Why Malcolm Colman-Shearer Believes Better Systems Lead to Bigger Impact

Tasha: Good afternoon. Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your nonprofit origin story?

Malcolm: Sure. Thanks for inviting me, Tasha. I, started my career as a bit of an accident. I, ended up in the operations division of a bank, which, was not exactly my intention, but I ended up there. And,, I enjoyed learning how to optimize systems and processes and how to manage all of that, but I learned a lot of things that I didn’t enjoy.

I started off with, not really a framework. A value-based way of working. But over the five years that I worked in that company, I came to realize that values were really important to me and the lip service that the corporation paid to community and to , building like their work together and, all of that way of thinking that I appreciate now.

It wasn’t, I. [00:01:00] And the technology and those things could not be questioned. They were the gods of the corporate world and I really didn’t enjoy that. It took me five years to realize that those were things that I didn’t enjoy. And at that point it was the global financial crisis. Ironically, I was trying to make myself redundant in the middle of a financial crisis where all kinds of people in the bank were not wanting to get made redundant.

And even more ironically, I couldn’t get made redundant. They wanted my role. So, , I quit. And I went on a very slow moving journey, looking for communities and networks and different things I could be a part of, where my values were more aligned. Yes. And so that, that ended up at an impact network called Enspiral and through that network I started [00:02:00] helping various.

Ventures with their financial admin and systems. And that eventually evolved into founding, optimize and doing system and process work and advisory work, helping , mission-driven organizations to build better systems and processes so that they could be doing the work, the impact work they wanted to do, not all of that other stuff that could be done so much more effectively.

Tasha: That’s awesome. And you stand out because. Of the different people who’ve joined the Hive who I’ve met over time. And I spent some time at, Salesforce for a nonprofits partner. So I have been in on the more technical hangout with the techie folks. Even if I wasn’t, there is few and far between people who decide to choose.

Data and technical as their, part of their role when they join the nonprofit high. And we have people from all different walks all over the place, but I think it’s. Often a space that nonprofit professionals feel really uncomfortable, and [00:03:00] comfortable in partly due to lack of training, I think.

But, maybe you have some other insights on that, because my next question is gonna be, what do you think are some of the biggest challenges nonprofits are facing that you keep seeing as recurring themes?

Malcolm: It’s a great question. I agree that people don’t join the social sector to get involved with technology, right?

Yeah. There are tools that they have to use and often they fall back on spreadsheets and documents and the most basic stuff that they know they can control because anything else, as soon as you add in lots of other humans, things get really complicated. Quickly, especially as you scale. So those things are challenges and I think they’re challenges because people just don’t have the time there.

There is, not a lot of focus on investing in overhead and, investing in infrastructure at the moment. And so people are trying to do the best they can with what they’ve got. [00:04:00] And there’s just, yeah, there’s not enough time to go experimenting with all the latest technology. I’m spending a lot of time on it, and I’m very fortunate to be able to do that.

So I’m hoping that I can build some resources that can help people to learn a lot quicker , than I am learning at the moment. So those, yeah, that’s some of the things. I think also, there’s a lot of, fear and risk aversion at the moment. People are stuck or. Are stuck with a lot of legacy software if they’ve been around for a while, and that to try and change all of that stuff and those obviously, those provider have no incentive to help you.

And then you have boards who, are worried about the future. And so investing in infrastructure doesn’t seem like the thing to do right now or since COVID I’ve heard Yeah. All businesses, not just nonprofit, but globally [00:05:00] businesses, are not keen on investing in infrastructure.

Tasha: Yeah, it’s, there’s so many, when people talk about, nonprofits being tech adverse.

And you’ll hear that or read about it. I think most of us who either have worked very directly with nonprofits or in-house or that it’s not that simple, right? Like that there’s, it’s almost coming at it from like, there’s not just one reason why the nonprofit is like that nonprofit professional is tech adverse, or the nonprofit itself.

There’s probably five or six good re good reasons all on their own as to why, hey, we’re too busy to do some deep learning right now. We have no staff capacity to even put someone on X project because when I started to hang out and was learning so much from Tim Lockey who had this cool idea between the intersection of humans and tech and he used the term digital voluntold and I was like, oh my goodness, I’ve been that person everywhere.

I’ve worked, right? I’m the digital voluntold. And it spoke so deeply to me. And I think in nonprofit [00:06:00] it’s often not a, Hey, we’re gonna adopt a new tech. Here’s an extra 10 hours per week out. We’re gonna remove 10 hours of work for you to figure this out. It’s like, no, we’re gonna adopt this and put in 10 more hours of work.

