Leader Spotlight: Leading product in a nonprofit organization, with Don Boulia

Don Boulia is Chief Product and Technology Officer at Charity Navigator, an independent evaluator of US-based charities. He began his career in software development at Acroscience before joining Mathsoft as a technical director. Don then spent over 20 years at IBM, where he worked in various areas including software development, product management, middleware, and cloud engineering. In addition to his current role at Charity Navigator, he also serves as an adjunct professor to master’s students in electrical and computer engineering at Duke University.

In our conversation, Don talks about his transition from working in product management at for-profit organizations, like IBM, to a nonprofit environment. He discusses how he introduced a formal product management function to Charity Navigator, as well as how he measures success when profit is not the ultimate goal.

Measuring success in nonprofit organizations

Your time at Charity Navigator marks your first experience working for a nonprofit organization. What surprised you the most when you first made this transition?

The biggest transition for me was understanding the difference in terminology. In our world, we don’t talk about profit. Instead, we focus on revenue. That shift in language was a significant adjustment, especially from a product management perspective. Another key difference is the mission component. Charity Navigator’s mission is to make impactful giving easier for all by providing comprehensive ratings. Many corporations have mission statements outlining their goals, but in the nonprofit sector, there’s a deeper sense of altruism. The reasons organizations exist often stem from a broader purpose, and those values don’t always translate directly into revenue.

How do you measure the mission? What does that mean? How do you balance the revenue versus the mission? There’s always this chicken-and-egg conversation with somebody who is mission-driven. They’ll say, “Well, it’s all about the mission,” but then on the other side of it, if you don’t make revenue, you can’t further the mission. How do you balance those two? That’s a constant discussion point.

Also, when you have a mission statement in a for-profit corporation, aside from the ethical boundaries of making sure you stay in line, you don’t really bring that up in the day-to-day conversation about whether the product is going to make a profit or not. That’s probably been the biggest change for me — figuring out how to incorporate the mission into the product management process.

What types of KPIs or success metrics do you track now, and how does that differ from what you might track in a for-profit organization?

The typical definition of a product is all about profit. It’s not just about revenue, but what it takes to achieve that revenue and what kind of profit margin you have. I worked in a big enterprise, and that was a huge driver. We would not even enter some product spaces, not because they weren’t interesting, but because the profit margin wasn’t interesting to us.

Without profit as a factor, you have to look at different metrics. Charity Navigator runs similarly to an ecommerce business in terms of how we present ourselves. There’s a website, and there are things you can do on the website that generate revenue for us. So, we can still measure conversion rates and the proverbial funnel. However, the conversion is a little different because it’s about people donating to nonprofits that we’ve rated. We encourage donors to contribute to causes they care about. We also hope that they’ll consider donating to us as well, recognizing the value we offer and the impact of our work.

And then for impact, which is hard to measure, we think about reach. That’s not necessarily a true conversion metric, but we look at how many people we influence and can get that message out to. The impact part of it is a slightly different KPI than one might use for other things in a for-profit space.

How are you assessing reach in that way?

Some of it is still site traffic. How many people do we actually influence? We also look at different types of channels. We do a lot of outreach on social media, depending on the event. If there’s a natural disaster or a major world event going on, those things generate news, and those news outlets tend to come to places where they can get an assessment of who’s the right place to give money to and how to ensure your donation maximizes its impact.

We can actually get our message out there further in those kinds of circumstances with news outlets, for example. We look for those opportunities and partner with other nonprofits to expand our reach as well. It’s all about how many people we were able to touch in a set of actions that gets the message out about both Charity Navigator as an entity, but also the nonprofits that we believe are the best in class.

Introducing a formal product management function

How did your stakeholder management strategy change when you shifted to the nonprofit space?

In this particular instance, we didn’t have a history of product management in the organization. As a result, even having a conversation about who the stakeholders are, what we’re doing this for, and who we’re targeting was an interesting conversation. There was definitely a bit of an “aha” moment in there. Having that clarity and identifying the products that we have was important.

We did a first pass of who our stakeholders are and the things we have for them currently. Once we identified those, we did an exercise to map the relationship we want with each of these stakeholders. For example, we think of nonprofits more like partners than revenue generators because we need them for the rating system. We work with them on that, but the donors are where revenue happens. They’re the ones who make donations to nonprofits.

