Name: Audit to Elevate: Building a Firm Foundation for Growth
Uploaded: 2025-03-27T20:30:02.984Z
Duration: 46 min 20 s
Description: Audit to Elevate: Building a Firm Foundation for Growth

Transcript for "Audit to Elevate: Building a Firm Foundation for Growth": Hey, everybody. Glad you're joining. We're got about 25 people in. Just wanna let you know as you join the workshop today, we'd love for you to put in the chat maybe, what ministry you're from, maybe where you live. Feel free to say hi. We're glad you're here. We'll start in, oh, maybe a minute or so. We're right at the top of the hour. So we'll wait here and, start in about a minute. Yeah. Great to see you all. I'm seeing you all coming in and recognize a lot of your names. So great to see you. Yeah. Fantastic. Alright. People still coming in, but, I'd like to go ahead and get started. Yeah. Wanna respect the time we have. So welcome. We're glad you're here. This is the first in a series of virtual workshops that we have planned for this year leading up to our donor conference, our donor connect conference in October. As you can see, this workshop is titled audit to elevate, building a firm foundation for growth. You know, we're all familiar with the metaphor of a firm foundation and the fact that the entire structure depends on that foundation. And so we believe that a system wide audit is one of the best ways for you to create a firm foundation for the growth of your ministry and your mission. I wanna start by, looking with you at the speakers. I feel a little awkward because I'm introducing myself as, the main speaker. So hi. Tim Loyola. Then later, we have a special guest joining, Mark Douglas, who is the director of development at ICCM, a ministry of the free Methodist church. And, in getting to know Mark, we have such similar backgrounds that I thought, hey. I'll just introduce both of us together. So just a few things. We both have, very long careers as a pastor, a church planter, business owner, and a professor. And I don't think either of us could have envisioned that we would be in our current positions and doing what we do, but we love it. And, we're glad that Mark is with us for this, workshop. Let me start with the agenda, what we hope to accomplish. So you can see we will, first look at what an audit is and why it matters. And then second, some common areas of improvement that we've seen in organizations in connection to doing an audit. Third, we're gonna look at some existing features in SE that are often overlooked by our clients, but that they surface during an audit. And, so we wanna look at several of those. Then we'll have our conversation with Mark and, kinda wrap up with, hopefully, some time for q and a as well as, just finishing real quickly with some, key takeaways. You notice at the bottom as well, we hope this will be an interactive workshop. So please use the chat to share your thoughts and and perspectives on what we're talking about. And then you've got the q a tab as well where, feel free to ask us questions along the way. We'll do our best to answer those. Maybe some of those at the q and a, but we'll try and answer some as well during the, workshop. So, we hope that this interactive workshop will include, you guys responding to some poll questions. So we'd love to get your feedback. Here's our first poll we wanna ask. How often does your organization conduct a system audit to assess organizational efficiency and effectiveness? So you've got a poll. You see a poll tab here that you can use to respond. I'd love to get your feedback. I think it's open, hopefully. Yeah. So if we could open that, poll and have people weigh in on it. Alright. Is everyone got the poll? I hope. I can see it, so I'm hoping everyone can. See a couple, responses. So, hopefully, people are responding here. Alright. Kinda. It's maybe half of people have responded. Looks like so far, the majority of you are saying that you haven't conducted a formal audit as of yet. Great. Glad you're here. Alright. I think we'll close if we can. We'll close that, poll, and, thanks for your response. We'll we'll move on if we can here. Let's see. Sorry about that. I don't know how I ended up in the beginning here. Alright. So we had our first poll. Here we go. We wanna start with looking at what we mean by an audit. What does it mean? Why does it matter? And so we wanna start with, as you can see, why an audit matters. So first, an audit matters because it helps you to evaluate gaps. They They could be knowledge gaps, functionality gaps, SOP gaps. Second, an audit matters because it will help to leverage growth opportunities. Again, as a mission, as a ministry, we hope to see you grow. Third, an audit matters because it will help to streamline processes. An audit is a foundational step toward greater efficiency as a ministry. And then finally, an audit matters because it will help to inform business decisions. So decisions about what you do in studio enterprise, even more so why you do them and how to use SE more efficiently. Another poll question. Here we go. Which departments within your organization do you think could benefit most from an audit of their use of the donor direct system? Hopefully, the poll's open. I see it. So, hopefully, you do too. Yeah. Looks like fundraising, development, big part. But I see responses across the board, so that's great. Fantastic. Yeah. So it looks like about a three to one ratio, with fundraising and development, and it's great to know. Give you just second or two more here. Yep. Fundraising and development by far. Great feedback. We really appreciate it. Hey. Donor management relations kind of catch nuts. Alright. We'll close the poll. Thanks. That's great feedback. Alright. We've