Constituent journeys

You're probably tracking thousands of constituents in your CRM software.

Tell me if you agree with these points:

• Each one of those individuals needs help to reach the next step in their relationship with your mission.

• Such a path forward is surely not the same for all of them.

• There's simply no way you can manage a fully individualized pathway for each of them.

It's all true. Your mission success depends on nurturing these relationships, but there are too many to nurture individually.

So what can you do?

You can create a plan to help them at scale.

Sure, sometimes you'll need to serve them in small groups, or even individually.

But you cannot manage thousands of unique relationship-building pathways forward.

Therefore:

You need to define a clear ideal pathway for each of the major types of contacts in your world.

Volunteers, staff, members, donors, industry partners, service recipients, alumni ... That list of categories is unique to your organization, and so are the ideal pathways on which you want to guide them.

If you've heard of "donor journeys," you'll be familiar with this concept.

But it's not just donors. You can — and should — have a journey in mind for everyone who helps, or is helped by, your mission.

Creating such a plan is hard, creative work. And guiding people through that plan, and improving the plan as you learn and grow, is more of the same.

But considering the limitations of time and space, what alternative do you have?

Just hope that things get better?

All the best,
A.