Nonprofits are faced with more challenges to accomplish their missions and the growing pressure to do more, raise more and be more for the causes that improve our world.
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So welcome to the good community. We're nonprofit professionals, philanthropist, world changers and rabid fans who are striving to bring a little more goodness into the world.
So let's get started. Hey, hey, Becky, you want to know?
Well, I'm very happy because we're going to St. Louis, and you know how much I love St. Louis. But before I introduce today's guests, I gotta just geek out with everybody about how we found out about this story. When you get a founder that pitches to you and says, one of my employees is so incredible and groundbreaking, the work that she's done to automate and save our time here in our incredible organization is worthy of your podcast. We jumped at that. So little shout out to Sarah Roy, who's the president and founder of soda because we're talking to Nicole Nivea. Today she is the program director at sodo, which stands for Student organ donation advocates. And not only are we going to be talking about transplant, which we are fierce advocates for organ donation, but we're also going to talk about how do you flex automations to scale growth and create the seamless donor experiences. But I want to give you a little bit of background on Nicole's story because it's just so cool. And Nicole will give you the mic so you can tell yourself, but she has really been devoted to educating others about organ donation since she was first introduced to soda, which was almost a decade ago, she led the original soda chapter at Wash U Washington University in St. Louis. And then she joined the team in 2020. As a volunteer director of development, she was doing the fundraising and then she got promoted to become sodas first full time employee and as program director, she's just ensuring that student advocates have the resources they need to succeed. She manages this national team, and she's built these automations. And so I gotta give you a little quote that Sarah gave us that really was the catalyst of saying we gotta get Nicole on the podcast. And she said, Nicole manages sodas automations to support more than 50 chapters and 20 community partners. The work she's done automating tasks saves our team, at least a part time employee, probably more realistically a full time employee, these automations create seamless donor and student experiences. And we all love them. Nicole, get into our house, teach us automations and just teach us all the things we're so glad you're here.
Thank you, Becky and Jon, I'm glad to be here too. I'm excited for this conversation.
Well, I really appreciate just you started in a volunteer role. It grew into something bigger. Clearly you have a heart and a passion for this work. But we want to go back a little bit we want to like know about little Nicole. We want to know about what kind of a kid you were growing up what what sort of formative experiences led you to want to pursue this work? Yeah, so
little Nicole did not know anything about organ donation. She did not think about it. Like most people don't think about organ donation. I feel like what most people think about or when they think about organ donation is on TV when you see the horrible representations of organ donation, or we unfortunately experience the need for organ donation for yourself or for your family. But I was introduced to organ donation for the first time when I was 18. And I was a student at Wash U, I saw that there was going to be a tour of our local organ procurement organization surgical suite hosted by that first ever set of chapter. And I thought I want to go to medical school at the time. So the idea of tour touring this surgical suite was so interesting to me. So I signed up. I was excited for it. And I met Sara at that first ever event that I went to. And when I met Sarah, she told me about her ProCredit personal connection to organ donation. Her sister was an organ donor when her sister was 14, and Sarah was 12. And her passing was very, very sudden. But Sarah played a very important role in her sister becoming an organ donor, even though Sarah was only 12. The parents Sarah's in Laura's parents were approached about organ donation, and they believe in organ donation, but it was a very difficult conversation to have. And they were talking about their 14 year old daughter who was only healthy a few days earlier. And then a social worker approach Sarah who, like I said, was 12 years old at the time and she said, I want more to be an organ donor so that nobody would experience a loss like our family did. And I was so impressed with that story. I didn't realize that organ donation could be so meaningful for a donor family, and how great the need was for organ donation in this country. But after learning all about that, at that first event that I went to, I became an organ donation advocate and I helped lead that sort of chapter at Wash You that was so formative to me because it really prepared me for a career in nonprofits. I started my career at a small nonprofit here in St. Louis. And I remember sitting my first day as a full time employee thinking like, Oh, my goodness, this goes exactly like soda. So I was really well prepared for a nonprofit career. I started off as an admin assistant at that organization. And then I was promoted to developing development and marketing coordinator. They really invested in me, and they put me through a five day course all about fundraising. And I was eager to apply that knowledge somewhere. But it was hard because I was a coordinator at that organization and development manager and Executive Director. We're the ones making the big moves, the strategy, all that type of stuff. So soda was top of mind for me, because I had such a wonderful experience with soda as a college student. And I knew Sarah was growing soda as a national nonprofit at the time. She got her 501 C three status in January of 2020. And I reached out in June of 2020. So she hadn't done much fundraising. But I said, Hey, I've learned so much about fundraising, let's fundraise together, her and I built the fundraising program from the bottom up, and we fundraise enough money to bring on our first first full time employee, which was me. So that's our story and my story.
rabid fans, y'all.
