Handling a loss

If you're coming to the end of your annual holiday campaign, and you haven't reached your goals, you'll have to deal with that, one way or another.

Failing at a goal is not fun. But it's also not a complete loss.

Instead, it's a win for your information gathering.

After all, you did set a goal. And then you worked for it, and then you paid attention to the results in comparison to your goal.

Those are things that a lot of people just don't do.

But the real point here is that you are gathering information.

The goal outcome was of course something that you wanted to achieve, for its own value.

But more importantly, the goal served as a test of your methods. Because even if you had reached that goal, you wouldn't just stop there; you’d go on to set more goals.

Win or lose, your ability to reach your goal is an indication of the strength of your methods.

The real win here is that achieving the goal — or failing to achieve it — gives you the chance to improve your methods so that you can make better results in your next effort:

• More realistic goals.

• More effective tactics and strategies.

• More focused effort by the right team members on the right tasks.

Here's the thing:

Failing to achieve a goal is not a failure, unless you let it pass without learning and improving.

All the best,
A.

Handling a win

Napoleon famously said, "The most dangerous moment comes with victory."

Many of you are coming to the end of your annual or holiday campaigns in the next few days.

Hopefully you'll be able to celebrate a little as you find that you've reached your goals.

The question is, what's next?

I suspect the reason Napoleon said what he did is that it's easy to spend too much time celebrating and then forget to set the next goal.

There's always something more to do.

What are you planning next?

All the best,
A.

Training vs oversight

Getting results with CiviCRM requires that you master its functionality.

That comes through training, and practice. It's just a technical skill.

You can be self-taught, or you can get help, like my CiviCRM Success Coaching program.

But there's something else you need: oversight. Somebody has to be responsible that your CRM is well configured, well used, and well maintained.

That's pretty hard to outsource.

You need someone who knows your programs, policies, and goals. And that usually means someone who's inside your organization.

Here's the thing:

You can have someone from the outside help you master the technical skill.

But someone on the inside has to be sure those skills are used appropriately for your organization's goals.

If you don't know who that is, it's worth putting some thought into.

All the best,
A.

Nothing solves everything

My wife and I decided to homeschool our kids, as a solution to some problems we were seeing in the public school environment. It solves a lot of those problems, but maybe it brings up new problems of its own.

I decided to stop doing my own car repair even for small fixes, and hand that off to a professional, because of problems I was having doing it myself. It solves a lot of those problems, but maybe it brings up new problems of its own.

You've chosen CiviCRM as your primary constituent management system, because of problems you noticed with whatever other options you might have had.

And just like everything else, it solves a lot of those problems, but maybe it brings up new problems of its own.

Here's the thing:

No solution solves every problem.

Hopefully, you're able to compare objectively, and you’re content that your chosen solution is the one that solves the most problems, or at least the most valuable problems.

If it doesn't, why are you sticking with that solution?

All the best,
A.

Sometimes slower is better

CiviCRM charges no fees for its upgrade releases, which come out at least once a month.

So you can upgrade as frequently as you like, for free.

So why would anybody pay for the ability to upgrade less frequently?

Maybe you didn't even know that was an option. But the CiviCRM project offers an Extended Security Release plan, and many organizations pay between $20 and $100 a month for the privilege.

The reason is simple:

Upgrades that add new features can also introduce conflicts with your extensions, and other bugs. It’s just a reality of ongoing development in an active software project.

Having an easy way to get the latest security fixes without introducing those potential bugs is a genuine benefit.

Here's the thing:

Always sticking with the latest cutting edge version does have drawbacks, to the extent that some people are willing to pay to avoid such problems.

You definitely want to get the latest security fixes, but it's wise to consider the potential downside of always chasing the latest version.

Sometimes, slower is better.

All the best,
A.

Friction

When you catch yourself doing something you really don't want to do...

that's friction.

I don’t mean intentionally doing things you don't especially enjoy, like exercising for health, or deciding to eat less pie at the big holiday meal.

I mean the things you really feel you shouldn't have to do, but do anyway. The little tedious tasks you would outsource if you could. The annoying extra hoops you have to jump through to complete an important task.

That friction adds up.

In the extra time you spend. In mental stress. In distraction. Even in avoidance

What if you could remove it? Would you? At what cost of time and effort? What would that get you?

The truth is, you probably could remove a lot of it for an investment that's smaller than the benefit.

What's stopping you?

All the best,
A.

