Supporting the CiviCRM project

List reader Jim Miller of the North Shore Choral Society writes in with a generous thought:

Is there any way to code the PayPal button on our website so that CiviCRM could receive revenue?

And he references the recent civicrm.org blog post RevShare & CiviCRM, which highlights exactly this point:

If you’re using PayPal, Stripe, iATS Payments or TSYS to process payments in CiviCRM, you’re already supporting the CiviCRM project financially — at no cost to you or your organization.

From the blog:

These are payment processors that have literally processed millions of transactions for organizations using CiviCRM and, as a result, have voluntarily chosen to share a small portion of each transaction fee with CiviCRM.

The income from RevShare has generally represented around 20% of our annual budget, so it’s quite important.

… Our revenue sharing agreements don’t increase the transaction costs that organizations incur when using the payment processors. ... The rates that payment processors charge is the same regardless of whether CiviCRM participates in the RevShare or not.

What’s happening here? It’s pretty simple:

These payment processors have a financial interest in ensuring that systems such as CiviCRM work seemlessly with their offerings. It naturally increases their own profitability. To help incentivize CiviCRM developers to keep it all working smoothly, they offer the CiviCRM project a tiny percentage of their own part of each transaction fee.

It costs you nothing, but it helps the CiviCRM project significantly.

But Jim, bless him, goes one further:

From a practical standpoint, given the low volume of PayPal transactions processed by NSCS, it might make more sense to just make a direct contribution from me to the organization as a whole or to a project you consider worthy.

And the answer there is also quite simple. I’ll tell you what I told him:

That's a generous thought. If you like, the CiviCRM project does accept financial contributions on its Support CiviCRM page.

To sum up:

• The CiviCRM project is a community effort, not a giant corporate profit-making machine.

• If you’re using one of the more popular payment processors (PayPal, Stripe, iATS Payments or TSYS) in CiviCRM, you’re already helping to fund CiviCRM’s mission.

• If you’d like to take it a step further, you can certainly offer any financial support here.

All the best,
A.

Like the growing grass …

I've been very busy the past couple of weeks. So has my lawn.

I look at it everyday, and it never seems any taller than it did the day before.

But it's clearly in need of attention now.

It turns out consistency matters.

Grass grows.
Duplicate contacts accumulate.
Donor relationship strengthen or degrade.
Membership numbers increase, or recede.
Skills build slowly over time.

You don't notice it from one day to the next.

But it's happening.

And it's your consistent effort, or lack thereof, that determines the outcome.

All the best,
A.

Redux: “Difficult” vs “Complex”

The length of yesterday’s “Difficult” vs “Complex” email may have obscured my point, which is really about delegation and scale.

Take, for example, the computer or cell phone you're using right now.

Designing it was a complex problem. Beyond a certain point, adding more people to the design team will actually slow the process, with no benefit in quality.

Building it was merely difficult. Once the build process was standardized, the manufacturers could in theory create as many assembly lines as they wanted.

Here's the thing:

For complex processes or unique projects, you need a few people, at most, with deep understanding of your needs and the tools that can meet them.

For standardized simple tasks, any requirement of time and effort can be overcome by adding reliable people — or even automation.

Complex problem? Pick a small team of knowledgeable experts.

Difficult but simple? Many hands make light work.

All the best,
A.

“Difficult” vs “Complex”

The solution for a complex problem requires intimate knowledge, so you can't avoid being involved. But simple tasks, even difficult ones, can be delegated.

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Staging a play takes a lot of work.

Some of it is just hard work, requiring significant time or effort.

• Building the set

• Selecting and acquiring the right props and costumes

• Memorizing lines

• Showing up for rehearsals

• Editing the playbill

• Getting the word out

• Ticket sales

• Ushering patrons to their seats

But some of it is complex.

• Coordinating the actors' movements on-stage

• Deciding on cues for lighting and sound

• Working around the unplanned absence of cast or crew

• Finding and expressing the emotional arc of the script

A smart director knows he can delegate most of the hard work,
but that he must be involved in most of the complex decisions.

