With Gratitude

00:00:04 Narrator

What happens when a simple question creates a ripple effect that transforms an entire organization? In this episode of With Gratitude, Stephanie Hogen sits down with Karen Borchert, founder and CEO of Alpaca, to explore how listening, recognition, and small acts of gratitude can drive meaningful change. Karen shares why the most powerful improvements often start with simple conversations, how positivity spreads through teams and communities, and why asking for feedback only matters when you’re willing to act on it. You’ll also hear how AI can help uncover opportunities for human connection, turning thousands of words of feedback into moments that help leaders recognize people, build stronger cultures, and create better outcomes. Whether you lead a school, a business, or a growing team, this conversation offers practical ideas for creating cultures where people feel seen, heard, and valued. Let’s jump in.

00:01:00 Stephanie Hogen

Good afternoon, and welcome to the Vervint 10,000 Feet podcast. Today, live with you all, we’re excited to continue our new special series with gratitude, where humans and AI take us next. At Vervint, we believe that the best technology doesn’t just work. It creates lasting human gratitude for the people who use it, the teams who build it, and the customers they serve. Over the coming episodes, we’re going to sit with visionary leaders like Karen, Mark Ortung, and other leaders across different industries who are proving that thoughtful human and AI collaboration can build technology so good that you aren’t just satisfied with it, you’re genuinely grateful for it. I’m your co-host, Stephanie Hogen. I’m the Chief Consulting Officer for Vervint. My co-host, Allen Debes, the CEO of Koniag Capital, is unable to be with us today due to a community service project he is taking part in in Alaska to help support our missions across the Koniag family. I’m joined today by Karen Borchert, founder and CEO of Alpaca. Welcome to the With Gratitude podcast, Karen. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Alpaca or Karen, why don’t you give everyone a quick introduction?

00:02:08 Karen Borchert

Sure, thank you. It’s really wonderful to be here, really grateful for that. My name is Karen Borchert. I am the founder and CEO of a company called Alpaca, and we are an employee engagement and retention platform for K-12 education. So we are in the education technology space, and we focus on ways for school and district leaders to listen to their teachers, understand what they need, and help support them that they stay in the profession. And I’m really grateful to be here. Thank you.

00:02:42 Stephanie Hogen

Awesome. And so when we chatted previously, you told us that you started this company sort of with this idea to show up after school with a cup of coffee and to ask one question. What did you start hearing in those conversations that you didn’t expect?

00:02:58 Karen Borchert

Sure. Well, so by background, I was trained as an English teacher, that’s where I started my career. But then spent a lot of time in higher education and then in the technology space. And so got away from education over time. And then in 2021, I knew I wanted to start my own company and I was really drawn to the profession of education kind of back at the end of the pandemic as we were or at the at the tail end of the really tough part of that. I knew that there were a lot of educators that were having a really hard time at work, honestly. I wanted to understand that more. And so I did, I went and just asked teachers that I knew and principals that I knew if I could bring them coffee or a Diet Coke at the end of the day and just hear a little bit about their life and a little bit about their work. And so I did, I just started, I started asking, coming to their classrooms. Sometimes I was the first adult that they’d seen in their classroom in a long time because the pandemic made that really hard. And so I sat in their little tiny chairs and I asked, tell me about your job and what would make your day easier? And it was really amazing the little, what I think I was most surprised by was how small the things were that people were asking and that teachers and educators were saying would make their life a little easier. So it was things like, I wish it was easier to order pencil top erasers, or I wish that more parents would walk into the building, or I wish that my my principal would check in on me a little bit more, or I wish I would see another adult in the daytime. I only see nine-year-olds all day long, right? And that’s those are all really tiny little things, but they, but it felt like, when I asked, what would make it what would make it easier? It was it was those little things. That felt like they were the highest impact. And so it made me, it really kind of inspired me to say, okay, well, we can do lots of little things. There’s lots of little things we can do. And if we could start a company that, or start a organization that could do many little things, it could make a big impact. It felt like it could make a big impact. So that’s how we started.

00:05:20 Stephanie Hogen

Thank you. I have two daughters and I always feel very, very silly. I’m a taller than average woman sitting in those tiny chairs. So good for you to put yourself out there in those tiny chairs. What I hear you say in this is deeply relational. So you didn’t do a survey. You didn’t put something out on LinkedIn to gather feedback. You actually took time. Your little pockets full of Diet Coke or however you brought it to them, to really build those relationships and connect with folks. And so how did that change or influence the building of the platform, building a platform based on recognition and relationship? How did that shape your experience?

00:06:09 Karen Borchert

It really did. I mean, honestly, one of our, we have 5 core values as a company, and the first one is write thank-you notes, and the second one is listen to teachers. And that came from those meetings, that came from all of those conversations over coffee. Because really what I realized is that everything I thought I knew as somebody who wanted to start a business, what wasn’t necessarily real until I heard things from teachers themselves and until we showed gratitude towards teachers in some way. So those two things really shaped the company that write thank-you notes and listen to teachers really shaped the company and they continue to shape the company. Every time we want to build something or do something or create something, our first move is to go speak with teachers in person or step into school buildings, understand really what is happening. It’s part of our onboarding for staff. It really, it truly shapes everything we do. So I think the act of being in person and listening to teachers made us realize that that’s the entire thing, is that what teachers really needed the most that they showed us was to feel heard and seen and listened to. And so we built a company around that. I didn’t expect that. I expected to build a company around appreciation and recognition, and we ended up building a company Around listening instead, that’s really cool.

