Return on investment

Obviously you have a limited budget: of time and of money, and of other things like trust, goodwill, and the interest of your supporters.

If you're going to expend some of that budget to get something done, do you at least know what you're hoping to get out of it?

Do you have a way to enumerate the value of what you'll get?

If you do, then you can calculate the return on investment that you're hoping for.

If you don't, one might wonder why you’re making this expenditure at all.

Here's the thing:

Sometimes we make a purchase just because it feels good. I bought a new pair of shoes last week that look great and feel great, and that's worth it for me.

But when you're spending large parts of an inherently limited budget, it can help a lot to know what you hope to get out of it, and what do you think that's worth.

Otherwise, you have no reason to expect a good return on investment, because you don't even know what return you're hoping for.

Remember, your resources are precious.

Wouldn't you like to have a reason to believe that you're spending them wisely?

All the best,
A.

Easy things first

If I asked you, you could probably make a list of 5 or 10 things you'd like to improve in your CRM.

Email templates
Staff workflows
Easier imports
Streamlined reporting
Refined user permissions
A dozen other things

If you’re like most people, the longer that list gets, the more overwhelming it feels.

That's our nature. We envision a perfect world, and then feel a little intimidated imagining what it would take to get there.

But what if you just started with the easy things?

You probably did this back in school:

When you have 87 chemistry problems for homework, there's no rule that says you have to do them in order.

You can skip the hard ones and do all the easy ones first. That will give you practice with the concepts you understand which can give you insights into the ones that seemed impossible before.

You can do this with your CRM improvements as well:

Start with the ones that seem easy, and that you're sure you really need.

With those hard ones sitting in the back of your mind, the easier work will often trigger some idea to solve the harder ones.

Here's the thing:

It's perfectly fine to make One Long List of Everything, and then build a plan and budget to tackle it all at once.

But if that's blocking you from getting started, you're in a bad spot.

Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Don't let the whole shebang be the enemy of moving forward.

Start with the easy things, and see what that tells you about the harder things.

Otherwise, you may never move forward at all.

All the best,
A.

Send passwords by email?

In an ideal world you'd never have to share your password with anybody.

But sometimes it's almost unavoidable. If you're pulling someone in to help with an external system you may have no choice but to have them log in as you on that system.

And it can be tempting to send them the password by email. That's the easiest way.

But please don't do it.

It just leaves too many opportunities for the bad guys to get their hands on your passwords.

Here's why:

• Email is completely unprotected from eavesdropping in transit.
  
  Your email message will pass through any number of servers between the time you send it and the time it's received. That means your email can be read by anyone with access to any of those servers. Including, potentially, the bad guys who would like to abuse your systems.

• Email has a tendency to hang around.
  
  It will stay in your sent folder, and probably in the recipient's email archives, for months or years. If any of those locations is compromised, your password will be disclosed.

• Emails get copied.
  
  Your email message will often be forwarded, and copied in replies, and even sent to additional CC and BCC addresses. Every time that happens, there's another copy laying around, and more people who can see your password.

So what's the alternative?

There are a few options that will let you avoid nearly 100% of the problems mentioned above.

1. onetimesecret.com: This is a simple web-based tool that will store your message (e.g. your password) in an encrypted format, and give you a link to that message. The link will only work one time, for the first person who uses it, and it will expire entirely after some days. You can then email that link instead of emailing your password.

2. Joinery Secure Message: if you need to send a password or other sensitive information to me here at joinery, you can submit a secure message at https://my.joineryhq.com/message/. This will notify me that you’ve sent a secure message, but it will never send the message itself over email.

3. Telephone: This is not ideal, because hopefully your password is complex enough that it’s hard to read out loud, but if a telephone call is your only option, I say the inconvenience is worth it.

Here's the thing:

A password is a key into a system that you want to keep secure.

Every time you send the password by email, it's like making an actual copy of the key and giving it away … by taping it to a postcard and dropping it in the mailbox.

