“Not my job”?

Who's responsible for making sure your systems are running well and supporting your mission?

Simple: Anybody who has a say in the matter, and who cares about your mission.

But you can’t assume that everyone on your team will understand that.

The question is, how does it help them?

This is a perennial problem in commercial CRM implementations, and associations and nonprofit teams are no less immune.

Harvard Business review has a nice little article that touches on getting buy-in from all departments to avoid the outright failure of a CRM project. Sure, that's in a commercial context, but the lessons are the same for your organization:

• Data quality suffers when staff members routinely fail to enter good data.

• Getting everyone on board with data quality is a lot easier when they believe it will help their own work.

• If the CRM is hard to use or confusing, staff members will be subtly but powerfully incentivized to just work around it.

Here’s the thing:

No matter how great you think your system is, if your department directors and staff — and even your board — can't see how it fits their priorities, it won't be long before you’re back in the fragmented world of spreadsheets, Google docs, and address books.

Building a successful system requires helping everyone to see the value of that system for their own work.

What steps can you take to help them see that value, and to make it easy for them?

All the best,
A.