No Curiosity in Shame: Teaching Digital Skills

This article is part of a series by members of the Okta for Good Nonprofit Technology Fellowship.

“Any other questions before we wrap up?” I had just spent an hour talking with an executive director about her organization’s information management systems.

“Not a question, just a comment,” she replied. “Thank you for this hour today. Honestly, it felt like therapy. I feel really relieved and even a bit excited about what we can do with technology.”

The people who run small nonprofits are having big feelings about tech. We don’t typically think of databases, spreadsheets and CRMs as topics that demand emotional vulnerability, but maybe we should.

For 10 years, I’ve helped small nonprofits (typically fewer than 10 employees and less than $1,000,000 operating budgets) develop digital skills. Organizations of this size make up the vast majority of the world’s nonprofits—the kind of organizations that can be found in every community, providing a huge breadth of services, and touching all of our lives in some way. I began noticing that many of the leaders I work with are ashamed to talk about their challenges with technology. Their responses to seemingly simple questions, like “what CRM do you use?” or “do you have a password manager?” are drenched in embarrassment and defensiveness.

These leaders are typically experts in their respective fields—hospice care, grass-roots organizing, youth mentorship, anti-oppression and anti-racism, etc.—but they’ve struggled to keep pace with technological change. Who can blame them? New digital technologies are revolutionizing the way the world works, and the pandemic has only accelerated the rate of change. This digital skills gap threatens the ability of nonprofits to keep up with community needs and expectations, but recent efforts to address the digital skills gap have been missing a critical aspect.

My therapist once said, “There is no curiosity in shame.” Shame short-circuits our ability to be vulnerable, which, in turn, prevents us from learning.

Think of the last time you made a fool of yourself. Maybe you tripped in front of a patio teeming with diners. Maybe you forgot someone’s name who you should have known. Most of us recall embarrassment and scrunch up our faces, wrinkle our noses, and squeeze our eyes shut at the shame we experienced in those moments. Even the memory of shame is visceral.

I brought up this idea of shame in the context of technology training in a conversation with some colleagues not long ago. One of them exclaimed, “Yes!” and told us a story of training an organization on a new database. All the organization’s staff was present, from the executive director to the part-time bookkeeper.

“It was so remarkable,” my colleague noted. “The ED completely sabotaged the session.”

“How so?” I asked.

“They were struggling to keep up with the concepts I was introducing to them: merge fields, user group permissions, field types—that kind of thing. I watched them become increasingly sullen, defensive and critical of me, the tool and the entire training process.”

That ED’s negative behavior was a symptom of shame. The learning opportunity was lost not because the ED wasn’t capable or interested, but because they felt embarrassed. There’s no curiosity in shame.

For what it’s worth, I used to teach literature and writing at the university level, and, in my experience, lack of technology knowledge is much more likely to trigger a shame response than lack of knowledge in other subjects.

The issue of shame surrounding digital literacy is further complicated, and, perhaps, partially explained by the fact that women constitute the majority of nonprofit staff at every level. For women in particular, their earliest experiences with technology or data concepts may not have been a positive one.

I’ve worked with many female nonprofit leaders over the past decade who have successfully adopted new technologies and ways of working digitally. I believe they succeeded because we moved at their pace, using accessible metaphors, avoiding jargon and giving them hands-on experience using no-code cloud tools. These tactics allowed them to move out of shame and to embrace curiosity around technology. Some of them, like me, even came to embrace technology as a part of their professional identities. Critically, they now feel that the digital revolution includes them too.

In order to achieve the kind of large-scale re-skilling of the nonprofit workforce so that they can embrace and leverage digital tools, we need a whole-person approach to technology training and one that is grounded in the lived experiences of nonprofit staff and contextualized within the nonprofit operating context.

—

Aine McGlynn is a Toronto-based "accidental techie" with more than ten years of experience in small nonprofit fundraising, management, partnerships, board governance, impact reporting and program development. Since 2016 she has been working hands-on with small charities to choose, implement and maintain digital solutions to their operational challenges.

Featured