The symphony

"No one can whistle a symphony. ..."

I've tried without much luck to figure out who coined the phrase. But it doesn't matter.

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This week we've completed final preparations for CiviCon 2025, the first CiviCon since the bad old days, when the big virus scared us all into hiding.

The Admin Training portion starts on Monday.

It feels a lot like opening night: Are we ready? This is gonna be awesome. Will they like it? Let's go! Should we run through it one more time?

One thing I've seen: It's a team effort.

Just like the work you're doing every day.

Everyone's working hard. Everyone's trying new things.

And when it's time to launch — the new program, the big event, the grand gala — we're all there to wince at the flubbed notes and celebrate at the crescendos.

No one person could make this happen.

"... It takes an orchestra to play it."

All the best,
A.

“Making it up as we go along”

Friend of the list Rose L. writes in with a response (shared with permission) to my email “Wishful thinking” from a few days ago.

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I had said:

• Complex systems are hard to master.
• The future is hard to predict.
• Donors who don’t feel appreciated don’t return.
• Members want substantial value in return for dues.
• Staff need training, support, and leadership.
• Every improvement requires an investment of time, attention, and funds.

But unlike gravity, these simple facts of life are still not understood and accepted by many of us grown adults. It’s easy to imagine that we could — if not for these pesky realities — truly change the world for good without so much effort.

But it’s no use.

The realities are there, and there’s little value in trying to wish them away.

Rose replies:

… maybe this reflects my current state of mind (!) but I read it as something like “despite being grown adults, we often keep our head in the sand when something is difficult or complex”

and maybe it’s the use of the term ‘grown adults’ –

as kids, we assume that becoming an adult means we know what we’re doing but that’s pretty far removed from the truth.

Most of us are making it up as we go along, giving the impression that we confidently know what we’re doing!

So I’m thinking:

Oh yeah, I’m totally making it up as I go along (no kidding), for a lot of things.

And that’s part of the fun of it.

When I was 8, I was excited to mow the lawn.
That got old soon enough — just about the time I learned all there was to know about cutting grass.

Fortunately for all of us, there’s always something new to learn.

Fortunately for the people we care about, there’s usually a way to harness that learning for everyone’s benefit.

All the best,
A.

Metrics are not goals

When a metric becomes a goal, it ceases to be a meaningful metric.

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A friend of mine jokingly hypothesized today that you could measure the popularity of a professional sports team by noting how many of its fans go to jail the night the team wins the championship.

It's a little funny, but there might be something to it: “Fans were so excited for the win that an estimated 83% of revelers were arrested for disturbing the peace, local police said today.”

But even if we decided it was a useful metric, imagine how meaningless it would become if fans began trying to prove their loyalty by striving to increase their team’s “Jailed Fans at Championship Win” rate.

Developing a fanatical fan base may be an important objective for team owners.

But surely their real goals have more to do with profitability and long-term sustainability of the organization.

Instigating a campaign to get more of their fans arrested probably isn't exactly fruitful.

Here's the thing:

When metrics become goals in themselves, we get an effect commonly known as “gaming the system.”

Because we’re all influenced by incentives, and having great results in one metric or another is a quik way to appear successful.

Think about this in other ways:

• Your email open rate.

• Event, participant satisfaction surveys.

• Time spent to complete a common task.

All of those can be useful metrics. But they’re not actually goals.

If they were real goals, you might be justified in arguing for sensational and deceptive subject lines to get that open rate up. In truth, that’s probably counter to your real mission goals.

It’s the mission that matters.

The metrics are just one measure of early successes on the way to the actual mission goals.

All the best,
A.

“Who should we get to manage our CRM?”

I got this great question yesterday from someone at an organization that’s just now launching their new CiviCRM system:

Our team is not especially technical, and we’re completely unfamiliar with CiviCRM. Who should we get to manage our CRM? Is that something we can hire you or someone else to do?

That’s paraphrased from memory, but it’s pretty close.

My answer:

This is a job for a staff member: One person, internal to your organization, who can build mastery of your CRM system and, if needed, coordinate the work of others to fit your organization’s goals.

Sure, sometimes you’ll need specialized technical help. Big complicated problems, creation of new features, strategic consultation on how best to leverage CiviCRM’s broad feature set. That’s a good time to think about hiring an outside specialist.

