What’s your bus factor?

Bus factor:

The minimum number of team members that have to suddenly disappear from a project before the project stalls due to lack of knowledgeable or competent personnel. [Reference]

In other words, it's the number of people that have to get hit by a bus (or otherwise "disappear") before your systems become useless to you.

Obviously, the lower the number, the riskier your situation.

If the loss of any given person would cause important projects to grind to a halt, your bus factor is “1”.

You’ll probably want to address that.

Here's the thing:

Most people would rather not think about this stuff. It’s a little dark.

But life is full of surprises, both good and bad.

Think about this:

If one of your critical programs has a bus factor of “1,” increasing it to “2” (say, by cross-training one additional person) means you've just cut your risk in half.

Not a bad investment, I'd say.

All the best,
A.

Something unexpected

For a project (or team) of any meaningful size, something unexpected is bound to happen.

This is probably not news to you.

Someone will make a mistake, or miss a meeting, or be out sick. Some component will need to be upgraded, or fixed, or replaced. It will rain, the power will go out, you’ll get a flat tire.

If it doesn't come, count yourself lucky.

But when it does, it will have an impact, usually at least one of these:

• increased cost

• Delayed launch

• Deceased functionality

So if it’s sure to happen, why is it even worth considering?

Because, while you can't predict the unexpected, you might be able to plan ahead and direct the impact.

Say, allow costs to increase in order to get full functionality on time. Or, accept a delay in order to conserve funds without sacrificing functionality.

It can be hard to make that decision under pressure. Much easier to decide when your mind is clear.

Sure, we all hope everything will go perfectly according to plan.

But when the unexpected happens, you can save yourself a lot of stress — and some regretable “didn’t have a choice” decision-making — by deciding ahead of time how you might like to handle it.

All the best,
A.

Message Templates keep getting better

CiviCRMs Message Templates features make it pretty easy to customize many of the automated emails that CiviCRM sends: contribution receipts, event confirmations, etc.

It's a great feature. But editing them can be tricky, and any customizations you make might need to be adjusted when you upgrade.

Fortunately, recent improvements are making those things easier. Now you can:

• Easily preview your changes before saving them, so you can quickly get a good idea how they'll look for your constituents.

• Easily add your organization's logo and branding at the top of all message templates, with the site-wide Message Header token. This removes the need to edit Message Templates directly (and to manally update those modifications at upgrade time) in order merely to add a logo.

• Easily see the difference between the default version and your modified version, with the "Show diff" button. This is a big help at upgrade time.

All of the above, plus a few more goodies, are available in versions 5.76 and above.

You can try these out on the live CiviCRM demo sites for Drupal and for WordPress).

And if they sound useful to you, it might be a good reason to upgrade.

All the best,
A.

The library or the garden

I really love books. The smell, the touch, but most of all, the immutability. I can go back to my grandfather's World War II Navy Bluejacket's Manual — or any of the hundreds of books in our home library — and count on it to have exactly the same information as the day it was printed, no matter how long I've left it untouched.

My wife loves gardens. The life force, the care and maintenance, and most of all, the surprise of beauty. Every season presents a new adventure of care, and yields unexpected disappointments and delights.

How different these two are, in their maintenance, and in what we get from them.

A thought for you:

How do you think of the people represented in your CRM?

Are they a library of resources, to be left alone, and retrieved for your use whenever you need them?

Or are they a garden of living organisms, in need of continual care, needing themselves to be enriched before they can enrich you?

Either answer is fine.

Just remember that if you maintain a library the way you would a garden, you'll probably end up with compost.

And if you treat a garden the way you would a library, you'll probably end up with dead trees.

All the best,
A.

My mistakes

For the last two weekends, I spent too much time and money trying to build something that didn't work, only to realize afterward that I could have easily bought a great solution off the shelf for far less. You can read about my video backdrop failure here, if you missed it.

Sadly, I had broken many of the rules that I routinely write about.

What rules, you ask? Here's a list:

1. First identify the mission value.

Instead of first asking, "What would this be worth to me?" or "How bad would it be to live without this?", my first question was, "How hard could it be?" That means trying to name the cost first, which then subtly incentivizes me to overestimate the value as a justification for the cost.

2. Identify (and stick to) mission requirements.

My requirements were simple: I needed something that's flat, quick to set up and take down, and compact to store. Along the way, I wound up prioritizing non-essentials like clever, unique, and custom-built. Those are attractive to my personally type, but they're not mission requirements.

