Why would anyone … ?

Sometimes folks want to help for reasons all their own. It can help a lot to know what those reasons are.

---

Behind the tool shed on my back lot, a pile of scrap metal grew slowly over a few years.

It was never an eyesore because of its location, but it was inconvenient for mowing, and I kept meaning one day to load it up in the truck for a trip to the dump.

But it was never a priority. And it would have been a few hours of sweaty work. So there it sat.

If only I could make it go away…

Turns out, there are people who like to make such things go away.

Once I found the right person, all I needed was a simple phone call, and a nice gentleman came and took it — no charge.

I don't know if it's his hobby or his hustle, but do I know he'll take it to the scrap yard and get a little cash for it.

He was happy. I was happy.

Of course …
I could have hired someone to do it.
I could have begged a friend for help.
I could have, indeed, finally done it myself.

But this fella was looking for this kind of thing. All I had to say was, "Hey, want some free scrap metal?"

Easy peasy.

Here's the thing:

When looking for help in any effort — from donors, volunteers, or even your social media followers — you can of course explain all the reasons why you think they should help.

But if you can understand why they might want to help, it gets a lot easier.

(Asking them — and listening — is a great way to find out!)

All the best,
A.

“But I’m not a spammer!”

If your emails aren't reaching their intended recipients, you're going to have a very hard life.

I've had conversations today with three separate coaching clients whose outbound emails are being either bounced, routed to the junk folder, or just silently sent into a black hole of invisibility.

They're not spammers. But somebody thinks they're acting like spammers, and that's all it takes.

To avoid looking like a spammer:

• Ensure you're using a reputable SMTP service (e.g. SendGrid, Mailgun, Sparkost) to handle your outbound email.

• Your SMTP provider will give you some steps to configure your domain name for valid sending. Follow those steps.

• Configure CiviCRM to support one-click unsubscribe.

• If someone is marked as unsubscribed, don't assume it was a mistake. This is a hard thing to accept, but losing one subscriber is better than having all your emails go undelivered.

• Don't send a single email message to dozens of recipients. CiviCRM will usually let you send one email with up to 50 CC or BCC recipients, but that's usually a bad idea. It's the kind of thing that spammers do. (Instead, used CiviCRM’s mass emailing features. That's the right way to send a mailing even to thousands of recipients.)

Here's the thing:

You know you're not a spammer. I know you’re not a spammer.

But the computer systems on the recipient end don't know it.

They’re processing billions of email messages a day, and they’re highly motivated to keep spammers off their networks. They won’t make time to hear you explain your good intentions.

If they think you're acting like a spammer, they'll treat you like one.

And the result of that is: your people, who genuinely want to hear from you, will not.

All the best,
A.

Member logins and back-end access

Allowing members or other constituents to log into your CRM site can be very useful. But don't give them back-end access to the CRM.

Now and then I come across a site, usually built by someone new to CiviCRM, that gives logged-in members access to the CiviCRM staff area.

If I think hard enough, I can see why this approach might be appealing.

After all, one of the best reason to have your constituents log in at all is so they can view their own history of participation, and update their own contact information.

But while you certainly can do that with back-end access, there are some significant drawbacks:

• The back-end interface is not designed for the untrained user. For them it is usually both overwhelming and confusing.

• CiviCRM’s permissions are not fine-grained enough to limit access appropriately for non-staff users. They’ll usually have far more access than you want them to have.

So what to do instead?

I usually handle it like this:

• Create profiles for viewing and editing the user's contact info. (SearchKit and FormBuilder are also increasingly useful options here.)

• Make use of CiviCRM's excellent contact dashboard (available on your site at https://yoursite.org/civicrm/user) to give users an overview of their history with you. (Bonus tip: the Contact Dashboard Tabs extension turns this into a tabbed interface and allows you to embed additional profiles, re-label and reorder the tabs, and more.)

• Provide a navigation menu that makes it easy for users to find these streamlined features.

• Most important: Remember to look at this from the viewpoint of your users. Login as a member, think about what they want to see and do, and ensure it all makes sense to the untrained eye.

Here's the thing:

Most organizations don't bother giving their constituents a login. You certainly don't have to.

But I have several clients whose members value what they get by logging in (including access to members-only features and content).

It might be a great idea for you. But limit your back-end access to train staff.

By taking just a few extra steps, you can give your logged-in constituents a wonderful user experience that’s much better for them than the back-end features.

All the best,
A.

Simple, targeted surveys

Gathering useful feedback doesn't have to take a lot of time and effort. And it pays in more ways than you might think.

---

Yesterday my local community theater wrapped production on a 3-week run of The Diary of Anne Frank.

Within two hours of the final curtain call, the entire set was struck, and all props and costumes returned to their proper places. An hour after that, a new cast gathered for the first table read of the next show.

