Impact reporting

Donors, volunteers, and advocates want to believe that their contribution is going to bring substantial results to your mission.

Members want to believe that their membership will benefit them as well.

Do you have strategy in place to show them your measurable successes?

Here are four ways your organization can benefit from such a strategy:

1. Accountability: Stakeholders want to know that they're investment will be used well. Well structured impact reporting will show them exactly what you’re accomplishing in your mission.

2. Learning and Improvement: Careful measurement and reporting gives you the insights that you need to improve your programs and strategies over time.

3. Engagement: Transparent reporting and a track record of self-analysis will build trust and inspire participation from the people who power your work.

4. Funding: Measurable outcomes are some of the most critical information you can share with potential donors and grant funders, who need to see that their investment will support the outcomes they care about.

Fortunately, you’re running a CRM with the capacity to track and report on the things that matter.

It's up to you to put that to use in ways that will inspire participation from others.

All the best,
A.

Drupal or WordPress for CiviCRM

I got this very practical and common question from a client last week:

We know we want CivCRM. Should we use Drupal or WordPress, or maybe even something else?

Of course every situation is different. The more I know about what you want to achieve, the more I'll be able to recommend solutions specifically for you.

But let me answer this in very general terms:

CiviCRM itself works just fine under Drupal, WordPress and a couple of others. (You probably haven't heard of the others, and if you haven't, there's no real need to consider them.)

If you already know that one or another is going to be right for you for specific reasons, there's no reason not to go ahead.

But if you're just completely unsure, I'm almost certainly going to recommend WordPress.

For three reasons:

1. It's simpler to use.

CiviCRM is complex enough. Yes, Drupal can be a lot more flexible in the right hands, and if your team is already in love with Drupal there's no reason —none at all—not to go with it.

But if you're in the position to make this decision yourself, and you're asking this question, you will almost certainly be better off with the simpler approach of WordPress.

2. it's easier to maintain.

Drupal site maintenance includes working with composer on the command line over ssh.

If you know what that means and are comfortable with it, you may be comfortable keeping a Drupal site up to date with security releases and new versions.

Or, if you're outsourcing the entire maintenance of the site to someone who's familiar with Drupal, they'll do just fine.

But if you don't already have a preference, you will almost certainly be frustrated by the technical skills required for Drupal maintenance.

3. CiviCRM is the same under both systems.

There's virtually nothing you can do with CiviCRM under Drupal that you can't do under WordPress.

Almost all of my clients are using either WordPress or Drupal. A scant few use one of the others.

And I can't think of one case where I’ve wished a client was using Drupal instead of WordPress.

But I can think of a few who are using Drupal whose lives would just be easier under WordPress.

Believe me, when I discuss this with other tech-minded people in the CiviCRM community, the conversation is a lot more complex.

At the technology level, there are pros and cons either way.

But here's the thing:

When you have clear goals and measurable business outcomes that you're trying to achieve (and you do, right?), debates over technology are not the most important thing.

You need something that will get the job done, and fit your ability to use it well. There are no bad systems.

Focus on the outcomes, and pick the solution that's most likely to help you keep that focus, without needless distractions on technical minutiae.

All the best,
Allen

Quick vs durable

Everything is a trade-off.

One trade-off worth considering is the one between initial cost and long-term durability.

If you need something quickly, or cheaply, it’s fine just to build anything that works, and move forward.

My family got baby chicks a few weeks ago. I need to keep them safe and warm in their own space for about 2 months.

So I put a brooder in the tool shed, built of cardboard boxes and scrap wood.

It's perfectly good enough. When I'm done with it, I'll throw it away and then build another one when we get chicks again in two years.

On the other hand, when you need something that will be easy to maintain, have a long life, and be used frequently, it’s worth putting more care into its creation.

My adult chickens will live several years. I need to keep them safe from predators and weather, in a setup that's easy to clean and easy to harvest eggs. (Yay, French toast!)

You can bet they've got something a lot better to live in than some old cardboard boxes.

The investment of time and money that I put into building that coop is paying me back year after year. It's been 4 years now, and I expect at least another 10.

Here's the thing:

Everything is a trade off.

When you need your CRM to do something quickly or once, the smart choice may be just to get it working as easily as possible.

For a durable need, the big win is probably in planning carefully.

And here's a bonus: If you're only ever doing quick one-offs, you're probably missing some significant opportunities. It's worth pausing now and then to think about where you'll be a year from now.

All the best,
A.

Training vs coaching: Do it yourself?

I wrote recently about the difference between coaching and training in terms of outcomes.