You probably wouldn't want 20 or 30 copies of your house key floating around in your neighborhood.

So you probably don't want to send your password by email, either.

All the best,
A.

Better group management in CiviCRM

Besides their original purpose as a way to organize your contacts, CiviCRM groups wind up becoming very useful for a number of things, including mailings and complex searching.

Unfortunately, long-running CiviCRM sites often have hundreds of contact groups that have been created over the years.

And making efficient use of hundreds of groups can be a real headache.

Just finding the right group might take you several minutes of frustration. Each time. (And worse, it's easy to just create a new group when you can't find the right one, which of course means you now have more groups to deal with.)

So here are a few tips to help you make better use of groups and avoid the headaches:

1. Develop (and document, and use) a naming convention for your groups, so that you can know what each group is for and easily find the right group when you need it.

2. Have a look at the Temporary Groups extension. Sometimes you just need a group to do one task, like sending a mailing. This extension makes it easy to ensure that such groups don't hang around forever.

3. Avoid some tricky areas. These are the kind of things that seem really smart when you find out about them, but can be very confusing if you're not careful.

• Parent and child groups are tricky until you work with him for a while. Make sure you really need this functionality before you just dive in.

• CiviCRM will allow you to manually add and remove contacts from smart groups. I advise against it, because it can be confusing later when you find there are contacts in a smart group that don't fit the smart group criteria.

Here's the thing:

Groups are awesome. You can do a lot with them.

But proceeding carefully can save you a lot of frustration in the long run.

All the best,
A.

PSA: Hosting troubles

Quick note on potential problems with some WordPress hosting platforms. (If you’re not currently looking to change hosting, you can probably skip this.)

TL;DR:

Some “managed WordPress hosting” services make life difficult for CiviCRM.

The deets:

Most any web host these days that can support WordPress (or Drupal) can also handle CiviCRM just fine.

But my clients, and several of my colleagues in the CiviCRM community, have had a hard time with a certain category of hosting.

This is usually called “managed WordPress hosting.” Examples include Kinsta, WP Engine, Pressable, and others.

These are, to be honest, really awesome platforms for enterprise-level WordPress website development.

The general idea is that, while of course they offer all of the standard web hosting features, they also provide lots of automation that WordPress developers love.

One of those great features is a streamlined mechanism for hosting three versions of a site: one for development, another one for pre-launch staging, and of course the live site.

Unfortunately, that very cool feature often relies on some assumptions that make life easy for WordPress developers, but tend to cause problems with CiviCRM.

What this means for you:

In short, it means you should expect to jump through a few more hoops to get CiviCRM working on these platforms.

I've spoken with other CiviCRM developers, and scoured the online community for other perspectives.

The short story is: I've heard from several very capable people who’ve tried it, and almost none who have actually made it work.

I've got plans to talk this over with a few people at CiviCRM Manchester next month.

Our hope is to come up with some documentation that will do a couple of things:

• First of all, avoid casting aspersions at these platforms, which really are wonderful for what they do.

• Secondly, to help set reasonable expectations for CiviCRM site owners: what’s easy, what’s hard, and what might just be impossible.

In the meantime, if you're considering one of these platforms (or your WordPress developer is), I encourage you to talk it over with your CiviCRM specialist first.

Then, before you make the move with your live site, consider setting up a test site and putting both WordPress and CiviCRM through their paces.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

And significant breakage on your live CiviCRM instance is probably better prevented than cured.

All the best,
A.

What a home run looks like

When a baseball player gets up to bat, he's often looking for just a single or a double.

But if the pitch is right, and the timing is right, and it feels right, he's going to swing for that home run.

Because it's there.

He know what it is, and he'll take it if he can get it.

What about you?

Do you know what a home run would look like on your current campaign?

Have you taken some time to think about it?

Will you, on your next campaign?

Here's the thing:

You can't always hit a home run. It's fine to be content with a double.

But it's good to know what a home run would look like.

So you can swing for it if the opportunity arises.

All the best,
A.

