Is Your Nonprofit a Learning Organization? with Karen Graham pt 1

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

In pt 1 Karen defines a Learning Organization and explored 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.

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.

Presenter:

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. 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. 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.

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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 

• what it means to be a learning organization, 
• share our biggest struggles in pursuing learning at our organizations, 
• learn the different types of tools used in learning and knowledge management, 
• and understand the practices that promote and support being a learning organization. 

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, karen@karengrahamconsulting.com 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:

• Is adaptive
• Asks questions
• Isn’t static
• Responds to dynamic environments/Anticipates change
• Always trying to improve
• Has curiosity
• Experiments
• Regards mistakes as opportunities to learn
• Is made up of individuals who are learners

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.