Scan for Unintended Consequences before you Implement

Sign up for our weekly newsletter, The Technopath Way Tips, here: technopath.ac-page.com/the-technopath-way-sign-up Summary: Sarah sits down with Melissa Hill Dees of Hands on Connect Cloud Solutions. Melissa has 15 years of experience as a nonprofit executive and over 10 years leveraging Salesforce. Her goal is to automate what can be automated so that nonprofits have more time to do what can’t be automated. She is an NGO Community Group Leader, Dreamforce speaker, Lightning Champion, SFDO Sprinter, founder of #foodforce and Nonprofit Dreamin, and advocate of #domoregood, #WiT, #EqualityForAll. She is 4X Salesforce certified: Admin, Platform App Builder, Sales Cloud Consultant, and Nonprofit Cloud Consultant. We’re so glad she took the time to speak with our Technopath Way community about consequence scanning for nonprofits. In today’s episode you’ll hear about ways to think through possible negative and positive outcomes from implementing a new piece of technology or program. Something we as overwhelmed nonprofit professions don’t do often enough is think through every possible outcome when jumping into something new. It’s understandable - when you’re running at a million miles a minute, who has time to stop and dive that deep into the ‘what ifs’ of a situation? Well if we don’t, we can often end up in situations that take far more of our time than we have to spare. Key Take Aways: * Consequence scanning means thinking through 4 different categories: - Intended positive outcomes, unintended positive outcomes, possible negative outcomes, unintended negative outcomes * Find someone with fresh eyes to help you think of other unintended consequences * Even really positive outcomes can cause issues we may not have thought about * Ask ‘Why’ at least 5 times to get to the bottom of what’s needed (and avoid data that isn’t truly necessary, just clogging up your system) * Ask yourself what you’re not seeing * Automate everythin you can so you can spend all your time on things that can’t be * Initial registration to be a volunteer for a simple task (beach clean up, handing out food, etc) should only require a name and email address - more data than that doesn’t serve your organization and discourages people to help you! * Truly use the 360-customer view your CRM gives you to cultivate donor-volunteers