Notes from the field
Technology insights and examples for business and nonprofit leaders.
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Give your automations a persona: Meet “Tech Bot”
Read the post: Give your automations a persona: Meet “Tech Bot”Who owns the connection between your CRM and Slack? Or your project management tool and your ESP? At most small organizations, someone might authorize an integration on the fly. It might become a critical workflow. If that person leaves, or…
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Four docs to provide your team with clear AI guidance
When AI policies fail it’s because they don’t hit the right notes: they’re either so cautious that nobody follows them, or so vague that nobody can. Either can discourage widespread AI adoption. When I helped…
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Free and Discounted Tech Tools for Nonprofits
Every nonprofit I’ve worked with was paying more than they should for technology. Below are some tools I’ve used firsthand that we ended up getting for free — what each one actually saves you, and…
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Building a Culture of Documentation
One of the initial goals I shared with the team at Chronicle of Philanthropy was to build a “culture of documentation” at the organization. Shortly after, I started rolling out Slab as the knowledge hub…
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Slack as a Monitoring Layer: Five Systems, Five Levels of Effort
Most of the systems I build don’t have anyone watching them — that’s the beauty of automation. A subscription sync fires overnight. A webhook lands from Zoom. A HubSpot workflow updates a deal. Nobody sees…
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Distilling 50,900 JSON files down to what actually matters
When we migrated Chronicle of Philanthropy from Brightspot to WordPress, the content came over — but not cleanly. Months later, we were still tracking down missing articles that return 404 errors, content with broken formatting,…
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Change Your Headlines Without Fear of Destroying the SEO
I received this SEO question shortly after starting at the Chronicle of Philanthropy: “How can I change the headline without hurting the SEO?” Editors often hesitate here because they’ve heard that touching a published headline…
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Can’t-Miss Speakers on the ONA22 Agenda
This post first appeared on the ONA22 conference website. The ONA community is truly a beautiful thing. In this organization’s 23-year history, one fact has always rung true – the people are what make all the…
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A career in product without the label
The enduring story of this pandemic will be that it was a life-changing event for so many of us. For my family, the difficulties we faced triggered a move to the Chicago area—where I grew…
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First 5 things to do when creating a spreadsheet
So you’re putting together a spreadsheet? You’ve already taken the first step toward organizing your information is a much more useful way that simple text documents. But spreadsheets are much more useful than giving you…
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Transitioning annual awards announcement to virtual
With the annual ONA conference going virtual, it was an additional heartbreak that the annual Online Journalism Awards would be virtual as well. A three-hour participatory program doesn’t necessary translate well online, so our program manager Hollie Schultz…
