5 simple questions

Try this little exercise when you get a chance:

Open up any random contact record in your CRM software. You want one that's still living, and not known to you personally, so try again until you find one.

Ask yourself 5 simple questions about this contact:

1. Why are they in my CRM software? This is not, "How did they get there?" Rather it's, "Why does my organization want to maintain a relationship with this contact?"

2. What’s a reasonable goal for our relationship with this contact?

3. Where are they now in relation to that goal?

4. What are one or two reasonable pathways to reach that goal?

5. What measurable next step could I take (or could they take) to move them forward on that path?

This should only take a couple of minutes.

If you can't answer those questions for the first contact, try again until you can. (And note how many tries it takes.)

…

So, how’d you do?

Were you able to answer those questions, just based on what’s visible in a given contact record?

Do you have a good sense of the goals you’re moving people toward, and how to get them there?

Was it easy to see the next steps for them (or you) to take?

Here's the thing:

The real value in maintaining your CRM data is not just as a record of addresses, phone numbers, giving history, and membership dates.

It's in having the information you need so you can rally people forward in the cause of your mission.

That takes active planning, creative thinking, and an understanding of the goals you have for each person in your expanding circle of influence.

All of that together is your relationship management system.

And it makes your CRM tracking software much more valuable in your mission than a mere address book.

All the best,
A.

Your “CRM system”

If I asked you about your CRM system, how would you describe it?

Is it a piece of software?

Is it CiviCRM?

That's the usual answer, but I'm growing less and less satisfied with it.

Not with the software. CiviCRM is great, for many organizations, and for many reasons.

But I’m starting to see it's a mistake to say that your CRM system consists solely of your CRM software.

True, CiviCRM, like Salesforce and others, is a fine CRM tool. And mastering its use is important and valuable.

But such tools will only help you to the extent that you have your own CRM process, that is, your organization's unique process for managing relationships with your constituents.

That CRM process, together with your tools, is your CRM system.

What this means is:

If your primary concern, when it comes to Constituent Relationship Management, is about your CRM software, you're probably missing out on a lot of relationship opportunities.

Those are opportunities that you won't even notice until you make a regular practice of looking for them.

And regular practice is what it takes. Frequent, creative, goal-driven effort to:

• identify the journey you have in mind for your constituents,

• understand where each of them are in that journey,

• define the next step they need to take, and

• lead them, kindly but effectively, to take those next steps.

Here's the thing:

Your CRM software can help, but no software can really do this for you.

It's a process that you, together with your staff and your advisors, have to work out on your own.

It's simple to say, hard to do, and oh so worth the effort.

All the best,
A.

The next steps

In the world of your mission, you have roughly two kinds of people: Those whom you help, and those who help you.

But from another perspective, maybe they’re all people whom you help.

Sure, we hope our service recipients and members are receiving something wonderful through our work.

But even our donors, volunteers, advocates and staff members — if we’re doing our jobs right, those people receiving something they truly value by participating in our work.

So here’s a question:

Do you believe these folks are made happy by participating in your work?

And if you could guide them, gently but effectively, to participate in that work even more, do you think they’d be even happier?

I do. If they can feel connected, and see how your work matters to them, I believe they’ll feel proud and fulfilled by participating.

But here’s a harder question:

What’s the best way to move them in that direction?

• They’ve applied for services but aren’t showing up for appointments; do you just tell them not to forget next time?

• They’ve signed up for your mailing list; do you just tell them how happy they’d feel to give $5000?

• They’ve attended a training; do you just tell them “it would be awesome” if they became a lifetime member?

Of course, it’s not that easy. If it were, you’d be overwhelmed with resources and opportunities.

Helping someone to get from where they are now to where you want them to be is not always a simple matter.

There are any number of steps between here and there, and it’s not always obvious — to you or to them — which is the next best step to take.

Our job is helping people to the next step.

Whatever you call them, whatever you do for them — or they for you — you have (don't you?) some direction you want them to go. Some goal you’d like them to reach.

But we can't just tell them to go there and call us if they need help.

They don't see the goal as well as we do.

They don't know the path to get there.

They won’t take all the steps on their own.

But what we can do is help them to take the next step.

A little at a time.

Starting from where they are now.

And here's the thing:

To guide them to the next step, we have to understand where they are now.

And we have to think of ways to make it easy for them to progress.

If we're not doing that, we not leading them to something better.

We’re just hoping they figure it out.

And they won’t.

But…

Wouldn’t it be nice if you had a way to keep track of where people are on their journey, to discern the challenges they may be facing, in order to more easily guide them along the way?

