What does it mean to be a learning organization and how can you grow learning practices at your nonprofit?

View Video

Subscribe to our Youtube Channel here

Karen Graham on being a Learning Organization


Listen to Podcast

In pt 1 Karen defined a Learning Organization and explored common struggles to embrace learning at your nonprofit. In pt 2 Karen discusses the categories of learning technologies that can help nonprofits organize their learning management, and gave us tips on implementing learning strategies at our organizations.

Like podcasts? Find our full archive here or anywhere you listen to podcasts: search Community IT Innovators Nonprofit Technology Topics on Apple, Google, Stitcher, Pandora, and more. Or ask your smart speaker.

Transcript below.

Karen Graham has more than 20 years in senior nonprofit leadership, and a broad knowledge of trends and best practices in technology, leadership, and organizational development. Formerly head of Idealware, a research institution studying nonprofits’ use of technology, Karen has long observed there are some nonprofits that have a strong internal learning culture, and she sees benefits to those who take knowledge management and sharing very seriously.

She shared ideas on how to grow that learning impulse at your nonprofit and find funding for it and strategic value in it.

If you are struggling with a learning management system or thinking about investing in one, we also talked about tech tools that help with knowledge management – but as we always say, the tech should come last, the clearly articulated business need should come first.

Karen’s presentation helps us think about why learning is so crucial to our organizations and how to invest in the idea of the learning organization.

Is your nonprofit a learning organization?

For more on the concept of learning organizations and the history of the term over the decades, we recommend this article from Harvard Business Review Is Yours a Learning Organization? (1 free article/month or by subscription.)

As with all our webinars, this presentation is appropriate for an audience of varied IT experience.

Community IT and Karen Graham Consulting are 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.

Presenters:

Karen Graham

Karen Graham is a nonprofit technology strategist who loves helping people solve problems – from making their work easier and more enjoyable, to enabling their organization to more effectively achieve its mission. 

Her 20+ years experience in nonprofit leadership, consulting, and capacity building earned her a broad knowledge of how people, process, and technology can work together to create impact. She writes, speaks, and advises organizations on technology leadership, software selection, user adoption, innovation, and strategic IT alignment. She has guided dozens of organizations through their software decisions, from requirements analysis to implementation and ongoing database optimization. 

Her consulting work focuses on the intersection of technology strategy, leadership, and culture for mission based organizations. She has worked in a variety of roles in sector-strengthening organizations such as Tech Impact (Chief Advancement Officer), Idealware (Executive Director), MAP for Nonprofits (Director of Technology & Innovation), and thedatabank (Director of Business Development). She serves on the grant review board for the Shavlik Family Foundation and the board of directors for the Minneapolis Southwest High School Performing Arts Committee. Karen earned her MBA in Nonprofit Management from the University of St. Thomas.

For an introduction to Karen’s thinking on learning organizations, listen to this podcast Karen Graham on Learning from Build Consulting. You can also follow her on LinkedIn.


Carolyn Woodard Making IT Governance Work for Your Nonprofit


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 was happy to moderate this webinar on is your nonprofit is a learning organization.





Transcript

Carolyn Woodard: Thank you all for joining us, and welcome to this Community IT webinar, Is Your Nonprofit a Learning Organization? It’s a conversation with my friend, Karen Graham. In her career working with technology and nonprofits, Karen has long observed that there are some nonprofits that have a strong internal learning culture, and she sees benefits to those who take knowledge management and sharing the pledge very seriously.

She’s going to share some ideas today on how you can grow that learning impulse at your nonprofit and find funding for it and strategic value in it. If you’re struggling with a learning management system or thinking about investing in one, we are going to talk about some of the tech tools that you could use. But we always say that your articulated business need should come first and the technology should come second that meets that need. 

So today we’re going to have a more strategic conversation about why you would want to be a learning organization and why that’s beneficial and how to go about growing that.

My name is Carolyn Woodard. I am the Outreach Director for Community IT and I’ll be the moderator today. And I’m very happy to hear from Karen.

Learning Objectives

At the end of today, we hope that you’ll be able to learn 

Now I’d like to turn it over to Karen to introduce herself and her background. Karen?