3. Budget funds appropriately.

Having completely neglected the rule, "First identify the mission value," it was easy to skip this one too. I'll just make sure the costs stay "reasonably low," I said. Wrong answer. If there’s a clear mission value, then there's a clear — and probably lower — maximum cost. I should have defined that at the outset.

4. Budget time appropriately.

Just like money, time is a limited resource. When budgeting your time, it can help to "charge yourself" an hourly rate, which you can roughly derive from what you earn at your "real job." If I had done that, there's no way I would have so readily sunk two weekends of my life into this little project.

5. Look hard at existing solutions.

It's a big world, and there's a big marketplace of products and ideas to go with it. However special your own situation may seem, it's very likely someone else has been there, done that, failed, and done it better. Once I realized my custom build was a failure, it took me just an hour or two to find an off-the-shelf solution that was darn near perfect for my actual mission requirements. If only I were subscribed to a daily mailing list that told me to look harder at existing solutions first.

6. Don't assume your needs are unique.

See above about existing solutions. A custom build is the choice of last resort. Your need is not unique until you've proven that there is no viable existing solution.

7. Don't be seduced by your own creativity.

Mission requirements are measurable outcomes. Clever, unique, and custom-built may be fun, but they're almost never measurable mission requirements.

8. Assess the value (and cost) of making it "even better" before seeking improvements.

A valuable mission-driven project must be launched at some point. Each improvement you think up along the way will delay that launch and increase costs. If you're going to do that, you’d better be able to justify it with measurable outcomes. My mistake was adding "bells and whistles" mid-project, without comparing cost to value.

9. Focus on your own area of expertise.

Learning new skills can be valuable — but not always. And always learning new skills will mean constantly struggling to produce middling outcomes. If you want great results, then do the things you're great at, and get someone else to be great at the other things. My custom project was fun (and I agree there's some personal value in fun), but it's not what I'm great at. And the result was not even mediocre. That's not a fun story to tell.

Here's the thing:

My "lesson learned" story is about a guy who jumped head-first into a DIY craft project that failed. I had a little fun, lost some hours and some bucks out of my life, felt bad about it for a while, and then recovered.

Your "lesson learned" story could be a lot more painful. I've seen organizations jump head-first into new projects, and eventually be forced to abandon the whole thing. The organization usually survives, but they've lost substantially in money, opportunity, good will, and morale.

When your team gets a hot new idea that just "has to be done," think carefully about the guidelines above. before getting seduced by the adventure of it.

You might just save yourself — and your mission — a while lot of trouble.

All the best,
A.

It's embarrassing, but I broke my own rules

See if you can spot where I went wrong:

I'm slowly working on a new podcast. I want a unique background for the video portion, but I'm using a rented studio space upstairs from my office, so I need something I can set up and take down quickly.

I thought, “How hard could it be to make a few panels that I could put up and take down quickly, and then store them easily for the next episode?”

This “quick and simple” project soon expanded into two weekends of work. Designing it, selecting and assembling parts, incorporating a dozen little ideas to make my project just a little better.

Things were going along fine, I thought, until shockingly, everything warped badly when I put on the final coat of paint.

After hours and hours of work, and spending far more than I expected on materials, I had a set of warped panels that were completely useless to me.

Back again at square one, I looked further to see how others were solving this problem.

It turns out, you can buy a nice foldable cloth backdrop on Amazon for 60 bucks. It'll be on my doorstep next Wednesday.

Did you spot the mistakes? There's more than one.

They're the same kind of mistakes you should be watching for in any new CRM project you might consider.

Custom features, staff training, new programs, new system integrations — all of them can have you putting in far more resources than you expected, and getting far less than your desired outcome, if you make the same mistakes that I did.

So what were those mistakes? Shoot me a quick reply, and let me know if you can spot them.

All the best,
A.

The obvious choice

The art of great constituent relationship management is simple: helping each person to take the next step in their relationship with your mission.

Yes, it's simple — but it's usually not easy.

That's because you have people in a vast range of situations:

• First time website visitors

• New members

• Long-time volunteers

• One-time donors

• Service recipients on the cusp of program graduation

• Budding mission advocates

• Internal staff, both the new and the veterans

• ... the list goes on.

The hard part, from where you stand, is seeing the world from where they stand.

But if you can do that — and with some consistent effort, I believe you can — the next part is fairly easy:

Help them to see the value of taking that next step.
Make that next step easy for them.
Make it the obvious choice.

