And if you don’t know, now you know

Ever feel like you’re reinventing the wheel? Is your team duplicating efforts? re-writing the same text? wasting time and energy because they don’t have effective ways of sharing information? Can you tell I have some stories? And working from home has made everything harder.

So I invited my friend, research librarian and informaticist Matt Von Hendy to join us on Coffee Time and give us some pointers on how knowledge management can keep teams moving forward effectively and efficiently.

We talked about thinking about

• information as an asset in your organization
• Simple processes to streamline the grant-writing process, and
• Reducing the stress of working remotely by concentrating on access to information.

Click below to watch the full episode.

Join the conversation live on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/groups/DataInformedPrograms/

Transcript

Pieta Blakely:

A few years ago, I was working in a mid-size not for profit and one of my colleagues did a literature search about partnering across organizations, and he presented it at a retreat. It was a great lit search. It was very thorough. He’d cited a whole bunch of sources, but I noticed he had not cited a handbook that the research department put out a couple of years prior on partnering across organizations. So I asked him about it, and sure enough, he didn’t know it existed.

Pieta Blakely:

So how does that happen? How does one part of your organization write a book, and another part doesn’t know? Do you find yourself writing things from scratch when you suspect there was a first draft somewhere? Do people on your staff have different ways of describing the organization or its work? Do grant applications take longer than they should? Today, we are going to get some help.

Pieta Blakely:

Welcome to Coffee Time with Masterminds. My name is Pieta Blakely and I’m the Founder and Principal of Blakely Consulting. Joining me today are my co-hosts Cynthia and Rebecca. Good morning.

Cynthia Rojas:

Hi. How are you, Facebook? How are you, Pieta and Rebecca?

Pieta Blakely:

Good.

Rebecca Tuttle:

Good morning. My name’s Rebecca Tuttle. I’m the Founder and Principal of Grant Write Now, and Grant Writing for Good.

Cynthia Rojas:

Yes, and I am Cynthia Rojas and I am the Founder and Principal of To Your Growth. Hi.

Pieta Blakely:

And if you are joining us this morning, please tell us in the comments who you are and where you’re joining from. Today, we have Matthew Von Hendy with us. Matt is a research librarian and an informaticist who helps nonprofits, evaluators and scientific researchers to organize their information. Good morning, Matt. Thanks for joining us.

Mathew Von Hendy:

Good morning. Hope everyone’s doing well out there. Nice to see you, Pieta, Rebecca.

Cynthia Rojas:

Hi, Matt.

Rebecca Tuttle:

Good morning.

Mathew Von Hendy:

Good morning. I’m glad to be here. Go ahead.

Pieta Blakely:

What is knowledge management and why is it important?

Mathew Von Hendy:

Oh, that’s a really good question. Knowledge management, as I’m sure many people I’ve heard, is one of these terms that’s used so often that the definition of it can get really muddled. What I tend to do is talk about knowledge management in some really simple, general terms. And I refer to it as the capture, storage and dissemination of information and intellectual assets that an organization has created in order to make better business decisions and to reduce inefficiencies. That’s kind of a mouthful, but that’s the basic idea about knowledge management.

Pieta Blakely:

I think that term intellectual assets is really interesting and key. It’s really important to understand information as an asset.

Cynthia Rojas:

I love that. Yeah. I was thinking IP, which is a term that’s more common, intellectual property, but yeah, I think organizations don’t realize that their knowledge or their information is an asset and has an enormous amount of value.

Rebecca Tuttle:

And how they should be using those assets, because some of them are still hidden away. They don’t even maybe realize they have them as assets.

Cynthia Rojas:

Yeah, exactly.

Mathew Von Hendy:

Yeah. There’s so many things that are assets in terms of individual creation that the organizations do, even a mission statement can be viewed in some terms as an intellectual asset, which we can talk about later on. But there are other things that a lot of folks will create, terms or frameworks, theories of change if they’re using those, internal structures of different … So there’s just a lot of opportunities there, but there’s also a lot of value that’s almost hidden from the larger organizational point of view, but that’s a little bit … I don’t want to go off on that. We can talk about that a little bit [crosstalk 00:04:26]-

Pieta Blakely:

No, I mean, that’s a really good point. There are documents and thoughts, contacts, all of these things floating around in an organization and if you don’t know about them then you can’t leverage them and get good value from them.

