How a nonprofit director moved his team out of the back office and into the field

Many mornings, Justin Rabbach works through his to-do list while walking his dog around his neighborhood in Waukesha, Wisconsin. He answers his Townie’s questions by voice memo, so by the time he gets home, his workday is already underway.

Justin is the executive director of the Board of World Mission of the Moravian Church, the church’s international mission arm. His organization raises money from donors in North America and sends it to partner churches and community projects. “Requests come in from the indigenous coasts of Central America, Nicaragua, Honduras, where somebody is using their phone and WhatsApp to communicate,” he says.

Justin has been close to this work for most of his life. He joined the board’s staff in 2014, and during his time its donor giving doubled, all with a small US-based team.

At Justin’s nonprofit, grant requests come in through many channels. Some partners fill out the forms in Spanish, take a picture of what they need, and send it over WhatsApp. Justin then has to get each request to an English-speaking grant committee, “edited into a discernible form,” and disburse the money on the ground. It’s a lot of work.

The organization’s memory lives inside decades of paperwork, with board members coming and going, all with different levels of historical knowledge. “How do you dig into 20 years of board minutes to find out when decisions were made?” There’s no team to decipher it all.

“As a smaller nonprofit, we don’t have the huge administrative staff for me to send that grunt-work stuff off to,” Justin explains. Even opening his inbox can derail his morning. “Once you crack that nut, you’re answering four or five [emails] and switching back and forth,” he explains.

Justin named his Townie Kermit, and the name has traveled well beyond the office. “My nieces and nephews even love that I talk about Kermit,” he says, and “people in my sphere know Kermit.” A colleague’s Townie goes by the name Fozzie, to round out the Muppets crew at work.

Kermit handles Justin’s mornings. A morning briefing drops each weekday, and a separate routine sends Justin up to five questions at 7am that help him focus on his priorities. Justin answers Kermit by text or voice memo, usually something like “I’ll look at it, but find me these three things.” Kermit replies with what’s in progress and what’s resolved, and nothing is sent until Justin has weighed in, which is his preference.

The whole team works from a single Google Doc of rules for naming and filing documents, and every Townie on his team follows it. When the rules change, Justin just has to edit that one doc.

This summer, the labeling and inventory work that used to fall to the interns ran as a routine in Town. So instead, the board sent its interns “literally up the Amazon area of Peru to see some of our ongoing development projects,” Justin describes. “It’s not that we just replaced interns with the routine. We were able to really add the human element,” allowing them to have a more meaningful internship experience.

For a small team, that’s the impact of using Town. “It’s literally buying me and my executive staff time,” Justin says. He also sees how Town is making life easier for his staff by centralizing important information, so they don’t have to get frustrated searching for things like leave or vacation policies.

Justin wants other nonprofits to know about how Town can transform their work, a corner of the market he cares deeply about and believes is underserved by AI.

Running a mission-driven team? See how nonprofit executives like Justin are using Town to get time back for the work that matters.