On a day-to-day basis, it’s a different story. The person who should be managing your CRM day-to-day is someone who first of all understands your organization.

The CRM is just a tool. A skilled person can make it perform very well for a very wide variety of needs.

But deciding how it should be used requires someone who really understands your programs, your policies, your people, your business goals, your funding model, your mission priorities.

Will they be a CiviCRM genius right out of the gate?

No. But a system like CiviCRM is designed to be manageable by non-technical folks. It’s a skillset they can learn. People do it every day. (I know. It’s my job to help them do it.)

On the other hand, will an outside provider ever come to know your organization’s dynamic, unique, intricate needs as well as someone who’s internal to your team?

That’s just not very likely.

Here’s the thing:

Technical skill is neither uncommon nor unatainable.

It’s also not a substitute for personal care and intimate organizational knowledge.

Given a choice between two people who have one or the other, you can either:

• Teach the technical skills to the person who knows and cares for your mission; OR

• Teach the nuances of your mission work and organizational culture to the person who has the technical skills.

I believe you’re far better off with the first option.

All the best,
A.

Chasing vs chased

If there's one thing I've noticed about virtually all of my CiviCRM coaching clients, it's this:

They usually have a lot on their plate.

Sometimes it’s almost more than they can keep up with.

Variations in the calendar, in staff and volunteer availability, and in funding can combine to create some challenging situations, when the list of To-Dos seems to grow faster than you can knock them out.

Such situations might be unavoidable, but I've found that my clients typically have two subtly different ways of dealing with it:

1. Just scrambling to get out from under and get back to “normal.”

2. Appreciating the value of each completed task, despite the large volume of work.

As you might guess, that second viewpoint is more common among my more successful clients.

Here's the thing:

It can be pretty easy to feel overwhelmed.

You can knock out three tasks, only to find that five more have been added in their place.

It can feel like it's just never going to end.

And that feeling is not especially motivating.

But what can be very motivating is to appreciate that you just quickly knocked out three valuable operations, no matter how much more it seems there is to do.

Those three tasks, now completed, have real value of their own, and that’s worth remembering.

It's a difference between feeling chased and chasing.
The difference between feeling that your work demands a lot of you and remembering that you demand a lot of your work.

After all, we're not just trying to “get to Done.”

We're trying to get valuable things done for the people we care about.

And even in the most hectic of times, the things you do get done are wins.

Prioritize and execute. When things get hectic, that's the only way to get ahead.

And not just to get ahead of your to-do list, but to get ahead of the real-world problems you’re working to solve for the people you care about.

All the best,
A.

Wishful thinking

How often do you find yourself complaining that gravity is just unfair?

I mean, if it weren’t for this ridiculous fundamental universal force, you could fly! You could be free! You could leap tall buildings in a single bound!

Right. Of course no rational adult is really bothered by that.

Little kids, maybe.

The rest of us learned long ago that the limitations of gravity (and its benefits, by the way) are a fact of life, and there’s little value in trying to wish them away.

Turns out, it’s not just gravity.

• Complex systems are hard to master.

• The future is hard to predict.

• Donors who don’t feel appreciated don’t return.

• Members want substantial value in return for dues.

• Staff need training, support, and leadership.

• Every improvement requires an investment of time, attention, and funds.

But unlike gravity, these simple facts of life are still not understood and accepted by many of us grown adults. It’s easy to imagine that we could — if not for these pesky realities — truly change the world for good without so much effort.

But it’s no use.

The realities are there, and there’s little value in trying to wish them away.

The value, of course, comes when we accept them, anticipate them, and learn to turn them to our advantage.

All the best,
A.

Down to the wire

Surprises will happen. If your plan relies on everything going to plan, you should expect those surprises to create real problems.

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The following is a completely made-up bad-dream scenario, but bear with me.

You’ve bought a new house and you're going to move. But you're too busy to handle the move yourself, so you've hired a full-service moving company.

They’ve promised to take everything from your old house — your Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic book collection, your grandmother's wedding dress, legal documents, kids’ kindergarten graduation photos ... all of it, right down to your socks and your nail clippers — and place it right where you can find it in your new house.

