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.

---

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.

How I publish daily emails with CivCRM

This daily mailing list is sent through CiviCRM, with archives available on a completely separate website. Here's how I do it:

Two sites:

I use Squarespace for my main website at joineryhq.com.

I also use CiviCRM to handle coaching subscriptions, invoice payments, and more — and to manage this daily mailing list and email courses like my Mastering CiviCRM Crash Course.

Mailing list archives:

I call this an archive, but technically it's not. It’s just a Squarespace blog. Emails like this one get published first as a post in that blog, and then each article is sent as a daily mailing.

The tech stack (how it really works):

1. I write today's email as a post in my Squarespace blog.

2. Squarespace automatically publishes an RSS feed of those blog posts.

3. My CiviCRM site uses the NewsStore extension to pull items from that RSS feed and queue them up as a CiviCRM mass mailing to everyone in my Daily Mailings group.

4. Within a few minutes after I post to Squarespace, list members receive the daily email.

One extra custom piece:

I do have a small CiviCRM custom extension that adds formatting, ensures I don't accidentally send multiple emails per day, and appends the email footer.

Why I went this way:

At first, I planned to compose mailings in CiviCRM, and have some third-party service monitor the list and maintain an archive of sent emails.

But I couldn't find an easy way to make that work with Squarespace.

So I turned it around backwards. I post to Squarespace first; then the NewsStore extension takes it from there.

What this gets me:

This approach is perfect for my workflow:

• I only have to publish the email once. Then it's automatically delivered and available in the archive.

• I have all the usual tools in CiviCRM for open and click tracking, user unsubscribes, and the rest.

• Subscriber information is right there in my CRM, so I still have a centralized view of every person’s interraction with my work.

In short, I get the ability to help my people efficiently at scale, and to assess where each person is in their journey with me, so I can effectively help them to make the next step in that journey.

And isn't that what we all want from our CRM?

All the best,
A.

5 ways to CRM

“CRM” is just shorthand for “keeping track of your people, at scale”. And there's more than one way to skin that cat.

---

You've got a mission. And you've got people. Some of those people help you carry out the mission, others benefit from it directly. Some do both.

The best way to keep track of those relationships will vary, depending on your goals, resources, and limitations.

I talk about CiviCRM a lot on this list, but not all my clients use it. Let's examine some options:

Spreadsheets:

Starting with spreadsheets is easy: create a few columns, and start adding rows.

This can work fine in the beginning, especially if there's only a handful of people who need to work with the data, and they don't need much complexity in the tracking.

But as your work grows, it can quickly become very hard to manage.

• Should all of your staff have access to view and edit all the data?

• Are you just tracking a name and a single email address for each contact? What about the history of event participation, donations, multiple addresses and phone numbers, relationships between contacts, and more?

• How will you record all the ways each contact has interacted with your organization, and identify the important next steps for each of them?

You can see that this is the easiest method to start, and one of the hardest to maintain long-term.

Multiple outside services:

Spreadsheets don't provide any features for your contacts to take action on their own.

So you might spin up one or more specific services to provide those features:

Eventbrite for event registration.
MailChimp for mailing list management.
A quick PayPal page for donations.
Google Forms or SurveyMonkey for surveys, volunteer sign-ups, and more.

This approach gives you a fairly cost-effective way to get those features. And the data in each of those systems is in some kind of a structured format, so you could export it to Excel or use the service’s own reporting tools to examine the data.

But it's still hard to get a complete view of any one person's history with your organization.

• Which long-time mailing list readers recently donated for the first time?

• Which regular volunteers haven't come to a training recently?

• Who has attended all your events, but hasn’t yet subscribed to your mailing list?

With your contact data spread out across five different systems, these questions are very hard to answer.

CRM-as-a-service:

There's no shortage of online services who will charge you a small monthly fee to serve as the centralized data store for all your contacts.

Most of them are designed for business and sales, but the nonprofit space has plenty of options: CiviCRM Spark (and other CiviCRM-as-a-service providers), Neon One, NationBuilder, and many more.

