The $250 hammer

Quick question: Why would anyone pay $250 for this hammer when they could buy this one for $3 ?

A hammer is a hammer, right?

Funny thing is, we can flip this question on its head:

Why would anyone waste $3 on this crappy hammer, when they could easily buy this professional-quality precision nail-driving beauty for $250?

It turns out, a hammer is not just a hammer.

I can virtually guarantee you that there are people out there who are happily buying that $250 hammer, and others who are equally happy with the $3 one.

If you know what it's worth to you, making a decision based on value gets a little easier.

Price is a distraction. Focus on the value.

All the best,
A.

Mastering CiviCRM #6: Your own documentation

Ever seen a really great banjo player?

I went to a bluegrass festival last night with my family — my goodness these people can pick. You can bet they've put in a lifetime of work and care to master their craft.

Anybody I know who's gotten really good at something, including myself in the few areas I've decided focus on, do it by slowly and consistently improving their skills and knowledge over time.

Reading up and learning from others is a big part of that. Hopefully by now you've dug in at least a little bit to get familiar with the online documentation and resources for CiviCRM.

There’s one problem with simply reading and listening to the wisdom of others: it's easily forgotten. There's an incredible wealth of information out there, and it's very hard to match it up to your own progress and learning in a way that fosters real learning.

That's one reason I recommend that you keep your own notes.

The benefits

Keeping your own documentation will get you several important benefits:

• Better recall: The mere act of reflecting on and summarizing what you've learned has a wonderful reinforcing effect on your brain's ability to recall it later.

• Quick reference: There are few things more frustrating than knowing that you've done “something just like this” in the past but being unable to remember exactly how it worked. If you've got good notes, that's a cinch to solve.

• Sharing with others: As your collection of notes expands, you'll have a valuable library of concepts and techniques that you can share with others on your staff. It may need some polishing and reorganization, but your notes are the rough draft of the valuable documentation you can build for your team.

Getting started

Starting can be as simple as keeping a pocket notebook in which you write just a few words about each new concept or technique as you put it into practice.

More likely you want to use EverNote, Google Docs, or something similar, into which you can copy/paste links to relevant online resources, and which you can easily edit and reorganize as your collection grows.

Frequent review

The value of good notes comes when you actually go back and use them.

Take a moment now-and-then to sit and review them, make edits, or reorganize. It's probably not worth studying them as if for a test, but the occasional reminder of what you've learned will help you find the note you want at the time you need it.

It can also be an encouraging indicator of progress to see how your knowledge has grown over time.

What to document

Some things you document just as a practice of interacting with the concepts. Other things you document because they're just too complex to remember.

• Anytime you have a question that takes you more than a few minutes of research to answer, write down the solution. The time it takes to write it down now will surely be less than the time it takes you to research it all over again 6 months from now.

• Complex arrangements related to user roles and permissions should almost certainly be written up in a document of their own. Mysterious “access denied” errors are some of the most frustrating and frequent problems I've seen that could have been easily solved by simply writing down the intended policy, rationale, and means of implementation.

• If you've pulled in an outside expert for coaching or consultation, take a moment after your call with them to write down what you've learned, what you decided, and a summary of the topics you discussed. If you've got a recording of that call, why not put a link to that recording right in there with your notes?

Here's the thing:

Online documentation is great. It is extensive and thorough, and usually up to date. It’s also a lot of information to try and retain in your head.

Don't let yourself be deceived that you'll “just remember” the hard lessons that you learn along the way.

Write it all down. Keep a log of your learning. Let it grow into a handbook for your department or organization.

You'll be glad you did.

All the best,
- A.

Mastering CiviCRM #5: Online documentation

Finally we can get into something that's specifically about CiviCRM.

… except of course that it's not only about CiviCRM. Any tool with more than a couple of moving parts is going to need some kind of documentation.

And the more complex that tool is, the more smart people rely on the documentation that's available.

Official documentation

CiviCRM's official documentation is free. Free to access, free to distribute to your staff, free to modify and reuse as you see fit.

And if you want to make the most of CiviCRM, you'd be well served by becoming very familiar with what it can do right out of the box.

The documentation is also quite extensive. So it can feel like a lot to consume.

But it's well organized, divided into several Guides covering major areas:

• User Guide: For staff members who use CiviCRM's web-based interface as part of their job at an organization.

• Installation Guide: For anyone who wants to install CiviCRM on a compatible CMS.