Mathew Von Hendy:

Yeah. One of the things I will say about knowledge management, if it’s done well, and we’ll talk a little bit, I’ll probably offer a few examples here, I think that it can really help organizations actually create new products or new services that can really benefit the group as a whole and particularly whoever the organization is trying to serve. So that’s something we can talk about a little bit later.

Pieta Blakely:

Yeah. Yeah.

Cynthia Rojas:

So I want to pick up on, Oh, go ahead.

Pieta Blakely:

No, no, go ahead, Rebecca.

Rebecca Tuttle:

I just want to pick up on the grant writing element. At a time when it’s especially important for everyone to have access to quick information, how can organizations focus on that process specifically?

Mathew Von Hendy:

Well thanks for asking, Rebecca, because money is the bottom line for a lot of things. It’s really what makes organizations go. I mean, obviously, if you don’t have any money or you’re running out of money, that is a difficulty, but I could notch management practice is, just to offer a few examples there in terms of grant writing, raising funds, and some of these tips are really simple.

Mathew Von Hendy:

Usually in my experience with most mission-driven organizations, finding funding opportunities to something that almost all staff participate in. And does your organization have one place where everyone can put in whatever funding opportunities they come across when they’re researching? Typically, people do this along with many others, wearing many other hats. And is the central place someplace that everyone in the organization has access to? It’s hopefully, if someone finds a funding opportunity, they stick it on their C drive on their computer. That’s not going to help people, if they’re trying to find it. I mean, and that happens more often than people care to admit or-

Pieta Blakely:

It does. It causes a lot of stress, where we’re suddenly writing this proposal and staff doesn’t know, how long have we known about this? Why did we decide that we’re writing it? Why is it due tomorrow?

Rebecca Tuttle:

I can attest firsthand to that stress, because what typically happens is in an organization is there isn’t one central location for everyone to have access to, but there is a central kind of location where that information is kept. But what happens is, as new opportunities come in, it’s like sticky note from H-E double hockey sticks. I served in these roles where you would come back from lunch, it’d be like 50 sticky notes here, “Apply for this, apply for this,” or, “Why can’t we go for this grant when they are down the street?” [crosstalk 00:07:54] you’re talking about a central organization and the different elements of that, it’s so important and it will alleviate a lot of that stress.

Mathew Von Hendy:

And just to offer a couple more examples just for the grant writing process [inaudible 00:08:08]. And some of these things are, I don’t want to say common sense, but at least from my point of view, from an information point of view is if your organization has a team that meets on a regular basis, say they meet each week or each month, in terms of making a go or no go decision, but pursuing a funding opportunity, having all those funding opportunities in one place makes it a lot easier to go through everything, to talk about how much bandwidth you have to actually apply for the grant at the moment with all the other services that your organization is offering.

Mathew Von Hendy:

If you don’t have a standardized process for reviewing all your funding opportunities, I would argue also that could be something you might want to institute, because that would be a good knowledge management practice so that you’re not trying to apply for a grant 12 hours before the deadline is [crosstalk 00:09:13]-

Cynthia Rojas:

I have to tell you, Rebecca, I really appreciate the sticky note method. And I think it’s a framework that we need to establish and make it very well known. I’ll tell you something, very early in my research, my research career, I hired a third research person, so it was me and someone else. And then a third person came in and it was the first time we had a third person. Well, it had been years before we had a third person, and I remember him asking for the code book.

Cynthia Rojas:

So we kept referring to sticky notes, so little pieces of paper, and one day he got upset and he said, “You guys don’t even have a code book.” And I said, “Are you kidding? That’s such an insult. Look at all these sticky notes. [crosstalk 00:10:00] was on a cork board, and there were a bunch, and I could tell you anything once I looked at the sticky notes. And so I stopped doing that, but we did it for years. And so I wonder, Matthew, at what point does it need to be formalized and centralized? So that is it two people in a team? Is it five people in an organization? At what point does an organization need to say, “Okay, we have to begin to manage our knowledge.”

