134. SPN: Eliminate Tech Debt -> Your Org's January Detox
Plus, “What is this LLM saying about your Org?” and fostering a culture of continuous improvement
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Game changer? It is for me!
In this week’s SPN →
Is this the future of advertising?
What is an LLM saying about your Org?
6 indicators of “Tech Debt” and how to detox it from your Org.
and, plenty of Jobs & Opps that took my fancy this week.
Let’s jump in!
Paradigm Shifting in 2025
I’ve spent the last few weeks on this topic. It’s exciting to be working alongside a few Org’s embracing “AI agents,” “multi-agent systems,” and “service-as-software” - is this the future of advertising?
AI agents: Autonomous digital entities performing specialized tasks, using LLMs to simulate human behavior and interactions. Instead of just aiding fund raisers and marketers, these agents draw insights from both structured and unstructured data to make decisions and complete tasks with minimal oversight from you and me.
Multi-agent systems: Networks of AI agents working together, effectively serving as a digital workforce. Complex problems are broken down into discrete sub-tasks handled by specialized AI agents (vs. CRM or CMS or ERP systems that help digitize fund raising processes but rely on structured data and manual inputs).
Service-as-Software: From traditional software-as-a-service (SaaS, like Hubspot) to service-as-software, where software is no longer just a tool but becomes the worker itself. Turning tools into end-to-end services is the sort of paradigm shift that will evolve how we both prep and deploy fund raising. On the tech stack side it also enables, even encourages, outcome-based pricing models and lowers OpEx by automating/replacing workflows.
Here are two potential impacts just on Advertising efforts this year:
Advertising to/with agents: Tools like ChatGPT have changed the way Supporters explore and learn about stuff… and Orgs. When someone is researching a new Org to donate to, or a program to sponsor, or frankly what anti-aging cream to buy, Brand marketers should be able to answer questions like, “What is this LLM saying about my Org? How do I educate it? How do we compare against our peers?”
Workflow automation: Agents will replace and streamline multiple workflows. This will both reduce (current) human workloads and enhance Org performance. Think of areas like creative automation (production design, personalization), media buying (planning, optimization, payments), and overall advertising analytics (from data collection to insights).
For Orgs, this model or prospective way of operating (even just within this paid media context) strikes me as highly scalable and agile, and empowering of even small teams to achieve results that were previously labor-intensive and costly.
It also nods towards how smaller Orgs can begin to operate at far more considerable scale and grow their reach and relevance at a far more greater rate than has been achieved before. And I think that’s really rather exciting!
Jobs & Opps 🛠️
This beats a job description any day! A 30 minute YouTube conversation about the role, team and opportunity - highlighting this in case it helps re-think how you’re promoting a job (in this case Programs Operations Director).
Brooklyn Museum: Director, Individual Giving & Major Gifts ($168,096)
NPR: Manager, Digital Philanthropy ($80,000 - $92,000)
Girls Scouts of the USA: VP, Individual Development & Major Gifts ($122,700 - $215,000)
United Food Bank: Director, Donor Analytics (Salesforce Administrator)
Conservation International: Managing Director, Social Media
Amazon: Senior Manager, Community Engagement ($148,300 - $245,200)
John Deere: Director, Community Relations and President, John Deere Foundation ($178,560 - $267,828)
World Central Kitchen: Manager, Fundraising Operations ($80,000 - $100,000)
Green Beret Foundation: Chief Development & Marketing Officer
CAVA: Sr. Manager, Social Impact & Sustainability ($145,000 - $195,000)
Union of Concerned Scientists: Director, Digital Marketing ($129,001 - $145,130)
Age UK: Chief Income Generation Officer (£140,000)
→ More jobs updated daily to SPN’s sister website: www.pledgr.com
Detox: Tech Debt
The juggling act of End-of-Year is behind us. Hopefully a successful one for all Org’s that implemented SPN’s tried and true nuggets from 2024!
I’ve always used January to detox my fund raising tech stack from some of the (many?!) bits and bobs that managed to attach themselves the year prior.
Here are 6 indicators of “Tech Debt” that I see all the time. Any seem familiar?
Outdated/Unsupported Software: Legacy systems without vendor support or security updates. Frequent manual workarounds or “band-aid” fixes to keep them running.
Excessive Custom Code: Code that’s highly specialized, hard to maintain, and/or lacks proper documentation. Reliance on a single expert who holds “tribal knowledge.”
