Introducing "Work Smarter, Not Harder" a collaborative content series to help you better serve your mission, and yourself featuring guest host Rachel Myers.

Rachel Myers, Founder | RM + Company

Rachel has over 23 years of experience working on all sides of philanthropy. She served for 12 years as an Executive Director for two nonprofit organizations and has worked for the past 9 years on the funder side at her local community foundation. Along the way, she's also served as a trustee for 11 years for her local public library board. The experience of working both as a staff member, and as a volunteer board member has provided her with unique insights on how boards and staff can effectively work together to make more good things happen.

As a consultant and collaborator, she offers expertise in strategic assessment, board training, communications strategy, fund development, planned giving, meeting facilitation and more.

Topics:

1. Leveraging Tech
2. Prioritization
3. Great Meetings
4. Time Management
5. Getting Work Done

Links:

• Compass: Connect with other members of the philanthropic community at Community.foundant.com
• Webinars: register here
• Social: Follow Foundant Technologies on Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, and Instagram
• Website: Foundant.com

Tools Mentioned:

• Loom

There's nothing like learning from peers, Like when I learn something from a peer, it has so much relevance. You know, you hear how they actually used to do something one way, implemented a new approach or idea, and now they're doing things differently and more effectively. That's so inspiring to me.

Welcome to Connected Philanthropy and Happy 2023. We're switching things up a little bit with the New Year and introducing a new voice to the podcast.

Hi, I'm Rachel Myers.

Foundant has partnered up with Rachel to talk about working smarter, not Harder. The goal of this content theme is to provide some tips and work hacks that will make your life easier. So for the next few episodes, Rachel will be acting as a guest host to guide you on this journey. So without further ado, let's dive right in.

Here's Rachel.

I have been working in the philanthropic and nonprofit world for about 24 years, and over those years I have sat in just about every seat. I think you can sit in around the film throughout the table. I've been an executive director. I've served on a board. I've been a staff member. I've been a volunteer. I've been a donor.

I've kind of been in every seat around that table. And over that time, I've worked with so many amazing people, hard working, dedicated, smart and talented people who want to make a big difference. And so when I went out on my own last year, after all these years of working in the sector, I brought with me this passion to help all of us in this work, find the time and space and energy that we need to focus on that work that's most important, that work that really moves the ball forward.

And that passion is what led me to a conversation with your colleagues here at Found End to think about who Wouldn't this be kind of a neat way to kick off 2023. Thinking about thinking together about how we can work smarter, not harder in these different ways.

It's so funny. Also, I hear how you talk about nonprofits and there's just almost a culture of doing more with less and pushing yourself to the brink. So this is such an important message. I think especially our audience and the entire philanthropic sector here. And you were a previous founding client in some of your past roles. Is that right?

Yes. In a previous life, I have actually been out to your office. I've been to Bozeman for training. So I have this connection with found in all of the different ways that you support these sectors with your products. And so I think it's also kind of cool to connect this idea of working smarter, not harder with the work that you all are doing because it's really quite aligned with your mission as an organization.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, how's the consulting business going so far? A year in, you said.

I'm a year end and I tell you it's been amazing. And I had I have so much, you know, gratitude for this time to spend with these different organizations who are doing incredible things. You know, here in my community and working with some organizations that are outside of my community. But it does keep bringing me back to how how much like you said before, Logan, how much is on everyone's plate and how we do have this culture of trying to shoehorn in one more thing, right?

Like, do more with less and make it all happen. And we're such a sector that wants to say yes. And I feel that in my bones, I feel the same way. I want to say yes as well. And yet, when you look at making the time and space for the projects and people that are most important to your organization.

Unfortunately, sometimes we have to say no with intention. And that's probably one of the biggest lessons that I've learned over my career, honestly, and especially as I'm consulting, is realizing the power and importance of saying no when or saying yes with intention to ensure that you're creating that space and time for those top you know, for that those top priorities that really are going to make the difference for you, for your organization, for your community, and for you personally.

Prioritizing is sometimes a challenging thing, especially if you're, like me, a people pleaser, and just want to say yes to everything. And that's a nice set up because that's kind of the first topic under this content theme. What are the topics that we're going to be covering in this in this project?

Yes, Thanks for asking. And you're right, prioritization is number one. I just posted actually a terrific article on the campus community that it's an article from the Harvard Business Review, and I love the title of it. The title is Say Yes to Say No and Really.

Shout Out Campus. Anyone who Wants to join campus, which is our online community, please click into the episode notes and join our community to see that post and talk with all the other members in there. Sorry to interrupt. I had to get that plug in there.