Another important difference is this: How much of it can you do for yourself?

In short: You can train yourself, but it's pretty hard to coach yourself.

Of course there are times when you want to get some outside help with training.

But you can do a lot of it yourself, if you have the time and interest.

Usual resources for training yourself are online video courses, documentation, and practice.

All of these are pretty easily attainable for CiviCRM.

CiviTeacher.com offers a pretty good library of video training materials.

The online documentation at docs.civicrm.org is fairly comprehensive.

And, if you’re pressed for time, or don’t know where to start, you may prefer to have an experienced expert lead you through a customized training process to get you up to speed.

On the other hand, when you need coaching — personalized help to level up your game and target specific outcomes in your mission, career, or bottom line — it's almost impossible to coach yourself.

Coaching, with its focus on achieving measurable outcomes and addressing gaps that you don't even see yourself, is by its nature the kind of help that only comes from outside of your own viewpoint.

Both can be valuable additions to your game plan.

And recognizing which you need, at different stages of your growth, can make the difference between reaching your goals and spinning your wheels.

All the best,
A.

Hair pulling

It’s frustrating. You’re trying to make a simple configuration change in your CRM. But something’s not working.

Before you know it, you’ve lost an hour out of your day, and it’s still not working right.

It makes me want to pull my hair out! (Well, if I had any.)

A friend at my co-working space was here this morning when I showed up. He had come in early, bright-eyed and ambitious, ready to knock out some tasks and start the day on the right foot.

But he's been here for 2 hours fighting with his software, and he's hardly begun on the tasks he came to do.

Frustrations like this take the fun out of work, and make it very difficult to plan your day — or even to plan a project.

Here's the thing:

Nobody wants to feel like this when they're working with their CRM.

We all want to get in, get it done, and move on to other things.

If you find this coming up a lot, it's probably a good idea to sit back and ask yourself:

Am I going about this the wrong way?

• Are you trying to use CiviCRM in a way that it wasn't intended?

• Are you running into limitations in your own knowledge of the system?

• Are you moving forward on features before you have a clear understanding of the measurable business outcomes you hope to achieve?

Hard work is a great thing.

But isn't smart work a lot more fun?

All the best,
A.

Training vs coaching: outcomes

Training and coaching are great options when you're ready to increase your success with CiviCRM.

The differences between the two can appear subtle at first, but there are a few important differences.

The most important, in my view, is their focus on outcomes. Here’s an example:

If I want to learn how to box I need training.

• Training will expose me to the facts and fundamentals that I need to participate.

• Training will give me an opportunity to focus on developing my own skills.

In addition to training, if I want to be a great boxer, I need coaching.

• Coaching will take into account my goals, such as winning more matches, or staying motivated and focused on the right priorities for an upcoming match.

• Coaching will help me to keep the right mindset through a match, or through my career.

• Coaching will help me break through when I'm feeling stuck, by identifying and addressing specific gaps in my understanding that I may not even realize.

in short: Training doesn't care about my outcomes and goals. Coaching does.

This is true for any field. In sports, in technical skills, in business, even in interpersonal relationships.

Here's the thing:

We all need training to get a grip on new skills.

And when we really want to level up our game, and stay on track to achieve specific goals and outcomes, good coaching is a way to make that happen.

There are other important differences. I'll unpack some of those in a future email.

All the best,
A.

What’s on the line for them?

Your organization thrives on the support of people who really could be doing anything else with their money and time.

Members, staff, board members, donors, volunteers, advocates, all of them.

If you want them to buy into your vision, you're going to have to help them see how it makes a difference in things they care about.

Ask yourself:

What’s on the line for them?

When they're thinking about anything related to your mission, what worries them?

What's taking up their head space when they're driving to work? What distracts them from conversation, or keeps them up at night?

It's easy to imagine members in this context; they are paying dues, and they expect to get something out of it.

But it's the same for everyone else who might decide to help you, or instead decide to do something else.

Here's the thing:

Everyone has their own concerns and priorities.

If you can tap into that, if you can help them see how partnering with you can fit those priorities, they'll help you.

Because they value whatever they expect to come from that partnership, much more than they value their contribution.

What do you know about them? And how can you help them to see that value?

All the best,
A.

Keeping up with upgrades

If you’ve already got an expert professional (in-house or outsourced) handling upgrades for you, you can probably skip this email. But if you’re curious about the kinds of challenges that can come up, or you’re doing the upgrades yourself (totally do-able, by the way), this might interest you.