Yeah, it's the connection. It's the belief. It's like, what can you do with somebody that just wants to plug in using the gifts that they have? Nicole, you are a wonder, my friend. And I love the story of love your founder, even though we haven't gotten to meet her, but like, what a beautiful story of why we do what we do. And I think Becky mentioned we talked about transplant a lot in our health care days, and we're really close to the transplant team. And it always struck me that more than really any other area in the hospital like it's philanthropy at its core, like it's looking for this gift of a lifetime, truly, in what organ donation can be to a family. And so we feel passionate about it. But I want to give you space just to tell us a little bit about what is so to do today, like what is your mission and work? We want that context before we start talking about all the automation pieces? Yeah, of course.
So on our website, you'll see that our mission is to inspire and support student led education and registration initiatives on high school, college and graduate school campuses. And what that means in practice is that we have 60 chapters across the country on high school, college and graduate school campuses that advocate for organ donation every single day. And soda makes it advocacy easy for them by providing them with mentorship, how to guides, supplies, and funding all for free so that students can save lives.
I mean, how succinct there you just did your elevator speech in like less than a minute, why can I never do it in less than a minute, Jon, that is so good. This is just giving me Movember vibes. Do you remember we talked to Caitlyn Whitaker, and she was talking about how Movember I mean, really, the start of that movement was about going into college campuses and giving them these toolkits, giving them the practicality that you can just take something, personalize it and use it on your own, I just think you're on to something really, really special here. I love that your passion is threaded through it. But you got 60 chapters, and you're like two people. So this just cannot happen without automations at all. And we love talking about working smarter, not harder, and automations are the future for us and our ability to scale tech into personalized tech. And so I want you to talk a little bit about just this case study and how to use and flex automations to scale impact. We referenced that Sarah had said that you really have saved the team, from a part time to maybe a full time employee. And we know listeners are fully leading in after hearing that. So walk us through the case study. Where did it start? And where are you today?
Sarah has always been so smart and so strategic about our growth that automations happened way before I joined the team as a volunteer. I believe that Sarah managed an intern of some sort, who set up all of our automations for us initially, when I joined the team as a full time employee, I hired a freelancer who had a background in software development, to help us with our automations and bulk them up a little bit. But he left our team, I say a year ago now. So I've been the one to manage all of our automations going forward.
Break it down for us. I mean, I know there's a lot of different types of automations. But like tell us how you're functionally using this as it to onboard people to activate people maybe all of the above like just kind of break it down for us.
All of the Above we have automations ready for all sorts of things when a new team member or volunteer joins our team when a new board member joins our team when we get a new chapter when a student who's interested come through our doors when we get a donation automations of all types over at soda.
Let's take one like maybe a donor journey or you have a new donor that comes through. Tell us what the tech is what tool are you using and walk us through Are some of the steps so people can see sort of what the practical application is.
Yeah, of course. So the platform that we use to manage all of our automations is Zapier. And Zapier is really great because it allows your software to talk to each other. So if you're using a different payment processor for your donations, it can talk to your CRM, and our CRM is HubSpot. And that doesn't accept payments, at least not donations like the way we like it. So we use donor box, we set our donations. So I get a notification from donor box. With all the donor information, I fill out a Google form with all of that donor information. And honestly, that could be done automatically, especially for a lot of other platforms. We just haven't invested in the money that it takes to unlock that portion of donor box just yet, but we I think we will very soon. So don't let that scare you. That could be automatic as well. But I felt that says all about this donor, the amount they gave their name, their address, all that type of stuff. And it fires off so many tasks automatically. The acknowledgement letter is created automatically for me. Donor thank you emails are created automatically for me. Reminders in our project management system are created for me. And this has been a godsend. Because before what I used to do is I would look at an old letter, I would copy and paste that old letter, change all the variables, copy paste all the emails, change all the variables. And the mindset is just so much different now that I have these automation setup because I used to dread having to copy and paste donor thank you letters. But now that I know that they're in a folder for me or my inbox for me, or maybe drafts folder, I mean, I'm ready to send them off as soon as we get a donation letter, which is great, because everybody says you should be thanking donors within 24 hours. And automations helps us do that.