• System Administrator Guide: For tech savvy people who install, upgrade, and maintain CiviCRM for an organization.

• Training Guide: For CiviCRM trainers who train users, system administrators and developers who would like to learn more about configuring and using CiviCRM.

• Developer Guide: For developers/programmers who create and improve functionality within CiviCRM or those wishing to develop for/with CiviCRM.

How to use the docs

Since it covers so much, I wouldn't recommend that you just sit down and read it all. (But if you're a voracious reader with an encyclopedic memory, don't let me stop you.)

Instead, make better use of your time with two healthy habits:

1. Regularly examine the Table of Contents for each of the Guides, to get familiar with what's covered. You can do it a few minutes every day; or once a week; or even the first day of every month.
   
   Like the student learning a new language who makes a daily practice of "learning" one new word each day, you'll find your knowledge increasing steadily over time.
   
   The purpose here is not to memorize anything — it's good enough that 3 months from now, when faced with a new challenge, you can say to yourself, "I read somewhere about something like this," and go back to the docs for the details.

2. Search the documentation first when you have a question. Each Guide has its own search feature, with which you can turn up a variety of articles on a given topic. Google works, too. Use the "site:" operator to search across all Guides; for example, this search on “mailings”.

Extension documentation

The main documentation page at https://docs.civicrm.org/ provides links to all of the above Guides, and it also links to detailed documentation for dozens of CiviCRM extensions. Take a look, and get familiar with what these extensions can offer you.

You can also search the CiviCRM Extensions Directory for an even larger collection of community-provided extensions. Just because you can't do something easily out of the box with CiviCRM, doesn't mean you have to build it yourself — there's a good chance someone has created an extension that can do what you need (or most of it) without hiring a developer.

Video demos

I’ll tell you that there’s no substitute for consulting the official documentation. But I get it, reading text-heavy manuals is not the easiest thing in the world. For a more passive “show me, don’t tell me” approach, you might enjoy CiviTeacher.com, a paid (and reasonably priced) service that offers a library of CiviCRM video instructionals on a wide range of topics.

I encourage my coaching clients to at least give it a look, and they tell me it's a great resource.

Here's the thing:

CiviCRM is just a tool, and merely mastering that tool is not a very useful goal in itself.

But I assume you've decided to make CiviCRM a key component in reaching the real goals you've set out to achieve — for your organization, for yourself, and for the people you care about.

If that's true, mastering the tool is an important part of reaching those goals.

And the online docs are an amazing free resource to help you do that.

Get familiar with them, consult them often, and you'll be on your way to making smart and informed decisions for managing your CRM.

All the best,
A.

Mastering CiviCRM #4: Your designated in-house expert

When I was growing up, my dad was our family's car guru.

Whenever an issue came up — squeaky brakes, funny engine noises, new radio to install, anything — we knew that was a question for Dad.

As a kid, I thought he knew everything about cars. As an adult, I found out he didn’t. That surprised me, because he had always just handled it.

Nowadays, I don't do much of my own car maintenance. Modern cars are pretty complicated, and I've got better things to do. So I have a good relationship with a good mechanic, and I'll take most anything to him.

Still, in my family, any questions about cars come to me first.

Believe me, I'm no mechanical genius. So how is it that I'm still the designated in-house car expert?

Why have an in-house expert at all

It's not that my family needs a professionally skilled live-in mechanic —we don’t. But we do get a lot of benefit out of putting one person in charge of this specific area.

• Knowledge increases over time, and is retained for everyone’s benefit.

• Routine maintenance gets done on time.

• Expense aside, quick in-house fixes are just easier than the hassle of putting a car in the a shop.

Mastering your CRM system really is a lot like this.

Complex systems need an in-house expert

A modern open source CRM is a complicated machine. To keep it running smoothly, you'll sometimes need a professional expert with years of experience and deep technical knowledge.

But unless you're a very large organization, it's probably not worth hiring such an expert full-time.

Instead, keep a good relationship with them, and pull them in only when needed.

And in the meantime, you'll get a lot of value by designating someone in your core staff to be your in-house expert.

• They don't have to know everything. But as more questions keep coming to them, they'll learn an awful lot.

• Keeping this knowledge in house means you have quick access to someone who can handle most questions as they arise.

• Because they're internal to your team, they'll have a better understanding of your policies, working style, limitations, and goals than any outside expert.

