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Real business owners. Real bottlenecks. Fixed on camera.
Each week Paul sits down with a guest who's stuck — in manual work, disconnected tools, or processes their business has outgrown. They diagnose it live, map the fix, and start building. No theory, no fluff, no generic AI takes. Just the exact solution Paul would build for a paying client, handed over for free on camera.
Every episode is a case study your ICP can't stop watching — because it's their business on the screen.
PAUL KORTMAN
(00:00):
They now have the stories to tell to their donors and potential donors because the dots are all connected. And so they can say, "Hey, you donated four years ago to this cohort. Here's what's happened in the four years since that cohort attended and the output of all of that." That narrative is just a way better story for donation increase or for applying for donors. And so I'm so excited to have been a part of this project because of the mission and the donation potential behind it. Every business has inefficient processes, limited hours and technology that really isn't pulling its weight. This is Connex the Dots where real problems meet real solutions used by real businesses. So I'm Paul Kortman. Let's Connex some dots.
(01:02):
If you've ever had that experience where you're banging your head up against the wall trying to figure out why this system is so disconnected, why there's spreadsheets everywhere, why, why? Why is this so frustrating? Stay tuned. Today's story is for you because not only did we simplify their lives, combine everything, Connex the dots for them, but we did it all in about half the time of what we were allotted. Let's Connex some dots. So setting the scene for this, we didn't actually speak with the nonprofit first. The first contact that we had was the grant writer. And so the grant writer was hired by this nonprofit to write for a grant to try to apply for a grant. So he was explaining this whole nonprofit to us that he wasn't intimately involved with. And we helped him write the grant and then a year later they won the grant.
(01:58):
And so the executive director contacted me and said, "Hey, we won this grant. We're ready to go. " And I was like, "Who are you? " Because we hadn't spoken before. So it was a kind of a fun situation of where they were so excited that they won this grant and they're a small nonprofit, but I had to get to know the nonprofit again to figure out what we're doing, but it was also time allotted. We had to complete all the billing and all the work within six months and we were already a month into it. So now we're down to five months. By the time the executive director got notified and was able to connect with me, we'd lost a month of that six month window. So now her biggest concern was, "Hey Paul, we're down to five months. Can we do this? " And we didn't even have the scope of what it was because it was a year ago that we wrote the grant.
(02:58):
So who was this nonprofit? What is this? Et cetera. We're dealing with a small nonprofit that works with over 600 students in New York City, mostly female and gender expansive youth. And good luck trying to coordinate 20 students. They're trying to coordinate 600 students. They had dozens of spreadsheets between parents and registration, between teachers and attendance, between administration and trying to figure out what was going on. So let's just say getting to know this nonprofit was fun at the beginning because we didn't even know what they were doing yet. But basically they're running camps and afterschool programs to help young females and gender expansive youth learn music, perform music, do music and tech. So kind of lifting them up in both tech and music. We were surprised because we got notified a month into this. And for those of you who work with nonprofits and governments and government funding, yeah, perhaps that's no surprise except just because they only found out a month in does not mean that the deadline got extended.
(04:16):
So we had even forgotten about this project because we had quoted it a year ago and now here we are a month into a project that we didn't know we were awarded. So it was a good way to start, let's say that. So when you think of spreadsheets and you think of running an organization on spreadsheets, whether that's a business or a nonprofit, you might think, okay, well, this person owns this spreadsheet and this person's responsible for that spreadsheet. And so if I need information from a spreadsheet or to know, hey, what's the current version? I go talk to that person. And let's do a little record scratch here.
(04:58):
In this organization, there weren't owners of given the spreadsheets. It was just kind of cobbled together. And so some teachers did it their way, some administrative staff did it their way. They did have some Google Forms, but that output it to a spreadsheet that then people would copy from to create attendance sheets or to create rosters or whatever. And so there were, I will say a dozen spreadsheets, but there were dozens of versions of each spreadsheet. And so it was just a challenge with the spreadsheets alone who was in charge and what was going on. So if you're familiar with nonprofits at all, they have to report a lot or you'll know that they have to report on what success they had, how many students did they serve, what did they do, et cetera. Those reports would take hours and hours and hours because you had to find the information from each teacher, from each admin, from each parent and try to pull all this together so that you could produce a report that was super tedious work and didn't really help them serve the youth that they're serving.