Daily practice = daily motivation

Are you creating systems of daily or weekly habits that help you reach your goals? Then you might have noticed that you get something pretty cool in the bargain:

Frequent, short-term achievement.

Here’s the thing:

Goals are awesome as long-term incentives. But that long-term aspect has its limitations.

Want to increase total contributions in your annual campaign by 15%?

Yes, that will be great when it happens, and that's worth celebrating.

But that can only happen once a year.

On the other hand, if you set up a system of daily and weekly habits that point you in that direction, and you actually stick to that system, you get small victories to celebrate every day, and every week.

If you stick to that system for a month, then you have a streak of small victories, and that streak by itself is worth celebrating.

Sure, it's not the big celebration you'll have when you reach your annual goal, but it's a series of real, if small, victories.

Try it for yourself. I think you'll see it's a genuine motivator in the short term for behaviors you know will help you get what you want in the long term.

All the best,
A.

Better results?

"We don't rise to the level of our goals. We fall to the level of our systems."

- James Clear, author of Atomic Habits: Tiny changes, Remarkable Results

The systems you have in place now — for outreach, for fundraising, for team communications, for personal time management — are perfectly optimized for the results you are getting now.

If you want to improve those results, why would you not want to improve the systems that generate them?

All the best,
A.

How to run a marathon

Say you're taking up running, and you've set a goal to run a marathon in the coming year.

How can you make that happen?

The simplest answer is something like, "Pick a marathon, register, and go run it."

But that's obviously incomplete.

If you've never run a marathon before, your chance of just showing up and completing one, on willpower alone, is just about zero.

To achieve this goal, what you need is to become a person who can complete a marathon.

And that will require a system of training: A series of daily and weekly habits that you adopt to build your endurance and your understanding of the marathon experience.

That's not just a commitment to running a marathon. It's a commitment to daily improvement.

So here's the thing:

If you have goals for the coming year, that's great (and if you don't, I hope you'll take time to set some}.

But to reach those goals, you'll probably also want to think about what it will take to get there, and to build in daily and weekly habits that will make it more likely to happen.

Goals are important to aim for. Systems are important for getting you there.

All the best,
A.

Finding help that fits you

Are you a person who loves to learn new skills, to really understand how things work and why? Let's call that "curiosity-driven."

Or are you more interested in seeing the results, and don't care much how they get done? Let's call that "outcome-driven."

We all have a little of both.

And most of us are more curiosity-driven in some areas, more outcome-driven in others.

Here's a question:

When you're seeking outside help with your systems, do you take time to get help that matches your curiosity-driven or outcome-driven interest?

Service providers aren't always clear about which one of these is a good fit for them. Some love to deliver outcomes, and hate explaining things. Others love to satisfy your curiosity, and care less about doing the detailed work for you.

Outcome-driven vs curiosity-driven.

If you want help that you're happy with, take a moment to figure out which of these describes your own motivation, and then take time to find a provider who likes to fill that need.

All the best,
A.

The hidden cost of delegation

When there's too much work to do yourself, it may be time to delegate: You can assign the task to one of your team, hire outside help, or even make a new internal hire.

But there's a hidden cost of delegation you should be aware of.

Because the ideal of delegation contains an important contradiction:

• You'd like someone to do it for you. Just take the task from you, get it done, and come back with everything finished.

• But you also want them to do it the way you would have done it.

The more you care about how it's done, and the more you care about the specific details of the implementation, the more time you'll have to spend in training, or at least in communicating your wishes.

The alternative is to address that contradiction in one of two ways:

1. Work out an efficient system by which you can get the work done yourself.

2. Decide to care less about how it's done and more about the outcome you aim to achieve.

There's a third option, too: Once you recognize the cost of doing it yourself and/or delegating, you might decide that the task is not worth doing, at least right now.

And that's totally okay. Picking your battles wisely is a valuable skill.

All the best,
A.

3 options for CiviCRM support

Let's look at your three general options for keeping your CiviCRM installation (and the Drupal or WordPress site that contains it) in good working order.

We'll compare these across three criteria:

• Reliability / ease

• Customizability

• Affordability / Low cost

Remember, the central question here is:
Who is the specific individual responsible for making your site do everything it should?

1. CiviCRM as a service

This includes CiviCRM Spark and similar hosted offerings.

• Reliability / ease: Pretty good. These services will make sure your site is always running well, but you can still screw up the configuration if you're not careful.