00:07:40 Stephanie Hogen

I want to come back to the thank-you notes, but I want to spend a couple of minutes talking about… So I think of a teacher being like, oh, there’s one more thing I have to go do. Or an administrator, like their days are insane. You’ve walked around the school. Whenever I go to one of my daughter’s classrooms, I’m like, how is this teacher still a sane person? Like it is crazy pandemonium all day. It’s a hard job. It is a hard job. Can you talk a little bit about how this, how the platform that you’ve created is also. Easy to use or isn’t like a burden on the administrator or isn’t a burden on the people that are using it so that it becomes sort of second nature to be grateful for details or to recognize them.

00:08:26 Karen Borchert

Yeah, sure. So our platform is really based, the core of our product is a check-in, a little, what we call the pulse check-in. And it is, it’s really built to be the fastest, easiest way for teachers to give feedback and for teachers to feel heard at work. And so when we designed it, we had one design rule for our designers. And we said the deal is that a teacher has to be able to do this check-in, take this little survey, on their own phone on the walk from their classroom to their car. It can’t take any longer than that. They gotta be able to do it on their own phone and it has to feel great to do it. So it’s the reason we, so we don’t use one to five scales on our little check-in. We just ask teachers how they feel at work, what are the words they’re using right now to describe work, what would help, what’s going well, what else do they wanna say, that’s it. And it’s so it’s really, really brief. It’s a beautiful interface so that it’s lovely to use so that it doesn’t feel bad to use it if you are taking that. If you finish a hard day of work at school and you’re doing your survey on your way from your classroom to your car, we wanted that to feel great. We want it to look great. We want it to feel like modern professional software because these professionals deserve modern professional tools to do their jobs. And we wanted it to feel supportive, actually. We wanted the survey itself to feel like a support, not like a survey. And so we built it with that design constraint, with that rule. And it’s the same, everything else we build into the platform is built with that in mind.

00:10:07 Stephanie Hogen

What do you think would change for users if that took 10 minutes versus 5? How do you think that would make somebody who’s already strapped for time feel?

00:10:19 Karen Borchert

Well, it depends. So I think if you did that 10-minute survey and you’re expected to do it once a month or once a quarter, and you did it once, and then you never heard anything back from it, If you never heard, hey, we heard what you said. We heard that these are the words you’re using to describe work. We heard that these are the things that you’re saying that you need. We’re trying, we’re doing some of these things. We can do some, we cannot do others, all of those things. If you heard, if you never heard that, I think the second time you were asked to do a 10 minute survey, you might just say that you’ve got 15 other things that you need to do ahead of that time. If you did that 10-minute survey, 5-minute survey, 15-minute survey, I don’t actually think the length of it matters as much. But if you heard back and you said, and there’s lots of research that supports this, that when you hear back that, hey, we heard you and we understand and we can see that you’re feeling these ways and we hear that you would like and need these things, if you hear back about that, you’re a lot more likely to do it again. And that’s really what we’re after. But removing the friction of the time aspect of it helps that, right? So if it’s super fast to do and if the person who’s receiving the data receives that data really quickly and can close that loop really quickly and say, hey, I heard you and I know what’s going on. And you can see that you were actually heard and seen in that survey, you’re going to go back and do it again.

00:11:51 Stephanie Hogen

Yeah. Can you tell our folks a little bit about that loop? So who receives the feedback? How do they know what to take action? What types of action can they go take?

00:11:59 Karen Borchert

Yeah, great question. So the person who administers the survey and receives the data is usually the school principal or the school leader. Sometimes that’s a assistant principal, sometimes that’s someone else in the building. But usually it’s the person who’s leading the school is the person who receives the data. They, it’s instant. So when teachers take the survey, the little pulse check-in, most of them do it at the beginning. They’ll, most principals will administer it at the beginning of a staff meeting once a month. So they will, they’ll, people, all the faculty and staff are gonna be coming into the meeting. There’s a QR code on the screen. The teachers grab it with their phone. They take the survey super quick. As they’re kind of getting settled, we’ve heard from them that it’s kind of a nice experience to sit down and say, okay, this is how I’m feeling at work and this is what I need right now as kind of the way that they get kind of grounded into the meeting. And then by the time that principal is back at their desk, the data is there. So they have an understanding of the overall level of positivity in their data. They have all of the top words that teachers are saying, which words are new this month, which ones are we’re seeing more of, which ones we’re seeing less of. And then they also have the opportunity to see see the shout outs and the shout outs are the most fun part. It’s the very end of the survey. You can send a shout out to anyone, anyone that you want. Teachers are bonkers about it. They use this like crazy. And so then the principal gets this full dashboard of all of these like little moments of gratitude and shout outs from teachers to each other for their teams, for the parents, for the kids that they see, they see all of those. So it’s a really quick, quick, quick, quick way to for principals to understand how their teachers are doing and see what they’re grateful for.

