Daniel Mrazik, Director of Data Strategy & Innovation at FIRE

In his Sage Spotlight, Daniel Mrazik, Director of Data Strategy & Innovation at The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), shares how he keeps a fast-growing First Amendment nonprofit secure and ahead of the technology curve. Daniel explains why finding the right vendors is critical when internal expertise is limited, what made the traditional discovery process fall short, and how a chance early meeting with Material Security on Sagetap turned into an active proof of concept.

Key Takeaways

• Keeping Pace with AI: Daniel's top priority is navigating the accelerating pace of AI, from monitoring internal employee usage to managing new external threats and ensuring the tech stack keeps up with fast-evolving models and security standards.
• Recognition Brings New Risk: As FIRE grows in prominence, it's attracting more attention from bad actors. Daniel is focused on scaling the tech stack responsibly while staying on top of MFA, SSO, device management, and account security.
• A Discovery Process That Left Too Much to Chance: Before Sagetap, Daniel relied on web searches, word of mouth, conferences, and inherited vendor relationships, a fragmented process with no standardized path from evaluation to POC to purchase.
• The Niche Vendors Nobody Else Surfaces: Dan appreciates that Sagetap brings both well-known and highly specialized vendors to the table, including ones solving problems so specific he wouldn't have known to search for them elsewhere.
• How an Early Demo Became a DLP Solution: Daniel met Material Security on Sagetap before FIRE had an active need. When a DLP strategy became a priority, Material's Google-first, cloud-based approach stood out as the perfect fit, and they're now heading into a proof of concept together.

Full Transcript

Daniel Mrazik: I am the Director of Data Strategy and Innovation at The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. We are a First Amendment nonprofit in the United States. 

And as a part of my role, we have the data strategy and the innovation side. So what that basically means is two parts: one, I'm in charge of all internal data systems, and then the other part of that is helping staff get the most out of the tools that we have.

I would say my main role, though, is overseeing our CRM system because that is our single source of truth for all supporter, program, events, marketing data, and workflows.

Meghan Lafferty: With all of those roles and priorities, what would you say is top of your list for this year?

Daniel: Something that keeps coming up is keeping up with AI, keeping up with the pace of AI.

One thing that I think Sagetap has and the vendors offer are those tools to help us guide that pace so we can keep an eye on, internally, what our employees are doing with AI, what safeguards we need to put in place there. But then we also need to look externally too and how the AI piece of SEO works.

There’s new threats that have been coming out and also just the new models and how they might interact with our tech stack. Every platform is constantly rolling out new standards for MFA, SSO, device management, account security, and that sort of thing. Our organization is growing really fast and is becoming more recognized, which is a good thing, but there's also increased interest from bad actors, so we have to make sure that we're staying secure, we're scaling and building out our tech stack responsibly.

Finding the right vendors is really important to us because we don't always have that internal expertise.

Meghan: Is that the best way that you've found to stay ahead of the curve, by working with the vendors that really know the space, or are there other ways that you stay ahead as well?

Daniel: Definitely talking with vendors who know the space. I'm also a part of different technology groups, so there's informal meetings we have, conferences. Just reading tech news is a way to stay up on it as well. 

One thing that I do like about Sagetap is they send out that digest every week about what the community is talking about, and maybe people are moving from this vendor to that vendor based on what's going on in the tech world. So I think that's been really helpful from a Sagetap offering perspective.

I've found that the vendor offering on Sagetap is pretty robust. There can be big organizations that you might have heard of before, but then there's also very niche ones where it's like, oh, there was this tiny little gap that I didn't even know existed, and there's a vendor that fits right into there.

Meghan: Before you were on Sagetap, I know you joined last year, what was your process for finding and evaluating vendors?

Daniel: I think everyone's experienced just doing a web search. When you do that, you're at the mercy of whatever the search engine's advertising model is or whatever the top ranked stuff is. And I'm always the one who's questioning those top results, so web searches can be a little fraught. 

Word of mouth and referrals, they're usually pretty good because they're people you know and people you've worked with, and so there can be some trust there. I mentioned going to conferences before. That's a good way to meet vendors as well. 

And then coming into an organization, you tend to somewhat just default to existing vendors too, so maybe you're inheriting that relationship from someone else. And so you don't necessarily have a lot of control over that or understand the history.

So those are the main ways that I would find vendors before coming to Sagetap.

Meghan: What made you decide that that wasn't a perfect process?

‍Daniel: Number one is relentless follow-ups. Sometimes sales folks don't really get the message.

The vetting, testing, and onboarding of whatever platform or vendor you're working with is nonstandardized. 

And the flip side of the relentless follow-ups is sometimes I've been ghosted, which is really strange. You'd think that the salespeople would want to sell, but that happens. Sometimes you're really interested in proceeding, and you just don't hear from them. Or what's happened is they've actually left the company and not passed your information along, and so you're just left there.

I got onto Sagetap because I came into this new role. I had more oversight. A lot of it was just general interest meetings and demos. 

Material Security was actually one of them. And at the time, there was no immediate need, but down the road, we were like, "We need a data loss prevention strategy." Their tools were way better than the standard Google functionality ones, and so that stood out automatically. And then the fact that they focused on Google first and cloud-based infrastructures really meant a lot to us. We looked around for similar providers and really didn't find anything that came close.

Meghan: What were your meetings like with them?

Daniel: They've been really great to us. As a nonprofit, a lot of the budgetary constraints come up, and so we met with them to learn more about the system. We went through two or three different demos. Now we're in the midst of doing a proof of concept in the next few weeks.

But they've been great to meet with, very responsive. They'll follow up with us, but not in an incessant, annoying way. They're just checking in here and there because we've had this back-and-forth that's been fruitful, and we're really looking forward to this proof of concept.

The standardized process that all vendors and Sages follow when we're exploring a platform, taking it to proof of concept and then purchase, there's no question about it, that's been the best part.

Meghan: What would you tell other leaders who are on the fence about joining Sagetap?

Daniel: Why not? Maybe the barrier is that you have to fill out your profile, but that's really not that big of a barrier, and it's definitely worth it in the end.

You're opening up the door to a community that will help you through the vendor process and the evaluation process. You don't have to rely on those third-party systems like the G2 ratings or whatever those other platforms are that a lot of the vendors push you to to rate them. It's all within a single platform. So you can do all your evaluation of vendors, you can see feedback from different Sages, and even reach out to other Sages if you have specific questions or people that have gone through an implementation.

And I really don't think there's a downside that I've come across. It's really up to you how you want to use the platform, how engaged you want to be.

I've just had a really good experience with Sagetap, not only just working with the vendors and the community members, but also people from Sagetap. Those three components add up to something that's really important and special, so the vendors, the community, and then the organization itself is great.