Not-for-Profit Navigator
With Nicole Aebi-Moyo - SalesFix For Purpose Practice Lead
I’m sure we’ve all sat in a meeting where a genuinely good idea has died a death. Not because it was a bad idea, but because of how it was pitched.
Someone, usually the person who has done the most homework, stands up in front of the board with a vendor quote and a slide full of features. Modules. Licences. A number with a lot of zeros. You can watch the heads start to drop, the multi-tasking start, the glazed look in the eyes.
The questions start. “Do we really need all of this?” “What if it doesn’t work?” “Can’t we just carry on with what we’ve got?” Fifteen minutes later the project is “parked for further discussion”, which we all know is where projects go to quietly die.
I’ve been on both sides of that scenario. Years ago, my last role in the UK was to find and manage the implementation of a new website and a new CRM inside a single year. I learned very quickly that the technology was the easy part. Getting the people who held the purse strings to actually believe in it, that was the job.
A cautious board is doing its job
Here’s something I wish more of us said out loud: a risk-averse board is not being difficult, they are being responsible.
When only one in four organisations feels financially secure (NFP Resilience Report by the Australian Communities Foundation), and every second headline is about a merger or a funding squeeze, a director who waves through a six-figure technology spend on the strength of a nice demo isn’t being bold, they’re being reckless. The caution is sensible, and if you’re the one pitching, treating it as an obstacle to get around is a fast way to lose the room.
The problem was never the caution. The problem is that we keep handing boards the wrong thing to be cautious about.
A few months back I sat down with Tammy Ven Dange, and one thing she said has stuck with me ever since: better to tell your board the true cost up front than to tell them six months later that the budget is gone and you’re running behind. Boards hate surprises. But they also hate vagueness. A slide full of modules and features manages to be both expensive and vague at the same time, which is about the worst thing you can put in front of a nervous director.
They are not buying technology
When a board says no to a CRM, they are almost never saying no to a CRM. They’re saying “I don’t understand what this changes, and I can’t tell whether it’s worth the risk.”
So stop selling them the CRM.
No board in history has been genuinely excited about a database. What they care about, what they are actually accountable for, is the mission and what’s going to help the organisation get there: more raised; a team that isn’t drowning in admin; better outcomes for the people you serve; and/or a smaller chance of the data or compliance disaster that ends up in their minutes, or even worse, in the headlines. Technology is the enabler. It is never the star. The moment you lead with the platform instead of the outcome, you’ve made your own case harder to say yes to.
Back in autumn I wrote about the difference between owning a platform and renting a point solution, and why the ongoing, month on month return matters far more than the sticker price on day one. A board that only sees the sticker price will always flinch. A board that can see the return will lean in. Your entire job in that room is to move their attention from the first number to the second.
So show them the value
Easy to say. Much harder to do at 4pm on a Tuesday, with fifteen minutes on the agenda and a director who still calls it “the computer system”.
This is the part we spend a lot of our time on with clients, and it’s honestly the part I find most interesting, so we ended up building a tool for it. We call it the Value Map Builder, and it does something deceptively simple: it forces the conversation to start with the goal, in the organisation’s own words, rather than with the technology.
You take one strategic goal at a time and work on defining what success there mean for the team. What’s the situation right now, and where does it actually hurt? What would you need to be able to do that you can’t do today? What genuinely changes for your clients, your supporters, your team? And then the question boards care about most: where does the value land? More raised, hours handed back to an overstretched team, a better experience for the people you serve, or risk and wasted spend taken off the table.
From there you put real numbers to it, over a sensible horizon rather than a fantasy one. You weigh each goal by the value it creates against the effort it takes, so you’re not trying to boil the ocean, you’re starting where the return is clearest and proving it before you expand. And you finish on the one thing that shifts a boardroom more than anything else: what it costs you to do nothing. The cost of inaction is the number that turns “let’s park it” into “we can’t afford to wait”.
What comes out the other end is a single, plain page you can put in front of a board. Goals, value, priority, all in language they recognise, because it started as their language. Not a feature list, a case to move forward.
As we define the value to be derived and the complexity to deliver, we can plot them on a chart to see which make sense to deliver and put goals in priority order.
There’s a side effect I’ve come to appreciate too. It makes you ask the slightly uncomfortable questions early: why are we investing in technology? How is this going to help us achieve our goals? What happens if we don’t? Far better to sit in that discomfort in a workshop than to discover the answer six months after go-live.
If you’re staring down a board pitch and the thought of turning a vendor quote into a value case fills you with a bit of dread, that’s exactly the conversation I like having. Reach out.
If you need any assistance understanding anything in this edition of NFP Navigator please reach out at nicole.aebi-moyo@salesfix.com.au, I am always happy to help.
Until next time,
Nicole
Coming Up in 2026
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