Why maintain complexity?

If your systems are complicated, you might have thought about hiring someone to help you manage them.

But then again:

Why would you pay someone indefinitely to manage your complicated systems …

instead of paying someone once to help you simplify them for you?

All the best,
A.

Why architects don’t clean office buildings

Just about any project you might undertake can be divided into three distinct phases of work:

• Planning, strategy, and architecture: Identifying near-term and long-term goals, assessing resources and limitations, and plotting the course.

• Execution: Taking what's called for in the architecture phase and building it into a working reality.

• Maintenance: The daily work of keeping the system operational.

I like to think of these as altitudes of involvement.

Consider an office building:

• Planning and architecture:
  This is the 40,000-foot view of things. It's in the realm of the zoning board, the architects, the designers, and the business strategists.

• Execution:
  This is ground-level work. It's in the hands of the general contractor, the subcontractors, the building inspectors, and everyone else who helps from ground-breaking to opening day.

• Maintenance:
  This is below-ground work. It happens in the basements and store rooms and mail rooms and cleaning closets. It's the work of everyone who keeps the place running smoothly, from building maintenance to security to housekeeping to tenant management.

You could apply the same division to even simple projects like your child's 5th birthday party. There's planning and design (date selection, guest list, menu, venue); execution (sending invites, decorating, food prep); and maintenance (keeping the guests happy and the space tidy during the event, cleanup afterward).

Here's the thing:

For a kids birthday party, there's a good chance mom and dad will be covering all areas.

But for any substantial business project, you'll notice that there are a distinct set of players at each altitude of involvement.

Architects, for example, don't usually provide office cleaning services.

And if they did, you can bet they'd charge a lot more than most folks would want to pay for that service.

What this means for you:

In short, it means that the work of planning your CRM strategy, improving your CRM features, and maintaining your CRM systems are three very different areas of work.

You can probably find someone who's willing to promise you all three.

But are they really good at all three? And are they really offering you great business value in all three areas? (Remember, great architects won't usually contract with you to clean your bathrooms.)

The good news for you is that you can consciously divide any project into these three different areas and assign each one to the right person for the job — in-house or otherwise.

By doing that, you've got a much better chance of getting great work at each phase, and of avoiding needless expense.

All the best,
A.

Organizing your own stuff

I get a little push-back sometimes when I say things like, If it isn't code, do it in-house.

Here's the best way I know to explain it:

Think for a moment about all the things that are in your house right now.

Every drawer, every garage box, every pantry shelf.

Now, imagine hiring someone to take all of your stuff and “organize it better.”

But here’s the catch: you won’t be involved.

You’ll go on a one-week vacation. And while you’re gone, they’ll pull out every little item in every little box and decide on “just the right” place to put it.

Then they’ll leave, and you’ll come back to a “perfectly organized” home! Yay!

Yeah. Not something most folks would want.

Sure, we all wish our stuff was better organized.

And it would be great to have someone else to do the organizing.

But if you're like me, it's hard enough to find things that you yourself have filed away.

If I hired someone else to do it, I'd be spending the next 6 months calling them every day to locate a screwdriver or a nail clipper or a handkerchief.

Still, you could hire a home organizer to help you decide what to keep, what to throw away, and how best to store things based on how you expect to use them.

And you could hire an extra hand or two to help you do the moving of things from one shelf to another.

But the actual organizing of all your stuff? You really need to be closely involved in that.

Here's the thing:

Your CRM data is some of the most important stuff that you own.

And your CRM system is the home where you and that data will live together for a long time.

If you want a home for your constituent data that's easy to use, you can hire help to figure out how to organize it well.

But you probably want to be very hands-on with the process of structuring, editing, and organizing it.

If you possibly can, do it in-house.

All the best,
A.

Why do (almost) all the CRM work in-house

You probably know already, there are many things you could hire outside CRM help for.

But there’s a difference between hiring someone to do the work for you and hiring them to do it with you.