• This person might be you, or you might just select someone who has a methodical and pragmatic mindset. They don't need much prior knowledge. They just need attention to detail and a willingness to learn. They'll become your in-house expert soon enough.

Pulling in outside help always incurs some overhead: scheduling, communication, availability. Sure, sometimes it's worth it, so keep that option handy.

But you can’t outsource everything. Institutional knowledge, organizational culture, development priorities — all of these have to reside within your core staff, and they will (or should) inform your plans for leveraging your CRM’s potential.

Designating an in-house expert will put you on the path to building up your institutional mastery of your CRM, as valuable resource for your organization's future.

You're already investing in a powerful CRM solution. Why not start now investing in one team member to be empowered and increasingly skilled at managing that system?

All the best,
A.

Mastering CiviCRM #3: Simplifying

There's no question that CiviCRM is incredibly powerful.

• You want a customized multi-level permission scheme in which members can view and edit not only their own information but also that of others in an ad hoc member cohort — without exposing sensitive data to unauthorized users?

• You want customized and automated deduping that prevents and removes duplicate contacts easily, based on any number of complicated rules that you define?

• You want to let site visitors purchase gift memberships and event registrations for any number of their friends or coworkers, with a discount code that only works for the first 10 people, and make sure all the payments get recorded automatically and correctly in QuickBooks?

Yep, I have clients who are doing all of that.

But that power comes with a cost: complexity.

Complexity is a cost

Make no mistake, complexity is a cost. It shows up when things aren't working the way you think they should work, and you can't figure out why.

A few real examples my clients have faced recently:

• Site visitors getting access denied errors on simple contribution pages.

• High abandonment rates for event registration forms that ask for too many questions.

• Staff spending far too long entering data via complex workflows.

All of these problems were solved with one or both of these solutions:

1. Simplifying the system by streamlining permissions, workflows, and user interfaces.

2. Or, for complex components that you've decided are worth keeping, carefully documenting both the rationale and the functionality.

Simplifying reduces that cost

Open source systems like CiviCRM will give you plenty of rope — usually enough to tie yourself up in some pretty good knots.

Failing to manage the complexity leaves you with a system that you don't fully understand. And it will lead to mysterious issues that make you want to pull your hair out.

That's no way to build for success. Simplify where you can.

All the best,
A.

Mastering CiviCRM #2: Investment vs expense

"Investment or expense?" This would be a typical question for an accountant: whether to count an expenditure as an operating expense or a capital investment.

But the investment/expense distinction I'm focused on here is not about accounting.

It's simply this:

A good investment helps you build momentum. A good expense just helps you survive.

(Notice that I said “good investment” and “good expense.” We're not even discussing the difference between wise expenditures and unwise ones. It's a mere truism to say that you should avoid unwise expenditures.)

So what's the difference here? Maybe an example will help.

Gas prices

These days it costs me around 50 bucks to fill the gas tank in my little Ford Ranger. So what do you think: Is that an investment or an expense?

Think about it for a second. I'll wait.

...

The answer is:

It's a trick question. You don't have enough information to know.

Because what you don't know is, why do I drive the truck at all?

• If I'm just driving as part of my everyday lifestyle — picking up groceries, shuttling kids to activities, showing off my great taste in small pickup trucks — it's an expense.

• But what if I'm driving across all of Texas to meet a potential client who could double the profitability of my business? That's an investment.

• Then again, maybe I'm driving across all of Texas just for fun. Expense?

• Just for a week of fun with my wife and kids, making memories that will shape their lives. Investment?

Expenses and investments can look an awful lot alike. The only difference is what you're hoping to get out of it.

Why this matters

Community-driven organizations often have a severely limiting set of underlying beliefs based on their limited access to resources.

When resources are very limited, everything tends to look like an expense. After all, how can I possibly think about investing in my future when I'm just trying to survive today?

This line of thinking comes with a focus on expense as a zero-sum calculation, instead of on value as the result of investment.

This notion is habitual and deeply held, but learning to get out of it is both liberating and empowering.

Even the most cash-strapped of us can look for ways to invest in the future.

The alternative

Instead of focusing only on the expense, why not focus first on the outcome?

Naturally, there’s a cost to every effort you might make.

But instead of starting with, "How much would this solution cost?", ask "What measurable goal am I trying to achieve? What measurable outcome do I expect that to get me? What steps could I take to move in that direction? Are there easy things I could do to get most of the way there?"