And as usual in a bad dream, there's a catch: Your old house will be bulldozed to make room for a superhighway, on the same day that you'll move into your new house.

If the movers goof this up, you might be left with nothing but the clothes on your back.

If you're like me, that's the kind of dream that would wake you up in a cold sweat.

Believe it or not, I'm now helping a client who's in a similar situation.

Their old subscription-based CRM will be decommissioned this week. Some time ago, they arranged with a specialist to move all that data into CiviCRM. As of today, they’re still not sure that the migration went well, and there are several indications that it did not.

I’m with them now to ensure they at least have some options — in the form of a raw data dump from the old system — in case they need to go back and get data that was missed.

It's a little better than the nightmare I described above, but not much.

We could say it's as if the movers, instead of just leaving thier things in the old house, have dumped all their belongings in a giant jumbled pile in Siberia. If they want their grandmother's wedding dress, they might just find it — if they can get to Siberia and dig through the pile.

Why am I telling you all this?

Because things don't always go as planned.

In any project of significant size, there will be surprises. You can't know what they will be. That's the nature of surprises. But there will be some.

Just as an experienced general in combat will, whenever possible, hold some force in reserve as a hedge against the unforeseen, so an experienced project planner will keep some resources in reserve on any given project.

In your world and mine, those resources are not troops, but time, money, and manpower.

If you’re smart, and if you’ve got a choice, you’ll hold some of that in reserve — a little extra time; a percentage of your actual budget; a few of your volunteers — to deal with the inevitable surprises.

The time to do that is before you begin. Because once you’ve committed everything, there’s no room for surprises.

All the best,
A.

CiviCRM extensions fix

CiviCRM has released a fix for a known issue with some of its extensions. You don't need to upgrade CiviCRM, but you might need to take some action.

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Extensions are awesome. They allow you to get any of a wide variety of additional features without requiring custom development.

Your CiviCRM site probably has at least a few extensions already installed. Most sites have a dozen or more.

And of course, extensions need to be upgraded now and then. That's usually pretty easy. You can do it just by clicking a couple of links within CiviCRM.

But there's a small issue that comes up now and then: extension upgrades can fail, leaving your site in a partially upgraded state.

It doesn't happen very often, but when it does, it's a pain to deal with.

Fortunately, the CiviCRM community has responded with a fix for this issue.

You can get this fixed in one of two ways:

1. Upgrade CiviCRM itself to version 6.1 or higher. This is the more labor-intensive option, so you might want something quicker and easier.

2. Install the “Hotfix: Extension Upgrades“ extension. This is the quick and easy option.

If you like technical details and long explanations, you can read the blog post announcement here.

But the short story is, you probably want to take action on one of the two options above.

It will help you avoid issues with extension upgrades and make your life easier.

And after all, making your life (and your mission) easier and more productive it's why you're using CiviCRM in the first place.

Hopefully, it's nice to know that folks in the CiviCRM community have each other's backs on things like this.

All the best,
A.

Coaching and accountability

There are lots of good reasons for getting a good coach, in any pursuit of excellence.

Consider someone who hires a personal fitness trainer. The usual reasons are like so:

• They want to ensure they’re “doing it right” and gain knowledge in what works well and what doesn’t.

• They may be trying to hit a weight-loss goal or prepare for an upcoming competition.

• They want access to someone of whom they can ask any number of related questions as they progress in their efforts.

But for most people, the biggest benefit of having a personal trainer — and one that’s often unspoken — is this:

• If they don’t show up for a session (or do their homework, or stick to their nutrition plan, or whatever), somebody will call them on it.

Here’s the thing:

Coaching is not just education. It’s not just transfer of knowledge or answering questions.

It’s an opportunity to build a relationship with someone who of course has the skills and knowledge you need, but just as importantly actually cares about your outcomes.

That means they also care whether you’re putting in the work, setting useful goals, and actually achieving them.

And if you’re not, a good coach should be calling you on it, and then helping you to stay on track.

All the best,
Allen

Get ready now: Why PHP versions matter

Forget all the geeky tech-speak. This is something you need to be aware of and act on.

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Just to cut to the chase, I'll give you the short story:

The next security release of CiviCRM (whenever it comes out) will require PHP version 8.1 or higher.

