Beyond Advanced Search

Your constituent data loses a lot of its value if you can't access it in the ways that are useful to you.

So let’s talk about searches in CiviCRM.

CiviCRM’s familiar Advanced Search tool is great for what it does. But when it's not enough for your needs, here are three other tools you might want to try:

SearchKit:

This relatively new feature really is the future of searching in CiviCRM.

(In fact the excellent search tools I mention below are getting harder to find in newer versions of CiviCRM, as the focus shifts to SearchKit.)

With SearchKit, you really can build just about any type of search you might think of.

And it’s not just for finding contacts, either. With SearchKit, you can search for any type of record in CiviCRM: participants, contributions, cases, even more obscure things like line items, notes, and option lists.

The hard part is: SearchKit presents a rather steep learning curve, requires very careful thinking on your part, and assumes you have a pretty good idea of how CiviCRM structures its data internally.

Nonetheless, I do have some fairly non-technical clients who are getting what they want from it.

So you may want to give it a try.

You can find it directly under the search menu at Search > SearchKit.

Include/Exclude Search

If you're making active use of groups and tags, you may sometimes want a list like one of these:

• All contacts who are in Group A but are not in Group B.

• All contacts who are in any of Groups A, B, and/or C; but who are not in tagged with any of Tags D, E, and/or F.

Yes, you could also do this with SearchKit, but the Include/Exclude Search provides a very simple and straightforward interface. So it's more limited in what you can do, but much easier to use.

Traditionally, you should be able to find this under Search > Custom Searches > Include/Exclude Search.

But newer versions of CiviCRM have been hiding this menu item, so you may need to access this (and a few other so-called “Custom Searches”) directly from the URL:

• WordPress:
  ://[example.org]/wp-admin/admin.php?page=CiviCRM&q=civicrm%2Fcontact%2Fsearch%2Fcustom%2Flist&reset=1

• Drupal:
  ://[example.org]/civicrm/contact/search/custom/list?reset=1

Search Builder

Search Builder allows you to find contacts according to very complex AND, OR, and NOT criteria.

Because it's a little more open-ended in its purpose, the interface is a little more complex than the Include/Exclude Search. So you'll need to think a little more carefully about turning the question in your mind into the criteria to use in this search.

But it's still a lot easier to use than SearchKit, and a lot more powerful than Advanced Search.

Traditionally you will find this under the Search menu at Search > Search Builder. But because newer versions of CiviCRM have begun hiding this menu item, you may need to access it from the URL directly:

• WordPress: ://[example.org]/wp-admin/admin.php?page=CiviCRM&q=civicrm%2Fcontact%2Fsearch%2Fbuilder&reset=1

• Drupal: ://[example.org]/civicrm/contact/search/builder?reset=1

Here's the thing:

When you need a search that you can't perform with Advanced Search, then you've probably got a complex set of criteria that requires careful thought.

But if you expect the search results to be valuable in your work, it may be worth the extra time and effort to get familiar with the above search tools.

All the best,
A.

No easy answers

What's the best way to tie a bow?
Or to catch fish?
Or to improve your health?

For these questions and a thousand others, there is no “one right answer,” except perhaps this:

It depends.

It depends on where you're starting from.
It depends on what you're trying to achieve in the long run.
It depends on the options and resources that are available to you.
It depends on your unique situation.

If you Google those questions, you’ll find dozens of clickbait articles offering easy answers. If you're lucky, one of those answers will fit your situation.

But chances are, none of them is exactly right.

Here's the thing:

The same is true both for your CRM strategy and for any particular tactic you might implement to achieve that strategy.

In terms of tactics, your open source CRM may offer a dozen ways to accomplish any particular task.

In terms of strategy, the possibilities are even more open-ended.

Either way, there's usually no easy answer — no "one best way."

But if you consider your goals, limitations, resources, and starting point, you can probably find a way that's good enough. (And because resources are always limited, “good enough” really is good enough.)

And if you need help, your CRM coach can probably suggest some options you hadn't thought of.

So you can find the one best way for you.

All the best,
A.

Why I’m here

On this daily email list, you'll find me talking about a variety of things (like announcements about CiviCon 2025, coming in May).

But the core elements are these:

• Escaping the Overhead Myth

• Building relationships at scale

• Naming the value first, then the cost

• Mastering your tools and systems

• Frequent goal-setting and assessment for real growth

These are also the same major topics I work through with my coaching clients.