It turns out that you do. At least, you have the tools for it, in your CRM.

Of course, defining the journey, knowing the steps, spotting the roadblocks, and guiding them along — that’s up to you. No software will do it for you.

But wouldn’t it be nice if you could do it.

I wonder what that would take …

All the best,
A.

CiviCRM security release

CiviCRM has released a security update, in version 5.74.4. See the release announcement here.

If you’re on Joinery hosting, my team has you covered. We’re rolling out those upgrades today and tommorow.

If you’re handling your own upgrades, don’t wait. Make sure you apply that upgrade as soon as you can.

If you need help upgrading, reach out to your CiviCRM specialist (or reach out to me for some coaching on that process).

This is not something you want to put off.

All the best,
A.

Don’t forget the R

If you're running a CRM for your organization, we can pretty safely assume you want it to help you Manage Relationships with your Constituents.

Managing a relationship is a real and specific thing.

And it's not exactly equivalent to...

• Collecting names and addresses,

• Receiving donations,

• Accepting event registration,

• Running reports,

• or any of that stuff.

Sure, of that can help you, but managing a relationship means...

• Thinking of another person's interests and well-being.

• Checking in on them to see how they're doing.

• Letting them know that you care about them.

• Trying to understand what they aspire to.

• Communicating what you aspire to and inviting them to come along.

• And all of that stuff.

Here's the thing:

You've got this great CRM tool at your disposal.

If you're not using it to actually build relationships with your constituents ... then your CRM is not of much use to you.

How are you nurturing relationships with your constituents?

All the best,
A.

Introducing CiviAcademy

You’re probably pretty familiar with the basics of CiviCRM already.

But when you’re bringing on new people to your team, you still need to get them up to speed — quickly, but effectively.

To help with that, you might want to consider CiviAcademy, which was just announced to a limited audience today.

Here’s the announcement from CiviCRM:

We’re excited to introduce a new initiative that should be coming online around the 1st of July: CiviAcademy. Long time partner CiviTeacher and the Core Team have joined forces to produce and maintain a series of videos focused on introducing the in's and out's of CiviCRM to new users.

CiviAcademy will focus on out-of-the-box functionality of CiviCRM, providing instruction and example use cases for much of the most important and sometimes complex features, such as price sets, memberships, mailings, payment processing, and more. The purpose of this video library is to assist new users and to help them gain proficiency and confidence while using CiviCRM.

Access to CiviAcademy will involve a single lifetime subscription available at https://civicrm.com. It will be a free resource for CiviCRM members. A more formal announcement is forthcoming.

Sounds fantastic to me!

I’ll update you here when it goes live, and I hope you’ll keep it in mind for building up the effectiveness of your team!

All the best,
A.

Branding your receipts is getting easier

With last week's upgrades to CiviCRM, I noticed a pretty strong trend:

Most organizations are modifying CiviCRM’s message templates simply to include their logo at the top of receipts and other auto-generated emails.

Up to now, this modification has made upgrades a little more troublesome than they need to be.

Here's why:

When a CiviCRM upgrade makes changes to the original content of that message template, the upgrade is smart enough not to wipe out your own customizations.

But it's not smart enough to apply those changes into your customized message template content. (That would actually be pretty hard for any software to do well.)

So instead you have two choices, neither of them very satisfactory:

1. For every message template you've customized, manually review the differences between your modified template content and the new template content. Then try to merge your customizations with whatever changes to CiviCRM is calling for, into a hybrid of the latest content customized for your branding. This can be very tedious and painful.

2. Ignore the latest changes from CiviCRM, and just leave your customized message template in its older form. This might be fine, but it might actually break those message templates so they don't work properly at all. So, not great.

Starting in version 5.76, CiviCRM will make this whole process easier, by letting you define a sitewide setting for your logo or other branding. You can change that one setting whenever you want, and it will be reflected in all your message templates.

That means you probably won't need to customize your message templates at all.

Which of course makes the entire upgrade process easier, and saves you all the pain of updating message templates every time you upgrade.

All the best,
A.

Forbes: “Who Is CiviCRM Best For?”

Forbes asks “Who is CiviCRM best for?” and then answers it this way:

CiviCRM is best suited for nonprofit organizations that have the resources available to either build out the CRM in-house or to outsource the initial build to a developer. This is because while it offers very unique features for nonprofits, it is complex to set up and get started with.

Okay, pretty good, Forbes, but not perfect!

First off, “nonprofit organizations” is a little limiting. I like to say CiviCRM is for “community-driven organizations” instead, because the CRM needs of many for-profit orgs (like for-profit professional associations) overlap pretty strongly with those of your typical non-profit.