Here’s the thing:

Resources will always be limited. Even if money grew on trees, somebody would have to pick it. And even if you had a million dollars, you'd soon find some very good way to spend 2 million.

Don't be hampered by limited resources.

Find the way to turn expenses into investments, and insist on getting a return on your investment that will build momentum for your mission.

When it comes to mastering your CRM system, try to think of your time, money, and effort as investments, not merely expenses.

You’re not just trying to survive here. You’re gaining mastery of your systems so that you’ll be better able to achieve your goals tomorrow than you are today, and better still the day after that.

All the best,
Allen

Mastering CiviCRM #1: Focus on mission value

The wonderful thing about open-source systems like CiviCRM is that you can make them do whatever you want.

That's also one of the most troubling things. You can spend a lot of time and money making them do whatever you want.

The question to ask is not, "Can I do it?" but "Should I do it?" — or even better, "Why should I do this? What will it get me?"

Getting what you asked for

In my early days as an open-source developer for hire, I believed it was my job to build whatever the client asked for. As a result I can point to several features that I built for CiviCRM and other systems that did exactly what the client wanted, met all the stated needs … and then were never used.

Those clients never had a complaint. They never blamed me for failing to deliver what was asked for.

But the fact is that, in the end, they were not happy with what they got. Even though it all worked 100% correctly, it was not delivering any real value for their mission.

“Wouldn’t it be cool if …”

It can be very easy, and a lot of fun, to get caught up in making your tools "better." Even the expert CiviCRM specialist you hire — usually at a substantial expense, I might add — can be easily distracted by the prospect of doing "something very cool" with CiviCRM.

But does anybody else care about that?

No, they do not.

Nobody cares that you can now have a checkbox on your donation forms to ask for an additional percentage to cover processing fees.

If they care about it at all, it's because it actually helped you to meet your bottom-line mission. But if it didn't, or if you can't point to exactly how much it did, why would they care?

(There is, by the way, an extension that does exactly that. I wrote it, and it's still pretty widely used. But the client who paid me to write it … never really used it.)

Shifting the focus

The good news is that you don't have to wait until after you've invested in these changes to find out it wasn't worth it.

You can ask yourself that up front. The simple way is to ask, "If I hire someone to build this feature, what will I get out of it? What measurable result will I be able to point to as evidence that it was worth it?"

And after you've done that a few times, you can ask an even better question:

What measurable outcome am I actually trying to achieve? Other than just adding a button or a checkbox or a report, how might I actually achieve that outcome? Could I get 80% of that result with 20% of the effort?

Here's the thing:

All the nice-to-haves are only that — they're nice. But are they valuable?

Ask yourself: What needle are you trying to move? By how much? How will you move it? What will that get you?

Remember, "better" and "more" are nice, but they aren't goals.

Goals are measurable and specific, usually with a number and a unit, often with a timeline.

If you want to win, you have to define what winning looks like.

And whatever it is you're trying to achieve, you'll be a lot happier if it's specific, measurable, and related to something that you and your people actually care about. Not just “cool” or “better.”

All the best,
A.

Mastering CiviCRM #0: Winner's mindset

I'm not a big fan of the “power of positive thinking” school. I am a cynic at heart.

I won’t try to talk you out of trying it if it works for you, but looking at myself in the mirror and delivering positive affirmations every morning has always seemed ineffective and a little silly.

So I'm not going to give you a list of pep-talk aphorisms or mantras you can repeat to buck up your spirit when things get tough.

But I am a realist: Life is beautiful, and life is hard. Resources are limited. We always want more than we have.

If you want to master your CRM system, I assume there is a reason.

I assume it's because you want to achieve specific and substantial results in your mission, your career, and in the lives of people you care about.

Because any CRM system has, as its primary value, the strengthening of relationships in support of those goals, mastering that system is obviously an important step in achieving them.

So it's counterproductive to believe that such mastery is beyond your ability. It is not.

Yes, there will always be things you don't know. There will always be tough decisions and uncertainty, and tools that you wish you had but don't, and policy requirements or funding limitations or time constraints that make your life hard.

But you are the one — the only person — who will decide how you face those limitations and what goals you will pursue in the face of them.

This is the winner's mindset.

• No tool will ever be perfect for your needs, and resources will always be limited, but you are in the position to use all available resources however you see fit, in order to achieve your goals.

• You are in the position to celebrate your successes and use them to gain momentum.

• You are in the position to acknowledge your failures and learn from them what you can.

