Feasibility, and trust

Reasonable decision-making requires reasonable understanding of what's possible.

---

Recently I made a mistake you might want to learn from.

A long-time client asked me what it would take to establish automatic membership renewal in CiviCRM.

That's a well-worn path.
Tons of organizations are doing it, including many of my own clients.

I already knew it could be done with PayPal, which this organization has been using for years.

I sketched out a plan for them, including costs and timelines, and even mentioned a light feasibility test as a first step.

They went through several internal conversations to get approval, then asked me to proceed with the plan.

And that's where I realized my mistake:

Their PayPal account is not configured to support recurring payments.
What's more, PayPal has announced that they're no longer enabling this feature for accounts like this one.

This means the organization needs to either abandon automatic renewals, or consider adding another payment processor (e.g. Stripe) to support them.

Now, is this terrible?

Probably not massively awful, but they've gone through a lot of internal discussion to decide on this plan, and that now needs reconsideration.

Does it break trust and confidence?

Probably. It certainly doesn't foster them.

What I could have done differently:

While I did suggest doing some initial feasibility testing, merely mentioning it was not enough.
The whold process would have benefitted from doing that first, before even drawing up a plan.

Or, put another way:
Just because it should be possible, and usually is possible, doesn't mean it is possible.

What you might learn from my mistake:

A light feasibility test -- and the time it takes to formulate such a check -- is usually worth the effort.

Skipping it might not lead to hours of wasted work, but it can lead to disappointment, frustration, diminished trust (which is hugely important) and cascading timeline adjustments on related projects.

So it's probably a good idea to emphasize the feasibility testing early in the process.

I've known this for years, but let it slide here.

You probably don't want to repeat my mistake.

All the best,
A.