00:13:52 Stephanie Hogen

I love that. And have principals seen, so if I were to sit down maybe before a staff meeting versus after, I might be a little more grateful because nobody’s given me extra work. But have these administrators found that just that idea of a check-in helps people feel more optimistic, happier, more grateful? And is that having, and if we titled this podcast The Ripple Effect, is that having an effect throughout their students, their, like you said, their peers, their grateful bunch sort of inherently. What kind of effect is that having at more of an atomic level that’s rippling through the organization or their schools?

00:14:36 Karen Borchert

Yeah, it is. It’s kind of our favorite thing at the office to watch it happen because it is, there’s great research out there in the world that, you know, when you see more positivity, you say more positivity. So positivity is actually contagious. It really does work that way that when teachers are saying, you know, if you read an article in the, you know, anywhere on the internet about how teachers are doing, you’re going to hear the words burnout, fatigue, exhausted. And those words are real. That is, there is nothing. There’s nothing not true about those words for teachers. It’s a really hard job and it’s a really hard time for the job. But what often happens in our data is that teachers use more words than that to describe how they feel at work. So our top five words of all of last year included exhausted and fatigued, but they also included committed and growing. And so what happens is when you start to share that data back with teachers and you start to say, hey, these were our top five words last month and they’re not all negative, then you start to see these little moments of positivity. And those, you know, one teacher may look at another teacher and be like, oh, people are feeling like they’re like growing and committed. Cool. Like I actually also feel like that in some ways. Or where can I look for that in my own work and in my own life? And so we have a really wonderful partner district who’s been working with us for the past 3 1/2 years. And they they have found in over time that every single building in their district, every single building that works with us and uses their uses our tools has seen increase in positivity over the past over the past two years. So to see that increase in positivity across every single building, regardless of who the leader is, regardless of what’s going on with the kids, there is it’s a really cool to see it is it is having that that kind of ripple effect of kind of increasing positivity over time.

00:16:36 Stephanie Hogen

Awesome. Is there a science behind? Frequency you’re employing. So like I, my, I have one daughter in middle school, one daughter in elementary school, and us parents with our loving hearts attempt to do a taco bar or again, a Diet Coke day or a beverage bar.

00:16:57 Karen Borchert

Yeah.

00:16:57 Stephanie Hogen

We’re only doing that like once or twice a year when another parent gets a wild idea for us to bring a bunch of snacks to the break room. Is there a science behind that frequency of monthly or? I think you do a weekly newsletter. Can you speak a little bit to the science that you’re employing or deploying behind that?

00:17:15 Karen Borchert

Yeah, and I don’t have like the exact hard numbers or of anything except for to say, so we did, we just published the school culture report in this year. That was the first year that we’ve done it. We did, we took 33,000 surveys from educators and then 155 surveys from school leaders. And to understand what was happening throughout the year when we saw positivity kind of ebb and flow throughout the year. So there’s a very there’s a very reliable curve in education around how teachers are feeling and and kind of level of of sentiment overall for for educators that’s well documented and you see kind of this high at the beginning of the school year because everybody’s super hyped and excited and you know all the pencils are sharp and everything’s you know fresh and new and then it’s my favorite time of year and then and then you see this dip kind of in that October November range. And then you see things kind of pop up again in January and then you see a dip again in March or so. And then, when we can kind of see the end of the school year in sight and the summer in sight, you see that kind of jump up towards the end of the year. And our data showed exactly that. So there’s, certainly you see that. But what that really means is that a lot of kind of teacher retention, a lot of decisions about whether I’m going to stay in the profession are made, they’re not made at Teacher Appreciation Week in May. They’re made in November, right? And so what we know is that asking really often, and then the other stat is that in the world is that 70% of all employees in the country wish that they were asked about how they were doing more often. And asked to, kind of checked in on more often. So that’s a lot. So we kind of put those two things together. And so we said, all right, we, if you, if we asked really often and you could act really small. So, the things going back to those coffees that we brought to teachers and the little tiny things that they asked for, if you need to, an easier way to order pencil top erasers rather than having to go through like a big procurement process in your school district, if you’re dealing with that, you can’t say that feedback and then have that acted on in four months, right? Like you need that right now. The work of being an educator requires you to be really real-time, very much in person, very much on the spot. And so when you need things, you need things right now. You don’t need things when somebody assesses the data in three months time. You need it right now. And so that’s true of a lot of frontline work, right? That’s true in nurses. That’s true in a lot of frontline professions. It’s very true in education, and it’s hard, you know, like that can be a really challenging thing to do. So We do this on a monthly cadence. We actually have, we have schools and districts who use our product on a weekly basis. We keep it open so that it can be used as frequently as a school leader wants it to be. We have actually some school leaders who put the QR code for their survey in the teacher’s lounge or even in the faculty, like on the mirrors in the faculty bathrooms. So that they can use it absolutely anytime and get real data in real time about what they need and what they’re what they’re working with.

00:20:40 Stephanie Hogen

That’s awesome. That’s similar to how we feel about gratitude as well, that it’s this practice that’s ongoing. When I was early married, we had this friend couple that they would thank each other for little things like, hey, thank you for doing the dishes. Hey, thank you for making dinner. Hey, thank you for, you know, giving our son a bath or et cetera. And it’s that constant practice, not just a slogan. So like, we’re grateful people. And so I think that intentionality around making it at the forefront of what people are doing and how they engage is really important. And it doesn’t need to be a big thing. And so in that vein, what is the smallest moment of gratitude you’ve actually seen, you know, change how someone felt at work that day or that week? Yeah.