What’s more, they're the areas that I beleive are most lacking in small and mid-size nonprofits who are struggling to get meaningful results with their CRM systems.

If you're a subscriber to this list, I hope it’s helping you to improve in each of these areas.

That, in a nutshell, is why I'm here.

All the best,
A.

The Overhead Myth

Would you fault a single parent for making time to go back to college and get a degree?

Or a church for spending money on a new roof?

Of course not. Most of us understand these expenditures are valuable ways to keep things moving forward.

Unfortunately many non-profit leaders can't seem to justify the equivalent in their own work.

They feel significant pressure to minimize so-called overhead expenses, on the simplistic assumption that it would take precious resources away from their mission driven programs.

The irony, of course, is that organizations that don't invest in education staffing and infrastructure are at risk of starving the very programs they're trying to support.

That's why three major nonprofit ratings organizations got together a while back and issued a letter to address what they call the Overhead Myth.

"We write to correct a misconception,” they say. "The percent of charity expenses that go to administrative and fundraising costs—commonly referred to as “overhead”—is a poor measure of a charity’s performance."

They continue:

In fact, many charities should spend more on overhead. Overhead costs include important investments charities make to improve their work: investments in training, planning, evaluation, and internal systems—as well as their efforts to raise money so they can operate their programs. These expenses allow a charity to sustain itself (the way a family has to pay the electric bill) or to improve itself (the way a family might invest in college tuition).

What's the harm of the Overhead Myth?

The letter, backed by a number of academic sources, cites a laundry list of common underinvestments:

• Limited/no staff for administrative roles (e.g. finance, development, operations)

• Limited investment in staff training and development

• Inexperienced staff for administrative roles

• Poor IT infrastructure

• Poor donation management systems

• Poor performance management systems

... which lead to meaningful problems for the mission:

• Limited ability for organization to manage/monitor finance, development, etc.

• Increased turnover among staff, particularly those looking for ongoing professional development

• Difficulty building senior team from within

• Poor work quality

• System crashes, downtime

• Loss of data/information, limited information sharing

• Inability to track donors and fundraising progress

• Limited ability to target fundraising

• Limited ability to track beneficiary outcomes, particularly across sites

• Limited ability to easily generate reports for grantmakers

In short, overemphasis on cutting overhead leads to a cycle of starvation for the organization and its mission.

Here's the thing:

Most of us have felt the pressures of the Overhead Myth — from grantors, board members, donors or other stakeholders … or even from ourselves.

Naturally we want to be careful with the precious resources that are aloted to us.

But if an arbitrary aversion to “any expenditure” is preventing you from investing wisely in your long-term mission and organizational health, that can't be good.

I encourage you to read the letter for yourself, and consider how the overhead myth may be limiting your work, and then to foster conversations about mission priorities within your own team, with your board, and with your grantors and donors.

Because your primary concern as an organization is not your so called “overhead ratio,” but the difference you’re actually making in the lives of the people you care about.

All the best,
A.

“the contact has disappeared”

Ever have data just “go missing” for no apparent reason?

Here’s a question I got this week via email (shared with permission):

I am running a year end donation report and noticed that one of our donation contacts is no longer showing up in civi. It seems like it was there on a report that was run on 9/2/2024, but now the contact has completely disappeared out of civi along with all the donation history. The contact was entered as (OCF),Anonymous. Do you have any insight as to why this might have happened?

Thank you,
Fiona

It’s not a terribly uncommon question, so I thought I’d share my reply with you:

Hi Fiona,

Hard to say without taking a deeper look at your data (and even then, it may be hard to know with certainty), but here are some ideas:

• With a name like "(OCF),Anonymous", it seems possible that one of your staff may have deleted the contact. It may still be in the Trash, which you can search by using the "Search in Trash" option in Advanced Search.

• Or, It could be that one of your staff changed the name to something else, either intentionally or inadvertently. If you know some specific contribution date/time and amount, you may be able to find that contribution, and thus learn what contact it's attached to, by using the Find Contributions search.

• Finally, if all your searching proves fruitless, it would seem that someone deleted the contact completely (even out of the Trash), and it will be essentially impossible to find a record of who did that and when -- unless you happened to have CiviCRM's logging option enabled (which I don't think you do). This Logging feature does a good job of capturing every single change in the database, who made it, and when, although it requires some technical skill to be able to extract all of the necessary information for any given "who did that?" question. I wrote about it recently in my Daily Mailings list, in the post, “I didn’t edit that”.