Overcomplicated Integrations: Multiple point-to-point integrations that require frequent fixes. APIs or plug-ins that break with every update or change in vendor tooling.
Data Silos: Departments that can’t share data effectively because systems don’t talk to each other. Multiple versions of “the truth” across different tools.
Tag Management: The ever-growing stack of trackers, DSPs, DMPs, analytics platforms, retargeting solutions and audience providers that guarantees your Tag Management tool is full of tags nobody knows the purpose of.
In-House platforms to address common needs: An in-house CRM instead of any off-the-shelf one. A custom attribution model that has 10% of the functionality of the market leading ones yet the C-Suite relies on the information it produces for all the strategic decisions.
Isolating Tech Debt
One of the tasks on my early January to-do list - and it’s linked to End of Year reporting - is to sit with the fund raising and marketing team and understand what pain points we experienced in our Q4 workflows (anything from donor processing and email deployment to reporting requirements, ease of use and manual workarounds that we’d swept under the carpet).
I’ll then build a catalogue of sorts with the aim of understanding use, cost/benefit and value. I’ve listed many of the steps I’m taking in today’s SPN in case it’s helpful to copy/paste/share/implement with others.
One thing to underline - don’t bake this tech debt discovery and remediation in a silo. It’s a collaborative task worthy of everyone’s participation.
List Out Systems and Tools
Do this yourself and ask every marketing and fund raising team member to do the same - it will help to determine “tool owners.”
Collate it in one shareable spreadsheet. Include every platform, software application and integration in use. Don’t forget to include any “shadow IT” tools that teams might be using outside official channels. Then mark each system with the team or individual primarily responsible for it. And keep a column to record costs and contracts (many platforms add “administrative processing” and other small nonsense like per-seat licensing, data overage charges, so check in with the Finance team).
Add Performance and Stability Metrics
Tap someone on your Web team and make sure the uptime/downtime of each platform met expectations, that page load speeds are where they should be, that tools have regular security updates and meet the latest privacy laws in regions you operate in, and that any error frequencies are confidence-inducingly low, etc.
Are there any cheeky patches being applied to legacy systems? Ask the team to look for any trends in the incident logs or help-desk tickets that might suggest anything other than perfect performance.
A visualization can be helpful. It also helps everyone participate in a way that’s more in line with their way of communicating or absorbing info.
I like to sketch out a matrix/quadrant where the X-axis is “Potential Impact” if the tech fails (Low to High) and Y-axis is “Current Technical Health” (from “Low Health” = lots of bugs and manual work to “High Health” = stable and well supported). I’ll use the following quadrants:
1. High Impact + Low Health = Immediate action required
2. High Impact + High Health = Monitor and maintain
3. Low Impact + Low Health = Replace/phase out
4. Low Impact + High Health = Routine maintenance
It can be quite a sobering exercise and highlight some holes real fast.
Flip the Script
While you’ve got the team's attention, now categorize each tool into one of these three buckets:
The last column will likely be close to empty on the first pass. The middle will carry the most weight, with a few tools in the left area.
Now look at it again.
Move that internal report or a legacy dashboard from the middle to the left.
Move that “AI-generated high likelihood to convert audiences” from the right column to the middle. And in every case if you can’t recall an ROI per platform/tool off the top of your head, move it to the left.
Most teams I do this exercise with end up with very few – if any – tools in the last column (far right). The middle usually includes the core platforms without duplication – e.g., one reporting tool. The far (left) column usually consists of tools duplicating some or all of the functionality of those in the middle.
Typical examples of tools from the left column I’ve seen are:
In-house-built reporting tool from the 2010s that serves no other purpose than reporting the data back to the Finance department, which requires some specific data massaging.
Experimental tool for AI email personalization that your team tried a year ago on top of the HubSpot implementation before HubSpot had the same functionality. The tool is still used, but integration is a pain.
An AI audience provider for Digital Ads that your team added to your programmatic buys before PMax became the new standard. The tool claims to do the same as Google, identifying the best prospects, yet somehow claims to do it off a much smaller dataset. lol
By now, you’ll have a good Technical list. Some tools will shine as the ones that pose a clear risk to the Org and have to be replaced, or aren’t used by anybody. The next level is to add an ROI view.