Karen Graham: All right. Thanks for hosting me today and having this conversation together. Those learning objectives really cover a lot of ground, and I think we’ll be able to only scratch the surface on some of those things today. But this will be a good, really quick tour of learning. 

A little bit about my background and my interest in this. I’ve done a lot of different things in my career. I’ve been fortunate to hold roles from being a summer camp director to selling shoes and working for a dotcom travel agency. I’ve been a chief advancement officer in a mid-sized nonprofit organization. I’ve been an executive director and CEO of a small nonprofit organization. I’ve been a consultant, worked for a software company. I’ve done a lot of different things. 

One of the common threads throughout all of that is that I’ve always had an interest in how technology and people and process can come together to make an organization more effective.

I’m especially interested in the kinds of organizations that are making the world a better place and that are mission-driven organizations. And so my work today is in helping nonprofits to be successful with technology. Not so much the things that Community IT does, which is really keeping it stable and secure and running smoothly and helping with a lot of the wires and switches kinds of things. They are so good at that. 

I am often partnering with people like that, including sometimes Community IT, to help organizations think more about strategy and the people/process end of things and how to get the very most out of their technology investments.

So I do consulting projects. I am a CIO on contract for one nonprofit organization. I also do a lot of speaking and teaching, and that is one of my favorite things. So this will be the highlight of my week.

Carolyn Woodard:  Did you want to tell us a little bit more about Karen Graham Consulting?

Karen Graham: That’s my company. It’s just me. It’s not a big agency. I’m kind of a solopreneur. 

And I’ll tell you this: One of the things that I offer is if anybody wants to have a one-on-one conversation and dig deeper into one of the topics we mentioned today or something completely different that’s related to my areas of expertise, I’ll do that for free. No strings attached. Your first 25 minutes with me is free.

So you can email me, [email protected] and set something up, and I’d be glad to have a one-on-one conversation.

Carolyn Woodard: That’s a very valuable offer, right there.

Okay, before we begin, I’m also going to tell you a little bit about Community IT. If you’re not familiar with us, we are a 100% employee-owned managed services provider. 

As Karen said, we keep the email working and cybersecurity going, everything kind of humming along that has to do with your IT systems. We provide outsourced IT support. We work exclusively with nonprofit organizations, and our mission is to help nonprofits achieve their missions through well-managed IT.

We are big fans of what well-managed IT can do for your organization. We serve nonprofits across the United States. We’ve been doing this for over 20 years, and we are technology experts.

We are consistently given the MSP 501 recognition for being a top MSP, which is an honor we just received this week for 2024. And we are one of the only MSPs on that list of 501 MSPs that only serve nonprofits. 

I want to remind everyone that for these presentations, Community IT is vendor agnostic. We only make recommendations to our clients and only based on their specific business needs. We never try to get a client into a tool or a technology because we get some kind of benefit from that. We do consider ourselves a best of breed IT provider.

So it’s our job to know the landscape, the tools that are available, reputable, widely used, and we make recommendations on that basis for our clients based on their budget, their needs, their priorities. 

I always think, in these presentations, it would be kind of ridiculous not to talk about Microsoft or Google because those are tools that a lot of nonprofits are using.

But I just want to make sure everyone understands. We’re not advocating for one of the tools over another one, and there are plenty that are out there. So that is one of the things we help our clients do is make those decisions.

What does it mean to be a learning organization?

What does it mean to be a learning organization? The hallmarks of a learning organization, the advantages, the ways adults learn, and how you can advocate for being more of a learning organization if you’re a nonprofit. 

So Karen, do you want to start us off?

Karen Graham: Yeah, my initial thought on this is that a learning organization is an organization that asks a lot of questions and isn’t static. And this is one of the big advantages of being a learning organization, is that it can be an adaptive organization.

You’re not just going to keep doing things the same way day after day, year after year, even when the environment around you is changing. When your beneficiaries or participants are changing their expectations or their needs, then you’re responding to that. Or maybe you’re even a step ahead of that. Maybe you’re anticipating it.

And so a learning organization is one that’s always asking, how can we do this better? What might be changing that requires us to adapt and plan for that? And just having a sense of curiosity.

Another hallmark of a learning organization would be that they experiment and they treat mistakes as opportunities to learn. At least we know what doesn’t work. And so their attitude toward mistakes is very different, I think, from organizations that are on the opposite side of that spectrum.