00:21:33 Karen Borchert

Oh my gosh, there’s so, there’s so many. It’s so, it’s so fun. It’s a, you know, there’s, it is amazing how, how, how small it can, it can be. So we do, we do, we have a teacher recognition program as part of our platform that we send out these really lovely little care packages to educators. And every single one has a, has a handwritten thank-you note in it. So we have with people, people always like when we were first starting the company, people were like, you’re never gonna be able to scale this. We’re never going to be able to keep up this handwritten thank-you note practice. And we’re like, I think we can. And so we actually have retired teachers and like people all over the country who write thank you, these little tiny handwritten thank-you notes for us. And what we find, you know, we curate these care packages really carefully. They’re every single item in them is so carefully selected and so carefully designed by educators, for educators, all of those things. And the thing that we get, comments about the most every year, every single time. We probably send out, I don’t know, 75,000 of these little care packages. It’s the thank-you note. It’s the handwritten thank-you note that’s in there that we hear about the most. We see people send us photos of their bulletin board in their office that has all of the thank-you notes that they’ve ever received, all the little thank-you notes that you’ve ever received. From us, it’s the one thing that they absolutely always keep forever and ever is the thank-you note that’s in that little pack. It just reminds me every time it is amazing. It’s, you know, it’s the size of a business card, but it’s, but there’s one in every single, in every single bit of gratitude that we send out. And it, I think it’s, I think it makes an absolutely enormous impact.

00:23:19 Stephanie Hogen

It’s obvious and novel at the same time.

00:23:23 Karen Borchert

Yeah, yeah.

00:23:25 Stephanie Hogen

And easy. I think for some, I think we got away from it. So my best friend, she is an expert thank-you note writer. If I have a conversation with her, there’s a card in the mail that day to me that I receive in one to two business days thanking me for great conversation. It’s just part of her habit. And she said it started when she was a child. Her mom would say, those toys look like they’ll be really fun to play with after you finish your thank-you notes. But it was something that was ingrained in her as like a little child that like, I need to be deeply grateful for the thing before I can even have it. And I think that we get away from that, especially when stamps are like a dollar a piece now. That idea of just sitting down with your thoughts, it doesn’t need to be fancy. You have a limited number of supplies and it makes a huge difference on somebody’s life. And again, in the grand scheme of things. I did joke recently that a card is like $7 and a stamp is $1. So you need to be like economically secure to send a card these days. Yeah. But postcards are cheaper. Postcard stamps are cheaper. It’s not a hard thing to do is to thank somebody for their time. And it has this meaningful little imprint on their heart or on their brain that extends well beyond, you know, the day that they read it.

00:24:44 Karen Borchert

Yeah, it really does.

00:24:47 Stephanie Hogen

So I wanna talk a little bit about data. If we can pivot over to that topic a little bit.

00:24:52 Karen Borchert

My other favorite topic.

00:24:54 Stephanie Hogen

Yeah, ours too. So you have found specifically that you’re sitting on something big. What you’re measuring, the data that you’re collecting specifically around positivity. Absenteeism. So can you walk us through what you’re measuring and what you’re finding when that positivity or potentially that gratitude or that optimism moves through the building?

00:25:21 Karen Borchert

Yeah, yeah, I can. So we measure overall positivity in the building at all at every time that people are taking the doing the check-in. So we understand we take all of the feedback that comes in from the words that you’re choosing, the things that you say that you need, the things you say that you’re saying are going well in the comments themselves. We do a huge amount of analysis using utilizing some AI tools and some things, some things we’ve built there to understand what how positive is this feedback. Back in total. And that’s it’s a that’s a great that’s to AI is really, really good at sentiment analysis overall. So we and we’ve we’ve we’ve built a lot of a lot of tooling around that. And what we have seen, we’ve measured with some of our kind of partner districts, some of the ones that are that are measuring, you know, schools and school districts are measuring all kinds of things. Obviously, they’re measuring student outcomes, they’re measuring retention of their teachers, they’re measuring absenteeism, both for students and for staff. You know, it’s one of the… Hardest things for teacher retention is actually not teachers quitting, it’s teachers staying and being absent a lot. Because if teachers are hard to hire right now, and they are, substitute teachers are also really, really hard to hire. So those who are, so if you have a lot of teachers who are absent, if you have a high rate of absenteeism for your teachers, you are, that’s even harder than filling the job because you’re filling days, you know, and you’re filling it at 6 o’clock on a Thursday morning. You’re trying to find somebody to fill a role. And when you can’t, what happens is that school administrators or other teachers are filling in. So then all of a sudden teachers don’t have a plan period anymore because they’re filling in for a teacher who’s absent today. So teacher absenteeism is actually almost a harder problem. And it’s also a really expensive problem for schools and school districts. Substitute, you know, substitute days are expensive. So we, with a few of our partner districts, we’ve started measuring how does the level of positivity in the building correlate alongside teacher absenteeism? How does it correlate alongside student outcomes? So our teachers who are more positive. Positive, creating stronger student outcomes? Yes. Are teachers who are more positive absent less? Yes. Are teachers who are more positive staying in their jobs longer? Yes. And are principals who have teachers who are more positive overall, who have more positive buildings, feel more confident in their role as a leader? Yes. So we measure all of those things and we look at all of those things, but our job mainly is to measure the positivity level. And then some of our partner districts share back data with us about how that correlates to their absenteeism, learning outcomes and retention outcomes.

