. She has a master’s degree in Nonprofit Management from Johns Hopkins University and received her undergraduate degree in English Literature from Williams College. She is happy to share tips and advice for nonprofit IT professionals to de-stress and explore self-care in nonprofit IT roles.









Transcript

Welcome everyone to the Community IT webinar, De-Stress! Self-Care in Nonprofit Roles. There’s a lot of stress in nonprofit IT – there are unrealistic expectations and demands, there are cybersecurity worries, there are budget constraints, the fast pace of change … and on top of all that there is a tendency of nonprofit workers to pour ourselves into our jobs until sometimes we completely deplete our own reserves. 

Today we’re going to talk about what the research says about stress, how to decrease your stress, and I hope we’re going to learn together and share some of your tips and your practices for decreasing your own stress levels. 

My name is Carolyn Woodard, I’m the Outreach Director for Community IT, and first, I’m going to go over our learning objectives.

Learning Objectives

First, we’re going to learn 

Reset Exercise Example: Reconnect with your Senses

Before we start, we’re going to do a quick reset exercise, which I like to do in meetings sometimes. 

First, I want you to take a few deep breaths, and we’re going to reconnect with our senses.

Pick one thing that you can see and really look at it. This could be something outside your window, it could be something on your desk, it could be a photograph that you have, people that you love. Really take a look at it and try to really see it.

If you’re doing a real mindfulness exercise, you might do something like this for five or ten minutes. We’re just going to do it fairly quickly, and we’re going to go through all of our senses. 

So now that you’ve looked at something, I want you to close your eyes and think about what sounds you can hear. It may be something ambient, it may be the noise of an air conditioner, it may be a dog barking, it may be children playing next door. Just focus on what you can hear.

And while you have your eyes closed, think about what you are able to smell. It may be very neutral in the room where you are, which is something a lot of us strive for. But you may have lotion on your hands, you may have incense or a diffuser in your room. Try to think about the things that you can smell.

Next, we’re going to touch something. You may have something on your desk, something that’s fuzzy, squishy, smooth. You could feel your clothing. Do you have something on that’s rough? I’m feeling my sweater is quite soft. So that’s another way you can reconnect with your senses.

And the last one is your sense of taste. Taste is very easily evoked by memory, both taste and smell. So, when you need a reset, you might think about something that you love the taste of, for example the way coffee smells in the morning, and then you have your first sip of coffee, and it tastes delicious. Or a holiday meal that is very important to you, and what that tastes like.

You could also do this with an actual snack. If you need a reset break, you can have a snack, but just really focus on how it smells and tastes and savor it. Don’t just eat it while you’re doing something else. Be a person for a moment who all you’re doing is eating. 

Those are some ways that you can reconnect with your senses. 

Introductions

I’m going to introduce myself. My name is Carolyn. I’m often very stressed. When I told my son I was doing this webinar, he just laughed and said, “but mom, what do you know about stress? You are very stressed all the time.” So, I’m not leading this webinar because I’m particularly good at it, but I have spent a lot of time thinking about it and looking up different techniques and practices. 

And I have learned that it is so important to us in our lives, so I hope that this is going to be helpful for all of you. 

Before we begin, I’m going to tell you our familiar spiel about Community IT, a little bit about us. We are a 100% employee-owned managed services provider, and we provide outsourced IT support. We work exclusively with nonprofit organizations, and our mission is to help nonprofits accomplish your missions through the effective use of technology. We are big fans of what well-managed IT can do for your nonprofit, and we serve nonprofits across the US. We’ve been doing this for 20 years, and we are technology experts. We are consistently given an MSP 501 recognition for being a top MSP, which is an honor we received again in 2024. 

I interview all of the staff for our Voices series, which you can find on our website, which is www.communityit.com. And I can tell you that everyone I’ve talked to from all different walks of life and different backgrounds, one of the things that we really have in common is how much we love working with nonprofits. We all kind of get caught up in the good things that our clients are doing and how we can make that better through well-managed technology. So, I think a lot of us here also feel that nonprofit IT stress that we’re going to talk about today. 

I am hoping to have interaction in this presentation because as I say, none of us is as smart as all of us. I know that people in the audience, you all have lots of good practices and suggestions. So, keep an eye on the chat and I’ll be asking you at various points to weigh in on something that works for you. 