How actively should you be applying updates to your open-source CRM and CMS?

CiviCRM drops a new release at least once a month, and usually more often.

Drupal and WordPress may release a little less frequently, but not by much.

On top of that, new versions are continually being released for CiviCRM extensions, WordPress plugins, and Drupal modules.

How you respond to these updates is entirely up to you, but here are my general guidelines for most sites:

• Security updates: Take the update.
  
  If you find that a new release includes security fixes, take the update. It's very rare that you'll have a good reason to wait. Just do it.
  
  Rationale: Security issues are serious, and once the update is released, you can be sure that nefarious players are looking for un-patched sites they can attack. (Sure, if you're a developer with opinions about whether some security patches are not-so-serious, and are willing to own the risk, I won't try to persuade you. But for everyone else: take the update.)
  

• Non-security updates for the core CiviCRM, Drupal, and WordPress projects: Wait on it, if you can.
  
  If there's as bug-fix or feature improvement you believe would be fixed by updating, then take the update. Otherwise, it's generally not worth the effort to chase these updates just because they're available.
  
  Rationale: Updates require measurable effort (backups, installation, testing) and present measurable risk (potential new bugs). And updates to core systems increase the risk because they're more likely to affect the entire system. Unless you have a specific reason to update, it's not worth it.
  

• Updates for CiviCRM extensions, Drupal modules, and WordPress plugins: Take the update.
  
  Go ahead and take these updates as they're available. Make a practice of checking every week or so for available updates, and take them as they come.
  
  Rationale: These updates are relatively easy to apply, and carry a lower risk than core updates -- they may still introduce new bugs, but the scope of that bug is usually limited to the scope of the plugin. Applying frequent updates on these plugins gets you incremental improvement in bug-fixes and functionality, and helps limit the risk of version incompatibility when you do update your core systems.

Here's the thing:

Your open source tools are continually being supported by a vibrant and active community of contributors who are constantly handing out free fixes for your benefit.

Isn't it nice that you, your organization, and your members can benefit from it?

All the best,
A.

Knowing what you want

Sometimes I'm surprised by the number of people I see who seem not to know what they want.

Career decisions, relationship decisions, education decision, and business decisions.

Or I hear from people who say they want something, but they can't really tell me what it's going to get them or why they want it.

Here's the thing:

If you can't explain why you want something, then you're probably not really sure that you want it.

And if you don't really know what you're trying to achieve, why even bother starting?

CRM projects are expensive and risky: you're investing a lot of time, emotional energy, good will, and money. And all of those resources are always limited.

It's important to spend a little time figuring out what you want, and setting a goal or two to shoot for.

And if you can’t quite put your finger on it, then you’ve found your starting point: Identify the need, and identify even one thing that would help you move toward meeting that need.

Then set a measurable goal, and start working toward that goal.

Otherwise, how will you even know if you've succeeded?

All the best,
A.

There are no bad systems.

There is no right or wrong way to arrange your CRM systems.

There are only ways that fit your needs and resources, and ways that don't.

You've got 17 different Excel spreadsheets? That is not inherently bad.

As long as it fits your needs, and is well supported by your available resources, then surely there's no real business case for changing that arrangement.

Here's an example:

Several weeks ago I had a coaching call with a client who was trying hard to get CiviCRM going, so he could track and report publicly on certain kinds of data. Publishing that data is a major pillar in his org’s mission.

But he was a one-person operation, with a lot of irons in the fire, and not a lot of funding to get started with.

He had come to me for help with CiviCRM. It seemed like the "right" thing to do was to help make that happen for him.

But hold on — why does that have to be the "right" thing? What is inherently wrong with something simple like putting that data into a spreadsheet and publishing a couple of easy-to-read PDFs along with the raw data?

After looking closely at his situation together, we both agreed that was the way to go.

It fit his needs, his budget, and his working style. It was right for him.

This past week, he called me again to let me know that it was working great!

Here's the thing:

It is so easy to get caught up in the notion that you need a "real" CRM in order to operate like a “real” organization.

You do not.

What you need are clear goals, a clear assessment of what's possible, and a commitment to getting the results that you want.

If that means using CiviCRM or some other tool, or making substantial improvements to your current setup, that's fine. But it's not a requirement in itself.

Don't buy the hype. Stay focused on the outcomes. That's where success happens.

All the best,
A.

Who cares if you’re measuring outcomes?

Plenty of organizations muddle along "just fine", without setting challenging goals that target measurable results.

They make plans and programs, and they help their people, and they're okay with that.