If you want to win, you have to define what winning is.

• Achieving your organization's publicly stated goals is winning.

• Achieving your personal goals for your department is winning.

• Trying something, observing that it didn't work as well as you hoped, and learning from that is also winning.

• Building systems — both automated and human — that help you to remove uncertainty and increase confidence for you and your team is winning.

In this series I'll cover topics that are critical to mastering CiviCRM, but many of them are not specific to CiviCRM itself.

That's because winning with CiviCRM is not about becoming an expert in a specific tool set.

It's about remembering the connection between your tools, your people, your resource limitations, and your goals.

And it's the goals that matter. The reason you got into this work in the first place. The positive impact you can make in the lives of people you care about. The satisfaction of being damn good at what you do.

We'll talk more about goals and mission tomorrow.

In the meantime, think about how you handle the fact that resources will always be limited, and that your capacity for continual improvement is not.

All the best,
A.

Mastering CiviCRM

What does it really take to succeed with CiviCRM?

First let's define clearly what we do and do not mean by "succeed".

By success I do not mean any of the following:

• Never hitting a challenge

• instant gratification

• perfection

Success means simply this: You have clear and measurable goals, and you achieve them.

And by "succeeding with CiviCRM", I do not mean that you will become the worldwide expert in this or any other system. Instead I mean that you will achieve valuable goals for your organization's mission, by leveraging what CiviCRM has to offer.

In my next several emails I'll elaborate on 10 critical elements of mastering CiviCRM.

In my many years of helping organizations nail their goals with CiviCRM, I've seen that the ones who are happiest with their systems are those who who make a habit of sticking to some or all of these points.

Here they are:

0. Winner's mindset
1. Focus on mission value
2. Investment vs expense
3. Simplifying
4. Designated in-house expert
5. Online documentation
6. Your own documentation
7. Online community
8. In person community
9. Professional help
10. Staying current with new developments

(Being able to count 10 is optional.)

I'll see you tomorrow, winner.

- A.

Mysterious permission problems

Most of my clients handle things pretty well on their own, and they only come to me when they get something that really mystifies them.

Among all the mysterious problems that come my way, the most common cause is probably complex user permissions.

WordPress and Drupal offer a variety of ways to control access to content, and so does CiviCRM. Permissions, roles, ACLs, financial ACLs, groups, memberships, etc., etc.

I've found that organizations who avoid problems with permissions are doing at least one of two things:

1. They limit the complexity. Fewer roles, fewer ACLs, fewer policies about who can do what.
   
   They either know that they don't need the complexity, or they make an intentional decision to keep things simple and make sure that staff are well trained and user interfaces are well designed.

2. They keep thorough documentation. Both the rationale and the mechanism for any permissioning scheme is written down somewhere, and frequently referenced and updated. This makes it easy to sort out what's going on when something surprising happens.
   
   It also has a limiting effect on the complexity: if you have to document everything, it kinda makes you think twice before changing the permissions.

Some of the biggest wins in reducing complexity come from simplifying the user permissioning scheme.

If you can think of more than a handful of times that your users have been mysteriously denied access the content or features that they should have, there's a good chance you need to sit down and simplify.

All the best,
A.

Simplify, simplify

Walden author Henry David Thoreau wrote:

“Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.”

To which Ralph Waldo Emerson replied:

“One ‘Simplify’ would have sufficed.”

I just love those guys.

Do you understand your CRM system? Sure, probably not all of it. Any robust system is likely to have complexity that you don't need to comprehend.

But among the things you need to do on a daily, weekly, or even monthly basis, are each of the various moving parts understood by at least one person or another on your team?

Can you recall more than a handful of “mysterious” problems in the past year?

Emerson and Thoreau might have some wisdom for you.

All the best,
A.

Easy decisions

The difference between a hard decision and an easy one usually comes down to your assessment of cost versus benefit, or difficulty versus value.

Take a look at this matrix:

We can make fairly easy decisions for something that is high value and low difficulty, or low value and high difficulty.

In between those extremes, you can lose a lot of time and energy wrestling with the possibilities.

Don't do it.

Try this instead:

If it's low value, it doesn't matter how easy it is. Either do it, or don't do it, but decide quickly and move on. You've got bigger fish to fry.

If it's high value, but still seems too hard, take a minute to consider some alternatives: Maybe you don't really need everything you thought you needed. Maybe you could get most of the same value by just doing something easier.