A Learning Organization:

Carolyn Woodard: I agree. I think that I’ve been at many organizations in my career, and there’s definitely a different, I don’t want to say a vibe, when there is support for curiosity and seeing where something is going to take you. And I also love what you said about learning from mistakes.

So putting in place systems where when you’re finished with a project or even midway in a project, you’re getting a lot of feedback and you’re learning a lot about what’s working, what’s not working, how the participants are feeling about it. All of those things, I think, are hallmarks of an organization that’s invested in learning.

Karen Graham: Yeah. And it can be just one person who sparks that sometimes. I’m actually seeing this happen in an organization that I’m working with right now where they have a relatively new executive director and she came in with just so much curiosity and strategic thinking about the future.

And I think that it’s contagious. Other people are starting to kind of catch that. And actually, we were just having a conversation about how she was trying to connect people in their network with each other.

And a lot of people initially respond like, Oh, I’m too busy. I can’t make time to meet up with a peer from another organization to compare notes or learn what they’re doing. But she’s got such enthusiasm for it that I think that that’s going to start happening more.

It’s a very real advantage for their organization when you start to make that culture shift to being a learning organization, because they’re on a path right now with their technology where if they keep going like this, they will become very vulnerable to equipment failures and things like that. I won’t go into the details about why that is, but they’re not on a sustainable path. And she has been able to get everybody aligned around a major shift in the way they use technology, not just inside her network and inside her organization, but also with their funders.

She was able to get an enormous grant to support this work because she was able to articulate this vision.

And so I think that’s something that encapsulates the connection between strategy and growth and agility and resilience and this learning mindset.

Carolyn Woodard: We have a comment in the chat about the tyranny of now and the pressure to be responsive that can lead to deprioritizing personal development as opposed to client services.

That’s a great comment. Thank you, Ben, because I was also thinking about that. I haven’t spent a lot of time in the for-profit world, but I know that in the nonprofit world, there’s constant urgency, right?

You need to finish that grant. You need to get it in so you get the funding. You need to reach more kids after school. You need to reach more people with health care. 

Whatever it is that your mission is that you’re working on, you feel like if you waste time, you’re not reaching as many of the people or saving as many of the whales as you want to. 

Like Karen is saying, that can deprioritize giving yourself time and space to process and digest the projects that you are working on.

So can you talk a little bit about that? 

Do you have any advice on ways that you can help an organization make that kind of time and space and de-emphasize the urgency of everything?

Karen Graham: There are some times when it’s real. There’s an undeniable need to focus on the thing in front of you. I’m thinking of a friend of mine who runs an after school program, and the other day she had a kid whose parents didn’t come to pick him up, and it was after the program closed, and he’s sitting in her office, this five-year-old kid. Well, she can’t just ignore that, right? 

Her options are limited there. She needs to be caring for the safety and well-being of this child at that moment. And I think many of us find ourselves in situations like that, where there are times when it’s just clear that you have to prioritize the here and now.

But there are many times when it’s a lot more ambiguous and that we fool ourselves into thinking that the here and now is more important than planning for the long term. And it takes a little bit of thoughtfulness and discipline, I guess, to differentiate. 

When are you in that kind of place where you actually do have a choice? And when do you have no choice? 

Techniques to Set Aside Time for Learning

Admin Day

Some of the techniques that I’ve used to set aside time for learning and make it a priority in organizations I’ve been in the past are, I do an admin day, and I still do this even in my business of one, but when I worked with a nonprofit, I instituted this one day a month.

And we tried at first doing it on the last working day of the month. That didn’t work as well as doing it on the first working day of the month. But it was a day when we had no meetings. And our only job was to do paperwork and catch up on planning and review where we were at with our strategic plan and work plans and things like that. Do reporting, meet together. 

One meeting would be to look at metrics and talk about what course corrections might we need to make, how are we doing on our goals, those kinds of things. So it was very much an internally focused day and a day that was focused on the health of the team and our progress toward our goals. I think that was really helpful.

Learning Retreat

I also have worked with teams sometimes where we set aside a day of learning quarterly and we actually treat it as kind of a retreat. We’d sometimes go off site.