Yeah, I've really vibing with just the conversation around Zapier, we also use that as a company just because your write a tool like that is going to allow all your tools to talk to each other. And it's going to save you so much time. So for let's say we have a nonprofit listener, like really diving into this conversation, talk to us about where they should start. Where do you start to build an automation? How do you audit and kind of give us the steps to get someone started at the beginning?
Yeah, so if you want to start small and simple, I look to see if your existing softwares have some automation capabilities within their internal processes. So I know HubSpot, which is our CRM, they have some automations that we use within their platform. And since I know how HubSpot already, it might be easier to set those up. I know our monday.com, which is our project management system also has some internal automation so you can start there. But Zapier is so user friendly. I would say maybe just watch a few tutorials and see if you can figure out yourself so that you can really dive deep and get your software's actually talking to each other.
I love that because Zapier is basically it has this wonderful like search tool that you can, you know, figure out what software it does connect to on both sides and just kind of just seeing what you have, what does your tech stack look like? And how can you link it up like it is just a lot of power is waiting to be unleashed if you've not looked into Zapier. So I love that recommendation. So I'm just curious how have these automations transferred your engagement with donors or maybe just your internal processes? Like I
said, it's totally transformed our donation and donor acknowledgement process. It's faster overall. But we just go into better mindsets. We don't we don't have to do as much manual work. But we're also able to automate things like interested students that come through our doors. And I know our program coordinator, she loves our automation. She says it makes her job so much easier. Because, again, we're in a better mindset. We know we don't have to do as much manual work every single time that we get a new chapter lead. tons of emails are in her drafts already ready for her to customize and then send off to our students. So it's quick, it's customizable, and it makes burnout happen less.
Yeah, I mean, we're talking about wellness, we're talking about balance, and you're already juggling so many things in your nonprofit position. I just don't want people to fear tech, because it really can be the thing that saves us one of our trends this year has been humanizing the Tech experience and automations is such a clear way to do that. If you're looking for more information on this, we had an incredible conversation with G Han Safari who's with sensor Maya. She walked through how airtable allows her to have automations and have connection points. And I'm just curious, anecdotally, Nicole, what has this allowed you all to do? What is this allowed you to personalize? What have you learned from this experience that has sped up engagement because I think that's something that people would be interested in. Yeah,
so the first thing that comes to mind is that like Sarah said, it has saved us at least a part time employee if not off full time employee because of all the automations that we've built. And this is allowing us to be really lean. So to have some really big goals for the future, we want to have 100 chapters by the end of 2025. But we don't want our budget to increase exponentially. And donors eyes light up, when we say, hey, we don't want to expand our team too much as we support all those new chapters. Instead, we're relying on technology, so donors love it. One of the things that is triggered once we get a new donation is that a email goes into my inbox or my drafts folder. And it is a prompt to send a customized boom video to our donors. And this is the best of both worlds because I have an automated for me, but I'm still able to customize it by creating a custom little video that thinks the donor by name. And donors love these little videos. And they love that they're customized, we get such great responses, and replies to emails with videos. So I think that's a great example of having something automated, while still being able to personalize it and feel very human.
I think that's so good, because, you know, we've talked a lot about the blowing up of AI and chat GPT this year, and all these kinds of tools that are really helpful, but at the same time start to like, remove the humanity, whenever we start to use them to, you know, the full extent sometimes and so I love that it's just cueing you up to do what you can do, which is bring the human, get on the video Connect for like one minute, it's only taking you one minute, it didn't take you 20 minutes to get it to that point, you know and descend, it so just makes so much sense.
