Empowering your staff

Investing in your own skills development is a powerful thing.

• Taking time to experiment and learn on your own

• Attending a structured training course

• Just making a regular effort to read up on the latest trends in your sector.

All of that is an investment of time that empowers you to make better use of your time going forward.

In other words: you invest time wisely, in order to recoup that time and more.

So, what about your staff?

How can you help them get that same benefit?

One way is to conduct regular staff trainings.

• Pick a schedule that works for you, say, a short session every two or three months.

• Cover topics that will empower your staff jn their work.

• Listen to their questions and feedback, and let that inform future sessions.

Naturally this is a bigger investment of time than just educating yourself.

But then, you can also expect a bigger return on that investment — since it's your whole team who will benefit.

All the best,
A.

Data is confidence

Let’s say I asked you how confident you were that you could drive from your house to the airport in under two hours. (Yes, it’s the same question I posed in Monday’s Everything is a bet email.)

There’s one very important factor in deciding your confidence level, which you might not even have thought about because it’s so obvious: having some clue about the typical drive time.

• Have you ever actually made the drive?

• If not, have you checked the drive time in your maps app?

• Or, do you even know roughly how far the airport is?

If those answers are all “no,” it’ll be very hard to claim you’re at all confident about the drive time.

The good news is, you can dramatically increase your confidence very easily: just turn any of those “noes” into “yeses.”

Here’s the thing:

When you have little-to-no data, you should have little-to-no confidence.

By adding even a small bit of data — even rough estimates — you can significantly increase your reasonable level of confidence.

And, the bonus question:

Of the three yes/no questions above, which one do you think is the easiest to turn from “no” to “yes”?

Probably, it’s “checking your maps app.” You don’t actually have to make the drive yourself to find out.

Often there’s an easy and good-enough way to close the data gap, so you can get to a confidence level that suits your risk tolerance.

All the best,
A.

P.S. Yes, I checked the correct plural of “no” and “yes.” Yes, it looks funny to me, too. So does the other correct way. C'est la vie.

Risk aversion, or procrastination?

So, if Everything is a bet, you might want to do all you can to get to 100% certainty before investing your limited resources.

But that would be a mistake.

Virtually no future prediction can be 100% certain. We must always proceed — if we’re going to proceed at all — in the face of some uncertainty.

insisting on 100% certainty means never taking action.

And in terms of results, doesn’t that inaction look an awful lot like procrastination?

All the best,
A.

Everything is a bet

How confident are you that you could drive from your house to the nearest airport in under two hours, say, tonight?

You might be tempted to answer as a certainty: yes, or no.

But think a moment: If you say "no way," are you sure it’s literally impossible? What if you got insanely lucky with traffic and drove like a demon? Couldn't it be something greater than zero percent?

And if you say, "yes, absolutely," are you really that sure? Car trouble, traffic, accidents, family emergencies — a dozen things could slow you down. Couldn't it be something less than 100 percent?

Somewhere between zero and 100, there's a number that matches your level of confidence.

Why does this matter?

Because everything you do is a bet.

To attain a certain outcome, you'll make an investment of time, money, and mental energy.

And you might still fail.

This means that there are no sure bets. You must take on some risk.

So, how much risk is tolerable? Only you can decide.

Back to the airport:

If you're 50% sure you can make the drive in two hours, would you be okay with that? Or would you invest more time?

Is 80% certainty enough? Do you need 90%?

Here's the thing:

Your level of comfort with risk — your risk tolerance — is a real thing. It can actally be measured. And your organization’s risk tolerance is real and measurable, too.

Pay attention to that comfort level. Get a feel for your risk tolerance - and your organization's.

It will help you in making honest decisions that don't pretend to be 100% certain, and in making rational decisions about whether and how to proceed toward your goals.

You can’t win every bet.

But you can learn to measure your certainty and to move forward only when the risk is tolerable.

All the best,
A.

SCOTUS case could impact associations

If you’re a director at a professional association, take note:

An antitrust case now pending with the US Supreme Court could have major implications on association membership, particularly recruitment and retention.

The legal rubric is more than I want to get into here (especially since I'm no lawyer), but if this concerns you, I recommend the ASAE article here:

What a Pending Supreme Court Antitrust Case Means for Associations

All the best,
A.

“Teach me to code?”