Not at all. No, absolutely. Please, please join in, because that's going to be a great place. That campus community is going to be a great place to hear from this community about how they're working smarter, not harder. And also the challenges they have when it comes to these topic areas. So I have this quote about prioritization. As long as they're on prioritization and it's clarifying the priority in any situation is one decision that makes it thousand.

And that idea of the power of prioritization really gets me excited because like you, I also like to say yes, like many of us. And then I also but having the the strength to really take a pause and ask yourself, is this new opportunity or request more important than these top priorities that we already have on our plate?

Just taking the time to do that can make such a big difference in how much you can accomplish in your days and weeks. So prioritization is definitely going to be a big topic area for one of our conversations coming up.

I kind of subscribe to the mindset that you should do less and focus on doing it really, really well. Then try to do more and more and more and watered down everything to the point where you're just doing mediocre work or dropping balls left and right. So I think that's a really important reminder and definitely you need to get that right first, get your priorities right, think critically about that, and then we could move on to all the other fun stuff that we're talking about.

So what are the those other topics that we'll be covering?

Yeah, 100%. So one of the next topics that we're going to dive into as a part of this series is having great meetings. And this one is another area very near and dear to my heart because I think in many ways right now we're kind of in a renaissance time for meetings with shifted how we have meetings over the last few years.

So many more meetings are virtual and virtual is amazing. It gives us the opportunity to connect with folks across distances and at the same time, there's this thing called Zoom fatigue. And there's also I mean, I'm sure you've experienced the slogan. I know I have. We've all sat in those meetings, in a meeting where we're like, Why am I here?

Why are any of us here? What are we really trying to accomplish in this meeting and meetings? Can be magic. They can create so much momentum. Decisions can be made, strategies can be set, and meetings can also be the opposite of magic at times where they're just, you know, draining and they're taking a lot of time and energy.

So we're going to look at in our conversations about having great meetings, we're going to look at kind of what I look think of as two sides of the meeting. One, how to plan a great meeting and set yourself up for success as you plan the meeting. And then the second side, how to facilitate a really engaging and effective meeting.

So I'm really excited about this topic.

I want to compliment you. You do such a great job like planning for this episode. I love your use of Lume, which is a just quick video recording software. There are so many alternatives to meetings that we have at our disposal. You know the obvious of just send an email and people will get the information that way. But also just recording yourself and meetings are also funny, he said.

Being in a meeting, everyone's been there where they've been in a meeting and think, Why am I here? This is a waste of my time. But on the flip side, people's feelings can get hurt. It's like, why am I not a seat at the table? I should be in there. And it's kind of finding that balance. Meetings kind of have a weird stigma.

That is a great point to raise. So you don't want people to feel offended because they aren't in the meeting. And at the same time you don't want to waste people's time by having them be in a meeting that they don't need to be in. So yeah, that's a great that's a great angle. I think the other thing about meetings, you just thanks for bringing up the Loom idea.

That was really a big aha moment for me. Over the past year. I discovered this tool loom and at first I just thought it was kind of a fun and cool way to share information, which it is. But then I realized, just as you were saying, that you could sort of like deconstruct your meeting with the help of Zoom by offering sort of the update side in the meeting, sort of the context and the update side in an asynchronous way where I could record it whenever was convenient for me and you could watch it whenever it was convenient for you.

And then we saved the actual face to face meeting time for those like back and forth strategic discussions, making decisions, setting a path, you know, those things we really need to do live and together. And I hadn't really thought about the that idea of sort of deconstructing meetings until I started working with so many folks through my consulting business at the leadership level.

You know, CEOs and executive directors, they have little teeny tiny bits of time on their calendar. They're just really hard to it's hard to get time with them. And so I realized, wow, I could I could share this with them so that they could watch it at their leisure. And then, like I said before, when we actually get together, we'll focus that precious time we have on the decisions and strategies and sort of collaborative thinking time that we need.

So I do think that was a for me personally, speaking of working smarter, not harder over the past year, that was a big aha for me.

Yeah, what a great tip meeting deconstruction that you should almost like trademarked that or something. That's and of course there are some meetings where it needs to happen real time.

But absolutely, absolutely. Yeah. So I think just being really again intentional about what is the purpose of this meeting that was going to be my big or my little tip, my little teaser tip around meetings was tips. Yeah, that that one question that I always that I now know I want to start every planning process around a meeting is the purpose what's the purpose of this meeting or even more simply, why are we having this meeting?