What we one thing that we do, do they think our graduates or our student leaders who are about to graduate is we give away free graduation cords and blue and green because those are the colors of organ donation. And that is like so popular and it's totally hands off. Because we're able to, well, it's almost hands off, at least for the staff, we are able to enroll people in emails, tell our volunteer or volunteer sends the items out automatically. So our full time staff doesn't have really anything to do with it. Besides the setup. The emails are sent automatically the reminders to the volunteer, this applies volunteer or automatic. So it's really hands off for our team. And that helps us start more chapters, because it helps us like cultivate student leaders, whether you're going on to college or graduate school to start another Sunday chapter.
This is exactly what we've been talking about. This is equipping your change makers to be the rabid fans of your mission. This generation Gen Z, they want to proudly talk about their affiliation with you. And I don't just mean on social media. I mean, we talk about merch shops, people want to wear your save the whales shirt, they don't want to wear their Nike shirt. And here you've created a completely frictionless way for someone to be a walking billboard of what you're doing. And I'm sure it creates all of this, these questions like what is that? What's that about? And what an incredible invitation to that person to talk about why they're connected to your mission, spreading awareness at a time when things are so visible. Think about graduation, how many eyeballs are on someone when they walk across the stage. And the fact that you can automate that get them in the fold. It is like someone signaling with an with an arm in the air saying I am a fan of your mission. I want to be connected to you in the long term. So I think it's very cool that you have a student organization that is creating lifelong donors out of this mission. And it's something as simple as an automation can get that visibility to him. Great case study.
So I wonder if you would just round us out with some tips for those that want to you know, lean into automations at their organizations, what's some advice? What are some kind of quick hits that you would pass along to them?
I have two pieces of advice. My first tip is to just do it. Zapier is so user friendly, that I think you're gonna find it to be so much easier than you would think. I am a little bit younger. So I grew up with technology, but I have no by no means a tech whiz. Like I don't know coding. I just know how to get by day to day and I can do zap so I think you can too. And then if you're afraid to get started, I would recommend getting the freelancer who does this. To set things up for you and teach you how to use Zapier. I think the teaching you part is key. I think as a leader as an org as an organization, you should know how Zapier works and how to build zaps because you know how to do everything in your organization. So you'll be able to build really robust, robust automations or find out alternatives if the automation in your mind isn't working out the way you want. When we had a freelancer manage the zaps all on his own, he would get stuck sometimes because he is not a fundraiser. He is not a marketer. He is not a program manager. So he didn't know good alternatives. He wasn't super in tune with our day to day processes. He's so we were able to really build up our automations once I stepped in since I do have a great understanding of how our our organization operates.
You know what I love so much about Gen Z. They just like roll up their sleeves and freakin do it, they go figure it out. Can we point to our unicorn? Julie? Like Julie confer our producer literally had no clue how to produce a podcast she got on YouTube, she took classes. And now i Julie, you can fight me on this, please don't cut it out. She is one of the premier producers for the impact sector, especially in media. Thank you for just saying roll up your sleeves and go try it. And if you're looking for a guide to go through it, we have a great friend Rachel bear Bauer. She works with small shop strategy. She does this we're happy to recommend her. But I got to talk about Gen Z because I love Gen Z so much you guys care at a crazy level, you get it done in such a scrappy way. And here you are, you know, as a semi new grad new professional. What kind of advice would you have to new young professionals that are coming in to the impact and nonprofit sector perhaps are coming into leadership roles like you? What have you learned? What advice would you give them?
I have two tips. Again, my first tip is to really invest in internship opportunities and volunteer opportunities really, really show up to those because my internship in college led to my first time first full time role out of college, and then my volunteer position throughout college led to me being a true leader in the nonprofit space. So really, really invest in those opportunities, because you don't know where it's gonna lead you. My second tip is to get a mentor. And this is really scary. At least I was really scared to get a mentor when I was straight out of college because I'm like, Oh, I have to build a relationship with somebody and then have to ask them, that's great question of will you be my mentor. But if you find a professional development group in your area, chances are they have a mentorship program, and they'll assign you to a mentor, which is a lot less scary than having to find one out in the wild on your own. And that's what I did. So I would really recommend investing in internship and volunteer opportunities, and then finding a mentor.
On the call. You may not know this, but I was Becky's and just got into this entire work. And here we are 20 years later. And I think I think that's part of the story is like just showing up being leaning in coming with your full heart and all your toolset and having that curious mindset. Like it's just such a great posture to come into this space. So really love this conversation. I know you're drawn to just philanthropy itself. Just hearing your story. I wonder if you would take us back to a moment of philanthropy in your life that has just really resonated and stuck with you.