One time we went to the public library, actually. Anybody can just rent a room or reserve a room in a public library. And so we put the whole team in there for the day, ordered in a nice lunch, and we spent some time individually watching TED Talks or webinars or doing some reading or doing our own research in the morning.

And in the afternoon, we did a share-in thing where we all shared with the team about what we learned so that everybody could benefit from that. And that was an amazing experience. People loved it. It also helped us. And in that organization, we were responsible for being ahead of our field. And so there was a very clear business case, for lack of a non-profit word for it.

There was a very clear business case for spending time on that learning. I think that’s the thing when you’re trying to make time for this. Are you really clear on what the benefit is and what the strategic advantage of it is? And if you’re not, then of course, you’re never going to make time for it.

Benefits of Being a Learning Organization

Carolyn Woodard: That was going to be my next question. I don’t want to just make the assumption that being a learning organization is advantageous over other types of organizations. 

So can you talk a little bit more about the benefits and the advantages? 

Like you said in that one case, they had a business advantage because the executive director was being more curious and asking more strategic questions. So can you talk a little bit more about that? Because I think we can link that to advocating for doing it more. If people see that there’s a benefit, then they’re like, oh, we should make time once a quarter or once a week or whatever it is.

Karen Graham: Right. Maybe the easiest way for me to talk about this is just based on my own work. And then I’ll rely on people listening in to make the bridge from that to how does this apply to my own situation.

Need to Know Your Stuff

One thing that is crucial for me to succeed as a consultant is that I know my stuff. I have to be current on best practices and what kinds of software packages are available to do different kinds of things, and what are the security risks right now, that sort of thing. And I’m sure that’s probably true no matter what field you work in. There are certain kinds of best practices and knowledge that you need to keep current on in order to be effective in your work. So that’s one thing, that I can make a direct connection between my success as a consultant and my current knowledge and skill.

Efficiency and Productivity

The second thing is that, and this is probably true for many nonprofit organizations as well, a lot of my work is very labor intensive. And so whenever I can find an efficiency, if I can automate something, if I can figure out a faster way to do things or a more effective way to do things that gets a better outcome, then that helps me be successful. 

And so my gains in productivity and effectiveness are gains for my clients. And they also enable me to accomplish more with fewer minutes of my day, right? And so that’s another place we’re learning.

If I can learn by examining my processes and kind of breaking down a project and saying, okay, what worked well? What didn’t? What would I do differently next time? How could I do this better? Then I’m always improving and providing better quality, better value to the people that I serve.

Individual Learners Who Share Learning Build Capacity of the Organization

Carolyn Woodard: I’m hearing you say that this is something you can work on as an individual, so you can put effort and prioritize your own learning, which may make you more valuable to your organization, so it can help in your career path as well. 

And then if you are knowledgeable within your organization’s specialty and you’re connecting with a network of people that are also interested in whatever your mission is, then that can also help your organization. 

Are there other ways that maybe an organization that has a bunch of individuals for learners, is more than the sum of those parts?

Karen Graham: Yeah, I think so. An organization can have an effect on the whole ecosystem that it works in. 

And one of the people who signed up for this mentioned something about that in their registration. They were thinking along the lines of, how can we share knowledge not just within our organization, but externally and help everybody in our field get better at this work? I think that’s fantastic. 

There’s also beyond the individual. There are systems and structures and tools that you can put in place that makes it easier to discover expertise within your organization. The motto of one of my clients with knowledge management is “when one person learns something, everyone in the organization gets smarter.” And I think that’s a great guiding principle. 

You want not just individuals to be learning, but you want them to be able to disseminate that learning to the whole organization so that you’re building the capacity of the group and not just that one person.

Redundancy Builds Organization Capacity

Carolyn Woodard: And that touches on a point that we talked about when we were preparing for this webinar, which is that if somebody’s out sick for a month, do you have other people at your organization that know enough about what they do that can cover for them and do the things that they know? Are those things accessible to people who might have to cover for them? So if you have that kind of a learning culture and sharing culture, then you are more protected against people leaving, people being out sick, whatever happens.

Karen Graham: Retiring. I don’t know about you, but there have been so many retirements of long-term nonprofit leaders in my local community in the last year. It just seems like everywhere I turn, there’s a new ED search, a new person announcing their retirement.

