Lonnie Snyder discovered technology as a finance major after finding a part-time job with a help desk run by a family friend. He decided to pursue technology full-time after shadowing the Accounts Payable department, which led to his role as Chief Information Officer for the 2022 Special Olympics USA Games. Lonnie harnessed his passion for helping people in the creation of a fan engagement app that was the first of its kind for an event like the Special Olympics, allowing fans and athletes to connect like never before.

In this interview, Lonnie tells the story of the app’s creation, shares his plans for the 2026 Special Olympics USA Games in Minneapolis, and imparts advice to aspiring CIOs.

How did you become interested in technology?

In college, I was studying finance and needed a part-time job. A friend of my parents had just taken over a help desk and asked me to come in for a few hours each day. I thought, “this is perfect.” Within a few months, I took over their procurement and worked closely with the finance team. I met this interesting and challenging Accounts Payable supervisor who ran around the office chasing people with a ruler. I watched the finance department and their work, and after a while, I thought, “Man, this is terrible. I can’t do this for 40 years.”

I decided to give technology a try. From there, I moved up from running the helpdesk to working on the network to being an IT manager supporting a company of 40 people. My level of responsibility was increasing. Eventually, while I was working in a 50-person national nonprofit, the former CFO of that organization reached out and asked me to join him at Special Olympics International. Their financial systems were end-of-life, and everything needed to be repaired and replaced, and they didn’t have the in-house talent they required for that kind of overhaul.

I thought it sounded interesting to work for a global organization and do something on a very different scale. I met with the President, Chief Legal Officer, and the head of HR. I remember thinking it was interesting for a director-level position to meet all these executives. I got the job a few months later, and we ripped and replaced everything. It was a whirlwind.

Special Olympics is a global organization operating in 190 countries and territories. Pre-COVID, 108,000 events were happening every year, about 300 every day. It’s not just a one-time event each year like the World Games. Regional events, like the USA games, happen every four years. Special Olympics follows the Olympic model, so they award bids to cities for the USA Games or countries for the World Games. Special Olympics Florida, based out of Orlando, was awarded the bid for the ’22 Games.

Not long after I joined Special Olympics International, I traveled to South Korea for my first World Games and ended up supporting a lot of events and ultimately spent eight years as the Senior Vice President of Technology. I was responsible for our enterprise systems and health technology made up of about 20 different applications used by a couple of thousand people worldwide.

In January 2020, the CEO of the 2022 Special Olympics USA Games came to Washington, D.C., for a meeting, and I was asked to join to talk about the previous Games from a health technology perspective. In the meeting, I was drawn in by his passion and excitement for the project. He was incredibly visionary, talking about athlete focus for everything from creating the logo to the whole design of the games. He wanted to do 12,000 health screenings, whereas the Seattle games, one of the most successful Healthy Athletes programs, had done 7,000. He wanted to be the most technologically advanced Games ever. He wanted an app. Although he didn’t know exactly what he wanted, he pulled out his phone and drew the whole room into this conversation about an athlete and her family coming from Nebraska to see her compete. He wanted the app to show her family the competition schedule, how to get there on the closest shuttle, and the results. His vision for a fan engagement platform was exciting and aggressive, and it had never been done before. It struck me that this project was unique, and I needed to find out more. 

One conversation became three, and then I was on a plane down to Orlando just to see if this was something that could work. I brought my wife with me, and at the end of the weekend, she said, “Well, this is what you have wanted to do for years. Let’s do it.” We picked up and moved our whole family 17 hours further away from our family and started this adventure that was just a whirlwind in the middle of COVID.

In my first year at Special Olympics, I went to South Korea six months into my new job. The “other duties as assigned” is revealed when you’re deploying technology on the other side of the world all while trying to help hundreds of people work as if they’re working out of their home office. You must get creative and do things you’ve never done before. After I left that event, just exhausted, physically exhausted after almost three weeks of 18-hour days, I went home. I told my millennial teenagers I was sorry for telling them they were silly for thinking they could change the world. I saw that the health programming Special Olympics does saves lives, which rocked my world. It completely changed my worldview and perspective on people and folks with different abilities. That started a journey that ultimately led my wife and me to adopt a couple of children with special needs.

When I met Joe Dzaluk, the CEO of the 2022 games, I knew that his passion, excitement, and desire to do something big and audacious, something that had never been done before, was something that I wanted to hitch my wagon to.

Walk us through the creation of the app.

I started a listening tour and talked to about 100 people within my first 60 days on board. These were folks that had attended previous events or had different perspectives. I spoke with Special Olympics program staff, people on the Organizing Committees, athletes, heads of delegations, and Program CEOs to understand what they needed for one of these events to be successful. We had an athlete input counsel, and we convened them in a focus group to understand what type of apps they liked and what they thought would be cool for us to include. We built out the rough requirements, put it all in Smartsheet, and started having other departments weigh in. Finally, after a five-page business requirements document with no technology speak at all, just simple business requirements with “must do this, must do that” and the menu structure, we put it out to a bid of 11 companies, which we narrowed down to two.

