Accidental to Intentional Nonprofit Tech Leader with Gozi Egbuonu and Hugo Castro pt 2

Hugo Castro, author of the Accidental Techie newsletter on Linkedin, and Gozi Egbuonu, accidental and now intentional tech leader, lead you through a discussion on the transformation from firefighter to strategic advisor.

In pt 1 they discuss the role of the "accidental techie" in nonprofit organizations and explore three bridges to transform your career: Skills, Relationships, and Projects. In pt 2 they finish up the fourth bridge: Communications, and take questions from the webinar audience.

If you never applied to a tech job, but somehow you are the person everyone turns to for tech help and assistance at your nonprofit, you may be the accidental techie of your office. Learn how to transform your valuable experience as a problem-solver into a professional career as a nonprofit tech leader from two people who have lived it.

Hugo and Gozi share what separates reactive problem-solvers from strategic technology leaders, and give you practical frameworks for repositioning yourself professionally. You’ll discover how to communicate your value differently, build the right relationships, and choose projects that showcase your strategic thinking. 

Learning outcomes

• Build a transformation roadmap using four pillars: skills, relationships, projects, communication
• Identify your position on the accidental-to-intentional spectrum and key mindset shifts needed
• Reframe how you communicate your work to position yourselves as strategic advisors, not tech fixers-for-free.

_______________________________
Start a conversation :)

• Register to attend a webinar in real time, and find all past transcripts at https://communityit.com/webinars/
• email Carolyn at cwoodard@communityit.com
• on LinkedIn 
• on reddit/r/nonprofitITmanagement
• on the Community IT website

Thanks for listening. 

Transcript

Community IT Intro 0:01

Thank you for joining this Community IT podcast part two. You can find part one in your podcast feed if you subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.

Carolyn Woodard 0:12

So welcome everyone to the Community IT Innovators webinar on the accidental to intentional nonprofit tech leader. My name is Carolyn Woodard. I'm the outreach director for community IT. I'll be the moderator today.

Hugo Castro 0:27

So welcome. I'm Hugo Castro. I also run Flourish Collective, working with nonprofits to exactly uh enact these kind of technology transformations. And I also write the accidental tech newsletter, which is basically me documenting everything that I wish somebody would have told me when I started on this journey 15 years ago.

Gozi Egbuonu 0:46

I'm Gozi Egbuonu. I am the director of programs at the Technology Association of Grantmakers, otherwise known as TAG.

Hugo Castro 0:53

There are four bridges you need to be able to get from the accidental shore to the intentional shore. Skills, relationships, projects, and communication. You don't have to build all four at once. That's probably a recipe for doing nothing. You pick the one that fits where you are right now and you start there. All right.

Hugo Castro 1:13

And uh we are getting to the last bridge. Uh the bridge of communication. So this bridge is about moving from being a technical explainer to being a strategic translator. Right.

Hugo Castro 1:27

So usually in accidental mode, you describe your work in terms of tasks and systems. In the intentional mode, you translate your work into mission impact. So this is a more of a mind shift, mind, mindset shift as much as a language shift.

Hugo Castro 1:44

And this is probably the bridge that makes all the other bridges more visible to the people who matter at the organization that are going to help you kind of expand and grow in your career.

Hugo Castro 1:55

So I wanna I wanna use the chat really quick for you all. Um, and either type A, B, C, or D, it is uh how do you currently describe your role to a new colleague? Right. So somebody came to your organization and says, So what do you do? Be honest. Pick the one that sounds most like what you actually say when somebody comes in to work at your organization.

Hugo Castro 2:19

And here's what the poll results are telling us, right? If most of us describe our role in tasks, I manage systems where it fits problems, that's not a failure, that's the accidental pattern, right? You're describing what you do, not necessarily what you are accomplishing, right?

Hugo Castro 2:36

So the shift here is simple to understand and takes a practice to execute, right? So my

Hugo Castro 2:43

I manage the database because I help our team make data-driven decisions. I do IT support because I solve tech problems so staff can focus on serving our community.

Hugo Castro 2:53

It's the same work, it's just completely different positioning. One describes a task, the other one describes a contribution to the impact of your organization, right? You're not making stuff up, you're just changing the language so it's mission driven instead of task-driven.

Hugo Castro 3:10

So a question for you, Gozi, like how have you translated this work uh into mission impact, uh, you know, at TAG or previous organizations?

