Community IT Innovators Nonprofit Technology Topics

Write a Better RFP for IT Support for Your Nonprofit with Johan Hammerstrom

• Community IT Innovators • Season 7 • Episode 21

Share episode

Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.

0:00 | 26:39

Are you struggling to articulate what your nonprofit actually needs from an IT provider? In this episode, host Carolyn Woodard and Community IT CEO Johan Hammerstrom discuss the rise of the generic, AI-generated Request for Proposal (RFP). While it is tempting to use AI to handle the heavy lifting of technical writing, doing so often results in a document that lacks the heart of your organization’s mission.

Johan explains why a successful RFP is less about technical jargon and more about your unique business needs. When you rely on a generic template, you end up with a generic partner. This conversation offers a roadmap for moving beyond checklists to find a support model that actually fits your culture and budget.

Johan and Carolyn explore the essential process of defining your requirements, including:

  • The AI Pitfall: Why using AI to write an RFP without deep organizational context leads technical jargon. If you can't understand exactly what your rfp is asking for, neither will the vendors. 
  • The Thinking Process: A look at why the act of writing—rather than just the final document—is a vital exercise in disciplined thinking and clarity for your leadership team.
  • Staff Feedback: How to gather input from your team to identify where legacy systems or siloed tools are creating daily friction and missed opportunities.
  • Finding a Partner: Practical advice on how to draw out the unique requirements of your nonprofit to ensure your next IT provider is a true partner, not just a vendor.

A key part of this search is recognizing why many nonprofits feel dissatisfied with their current support. Johan identifies three specific pitfalls that occur when working with a regular, for-profit focused Managed Service Provider (MSP):

  1. The Culture Gap: Most MSPs are geared toward a bottom-line, efficiency-first mindset that can feel brusque, abrasive or dissonant when it comes up against a people-centered nonprofit culture.
  2. Misaligned Logic: Standard providers often recommend solutions based on revenue generation, failing to understand the resource-constrained and programmatic realities of the nonprofit sector when making IT investments or dealing with legacy IT.
  3. The Priority Problem: In a large, general-market firm, smaller nonprofit accounts are often deprioritized in favor of more lucrative corporate clients, leading to inconsistent support, junior-level staffing, and frustration.

If you feel your current provider doesn’t quite get you, or if you are preparing to search for new support, this episode will help you ask the right questions of your AI tools, your staff, and your potential partners.

Resources Mentioned in this Episode:

Link: How to Vet an MSP for Your Nonprofit

Link: How do I Know if an MSP is Right for my Organization? 

_______________________________
Start a conversation :)

Thanks for listening.


Carolyn Woodard

What I was gonna ask you about was what you said yesterday about the RFPs being kind of gobbledygook.

Carolyn Woodard

Welcome everyone to the Community IT Innovators Technology Topics podcast. I'm Carolyn Woodard, your host. And today I'm really excited to speak to our CEO about a kind of troubling issue that we're seeing with RFPs that are really hard to respond to. And maybe some advice on how to understand better what you're looking for in IT support for your nonprofit. So, Johan, would you like to introduce yourself?

Johan Hammerstrom

Hi, I'm Johan Hammerstrom. I'm the CEO of Community IT.

Carolyn Woodard

How do you put in what you need to an AI tool to help it write you a good RFP that actually describes what you need in ways that aren't like contradicting each other but sound good?

Johan Hammerstrom

Yeah. Well, I think the problem that I've observed, and I think this is true not just in IT, I think it's in lots of areas, is that um the problem is you can ask AI to generate something for you, but if you don't really know what you're asking for, you have no way of evaluating what it's generating. And so

Johan Hammerstrom

What we've seen more of is our RFPs being released that sound good, they have a lot of technical language included, but there's just a sense that the the different pieces that are in the RFP don't all fit together clearly in a way that you know um makes it easy for us to understand. There's like an essential piece missing, like the heart of the need hasn't been sort of clearly communicated. Um and

