Sheryle Gillihan is Co-owner and CEO of CauseLabs. She is a 2022 Great Women of Texas honoree, a 2017 Dallas Business Journal 40 under 40 honoree, a nonprofit board member, a social enterprise advisor, and a speaker on leadership and impact. She uses technology as a force for good to bridge cultural gaps and disrupt both local and global challenges to help organizations scale impact toward equality, education, and access.
Sheryle fuses her hope for a better, brighter future with over 20 years of leadership, operations, and technical management experience. Ranging from military to corporate to nonprofit sectors. A year in the military as an Arabic translator, seven years as a stay-at-home mother, and four years in corporate America taught Sheryle to seek purpose and value meaningful work. In 2010, she joined CauseLabs, a web agency working with nonprofits and social enterprises to scale their missions and solve problems worth solving. It blended her experience with technology with her passion for giving back. Through her work, she discovered her own poverty story and leaned into her values to do her part to create a better future for everyone.
Sheryle has served on multiple advisory boards, lead the United Way of Tarrant County’s KERNEL social innovation program, and led a Girl Scout troop for 13 years.Today, in addition to her role as CauseLabs CEO and co-owner, Sheryle serves on the Tarrant County College advisory board, the EO Fort Worth board, is the lead organizer of Impact Fort Worth, is a mentor for several social enterprise programs, and serves a delegate at Opportunity Collaboration, a community of leaders focused on poverty alleviation. Sheryle speaks at conferences around the world about purpose-driven, mission-focused business and leadership skills and she recently started a podcast empowering women called Woman Owned Agency.
Can you tell us what trends you are seeing in non-profits from your specific position in the landscape?
I have seen an increased focus on digital marketing and nonprofits are exploring and investing more in digital marketing strategies such as social media, email marketing, and search engine optimization (SEO). And if they aren’t already, they are scrambling to make their website mobile friendly since more and more users are accessing sites from their mobile devices. While it’s always been true more so for nonprofits than any other company, there is an emphasis on storytelling. Storytelling has become an essential component of nonprofit marketing strategies. Along these same lines, video has become a popular medium for nonprofits to communicate their message. With the rise of remote work and the ongoing impact of social norms since the COVID-19 pandemic, nonprofits are hosting more virtual events and webinars to engage with supporters and continue their educational and awareness-raising efforts. A more recent trend I’ve noticed is increased personalization. Nonprofits have collected data on their audience for years. This data is used for a variety of purposes, but the ways in which nonprofits can automate personalized interactions now goes beyond adding your name to a mailer or a newsletter email. Some websites can provide a download of your annual giving receipt. Some offer resources related to your request. Some autofill suggestions when searching for an item or type of content. These are just a few ways in which technology and AI are offering increased personalization and nonprofits are starting to take notice and implement creative ways to engage their community.
What have you learned from a leading a successful company that targets a non-profit audience?
I’ve learned a few things over the years. First, these are businesses, just like any other business and while the return they seek for their investment may be measured as impact, they do still expect to see a return. Second, there are seasons for funding and thus, seasons for starting new initiatives. The last one that I’ll share is that nonprofits are a bit behind corporations in the adoption of technology. Even larger nonprofits tend to hold onto their systems for far to long and there is a reluctance to change or enhance, even when it’s throwing errors and alerts that they need to update. I noted above that there is an increase in nonprofit marketing investments, however, I still believe this investment is far less and behind the curve compared to their corporate counterparts.
You have a unique time management rule where you spend two weeks doing meetings and two weeks home each month. Can you tell us about how that works, why you did that and what you’ve learned?
I started this and other tactics for managing my time because I needed space to accomplish my action items, as well as breathing room to think. Thinking is an under-rated skill. Thinking about our company, thinking about our clients and their projects, thinking about the community of users and the impact… all of this helps me make better decisions, recharges my batteries, and creates space for creativity.
I wish I could say that I was able to maintain this long term. I still have cycles where I’m able to get back into this, but there has definitely been a difference between serving as the CEO and owning the company. As an owner, new hurdles that arise and require unexpected meetings feel more urgent. However, I still try to block my meetings to specific days of the week and I aim to complete all my meetings by noon so that I can focus on other tasks in the afternoon without interruption.
This month, I have forced my schedule to mimic my old habits of two weeks doing meetings (in person and virtual) because I am spending the last two weeks in Cape Town, South Africa. Having to do that for my trip reminds me how feasible it is and it simply requires discipline and patience.
What else do you do to manage your schedule as a CEO?
For a few years now I’ve had an executive assistant. It felt strange at first, but I highly recommend it especially if you’re also the business owner. Not only am I able to delegate tasks, but it also helps me get things out of my head.
I wanted to try a virtual assistant, but having someone in person with me to talk things out at any random moment, manage my clutter, check the mail, file paperwork, brief me before a call with a new prospect, prepare strategy workshop materials, and make sure I don’t skip too many meals is invaluable to my sanity and success.
What do you think are under-noticed trends that impact women in the C-suite?
There is an under-noticed trend of parent-friendly workplace practices. It involves everything from increased maternity leave, paternity or caregiver leave to support women after childbirth, adoption-friendly and foster-care friendly practices to provide bonding time with a child of any age joining a family, onsite childcare, flexible schedules for school pickup or childcare dropoff, work-at-home opportunies for unexpected child illnesses, and so many more. While these are not specifically targeted towards women, it is commonly shared that that women struggle to enter the C-suite without making sacrifices related to childbirth or family. These new trends are making it easier and more feasible for women to balance both their career and their family.
What is one thing you can’t live without?
This is an interesting question and my answers are situational. There is no single item I cannot live without. I do a lot of work from my smartphone, however, when I’m not working I don’t always have it on me. Also, everything is in the cloud, so if I lost my phone, nothing is truly lost. I suppose if we’re talking about my ability to function on a day to day basis especially as a CEO and business owner, I do think I would need to maintain access to my calendar, contact book, and my password manager.
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