Mathew Von Hendy:

Yeah, I think it varies a little bit with the organization. Yeah. In my experience, if it’s a couple of people who’ve worked closely together and you’re in two different offices, but all your sticky notes are in exactly the same place on both your desks. I’m joking there, but yeah, you obviously have a lot of similar ideas that it’s probably not as much of an issue, but I think as soon as you get over to more than two people it’s good to have some type of little bit more of a standardized … some knowledge management practices put in that you can use.

Mathew Von Hendy:

A lot of these are really simple. I’ll just offer another example that always comes up. When I hear about people, grant writing in terms of finding information is a lot of the grants will have standard things that they ask for. Like they ask for your mission statement. They ask for what types of some basic demographic information about the client groups that you might potentially serve. And if you can have this stored in one place, you don’t have to go back and recreate the wheel every time you’re applying for a grant, but it is just amazing how often the folks wind up doing that. And you could save yourself a little bit of time and effort and spend that time to write a stronger proposal. Just my 2 cents.

Rebecca Tuttle:

No, that’s absolutely important. And you know what else I find, is by having that shell structure, it’s great. But what else I find is that, if you don’t do that, sometimes what happens and I’ve seen this with organizations is they’ll state their mission statement, different across applications, or sometimes they’ll include the value statements within the mission. And if philanthropists are talking to one another you want to have consistency in your message of what is your mission and what do you stand for? And you want it to be the same with every application. I love that we’re talking about … this is right up my alley. I’m so excited for you. [crosstalk 00:12:42]

Mathew Von Hendy:

And let me just offer another example. I was just talking to a client about doing potentially doing a lit search for them. And they had heard about a funding opportunity. Oregon’s a nonprofit organization. It’s probably, I’m guessing about a dozen people that either work on staff or work as consultants, and they’re actually having a consultant write that grant application for this funder, but the consultant doesn’t know anything about the previous history of the funder and the relationship that the organization has had with the funder, and so if that information was captured in some central place, they would know that one of the principals of the organization actually knows a high level a person at the foundation. So that’s a key piece of information that the consultant should know because they’ll know a little bit about what the conversation has been between the principal of the organization seeking the funding and the funder themselves. So just one example of knowledge management that’s at work there, so anyhow.

Pieta Blakely:

And this is so important in terms of keeping your staff on the same page in a lot of ways. Telling the organization story consistently, understanding why we’re going for a particular grant at a particular moment in time. It really has implications for the culture of your organization to think about your information as a shared asset.

Cynthia Rojas:

Yeah, I think I want to add to that because I think that’s a good point, Pieta. A lot of times organizations, especially non-profit organizations that tend to be under-resourced, don’t have the time to pause, they’re going 100 miles an hour and knowledge management is a thoughtful process and requires some type of organization. So if the culture of the organization is not one where they tend to pause and really value these assets, what’s your recommendation, Matthew for helping organizations to shift the culture?

Mathew Von Hendy:

Well, I maybe it’s the library and in me that comes out, but I really think that basically making all the information you can accessible to your staff is crucial, and that decision starts up on top. So it’s really kind of … and ultimately it empowers your staff. It really makes people feel included as part of the team and the decision-making process. And so that’s one of the things, there are simple things that people can do with knowledge management, and that is making sure that everyone, that there is a central place or central method that everyone has got access to with whatever information that they need to do their jobs, and whatever information … I would say it’s almost transparency for the internal staff, with the knowledge management.

Mathew Von Hendy:

I’ll just get one really simple tip here and that is, saving files with the same naming protocol so that staff members can go in and access them, or saving them in a clear place, say an internal directory or intranet. If people have that, as opposed to saving it in 10 different files or folders where no one can find it, or people find … the joke about version control, there are 10 versions of the same document that might be out there. So I think that if a little bit of time is spent doing this in terms of thinking about knowledge management and hiring a knowledge management consultant or trainer to come in and help the organization, maybe even for part of the day, that ultimately it’s an investment of a little bit of time that will pay large dividends further down the pike, particularly say in the fundraising or the grant writing process is one example that we’ve been talking about.