They won't all take that step. Some will slip away.

But when that happens, don't let it be because they couldn't see what was next.

Make sure you know what that next step is. And then make sure they know.

Make it the obvious choice.

All the best,
A.

“Every tool is a hammer …

… except a screwdriver, which is a chisel.”

My grandfather, a journeyman carpenter, repeated this tradesman's joke to me more than once.

The rule: Always use the right tool for the job.

The exception: In a pinch, use what you must to get the job done.

All the best,
A.

500 contact groups?!

Here's a question I got from a client this week (paraphrased here for a broader audience):

Hey Allen. We have so many contact groups in CiviCRM that it's getting really hard to manage. It's hard to find a particular group, and sometimes we pick the wrong one, which of course creates problems for us. I figure we could probably delete 90% of them, but it's hard to know which ones aren't being used. You have any recommendations to help us clean this up?

A closer look shows that this team has nearly 500 active contact groups, and around eight staff members with access to create groups. They've been running CiviCRM for over 5 years, and many of the groups were created by people who don't even work there anymore.

It's a tough situation, the kind that just gets worse with time:

Staff who can't find the group they want may just be inclined to create a new one. And the more of them there are, the harder it is to get in there and sort it all out. And the snowball keeps growing.

So, what to do?

This won't be solved overnight, but you can do it with three steps over time:

1. Create a naming convention for groups.

Make it so simple that any staff member can understand it, and communicate it clearly to all staff members. Be sure to explain why it's important that they stick to this naming convention going forward.

A simple naming convention I recommend is this:

Every contact group must have, at the end of its title, the date it was created.

CiviCRM already records who created each group, and even displays that in the Groups listing; this will be useful as well.

Knowing the creation date and creator name will give you some real advantages:

• It's easy to see how old a group is, which can indicate something (though not everything) about its present usefulness.

• It's easy to remember to use Alice's group for one thing and Bob's group for another thing, even if they have similar names.

• When you're not sure of the purpose of the group, you know who to ask.

2. Wait a while, and then start disabling groups.

After a few weeks, you can verify that your staff are actually using the naming convention, and you can distinguish newer groups that use it from older groups that don't.

You can now begin the clean-up process. Start with the groups that seem pretty obviously unused.

But don't delete them. Just disable them. This gives you a chance to re-enable them if it turns out someone misses them.

Optional but awesome: When you disable a group, add "disabled on [today's date]" to the title. This makes it easy to see how long a group has been disabled.

3. Schedule a periodic review

Just as you do for cleaning up duplicate contacts (don't you?), schedule time to review your groups — 30 minutes every week or two should be enough. The number should be shrinking over time, so this will get easier as you go.

Start with groups that have been disabled for a few weeks. Nobody has missed them, so you can delete them outright.

Move on to groups that you're less certain about. Disable a few, and see if anyone misses them.

Wash, rinse, repeat.

Here's the thing:

The large number of groups here is a result of two things: multiple users creating groups without always knowing what other users are doing; and a CRM that has been around for a while.

Your CRM software is your own — you own it. It gives you all the freedom you could ever want, and with it some burden of maintenance.

A good naming convention and basic staff training can go a long way to keeping it useful for everyone.

And a little clean-up now and then is just part of owning anything: your house, your car, and your CRM software.

All the best,
A.

Cheaper, effective-er training

Effective-er? More effective? You know what I mean.

Say you have a team of 10 people using your CRM software.

How are you going to train them on that?

And more than the software, how will you train them on your organization's unique CRM system, of which the software is only a small part?

• You might find a CiviCRM training event to send them to. That would get them started.

• You could organize some group or individual trainings with your outside CiviCRM specialist. That would get them moving forward.

• You could give them all direct access to your outside CiviCRM specialist. That would get their questions answered when they're stuck.

Those aren't bad options. But they suffer from two important problems:

1. They're expensive.

2. They're generic and focused on the software, not aligned with your unique CRM strategy and systems.

But there's another option that addresses both of those concerns:

Designate an internal CRM specialist.

This has important advantages. Because this person is internal to the organization:

• They know (or will learn, or even help define) your unique CRM strategy and systems.

• As they gain mastery of the software, they can share that knowledge within the team more easily (and cheaply) than any external resource ever could.

Here's the thing:

Good training, as important as it is, can still make for a significant investment of funds.

Outside experts are a great resource, but they'll never know the details of your work — your policies, procedures, and people — as well as your own team does (and hey, if nobody on your team knows those details as well as an outside support provider, you've got problems).