Yeah, I'm gonna throw an oddball out here because I know a lot of people respond with a financial donor story when you ask this question, but I want to talk about organ donor in the spirit of soda in organ donation. And just so many organ donation allies on this conversation right now. And this story is about Morgan who is actually a former chapter leader. In 2019, Morgan's mom was experiencing end stage liver failure, and the doctors told her she had less than a year to live with at a transplant, so their family did what any family would do and that is educated about themselves about organ donation and try to find a potential donor. Morgan learned a lot about organ donation throughout this process, and she decided to go through the stages of seeing if she could be a potential donor. She was walking around campus one day at Northeastern University, and she got the call that said she was a match for her mom. So she actually ended up being an organ donor for her mom donated part of her liver to her mom. Morgan told her team would huge transformation. This made it for her mom, obviously because she went back to her happy and loving self. And Morgan wanted to be an organ donation advocate so that everybody could be their happy and loving self. And part of that advocacy was starting a sort of chapter. So she founded SOTA at Northeastern University. And she graduated in 2022, which is why she's a former chapter leader, but she's about to start medical school so she can save more lives and I have never met a living donor as young as her which makes sense because living being a living donor is hard, especially if you're balancing college. So I keep her in mind a lot when we're filling. So this mission since we do serve students,
okay, I'm going to do something untraditional, but I got to tell the story too, because it connects all of this together. When Jon Julia and I worked at our health care organization, we were introduced to this incredible kid. I say kid because I think his journey started when he was 17 or 18. And his name was Heath, and he had a very typical Oregon transplant story, which is he just wasn't feeling well. Shortness of breath, thought he had asthma, went in and found he had an electrical pathway disease and was going to need an entire heart transplant at 18 years old. He went from being a top rower, and to being to where he could hardly even walk. And we fell in love with this family. And we fell in love with the story in this in this incredible kid. And the day that they found out about that a heart was available is one of the most exciting and sad days ever, because you know what the cost is of getting something like that. But I have to tell you, it ended up being a complete success. Heath is graduated out of college, we actually hired him to be our intern, this is the full circle moment. And he came in to our Health Care Foundation, and understood uniquely what we were doing to raise money and awareness for this. And so I just want to say to anyone out there, if you've ever thought about being an organ donor, I really want to like create some space to say that you have no idea when it could be you or your loved one who needs this life saving medicine. And I just think the work that you're doing is transcendent. I love the awareness to it. I love your passion behind it. And we sort of put all of our efforts into this combo, we distill it down to one good thing at the end of this conversation. And I wonder what would be your one good thing, Nicole that you'd leave with our audience?
Yeah, so my WONCA thing isn't revolutionary, especially for fundraisers. But my one good thing is to always write thank you notes. I apply this to my professional life, I write thank you notes to all of our donors, no matter what size of their gift. I write thank you notes to our staff, I write thank you notes to our board members, I write thank you notes to our volunteers. But I also apply it to my personal life. I think write thank you notes to my mom, to my grandparents all the time. And I think a good candidate, and thank you now really stand out. With today's technology. Even though we just talked about the powers of technology, it really stands out with texts and phone calls, emails. And I think that it will make a big difference if you really try to implement that in your professional and personal lives.
I love that the automation expert just told us to go write thank you notes. That is so true.
And good. Yeah. I mean, Nicole, you've won us over just rooting for you and what you've built and what you're building into is soda. So cool point is to help people can follow along with your mission and where to find you online. If they want to connect to
find me on LinkedIn, it just under my name, Nicole Navia. Or you can send me an email at Nicole. It's ni C O L E at Saudi national.org.
And if you're someone who's really been struck by this conversation, are you thinking about it, you can go sign up to be an organ donor at organ donor.gov. It's incredibly easy. This is a gift that you can give without ever letting one cent come out of your pocket. So please think about that. We dedicate this episode to the Morgans, to the heat's to the people who have given so much. Thank you for your incredible sacrifice. And Thank you Nicole and Sarah for bringing such an incredible story and insight to us.
Thank you so much for having me. And thank you for being amazing organ donation allies. I love it.
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