Weigh Cost vs. Benefit
Determining each tool’s actual ROI is painful. I discussed it at length almost two years ago in SPN #36 and #37. Some tech debt is straightforward (like upgrading a Drupal version); other tech debt will require a large-scale project (like migrating a CRM). Like anything, especially in detox mode!, you need to balance the short-term disruption vs. long-term benefits of fixing each area.
That said, a summary rule-of-thumb for Cost is simple. Take a one-year subscription cost of the technology itself and multiply it by 7. It’ll be close enough to an actual 3-year cost of ownership, including the tech itself, its implementation, and the cost of the internal team’s time using and supporting it.
Value is much less straightforward and there’s no right way around it. You need to determine which metrics within the Donor Lifecycle a given tool should impact and see if it helps cut costs or generate extra revenue.
For large-scale investments, like evaluating a new CRM or migrating an AdTech stack, you want to be thinking along the lines of whether it’ll increase the conversion rate by 5% or generate $1M incremental in annual revenue. That number needs to be at least 2x the tool’s cost of ownership to justify its existence.
But usually it’s the little stuff that contributes to a death by a thousand cuts. A couple too many reporting platforms to maintain... A few seemingly similar audience platforms that drive the same functionality... A stand-alone plug-in instead of a built-in functionality of a larger tool…
Determine Alignment With Org Goals
Who’s the owner of the said tool and do they still advocate for it?
Why did we initially implement it?
When was the last time we changed something we do thanks to this tool, and this tool alone?
Does this tool help us reach more donors, drive more fund raising revenue, strengthen marketing and brand efforts, or otherwise support our mission?
If any of these questions require digging through old notes and emails to find an answer, chances are a particular tool is wasting your team’s time rather than adding value. There will, of course, be the “we must maintain it” ones, such as a finance report – I’ll address that below. At this stage, simply make sure you really must.
Some Next Steps Thought Starters
With the current state documented, now pay particular attention to tools that aren’t a risk per se - those were addressed earlier - but have a negative ROI.
Look for overlapping functionalities (e.g., multiple social media management tools or two CRMs - both real examples I’ve lived with and offloaded).
Look for opportunities to roll tools up e.g., are you using Mailchimp for email management and also have an SFMC instance that was implemented before the Email module became available?
Create a phasing out roadmap of low-risk tools, prioritizing the ones people couldn’t articulate the use cases for.
Intentionally add more tools to the right column – using the saved cost from the left one to pay for it.
Can you achieve the same objective with other tools you already have?
For the tools used solely by your team, combine ruthlessly. After all, chances are that your Org doesn’t need most of the stand-alone tools. Yes, walled gardens are a beast of their kind – but if your Org already has HubSpot, you’re much better off bundling most of the email tasks within it.
The same applies to website management within one CMS, instead of multiple plug-ins slowing down the load time and having only one Web Analytics platform to avoid the stand-still in decision-making because of the non-matching numbers.
For the must-maintain ones, automate. Spend a week building an automated copy-paste algorithm to populate data in that finance report instead of spending an hour a week for the rest of the year.
Recall that simple table I sketched above? The target should be to reduce the number of tools in the left column to a third of the ones in the middle. Aim to have one tool in the right column for each in the left column. If your Org has six “core” tools, you should have no more than two legacy ones – and at least two innovative ones.
This year, the bias will naturally be toward AI. We should be experimenting with tools of all kinds. For the ones your team’s like and suggest adopting, go through the “right” process by determining the metric it needs to affect and hypothesizing the exact value you expect to generate back. This’ll help ensure tools don’t end up in the left column three years from now.
Final Thoughts
At every step of this discovery, get input from fund raising, tech and marketing teams on what’s most critical and the potential consequences of success/failure. This whole exercise is as much about communication and collaboration, as it is about building a lean, streamlined revenue machine.
It’s important to ensure any prioritization aligns with the needs of the wider Org - the upside here is it can help open up other teams’ budget lines to pay for some of your testing.
Tech debt management needs to be an ongoing effort and process of evaluation. I’ve a quarterly check-up scheduled with teams to ensure new tech debt doesn’t accumulate unnoticed, while we’re still able to test new tools and give them a fair shot. Why not follow suit? I think it’s what some folks call a “culture of continuous improvement”, which feels like a good mantra for 2025 ;)
Happy New Year. I hope it brings you much professional success and happiness.
OK, that’s all for today.
I hope you’ve found one thing in today’s SPN that you can make your own and run with.
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