Two ways to think about your budget

Have a look at these two questions:

• "What can we afford on our budget?"

• "How could we increase our budget?"

So tell me what you think:

Which of those is more common among community-driven organizations?

Which of them is more likely to lead to long-term success?

All the best,
A.

Book rec: How to Measure Anything

I know two things about you:

1. You care about outcomes, are aiming to accomplish something in the world, and have limited resources.

2. Succeeding in your work requires measuring: costs, outcomes, and your level of confidence in cost and outcome projections.

If you want to get a better handle on measuring things that matter to your organization, I recommend you pick up a copy of Douglas Hubbard's How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business.

The premise is simple and will probably revolutionize your approach your work, if you give it a chance.

Here's the gist, from the book's opening:

Anything can be measured. If a thing can be observed in any way at all, it lends itself to some type of measurement method. No matter how “fuzzy” the measurement is, it’s still a measurement if it tells you more than you knew before. And those very things most likely to be seen as immeasurable are, virtually always, solved by relatively simple measurement methods.

Hubbard doesn't pull punches when it's time to dig in on the numbers, so you'll either wade through or skip over technical discussions of Excel spreadsheets, statistical analysis, Monte Carlo simulations, and the like.

But in between, you'll learn fascinating concepts about measurement and observability, including Hubbard's well-supported assertion, based on years of experience consulting on complex projects, that:

1. Your problem is not as unique as you think.

2. You have more data than you think.

3. You need less data than you think.

4. An adequate amount of new data is more accessible than you think.

If you're not ready to dig into the whole book, maybe start with one or both of these excellent summaries:

• From This is Important: The Concepts Behind the Book: How to Measure Anything

• From LessWrong: How to Measure Anything

Here's the thing:

Most measurements are mere approximations. I'm not exactly 5 feet 10 inches tall. But in almost every case, that's more than close enough.

It's easy to think that some things can't be measured. That if we don't know it now, or can't I know it exactly, then it can't be measured usefully.

But with the concepts and techniques that Hubbard describes, you'll see it's a lot easier than you think.

All the best,
A.

A method for measuring uncertainty

Here's one simple technique for measuring uncertainty. It's called the equivalent bet.

Say you have $100 and you're going to bet it on one of these two propositions:

1. I give you a spinning dial (think “Wheel of Fortune” or the board game Life) the face of which is completely green, except for one red wedge that takes up 20% of the dial. You bet $100 that when you spin that dial, it will come up on green the first time.

2. You bet $100 that George Washington was born between 1700 and 1710. (Using only what you know right now — no Googling!)

Got it?

Okay, which bet would you take?

…

…

…

If you prefer the second bet, about George Washington, that's a pretty good indication that you're more than 80% sure about this range of dates for Washington's birthday.

And if you prefer the first bet, with the spinning dial, it must mean that you’re less than 80% sure about the Washington dates.

Congratulations. You've just measured uncertainty.

What's the point?

Obviously you can look up George Washington's date of birth on your phone.

And it doesn't have much value for your business decisions anyway.

But there are plenty of questions that do affect your business decisions, for which you can't just look up a correct answer. You have to estimate.

You can use the equivalent bet technique to measure the uncertainty, or to adjust your estimates to a measurable level of uncertainty.

Don't know anything about American history? You could expand the range of dates until it feels like greater certainty. (I mean, surely we can be 100% certain that Washington was born between the years 1000 and 2023, right?)

Here's the thing:

Disregarding an estimate because it's "just an estimate" is as unnecessary — and risky — as treating it like a guarantee.

The hard part is knowing where it lies, somewhere between “useless” and “gospel.”

But there are ways to figure that out. And they're worth using.

All the best,
A.

Why measure uncertainty

Uncertainty makes life risky. And resources are limited.

What if you could measure uncertainty?

• Would it help you quantify risk, so you could make more informed decisions?

• Would it help you to identify areas where gathering a little more information would be worth your effort to reduce the uncertainty?

• Would it help you to know when you've reduced the uncertainty to an acceptable level?

Of course it would.

It would also

• Help you develop, over time, a sense of what “acceptable levels of uncertainty” means for you.

• Allow you to compare the uncertainty of one potential action plan over another.

• Increase your chances of achieving your intended outcomes.

Imagine this scenario:

You've got a specific goal you want to achieve, and you have two different ideas about how to get there.

For each potential plan, you have to estimate the both cost and the likelihood that the plan will work.

Neither the cost nor the success are a certainty.

So, do you just close your eyes and guess?