And so that creates a greater than ever need for knowledge transfer from the person leaving to their successor and to the rest of their organization so that in the future they don’t become overly reliant on a single person. 

Prioritize: Make Time for Learning During Work

Carolyn Woodard:  And last thing, because it really resonated with me, about keeping work at work and home at home. I had a supervisor who used to take two days a month as his writing days that he worked from home because it was the place where he could focus and not have a million meetings and people just popping into his office.

And now that so many of us are working from home, I loved what you said about an organization prioritizing time during the workday, working hours dedicated to this so that when you’re home, not working, you get that refresh of relaxing and not thinking about work.  Not thinking I need to take this lesson or this tutorial or network with this person or make this connection; you do that all during your work hours. I think that that also helps you be clearer when you’re doing your work.

Prioritize: Be Flexible About What Learning Time Works for Staff

Karen Graham: I would also encourage people to think about what works best for them and their teams as far as work and the rest of life separation versus blending those things together. 

I told somebody once, I’m on a farmer schedule now. My grandparents were dairy farmers, and they milked the cows when the cows needed to be milked. They didn’t clock in at 9 a.m. and clock out at 5 p.m. They just worked around what the needs of the farm were. And if they wanted to take a big nap in the middle of the afternoon, well, then they did that. And that’s kind of where I’m at right now.

I’ll give you an example. Today, I took a little lunch break, but not really because I was reading this book that was about nonprofits. So I’m learning while I’m munching on my sandwich. When am I working, when am I not working? I don’t know. It’s kind of really blended for me at this point.

I think that’s great for some people. I also think it’s unfair to put that expectation on your employees or your team members if that doesn’t work for them and does not allow them to have some separation if that’s what they choose and what works best for them.

Carolyn Woodard:  Yeah. I think for learning, you need to have a relaxed mind. If you’re urgently trying to learn, it’s like trying to cram for a quiz versus studying for the entire semester. I think that kind of learning builds up better.

Learning Management Systems

We have a question from David about selecting the best learning management systems and getting help setting them up.

Do you want to talk a little bit about what a Learning Management System is, that category?

Karen Graham: This is software that is designed to provide, or to be a container for self-paced learning. And so it’s software that will often have the ability to show videos and provide maybe downloadable materials or materials you can read on a screen. 

It might have quizzes. It might have some tracking of learners, so they can indicate when they’re completing something or so that you’re able to kind of monitor their learning and their progress. Some organizations will use this internally for employees, others will provide it for external people. 

For example, if you’re a health organization and you want to provide education about a particular disease, like living with that disease or supporting a family member with that disease, you might deploy a learning management system to hold all the training materials. Some that I’ve used are Tevudi, Decibo is another one that I’ve played with a little bit. There’s a bunch of different ones. Those are just two off the top of my head that are relatively lightweight ones that are used by a lot of nonprofit organizations. 

If you have kids, you’ve probably experienced some of these things that are used by schools. One thing I’ll say about those tools is that they are quite expensive. 

When you’re even thinking about whether you need this tool or not is to what degree do you really need to be able to track things versus just being able to provide the materials? If you’re just looking for a place to provide the materials, then maybe if you have SharePoint or Teams or something like that, that might be a good enough container where you can organize materials into a nice visual format and make them available to people.

Learning Repository Tools

Carolyn Woodard: Our second point was that there’s this other category of learning tools, which is more like a library or a repository where the things that you have learned reside. And then people can access them as and when they want to. A learning system is like a classroom – you do these things in this order, and then you get a certificate at the end. A repository is like a library – you can self-direct what resources you need and when you need them.

It’s so exciting right now. AI (Artificial Intelligence) search is going to help a lot of organizations pull some of those resources out of obscurity. Maybe they’re way down in somebody’s file system in SharePoint. But now you’re going to be able to search a little bit more easily and share those resources. 

Administration and Curation

I’m wondering, with these first two categories, the learning management system and the repository system, would you say that it’s usually necessary to have a curator?

Can these systems just exist on their own and run themselves indefinitely? Or do you really need to have somebody managing, massaging and organizing these resources?

