Start big, or start small?

CiviCRM can do a lot out of the box, but sometimes you need to push the limits.

• Specialized and streamlined event management workflow?

• Unique membership management policies?

• Integration with third-party systems?

When you've got a big idea to leverage CiviCRM for your programs, you have a choice:

Start big, or start small?

Starting big:

With this approach, you sit down with your CiviCRM expert and map out what you need, why you need it, and how you'll make it happen.

You’ll need to discuss timelines, staff roles, workflow optimizations, and of course measurable business outcomes.

If you're really making significant changes to your system, this can be a big project. It's an investment of time and money that you'll make up front in order to get things working as they should for everyone involved: staff, users, marketing, C-suite, whomever.

The advantage is that you can launch a new feature set, train your staff, and have everything working smoothly from the beginning. This reduces staff and user frustration; and it increases confidence and morale. No fuss, no muss, just a sizeable investment time and money.

Starting small:

The alternative is to start small. Work with the software in its current form. Squeeze everything you can out of existing features.

With this approach, you can get going almost immediately, with very little up-front investment or delay.

Of course, this means someone on your staff will surely have a lot of work to do: managing the data manually, remembering any configurations, sharing data between systems or departments, because you haven't built custom features that fit your unique needs.

The advantage here is that you can get started quickly with little investment.

And along the way, you can identify the choke points that really need to be addressed. This slower approach can give you more bang-for-buck on any custom features you eventually do decide to implement.

Here's the thing:

There is no right or wrong in this question. It's simply a matter of applying the limited resources you have to get the business outcomes you want.

Starting small can work great, if you have the time and staff members who are happy to put in the extra work.

Starting big can be great if you have clear and high-value business goals, and the resources to make a larger investment in the beginning.

Either way, it's about getting results in the most effective way possible.

All the best,
A.

Referrals and recommendations

I've been asking folks I know for recommendations of providers in services I don't normally provide.

I just ask them: I'm looking for people who have a great track record helping non-profits and professional associations with annual revenue in the $100K - $200K range, for any of these services:

• Bookkeeping and accounting

• Legal services

• HR and Payroll

• Employee health coverage and benefits

• Marketing

• SEO

• Graphic design

• Photography

• Grants management and fundraising

• Printing and mailing

• Branded swag

Sometimes they have a recommendation, sometimes they don't. But they're usually happy to share.

This is a win-win-win for everyone:

• I can make better recommendations to my clients,

• my friends are happy to connect providers they love with great new clients,

• and those service providers are of course happy for the referral.

Here the thing:

Connecting people with others who can help them is almost always rewarding.

What related services are you recommending to your members, donors, and service recipients? How hard would it be to refresh or augment that list, and make more use of it?

A little effort, a little care, and you could have a valuable resource on your hands.

All the best,
A.

Events: recording participant relationships

A question at CiviCRM StackExchange asks (edited for brevity):

I would need to create relationships between participants when registering for an event in the CiviCRM online registration form.

I have seen there is an CiviCRM extension [link to blog post from 2012] that promises to do that, but it seems it is not fully developed yet. …

Is there any CiviCRM extension that allows to create relationships between participants to an event?

And here's my answer:

The "Group Event Participant Registration" extension does create relationships among contacts in a multi-participant registration.

(I'm the author. The extension has been in production use for a couple of years by a client, but I've never bothered to promote it or list it in the CiviCRM Extensions Directory.)

The basic intent is to allow one person (who may not even be attending) to register others from their family or workplace for an event.

From the ReadMe:

• Allows registering user to indicate whether they will attend the event or not.

• Provides list of related contacts as optional pre-filled additional participants.

• Related contacts may be related directly to the registering user, or (optionally) through a mutually related organization.

• Records all additional participants as related to user, with relationship type selected by user.

… See beta demo video here: https://youtu.be/2zd3bENs0Ow

The StackExchange question has a few other answers you might want to check out as well. Here’s the link.

All the best,
A.

What your CRM can’t do

If any of the following is your primary problem, your CRM software isn't going to fix it for you:

• Inconsistency

• Defeatism

• Apathy

• Indecision

Sometimes the big blocker is your people (or your own limiting mindset) and not your systems.

Fortunately, there's still a way forward. Just be sure you're addressing the right problem.

All the best,
A.