So if your site is still running PHP 7, you'll probably want to be sure your site is actually ready to run under that newer PHP version.

To fill in the details a little…

Why this matters:

• Your CiviCRM site is running on PHP. Even if you don’t know what PHP is, it’s there, doing its job quitely.

• A change in PHP version will apply to every component of your website: the CMS (WordPress, Drupal, etc.), CMS plugins and modules, CiviCRM, and all CiviCRM extensions.

• There’s at least some chance that one of those will have some surprises (bugs, or fatal errors) under PHP 8.

• When a CiviCRM security release comes out, you’ll want to apply it right away.

• And since it will require PHP 8, that’s not the best time to find out that one of your website compnents has problems under PHP 8.

Wait, is PHP 7 insecure?

Nope. If your web host has your site running under PHP 7, they’re almost certainly keeping it up to date for all known security issues. So your site should be just fine running under PHP 7 right now.

So what’s the problem?

It’s about timing. It’s like this:

Assume for argument that some component of your website will be buggy under PHP 8. And assume that you know neither which component it will be, nor what kind of problem it will have.

Now, ask yourself:

• Would you like to know about that now, so you have some time to fix those components and make them compatible with PHP 8, in your own good time?

• Or would you rather wait until a CiviCRM security update has been released; and you’ve upgraded to that security version; and then find out that you’ve got bugs in your site; and then find out that whoever you might ask for help with those bugs is already busy fixing similar emergencies on other people’s sites?

I myself would prefer the first option. Perhaps you can see why.

So what to do?

Taking action here is probably pretty simple. You’ve got some really competent person helping you with the complex technical details of your site — right? Some expert in CiviCRM and your CMS of choice (WordPress, Drupal, etc.), whom you lean on for tasks that are outside your normal in-house expertise?

Great! (And if you don’t I do suggest you find one.)

Just reach out to them and say something like, “We’re going to need to upgrade to PHP 8 pretty soon. Can you help me make sure we’re actually ready for that? And then, can we go ahead and start using PHP as soon as possible?”

Send them a copy of this email, if you like. It might help explain the urgency more clearly.

They might also want to read CiviCRM’s announcement about this change or CiviCRM’s recommended PHP versions.

Here’s the thing:

Neither you nor I know when the next CiviCRM security update will be released.

It could be soon.

When it happens, you’ll want to apply that update as soon as possible.

And to make that possible, you’ll want to be sure now that you’re ready for the upgrade then.

All the best,
A.

Delayed upgrades: extension compatibility problems

Are you keeping up with CiviCRM security updates? Delaying your upgrades can create more than security problems.

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By now you probably understand the importance of keeping up with CiviCRM security updates, to avoid operating with known security vulnerabilities.

And maybe you’ve taken my general advice about not upgrading needlessly (“chasing version numbers”), to avoid the headache of potentially introducing new bugs into the system.

But it’s worth noting:

• Security issues aren’t the only potential problem with avoiding periodic upgrades.

• “Don’t upgrade needlessly” is good advice; but treating it as “wait as long as possible to upgrade” can get you into trouble.

This week I spoke with someone from an organization who decided — for their own reasons, which I won’t question here — to avoid CiviCRM upgrades for almost 2 years.

Until recently.

A few weeks ago, they finally decided to

• upgrade to the newest CiviCRM version.

• upgrade all extension to the latest versions.

Unfortunately, this led to a problem — specifically with one or two custom extensions.

The problem was this: Since these custom extensions are used only by this one organization, nobody else was working to improve them and keep them compatible with newer CiviCRM versions along the way.

The result?

These extensions aren’t fully compatible with their current CiviCRM version, so now they’re misbehaving.

They’ve now got some tough decisions to make:

• Should they drop the extensions and try to make do another way?

• Should they try to get their in-house tech staff to debug and fix the extensions?

• Should they search for — and then hire — a CiviCRM specialist to do that?

• How should they handle the missing functionality in the mean time?

It’s not an easy situation to be in.

Here’s the thing:

As with your CMS (WordPress, Drupal, etc.), the CiviCRM functionality you rely on is very likely built on a number of extensions.

And when you can’t find a well-supported existing extension that does what you need, custom-built extensions are a fine way to add that functionality.

But then the maintenance of that extension — for as far into the future as you’ll use it — rests with you.