Karen Graham: I think you do. If you really want to be the most effective, if you’re taking learning and knowledge management really seriously, it’s probably worth designating someone with responsibility for monitoring those things, cleaning them up and enforcing guidelines. But there are some things you can do in the tools themselves in some cases, to enforce naming conventions or metadata, things like that. For those people who maybe aren’t as technical, metadata in the Microsoft universe is not quite as easy to access or to deploy in the Google stack.

But in Microsoft, you can use metadata to be able to sort things in a lot of different ways. Instead of just a folder hierarchy, you might also be able to group things by a tag or some other kind of information that you add to that file. And so that can be a useful way to sort things, especially when you know what you’re looking for.

The challenge is if you don’t know what you’re looking for and you just want to be able to discover, browse around and see what’s there. Then these tools don’t always make that easy. 

But what I’ve found really promising is applying AI to your own files. And I know you can do that now in SharePoint and a lot of the different Microsoft tools, including VivaGoals.

It has kind of a built-in AI there. So you can ask your system a question, like, look at my own library of files and summarize all the work that my organization has done on bike rapid transit in the southern hemisphere. And it’ll give you that with references to specific files and documents that it is learning this from.

So stuff like that is really promising for the future of learning and discovery. Same thing with people’s profiles. You can set up profiles on your system of employees that include their areas of expertise, past projects they’ve worked on, and use that to find somebody you can ask. Because that’s really what people are more likely to do. 

If you think about how people learn, when they’re looking for a briefing on a topic or they’re looking for expertise on something, they’re more likely to chat or pick up the phone and call somebody they know and ask about it than they are to try to find it self-serve. So I love tools that make it easier for people to do that.

Carolyn Woodard: Yeah, and I think the AI tools, they’re not there yet – they’re getting there. I think a year from now we’re going to be like, wow, this AI tool can really search this specific thing and give me really good information. So I think if you’re frustrated with AI searches right now, just hang tight, they’re going to keep getting better.

Communication/Project Management Tools

I want to just talk about this last category that we talked about, which is the Communication Project Management Tools, which help you find the information that you need, when you need it, in the place that you need it. 

Some of these tools can help you manage that project or store something that has to do with that project. And then it’s associated with a deadline or dependencies.

For example, this part of this grant process can’t happen until this person okays this piece of the financing. It is a kind of knowledge management or learning management where you don’t have to constantly ask that person, did you do this piece that I need before I can do my piece? You can just look in the tool and see that it’s been checked off.

Karen Graham: Yeah, that’s more about coordinating work, really, than it is about learning, but they’re adjacent to each other. 

For use of project management tools, one thing I love to see, but I don’t often see, is say you have a template that you use every time you set up a new project, or even if it’s just kind of in your head. If you build right into it that there’s going to be a debrief at the end, there’s going to be a chance for reflection and looking back on what we learned from this project, what might we have done differently had we known what we know now? 

Those kinds of Learning Organization questions, if they’re baked right into the project management tool as a task that is assigned to somebody to make sure that happens, that’s really strong for making sure it does happen.

Supports for Being a Learning Organization

Carolyn Woodard: That is a perfect segue to all about the practices that support being a Learning Organization. 

Having a Formal Knowledge Management Strategy

What is that?

Karen Graham: I had to create a knowledge management strategy with one of my clients recently, and I had never done that before, honestly. And so I asked around a little bit in some groups that I’m part of, some networks that I belong to. Does anybody have an example of a knowledge management strategy they can share?

And I didn’t come up with any examples from those groups. And then I searched the internet, like “sample knowledge management strategy documents.” And I found a few, but I didn’t think they were very useful.

So I just made something up. But I did find that an AI tool was pretty helpful. Asking this AI tool, “what should be the components of a knowledge management strategy? What should this include?”

There was also a good article that outlined the components of knowledge management. Capturing the knowledge, discovery, being able to search and find something, but also being able to explore things like that.

And so the knowledge management strategy that we developed had that motto when one person learns something, the whole organization gets smarter. But then it also included some components, like what are the kinds of tools that we will use to support this? In that case, it was SharePoint and Planner, and they’re on Microsoft. If you’re familiar with those products, you’ll know. 