Pieta Blakely:

It’s not good practice to have 10 different documents with the suffix final, final, final, final, really, really final?

Cynthia Rojas:

Well, we’ve all had the experience at various places we’ve worked of spending a lot of time working on a document, thinking it’s the final version of it, and you have someone who says, “Oh, no, there’s the revised final version.” And I don’t think there’s anything more frustrating to staff people than to have that experience. So that’s what ideally you’re trying to avoid.

Pieta Blakely:

I think there’s a certain resistance to changing these systems. People feel like in the moment I just have to get my work done, and I will fill this in later. I’ve had situations where we’re trying to use Salesforce because I tell people, “Look, anyone of us could go away any day. Every time you talk to somebody, put notes in Salesforce, so that if you’re not here, we know what happened.” And it’s a little bit of a culture change to do it in the moment, and it’s a little bit of a culture change to go check in Salesforce rather than pop into your colleague’s office and ask what happened. Right?

Cynthia Rojas:

Yeah. And you know, I struggle, I have to tell you, with naming conventions, if we should put version numbers, because sometimes I get nervous, especially when I work with other people and I get a version three, but I don’t know if there’s a version four. Then some people use dates for version control and I never know like, “Okay, so if I got one yesterday, 11/12, then is there a 11/13 version? So I think the naming convention even needs a code book almost, because all these conventions make me nervous, because I never know if there’s a later version. So I don’t know if you have found-

Pieta Blakely:

That’s in the implementation. Right?

Cynthia Rojas:

Right. If you’ve found a solution to that problem, or is that just coming to agreement as a team?

Pieta Blakely:

Google Docs is the solution to that problem. [crosstalk 00:20:00]

Mathew Von Hendy:

I’ve seen places that have had a little bit of success doing this, but I also think it’s a little bit of somewhat of a chronic issue. Like it’s something that people have to always be aware of, and there ideally to be some type of agreement, but you see so many organizations that wind up, they have an intranet and there’s no naming protocols, so they wind up having to put in a Google search box for their internet in order to find the information because it’s not find-able.

Mathew Von Hendy:

I guess that’s part of the bottom line when I talk, a little bit more about knowledge management is part of what you’re looking for is you’re also trying to make sure with the knowledge management protocols, that your information, that people can find it, or I call it searchability.

Mathew Von Hendy:

If at some point a year later someone is trying to find some previous information you’ve used for our grant application, but they can’t find it with whatever internal system that you have, could be an intranet, could be a Dropbox directory of files that your organization’s using, but you want to be able to make that information accessible to the staff people in the time that they need it, so they don’t spend a lot of time kind of floundering around and eventually having to go to someone say, where is this? So, anyhow, my two cents. Go ahead.

Pieta Blakely:

You know, I’ve heard from a lot of different organizations that they’re particularly struggling right now because everybody is working remotely. So they used to address some of these issues by literally hanging over the cubicle wall and asking their colleagues for help. And we can’t do that right now cause we’re all working remotely. So what could an organization do, given the current constraints and the rushed transition to working remotely to try and make this go a little bit more smoothly?

Mathew Von Hendy:

Ah, well, I think that you’ve asked the magic question that almost all mission-driven nonprofits are really dealing with in kind of our COVID times. Some of these things are really fairly … I’ll just offer a few really practical suggestions about what groups organizations can do. That one is to make sure that everyone’s got, can access whatever platform that they’re, that your organization is using to store information. I mean, this sounds kind of like a no brainer, but excuse me, [crosstalk 00:22:55], and I don’t mean that disrespectfully, but it’s kind of like, if you’re using some type of, say, you’re still using your organization’s intranet what, it’s behind the firewall. Does all your staff have access to get behind the firewall?

Cynthia Rojas:

That’s a good point.