Gozi Egbuonu 3:21

Well, for you know, for me, it was about the communication, honestly. Um it was, you know, I feel like that's where I feel most at home.

Gozi Egbuonu 3:31

And I want to say something really important about um, you know, about it. You know, this is not just about spin or just making things sound fun. Um, this is and this isn't about making, you know, sound like something is something that it is that it isn't, right?

Gozi Egbuonu 3:46

It's about finding the accurate story that connects what you do to what your organization cares most about. So it's not just the task, it's it goes deeper.

Gozi Egbuonu 3:55

And so for me at least, you know, at TAG, I facilitate conversations between subject matter experts, practitioners, and sector thought leaders. But when I describe that work internally, I don't say I run panels. I say I create conditions for philanthropy to interrogate its relationship with technology. That's accurate. It's also strategic. It positions the work and by extension, me as essential to the mission, not peripheral to it.

Gozi Egbuonu 4:21

So that's really important is that, you know, while we know that, you know, for anyone can certainly do a certain job, there's a unique quality that we all bring to the work. And I think this is the way that you're able to try to define it by communicating it in terms of how does it align with the strike, the mission of the work.

Hugo Castro 4:38

Yep, 100%. And I mean, the the shift here was realizing, at least for me, that my job wasn't to be technically accurate. Really, my job was to be clear strategically, right? It didn't, you know, for the leaders of our organization, it didn't matter how like all the tech behind the scenes, they it matter how that helps solve problems that people were experiencing.

Hugo Castro 5:02

So, for example, for me, it became oh, like instead of saying, oh, we need to implement SSO, right? I started saying, hey, we need to make it easier for staff to securely access our tools. And that way they will have to remember 15 different passwords, right? Uh

Hugo Castro 5:17

At every job over the past like 10 years that I have had, I have successfully advocated for operations time during all staff meetings, right? So this could look like updates that you're making about things that are happening in operations that are going to be affecting or improving the lives of people. Um, it could be lunch and learns that you're doing about a new software that you're rolling out. It could be upcoming changes or projects. It could be feedback from staff, right? Taking time to actually get live feedback about how the operations are being run, how the technology is being run, what are some of the pain points going on.

Hugo Castro 5:52

This is just information data that you need to help you build all those other bridges. But it shows that you've been strategic about how you're approaching this work. So when you think about the action steps that you have, and sorry if you thought that you're gonna get you you weren't gonna have homework during this webinar, you're just going to listen. I'm giving you homework. Right.

Hugo Castro 6:14

So this week, your job is to rewrite how you describe your work. So you can take your job description or even just how you answer what you do and rewrite it in terms of mission impact, not tasks. Uh, think about outcomes, not systems, think about the people that you serve.

Hugo Castro 6:33

And share that new version with one person and see how it lands, right? It can be your best buddy, or it can be somebody else at the organization. Uh, do it at your kind of next networking event. Uh

Hugo Castro 6:45

Maybe in in your next meeting where a tech issue comes up, try this, right? Before you explain what's wrong with the system, explain what is costing the organization instead. That's key, right? Leaders are gonna understand return on investment, right? So instead of saying our CRM has a data integrity issues, becomes hey, our team is spending three hours a week manually correcting the data that should be automated. That's time that we can spend on donor relationships, right? That's gonna speak to a leader of your organization instead of like this data integrity issue, right?

Hugo Castro 7:18

So think about that kind of stuff, right? Yes, Christine. Sounds exactly like that, right? Just kind of like think about it all the time. Uh

Hugo Castro 7:26

For me, for example, uh when I work at different organizations, I really I took onboarding as a way to kind of like bring all the information that was needed for someone to come in, right? So we use a Slack, so we use different applications on Slack. So even before the person started working, they were getting Slack messages to their email, to their personal email, about what it was going to be like the first week working there, creating a 30, 60 day plan, working with the different departments to set up meetings for them. So that way they have as much information as they could have, right?

Hugo Castro 7:58

So that way I was able to set myself as kind of like, hey, technology and operations are key to helping develop organize uh new people or helping the onboarding process so they can hit the ground running right away. Right. Anything you want to reinforce here, uh Gozi?

Gozi Egbuonu 8:16

Um, you know, I think it's gonna be important to change the questions that you ask. You know, what features do you need is a task question. What problem are we solving and who does it affect is a strategic question.

Gozi Egbuonu 8:29

The question you lead with signals the kind of partner you're going to be. So it's really important to really think through those.