That's because complexity requires intimate knowledge of both the larger picture and the details, while hard work "just" requires time, effort, and dedication.

Here's the thing:

Guiding your constituents forward in their journey with your mission will involve both difficult tasks and complex challenges.

It's helpful to remember that those are not the same thing.

• Designing a well-segmented communication strategy to reach your constituents effectively en masse — that's complex. It requires intimate knowledge of your situation and your people, and careful arrangement of many interrelated components.

• Ensuring the data for each constituent is properly recorded — that's merely difficult. It “just” requires attention to detail and consistent effort.

As a leader in your organization, understanding where your attention is most valuable, and where you can afford to delegate, can make or break the success of your efforts.

The stage director can't afford to get lost in sewing costumes or seating patrons. He must remain focused on coordinating the complex details that only he can address.

You, too, can afford to delegate and outsource many of the difficult tasks in your work.

But the complex tasks will always need your attention.

All the best,
A.

Deciding priorities

Perfection is elusive, and priorities matter.

But while it's easy to say — obvious, even — that you'll want to consider the costs and benefits of any effort at improvement...

it's a little harder to put in the time and effort to understand the real benefits, and to know what the potential costs will be.

Say for example you have these two problems:

• A large percentage of your mass mailings are getting bounced, dropped, or routed to the Junk folder.

• Your email open and click-through rates are becoming increasingly unreliable due to privacy protections by Apple, Gmail, and other inbox providers.

Which of those is the more troubling problem, and by extension has a greater benefit if it's addressed?

Which is more difficult to address, and thus more costly?

Benefits:

The benefit of fixing a problem is something you can determine almost completely on your own (though it can help to talk through it with someone more experienced).

What's the negative impact of leaving this problem unresolved?

If you could fix this problem by waving a magic wand, how would that help your organization, your mission, your staff, or even yourself?

Even if you can't put a number on it, you might at least have an idea how it would feel.

Costs:

Understanding the costs can be more difficult. You may have no idea which of those problems is easier to fix.

If you'll need outside help, you can't know the monetary cost of that help without asking someone.

And non-monetary costs — like staff training, configuration and maintenance, and changes to your existing workflow — are also hard to think about without significant experience or research.

Professional opinion:

This is where it helps to have a good relationship with a knowledgeable expert who knows you and cares about your work.

Because uncertainty entails risk, reducing uncertainty — and thus reducing risk — has real value all by itself.

Here's the thing:

Of course, there's no such thing as a sure bet. Any effort you undertake may not get you the results you hoped for.

But reducing uncertainty in the beginning gives you a much greater chance of celebrating in the end.

All the best,
A.

Perfection vs Priorities

I'm in a play at the local community theater.

The Diary of Anne Frank. Beautiful story. Thought-provoking message. Period costumes. Tons of props. Specific religious observances. Dialogue, monologue, emotions, motivations, timing.

That's a lot of detail to get right.

But the timelines are tight. Three weeks of rehearsals, tech week, then opening night.

In that short time, we are not going to get everything perfect. It's a fact.

So what do we do?

We prioritize.

• Script calls for a wood-burning stove, but ours is gas? We can work around that.

• Emotional scenes not striking the right chord? We must spend time addressing that.

• Costumes not exactly to period? It's not ideal but we can work with it.

• Plot-critical costume pieces missing? That's a must-fix priority.

The truth is, the only way we could get this perfect is if we had an unlimited budget and unlimited time to prepare. There will always be something that could have been better.

And when time or budget are especially limited, we buckle down, make the hard choices, and ensure we don't sacrifice the critical elements — character, story, relationships, meaning — for nice-to-haves like 100% historically accurate individually tailored costumes.

Here's the thing:

Perfection is a chimera. Anything can always be made better.

When resources are limited — and they always are — it's worth taking time to set priorities, and to understand the costs and benefits of any effort at improvement.