So why focus so hard on setting clear goals and measuring outcomes? Who cares?

Here are some people who probably do care:

• Your board. When they're deciding whether to approve your next initiative, can you remind them that your last one increased membership renewals by X percent?

• Grant sources. If your work is funded by grants, you can bet the grant funders want to see measurable outcomes, not just generalities like "we did well".

• Your members. Members want reasons to believe that you’re helping them. Can you point to successful projects that, for example, helped place X hundred recent college graduates into jobs in the industry?

• Your supporters. Individual donors, volunteers, and advocates get excited — and more willing to participate — if you can tell them that your new campaign is on track to help X percent more people than you did last year.

• Future employers. We don’t usually like to talk about this, but it's a real thing. When you're seeking that exciting higher-level position at a new organization, will they be more impressed to hear that you “managed operations” in your previous position, or that you implemented an efficient donor outreach system that increased donor retention by 15% — without increasing HR costs?

• Maybe just yourself. Maybe you want to know that you're making the world a better place in real, measurable terms. Maybe it doesn't matter if anybody else in the world appreciates that, as long as you can take pride in it yourself.

Who really cares if you're setting and reaching clear and measurable goals in your organization's work?

Lots of people.

All the best,
A.

Is this a good deal?

Not every "good deal" is as good as it looks.

Yesterday at the grocery store I spotted milk for $1.29 a gallon. In my neck of the woods, that's about 1/3 of the normal price.

Who wouldn't want that?

Then I noticed that it was stamped to expire the same day. Not a good purchase for me.

But other people were buying it.

Maybe they didn't notice the expiration date.

Maybe they have a large family of teenagers and they know they'll go through a gallon of milk in a day.

Either way, I have to let them make their decision, while I make mine.

Here's the thing:

Something can look like a really good deal. The price is right. It's the kind of thing you need. Other people are snapping it up.

But it's not a good deal until you decide it's really right for you.

A new CRM, improvements to your existing CRM, whatever.

The way to know if it's right for you is to check whether it will meet your desired measurable outcomes (you do have those, right?) and fit your limited resources (I know you have those).

If it does, move ahead.

If it doesn't, look for something that does.

All the best,
A.

When a CRM is not the best tool

It can be tempting to try and make CiviCRM do things it wasn't really built for, or more importantly, to do things that don't fit the way you'll use your CRM.

For example:

• Anymous surveys: You're planning to send a link for this survey to a certain segment of your contacts, but you have good reasons to make it anonymous (maybe you believe that makes it easier to answer sensitive personal questions).

The responses are anonymous, so where would you even store them in a CRM?

The better tool for this is probably a plugin in your CMS (Drupal, WordPress), or an online form service like Google Forms or SurveyMonkey.

• Events that don't require fees or registration: You're running a series of "come and go" events in your community — maybe a monthly block party, or frequent bingo games, kareoke night, trivia bowl, etc.

Since these events don't require registration or fees, and you aren't planning to track attendance beyond total numbers, there’s not much for a CRM to do here. The better tool would be a simple static page on your website, or even a more full-featured "event calendar" plugin in your CMS.

Of course if you want, you can use your CRM to create a form where event attendees can voluntarily check-in on their phones, or where survey respondents can sign up to get the survey results.

Those would be smart uses of your CRM, to increase engagement with these folks.

And that — increasing engagement — is where you should be using your CRM.

It's just not for everything.

All the best,
A.

“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.

Learnable skill sets

Managing your CRM, whether it's CiviCRM or anything else, requires a substantial set of skills.

It's unavoidable. It's the same as operating a sailboat, a bulldozer, or a race car. If you want to experience the satisfaction of using it well, then you and your team will always be learning how to do it better.

You can decide how to divvy up the work. You don't personally have to be great at everything. But you do have to make sure you've got the skills on your team.

And here's the thing:

It is a learnable set of skills.

Get a little help if you need to. Teach yourself over time, hire someone to show you the ropes, or find a coach who can guide you through the difficult parts.

It can be intimidating to ensure that your team is mastering the tools you’ve selected — but it’s always worth the effort.

All the best,
A.

You do not need features

When you're on foot in midtown Manhattan, and you need to get uptown quickly, what you need is not a taxi.

Sure, a taxi might help. But the taxi is not what you need.

What you need is to get uptown quickly. There are any number of ways to do that.

And let's be honest, is getting uptown even the thing you really need?

Are you severely injured and need to get to the hospital? An ambulance might be better than a taxi.

Do you just need to deliver an important package? A bicycle messenger could get it there without you.