Once we started the kickoff to do our own custom software, we knew we wanted this to be a legacy project that could be used globally by Special Olympics programs, not just events. We knew it had to be custom, so we decided to do a user study based on the notes I’d taken from conversations with people. We hired a UX design firm that had worked with REI, and their specialty was creating experiences. They came up with 50 or so low-fidelity sketches, and we narrowed it to 16 sketches we liked and concept tested with those drawings. It felt like being on TV in a police interrogation room where we stood behind a one-way mirror watching the tests. We were all on the edge of our seats, waiting to see what these people would say and how they would react. Although we are all part of the Special Olympics organization, my experience differs from that of an athlete. In the beginning stages of this, when we talked about what success would look like, we knew that we wanted it to be athlete-centered, and they had to be at the center of the design.

I wrote down everything those focus groups said about our tests, which changed five assumptions we had about the project and ultimately changed the creative direction. We built the app to be 100% focused on athletes. My CEO said, “what about the other 95% of people that will be at our event or use the system?” Which is a great question. I hang my career on this, but I firmly believe, deep down, that if we build this, it will be our Field of Dreams. We build this for athletes, and this will revolutionize how people experience this event. And it did.

It was 18 months of meetings, design, build, and testing, and we did all of this on a shoestring budget. You get creative with finding partners by sharing your passion and trying to do something that’s never been done before. I was in Singapore a couple of years ago for a leadership conference, and they played a TEDx video about how having no money is an asset. What? That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. Any corporation around the world can do anything with enough time and money, and people. But when it comes to nonprofits, you must get inventive. You must think about shortcuts and ways to skim off layers, which is what we did. We went out and found partners excited to help. We had a company give us $100,000 worth of cloud consulting, like how to do this in AWS and a serverless environment with containers, which had never been done before. We found through another partner, a partner who did a $30,000 engagement pro bono because they wanted to help. You find lots of people when you put your heart out there. It’s amazing how many people will step up, raise their hands, and help.

Well, the app seems like it was a success!

It was a resounding success. We built it to scale for 25,000 concurrent sessions with no more than a one-second wait time. It was all made possible with an Amazon Innovation grant, and we had over 200,000 total sessions by the end of the games.

As I walked around each day of the games, I was beaming with pride watching athletes pull out their phones and get notified from the app – that their results were in and congratulating them on their success. Fans could safely send them kudos without direct messaging, and the athletes loved it. It was such a game changer for their experience. People ask, “what’s the most important thing you’re trying to do.” It was about delighting and amazing the athletes and showing the world they are heroes. We developed “hero profiles” so they could be celebrated and tell their stories, demonstrating what they overcame to get here.

In our media event two months before the event, I met a mother and her daughter, a triathlete competing in the games named Juliette from Florida. At the event, I told her, “I want to show you something.” I took out my phone, pulled up her profile, and showed it to Juliette and her mom. It was her story, and I told her, “the world will get to see who you are, what an awesome person you are, and everything you had to overcome to get here.” Her family and friends from around the world would be able to support her. She was stunned when I told her how the app would connect her friends and family who weren’t there. Her mom was crying and hugged me. It totally reiterated that the blood, sweat, and tears we put into the app were worth it. That one moment made it all worthwhile.

What was the biggest hurdle you faced during the whole of the games?

COVID really screwed everything up. The vaccine caused a lot of divisiveness and led to some registration challenges. Each Program was supposed to have all their athletes registered by a certain date, but nothing was done on time. We had changes coming in until the second day of arrivals. Everything was in a constant flux, from arrivals to meals to oh 200 people who weren’t supposed to be here in the morning just showed up.

We learned to expect the unexpected, and you won’t be as frustrated or surprised. There were a lot of operational things that detracted from the overall experience that were completely out of our control, and many of them stemmed from COVID. Half of the organizing committee got sick right before the event, or during the event, or after, including me. I spent 18 months being super careful, wearing a mask everywhere and washing my hands. Then two weeks out from the event, I got COVID. I’m persona non grata in the office, but I’m going in at nine o’clock at night with my adult son to fill up two cars with laptops, and we spent the night imaging computers in my dining room because I had to get it done.

The whole experience contributed to a lot of lessons I’ve tucked in the back of my head to do differently next time.

You just started as the Chief Information and Technology Officer for the 2026 Games. How will you implement some of the things you’ve learned from the 2022 Games over the next four years?

We’re transitioning the whole Smartsheet environment to the new organizing committee. We’ve prepaid the main instance for almost a year beyond the event. Just as everything was legacy for us, we want to be able to pay it forward. We’ve got all the collateral and all the great stuff we did in Orlando to carry forward. I’m the first employee and am almost 30 days in now. My CEO has asked me to help with a bunch of non-technology projects, like helping with an RFP to find a PR firm.