These will give you many of the online features you would have gotten from your “multiple outside services,” nicely integrated into a single platform for holistic reporting and analysis.

Not bad, and you might stop there. Unless you need features they don't offer. Then you need something customizable.

Salesforce:

Yep, I'll give this product its own category. It has a lot going for it:

• It's incredibly customizable.

• It has thousands of available plugins, apps, and integrations.

• ... plus literally thousands of firms you could hire to build out something with it.

• It has a massive marketing machine; almost everyone you know has already heard of it.

It also has two major limitations:

1. Out of the box, it's fairly limited: you get basic CRM features for your staff, and not much more. You'll need paid plugins or custom development if you want:

public facing donation and sign up forms …
targeted features such as for memberships and events …
mailing list management …

… basically, most of the community-organization features you would get from your CRM-as-a-service or even from your “multiple outside services” approach.

2. It has a reputation for being very expensive, both in development cost and in per-user license fees.

So, for an organization with a very large annual budget, a solid business case for custom features, and an aversion to trying anything they haven't already heard of, it can make sense.

Managing your own CiviCRM instance:

Obviously this is the space I work in most. It's not the right choice for many organizations, who will prefer one of the options above.

But it has some pretty compelling benefits:

• Solid out-of-the-box features for membership management, online contributions, mailing lists, events, case management, and more.

• Literally unlimited customizability, within the bounds of your budget and/or development skills.

• Zero licensing fees.

• An active and sizable (if not 800-pound-gorilla status) community of developers and service providers.

• Gives you complete control of the ownership and privacy of your constituent data.

None of the above options offer all that — and I don’t know any other offering that does.

Of course, this approach also means it’s your system, for better or worse. “Unlimited customizability” does not mean “never needs extra effort or expense.” You’ll eventually want some help from someone with more technical skills than you.

Here's the thing:

None of the above choices are the right answer for every organization. Smart organizations will make an informed decision based on their own needs, goals, and resources.

But more important is this:

In the end, having the fanciest — or simplest, or cheapest, or most well-known — CRM toolset won’t define your success as an organization.

Whether you're running things in six different spreadsheets copied across 15 different laptops, or you're paying $100,000 a year for a system that's the envy of all your ex-bosses, what matters is this:

How are you leveraging that system to build effective relationships … with the people you care about … and the people who want to help you?

All the best,
A.

Tool talk: CiviCRM upgrades

CiviCRM released a security update last week. Here are a few issues I've helped my clients address after upgrading:

• Server memory:
  In some cases this newer version of CiviCRM may require more memory resources than your previous version. You may want to check your server logs for out-of-memory errors, and then adjust your memory limitations accordingly.

• Custom extensions incompatible with CiviCRM:
  This one came up on several sites this past week. Well-maintained and publicly distributed extensions probably don't struggle with this, but if you have custom extensions, you might find that they're causing errors because of changes in the parts of CiviCRM they’re interracting with. This is hard to anticipate before the fact, but when it happens, there should be a notice in your server logs or CiviCRM logs.

• Custom extensions incompatible with PHP 8:
  The newest versions of CiviCRM require PHP 8. If you've upgraded PHP to meet that requirement, you might find that some extensions occasionally cause errors. These are errors that even a thorough syntax check won't prevent, so again, you may want to check your server or CiviCRM logs for clues.

If you have a trusted CiviCRM partner or other outside expert maintaining your site, you can probably let them handle this.

But if you're hosting and maintaining it yourself, these are probably worth watching out for.

All the best,
A.

The leaky boat

Almost every boat leaks a little bit somewhere. Usually you pump or bail, and sail on. But when you're leaking faster than you can bail, you've got trouble.

---

I just finished a meeting with a board member at a service organization here in Texas, who feels they have something of a leak in their boat:

Their donors are aging.

Of course everyone's donors are aging. But he's concerned that this hole is leaking faster than they've been keeping up.

He figures, if they don't address this, they have maybe 5 years before things start to get tight. It would probably look something like this:

Donations start to trail off.
Staff begin to feel the pressure.
Morale decreases.
Staffing and program cuts must be made.
The remaining donors begin to wonder if their contribution is well placed.