Here's the thing:

When you're working everyday with a powerful CRM system — especially one as open-ended and customizable as CiviCRM — it can be very easy to get caught up in ideas about what it can or cannot do, or could be made to do.

But that, in itself, is not the thing you need.

Focusing on features without carefully identifying the measurable business outcomes is a dangerous distraction.

Identify the need first. Identify a goal — hopefully one with a number and a unit. Then, and only then, are you in a position to decide how best to reach that goal.

All the best,
A.

Selling your vision

Ever feel like you're all alone in pushing for better systems and data for your organization?

Your board, your ED, your staff, they've all got a dozen other things on their mind. And there's a good chance they don't understand the value of the improvements that you'd like to see.

Sure, we're all in this together. We're all here to serve the mission of the organization.

But one of the unavoidable facts of operating in a team is the ongoing tension between doing well in one's own area and supporting the work of other team members.

When you have a vision to improve your organization's efficiency and effectiveness through better use of your constituent data, you're probably going to have some convincing to do.

Here’s the thing:

To be a winner in your position, it's not enough to get buy-in from your donors and members. You have to get it from your own team too.

Wouldn't it be nice if you could point to a track record of measurable business wins? Or to important early indicators of bigger accomplishments to come? Or even to a clear plan that offers a well-founded expectation of specific and measurable results?

Just like your donors and members, internal stakeholders have their own ambitions and anxieties.

What steps can you take to promote your vision in a way that appeals to their concerns?

All the best,
A.

CiviCRM is free, but so what?

Hopefully you didn't choose CiviCRM just because of its zero-dollar license fees.

I'll admit that's a vote in its favor, but by itself it's almost certainly not enough to make it the right choice.

Where CiviCRM really shines is in two aspects:

First, it's designed from the ground up for associations and community-driven organizations. The more well-known business CRMs, designed as they are for sales pipelining, do not really fit the business needs associated with memberships, contributions, events, and advocacy.

Second, as an open source project it is infinitely customizable. With skillful configuration and the addition of any of a vast number of community-provided extensions — which also usually come with no license fees — you can make it do what you really need it to do. Assuming you make a practice of goal-driven and value-based planning, this customization can be a huge win for your organization.

But the fact that it's “free software” can be a bit of a distraction.

Here’s the thing:

Yes, resources are always limited, and what you get out of the box with CiviCRM, for free, is a huge leg up. But as an organization, you're not in business to save money. You have a mission in the world, and your business is to further that mission.

If you just need something free, or cheap, there are plenty of other options out there that are easier, quicker to spin up, and cheaper to own.

If, on the other hand, you're interested in choosing the CRM that works best for you, and you’re ready to budget appropriately to achieve specific business goals, this open-source solution can be a real winning long-term play.

Don't get caught up on the free price. Instead, ask yourself how you're going to use this to win in your mission.

All the best,
A.

What keeps them up at night?

Do you know what your members’ biggest concerns are? Your donors? Your allies and your volunteer advocates?

If they're giving something to your organization, what are they hoping to achieve by that? When they’re reminded of issues related to your mission, what are the worries and frustrations that really trouble them?

Hopefully you've asked them, but if you haven't, what's stopping you?

And if you do know, how are you using that to inform your outreach, your programming, your membership offerings?

Here’s the thing:

Knowing your supporters, and your potential supporters, is a critical element of your capacity for growth.

Don't forget to keep asking, keep listening, and keep responding.

All the best,
A.

KPIs for success

So if you’re really after “success” and not just “systems that work well,” how do you define success?

And how do you identify steps that will take you in that direction?

And even better — how can you celebrate your successes in ways that support your mission?

ASAE dropped a great article on Tuesday covering the value of tracking and reporting Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for volunteer programs.

Some key takeaways:

“I framed the discussion around our goals, the metrics we’ll use to measure impact, and the outputs and outcomes,” she said.

Identifying goals? Measuring outputs and outcomes? Winning!

Before ASID green lights any special initiative, the volunteer group must answer the “what” and the “what for”—in other words, what the project is and its purpose. … “The volunteer group would need to map it back to our core values.”

Planning and prioritizing based on mission impact? More winning!

“This framework removed a lot of ambiguity,” she said. “It was easy for us to say, ‘Here’s the initiative, here’s how it aligns with our core values, this is how the group will be able to accomplish these goals by doing x, y, and z.’”

Fostering engagement and buy-in by sharing the expected measurable outcomes? Most winning.

Take a look at the article here, and consider the possibilities for your own mission.

All the best,
A.