00:28:21 Stephanie Hogen

And if I recall from our first conversation, you mentioned that you went, your mission was sort of to seek how you could lift teacher recognition and In doing so, their absenteeism is leading to better student outcomes. That wasn’t something you necessarily went up to achieve when you started this.

00:28:42 Karen Borchert

No. Yeah, we started. But it found its way to you. Yeah, it did. So we started as a stitch fix for teachers. We started as a care package company. And we just thought, it would be, it should be easier. Like I’m a, I’m a parent of school-aged kids also. And as a parent, I was like, wouldn’t it be, wouldn’t it be great if this like PTO wasn’t reinventing the wheel every time we wanted to do something nice for the teachers? And also like, do the teachers want. Like a snack bar day or do they need something else? What do they need? So as a parent, I didn’t know. And I thought, and as I did all of those coffee meetings, things like out-of-pocket spend and things like that felt like, okay, those are easy problems. There should be a way to solve those. So we really started in the care package business. We started releasing a really cute, really beautiful care package every month. Contracted with schools and school districts to provide them to their teachers, make it easier so that principals weren’t like at Target or like buying gift cards online at 10 p.m. On Sunday night. We were like, let’s just make that part easier. So we started there. And then, but in those care packages, we always included a little tiny QR code for a little tiny survey that just said, hey, did you like what was in this thing? Is this helpful? What do you need more of? And by the way, how are you doing? What what how would you describe work right now? And we included that in there to make the care packages better. And then it came back and everybody was answering this survey, this tiny survey. Like nobody likes surveys, but everybody was answering this little tiny survey, I think, because it came along with a little tiny gift. And so we we started looking at the data and we actually we had a district that we had that, you know, kind of a lot of survey data for and we said, you know, hey, we can tell you We can tell you which of your schools are feeling really great and which ones aren’t. We have this data and we showed them and they were like, how? Where is that from? We’re like, it’s from a QR code inside the care package. And they were like, this is incredible. Please, can you surface this to us every month? Can you let us know this? Can you tell us what we can do with that information? And so that’s what ended up building our software platform. We weren’t expecting to be a data platform from the beginning, but we ended up that way.

00:31:11 Stephanie Hogen

Oh, awesome. If you can figure out how to make people happier and more grateful for taking surveys, I think that could be your next business, your next business now. Yeah. So if a happier and more appreciated teacher is changing the outcomes for like my daughter, one of my daughters, her class size is like 30 kids. So if it’s changing the outcomes for 30 kids and that effect is repeating itself across the school and in the district, you’re talking about tens of thousands of students over time. That’s a huge effect on not just the district, but a community. So how do you talk about that with the school or the school board? Really, the administration is used to hearing about test scores or funding. This is really talking about feelings. So how does that change your conversation as you go to, you know, sell or launch platforms like this in the schools?

00:32:02 Karen Borchert

Yeah. I was speaking with the district administrator this morning who said, who isn’t using us yet, but said, kind of we talked through the whole platform and everything, and he said, okay, my district needs this. They don’t know that they need this yet, but they need it. And it was a, and it’s because it is, it’s a very, it doesn’t, it doesn’t, it’s a conversation that isn’t being had in schools and school districts very often yet. But I think that the way that we talk about it is that, putting them the feelings part of the side for a second, what we know is that to be successful in your job, you have to feel great at work, right? Like, that’s that is that is true, and what safety. Right. Psychological safety, positivity, confidence, all of those things have to be, trust, all of those things have to be in place to feel, to be successful at your job. Your daughter’s teacher can’t stand in the front of the class and deal with 30 kids who are dealing with all sorts of stuff, right? She can’t do that. Well if she doesn’t feel good. None of us can, none of us can, none of us can do our jobs well if we don’t feel well. And so we know that. And so the focus at the district and the school board and all of those levels, the focus of the conversation generally is all about student outcomes. And that’s great. That’s right. That’s why we’re, that’s why education exists is for kids to learn, right? So it’s correct that the focus is on student outcomes. I think what we want is to Is to help augment the conversation to say it is all about student outcomes, and those student outcomes can’t exist without. Happy teachers and without teachers who feel great at work and who feel positive about their job and who step into their classroom every single morning ready to go, ready to face the day and face the challenges that might be there. And so that’s really, we’re not suggesting that student outcomes aren’t the main thing ’cause they are. Like how students are performing at school is the main thing. Our strategies and our conversation with schools and districts is to say That can’t happen without really whole, complete, positive, and engaged adults. And that’s true in any profession, but it’s really mission critical in education.

00:34:34 Stephanie Hogen

Yeah. So I have an interesting question. Why Alpaca? Like, why did you name the company Alpaca? I feel like there’s a story there.