Johan Hammerstrom

I think actually it would be more effective if when you were putting together an RFP, you just wrote it in your own language from your perspective. Like this is what I this is what our organization needs. And I think you know, I I've uh long felt that um

Johan Hammerstrom

A good IT vendor support provider can bridge the gap between the technology solution and the um and the business need, and that it's not up to the business owner to articulate their business need in technology terms. It's important for the, and I'm using the term business owner, but you know, the business of running a nonprofit, the business of accomplishing the mission of a nonprofit, is something that that organization and everyone in the organization should know really well at the level of responsibility they have within the organization. And so they need to be able to articulate what they need from that business perspective. And then it's the responsibility of the technology support provider to bridge the gap between the technology solutions and services and the business need that that has a need for those solutions and services. And

Johan Hammerstrom

what AI is doing, AI doesn't know your business needs as an organization. You can tell it, but I don't think that people - one of the things that I think is starting to dawn on me about AI is that you have to feed a lot of information into it to get a useful response. And personally, I feel like by the time I'm done figuring out how to talk to these machines and feed them the information they need to give me a useful response, I could just write it myself and then go through the process of thinking about what I'm really looking for and trying to say. But I

Johan Hammerstrom

my guess is that a lot of people don't feed it the knowledge of the business that it needs to craft a good RFP because you have to get very detailed and you have to have there's a certain way of framing prompts for AI tools that is almost like a new sort of command line interface. You just need to understand the syntax and you know how they're looking for information. And I think most people aren't doing that, and so they're just asking for an RFP, and it's a very they end up being very generic because they're not specific to the business needs of the organization. And

Johan Hammerstrom

so instead of trying to focus on the technology solution, AI is now like playing the role of the IT consultant or the IT provider because it's identifying the solutions that are needed. But those solutions aren't being recommended in response to specific business needs, they're just sort of you know the most common or probabilistically identified solutions. And so

Johan Hammerstrom

for an IT support provider like Community IT in responding to those RFPs, it becomes very challenging because it's just asking for technology solutions, but not really explaining what the business need is. And in some cases, you know, like do you really need to know what the business needs are to recommend an email solution? No. Everybody needs email. Well, I don't know. Some people would argue now that you don't, like you could use a chat solution instead of instead of email, but you don't need to make a big business case for email.

Johan Hammerstrom

Chances are if you're a if you're a functioning nonprofit organization, you need email on some level. Even if you don't communicate internally, you got to communicate externally, you gotta get you know invoices sent to you and contracts and so on. And so you gotta sp you know interact with your financial auditors and your board members and your constituents.

Johan Hammerstrom

But the decision to whether to go with Office 365 or Google workspace for your email could could be an uh important decision that might depend on the business needs of the of the organization. And so if those business needs aren't being clearly articulated or understood, it's gonna be hard to make a good decision. So if you just go to a Chat GPT and ask it, should I implement Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace for my new nonprofit organization, it's gonna give you five pages of blah blah blah that aren't really, you know, it can give you interesting things to think about, but it doesn't know enough about your situation to really give you advice. Now you

Johan Hammerstrom

it might give you enough if it might give you enough um sort of background information and context on those solutions that you can connect the dots yourself. You, you know, you know your business needs and you could evaluate. But that's a that becomes harder and harder the larger the organization is and the more complex and sophisticated the technology solution is.

Carolyn Woodard

Well, and for the most part, they're gonna, if they're going to reputable sources, they're gonna give you what it says on the website about how great that solution is to some extent. So you could have looked that up yourself. Um,

Carolyn Woodard

interesting that you said if you're a new organization writing an RFP, because my sense would be that, you know, for 90% of the RFPs that are out there, it's an existing, they have an existing stack. They have an existing, you know, they have some technology that they want to put in the RFP that whoever they hire is going to have to know and be able to work with. And the idea that you just stop there, like you get a very generic RFP, and it gives you, well, these are the these are the tools you're using.

