“free”

CiviCRM is free. So are Drupal and WordPress.

Of course “free” means lots of different things:

• Free beer

• Free speech

• Free reign

Which one of those matters most to you?

• Just that it has zero up-front cost?

• Or that it's built by a community that aims to empower the masses?

• Or that it gives you virtually unlimited potential for customization?

Whichever one it is, it's good to think about which of these is most valuable to you.

Because even free kittens have a cost of ownership. And so does your open-source CRM.

All the best,
A.

Chasing upgrades

If you wanted to, you could probably be upgrading some part of your software systems every week.

I don't recommend it. Here's why:

God bless them, the open-source community is constantly working to improve CiviCRM, your Drupal or WordPress CMS, your plugins, your CiviCRM extensions.

And every time you do an upgrade, you've got things to think about:

• Back up everything, and be sure your back up restoration process works.

• Some level of sanity testing to be sure your upgrade didn't break anything obvious.

• Some level of finger-crossing to hope it didn't break anything not so obvious.

• Some potential for downtime during the upgrade, or afterwards if anything didn't go as planned.

• Changes to features, configuration, and processes that you may already be familiar with but will need to adjust for. These aren't always documented or obvious.

So what to do?

Here's what I recommend:

1. Upgrade only when you have a good reason — typically this means you have reason to believe that the upgrade will give you a feature or bug-fix you need, or it's a security update.

2. If you can, consider upgrading to something less than the very latest release. All software has bugs. A version that's been around a month or two without subsequent bug-fix releases is likely to have been vetted by the community a little more thoroughly than the version that came out yesterday.

Remember, you don't get points for having the shiniest new software.

But you do get a lot of points for having you reliable systems that let you do your work smoothly.

All the best,
A.

Tomorrow’s history is today

Think about all your former members who didn't renew in the past year.

Do you know why?

If you knew, could you use that information to help more of this year's members renew?

If you don't have that information now, wouldn't you like to have it a year from now?

Here’s the thing:

You don't need an answer for every one. A representative sample is enough.

But to have it in the future, you have to start collecting it in the present.

What's holding you back?

All the best,
A.

More ways to belong

If every one of your members (or whatever you like to call them) had renewed in the past 5 years, where would your organization be?

Member dues. Advocates for your cause. Mentors for your new members. Volunteers for your programs.

The people who want to support your work are undoubtedly your greatest asset.

What steps are you taking now to help them stick around just a little longer?

Could you create a membership level for alumni who don't need the same benefits as active members but still want to support your work?

Would your retiring members gain a sense of satisfaction helping your new members through a mentoring program?

Here's the thing:

Unless they've found some reason to hate you outright, most of you departing members would still love to help your work in one way or another.

Why let the beauty of that partnership slip away unattended?

All the best,
A.

Membership is belonging

I've been a member of my local Chamber of Commerce for over 10 years.

But I've never once had a client in the local area, and never really expect to.

Waste of money? Not at all.

I'm proud to be a member, despite the fact that I'm not using almost any of the benefits that membership offers.

So what do I get out of being a member?

• Assurance that I'm supporting an organization that does good for people I care about.

• Connection to others who share similar values.

• A sense of belonging.

Here's the thing:

Not every organization needs a membership program. Maybe yours doesn't either.

But I'm willing to bet that many of your constituents would love to have a way to "belong" more in your work.

What could that do for your mission? What steps could you take to help more people feel like they belong with you?

All the best,
A.

Why seeing an error message makes me happy

What’s the worst kind of error message?

It's the one that you hear about but cannot see yourself.

On the other hand, the best kind of error message is the one you can make happen at will.

Because knowing the exact steps to generate the error will give you a lot:

• Valuable clues about what might and might not be the actual cause, so you can fix it efficiently.

• After you’ve fixed it, a set of steps you can use to test and confirm that it's really fixed.

Yes, we hope our systems will always be error free.

But when an error comes up, and you can actually make it happen at will, that's something to be happy about.

Because it means you're already halfway to getting it fixed.

All the best,
A.

The stick shift

Why would anybody want to drive a stick shift?

• Control

• Freedom

• Fun

• Responsiveness

• Gas mileage

• Purchase price

• General awesomeness

For people who want all of the above, it’s perfect.

It's not easy to learn. It takes time, practice, and patience.

Sometimes you'll grind your gears, stall the engine, endure honking and yelling when you're stuck at a traffic light.

