Olson Analytics · Bedford, NH

Your staff didn't take the job to fight with a spreadsheet.

A report that takes a week eats time someone meant to spend with the people they serve. A grant application that's hard to fill out favors the organizations with the most capacity. I'm Nate Olson. I help nonprofits and public agencies find where their systems are working against them and fix it, usually with the tools they already have.

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How I work

Most people bring me a problem that isn't quite the real problem yet. Why can't anyone find the current version of this document? Why don't these numbers match? My first job is to scope it down until we arrive at something that can actually be fixed.

I ask a lot of questions, I craft a lot of examples, and I love a template. In most systems, early decisions are hard to undo. When I set up a grant program, for example, I walk through the whole life of a grant with the people who'll run it:

What does an applicant see, and in what order?
What does a reviewer need in front of them?
What will staff need to learn from grantee reports two years from now?

I'm most useful when you've tried to fix something a few times and new heads keep appearing on the hydra. If you already know exactly what needs doing, I'm probably not your best bet.

At CDFA, updating the application and program guides every year created a lot of friction. Once we pulled it apart, the real issue was ownership. Different people wrote different sections, and who owned what was understood informally but never written down or enforced. So we're starting with one or two sections, writing down who owns each piece, and rolling it out further if it helps.

Recent work

NH Community Development Finance Authoritywith GO-NORTH

A rural health grant program

New Hampshire is putting capital money into rural health infrastructure through a program CDFA runs under GO-NORTH. It's the first CDFA program with a pre-application and the first where an outside organization is involved in a review stage. So instead of one application there were two, each with its own review. The GO-NORTH team was also new to the grants system, so they needed training, plus review forms that let CDFA see where things stood and keep the program on schedule.

Most of my work happened before the program opened.

Every confusing question on an application costs a rural provider time they'd otherwise spend on patients. It also shapes who applies at all, and this program is meant to reach small organizations as well as the ones with a grants team.

A New Hampshire nonprofit

Donation records in three places

Their donations had three sources of truth: the bookkeeping software, the donor database and a spreadsheet. When those disagree, nobody can say with confidence where fundraising stands. I built a way to reconcile the three, and along the way discovered it might be possible to connect the bookkeeping and donor systems directly. If that works, the spreadsheet goes away, along with the need for most of the reconciling I built.

NH Community Development Finance Authority

The thank-you letters

CDFA sends a thank-you letter for every tax credit donation, about 320 last year. They came out of the grants system with broken formatting, so staff fixed each one by hand, 76 of them in December alone. I worked with the team to fix the report, and now the letters only need a review before they go out.

How I got here

I studied engineering and management at Clarkson. The fall of my senior year I did Semester at Sea, 12 countries in about four months. Seeing that many places back to back, I kept noticing how much the choices a society makes shape people's standard of living, and I wanted to work closer to those choices. When I got home, the entry-level engineering jobs I was reading about didn't feel like they'd change anything for anyone, so I joined City Year.

City Year corps members aren't credentialed teachers. We showed up every day for students who needed someone in their corner, and those students made real academic gains. The organizations I work with are full of people like that. I want the systems around them to give them more time with the people they serve.

I came to CDFA to build training materials for one program. Now I support their grants management system across every program.

Working together

Olson Analytics is just me, and I keep a small client list, so the person you talk to is the person doing the work. I work with nonprofits and public agencies, especially ones serving people that current systems leave behind.

Before I change anything, I spend time learning how the work actually runs, so I do my best work on projects with some room in the schedule.

If this sounds like your organization, email me at nate@olsonanalyticsllc.com. Tell me what's bugging you, even if you're not sure it's the real problem yet.