What role do consultants play in technology training?

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This week I've decided to focus on the role that consultants play in helping nonprofits manage or engage with technology.

My first post on the subject focused on the role that consultants play in finding the right technology for their clients. We have come a long way in ten years when I first started selling to nonprofits where subject matter experts in specific platforms are becoming less influential and there are fewer RFPs and RFIs occurring in the sales process for small shop nonprofits to choose from.

An unscientific poll on Twitter also showed that there is not one specific place that nonprofits will go to learn where to buy technology, with peer recommendations and product demonstrations playing an important role.

Yet, for my deeper dive, I wanted to go a different path. I had originally planned on doing a round-up of all my favorite consultants and their expertise, with categorization and links to their specializations. I still want to do that but something else caught my eye after I posted a thread this morning on Twitter about training.

How Tech Training Has Changed

When I joined the nonprofit technology world on the vendor side in 2011, the landscape looked very different than it does today. Finding reviews for technology was typically confined to a few community forum posts and videos on functionality were hard to come by.

Learning to use technology also was very different. We had requests for PDF downloads of guides as well as user manuals. I even had to talk about tax designations being different for cloud-based software because there wasn't a physical manual to mail people (that too has changed).

The biggest impact has been the rise of video and learning management systems that pair with that. Nowadays, many vendors put video basics together on YouTube or have a full LMS where someone can guide themselves through basic functionality.

Self-guided learning is just one way that people learn, but as this video outlines different sensory and psychological elements go into learning that most technology companies have not thought through in their training programs.

This means that we cannot rely on learning management systems alone to ensure that people feel comfortable with tools and technology.

That's where consultation comes in.

The Role Of Consultant In Training

I'm linking to the thread that changed my focus today, where T. Clay Buck, CFRE rightfully pointed out that every nonprofit has specific needs and expertise and personalization requirements that require special care and attention that only consultation can provide.

For this post, I'm not going to get into the BUSINESS of this. A whole set of friction points between independent consultants and vendors need to be ironed out and that is something that can be tackled another day.

Consultation in this context can be defined as "a meeting with an expert or professional, such as a medical doctor, in order to seek advice."

This leads to where the real evolution is going to occur, which is that training is going to shift to advisory guidance in the coming years. I feel that with the right approach to curriculum design, a set of basic guides and hands-on experiences can make even the most ardent Luddite comfortable with technology.

Yet, what needs to happen is to align those basics with the operational goals of the organization. We need to focus on providing intelligence and enablement to nonprofits, respecting that they have the inner capability to become great at things like data management if they prioritize it.

Investing into training, professional development, and drilling into passionate expertise to become an organizational expert at something is going to become more important in the coming years. The role of a technology vendor is to ensure that this is equitably available and affordable to anyone who wants it. Consultation then becomes a critical investment around how to best accelerant the role that technology plays in operations.

Where Next?

I hope that we can find a proper balance that centers on the needs of the nonprofit itself first and foremost. Conversations about who owns what will not matter if the ultimate goal of helping create sustainability and growth is not first addressed.

I also have watched with growing concern as vendors become the "go-to" in many forms of professional development in our sector. As the membership and influence of professional associations wane as our sector's information sources further balkanize, there needs to be a recommitment toward what a healthy career path looks like.

Vendors can play a healthy role in this development and that is why I'm excited about how we've been approaching the design at conferences like Generosity Xchange, but ultimately this needs to be addressed in a sector-wide approach where all stakeholders are involved in the goals and objectives of what this future looks like.