By the way, this is not a terribly uncommon situation in any CRM, considering there are any number of staff who might be making changes at a given organization.

- A.

Looks like I wasn’t far off the mark. Fiona wrote back to say they’d found the contact in the Trash. A staff member had indeed deleted it, “as she thought they were malicious accounts because they did not have a contact email or address attached to them.”

With contacts restored now from the Trash, life is good, Fiona says.

What this means for you:

1. Training staff can be a gradual process. Proceeding with grace is as valuable as proceeding with care.

2. Sometimes contacts look surprising or “suspicious,” but it might be worth looking closely before deciding to delete them.

3. If “what happened to my data?” is a common question in your work — and you can’t seem to get answers — you might consider turning on CiviCRM’s logging features for a while, to get a better idea what’s happening.

All the best,
A.

CiviCon 2025: Registration is open

Is your CRM software at the top of your “Things I Love to Talk About” list?

I’m betting it’s not.

You want it to work when you need it, and otherwise it should just be there waiting for you.

Meanwhile, you’ve got more important things to consider:

• Building better relationships with your people.

• Making it easier for them to support your mission.

• Serving the needs of the folks you care about.

• Leading your team to set smart goals and work towards them effectively.

Of course, as it turns out, your CRM is a valuable tool to help you in all of those areas.

If it’s ever not working smoothly for you, you’re going to notice, because that limits you in the things that do matter.

That’s why I encourage you to make time to keep your CRM tools sharp. You can’t always focus on your tools, but their mastery is worth some investment.

Here’s a good opportunity to do that:

If you’re looking to up your CiviCRM game and make connections with like-minded folks, there’s nothing better than an in-person CiviCRM conference to make that happen.

Open registration has just been announced for CiviCon 2025, happening May 21-22 in Oakland, California (in the San Francisco Bay area). Besides the 2-day, 3-track conference, there will also be:

• Admin & User Training in the 2 days before the Conference (May 19-20)

• Developer Training in the 2 days after the Conference (May 23-24)

• Residential Working Retreat (“the Sprint”) for developers and documentation writers, in the 5 days after the Conference (May 23-27)

Participants can attend any or all of the segments listed above, but I think readers here will benefit most from the Admin & User Training (May 19-20) and the main CiviCon event (May 21-22).

You can read more at the announcement page on civicrm.org: Register now for CiviCon San Francisco 2025

I’ll definitely be there, and I hope you will too!

All the best,
A.

Missed some emails?

I learned today that many list members haven’t been receiving the emails for some time now.

In case that affected you, here’s a quick catch-up on what you might have missed:

• Identifying a goal

  Friend of the list Rose Lanigan wrote in with a great response (shared with permission) about setting goals and taking care of aspirations … [read more]

• Ready for anything

  Life is full of surprises, so it's important to be ready for anything. A word like “anything,” though, is incredibly broad. And there are any number of ways to “be ready.” … [read more]

• Snowplows?

  My little North Texas town got about seven inches of snow one day of last week. My county road crew, as far as I know, does not own a single snow plow. … [read more]

• Texas is not Minnesota

  Of course my local road department could get one of these to plow the snow. But is it worth it? …[read more]

• Spare keys

  Would you let me make 100 spare keys to your house and scatter them around your neighborhood? … [read more]

• Rookie mistakes

  The folks at CivAcademy have put together a great little video on their most frequently encountered CiviCRM rookie mistakes. … [read more]

• Easy vs hard?

  When you have several things on your to-do list, some of them will be harder than others. But “easy versus hard” is not the most important question here. The more useful question is … [read more]

• Forklifts are risky

  Driving a forklift is not especially hard. But just for laughs, head over to YouTube and search “forklift fail.” It’s warehouse mayhem and destruction. That’s why operators are given training … [read more]

• Email passwords matter

  Weak email passwords can punch a big hole in your security. … [read more]

• Slow news day: CiviCRM version 6, and Standalone CiviCRM

  In the next few months, you might start to hear more about a couple of developments in CiviCRM that sound like they might be a big deal … [read more]

Thanks to the folks who chimed in and let me know about the problem.

It’s resolved now, so everybody should be getting the emails they signed up for!

All the best,
A.

Slow news day: CiviCRM version 6, and Standalone CiviCRM

It’s a slow news day here at the CiviCRM desk.