So could part of this meeting be a little video like you just alluded to or could do we need to meet at all? Could this be an email? Could this be a collaborative document? You know, we weren't using our I wasn't using collaborative documents nearly at the rate I am now a couple of years ago. And so it wasn't even in my toolkit as an option.

And now it is. So thinking about the different tools in your tool kit kit that you might tap into instead of a meeting or alongside your meeting to make that meeting time even better.

Well, I love that word. Just kind of teasing some of these topics. We also have leveraging technology, time management, getting work done. We won't dive too much into those. Just know there's much more to come. And talking about purpose of meetings, just kind of want to come back to the purpose of this episode is almost to set up this content theme and introduce you.

Rachel, you're going to be having discussions with some founded employees from different departments and potentially even found in clients sharing their knowledge. And it's pretty exciting because it sounds like you're pulling from different departments and people have vastly different backgrounds.

We are. I'm so excited to tap into the expertise that you all have internally. So we're going to be talking with Cory Brewster, who's your I.T. Director when we get into the topic of leveraging technology, which will be a perfect fit. So in that topic area Korean, I are going to talk about both using the tools that we have to their, you know, being as effective as we can with the tools we have so many times we have tools and we don't even know what they're capable of.

I think I was sharing with you a story where when I first was introduced to Excel right back in the day, back in the nineties, I was so intimidated by Excel, I just wasn't sure I was going to be able to ever use it. I kept kind of avoiding it or finding reasons to not learn it. And then a friend sat me down and she was like, Rachel, you need to make excel your friend.

There's so much that Excel can do for you, but you have to learn how to use it. You have to learn the basics. And I was like, Okay, I think I can do this. And I did. And think of now like, I mean, this was back in the nineties, this was years ago, but I remember using learning about the control F function on Excel, finding things on Excel, and now that seems like that's not a hack, that's not a smarter, not.

A hack, that's a hassle.

To hack.

Full blown hackers.

And that's just full blown hack. But at the end it felt like this huge learning at the time and it was a huge timesaver. And now I don't even think of that as something special, right? I'm so used to doing it that way. So I think it's also interesting to think of like what we integrate into our work lives easily.

And so sometimes, but sometimes we have to work a little harder to get these new tools into our workloads.

Speaking of tools, I think podcasts are a great example of a relatively new medium that's just catching on like wildfire. You can be on a walk and see learning something. Yes, you'd like to sign up for every single webinar that pops up across the sector and read every great book and there are millions of those. But we want to give you 1020 minutes of just a nice reminder, a cool tip, an interesting conversation with these people.

And on your drive home while you're doing dishes, just tune in with us and listen to these little tidbits. And the podcast is only one element of this content theme working smarter, not harder. We also have blog posts. We are doing a few webinars for people who actually want to tune in and have an interactive live experience. There are hopefully going to be a bunch of conversations and our online community compass hearing from people like you, the listener.

Am I missing anything? Is that is that everything we're doing?

I think we're also going to have some real short videos. You know how much I love this? Yes, I'm about to do the same thing. Kind of summarized some like you were saying, some of the tips, some of the big ideas and takeaways from the podcast conversations. So we have a lot of different ways to engage.

And for people who want to follow along and maybe even interact and contribute, follow sound and technologies on social media, definitely subscribe to this podcast and just check out our website. You know, there's going to be webinar registration links, you can click there, but all this information will be in the show notes of this episode. So check out those links and this should be pretty cool.

I think it'll be great. And I think, you know, we can make the most significant difference if we don't burn ourselves out. So part of the hope and goal for this whole series is to not burn out, to help us recharge and start the New Year with more time and energy for our mission and for ourselves. So I'm excited to get this going.

Well said. I'm so thankful that we're partnering with you. You have such great experience and a wonderful background and I think this is just the type of voice our audience wants to hear from. So thank you so much.

Well, thank you. And I am really excited and thrilled to be a part of this. And at the same time, I have my ears open for the ideas and insights from the folks who are joining us. For both the guests on the podcast that we have planned and also folks from the community, because I'm always hearing about a new thing where I'm like, Oh, I had never thought of doing it that way.

Could I do it that way? Let me look at that. And for me, this is my own preference. There's nothing like learning from peers. Like when you when I learn something from a peer, I it has so much relevance. You know, you hear how they actually used to do something one way implemented a new approach or idea, and now they're doing things differently and more effectively.

That's so inspiring to me. So I hope we can shed some light on some of those stories so that others can follow along in some of those paths of success.