And most nonprofit professionals are going, this is crazy. There’s no way. Right? And so I see a lot of. Technology adoptions fail. And the writing was already almost on the wall beforehand that this wasn’t gonna go well. And it’s too bad ’cause there’s so many cool new things out there that could really change so much for a nonprofit.

Malcolm: Totally. There are a lot of cool things, but there isn’t currently the kind of, I, I don’t know if it’s a culture in the organization or. I wonder whether a root cause here is that donors, and we’re all donors don’t actually like giving to overhead. We have this kind of core need to feel like we are impacting the world.

And so I can see that I’m [00:07:00] giving my money directly to some project that’s not inside that nonprofit, but actually. Their overhead needs help them with their operations, they could have so much more impact. Absolutely. Absolutely. And then maybe they could think about giving staff some capacity to train on these tools and, creates a positive chain reaction instead of a negative one.

Tasha: Absolutely. We’re gonna keep dreaming of it. And this kind of leads into my next question is what’s your favorite part about working in this sector and working with nonprofits?

Malcolm: I guess the headline is just. Seeing clients excited to do their work because that painful thing that they were having to deal with when they were copying , one thing to two other places, like trying to get their report and there’s informational over the place and now it’s all in one place and they’re not having to do a lot of manual operations.

Seeing that excitement. That’s probably the headline for [00:08:00] me. The things that come under that, that are particularly exciting for me. How do I make that happen?

Tasha: Yeah.

Malcolm: Is new tools that I’m getting access to all the time, which I’m geeking out over with. Obviously AI assistance, so Claude or chat gpt or whatever, and spending quite a lot of time creating better prompts so that they gimme better answers.

So that’s start. That’s everyone.

But then there’s lots of other stuff coming along like, AI coding. So I’ve built a few kind of work hobby apps that are solving little problems that previously might have cost 50 or a hundred K to build a solution. And now I can, with a few prompts, maybe an hour or two’s work, I can build a.

tool Gonna be amazing in another year’s time. At the moment, they’re a little bit painful to play with. But I’m trying to figure out how to use those because I think they’re going to save people a lot of [00:09:00] time. And then eventually, plugging our AI assistance into knowledge, all of the knowledge and our organization so we can just get it in one place so that AI is actually smart, is trained on our own information.

There’s good governance around it, so we’re not giving away anything. I think that’s fantastic.

Tasha: Yeah, because so many organizations have these enormous websites, particularly if they’re like on the like slightly legacy nonprofit where they’ve been around for quite a while. Probably the website needs an overhaul, but there is this cool intersection where.

They have so much information that’s scrolled away in little corners and we’re all not patient enough to go searching for it. , I feel like agents, there’s so much potential there, but I don’t even think most nonprofit professionals, if we said the word AI agents, they know the word ai, but they’d be like, what is an, that’s not even an in the lexicon, right?

Of what we understand is out there. So super exciting tech, but. [00:10:00] Big stuff to try to figure out.

Malcolm: Yeah, and it’s only, the first wave really. , I’ve had a bit of a play around and find it a bit frustrating and I go into the communities and, oh, there’s all kinds of bugs. So maybe it’s not time yet, but

Tasha: yeah.

Malcolm: In the next year, I think they’re going to do some amazing stuff.

Tasha: That’s very cool. Peer support. I always ask everybody about peer support. So as you started to come in to this more community based, nonprofit based work and those groups you were supporting, how did peer, relationships factor into your success as you’ve grown?

Malcolm: Well, that, network that I joined back in. 2012 was Basically the forming of me into this new, socially minded person who, wanted to change the world, wanted to use technology to do it, and wanted to reinvent the way that we work. And that wouldn’t have happened without a network of people to be having conversations with [00:11:00] going on retreats.

Worth sharing knowledge. Just learning about what best practice was, all of those things made a huge difference in, in me, totally changing the way that I saw the world , finding alternatives to how things have been before.

Tasha: Love it. I think it’s that influence. Finding those people, and I hesitate to use the word like-minded because in fact it’s been some of the more slightly spicy adversarial people who I admire deeply, but don’t necessarily agree with that are my peers that I feel I’ve grown with the most.

I think sometimes people are like, oh, you’ve joined a community of like-minded people. And it’s no, I don’t, I think we care about the same things. We have, like the same value sets, but how we came to that spot and that location and how we continue to move through, it doesn’t have to be the same.

Malcolm: Totally. I have met a lot of very different minded people, but [00:12:00] we’ve had similar values that’s.

The difference of our minds, we’ve actually been able to resolve conflicts and, develop better solutions because we’ve been able to rub up against people that operate in different ways to us that I wouldn’t have done in the old corporate world. That’s fantastic.