Here's the thing:

Your brain has to make thousands of decisions every day. You don't even think about the easy ones. But there are more hard ones than you would like.

Pick your battles. Look for the value. Remember that no solution is perfect, but real value is attainable.

This applies to your fundraising strategy, your membership engagement, even to practical matters like making your CRM do exactly what you want.

Remember what your goal is. They're surely more than one way to get there.

All the best,
A.

Client question: How can I make membership changes easier for my members?

This week I got the following question from a coaching client (paraphrased here for brevity):

We've been using CiviCRM's contact dashboard for a long time to let our users keep up with their history — contributions, email subscriptions, etc.

We've recently started a membership program and now have about 150 members, all with automatic monthly renewal (payments processed through Stripe). The contact dashboard is still useful, but we've noticed a couple of limitations:

1. There's no link for a member to cancel their membership. We'd like them at least to have the freedom to stop the recurring payment if they really want to.

2. Our membership program allows members to set their own recurring membership amount. We'd like to allow them the flexibility to change this amount if they need to. The dashboard provides a “Renew” button, but when the member clicks this button and renews with a different amount, CiviCRM creates a second membership for them, so now they have two recurring contributions with different amounts.

Is there any way we could allow users to cancel their own membership? And can we also allow them to easily change their membership amount?

I love this question because it presents a few different possibilities.

The short answer:

Neither CiviCRM nor the Stripe extension provide a way to offer these features.

Still, I'm pretty sure we could develop a custom extension that would do it. CiviCRM's APIs do allow for canceling a membership, and canceling a recurring payment; so it should be possible to create an extension that allows the user to cancel their own membership and its recurring payment, and also to create a new recurring payment (at a different amount) while automatically canceling the previous recurring payment at the old amount.

But it would be smart to do some value assessment first.

Consider some alterenatives:

Developing that custom extension is not a trivial expense.

As with anything, there's a broad range of investment that you could make in such an extension, from something very bare-bones to something very robust. The fancier you make it, the easier everything will be for the people who use it, but the more investment you'll need to make in building and thoroughly testing the functionality.

Since it's not a trivial expense, and could become "very expensive" (whatever that might mean to you), it's worth thinking about the alternatives.

Especially since you only have around 150 members, you might not even know yet how common this need is. And you probably don't yet have a clear picture of all the other things that members will want to do in this vein.

So there's a lot of uncertainty here, not just in the expense of building an extension, but in the nature of the actual need.

As one example of an alternative: Why not just throw staff hours at it? For example, you could:

• Create a simple form by which users can request that you cancel their membership. Have a staff member monitor those requests, and manually cancel the memberships.

• Create a simple form where users can request to change their membership amount. This one would need to collect the credit card details and actually create a new membership with a new recurring payment via Stripe. Have your staff monitor the form submissions and manually cancel the old membership in favor of the newly created one.

• On both of these forms (or on a completely separate form), include a free-form field where users can ask any question at all about changing their membership. Who knows, maybe you’ll find a lot of people who just want to pause for a couple of months.

That should be pretty simple to set up; and letting it run for a few weeks, or even a few months, would help you get a sense of how often such requests come in, how much staff time is spent processing those requests, and what other changes your members want that you haven’t thought of.

Once you have that info, you can make a much more informed decision about any custom featurese.

Clear goals for measurable outcomes:

Obviously this is not as sexy as having a fancy interface where users can do everything they want without your help.

If sexy user interfaces are a big part of your brand identity, then you might already have some mechanism for estimating the business value of such tools.

And if you can put a number on that, then you can think about how much you're able to invest in such an extension, and make a real value decision on the investment.

Either way, before you dive in on a custom extension project, I recommend you get a clear sense of exactly what needle you're trying to move — what specific measurable outcome you're trying to achieve — and the measurable business value of moving that needle.

This way you’ve got a clear target, and a clear standard by which you can judge your success afterward.

All the best,
A.

When the solution is elusive, go back to the problem

Yesterday I wrote about a simple brain hack for tough problems:

When the solution is elusive, take a step back and make sure you understand the problem by writing it down.

So why does this work?

I'm not a specialist in human brain function. I can't tell you exactly what mechanism inside your skull is blocking or promoting success in these situations.

But I think it's mostly a "mirage" effect:

Sometimes it just "feels" like the solution is just out of reach. And if we're walking toward that distant shadow, surely we'll get there eventually.

This is all rolled up in your brain's incredible capacity for distraction, misdirection, wishful thinking, and a tendency to expect that you'll get it right the first time.

