Gena Dellett
CEO at Skvare
Gena Dellett is the CEO and owner of Skvare, a technology consultancy supporting nonprofits, membership associations, and education groups with their technology needs. Since 2008, Skvare has combined strategy, design, and engineering to deliver systems that make operations simpler and impact easier to measure, guided by the promise of “Helping Others Help Others.”
A longtime open-source champion, Gena leads the Skvare team in contributing code, documentation, and leadership across Drupal and CiviCRM. Skvare is a CiviCRM Gold Partner and maintains and supports widely used modules and extensions. Gena’s leadership style is constructively opinionated and deeply collaborative, grounded in regenerative principles that align technology choices with organizational health and responsibility.
Before and after the launch of any project, Gena focuses on outcomes: accessible user experiences, reliable data, and teams who feel confident owning their tools. She speaks frequently at community events, sharing practical lessons on partnership, governance, and building systems that are designed to adapt to an organization's work and mission.
A developer accepts a task during a standup and says it looks straightforward. Two weeks later, there is no progress. The lead expected steady progress without check-ins, and the developer expected more guidance at the start. Neither person said their expectations out loud.
As the mantra goes: expectations are premeditated resentment.
This session provides a practical way out of this cycle. Following the principles of Situational Leadership, participants will learn how to diagnose what their team members need in order to adjust their leadership style. The right leadership style depends on two things: who is doing the work and what the work is. Your strongest back-end developer can fully own a Drupal migration but may need close coaching for their first client demo.
Attendees will learn why defaulting to a single leadership style in all situations fails, like always delegating when coaching is needed. Attendees will also learn how to:
- Assess an individual team member’s skill and commitment for a specific task.
- Turn unspoken expectations into a clear, shared plan.
- Use a simple matrix during daily work to support the performance and experience of a team.
Many nonprofits do a lot with a little. Drupal can be a powerful ally, but only when it’s implemented and maintained with the unique needs of mission-driven organizations in mind. In this session, we’ll explore how nonprofits are using Drupal to stretch their budgets, engage supporters, and streamline operations.
Learning Objectives:
- Understand the key reasons nonprofits choose (and stay with) Drupal
- Learn best practices for planning, building, and maintaining Drupal sites with limited budgets
- Identify pitfalls and strategies for working effectively with developers and vendors
Session outline:
Getting It Right from the Start
- Strengths of Drupal for mission-driven orgs
- Planning for long-term sustainability
- Stakeholder engagement and internal alignment
- Avoiding scope creep and vendor misalignment
Drupal as a Platform, Not Just a Website
- Integration with CRMs (like CiviCRM, Salesforce, or custom solutions)
- Event management, donations, membership, advocacy tools
- Accessibility, multilingual, and privacy considerations
Working with Developers and Vendors
- What to ask before you sign a contract
- Building a productive relationship between orgs and dev teams
Maintaining and Growing Your Site
- Budgeting for the long haul
- Content strategy for small teams
- Keeping up with updates, security, and community contributions