00:34:44 Karen Borchert

There is a story there. So like I said, we started as a care package company. And so as we were starting, we had these, we called, like, we had these little things, and we called them packs. And we, when we were trying to name the company, I had a, I’m terrible at naming things. So I had some help from a brand, a brand strategist. And he said, listen, you are starting a company that is for schools. It has to have a mascot and you are creating care packages for educators. And so why are we not calling this alpaca? I had like schoolsupply.com or something terrible. And he was like, why are we not calling this alpaca? And I was like, I don’t know, that’s great. And so it was, it stuck. It’s, you know, it’s memorable. Everybody always knows it. Has a cute mascot. We have, you know, stickers, alpaca stickers for days and days. So we have, we called it that. And then, you know, when it kind of started evolving into this data platform, we were like, should we still call it alpaca? But by that time, everyone who worked with us knew it that way. And so that, so it stuck.

00:35:46 Stephanie Hogen

That is funny. Every alpaca you see is either the cutest animal possible or like your deranged uncle, like their hair is all crazy. They’re hanging out. I like it.

00:35:57 Karen Borchert

My favorite thing is that we go to a lot of conferences and we go to, we spend a lot of time at conferences and we have a banner behind us that has our name alpaca, you know, four feet wide. It says alpaca enormous on it right behind us. And not like without fail, without fail, somebody comes up to our booth at that conference, sees the stickers on the table and goes, llamas, I love I love llamas. And we’re like, it’s a never mind, it’s fine. We’re like us too. We love.

00:36:27 Stephanie Hogen

We tried. We tried. That’s so funny. So we spent a lot. I don’t know if you had a chance to watch our first episode, but in that episode we we spent a lot of time setting up this idea of whether people feel gratitude towards a tool itself. So our CEO, Alan, like thanked Claude. He was like, then Claude gave him an answer and he’s like, thank you. So you’ve talked a little bit about where AI is showing up inside of Alpaca today, but where do you want to take it? Where do you think the evolution point is going to be for you next?

00:37:00 Karen Borchert

Yeah, well, I think your point that, you know, the feeling of feeling a sense of gratitude towards software is like, that’s so real. I thank Claude all the time for things. I think that what we hope is that when a school principal opens up our dashboard and sees what they, how their teams are feeling and what their teams need, they feel just a little bit better at their job. Right? So if you go in and you log into a dashboard and you’re like, okay, my teams are feeling these words, they’re saying these things, this is what they said that they need. Here’s a little tool that I can use to do that thing that they need. And by the way, they sent 45 shout outs to their peers that I’m gonna go print out into little cute postcards and hand out in my school building. As a school leader, you just feel better at your job. All of a sudden, you’re like, I didn’t have to go searching for all of the nice things that they say to each other. I just found them. I just got them all. And here they are. And so you don’t have to go looking for, like, oh, gosh, I should probably do something to recognize some of our newer teachers. You just see the little shout out that comes in that says, hey, you know, you as a brand new teacher, you are really focusing on the right things and doing all of the right stuff. And I saw your kids kids light up when I walk past your classroom the other day. As a school leader, you get to print out that little note, write your own note on it and say, I saw that too. That was awesome. Like, we’re so glad you’re here and go hand it to that new teacher. That is going to make that new teacher’s day twice because not only did their peer see them and say that, but their leader said that too. And then as a leader, you are like, my gosh, this feels so good. I know what’s going on in my building. I know what’s happening. And it just feels great to do that. And what we want is to find. All of those moments. We wanna find those moments all day long and bring them to school leaders and make school leaders feel amazing at their jobs. So every time we think about building something, every feature that we build in the platform, everything that we will do is focused on that. How do we help school principals feel confident and extraordinary at their jobs?

00:39:22 Stephanie Hogen

So you’re playing with two different ends of the spectrum here. That deeply relational handwritten note person, And like AI being able to automate and put that at the forefront, is there a risk of those two things coexisting or is the AI automation, all of that part of it, actually enabling A principal to have the space to print that out and write it?

00:39:52 Karen Borchert

I think that when AI can do the stuff that takes time away from a principal, when AI can say, hey, in a three-minute check-in with your team, we are going to, this software is going to surface 100 human moments. That is the best of AI, in my opinion. That’s where AI does the tedious work, we’re not asking, like, we don’t ask, hey, how are you doing on a scale from one to five? We’re not asking, like, how supported do you feel as an educator on a scale from one to five? We’re saying, what words would you use? What do you need right now? What would help? What else do you want to say? You know, we’re asking for just human language. And then we’re utilizing AI in part to turn that natural human language into actionable information for a principal. And those actions are all human actions. Like, those are things like, hey, you know what would be, you know what they’re asking for? They just wanna see their principal a little bit more. Go get out into the lobby first thing in the morning and greet all your teachers when they’re coming in the door. That’s really gonna make a difference. That’s just creating an opportunity for a human moment for a principal that’s going to make a difference for their teachers. And if AI can help us and software can help us do that, you know, software helps us do lots of things, but if software can surface more human moments, more opportunities for human moments or more opportunities for authentic gratitude or human connection, then that’s software at its best, in my opinion. Yeah.

00:41:34 Stephanie Hogen

So schools are notoriously underfunded. How does a principal or a district or an administrator go about carving out funding to make something like Alpaca be part of their solution? Is it funded by the district? Is it PTO donates to it? How does the funding mechanism of recognition happen on your end?