And, you know, there’s this gem:

… organizations that have the resources available to either build out the CRM in-house or to outsource the initial build to a developer.

This means you must either do it in-house or outsource it. Well … was there ever any other way, for anything?

Here’s what I like to say instead:

CiviCRM is for community-driven organizations with a genuine business case for one of these scenarios:

• Security and privacy concerns that require full control over all constituent data; or

• Heavy customization of features; or

• Reasonable certainty that your CRM needs will match CiviCRM’s out-of-the-box feature set, and a commitment to adapting your needs to fit the CRM (rather than the other way around).

If you’re not in one of those situations, I’d be curious why you chose CiviCRM at all.

All the best,
A.

Pulling numbers out of your …

This week the following question came my way (paraphrased for brevity):

Hi Allen,

We are working on getting a proposal out to funders for a project. Here's a loose description of some technical requirements. How much funding should we be asking for?

This question is pretty similar to the rhetorical “How long is a piece of string?” or, “How much should I plan to spend for a house in Guatemala?”

Put simply, it's impossible to answer well.

There are too many unknowns. Too many variables. We have little more than a rough concept.

At that stage, any number you pitch to funders is just made up.

The right answer is: You do not want to seek funding at this stage.

Unless you're okay with pulling numbers out of your … hat.

But don't do that!

All the best,
A.

A house in Guatemala

Can you spot what these two questions have in common?

• “How much of my budget should I commit to this CRM system improvement?”

• “How much should I plan to spend on a house in Guatemala?” (er, unless you happen to be familiar with Guatemala, in which case pick some unfamiliar locale).

Consider that house in Guatemala:

We think it would be nice to have a house there, but there are an awful lot of unknowns when it comes to deciding how much we'd want to spend on it:

What kind of house? How much land? Where exactly in Guatemala? What do we hope to achieve by owning this house? What about dealing with local sellers, local regulations, exchange rates, tax implications, etc., etc.?

Until somebody does some good research into all of those unknowns, any guess about the appropriate spend on that house is, well, just a guess.

So, now can you spot the similarities between those two questions?

All the best,
A.

Making upgrades easier

If CiviCRM security updates stress you out, you have some options:

1. Ignore them and hope for the best. Or:

2. Plan for them and budget the time and/or money to do them properly.

Mental stress is a cost, and it's usually the result of indecision.

You can avoid it by making a decision.

All the best,
A.

“Charity CRM” survey results

Ever wonder how CiviCRM stacks up against other CRM offerings in the non-profit space?

I think it’s good to know. You will always have options, and it can help to know what they are, even if you’re not looking for something new (and especially if you are).

Yesterday I mentioned a recent survey of several hundred non-profit organizations and how they rate their current CRM.

This survey is conducted annually by Fundraising Magazine, the UK’s only printed magazine for professional charity fundraisers. Most of my readers are in the US, but there’s a lot to be learned here, regardless. This year’s survey was completed by over 500 respondents, which is a pretty sizeable sample considering the scope.

So how did CiviCRM stack up? Here are some highlights:

• CiviCRM was one of only 3 offerings to score 4/5 or better in every one of the measured categories.

• CiviCRM scored 2nd overall, beating out plenty of better-known players including Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, and Raiser’s Edge.

• 96% of CiviCRM respondents said they’d recommend it to a colleague.

• CiviCRM scored at or near the top of the pack in virtually all the categories, including functionality, cost, website integration, and automating business processes.

I’d be glad to share the report with you as a PDF. If you’d like that, please shoot me a reply and I’ll get it right out to you.

All the best,
Allen

CRM: easy?

I love CiviCRM. Except when I don’t.

Right now I'm looking at the results of a recent survey of several hundred non-profit organizations and how they rate their current CRM.

The good: CiviCRM was one of only 3 products to score higher than four out of five across every single category.

The not-so-good: One of its lowest-scoring categories was "Ease of Use." Only 4.1 out of 5. Not bad, but not great.

But in that same "Ease of Use" category, CiviCRM ranked:

• Well above the average, and

• Far above more well-known offerings such as Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, and Raiser's Edge.

What does this say to me?

1. Even in its lowest category, CiviCRM scores near the top of the pack.

But more importantly:

2. CRMs in general don't score very high in the "super easy to use" category.

And what does this suggest for you?

1. The term “ease of use” is relative — not just to your own experience and skills, but to the type of problem you're trying to solve.

2. If your CRM is helping you to solve high-value problems, then that's a win. If you're struggling to make it do things you thought were simple, it will probably help to take a step back and rethink your approach to the problem.

