No Solo Admining: Building Community When You’re a Team of One
A Resource Guide for Social Profit Leaders
If you’re the one person at your organization handling data and technology, you already know something most org charts don’t account for: there’s no one else in the building who does what you do.
Small and mid-sized social profit organizations rarely start with a data and technology team. They start with one person – often someone who didn’t set out to be “the data person,” but ended up there because someone had to. That person carries the systems, the reporting, the tools, the questions no one else knows how to answer. And for a long time, that’s just how it is. Building out a dedicated role for managing the organization’s data & technology (let alone a full team for this) takes a commitment in both budget and capacity. And even when the need for such a role is recognized and created, where that role should sit in the organizational chart can be unclear, and the manager for that role might not have the same kind of technical skills and knowledge as the person in that role. It is a challenge, for sure.
It isn’t a failure of the organization. For most small and mid-sized social profits it is the normal starting point for this kind of work. But it comes with a real risk: isolation. When you’re the only one doing what you do, there’s no one down the hall (or on the zoom) to sanity-check a decision, trade notes with, or learn from when something new comes up. The job can start to feel like it’s yours to carry alone, which can also start to reinforce the “wizard myth” – the myth that the tech-person at the org has all the knowledge about everything technical in the world and waves a magic wand to make things work.
The Challenge of Solo Admining
I was lucky with my in-house social profit jobs – at Teach For America I was part of a massive team of data & technology centered roles and at New Leaders I was on a smaller team but everyone on it was focused on data & technology for their part of the work. We built partnerships and friendships with each other within the organization that made the work more productive, more effective, and more fun.
When I started working independently with social profit organizations, I got my first real taste of that isolation. Not only was I the “solopreneur” in my own business, I was stepping in as the solo admin or solo data & tech person for small social profit organizations, or supporting the solo person at the organization. There were nights when I would stay up far into the early morning hours with paralysis, not knowing if I should take the next steps in my decisions because I wasn’t sure if they were the right ones.
There were also times when I found myself spending a huge number of extra hours having to re-do my work because after implementing a decision I would come to learn that there were better ways or other factors coming into play that I hadn’t considered and I needed to back-track and start over. The thing is, I could have avoided all this extra time and effort if I had had my people. My team, my crew, my trusted circle of colleagues to call on early in the process to share my work with and have them share their work back. Thank goodness for the ever-present generosity of the people sharing on the StackOverflows and Substacks and other forums of the internet. Reading through what was already there helped me a tremendous amount in finding possible solutions to tricky questions. It was out of gratitude for these resources that I started sharing my own insights and work approaches on the internet. But this is only a place to start, not the full scope of the community we need to do this work well.
Learning and sharing cultures at organizations are the key to building communities of practice around the work we do. Staff members need the support of their managers and organizational policies to seek out learning and sharing opportunities within their own organization and with other people and organizations.
Pillars of Data & Technology Culture
At Make Tech Work For You, our Fractional Tech Team works within a framework of 10 Pillars of Data & Technology Culture. Most of the pillars keep the work inside the organization – building your data & technology roadmap, using your logic model to guide what you collect and store, building the data dictionary and systems map specific to your org. But just as we can’t do our best data & tech work solo, mission-driven work overall doesn’t happen in isolation. We’re part of an ecosystem of communities and issues that require working together to move the whole picture forward, not just our own corner of it.
Two of our pillars are built specifically around the give-and-take nature of learning and sharing together in community:
- Pillar 9: Learning & Training – The practice of building an ongoing learning habit around data and technology – inside your organization and beyond it – so your skills keep pace with a fast-moving field instead of going stale the moment onboarding ends.
- Pillar 10: Sharing Culture & Best Practices – The practice of giving that learning back – internally, so your organization can see and build on what you’ve figured out, and externally, so the wider community benefits from it too.
In the spirit of sharing, here are some examples of how we guide and coach organizations to embody these principles.
Ways to Build a Learning Practice
Inside your organization
- Job shadowing: Have your data/tech team member(s) participate in programmatic planning and delivery, and have program team members join in on calls with vendors or tech support services.
- Co-building FAQs: Have program team members contribute questions to the data & tech FAQs, and vice versa.
- Train-the-trainer: Train team members to onboard new staff to the parts of the data & tech systems and culture relevant to their specific role.
Outside your organization
- User groups: Join user groups for tools your organization relies on.
- Professional communities: Find professional groups or other established communities, in person and/or online – NTEN, TechImpact, MeetTheMoment, TAG.
- Peer outreach: Ask for other people’s time to help you with your data/tech topic – most people will say yes.
Ways to Build a Sharing Practice
Inside your organization
- Team shout-outs: Give a short call-out in a team meeting about something built or solved in data & tech.
- Internal updates: Start a lightweight internal newsletter or update thread where you can share data & tech tips and tricks.
Outside your organization
- Blogging: Write up a blog post about a problem you solved.
- Community Q&A: Answer a question in the same community where you once asked one.
- Speaking & panels: Present at a conference or panel solo or with a peer.
This Isn’t Just About Tech
Swap out “data and technology” for fundraising, or programs, or communications, and nothing above stops being true. Any small or mid-sized organization is full of teams of one – the sole grant writer, the one-person comms shop, the program lead wearing every hat.
The fix is the same wherever it shows up: build your team out of a community that already exists – a Slack channel, a user group, a peer at another org who does what you do – and make sharing what you’ve learned a normal part of the job, not an extra one.
Isolation isn’t a data problem – it shows up wherever a role exists before the budget for a team around it does. We can’t wait for head count to arrive before we stop working alone.
No solo admining. No solo anything, really.
Let’s Connect & Build Community!
Are you a “team of one” navigating data and tech challenges? You don’t have to go it alone.
📩 Email: emily@maketechworkforyou.com
🌐 Website: maketechworkforyou.com
Connect with Emily Hicks-Rotella on LinkedIn for more insights on data & tech culture.
Emily Hicks-Rotella has over a decade of experience working with organizations of all shapes and sizes to support their data and technology culture and strategy. As part of this work, Emily supports staff members to learn, use, and love their data and technology, adds capacity to teams and organizations that need additional technical knowledge and skill, and uses a uniquely human and non-technical approach to develop and support a culture that sets up staff and organizations for success using data and technology for their missions and impact. Emily lives in New York with their wife and three young children, and when they aren’t being a total data and tech nerd, they are either singing outside, snowboarding, skateboarding, reading, or getting more tattoos.