Now and then, a client will ask me if custom development is something they could handle in-house. And if so, could I help them get started?

To the second question, the answer is: Yes, I can certainly help you get started. Actually, I could help you get pretty far along on that path.

And to the first question: Could you do that in house? Sure.

What's not being asked here is, "Should you?"

• Do you personally have any experience writing custom code?

• Do you have someone in-house who is?

• Considering the steep learning curve, is this the best use of your time?

• Considering that many people do this kind of thing as a career, is this something you want to add to your job description?

In most cases, the answer to all of those is, “No.”

Here's the thing:

Given enough genuine interest and dedication, there is probably no skill that you cannot acquire.

The important question is: Is it worth it?

But isn't that always the question?

All the best,
A.

Tools for in-house documentation

If you care about mastering your CRM and other systems, you’ll want to start building a library of documentation for yourself and your staff.

But where to start?

Google Docs (or something similar) is a fine start, but it probably won’t long until you notice its biggest limitation: because it’s so flexible, it provides very little structure for building an organized library of content.

As a result, you can quickly find yoruself with a lot of documentation that’s just hard to use.

Here are some alternatives that will provide that structure and allow you to easily organize all of your in-house documentation:

Use your CMS:

If you’re running CiviCRM under Drupal or WordPress, then keeping your documentation there can make a lot of sense.

• Your staff already have a password, and you can protect your in-house documentation behind that CMS login.

• Your CMS probabl already has a dedicated module or plugin for structuring this kind of content.

Under Drupal, the Book module is a great option. It’s part of Drupal core, so you only need to enable it if it’s not already enabled.

From drupal.org:

A book is a set of nodes tied together in a hierarchical structure, with chapters, sections, and subsections. You can use books for manuals, site resource guides, Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ), novel, or curricula. …

Users who have the right permission can create a book and write, review, modify, or rearrange the nodes that are part of a book. Many users can work together on a book; you can allow or disallow collaboration, to whatever extent you want. …

It also provides smooth navigation up and down the heirarchical structure (chapters and section), and to “previous” and “next” pages in each section.

If you’re running WordPress, you’ll probably want to try the PublishPress Series plugin (though there are many other options, as with almost everything in WordPress).

From publishpress.com:

PublishPress Series is a publishing plugin that allows you to organize posts into issues or series. This is ideal for magazines, newspapers, short-story writers, teachers, comic artists, or anyone who writes multiple posts on the same topic.

… You can organize chapters into an overall story.

Like many WordPress plugins, this one does offer a “pro” upgrade option with additional features, but you’ll probably be quite content with the free version.

Use a dedicated documentation wiki:

Maybe you’d rather have a separate dedicated site for your documentation.

Check out DocuWiki. It will run alongside your Drupal or WordPress site (or on any hosting platform that supports PHP — which is essentially “everyewhere”), and offers some advantages over using Drupal or WordPress:

• Wiki-like editing (a la Wikipedia) keeps track of previous versions, provides heirarchical navigation, search, and more.

• Dedicated interface that’s completely separate from your CMS — could be attractive if you’re not yet confident about adding plugins and managing permissions on your own live WordPress or Drupal site.

• Narrow set of formatting options — you can’t just “format content any way you wish,” which is actually an advantage because it tends to enforce a common structure on all of your pages.

Summary:

Google Docs is great to start, but its lack of structure can create challenges as you grow.

A dedicated documentation wiki, or a set of structured content in your Drupal or WordPress site, can make it all much easier for you to manage — and for your staff to use.

All the best,
A.

Customized systems need customized support

Your organization’s installation of CiviCRM is a unique system, because it's a combination of all these things:

• Your CMS (Drupal? WordPress? Joomla? Backdrop?)

• The specific version of CiviCRM

• Your collection of extensions

• Your collection of CMS plugins

• Any custom extensions or plugins you may be running

• Yout carefully configured user roles and permissions

• All of your configurations for contribution pages, memberships, events, and more

Add to that your organization's own unique policies, programs, and practices, and you have a system that's like none other in the world.

The advantage here is that you get a system that's customized to work exactly as you need it to.

The challenge is that you'll sometimes hit a question that no one but you can answer.

Who do you look to when you need help with those difficult questions?

All the best,
A.

Goals make the game

Think about the last time you really felt like celebrating.

• Your team won the world series.

• You made the last payment on your mortgage.