And then: You get through it and master the system, and it all makes sense and feels good.

CiviCRM: the stick shift of CRMs.

All the best,
A.

Mastering CiviCRM #10: Staying current with new developments

Just like your organization, CiviCRM is an active community-driven project, constantly working to improve and reach new goals.

New things are always happening.

Here are some easy ways to keep up:

System Status console

This in-app tool will tell you when there's a new version of CiviCRM available, and specifically highlights security releases. It also informs you of available updates for your extensions, and provides notice of a wide variety of potential issues on your site that may sometimes appear. Navigate to Administer > Administrator Console > System Status, or click the “System Status” link in the footer of any CiviCRM backend page on your site. It's worth checking frequently.

“CiviCRM News” dashlet

This handy dashlet pulls info from civicrm.org on the latest news, events, and trainings, and more. It's enabled on your CiviCRM dashboard by default, and if you don't see it there you can add it.

CiviCRM blog

The CiviCRM Core Team and others in the community regularly post to the blog with new ideas, new projects, upcoming events, and user success stories. The volume of information is manageable, maybe five or six new posts per month. Give it a look every week or so to stay informed..

Extensions directory

CiviCRM community members have created hundreds of extensions for CiviCRM, and the number keeps growing. Give the Extensions Directory a look once a month or so. There's a good chance you'll find something that fits a need you've been trying to fill. There's no point in building it yourself if somebody else is already giving it away.

The usual suspects

On top of all that, you've got Twitter, Stack Exchange, the MatterMost chat, and the GitLab repository.

Here's the thing

You don't have to obsess over knowing every up to the minute detail that's happening throughout the world of CiviCRM — just like you don't have to keep the 24-hour weather channel running in your living room all day.

But but mastering CiviCRM for the sake of your goals is something like navigating a sea of new opportunities and potential challenges.

Checking the weather report now and then will make for much smoother sailing.

All the best,
A.

Mastering CiviCRM #9: Getting professional help

Wouldn't it be nice to be totally self-sufficient with CiviCRM?

That's my aim for all my clients.

But now and then you may want professional help. It's out there:

• Training:
  Have someone who knows the ropes take you through a set curriculum or a customized educational plan so you know the ins and outs of the features you will need.

• Coaching:
  Work through your specific goals with an experienced pro who can help you decide on strategy, reduce uncertainty, and achieve measurable outcomes. Unlike training, which is focused on explaining the features of CiviCRM, coaching is a partnership that focues on your specific situation, goals, and resource limitations, to get you from where you are now to where you want to be.

• Custom development:
  When the existing features of CiviCRM and its community-provided extensions aren't enough for you, you may have a business case for investing in custom feature development. Because CiviCRM is open-source, virtually anything is possible. Just be sure that the expected value is greater than the expected resource investment.

Finding the right professional for you:

Look for someone who has experience and expertise specifically with CiviCRM. There are good and bad ways to work with CiviCRM, so experience counts.

You probably don't want any of these:

• A random "web developer" who specializes in "anything for anybody".

• A WordPress or Drupal developer who hasn't worked with CiviCRM before.

You probably do want any of these, depending on your needs:

• The author of a CiviCRM extension that you already use and like.

• An established CiviCRM expert whose insights you already value.

• And if you don't have anyone in mind yet, find a CiviCRM partner who is active in the community. You might start by checking CiviCRM’s Partner Directory.

Hiring outside help is an investment.

When you need it, it's not always cheap.

But when you know why you need it, it's very often worth it.

All the best,
A.

Mastering CiviCRM #8: In-person community

Yes, CiviCRM has a fantastic online community.

But if you ask me, in-person meetups are where the real magic happens.

When it comes to learning, contributing, and inspiring each other, nothing beats hanging out in real life with a bunch of other people who are working with the same tools and facing similar challenges to achieve similar goals.

Of course in-person gatherings for CiviCRM, as for everything else, took a big hit in the gloomy COVID lockdown days.

But they've been slowly making a comeback. CiviCamps, trainings, and developer sprints are coming up in 2023:

• CiviCamp in London, UK: June 20

• CiviCamp and sprint in Leipzig, Germany: Sept. 11-14

• CiviCamp, sprint, and training in Manchester, UK: Nov. 29 - Dec. 8

And great news for us here in North America: discussion is under way now for a CiviCamp in Ontario, Canada (currently looking at Toronto or Ottowa) in the Fall.