After all, life is as easy as it is only because we normally deal with problems that are pretty familiar to us. So we usually do get it right the first time.

But when we don't — when the first time or even the fifth time doesn't produce something useful — it's time to change tactics.

Next time you feel a dull pain from banging your head against a problem repeatedly, take a step back and re-examine the real problem.

You probably won't break through that brick wall with one more whack of your forehead. But maybe there's a door that you just haven't seen yet.

All the best,
A.

A simple brain hack for tough problems

Two tough problems this week reminded me of a simple brain hack that I sometimes recommend to my clients:

When the solution is elusive, take a step back and make sure you understand the problem by writing it down.

1. Chemistry homework

Helping my high-school daughter with a tough chemistry problem, I spent half an hour struggling to explain the method that I thought would work, until I finally realized that I wasn't super-clear about what I was trying to find.

Finally I took 2 minutes to write the question on paper, as a grammatically correct sentence starting with a capital letter and ending with a question mark. And then the correct method became obvious.

Ten minutes later we were done with the calculation.

2. Software headache

For three days this week, I puzzled repeatedly over a tough software development challenge for a client project. Each time I came back to it, I thought I had the right approach. But I couldn't quite make everything fit together, for reasons that eluded me.

This morning I sat with pencil and paper, and I wrote out in a few simple sentences and a couple of very simple diagrams what I actually wanted to achieve.

One hour of genuinely productive work later, it's done.

Here's the thing:

I've seen this approach work time and time again.

Put down your tools — your dashboards, your spreadsheets, your calculator, your email, your brainstorming committee — and write, with pencil on paper, the simplest possible explanation of what you're actually trying to achieve.

Sure, when you just get it right the first time, you don’t need this — and that’s great!

But when you don't, getting back to the problem — and away from a swirling morass of possible solutions — has a genuine clarifying effect.

All the best,
A.

ASAE: "Are You Measuring What Matters to Grow Revenue?"

I love a good discussion on measurement and goals.

The American Society of Association Executives has a great little article here that presents a few gems worth noting:

1. Long-term tracking provides insights to actual program results.

The American College of Osteopathic Family Physicians ...monitors a group of nonmember attendees that it offered memberships to in 2019. “We have tracked this cohort and have been able to maintain just under half of these physicians since,” [the association's Executive Director] said.

2. Organization-wide access to your metrics helps everyone pull together.

“You may have membership data on renewals or lapsed membership that the CFO alone is looking at from a revenue standpoint. But those numbers can help the organization identify what they need to create a communications strategy and messaging that will resonate with a member.”

3. Website stats can help identify weak points in your messaging.

If engagement with your products isn’t what you’re hoping for ... Carlisle suggests looking at your website’s bounce rate—the percentage of visitors who leave after viewing only one page. A high bounce rate can mean you’re leaving money on the table.

4. Goals matter.

Any meaningful work around KPIs should begin with a discussion of what strategic goals the association is trying to meet, says Cruz... “The organization should be defining the problems that they’re trying to solve, and the data they’re collecting should be providing insight into the effectiveness of the organization at solving those problems,” she said. “Before data collection can start, you should have a thorough, achievable, and measurable operations plan.”

5. Common terminology keeps everyone on the same page.

For an organization to draw meaningful conclusions from its data, it needs to establish consistent terms for KPIs across departments and agree on definitions and usages. “We’ve standardized it—here’s the data, here’s the metrics we’re pulling, here’s when it’s pulled, here’s when it’s communicated,” George said. “Everybody has a single point of truth, and there aren’t alternative narratives.”

I encourage you to give it a read, and think about how your goals, plans, and measurements are (or could) work together to help you nail your development goals.

All the best,
A.

Getting back to the joy of your work

Do you remember when you decided to take on your responsibilities at your organization?

I'm guessing you saw it as an opportunity:

• To make a difference in the world

• To help people who really need your support

• To practice and perfect your particular set of professional skills

• To feel a sense of belonging among a team of people who share your values

At some point you decided to use CiviCRM as a significant tool in this work. (Or someone else decided, and you agreed.)

I'm guessing you also saw this as an opportunity, as a way to support your personal mission in pursuing all of the above. You probably hoped it would help you:

• To get a clear picture of the data that informs your work

• To understand the people you're trying to help

• To easily connect people to the services and information that they need

• To feel the satisfaction of achieving one goal after another

So how's that going?

