… and when to quit

Yesterday I told you about an organization that did a great job knowing where to invest in their systems.

They also did another very cool thing:

They canceled one of their fundraising programs.

Every year at their big annual gala, they have several ways for people to give. This one was a drawing of sorts.

For 50 bucks, you'd get a nice bottle of wine or spirits. Sometimes a very nice bottle, but of course you wouldn't know what you were going to get.

It was fun. And it pulled in several thousand dollars, reliably, every time.

But it had two big drawbacks:

1. Those bottles had to come from somewhere, and the simple cash value of those donations was not dramatically less than the total amount raised.

2. More importantly, it was a lot of work for their staff. Acquiring, curating, packaging, transporting and setting up. Really, a lot of work.

So this year, they're scrapping it.

Are they just going to lose those several thousand dollars this year? No, there are plenty of other giving opportunities, and gala attendees who want to help will still want to help.

What they will lose is a lot of tedious effort for their staff.

Here's the thing:

The total measurable outcome is important. Several thousand is not to be sneezed at.

But the cost is worth counting. And that cost is not always in dollars.

When the expected outcome (whether in funds raised, or in lives reached) is not much more than the expected cost, it's worth asking if there might be a better way.

All the best,
A.

They knew where to invest

A service organization that I support recently implemented a system to send their clients automated SMS reminders about upcoming counseling appointments.

The business rationale was simple and sound:

They receive some income from various sources for each completed appointment. Not so for each missed appointment, which incurs the same the costs in staff time, facilities maintenance, and the rest.

With a goal of increasing their "kept appointments" rate by mere a 6%, they knew that by reaching the goal they would more than cover the cost of the SMS reminders system.

I heard today that within just a couple of months of launching the new system, they've met and surpassed that goal.

It's a win.

And there are two simple reasons it worked:

1. They had a clear and measurable goal that aligned with both their mission (serving their clients) and their business concerns (funding the mission).

2. They knew what the next step was for their clients, and they found a way to help them take that next step.

Of course, it’s not always so easy.

When you're a service organization that provides free and low-cost counseling to children and families in distress, it may seem obvious that for many of them, the next step is to show up for counseling.

Your situation is probably different.

For the people you care about, the people with whom you're trying to build relationships in support of your mission, the next step may not be so obvious.

Maybe you haven't identified the journey that you want them to be on.

But with some careful thought, you can. For many of them, probably for most of them, there is a reasonable next step, and a reasonable set of actions you can take to guide them there.

That's the value of well-thought constituent journeys:

• If you can identify the journey, you can identify the next steps.

• If you can identify the next steps, you can find ways to help them get there.

• If you can identify those ways, then you can set goals for them that are in line with both your mission and your business concerns.

Here’s the thing:

Your people are waiting to progress in their relationship with your mission.

It's up to you show them how to do it.

All the best,
A.

Video tutorials for CiviCRM

Ever feel a little overwhelmed by some feature in CiviCRM?

If you haven't yet, you probably will. There's a lot of wonderful, complex stuff in there.

Video tutorials might help.

Sure, no off-the-shelf training program is going to tell you exactly everything you need to know in every situation.

But for getting a good understanding of the concept, and of how a set of features is intended to work, video can be a great format. It's usually much more easily absorbed than written documentation.

If you agree, you should check out CiviAcademy, a new offering from the creators of CiviCRM, which they call…

Bite-sized tutorials to help you maximize CiviCRM.

Easy to understand video tutorials that will take you from an absolute newbie to a CiviNinja in no time!

... high-level, fast-paced instruction designed for users of CiviCRM ... showcasing major features and common customizations.

I've mentioned this before, and have been excitedly awaiting its release.

Well, now it's here.

Give it a look, and consider where it might help you and your team master this robust set of CRM functionality.

All the best,
A.

“When a measure becomes a target …

... it ceases to be a good measure."

If you care about reaching your goals, this matters.

It's a common expression of what's called "Goodhart's law.”

If you know anyone with kids in public schools, you might have heard this as a common critique of standardized testing regimes and “teaching to the test.” It goes like this:

• Tests are meant as an assessment of learning.

• That assessment value is lost when teachers focus on helping kids pass the tests instead of helping them to learn the material itself.

By "teaching to the test," we've changed the goal. It's no longer "helping kids understand history." It's now, "helping kids pass history tests."

Why this matters to you:

Goals matter. Goals motivate us. Goals help us assess our progress and improve our methods.

We believe that if we do more of X, we can accomplish more of Y. Say, if we increase newsletter subscriptions, we can (somehow) stimulate more potential donors to give.

A long as we remember that increased subscrber count is not really valuable in itself, it can be one of several useful metrics in our strategy to increase donations. But on its own, it's not a meaningful target.

Indeed, is even "increased donations" a goal in itself? Even that is probably just a step on the path to your real mission of changing lives.

Here's the thing:

"Lives changed" is hard to measure. "Subscriber count" and "donation total" are easy.

The metrics are useful, and important, and worth your attention.

But only in the context of the real goal.

All the best,
A.

Reducing “bus factor” risk

A low bus factor creates risk for your mission-critical programs and projects. (Yeah, I talked about this yesterday.)

In other words, if only one person understands how your systems really work, losing that one person (say they get hit by a bus) can stop you in your tracks.

So how to increase that bus factor, and how to reduce the risk?

Some common recommendations are:

• Reducing complexity, so it's easier for people to understand the systems.

• Maintaining thorough documentation, so complex systems can be understood.

• Cross-training, so there are more people with a working knowledge of the system.

These are indeed great. I do recommend them.

But it's also worth considering where your irreplaceable "bus-factor people" are positioned in your organization.

Are they internal to the organization, people who are invested in the organization and the mission?

Or instead, are they outside the organization — external contractors and service providers — who will have any number of other concerns competing for their attention?

Which of those is riskier? Which is more likely to become unavailable, and to be unable to pass on their knowledge to a successor?

I'm pretty sure your internal staff are the safer bet here.

Here's the thing:

When you need specialized expertise, it's smart to pull in an outside expert. Often, it's your only good option.

But what's not smart is relying on that outside expert to be the only one who fully understands some critical part of your systems.

Because when you do that, you're really not in control of your own systems, however strongly you might feel that you are.

All the best,
A.

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.