Hugo Castro 8:35

Yeah, 100%. Um, so I want to hear from you all on the chat one more time. So which bridge is big to where you are right now? The skills, the relationships, projects, communications, just one and go. Any patterns that you see, Gozi?

Gozi Egbuonu 8:58

It's I mean, it seems like a lot of folks are relying on communication. And to Carolyn's point, it just means you're committed to your craft and improvement, continuous improvement is great. But it's, you know, that relationship piece, it's hard, especially in a digital world. Um, but I I'm not sure how many of you are working in the office too. But I think we had to relearn a lot of those communication and relationship building skills once we went back to the office. So I totally get it. Yeah.

Hugo Castro 9:23

Yeah, 100%. And and look, with the communications bridge, you know, uh, this is not about like marketing yourself. Like it is you're actually doing the work, right? Like you're doing the work, you just slightly shift in how you talk about it. Um, so how you not write your work really determines um who gets to participate in shaping it, right? So you get to shape your own work, right? That's super, super important, right? Um,

Hugo Castro 9:49

I have one more thing for you all in the chat. Um, and I tell you um one more, and this one is important, this one matters. So in the chat, I want you to write one action that you're going to take this week after this webinar, not someday this week, and be specific. Uh, it can be schedule a coffee chat or virtual coffee chat with our program director. It can be sign up for one class, it can be rewrite your role description, type it out. When you write it down, even in a chat box, you're more likely to do it. That's the research talking, not me talking. Yeah.

Gozi Egbuonu 10:27

And I love this. This is a great exercise because it removes the excuse of not knowing what to do next. So you just told the room what you're going to do. That's accountability. And if you're part of any community, like NTEN, TAG, the accidental techie newsletter, share it there too. Uh,

Gozi Egbuonu 10:44

Community accelerates transformation. And so having folks that can be there to be your accountability buddies to an extent are really critical. It gives you that extra push to try to get things done. And they're your champions, you know, they're they're gonna be there to support you. And if you have to change your deadlines, change things up a little bit, it's good to also have a community to express that and talk about it and talk through how you can ultimately meet your goals, even if you have to change it up a bit.

Hugo Castro 11:07

Yeah. I kind of emphasize enough that you're not alone, right? Lots of people are going through this. And I think finding community on it is gonna be super important that, yeah. Um, and you know,

Hugo Castro 11:20

Let's be real, right, about this transformation, what it is and what it isn't, right? Um, this is not a personality transplant, right? We're not trying to become someone else that we're not. Uh,

Hugo Castro 11:31

It is not really finding, it's not magically finding more hours in your day. Uh, I know some of you are running operations, you're training staff, you're handling IT, you're writing grants, and you're doing three other people's jobs. I've been there, right?

Hugo Castro 11:47

This transformation doesn't require more time. It's gonna require different choices with the time that you have, right? Um, it is small, consistent choices that you're gonna make over a period of time, one bridge at a time, and it comes out it comes compounds over months. The first thing you do this week is probably not gonna feel significant, but the 37 that you do will do, right?

Gozi Egbuonu 12:13

Oh, you know, I will add that uh trans this transformation is also uncomfortable. You know, it's really gonna stretch you. And deciding you're worth investing in strategically, not just reactively, requires a kind of self-advocacy that many of us, especially in nonprofit culture, weren't taught to do.

Gozi Egbuonu 12:31

So we were taught to serve, and service is beautiful, but you can't sustain service if you don't also advocate for yourself. Those aren't in conflict. Advocating for yourself and also sustaining the great work that you do.

Gozi Egbuonu 12:44

So, as nonprofit technology professionals, you have the power to connect strategies and people. By choosing to be intentional in your actions, you can create lasting impacts within your organizations and your communities.

Gozi Egbuonu 12:56

And so remember, the journey to becoming a leader starts with the choices you make today and service to your mission and to yourself, of course.

Hugo Castro 13:06

Yeah. I love all the stuff on the chat. Uh thank you all. Um so let's let's talk about progress markers. How does it look like that you're making progress on this?

Hugo Castro 13:18

So here's how you know how things are working. So in 30 days, uh you say at least one, you say no to one thing that didn't fit your strategic direction. That's it. Just one no, right? Uh

Hugo Castro 13:32

At 90 days, uh, you have initiated one strategic project, uh, not responded to one initiated one. So you have one strategic project that you yourself started yourself instead of somebody else initiated for you.