Carolyn Woodard

Exactly what you're talking about, like it doesn't, it doesn't give you what are the issues that need to be addressed for your specific organization and the way you use technology.

Johan Hammerstrom

Yeah. Yeah.

Carolyn Woodard

Now I have heard that um I have not done it myself yet, but I have heard different people talking about asking your AI to ask you questions. Because I could see a use case where you could have your AI help you walk through what your pain points are. Like,

Carolyn Woodard

why do you need IT support? Like what is the thing that's the biggest problem? Do you have, you know, siloed tools that aren't talking to each other? So your data isn't valuable. You have to download it, clean it up, re-upload it, make your board report every month. And that takes staff, you know, two staff, two days to be able to report on your major donors or something like that. Like that could be a pain point that you could have your AI pull out of you, and then that would help you put that in your RFP. Like it could help you clarify.

Carolyn Woodard

I think what I'm hearing you say is that if you just ask it a vague prompt, like help me, can you help me draft an RFP for my nonprofit for nonprofits for IT support? You're gonna get a really generic answer just based on what else is out there.

Johan Hammerstrom

Yeah, I mean, I'm I'm super biased, so I'm I'm putting my biases out there. I think that a lot of people right now, and I think this is gonna change because it's creating issues and problems, but I think a lot of people are using AI to generate documents that they don't want to have to write themselves.

Carolyn Woodard

Yes.

Johan Hammerstrom

And that and that I think applies to RFPs. And I think we're all now seeing a lot of AI-generated content, whether it's documents, policies, handbooks, RFPs, websites that were generated by these tools because people didn't really want to take the time to write them themselves.

Johan Hammerstrom

And so it raises this interesting question like, what's the value of the document? Is it words on a page? Was it the thought process that went behind writing the document? Was it, you know,

Johan Hammerstrom

there was a there was a fantastic uh article. It was about at so Amazon for for decades had this practice, the six-page, I'm getting some of the details wrong here, but basically when you were proposing something or or you know, starting a new initiative, you had to write a six-page synopsis of what you were proposing. And you'd take your six-page synopsis to the meeting where you were going to talk about it and hand it out, and everybody in silence read the six-page synopsis for like the first 15 or 20 minutes. This was the practice throughout Amazon for decades. And

Johan Hammerstrom

the whole idea was that the process of writing this summary forced you to think through what you were proposing. And you don't really think about something until you're you don't really think about your ideas and thoughts until you're forced to articulate them. And so it really forced you to be disciplined about what you were proposing. And

Johan Hammerstrom

conversely, the people reading the document were then required to uh understand the totality of what was being proposed, because when you're just explaining the idea in a meeting, people just listen to the first three or four sentences and then they start reacting to that instead of looking at the idea. And so

Johan Hammerstrom

the idea was that um important concepts, uh key initiatives in the organization couldn't really be expressed in one or two sentences. It required six pages to think through and express and articulate what was being what was being asked for. And this article that I read uh is about this trend that's happening because of the all the buzz and the hype and the pressure to use AI tools. Um, all of these managers at Amazon are now telling their staff, use AI tools to write the six-page synopsis for you. And

Johan Hammerstrom

there are all these like longtime Amazon staff who are like, that's defeating the purpose of it. Why even bother writing this six-page summary? Because the whole point of it is to go through the exercise of thinking. But you know, because Amazon needs to be at the forefront of technology and AI, it's sort of taking over the whole company. So

Johan Hammerstrom

that's an interesting experiment in uh a massive organizational change. It'll be interesting to see the impact that it has on Amazon.

Carolyn Woodard

Well, along those lines, I wonder if you, having so much experience with reading RFPs or handling um, you know, assessments and sales calls and and trying, someone called it um IT therapy, that you just can call someone up and tell them everything that's wrong, and then they can help you figure out, you know, like, do you need to write an RFP? Do you need, you know, this kind of thing? You know, what do you need to respond to those pain points? Um,

Carolyn Woodard

so do you have advice for someone who is in that situation of they have they work at a nonprofit, they're in maybe leadership or management, and they have IT pain issues? What would you suggest as a way to draw that out into a document or a phone call that is gonna be more effective in finding the vendor support and eventually the tools and solutions that will help address those pain points?