But a single staff member who's committed to mastering both your CRM software and your unique way of using it ... that's a pretty impressive resource.

It's a whole lot cheaper, too.

All the best,
A.

Mistakes at scale

The beauty of a healthy, effective team is an effect of scale. Many hands, they say, make light work.

But what happens if your team is not working so well? Unfortunately, the same principle of scale applies — it’s just a little less beautiful.

When you're working alone, a mistake here and there can be frustrating, but you can recover.

The larger your team, the more troubling a simple mistake will be.

• Data entered incorrectly — or not at all — by one person can add hours of work for the others on your team.

• Reports created with the wrong criteria can lead your whole team to make critical decisions based on incorrect information.

This is the problem of mistakes at scale.

And it's usually the result of insufficient training.

Of course, training your staff well takes time and effort.

Funny thing is, when your staff are well trained, your team saves time and effort. This makes training a smart investment, not a frivolous expense.

So, you can budget some time (and optionally money) for staff training, or you can just budget those resources for dealing with frustration and inefficiency.

The difference is, one of those makes your people effective, empowered, and appreciated.

And that, dear reader, is a beautiful thing.

All the best,
A.

Stress, and locus of control

On the topic of putting yourself (or at least, your organization) in control of your own CRM systems:

Not to get all psycho-babble on you, but there's a concept in human psychology known as locus of control.

I love this kind of thing, but I won't try to make you love it. You can read more about it if you like.

The short point I want to make is this:

Folks with a generally internal locus of control (they believe the direction of their life is determined by their own actions) are often less likely to experience debilitating stress, compared to folks with an external locus of control.

Stress. Friction. Frustration. Yuck.

It makes sense to me.

If I keep my ducks in a row and keep trying, there's a good chance I'll get more of what I want. And the more control I give away — to circumstance, chance, and outside forces — the more likely I am to be frustrated in my efforts.

So...

If your CRM systems are giving you more stress than you'd like, there may be a way to fix that.

And it may just have to do with setting an internal center of control for these systems, somewhere within your organization.

The starting place is to designate a CRM systems coordinator, your "in-house CRM expert."

And then, it's about increasing that person's level of expertise, so that your whole team can benefit.

All the best,
A.

Who’s in control?

Who has control of the CRM systems and processes by which you cultivate relationships with your people?

You've got department heads and project leads and other staff members on the inside. You've got vendors and support and other consultants on the outside.

Who's in control?

Consider these two amazingly high-tech diagrams of a hypothetical organization:

1. Everyone talks separately to your outside consultants.

This approach centralizes the control outside of the organization. There's nobody on the inside who can really know everything that's going on.

And really, could anyone on the outside keep track of what's happening on the inside? (Spoilers: No, they can't.)

2. Communications streamlined through a single staff member.

This approach, on the other hand, centralizes that control within the organization. The Systems Coordinator is in a position to know how the systems are being used and to ensure things are working well for everyone.

So what about your organization?

Is that control inside your organization, or outside? If it's outside, how's that affecting your work?

Now, where would you like that center of control to be?

What steps could you take to shift it in that direction?

All the best,
A.

Staff spending their own money on training?!

"As a valued member of our team, you will be asked to complete tasks for which you have not been trained."

... said no job description ever.

But, you know, it happens. Sooner or later, all of us will probably be faced with tasks for which we've not been fully trained. That's part of the adventure.

"If you can't figure it out, you're on your own..."

Wait, what?

" ... There is no budget for training. Team members are encouraged to seek outside training at their own expense."

What the heck? Who would sign up for this?

Well, of course, nobody would. That's why job descriptions never say such things.

But ... the truth is ... it happens.

I know it happens, because some of these staffers come to me for help, ready to pay out of their own pockets so they can stop feeling like a failure when repeatedly given tasks that they haven't been trained for.

Are they your staff members?
Would you care if they were?
Would you even know that they needed help?

Here's the thing:

Check in on your people now and then. They could probably use some help.

And if they've got everything under control, they'll at least be encouraged you're checking in.

All the best,
A.

"What’s wrong with this darned thing?"

This past weekend I took a few hours to help my dad build a new vanity cabinet for his bathroom.

I had limited time on Sunday afternoon, but figured we could knock it out quickly enough.

Not so fast, cupcake.

When you haven't used your table saw in a while, it may need a few adjustments in order to make perfectly square cuts.

And if you're not really familiar with the tool, those adjustments can take a lot more time than you expected.