Hugo Castro 13:47

And maybe this is like a nine months or so, you know, give it three or four months into it. Someone in leadership introduces you as a strategic partner, not just the third person, right?

Hugo Castro 13:58

That moment, that shift and how people describe you, that's the signal that you know that you're moving from accidental to an intentional tech leader. And you know, this is just kind of you're in the middle of the reactive grind of the nine months. Um, and we just want to validate that, right?

Hugo Castro 14:18

Does this ring true to you, Gozi, or uh in your own experience?

Gozi Egbuonu 14:23

Yeah, you know, I think it it can be it feels like a lot when you're in that grind, but you know, I think it's important that, you know, that six months of consistent intentional choices looks very different from six months of waiting for things to change on their own.

Gozi Egbuonu 14:37

So just reiterating the importance of starting, just starting this week and six months from now, you will have a different story to tell. So there's no time like the present.

Hugo Castro 14:48

100%. And we're gonna put uh questions on the chat in a second, but you know, Gozi is 100% right. Uh deciding that you are worth investing in strategically, not just reactively, that you deserve to be in those rooms before decisions are made, right? That's your expertise. Even if it's arrived accidentally, it is real and has value beyond fixing things.

Hugo Castro 15:13

So, what's gonna be your first bridge? You know, I'll leave you with this. You know, I I came into my career asking questions and building bridges between people, ideas, and systems. And that's what every one of you is doing, whether you have the language for it or not, you're already the bridge builder in your organization.

Hugo Castro 15:31

So this framework just gives you a map for doing it more intentionally and becoming that intentional tech leader that you want to be. So I really want to thank you all for being here. And I know we're gonna be taking some questions. Um, just feel to put them in the chat. Um, and Gozi and I will do our best to answer those.

Carolyn Woodard 15:49

I have one question. Go ahead and everyone put a question in the chat if you have questions for Hugo and Gozi. Um, and we have one. All right, so I'm gonna uh read this one out. Um

Carolyn Woodard 16:02

"Interested to hear about the choices we make when choosing what to outsource versus what to retain or bring in-house, especially with the limited resources that nonprofits have. Logic would say the stuff in incompetent and competent, those realms that we talked about earlier, should go out, but often that costs more than executives want to invest." Um, so I think that's a really good uh question to start with. It actually kind of links with a question from uh registration where someone said there's a risk to not hiring a professional, maybe in some of these, like outsourcing some of these pieces. So, how do you pitch that if you're also pitching yourself as the expert? So I think those are connected questions.

Hugo Castro 16:49

Uh let me take a stab at it really quick. So

Hugo Castro 16:51

I think that's a great question, Brian. And I think uh the logic, yes, we'll say that um in the short term. I think long term, I think you want to pitch to the leaders what is gonna cost long term, not being able to work in in more strategic projects or uh really incurring technology debt.

Hugo Castro 17:12

You know, I I will venture to say that most of our nonprofit organizations are on tech debt, right? We haven't invested in technology and we're paying for it eventually, right? So, yes, I mean, uh, if maybe you are early on and maybe you don't want to have an MSP, um, yeah, you can probably learn a bunch of different skills about fits and computers and all the different things that happen in your organization.

Hugo Castro 17:34

However, if you're more a senior leader, I think you can make the case that you can either bring a part-time person, you can oversee an MSP that is a little bit uh that doesn't necessarily have to do everything. It just helps you with your literature shops so you accumulate less tech debt.

Hugo Castro 17:51

So that way when new things come to fruition, like you know, four years ago with the pandemic, uh the everything is happening with artificial intelligence, right? Nonprofits right now are scrambling trying to figure out what to do because they did not invest on kind of like the the tech forward things that needed to be invested in.

Hugo Castro 18:11

So that's a decision that I think with leadership, I will say is like, hey, the short-term solution, yes, that makes sense. But long term, we're gonna be accumulating tech debt that is gonna come bite us on the butt if we don't take care of it now.

Gozi Egbuonu 18:25

That was a great response. My only thing I would add to what Hugo shared is these exercises I think are really critical for nonprofits to start engaging in as well.