Carolyn Woodard

Because I have this feeling that if you just do a generic RFP, you get a vendor who can respond to that, they give you those generic tools. It's there's it's highly possible that five years from now, none of those tools is actually addressing your business need.

Johan Hammerstrom

Yes. Or, I mean, I think, you know, especially with the line of business that we're in, managed services, there's not a lot of differentiation between managed services providers. We're all installing software on your computers to keep them secure and up to date. We all have help desks that answer calls. We all have hopefully, you know, um IT manager roles that are the point of contact for helping with the big picture and managing initiatives and and so forth.

Johan Hammerstrom

So if you um just kind of take what your current MSP is doing and put that in an RFP, you're gonna get a lot of generic responses um from different MSPs who all kind of do the same, who all do the same thing, basically.

Carolyn Woodard

And why would you change? Like they're all just gonna say they could do the same thing.

Johan Hammerstrom

They're all gonna say they could do the same thing. So it's really the you

Johan Hammerstrom

I would encourage organizations to think about what makes them unique.

Johan Hammerstrom

I mean, maybe, maybe really it isn't much more than just a commodity service that you need. But if if something is not working well with your current provider or your current situation, such that you are looking for someone new to work with, um, I think it providing the context for what's not working is the most important thing you can do. Because that'll bring out the differentiation in the bidders, hopefully. Because hopefully they're paying attention to those needs that are being articulated and speaking to how their services, how their firm is a good fit for meeting those specific needs. So that's

Johan Hammerstrom

I think focusing on what the unique I think providing some context about what's not working right now and what needs to change is always really helpful in an RFP. If that's not something that's included in the RFP, that's always a question that we ask, just so that we can have a better understanding of the situation that what they're really looking for.

Carolyn Woodard

I feel like I've I say this quite frequently, but I have worked at for-profits and at nonprofits. And one of the big differences that I have come away with from those experiences with is that at a nonprofit, because of the way they work and because people are really dedicated to the mission of the organization in all the different roles, you often find a lot of knowledge in all those different roles. And you have a lot of understanding of what the mission is throughout, you know, from the, you know, interns to the admin to the managers to the you know, CFO to the major gifts donor. Like everyone knows what the organization does, which

Carolyn Woodard

maybe this was just the for-profits that I worked at, but uh, it would be very possible that people in different teams like couldn't really articulate what the company did or just did their little role, and that was all they needed to do, and they didn't need to see the bigger picture. Um, but

Carolyn Woodard

People that I've interacted with at nonprofits have been very thoughtful. They really think about larger factors, they think about the ecosystem that they're working in, what the nonprofit is trying to do. And I think that that is an advantage.

Carolyn Woodard

So if there's some mechanism that you can use, or maybe you can just like go on, you know, the water cooler conversation or the, you know, Zoom chats or whatever. But I think a lot of staff at nonprofits know what they wish worked better, where they could save time, where they're missing opportunities, you know, where there's something that's just a legacy, something that they're like, why do we even do it this way anymore? And

Carolyn Woodard

I think uh finding some way to gather that feedback as you prepare to identify those pain points that are unique to your organization, uh, that can really help you craft that, you know, RFP or inquiry or, you know, whatever you're however you're gonna approach this process of making a short list of vendors that you're considering for your IT support and what that IT support really needs to look at be. And

Carolyn Woodard

I think another thing that we run into a lot is I don't know if I can call it the vibes, the feeling. Um, I've I have heard that we often have someone who is approaching us who says that their MSP just doesn't get them. You know, they're just either not explaining what they're doing, they don't respond quickly, they kind of feel like they're the last priority on that MSP's plate. So being able to identify, well, really, we need someone that does the same thing, but we're looking for a better partner, someone that will, you know, partner with us better, communicate better, respond more quickly, whatever it is.