looked at why an audit matters, but now we wanna get into what an audit is and particularly the components. What makes up an audit? And so, typically an audit starts with a system wide or a ministry wide meeting with key stakeholders. Lot of times it'll be PowerSE users. And, we spend some time identifying pain points and frustrations, related process issues more on a ministry wide level, a global level. So not not as much with individual users. And then closely connected to that is, just surfacing, a client's wish list. Again, in that large group setting, we discuss needs and, wants for SE that just seem to not be there right now. What do you wish it would do? And then the bulk of the audit is spent by connecting with every department, you know, or team even down to individual users who in any way use SE just to observe them and ask questions and really understand current processes across the board with everyone who uses SE. And then at the end of the audit, we kinda come back together in a large group again with the same, key stakeholders and we give both a verbal and then later written summaries of our observations and recommendations from the audit. And then, of course, key to the whole thing is a little bit later, we hold a solutioning meeting post audit for next steps to really, you know, make a difference as a result of the audit. We don't wanna surface all these things and then not see some real change and progress in your use of SE. So those are the components, main components of an audit. And, now I wanna talk about some of the main outcomes. What happens as a result of an audit? So one of the best outcomes is best practice usage. An audit will help you to align the way you use SE with best practice, correcting some of it, enhancing some of it so you're you're using SE, according to best practice. There is always a recognition of the need for training. So there's almost always further training. And you can see here as well some of the areas for consulting and partnership together around, you know, configurations and, automations and ways to enhance the system. So that's a main outcome. Third, expanded knowledge. It's always a significant outcome of an audit. I'm gonna speak to that a little bit more in just a minute. And then finally, there is sometimes, some value in talking about some possible projects. Not necessarily development projects, but client services ways to extend and personalize the functionality of SE for you to achieve the kind of efficiencies that your ministry needs. So that's what an audit is and why it matters. It's first main thing we wanted to discuss. And now second, we wanna cover some of the common areas of improvement. You probably will connect to many of these areas, but we find that sometimes, areas of the system not even on the radar surface as a real opportunity for improvement. So I'm not gonna go through all of these on the list. I just wanna mention a couple of them. So I already mentioned, you know, that expanded knowledge is a real outcome. And so this is a real area of improvement. Obviously, there's tremendous value in gaining knowledge of features and functionalities and SE and an understanding of how to use them that can really make a significant and positive difference. We often have clients say, I didn't even know that was in in SE or I didn't know that SE could do that. You'll notice right underneath there production, we commonly see an increase in efficiency in, client's production process as well as improvements in the ability to do more with your responses and often with less effort. So production's a common area of improvement. And then if you look down just a couple more, you'll see automation. It just seems like one of the real needs that surfaces with clients often is for more automation. And SE has several fantastic tools that can be leveraged to alleviate and sometimes to remove manual repetitive processes. So this is one of the main ways that you end up saving time and gaining efficiencies in the way you use SC and in, you know, your your ministry in general. And you'll see others there as well that maybe you can identify as, areas of need for improvement. And so we'd love for you to weigh in on that. So you'll see, we can open up the third poll here. Which of the following areas do you feel need most improvement in your experience of SE, your system, to better align with your organization's mission? So you'll see that same list there. Again, we'd love to, know where you see a real need for improvement. So poll is open. Let me take a minute there and and, look through that and vote. Yeah. Not really surprised. So far, Reporting, advanced CRM, knowledge, and understanding. Yeah. Automation is coming up. It's it's great. It's right in line with what we often see. Yeah. Reporting's still out ahead, but automation is right close behind. Advanced CRM is way up there as well. Not much on production even though I highlighted that one. Yeah. Great. Reporting, by far, the highest need. That's fantastic. Yeah. I think we have everyone has voted. I'm pretty sure. I'm doing quick math. And, yeah, I think almost everyone has voted, so I think we can close the poll. Hey. Reporting is at the top. The automation came in next. Advanced CRM and then knowledge and understanding. It's it's great. Fantastic. Yeah. We had a request to share. I'll yeah. I can share the results here. Just a sec. You can kinda see. Alright. Oh, well, I noticed when I now go back to sharing the screen, I think I'm at the beginning. Let's see if I can get down to where it's supposed to be. Alright. Great. So here we go. The final thing we wanna look at, we've looked at, you know, what an audit is and why it matters. We've looked at some of these