What Does Stress do to Your Body and Mental Health?

If you’re interested in the exact science of our response to stressors, there are lots of sites out there where you can learn about it. And I’ll share some from Harvard and Cleveland Clinic. In a nutshell, millennia ago, our ancestors who had evolved a quick autonomic response to danger were more likely to survive, and now we all have this automatic response. 

The difficulty is that the chemicals and changes that are released to help us fight or face danger in the short term are themselves dangerous to our bodily systems in the long term. For example, our heart, our blood vessels, digestion, our immune system, our brains.

So ideally, once released and the danger is over, those chemicals should go away, and we would return to our “normal” settings. But when our body never gets back to normal and the chemicals stay elevated, over time they cause havoc with our bodies, and that’s where burnout lies. 

You may have seen these terms, the fight or flight response, and recently two have been added. There’s also the freeze response, which is where your body just collapses, and you shut down. And there’s also fawn, which is where you try to appease your way out of the danger that you sense. You may have heard about people who are people pleasers, who are always saying yes, always trying to do the thing that everybody else wants. That would be an example of fawning. 

And of course, I couldn’t do a webinar about stress without including this meme about the little dog in the fire who is saying everything is fine. 

https://www.npr.org/2023/01/16/1149232763/this-is-fine-meme-anniversary-gunshow-web-comic

What Does Stress do to Your Mental Health?

These are just some of the symptoms you may show when you are under stress. Luckily, paying attention to our mental health is losing some of the stigma that was once attached to “not being able to cope.” And we have a lot of research into the ways we can improve our mental health and our ability to be resilient to challenges that cause us stress. A lot of colleges, for example, have programs where you can play with a puppy during exam week, that sort of thing. 

Some of these symptoms that you may feel when your mental health is responding to a stressful situation or elevated stress over time might be worrying, indecision, having negative thinking or foggy thinking, making hasty decisions or having impaired judgment, and making bad decisions. You might have substance abuse, lack of appetite, and you may become more accident prone, experience restlessness, loneliness, difficulty sleeping. You might have a lot of loss of confidence, apprehension, anxiety, indifference. Things just don’t mean anything. They don’t matter to you. Depression, irritability. 

Of course, anyone who’s taken Psych 101 can tell you that as soon as you see a list of symptoms, you think, “oh my God, I have all of those. I’m diagnosing myself with this thing.”

The key to understanding your own stress is thinking about, “Does this stress feel manageable? Or is it changing my life and my behavior in ways that don’t feel healthy to me? Am I avoiding things? Am I abusing substances? Am I able to sleep? Do I have some of these symptoms a little bit some of the time, or do I have a lot of them all of the time?”

Those are the things that you need to think about when you’re thinking about your mental health and stress. 

What Is Stressing Us Out in IT Roles at Nonprofits?

Here are the things that came out at registration.

Steps to Manage Stress

Here are some steps to manage stress. And I really liked this way of thinking about it. 

Mental Stress, Mental Health.

I really loved this little illustration. It’s from an illustrator named Color Me Happy on Instagram. It was shared by Viola Davis.

How to take care of yourself? And good checking questions to ask yourself. 

Physical Health

Here is some information on your physical health and the ways that you can use exercise to make your mood better. And I’m going to share that link with you as well.

If you’ve been feeling down lately, exercising really can change your mood. It reduces feelings of depression and stress, can enhance your mood overall, your sense of your well-being, it can increase your energy level. And of course, exercising can help with your sleep. And if you’re not rested, it’s really hard to tackle the things that are going on in your life. 

Reduce Stress

And then here’s another quick illustration about the health benefits of reducing stress. I mean, I think all of us want to reduce our stress, but there’s real research into why it’s important to your body and your outlook to be able to reset and reduce your stress.

So, as I said, it can give you better sleep, which makes you better able to tackle your problems, can lower your blood pressure, can improve your digestion, reduce your muscle tension, and boost your immune system. And I don’t know about you, but I know a lot of people and not just myself. When I’m under a lot of stress, that’s when I catch a cold. So, stress really does have this interplay with how our bodies are working

Here’s a share question.