In almost every case, I encourage you to do as much of the CRM management in-house as you possibly can.

Everything in-house?

Yep, almost everything.

This means you personally, or staff members you can rely upon.

But why?

Doing the work in-house puts you in the driver's seat, and leaves you with a system that your team fully controls and understands.

For anything that you hire out, if you want to understand how it really works, you’ll need to budget significant time and effort (and probably more billable work) to be trained on its intricacies and nuances.

Really, everything?

As a rule of thumb, I recommend this:

If it doesn't involve custom code or direct database manipulation, do it in-house.

In other words, if it can be done in your browser, do it in-house.

Sure, get some professional advice where you need it. Talk with a coach or a consultant to work out the right strategy.

But remember that this system will be your online office, and a daily work environment for you and your staff.

You'll need to be as familiar with it as you are with your own office or your own home.

And building that familiarity starts from the very beginning.

If it isn't custom code, do it in-house.

All the best,
A.

“All you want” advisory support

For the past few months I've been offering an unlimited advisory support plan to my clients, and I have to say I'm loving it!

So are the clients:

“Your expertise was invaluable. We had an expert in our corner to answer both technical and user questions if needed. I’m sure we could have worked through everything but it would have taken so much more time. Having you as part of our team allowed us to directly target an issue and solve it, instead of finding, researching, planning a resolution, and implementing it.”

“This is exactly what we need!”

So what's so great about this arrangement?

Something beautiful happens when we stop charging for every conversation:

• Clients ask me all kinds of things they would never have asked on an hourly or per-request pricing model -- and therefore they learn all kinds of things and become more proficient at supporting themselves. That's what I want!

• As a result, their systems are better organized and more secure, and they actually understand what their systems are doing.

• Naturally this increases trust in the relationship, and the client's own understanding of their system's strengths and weaknesses, as well as my understanding of their business goals and limitations.

• This then makes it easier to discuss the real value proposition of any specific non-advisory work they might be considering. (Sometimes they come to me for that; sometimes they don't, which is fine. The point is that they're making smart business decisions.)

The motto is, essentially, "I won't do it for you, but I will do it with you."

They have questions, I answer them.

If it needs a demonstration, I make a short video, or we jump on a screen-sharing call to work through it together.

I want to empower these organizations to excel in their mission outcomes, and this arrangement makes that so much easier.

Not all of my offerings will fit this "all you can eat" model, but for advisory work it's working out great.

All the best,
A.

CiviCRM Montreal

I've already told you that CiviCRM Manchester is just a few weeks away.

If that's too far to travel or the timing is not right, you might think about CiviCRM Montreal, coming up at the end of February.

These in-person events are The Place To Be when you're ready to spend a couple of days meeting the community, learning new ideas, and making CiviCRM everything you want it to be.

Check out CiviCRM Montreal here.

I'm going. I hope you are too.

All the best,
A.

How to eat an elephant

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

So I'm planning my travel for CiviCRM Manchester at the end of November.

It's always more complex than I expect.

• Primary ccommodations with the right dates, amenities, and location

• Flights with the right dates and manageable layovers

• Secondary overnight accommodations after the post-conference sprint

• Managing my own work schedule with travel and time zones

• Deciding how much to pack

• Getting nutritious meals and a good rest during of all this moving about

• Everything at a reasonable price

There are multiple options for everything, but everything has to fit together smoothly.

Experience helps. I've done this plenty of times before.

I even have a checklist to help me make sure I'm covering all the bases.

Because the biggest help is breaking it down into small pieces.

Even the most complex travel plans are just a series of small decisions and small actions.

Here's the thing:

Complexity is a real concern for almost any significant undertaking.

Getting all the pieces to fit together requires some careful attention.

And bad assumptions in one small area will cascade into problems in other areas.

But each piece, however intertwined it might be with the others, is only a single decision, or a single task.

When you're working out your staff workflows, or your membership journeys, for future improvements to your CRM, it's all connected. And sometimes it can feel a little overwhelming.