common areas of improvement that we see that many of you are in touch with, that we see improved during, and as a result of an audit. And then the final thing we wanna look at is some overlooked features in your SE toolkit. As I said, we we often hear clients saying, oh, man. I didn't know that was in SE. And so a lot of times, hiding in plain sight are these features, that you can start using. And and, this is some of the immediate benefit of an audit is just pointing these things out as we're doing observations with your teams and and with individuals. So by the way, we've put together a list of, I think, 14 features that we commonly find are overlooked by clients, and we wanna make those available to you. Let me go through just three of them, together that that will be on this list that we wanna share with you. So the first one is quick entry. Did you know that SE has several ways of entering different types of transactions much more quickly than using the standard transaction entry process? One of those is quick entry. You can see, by the way, in the little screenshot, document number entry to the left and free product to the right. Those are other ways to enter different types of transactions much more quickly. But we've actually done metrics on quick entry. It's intended to enable you to enter simple donations, and we found that it can be up to 80% faster than using regular transaction entries. So to me, it's very worthwhile to batch simple donations separately so that you can use quick entry when you're when you're entering those into SC. A second feature often overlooked is the adjust donations action. I was recently on a call, listen, with a client who has been live for probably three years and specifically with what I would call an SME in SEO, power user. And we were talking together and something about, you know, incorrect donations came up. And I said, well, of course, you can use the adjust donations action. Never heard of it. So you can see in transaction history, there is an adjust donations actions that you can use to make corrections to incorrect donations that have been completed. In other words, you can't go edit the donation through, the deposit process. And with adjust donations, you can correct or change the project, the source code, the pledge, or the sub account. And just like quick entry, we've done some metrics here and found 80 plus percent quicker to use adjust donations than to do the old what we would call the old way now, you know, where you cancel donations for credit and then you use that credit to enter the correct donations. This action makes that, so much quicker. So hopefully, you're using that. There's a third feature I wanted to mention, often overlooked. So did you know that several years ago, we made an enhancement to SE, that enables you to set up automated, credit card decline notifications to your recurring donors that can be sent by email or letter or both. And you can configure a different message for each decline notifications and then tell SE to cancel the recur recurring after a certain number of declines. So are you using this feature? Again, just saw a client, interacted with them. They didn't even know, CC decline rules existed. So hopefully, these are three features that you can become aware of. They're often overlooked. So we've put a document together kind of as a bonus handout for you, a bonus result that you can use, and it's in the docs tab. So you can go to the docs tab and download that to give you, I think, 14 features that we find in audits are commonly overlooked. Alright. Well, it is time to bring, Mark on, to have a conversation around audits. Welcome, Mark. Glad you're volunteering to talk a little bit about audits with us. Well, I am glad to be with you. An east coaster who now lives in Colorado but is sitting in rainy Houston this afternoon. So yes. Welcome to Texas. Yeah. Thank you. Alright. Well, first question, you know, what led ICCM to have a desire to do an audit? Got on your radar and you said, yes. You know, we wanna do that. So ICCM, before the big c we call now COVID, had a database, and it wasn't doing what we wanted. So we came to donor direct, and that was during COVID and implementation. Fast forward to today or early last year, we recognized that there were some best practices or worst practices, as I like to call them sometimes, that we were doing, that we just I there had to be a better mousetrap. So, we reached out and said, hey. We wanna do an audit to figure out what we're doing good, what we're doing bad, or what we would and then what we're doing well. And so that's how we got to the audit. We recognize that we were we were road blocking, and we need to figure out a way to bust through the roadblock. Yeah. I'd love for you to you know, when you say you recognize that, you know, oh, man. We're we're aware of it. How did that happen? In other words, what was it frustration? You know, what what made you realize, hey. We're not doing things as well as we could or the system's not working as well. How did that manifest itself? So part of it was frustration. Part of it was Yeah. I was a I was a new voice and a new set of eyes coming into the process. Yeah. And and I had been in other environments. And I'm sitting there looking at what we're doing and going, no. There's a better way to do it. Now I don't I didn't necessarily know how to create the better way in the database. Yeah. But there there was a better way out there, and so we just said, let's do let's figure this out. Yeah. That's awesome. So you had an audit and, love for you to just share, the experience a little bit and maybe a couple of the best things that came out of it, the positive impact on you and your organization. We