All the best,
A.

CiviCamp Europe is coming

Longtime list member MJ Chwalik hit me with this question (shared with permission) yesterday. I thought the answer might be informative, so I’m sharing it here.

First, the question:

HI Allen, hope all is good your way. 😊

We are currently in the process of budget planning, and I am gathering information on the upcoming CIVI Conference. Could you please share with me the following details:

• The dates and location for next year’s conference
• The cost of attendance (including any pricing for additional guests)
• Any other key information that would be helpful for me to present to our board

I am very interested in attending. The more details you can share, the better I can prepare a complete presentation for our team.

Thanks MJ

And my response:

Hi MJ,

(BTW, I'll probably be re-using most of my answer as a short post to my daily mailing list. It's totally fine to say no, of course, but would you mind if I share your question in that post, for context?)

That's wonderful news! There's nothing like an in-person event to augment your learning and build relationships in the community.

The next upcoming conference is CiviCamp Europe in Lunteren, Netherlands. This event offers a one-day conference on Monday, October 20th, followed by an optional 2-day Administrator Training on Oct. 21 and 22.

You can easily learn more at the event website: CiviCamp Europe 2025

The Registration Page shows the pricing options, but a quick summary is like so:

• Conference on Monday: € 100
• Administrator Training on Tuesday, Wednesday: € 650.00

You can also see the Conference Program here, and a lengthy FAQ here.

By the way, I myself won't be attending, since I've learned that the available flights to Amsterdam from my Dallas-area location would require me around 24 hours of travel each way. I hope you have better luck from your area!

If you can work out the timing and the budgeting, I expect you'll have a wonderful and enriching time. I'm good friends with several of the organizers, and I'm confident they're preparing a very informative program and a welcoming atmosphere.

Please let me know any questions you might have, but hopefully this is enough to get you started!

All the best,
Allen

The best time to learn

Driving:

I have friends who first got their driver's license in Japan, where it's pretty common to study hard, get your license, and then never drive again. They call it "paper driver." Most of them, when they moved here where I live, had to re-learn the entire driving experience, because their original learning pretty quickly wore off.

On the other hand, my childhood friends and I could not wait to get our licenses, and then we immediately drove every time we got the chance. The learning stuck.

Academics:

I did very well in school. I studied, aced the tests, got wonderful grades. And then quickly forgot most of what I had "learned."

On the other hand, most of my learning as an adult has been self-led, seeking out whatever resources I needed to gain information and skills for which I've had a practical use. Most of that learning has stuck.

CiviCRM:

I've also designed, conducted, and facilitated numerous formal trainings for system administrators in CiviCRM. And I've spoken with many participants in those trainings some weeks or months later. For better or worse, I can tell you that most of the topics we covered in those trainings are either completely forgotten or reduced to vague memories.

On the other hand, some of the most effective trainings I've conducted have been ad-hoc, on demand sessions for people who needed answers to specific questions for their daily work. That learning sticks.

Here's the thing:

To be fair, when you need access to skills and knowledge, any prior training, however distant in the past, can be better than none at all.

But I’ll maintain that the best time to learn is when these two things are true:

1. You have a genuine curiosity or other personal motivation to learn.

2. The instruction is followed by frequent real-world opportunities to use, test, and solidify that learning.

Learning for the distant uncertain future can be nice.

Learning for the immediate future tends to “stick” a whole lot better.

All the best,
A.

Ketchup popsicles

Ever try to sell ketchup popsicles to group of a people wearing white gloves?

Sure, you might think ketchup popsicles are awesome.

But from their perspective, it's probably not a great fit.

In the same way …

You might think your membership program is awesome. Who wouldn't want those benefits, right?

But from the perspective of your members and potential members, is it a great fit?

It depends on what they want.

And the only way to know that is to ask them.

All the best,
A.

Painting vs trenching

Almost any task can be either outsourced or done yourself. It all depends on what you want, and that’s usually not a simple question.