I put two thought questions in here as well, which, I don’t need you to share them with me, but maybe something to reflect on after this webinar and going forward.

So those are things you can think about going forward.

How to Reduce Stress

Here is a quick list. These are all things that work for me and also that are out there as ways to counter stress.

As we talked about exercise and getting outdoors – you may have seen stories about writing a prescription for forest bathing or just getting outside. It really does alter your mood. And in our modern lives, it’s possible to not get outside very much. So sometimes we have to make that extra effort. And I see Beatrice has put in the chat, getting out in nature can be as easy as going outside and really looking at the leaves on a tree in a park. So that is something that is right at the top of our list.

Next, there’s also nourishment. Getting good food, listening to your body, what your body needs, and having good routines. Both of those are really good to help combat stress or reset yourself.

And remember from the earlier slide, we’re talking about when those chemicals are elevated all the time, that’s when your body starts to break down. So daily having some practice where you de-elevate those chemicals and set yourself back to normal, do a reset, a re-grounding, that’s one of the things that really can help your body handle your stress. 

Mindfulness is another thing. Reconnecting to your five senses daily. It does not have to be meditation or practices like yoga, but it can be. Meditation and mindfulness work for some people. They don’t work for other people. Trying to find something that works for you is really important. 

Hobbies, they can absorb you and require focus and attention. This also can reground you. 

Play. I just read a great article about play therapy and how as children, we play a lot. And as adults, we kind of lose that habit. Or maybe we play a board game with our family, but we don’t have really active play, like skipping rope or playing tag or running around. And so, there’s even a movement at retreats to do more physical games and playing, because it again just resets your mood and your stress level.

Seeking out new experiences. This can be going away for a weekend, but it could be just locally going to a different restaurant, someplace you haven’t been before. Exploring creativity, music, and dance.

Alexandra put in music, playing and listening to it, writing and journaling, driving around country roads, spending time with yourself and other people that you love. William says, just going for a drive with the windows down often can be enough. So, something like that, that breaks your routine and takes you out of your automatic-on-autopilot responses is something really good to do. Alexandra says, going outside is one of my favorite things to do when the weather is right. 

You can learn a new language. So again, something that’s engaging you, engaging your brain and that you’re not able to do on autopilot is one of the threads running through a lot of these different techniques.

Practicing gratitude, positivity, and making good connections, all of these we know through research are really important. And I don’t want to say just a toxic positivity of “I’ll just tell myself everything’s fine.” 

But being able to do that reset, one of the things you can do is instead of saying, “I have to,” you can change that into a more positive, “I get to…”

So, for me, it could be, I have to drive my daughter to her violin lesson. I could say instead, I get to spend this time with my daughter, taking her to and from her violin lesson. Years from now, she’s going to remember this time that we had together in the car, when she talks about different things, or we listen together to music that she likes. So just changing that little reset can really help. 

Focusing on what you control in your life. This is a really big one.

So often we are stressed about something that is not in our control. One of the examples earlier, “I have part of the project, but a big part of the project is not in my control.” Being able to focus on practices that remind you to change the things that are within your control to change actually helps you deal more resiliently with the things that are out of your control to change. 

And the last thing is deep relaxation. Being able to fully relax is just incredibly helpful and good for your body. And when you are not able to relax fully, you’re having trouble sleeping, you’re kind of always on. That is something that is going to make it harder for you to respond to stresses and difficulties in your life later.

Real Self Care

I’m going to go on to our next topic, which is to talk about some of the theories and the role of oppressive systems, because we all work in nonprofits, and we think about things like this in our communities and in ourselves and in our jobs. 

Recently, when I was doing the research for this webinar, I listened to this podcast, which is one of my favorites. It’s the Code Switch Podcast.

And this one really got me thinking about the larger picture reasons why we feel so stressed out and why self-care can feel just like another job. Dr. Pooja Lakshmin wrote this book, Real Self-Care. The subtitle is, Crystals, Cleanses, and Bubble Baths Are Not Included. And she talks about, in fact, faux self-care, which is part of the wellness business and is really just a way to promote more consumption. 

This quotation from her interview really resonated with me, especially working in nonprofits, where we pour ourselves and our lives into our work.