did the audit, and it took a while because most of our people are remote. We had to do a remote audit, but we had we had to break our team up into smaller pieces. And so we didn't want everyone to have to sit through accounting stuff. We didn't want everyone to sit through data entry stuff. So we just broke people up, and we sort of spread it out an hour and a half, two hour session. And literally, the question was asked, what do we do you know, from donor direct standpoint, how you know, what are you doing to do this? And then we would answer. Or we would ask a question that would bubble up. How do we do this? Because this, we see this. And so it became this interactive conversation. Clearly, Donner Direct listened more than they communicated during the audit. But, I mean, they there was a lot of communication, but they listened to what we needed. Yeah. And then the after action part is where we came back and said, okay. Here's a few things we need to do next. And so that was the valuable piece for us. Right. Have you done some things next? I hope. You know? We we have done a ton of next things. Oh, that's great. And we actually, have created probably more work for you folks than you were anticipating after our next thing. So no. That was that was one of those things that we wanted to, we clearly knew we needed to do better, and so some of those were easy fixes. And Yeah. Some of those created some questions that we knew that we needed to be better at, particularly in our context or our environment, which meant that you all had you all have come alongside of us to actually figure out how we need to do it effectively in the database to to meet our needs. Yeah. Yeah. And I happen to be kind of, you know, involved in that because it's a lot with my team. And so, yeah, I just love that we're partnering together. That's awesome. Well, last question. I told you, you know, a little bit of sales kind of, feel. But what are a couple reasons you would say, you know, for recommending doing an audit, you know, to other organizations, you know, the ministry clients that we have here. You know? What what would you say is to recommending? Yep. So so like I said, I was the new kid on the block coming in. So I was the guy that would ask all the crazy questions because no one else, you know we don't our organization only knew what we knew. And so the biggest the re the biggest recommendation that I have is the reason for the audit is we get stuck in doing what we only know. We pigeonhole ourselves, and we don't find out things that are available in the database. I I cannot begin to tell you the number of I didn't know that moments. That now that I know them, and I use the word, and it's probably not the correct word for Tim, but I want to turn those features on. And, and so my recommendation is do the audit, allow donor direct to come alongside you, offer you ideas, which will also stimulate other questions. And then, and here's just a simple one for us, and then I'll be quiet, Tim, because I know you got it. But a simple one for us was we weren't doing email receipts. And we learned how to do those in the audit, and now they're just normal processes for us. So I am That's huge. Yeah. That that's a huge moment for us, and, and I that's where I, you know, am thrilled. So Yeah. Yep. If you haven't done an audit if you haven't done an audit, do one. I think in five years, we'll go back and do another audit because there's gonna be some things that we're not doing well that we need to do better. Yeah. So Fantastic. Alright. Hey. Thanks, Mark. Appreciate it. Thank you. Yep. Alright. Well, we love to hear that and, partner together, with Mark and, hopefully, some of you on, doing audits together. Well, we we're gonna head into QA here. We've got a little time, and so that's great. Hope, we have some questions on deck. But before we get there, we'd love to know how we did here on this virtual workshop. As I said, it's the first of several that we're gonna schedule out through the year leading up to donor connect conference. So if you would, you, hopefully have those questions up. And where are those gonna be? Are the are you guys seeing them? I'm not. Hopefully, you can see him and you're responding to them. Oh, I see my whole thing. So I hope the are you all maybe, Yeah. Now I'm reading some of the chat. Thanks, Brandy. Agree with the benefits in the audit. Can someone tell me, are you all able to, do the survey here? Okay. Great. Thanks. And we'll leave that up, you know, so don't don't feel like, you have to be completely done before we move into q and a. But, yeah, we we've still got ten minutes here, so we're in really good shape, for some q and a. And, Mark, I know you kinda went backstage, and you can stay there for now. But, you know, q and a may include you. So, you know, if someone wants to ask you follow-up, that'd be great too or or anything on that. So great. Yeah. So we're on the survey here. How would you rate today's workshop overall? How valuable was the content? You got a free form there. Are there other topics you'd like us to consider? Future workshops, that's fantastic. And then would you like a member of our ministry success team to contact you about scheduling an audit for your organization? K. Alright. We'll we'll leave that up a little bit. We won't close the survey, but, why don't we move into a time of q and a? I know Taylor's been answering a lot of the questions, but let's see. I'll I'll monitor q and a here. So if you've got something, and you want us to address it here, let's do it. And, Taylor, you can let me know in chat, you know, or internal chat if there's a question that came up that you haven't answered yet. Just send it to me. Yeah. Okay. Question. What version of SE are the screenshots in the overlooked features document? Way to stump me on the first question. I must say it came from, 16 o version 16 o. But I will say, I don't think any of those, I think it's 14, aren't there in version 15. 