Mathew Von Hendy:

I was just talking to another consultant, who’s working on a project for an external organization and yeah, they’re waiting, they’ve waited a month to start working on this project because they need to get access to the internal behind the firewall of an organization, and they haven’t been granted permission yet. Again, not a huge issue in this context, but still, it’s something that if you have internal staff members, they need have access to information they have.

Mathew Von Hendy:

There’s so many great information sharing resources that are out there now that can be used in a variety of ways that are publicly, I don’t want to say publicly accessible, but they can be formatted so that a group can share them. Obviously, it’s something, Dropbox has been around forever. There are, I do a lot of citation work. So just sharing articles, citations. I’m an EndNote user and there is actually a public version of EndNote that’s out there, and Note desktop it’s available. It’s usually a 30 day free trial. If you’re working on a short term project, that can be good, particularly if you have … one of the issues, obviously is team members are now scattered all over the country potentially. So in terms of that really reduces that geographical distance. So just a couple of examples that folks could use. And there’s certainly others that it’d be always be glad to chat with people, because every organization is different in terms of what they’re trying to accomplish, in terms of knowledge management and kind of what their contexts are. So, and there’re specific tools that might be a little bit more relevant to them than other tools

Pieta Blakely:

I just wanted to bring up Myra is, was had a comment and I didn’t want to interrupt you, but it was relevant to what you were saying, Matthew. So she says, “Access is so important.” And I just wanted to acknowledge Myra’s comment. Yeah, no,

Rebecca Tuttle:

I think that goes back to the thing we said at the very beginning about your information being an organizational shared asset. And there is a lot of power in that for better or for worse, and making sure that people have access to the information that they need is the organization’s responsibility.

Mathew Von Hendy:

Actually, I’ll just mention one thing when we returned in terms of how it came about grant applications and grant writing and raising funding, and I was actually working with a scientific nonprofit. I won’t mention who they are, but I was talking to them about knowledge management, and they actually noticed when they were writing funding, applying for grants, that they were getting funded for a certain type of grant on a more consistent basis than the general types of grants they’re going for.

Mathew Von Hendy:

And this is something that the principals noticed after a couple of years when they are looking back on kind of doing an analysis of their kind of win rate with grant applications, and they actually pivoted their grant writing a little bit more to this area. It’s kind of a little bit of a nuanced thing, and they’ve actually gotten quite a bit of funding in that area. So that’s one example where you talk about potentially a new service that’s come from a good knowledge management practice. They had stored all their information in one place, they could do analysis of in various ways kind of quickly. So that’s just one small example of how you’re not good knowledge management practices can help an organization develop new or innovative services or products, which is ultimately-

Cynthia Rojas:

Okay. I love that. So thank you for going back to that point. Because I wanted to come back to that point about how knowledge management then translates into innovation. So thank you for that, Matthew. I have to tell you, knowledge management you mentioned earlier that it’s a word that gets tossed around. For me, it’s a newer term and it’s new for a lot of nonprofits. And I think as the last 10 years, we’ve seen more and more funders asking for outcomes, asking for data, really wanting nonprofits to articulate their impact. So as that is increasingly moving forward and we start to really create that level of sophistication among service providers, knowledge management now comes into the picture, but I think it’s still a new term to a lot of nonprofits, especially small ones. So this is going to take a while, I think. I think it’s an important topic.

Mathew Von Hendy:

I think you raised an excellent point that, I mean, a lot of what … and not to sound too practical here, but a lot of the issues that we talked about are something that nonprofits always deal with on a daily basis. But in terms of having kind of a name for it and kind of a process, that knowledge management’s a new relatively new idea in terms that you can look at as kind of a holistic whole and apply kind of a system to managing this.

Mathew Von Hendy:

The other thing I should mention, I know we’re kind of going towards the end here, but is the other issue that nonprofits are dealing with is there’s just a torrent of information that’s out there that can be used to make decisions, kind of publicly available information that’s out there, say, census data that can be pulled in when you’re writing a grant application. It’s just one small example. There are fewer and fewer resources and more and more information out there. So knowledge management can be a real tool for trying to manage those two conflicting forces, so to speak, and make most use of your staff and your time.

