DIY Digital Solutions for Arts & Non-profits: Q&A with Andy Farnsworth of Morning Strategy

If you operate or work with an arts-based business or non-profit, you likely have a lot of digital clutter - documents, spreadsheets, apps, etc. etc. etc. Wouldn't it be great if you could apply your creative skills to create a digital "home" for all of these important materials to help better manage your business or organization? That's what we'll be digging into during our December 4th workshop.

Led by one of our newest members, Andy Farnsworth of Morning Strategy (a work design and operations agency based in St. John's), this session will walk you through how to build a custom tool to help you get (and stay) organized and optimize your workflow, that's unique to you and your organization. This workshop is free to attend and will be hosted online via Zoom. (Click here to register for "DIY Digital Solutions for Arts & Non-profits.")

We recently caught up with Andy to learn more about his work with Morning Strategy and what participants can expect from his upcoming session.

Andy Farnsworth

Business & Arts NL: Can you tell our audience a bit about the work that Morning Strategy does and how it might apply to them?

Andy Farnsworth: I build tools to help people make sense of their lives. So these are digital tools - organizational apps, task managers, project managers, CRMs (customer relationship management tools) - that help structure things so people can  learn the stuff they need to do their jobs, but also where you can tie various pieces of information that might otherwise be spread around the periphery of your business into one place so that you can do the work you need to do. Often, my clients are small businesses/non-profits who maybe can't afford four or five different traditional software applications, and they might not need huge software packages; what they need is to represent these workflows that are core to them. So, let's say your non-profit offers a very specific program or service; we'll build a tool around that program or service to make it easier for your employees to do their work.

And then it extends beyond tool-building into operations design, organization design - helping people think through the tools and processes that they need in order to achieve their business missions and outcomes.

Usually my end goal is to help the individual people doing the work do their work better.

Business & Arts NL: You're going to be hosting a workshop for us on December 4. Can you tell us a bit about what people can expect?

AF: It's about helping artists and arts-based non-profits tie together their sort of disparate information into an organizational operating system - bringing together all of your contacts, your tasks, your funding applications into a single software tool that you can use to support your operations. And it's using free, no-code tools; so it doesn't require coding, really all you need is a computer and general computer literacy skills. If you can use a Google Doc or a Microsoft Word document or maybe a spreadsheet, then you'll be fine. So it's building this tool that will help you organize and track and manage all of these different components of operating an arts-based business or a non-profit digitally.

Part of where I come from is a creation lens. And so part of what I do is like a rejection of the sort of standard software programs that tell you how to manage your information. I want to build from your perspective, from the business or the artist perspective, and let them sort of create the thing in their image. It's like creating custom, bespoke tools that represent the way you feel about your work and the way you think about work. So that's what this workshop will do; instead of sending you out to get a template from someone for how to organize your business or to buy some other software application, it's like, let's take those three or four things that are core to the way you operate and the way you want to manage your business, and you build it yourself. You build a tool that matches your unique workflows.

Business & Arts NL: Morning Strategy offers a range of other workshops that cover a variety of topics. What do some of these offer and how do they help individuals or teams?

AF: I think it ties back to the difference between my agency and a lot of others, where I'm happiest when an engagement finishes and the organization doesn't need me anymore because they have learned some skill or technique, or learned the tools that they can build in themselves. So a lot of my workshops focus on taking either traditional tools, like a contact management system or CRM, and turning them into learning tools so that the people using them are continually prompted to learn more about both the basic work - which is managing contacts and companies within your network - but also how to improve the system over time and how to better understand your own relationship with whatever the workflow is.

Most of the workshops are split into two buckets. One is really practical workshops about how to make a specific thing - so it's a CRM, it's a wiki knowledge base for your company, a place where people can go internally to find the information that they need, project and task managers... and then the second bucket is more like conceptual workshops about how to think differently about your work. So one of them is this AI sandbox workshop…the idea is less about learning specific techniques for using AI as it is about creating a place to experiment and learn for yourself.

Business & Arts NL: Looking at the tools and the work you do, it seems collaboration is also a big part of what you do. Can you tell us more about that?

AF: Some of the biggest challenges in collaborating, I think, are understanding other people's perspectives within the organization. So I always try to, within these tools, help people represent what it is they do and their unique perspective, so that that sort of lens is obvious to everyone else within the system. A collaborative system is going to be most beneficial when the people who are entering it can see the other people clearly and understand what they do.

I'm always looking at how to take the work from a process lens that might move from, say, department to department, or span individual roles, and figure out how to tie that together into a sort of seamless workflow; and help the people within that process or workflow understand what's happening upstream from them and what's happening downstream - especially relating it to what your end goal is, who the customer is, and what your business mission values are.

Workshop: DIY Digital Solutions for Arts & Non-profits
Date/Time: Wednesday, December 4 from 1-2pm NST
Location: Online via Zoom
Price: Free
Registration: Click here to register for the workshop "DIY Digital Solutions for Arts & Non-profits"