A friend of mine has bought a home his family loves, but it needs some work.

Interior paint: He and his wife are taking this on. It's within their skills, and can be done in manageable chunks without much time pressure. He also values the time they spend working together, and expects they'll all value a certain pride of accomplishment once they're living within the rooms they've painted to fit their own tastes.

Replacing a septic line: This job he will absolutely hire out. It's hard physical labor that neither he nor his family will enjoy. It requires specific knowledge, skills, and tools. Once begun, it must be completed in a timely manner. And when it's done, absolutely nobody will sit and admire the work; if it's done right, everyone will forget about it. What's more, there are people who can do it faster and better than him, at half the cost (if he values his time by what he earns professionally).

Here's the thing:

There's no hard-and-fast rule about which tasks you should outsource and which you should handle in-house.

But it's worth considering your own skills, interests, and desired outcomes.

If you love doing the work and expect to care about how it's done, in-house may be the right choice.

But if you don't enjoy it, or care mainly about its functionality and less about exactly how it's done, you might let someone else handle it.

Either way, the cash outlay is not the only cost.

And having it done is not the only benefit.

All the best,
A.

Competition

"Beating the competition" is an obvious concern for business owners. But does it matter for your organization?

After all, you're not selling sneakers or cell phones or breakfast cereal.

Indeed, you may be the only organization addressing the need that you serve.

But then again, your people are:

• giving you something of which they have a limited supply:
  time,
  money,
  good will.

• getting something valuable (if usually intangible) in return:
  good feelings like pride, belonging, and hope;
  benefits to their community;
  information, encouragement, and more.

And while your organization may be truly unique in its mission …
you're not the only place they can give those limited resources …
nor the only place they can get those valuable benefits.

So while you're not selling pickup trucks or handbags or diet pills …

you've definitely got competition.

All the best,
A.

48 relationship types?

CiviCRM offers a very broad range of configuration options. You can make it as complex or as simple as you want.

Usually with a little forethought, you can use simple configurations that make your life easier, even when it seems like your data is very complex.

Last week I spoke with someone who is tracking 48 membership types in their CRM. And that complexity is giving them significant headaches in reporting and communications.

But if you look at it another way, they don't really have 48 types of memberships. They've just configured CiviCRM to track 48 “membership types.” Here’s an example:

• Premium member, standard price, 1 year

• Premium member, standard price, 2 years

• Premium member, student price, 1 year

• Premium member, student price, 2 years

• Associate member, standard price, 1 year

• etc.

That list really just contains two membership types: premium, and associate. The rest of it is just variation in the member’s expiration date and pricing discounts.

Sure, if you multiply every membership type by all the variations in pricing, expiration date, and other attributes, then you can get to 48 membership types pretty quickly..

But you don't have to.

After all, a membership type is really just a benefits package. What the member paid, or how many terms they're entitled to, is a separate question. So it can make a lot of sense to track it separately.

Here's the thing:

This isn't just true for membership. It applies to event participant roles, event types, contribution types, and much more.

As things grow organically, you can encounter a kind of “configuration sprawl”

… like a city that grows up from a small village without careful planning.

Fortunately, we don't have to let that happen.

Careful forethought, combined with the occasional cleanup effort, can do a lot to prevent that sprawl and create a healthy system that's genuinely easy to use.

All the best,
A.

Cleaning out the trunk

The trunk of your car is a handy storage space for transporting any number of items.

But if you let things accumulate there, you begin to incur a cost. Mainly in gas mileage, and in finding things when you need them.

• An extra backpack or two? No big deal.

• That home gym you picked up 6 months ago at a yard sale, with 1000 pounds of plates and dumbbells, and you just haven't had time to set it up in your garage yet? That's costing you every time you drive across town.

This can happen on your CRM system too.

• Accumulated duplicate contacts.

• 6 years of backup files just laying around.

• Admin user accounts for long gone staff members.

• Paid services and plugins you don't use anymore.