And if you then happen to delay upgrading CiviCRM for a long time, you could be looking at some big surprises when you finally decide to start upgrading again.

See also: Upgrades: the bigger, the harder; CiviCRM upgrade oddities: extension compatibility; and Cooperative customizations.

All the best,
A.

“I never imagined it would be this complicated.”

Even if a system is perfect, it's not especially valuable if the people who use it can't trust it.

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Here’s a comment, lightly paraphrased, from a call I had today with a new client:

If we had planned this out from the beginning, with conversations that included the staff, department heads, and volunteers, we wouldn't be in such a mess now. I never imagined it would be this complicated.

They’re in the midst of a data migration from Blackbaud to CiviCRM, and they’re struggling to have confidence that it will be truly ready to go when they turn off Blackbaud in a couple of weeks.

The one or two people who headed up the migration are — of course — very confident.

Other staff, department heads, and volunteers … not so much.

Looking back, it's easy to see how it would've been a good idea to involve more people in the process from the beginning.

Because even if a system is perfect, it's not especially valuable if the people who use it can't trust it.

Here's the thing:

Hindsight is 2020.
And the future is hard to see.

But common patterns do emerge.
And experience allows us to better anticipate common problems.

Fortunately, you don't have to wait until you're the one having all those experiences.

There are plenty of people going through it ahead of you, from whom you can learn.

Like these folks — who now know that it's good to involve major stakeholders early, and throughout the whole process.

All the best,
A.

Hang on to that owner’s manual

Even systems that work very well can be really hard to use without good documentation.

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Spring is here, and it's time to groom the lawn.

I bought a gas-powered line trimmer a few seasons ago. Weed-eater, grass-whacker, whatever you call it, yesterday it was finally time to dust the thing off.

But the darned thing was fresh out of line. You know, the little plastic filament that actually cuts the weeds — it had just run out.

No problem, I thought, I've got extra line. I'll just wind it onto the spool.

Sorry, not so fast. I just could not figure out how to open up the spool and load the line, even though I’ve done it half a dozen times before.

Fortunately, I have the owner's manual filed away somewhere.

It took me a minute to find it, but once I had that in hand, the whole thing was easy.

I'm not winning any neighborhood awards for Best Kept Lawn, but at least now I can tell where the driveway ends and the yard begins.

Without that manual (or a lot of Googling), I may never have figured it out. Seriously, it wasn’t obvious.

Funny thing, the same concept came up with a couple of clients just today.

They each had a question about functional and well-designed systems that we created together many months or years ago, which for some reason were acting in surprising ways.

For one of them, it was easy enough to consult the Google Doc that contained a detailed explanation of how it all worked, and why it worked that way. So we could see that the system is working exactly as designed (though it may need some changes now, in light of newer developments in their organizational policies).

The other was more of a mystery.

It was built several years ago, and though we had several discussions and training sessions at the time to ensure the client understood it all, there was very little in the way of written documentation.

I had to go back and literally read through the code to understand what was going on.

Not a major problem, but not the most efficient use of time either.

Here's the thing:

When you buy a hammer, it doesn't come with a user's manual. Because it doesn't need one.

But just about anything with moving parts does.

So does customized software.
Or complex configurations.
Or any part of a system that takes more than a couple of words to explain.

Sure, it's wonderful when it's fresh and new and everybody’s happy that it works as needed.

But when questions come up later, you'll be glad that you wrote down how and why it does what it does, and filed that away somewhere for easy reference later.

All the best,
A.

Experimentation

Experimentation.

Learning demands it.

It's how you learned to walk.
It's how you learned any language you speak well.
It’s how you’ve learned anything you’re pretty good at.

Sure, study helps.
Advice helps.
Instruction helps.

But if you're going to master the thing for yourself and your own needs, you must experiment.

So: Are you making time for it?

All the best,
A.

Yes, you can take it with you

Ever tried migrating away from a Software-as-a-Service (“SaaS”) platform? Some of them make it pretty hard to do.

Sure, you can just cancel your subscription — that’s easy. But can you:

• Export all of your historical data in a usable format?

• Find someone to help you turn that export into something that’s usable elsewhere?