Life moves quickly when you have an active community-driven organization.

Nonetheless, Diary cast members today received a request to complete a simple survey on their experience in the show.

Anonymous and online. Eleven simple questions ranked on a “Strongly agree” to “Strongly disagree” scale (e.g. “The director(s) clearly communicated and executed the schedule and plan for each rehearsal,” and “I was proud to promote the show to my friends and family”) followed by three open-ended questions like “What was your favorite part of this experience?” and “Was there anything that would have made this experience a more positive one?”.

It took me all of 10 minutes to complete, and after chatting with the executive director by email, I learned that she's reading the responses just about as quickly as they come in.

There are a few simple lessons here:

1. Volunteers are invested in your work and motivated to give solid answers. Their views and experiences are worth asking for.

2. Volunteers are not part of your internal staff structure. Their insights can reveal viewpoints that you can easily overlook from the inside.

3. A simple and reusable survey format can yield useful insights and long-term metrics that will benefit your work. Design it once (or iteratively over the first few events), and you can potentially reuse that one instrument for every single volunteer at every single event, for years to come.

4. Asking your volunteers about their experience doesn’t only benefit your mission. It also demonstrates that you care about their experience. Even if they don't all complete the survey, they’ll all notice that you're asking. They've already committed to serving your mission without being paid. For many people, showing that you care about them and value their contribution is a significant reward in itself.

Here's the thing:

Of all the work you might undertake in your mission, building relationships may be the most important.

Learning what matters to your people is critical in building those relationships.

So is demonstrating that you care.

A simple reusable survey instrument, coupled with a standard practice of implementation, can go a long way towards accomplishing both.

It doesn't have to be fancy or complicated.

It just needs to be sincere and consistent.

All the best,
A.

The “best” way is the one that you understand

Yesterday …

I sat with my daughter to help her figure out her college’s online learning platform. I got the hang of it pretty quickly, and then in 5 minutes showed her exactly the fastest and best way to do what she was trying to do.

She understood exactly none of it. :-(

Then I watched her figure it out herself, just pointing here or there at a link or button that might help her with the next step.

She now has a way to get her work done.

It's painful for me to watch her. Her way is slow and clunky. I would go crazy doing it that way.

But you know what?

It works for her. She understands it. She can do it without me whenever she needs to.

This morning …

I sat with a coaching client, working (yes, again) through a CSV import and mass editing of contact records.

I was tempted to show him my way of working. It would have been faster. It would have worked well.

But I let him do it himself, answering questions as he went along, and sometimes pointing out a link or button that would help him to the next step.

My way works for me. It's quick and effective. His way seems to me both tedious and slow.

And you know what?

It works for him. He understands it. He can do it without me, whenever he needs to.

Here's the thing:

In both cases, I could give you a list of reasons why my way is better. Faster. Smoother. Easier.

And that does not matter. Not one bit.

What matters is whether the person doing the work understands what they're doing and can remember how to do it effectively next time.

For any given task, there are — of course — wrong ways to do it.

But there's not just one right way.

The “best” way … is the one that you understand.

All the best,
A.

Households?

A list reader wrote me recently with question about reducing duplicate contacts, proper attribution of contributions, and households. I’ll paraphrase for the sake of brevity and privacy:

We’ve long had a problem dealing with the blurred lines between spouses and others who might share household finances. For example: online contributors sometimes enter their first name as “John and Mary,” creating duplicate contacts which are hard to resolve. We’d also like to send printed mailings to our constituents, preferably only one mailing per household — but have a hard time deciding the correct salutation: “Dear Resident” is too generic, but “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” might just be incorrect.

As to the mailings, I’m wondering: is there a way we could use Households to track this information, and then use tokens to get something like “Dear Smith Family” on these mailings? What would we do if the two adult partners in the household have different last names?

It’s a great question!

These challenges are often overlooked or simply avoided because they’re complex. Emails are (usually — and don’t get me started!) read by a single individual. But printed mailings are a different matter, and constituents often expect, or at least prefer, to get one printed letter per household, not separate letters for each individual.

Unfortunately, it is indeed complex, and there’s no one-size-fits-all answer. Below is (basically) what I wrote back to this question:

---

Households in CiviCRM can be useful for this purpose, though I know some organizations make a specific decision not to use them, usually because it's hard to settle on best practices for various scenarios. Here's a quick outline of typical concerns:

We'll use a hypothetical example of the Smith family, consisting of Bob and Alice Smith. Bob and Alice each have an individual contact record, and we also create a Houshold contact named "The Bob and Alice Smith Family" (or something similar). Sometimes Bob donates online; sometimes Alice. Sometimes they send a check donation by mail, with no letter explaining who it's from, and the name on the check is "Bob and Alice Smith". Now, we get to decide some things:

• Bob's contributions will naturally be attributed to Bob, and Alice's to Alice (after all, households don't fill out forms online; only individuals do). But Bob, when he's donating online, may intend that his donation be attributed to his household instead of to him directly. Do we want to accommodate that, and if so, what's the best way to do it?