00:42:01 Karen Borchert

So all of the above, right? So we have, we sell to both schools and school districts. We have some schools that pay for us with PTO funds or grant funding or things like that. At the district level, it is, it’s very interesting. A lot of district strategic plans have big goals around teacher retention. They have big goals around school culture. And those, every goal has to, you know, you can’t achieve a goal if you’re not funding the goal. And so they will often find funds for what we do in those places. We also truthfully keep our platform very well priced and reasonably priced because we understand those challenges. But teacher retention is a really expensive problem. It substitute teachers days cost no less than $250 a day. So if you save, if you save a few absentee days. For every school building over the course of the year by having a platform that helps principals support their teachers better, and you have fewer absentee days, fewer substitute days, it kind of pays for itself pretty quickly, to be really honest. And retention is even more expensive than that, right? So it’s, you know, replacing a teacher or dealing with what happens if, you know, what happens if you can’t if you can’t fill all of the roles in your district and especially public schools districts who have a mandate to support every student in their community, if you don’t have that, that’s that can spell really big trouble actually. So, you know, school districts are starting to build in more budget and build in more More allocation for the things that they need to do to make sure that their teachers are there and that they have enough of them and that they are and that they show up every day.

00:43:56 Stephanie Hogen

Thank you.

00:43:57 Karen Borchert

Yeah.

00:43:57 Stephanie Hogen

A couple wrapping questions.

00:43:59 Karen Borchert

Yeah.

00:44:00 Stephanie Hogen

So if we I actually, while we’ve been talking, broke down. I have three principals that I just happened to know and a couple of other teachers, so I wanna make sure to connect you with them.

00:44:09 Karen Borchert

Great.

00:44:10 Stephanie Hogen

But if they come to watch this, what advice would you leave with school leaders? What’s one small thing you would leave them with that they could do tomorrow to create gratitude in their organization? What might that be?

00:44:28 Karen Borchert

One small thing that they could do tomorrow, we are a huge fan of, and we have a resource on our website about a little practice called start, stop, continue. And start, stop, continue is a really nice moment for a leader, any leader to say, okay, to say to your staff, put it on post-it notes, put it, take 5 minutes at the beginning of a staff meeting and say, please write one post-it for one thing you want us to start doing at school, one thing you think we should stop doing, and one one thing that we’re doing that you think we should continue doing. It creates basically an attitude or a responsibility for school culture and for our culture as an organization. It puts it in everybody’s hands, and it’s super clear. When you just write down one thing you want to start, stop, and continue, it is a transformative little exercise, and it can be just a wonderful thing for then a leader to say, Okay, I got all your stuff. This week, I’m choosing these three post-its that I’m going to try. We’re going to try this start. We’re going to continue doing this thing because I know you love it. And you know what? I hear you on the super long newsletter that comes out on Sunday nights. We’re going to make it shorter and send it out on Wednesdays. It’s like, it can be really, really, really easy things to do. And like I said, a lot of what teachers are asking for are really small things. And so if you can do that exercise and make a huge impact really quick.

00:45:57 Stephanie Hogen

That’s awesome. We had one question come in that I’m going to ask you from folks that are online. And because our viewership is likely not in education. And so if a startup in a completely different industry wanted to build this your listening loop or that data into their teams, what’s the first thing you would give them for advice for how to do this right? Like what’s something that you maybe tripped on or would do differently now that you know that you’ve been in it?

00:46:28 Karen Borchert

I think the way we say it often is ask often and use real words. So if you’re wanting to create a listening loop, I think it’s those two things. It’s why we created our check in the way that we did is that, and any organization or company could do this. We just started asking, hey, how would you, how are you doing right now? There’s a really awesome app out in the greater world called How We Feel that was actually started during the pandemic. And it is an emotions based application that asks, that just says like, how do you feel today? Like what are the words that you’re using about your feelings? It’s backed by some really amazing research at Yale. But that How We Feel app would be an amazing way to start for almost any organization. But what I love about it is that you can do it every single day. And also it is, and it uses real words. So I think in the face of being asked how you’re doing, that’s a very personal and emotional question. And so when you ask it with one to five scales, most people, if you’re, they, if you ask how they’re doing or how they’re feeling or how satisfied they are at work on a scale of one to five, are gonna say three or four. Like most people don’t, most people don’t actually say one or five. And so everything, it’s like Yelp reviews, like everything melts into like everybody’s a 3.2, right? So it’s, it is, and that. Yeah, everybody feels meh. And so that’s, I think that’s not, it’s not very hopeful and it’s not very actionable. Like what as a leader, what do you do with a 3.4 versus a 2.8? So it’s, so I, but if you know that people are feeling joyful, That’s different than if they’re feeling ambitious, right? Those are two, and you can act differently with those different words. Same as if they’re feeling fatigued versus if they’re feeling frustrated. Those are two negative emotions. Those are two probably, you know, 1.2s on the one to five scale, but they’re really different in the way that you handle them. So I would, that’s what I would say to anybody is ask it often so that you can act on it quickly and use real words instead of one to five so that you can understand. Understand what the what the what’s at the heart of it?