If you can’t, then you’re pretty well locked in. Moving away from that vendor can be all but impossible, no matter how certain you are that it’s time to move on.

Here’s the thing:

Wouldn’t it be nice to know what your “end of relationship” options are … before you begin the relationship?

With open-source tools like CiviCRM, you’ve got options.

• CiviCRM partners, to whom you might be looking to host your systems, are used to this kind of question, and should be able to give you a straight answer in the early stages of discussion — in writing, if you wish.

• The answer, in all but the narrowest of cases, is (or should be, IMO): “Sure thing! If you ever decide to take your CRM systems elsewhere, we’ll package it up and deliver it to you, so that any competent CiviCRM provider will have what they need to keep you moving forward.”

• On top of that, in most cases, it’s not only “when you decide to go elsewhere.” It’s “any time you want a full data dump or export of your entire system, we’ll deliver it to you.”

• Sometimes there’s a fee for such services; sometimes there’s not. It’s worth asking about.

Sure, once you get that package delivered, you’ll probably need help — professional, competent, paid help — unpacking it and assembling it so it’s useful. But that help is available from any number of well regarded other CiviCRM partners (or your own in-house team, or even your selected non-CiviCRM vendor, if you’re leaning that way).

And the critical point here is:

You can take it with you, and (almost always) you can practice taking it with you, at any time.

All the best,
A.

Texting: “What Nonprofits Can Learn from Gen Zers’ and Seniors’ Mobile Habits”

Are you using text messages to reach your audience with effective appeals? You can do this with CiviCRM, and all indications are that you probably should be at least considering it.

The Giving USA Foundation publishes a series of annual reports and updates on philanthropic giving in the United States, and it recently released its “Special Report - Giving by Generation UPDATE”, which highlights several salient points regarding the intersection between age, mobile device usage, and charitable giving.

You can purchase the report for your own use, or you may prefer to see what others have to say about it, such as this article from NonProfit Pro.

Or you can just take my summary of bullet points — hooray for low effort!

Gen Z and Millenials are continuing to grow in charitable giving.

• The Baby Boom generation has long been seen as the bedrock base of charitable donors, but how long can this last?

• Millenials have increased their annual donations by 72% in the last 10 years, compared to Gen X’s modest 8% increase.

• And, Gen Z’s generosity trends, adjusted for inflation, have surpassed the point where Millennials’ giving was in 2015, when Millennials were similar in age.

Everybody’s texting.

• “Everybody knows” the cool kids among Gen Z and the Millenials are heavy mobile users. But 88% of Baby Boomers own mobile phones, and on average use them for about 3-and-a-half hours per day — no small amount!

• Your Gen Z constituents are more likely to respond to text messages from charities that any other channel: 3.8 out of five for text, compared to email (3.6), social media (3.6) and direct mail (3.4).

• Even your Boomer constituents are more likely to prefer receiving a receiving a monthly text message than a monthly mailing (29% for text, vs 19% for the mailing). And that’s up from two years ago, when 23% of them said they were open to receiving a monthly text, and up from just 16% in 2016.

Here’s the thing:

Everybody on the Internet will tell you that SMS has an average open rate of 98% or higher. Some will tell you that 90% of them are opened within 3 minutes. Nobody’s saying where those numbers came from, and most of them are trying to sell you something, so take it with a grain of salt.

But I think that roughly matches my own experience. People read texts.

And,
if Boomers are texting more (they are), and
if GenZers and Millenials are giving more (they are), and
if sending automated and segmented SMS messages is supported in CiviCRM (it is) …

… then … maybe … it’s worth considering how you can start to leverage this whole new (30-year-old) texting thing?

All the best,
A.

“You can't paint dirt”

My grandfather used to say, “You can't paint dirt.”

I thought of it this past weekend while re-painting our backyard chicken coop. That thing had a lot of dirt that needed to be cleaned up before we could paint it.

But grandpa meant something else, too.

I mean, you actually can sometimes paint dirt. But because the dirt isn’t fixed in place, your paint job won't last very long. However beautiful it may be in the moment, your work will amount to lost effort when the dirt beneath it shifts.

This came up again yesterday as I was helping my oldest daughter revise a research paper she's been working on. Trying to polish the language early on, before the major pieces of content are organized and put in place, can not only be wasted effort. It can actually prevent the writer from completing that important task synthesizing the research into a cohesive whole, by getting lost in the details of word choice and sentence length.