“You really can’t meditate your way out of a 40-hour work week with no childcare, without health insurance, without access to actual real systemic support that is going to take care of the fact that our world is pretty much constantly on fire.”

And that just really spoke to me. And I hope it speaks to you as well, that a lot of our nonprofits where we work deal with these larger problems, like lack of access to paid leave, paid childcare, health insurance, things that would make us less stressed.

And I love the way that she talks about faux self-care. Faux self-care is something that is prescribed from outside of you. It’s describing some sort of activity or product that you need to pay to do or to use, like buying a candle to have when you are taking a bath, to do your self-care. Often, they are experiences. Go do a thing, pay someone to do a thing with them that will be de-stressing.

One of the things about this kind of consumer capitalism-based aspect of approach to self-care is that it often maintains the status quo of your relationship to the stress that’s in your life. So, it’s offering you more of an escape than a way to change those larger systems. 

And I will say that when I first heard the term self-care, my honest reaction was “Great. That is just one more thing I have to put on my list. And my to-do list is already long, and I’m already stressed about it, and I don’t have enough time already, so I can’t put one more thing on my list!”

I have a friend who’s a nurse who very gently talked to me about how important it is to put your self-care first on your list every day.

Because if you burn out, you will not be making one more phone call, you will not be writing one more report, you will not be fixing one more cybersecurity breach, you won’t be doing anything because you will be taking sick leave if you have it to get your body and your mental health back under control, which is the opposite of why you’re driving yourself so hard in the first place. 

Looked at in this light, caring for yourself first allows you to care for your immediate community, your wider community, including your workplace and the community that your non-profit is working in, and of course, the widest expanse, our universal community that we care about and want to be healthy and moving forward, making progress. 

Tips to Build Self-Care into Your Routine

Dr. Lakshmin gives this council in her book on these four principles to real self-care, and it is hard work. It is not sitting in a bath with a candle. But I really like these principles, and this really gave me a good framework to think about in my own life, personal life, work life, the different stressors and the impact that I can make to change how stressed out I feel from those stressors. 

Set Boundaries and Learn to Deal with Guilt

The first principle is setting boundaries and learning to deal with guilt, making space for yourself.

Boundaries are for you, for your actions that you control. You need to be clear and specific in setting these expectations and then following through. One example that you might have from work is, “I have told everyone I am not available after hours. If I get an e-mail or a text after hours, I will not answer it. And I will not feel guilty about not answering it.” In a larger sense, right, you will say, “I will not feel guilty about spending time on myself to de-stress myself, because that is one of the boundaries that I’m setting for myself, that I’m making the time for and the space for myself in my daily routine.”

Develop Self-Compassion

The second principle is to develop self-compassion. Pay attention to how you approach yourself. And this is not kind of a “get out of jail free” card, just to let yourself off the hook for everything.

Always have self-compassion for everything that you do. You need to develop reliable methods for self-reflection. So don’t be too hard on yourself. If you tend to be too hard on yourself, realize that and try to ease off. Don’t go too easily on yourself. If you tend to always give yourself a lot of benefit of the doubt, maybe examine that and give yourself a little bit more of a kick in the pants sometimes.

Developing self-compassion and kind of a self-reflection, as accurate of a self-reflection as you can, is a really important principle in building self-care into your routine. 

Get Clear on Your Values

The third principle is to get clear on your values. I think this may be one of the hardest ones.

For some people, maybe some people already have identified all of their values. But in this, she talks about using an internal lens to understand the big choices you’re making in your life now and going forward. So, these are kind of your rules to live by, that provide you with a deep well of strength and courage to nourish you and guide your decisions.

And if you think about people in your life that you think really have that kind of positive energy, that are able to make time for themselves and are able to calmly and appropriately interact with the world, give you advice, be there for you. What I’ve noticed in people like that in my life is that they do tend to have these really deep values, that they understand very well. So, this is where you can have a real disconnect in your life if you’re experiencing a lot of stress.

Is your work the most important thing in your day, in your life? 

What during the day is getting the most of your attention? 

What do you think about the most?

Is that what is most important to you? 

And if you can do the work, answer these kinds of questions to really understand your own values, those values become a welcome guiding factor as you make these big and small decisions daily about what you’re spending your time on, and your energy. 