• Customizability: None, really. To achieve that “pretty good” reliability at a reasonable expense, these services will lock down the features and even limit you to a predetermined list of available extensions. You won't be able to add your own custom extensions, either.

• Affordability: Pretty good. CiviCRM Spark is incredibly affordable, and the others are not too bad.

2. Full-service agency support:

This is an arrangement that you might make with a CiviCRM provider be your hands-on maintenance and configuration team. In its most full-service form, you'd be calling them for almost any configuration change that you want.

• Reliability / ease: Very high, assuming the provider is as responsive as you need. (This can vary by provider, and like anything, that can be hard to know until you've actually worked with them.) Part of their service will be to tell you when you’ve asked for something that’s unwise, and to ensure all configurations actually make sense in terms of what you want.

• Customizability: Very high. A provider who is offering this level of service will be able to create whatever custom features you need, and then make sure it works well with your configuration.

• Affordability / Low cost: Not so great. The provider is potentially performing a lot of work at your request. They're also taking on the responsibility to make sure everything works flawlessly. You can expect to pay handsomely for this level of service.

3. In-house expert (with or without outside help):

This is the model most of my clients are using — which is not surprising, because it's also the model that I most like to support.

In this model, you'll designate one of your own staff to be the in-house expert. This is your responsible person. Any questions about the system come to this person. Any change to the system is done by this person or their staff.

• Reliability / ease: Varies, depending on the attention this person gives to their responsibility.
  
  in the beginning, this in-house expert will often need help from an outside expert. That need generally decreases over time, as they become more familiar with the system.
  
  But any problems with your system (or improvements to it) will always be the responsibility of one of your own staff.

• Customizability: Very high. Your in-house expert can install whatever extensions they like, and if they want they can hire someone to develop custom extensions for them (or even learn to do that themselves, if that's their thing).
  
  In truth, this system belongs entirely to your organization, and you can make it do anything you want.

• Affordability / Low cost: Rather low, but this varies. Your cash outlay to outside providers will be fairly low. But you should also count the staff member's time. Even if they're a volunteer, time is a limited resource, and its use is an expense.

So to sum up, to might choose:

• CiviCRM as a service: If you don't need customization and are fine with the limited features, but like the reliability and price.

• Full-service agency support: If you have a business case for expensive white-glove support.

• In-house expert (with or without outside help): If you want maximum flexibility and are willing to put in the work of mastering CiviCRM.

And if none of those exactly work for you, talk with a CiviCRM partner. They may be able to work out some hybrid that meets your budget and your preferred balance of freedom and responsibility.

But all of these options share two caveats. Can you spot them?

I'll spell those out tomorrow.

All the best,
A.

Support options: Trade-offs

So you're running CiviCRM (probably under Drupal or WordPress) and somebody is responsible for making sure the site runs well.

Naturally that person reports to someone above them, and possibly they have a team working under their direction.

But who is that one responsible individual?

You've got a few options, and they all represent a trade-off between:

• Reliability

• Customizability

• Low cost

And the options, boiled down to a few categories, are these:

1. CiviCRM as a service

2. Full-service agency support

3. In-house expert (with or without outside help)

Remember, everything is a trade-off. Probably none of these will be "perfect" for you, and none of them are even "best" for evrey organization.

But one of them — or some hybrid of them — will be.

More tomorrow.

- A.

CiviCRM support: arrangements vary

If you're running CiviCRM (and probably Drupal or WordPress as well), there’s someone who is maintaining and supporting that site.

It might be one person, or a team of people.

They might all be your internal staff, or a mix of outside contractors.

The essential question, though, is this:

Who's responsible for coordinating that effort, and who's accountable for making sure the site runs well?

The are a variety of common arrangements to assign that responsibility.

I'll cover some examples in the next few days.

But ultimately, if you care about the value you get from your CRM, it's critical that you know who's the one individual person responsible to keep it running smoothly.

(Hint: If you don’t know, it might just be you.)

All the best,
A.

You might have to swim the river

Having a good map is important when you’re navigating unfamiliar territory, but even that isn’t as good as the experience of someone who's been there.

Imagine that your map shows two routes to your destination.

One of them looks far shorter than the other.

An experienced guide can tell you, "Yeah, we’ve had some heavy rains, and that bridge might be washed out. If we go the short way, we might have to swim the river."

Sure, there could be many good reasons to take the short route anyway. But it's nice to know what you're letting yourself in for.