Here’s the thing:

I’m so impressed with the benefits of attending that I sponsor 50% of the event fee for my most active coaching clients. If they're that committed to mastering CiviCRM to further their mission, I want them to be at these events

If you can make it to one of these, you probably should.

It’s one of the best time investments you can make in mastering CiviCRM to support your mission.

All the best,
A.

CiviCRM online community: the geeky side

Hey, I forgot to mention one more great online community resource, especially if you're the slightest bit technical:

“CiviCRM GitLab” (lab.civicrm.org).

This is CiviCRM’s online repository for code development, bug reports, and community planning.

Even if you're not a software developer, this is still a great resource for learning about new feature improvements and new bug fixes that are in the works — or completed.

And you don't have to be super technical to file a bug report either. If you're sure that CiviCRM should be behaving in a certain way and isn't, there may be an existing bug report that you can add to, or you can create one yourself.

Ultimately CiviCRM is just a bunch of code files.

Peeking into that world now and then is like learning a little more about your car’s engine or your household plumbing:

You don't always have to be the one to pull out the tools, but it can help to have some idea what's up when it's acting strangely.

All the best,
A.

Mastering CiviCRM #7: Online community

Can you name anyone who got really good at what they do all by themselves?

I can't.

You'll hear of someone like that now and then, and when you do it's a great story.

That's because it's pretty rare.

And it's hard. Having a community of people around you is a huge advantage for learning.

Fortunately, you don't even have to change out of your pajamas these days to find an online community of people a lot like you who are making great things happen with CiviCRM.

The online CiviCRM community is active, communicative, and to my experience very supportive.

If you want to accelerate your journey in mastering cbcrm, I strongly recommend you check out these online community resources:

CiviCRM Stack Exchange

Have a question that you just can't seem to get answered? The CiviCRM Stack Exchange is a dedicated Q&A forum for exactly that: getting your questions answered.

It's not a general forum for open-ended conversation; it's specifically designed to get "the one best answer" to a specific answerable question.

Questions and answers are all provided by real people in the CiviCRM community — from complete noobs to seasoned experts. There's no guarantee that you'll get a perfect answer, but it's a great place to start, and often turns up exactly what you need to know.

Even if the answer is "sorry, what you want to do isn't possible yet," you'll be a lot better off than if you just spent hours trying to do the impossible on your own.

Since all the questions and answers are provided for free, by CiviCRM users just like you, you can (and should, if you ask me) jump in an answer questions yourself. Sharing what you've learned is a great way to reinforce your own learning, and you might even get some feedback that helps you refine your understanding of how it all works.

That's the beauty of learning together.

Community chat

CiviCRM’s online chat platform is the closest thing we have to an online forum, with separate channels for a wide variety of topics.

Need help with Mosaico, or something Drupal-specific, or financials, or general system administration? There are dedicated channels for those topics, and lots more. Just trying to figure out where you fit in with this new community?

Try the Town Square channel, where "all things CiviCRM" are on-topic; or even the Off Topic channel, for "Random chit-chat about anything at all".

It's sometimes just referred to as "MatterMost", the name of the software that powers the chat platform. It's about like Slack, in case you've used that elsewhere. If someone in the CiviCRM community suggests asking on MatterMost, they just mean chat.civicrm.org.

You can just use it easily in your browser, but dedicated desktop and mobile apps (look for "MatterMost") make it even easier.

Twitter

Yep, it's still there. See latest tweets and the official @CiviCRM twitter feed.

Online meetups

Now and then you'll find an online meetup that's worth checking out. They're often listed in the Community channel at chat.civicrm.org, as well as at https://civicrm.org/events/.

The CiviCRM North East meetup has been running once every few months for a few years now. It's based in Newcastle, England, but it's been an online meetup (often only online) since the "bad old days" of pandemic lockdowns. Organizer William Mortada, is an active CivCRM contributor who says this is an "informal friendly meeting with plenty of opportunity to meet other people ... aimed at end users. No experience is assumed and technical language will be kept to a minimum. Everyone is welcome!"

Here's the thing:

Online documentation and personal experimentation are important, so don't neglect those. But something magical happens when people start sharing ideas.

Piping up with "Hi, I'm new here," can be a little intimidating (for some folks), but the boost you'll get to your your learning is worth it.

All the best,
A.

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.