• Your kid passed that black belt test after years of work.

Whatever it was, do you remember that feeling?

That celebration feeling doesn't usually show up just because we "did a good job" or "did better than before."

It's because we set a challenging goal, invested our time and energy, and then achieved it.

It’s the goal.

Goals define the game.

Goals define the win.

You can always do a little better or achieve a little more. And that's great.

But when you set a goal and achieve it, that's more than great. It's awesome.

Name your goals. Invest. Achieve. And then celebrate.

All the best,
A.

“Exactly what we need”

If you happen across a complex software package that seems to be exactly what you need, I suspect one of two things is happening:

1. You're overlooking some important need, and you'll be disappointed in a month or two when you discover it's not met.

2. You should snap that baby up right away, and count yourself lucky.

Here's the thing:

Every organization's needs are unique.

It's next to impossible that your every need will be met by any given software package.

And insisting on a perfect match is likely just setting yourself up for disappointment.

Instead, look for something that's a "pretty good fit" to start with, and look for ways to modify both the software and your own methods until the fit is perfect.

Naturally those modifications will take effort.

But it's more practical than hoping for something that probably doesn't exist.

All the best,
A.

Make it easy for them

Your staff probably don’t need to be fully trained on every part of your CRM in order to use it well.

As long as they know how to do their specific tasks, they'll be fine.

In fact, we all use complex systems everyday without really knowing how they work under the hood.

My kids know how to use our washing machine perfectly well. Of course if it ever needs repair, they definitely don't know enough to fix it.

But using it is just a matter of pushing a few buttons and understanding some basic principles.

Nobody needs to know how it all works under the surface in order to make it do what they want.

You can do that for your staff too.

The trick lies in understanding the tasks they need to do and then configuring the simplest possible set of features that will allow them to do it.

Naturally, that can can require some effort on your part.

But as an investment, it's usually a lot more effective than trying to train everybody on everything.

All the best,
A.

Roller coasters and cars

Another funny thing about roller coasters and cars: the amount of control, and the cost per ride.

A roller coaster gives me very little control over my experience, and I must buy a ticket for each ride.

It's no surprise those two things are connected:

Why do I have to buy a ticket? Because I don't own the ride.

And why do I have very little control? Because I don't own the ride. The owners have a strong interest in providing a very predictable experience for all riders, so they can't afford to give riders control over that experience.

On the other hand, my car gives me a great deal of control over any number of rides, and though I do bear the cost of purchasing and maintaining it, I never have to buy a ticket.

Consider this a metaphor for the difference between a subscription-based software-as-a-service CRM and a self-hosted open-source CRM.

The one gives you an awful lot of predictability in exchange for limited control and pay-to-play pricing.

The other gives you more flexibility for a lower overall cost of ownership, in exchange for increased complexity (and the resulting potential for frustration).

They each have their place.

The question for folks like you and me is this: Is the extra flexibility worth the increased complexity — and is there perhaps a way to master that complexity so I can get the flexibilty without the frustration?

All the best,
A.

Learning to drive

Learning new things is sometimes fun, and sometimes challenging. Often it’s both.

Do you remember learning to drive a car?

I'm now in the midst of teaching my child to drive — on a stick-shift.

It's been a long time since I was in her shoes, but I'm remembering now just how much of a mystery it was at first.

Steering, gas, clutch, shifter, and brake all have to be manipulated simultaneously for even the most basic driving.

And they're totally independent controls! You can twist and push each of them however you want. But if you don't do it exactly right, you can end up in a ditch or just go nowhere at all.

And that's not nearly enough to be safe and effective on the road.

Headlights, high beams, turn signals, mirrors, reverse gear, dashboard gauges, night driving, jerks on the road, gravel, rain, emergency vehicles ... it just seems endless.

Here's the thing:

CiviCRM (or any complex and powerful system) is a lot like that:

Dozens of completely independent settings, features, and configurations, which work together in ways that aren't immediately obvious.

A seemingly endless array of things to learn, options to implement, real-world conditions to navigate.

You can think of it as a burden if you want.

But my 15-year-old somehow doesn't think that way. She's just excited about the possibilities of being in control.

I hope you are too.

All the best,
A.

The roller coaster

Riding a roller coaster is super easy: sit down, strap in, hang on.

It's also pretty exciting. The first time. And maybe even the 10th time.