Separate hosting for CiviCRM security

Yesterday I said that there's not much security value in merely hosting your CiviCRM on a separate website.

Such a move might make sense in the context of a larger security effort, but that assumes you're talking with a qualified security specialist who knows your unique threat profile.

But for now let's talk CiviCRM security in general terms.

The trade-off

Like everything else, security is a trade-off. Usually the biggest trade-off is with convenience.

You could, for example, take your CRM offline, store it on an encrypted drive, and keep it in a safe deposit box at your bank.

In the real world, your CRM needs to be accessible by the people who use it — and they're probably going to be accessing it through a browser on a website.

Unlikely scenario

I can only imagine one scenario in which you'd get a security benefit hosting CiviCRM separately from your main website:

If the people who access your CRM are more willing to jump through hoops to use it than the people who use your main site.

That's because additional security will surely work out to a trade-off in convenience. To actually reduce the chance of inappropriate data disclosure, you'll have to limit access to the system in some way: additional passwords, two-factor authentication, or even taking it offline for local in-office use only.

Of course the problem with this is that you probably want as many people as possible to use your CRM: to make contributions, to register for events, to sign up for memberships, et cetera.

Here's the thing:

If you have a unique situation, with security concerns that you can reasonably articulate, it's important to address those concerns.

Feel free to write with any questions you have.

But in general terms, there's no almost never a situation where simply hosting CiviCRM on a separate site will get you any realistic security benefit without crippling the use of your CRM.

Instead, it's probably better to apply your resources to increasing security on your main site.

All the best,
A.

Separate CiviCRM for security?

Here's a question that came up on a client call yesterday (paraphrased for simplicity):

CiviCRM is part of our main WordPress site. Some of our board have asked whether that might present security concerns. For example if someone were to hack into our main site, wouldn't that give them access to all of our constituent information? Would it be better to run CiviCRM on a separate site, to reduce the chance of that happening?

I'm always glad to hear clients thinking carefully about security. So let's unpack this a little bit.

The short answer is: It probably doesn't matter.

The way I've paraphrased this question, there's not much security benefit to be had.

It's rather like saying: I'm concerned that if someone broke into my house they might steal my jewelry; would my jewelry be safer if I bought the house next door and kept it there?

The thing you're trying to protect has to live somewhere. And that place has to be accessible somehow.

A separate website, like a separate house, works exactly the same as your primary one. So it has all the same vulnerabilities.

On top of that, managing two properties is significantly less convenient, and more expensive (in time and money) than managing just one.

• You need two sets of keys (or passwords).

• You need to monitor both properties (or websites).

• Both properties (or websites) need routine maintenance and upgrades.

• Your own belongings (or constituent data) are now harder for you to access and use.

• Anyone who can break into your primary house (or website) can just as easily break into the other one.

• Moving valuables between one house (or website) and the other can present additional opportunities for thieves.

Here's the thing:

Merely storing your valuables in a second property, will only increase your workload, decrease convenience, add no real security value, and potentially increase the risk of theft.

Naturally, there are cases where having two separate sites could be an important component of a larger security plan.

More about that tomorrow..

All the best,
A.

Standing ovations

When you want to make an improvement, it helps to know your current metrics as a starting point. (Otherwise, how can you tell if you've improved — or if you're even moving in the right direction?)

But if you haven't been tracking metrics carefully, how can you even know where you're starting?

It's probably easier than you think.

Imagine you're the artistic director for your city's symphony orchestra, and you want to increase the quality of your performances (probably because you want to increase ticket sales and season memberships).

You could take steps to improve your performances, but how can you measure that?

Hire a big firm to conduct randomized surveys of a statistically relevant sample of your patrons? Ask patrons to rate ready performance from "poor" to "excellent" and compare the results over time?

Douglas Hubbard, in his How to Measure Anything, explains how the Cleveland Orchestra did it:

They counted the number of standing ovations.

Hubbard writes:

While there is no obvious difference among performances that differ by a couple of standing ovations, if we see a significant increase over several performances with a new conductor, then we can draw some useful conclusions about that new conductor. It was a measurement in every sense, a lot less effort than a survey, and—some would say—more meaningful. (I can’t disagree.)

Here's the thing:

For any outcome that you really care about, you could spend a lot of time and money measuring exactly that thing plus a long list of contributing factors leading up to it.