You could. But that's not a very informed plan.

If you could measure the uncertainty — or even gather more information to measurably reduce the uncertainty — you could make a well-informed decision: either to pick one of the two plans, or to shift your focus to another goal.

Here's the thing:

Resources are limited. Decisions are risky. Reducing uncertainty decreases risk.

And measuring uncertainty allows you to plan accordingly.

Wouldn't that make life a little easier?

All the best,
A.

Dealing with uncertainty

In work and life, very little is certain. But we don't let that stop us.

Routine helps to remove most of the uncertainty, and we build little margins into our schedule to accommodate what's left.

But what happens when you're trying something that's actually new to you?

Or when you're trying to decide whether that new task is worth the effort?

That's when you have to estimate. You estimate the effort; you estimate the likelihood of a positive outcome; and then you make a decision.

Here's the thing:

Estimates, like everything else in life, are uncertain.

The question most people skip is: How uncertain is this estimate?

Because uncertainty, like everything else in life, can be measured. (Yes, everything.)

You can't be 100% certain whether you’ll be late to work tomorrow. But compare these two choices:

• How likely is it that you'll be less than 5 minutes late to work tomorrow?

• And how likely is it that you'll be more than 3 hours late to work tomorrow?

If you think one of those is less likely than the other, then you’ve just measured uncertainty.

You probably haven't measured it very precisely, and you probably don't have to.

But when you're making important decisions, more precise measurement of uncertainty becomes incredibly useful.

And there are techniques for that.

More on that tomorrow.

All the best,
A.

Switching payment processors with recurring payments

This may be interesting if you're considering a move from one payment processor to another, or migrating to CiviCRM from a proprietary CRM that provides its own payment processing (looking at you, Blackbaud).

Recurring contributions and membership payments are great. They're an important source of income for most organizations using CiviCRM. And all of CiviCRM’s most popular payment providers (Stripe, iATS, Authorize.net, PayPal Pro) support this feature.

So what happens to them when you decide you hate Authorize.net and want to switch to iATS, for example? Can you migrate recurring contributions from one payment processor to another?

Short answer is: it's not easy.

Longer answer is: it's usually possible, but you should ask yourself if it's worth the effort.

Your unique situation will dictate how you want to work through this problem, but in general terms I suggest thinking about it like this:

1. Estimate the cost of not doing it.

If you don't transfer the recurring contributions, the only way to keep them going is to convince your recurring donors to manually recreate their recurring payments after you make the switch. How much staff time will you need to make that happen? How many of your recurring donors won't bother? What impact will that have on your organization?

2. Estimate the cost of doing it.

If you've already estimated the cost of not doing it, that cost is your maximum budget for this project. You'll probably need a specialist to help you determine whether it can be done within that budget.

3. Pick whichever one of those is cheaper.

Naturally those are both estimates, so there's some unavoidable level of uncertainty. Ideally, you'd want both of those estimates to have the same level of uncertainty.

Measuring uncertainty in estimates is a topic for another time, but it can be done.

All the best,
A.

Blending in is no longer “safe”

Over millions of years, most species have evolved an amazing ability to blend in.

If you're a grasshopper or a zebra, standing out will most likely get you killed.

People too. For most of human history, blending in has been the safest option. Standing out could work for a few, but not for most.

But for organizations in the modern world — where attention spans are fleeting and alternatives are plentiful — blending in is no longer the safest choice. If you don't stand out, you're very likely to be forgotten.

In this world, you compete constantly for the attention and support of your members, donors, and volunteers.

What are you doing to stand out?

Do you know what your people want?

Do you know how to demonstrate that you can give it to them?

If you don't know those answers, figuring it out — even just beginning to learn the answers — is a goal worthy of your time.

Or, you can just hope that you guess right. But hoping is not a plan, now is it?

All the best,
A.

How to have fun losing

Everybody enjoys winning: you set a goal you care about, work diligently and carefully, and achieve that goal. It's fun.

But how do you have fun when you lose?

The answer is: losing is a lot more fun if you know why you lost.

When you keep trying the same thing, you can't get it to work, and you don't even know why, that's frustrating.

But if you take time to measure, and observe, and reflect, you can learn to see where you went wrong.

And that's great. Because you can try again with a different approach.

Here's the thing:

If you’ve got goals you want to reach, for your members, or your team, or just for your own sense of pride in your work, you won't always get it right the first time.

But you can always learn and improve. That will get you closer to your goal. And that's a lot of fun.

All the best,
A.

“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.