But the reason it’s super easy is because it's also super predictable.

There are zero variables for you to consider.

You’ll always start and stop in the same place.

You’ll never have control of the speed, or the acceleration, or the number of loops, or the height of the drops.

Driving a car is just about the polar opposite:

You have a thousand variables to consider. And you are in control of navigating all of them.

Which can also be pretty exciting. And not just the first time either.

Here's the thing:

If you're using CiviCRM (or any other complex and powerful tools), remember that it's a lot more like driving a car than riding a roller coaster.

It's probably not super easy all the time. But your destination, and your course to get there, are totally in your hands.

All the best,
A.

5 ways to increase efficiency

1. Invest in training for your staff.

2. Pick a frequent and tedious manual task, and automate it.

3. Pick a common report, procedure, or policy question, and standardize it.

4. Got a simple task to assign? Assign it to lower-paid workers, and save the expensive specialists for the really hard problems.

5. Pick a high-value problem (or opportunity) to focus on, before getting "lost in the weeds" over little things.

All the best,
A.

Imperfect estimates

A little more on estimating the value of automation:

No estimation is perfect, by definition.

• You'll have some uncertainty about some of the numbers.

• Human experiences such as stress and low morale are harder to quantify.

Regardless of these limitations, your estimate is still very useful, if you make it with reasonable care.

For example, say your estimate comes out to $100K. It's possible that someone else in your organization might estimate it at $90K or $110K.

But is it likely they'd come up with an estimate of just $10K, or of $1 million?

An estimate of "$10K to $1 million" is too broad to be very useful — the top end is 100 times the lower end.

But an estimate of "$90K to $110K" doesn't have that problem. Yes, there's some uncertainty in the range, but that top number is only about 1.2 times the lower number.

Here's the thing:

Every estimate, like every measurement, carries some imprecision.

If I tell you I'm 5 feet 10 inches tall, the actual truth may be that I'm 5 feet 10 and one-eighth inches tall, or 5 feet 9 and fifteen-sixteenths inches tall. And even those numbers might not be precise enough to reflect my actual height down to the 1000th of an inch.

But we don't let that stop us from taking such measurements, and then using them to describe the world around us.

It's the same for your estimates. There will always be uncertainty and imprecision.

Don't let that stop you from making careful estimates, and then using them wisely to apply your resources toward your goals.

All the best,
A.

The value of automation

Say you're looking at options to automate a tedious manual task.

How can you know whether the value of that automation is worth the cost of building it?

First you have to know (or at least estimate) it's value.

You can get a fairly simple estimation just by asking yourself a few questions:

1. What exactly is the task you want to automate?

2. How long does it take to perform this task once?

3. How many times (in a week, month, or year) does this task need to be done?

4. What would you be paying an employee, intern, or contractor to perform that task manually?

For a little more nuance, you could also ask:

1. How often are human errors made in this manual process?

2. What is the cost (translated somehow into dollars and cents) of such mistakes?

If you can answer those questions, a little multiplication and addition will tell you how much of your organization's limited budget could be saved by automating this task.

That's a pretty good measure of the value.

Naturally, estimates aren't perfect, by definition.

But assuming it's done with reasonable care, it's a useful measure of what you can hope to achieve.

And that, all by itself, can give you some clues about whether it's worth pursuing.

All the best,
Allen

Efficiency?

What would it mean for your organization if your department were twice as efficient as it is now?

We all love to talk about increasing efficiency, but what does that actually look like?

If you were twice as efficient, would you:

• Achieve the same output and lay off half your staff?

• Shift half of your staff to part-time work?

• Double your output with your present staff?

Those are all probably pretty hard to imagine.

But in the real world you might actually aspire to:

• Finally work through that back-log in your service case load.

• Have more time to respond to member inquiries.

• Reduce stress and increase morale among your staff.

• Spend more time on creative and forward-looking processes, and less time putting out fires.

• Reduce the number of mistakes that affect your constituents, donors, and members.

Here's the thing:

Efficiency can be just an abstract business concept, if you let it.

But where it really matters is in improving the lives of the people you care about — including yourself, your staff, and your constituents.

Sure, increased efficiency can result in increases in profitability or mission impact.

It can also just make the work — and its results — a whole lot more enjoyable for everyone.

All the best,
A.