It's a downward spiral.

The time to start patching this leak has already begun.

That means appealing to a younger crowd of donors. And that works out to changes in three important areas:

1. Messaging

Younger donors typically have a different set of motivations and personal values than this organization’s current older audience. So while they may be very well in tune with the thoughts and feelings of their current donor base, a targeted effort is required to understand the language, images, and emotional cues that will appeal to a younger crowd.

2. Mechanisms

Paper checks, snail-mail letters, and everything else that goes through the postal system probably works great for their over-65 audience. But it's all but useless for the younger audience they need to target.

3. Media

Television and radio PSAs have been a large part of their outreach effort. This channel is, frankly, fading fast. New channels must be explored, and there is no single medium or channel that dominates public information. They'll need to experiment, monitor, and shape their plan as they go.

Here's the thing:

It seems to me this organization has a chance to make the changes they'll need to make. They've got board members who are forward-thinking and goal-oriented.

Of course, an aging donor base may not be the leak in your boat. And though you surely have a few leaks, they may not be severe enough to warrant immediate action.

But when they are, focused effort is surely required.

Maybe you can bail faster. Maybe you can repair the leak.

But when that's your situation, you don't want to use all your effort, er … rearranging deck chairs.

All the best,
A.

Getting their viewpoint

Getting your constituents’ perspective on your next big campaign — or just to refine your ongoing outreach efforts — is hugely valuable.

But it probably shouldn't become a major project in itself.

Here's a common approach, but it has significant drawbacks:

• Set up an online survey with 20 multiple choice questions like, "What's the most important issue for you?” and “How likely are you to give again to our work?"

• Email-blast everybody who's given you a donation in the past year, asking them to complete the survey.

• Wait several weeks to get as many answers as you can.

• Collect the answers into a series of bar charts for your board to review.

That approach has some important limitations:

• It constitutes another ask from a big portion of your potential donors.

• It doesn't give the respondents an opportunity to speak freely.

• It takes a long time to get results that are fairly generic.

Here's an approach I think is significantly better:

• Identify 5 to 10 individuals whom you think could be of a stage of life, demographic, or mindset similar to the people you'll be reaching out to.

• Arrange a short one-on-one phone call with these folks, in which you’ll ask them open-ended questions to tease out their hopes, concerns, and motivations.

• Do your very best to record their exact words — either by fully disclosed audio recording or by taking copious notes.

• Then review your conversations. Look for patterns in meaning. Look for poignant expressions of emotional weight.

• Treat this as a decent snapshot of your audience, and use it to inform your communications, your programs, and your overall outreach.

Here's the difference:

It can certainly feel "safe" to try and collect dozens or hundreds of organized responses to a consistent survey instrument.

That's great for clinical research and peer reviewed studies.

But that's not what you are doing here.

You're just trying to step out of your own viewpoint and into the mind of the people you're reaching out to.

And you don't want that — valuable as it is — to put a significant and needless delay in your actual outreach.

Simple, and personal, is likely to be much better for you.

From my own experience, I would much rather have five simple interviews with the latter method than 100 survey responses from the former method.

Real people. Real conversations. Real insight. Simple.

All the best,
A.

Whose perspective?

If you were designing a new membership program, what would be the best source of information and ideas to shape your plans?

A. Trying really hard to think of something yourself?
B. Brainstorming with your board?
C. Asking open-ended questions of the people for whom the membership is intended?

It might be obvious that the best answer is “C”.

But then again, maybe it's not so obvious.

I've seen more than a few failed or stalling membership programs that are simply not appealing to the potential members, because they weren't designed from their perspective.

Here's the thing:

There are many reasons why your fundraising campaign, advocacy push, or membership drive could fail to meet its targets.

Low staff commitment, ineffective marketing and communications, unrealistic goals.

Those are real problems.

But solving them won't matter a bit, if what you're actually offering is not actually interesting to the people you're targeting.

If you can build your plan around actual conversations with some of those people, that’s best. But in any case, do what you can to see it from their perpective.

Otherwise, how would you expect to motivate them at all?

All the best,
A.