Bang for buck

If you're at a small organization, limited funding is a perennial problem.

The problem we're trying to solve is that there are rich teams and there are poor teams. Then there's fifty feet of crap, and then there's us.

— Oakland A's General Manager Billy Bean (as played by Brad Pitt in Moneyball)

In the film, Beane and his assistant manager turn around a struggling small-market baseball team with an elegant implementation of a fairly simple principle:

Hitting your goals is not about spending lots of money; it's about taking the most effective action you can with the resources that you've got.

In terms of your CRM, that means prioritizing the improvements that will get you the biggest bang for the buck.

Fancy new feature? Not a bad thing, as long as you can clearly articulate exactly how it will pay for itself.

If you can't, it's probably worth considering alternatives: creative use of existing features, better training for your staff, better analysis of the data you're already tracking.

The specific steps you take will depend on your actual goals.

But the principle is the same:

Put aside the notions of “how we’ve always done it” and “how the big players are doing it,” and focus instead on actions that will get you measurable results toward goals that you care about.

All the best,
Allen

Striking out

Are you afraid of failing?

Afraid that your next project or campaign won't be the home run that your organization needs?

Or that it might even be a complete strikeout?

Everybody wants to hit a home run.

Here’s a fun fact:

Babe Ruth — often called the greatest baseball player of all time — held, when he retired, the all-time record for career home runs.

Did you also know he held the all-time record for career strikeouts?

If you want to hit the ball, you gotta swing.

Sometimes you'll strike out.

Don't let that stop you from getting up to bat.

All the best,
A.

Consent and interest

Yesterday I wrote someone and asked them to take me off their mailing list. (Yes, emailing them about it was the only "unsubscribe" option. And no, I had never actually subscribed to get their mailings.)

Their response was, er, not what I expected:

Done. I'll never send you anything remotely useful ever again.

Okay then. I'm glad at least that you've removed me.

But here's the thing:

As a vanity metric, it can feel good knowing that you have X thousand people receiving your emails.

But if they're not actually happy to read your emails, such a metric is just that: vanity.

That's why I will always caution against adding people to your mailing lists without consent. It's probably illegal, but worse, it's largely a waste of effort if you're genuinely trying to build support for your cause.

Instead, look for opportunities to capture interest and capitalize upon it.

For example, a client I spoke with today is putting up an advance information page for their annual student film competition.

The submission period won't be open for a few more months.

But you know what is open? A simple sign up form at the bottom of the page for people who want to be kept informed on the competition.

Those people are demonstrating their genuine interest.

And they've not only consented to receiving emails; they've actually asked for it.

And that's the point.

Folks who have asked to receive your material are the ones you want to reach.

Those that haven't are not very likely to be interested in the first place.

Look for interest. Deliver value. And then maximize the relationship.

That's how to turn consent and interest into advocacy and action.

All the best,
A.

Driving and navigating

Navigation is a separate task from driving.

• Rally racing teams rely heavily on the co-driver's navigation skills.

• Commercial airlines, which haven't had a dedicated navigator on the crew since the 1980s, rely on automated navigation systems.

• When you're alone in your car, you're both driver and navigator (probably with some less-than-perfect advice from your phone).

It doesn't matter how the navigation gets done.

Somebody has to do it.

Without it, you can drive all day and never get anywhere.

Here's the thing:

Somebody will need to operate your CRM system, your membership programs, and your fundraising campaigns.

But somebody will also need to navigate: identify the goals, read the terrain, chart a course, and adapt that course as needed.

It can be tempting to put your head down and just work, and now and then that's what you'll have to do.

But don't forget to look up now and then. Check the road. Check the map. Try to foresee the challenges. Try to spot the opportunities.

That's how you get where you want to go without driving in circles.

All the best,
A.

Scale and value

Say I've got a nagging problem with one of my systems.

And, say I finally decide to put aside one whole day this week to fix that problem.

Is it worth it?

Maybe.

What if I told you I only encounter that problem once a year, and the real problem is that it takes me an hour to do something that could take 5 minutes?

Sure, that's frustrating.

But is it worth a whole day of my time?

That's 8 hours of work. Considering the scale of the problem, the fix won't save me that much time in 8 years.

And there's a very good chance I won't even have this problem 8 years from now.

That's why scale matters.

Here's the thing;

A little math goes a long way.

A problem that feels like a big headache — but that only comes up now and then — may be frustrating, but it may not be worth solving.

Or, maybe there's an alternative solution that's less sexy but more pragmatic. Like handing that onerous task to an intern.

Time and money are always limited, so it makes a lot of sense to pick your battles …

… and to consider the scale of a problem when estimating the value of a solution.

All the best,
A.

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.