And so we named some tools that were going to be used. And we also talked about some processes, such as the formal way that they do project management, having a review at the end of every project to reflect back.

Communities of Practice

Communities of Practice are another key part of that organization’s knowledge management strategy. They’re a global organization with about 150 employees, and so they have communities of practice that go across all regions and bring together all the people that work on a certain topic. And they talk about what are the best practices, what are we learning about this, what did they do in Mexico that maybe we can implement in India, that sort of thing.

So those are the kinds of things that I would hope to see in any organization strategy. I hope that more organizations will start being a little more deliberate about that, because it is a strategic advantage.

Carolyn Woodard: I love what you said about the communities of practice or just formalizing what we were saying earlier about how you want to go talk to the person who knows about that thing and just ask them because you have a specific question and they know all about that topic. They’ll be able to search their own internal (brain) files and come up with the answer that you’re looking for. 

You formalize that in bringing groups of people together that have similar roles or similar experiences and that can share. We did a little group about Copilot. Of our clients, we had a few that had already implemented Copilot and we had a bunch of others who were thinking about it.

And so getting the early adopters sharing some of their best practices and what they had learned was really important to the group. So I love that you said that having postmortems and having a review built in midway, maybe at the end of the project. I love something else you said earlier, which was not shaming failures.

Create Space to Learn from Failures

And you said it a little bit earlier too, about treating mistakes as an opportunity to learn. I just think that’s so important.

Karen Graham: Yeah, there’s been a lot of talk about that. I think there’s some big TED talk about it. And I’ve heard a lot of talk among nonprofit leaders about this concept. But maybe connecting that idea to being a learning organization overall is something that’s a little different twist on it.

Carolyn Woodard:  And something to talk to your funders about as well. Are you partnering with a funder who is going to give you the opportunity to make some mistakes and learn from them? Or are you partnering with a funder that is like, I need you to have reached 500,000 more children this year, or else? 

Budgeting for professional development, that’s again part of making it a priority. I loved what you said about validating curiosity and exploration and making space for learning and just embracing that. Making a day, a month for it, or a quarter. I love the idea of going to the library together. That’s just wonderful.

Learning, Innovation, and Cybersecurity

Karen Graham: A lot of people are on this webinar because they’re connected with Community IT because of technology support. 

I want to think about the connection between innovation and security and other kinds of control. I don’t know if it’s exactly a trade-off or it feels like maybe a false dichotomy, but there are some points where those things rub up against each other.

If you’re trying to be a nimble organization that does a lot of experimentation and lets people follow their curiosity, then that suggests maybe you want to loosen some controls and, for example, allow people to download software without going through a big permissioning process and approval. 

But yet, as probably most of you know, there’s heightened concerns about cyber security, and there are also a lot of efficiencies that come from an organization having centralized management of technology and it can be more cost effective to manage an organization that way rather than letting everybody do their own thing. 

And so that’s something that is a conversation that I think leadership teams and even boards of directors should be having. What are the trade-offs here and what’s our organization’s stance on this?

A lot of times when people talk about technology strategy, what they really mean is how many computers are we going to buy next year? And that sort of thing. It stays actually on a more tactical level.

But I think technology strategy should also be at this level of, what kind of organization do we want to be? What kind of culture do we want to create? And how do our technology policies and practices help or hinder that?

Carolyn Woodard: Yeah, imagining the future, and then it makes it easier to get there. You see how your little steps are going to lead up to where you want to be five years from now. But that is so true.

I cannot tell you how many times I’ve been in an AI discussion recently where someone has said, just try it, just start using it. And the IT guys, the cybersecurity guys are like, no, don’t do that. Hold up. You’re sharing your institutional knowledge on a public site. 

So there’s definitely a tension there. 

Q and A

Learning Management System Software Selection

Can Community IT assist with selecting the best learning management system and help setting it up? 

So as I said earlier, for our clients, we do that. But I think Karen, you are more on the expertise on the selection side of things.

Karen Graham: Yeah, that is something that I’ve guided a couple of organizations through, so that’s something that I could talk with you about if you’re not already working with Community IT for support.

Carolyn Woodard: And even if you are, it may be the sort of thing that we would want to call in somebody who has a lot of expertise with that landscape and the selection of the specific tools that you’re looking at. 

