Transcription
Hey, welcome back everybody. It's another episode of the nonprofit show. Big topic with a big guest today, Robert Wolf. He's the CEO and founder of Zack. Hey, welcome.
>> Thank you so much.
>> Okay, everybody has a board meeting horror story. [laughter] And so I'm really interested, Robert, to hear your perspective and how we can reimagine this type of work that all nonprofits have to do. There are 1.8 million registered nonprofits in this nation of ours and they're all having meetings and most of them are not so great. So, we're going to dig into this with you. I'm really excited to learn from you. Um, we have amazing presenting sponsors that are with us day in and day out. We're coming up on our 1,500th episode of the nonprofit show. And most of these folks have been with us since the beginning. They include Bloomerang, American Nonprofit Academy, Staffing Boutique, Holdings, Nonprofit Banking, Third Sector Company, Your Part-time Controller, Crescent Cares, Fundraising Fundraisers Friday, and JMT Consulting. I'm Julia C. Patrick, CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy. Hey, I just want to give you a heads up. Tony Bell, one of our other Intrepid co-hosts, and I have written a book. It's called The Architecture of Fundraising. It's available on Amazon for 1999. Okay. Robert Wolf.
>> Let's do it.
>> Let's do it, my friend. First of all, um, welcome to the nonprofit show. As we are talking, there's been severe severe weather um in our country moving across um put a lot of burden on nonprofits serving in this type of weather and so thank you for joining us during this kind of crazy time.
>> No, I love the chaos. I'm ready. [laughter]
>> Okay, talk to us quickly about what Zack is.
>> Yeah, I I'll I'll give you a little background because we really did build Ze based on our own life experience. Ze is reimagining the entire board meeting process. At prior to Zeke, I first I started a company called Moosejaw. We sold Northace and Patagonia and brands like that and then a second company called Crowdrise which was in the giving space and is now a part of GoFundMe. And at both of our companies our process around the board meeting went as follows. We as a leadership team would spend 150 hours building our board presentation. I used to say that our board meeting ruined one month of every quarter for me. And then we would send it along to our board as a PDF or a PowerPoint. In neither case could they read the presentation on their phone nor could they engage with it in any way. But the very worst part was we would get into the live board meeting and everyone would be ready for this grandiose, strategic, forward-thinking meeting and instead we would get into the room to have me reread the board a deck that they had already read or presumably already read. So we knew we were bad at it. It wasn't until after our companies were acquired and we sort of got out there in the world that we realized this angst we were having was universal and we knew there had to be a better way and that was the catalyst that led us to launch Zach.
>> It's so interesting because I've got to believe that your story is being repeated over and over and over again and yet the frustration just continues to build. There haven't been a lot of strategies to navigate this. I mean, you can go all the way back to Robert's rules of order, trying to figure out, okay, is that going to help us, you know? And so, I really appreciate the the genesis of of where you got to this point. So,
>> thank you.
>> Why do board meetings feel so miserable? Um, even though we have adapted this, you would think technology um, we're working because of the pandemic more remotely.
>> Yeah.
>> Is that a good is that a bad? I mean, give us a sense of where we are right now.
>> Yeah, I I think they are bad for several reasons that we're attacking at Zach. One is the technology. Just if you think about it, no one in the world would wake up in the morning and read their news in a PowerPoint slide deck. Nor would any journalist write that way. It's crazy. Yet, we insist on using these old tools. PowerPoint was literally built in 1987. It is not compatible with mobile. Yet, we continue to use that as the means of communication for our most consequential meetings. So, that's just insane, right? You would never I I'll say it this way. I can't stand it when someone sends me a legal document with all those little tabs on it and I have to sign everywhere and throw it back in a FedEx. That that is just archaic. And DocuSign solved that, right? This might be a grandiose analogy, but Ze is to board meetings as DocuSign is to signing your your contracts and agreements. So part of it is the tool set which leads to better but dynamics between the leadership team and the board because if you can save the leadership team time, if you can get the leadership team to surface the information that the board will care about most, then you can have some banter prior to the meeting, get what I call the drudgery or homework out of the way. So once you get into the live board meeting, it is indeed forward thinking and strategic instead of a lecture.