Visual design: “Ongoing maintenance” for CiviCRM

This one is similar to yesterday's discussion of feature improvements, but different enough that I think it's worth mentioning.

What it is:

At some point you may decide that you’d like some part of CiviCRM to look “better.”

Usually, this comes up when your public-facing forms don't fit “exactly right” with your website’s visual theme. But I've also had clients who want specific layout or styling changes in CiviCRM’s back-office area too.

Who can do it:

Whether it's the front-end forms or the back-end layouts, your probably going to need outside help with this.

There's the design work itself - that, defining what the desired design should look like - and there's the implementation of it - that is, actually making the online content look as it should.

Just a with feature improvements, these are both very technical skills that you probably don't have in-house.

The difference is this:

Whereas feature improvements will usually require an experienced CiviCRM extension developer, the visual design improvements can often be handled by your existing WordPress or Drupal specialist. If you have a good relationship with such a provider, it's definitely worth asking them about it.

And, if you also have an advisory relationship with a CiviCRM specialist, they may also be willing to consult with you CMS designer to answer any technical questions they might have.

In summary:

• The designing and the implemention will require specialized skills and tools. This is a good candidate for outsourcing.

• Your CMS (WordPress or Drupal) specialist can probably handle this, though they may benefit with some advice from your CiviCRM specialist.

All the best,
A.

Feature improvements: “Ongoing maintenance” for CiviCRM

Sure, CiviCRM is awesome and does more out of the box than you could possibly imagine …

… until you’ve used it for a while, and you start to imagine even more awesome things that it can’t quite do yet.

Fortunately, CiviCRM is very extensible, as evidenced by the 100s of extensions in the CiviCRM Extension Directory.

And if one of those extensions won’t do the trick for you, you could create a new one — or have one created for you.

(That is, you can do it after you’ve carefully considered your goals and resources and still believe you’ve got a sound business case for proceeding.)

This is what we mean by feature improvement.

What it is:

We’re talking about the modification of CiviCRM’s features — or creating entirely new features — through custom development. This usually means creating a CiviCRM extension, but it might also rely on some other means, depending on the need.

The possibilities are basically endless, but some custom development will be required for anything that’s not currently possible with point-and-click configuration.

Who can do it:

Again, let’s look at this question using the in-house/outsource criteria from earlier in this series. I’d rate this item like so:

Each rating is 1-5; so each Total can range from 4 to 20, with a mid-point of 12.

	Technical	Generic	Explainable	Inscrutable	Total
Feature improvement	5	2	2	5	14

On each criteria:

• Technical: Very.
  Creating a CiviCRM extension (or otherwise writing programming code to alter CiviCRM’s behavior) requires a highly technical set of skills, knowledge, and tools. Unless your in-house team is already very experienced in programming languages like PHP and JavaScript, it’s unlikely you’ll have this technical proficiency in-house.

• Generic: Somewhat.
  This will depend on the need, but it’s likely that what you need is unique to your organization, though a seasoned CiviCRM developer will probably try to find some way it can be generalized for use by other organizations. (That’s good for you, by the way, since it increases the interest of others in making further improvements to your new CiviCRM extension — from which you’ll benefit down the road.)

• Explainable: Somewhat.
  Again, this depends on the need. The less generic it is, the more time and effort you’ll need to invest in explaining to whomever is doing this custom development.

• Inscrutable: Very.
  Although you’ll definitely care that the new feature works correctly in all aspects, you’re very unlikely to care how it works under the hood. You’re not very likely to inspect the programming code or ask why the developer prefers one code editor over another.

All of this means that it’s a very strong candidate for outsourcing.

You’ll still need to explain it to your selected specialist in the beginning, and they’ll need to show you how it works in the end. But in between, you can focus on other matters, while your specialist builds this feature for you.

Of course you could do it in-house, but unless you’re going into the business of custom feature development for CiviCRM, you’ll be facing a steep learning curve in exchange for mastery of a skill that you’ll rarely use.

The juice ain’t worth the squeeze, as my uncle used to say.

In summary:

• Yes, you can improve CiviCRM’s features to do just about anything you can imagine (though I’d want you to be sure there’s a sound business case for it).

• You’ll almost certainly want to outsource this — it requires a very technical set of skills, knowledge and tools, and anyway there’s not much value in doing it yourself.

This brings us near the end of our discussion. Tomorrow: what about custom visual design?

All the best,
A.