We also have foundations as stakeholders, so people who are interested in the work that we do, who are helping to further that.

You alluded to the fact that there was no product management function at Charity Navigator before you joined the team. Beyond what you’ve already mentioned, what were some of the first steps you took to introduce the concept of product management to the organization?

The first thing I did was take inventory of the roles we had in the organization. While most people didn’t have a product management background, there were things we were doing within the organization that were product-focused. We did have a concept of a product owner, but because we’re a fairly small nonprofit, it wasn’t feasible to create a bunch of new roles just for product management. I knew we’d have to shape this function based on the people we already had on board, so we worked to redefine the roles to put more of an emphasis on product management.

After that, we focused on educating everyone on product management terminology. We had a very interesting debate about what a product is. I also had to change my terminology because profit wasn’t the primary driver here. We came up with basically a set of criteria of what makes a product versus something else. As I said, we are like an ecommerce platform, and in part of my education, I found analogies to be very helpful. While nobody had a product management background, everybody shops online, so analogies made it easier for everyone to understand the distinction between products, platforms, etc.

While Charity Navigator primarily rates nonprofits, the rating system is one feature of our platform. It’s similar to reading reviews before purchasing a product — invaluable, and likely to influence your decision. However, the core product we offer is the donation itself, which donors can make through our Giving Basket platform. This shift was challenging for some to understand because Charity Navigator’s original mission focused entirely on the rating system, and now also includes the Giving Basket to make giving easier.

Thinking like a product organization

What practices or rituals did you prioritize introducing first when you started to introduce product management more formally?

We were lucky enough to have an agile approach within the organization, which started with engineering and eventually grew to other parts of Charity Navigator. Things like stand-ups and sprints were already in place before I joined. What was missing, however, was a roadmap. Now, we reference our roadmap constantly and keep it up to date. If we’re talking about doing something new or changing directions, we turn to the roadmap as the first place to have that discussion.

Beforehand, it was easy to chase ideas whenever they came up. But by doing those things, you’re inherently not doing something else. When it’s on a roadmap, you can see that your current workload is increasing from 10 items to 12, for example, and it’s easier to call out that you don’t have capacity for that. To me, that’s a fundamental product management exercise — always assessing whether what you have on the roadmap is right and prioritizing it accordingly.

Even though we do a variety of things to visualize what we’re working on, having this roadmap process has been a huge help for everyone. We’ve then implemented OKRs and KPIs that map to our goals. That’s helped create a really deep understanding of what we’re doing and why it matters.

What specific indicators do you look for to assess whether an organization is beginning to think and act like a product organization?

It comes down to asking the right questions. As we’re looking at new features or products, or if we’re assessing the performance of our existing products, there’s a set of basic questions that we are always asking about the investment. What is the return on that investment, whether it’s revenue, the mission, etc.? Are we getting what we expect? Do we think the organization can handle it? Is it something that we can go after, or is it going to be beyond our capabilities? Is it a fit for us from a mission perspective?

There are opportunities we could pursue from a revenue standpoint that may not align with our core mission. But when we start hearing others ask those same questions, that’s when we know our mission-driven focus is starting to take hold.

Can you provide an example from Charity Navigator of when you noticed the turning point in the organization’s adoption of product management?

We have a product called Causeway, which offers an alternative to the typical way people donate to nonprofits. Typically, a donor would look up individual nonprofits, evaluate if they’re the right fit, and then decide whether or not to donate However, some people prefer to support a broader cause, such as homelessness or hunger, and may not have the expertise and time to identify the top nonprofits in that area. This is where Causeway comes in — it allows you to donate to the cause, and we curate a list behind that with weights and percentages that we update over time.

Causeway is like a mutual fund in some ways. You’re giving to the top level, and then we’re managing ratings underneath that. That was a new thing for us, and it’s not something that we’d ever done before. This was probably the first thing we applied an actual product management process to, both in the original implementation and its ongoing work.

The folks that we have working on that particular product are always asking the right questions. From my perspective, that’s when I know something is sticking, because we’re hearing the terminology and the right questions being asked. We’re applying those principles as we go forward, and it’s made a clear, positive difference in how we operate.