But there's probably a relatively easy proxy you could measure instead.

It wouldn't be an absolutely precise measurement — but nothing is, really (Neil deGrasse Tyson makes a good point).

Any measurement at all is still a lot better than no measurement.

What's so bad about a low-effort low-cost measurement that tells you most of what you need to know?

All the best,
A.

New extension: Contact Dashboard Tabs

CiviCRM’s contact dashboard is a great way to let your logged-in contacts see a quick summary of their recurring contributions, activities, even registrations, etc.

Unfortunately, the shear volume of information in the dashboard can be a little overwhelming.

To solve that problem, the Florida Public Pension Trustees Association sponsored the creation of the Contact Dashboard Tabs extension. It collapses all the dashboard sections into tabs, making the whole thing a lot easier to use, like so:

It also allows for inserting one or more profiles as read only sections into the dashboard. With that, they're able to show their contacts important information about their membership status that isn't usually available in the contact dashboard.

If that sounds useful to you, take a look at the extension’s listing in the CiviCRM Extensions Directory.

It’s just another way that the CiviCRM community is working together to make life easier for your consituents and staff.

All the best,
A.

It’s the outcome

Business consultants love to draw distinctions between goals and objectives.

Go down that rabbit hole if you like. (And if you enjoy that, you'll probably get something good out of it.)

For now, it's enough to make the distinction between tasks and outcomes.

You can stay pretty busy focusing on tasks:

• Coordinating speakers at your next big event

• Composing and sending the monthly newsletter

• Recording the contributions that came in by check

• Reviewing new donors and planning effective follow up

• Reporting, deduping, training, supporting, on it goes.

But after all of that is done, what's the real outcome?

What are you achieving that you actually care about?

Here’s the thing:

Completing tasks is the only way to get anything done.

But the real value of any task lies only in it's effect on a real-world outcome that betters the lives of people you care about.

Otherwise, it's just work.

All the best,
A.

Starting over

The restaurant across the street caught fire a few months ago. This week they reopened, better than ever.

Your organization is going to hit some surprising difficulties sooner or later. You don't know what it's going to be, but you can bet it will happen.

When it does, you may be able to patch things up and move forward. But sometimes you have to tear the whole thing down and start over.

Maybe that means replacing your entire board and rebranding under a new name. (I know some organizations that have done it — successfully.)

Maybe it just means canceling one event or discontinuing a long-running program.

Or it might mean admitting that your current feature set is inadequate, and investing in something that really meets your needs.

Here's the thing:

Most problems don't just go away on their own.

As with your health, your relationships, and everything else, the longer you wait to solve a business problem, the harder it gets.

Sometimes the best way forward is to take a step back and reassess.

All the best,
A.

Building momentum with conference attendees

Building capacity as an organization is often a matter of capitalizing on opportunity: getting results A is great; so how does it help you to get closer to result B, C, and D?

If your organization hosts one or two big events per year, it feels wonderful just to know that youre attendance is increasing, or that your total income from the events is meeting or exceeding your goals.

But are you missing an opportunity to leverage your relationship with those event attendees?

• Could you inspire them to greater involvement by offering targeted sessions for first time attendees?

• Would offering a discount on their first year of membership encourage more of them to become members?

• Would tracking their session attendance tell you more about their interests and help you deliver more effectively targeted follow-up emails?

Here’s the thing:

They've already shown that they care about your work by attending an event.

What steps can you take to make it easier for them to take the next step?

All the best,
A.

Just-in-time training

The limitation of most training programs is that you spend a lot of time examining features and possibilities in the abstract, usually long before you'll ever actually use things you've learned.

This is definitely better than nothing, so its greatest value is in one situation only:

When you've already selected the system and know almost nothing about it.

In that situation you get one substantial benefit:

You can go from “I know nothing about this system" to "I think I remember there's a way to do that in this system" pretty quickly.

But when it comes time to actually do that thing:

• How likely is it that you'll just be able to go and do it?

• Do you have the knowledge to just dive in and make it happen?

Probably not.

That's why some of the most effective training and coaching is done for people who have a specific goal in mind, and need help making it happen soon.

Contrived examples in training are still just contrived examples.

When it comes to clarifying your learning and mastery, there's nothing like digging right now in on a problem you care about right now.

All the best,
A.

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.