>> So, are you talking about um the issue of consent agendas as well? I mean, looking at getting your board members to say, "Okay, we're going to we're going to agree or look at and and get through, you know, the the paperwork stuff that takes us away from what we really should be doing." Is that part and parcel of this?
>> Yeah, I'll give I'll give you a quick example. We we launched something in Ze that we call prevote, right, around voting and governance. So a VC, a very famous VC came to us and he said, "Listen, I may all I do is sit on boards. I'm on 15 boards. Every board meeting I get into, we spend the first 45 minutes dealing with the chaos of voting." He said, "If you can solve that for me, I will put you in front of every portfolio company I ever come in contact with." We said, "Okay, great. Let let us think through that." So now when you get a Zack, you as the board member can give a nonbinding uh you click a button to give a nonbinding preference of where I sit relative to the vote. So in terms of approving minutes, for example, right? If you have I'm on I'm on a board of a nonprofit. We actually have a board meeting tomorrow night. There are 17 board members. we're going to get into the room and 17 board members will have prevoted most likely saying yes, we approved the minutes from the last board meeting. Then you don't have to spend any time on it. The board secretary clicks a button, says go and you're done. So again, you can spend that valuable time talking about what is going to actually impact our mission instead of dealing with voting that can be solved asynchronously now. Right? You don't need to banter about that live when you can deal with it as part of the pre-read.
>> Great. I love that. I mean, that's just a huge timesaver. Um, let's talk about the issue of tech.
>> Yeah.
>> Coming forward, you know, it's no secret that a lot of boards are comprised of older Americans in in North America particularly. Um, an aging board system is a whole another kettle of fish. and problems. Um, how are we looking at the adoption of technology and the comfort of these issues and processes that can streamline board meetings with an aging demographic? Or is that even an issue?
>> Yeah, I I'll I'll I'll answer the question in in two parts. One, the number one question we get asked when we do a demo for an organiza for a nonprofit is will my board member be able to to to participate? And the answer is yes. Right? So again, going back to uh the mobile experience, my mom who is 78, she is as bad as my kids when we go to dinner about being on their being on her phone, right? And when you wake up in the morning, you're not reading the newspaper or reading a PowerPoint. You're really you're reading the news on your phone. And Zack reads exactly like Axios, Medium, the New York Times, ESPN. In fact, we took the science from these organizations whose job is to keep eyeballs on the page so they can sell advertising. We took that same science and applied it to the board meeting. So it is really, really easy. There is there was actually zero training for board board members. No friction. It is a familiar reading experience and the engagement is is pretty awesome also. So again, they can ask questions and comment prior to the meeting and then the flip of it is for the leadership team, right? So the way that Zack works is you are taking the information that you are using to run your business currently. So whether you're in finance and marketing, you're taking those existing workflows, using AI to integrate those into your ZEC, and then the AI runs through that information to surface the information that your board will care about most. So instead of your CMO spending weeks or hours upon hours building her presentation, she can let Zeke do that work so that she can focus on improving the mission.
>> Right. So with this technology, can you give me an idea of about how many meetings it might be for your board to get comfortable with this? Because think about it. I mean, you you mentioned it in the beginning. You know, if you're only having a quarterly meeting, you're going to have to retrain or re um reassert the process for everybody or not. Do you feel like it's going to move quickly?
>> Yeah, it's it's a great question. For board members, it's zero time, right? It's super easy. They get a Zack, they get a link, they open it up, and it is again a familiar reading experience. It is a transformation for the leadership team, right? They're going from PowerPoint or a slide deck to something new where they're entering their content in a text editor. It's super easy, but it is new. We I don't I don't want to be hyperbolic, but I would suggest that we are the most engaged, customer-friendly software company that anyone has ever dealt with. So to make that transition really easy for the leadership team, when you sign up for Zack, you send us your most recent board deck and we actually turn that into a Ze for you. So when you get started, you're not looking at a blank screen or a demo site. You're actually looking at your own content that you can then go in and update. So we make that transition super easy so that leadership teams don't have to worry about that switching cost.
>> It's interesting. So, I I'm I took a demo um two weeks ago, I guess, week and a half. Um, and it so it was really interesting because my my comment was that you were taking a a portal issue like what most the most recent advances in board management has kind of been almost like a a tech secretary like how do you, you know, record things and how do you track the votes and but there hasn't been that piece that Zeke has offered whereby you're presenting the information, right? And in most other board portals, which let's face it, it's still new. It's still a new concept.
