Small steps
You can do it all at once, but you don’t have to.
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I had two interesting conversations today with people who are being very wise about new things they're trying:
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.
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.