I mean really:

• Are you feeling satisfied and proud of your achievements?

• Are you looking back with pride on a series of accomplished goals, large or small?

• Are you continually improving in your sense of clarity of the data that matters?

If you are, that's music to my ears.

If you're not, what's up?

Here's the thing:

A powerful and flexible tool like CiviCRM comes with its own set of delights and derailments.

I hear from people on a regular basis who are experiencing the delights, by working through (and going around) the derailments.

They do it by mastering the tools, focusing on measurable outcomes, and making sure they understand the underlying structure of their data.

Fortunately, these are all learnable skills, if you make the time to learn them, and get help where you need it.

And it’s worth doing. Sometimes it's just a matter of pausing to remember why you started this journey in the first place.

All the best,
A.

Where’s the joy?

Where do you find joy in the work that you do?

It's probably not in struggling with technology, though if you're a puzzle solver like me, there is a lot of satisfaction in making a tool do what you want it to do.

But there's a deeper reason why people work in community-driven organizations.

Why they seek out those positions.

Why they stick around through all the headaches and challenges.

As you slug it out in the trenches today, remember this:

You are helping people who matter make valuable accomplishments in their lives.

Your members, your staff, your volunteers. The work you do matters to them.

Press on, and count the wins as they come, large or small.

All the best,
A.

What needle are you trying to move?

Running an organization — nonprofit or otherwise — is kinda like flying an airplane. You know you're trying to get somewhere, and meanwhile you're faced with decision after decision.

It can feel a little like this:

Which one of these settings is for Donor Retention Rate?

Mission objectives, board requirements, regulations, income in all its forms, expenses in all their forms, staff management, internal workflows, policies, on and on.

When you get an idea that your CRM can help you with some of this, it's important to ask yourself one question:

What needle am I trying to move?

Of all the inputs and outputs your organization has to deal with, can you name even one — perhaps two or three — specific measurable changes that you want to see?

• Reduce staff workload by 10%, thereby freeing up resources for more important tasks?

• Decrease by 25% the time it takes to onboard a new service recipient, so you can effectively serve more people?

• Increase membership renewals by 20% year over year, in order to increase funding and member advocacy?

• Decrease form abandonment by 35% so you can stop losing so many sign-ups and contributions?

Here’s the thing:

Every pilot would love to “fly the airplane better," or "have a better airplane." Every airline executive and passenger would probably want that too.

But in order to do that intentionally, and not just get lucky, you have to know what “better” means, and you have to decide what specific and measurable improvements you want to pursue.

Yes, you have to keep flying the airplane you've got. The question is, where's the next best chance for an improvement? (Hint: it’s probably the one that’s aimed at a specific measurable outcome.)

All the best,
Allen

The best payment processor for CiviCRM

Here's a question I got from a client recently:

In your opinion which payment solution works best with CiviCRM?

PayPal

Square

Or what?

Of those two choices, only PayPal is supported by CiviCRM (there's no available payment processor for Square), but if you're just starting out, I'm going to recommend Stripe instead.

PayPal

PayPal works, is well known, and is fine for low-volume situations. But for an organization using CiviCRM, PayPal is full of headaches. For example, PayPal requires you to include their logo on all payment forms, insists on trying to get end-users to pay with their PayPal account instead of their credit card (which is confusing to people who are just trying to give you money), and is very hard to investigate when questions or issues come up (as they sometimes will, e.g. why was this payment canceled? etc.)

Stripe

Stripe, on the other hand, is very actively used in the CiviCRM community, offers clear documentation and clearly organized data, is completely transparent to the end user (users will never see a Stripe logo or get redirected away from your site to make a payment), and has a CiviCRM integration that is actively maintained and continually improved.

Stripe is what I use on my own site, and what most of my clients are using.

iATS

Here's another one that's fairly popular, and I know a few organizations that are using it happily with CiviCRM. They're also active supporters of the CiviCRM project, which is a boost for everyone, including organizations like yours who depend on it.

Others

If one of the above doesn't work for you, or if you have a specific payment processor you want to work with, you have a couple of options:

1. Take a look at the CiviCRM extensions directory. There may already be an extension that supports integration with the payment processor you want.

2. It is possible to hire a developer to create an extension for a given payment processor. This is not a small project to be undertaken lightly, but if you think that using that specific payment processor will save you $10K to $15K in the first year, then it might be worth it.

All the best,
A.