>> Um, they haven't interfaced with that yet. They've just literally put forward that mechanism for tracking a meeting, if that makes sense.
>> Yes.
>> And so I found that very interesting and somewhat surprising because I didn't in my own mind I thought, oh, it's just going to be another board portal.
>> Right? No, we we we have an entirely different approach than the portals and and again based on our own experience as operators. So the portals and I'm not saying this in a disparaging way at all. This is this is how they market themselves. They are a secure repository for your existing slide deck, right? Or PDF. When we were thinking about the space and again I don't mean this in a negative way, our challenge wasn't where do we store this? It was how do we save time? How do we surface the information that the board will care about most? How do we have a meeting that is forward thinking, not rearward? We're looking. Well, the portals don't solve that. They don't even try. They're entirely agnostic to the content creation experience. We are not. Right? So we think that the problem goes significantly deeper than security or where do we store this? It's how do we actually make these meetings more valuable? How do we take the dread out of board meetings? And you talk about a lot of serious topics in a board meeting. So, I can't quite say we're going to make these meetings fun, but if we can make people look forward to them, then they will be more productive. So, and I think that's all part of our branding, right? I mean, we are in the board space which is very serious. Yeah. If I you go to our site, you'll see a wedding crashers quote on our homepage. Right. Because part of this is again, if we can make it so people look forward to these meetings, they the meetings will be better.
>> Right. Well, and you know, as I was going through the demo with your team and they were just lovely by the way. Um, I was thinking back about organizations where I've served and like I I psyched myself out before I ever even walked through the door.
>> Uh, because I was like, "God, this is just going to be misery." Right. Right. Versus other groups where I was at that even had tougher missions, brutal missions like domestic violence where the meetings were so great and the energy was so positive that I was completely ready to go focused and engaged. And that's quite a difference. I mean, just if you're walking through the door and you have a bad attitude and I say walking through the door, I mean if you're logging in or whatever, right? Right. There's there's a difference. And um, right.
>> So you've got to I think recognize this first. Um, I I also want to ask you about the AI piece that you brought up because I'm wondering how that factors in and how we should be looking at that.
>> Yeah, it's I I think it's super interesting and where our team is spending a lot of time. I'll I'll say one I'll talk about the live board meeting and then I'll talk about the the um the content creation and the interaction between the leadership team and the board. So in the live board meeting, we actually went out to our customers and said, "Do you want us building AI features to sit in the board meeting with you?" And overwhelmingly the answer was no. That boards didn't want every single thing they say in the board meeting to be discoverable and therefore let's not have AI record everything, right? So we have not built that feature based on the fact that the feedback from our community was, "No, don't spend your time building something else. We don't need that right now." So the AI we have embraced is pretty amazing. A and I've I've said this a few times that I'll say it this way that the at our prior two companies, the shortest deck we ever sent to our board was 134 pages, right? That's crazy. So, Zach, it doesn't necessarily make everything concise because there's a lot of data you may want to include in your board presentation, but the AI does surface the information that your board will care about most. So now instead of getting a deck that's going to take 4 hours to read, you get something that's a 27-minute read time, right? And all of that is documented so you know exactly how long it's going to take you to get through each individual section. What the AI will also do, and this feature is going to go live any minute, is we have an ask AI feature. So now the board can go in and ask questions of the Ze. So, "What do I need? What is the most important topic I need to know from this presentation?" Or, "I see the donor data from Q1 for 2026. Can you compare it to Q1 of 2025?" And and Ze will actually come back with that answer with AI. So so your leadership team doesn't have to go in and solve those. So, so that's one piece that's going to be really cool. And also, we're building a feature that we're calling tear it up, right? And the idea is before you send your ZEC to the board, you can have sort of an a Zech AI super board member, >> go through your presentation and and say, "Hey, you should address X, Y, and Z before you send it to your board." So, we're really trying to think about very niche use cases for AI that you couldn't go and solve in GPT or in quad. And and so far to date, that's been really really well received.
>> It's it's super interesting because I'm wondering and this is just a a side question. Um, it seems to me like this product and this philosophy could be working internally in an organization and not just for the board. Are you seeing that where you're where where CE are saying, "We want to start using this internally?"