I said a lot of unpleasant words to that table saw during the first hour.

Finally I got things right, and we were able to make some good headway. But that vanity is not done yet.

Here's the thing:

Working on your tools is important and valuable. But it's not nearly as fun or satisfying as working on your actual work.

And the more time you spend struggling with those tools, the less time you have to get the results you're really after. Cursing at the tool is a bit of a release, but it doesn't get the work done.

That's why it's important to budget time to master your tools and keep them in good working order.

That's true for table saws, and it's true for your CRM software.

Next weekend I'll head over to Dad’s again, and I’ll finish that vanity. Now that I know how to handle my tools well.

All the best,
A.

To have what you want to have …

... you must usually do something you don't want to do.

Sure, sometimes we get lucky, and everything is easy.

But usually...

• If you want to be well rested tomorrow, you have to put down the TV remote and go to bed at a reasonable hour tonight.

• If you want to be fit and healthy, you have to eat wisely and exercise regularly.

• If you want good clean data, you have to spend time deduping your contacts.

• If you want systems that run smoothly, you have to dig in and figure out what's causing the friction.

What's cool about this is that sometimes ...

just sometimes ...

we can actually spot the actions that will get us what we want ...

just by noticing what it is that we don't want to do.

All the best,
A.

“Busy”

When I ask a friend, or a client, how they're doing, the most common response by far is, “Busy.”

It's a safe answer: most people can probably relate to it, and it doesn't reveal much personal detail — good or bad.

But I always hope, quietly to myself, but this isn't really the way they think about how they're doing.

Because it's only half the story. And the least important half, I believe.

Here's the thing:

The amount of time and effort you spend staying busy is not nearly as important as the actual results you're getting.

Staying busy is fine.

But reaching the goals you care about, for the people you care about, that's what matters.

How are you doing, with that?

All the best,
A.

BS detector: Is it measurable?

He's a quick test of your bullsh*t detector.

Which of these sounds more like BS than the other?

"The finish line is closer than ever."
"The finish line is finally in sight."

...

...

...

I’m picking the first one.

What’s the difference?

• “Closer than ever” could mean anything. It only means that you haven't moved backward, but it says nothing about how close you are.

• “Finally in sight” actually describes something specific about the distance remaining.

Okay, here’s one that's even less meaningful:

“We’ve come so far!”

This describes only how far you’ve come. It says nothing about what remains to the finish. Heck, there may not even be a finish line.

Here’s the thing:

Getting close to a goal is a powerful motivator. Nobody wants to give up when they’re close.

But that implies a few important elements:

• There is a specific goal to be reached.

• You know what that goal looks like.

• You know why that goal is important.

Of course, there will always be another goal to reach. Many of us are working on a mission that, for all we know, will never truly be fulfilled.

But having a specific and recognizable goal, even if we know it’s not the Completion Of All Good Things, gives us something to strive for.

That’s true for me, and for you, and for the people you’re aiming to motivate.

I hope you never tire of working hard to "make things better." That’s a good thing.

And while you’re doing that, I hope you remember the value of defining, and naming, measurable goals that you and your people can strive for.

All the best,
A.

Best possible outcomes

Today, someone somewhere will hear of your organization for the first time.

What, do you hope, will be the ultimate best possible outcome from that first awareness?

• That they'll bequeath a large gift to your mission in their will?

• That they'll become a lifelong supporter and a vigorous advocate for your work?

• That they'll take full advantage of all your services and therby better themselves and their community?

Not every person is a candidate for all of these.

But for each person, there is an ideal outcome that you can lead them toward...

... if you put in the time and effort to envision it.

... if you can plan out a pathway to guide them there.

... if you make a continual practice of leading them to the next step in that journey.

There is a path to enrichment for every single contact in your network.

Defining it, designing it, and nurturing it ... that's up to you.

All the best,
A.

The adventure of routine

Routines: boring, predictable, efficient.

Adventures: dynamic, exciting, messy.

The worst of both worlds: Treating routine tasks as adventures; then never having time or energy for dynamic adventures that really matter.

The best of both worlds: Making an adventure out of developing routines for tedious repetitive tasks; then putting them on autopilot while you focus on new adventures that actually deserve your creative energy.

Here's the thing:

Adventure is exciting, but not everything should be an adventure.

Creating routines for the tedious tasks — automating, delegating, systematizing — can be its own adventure.

And then … you've got time and creative energy for the adventures you really care about.

All the best,
A.