Gozi Egbuonu 18:37

Thinking about that gap between the technical knowledge and the funding gaps that you have, and really thinking through what would it take for us to get to that point to be able to have these things that we know are going to support our foundation or technology infrastructure, and then mapping it out, budgeting it out. Because the reality is that more organizations are willing to start funding that, or you can get operational grants. But now with this information and this step-by-step process of what we need to do, the gaps that we have and funding to make it happen, the timeline that we've gotten from the due diligence we've done by reaching out to other peers in our networks.

Gozi Egbuonu 19:11

You know, shout out to any folks who know TAG folks or anyone in the LinkedIn or NTEN, go to your peers, find out this information to help you build almost essentially kind of your guideline for how you go from point A to point B.

Gozi Egbuonu 19:22

And once you're able to do that, I think right then and there you have an opportunity to make the case and do it from, again, a mission-aligned standpoint. So for nonprofit folks, that's saying if we don't do this, we're not going to be able to scale our impact. We're not going to be able to keep our doors open if something X, Y, or Z happens and we don't have the technology to, you know, keep track of our or to, you know, essentially safeguard the work that we've already started to do. So

Gozi Egbuonu 19:44

I really think folks need to, you know, have these long communications conversations about what it takes for you to build that essentially that infrastructure and ultimately try to work towards building it to, you know, taking what you know you can do in-house and then thinking through what would be out-house. And if it's not available, doing what you can with what you have. There are many resources that are available.

Gozi Egbuonu 20:04

But again, you know, just thinking through it and ultimately trying to make it very detailed documentation.

Hugo Castro 20:10

I think one of one of the uh one of the things I'm thinking about, like this has been a labor of love for me to do the accidental techie and doing the newsletters, just kind of like like I know that I wish I would have had this information. So that's kind of what I'm doing right now. Uh so

Hugo Castro 20:25

I might be doing like a six week pilot cohort of like, how do you taking this framework and really taking into like six weeks and doing a lot of work into that? Um, so if you're interested in that, you know, just let me know in chat. Uh I'll let Carolyn also know uh a link for people to sign up for interest and and we can figure something else out. But I really wanna, I know this is something that we need as accidental techies. So yeah.

Carolyn Woodard 20:47

Yeah, I'm so sorry to have to start bringing this to a close because I feel like we could keep talking for another couple of hours about this. And thank you so much to everyone in the chat for sharing. I know that can be uncomfortable. We really, really appreciate it. I feel like we had this great conversation going in the chat today. We're gonna keep that going over on Reddit after the webinar, so you can join us there.

Carolyn Woodard 21:10

I want to make sure to go back over our learning objectives. I think we hit them all brilliantly. Thank you, Hugo and Gozi. Um, so talking about moving from being the person who fixes things to being the person who has asked for strategic advice about IT, the four bridges for transformation, uh, translating your work. A lot of people had put in the in the chat that they were going to work on communications, how you would start to talk about what you do in ways that hit better for this transformation and the mission. Um, and then we went over an action that you will take this week accountability with each other. As soon as you put it in, you know, you feel a little bit more uh that you need to make it happen and you start thinking about how is that gonna happen for you. Um

Carolyn Woodard 21:56

Before people go, I want to make sure to mention our webinar. Next month, we're going to turn back to cybersecurity at nonprofits. We'll have our chief technology officer and cybersecurity expert Matt Eshelman here with his annual report on the trends he sees in the thousands of endpoint users we have over the course of 2025. So he can see new patterns, new scams that are coming in, what that means for your nonprofit.

Carolyn Woodard 22:23

Of course, he'll be talking about the changes that AI tools are making, both in new scans and in new protections. So I'm going to drop that in the chat that you can find it on our website at community it.com and uh sign up for that now. It's at 3 p.m. Eastern, Noon Pacific on Wednesday, April 15th.

Carolyn Woodard 22:43

We had a couple more questions come in that we didn't get to. So if you can join us over on Reddit, we're going to try and answer them over there for about the next 30 minutes or so. So I want to thank you, Hugo and Gozi, for joining us today. This was just such an amazing conversation.

Carolyn Woodard 23:00

Really appreciate it for everyone in attendance. We know that your time is a gift. You chose to spend an hour with us today to learn and think about and talk about these questions. So thank you so much. And we'll be back here next month with another webinar. So thank you. Thanks everyone very much. Thank you guys.

Hugo Castro 23:21

Thanks, everyone. Have a good one.

Carolyn Woodard 23:22

Thank you, Hugo.

Community IT Intro 23:26

Thank you for joining this Community IT podcast, part two. You can find part one in your podcast feed if you subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.