Johan Hammerstrom

Yeah, no, I think that's a great point. There's sort of three areas that we've seen pop up over and over again in terms of uh dissatisfaction with IT support, the sort of specific and unique to nonprofit organizations. And

Johan Hammerstrom

The first area is culture, because nonprofit organizations have a very uh unique, sort of typically people-centered and people-focused culture. And that's not true of most businesses. Most businesses are all about the bottom line. And it's about get the job done and let's, you know, be efficient and make money. And that's how a lot of MSPs are geared to support their clients. And that can be sort of abrasive, you know. It just isn't consistent with the culture that exists within a nonprofit organization. So nonprofit staff are having one type of interaction with their coworkers all day long, and then they call their vendor for IT support and they're getting a different type of interaction, it's just dissonant and frustrating.

Carolyn Woodard

It's jarring.

Johan Hammerstrom

Yeah. So that's the first.

Johan Hammerstrom

The second is similar in that um understanding it goes back to this need to connect technology solutions to business needs. And most MSPs are used to working with for profit businesses. So they always just assume and their experience is with business needs that have to do with the bottom line. Buy this technology solution, and you will see your revenue go up. You know, invest $100,000 and you'll make $300,000. And that's that's the logic of for-profit business.

Johan Hammerstrom

But that way of thinking about investment, that way of thinking about planning, that way of connecting technology solutions to business needs makes no sense in the nonprofit environment. With not

Johan Hammerstrom

Nonprofits are resource constrained, and getting more efficient at how they do their work isn't necessarily going to generate more revenue for them. There's a disconnect between revenue generation and programmatic service operations, programmatic operations.

Johan Hammerstrom

And if you don't understand that, if you haven't been like working in that environment for a long time, it's difficult to understand how priorities are getting made, understand how budgeting happens. It's just all a very different dynamic in nonprofit organizations.

Johan Hammerstrom

And so the typical playbook that a lot of IT support providers use in working with their customers just doesn't seem to work with nonprofits. And um, we've talked with a lot of our clients leaving a standard MSP, who are just like, you know, I just don't feel like they ever got us. The stuff they were recommending didn't really make sense to us. They were requiring us to do things that we weren't, you know, um capable of doing. And so that's that's the second.

Johan Hammerstrom

And then the third kind of is the um, you know, sadly, for better or for worse, uh companies prioritize their larger customers and they prioritize their more financially successful customers. And typically a nonprofit is one of the smaller customers of their IT support firm, and they're probably one of the less lucrative customers. And so they're just getting deprioritized relative to the other, to the other customers. So

Johan Hammerstrom

I'm no one will no one's gonna admit that, but no one's gonna tell their client base you're not as important to us, but they feel it and you hear it, you know. Like I just get the sense that, you know, our great IT manager got sh moved to another client account, or you know, we always get told to wait when we call the help desk. Like the reality comes through, you know.

Carolyn Woodard

We always get the most junior person who has to like spend time to understand the problem first before they can even help us work through. Yeah.

Johan Hammerstrom

Exactly.

Carolyn Woodard

That makes sense, or we get a different person every time.

Johan Hammerstrom

Yeah.

Carolyn Woodard

It's not worth it to the MSP to have a consistent um support person for us. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. Well, I guess, yeah, I had never thought about it that way, but that is really a helpful way to think about it.

Carolyn Woodard

I want to, you know, just drop a resource on people. We have a couple different free downloads on our website about how to vet an MSP, how to know if an MSP is a good solution for your nonprofit based on your, you know, size, complexity of the IT that you're dealing with. Um, so we have a couple good resources that can help you if you're thinking about this journey.

Carolyn Woodard

And I just want to thank you, Johan, for sharing all this experience and uh understanding with us. And hopefully this will help people ask better questions of their AI to get better RFPs and also maybe ask better questions of themselves of what those real pain points are.

Johan Hammerstrom

Thank you. Thanks, Carolyn.