The NetRaising Experience
Agnes Zach
What’s your NetRaising experience?
It’s kind of interesting. [Previous] web developers were consistently telling us that we could do everything that we wanted to do, and then it never worked after we did it. And I think Kurt was the first one that we worked with that said, “Well, we do our websites this way. And there’s a lot of flexibility in that, but there are limitations and there’s this, and it’s going to look like that and it’s going to work like this.” And you’re like, “Oh, okay.” And so I think that change is really what helped us. I think just having people tell us they could do anything never worked.
We would go to a database company that would say, “Well, we’ll do the front end of your website.” And it was like, yes, and you’re only doing a piece of it because you can’t do all of these other things, so you want to route them someplace else. In fact, we don’t want that. Kurt was the one that would say, “Well, if you’re using this database and you let me talk to this person, it’s this kind of an integration tool.” He did all of the API integrations. He talked to database team, he went and did some research for us on a couple of databases to see if their integrations made sense. And it was faster for him to call those companies or email them and get us out of the middle because we weren’t translating well.
We also appreciated the fact that he maintains the site on an ongoing retainer basis. So when we decide we want to change something, when we decide that we’re confused, when we kind of need something, it’s not like we have to go out and hire a consultant to fix that particular project. It’s that we have this ongoing relationship. Sometimes people think that a website is stationary, you pay once and you’re done. That ongoing connection was really helpful to us when we would suddenly decide to pivot to do something different, which as a small nonprofit we did probably more than we should have. It wasn’t like we had to go find somebody to come in and fix our website for us because we decided we wanted a new program. It was just, we reached out to Kurt and said, “Well, we decided to do it this way.” Then he’ll go, “Oh, okay.”
And we really do have new ideas every six months, once a year or something. I think we just had, oh, it was probably three or four months ago, but I think we just made a change to the job board that he created for us. And so then he was reaching out and saying, “Okay, I think we need to change this and that, this isn’t showing up.” And so the job board now looks different than it did last year. And it’s like, “Okay, let’s just do it.”
Usually, it’s us getting together at a staff meeting and saying, “I don’t like the way this looks,” or, “you know, we’ve been doing this for a while and I’m just not getting the responses that it needs to get,” or, “something’s not working on the backend and the operations person is having trouble figuring out how do we do this.” And then once we kind of get down to a couple of ideas, then we reach out to Kurt and his team and say, “Okay, so this is what we thought the problem was and so we were thinking about doing this.”
Then they usually talk about it and come back to us with a proposal. “I think what you’re thinking about is it’s probably going to be able to look like this, but not that.” And so then we sort of start that iterative process. But the programmers that they have are amazing. And so then they just plop us into their timeline. And then they give us a lot of room in the middle to say, “Okay, so that gives you lots of play area. What are you going to do?”
It’s the access to Megan. I would do anything for Megan that she ever asked for because she’s done so much for us. So she’s just incredible. So I appreciate his team, obviously, the people on his team a lot. I appreciate the speed that they respond. And then I appreciate the way they talk through with us what it is that we’re trying to get to, to see if it’s actually reasonable, portable, practical. They’re actually interested in making sure that it worked fully into the end, it’s not just, “Well yeah, of course, we can do that.” It’s like, “I see where you’re headed. Is that really where you’re headed?”
They have an innate understanding of what our limitations are. And that’s just handy. That just avoids a whole segment of explanation.
They don’t assume that we can afford absolutely everything we want to do all the time.
They don’t assume that we know exactly what we’re doing all the time.
They don’t assume that we’re going to be on the same trajectory for two or three years.
They’re not surprised when we pivot.
And I think they have a pretty good understanding of the fact that we just don’t really have time. And so having something that works, having somebody just taking care of it is huge to us. because we just really don’t have time to fiddle with it.
That retainer thing is really handy because you come to them with a project and they go, “Well, that’s a 15-hour project, but you haven’t had us do anything else this year. So it’s just part of your retainer.” You’re like, “Oh, okay. So that’s really cool. I appreciate that.” Whereas other times they can come back and say, “Yeah, we need to do a big upgrade to the backend, or we’ve got to move everything to the upgrade. But don’t worry, there’s no cost to that because that’s part of your retainer.” You’re just like, “Ah, okay.” So that retained piece I think is really the responsive side for us. Right, and you always hear about the benefits of retained contracts, but you don’t usually see them set up this way.
We know what we’re signing when we sign the contract, we know what those pieces are. I think actually the key to the transparency piece is, it’s pretty consistent. It’s not like they’re changing their contract every year or that when we go in for a renewal every two or three years, whatever we’re on with them, it’s not like there’s making changes. It’s pretty consistent. It’s pretty open. So we don’t have this fear that things are going to change dramatically.
I’ve got the Ask Agnes blog, which is part of why the story comes to mind every day. And so I reached out to Kurt and I reached out to Megan and said, “Okay, we’re redesigning the website. I need a spot for my blog.” And Kurt came back to me and said, “What do you mean blog?” And I said, “Well, you know I’m going to do these things, I’m going to do this thing.” And he was like, “How many have you written?” And I said, “I haven’t written any.” And then he said, “I will not turn on that feature until you have two months’ worth of blog posts written and submitted.” I’m like, “What do you mean won’t?” And he’s like, “Too many people start blogs and they do it for two or three weeks, and then they forget about it. If you’re not committed, and if you’re not ready to make that commitment and put it into place, I don’t think it’s a feature that looks good on your website.” And I managed to do it for a year and a half straight until this week, and now it’s dormant because I missed like four weeks, but I have a plan to get back. So anyway, I did that, I did not turn on the blog post until I sent him eight weeks of blog postings. I completely agree with him. I was just going, “Oh, they want me to do this thing and it will be fun, and it’ll be fine.” And he’s like, “Yeah, no.” And it was such a surprise because I knew nothing about blog posts except I needed to write. I had never thought about it from the context of what does it look like to have dead space on your website? And you’re actively creating dead space. And I was like, oh, you’re right. And I was saying that there is something that is active and live and searchable, and it does, and it’s going to be good. So it was really enlightening. I had just never thought about it that way before. It’s one of my favorite Kurt stories. I use it regularly.
Agnes Zach
Chief Executive Officer
Nonprofit Professionals