(06:18):
One of the things I didn't talk about here was the versioning of them. So if one person pulls this version of the spreadsheet and it's two versions old and it doesn't have the right students on there and so they write a report based on that and they're missing a dozen students. And so then someone comes in and says, "Well, wait, that's not the right number." And so now they have to do it all over again. And just the tedium of finding the right version, the most accurate data, getting it right the first time, hopefully, it was just too much. And when I say a small staff, they had three admins. Everybody else's teachers and directly involved with the mission. They had three people trying to coordinate this to be able to serve 600 students. It was a lot of overhead for day-to-day tasks. Initially, they tried to coordinate and do more organization through spreadsheets.
(07:18):
You have to be happy that they actually turned two spreadsheets. That's better than a document. It's better than they typed it out in a Word doc or a Google Doc or something. Okay, so they're on spreadsheets. That was their first try, first attempt. Then they moved to Google Forms where they could collect data from the parents and have it submitted. There's a ton of problems that Google Forms can create. For example, they needed to submit multiple students from each parent. And then now they have this form for that site or for that class at that site. And then they have another form for a different class at a different site. And so now they have these separate spreadsheets with form data and they merge them, but they named fields different in different forms because different people built them or they were built six months apart and now the columns don't line up.
(08:18):
And so for half of your data in this master spreadsheet, you have the student age in one column and the other half you have date of birth in that same column or in a different column. And so you have to calculate their age. It just these tiny, minor seemingly difficulties that when multiplied and done every year, every month with every student, with every family, not to mention some teachers were taking attendance handwritten and the spelling of names does not always match up with what someone else has in a spreadsheet. That was one of the big problems that they had is that a parent would submit this spelling of the student name. The teacher would have a different spelling of that same student and the administration would have a third spelling because a parent called in. And so now they have three different records that is one student.
(09:21):
So they have to manually crosscheck all of these spreadsheets and make sure they're dealing with unique students, not similarly named individual students. And so everywhere we turned, everything they tried worked better slightly, but then introduced more problems. And that's when we showed up. So you may think like, oh wow, that's really a hassle. Poor administration, poor teachers, poor volunteers who have annoying things that they have to do in spreadsheets. But that's not what was at risk. It wasn't just the fact that these teachers and staff had difficult jobs. It was that if they don't do the reporting, if the reporting is inaccurate, if the funders didn't get data back, they would lose their funding. And so then the whole nonprofit would evaporate. It's very difficult for nonprofits to get funding for maybe let's call it operational expenses or operational upgrades. And that's what this grant was set aside for.
(10:35):
A tech improving tech at a nonprofit. That was the whole idea behind this grant, which is rare to find a grant that does that, that you are just improving the tech behind the nonprofit, which we all know that that would actually help the nonprofit serve more people, but that doesn't come out in the numbers right away. You can easily get funding to say, "Hey, you're going to help 13 girls go to camp this summer. This is how it's going to change their lives." Okay, people will fund that. But to sell someone on, "Hey, you're going to help us serve 600 youth? Well, what if I don't fund it? We would serve them anyways. We would just hate our lives." It doesn't sell as well. And so the fact that they got this funding that we're going to dramatically improve their day-to-day lives as well as the reporting means not only is the nonprofit going to exist in the future because they can report, but then they can also spend that time that right now they're spending on reporting or previously they were spending on reporting.
(11:48):
They can now spend that time on fundraising or on actually doing the mission with the girls and the expansive youth that previously they were spending all this time in reporting, which isn't actually doing the mission and isn't actually fundraising to expand the mission, but they're spending all this time on reporting. With what we solved, what we helped them with this database system, now they're able to either expand by fundraising or expand the mission by working with the girls and the gender expansive youth to be able to lift them up in both music and tech before we get into the results of this case study. If your team is spending time on manual process checks like these supervisors are, Connex Digital actually offers free process audits where we'd love to help. The link is in the show notes. So once we figured out, kind of wrapped our brains around what the problem was, all these spreadsheets, all this complication, all this weird data that they have to merge and try to figure out, that was the problem.