I’m also creating a roadmap based on what we did for the 2022 games. We had about 27 different pieces of software, including four different timing systems. You only want as many things as you need and working in 27 programs is overwhelming. It would be like spinning plates. I’m hoping we can do it with less stuff.

[Read more on the creation of the fan engagement app for the 2022 Special Olympics USA Games]

It’s going to be different, but it’s a different organization. I had breakfast with the board chairs last week, who encouraged me to have a growth mindset. He asked me, “what can you do for one, two, or three million dollars. If you give me the roadmap, I’ll ring the connections.” I’m thinking, “where were you three years ago.” It’s felt like having the rug ripped out from under you, but I’m in this ocean of possibility when I’ve been used to swimming in a pool. It will be a completely different scaled event.

You’re building a new IT organization. How are you looking at the talent landscape, and how will a nonprofit affect hiring?

At Special Olympics International, I had seven direct reports and a decent budget for a nonprofit. But there is no comparison to affiliate organizations like Special Olympics Florida. Going to Orlando without knowing my budget and finding out how little I had to spend was challenging. I hired an IT manager just to help with registrations and the help desk, whereas in my old role, I would have had five people for that. We relied on volunteers a lot. I went around to tech councils and local meetups to pitch our organization like they were venture capitalist firms, but we just wanted people to help.

For ’26, we’ll have more staff, but it will be a lot of looking for raw talent that we can refine. I’m hoping hiring challenges will improve in a year or two, but the world is changing. This whole quiet quitting thing is not something I understand or grew up with. It’s a generational thing, but it will be different to see how older generations adapt and think about connecting people to the mission. That’s the hardest part. If you don’t have a compelling mission, and you can’t excite someone about it and paint how they’re going to help change the world, well, this probably isn’t the industry for you.  

What advice would you give to someone aspiring to be a CIO, especially in the nonprofit sector?

You need to get out, talk to people, and understand what your business is, what you do, and who you serve. If you try to impress people with how much you know or all the great stuff you’ve done, no one cares until they know how much you care. You must understand people’s pain points and what they need to be successful in business. I’m a problem solver, and I like to help people get out of their boxes even when I get stuck in mine.

Ask questions. Be a curious person and find a desire to help because thinking about technology is totally wrong. Going forward, the CIO will not be knee-deep in tech and coding, but they’ll be Swiss Army Knives who can do a little bit of everything: make connections, help understand how to solve problems, and turn problems into an opportunity. COVID decimated so many businesses but look at the grocery pickup and food delivery that came out of it. Challenges help change things.

Who has been the biggest influence on your career path as you’ve grown from finance major to CIO?

The guy who gave me my first IT job took a chance. I’ve seen him once in the last 25 years in person, but we connect on Facebook, and he’s watched my career. I saw him about a year and a half ago, and he said, “I’m just so proud of who you’ve become.” He believed in me because no one should have hired me for that job, even though it was entry-level. But I got a shot, and he didn’t mind me asking dumb questions. If it hadn’t been for him, I probably would be a controller or CFO somewhere and angry that I was working 80 hours a week.

When you take time to help someone and make them feel valued and important, that sticks with you. I’ve tried to take that same approach to everyone I work with or who works for me. I’m not a boss; I’m here to help solve challenges and get roadblocks out of the way. When you help develop people because you really care about them, it changes your perspective, and you’re not frustrated when someone brings you a problem. You must train them to bring you solutions to think about instead of just giving you a problem.

How do you decompress from the challenges of being a CIO?

I have two adult kids, one still living at home, three little kids, eight, seven, and five, and two dogs. When I get home, it’s chaos all the time. I have little kids running at me to pick them up and pushing each other out of laps while competing for attention along with the dogs. I spend a lot of time with my family. If I’m alone in the city, I walk a couple of miles a day. There was a lake at our house in Florida, so I’d go down to the boat launch and look out at the water. It brings me back to a Zen state of mind.

Do you have books that have helped you in your CIO journey?

I read a lot more before we adopted our little kids. Now it’s a struggle to listen to audiobooks or read a few pages here or there. One of my favorite books is David Allen’s Getting Things Done. That changed my career trajectory by giving me a superpower for cutting through stuff and always staying on top of things. When you’re in a stressful job and getting 200 emails a day, you’re responsible for big projects, and unless you have a system and a way to keep on top of it, you’re underwater and toast. Jeff Shannon, who inspired our journey for Miles, wrote this great book called Hard Work Is Not Enough. That’s also a good business book. And, of course, the CIO professional network recommends excellent books that will help you in every facet of life. 

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Any final words you’d like to share?

It’s been incredible to get to do something that’s never been done before and being on this project has been one of the greatest privileges I’ve gotten to do. The 2022 Special Olympics USA Games is a project I will remember fondly for the rest of my life. My family has been so supportive even after I ripped them away from everything they knew. My wife is an amazing person to loan me out to people and to let me be a part of this project. It’s been a wonderful ride.