In the next few months, you might start to hear more about a couple of developments in CiviCRM that sound like they might be a big deal:

• CiviCRM version 6.0

• CiviCRM Standalone

The short story is not quite as exciting (or risky) as one might think. If you’re fascinated by upgrade-related drama, you’ll be disappointed here.

So what’s up?

In March of this year, CiviCRM plans to relesae version 6.0, which sounds like it might be a major upgrade (with lots of potential for breaking things) from the long-standing 5.x series.

In truth, the upgrade from 5.x to 6.0 is expected to be as boring and uneventful as an upgrade from 5.81.0 to 5.81.1.

One thing that will change — which you still probably won’t even notice — is that as of CiviCRM 6.0, the project will officially support a Standalone installation.

That is, if you could install and CiviCRM without a content management system (e.g. Drupal, WordPress, etc.) if you wanted.

If that gets your attention because you’ve always wanted to do that, then this is great news of course.

For the rest of us, who are quite content running under Drupal or WordPress (or something similar), it’s a polite yawn.

So why am I telling you about it? Two reasons:

1. Maybe you are interested in a Standalone version of CiviCRM — or know someone who might be. In that case, this is a hint to keep your ear to the ground in March.

2. Maybe you’ll hear about Standalone and CiviCRM 6.0 from somebody else, and wonder what trouble it might mean for you. (After all, a “major version upgrade” sometimes means lots of headaches.) In that case, this is a word of assurance: this is no major version upgrade at all. Just a little rebranding, and barely even that.

We now return to your regularly scheduled programming.

All the best,
A.

Email passwords matter

Weak email passwords can punch a big hole in your security.

Ever forget your password for an important website? Maybe even for the WordPress or Drupal site that contains your CRM?

Fortunately, both WordPress and Drupal (and most of ther website platforms) offer a way to recover your password by email.

You just click the “Forgot my password” link, and it will send you an email with a special link you can use to set a new password.

Now you’re back in. Yay!

Can you see a potential security flaw in this design?

It’s this:

• If a slimy criminal can guess your email password, they can log in and read all your emails.

• If they want to get into your CRM, all they need is to click “Forgot my password”, then check your emails, and now they’ve got a link that will let them into your site.

Bada-bing, bada-boom.

Here’s the thing:

You are (hopefully) enforcing some password strength requirements for staff users on the website that contains your CRM.

But are you also insisting that your team members use strong passwords (or 2-factor authentication) on their email accounts?

All the best,
A.

P.S. This flaw is also one reason for the rising use of 2-factor authentication at the website level — something else you should probably also consider

Forklifts are risky

Driving a forklift is not especially hard. You move some pedals and levers, and it does what you tell it.

But just for laughs, head over to YouTube and search “forklift fail.” Or don’t, because you can already imagine it: warehouse mayhem and destruction.

It turns out, forklift operation can be pretty complex.

That’s why operators are given training, to help reduce the mayhem and destruction.

As YouTube testifies, you can’t really eliminate the forklift mayhem. It will always be a risk. But you can reduce it.

Here’s the thing:

For systems where clumsy operation can have disastrous results (like your CRM), training your people is a form of risk management.

All the best,
A.

Easy vs hard?

When you have several things on your to-do list, you can probably tell that some of them will be harder than others.

You might want to take on the easy ones first and get them out of the way. But then again, maybe you should bite the bullet and do the hard ones first.

If I may, let me suggest that “easy versus hard” is not the most important question here. The more useful question is this:

Which of these tasks will get me the most value in return for what it costs?

Value could mean a number of things:

• Benefits to health and sanity.

• Financial profit.

• Increased Goodwill.

• Avoiding a significant loss.

• Making the other tasks on my list easier (that’s a big one you might have missed!)

Cost takes on different forms, too:

• Time and money.

• Physical effort.

• The mental stress of doing things I dislike (another one that’s often overlooked).

• Calling in favors.

Here's the thing:

Focusing on “hard versus easy” means you're starting with the cost.

You'll get much better results if you start with the value, and then compare that to the cost.

Heck with a little practice, you'll probably be able to cross some things off your list entirely — because they're just not worth doing.

All the best,
A.

Rookie mistakes

Sometimes the most frustrating things turn out to be what the pros call "rookie mistakes."

Of course, even the pros make them from time to time.

Then they learn from it, laught at themselves a little, and move forward. it doesn't need to be embarassing; it just needs to be addressed.