(12:58):
That was our step one is we have to clean this all up and have a place to store this. So we settled on a database structure, a database system. So we had to start with something. And when you have all these dispersed spreadsheets with weird data and you have to report it and put it all together, we started with, okay, we need a database, a centralized system where all the data goes to make it easier for reporting. That was a fundamental that we knew we needed to start with. Once we knew we needed a database, the choice was fairly straightforward as to which system we were going to use. We ended up going with Airtable. There's a lot of alternatives that you can pick from, but for this nonprofit, the pricing was fantastic, but also the usability was great. So we went with Airtable. And ironically, the plan initially was to build out the database structure and then to roll it out and then to do importing of data, old historical spreadsheets.
(14:09):
And our consultant, we call them consultant, but my teammate who started this project, she actually decided, "You know what? I'm going to import these spreadsheets and create the structure around the data as I import them." And that is what really made this process a whole lot more smoother because as she was importing the spreadsheets, she realized different data points, different areas, different potential issues, and was able to cut all that off. It wasn't just we made a plan that was disconnected from reality. We took real data and as we were pulling it in, built the database around it. With all database structure, you have to simplify it to objects. What are the different objects that we're dealing with? And so as my colleague was importing those spreadsheets, she kept figuring out, okay, well, this is an attendance sheet and so we need an attendance object.
(15:07):
Well, obviously we need a student object because those students are in this class, but they're enrolled in the class and the class is actually part of a program. So we ended up with four objects. We have students, programs, enrollments, which connects students to those programs and then attendance, which is a different object for each day related to the enrollment. Once we settled on those four objects, it became a lot clearer as to what we needed to build as far as interfaces, how users would sign up for how parents would sign up their students and enroll them, and then also how teachers would interact with attendance. So the kind of fun part about this is by importing those spreadsheets, settling on a simple four object plan or four object structure, it really enabled us to make a much more simplified experience and interface for the admin, for the teachers, for the staff, for the parents.
(16:12):
And now the reporting is a breeze because these objects are all connected. And the fun part that came through all of this is that not only are they able to report on this summer, because it's summer when we're recording this, it's summer when we finish the build, they're actively using this system for this summer, but their reporting goes back five years in their active system. Maybe I didn't make this clear, but it wasn't just we took last year's spreadsheets and imported it. We took all their archived, all their retroactive data and imported it because their patterns showed up in how people were using spreadsheets. And they kind of had, well, this is the 2024, 2025 year. And so we were able to import that data in and now they can run reports that they never envisioned of, okay, how this student from 2024, where they ended up in 2026, or what are our numbers in this course this year versus four years ago?
(17:25):
So it wasn't just, "Hey, we need to report this year," which is what that's what they actually asked for. That's what the problem was is we need to report data on this year, the active students. Instead, now they're able to report on data they hadn't even thought of like tracking a student through multiple years. They hadn't even dreamed of that. When we told them we could do it, they got really excited, but it was like we didn't want to dream that big. And we're like, "Well, it's here. You can do it if you want. " Oftentimes our clients come to us and they've tried multiple different systems along the way, whether it's every year they're trying a new software or for these three years they ran on this program and for those four years they ran on this program. And sometimes they'll have that data exported in a zip or just in a database sitting somewhere that they still have access to, or even in spreadsheets like in this case.
(18:24):
And so we had found the systems that we build, we're still able to import that old data into so that they can do the reporting. This is something that's actually fairly common for us to do. Usually it works more along the lines of we build a system and then we import. In today's case study, part of building the system was the data import. And that happens probably fifty fifty time. Imagine for your business, if you wanted to build a new system and you feel, oh, all this legacy retroactive data, I'm going to lose it. Nope, we'll take that along the journey with us. Back to the nonprofit. Not only were we able to pull in their retroactive data to help with reporting to make their lives better, to do reports they never thought they could do. We also heard from the alumni tracking and the contact tracking and the donor management side that they were missing an aspect.