>> Yes. The short answer is yes. The longer answer is I I'll I'll say I actually had a call with one of our investors this morning [snorts] and she said to me, "Tell me the three best things to happen at Zack so far." Right? One of them, which is which is related to to this call, is that we've not targeted nonprofits. >> Yet nonprofits represent about 35-40% of of our customer base and that's because board member X, who is on the board of company Y, right, gets put in front of him or her and says, "I'm also on the board of nonprofit A and reaches out to the executive director and say, 'Hey, you should check this out.'" So that's one thing, which is obviously relevant for this conversation. And and and I and many people on our team spent years in the non nonprofit space at Crowdrise and GoFundMe. The other the other answer I gave to her is that most organizations are embracing Zack entirely organically for lots of different use cases. So stakeholder updates, internal leadership meetings, um, executive sessions, all their committee meetings. So that's been that's been really awesome and and and lucky.
>> It's it's fascinating. I think there's a new dawn, you know, in the last 10 years of um how we work, right? I mean, the pandemic moved us to a digital environment much more quickly. I mean, we were already, I think, hit a heading there, of course, but just it pushed us quickly and um those folks that could lean into it and and see that it's a better way have flourished. And then those have that that couldn't or won't adapt uh are stumbling. And I think it's still going up, right? I mean, it's
>> Totally. You know, it's kind of where we are.
>> Transformation is hard, but
>> it is clear that uh
>> uh, you know, if you're not embracing it, you're not going to survive, right? We can we can talk about Darwin if we want to switch topics.
>> Totally. Yeah. I see it all the time. I see it all the time on the nonprofit show. It's really an interesting time I think to be um looking at your your mission and your service area at the same time looking internally and saying, "How do we get better so that we can be better?" Right? And that's a tough thing.
>> Uh, I mean, arguably the most successful company in the world, Amazon, Bezos does not allow decks. They do not allow it. You cannot come in with a PowerPoint or or a slide deck, right? It's all memos. And and I do think there is something in the zeitgeist, right, where where people are saying, "Yes, this is this is archaic. It it actually leads to antagonism between the leadership team and the board because the communication is so poor." Right? So part of what we want to do is flip that dynamic so that this reciprocal obligation between the leadership team and the board can be met with more joy and and less dread.
>> So let's dig into that a little bit because one of the things that you have observed with your I would imagine your own personal service and and looking at at the leaders around you, talk to us about burnout when we have these these these meeting issues because burnout is such a real issue for boards for staff for seauite um and I feel like we're at this point where uh leadership is saying, "Yeah, I I stuck it out during the worst of the times, the pandemic, post pandemic, and now I'm done. The the straw has broken my back." Where do you see this?
>> It is It is so interesting. If we were having this conversation literally yesterday, I would not have been able to tell you this story. So, I I mentioned I have a nonprofit board meeting tomorrow night. >> We got the Ze on Friday, and I emailed the executive director. I said, "There is there's no finance section. Where's the finance section?" And and she said, "It's just taking us so long to put this together." And I said, "Well, with Zack, you can integrate your financials directly from Excel or Google Sheets, literally with a click of a button. And then with another click of a button, you can visualize your data. And then with yet one more click of a button, you can take all the data and and surface the information that your board will care about most, which I know is repetitive without you doing anything, right? Literally, the software does that for you. And then maybe you want to spend 15 or 20 minutes editing that output so that it's perfect for you and your voice. Maybe maybe you want to make some changes or delete something. But it flips the process from going from hours and hours of the CFO's time to literally minutes. And typically the output is better for the board, right? So that is that is now done. And the it was it was met with like with cheers, right? So I I think the um
>> the the feedback we get from our customers is ausive. It's almost odd, right? We have we buy lots of software at Zack and I've never emailed someone from HubSpot saying, "This is game-changing for us." The board experience is so bad that when we're able to make changes and make it less arduous for the leadership team >> there it's met with with literally with cheers. I mean, we could we could show you the feedback that we get on a daily basis. It's it's crazy um and amazing. So, we're trying to again, particularly for nonprofits, make this significantly less burdensome so they can spend their time trying to save the world instead of build build a report.
