Is Your Nonprofit a Learning Organization? with Karen Graham pt 2

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

In pt 1 Karen defined 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. 

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.

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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.

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.

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. 

AI Tools for Search

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 

• learn more about what it means to be a learning organization and those advantages to being a learning organization.
• We shared some of our biggest struggles. 
• Learned about some of the different types of tools. We learned more about the categories than specific tools, but again, just please contact us if you have more questions about these. And also on Community IT’s website, we have a bunch of articles and resources on different tools and Build Consulting tools, as well. 
• And understanding the practices that promote and support being a learning organization.

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.