But just as I'm teaching all my coaching clients, you can do it, and have great results, by breaking it down into small tasks, devising good checklists, checking your assumptions about each component, and implementing each part carefully.

Plan the work; then work the plan.

Eat that elephant one bite at a time.

All the best,
A.

You’ve got options

Let's say you go see your doctor about knee pain, and she gathers enough good information to make a good diagnosis:

“You've got a hyper-phalangeal retraction of the upper metaparkus.” (Yeah, I made that up. Thanks for playing along.)

The next question is: what are you going to do about it?

Because there's never just one option.

You'll be making the decision based on a number of factors:

Severity of the pain
Your sense of urgency
Likelihood of things improving (or worsening) without treatment
Your risk tolerance
Likelihood that a certain treatment will work
What you can afford

Based on all that and more, and with professional advice, you might decide on one or more of these paths forward:

• surgery

• medication

• physical therapy

• lifestyle changes

• watchful waiting

• … and the perennial alternative in any situation: do nothing and live (or die) with it.

What this means for you:

Maybe you can guess where I'm going here.

Your CRM strategy can be boiled down to a succession of efforts at solving problems and reaching for opportunities, very much like taking care of your own health.

When you got a problem to solve, and have taken the time to diagnose it properly, you still have a number of options for moving forward.

The more you can give careful consideration to …

your sense of urgency,
your risk tolerance,
your desire for improvement,
and the resources you can apply to the situation,

… the more easily you'll be able to move forward with clarity and purpose.

It's no one's position to tell you that you've made the “wrong decision.”

But hopefully you'll make it with appropriate reflection on your own priorities.

All the best,
A.

Knee surgery?

Imagine you visit your doctor and say, "Doctor, my knee hurts. What should I do?"

The doctor says, "You need reconstructive knee surgery. See my staff on your way out to get scheduled."

Would you be ready to schedule surgery based on that?

What if she showed you glowing testimonials from dozens of knee-pain suffers whom she'd helped with her surgical procedure?

Now would you be ready to schedule surgery?

I'm no doctor, but something important is missing here: diagnosis.

And a good diagnosis requires gathering good information.

Before prescribing a remedy, you'd expect a good doctor to diagnose the cause of the problem. And before diagnosing the cause of your knee pain, you'd expect her to consider things like:

Age
Physical activities
Body mass
Recent injuries
Family history
Medical imaging results
Other test results
... or anything more than a mere report of pain.

So what does this have to do with CRM strategy and nailing your development goals?

Just this:

Symptoms are easy to see:

Your knee hurts.
Your membership renewals are tapering off.
Your recent attendance is down.
Your data is confusing and hard to analyze.

But the cause is usually not obvious — until you can gather more information. And not just any information, but the right information.

Even if others with similar problems have been happy with one solution or another, without a proper diagnosis there's literally no reason to think it would help you.

Notice the problem.

Gather relevant information.

Decide on a diagnosis.

And then you can start thinking about whether one solution or another is right for you. (Hint: There's rarely only one option.)

All the best,
A.

Unlikely connections

A solar eclipse passed through my part of the world today.

I had some proper eclipse glasses and was running errands around town, so now and then I'd check the progress of the eclipse.

And literally every time I did, some total stranger would strike up a conversation with me.

I would offer them my glasses so they could take a look, and we'd chat for a brief moment.

It happened over and over. A little human connection between complete strangers, people you'd assume have very little in common.

Sometimes there are conditions on everyone's mind that bring us together and allow us to forget our differences, overcome our shyness, and connect for just a minute.

Here's the thing:

Your audience — your donors and members, your staff, your board — may seem to have very different things on their mind from you, or even from each other.

But if you can find where their interest overlaps yours, then you'll have found an opportunity for connection.

All the best,
A.

Lagging indicators

Obviously, leading indicators are great for knowing if you're on the right track to reach your goals.

So why would you ever want to pay attention to lagging indicators?

By definition, lagging indicators are a sign that you've been doing something right. Because somehow you've achieved a good result.