The folks at CivAcademy have put together a great little video on their most frequently encountered CiviCRM rookie mistakes.

Maybe you've made some of these. I know I have, and many of my clients have. So we’re all in good company here.

I encourage you to give it a look when you've got 5 minutes to invest in mastering your CRM:

Top 10 Most Common Mistakes Users Make in CiviCRM

(And if you’ve made some rookie mistakes that you think should make the list, I’d love to hear about them!)

All the best,
Allen

P.S. Mistake #1 was my suggestion for the list. That one seems to bite everybody, sooner or later.

Spare keys

Would you let me make 100 spare keys to your house and scatter them around your neighborhood?
How about 10?
Or maybe just 2?

Of course you wouldn’t.

Because the only people who should have a key to your house are the people who are supposed to be inside. Any extra keys should not be left "lying around" for "just anybody" to find and use.

Sure, anybody who found a key wouldn't necessarily know what it's for — but that's small comfort when it comes to the security of your home.

Compare this to administrative login accounts for your website.

Do you still have active admin accounts for your site, for folks that no longer work for you?

Or for staff members who don't actually need full admin access (you know, the ability to literally change, export, or destroy all of your content and data)?

Those admin logins are the keys to your organization's online home.

I hope you're not letting them "just lie around" for "just anybody" to find and misuse.

(Fortunately, unlike physical house keys, you don't need to go looking for them. Just turn those accounts off!)

All the best,
A.

Texas is not Minnesota

Of course my local road department could get one of these to plow the snow:

It’s a TowPlow! It plows two lanes at once! OMGGGG!

I mean, Minnesota has them! Why not my little Texas town?!

Well…

Mainly because: Texas is not Minnesota.

And by the way, Minnesota DoT says they paid over $260,000 for each of them, and they conducted a massive study to evaluate the cost/benefit implications, years before actually deploying them on the roads.

Here's the thing:

Just because your neighbor, or your competitor, or your previous organization had one, doesn't mean it's the right thing for you.

Texas doesn't have Minnesota winters. And you, of course, don't have somebody else's problems.

The right solution for you is the one that fits your problems, your goals, and your resources.

It’s fine to learn from someone else’s experience with any given solution. But it’s important to consider how your situation differs from theirs.

All the best,
A.

Snowplows?

Something else on the topic of being ready for anything.

My little North Texas town got about seven inches of snow one day of last week.

My county road crew, as far as I know, does not own a single snow plow. So the roads never got plowed.

So, do we say that they were not ready to handle the snow?

I don't think so.

In this part of the world, it's exceedingly rare to get that much snow in one day.

Yes, it did slow people down for a while. But, as usually happens, the roads cleared themselves with the help of a little sunshine just a day or two after.

If we say the local public services were “ready,” what we really mean is that they were:

• Ready to haul out the salt trucks and gravel spreaders.

• Ready to handle the occasional complaint, which is sure to come from a few people.

• Ready to accommodate the two or three days of delay in their public works projects.

• Ready to drive out and help the occasional person who gets stuck in the snow.

Of course they could use their limited budget to purchase a handful of snow plows. And to store them. And maintain them. And run them over all the roads so quickly that they’re all plowed before the snow melts on its own.

And one day, if public sentiment insists upon it, they may decide to do that. (I think it would be crazy, but local politics can be weird.)

But in the meantime, they're doing something that I think is rather prudent:

• They're calculating the likelihood that the snowplows would even be useful.

• They're calculating the cost, both of plowing the roads, and of not plowing them.

• Thus, they're calculating the total risk by considering the likelihood of an event, combined with the severity of that event.

• Finally, they're making a reasonable and informed decision as to the most effective way to handle that risk.

Snowplows? Probably not worth it.

Extra manpower and an occasional disgruntled voter? Probably worth it.

You are — I hope — doing some of the same in your own work.

Building an ironclad system that smoothly handles every possible contingency is very, very expensive.

And considering that “every possible contingency” is literally an infinite range, it's both very expensive and literally mpossible.

Instead of that impossible expense, you can protect both your sanity and your operations by gauging the risk (the likelihood of a particular negative event multiplied by the negative impact of that event) and letting that inform the appropriate cost (in missed opportunity, funds, human resources, good will, and delay) for a solution that will handle it.

If the total risk (likelihood X negative impact) is high, it’s probably worth a more elaborate solution. But if it’s low, a simpler approach may be better.