>> Okay. So, tomorrow you're after tomorrow, you're going to have to report back. Yes. on if the board made different decisions based on the way that financial information was shared because I find that most boards their eyes gloss over when it comes to financial, you know, reporting and they really kind of rubber stamp it or they ask >> questions like, "How many did do we do you really need to buy that many paper clips, you know, a quarter?" I mean, like inane questions. So it'll be really interesting to see how that informed their decision-making.
>> Yeah, I I would be very surprised if people go deeply into the data sets, >> but I would I would be equally surprised if the board members don't read the key takeaways that Ze generates from those data sets. And I'll take it one step further. I'm on the board of another nonprofit and not at the last board meeting, but the board meeting before the uh the executive director said that only one person on the board had not read the Ze. Right. So, you get analytics. Not only do you know >> where everyone spent their time, you know that on an individual basis and on an aggregate basis. Well, the one board member who didn't read the Zack was ruining the board meeting. He was asking every question that was already contemplated in the Zach and driving everybody crazy. I by chance happened to have been sitting next to him and turned to him. I said, "You you literally ruining the meeting. You're the I couldn't help myself. You're the only person here who didn't read the presentation." He probably signed something saying that he would read the presentation, right? You're signing documents saying you are going to be a participatory board member, right? There is a fiduciary responsibility. Yes. Well, he is no longer on the board now. He he quit voluntarily. Um, but I it was it was it was unfair to the other board members.
>> So, I think Z creates this positive peer pressure >> that gets people to participate. But part of it is you're asking people to read a 27-page presentation that is perfect on their phone as opposed to a 134-page deck that you can only read from your laptop.
>> Right. Yeah. I I thought that was fascinating in the demo that I took um to see those that reporting that said that explained what the engagement was.
>> Yeah.
>> And I thought that was really cool and I I I didn't think that it was intrusive >> if it has explained in advance, this is this tool exists. Yes.
>> And we're going to look at it and we're going to figure out what information works better for you. Where do we need more discussion? I mean, it's not a punitive issue as much as >> I mean, yeah, it's a little bit of a >> a jab to participate, but um, yeah, I thought that was really cool.
>> But it's their job to participate, >> right? If you don't want to participate, then don't be on the board. In fact, I actually think and and we work with a couple of the the fundraising platforms. >> I I am on a mission to prove that the more engaged board members will donate more to your cause, right? So then it becomes even more self-interested for organizations to have an engaged board. I would just be shocked if that wasn't true.
>> Absolutely. Because they're going to become your champion. They're going to go out. It's not only just their own checkbooks, but it's, you know, corporate relationships. It's fun relationships. It's, you know, members of the community. I mean, if you can stand up in your community and say, "Hey, this is important and this is why you should be a part of this journey." That's golden, right? That's the that golden piece. Well, Robert Wolf, this has really been fun. I have really enjoyed talking.
>> Yeah, Robert is the CEO and co-founder of Zack, and you can learn more about this really interesting um I'm going to call it a rewrite of how we Yes. look at board development, board structure, board implementation. And you can do that at zec.app. and and go ahead and and take the tour. It's just fascinating because I found for myself that um I was needing to re reimagine and reprocess how to run a meeting, right? I mean, it kind of made me think, oh wow, you know, I'm part of the problem if I'm not structuring uh things in a new way. And so I appreciated that that opportunity to kind of evaluate myself in this ecosystem of running meetings and everything.
>> I did the same. I mean, I used to when we sent our we would send our deck to the board a day before the meeting. It would be again 150-175 pages and then I would be upset that they didn't add value, right?
>> Only later did I realize that was my fault, not theirs. So, and and I know that is that that experience of sending a brutal deck to your board a day or two before the the board meeting is typical. That is not that is not the edge case. That's what usually happens and and it's so easy to solve.
>> Yeah, it's super cool. Well, this has been a great conversation. Um, good luck with that board meeting tomorrow night. It'll be really interesting to see what happens. Hey, I want to give a shout out of gratitude to all of the folks that support us here on the nonprofit show so we can have these conversations. They include Bloomerang, American Nonprofit Academy, Staffing Boutique, Holdings, Nonprofit Banking, Third Sector Company, Your Part-Time Controller, Crescent Cares, Fundraisers Friday, and JMT Consulting. Um, Robert, we end each and every show with this mantra, and I'm thinking about it so differently because you've been such a great guest, and it goes like this. To stay well so you can do well. We'll see you again everyone. Thanks, Robert. [music]