14 even, most of them should be there. So another question. Do we need to be highly technical to conduct this audit, or can different teams contribute? Oh my goodness. One of our favorite things is hanging out with users who would admit I'm not the most technologically savvy. We'd love to help, those kinds of users, and and that's where just little things that can be pointed out can make a huge difference for you. So my goodness. No. You don't have to be, you know, super technological to benefit from it. So here's another one. Who, within our ministry should be involved in this audit process? I'd mentioned in the, you know, what what goes into a the components of an audit, having a large group meeting, with key stakeholders, you know, kinda leadership of the ministry and then and then power users. But then the bulk of the audit is to actually connect with everyone who uses SE. So who should be involved? To me, it is, it would be less than fully effective if we didn't have everyone who touches SE in your ministry involved in the audit process. Yeah. I saw that, you know, question came in again. How long does a typical SE system audit take to complete? We we have a range of time depending really on the size of your ministry. Smaller if you're, you know, on the really small side of of our spectrum or our range, you can probably do an on-site audit in a day. Most of our clients, we we have two days of audit. We've scheduled an audit with a very large client. It's gonna be three days. The question was as well, on-site or, you know, virtual. Our huge preference is on-site. And and, yeah, we've got five minutes left where we don't have really much to go. I'm wondering. So, Mark, you had a virtual workshop. You know, do you feel like you lost anything by virtual versus on-site? No. Actually, for us, because we're we're deployed all over the country, we were able to do what we needed to do in smaller blocks. It took longer, smaller blocks, but we also came out of it with this list of training. And so that was the beneficial thing. And, no. I I didn't lose anything. We didn't lose anything in the process. It actually in some ways for us, it was it was the only way we can do it, but it was really beneficial. Yeah. So thanks, Mark. Yeah. We, you know, we prefer on-site because we love to literally walk around and see people in their environment work environment and just hang out and observe. It's really beneficial for us. But as Mark can attest, you can do it virtually, and in some ways, it it may work better for your ministry. So either one will work. So one final question, and we're gonna be done. But, one of the questions that came is what is the next step after the audit process? So I mentioned, a couple of things, we do after an audit. One is we will send written documentation of all of the issues and and things that came up, all the items we observed, and our recommendations, for each one of those, in whatever situation it was. And once we send that, give a little time to digest it, then we have what we call a solutioning meeting. I've had with some of the larger clients, it can be several solution meetings, where we talk through those recommendations and then consider partnering together. You know, which one of these, which ones of these items do you feel your ministry can take care of yourself? It can be real easy, you know, setup changes, configuration changes. Hey. You need to do a new form type for this in production, or you need to set up an advanced fine view. And there are often, you know, power users in your ministry that can do that. But then we we just wanna partner and say, okay. How would you like us to engage with you, particularly in client services to be able to help you with these other recommendations. And sometimes, maybe, the best thing would be a a professional services agreement where, we could allocate some hours, for us to come alongside you and help you with some of these recommendations. And in fact, that's what's happening with Mark and ICCM right now. And so a lot of what's what we're doing to help them has come out of that audit process. So that's kind of the the, post audit next steps that come out. Well, great. Hey. Good q and a as well. We're we're really at time. And so, I wanna just end with, several key takeaways connected to an on-site audit. So as you can say let's see here. Take advantage of system wide audits to leverage growth opportunities. You know, our passion, alongside yours is to see you all grow in your ministry impact and in your mission, for the kingdom and in in the world. And an audit is a great first step to that. You know, take advantage of system wide audits to streamline your processes, to reduce redundancy and boost organization efficiency. And then finally, take advantage of system wide audits to make informed business decisions. Awesome. Well, we let you know, in the information about the workshop and in registering that we would make available as a takeaway for the workshop, your very own system optimization checklist. So please know we will be sending that to you. You can do some self auditing, with that. And so we hope it'll be a valuable resource for you. Well, thank you. We appreciate you attending. You can see here there's an email address if you wanna reach out to consult, for, you know, the possibility of an audit or to schedule an audit. Info at donor direct dot com. Thanks for attending. Hope to see you soon and particularly at the next virtual workshop. Take care.