Your CRM can make it possible to solve some really difficult and high-value challenges, but you'll probably benefit from some experienced advice along the way.

Upgrading twice FTW

You probaly know, CiviCRM has security update coming up next month.

So here's a crazy idea:

It might be smart to upgrade twice.

Yeah, I know. Upgrading is work, so why double that work?

But consider this:

1. When a security update is released, it's important to upgrade quickly.

2. The more versions your upgrade spans, the greater chance you'll have of hitting some surprising challenges to complete that upgrade.

So, if it's been a while since your last upgrade (say, you're running the most recent security release from version 5.65.0 or thereabouts), you’ll have a large upgrade (greater chance of surprises) at the same time as a time-sensitive security update.

Upgrading twice will allow you to split those problems and deal with them separately.

In this case, we know (per the announcement) that the security release will come on June 19, after version 5.74.0 is released around June 5.

So you could take the “upgrade twice” approach like so:

1. Soon after the release of 5.74.0 on June 5, upgrade to that version. This will give you a chance to deal with any surprises without the time pressure of a security upgrade.

2. On June 19, when the security update is released, upgrade to that version. Since the time between upgrades will be very small, you'll have a very small chance of hitting any challenging surprises, which means you'll be more likely to get that security upgrade done in a very timely manner.

The alternative is to do the whole thing at once on June 19. That's not impossible, but you're setting yourself up for the chance of hitting difficult upgrade challenges while you're under some serious time pressure.

You can avoid that — by upgrading twice.

All the best,
A.

Upgrades: the bigger, the harder

You've probably noticed that your CiviCRM alerts will let you know now and then when there's a new version available.

So you might ask, "Do I need to take every upgrade?"

The short answer is “no.” I don't usually recommend that you do. (Upgrade strategy is a bigger topic that geeky people like to sit around and talk about while normal people are out having fun, but in general it's just not worth chasing version numbers.)

But here's something to think about:

The longer you wait, the more work that one upgrade can be.

A small upgrade, say from 5.65.1 to 5.65.2, contains very few changes. Naturally, a larger upgrade, say from 5.65.1 to 5.74.1, will include many more changes to CiviCRM’s — both in its inner workings and in its visible features.

The more changes an upgrade contains, the more you may need to deal with certain challenges, such as:

• The need to upgrade various extensions

• The need to test and modify any custom features you've built

• Configuration changes

• Training in new or different functionality

• Compatibility with your website infrastructure (PHP, MySQL, WordPress, etc.)

Usually, there's no problem, and no extra work is needed. But it's good to be aware that the chance of needing extra work will increase together with the amount of time between upgrades.

What does this mean for you?

In general, I still don't advocate taking every available upgrade. The benefits of that approach don't usually justify the effort and expense.

But when you know you have a time-sensitive security update on the horizon (as CiviCRM does right now), understanding this fact can help you be ready to perform that upgrade in a timely manner.

More on that tomorrow.

All the best,
A.

Security updates: don’t wait!

CiviCRM has a security update coming in June.

If that’s an inconvenient time for you, you might think that you'd rather wait until later.

Don't wait!

Here's why:

A security update fixes security problems that already exist in your software.

Of course, that's not a big concern by itself. Major commercial software providers (think iPhone, Android, and the rest) routinely release security updates for exactly the same reasons.

But what is a major concern is this: before the security update, very few people know about the vulnerability; but on the day of the security update, potentially everyone will know about it.

That's because that's the day when the software authors acknowledge it publicly — by publishing a solution for it.

Think about this:

If your home's back door wouldn't lock properly, you might think, “I should get that fixed pretty soon.” But if your darling teenager posted that fact on Facebook, you might suddenly start thinking, “I've got to fix this right away!”

When a software author announces an upcoming security update, it means your version has something like a back door that won't lock. You (and the rest of the world) just don't know where that problem is, or how it could be exploited.

But once they drop that release, anyone can know about it and begin to exploit it. That, dear reader, is Not A Good Thing™.

So I implore you, for this CiviCRM security update scheduled for June 19, take time now to make sure someone on your team will be taking care of it.

You’ll sleep a lot better at night knowing your back door actually locks.

All the best,
A.

New security release for CiviCRM

Get ready for an upgrade to CiviCRM. The announcement is below.

How prepare for this important security release:

• Understand the importance of security updates. This is not the kind of thing you want to skip.

• Test your backups. You’ll want to perform a full site backup before upgrading, and have confidence that you can revert to that backup in case of any surprises during the upgrade.