This means lagging indicators are great for assessing processes that you might repeat later — because if something has worked in the past, you might be able to look back and figure out why it worked.

To build on yesterday's examples:

If you've had success losing pounds before, that successful lagging indicator can point you to steps that could bring similar results in your next effort.

If you've seen success building up a store of cash in the bank before, that successful lagging indicator can point you to some smart behavior that might be worth repeating.

If you've seen a spike in your revenue at any previous annual gala, that successful lagging indicator can point you to something that may be worth repeating at your next gala.

As any financial advisor will tell you, past performance does not guarantee future results.

But patterns can provide clues.

And if you're gathering data as you go, and assessing it rationally, a successful lagging indicator can be like a beacon pointing you in the right direction for your future efforts.

But of course, you have to gather the data, and you have to analyze it rationally.

If you’re doing that, there’s a lot to be gained by paying attention to lagging indicators.

All the best,
A.

Leading indicators

Have you ever wanted to be 20 pounds lighter?

Or have a million dollars in the bank?

Or double the revenue of your annual gala?

Being 20 pounds lighter is what we can call a "lagging indicator." It indicates that you've been doing something right.

Lagging indicators are results-oriented. You can’t usually just snap your fingers and make results (or lagging indicators) happen.

So how do you end up with a lagging indicator that you desire?

That’s where "leading indicators" come in.

A leading indicator is something that you can observe and measure in time increments that are much more frequent and regular than the lagging indicator.

For example, a leading indicator for losing 20 pounds might be observing a half-pound weight loss each week.

Or a leading indicator for having a million dollars in the bank might be that your savings grows by $1000 per month.

Or a leading indicator for doubling your revenue at your annual gala might be adding 10 new sponsors and 50 new participants (above what you had last year) each month leading up to the event.

How you make those things happen is up to you.

But here's the thing:

You can know early on if you're on track. And you can change tactics if you're not.

You don't have to wait for your daughter's wedding to find out if you're likely to fit into that outfit.

You don't have to wait until you retire to find out if you're likely to have a million bucks in the bank.

You don't have to wait until the night of the gala to find out if you're likely to hit your goal.

The first month, even the first week, you can already plot the trend, and if it doesn't look great, you can adjust.

That's the beauty of leading indicators.

It's like seeing the future.

Which is great.

Because when the future becomes the present, there's no time left for adjusting.

All the best,
A.

Time vs money: not a simple trade-off

It's true there are times when getting something done is a mere question of deciding to spend time or money:

Mowing your lawn
Changing the oil in your car
Power washing your driveway
Building a house
Printing and mailing your direct appeal letters
Performing data entry

All of those have one thing in common:

You really only care that it's done well, and once it's done you'll probably never need to understand how it was done.

So yes, you can choose to hire someone else or do it yourself, depending on your interests and your budget of time and money.

But so many things are not like this.

No matter how little free time and how much money you have, it's very hard to hire somebody to do these things for you.

Lose weight
Learn a language
Excel in a sport
Make friends
Raise your children
Create a healthy work environment for your staff

For these things, there is no simple one-time deliverable. It's an ongoing process in which you personally must be involved.

Sure, you can hire an expert advisor to help make your own work more efficient and effective. And spending some money can save you a significant amount of time (and frustration).

But it's not always a simple one-to-one trade-off.

What about developing the best workflows for your staff, and the right tools to help them work effectively?

Is that something you can just outsource as a one-time deliverable and expect ongoing success?

No, it's not. That's something you and your team need to be closely involved with, now and into the future.

All the best,
A.

“Never losing” is not much fun

Overheard today, from a sports coach:

You'll never win at anything by sitting on the couch.

Of course you'll never lose at anything either, but is "never losing" all you want out of life?

Aiming for goals is risky.

If you set a goal and don't make it, you'll have to admit failure.

You could avoid that by not setting goals.

But is "never failing" all you want out of your professional life?

All the best,
A.