Tasha: And you’ve been a Hive member now for quite some time.

You have the honor of being the first. Person from New Zealand to join. And I remember specifically because it was one of those things where I think we’d had one or two Australians join and I was like, but then they never actually took a chat like they joined. But the time zones are bananas , they don’t make any sense and we have to work on that.

But I remember you joined and then you started to participate and I knew. The time zone must be crazy for you whenever you join. Couldn’t be that friendly, you’ve been very active, many chats. It’s always easy to put you into a [00:13:00] conversation because for our community, they’re so curious as to what’s happening on the other side of the world and nonprofit even a little bit, they did like just grasp onto that opportunity.

What have you gotten out of being a member of the Hive community?

Malcolm: Sure. I think the biggest thing is just the ability to have a call every week and to not have to worry about how that’s gonna happen. You get paired up, what you have to do is choose a time, and for me, eight 30 in the morning on a Friday is perfect.

So I’ve enjoyed that. In the summer, it’s a bit later and it doesn’t work as well, but right now it’s winter for me. It’s a great time. And so I had met. People from different career stages, different geographies. Different types of organizations, different roles in organizations. So it’s that very variation of different types of people and different types of minds.

That has been great for, just learning [00:14:00] about what’s happening in different parts of the world and, what best practices, what people were learning, and how we can share resources. All encourage each other together. And then of course that branches out. It’s not just in the call, it’s on LinkedIn where lots of us hang out and so you see people that you’ve had calls with and, hey, now I’m interacting with that person.

I’ve had a call with them. And so the LinkedIn feels more real because of what the nonprofit hi has given us every Friday.

Tasha: Yeah. And you definitely sent me one of my favorite random photos to receive on a day because it was you and another member who I knew I’d talked to her and her. She says she was in the US but then she’s like, oh no, I’m actually in New Zealand.

Do you have anybody else? And then you guys ended up in the same time slot the next time. And I was like, oh, I’m just gonna see. We’ll try it out. And then you sent a picture of the two of you actually meeting up for a beer. And we’re still in those early stages of. The community [00:15:00] deciding to find in real life opportunities.

But what’s so cool is that people tend to hit it off because there’s like that, again, that core value of both being people in social impact. You obviously care about things. You can find things to talk about is pretty cool.

Malcolm: Yeah, definitely. I’m not even sure which one you’re talking about because there was two.

There was two in about, oh, you’ve already got two. That’s

Tasha: crazy. I was thinking of Rebecca, but I guess there’s also now Rochelle as well, I think. Yes. That’s

Malcolm: right.

Tasha: Yeah. So in

Malcolm: both cases, oh no, in Rebecca Case, we had a call online. It’s like, oh, you’re in the same as me. Let’s. And then four weeks later, I had another one in person because here I am working at home all the time, which is great for my kids and great for work flexibility, but it means I don’t have in person stuff that often, so, yeah.

Yeah, that was cool.

Tasha: That’s awesome. For sure., I always like to finish up best ways for people to get in touch with you and just give us a quick like blurb of what optime [00:16:00] services cover, because I know they’re very specialized for this sector in particular.

Malcolm: You can find me on LinkedIn.

That’s, where I’m most active. Otherwise the website,

what we work on, really it’s. It’s the flow of information around your organization. So whether it’s, fundraising or general knowledge or financial operations or anything where an operations manager is helping out, we can help with that too. So we like to call it digital operations or sometimes, I call it digital plumbing.

So digital plumbing, you have your. You have your tap with, forcet or whatever you call it there, and water’s flowing out of it, and you need that water in the washing machine. But so many nonprofits don’t have the metaphorical pipe that goes from that tap to that machine. Imagine that’s the kind of work that we do to help that water flow around the.

House. I think people

Tasha: love a good metaphor in this sector. They love a story. There’s [00:17:00] gotta, if there’s a story behind it, they love it. I used to say I was a tech translation because, I really, there wasn’t as much of a techie, but I was having to try to take this very, tech terms and make it so that other people like me could figure out what the heck anybody was talking about and, have them big.

Arguments with my implementation team to go, it’s fine and dandy for you to say these words. It means nothing to the rest of us, right? Like we gotta bring it into nonprofit speech and how do we do that? How do we, , give them explanations for it that makes sense to them because it’s just so critical.

But thank you so much for doing this with me Malcolm. Really appreciate you making the time. And thanks so much for being a member. Just love being able to go. There’s a great match this week because you’re always so easy to pair people with.

Malcolm: Awesome. Thank you for having me. I’ve loved having a chat and to see more of you folks online in the Nonprofit Hive chat.