Pieta Blakely:

I think that’s … my big takeaway is to think about all of the information and knowledge in your organization as a unit, as an area of work. I think we saw all of these inefficiencies as one-off problems and irritations, but when we actually think about our knowledge as an asset, what we do with it, how we store it, how we leverage and maximize it and pay close attention to it, there is a whole lot of power that we haven’t been necessarily harnessing.

Cynthia Rojas:

Yeah. I think, I think my biggest takeaway is this idea of access. So we assume people have access, but the example that Matthew gave I’ve seen before I worked for an organization a while ago where they have a VPN portal that you have to go in through. And I mean, the amount of times that I had to call their it department to get in, and I did what you are advising people don’t do. I took the files and put them in my own drawer so I can work with them.

Pieta Blakely:

Well I used to have a VPN where it was this little screen, right. I had to open a piece of software and use this little screen and all the [inaudible 00:31:09] within that screen, and it disabled everything else about my setup. Right. I couldn’t use my second monitor. I couldn’t use it if I was on the road with the result that you end up storing things on your C drive and saying, “Oh, I’ll upload it later.” What if we thought that the most important thing about the system is that it’s easy to use, right. That we need to encourage not discourage people and make sure they’re in the system. It would have implications for how IT does their jobs too.

Cynthia Rojas:

Oh, yeah. All right. I’m wearing out, so it must be [crosstalk 00:31:45].

Pieta Blakely:

Yeah. One of the things that we didn’t touch on, which I think ties back to the issue of transparency is with a lack of transparency, either comes fear. And so we have to get through that fear and figure out that hesitation to get to the transparency and explain to people that there are reasons why there are levels of access. So my biggest takeaway is, if you find that this conversation is something that your nonprofit is not ready yet for what you can do is figure out the systems that work to give the right department. So the right sections of your organization the access that they need to be successful in their work, and then someone else can tie those access management systems together, so it’s one cohesive system.

Cynthia Rojas:

Thank you.

Pieta Blakely:

So folks who are watching, please add your takeaways in the comments. Rick, what do you want to leave us with? What is the one thing we should all go back to our desks and look at after this go?

Cynthia Rojas:

I would say, take a look at what information that you have. And I would actually say, do what they call a knowledge management audit, see what resources your organization makes use of, what resources or information that your organization has created, or has stored, and also what you might need going forth. That’s something obviously that we could do another half hour show just specifically talking about a knowledge management audit or what sometimes people refer to as the information audit in the library world. But that would be beyond the scope of obviously what we’re talking about here today in terms of time. But that would be the one thing I would say.

Cynthia Rojas:

And in simple terms, just think about knowledge management. If it’s not on your radar, put it on your radar. I know that people have multiple things that they were thinking about and doing, but it’s something that I think is really worthwhile.

Pieta Blakely:

Yeah. And it really highlighted it’s going to get more and more and more important, and the advantages of getting our arms around it are even greater than we might have imagined. I mean, even as a one person shop I was starting to think about auditing my information a little more.

Mathew Von Hendy:

And certainly with the data, just the sheer amount of data that is coming in from everywhere with the data, the data sets, there’s just more and more information that’s out there. Both it’s being produced internally and also externally that it’s … can it just get more and more important?

Pieta Blakely:

Okay. Wow.

Cynthia Rojas:

Wow. [crosstalk 00:34:40]

Rebecca Tuttle:

Well, I think you’re coming back another day, so.

Mathew Von Hendy:

Okay, okay. [crosstalk 00:34:41]

Rebecca Tuttle:

So everyone, if you got good value from our program today we’d appreciate it if you would like, comment or share, particularly if you’ve got somebody who you think should see this, share it and tag them. Matthew, thank you so much for joining us today.

Mathew Von Hendy:

Well, thank you so much. It was great. Great to be on, and thank you for having me.

Pieta Blakely:

And everyone have a good weekend.

Cynthia Rojas:

Yes. Take care.

Mathew Von Hendy:

Okay. Bye-bye.