Managing Knowledge Resources

And then we had some other two great questions from Sarah about specific examples on how to use tools to manage learning resources, like news articles, white papers, etc. They are using Teams and SharePoint and still have not found a successful way to maintain the information. 

And additionally, they’re looking for a way to create a digest for program officers that would surface that relevant information from multiple newsletters that they’re getting in their topic area.

Is there an easy way to pull that information and create a newsletter that goes out that has those links and articles in it, or is that something that you just have to curate yourself?

Karen Graham: I want that. I know, right? Like, Karen, here’s your daily briefing. This is all the stuff that’s going on in your field that you need to know today and compile the headlines and do it for me. I haven’t found that tool yet.

There are things you can subscribe to, like Pocket is one that I’ve used sometimes. I follow certain topics, and it’ll round up the best articles about change management related to technology, and send that to my inbox from time to time. So I’ve got to believe that there’s something out there that is good at that. 

There’s also Google Alerts. It’s kind of changed how it works over the last few years, and I’m not currently using it, so I can’t speak very intelligently to the details. But Google Alerts is another way that I know some people have tried to follow certain topics and get alerted of changes. 

Carolyn Woodard: I think we have some good suggestions. I was also going to say that in Virginia, I subscribe to a newsletter that pulls articles from different resources based on that they’re all about Virginia politics. If you haven’t Googled it with a news aspect, maybe newspaper, news sources, there may be some tool there that you could use for your own newsletter.

Google Alerts and Zapier in ChatGPT can be effective, but it’s trial and error. I think this would be my advice based on some of the stuff we were talking about earlier. 

Prioritization of Learning

And I did ask you a loaded question earlier, Karen, about whether this could be done without someone curating it. In my experience, it falls apart pretty quickly. Even if you set up an information architecture in your SharePoint or Google Drive, without somebody who knows that SharePoint like the back of their hand, people just do their own thing. 

Then you know that the information is in there and you can’t find it, or it’s buried too deep, or it was from three years ago or ten years ago or what have you. 

This may be something where as a priority, you would say someone in our organization is going to semi-manually create that newsletter that’s going to go out with those resources because it’s important enough to us and to our community that we’re going to put time into doing it.

Karen Graham: To the first part of Sarah’s question, I think the key there is maintaining the information. I wouldn’t see that as like you have tools that aren’t capable of doing this, but I would guess, maybe you don’t have the staff capacity to have somebody in charge of it. And so that kind of begs for either chaos or maybe more simplicity with what information is maintained so that you are maintaining what you really have the capacity to manage and keep updated.

Carolyn Woodard: Yeah, we talk about that a lot. The tool has the capacity to catalog things, left, right and center, up, down and sideways. But are you as an organization ever going to be able to use that information?

And if you aren’t using it, then why are you spending the time classifying it as you’re putting it in with those detailed classifications? So that’s another thing to consider around prioritizing how people learn and what they need to be learning at your organization.

But you know you have somebody at your organization who’s spending hours creating those fields and making sure they’re populated correctly. And then somebody just walks in or gets on a Zoom call with somebody and says, “Hey, you’re an expert in this piece of what we do. Can I just ask you this question?”

Karen Graham: Yeah, yeah. I see Jennifer in the chat on this conversation. And so I have for a while thought that Build Consulting, where she works, is so good at this.

They’re so good at internal knowledge management. They’ve got this thing on Teams that’s called the Build Way, and it has methodologies and templates and things like that. And I just recently learned that they are trying to reinvent that a little bit. They’re not satisfied with it. 

Carolyn Woodard:  But they’re learning. 

Karen Graham: Yeah, they are learning. And I think that’s a hallmark of a learning organization as well, just because you’re pretty good doesn’t mean you can’t be great. And I’m just always striving to get a little bit better.

Learning Objective Recap

Carolyn Woodard:  Wow, that is a great segue again to go back over our learning objectives for today. We hope you were able to 

I hope you were able to take away some of those ideas that we shared with you. Karen, I just wanted to thank you again so much for joining us today and spending your time with us and all of your expertise. I just loved this conversation. I felt like I learned a lot. 

Karen Graham: You’re welcome. Thank you so much. And thanks for all the comments and chats from people, too.