My Experience Directing a Student Nonprofit Organization

As a freshman at Georgia Tech, I joined Bits of Good, a computer science organization. For the past year, I’ve served as BoG’s Executive Director, and last month, I handed the reins to my successor. When I joined three years ago, I could not have imagined the growth of both myself and the organization.

This article’s goal is to shine a light on what it means to direct a 150 person nonprofit organization in technology. I hope this will showcase the hardships but also the successes of this organization!

Background

Bits of Good is a student-run organization that connects students with nonprofits to provide pro-bono software engineering work. We are also a part of Hack4Impact, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit with a national collegiate presence.

When I joined, the club’s full member base barely filled a classroom with a sparse 25 students. Our nonprofit teams were just developers with a passion for using their technical skills in a real-world environment, passionate to help our local community.

As I grew as a person in the organization, I also grew in position. I spent some time as Director of Engineering and then Director of Product learning about the challenges the organization needed to address to grow.

Finally, at the end of my sophomore year, I transitioned into becoming the Executive Director, crucially giving me a summer to learn my position as well as create my plan for the organization.

Challenges

Before becoming the Executive Director, there were clear challenges that needed to be addressed in the organization. While there were obvious problems with engineering, product, design, etc., I believed they stemmed from core systematic questions that needed to be addressed:

1. How do we convince students during a busy academic semester to contribute to software development, product management, design, etc.?
2. How do we get the recognition and respect of nonprofits, the college, and adults in the field?
3. How do we create leadership that is more than one or two people?

At the same time, I had to answer personal questions regarding my job and how I was to address mistakes.

Culture

In a company, employees are paid to build software. They receive benefits, a full 40 hours, and no worries from an angry professor.

Now, how does a student organization convince those soon to be employees to take those allocated 40 hours in academics to essentially build a SAAS startup for nonprofit organizations?

What students potentially have to think about constantly

This is a hard problem. I asked industry PMs, other student directors, faculty, students, family, friends, etc. Nothing seemed to truly click until I was able to find Lazlo Bock’s Work Rules!

Mr. Bock is the former Senior VP of people operations at Google. In his chapter Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast, Mr. Bock establishes the tenets that created the Google culture we see today. He explained that it wasn’t the pop-culture artifacts of ping pong, video game breaks, free breakfast, etc. that many thoughts drove Google’s success.

Instead, he celebrated the organization’s mission, transparency, and trust.

Changes

With the tenets in mind, the first action was the creation of our mission.

The GT Bits of Good team aims to bridge the gap between Georgia Tech students and our Atlanta community.
By building relationships with local nonprofits, we are redefining social good for students who want to make a meaningful impact with their technical background.
Our organization develops real-world applications and promotes learning and mentorship at all levels, both from team members of diverse skillsets and from the close-knit, passionate club community.

Though with its flaws, the new leadership took hours and days with deliberation on values, plans, inspiration, and, most importantly, wording.

Our mission drove the plans for the next semester and led to the new divisions of product, marketing, and design to create the culture we needed as an organization.

Secondly, we tackled transparency with an ambitious plan of documentation and communication. Weekly updates, open documentation throughout the organization, and frequent 1:1 meetings were the new norm.

Lastly, transparency leads directly to trust, and I believe companies who can’t share information don’t trust their employees (or shouldn’t be trusted by the employees).

Now, these were not the only changes that happened, not by a long shot.

These changes, though, were the catalyst for all changes to follow.

My Job

Meetings, meetings, and more meetings.

Knowing a clear vision of our problems early on made my job very easy. Having established the clear five department heads in product, marketing, design, operations, and engineering, my task was to make sure they understood our problems and how they could solve these issues.

I found that my job was either to put the right people in the same room or decide whether that room needed to exist. All along, I encouraged but also challenged ideas.

I never shot down an idea. My goal every time I played devil’s advocate was to make sure they could see the problems when they tackled their endeavor.

This ended up being a lot of meetings.

I found myself having to be a realist far more than when I started as an idealist. Even though I kept my ideas, I found myself giving reservations to other bright-eyed individuals trying to give change.

Rather than trying to solve all the problems on my own, I trusted my friends and peers to solve them with me.

There will always be problems in an organization. When you fix a problem, you find that ten other problems became apparent because of it. Even if I identify a potential problem, sometimes it’s not your job to fix them.

Instead, it’s up to whoever is directly affected by the problem to address it.

My problems became the holes that no one could identify.

Mistakes

I made a ton of mistakes as the director:

1. I got our organization suspended from our computer science college because of our lack of communication.
2. I failed to balance personalities that led fights on the board to become personal rather than professional.
3. I never got legal help to help protect our organization and members.
4. I never emphasized to our organization the importance of social impact with technology.
5. I didn’t get the word out about the amazing work that Bits of Good was doing to the best of my ability.

While these mistakes were absolutely brutal, I learned far more important lessons that I use every day.

1. Over-communicate to stake-holders. Even when you don’t believe they need the information, there is always knowledge that can be effectively communicated.
2. 1:1 meetings are essential as a leader. When there is a conflict that seems personal, there needs to be a clear understanding that we’re all working to make sure the world is a better place with our work. Often times, conflicts breed from misinformation rather than actual misdeeds.
3. I needed to ask for help earlier. There were contracts that different chapters in Hack4Impact were using that could have been very useful.
4. There needs to be clear priorities that surround the mission that was set in place. Every now and then, you need to step back and check your priorities that can bring effective change to an organization.
5. You can’t do everything, and you have to rely on members responsible. It is, though, your responsibility to give those leaders the necessary resources to execute on their ideas. You also need to collaborate on what those ideas are and unify on the priorities.

Now, these are just a couple of mistakes that were more high level. These were not the day to day mistakes that also happened.

I found that mistakes were bound to happen, and the progress we made far overshadowed even my largest mistakes.

By the end of my time as director, I had accepted most of my mistakes.

The best advice to avoid mistakes is to always take the extra step forward even when it’s not expected of you. Mistakes should not bog down your mentality to improve, but rather, encourage yourself that you’re moving towards the right direction.

Conclusion

Entering college as a neuroscience major, I never imagined I would become involved in a computer science organization working with nonprofit organizations as a nonprofit organization.

Helping Bits of Good has been a privilege.

I wrote something for when I officially left the organization, so I’ll just leave that here.

Having been in Bits of Good my entire college career, I must say writing my farewell is a bit surreal. For the past three years, I've been lucky enough to work with peers who have been far smarter than me, building something our university has never seen. Just within the last year, we've achieved so much, persevering past many obstacles, but even so, there's still so much to do. Though it won't be apart of my responsibility anymore, Bits of Good is in stronger hands than when I first arrived. It gives me great pride to say I was a part of Bits of Good, and as I look forward, I know everyone will thrive beyond my wildest imagination. But most of all, I know they will always be doing a bit of good.

Bits of Good Members go up to Stone Mountain

Future Steps

While I’m leaving Bits of Good, I’m not leaving the social good space. I’m looking forward to spending the next year working with Hack4Impact to implement the changes that make BoG awesome to all chapters.

With 6 other chapters spread across the world(USA and Canada), I hope to progress our organization to gain the international attention it deserves!

Wish me luck!