It’s all creating a series of small but needless expenses — in extra friction, service fees, and security risk.

Why not make a habit of keeping track of such things, and routinely clearing them out?

It's easy to push this kind of thing aside in the face of more urgent demands.

But over time, good system hygiene has measurable benefits that accrue to the efficiency of your work — and to your ability to thrive as an organization.

All the best,
A.

30-ft blades

The Big Fancy Thing is undoubtedly appealing. But it's not always within reach, may not be prudent, and isn't the only option.

Let's look at that giant wind farm again.

Say you've crunched the numbers and you can see there's a tremendous upside.
The market is right.
You have the skills and the people.
And the timing is perfect.

But what if you don't have the resources right now to meet all the logistical requirements?

Then you've got some tough decisions to make — but you're not without option.

You could:

• Build a smaller wind farm with fewer turbines.

• Bank your resources and wait until implementation costs decrease.

• Scrap the project altogether and look elsewhere. (Solar, maybe?)

• Erect more turbines with smaller blades that are easier to transport.

Here's the thing:

Just because you've envisioned this project to work in a certain way, that doesn't mean it's the only way to get it done.

What matters is the outcomes you're trying to create, and the resources you have available to make that happen.

Somewhere in the overlap of those two things, there's an option for you.

All the best,
A.

300-ft blades

Think about the amount of work it takes to erect a wind farm like this one in West Texas:

Building and erecting the turbines is just part of it.

Even transporting the blades is no small challenge.

These things can range up to 300 feet in length.

Three of these cruised past my coffee-shop window this morning in a huge convoy. Three massive trucks, surrounded by about 20 lead and follow cars.

That counts for an awful lot of effort in planning, permitting, and execution.

But it's clearly worth it to somebody.

They've done their best to estimate the potential upside, and then found solutions that are likely to fit within those parameters.

Here's the thing:

If you have a solid business case for a substantial improvement to your CRM system, the projected outcomes should be worth all the effort and expense.

Making a sound investment also means planning for all the ancillary effort, like transporting the turbine blades — or training your staff on your new CRM features.

And it's all based on understanding the potential upside. Without that, you can’t have a clue whether your investment will be worthwhile.

But with it, you have a reasonable basis for deciding how much you're willing to invest.

Even if it means spending a ton of effort just putting all the parts together.

All the best,
A.

Actors, and action

In the performing arts, some of the best directors don't tell their actors exactly what they want to see.

But they still have a way of saying things that will generate the results they want.

I saw this yesterday, at my daughters audition for a local community theater.

The scene was a conflict between a mother and daughter. After the first reading the director said, "Good. Let's try it again, and this time, Mom, I want you to let yourself get a little more worked up. Let your words scare her. Let's see what that does to the interaction. And Daughter, if her words frighten you, see if that changes how you react. I think it might make your response less angry and more ... something else. Do you see what I mean?"

He didn't say, “I want to see some tears.” But he got them.

He didn't say, “I want the audience to react with sympathy.” But he got it.

He didn't say, “I want to see the desperation in these people's lives.” But he got that too.

Here's the thing:

Telling your people exactly what you want can sometimes work. I mean “Donate Now!” certainly seems like the obvious thing to say.

But people are unpredictable and complex. Telling them “Do this now” might get you a short-term response and nothing more. It might just generate resistance.

On the other hand, careful messaging can stimulate folks to act from within. Plant a seed in their mind, and watch it sprout naturally into actions that, while unpredictable, align their own desires and personality with your mission and programs.

Telling them that their help is needed is one thing.

Making them feel that their help is needed — that’s quite another.

All the best,
A.

Small steps

You can do it all at once, but you don’t have to.

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I had two interesting conversations today with people who are being very wise about new things they're trying:

1. Organization A is going to start selling educational materials in support of their mission. But they don't really know what the demand is or how much volume they'll be moving.

2. Organization B wants to spin up CiviCRM from scratch, since they have no CRM to speak of now. They're already using WordPress, but they're concerned about the organizational challenges of introducing a whole new CRM system to their staff.

