Virtual Meeting Tools Enhance Collaboration and Donations

(Editor's Note: This weekly series is a feature of The Online Nonprofit Information Center (TONIC), sponsored by David V. and Sonya Williams of Cutler Bay, FL. TONIC includes the full text of six nonprofit management books, including Fundraising Online. The TONIC homepage may be accessed at: http://socialworker.com/nonprofit/tonic)

by Gary B. Grant

     Welcome back.

     In the first blog, I shared a high-level view on the past 30+ years since the internet transitioned fundraising methods to include the development of the internet and its associated tools. The old pattern (consisting mainly of direct mail, events, call centers and 1:1 visits for larger donors and sponsors) transformed to include mass emails and websites (including crowdfunding sites).

     In some ways, the paradigm shift was not all that major. We forget how scary it was to think that your entire profession was shifting to this digital format and what would happen to those unable to conceptualize the new methods of asking for support. Instead, it normalized quickly. 

     I think it’s normalized too much.

     The very fact that we have fallen into familiar, even comfortable, patterns is what makes me want to start a new dialogue. As I describe the best practices in this and future blogs, I’d love for readers to think creatively. There are things we can do differently that we just don’t consider.

     A big example is in the shifts made during the COVID-19 pandemic. How many of us talk about the silver linings of the isolations forcing us to break out of familiar patterns into practices we intend to keep later?

     Let’s consider working from home and virtual meetings.

     Twenty years ago, internet bandwidths were too slow to really allow many organizations to take full advantage of video calls. Over the ensuing years, however, this has changed. For some time, the ability to meet with our teams, our partners, and even our donors in “virtual meeting” spaces like Zoom and Google Meet was widely available, but for most organizations was limited to extreme cases of necessity.

     At the start of the pandemic, we saw hurdles start to be overcome. Connection problems seemed to evolve away and, at least in my experience, we learned to mute someone with a poor connection rather than making everyone in a meeting suffer the anguish of watching one person struggle to communicate.  

     Similarly, we grew less wedded to only using our own videoconferencing platform and learned multiple systems to make it easier to negotiate meetings.

     At the start of the pandemic, I used a relatively unknown tool, called 8x8 (https://8x8.vc/).  What I liked about 8x8 was that I could create a room by just naming it in the URL.  https://8x8.vc/GaryGrant would open up a room in any Google Chrome browser. My favorite practice was to name the room for the constituent I was visiting (an effort to make them feel at home).  The tool was free, good quality, and very easy to figure out how to navigate. Every person in a meeting could share their screens, and there was no time limit on its use. There is a limit of no more than 40 users at a time, however.

     By far, the most commonly used application was Zoom. Over the last year, I would estimate that outside of my own preferred platform, 90% of the meetings I had were on Zoom—perhaps that being particularly popular for academic institutions. Microsoft Teams’ video platform and Google Meet were also popular, the latter managing to pivot away from its previous name of “Google Hangouts,” which implied more casual and non-business uses.

     Skype had been in a front runner position years ago for pioneering video calling, and is often touted as a good meeting platform, but I have had no requests by constituents or partners to meet over Skype in the past 18 months. A host of other tools are used, but from my experience, rarely. Go To Meetings was popular for presentations in past years, but it has not seemed to become a common platform for team meetings.

     In the end, fundraisers and nonprofits can pick what they like. Chances are you already have done so.  But I would encourage experimentation. You can experiment just by meeting someone using a different platform, so be mindful of the features you see.  For example, while I like 8x8 for most of my purposes, I need to use Zoom for larger audiences, not only because of the capacity limit on 8x8, but also because Zoom has stronger audience management tools.

     My suggestion is not to feel obligated to keep to a particular platform. Fight the urge to feel “brand loyalty” and instead challenge the systems you use to serve the needs you have. Someone not very comfortable with technology and with limited IT resources may want the most “keep it simple” option, while others need more robust features.

     I’ll stop with a list of some to consider, and in the next blog, I’d like to explore innovative work from home practices. I have found that with the right mix of technology and culture change, working from home has provided more improvements than disadvantages.

Virtual Meeting Tools

     And if you would really like to explore the hundreds of options, see https://www.g2.com/categories/video-conferencing

Gary Grant has a BA from the University of Chicago and a JD from Illinois Tech's Chicago-Kent College of Law. He currently serves as Senior VP for Development for Florida Institute of Technology (Florida Tech). Founded at the dawn of the Space Race in 1958, Florida Tech is the only independent, technological university in the Southeast. In this role, he oversees all fundraising and leadership engagement for the University. Gary has authored several books on the use of the internet in nonprofits and fundraising.