(19:29):
And it's like we can add that to the system at no additional cost because the system is flexible because it's built in such a way. So I talked about four objects. We ended up adding a contacts object. So there's a fifth object where the admin can track donors, can track their alumni to be able to say, okay, they graduated our program. They attended our summer school three years ago. Where are they now? What are they doing? And then that enriches their reporting where they're not required to give that kind of data of how many students did you teach how to play the drum to? That's kind of more the basic reporting, but now they're able to say, "Hey, by the way, one of our alumni who went through our program in the summer of 2024 now is at the Julliard School of Dance or something.
(20:29):
And she only though she could do that after going through our program." They had no way of capturing those stories and those data points. And so with a simple object creation in a database, a simple interface on top of that, the alumni coordinator, the donor coordinator, who happened to be the same person, they're able to now track those alumni and have a place to store that data and a place to report that data in a very, very simple and easy interface. Again, without spreadsheets that'll get lost all connected to this one place so we can actually report the outcome of a cohort from 2024. We can see if any of them became donors, if any of them are in college or university or what the story is with that entire cohort. So this is kind of magic for this nonprofit, but for us, it's what we do every day.
(21:31):
As the case with a lot of the projects that we work on, and specifically this project, what we were able to do was connect the dots. Basically they had all these spreadsheets that were disconnected. Let's call those dots. They had objects and people and information that was dots that were disconnected. We put them all into a database, we put them into a system, we connected them and made it easier for them to interface with it. And what that ended up doing, well, it's early days. And it's kind of sad that I'm coming to you three weeks after we finished this project and not a year from now, maybe I'll come back and follow up with this. But they now have the stories to tell to their donors and potential donors because the dots are all connected. And so they can say, "Hey, you donated four years ago to this cohort.
(22:28):
Here's what's happened in the four years since that cohort attended and the output of all of that. " That narrative is just a way better story for donation increase or for applying for donors. And so I'm so excited to have been a part of this project because of the mission and the donation potential behind it. But we do that on a day-to-day basis for all kinds of businesses where we connect the dots. We take disconnected data, connect it, make it simpler, make it flow and actually have a workflow in there. You might think, "Hey, what is a nonprofit working in New York trying to help girls learn music and tech? What do they need automation for? " What we build is workflow automation. We help smooth out processes and that's what we did for them. We'd be happy to do the same for you. As we wind this up, let's talk about the real numbers here.
(23:31):
Yeah, 600 youth that they average impacting every year. But from a nonprofit business owner perspective, with this system in place, we estimate that we save four to six hours per staff member per week. And so if you math it out and do all of that, we're saving them over $13,000 a year. That's $13,000 in their operating expenses that well, you could do lots of different things with. They could take that staff, keep paying them that same amount of hours, but now they're able to go fundraise or now they're able to work with more students because they have more time. Or you could actually reduce the amount of effort that the admin staff is putting in and now that 13,000 you don't have to raise again next year or whatever. Obviously talked with the executive director, they're going bigger. They're always trying to expand. And so they're repurposing their staff hours into both the mission and donations.
(24:42):
But think of that, what would you do to build a system that makes everybody's life easier and saves you $13,000 a year? So if you're listening to this and thinking, "Hey, there's areas in my nonprofit or my business where I could use a system like that or optimization or workflow automation, reach out and we'll show you how we can connect the dots for you, your business, and give you some of this real tangible either time back or money back in your pocket. When you optimize these systems, when you run these workflow automations, it puts real money either in your pocket or gives you real time back. Let's Connex some dots. So if you're listening to this and you want to understand more about how to practically improve the efficiencies inside your business, check out our other episodes. That's what they're here for. But if you're ready to start, reach out.
(25:41):
We offer a no-cost consultation and I'd be happy to help you.