The wise thing they're both doing: starting off small.

Organization A knows that one day they may want a full-featured shopping cart system for smooth management of high volume sales across a wide variety of products.

But since they only have one product now, and they don't even know how to estimate the demand for that product, they've decided to start with a simple CiviCRM contribution page, where buyers can indicate how many of each version of the product they want, and submit payment.

This won’t give them inventory management, shipping fee calculations, and other great features that they would get from an e-commerce solution.

But it will let them get started quickly and begin gathering experience in order fulfillment and real-world information about demand.

Organization B believes they might get wonderful benefits from integrating CiviCRM with their existing WordPress site, but their initial step will be to roll out CiviCRM as a standalone system on a separate subdomain.

They don't get all the fancy integration that they would by running Civi under WordPress, but their plan allows them to start up quickly, introduce staff to the system slowly, and gain experience with a proper CRM without confusing their existing WordPress admins.

In both cases the organization gets important benefits without needless expense:

• Valuable information and experience;

• A solution for challenges they're facing right now;

• Manageable and incremental next steps;

• Avoiding complexities and expenses that they may not ever need to face;

• All while leaving open a path to move forward smoothly in the future, appropriate to their future needs and resources.

Here's the thing:

When you have a great idea and measurable data showing that it's both achievable and valuable, it makes sense to dive in on a substantial project for improvement.

On the other hand, when the idea is there, but the data or resources are not, it makes sense to move forward only with those components for which you do have the data and the resources.

Starting small.
Building only what you need now.
Leaving room for future growth.

These may not be the epic victories that Hollywood stories are made of.

But they are smart.
And manageable.
And valuable.

And in the long run, they add up to meaningful growth in your ability to serve the people you care about.

And that’s what great stories are really made of.

All the best,
A.

Improving the whole

If we have a system of improvement that's directed at improving the parts taken separately, you can be absolutely sure that the performance of the whole will not be improved.

— Russell L. Ackoff, American organizational theorist

When you’re trying to improve your CRM systems, it can be tempting to get hyper-focused on “the one big change” you might make to get everything working just right.

Russ Ackoff makes a great point in this 1-minute excerpt:

Improving the parts is important, but it only has meaning if it’s in the context of improving the whole.

All the best,
A.

Security: change your WordPress login URL

Several of my clients have reported a recent spike in WordPress brute-force password-guessing attacks.

Is this a worldwide increase, or just something we happen to have noticed?

It doesn’t really matter.

There's a good chance that sooner or later somebody is going to start hammering your site with millions of attempts to guess your admin passwords — which leads to two problems:

1. If they get in, you're compromised. That's a problem nobody wants.

2. If they fail, they’re still slowing down your website by using up server resources.

One simple step helps prevent both problems:

Change your WordPress login URL.

It's pretty easy to do and will eliminate all but the most determined of these attacks.

There are multiple free WordPress plugins that can do this for you.

You just need to install and configure the plugin (or have your outside specialist take care of it for you), and then tell your staff about the change, so they can still log in.

You don't have to do it.

But it's not very hard, and it's a big upgrade in your security.

So I strongly recommend it.

All the best,
A.

“You are entirely a star child!”

Behold currently! You are entirely a star child!
Begin your power! Go! Laugh!
Behold currently! You are a master of the music!
Begin your singing! Acquire your wages!

That’s a selection from a longer poetic work. Some might find it inspiring, or just cornball.

Actually, it’s Smash Mouth’s Shrek-famous 1999 hit All Star, translated by this linguist from English to Aramaic, then back to English.

Here’s the original, just in case you want it stuck in your head all day:

Hey now, you're an all star
Get your game on, go play
Hey now, you're a rock star
Get the show on, get paid

Same message, different expression. Probably appeals to a different audience.

So:

What’s the best way to express a message?

Depends on who you’re trying to reach.

All the best,
A.