The same can be said for your custom-built features and configuration of event registrations, online membership signups, and the like.

Digging in too early on polishing the look and the language will usually result in a lot of wasted effort. What’s worse, it can be a major distraction from focusing on getting the functionality right in the first place. Make it as beautiful as you like, but if it doesn’t function properly, it will create more frustration than joy.

Here's the thing.

Creating new tools and features for your users is an iterative process.

Making it all beautiful is valuable work that will absolutely improve the experience of your users and their willingness to it.

But the more you can focus on building the right functionality first, the better positioned you'll be to have a fixed surface on which to build a beautiful presentation that lasts.

All the best,
A.

CiviCon Admin Training: program and presenters

CiviCon 2025 kicks off with a two-day Admin Training, May 19th and 20th, aimed at folks like you who need to manage CiviCRM on a day-to-day basis.

Here's the lineup of speakers (a great group of legitimate CiviCRM experts whom I've worked with for years), and topics:

Presenters:

Stuart Gaston

Known to friends as Stoob (MatterMost: @stoob), this is Stuart Gaston, with 17 years experience building CiviCRM and website solutions for nonprofits as an employee and self-employed contractor. He's also spent 10+ years as a teacher and is the member of the CiviCRM Core Team responsible for the creation of most of CiviAcademy — the online video tutorial service helping users get the most of CiviCRM.

Noah Miller

Noah (MatterMost: @noah) is a CiviCRM consultant and frequent contributor of improvements to the software. He studied cognitive science and music as an undergrad, then jumped into the world of nonprofit science journalism, where he built his first Drupal websites and CRM databases. He founded a project called outLoud Radio in 2002 to support LGBT+ youth in empowering themselves by telling their stories, and grew the organization over the next 12 years. For the last decade, drawing on his experience using CiviCRM and website platforms for his own social justice nonprofit, he has been helping other organizations get the most out of these powerful technologies.

Allen Shaw

Allen (MatterMost: @twomice) has been helping ambitious organizations meet their development goals with professional CRM solutions since 2001, first with custom-built solutions, and now – for over 15 years – focusing on CiviCRM as a platform that's built from the ground up for community-driven organizations. Allen is a regular contributor of improvements to CiviCRM, the Group Lead for the CiviCRM Extensions Working Group, and author of the Mastering CiviCRM 10-day email course. He also publishes daily mailings to his subscribers as a zero-cost source of inspiration, insights, and stories from the trenches for non-profit leaders.

Ben Walpole

Ben (MatterMost: @ufundo) is a freelance developer and member of the CiviCRM Core Team. He learned the ropes of CiviCRM while working in-house for a small public health charity, and has since worked with a range of UK campaigning/community groups. In his work with the CiviCRM Core Team he has been focused on the new ChartKit tool for no-code visualisations of CiviCRM data; and the relaunch of CiviCRM Standalone as a simpler option for deploying sites.

Program:

The Admin Training program lays out the major components and most common use cases for CiviCRM’s diverse features, covered in an orderly structure, with a mix of live demonstration, discussion, and hands-on exercises for participants.

Day 1, May 19th

09:00 - 09:15 Arrival with coffee
09:15 - 09:30 Introductions and ice-breakers
09:30 - 10:30 Session 1: Introduction to CiviCRM
10:30 - 11:30 Session 2: Organizing Data
11:30 - 11:45 Break
11:45 - 12:15 Session 3: Custom data: organization and usage
12:15 - 13:30 Lunch (provided on-site)
13:30 - 14:00 Session 4: Finding data (Reports, Searches, SearchKit)
14:00 - 15:00 Session 5: Contribute management
15:00 - 15:15 Break
15:15 - 16:15 Session 6: Event management
16:15 - 16:30 Closing Session
16:30 - 17:00 Extra time, to be used for 1-on-1 assistance and answering questions raised so far