Self-Care Equals Power in Oppressive Systems

And then the fourth principle is that self-care equals power in oppressive systems.

And I love this quote that we need soul food to be able to march. Something that the civil rights movement, people in that movement really understood, is that you cannot march all the time. You have to have soul food to nourish yourself, to be able to march again.

So, self-care is not just set it and forget it. If it becomes something that you do on autopilot, that is taking you right back to those automatic responses that we’re trying to disrupt and we’re trying to overcome. Re-examining and re-evaluating your self-care practices are some things that can help you keep marching and know that you’re marching based on those values that are of the deepest importance to yourself.

Put Self-Care First on Your List

And lastly, always, always put self-care first on your list. Thank you, my friend, Nurse Mary. 

Spend time with your question, with the question, why do I feel like this? And what do I want and need in my life? Setting boundaries and being compassionate with yourself is good. That’s about the process.

Some things that you may do for self-care might not necessarily be wrong, like having that candle, but it may not be enough. You need to understand that the answers to your self-care are going to come from you, not from someone else or from some thing else. 

And one of the things that leads to this is that automatic responses feel so good. They soothe a part of your brain that craves repetition and certainty. So that kind of “vegging out” feeling that you have, where you’re just thinking, “I don’t want to think about anything, I just want to relax.” But, like eating potato chips or popcorn, where you have that kind of mechanical action that feels really good, you have this reward, it’s soothing, but it’s not nourishing.

Finding your way into some nourishing practices, it takes more work, but it leaves you feeling energized and capable.

This also is something that my friend Mary sent to me, which is that if you don’t schedule a break, your body will take one for you, and it probably won’t be at a convenient time. So, paying attention to this before it becomes a five-alarm alarm fire and you’re in the middle of it saying, “this is fine,” it’s hard because you have to move it from something that you should do into something that you are doing.

De-Stressing Advice

These are some of the things that came up at registration when I asked, “What was the best de-stressing advice you have received or would like to give?” 

I just found these were just so helpful. Like I said, none of us is as smart as all of us.

Some of the things that were said were, for example, to focus on your sphere of control, that burnout is real. We know burnout is real. 

Make a clear line between work time and personal time.

Sometimes it’s okay to drop the ball. Not all balls are glass. Some are rubber and will bounce. You have other members on your team. You have colleagues at work. If there’s something that you’re not the only one who can do that thing, think about passing it off or getting help with it. Someone else can take up part of it. 

Finding your community and connect with real people, not just screens. It’s ironic today doing this over Zoom.

Give it time and don’t do drastic decisions when you are tired or upset. That’s a good one. 

Sometimes you just need to step away and pray.

The people who were putting in the chat earlier, go for a drive, go for a walk, get outside, take some deep breaths, reconnect with your senses. All these disruptors get you out of that automatic kind of on autopilot attitude. 

Make sure there’s a proper ratio of employers to IT staff. That’s a good one. Some of us are thinking, I’m the only one at my department and I have to do it all. So those are conversations, again, talking about the bigger picture, the system that you are in that is stressful.

Maybe that’s a conversation you need to have with your team, your direct report, your executive team. How is IT being managed at your nonprofit? And is it strategic? Is it sustainable? Is it manageable? 

So, all of those questions might be something where, this time of year is a good time to do your strategic planning and kind of check in, do an assessment, even if it’s just to check in with stakeholders and your colleagues about how IT is working at your nonprofit.

Listen to your mind and your body. Don’t take on too much at one time. 

And a little salty one. So, allocate the things that you care about. You can’t care about everything all the time. So do your budget and allocate appropriately what you have time to spend time on, mental energy on. 

It was really, it was kind of a bigger revelation to me to think about stress in the terms of bigger systems that are keeping us in a more stressful state, and the ways that our own work to get out of constantly feeling stressed and constantly maybe consuming things to help us feel less stressed impacts us. 

Doing a little bit of that step back and reset and finding things that work for us can be a revolutionary action, a small one, but it’s a way to not let the system control the way that you are feeling about your work and your time that you’re spending on the things that are important to you.

Jessica has weighed in on chat. Jessica says spending time with friends helps a lot. Doing something fun together or even just getting to exchange job complaints. 