• Get a preview of any extra steps that may be needed. CiviCRM upgrades can require some additional manual steps, and you typically won’t know what those are until you read to on-screen instructions during the upgrade, which is not the most convenient time to learn about them. You can prepare ahead of time by previewing those messages in my CiviCRM Upgrade Messages Previewer.

This update will be released on June 19. Don’t wait until then to start preparing!

All the best,
A.

P.S. Here’s the original announcement from the CiviCRM Core Team:

There will be a security release for CiviCRM on Wednesday, June 19 (US/Pacific Time). Updates will be provided for the following versions:

* CiviCRM v5.74 (current RC; pending release circa June 5; see download at https://download.civicrm.org/latest/)

* CiviCRM v5.69 (current ESR; see https://civicrm.org/esr)

We expect the release to become available near the end of the day (TZ conversions).

Your “donate” is a donut, unless ____

Do you have a “donate” button on your homepage?

If you're like most organizations, that button brings in just a few contributions now and then, if you're lucky.

I'm betting it's pretty close to zero — a big old donut.

Unless ...

... that button links not just to your online donation form, but to compelling content that informs visitors of why they can feel great about supporting your work; AND

... you're using those first-time donations as a starting point to a long-term relationship with new donors.

If that's not you — if you're seeing great results from a well-placed “donate now” button on your site, and you're not doing those two things, write me back and tell me I'm wrong.

I'd actually love to hear your success story!

All the best,
A.

Lost in the “how”

People often come to me with questions about tactics.

• How can we configure our membership levels to support this novel requirement?

• How can I use a wait-list for my limited-capacity team-based event?

This is awesome! I love to see that folks are reaching out for help with how-to questions.

But what I really love is when people hit pause on the "how" long enough to think about the "what" and the "why":

• What is it that I'm really trying to achieve, long-term?

• Why do I want that? What do I think it's going to get me, and why is that so important to me?

Because — believe me — I know what it's like to agonize for hours (or days) trying to get some feature or configuration to work exactly right, without having thought clearly about why I wanted it in the first place.

And then — really believe me on this one — the sinking feeling, after spending all that time and effort, that this thing isn't so important after all; that I could have gotten the same results (or better!) with a simpler solution.

Example: Fighting with that report to make it show exactly the right output, before finally realizing that I just need these numbers one time, and I could get them far more easily by just exporting it to Excel and quickly manipulate the data there.

Chances are you've done something similar.

I've done it, and I have stories from most of my clients who've done it.

Here's the thing:

Don't get lost in the "how." It's a seductive trap.

Our brains just love puzzles, and there's some (usually fleeting) satisfaction in the feeling that we're "working hard on something."

Before you start digging in on the "how," push back on that temptation and make sure you can articulate clearly "what" your end goal is, and "why" that end goal is so important.

You may have to really force yourself into this at first.

But the payoff is real.

In the end, we all have a mission to improve the lives of people we care about.

No one will care how slick our solution was or how hard we banged our heads on the keyboard to make it happen.

They will only care that we helped them. That's where the payoff is.

All the best,
A.

Reasonable estimations for reasonable goals

Yesterday I mentioned how an expected 6% increase is leading one organization to implement new features in their client communications.

In that email I mentioned, "6% seems very doable". Honestly, that's a claim worth challenging.

Their goal is to increase their rate of "client services appointments kept" from 80% to 85% — an increase of just 6.25%.

They believe it's “quite doable.” But is it really? Remember, if you can't justify your assessment, it just might be hot air — based on anything from wild guessing to wishful thinking.

In their case, they've gathered useful measurements, used some simple math, made a few reasonable assumptions, and honestly acknowledged their confidence (or lack of confidence) in each those assumptions and estimates.

For example:

• Among clients who've missed an appointment, and whom they've been able to ask, the number one reason given — by far — is simply, "Darn it, I forgot."

• Almost all of these clients have already indicated they'll receive text messages on other matters.

This gives them some reliable information to work with.

It doesn't mean nobody will ever miss an appointment again, but it's pretty reasonable to guess that at least 25% of those missed appointments (one quarter of the 20%) could have been prevented with timely SMS reminders.

And that's enough to get them from 80% to 85%.

Here's the thing:

There's no such thing as a silver bullet. No one solution is guaranteed to fix everything.

And projections like these will necessarily contain some uncertainty.

But by gathering some information and quantifying its reliability, it is indeed possible to make reasonable estimations, even when not everything is 100% certain.

If you wait for 100% certainty, you'll never begin. On the other hand, if you never bother to estimate the likelihood of success or failure, you'll also never be able to target reasonable goals.

All the best,
A.