00:48:48 Stephanie Hogen

Yeah, this I think this has real world application besides education. I think about it in a church setting. I think about it in like any organized group corporate. I think it has a lot of applications. So thank you for sharing that. Absolutely. We’ll open the floor folks who are online. If you want to pop questions into the chat or the Q&A, I am able to see those. OK. If not, I have more questions.

00:49:18 Karen Borchert

OK, great.

00:49:20 Stephanie Hogen

So while we wait for a question to come in. Can you talk a little bit about or maybe just finish the sentence? Gratitude becomes lasting when. Dot dot dot.

00:49:36 Karen Borchert

Gratitude becomes lasting when it’s a habit. Right. When it’s so like to your point of like your friend who, didn’t didn’t play, didn’t play with toys until she wrote the thank-you note for them. You know, we, I have a thank-you note station in my house, like where we, our family has a place where there’s cards, pens, stamps, everything ready to go so that it’s never, it’s never far away from you. Don’t have any barriers or friction to showing gratitude. And that’s, I think, you know, we, are, we’re, kind of model that with our children about saying thank you for things when they are, when they’re, and I think that’s, we are that way because we want to grow the muscle and the habit of showing gratitude. Awesome.

00:50:24 Stephanie Hogen

I love that. It’s not quite a station, but there is a little box that has all the ingredients you need. We do that too. Like my girls are like, hey, gotta write a thank-you note for that. And there’s a little bit, even though they know they have to do it, they’re like, fine, mom, fine. I don’t know what I should write. I don’t know what I should say.

00:50:42 Karen Borchert

Yeah.

00:50:42 Stephanie Hogen

But I’m like, I said, write your feelings. Do you feel happy you now have a new pair of shoes? Then write that you feel happy.

00:50:49 Karen Borchert

Yeah. What will you do with your new pair of shoes? Like, just tell them something.

00:50:53 Stephanie Hogen

It doesn’t need to be hard. Another question is, love the concept of software that creates human moments. What was your most meaningful moment that you’ve experienced so far from your clients?

00:51:05 Karen Borchert

Oh my gosh. The most meaningful moment. So we have a really wonderful customer in Alaska who is a school principal in Alaska. And he’s been utilizing our platform for a couple of years and it has made a really big difference in his school building overall. And we were talking to him about it and we said, you know, would you be willing to share your story with our new hires and tell us, kind of tell us your education story and tell us the story of how our platform and how your work with us has helped change your school culture. And he said, yes, when would you like me to do that? And I said, we said, well, we’re doing a, we’re doing a new hire class in the month of June. And he said, I’ll be there. And he and his family flew to Nebraska from Alaska to share their story with our team and to share their, like, how they changed, how they changed the culture in their school with us and with other things too. Not just us, but they were so, it created this human moment. You showed up in Nebraska, and we had dinner with my family. And it was the best. Like it was the coolest thing to see one of our clients care so much about what we’re building and what we’re doing that they would come to visit us and visit our team, spend that time with us.

00:52:35 Stephanie Hogen

I love that.

00:52:35 Karen Borchert

It was so cool.

00:52:38 Stephanie Hogen

That was cool. So we’ll land the plane here. Thank you. Okay. We’re grateful for you. We’re grateful you’ve built this platform where teachers and students have more meaningful outcomes. Can you tell everybody just really quick as we close where they can find Alpaca and follow the great work that you’re doing?

00:52:56 Karen Borchert

Sure, yeah. We are at getalpaca.com. So getalpaca.com. And you can find us there. You can find us on social media and all of those things. But it is, yeah, there we go. Getalpaca.com. You’ll find us there. You can find me on LinkedIn. Would love to connect. I’m just Karen at getalpaca.com if you want to connect personally. And yeah, we’d love to meet you.

00:53:23 Stephanie Hogen

That’s wonderful. We did have one quick question come in that I am now curious about. Yeah. So you’ve talked about the staff, you’ve talked about the administration, but have you received feedback from students and families that are on the, that have staff on the Alpaca program and what has that said?

00:53:40 Karen Borchert

So yes, we do hear from families and from students that the kids get really excited about, especially about the care packages. So for schools that are doing that, like when, so when they arrive, so they’re different every month, and usually most schools will do it where they give out five or 10 of them each month throughout the month. So who gets them and what’s in them is a big topic with kids. They get so excited and then so like we see on TikTok sometimes there’s like unboxing videos of teachers opening their packs with their kids, with their students and the students get crazy like they love it so much. So that’s really that’s really been fun and then you know we hear we hear from family like we love to hear from families and parents you know oh our school’s an alpaca school and you know we utilize that so that’s always really fun.

00:54:36 Stephanie Hogen

I see a mascot in the future doing tours to schools in the spring. In that in that March time, in that March lull, we need Al the Alpaca going to visit.

00:54:48 Karen Borchert

I see. I think that’s right. In a school.

00:54:51 Stephanie Hogen

Yeah, that’s a story for another day. Thank you, Karen. Enjoy your day and we’re so grateful to have had you on the 10,000 feet podcast.

00:55:00 Karen Borchert

Thank you so much. Thank you. That’s a pleasure. Thank you.

00:55:03 Stephanie Hogen

Bye.

00:55:04 Karen Borchert

Bye.