All the best,
A.

Ready for anything

Life is full of surprises, so it's important to be ready for anything.

A word like “anything,” though, is incredibly broad. And there are any number of ways to “be ready.”

Some things are certain.

Your upcoming annual fundraising kick-off? That's sure to happen, and you can even predict the date. Being ready probably includes includes a good number of things that you can prepare in advance.

Some things are fairly likely, but unpredictable.

A staff member has to be out sick for a week? Being ready means having some contingency plans to deal with the extra workload, and probably cross-training other staff members so they know how to fill in the gaps.

Other things are conceivable, but so unlikely that they don’t merit a specific contingency plan.

The venue for your annual gala burns to the ground the night before the big event? Being ready means simply being mentally prepared to deal with any hardship. It means continually remembering that some things are out of your control, and that striving forward in any situation is within your control.

Why does this matter?

Because efficient management of your people and your systems requires that you budget appropriately (not recklessly) for both the known and the unknown.

Because maintenance of your own sanity requires you to acknowledge that some things cannot be anticipated.

And because continued success in the face of uncertainty requires that you prepare your mind — and the minds of your staff members — to move forward regardless of what challenges may arise.

Sure, it’s pretty hard to make a detailed plan for a surprise catastrophe.

But with a little practice, even that is something you can be ready to handle, one way or another.

All the best,
A.

Identifying a goal

Friend of the list Rose Lanigan wrote in with a great response (shared with permission) about setting goals and taking care of aspirations:

Hi Allen,

Happy New Year! Hope you had a nice break and enjoyed the holiday 😊

This email is very interesting – I wanted to reply to your earlier email about setting goals but I’m coming up empty so far.

However, I’m halfway through a Masters degree at Loughborough University (in Data Science if you’re curious), and reading this email today makes me reflect on one of the reasons I enjoy it so much – in the same way, you benefit from [your tournament] videos, I’m finding the challenge of the assignments and the feedback I get really satisfying. Even if I never earned a penny (dime?!)) more if and when I complete this Masters degree, it’s not time wasted because it’s stretching my skills and abilities and I’m learning so much.

I’m currently thinking I want to follow up with a PhD for similar reasons – to continue to reach and stretch what I’m able to do and what I can contribute with these newly acquired skills. Maybe this is my new year’s resolution – complete the Masters to the best of my ability and to move onto a PhD!

Hope your 2025 is a year of learning, loving and growing 😊

Best wishes,
Rose

Yes!

Rose makes a few great points here:

• When put on the spot, many of us will struggle to identify a specific goal we’re striving for; we seem to “come up empty” for a response.

• But on reflection, and on looking at how we’re actually spending our time, we might notice that we’re actually striving to achieve something in particular, or that we enjoy making progress in certain areas.

• A sense of fulfillment is a perfectly legitimate reason to pursue a goal — it’s not as easy to quantify as a dolalrs-and-cents bottom line, but it’s very real, and it is measurable. (I mean, we can see that some things are really satisfying and other things are less so. That’s a measurement.)

• Identifying what we actually care about, however we get to that conclusion, is a great mechanism for identifying goals worth pursuing.

Best of luck to you, Rose, in your pursuits! Fight that fight!

And for the rest of us, whether it’s an advanced degree or whatever moves you, here’s hoping you can identify it and then remember to find the strength to go after it.

All the best,
A.

Automate all the things?

Something we all love about the potential of a good CRM is that it can automate or streamline the tasks that we might otherwise have to undertake manually.

Who doesn’t want that?

But while it's tempting to look for an elegant automated solution for every task that could be automated, it's not always worthwhile.

Case 1: Responsive tech support

I bought a customizable keyboard last week, and was excited to configure it just as I needed.

But no matter how I tried, I couldn't get my keyboard configurations to save properly.

The "help" link in the configurator tool was quite prominent, so I chatted with tech support, and within minutes they helped me get it done.

Turns out I had mistakenly used the configurator for a different keyboard model, and once they pointed me to the right steps, I was good to go.

What if ... they improved their tool so it would detect my mistake and then point me in the right direction? Then I wouldn't need to ask for help, and they'd reduce their tech support staffing requirements.

But then again, maybe ... they've already thought of that, and decided that it was more efficient to stick in a big "help" button and make sure they actually help people via tech support?