• Should the check be attributed to Bob, Alice, or the Household?

• In reporting on Bob's contributions, do we only want to include his own, or also those of the Household, or even also include Alice's? (And the same question arises for Alice, and for the Household.)

• CiviCRM will allow you to register a Household for an event, but households (like companies and other organizations) don't attend events; only individuals do. But is there ever a case where we'd want staff to register a household for an event?

• CiviCRM will also allow you to send mass emails to a household, but households don't read; only individuals do. Under what circumstances, if any, do we want to send a mass email to a household? What email address should be used — Bob's, Alice's, or some other? If we send to Bob's email address, how do we handle it when the Household unsubscribes or opts-out of all mailings — should we also apply that to Bob himself?

Deciding for yourself:

All those questions can be answered with some care and forethought, and I strongly recommend that each organization take the time to think those through before they begin using Households. Practices can be altered and improved as you go along, but it's quite difficult to "clean up" data later if you don't know what it means (as you probably won't if you don't have clear practices).

Based on the policies and practices you decide, there are ways to get good and predictable behavior for reporting (for example, the Aggregated Household Contributions report extension), recording contributions, sending mass emails, and mailing letters/statements.

As for tokens in exports:

There's currently no way to use tokens directly during the "export contacts" process. However, there are some exportable fields which support tokens, namely: Postal Greeting, Email Greeting, and Addressee.

Still, I expect that whether you need these, and how you use them will depend on the policies and practices you develop for Households. The typical use case is that the Household record is created with its own name (e.g. "The Bob and Alice Smith Family"), and then that name is used in communications (emails, printed letters) targeting that household — in which case the Household name is already known, and tokens need not apply.

You can see I'm hinting that good use of Households is more complex than it might appear on its face, and that implementing their use is probably best done with great care.

I realize I'm not answering all of your questions, but hopefully this helps move you forward. If you'd like to schedule a call to work through the details of your various situations, please let me know; I expect there are some nuances that are worth unpacking further.

All the best,
A.

CSV imports in CiviCRM

In the past week I've had coaching sessions with three different clients, about CSV imports in CiviCRM.

Here are some details from those discussions that these folks said we're very useful:

1. You can import Excel spreadsheets (not only CSV files)

2. Saved field mappings are very handy for predictable repeat imports of a consistent format.

3. Tagging every import with a unique tag makes it much easier to double check your work.

4. The CSV Import Helper extension is a big help when importing contributions or event participants, by making it much easier to identify existing contacts in your data.

5. Understanding how Dedupe Rules work, and selecting the right one, will help reduce the number of duplicate records you might create through an import.

You might have known some are all of those things already.

But if you've been struggling to make CSV imports work smoothly, it might be worth trying again.

All the best,
A.

Sustainability? Redundancy.

Imagine being suddenly unable to access all or some of your organization’s online service accounts.

Think of all the online services your organization is using: domain registration, outbound email, inbound email, hosting, DNS management, CRMs and related services, Google apps, Microsoft apps, YouTube, social media, Dropbox… It's probably a surprisingly long list.

I've spoken with two organizations in the past week who have nearly lost all their online properties and data because they were tied to the private email address of a single person who left the organization.

This is incredibly simple to avoid:

Create an inbound email forwarder (e.g. systems@YourOrganizaton.org) that delivers mail to at least two people in your organization, and insist that all online properties use that email address as the primary point of contact.

Or, come up with another plan.

But please have a plan.

Staff turnover, long vacations, medical leave, personality conflicts, and any number of other surprises can throw a wrench in your works very quickly.

You probably won't see it coming.

But you can prepare now to make sure you can navigate it smoothly.

All the best,
A.

New CiviCRM Extension: “Protect Smart Groups”

I've said it before, I'll say it again:

Smart Groups are awesome.
Smart Groups are smart.
Manually adding contacts to a Smart Group?
Bro. Don't even start.

The beauty of Smart Groups is that contacts are automatically added or removed based on the criteria you specify.

Except when you manually add a contact to a Smart Group.

Then it will never be automatically removed. And one day, you're going to spend much more time than you want trying to figure out why that contact is in that Smart Group.

Fortunately, there's now an extension that will prevent you — and your staff — from doing this Bad Thing™.

The “Protect Smart Groups” extension is now available for CiviCRM versions 6.4.0 and higher. (And since 6.4.1 is the latest Security Release, you should be running version or higher already.)

I recommend you install it, and save yourself some headaches down the road.

All the best,
A.

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.

---

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.