Yes, I think that is definitely a good practice, I often will vent to my husband because he has nothing to do with anything at my job. And I’ll just tell him at the start, “I’m just venting, I don’t want you to make any suggestions or try to figure out the problem. I just want you to listen to me talk about this crazy thing that happened. That I feel like I just need to get off my chest.”

So, he’s been a good sounding board for me. Sometimes having somebody outside of your work, your colleagues that are directly impacted by what you’re experiencing, can be good. 

Finding mentors was mentioned in chat. Twenty years ago, 25 years ago, when I was starting out as an IT manager at a nonprofit, and I actually had my first job where I was managing people who reported to me. And I found it incredibly stressful to take on that responsibility. 

I had a mentor that I would have coffee with every couple of months. And I want to shout out, give him a thank you from the future me to past me. Because that was just incredibly helpful to have him recognize that one of the reasons I felt so stressed out was because I felt so responsible for the people who reported to me. In that job, I really saw myself as the bumper on the car in our department, that if something was going to happen, I wanted me to be the one who absorbed the shock, and then I created a space where they could do their jobs.

And that wasn’t necessarily the healthiest way to approach it. So, it was very helpful to have someone mentor me through that kind of responsibility. Finding those mentors that you can talk to, is also very important.

Conclusion

Well, I’m going to give you some time back, which is a trick that I sometimes do is I’ll schedule something for an hour, even if I know it’s only going to take 20 or 30 minutes, so that nobody else will schedule something with me for that extra half an hour. And then it’s like bonus time, like free time that you got back.

And I try also not to do something like, “oh, I’ll just catch up on this other thing that I had to do that’s weighing on me.” It’s like if I get a half an hour back, I might go outside or turn on some music and just dance around or do some kind of reset like that. 

Before you go I’m going to go through our learning objectives.

I hope that today you were able to learn why stress is bad for your physical and mental health. It’s a catch-22. The more stressed you are, the harder it is to respond to stress, the more stressed you get, etc. Breaking that cycle and doing disruption to get yourself out of it is really important. 

Learn and discuss unique stressors in nonprofit IT roles. Thank you so much for everything that you shared with us about the things that are particularly stressful in this specific job that we have.

Exploring tips and techniques to reduce the stress, learning to build self-care into your routine, maybe as a revolutionary practice, and to share best practices on de-stressing. I really appreciate everyone who shared something in chat or shared something with us at the registration. 

I want to invite you back in January. We always take a break in December for our webinar series, so we will not be back until January 22nd for our traditional Nonprofit Tech Roundtable. We have our experts who will be talking about tech trends to keep an eye on, and what they are seeing at our clients and in the community.

Of course, they’re going to be talking a lot about AI. So, after a year or so of hearing about the transformative power of AI tools, we’re starting to have some cases specific to nonprofit staff and productivity. I feel like when AI started to be such a huge buzz, and then when ChatGPT came out, there were a lot of nonprofit, well, there were a few nonprofit stories about nonprofits using AI to do something that was related to their mission.

And really, I think a lot of the power of AI is going to be transforming our work lives. So, we’re starting to have some case studies of those types of productivity gains that you can have if you’re using AI to do analysis or help you with drafting things. We’re going to have some stories in January, not just about AI for your mission, but how you can do your nonprofit job with AI tools.

They’re also going to talk about cybersecurity worries that are coming up. AI is also involved there. About Google Workspace and Microsoft, other tech topics.

You can ask them your questions at registration or live in the webinar and find out about the trends you’re interested in. I really encourage you to do that. Just go ahead and register and ask what you’re interested in, so they can talk about it then.

That’s going to be at 3 PM Eastern, noon Pacific on Wednesday, January 22nd, in 2025. 

And I just want to thank everyone who joined us today. Your time is a gift.

I would love to stay connected to you online and continue this conversation. I hope that you have a holiday season that is rejuvenating, and that you connect with your friends and family that give you that space to reset. I hope that some of the practice we discussed today are helpful to you.

And I just really appreciate you sharing what works for you and being with me today for these 50 minutes. I’m going to give you your 10 minutes back. So go do something. Don’t just go on autopilot. Do something that will be rejuvenating and resetting for you. Thank you so, so much.