Day 2, May 20th

09:00 - 09:15 Arrival with coffee
09:15 - 09:30 Brief recap of Day 1
09:30 - 10:30 Session 7: Duplicate contact management
10:30 - 11:30 Session 8: Communications: mass mailings, scheduled reminders, message templates, etc.
11:30 - 11:45 Break
11:45 - 12:45 Session 9: Membership management
12:45 - 14:00 Lunch (provided on-site)
14:00 - 15:00 Session 10: SearchKit and FormBuilder: Advanced searching and data intake
15:00 - 15:15 Break
15:15 - 16:15 Session 11: SearchKit and Charting: Data analysis and visualization
16:15 - 16:45 Session 12: Flexible breakouts: small groups on specific topics of interest to the group
16:45 - 17:00 Closing Session

If all that sounds interesting to you, you can still register online, for both the Admin Training on May 19-20, and for the main CiviCon event itself on May 21-22.

All the best,
A.

The cost of deferred maintenance

Just because something isn’t urgent doesn't mean it's not important.

Sure, most nonprofits have their resources stretched very thin, in both money and time.

So it's tempting to delay what can be delayed, focusing only on the things that demand our immediate attention.

But the result is deferred maintenance, a deceptively costly approach.

If you don't think it's costly, consider this real-world example:

Kansas State University recently decided to demolish 20 campus buildings, including the indoor swimming facility and the gymnasium, rather than face the expense of catching up on decades of delayed repairs and maintenance.

You’re (probably) not in the business of managing university campus facilities. But your operations do rely on maintaining accurate CRM data and effective tools to leverage that data.

So you’ll need to consider tasks like these:

• Detecting and merging duplicate contact records.
• Documenting and implementing a solid permission scheme for your users.
• Performing security updates.
• Ensuring you have a sound backup system for all data and files.
• Conducting regular trainings to keep your staff up to date with the latest system functionality.

Obviously those are all important and valuable.

But they’re nothing your board will demand that you solve right away. A major donor isn’t going to call you at 5:00 p.m. on a Friday, irate that you haven't addressed these things.

In other words, it's a can that you could kick down the road.

But unless you enjoy demolishing things that have not been properly maintained, I encourage you to make time for the ongoing maintenance.

All the best,
A.

Improving the providers’ registry

Yesterday I shared some highlights of my demo talk showing off the New Mexico Respite Provider Registry, and as promised, here are some additional thoughts on improvments we're considering to make it even better.

To be sure, the New Mexico registry is doing its job quite well. Providers are registering, and folks who need their services are finding help.

So what, you might ask, could be better than that?

If you’re thinking of creating your own provider directory, that’s a great question to ask.

Here are a few ideas:

1. Make it more beautiful

In line with thoughts on the value of good design (and examples) that I’ve shared recently, there’s no denying that a beautiful presentation has significant power to create trust and buy-in among users. — even if precisely quantifying that value can be a challenge.

As an example, take a look at the soon-to-launch New York State respite registry (not my project BTW, just one that was also showcased during our recent presentation at the ARCH National Lifespan Respite Conference). It’s a great example of what can be achieved with a little (or a lot of) judicious investment in typography, color, and stock photography.

2. Add helpful content

First-time visitors to your directory — whether they’re seeking services or offering them — probably won’t already be sold right away on how they’ll benefit by participating.

Adding some instructive information can go a long way. Consider topics like:

• Is this service right for me?

• How does this directory work?

• Are your providers screened, trained, or otherwise specially qualified?

• Why would I want to be listed as a provider?

• Am I qualified to be listed as a provider, and how could I become qualified?

3. Provide testimonials

It goes without saying that you think your directory is useful. But does anyone else think so?

First-time (or fifth-time) visitors may not be so sure.

Trusting one of your providers is an investement of effort on the part of those seeking services.
Creating a listing is an investment of effort on the part of the providers.

Collecting — and sharing — testimonials from both of these groups is an incredibly effective way to let your visitors see the value they’ll get from that investment.

Here’s the thing:

The beauty of a public service provider directory lies in its ability to connect people who really want to be connected. People who may be not able to find each other in any other way.

To make that truly effective, something of a “critical mass” is necessary: Shoppers don’t like to visit a shopping mall with empty stores; and retailers don’t like to maintain stores in a mall with no foot traffic.

By making your directory beautiful, adding helpful content, and providing testimonials from happy folks (both providers and seekers), you can help ensure that there’s a healthy give-and-take of traffic between both audiences.

All the best,
A.