In this episode of Executive with a Cause, host Tammy Ven Dange chats with Jessica Macpherson OAM, Founder and CEO of Blaze your Trail.
How did a request for a gift card spark a pursuit of automation, and what did migrant unemployment have to do with implementing digital transformation? In this episode, we hear all about Jessica Macpherson’s digital journey and how technology can support your organisation to achieve more with less.
With a strategic marketing background, Jessica recognised the power of technology to automate and improve business processes at St Kilda Mums. After initially relying on skilled volunteers for digital delivery, Jessica describes her learning journey to becoming more self-sufficient through Salesforce’s free Trailhead learning program. This eventually led her to her current social enterprise, Blaze your Trail.
From this, Jessica explains why organisations should take responsibility for learning the digital basics and continual IT investments to reflect the rapidly evolving landscape. Finally, we tie it together by hearing how NFPs can employ their technology success stories through free-licence opportunities from companies such as Salesforce.
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IT in Plain English
In this week’s segment, Tammy answers the question, ‘what is two-factor authentication?’. Two-factor authentication or ‘2FA’ enhances your organisation’s security by requiring a sign-in confirmation when using certain applications.
UPDATE: This is also called multi-factor authentication (MFA).
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Topics from this episode:
- 0.00 | Introduction
- 0.55 | St. Kilda Mums
- 04.21 | Achieving economies of scale with technology
- 13.20 | Transitioning into tech consultancy
- 17.22 | Advice for automating business processes
- 22.55 | Tracking inventory digitally
- 27.20 | Applying approaches to similar organisations
- 31.10 | Blaze your Trail
- 47.15 | IT in Plain English
Quotes from Jessica Macpherson in this episode:
“I really wanted my gear to go to someone who really needed a helping hand; I didn’t want to unnecessarily donate things to op shops because I knew that op shops don’t have the time. They don’t have the volunteer labour and have the skills to make sure everything’s clean and safe. So that’s how St Kilda Mums got started.”
“I often talk about economies in charities because we were entirely volunteer-run and are helping 1,000 babies and kids a year. That was incredible; that impact was incredible. But nowadays, the organisation helps 20,000 children and babies every year. And then in that time, you know, a growth of a factor of 20, the income or the revenue that it took to achieve that only grew by a factor of six. So that’s the real compounding, you know, like compounding interest. That’s the impact of professionalising. By hiring dedicated staff for whom it’s their job, it’s their focus, and getting the right people with the right skills into the right roles, you can really have an incredible impact. And that’s what all charities strive for.”
“The first two things I did in 2013 was get Salesforce for our CRM and get Xero for our accounting. And then I set about teaching myself, but I knew nothing. And I relied on volunteers, and a pattern started to emerge, which was that the skilled volunteers who were helping me customise our Salesforce, for instance, were getting employed quite quickly, within sort of three or six months of getting involved as a volunteer, they would be letting me know that that was their first job in Australia, a lot of these volunteers were migrants, you see, and they were looking for local work experience to help them break into the Australian workforce. And I realised that there was a double social good happening here, there was the fact that these skilled volunteers were helping us scale up and use technology for more and more good, but at the same time, it was helping them get the work experience they needed to demonstrate to employers that they were job ready.”
“We were in the right place at the right time. But we also wrote a very clear and concise plan for how we were going to achieve this and executed the plan. And it all came together very nicely. So yes, I have some experience in sales and marketing. And I was able to apply those skills to establish a charity, and that’s how that sort of played out.”
“With Blaze your Trail. It’s very important to me, you know, the generation of quality content, having a beautiful website, writing lots of stories, success stories and case studies, that all harks back to those early days of sales and marketing in the wine trade.”
“But the great thing about Salesforce today is you don’t have to be a software developer to use it. Because a lot of the tools are point-and-click. So you don’t have to know how to code; you just have to know how to design.”
“The fun and easy way to learn Salesforce is to get onto Trailhead, and it’s learning gamified, so you complete modules and projects, and you earn points and badges, and it’s very addictive. But it’s also an incredible resource. And there are lots and lots of other resources. A lot of resources are generated by the community of users themselves.”
“But I mean, the Not for Profit sector is always very collaborative. And we’re always very supportive of each other. But even between our sector in the for-profit sector and even between for-profit organisations itself, there’s a lot of collaboration in what Salesforce like to call the ecosystem. And it’s very welcoming.”
“So in the early years, I relied heavily on volunteers, I just told them what I would need, and they’d go away and build it. And then, in the last three or four years, I’ve been the one doing much more of the building. But even today, in Blaze your Trail, which only has four employees, me included, a lot of what we’re doing is helping people understand how they can digitise their business processes and opening them up to a new way of thinking. And in order to do that, you don’t have to be terribly technical. You just have to be able to translate business processes into a solution. And that’s a lot of what we’re doing.”
And I just realised that this was a colossal time suck. And surely it could be digitised and automated. And so for that, I built a solution, a technological solution. That meant that the first iteration and we talked about how you design and test and design and test and improve things all the way. What I realised was that when you don’t provide a solution to people, they make up their own solutions.”
“Something that you really have to appreciate is that the rate with which technological solutions are being innovative means that you actually never stop investing in your tech stack. Because something better and faster is going to come along …so you’ve got to be able to continually invest.”
“I saw these technology roles as being a real key to women empowerment, and COVID came along and just like put the exclamation mark at the end of what was possible.”
“I wanted to be part of a much longer-term solution to children growing up in poverty, which is their mums being able to work well paid, meaningful, flexible and stable employment.”
“What we see in Australia is migrants who have university qualifications and work experience in their home country but who are effectively locked out of the Australian workforce because they don’t have local experience. And these people are often highly qualified. They have Salesforce certifications, and they have a lot of transferable skills, but there’s nothing local because they moved here when they married, and they had children straight away. And because they’ve been out of the workforce for ten years, nobody will give them a shot.”
“Through volunteering with Blaze your Trail, assigning them to a pro bono project where they get to work with the client daily, weekly, build, solve, and support when it comes time for them to put in a job application, they have got two referees because they’ve got me and they’ve got the charity that they’ve been volunteering for. And the typical timeframe for somebody in my program to get their first job is between three and six months.”
“It’s such a rich learning environment for them because there’s nowhere else that they’re going to be able to have the opportunity to take requirements directly from a client; they get to do that at Blaze your Trail. Their clients our pro bono clients are so grateful for the support that they will be there at 6 am. They’ll be there in the 6 am class to describe their current problem or the current challenges. And they’ll be happy to be interrogated by our volunteers because they know that they’ll have a solution within a day or two. And that kind of skill, that access to that kind of skill is pretty rare.”
Links & Resources
- Connect with Jessica on Linkedin
- Visit the Blaze your Trail website
- Visit the St Kilda Mums website
- Learn about Salesforce’s Power of Us free licence program for eligible NFPs
- Register for Salesforce’s free Trailhead learning system
- Learn more about GoCanvas
Other Episodes Mentioned in this Show
- Watch our interview with Hannah Andrevski of Roundabout Canberra.
- Watch our interview with Heidi Prowse of MIEACT.
Credits
Thanks to our Producer, Nick Whatman, and the entire team at Lonsdale St. Studio. Thanks also to our Digital Content Creator, Laura Kleinrahm.
Tammy Ven Dange is a former charity CEO, Not for Profit Board Member and IT Executive. Today she helps NFPs with strategic IT and data decisions with her business, Roundbox Consulting.