Here's the thing:

There's almost always more than one way to do something in CiviCRM.

New extensions and core features are popping up all the time that offer wonderful possibilities.

And the challenges of those new options are not always obvious.

It never hurts to reach out to your coach or advisor for some preliminary giudance.

It helps to know ahead of time if you might have to swim the river.

All the best,
A.

The coxswain isn’t rowing

If you’ve ever seen crew rowing, you’ve probably noticed there's often one person in the boat who isn’t rowing — at all!

There she sits in the rear of the boat, just watching, and talking (often shouting).

What the heck? Is this person serving any purpose at all? Isn't she just dead weight?

Nope.

That's the coxswain, and she (or he) is filing a very important role.

The rowers is all face the rear of the boat. They can't see where they're going.

They also don't have a clear view of each other.

But the coxswain faces forward and sees all of them. The coxswain is there to steer the boat, and to coordinate the power and rhythm of the rowers.

Far from being a deadweight impediment, the coxswain is critical to the success of the team.

Here's the thing:

Any project you undertake, any coordinated effort among your team members, needs somebody to watch, and steer, and coordinate.

Some outsiders, or even some team members, might assume that person is not pulling their weight.

But without that coordination, everybody's work is at risk of failure.

All the best,
A.

Your organization doesn’t exist

What is your organization going to achieve in the coming year?

What actions will it perform to achieve those goals?

Let me suggest to you that those are trick questions.

Your organization doesn't hope, doesn't act, and doesn't achieve.

Only its people do that.

• Any accomplishment is based on the individual or collective actions of one of more people.

• Any goal that's genuinely pursued is based only on the hope and commitment felt by specific individuals.

• Any sense of joy in accomplishment is felt only within the minds of the people who worked hard to achieve it.

Here's the thing:

As a leader in your organization (which you are, regardless of your job title), what are you hoping your people will achieve?

If you really want that to happen, it's up to you to connect those people to that goal — inspire their hopes, coordinate their efforts, smooth their challenges, and in the end, encourage them to celebrate.

I get it. It's a habit for most of us to focus on the organization as a whole, as if it really were a thing that exists on its own.

But just because that's our usual way of thinking, it doesn't mean it's really effective, or even true.

All the best,
A.

A goldfish grows as big you let it

Every project or campaign you might undertake will consume some amount of your resources.

Time, money, mental energy, goodwill.

In fact, that project will usually be quite happy soak up as much of those resources as you let it.

There will always be "just one more" little feature to include, no matter how much time or funding you add to the project.

It's something like a goldfish, that always grows to fit the size of the fishbowl.

But here's the thing:

Projects grow in scope — and in corresponding delays and maintenance costs — only if we let them.

And usually, the only reason we let them is that we forget the value of a project that actually launches, compared to one that's always "almost done.”

All the best,
A.

Facing adversity

Have you ever been snowed in unexpectedly?

Ever run out of gas in the middle of nowhere?

Ever had an internet outage or a burst water pipe make your office unusable for a day or two?

You've probably had lots of experiences like that: unexpected events that create significant inconvenience and even physical discomfort.

And you know what?

You came through it.

Here's the thing:

Even when a surprise development is really difficult to deal with, most of us come through it just fine.

Sure, it can be a setback, and it's worth planning to try and avoid such things.

But when those things happen — in your career, or your organizational mission, or your team development — remember that you will get through it.

Whether it was caused by your own lack of planning or something completely unforeseeable, that's a question for the post-mortem analysis.

In the moment of trouble, it's important to keep a cool head, lead your team by example, and deal with matters at hand.

Get through the initial "freak out" as quickly as possible, and face this thing head-on.

Because you can.

Whatever the challenge, you will deal with it.

Then you'll learn what you can from it, turn blame and regret into wisdom and experience, and move on to the next thing.

We're people. That's what we do.

All the best,
A.

CiviCRM training resorces

Introducing new staff to CiviCRM can be a daunting task.

There’s just a lot to cover, and it can be challenging to decide which parts to introduce first.

Fortunately, the CiviCRM Training Guide is a great resource.

It outlines three fairly complete curricula:

• 1-day Administrator Training

• 2-day Administrator Training

• 1-day Fundraiser Training

As with most things, you might want to modify the plan a little to fit your needs.

But these courses are a great start for taking new staff through the basics, or even walking yourself through the learning process.

Give them a look, and see how they might help you empower yourself and your staff to work more efficiently.

All the best,
A.