As a customer, it makes little difference to me. I got what I wanted, quickly. And they got a happy customer, which is presumably what they wanted.

Assuming my mistake is not very common, there's not much of a business case for developing features that would automatically detect and resolve it.

Case 2: Small-scale reporting

I spoke with a client this week who has some fairly unique reporting needs to segment her end-of-year fundraising contacts into two separate groups. The data she needs is clearly in the CRM, but there's no easy way to get it with CiviCRM's current features for searches and reports.

We puzzled through a variety of solutions for a while, and then I asked, "Wait, how many contacts are we talking about here?" Turns out there are just around 80 contacts.

With that, she realized she could do this -- without too much anguish -- by manually examining those contacts.

What if ... we developed a custom reporting solution, or other more complex features, to make this possible with the push of a few buttons? I probably could have talked her into that, and I probably would have had fun building it.

But then again, maybe ... there's not a sound business case for that level of custom development for a fairly unique need that's not expected to come up again any time soon.

Here’s the thing:

Just because you could automate something, doesn’t mean you should. You certainly don’t have to.

What you have to do is get your data into a useful form, while expending an appropriate level of time and money to do it.

And sometimes, the appropriate thing is to do it by hand.

All the best,
A.

Win, lose, learn

Want to start getting better results in your work? Try frequently measuring your progress, setting small goals, and analyzing your processes.

If I were a young athlete competing at the Olympic games, it's a safe bet that my entire focus would be the outcome of that one event. After all, an Olympic gold medal is probably the single greatest achievement of any athlete's career.

As it happens, I am neither terribly young nor an Olympic contender. But I do train in a competitive sport, and I participate in several tournaments each year.

And while there's no denying that it feels nice to walk away with a medal, here's something I've noticed:

When I compete in a local tournament, I'm not as interested in the medals as I am in the video of my matches.

That's because, unlike the friendly sparring I get in training several times a week, I know that at a tournament:

• My opponent is roughly my age, weight, and skill level; and

• My opponent will not go easy on me, ever.

So even though the medal is of no particular value, the matches themselves are an actual test of my progress in the sport.

Reviewing the videos helps me to see:

• Have I improved in the specific skills I'm trying to perfect?

• Did I anticipate the challenges that would come to me and respond appropriately?

• Did I miss opportunities that could have made a difference?

• Was my game plan sound, or should I rethink my approach?

• Did I execute my techniques properly? And if not, where could I improve them?

That learning gives me a win that goes far beyond a tournament ranking — it’s a durable process for continually improving my game.

When asked, I will encourage people new to the sport to compete as frequently as possible, for just these reasons.

And for those same reasons, I encourage my nonprofit coaching clients to do the same:

As frequently as you can, set goals that are challenging for you.

Enjoy the wins (you will). Mourn the losses (you will).

But more importantly, review the tape. If you win, why did you win? And how could you have won better? If you lose, why did you lose? And where could you improve?

Here’s the thing:

Most of us are not going to be Olympic-level athletes. But our work, if it's effective, wil make a difference in the lives of the people that we care about.

The beauty of frequently setting challenging goals for ourselves is that it's a win-win:

If you reach the goal, then of course that's fantastic.

And if you don't, win anyway! It’s a matter of measuring your results and carefully reviewing your processes for continual improvement.

All the best,
A.

The reserve

Would you plan to start a trip across the desert without a spare tire?

Of course not.

Forget about the desert, most of us, wisely, would hesitate to drive around town without a spare.

Likewise:

• Any sailing ship will carry with it, on any journey, a generalized supply of repair materials and tools.

• Any army, since ancient times, will commit only a portion of its forces to the main battle and hold back a reserve force to be used later.

Why do we operate like this?

Obviously you may drive from home to work without getting a flat.
And a ship may sail across the ocean without incident.
And an army may simply conquer its enemy outright.

But we know it doesn't always happen like that.
Surprises will arise.
Even our best plans often face unexpected challenges.

It's worth keeping this in mind with any new project you might undertake in your work.

• Key staff members can get sick or otherwise be absent.

• Requirements that seemed clear in the beginning can change as the project develops.

• Launch dates can be delayed due to technical surprises or the challenge of getting all of the stakeholders fully on board.

Of course, there may come a time when you need to make a long drive on your last spare tire.

But as a general rule, that's not a recipe for long-term success.

Always, if possible, keep something in reserve.

So you can have it ready when the unexpected happens.

All the best,
A.